“These children are our future,” the reporter said, grinning ear to ear on the T.V. Everyone cheered, hooted, set off fireworks celebrating this fabulous announcement.

Crona took forty-three lives. You could say that the plan was immaculate and could still be executed, but no. Crona overlooked one thing. And it was those that still had feelings.

***

In the year 2030, our organization, Crona, set its sights on creating the most flawless system the world could live by. A world where there was no such thing as a negative emotion.

To accomplish this, we searched for the supernatural. The reincarnated. The special.

We found fifty orphans who had some type of connection to strange phenomena. Our scientists conducted painful tests on them, and yet they needed to be done. The world was waiting for us to do so. They were waiting for the perfect world that these children would bring them.

I remember visiting where they resided. I walked down the stairs to the basement of our office building. At some point, the white concrete stairs darkened, and the sickening stench of rotting flesh made my stomach curdle. I covered my nose and kept going down. The metal walls around me were so rusty, they almost looked like they were painted in blood. Screams filled my ears as I reached the bottom of the stairs.

What I saw was a horror—fifty beds in rows of five greeted me. The few workers stooped over the children, injecting shots into them. Every so often, the heart rate monitor beside a bed would show a straight line, then jump back to an uneven beat.

I dared myself to take a closer look at the child nearest me. She jerked occasionally, veins bulging unnaturally. She was a little girl, and purple bruises covered her arms.

Suddenly, her eyes snapped open.

I watched her pupils dilate as she shook violently. My heart lurched. Her arms shot up, twisting unnaturally. Her mouth opened, releasing a guttural scream, which suddenly turned into silence as she fell limp. I waited for her to start thrashing again, but she never did. Hesitantly, I looked at the heart monitor. A continuous straight line ran through it.

Wake up! a voice said in my mind. I took a step forward and stared down at her body. Wake up! it screamed, WAKE UP! But the girl never did. She was as still as the line on the heart monitor. She was a corpse.

Looking around, I saw the same thing happening to other children. WAKE UP! the voice inside my head screamed louder. The fetid odor brought tears to my eyes, and I could no longer stand the reeking smell of decomposing bodies. I backed away, edging toward the staircase. I had come downstairs only to see how many children lived. Thirteen were dead.

Eager to escape the stench and gruesome sight, I sprinted upstairs.

But the memory of the dead girl stayed.

***

A few months later, only seven kids remained. The deaths of the forty-three children were honored, but people didn’t mourn for long. Pain would soon be a part of the past. Right?

Every day I worked hard, convincing myself that I was doing the right thing. Taking another step toward peace. But at night, all I thought about was the girl I had watched die, and how I did nothing. Sometimes, I thought humans had already lost the ability to sympathize, to mourn, to feel. We already sacrificed the lives of forty-three innocent children without a single doubt. No. It couldn’t even be considered sacrificing. It was pure murder. How could our existence be so selfish? So disgusting?

Upon the death of the forty-third child, we started training the survivors. Our goal? To make them feel the pain that all humans would have to feel. In return, sadness, anger, jealousy —every negative emotion—would never be felt again. The only emotions that remained would be happiness, love, and affection.

My co-workers attached tubes to the children, performed surgeries, sedated them, and monitored them 24/7. No one cared about what we did to the children. Everyone wanted a perfect day.

The seven kids were trained to receive the emotions of every person. They were extremely sensitive. They could feel what anyone felt, and we used that information to our advantage. After one year, the children were ready, and the announcement was made. In one week, no one would feel a single negative emotion again. Everyone was ready. Little kids, teenagers, adults—all prepared to give up their suffering.

Philosophers agreed, therapists raved, teachers looked forward to never dealing with a troublesome child. They called it “The Day of Freedom.”

The seven children were locked in a small room, each in a capsule emitting gas to keep them alive. I walked to one of the capsules and peered inside through the glass window. The child inside seemed to be peacefully asleep. This was it—the future of our world.

My mind flashed through months of work. So many accomplishments and discoveries. But disgust ran through me whenever I thought about the children. I remembered the girl who died before me. Her dilated eyes, her thrashing limbs, the condition she was kept in.

My hand pressed against the glass. I could walk away, like the day I counted the dead children. I could pretend I was doing the right thing. Like I did every night after watching the girl die.

No, the voice inside me snapped. Yes! I snapped back. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t let the world down! But the voice inside me grew. It grew into the voices of the children. The forty-three children who had died unjustly.

“No!” I screamed. I looked at my reflection in the glass. “No!” My breath was ragged, my heart pumped like crazy.

A chorus of children’s voices screamed in my head—DO IT!

My fingers curled into fists. My nails dug into my palm. My vision blurred. A crushing weight of guilt and grief consumed me. The room felt smaller, suffocating, the hum of the machines, my pounding heart.

My breath hitched. My body moved. My fist swung, and the next thing I heard was the sharp, splintering crack of breaking glass.