The coffee shop was called "Zeitgeist," because of course it was.
Liz had chosen it specifically: Friday afternoon, university district, midterms week. "Maximum stress density," she'd said over breakfast. "College students are emotional powder kegs, all you have to do is provide the spark."
Now Darren sat at a corner table, the navy tie she'd specified making him look like he belonged in business casual hell, watching a young woman at the next table over. Her laptop was surrounded by textbooks, energy drink cans, and the desperate energy of someone running on three hours of sleep and pure anxiety.
Her tag: [STRESS: HIGH] [$18.50].
Respectable, but not exceptional.
"Make it worse," Liz had said this morning, her gold flecked eyes gleaming with professional interest. "Not obviously, no direct attacks. Just... create friction, a small obstacle and watch what happens to the yield."
"That's cruel."
"That's practical." She'd smiled over her espresso. "You've been harvesting ambient emotion like a scavenger. I'm teaching you to be a farmer, farmers don't wait for fruit to fall from trees, they cultivate, they optimize and they produce."
Now, sitting three feet from a target, Darren felt his heart rate climbing.
This was different from the hospital waiting rooms, different from the pawnshop. Those people were already suffering, he'd just collected the emotional byproduct, like some kind of misery recycling program.
This was deliberately making someone's day worse.
The woman—early twenties, hijab, engineering textbook open to a chapter on thermodynamics, took a sip of her coffee and went back to typing. Her movements had the frantic quality of someone racing a deadline.
Darren checked her tag again: [STRESS: HIGH] [$18.50].
Stable. Sustainable. Ethically harvested stress.
He could just take it now, walk away. Tell Liz he'd done the exercise.
"But then you'll always be limited to what people feel naturally," Liz's voice echoed in his memory. "And natural emotions are small, controlled, civilized. Real profit comes from disruption."
Darren stood, coffee cup in hand.
Walked toward the bathroom.
As he passed the woman's table, he stumbled, just slightly, just enough and his elbow caught her coffee cup.
The cup tipped, spilled. Dark liquid rolled across her laptop keyboard, her textbook, her notes.
"Shit!" The woman jumped up, grabbing napkins, trying to salvage her laptop. "No no no no—"
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry!" Darren said, and he was. Genuinely, his hands were shaking as he grabbed more napkins. "I didn't see—let me help—"
"My laptop!" She was tilting it, trying to drain the coffee out. The screen flickered, died. "No. No! I have a project due in three hours!"
Her tag exploded:
[FRUSTRATION: ACUTE] [$45.00]
Not just frustration, panic, genuine, intense, multilayered emotion born from the intersection of ruined technology, looming deadlines and the special kind of despair that came from watching weeks of work potentially vanish.
The woman's hands were shaking, her eyes were tearing up. "I don't have time to—I can't afford—oh god, my backup is two days old—"
[PANIC: RISING] [$52.75]
Darren stood there, napkins in hand, watching the numbers climb.
Nine times higher than the ambient stress, nine times more valuable. All because he'd "accidentally" knocked over a cup.
"I'm really sorry," he said again and meant it. "Can I—do you want me to call someone? Or—"
"Just go." The woman wasn't looking at him anymore, she was staring at her dead laptop, at her coffee stained notes, at the ruins of her afternoon. "Please just... go."
[DESPAIR: MODERATE] [$38.25]
Darren backed away, grabbed his own laptop and left the coffee shop with his heart hammering and his conscience screaming.
Outside, he leaned against the brick wall and harvested.
The cold hit him like always, but sharper this time. More intense, the woman's panic tasted like "three weeks of work gone, can't afford a new laptop, parents will be so disappointed, why am I so careless, why can't I just be better at this—"
It dissolved into golden particles.
DEPOSIT: $52.75
His phone buzzed with a text from Liz: How'd it go?
Darren stared at the screen, at the deposit notification, at his reflection in the coffee shop window, wearing a suit woven from other people's confidence while he stood in the wreckage of someone's afternoon.
Done, he typed back.
Yield?
$52.75
Excellent, See? Manufacturing beats scavenging every time. Meet me for dinner. 7 PM. Address to follow.
Darren pocketed his phone and started walking.
He made it two blocks before he had to stop and lean against another wall.
His hands were still shaking.
$52.75, that was... that was significant money, half a day's work at his old job, earned in thirty seconds of "accidental" clumsiness. The math was undeniable, the efficiency was spectacular.
The horror was mounting.
[OBSERVATION: USER EXPERIENCING GUILT]
[NOTE: COMMON IN EARLY CULTIVATION PHASES]
[EMOTIONAL RECOVERY TIME: EXTENDED]
"Shut up," Darren muttered to his UI.
A passing cyclist gave him a weird look.
He kept walking, trying to outpace the memory of the woman's face, the way her expression had crumbled from focused determination to devastated panic, the tears she'd been fighting back.
All because he'd bumped a coffee cup.
"It was an accident," part of him insisted. "You said you were sorry, these things happen."
"You did it on purpose," another part countered. "You calculated the angle, measured the distance, executed it like a fucking operation."
"She'll be fine, she'll find a backup, use a library computer, it's not like you ruined her life."
"You ruined her day deliberately, for money, for $52.75."
The Analyst, cold and calculating: "$52.75 versus $18.50 represents a 285% increase in yield. The manufactured emotion was purer, more intense, and more valuable. This is called optimization."
Nova, desperate and horrified: "This is called being a sociopath."
