Forty-seven families came to bury their children, parents, and partners. They left empty—not just of their loved ones, but of their love itself. The most efficient mass extraction on record had stolen their right to grieve.
The Riverside Memorial Incident began as a routine assignment: process the emotional overflow from a mass funeral before grief contaminated the surrounding district. Forty-seven families mourning victims of a transport accident, their collective anguish threatening to trigger sympathetic resonance in nearby civilians. Standard protocol called for a three-Collector team working in shifts over two days.
Emma Thorne walked in alone at 0800 hours and emerged at 1400 hours, having completed the most efficient mass extraction on record. Six hours of concentrated grief that should have required seventy-two hours and left most Collectors catatonic. The attending psychiatrists immediately booked themselves into therapy. The families went home feeling nothing. And Emma Thorne asked if there were any other assignments that afternoon.
The Assignment Nobody Wanted
The Riverside Transport Accident killed 127 people when a maglev train carrying families to a regional festival derailed during a storm. The passenger manifest included children returning from summer camps, grandparents visiting relatives, and parents bringing their kids to see the annual harvest celebration.
The accident wasn’t anyone’s fault. Weather monitoring systems failed. Communication networks went down. Emergency braking protocols didn’t engage because computer systems couldn’t process the conflicting data from damaged sensors.
But fault doesn’t matter to grief.
Within hours of the accident, Riverside Memorial became an emotional disaster zone. Forty-seven families gathered to identify bodies, plan funerals, and process the sudden absence of loved ones. Their collective anguish created a grief field so intense it affected people within a three-kilometer radius.
Civilians in nearby neighborhoods began crying uncontrollably without knowing why. Children started having nightmares about losing their parents. Emergency responders couldn’t function because exposure to the families’ grief triggered their own suppressed memories of loss.
The Council declared an emotional containment emergency and assigned a three-Collector extraction team to process the families before their grief could contaminate the entire district.
Two hours before the scheduled extraction, Collectors Hayes and Morrison reported severe neural feedback after a preparatory assessment. Collector Rodriguez was hospitalized with emotional overload syndrome after attempting to approach the memorial site.
Emma Thorne volunteered for solo assignment.
The Technique That Shouldn’t Exist
Standard mass extraction protocols require multiple Collectors working in coordination to prevent neural feedback and emotional contamination. The human brain can only process limited amounts of external emotional energy before reaching overload.
Emma had developed techniques that her Academy training hadn’t included.
Instead of extracting emotions directly from subjects, she created compression fields that concentrated multiple people’s feelings into dense emotional constructs. Love, grief, and hope were compacted into crystalline structures that could be safely absorbed without overwhelming her neural pathways.
She could extract an entire family’s grief and compress it into a single emotional artifact small enough to be contained in her extraction device. The process required precise neural control that exceeded Academy protocols by roughly 300%.
Her compression technique allowed her to process forty-seven families simultaneously rather than one at a time. Where other Collectors needed to drain each person individually over several hours, Emma could harvest collective emotional states in minutes.
The families never knew what hit them.
The Six Hours That Changed Everything
Emma arrived at Riverside Memorial at 0800 hours wearing full extraction gear and carrying advanced compression devices that she’d modified beyond Council specifications. Her handler, Marcus Chen, monitored from a safe distance while emergency medical staff prepared for potential neural casualties.
The first family Emma approached was the Hendersons: parents and two surviving children mourning their six-year-old daughter who had died in the crash. They were holding each other and crying while looking at a picture of their lost child.
Emma’s extraction lasted forty-three seconds.
The family stopped crying immediately. They continued holding each other, but their expressions became neutral, clinical. Mrs. Henderson looked at her daughter’s photograph with mild curiosity rather than devastating loss. Mr. Henderson discussed funeral arrangements with the detachment of someone planning a business meeting.
Their surviving children asked when they could go home. Not because they were distressed, but because they no longer understood why they were at a memorial service.
Emma had stolen their capacity to mourn their dead daughter.
She moved to the next family. Then the next. Then three families simultaneously, her compression fields expanding to cover multiple groups at once.
The Witnesses Who Couldn’t Forget
Dr. Sarah Magnus was assigned to monitor Emma’s psychological state during the mass extraction. Her job was to ensure the Collector didn’t suffer neural damage from processing so much emotional energy at once.
Instead, she found herself documenting the systematic theft of humanity’s most natural response to loss.
Magnus watched parents forget why they should miss their children. She observed grandparents discussing their deceased grandchildren with the emotional investment of strangers. She witnessed siblings planning to sell their dead brother’s belongings because they couldn’t remember feeling attached to him.
The most disturbing observation was how efficiently Emma worked. Other Collectors showed visible strain during extractions, requiring breaks to process the emotional energy they absorbed. Emma moved from family to family with mechanical precision, showing no signs of fatigue or emotional feedback.
Her neural monitoring readings remained stable throughout the six-hour extraction. She processed forty-seven families’ worth of grief, love, and loss without apparent difficulty.
Magnus noted in her report that Emma seemed to be absorbing emotions without being affected by them—a psychological phenomenon that shouldn’t be possible.
The Aftermath That Broke Hearts
The families left Riverside Memorial believing their loved ones’ deaths were unfortunate but manageable losses. Parents who should have been devastated by their children’s deaths returned to work the next day. Spouses discussed remarriage within weeks of losing their partners.
Six months later, Magnus conducted follow-up interviews with extraction subjects. The families described feeling “disconnected” from their memories of the deceased. They could remember loving their lost relatives, but couldn’t access the emotions associated with those memories.
Mrs. Henderson still kept her daughter’s photographs but couldn’t explain why. “I know she was important to me,” she said, “but I can’t remember the feeling of loving her.”
Children who had lost siblings began treating their bedrooms as spare storage space. Parents donated their dead children’s belongings without experiencing any attachment to them.
The most tragic cases involved families where only some members had been extracted. Children who hadn’t attended the memorial still grieved for their lost relatives, but their parents couldn’t understand or respond to that grief.
Eight-year-old Tommy Rodriguez cried for weeks after losing his older brother, but his extracted parents couldn’t comprehend why he was upset. They treated his tears as an illness requiring medical treatment rather than a natural response to loss.
The extraction had broken the emotional connections that held grieving families together.
The Request That Chilled Everyone
At 1400 hours, Emma Thorne completed the extraction of the forty-seventh family’s grief. Her neural readings showed perfect stability. Her psychological assessment indicated no signs of emotional contamination or processing strain.
She filed her mission report and asked Handler Chen if there were any other assignments that afternoon.
Marcus Chen had been monitoring extraction operations for five years. He’d never encountered a Collector who could process that much emotional energy without requiring recovery time. Most Collectors needed days or weeks to psychologically reset after major extractions.
Emma was ready for more work immediately.
Her request created the first recorded case of a handler refusing additional assignments due to Collector performance being too efficient rather than too risky.
Marcus Chen noted in his report that Emma’s abilities exceeded safe parameters for mass extraction. He recommended psychological evaluation and temporary suspension pending investigation of her enhanced capabilities.
The Council ignored his recommendations and approved Emma for advanced assignment protocols.
Her efficiency ratings earned her promotion to Elite Collector status and access to high-priority targets.
But Emma’s next collection will be different. Because the next emotion she extracts will be her own.
Pre-order “The Emotion Collector: Awakening” on Richardfrench.net, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and wherever books are sold to discover what happens when the most efficient heartbreaker learns how to feel again.
