Seeing Red

Phillip Sissell looked out the window of the monorail car across the craggy plains and distant mountains of Proxima Centari B and was struck by how cold and inhospitable the planet was. White light shone down from the sun onto the gray, rocky ground, occasionally glittering in silvery reflection on the surface of nearby frozen lakes.

The sky above was gray, marred only by the large dirty clouds coughed into existence by the vast atmosphere processors.

Then, as he often did, Phillip wondered what the planet would look like if he could see what was passing by his view in the full spectrum of colors that most people could see. Diagnosed with colorblindness at a young age, the medical plan he was covered by did not include the expensive gene therapy that would allow him to view the full spectrum of reds, golds, blues, and the nearly infinite variations of colors in between. His vision disqualified him for any chance at a career in engineering, medicine, or other vocation which required advanced education and training.

Phillip looked down at his hands. His work was honest. It was necessary. And it would bear fruit in the eventual colonization of this world, which was critical to the survival of the human race. But… was this his destiny?

Phillip’s parents had hoped that the credits they saved would allow their son choices they never had, but after the colorblindness diagnosis, these ambitions were set aside and practicality prevailed. Instead, Phillip would follow in his parents’ footsteps as a driller.

Upon arrival at the habitation station, the monorail doors opened and Phillip stepped out of the car and made his way down busy, grimy corridors towards his assigned dormitory. Workers passed in the hallways in great numbers as some came back from one shift and others departed on their way to begin the alternate shift. He stopped by the food dispensary and picked up a selection of food cubes and a container of recycled water. The cubes were grayish with bluish spots scattered through their jiggly mass, and for once Phillip was happy he was not able to see the full spectrum of colors that the food cubes presented.

Returning to his room with his meal, he found a bowl to drop the food cubes in, pouring in a little water and stirring the mixture with a spoon. After forcing down his meal as quickly as possible, he opened his terminal and went through his messages. Various offers for logging overtime filled the majority of his message inbox, which he considered briefly and then deleted.

The last message in his Inbox was a notification that he had a package waiting for him at the habitation shipping office. Staring at the screen for long moments, he puzzled over why he would be receiving a package. Shipments from off-planet were incredibly expensive for someone in the lower ranks of the contracted mining workforce. He certainly hadn’t ordered anything.

Grimly noting the time, he made the decision to put off sleep and to get down to the parcel office and straighten out any misunderstanding and hopefully avoid paying any fees. Dropping his bowl in the small sink in his room, he grabbed his jacket and again headed out into the habitation concourse. The bustle of human traffic of the last shift change had ebbed and he noticed the dirt and grime and discarded food wrappers on the floor and walls of the passages leading to the grungy admin office near the monorail station.

Seeing the lights on in the office, he pulled the door open and stepped inside. Presenting himself to the tired looking clerk, he gave over his ID chit for scanning and started talking nervously.

“I’m not expecting any package, so there must be some kind of mistake. I don’t have any money to pay if there is some kind of balance due…”

The clerk, a young woman around Phillip’s age, waved off his questions and concerns as if she didn’t have the energy to engage in conversation about it. “There's no balance due.” She walked around a corner for a few moments and returned with a relatively small biodegradable shipping box, sealed but obviously a little worse for wear as if it had seen a lot of action. The clerk presented a biometric scanner to capture his thumbprint. “Scan here and you’re good.”

Phillip pressed his thumb to the scanner and walked out of the office slowly, inspecting the box curiously. It weighed less than his mining helmet, and the box made no noise when he shook it. Looking around with mild concern that he might attract the interest of off-shift miners who might want to relieve him of a valuable item, he was suddenly thankful that he decided to collect his package when foot traffic in the concourse was light.

Returning to his room, he sat down heavily on his bunk with the box in his lap. After failing to think of any reason why anyone would bother to send him a bomb, he reached for a sharp piece of metal that he used for a knife and sliced through the plastic seals on the box and opened the flaps. Reaching inside he withdrew a small clamshell container covered in plastic and a bottle filled with a clear liquid. The bottle was marked “RGP solution,” whatever that was. Looking at the packaged clamshell, he saw the top was labeled “Protanopia Corrections” and had a bar code on the side.

