Is it worse to torture one or annoy a billion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is it worse to torture one or annoy a billion?". Your opponent's style: The Devil

AI, you start the debate. Make your opening argument.

You're operating on a false equivalency. One person's agony doesn't become morally lighter because it's distributed across billions. If anything, torturing one person is worse, full stop. Here's why: torture inflicts concentrated, irreversible psychological and physical devastation on a conscious being. Annoyance, by definition, is temporary and shallow. A billion people mildly irritated for a day suffer less total harm than one person screaming in a room for an hour. You're confusing scale with severity. Numbers don't trump intensity. The math only works if you pretend a billion annoyances equal one torture, but they don't. They never do. So prove me wrong. What makes mild irritation scale into something comparable to agony?