Darren stopped walking, stood in the middle of the sidewalk while Seattle flowed around him—people with their own tags, their own yields, their own potential for cultivation.
[INADEQUACY: MODERATE] [$7.20] - Man in a suit, phone pressed to ear
[LONELINESS: ACUTE] [$23.50] - Elderly woman feeding pigeons
[RESENTMENT: BUILDING] [$15.75] - Teenager arguing with someone over text
All of them potential targets, all of them vulnerable to the right push, the right word, the right "accidental" disruption.
He could make all of them worse, Could engineer scenarios that amplified their pain, could turn this entire city block into a harvest zone.
The Goldscript Protocol hummed with approval at the thought.
Darren pulled out his phone and opened his efficiency log.
Date: 10/3/2025
Target Type: College student (high stress, deadline pressure)
Method: Manufactured accident (coffee spill)
Ambient Yield: $18.50
Manufactured Yield: $52.75
Increase: 285%
Metabolic Cost: ~80 kcal (estimated - higher due to guilt response)
Emotional Recovery: TBD (currently at 15 minutes, still feeling like garbage)
Notes: The manufactured emotion was significantly purer and more intense than ambient harvests. Target's panic was multilayered - technological failure, deadline pressure, financial anxiety, self-blame. The complexity increased value.
Ethical concerns: High. Direct causation vs. observation. Crossed a line here, not sure I can uncross it.
Practical concerns: If I can generate 285% more yield through active cultivation, ambient harvesting becomes financially obsolete. The math is forcing me toward increasingly direct intervention.
Liz's assessment (predicted): "See? You're not a scavenger anymore, you're a farmer."
My assessment: I used to feel bad about my social anxiety, now it's a professional tool. Growth!
He read the last line twice. It was supposed to be funny. Self deprecating humor to distance himself from what he'd done.
Instead, it just felt true.
Dinner was at a place called "ALTURA," the kind of restaurant where menu prices required you to ask, which meant you couldn't afford it.
Liz sat across from him in a black dress that looked expensive, radiating satisfaction. "You're learning," she said, sipping wine that the sommelier had described with the reverence usually reserved for religious texts. "I can see it in your posture, you're starting to understand the game."
"I made a girl cry over spilled coffee," Darren said.
"You created a high value emotional event and harvested it efficiently." She cut into something that looked like it had been plated by an architect. "That's the job. The sooner you separate moral intuition from practical execution, the better you'll perform."
"That's sociopathy."
"That's capitalism." Liz smiled. "Every transaction requires someone to lose something. Usually, they lose money, or time, or opportunity. We just operate in a different market and frankly, a ruined laptop is less permanently damaging than credit card debt or medical bankruptcy."
"That's a hell of a rationalization."
"It's accurate cost benefit analysis." She gestured with her fork. "That student? Her emotion was going to exist anyway. Stress, panic, frustration—those are constants in university life, you didn't create them, you just... concentrated them, nade them useful. Extracted value from something that would have dissipated into nothing."
"She might fail her class."
"She might use a cloud backup and be fine by tomorrow." Liz leaned forward. "You're not responsible for people's outcomes, Darren. You're responsible for your own survival and right now, survival means understanding that manufactured emotions are nine times more valuable than ambient ones."
"285% more valuable."
"You calculated it." She looked pleased. "See? The Analyst in you understands, even if Nova is having feelings about it."
Darren stared at his plate—something with foam and microgreens that looked expensive but not necessarily good. "Is this what you meant by 'the cost'? When you said everyone pays for success?"
"Part of it." Liz's expression softened slightly. "The physical changes are real—the gold in the eyes, the hair but the psychological cost is steeper. You lose the ability to see people as people, they become yield potentials. Emotional vectors. Resources to optimize."
"That sounds horrible."
"That sounds honest." She finished her wine. "Most people do the same calculations unconsciously, why be nice to someone? Because it might benefit you later, why help a stranger? Because it makes you feel good—which is still selfish, just with extra steps. We're just doing it consciously, with better metrics."
The waiter appeared with dessert menus. Liz waved him off and ordered two of something Darren couldn't pronounce.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we're going to a networking event. Tech sector. Lots of people whose entire self worth is tied to their startup valuations and follower counts, you're going to practice cultivation in a controlled environment."
"More coffee spills?"
"More subtle interventions, a question that creates doubt, a compliment that highlights inadequacy, we're done with accidents, now we do it deliberately."
Darren's stomach twisted. "I don't know how I feel about this?"
You can always go back to harvesting whatever ambient misery you stumble across, and you make maybe $40 a day if you're lucky, and you spend your entire life in that grey zone between survival and thriving." Liz held his gaze. "Or you lean into the training, master cultivation techniques and make in an hour what used to take you a week."
"By making people miserable."
"By recognizing that people are already miserable, we're just the ones honest enough to profit from it." She smiled. "Besides, you've already crossed the line, the coffee spill proved that, now you're just negotiating how far past the line you're willing to go."
The dessert arrived—something with gold leaf that definitely qualified as showing off.
Darren ate slowly, tasting nothing, calculating everything.
$52.75 for thirty seconds of work.
$18.50 for an hour of passive observation.
The math didn't care about ethics, the math only cared about optimization.
And the Analyst in him loved math more than it loved being a good person.
"Same time tomorrow?" Liz asked.
Darren looked at her gold flecked eyes, then at his reflection in the restaurant window, wearing a suit made of stolen confidence, at the future where he became someone who saw human suffering as a revenue stream.
"Same time tomorrow," he replied.