Pain Proxy

Get ready, Tommy the Hamburger is about to twist your motherfucking brain. You're going to get two choices, and an examination of the fucking thought process behind both. Shit's about to get detailed and complicated, so you better pay attention. All right. Here is the motherfucking dilemma. Would you rather I dump every shred of pain my body feels into a gig worker strapped to my nerves, or keep every ache for myself while some motherfucker in a gray vest taxes every burst of joy that hits my system? I am standing in a humming little room full of cheap chrome and hot dust, and the whole place smells like burnt wires with old paper and that sharp hospital stink still hanging in the air after somebody cleaned up fear in a hurry. A broker in a glossy suit is smiling at a restraint harness bolted to the wall. Across from him an auditor is warming his hands over a brass lamp beside a stack of forms. One bastard wants to rent out my suffering. The other wants to meter my happiness. The harness on the left is already alive. Green lights crawl up the straps like something hungry trying to learn patience. There is a padded chair under it with a dent in the seat that tells me somebody sat there long enough to leave part of himself behind. The desk on the right looks worse in a quieter way. There is a scanner aimed at my face, and right beside it the receipt printer keeps twitching in little bursts like it cannot wait to punish somebody for smiling wrong. A metal tray on the desk says discretionary delight in brass letters. That is when the room first starts feeling evil in a way you can taste. The broker speaks first because of course he does. He has the smooth voice of a man who has never been trapped inside the consequences he sells. He calls Pain Proxy compassionate modernization, then starts talking about a market evolved beyond selfish suffering where approved contractors absorb the burden for a fee while I remain clear headed and productive. Then he points at the monitor behind him like the thing on it should calm me down. It does not. Some tired bastard in a side room is sitting shirtless with electrodes on his ribs, waiting to become a living drain for somebody else's nerves. He looks like rent has been chewing on him for years. Then the auditor starts talking and somehow he is worse. He does not smile. He has the dead face of a man who thinks cruelty becomes wisdom if he lowers his voice and uses cleaner words. He calls Pleasure Tax a stabilizing civic instrument, then starts in about unregulated joy creating imbalance and strong emotional peaks needing corrective pricing so people learn moderation. That word moderation comes out of his mouth like a priest blessing a knife. The printer beside him spits out a slip for no reason at all. He checks it and nods like the room just confirmed a weather report. I try to picture Pain Proxy in my real life instead of broker language. I stub my toe in the dark and some stranger across town folds over with the hot crack in his foot while I barely feel it. Then I imagine sleeping wrong with a neck full of barbed wire, or some other body eating the fever that should have pinned me down while I keep moving like my own body never raised the alarm. That convenience lasts about half a second in my head. Then conscience catches up and stomps it flat. Because I would know. That is the part the suit keeps trying to skate over. I would know every flinch I dodged landed in a body already desperate enough to sign up for this shit. I would know every easy step of mine cost somebody else a hard hour. The broker starts talking about surge rates for catastrophic pain, then tries dressing up recurring conditions like a stable income stream for the contractor pool. Healthy. Listen to that diseased little sentence. He has built a platform where desperation competes for the right to swallow somebody else's migraines. And Pain Proxy fucks with me too, even before the guilt starts eating. Pain is awful, but pain is also the blunt idiot alarm that tells me when I am wrecking myself. If I can walk on a torn ankle because somebody in another room is eating the signal for me, then I keep walking while the real damage gets worse. If I can grin through an infection because the worst of the agony lands in a contractor's skull, then I keep acting tough while my own body rots in the corner trying to get my attention. Pain Proxy does not only move hurt. It turns my body into a liar with my own face. Then the guilt gets its hands in. Every relief would come poisoned. Every easy breath would drag a shadow behind it. I would have to picture where the missing pain landed. Maybe it went into that skinny worker on the monitor. Maybe it hit somebody trying to finish a shift after selling an afternoon of nerves for bus money, or some worn out parent sitting in a parking lot with salt crackers for dinner because this platform pays more than honesty does. There is no clean comfort in that setup. The comfort arrives with fingerprints on it. The social rot is just as bad. If people knew I used Pain Proxy, every calm moment of mine would look purchased. If I laughed through an injury, nobody would call me strong. They would think I had outsourced the screaming. Lovers would wonder what else I am willing to unload onto invisible workers if the price is right. Friends would stop trusting the easy version of me because the ease itself would look rented. Once somebody believes your composure comes with a receipt, they stop reading it as character and start reading it as appetite. The broker senses that I hate him and tries to sweeten the pitch. He says clients are encouraged to tip, and he starts bragging about premium plans with gratitude notes and contractor wellness check ins folded into the package. That almost gets a laugh out of me, but not the happy kind. He wants me to believe a thank you message redeems the harness. He wants me to believe a little bonus turns extracted suffering into ethics. A nice note does not clean the blood off the thing. It just gives the blood a customer service number. Still, there is one hard truth about Pain Proxy that keeps scratching at me. The evil is visible. It has a room and hardware, with a motherfucker in a shiny suit standing right in front of me telling lies I can hear. If enough people finally stop pretending the brochure changed the smell, this whole business can be dragged into daylight. The workers can point while the buyers get named, and the contracts can be shoved under cameras. That matters when you are choosing between two forms of violation. A visible crime can still be cornered. Then I look back at the desk and the other option starts opening its mouth. Pleasure Tax sounds cleaner for a second, which is exactly why it is filthier. Keep my own pain. Fine. Maybe that even sounds grown up. But every good feeling gets assessed and skimmed before it fully lands, clipped down by a machine that reads relief as a