Molecular Sacrament

Had he been less scared he could have described his terror beyond the precision of poet and the suggestiveness of actor, for he knew the more intricate arts of neurochemical and microelectrode, of gene regulation and wetware code. He had to: he was a feelings designer for the rich and famous, who had always sought for genuinely new ones and now the technology had finally caught up with their desire.

It was possible now to feel things no human being ever had or could possibly feel without very expensive equipment. Somebody had to hold the creative reins of this most unmediated of art forms: that was him.

Somebody else had to be the replaceable guinea pig to protect the irreplaceable client. By the nature of the job, some of them had to experience "calibration failures" and disappear under veiled threats and ironclad NDAs. Some of those had kidnapped him and were standing around the operating chair he was tied to.

His profession had made him a quick reader of other people's feelings. His captors' he couldn't read. Not opaque. Alien. His failures (perhaps overreaches (perhaps not as accidental as much as not deliberate)) had left echoes and scars. They, too, had experienced feelings new to humankind. Unlike his clients they still did, spiraling out of his well-designed garden paths into wildernesses he knew himself curious about.

A smell at the edge of his awareness crossed softly into recognition. It was the smell of the local anesthetic he used to insert mobile microelectrodes and chemical pushers into a client's brain. From the base of his skull he knew a thin set of wires and tubes dangled down a control core.

He would have screamed if he hadn't been gagged.

He -

He stopped his trashing. He knew he was no longer scared. There was no word to describe how he felt. They had stamped on his brain using his own tools and his own reckless protocols some feeling new to the species - a circling thing that kept his brain locked away from the quaint familiar corridors of (ab)normal psychology into something exponentially stranger nobody in history had needed to find words for.

As the others untied and ungagged him he recognized what he felt on their faces. They, too, had gone beyond human language (he had taken them there neither entirely by force nor entirely not), yet not beyond the human need to describe one's feelings to themselves and to the world.

He had no words they didn't. But he had chemistry, neurophysiology, and the subtle engineering of both. Somebody gave him a pen and paper. Then they all watched with indescribable attention as he made a precise description of what they felt in the only language that could possibly work.        

They would kill him afterwards. He had known this before. Now he understood.