I wrote the first version of this story my senior year of college for a project called Illuminating Ethics via Fantasy Fiction – at the time I was a philosophy major destined for law school, and my primary interest was to figure out how best to live a good life. The goal of the project was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to demonstrate that speculative fiction is a valuable method for boiling ethical conundrums down to their core component parts in order to make them easier to consider. I may have graduated, but I never really abandoned the project ;) The original version was much longer and, I think, less effective. I've been fiddling with it and tweaking it for a long time, but I started thinking about it again now that I'm reflecting on how the first quarter back to teaching in 3 years went for me. Wow, let me tell you how much I empathize with Eisha now, in ways I never would have even considered possible when I first wrote this story. This is the wrong place for a truly comprehensive explanation of all the things that are frustrating about my job, but the emotion of "I signed up to do something I thought was good, people didn't listen to me, and things went badly, so now the only ethical choice I can make is to try and take what joy I can from the moment... or completely give up and stop contributing to a system I no longer believe in" is, wow, past me was prophetic. It's ironic, in some ways, since I initially wrote this as sort of a critique of people like Eisha – it was meant as a criticism of utilitarianism, of the idea that happiness is all that matters. Eisha's empathic gifts were supposed to be a sort of extreme version of the lotus-eater, taking questions of drug abuse out of the equation when evaluating the consequentialist goal of increasing the happiness in the world. If an empath could just feel childlike joy all the time, parasitically experiencing other people's satisfaction and pleasure, and chose to waste away rather than contribute to the society that created in any other way... is that ethical? Is it ethical for me to waste years of education and abandon students who might benefit from my presence because the system has changed so much I no longer believe in it? I hope so.