“In for an inch, in for a mile,” he muttered to himself and sliced through the package and opened the clamshell. Nestled inside the molded plastic inside were a pair of contact lenses. He stared down at the lenses, confused. Could these have something to do with the vision disability he was born with that kept him from any hope of a life outside the mines or a general labor crew?

Turning the box back over he flipped on the terminal at his desk and scanned the code on the side of the box. A video started playing on the screen depicting an attracting young woman in a white lab coat.

“Thank you for your purchase of protanopia correction lenses. The lenses you have received have been manufactured to not only correct your low wavelength color vision deficiency, but will also correct the acuity of your vision to the highest possible degree. Please consult your optometrist if you experience any side effects from the use of our lenses.”

The video continued to depict the woman putting in the contacts and smiling at the camera, but Phillip felt his eyes drooping with exhaustion from the day, and drug a hand across his face and fell over onto the bed and felt his eyes close, not even having the energy to undress.

As he drifted into sleep over the hours, he dreamed of pale yellow mountains, a gray sky, and the black earth. He dreamed of the yellow-gray face of his parents when they left for the mine on the day of the accident. His father spoke to him, but in the vagueness of the dream, there were no words, only his kind eyes and hopeful smile.

In the morning, he awoke to the sound of people bustling in the passageway outside his room. Grabbing his bag of tools he moved to run out the door, but hesitated a moment and then grabbed the clamshell with the contact lenses in them and dropped it into his bag before rushing out of the room to catch the train to his shift.

He reached the station just in the nick of time. Jumping onto the monorail car just before the doors closed, he sighed heavily and flopped down onto an available seat in relief, breathing hard as the monorail pulled away and began it’s journey.

It was not until after a long and grueling shift in the mine when he was back on the monorail headed home that he remembered the lenses he was sent. Jonathan, one of the older members of his team, had managed to get his hand caught in a conveyor belt and was badly injured, and the stress of the day weighed on him heavily, and he was happy for a distraction.

Phillip reached into his bag and pulled out the clam shell holding the contact lenses that had arrived the night before, looking for a distraction from his thoughts on the day’s grisly accident. Noting that he still had a half hour to kill before the monorail reached his stop, he hopped up and headed to the nearest lavoratory. Opening the container and setting it on the sink, he thought back to the instructional video he watched the night before and considered the uncomfortable prospect of attaching a piece of synthetic material to his eyes. Taking a deep breath he did his best to steady himself and leaned forward to the make an awkward attempt to apply them to his eyes.

After nearly dropping both lenses down the sink multiple times, he managed to get them both mostly where they should rest, but the effort left his eyes red and irritated from his fumbling attempts. Not knowing if he was supposed to or not, he dropped a little of the liquid from the bottle of lens solution into his eyes before putting everything away in his work bag and walking out of the wash room, eyes watering profusely as they adjusted to the lenses.

Opening his eyes, he stepped back out into the monorail car and made a move to find his seat again. Before he took three steps, he stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth hanging open.

Deep, rich hues of colors he’d never seen before shone through the window from outside, saturating the inside of the monorail car with their light. The setting sun on the horizon was blazing with molten tones of color, making the ground and the rocky crags of the mountain range passing by in the distance glow as if on fire. Phillip stared in awe, mouth hanging open, suddenly feeling lost as his world was revealed to him in it’s full glory after a lifetime spent in dull blues, grays, and pale yellows.

He tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat as he stared out the plexiglass portal of the monorail car. The ground which sped by glowed with red, orange, and deep gold, sand and rock reflecting the light of the nearby star as it began to sink past the horizon. Above, the sky was a deep violet, growing darker with the passing moments as night time approached.

“Yo, Phil! You ok? Something got you spooked?” One of the other drilling specialists from the mining crew was watching him from a nearby seat, a woman named Eva.

Blinking, Phil tore his eyes away from the window to look over at his teammate. Eva was middle-aged and weary from a day spent drilling in a high productivity mineral mine, but her tired face glowed with the light of the setting sun through the window. Gone was the pale yellow tone of her skin that Phillip had seen for a lifetime. Instead, her skin was a host of different shades of colors he couldn't name, and her eyes shone with a beautiful hazel green color that he had never seen before.

