A few people were still sitting in the audience claiming they had invested some emotion before the tragedy ended the performance, and now it was still owed them back.

The manager (of what, it wasn't clear) had to be called to try to deal with them.

"People are each others' tools each others' robots," the disgruntled audience members' self-appointed spokesman told him. "Each person is the only real human and all the others are machines put here either as helpmates or as cruel jokes or both."

The manager thought about saying "Nooses are never useless" in this situation, but he knew it would be misunderstood and counter-productive, though he knew that being misunderstood doesn't always have to be counterproductive and, in fact,... but that was for another time.

So instead he said, "Uhhh, yes, but I'm sure you'll also agree that the market is here precisely for this purpose: to create the appearance of emotion among these non-humans, as an interface to the one, the only true human, YOU (or ME)."

"So the market is about the movement of emotion, not about the movement or exchange of goods?" the audience member asked, ingenuously.

"Yes," the manager answered, knowingly, "Goods are just the cover story because people would rather be called materialist fuck bags than emotional dish rags -- and, anyway, they don't really exist as external matter, but only as neural patterns -- patterns of electrical activity -- but the same is true for emotions, so there really IS no difference between pure heartfelt emotion and the slimiest capitalist widget."

The spokesman nodded his head, the others however were still disgruntled but too emotionally drained to do anything about it. That's why they wanted their emotion back. So they'd be able to do something stupid about having lost it in the first place. And that something, once they finally did get it back after generations, became well-known and widely-practiced, decades hence, under the brand name: Emotional Suicide.

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