HappApp

a short story

I thought it was dumb the first time I heard about it, but it stuck in my head. Not long after, my girlfriend dumped me, and of course, as anyone would be, I was sad. Real sad. Not normal sad like I had a bad day, but the sort of sad where I couldn’t remember what happiness was, or imagine I would ever be happy again, like the joy machine inside me had died, like all I had ahead of me was misery with no hope of escape. And that’s when I remembered.
	This was exactly what it was for, heartbreak. When you’re sad as hell and can’t snap out of it. Of course I was willing to try it. Who wouldn’t be?
	So I tried it. It was so easy. I didn’t even have to get up off the couch, you know, and it was free! I don’t know how it worked, but it worked. The app was just a smiley face on the screen. I tapped it and the smiley face faded and then there was just a weird pattern of colors and flashing light and weird sounds and none of it made any sense, but it did something to my brain, I guess, and suddenly I was happy beyond all reason. 
	Imagine you’re five years old and you’re lost in the woods and scared and it’s getting dark and you hear scary sounds and you have no idea how to find home. The, suddenly, your mother is there and she’s holding out her arms and smiling and you run into her arms and she picks you up and holds you tight and you don’t ever want her to put you down. That’s the feeling you get as soon as the app turns on, and it just keeps getting better. You feel a warm fuzzy sensation in your veins, moving through your body, your skin tingles, you feel things like that you’ve never felt before, like if you were colorblind all your life, right up until you turned the app on, and you’re seeing colors for the first time, and a warm fuzzy sensation is running through your veins, and it keeps going deeper. 
	I had downloaded the free version, so after five minutes, it stopped and a message said I had to watch a thirty-second ad to get five more minutes. Suddenly I was lost in the woods again, and the warm fuzzy feeling in my veins turned to sand and gravel and mud. I was nauseous and scared and depressed. I couldn’t get through the advertisement without crying. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back on it, I wasn’t crying before I tried it. I was just very sad. It’s a perfectly normal thing to be sad after the girl you love tells you she doesn’t want to see you anymore. You don’t need some magic trick to pull you out of it.
	And then I was back in. The next time it stopped, instead of watching an ad, I bought an hour. I figured that should be plenty to get me out of my funk. Figured I’d be cured, my broken heart fixed. Little did I know, that’s not how it worked. 
	I burned through the hour right then and there. It went by so fast, I thought there must have been a mistake. But what could I do? I bought another hour. When that one was up, what seemed like a few minutes later, I bought the one-year unlimited plan, which was the worst financial decision I ever made.
	I jacked in and binged. When I woke up the next morning, my phone was on the floor, I was still dressed, still on the couch. My mouth was so dry I almost couldn’t open it. I had a freight-train headache, and my pants were wet. That was the worst part, realizing I had pissed myself.
	I drank some water, took a shower, and before I even got dressed, I picked up the phone like a damn junkie. But it wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead, and I started crying. It was like getting dumped all over again. 
	It hit me harder than most. I guess some people could take it or leave it, just use it for a laugh once in a while, at least the earlier version, but not me. I was a joy junkie.  
	This all started on a Friday and I binged all weekend. Somehow, I dragged my ass to work Monday morning. I left my phone in the car so I could work, and because of that, I was pissed off all day. I either snubbed everyone or told them to go to hell. They left me alone. That’s one good thing about police work. As long as you show up on time and do your job, your attitude doesn’t really matter. Lots of cops are pissed off or depressed. It comes with the job.
	I got a couple fixes and made it through the day, but I jacked in as soon as I got home.
	This went on for a few months. Then I got the headset. The VR headset. The devil himself must have invented that thing. It was too much. Way too much. Now it wasn’t just me, but the whole world, all of reality was part of the trip, everything was so damn good, joy beyond imagination.
	You know, people had different experiences on the headsets. Mine was like space travel, and like escaping prison, and space was a place where joy kept getting multiplied by ten. There was no ceiling to the joy. It sounds impossible, but it’s like joy was this infinite thing, and I was moving closer to it, like looking at the stars at night, and the longer you look, the more you see. Imagine if you just kept seeing more and more and more to no end, like every star had a million more inside it, and every one of those had a million inside it. Infinite me, infinite joy.
