"You see," she says. "The challenge is that given time, the human can adapt to any situation." She pauses for the obligatory laughter. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't delivered like a joke. The crowd chuckles anyway. "Well, perhaps that's getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe we should start a little further back." She raises her eyebrow, her hand making the smallest move. The screen behind her silently shifts, from a title slide listing her name and credentials to a brief timeline studded with black and white photos of pompous rich white men.
You glance at your notes and smile and nod. There's a coffee resting at your elbow, still too hot to drink. It was fresh ground, handed out freely in the lobby. They got the beans from somewhere foreign. Somewhere in South America probably. You smiled when they told you the country like it was something to be proud of, something that meant something to you. You wondered if it was connected to the product. Wouldn't that be a twist?
"Now, I don't have time to give you the full history," she's saying. "I could wax lyrical about each of these men and their contributions to the field. I could even explain whose work they stole." The audience chuckles again, although a little more hesitantly. "We'll circle back to that in a minute. First, I was wondering if anyone recognizes this graph?"
Her hand moves slightly again and the slide changes. The graph is a very standard exponential curve, very flat until suddenly it's not. Your eyes trace the curve. The horizontal axis is labeled in years, with the massive growth starting in the 1970s. There are no labels on the vertical axis. You study it carefully. It could be anything, really. Perhaps computing power? Size of the internet? You have a guess of what point she's making but you don't know the history well enough to say it confidently.
"Anyone?" she says to no reply. She shakes her slightly, her small smile comforting the audience that she knew no one would get it. "The green revolution," she said. "Improving agriculture techniques led to massively improved crop yields." She moves her hand and the labels show up, all the important dates on display. The audience nods sagely. You glance around the dimly lit conference room at them, sitting in their leather arm chairs and hastily stolen wheeled chairs. They're bored.
"But of course, we can see this shape for many things," she continues. "Computing power, productivity of a worker, life expectancy." She wrinkles her nose a little. "Climate change." The audience chuckles politely. "Everything goes up, right?" She clicks forwards as she talks, slides showing graphs of various measures for human existence, a thousand ways to quantify a life. Pictures begin to blend in too, computers and crops and guns and starving children, all the standard horrors. The audience nods along to this.
"This, of course, isn't the part of the graph that interests us. It's easy for engineers to build the future. It's easy to carve steel and circuits into shapes that do our bidding. Our metal friends walk and talk, our plants grow bigger and better. It's easy to grow." She smiles, white teeth glowing in the dark. "It's easy to grow because growth is new. Humans aren't yet inured to it. But sustainability." She trails off. Her hand twitches again and the graph drops away, progress falling off a cliff. It tanks through the years, divebombing towards zero, speedrunning societal collapse. "Sustainability is hard." The images flash by again, a whirling corporate dance of delightful tortures. The audience is leaning forwards now. This is the interesting part.
"I imagine you've all seen something similar in your own companies. Looking at you, Jack." She singles out an audience member who gives an appreciate hand wave. "Productivity climbs and then it tanks. Why? The limits of natural laws? The inevitability of mitigating factors? Or are these just the manifestations of a darker, more mysterious power?" The slide changes again, a grainy black and white photo of an unfamiliar figure hovering before us like some malignant spectre. "Magister Norvik Legrasse," she says. "The forefather of our theory and thus, the man we owe our entire business to." You study him. He's narrow faced and wide eyed. His clothes are fancy but ill fitting. You almost feel like you've seen him before. "He lived through the industrial revolution and it was his foresight that truly birthed the study of pain."
The crowd murmurs slightly. Sure, we all knew this was coming. Sure, it was in the emails and on the website and in the brochures at the door. And yet, to hear it out loud was something else entirely. You glance down at your notes, a rough scribble showing how little you've been paying attention. "Pain," you write, underlining it twice for emphasis.
"Pain," she says, almost as if replying to you. "That's the key. Now our Mr. Legrasse was good friends with the owner of a local factory. He was also a learned man. So when the owner of the factory came to him with a riddle, he was fascinated." She paused for a moment, enjoying the tension of the moment of reveal. "The question was: why does the factory produce most on days after there's an accident?" You glance around the room again, taking in the new curious faces. "Mr. Legrasse spent a decade tracking the statistics. He ran the calculations up and down and backwards. No matter how he did it, the worse the accidents were, the more the factory produced. It seemed backwards. And when he couldn't find a plausible physical explanation, he turned to darker powers. He appealed to demons and spirits. He claimed he saw dark ghosts hanging over the machines, the souls of the damned bound and appeased only by suffering equivalent to the fires of hell they escaped. He named this the "Malum of Suffering"." She shook her head. "This was overblown and overdramatic, of course. We hardly subscribe to such superstitions now. But he was not wrong. Pain. That's the correlating factor."
You nod. Frankly, you'd guessed as much before.
