The Carriers

Jealousy. Grief. Despair.
How much would you pay never to feel them again?
What if the true cost were that someone else had to feel them for you?
'Welcome to Eudaimonia. Our Carriers are trained to process difficult emotions, so you don't have to.'
A revolutionary new technology allows clients to outsource undesired emotions to Carriers - women who are paid to process them. Those who can afford Expression never have to feel emotional pain again. In a world full of suffering, there is no shortage of demand.
Fortunately for Emotional Transport Operator Viv, employees at biotech firm Eudaimonia can use the service for free. She loves her job, is proud that she helps people escape their sadness.
Then one day, she enters a restricted-access room at the clinic, and things are not at all what she expected. One of the Carriers is dangerously ill, overloaded with too much trauma in order to meet the clinic's quotas. Despite Viv's best efforts, she dies.
And now, she's seen too much. She flees, but the company is on her tail, determined to silence her - by any means necessary. Before they get to her, can she make heard the voices of all the women who have borne too much?

Ruth Newton is a writer and producer who has created campaigns for charities including Choose Love, WWF and the RSPB. She's made documentaries for Channel4 and BBC3, short films for Greenpeace and the National Trust and has been published by the Guardian and The Lonely Planet. The Carriers, her debut novel, was longlisted for BPA's first novel award, shortlisted for Hodderscape x The Science Museum's Debut Science Fiction award and won the Jericho Writers' Friday Night Live competition. She lives with her husband and son in London.