The Conscience Shift

The company was called Ballast, and its logo was a small stylized weight, the kind you would set on a scale, which Marcus Dubrenn came to think of later as the most honest piece of branding he had ever encountered. The premise was simple enough that it had taken the world only a few years to stop being scandalized by it. A person under strain, a surgeon before a fourteen-hour operation, an executive before a hostile board, a mother a week after burying her child, could route their surplus, the fatigue and the pain and the anxiety and the grief, off their own nervous system and onto someone else's, for a fee, by the hour. The neural interface had come out of pain-management research, from work on getting a burn victim's suffering to quiet down long enough for the grafts to take. Somebody had realized the quieting did not require the suffering to vanish but only required it to go somewhere, and there were always people who would take it if you paid them, because there were always people…