Her skin glows, translucent. She smiles, changing the slide again. A lonely grave sits atop a hill. "Mr. Legrasse's greatest contribution to the field was the taking of his own life after his results terrified him. He was ill fitted to progress the theory, after all. By all accounts, he was dreadfully soft." This elicits a few chuckles. "Despite the proven connection, it took another two generations of scholars for anyone to turn his work to anything useful. Largely, this was because they followed his methods of base statistics and counting. No, we didn't see any useful practice until Griffon White." The picture shows a wide man, dressed in a tight suit, frowning intently. "Of course, he owes his work to his two daughters." She leans forwards and whispers conspiratorially, "No pictures of them survive."
Laughing, she leans back and waves her hands dramatically. "See, he made progress because he frequently beat them and stole their work. Once again, pain is necessary for progress. For productivity. And when he had the idea to put it into practice, to gut men alive and decorate the machines with their blood, he made his daughters do the dirty deed." Her eyes almost seem to glow red. Something dark leaks from the corner of her mouth but she licks it up quickly. "This too was brilliant. Inspired. A doubling in a way. The machines grew more and more powerful with the blood poured into them. But it wasn't the blood that was important. No, it was the pain they suffered before they died. And how did he learn that? Because he beat his daughters until they beat the men they dragged from the streets because violence was all they know. It's cyclical, you see. Pain begets pain begets progress." She nods. "Any questions so far?"
The room is silent. You glance around again, taking in the dark shadows, the calm leather of the chairs, the dull glow of laptop screens and tablets. Not a face moves. No one blinks. Something is caught in your throat. You think it might be the truth.
The corner of her mouth crooks up. "Good." She takes a sip of water from the glass by her laptop and swallows. She wipes her forehead with the crisp white of her sleeve. "I won't bore you with the next two hundred years of the developing theory. I will simply tell you that for reasons they did not understand it seemed to stop working one day and was tragically lost. And society progressed onwards, new technologies seemingly running fine without pain. Seemingly." She lets the word echo. "But was that really true? For every machine that replaced a worker, a worker starved in the streets. For every new crop, someone who could never afford to eat it was forced to pick it. For every technology, every genetic modification, every algorithm, there was a group of undesirables it was invited to eat. The designers didn't know what they were doing, for the most part. They thought it was acceptable losses, unforeseen side effects. But I ask you now. Why is it that no development leaves anyone unharmed? Because pain!" She is suddenly shouting, her voice a throaty hoarse howl. "Suffering is what drives the wheels of the world! Suffering is true progress! Suffering is god!"
Your lips move on their own. "Suffering is god," you say, your voice startling you a little. Your eyes were too focused on her, your brain unable to break its intense concentration. Because you already knew this. It was in your heart the whole time, just waiting to be given voice.
"But the problem," she said, "is that humans can grow used to anything. If you stab them, they convince themselves the knife belongs in them. If you take away their food, they learn to eat the weeds growing between the concrete. If you kill their children, they say their children deserved it!" She shakes her head. "Such pathetic creatures. So wasteful. So everything breaks down. The machines need more suffering to get the same progress. So we invent new ways to harvest their hurts and they invent new ways to adapt." She lets the words hang. "It's an endless cycle. A constant battle. Someone needs to invent true suffering, a suffering so intense it cannot be resisted or decreased. Someone needs to invent a suffering so pure that no one will ever grow used to it. That even the knowledge of how it is done would never sit right with you, would agonize you for the rest of your days. The market demands someone figure it out." The slide changes again, a logo and a bottle. "Someone like us. Pure artificial suffering in a bottle."
The crowd murmurs slightly. Almost tentatively, hands go up.
She raises her head defiantly, calling no one. Instead, she changes the slide to a list of selling points. "Shelf stable for at least 10 years. Simply apply liberally to your projects. Our pain experts are happy to consult for appropriate dosing amounts. Simply ingest for improvements in your work performance. Crafted using all natural ingredients." She taps the table. "Surprisingly, regulatory legal in most jurisdictions. Pricing details and purchase forms are in the emails you just received." Sure enough, your phone dings. "Any questions?"
There are still hands up. You raise your hand too.
She points at someone. "How is it made?" they ask.
"Pure virgin blood," she says, completely deadpan. The crowd laughs. She smiles, relaxing. "Trade secret. For your protection. If I told you, you wouldn't buy." She points at someone else. "You."
"If the pain is necessary at all steps of the process, how do you develop something like this?"
She laughs. "We torture the researchers, of course." She makes a show of checking her watch. "Think I have time for one more." Her eyes meet yours for just a moment and her fingers jabs at you accusatorially. "You."
You swallow and ask the obvious question. "If humans can get used to anything, why should we trust they won't get used to this?"
Her eyes sparkle. "Don't worry," she said. "You and I will be long gone by the time it does. Thank you for your time gentlemen." And just as suddenly as it began, the lights were on and the spell was broken.
You stare at the now blank screen for a moment until a voice from next to you breaks you from your thoughts. "It's a load of nonsense, isn't it?" says your neighbour.
You glance at him cautiously. "Yeah," you say. "Are you going to buy?"
"Of course," he laughs. "Who can afford not to?" He hesitates for a moment. "Are you?"
You nod. "Don't worry," you say. "We'll get used to it."