The Empathy Virus

Dr. Elena Serrano stared at the petri dish containing her greatest achievement and biggest mistake. The virus strained against the glass, strands of red pulsing as if alive. In many ways, it was more alive than the doctors who created it.

Her team had done the impossible — engineered a virus that could rewrite the human brain, opening new neural pathways to greatly amplify empathic awareness and emotional understanding between people. It was supposed to be the key to uniting humanity, breaking down cultural barriers as people literally felt each other’s joy and pain.

Instead, it had brought the world to the brink of collapse.

The empathy virus swept outward from their Swiss lab in an unstoppable contagion. At first, its effects seemed miraculous — an end to hostilities as warring factions embraced each other, fully grasping their common human bonds.

But they had failed to anticipate its dark potential when too much emotional transference became a reality. As the virus spread, people’s minds became hopelessly entangled in a churning maelstrom of shared grief and fear. Love and kindness morphed into unbearable collective anguish.

Entire cities ground to a halt as populations suffered paroxysms of ambient emotional overload. The act of walking past a hospital or viewing televised news triggered a deluge of psychic suffering. Trying to block out the constant noise of empathic distress only made it worse.