So you’ve just gotten home from a hard day at work, or looking for work, or hiding your friend Jerry’s apartment pretending to look for work so Frank and Estelle don’t kick you out. When you open the door to your home everything looks normal, but when you step inside and look the door behind you, you discover that you’ve been transported into a cage dangling over a pit of lava.
Naturally the first thing out of your mouth is “God damn it, Skald, what have you done to me now?” But it’s not Rhymer Enterprises this time; it’s one of our competitors, a group with similar technomagic resources but fewer scruples. The Other Technomages tell you they’ve randomly selected you for an experiment. Telepathically probing your memories, they’ve identified the living person you love most, whom they name to your satisfaction. Now they don’t intend any harm to this other person–at least not directly–but using the same telepathic gizmo, they are prepared to rewrite your mind so that all the love you feel for that person is turned into the blackest, most venomous hatred, disgust, and contempt imaginable.
This isn’t to say that you’re be filled with violent hatred, of course. Oh, if you’re already the violent type, you might be moved to assault or murder the next time you see the person in question; likewise if you’e already treacherous, you’ll be moved to betray him or her. But you’re the peaceful type, you’ll just be repulsed by the mere thought of that person, no longer able to tolerate being in her/his presence because you hate them so much. It’s a given that you probably won’t be cured of this–not so much because a cure is impossible, but because you’ll have no motivation to seek it out or submit to it.
Now the good news is that the Other Technomages are not going to use their love-into-hate gizmo on you unless you agree. The bad news is that, if you don’t agree within the next 60 seconds, they’re going to drop you into the lava. So you have to choose. Say “yes, turn my love into hate,” and they’ll zap you, then teleport you home. Say nothing, or refuse outright, and it’s the Gollum treatment.
Give me the hate in a microsecond. Not even a question there. Because, not being Rhymer Enterprise employees, they made a crucial mistake in their wording/set-up/analysis. You see, the person I love the most is ME. Therefore, I would now hate myself. Not a big stretch sometimes, I’ll admit. But upon returning home, my beloved wife and cats would convince me that my hatred was misplace and wrong, and convert it into a white-hot fire that burns for vengeance upon those who have so wronged me. So I’d drop a dime on the miscreants and contract Rhymer Enterprises to have them nibbled to death by ducks.
I had to specify that it wasn’t Rhymer Enterprises fucking with you becaues RhE is evil, but not, you know, EVIL. The person you love most might be a child or a woman, and you might be the violent type, and so we wouldn’t take the chance that you’d kill them. But obviously they person the Other Technomages name is going to be the person you love most other than yourself; otherwise they might as well zap you, let you be miserable for however long it takes the convection from the lava to kill you.
Yes, he continues to love you. Wouldn’t be amusing otherwise.
I choose to walk across my living room, take off my backpack and set it by the easy chair, and then maybe go get myself a snack from the kitchen, because I’m almost certainly still in my apartment and not in a cage over lava at all. If the technomages have the capability to rewire my brain to hate my loved ones, then they also have the ability to project an illusion into my mind, without the need to assume that they also have teleportation capability. And if they don’t have that kind of mind-altering technology, then the whole scenario is moot.
Do you really want to do that? I know my partner could deal with my death, and go on with his life. But if he knew I chose to die for HIS sake, the guilt would be way more overwhelming than simple grief.
The only reason for explaining to him what happened would be if I had a martyr complex, which is very selfish.
I can’t really vote in this poll. I can’t stand coconut, and my choices are to either die, or deal with coconut. That seems to be outside the bounds of the OP.
First, in answer to the OP, I would choose death because I really couldn’t betray my darling soon-to-be-spouse by suddenly hating her.
Second, Skald, do you lie awake late at night thinking these scenarios? Or do they just ‘come to you’ following a fugue state? Does Mrs. Rhymer know of your imaginative excursions into ethical dilemmahood?