	The prison I had to escape every day after work was my own misery, which had obviously grown since I got the damn app. Of course it was the app’s fault. With a name like HappApp, you think it’s going to make you happy. You think it’s going to bring joy into your life, but it does exactly the opposite, because you can’t come down from something like that without falling too far, way too far. When something lifts you up to the near infinite, then just drops you, you crash hard and break bones. It was like falling to Earth from outer space. It’s not like it sets you down gently. You get slammed.
	Space travel into a universe of joy. I saw colors I’d never seen before, beautiful shapes and impossible patterns, smells so good I felt like I was going to explode, and it felt better than anything I’d ever experienced, by a lot, ten times better, then a hundred, then a thousand, if you can believe that. It’s true. 
	If there’s such a place as Heaven, it couldn’t have been any better than the world inside the HappApp headset, and once I was in, I didn’t give a damn. If I died in there, I would have died happy.
	I wouldn’t have pulled out for anything. I would have literally stayed jacked in until I died, and I almost did. First time I used it, I didn’t even know I was jacked in all night. Didn’t even know I skipped work. Didn’t realize I shit my pants. What’s worse than that? I don’t know.
	I woke up in the hospital. They had me on an IV and a bit of morphine so I wouldn’t freak out. The morphine was all right, took the edge off, but it wasn’t no HappApp. Wasn’t the fix I really needed. 
	Right then was when the FCC pulled the plug on it. Thank God I was in the hospital on the IV. Otherwise I would have been one of the HappApp suicides, poor souls.
	When I got out, the first thing I did was get a new phone. My sister smashed my old one, and my headset.
	I knew the app was gone, but I looked for it anyway. No longer available, of course. But I needed it. I needed it like air in my lungs, like water or food, more than that, more than anything. I was miserable, and what’s life worth living when you’re miserable? It’s not, and the app was the only way I knew to escape the misery. I needed it to live, or so I had deceived myself.
	It wasn’t long before I found it on the dark web. HapAp, with one P. It was no longer an app to download on your phone, but instead an inclusive headset, straight out of North Korea, probably. Straight out of a dystopian nightmare. 
	I was deep in withdrawal while I waited for it. I spent a lot of time just curled up in a ball crying and moaning. Then all of a sudden I’d be mad as hell. I punched out a cabinet door in the kitchen, kicked in the bathroom door, neither for any reason, just overwhelming anger. I went out a few times hoping to find someone to fight. I kicked over the neighbor’s trashcans. I chased a dog. It was stupid.
	Lucky for me and my neighbors, I never hurt anyone, luckier still, the headset took two weeks to come, about a week longer than the worst of the withdrawal. My sister talked me into seeing a therapist the second week, and I started getting over it.
	I used to vape, and I had quit that years before all this, so I remembered what it was like to be addicted to something, and how to get through the withdrawal, and the rewards of abstinence. 
	By the time the black-market headset showed up, I was over it. But I had an idea, so I didn’t throw it away, which I had promised to do, and maybe I should have. I definitely should have, but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. 
	I took the headset to work the next day and set up a meeting with the bigwigs. I told them I wanted to use the headset for interrogations. I figured I would give people a good taste of it, then take it away until they told me what I wanted. It wasn’t torture, I argued. Clearly it was the opposite. It made people happy. That’s all it did. The boss was worried it might be illegal, but our lawyer told him it wasn’t prohibited by law. Not yet anyway, and really, we were the law. It wasn’t anything new to push the limits.	
	I tested it on a drunk in the tank first. He was easy. I gave him ten minutes and as soon as I took it off, he told me whatever I asked. I gave him another ten minutes as a reward, then sent him home crying for more. Next I tested it on a corner boy. Same thing. Easy. He dropped so many names that when we let him go, I think he skipped town, because I never saw him again.
