Enlightenment — Douglas Smith

Aurora Award Finalist story from a multi-award winning author.
 
Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy.
 
Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of war, but in a systematic corporate strategy--of xenocide.
 
They will kill. And they will revel in it.
 
Welcome to the world of Scream.
 
Jarrod is a Scream-addicted soldier forced to take part in the destruction of entire races. But when his unit encounters the Be'nan, aliens who hold the secret to true enlightenment, no one is prepared for the result.