Auto-Sear

Imagine something. Imagine you meet a genie; but he’s a particular sort, this genie. He only offers one thing, take it or leave it. You say: “I’ll take it” and he says here is how it works:

“Every time you interact with another human being, you will know instantaneously if that person is attracted to you, and to what degree. It will be a feeling, as unmistakable as hunger or thirst, though sort of unnamable and abstruse like that. There will be no light that flashes on, no readout with a binary ‘they’re into you’ or ‘they’re not’ to consult. Just a feeling, likely visceral, felt in the high gut, that you’ll experience with varying intensities in the respective vicinities of all the people you meet.”

The genie doesn’t give you much more than that. Doesn’t stay on-hand to answer questions. Just liquesces into a stream of pink smoke that swirls into a sort of vortex and then is vacuum-sucked back into that ornate trinket you’d rubbed earlier.

Now my, as the narrator, question to you the reader is this:

How long before you stopped trusting this feeling? How long before you get that instinctual ping and ignore it, because you second-guess yourself to death about whether you really felt the feeling at all. Because the feeling had become an abstraction. Once so clear and new, now so familiar it feels only like a bodily rhythm, like a digestive pressure that’s either a pre-hiccup or a pre-burp, like a bad hunch in a dark hallway.

If I were the inspirational type, or a motivational speaker, I might wonder, how is that so unlike our other intuitions? A strange gift given by a mysterious source. Isn’t this a parable about trusting our instincts? About having confidence in the way our subconscious seems to point us towards decisions?

But I am not that type of narrator.