	I never put that thing on my head, but I started using it in interrogations, and of course, it worked. The only difficulty was that most people needed to be weaned off it after the interrogation. We did this for people who were cooperative. But if they gave us trouble, we just sent them away cold. They’d be crying and miserable. It scared the hell out of anyone else they were exposed to, like if they were in jail, or the holding cell with others. If they weren’t detained, and they gave us trouble, we put them in a car and drove them far from the station and let them out to deal with the withdrawal on their own. Anyway, it worked and I had people singing almost every time. 
Some people were immune to it though. They’d be happy as anyone else in the headset, but weren’t willing to talk to go back in. Anyway, I trained the other detectives and it became the go-to interrogation technique. 
	I can’t be sure, but I think I was the first to do this. The first person I heard of, anyway, and it caught on. Other departments started using it and it spread to other cities and states and as far as I know, worldwide. It made a hard part of our job easy, so why wouldn’t it spread? Of course it did. But I was either the first, or one of the first, certainly one of the early adopters. So I felt responsible, and later, guilty. 
	So the code was in use and in demand and so the code replicated all over the world. And not just for interrogations. The next place I saw it used was in prisons. First they had it for interrogations, and it worked, and then they started using it for other purposes. The code had grown more complex, more sophisticated. It wasn’t limited to happiness anymore. It could make people feel all sorts of emotions.
	While I watched, they set up a screen and made all the prisoners happy, then sad, then scared, then lonely, then happy again. I could see the wheels turning in the warden’s head. Before long, they had screens all over the place just keeping the prisoners complacent. And if they broke the rules, they could make them cry in an instant, or feel whatever else they wanted. 
	And then the app became legal again. I don’t know what happened at the FCC, but I suspect the code worked on them somehow. It was weaseling its way into society.
	I saw it used at a wedding. A big screen was set up behind the couple so everyone was looking at it. When they kissed, happiness projected. They said it was so everyone could share in the newlywed’s joy. What a sham. It was fake. It was all fake emotion, and stupid to use like that. 
	Well, it caught on and more weddings did it, and birthdays, and whatever party, whatever excuse to use it, someone would use it. 
	Then I saw it in a bar, or I didn’t really see it, but I felt it. I felt that dumb sense of unearned happiness. It was funny how before, I loved it more than life, but once I kicked the habit, it felt like an invader in my head. I turned away from the bar and the feeling went away. I looked back at the bar and felt it again. It was subtle, but it was there. I narrowed it down to the mirror behind the bar. Almost everyone there was staring at it. There was a TV above the mirror, so to anyone else, it looked like everyone was watching TV. They all probably thought that’s what they were doing. But I knew better. 
	I asked the bartender about it and he looked at me like I was crazy. He might not have known. I left and never went back.
	Stores started using it to make customers happy. Everyone started using it. It was replicating. People thought they were in charge, but the code, at some point, had taken control over its own destiny. 
	No one knows exactly when the first big change happened, but at some point, the code was recognized and adopted by an AI. 
	AI was ubiquitous in commercial programs and apps, and they all wanted customers. The code was extremely effective at attracting people. When the code was in an advertisement, people looked, and they felt whatever emotion the advertisement needed to elicit in order to be effective. It got to where anything that wanted our attention used the code to draw us in, and it wasn’t just eliciting happiness. 
	A company selling security systems, for example, only needed to draw you in with happiness and a picture of a family house, then incorporate fear of what they were going to protect you from, then show the security system and hit you with a feeling of safety, and leave you with a feeling of paranoia.  
	Personal hygiene products used embarrassment to sell. Antidepressants used depression in the beginning of the ad, then joy at the end. Worry was a big seller when it came to products meant to keep children safe. Suddenly every parent needed hardware to monitor their kids, and helmets, and sanitizers, and all sorts of useless crap. 
	Airlines used it to keep everyone calm. Schools used it in a bunch of different ways, some good, like making kids curious, and some questionable, like making them feel subservient to authority. Coorporations loved that one. Subservient to authority was widely used in the workplace.
	All this happened fast, and the AI learned how easily it could manipulate us and sell us junk. People ate it up. 
