>>2603so you wake up in a city that's the most beautiful place you've ever seen. everything is perfect, everyone's happy, and there's everything you could ever want. there's no suffering and it's a paradise where you can pursue and explore whatever carnal or intellectual interests you'd like. and yet, every now and then people leave and you're not really sure why.
a few weeks in, a mysterious robed figure comes up to you and asks you to follow him. you do, and he leads you down a dark staircase. after several minutes, you emerge in a dimly lit chamber. as you come into the (relative) light, you see a small child hooked up to a machine. the child is in constant, excruciating pain.
the man explains that the child is an immortal and that the machine the child is hooked up to converts the child's negative energy into all of the things that sustain the city. through the child's suffering, they have turned their city into a paradise, eliminated poverty and sickness and fighting. if the child was unhooked from the machine, they wouldn't be able to survive as they're no longer adapted to survival without the child.
you are given a choice: you can stay and live in this paradise, forever living with the knowledge of where this paradise comes from; or you can leave the city and never return.
you could also try and unhook the child from the machine and escape, but doing this would doom the city even if you were successful.
what do you do?