problem. Even peace gets priced by some bastard who thinks delight itself is a public hazard. That is not discipline. That is spiritual pickpocketing with an office lamp. I run that one through my real life too. I eat a good meal after a brutal week and the first real sigh out of my chest triggers a charge. Then I picture finally kissing somebody I have wanted for months, or just hearing a song that hits me dead center, while some scanner decides the pulse spike exceeded acceptable joy before the feeling can even settle. Fuck me sideways, that would rot a person from the inside faster than most wounds ever could. The body cost on that side is sneaky but vicious. If delight gets punished, the nervous system learns not to reach for it. The whole body stays braced, and even a laugh starts checking the room before it finishes. You flatten yourself in advance because flat is cheaper. After a while your body stops running toward good things. It creeps toward them with paperwork already forming in the blood. That is what this kind of system does. It does not beat the joy out of you in one grand scene. It teaches your muscles to help with the job. The emotional damage is worse. Pleasure Tax does not only take a cut. It teaches suspicion. Before long, anything bright starts sounding expensive enough to regret, and you begin acting like every good thing is a trap with the invoice already running late behind it. That is how people turn gray without chains. Not with one giant catastrophe. With enough little charges that the heart starts rationing itself out of self defense. A person can limp a long time through pain. A person does not stay human for long after learning to fear his own joy. The social side goes rotten in a different costume. Nobody wants to be the friend whose laugh ran up the tab, or the host wondering whether the best part of dinner is going to cost everybody extra. Nobody sane wants to fall in love under a system that tracks pulse spikes and bills them as premium emotional usage either. Rooms get cautious. Parties get smaller before they even start. People begin doing the shrinking themselves because they know the scanner is listening. You do not need cops in the room once the room has learned to police its own delight. The auditor watches me watching the printer and thinks he is winning. He says the tax can be progressive and compassionate. He says minor pleasures remain mostly untouched while excessive joy receives corrective pricing. There it is. The disease in plain language. He thinks joy becomes suspicious once it gets intense enough to matter. He thinks a life should stay livable only up to the point where it starts to feel too good. That is bedbug philosophy in a gray vest. This bastard would meter the sunlight through your kitchen window if it caught you smiling too hard into your coffee. Then the room starts proving both sides at once. The broker wants a demonstration, so he takes a little pin and jabs my forearm before I can pull away. The sting is real for less than a breath, then it vanishes from my arm. On the monitor, the skinny worker snaps forward like somebody pulled a wire through his bones. His hand clamps over the exact place that should still be burning on me. The broker says immediate relief like he is showing me a luxury seat warmer. I barely hear him. The worker is trying so hard not to cry that his neck is shaking. That should settle it. It nearly does. Then the scanner catches the tiny ugly flicker of relief that passed through me when the sting left my own arm. The printer spits out a charge before I can even swear. Relief assessment, six units. The auditor tears off the slip and slides it toward me with two fingers. He says I experienced measurable benefit. I stare at the paper. I look at the worker still swallowing my pain for wages. Then I look back at the slip billing me for the breath I took when the hurt left my skin. One system sells the wound. The other sells the pause after the wound. Now I am pacing between the harness and the desk while both of these parasites try to reclaim the pitch. The broker says pain is temporary and transferable, and the auditor says joy is destabilizing and taxable. Meanwhile the worker on the screen looks like he wants to fold himself into the wall. The printer keeps coughing up little judgments. The brass lamp throws dead gold over everything, and the whole room feels like a confession booth run by accountants. I keep circling because both choices are vile, but only one of them reaches deeper into what keeps a person willing to wake up tomorrow. If I take Pain Proxy, I become complicit in an open market of human misery. I let a real person absorb hurt that belongs to me. That is disgusting and I know it. But the disgust stays attached to bodies and contracts, with cameras and payroll records still there to prove what happened. It stays in a form that can be named and cornered. If I take Pleasure Tax, the rot moves inside every bright moment and starts teaching me not to trust my own joy. That does not only corrupt a choice. It colonizes the whole inner life. It makes hope feel financially stupid. That is the part I cannot forgive. People survive pain all the time. People limp through hell and keep a little fire alive somewhere anyway. What they do not survive for long is the learned reflex of shrinking away from delight before it can even land. Once a system gets into that space, once it makes relief feel billable and happiness feel like bad citizenship, it has its hand around the throat of every future thing that might have made life worth the trouble. Pain Proxy is monstrous. Pleasure Tax ruins a soul in a quieter, cleaner, more complete way. So I pick Pain Proxy. I pick Pain Proxy because I would rather face one filthy market in plain sight than let some motherfucker crawl into every good feeling I have and stamp a fee on it before it reaches my chest. Pain Proxy is cruel, but the cruelty has edges. It has a harness with a broker standing over it in a room I can point at and call evil without anybody pretending they misunderstood me. Pleasure Tax is worse because it turns the inside of a human life into taxable property. It teaches you to flinch at your own happiness. It makes the losing side a slow obedient death where even relief has to ask permission. That is the other side's humiliation machine. Pleasure Tax trains the body to mistrust delight and trains the heart to go numb before the charge arrives. Pain Proxy is still an atrocity, and I am not pretending otherwise, but the atrocity stays visible enough to fight. The desk option turns every future joy into a suspicious event and calls that civilized. I would take the visible horror, then spend the rest of my breath trying to burn the whole vile business down, before I let that gray vested parasite teach me happiness is a billable offense. That's the fucking verdict. I made the call, and if your brain still works, you know where this lands.