The Mandatory Joy

In the gleaming, glass-domed metropolis of Veridia, happiness is not an aspiration—it is an enforced civic duty monitored down to the millisecond. Senior Architect Grizzy has spent fifteen years designing the city's radiant plazas and polarized light arrays, engineering physical spaces to suppress human despair and force compliance. To the omnipresent optical sensors and biometric scanners of the Apex, Grizzy is a model citizen maintaining a flawless contentment score. In reality, his jaw is fractured from the agony of holding an unbroken smile, and his nervous system is on the verge of total collapse. Desperate for relief before the citywide synchronization of a lethal new monitoring firmware, Grizzy descends into the forgotten industrial ruins beneath the city. In the shadows of the unmonitored sub-levels, he discovers an underground sanctuary run by an enigmatic woman named Vesper, who trades in illicit grief, raw sorrow, and the dangerous freedom to weep. What begins as a desperate search for personal survival soon spirals into an act of profound structural sabotage that threatens to shatter Veridia's artificial harmony. The Mandatory Joy by Midgen Avrol is a gripping, atmospheric dystopian novel that explores the fragility of authoritarian control and the irrepressible power of human emotion. Perfect for fans of thoughtful speculative fiction and classic cautionary tales, this evocative journey proves that true freedom cannot be measured, optimized, or forced—it must be felt in all its messy, painful, and sacred truth.