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    The Happiness Broker
    The Happiness Broker
    The Happiness Broker
    Ebook40 pages40 minutes

    The Happiness Broker

    By Roger Williams

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    About this ebook

    Two stories about two men who become gods...and two very different outcomes.  The law of conservation of happiness says that you can't increase the amount of happiness in the world.  You can only change how it's spread around.  What if you had to choose who would live -- and who would die?  Two metaphysical parables by the author of the transhumanist classic, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

    Includes the complete text of the original short story, "The Happiness Broker," and the follow-up story, "The Powers That Abide." Total word count is 8,800 words.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeachfront Press
    Release dateAug 30, 2015
    ISBN9781516379552
    The Happiness Broker
    Author

    Roger Williams

    Roger K. Williams has spent over 20 years in retail, more than 18 years in IT, and in excess of 12 years in leadership roles at Fortune 50 companies. He has also earned numerous certifications including ITIL® Expert, PMP, COBIT® 5 Foundation, HDI Support Center Manager, ISO20000 Foundation, and Toastmasters Advanced Communicator Bronze. He has spoken at international conferences and panel sessions on ITSM and navigating the future of computing. His writings on managing attention and harnessing technology trends at the RogertheITSMGuy blog and on Google+ have garnered praise from a diverse audience.

    Read more from Roger Williams

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      Book preview

      The Happiness Broker - Roger Williams

      About These Stories

      THE HAPPINESS BROKER and The Powers That Abide are two of Roger's uncollected stories that were published on the old kuro5hin.org site during its brief flirtation with publishing fiction in the early 2000s.

      By popular request, they have been edited and reformatted for easy reading on your favorite devices.

      The Happiness Broker

      BEFORE:

      Hey, we need to talk! Don’t you remember me? From school? Well I sure remember you! Look, let me buy you a coffee. Surely you have a few minutes to chat. A lot has happened since those days.

      1.

      I didn’t remember the guy who flagged me down that day, but he certainly seemed to know me. I had the time and he was paying for my latte, and as he started talking it became obvious that he really did know me. Just as he seemed to know that I had free time that afternoon, and that I’d never turn down free Starbucks.

      He ran down what had happened to all the people I’d known in those days, students and teachers alike. You gotta watch your health though, he said ominously, looking at his watch. You have what you think is a little fainting spell, and the docs don’t really think it’s all that serious, but if you were to have one of those new non-invasive CAT scan angiograms they’d find you were a week from keeling over dead without a quadruple bypass. It happens a lot nowadays, even in people who don’t have a history of heart trouble. Some people think it’s the pollution.

      Well my family doesn’t have a history of heart disease.

      Well there you go. You need to be aware of these things. He looked at his watch again. Got to go, he said. Here, take one of my cards. Maybe we’ll be in touch again.

      Yeah, sure. I dropped his card in my wallet, where it would wait with the others I tend to randomly collect until I throw them all out.

      2.

      A week later I fainted dead away while I was walking back to my office from the restroom. The doc was more concerned with the bump on my head than my heart, but I asked about getting one of those angiograms just in case. Fortunately it was covered by the insurance, because a week after

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