Seasonal Transitions: The Fever Collector
Regulating acceptable grief levels in the face of death
By Nick Carson
SUMMER: Flasks and beakers froth and bubble with anger and other stifling fevers, while a figure in flame-gold protective gear scribbles furtively. As the chamber shimmers with simulated midday heat, the glass cracks and hues begin to bleed.
Fever Collector
Traditional meaning: Separator, tamer of passions
Shadow meaning: The Alchemist, who lets emotions mix
Key symbols: Broken Glass, Bleeding Colours, Hidden Journal
Associated fevers: Denial, Anger, Yearning, Despair
The official line is that fever is a disorder in the system. It burns with a wild, vengeful unpredictability that threatens everything we’ve built. But my grandmother used to say that a fever means your body’s fighting back.
Once, we succumbed to the thrill of raw emotion. The Optimisation promised us control over our chemically imbalanced brains. Now, with our parting memories carefully curated, we can rest in peace – and with their emotions precisely dosed, so too can those we leave behind.
We’re told that power demands moderation. Left to rampage unchecked, fire can consume us – but just the right amount brings cosiness and comfort. My fellow Fever Collectors and I don’t stamp out every ember: our task is to extract, distil, bottle and sell emotional essence to help those whose loved ones have passed. Anger burns with an intensity unlike the others – emitting an eerily blood-red glow. Like a fierce chilli pepper, it commands respect and requires delicate dispensing.
My name is Oriana Reid, and I’m a ninja with a pipette. It’s precise work, not made easier by my stifling working environment. Most fevers burn hot, and must stay that way or lose their vitality – but that logic isn’t reassuring when you’re prickling with sweat under the simulated midday sun.
Once decanted in the Extraction Chamber, it’s a race against time to keep the fevers vivid. Positive emotions are vital ingredients, adding levity and balance to the grief so it never overwhelms, reminding us of a life well-lived rather than drowning us in its inevitable end. Joy glows honey-gold, like warm syrup – cloyingly sweet and sparkly like glitter. Passion simmers sunset orange, forever on the verge of boiling over.
It’s our job to keep the balance; to allow just enough negative emotion to tie up loose ends. Some fevers must be kept a little cooler: Denial’s soft, translucent green helps soften the blow, while the chameleon-like Yearning – cycling from verdant green to rich autumnal shades and back again – offers fragile hope for a better outcome. Kept almost at freezing point, Despair pulses deep indigo, streaked with white. Heavy and dense, it quickly thickens and overwhelms the blend. Like Anger, it must be applied sparingly by an expert hand.
A low, throbbing headache is my baseline these days. I can barely remember a time when my mind felt clear and fresh, and at the end of each shift my nose wrinkles as I peel off the damp and sticky base layer beneath my protective gear. Sometimes, I see things that aren’t there: in the corner of one eye, the faintest mirage in the shimmering heat. It doesn’t help the headache.
As the surveillance monitor fades to black for its weekly system update, I slide my grandmother's heat-warped leather-bound notebook out of its locked drawer and flip through, scanning the tatty pages in what’s become a clandestine ritual. Writing by hand was archaic even when she was alive, but the faded spidery writing was all I had left of the woman who raised me. Inside the front cover she’d scribbled: “Fever dreams show us who we are.”
It made me think of Miriam Gray. We’d never met, but I still felt like I knew her somehow. You couldn’t avoid the whispers of the Memory Gardener who went rogue. Although her premature Closure ceremony had long since passed behind closed doors, the whispers were getting louder: The Optimisation had stripped us of something vital that no amount of precise engineering can replace.
The light flickers on the monitor. I hastily stuff the journal back into its drawer, shifting my attention to the task at hand. A contaminated sample. Instead of emitting its usual fierce blood-red glow, this flask of pure rage is flecked with gold. I glance furtively around before giving it a shake: the flecks briefly dance and sparkle before a tendril of indigo swirls around lethargically and sinks back to the bottom.
The light flickers again and goes dark: the system’s still updating. I slide the journal back out and flip to the back, where one of my grandmother’s more cryptic notes read simply: “Grief is in the mix.”
I lie awake at night pondering that sentence. Engineering grief is my day job, and it feels self-evident that the mix is important. We’re trained to gauge it to suit each temperament: some appreciate the catharsis when we dial up the Despair a little, others need more Joy to lift their spirits. But the fundamental rule is the same: positive outweighs negative, so we can move on. When my grandmother passed suddenly, the emotional cocktail I was dispensed helped me through it. I was back at work that afternoon. It had never occurred to me, ‘til now, how brutally soon that was.
Journal safely back in its drawer, my gaze shifts to the vibrant spectrum around me. I feel myself shiver, suddenly, despite the scorching heat. Perhaps we need fire for more than comfort. Perhaps, sometimes, we need to watch things burn.
I grab flasks and beakers in every hue and set them down in front of me, clinking together conspiratorially. Head pounding more than ever, vision beginning to swim and shimmer, I take a sharp intake of breath and feel myself beating my fists down, harder and harder, onto the fragile vessels.
I feel them crunch and shatter as the shards bite deep into my skin, and my blood mixes with the swirling multi-coloured ooze. Denial bleeds into Anger, Yearning dissolves into Despair. Fumes rise—intoxicating, exhilarating—and I breathe deeply, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably.
I see my grandmother’s face as my vision fades to white.
The death of human creativity?
The Fever Collector is the second in a four-part series called Seasonal Transitions. Mirroring its own themes of engineered precision meeting authentic messiness, the project emerged through collaboration between man and machine. Read The Memory Gardener here and The Change Artist here.
An AI assistant, Claude, helped architect the world in which the story takes place – including thematic structures and series-wide symbolism. But the intimate experiences at the heart of the story, and how that world comes to life through language, came from a human writer – Nick. Accompanying imagery was AI-generated using DALL•E 3, inspired by the look and feel of a Tarot deck.
Many fear that AI is a death-knell for human creativity, but this series demonstrates how artificial and human intelligence can be greater than the sum of their parts: AI's capacity for systematic world-building meets the human gift for capturing small, imperfect moments that make stories resonate.
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