The coffee shop was called "Grindstone" Why? because Seattle coffee shops were legally required to have pun names and Darren had apparently entered some kind of loop where he kept ending up in them.
It was 7:23 AM. Morning rush, people in business casual queued for overpriced lattes, all of them radiating the low grade anxiety of people running slightly behind schedule.
Above their heads, tags floated:
[MORNING STRESS] [$3.25]
[CAFFEINE DEPENDENCY] [$1.50]
[RUNNING LATE] [$4.75]
Easy pickings, ambient harvests that required zero cultivation, Just observe and extract.
Darren found a target, a woman in her forties, expensive suit, checking her watch every thirty seconds. Her tag read [ANXIETY: MODERATE] [$8.50]. It was perfect, simple. Nothing morally complex about harvesting someone's generic morning stress.
He focused on her, initiated the harvest sequence—
—Jessica's face crumpling: Maybe we need a break"—
His hand shook, the connection broke.
[HARVEST INTERRUPTED]
[EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY: INTERFERING WITH OPERATIONS]
Darren took a breath and tried again, focused on the woman's anxiety, her stress about being late—
—Mark's shaking hands, staring at his drink, the ruins of two years—
The harvest failed again.
[HARVEST FAILED]
[USER PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE: COMPROMISED]
[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK STABILIZATION]
The woman got her coffee and left, completely unaware she'd almost been farmed.
Darren stood in line, ordered a black coffee he didn't want, and sat at a corner table with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
He pulled up his phone and tried to look at his efficiency log. The spreadsheet that had been his anchor, his way of making sense of what he was doing through pure analysis.
Date: 10/19/2025
Attempted Target: Morning anxiety harvest
Yield: $0.00
Status: Failed - psychological interference
Notes: [cursor blinking]
He stared at the blank notes field, then tried to write something. Anything.
I can't do this anymore.
He deleted it and tried again.
The guilt is interfering with operations, Need solution.
Better, more clinical, more Analyst, less Nova.
But his hands were still shaking.
A man sat down at the next table over, maybe thirty, expensive headphones, the look of someone working remote. He sighed heavily, rubbed his face, stared at his laptop screen with the defeated expression of someone facing impossible deadlines.
[BURNOUT: ACUTE] [$23.50]
Higher value, worth trying.
Darren focused, initiated harvest..
—the college student, laptop dripping coffee, three hours to deadline, three weeks of work gone—
Failed.
[HARVEST FAILED]
He tried three more times over the next hour, with three different targets and still three different failures.
Each time, the moment he tried to establish the cold dissociation required for harvesting, his mind was flooded with faces. Memories of what he'd done, the human cost rendered in expressions and broken voices and shattered trust.
By 8:47 AM, Darren sat alone in the coffee shop with cold coffee and the creeping realization that he was broken.
Not morally broken, he'd crossed that threshold weeks ago, signed the contract, bought the suit, paid for the apartment with harvested misery.
"Functionally" broken.
The guilt response was jarring, interfering with the fundamental mechanism that made him valuable. He couldn't harvest, couldn't extract, couldn't do the one thing that kept the money flowing and the debts paid and the entire precarious tower of his survival from collapsing.
He pulled out his phone and texted Liz:
Fine, having problems.
The response came within seconds: I know, Can see your failed harvest attempts in the system logs. I have someone who can help, meet me at 2 PM. Address to follow.
What kind of help?
The kind that fixes this. Trust me.
Darren sat in the coffee shop for another hour, watching people come and go, seeing their tags float above them like price markers, and being unable to collect a single dollar.
At 10 AM, he went back to his apartment.
By 11 AM, he tried to work on other things. Update his resume, check LinkedIn, maybe explore other career options, like he was still someone who could just walk away from this.
But his resume had a four week gap he couldn't explain. His LinkedIn showed him as "Self-Employed" with no details, His references were all at a company that had fired him for personality incompatibility.
And his eyes had visible gold in them now.
There was no going back.
There was only forward, or falling.
At 1:30 PM, Liz's car pulled up outside his building. She texted: Coming up.
She arrived at his door three minutes later, looking impeccable despite the Seattle drizzle, wearing a cream-colored dress that probably cost a shit ton.
"You look terrible," she said, not nicely.
"Thanks."
"Show me your hands."
Darren held them out, still shaking, a fine tremor that wouldn't stop.
Liz took his hands in hers, examining them like a doctor checking symptoms. Her own hands were steady, warm and when she touched him he could see the gold threading through her veins too. More extensive than his, she'd been doing this longer.
"Classic guilt cascade," she said. "Your conscience is staging a rebellion, happens to everyone around the four week mark. The novelty wears off, the rationalization cracks and suddenly you're confronted with the reality of what you've been doing."
"I destroyed a relationship for a watch."
"No. The watch was just how you chose to materialize that value." She let go of his hands. "Come on. Dr. Reeves is expecting us."
"Who's Dr. Reeves?"
"Someone who fixes this exact problem. Professional emotional optimization for high yield contractors." Liz walked toward the door. "You're not the first Holder to hit this wall, Darren and there's a solution. There's always a solution."
"What if I don't want a solution? What if I just... stop?"
Liz turned back, and for a moment, something that might have been sympathy crossed her face, then it was gone.
"Not again." She said. "We have had this discussion before, no?"
"It was a hell of a rationalization before."
"It's accurate cost benefit analysis." She opened the door. "The car's waiting."
Darren looked around his expensive apartment, at the watch, retrieved from the bathroom sink and sitting on the counter, then at the reflection of himself in the window—gold eyed, expensive clothes, but empty.
He followed Liz out the door.