On the Button Fingered

At the turn of the third millennium, the leading anthropologists sought to reflect on the factors which contributed to the utter departure of religion from  all earth-domain planets. The Trinity Test hadn’t done it, neither had either of the digital and AI revolutions, or even the remarkable insights of the Hubble-Webb-Bubble-Bloody-Big Telescope that paved the way for our multi-raced society.

They concluded, after many months of anticlimactic skirmishes and raising of eye-brows, that the majority of all theist deterioration could be traced back to empathy-scanning.

Empathy-scanning, to clarify, is the only way yet developed of superimposing any given consciousness upon another. At the end of the fourth world war, the war criminals were rounded up and forced to partake in what is now referred to as The Great Scan. Into all the hospitals they’d be led, to the dying heroes, where they would join in enumerable empathy sessions. After a remarkably short period, the war-criminals were able to be released out into society with a renewed vivacity. They set up charities and soup kitchens, donated the remainder of their assets to Greenpeace.

In short, the effort, the struggle and all complication had been taken out of   understanding and redemption.

Henceforth our experiences became increasingly interlinked: into a hive mind. As soon as someone detected the cause of the slightest pain in another, they were able to empathise completely and take steps for the improvement of others.

Take the Morris’s for example who lived in North Cheam. Upon discovering, via empathy-scanning, that the garage they’d painted at the bottom of their garden was, to their neighbour, a torturous, most painful white. They instantly and most conscientiously went out to buy a new paint of creamy-green.

And, when the CEO of Shellfish Oil, went out to inspect the commencement of a new venture in Antarctica, on one drunken Saturday night, leaning over the handrail of the oil rig, he discovered cause to call the whole thing off after absent-mindedly empathy-scanning a nearby penguin. Apparently the penguin was somewhat troubled by the noise.

So you see, as the needs of the individual abated in preference of empathy, a newly connected world was born.

All social and existential struggles, that had leant so comfortably on the shoulders of religion, had been smoothed.

Not that there was now a lack of problems. Only the last decade, you will well remember the famous empathy chain of 3024. The empathy of near  half a billion people was connected in what has colloquially been referred to as the bucket-hole problem.

It starts off very simply. Person A has a hole in their bucket. Person B empathy-scans Person A, and feeling so completely the pain of Person A for having a hole in their bucket, goes out of their way to fetch them water-resistant duck-tape. But person B, in attending to Person A, neglects the care of their back as they bring the heavy box down from the shelf. Person C, on empathy-scanning person B, feels their back pain and straightaway offers them a back massage, for they are conveniently a chiropractor. Person D, upon empathy-scanning Person C, becomes aware of how the chiropractor has been subliminally affected by the sight of a snow globe in the unshelved box of person B; It has evidently reawakened a past trauma from a holiday in Sweden. 

So you see, by this rather ridiculous example, how empathy-scanning has caused a great number of issues as well as solutions.

But now we come to the subject at hand: for as morality is now only a product of fact and resting upon empathy, the guard-rails are down. It has come to my attention that we could be on the approach of a grave new precedent. From this article’s title you will know this concerns the button-fingered.

Up until the empathy-scan revolution, we have considered our mutant siblings to be one and the same with us. The button-fingered, having an eleventh finger, protruding from their belly button, have, as we know, a whole  third hand nestled against their stomach which to most of us is the most terrific of conversation ice-breakers. What college boy has not devised a chat-up line purely to elevate the spirits of their button-fingered crush?

But through empathy-scanning, we now know, that while the button-fingered appear perfectly normal on the outside, save their eleventh finger, they experience far more agony than even the soggiest donkey.

Upon empathy-scanning a button-fingered, it immediately becomes apparent the depth of the physical, physiological and psychological torment that these individuals endure.

So then, as this pain is unable to be prevented though any medical or therapeutical means, what is to be done?

I fear our reliance on fact and on empathy will ultimately lead to their genocide.