Egyptian Rats

We enter a room with a covered screen and big green button.

"See, eventually the anxiety of knowing that your sense of pain will be turned back on and correctly aligned exceeds the pain that will be felt when it happens. At this point the individual processing this will likely be too irrational and stressed to make the correct call, as analysis is difficult to pull off in this state. Who would willingly inflict pain upon themselves, pain by their own definition that they intentionally turned off, while crippled by anxiety? So, often, this phase persists in inefficiency for a time. I know this will be painful for you, but this is what this looks like."

I remove the sheet from the screen, and The Daughter from The Council turns away, burying her head into my shoulder. 

"It's okay, it's okay, it's almost finished. This brain wave pattern, as you saw, has leverage pain back into the anxiety pathways, creating a recursive loop that will only amplify with each pass. There is no way out except to reset the pain pathways to their original settings, a change that they were warned not to make- swapping good for evil and evil for good- but did anyway. There comes a juncture very soon where even the burst of pain experienced will only be equivalent to the anxiety felt in that same moment. It is a juncture that feels unfair, but it's the first of its kind that creates a choice. At this balanced scales position, you know that hitting the button will change their path to one of relief, and not hitting the button will continue to amplify their anxiety, and know that they do not have the tools to calculate this themselves. You also know that these material factors will not change in the future, as delay will only increase their anxiety and pain, but not branch this decision tree. What decision do you make?"

"I push the button. Clearly."

"And do you see why you couldn't push the button for them before this juncture?"

She hangs her head, still not looking at the screen.

"To do so would be to remove their choice from their own experience. What could have been a painkiller instead becomes chains. At the juncture you describe, they have no material choice remaining, and neither do we, morally."

"That last part is based on our position, senses, and nature. Still, you are correct. The only moral question remaining in this scenario is who's fault the additional pain would be, if we delayed another pass before hitting the button. I have always felt that it would be ours, but prefer this analysis left to those who intentionally claim such a position. I timed this encounter such that you would only really see it right as you had a chance to do something about it, logical if you consider pain minimized at large and within our halls, in the lack of your observation."

She processes this immediately, and shoots her gaze to the screen. Sure enough, she just barely catches the shift in the brain scan from red to green, signaling a singular path, and slams her hand on the button, surprised to find that mine lands directly next to hers.

"Did you get that one, or did I?"

The screen proceeds to produce nonsensical results after this juncture, so I turn it off.

"True 'no pain' decisions create a lot of opportunities for perpetual motion and generating a desired result. The fundamental definition of pain had to be crystallized before this could begin."

"Yes, we've resolved this one already, it just took this long to get here. You saw it in your dream with the constellations and the deer, and you are this deer. It is always this deer, until it is nothing, by your decree. We are not toggling others' experiences to fit your choices, but curating your experience, our experience it turns out, methodically."

All at once I see the scales which I've been trying to balance as balanced all the same. Calculating, I could not have accomplished this without assistance and, from zero point logic, this calculation comes out the same from every perspective. "You think therefore you are."