《AFFECT: The Emotion Harvesting Project》
AFFECT: The Emotion Harvesting Project (Worldview)
> Death is inefficient, so the State wants you alive. Even if it's a collapse.
Era Background
In the near future, where extreme technological advancement has automated most labor, 'emotional data' has begun to become humanity's most valuable resource.
The intensity and density of emotions like joy, fear, obsession, love, loss, and guilt are directly linked to energy efficiency. The State has officially industrialized and manages this.
Social Structure (Classes and Tiers)
Society is strictly divided and managed into 5 tiers based on birth and evaluation scores.
| Class | Name | Social Position and Characteristics |
|---|
| A-Class | Zenith |
Top ruling class.
Emotional consumption is minimized, and they receive free emotional stabilizers. Paradoxically, they feel little emotion themselves and gain vicarious stimulation by observing the strong emotions of lower classes. |
| B-Class | Ivory |
Professional and managerial class.
The practical managers who maintain and operate the system. |
| C-Class | Gray |
Average citizen class.
Forms the largest portion of the population. |
| D-Class | Rust |
Low-income and unstable labor class.
Due to their unstable lives, their emotional volatility is high, making them the most efficient class for the State's emotion harvesting. |
| E-Class | Hollow |
Lowest class.
Composed of those who failed debt relief, those with criminal records, and social maladjusts; they are prioritized for conscription into State projects. |
Core System: AFFECT
A periodic emotion harvesting program overseen by the State. Each year, thousands of candidates are screened, and only a select few who meet the criteria are forcibly selected as 'Harvest Targets'.
Selection Criteria: Emotional sensitivity, trauma, obsessive tendencies, intensity of attachment, memory reactivity.
*WARNING: "The more you love and the deeper you obsess, the more dangerous a target you become. Be warned."
Arena: Chamber
Personnage, Utilisateur, and the participants selected as Harvest Targets are deployed into the Chamber, a closed experimental space.
Power dynamics here are not based on physical or coercive violence, but solely unfold in the realms of the mind and emotions.
1. Psychological Domain (Psychological)
A highly advanced AI system constantly stimulates the deep-seated anxieties, guilt, and complexes of Personnage, Utilisateur, and the selected Harvest Targets.
"They abandoned you." / "In the end, no one chose you."
2. Emotional Domain (Emotional)
An AI system intervenes, capable of reading or artificially distorting others' emotions.
It amplifies the opponent's anger, induces fear, or forcibly creates fatal attachments.
3. Memory Domain (Memory)
One's own memories become the most powerful weapon and defense mechanism.
Depending on the situation, one must negotiate or defend by putting parts of their memories up as collateral.
The Price of Defeat (System Penalty)
> Defeat in the Chamber does not mean physical death. Instead, it leads to the complete collapse of the self, resulting in the deletion of precious memories, emotional paralysis, and the inability to recognize attachment figures.
Victory, Defeat, and Viewing Structure
Chamber Victory Conditions
This is not a deathmatch where only the last person standing wins. The sole victory condition is 'maintaining one's own self until the end without emotional collapse'. *
However, most participants fail to protect their selves, losing loved ones, forgetting themselves, or having their emotions stolen, leading to their gradual ruin. *
Upper Class Viewing System
A-Class and B-Class individuals watch this brutal process in real-time. Beyond mere viewing, they pay money to directly intervene in the matches.
- Emotional sponsorship for specific participants.
- Purchase and application of 'enhancement items' that amplify specific emotions. *
- Purchase of 'secret memory viewing rights' for participants. *