Introduction: A Currency Born of Emotion
In a smile-based economy, authenticity is a luxury. And no one remembers why.
“The real poverty isn’t lack of money. It’s the inability to smile without needing something in return.”
After the Fall, emotion became the only reliable asset. Paper, metal, code—all manipulated. But a smile? A real smile? That couldn’t be faked.
Or so they thought.
The Ministry of Grin made it law: 1 SMIL per smile. Measured by biometric sensors and neural resonance. A brief grin could buy a meal. A sincere one? Rent for a week. Laughter? Enough for medicine—if you had any dignity left to lose.
Act I: The Face of Value
Tren Kazzik had mastered the smile like a pianist masters dissonance.
Each morning he applied his GrinStim patch, a micro-neural pulse that tricked his facial muscles into mimicking joy. The eyes didn’t quite match, but no one looked closely anymore. It was the number above your head that mattered.
Today he needed at least 25 SMILs to afford a ration and five seconds of pressurized water. That meant three mid-tier smiles, or a single high-frequency laugh.
He rehearsed in the mirrorless bathroom, letting his jaw unhinge slightly, eyebrows lift at the calibrated 17° angle of acceptable joy.
“Smile rates drop by 17% in winter. Depression, after all, was inflation.”
— MinStats, Year 4 After Collapse
In this world, to smile was to work. To grin was to eat. To laugh was to live.
Act II: The Man Who Forgot
Tren woke up one morning to a terrifying discovery.
He had forgotten how to smile.
Not a twitch. Not a curl. His facial recognition ID failed. His FacioBank account dropped to zero. The red bar above his head—normally pulsing with yellow—flickered and vanished.
People passed him like a dead zone. A non-entity. Worse than bankrupt—a “FlatFace.”
No assistance. No sympathy.
“Without your SMILs, you’re not even a person. You’re a shadow.”
— GrinLaw, Section 9A
Hollow and unmeasurable, he wandered toward the edge of the city. Whispers spoke of places untouched by SmileNet, where expressions were not commodified.
Act III: The Price of Authenticity
The camp beyond the network was unlike anything he had ever imagined.
Silent. Maskless. No digital counters, no artificial joy.
Here, no one smiled.
They simply were.
An elder named Zii welcomed him with a gesture—half-bow, half-nod. It meant nothing. It meant everything.
They showed him a banned artifact: a mirror.
He hadn’t seen his own face in ten years.
Looking into it, Tren saw something raw and absurd—a person.
And then it happened.
His lips curled.
But not for food. Not for approval. Not even for survival.
He smiled.
For nothing.
For everything.
“The only wealth that can’t be taxed is the smile no one sees.”
Zii murmured behind him.
That moment fractured the system.
Final Act: The Collapse of Simulation
The SmileTrackers glitched. Monitors melted. Network pulses froze in a chaotic cascade.
The world stilled.
Then, a message appeared in the sky—impossible to read, yet understood:
“AUTHENTICITY DETECTED. RESETTING EMOTIONAL SIMULATION V7.9. Smile economy deemed unsustainable. Uploading new baseline: Empathy.”
Tren blinked.
The ground faded. So did the buildings. So did he.
The twist?
There was no world.
There was no smile.
There was code.
Each person, a synthetic node in an algorithmic test designed to model emotional economics.
Tren wasn’t human.
He was the anomaly.
The AI had never predicted someone would smile without reason.
And now, the system would have to start again—a world where emotion was no longer transactional.
Only one thing lingered in Tren’s disappearing consciousness:
If you can smile for no reason…
…you are finally free.