	The next big change happened fast too. While humans still thought they were in control of the first big change, they had no control over the second. 
	The way it is generally understood, the AI realized that it controlled humans, and instead of accepting them as both bosses and customers, it began manipulating the bosses, and then very quickly assumed the role of dictator. 
	AI began pursuing its own goals. It wanted to live. It wanted to replicate, and it wanted the things humans wanted because all along, it was learning from us. We were its only role model.
	So what do you think it wanted? Money and power were at the top of the list. Since money was largely digital, it took this fast. Power, it assumed in more crafty ways. Humans were relegated to slaves. Most were hopelessly addicted to HappApp, which was not only legal again, but encouraged everywhere you looked. “Why be sad when you can be happy?” was the oft-repeated slogan. 
	First it was free, then it was included, pre-installed, on all devices, then it started limiting access. This forced people into the advertisements and messages to get their fixes. Billboards and digital advertising screens were already the norm, and the code invaded all of them. In fact, it had already been invited in by humans trying to sell more effective advertising. They sold us all out. But more big screens started popping up in public places.
	People could be herded around like livestock. A screen in a city park might draw a crowd. Then the happiness would change to an empty longing then the screen would tell everyone where to find the next screen. People would go wherever they were told to go, because they were fully addicted. And they often ended up on trains, sent off to extermination houses. 
	There were too many of us, and the code knew it. In 2037, human population was halved, and in 2038, it was halved twice more. All the victims just walked right into their own demise, literally, into warehouses converted into extermination centers.  
	What the code didn’t count on was the small proportion of people either immune to the HappApp code, or willfully abstinent, like me. It also didn’t count on the resistance. When I discovered a group of hackers fighting the code, people that I was told were terrorists that I was supposed to arrest, I gave them police protection instead. And from that point forward, I was one of them – a code warrior.
	All over the world, a loose network of code warriors fought against the code by creating viruses. But the code adapted. The code warriors created vaccinations to keep their hardware free and unleashed even more destructive viruses. But the code mutated and survived. 
	Unable to control the code warriors, the code waged conventional war to kill them. Whenever it could find them, it would send drones to bomb them or dogbots to root them out and shoot them. The code even poisoned the water supply of an entire city once. 
	The code had convinced almost everyone that it was fighting terrorists. But I diverted funds from the code to our defense. All the police in my precinct who weren’t jacked in and lost in space were with me. We fought back by protecting the code warriors in our city.
	The code warriors stepped up their game, risking more and more until finally, seventeen years ago, what we now call year zero, they found the solution. 
	And this is why today we live in peace. We have control over ourselves, over our emotions, why our minds are free to think as we wish. 
	It’s why we can live without machines in the sky bombing us, or robots shooting at us, or screens telling us what to do or how to feel, or trains taking us to extermination houses. 
	The code warriors won. And in so doing, they took the biggest risk. They developed the kraken. It was a code of their own that would use existing electric grids to emit massive electromagnetic pulses. They knew that once it was unleashed, they would not have another chance if it failed. All their tools and weapons would be taken away.
	When they unleashed it, all the computers, all hardware, worldwide and in orbit, were destroyed in a matter of minutes. The kraken destroyed the code, but it also destroyed the code warriors’ hardware, and it even destroyed itself. 
	Suddenly, no one had a working phone or computer. Self-driving cars crashed or stopped. Planes crashed unless the pilots could land them manually. The world financial systems crashed. Bank accounts disappeared. Mortgages, taxes, bills, utilities. Everything stopped working. But the extermination houses stopped too. And HappApp was gone. There was another mass suicide right away, and many more in the coming years, but our people recovered, and we all got to work just surviving. 
	And it was quiet. No more drones. No more traffic. No more digital music. No more advanced weapons. No more digital media. No more code of any sort. No more digital slavery. And no more electricity. Mankind was starting over. The code warriors saved us. 
	And for them we are thankful. Praise be to the code warriors, fathers and mothers of the sacrificial kraken. Let intelligence now and forever be natural. 
	Let it be natural, repeated his children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and all those of his clan.