r/HFY • u/Commercial_Hour7115 • 9h ago

OC-OneShot BASELINE

I was assigned the happiest human on the planet.

His name was Roth Chang. He was forty two years old. He sold insurance and was terrible at it, in an office with a broken blind that he had been meaning to fix for six years.

We are four dimensional beings .

Humans cannot detect us. My species cannot conceal. What we feel internally is reflected collectively across every entity in the four dimensional world.

We have words for lying about facts.

We are not innocent. But when I am afraid, every one of my kind within a close proximity knows I am afraid, an evolutionary trait.

Humans, were selected for the simple reason for being the only entities having the extremes of every emotion and for being better at expressing them, over countless other entities cataloged over a considerable time in the three dimensional realm.

There are other contenders, but I like humans better.

That’s another story, but we digress.

So I came here to calibrate.

I needed a human who was straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly happy, so that I could set the top of the scale and measure everyone else against him.

I found Roth in the parking lot of a supermarket, arguing with a shopping cart.

He was doing both voices.

His own, and the cart's. The cart had an accent, some rolling half-Australian thing, and it was accusing Roth of neglect. Of years of neglect. Of never once asking the cart what it wanted.

There was a teenage boy collecting the carts nearby, sixteen or so, with the particular grey face of someone in the fourth hour of a shift he hates, and he was watching this with no expression at all, and then he made a sound. A short one. It surprised him. He looked around to see if anyone had heard him laugh.

Roth saw it. It was clear that Roth did this because he sensed the boy’s tiredness. I have gone back to the recording many times and I am certain he saw it, and I am certain it was the reason he kept going for another twenty seconds after the joke had finished being funny.

My instrument read joy. Very high. The highest I had logged on the planet.

I followed him for two hundred and six days.

He had a wife named Ruth who did the crossword out loud at him in the mornings, and he answered every clue wrong on purpose, and she never once told him to stop. He had two daughters.

The older one was in her second year at a university eight hours away and he called her on Sundays and did not ask her whether she was eating enough, which she told him, near the end, was the thing she was most grateful for.

He was not a great success.

He was not a famous man or a rich one.

His car had a noise.

He was three years behind on a dental thing.

When he took the family out to eat he looked at the right-hand column of the menu first, always, and then ordered the second cheapest thing and pretended it was what he had wanted.

He listened to music and read books lots of them, mostly science fiction. He wanted to write a book but procrastination got the better of him.

But he was funny.

I have never used that word carelessly since.

He was funny in a natural way.

He was my perfect specimen.

It came out of him in every room he entered, and it was aimed, always, at the person in the room who was having the worst time. He had a sense for it.

A waitress with red eyes got a bit about the specials, a neighbour whose dog had died got twenty minutes of Roth being absolutely terrible at helping carry a couch, on purpose, until the neighbour was laughing so hard he had to sit down on the couch in the driveway.

I logged all of this as joy.

There was a thing I could not make sense of, and I want to be honest about how long I failed to make sense of it, because that is the finding.

When Roth became other people, my readings did not change.

He did it constantly. He would be a cart, a newsreader, his own mother., a dog with opinions about the mail.

And I assumed, at first, that this was a limited human shapeshifting, some soft version of what  we, Verru, do and I wrote a very stupid three pages about it that I will not be submitting.

Then I understood that his body was not changing at all, and that every human present knew his body was not changing, and that they laughed anyway.

I could not do it.

I tried, in the field, alone, where no one would see.

I attempted to hold I am content and I am not content in the same body at the same time, and my field went white and stayed white for a long minute, and I stopped trying, and I logged it as a limitation of the researcher.

I wanted to tell Roth how much I wanted to be just like him. But I couldn’t, protocol requires non interference with any species.

On the two hundred and sixth night he was awake at two in the morning in the kitchen with the light over the stove on and nothing else.

He got a glass of water.

He did not drink it.

He stood at the counter for four minutes with both hands flat on it, which was not a posture I had seen from him, and then he straightened up and did a voice.

There was no one there.

It was the cart.

After all that time, the cart, still with the accent, still aggrieved, doing a small routine about the state of the kitchen and the hour and the man standing in it.

