empathy hardware
and the lack thereof
Her arms were already wrapped around me, but she held on tighter as the drugs started to wear off. Can we make this last a little longer, she asked. Is this how it feels to be normal? We were huddled together in a small room away from all of the people that she'd alienated on the trip.
She called herself a sociopath, by which she meant that she never felt empathy, except on molly. She’d broken up with her boyfriend a week before our trip but it was too late to disinvite either of them, so they both showed up. She’d gone on to pick fights with half of the people traveling with us and didn’t seem to mind.
I was an outsider who’d come along on a lark and probably uniquely happy to have her company. There’s nothing that can’t be improved through an interesting conversation with a beautiful woman, especially when I’d been struggling to make friends too. Still, even I was finding her hard edges uncomfortable, and she was full of hard edges.
As she came up we'd talked about our childhoods, her job, my family, all of the things that either of us cared about as far as I could tell. Everything she said about herself came with an affect somewhere between matter-of-fact and proud: her several millionaire boyfriends, her estranged relationship with her Yale dropout father, her career as a lawyer. Eventually we gave up on conversation, and I turned up the boom box and stroked her hair and back as she dozed off.
Hours passed, the playlist ended and looped. I fiddled with the volume as she puffed on her vape. Can we make this last a little longer, she asked. This is why this is my favorite drug, she said, and I don’t want it to end. I didn’t know what to say. You can take more but it fries your brain. If you burn out the circuits you can’t get high anymore, not the same way. A little later, the rest of my drugs disappeared, and she made fun of me for expecting to find them again. A few months later she told me that she didn’t think she wanted to do molly anymore, that it made her too depressed afterwards. It was years before I figured out that she’d stolen my supply.
We tried for awhile to be friends. During that time I thought a lot about how it would feel to live with a brain without empathy circuitry. Other than that one time, she never let on that it bothered her at all. She claimed that if anything, her wiring was better. You can just pretend, she said, and eventually you get better at acting it out than most people are at doing it for real. You can actually be more ethical this way, more helpful, because you think more clearly.
The more I thought about it, the tighter the metaphor seemed to me. She was running some kind of empath program in emulation. That meant that she could reflect on it and modify it, and she probably understood the program better than everyone who came with it wired in. On the other hand, it would always run a little slower than someone running it on native hardware. The stutters would always give her away.
So how would it feel for that kind of brain to be suddenly flooded by the strongest of empathogens, just for a few hours? I was reminded of that children’s story about the bewitched prince in the silver chair, waking up to his true self for only an hour each night, begging for release. It was too sad to think that maybe that girl was still there somewhere inside of her, looking out.
We tried for awhile to be friends, but after that summer ended I never saw her again.