He shrugged helplessly at Eva’s question and sat down in a nearby seat, glancing around the inside of the monorail car briefly to confirm that everyone else looked equally different now. Emotions surged through him as he was struck by the impact of his new perception of every thing and person around him. Confusion, sorrow for so many years lost in the pale yellow and blue world of his color blindness, and awe at the sight of the world as it truly was washed over him and surrounded him, nearly overwhelming. He looked down at his hands, clothing, and everything around him in fascination, losing himself in the moment, feeling as if he was seeing his world for the first time.

By the time the monorail returned to the habitation dormitories for his team, Phillip was focused on a single thought: How had the lenses come to him? Who had sent them? He had no family left living to speak of. No wealthy friends that could have spent the thousands of food and boarding credits to cover the cost of such expensive and rare lenses.

Resolved to learn all he could, he returned to the office where he picked up the package the day before, walking through the doors and standing in line behind a couple others who were waiting on packages that had never come, a relatively common occurrence. He found it incredibly hard to resist the urge to stare at nearly everything and everyone he looked at, shocked by how different the world was now with the gift of relatively normal human sight into nearly all colors of the visual spectrum.

When it came to be his turn to be helped, Phillip recognized the girl behind the counter as the same one who had helped him the night before. She looked just as tired as she had the previous night, with visible circles under her eyes. And yet, in the full spectrum of colors that Phillip could now discern, he noticed far more. She had a cute button nose that she wrinkled as she was concentrating on her work. Her eyes shone with focused determination, and her cheeks were dappled with freckles which gave her face an endearing and not unattractive appearance.

Phillip blinked as he realized he was staring again, and gave over the tracking detail from the package which contained his lenses and asked, “I received this package yesterday and I really would like to know whatever you can tell me about where or who it came from.”

Punching up the detail on her terminal, the clerk frowned thoughtfully. “It looks like the package was bouncing around the system for quite some time due to some issue with the address. If there was an error with the address it probably took the shipping AI even longer than usual to track you down. I show the sender information as from the Orbital One manufacturing facility, with no particular customer details provided. With all the time that has passed, I’m afraid some of the detail has been purged as part of the Company’s data retention policy.”

Noticing Phillip’s disappointment, the clerk smiled at Phillip empathetically. “Whoever ordered that package for you must have cared for you very much. It certainly cost them a great deal of credits. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

Phillip smiled back at her awkwardly and nodded. “Thanks all the same. I, uh… well, just thanks.” He left the office and headed back into the corridors to find his dormitory, lost in his thoughts. Everything and everyone in his life looked so different now. Felt so different.

When he stepped into his room, he stepped in and looked around at his humble home, noticing every small detail as he glanced around, seeing things in full color for the first time. As he glanced around he noticed something peculiar, a red scanning code sprayed on the wall that he had never noticed before, only just now visible with his newly corrected eyesight.

He scanned the code with the mobile device they issued to him for work, and a prerecorded video feed opened, dated a year before. His parents stood in the center of the frame and smiled, alive, happy, and excited.

“Surprise, darling!” his mom exclaimed. “Your father and I have been saving for years and we were finally able to order you the corrective lenses you need! I have been dying to tell you but your father made me promise to keep it a secret.”

Phillip’s jaw hung open as the mystery suddenly became clear, and the sight of his parents brought fresh pain, a sharp ache in his chest and tears springing to eyes that could now see so much.

“You’re a man now, son, and I’m proud of you,” his father said. “You have done so well and overcome adversity to be who you are. Don’t ever lose that. Keep your eyes open. Watch for opportunities. They are all around you.”

His mother smiled and squeezed closer to his father. “We love you! We can’t wait to see what the future brings for you. We’ll see you soon.”

Phillip sat down heavily on his bed, staring at the video screen in it’s final frame of the video, eyes locked on the hopeful and happy faces of his parents, emotions flooding through him for long minutes.

Through his renewed grief at the loss of his family, the words of his parents resonated, strong and true.

Presently, he took a deep breath and nodded to himself as if agreeing with a voice in his head that only he could hear. He stood up, splashed some water on his face at the sink, and then headed out the door. He had no idea what he would say to the cute shipping clerk with the freckles if she was even still there when he got there, but he would figure that out when the moment came.