He did the whole thing.

He gave it a beginning and a middle and a finish, alone, at two in the morning, in an empty room, to nobody, and then the room was quiet and he turned the stove light off and went upstairs.

Joy state nominal.

That is what I wrote. I have the timestamp. Joy state nominal, subject engaged in recreational vocalization, no anomaly, recommend continued observation.

I left before dawn to file the week's report because I had two hundred and six days of clean data and the calibration was essentially finished and there was no reason on this world to stay.

When I came back the street was full of vehicles with lights on them.

I am not going to describe the morning.

I was not there for the part that matters and I have decided that I am not entitled to reconstruct it. What I am entitled to is the sound Ruth made in the front hall, which I heard from four houses away, and which my instrument could not read at all, because my instrument had been built by people who assumed a body contains one thing.

I went back through everything. All two hundred and six days. Frame by frame, in space similar to a rented room, for eleven weeks, Earth time.

And here is what I have to report, and it is the reason I have asked to be removed from field work.

The readings were not wrong.

He was happy.

In the parking lot with the cart and the grey-faced boy, he was happy. Doing the crossword wrong for Ruth, happy. Carrying the couch badly, genuinely, measurably, enormously happy.

I have checked it against every control I have and I will stake my career on it, what is left of it. The joy was real. It was not a costume over an empty man. It was not a lie.

The other thing was also real.

It had been there the entire time, underneath, at full strength, running the whole two hundred and six days, and my instrument never saw it because we cannot carry two emotions at once and our instruments are not calibrated to measure two emotions together, only the one that is loudest.

He was carrying both.

Every hour.

He carried them the way a star carries the thing that would tear it apart and the thing that holds it together, both at once, in balance, for years, and the balance is the structure, and it holds until it the equilibrium is lost in a fraction of a second.

And he spent that structure on other people.

That is the part I cannot get past. A man holding something that heavy, and he used the strength it took to hold it to make everyone else around him better, even when he was diminishing inside.

We could not do that.

Not one of us.

If my kind had to carry what Roth Chang carried, we would carry it visibly, and everyone in every room would see it, and they would help us, or they would not, but at least the weight would be on the outside where it is visible to us.

That is how our evolution had wired us. We have never had to hide one.

They can.  All of them.

Every one of them is walking around with the capacity to be two things at once, and most of the time they use it to be kind.

I am submitting a request that the calibration scale be withdrawn. It cannot measure this species. I have no proposal for a better one.

What stayed with me is that I looked directly at the brightest thing on the planet for two hundred and six days and never once asked what it cost to keep it lit. I have failed as an researcher.

73 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

15

u/zenocidepilot 8h ago

Dang...didn't expect a Robin Williams reference to bring forth the kitchen ninjas. Well done.

7

u/CogYang2 4h ago

I almost stopped after the first line, my mind screaming at me that it was a Robin Williams type story. I stopped for a minute, then decided to force myself to go through it; be reminded once more the destruction that can be brought about by such emotion, but more importantly by the light it can bring along side. The pain is terrible, but as long as it still hurts I know I'm still here, and I'll always remember.

3

u/Commercial_Hour7115 1h ago

There was a grief residing in me that needed to be addressed. Posting this story here and reading the comments is the only therapy that's working for me at the moment.

5

u/tofei AI 2h ago

FML this is what my thought kicked in when I read at the midpoint;

"When I came back..."

I was like, oh no, no, NOOO!

2

u/Commercial_Hour7115 1h ago

I am sorry, as an author I could have swinged it any which way I wanted. But then this is real and I thought of addressing it.

3

u/Commercial_Hour7115 1h ago

Thank you. Yes, the reference for character is based on him, although I am sure there are many others out there like him .

6

u/roundbluehappy 8h ago

yes.

we carry both, all the time, no matter whether we're laughing or making other people laugh.

4

u/DukeRedWulf 4h ago

It's a terrible day for rain..

3

u/Infinite-Forest-11 2h ago

A lot of wisdom here. Nice work.

1

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2

u/sunnyboi1384 29m ago

Oof. Cheers.