The Grey Divide

The world had once been vibrant. As children, we hadn’t thought about the color of our skin. It was never a consideration, never a factor in whom we played with or how we laughed. The sky stretched wide in endless blue, the grass once danced in vibrant green, and the air shimmered with colors we could no longer even name. That was before everything turned grey.

It wasn’t sudden. The colors faded slowly, like a memory slipping through your fingers. First, it was the flowers, their reds and yellows turning into shades of dull grey. Then the birds, their feathers losing their sheen, becoming faint shadows of what they once were. Finally, the people. No longer did we see the rich browns, blacks, or whites of humanity. No longer did we see the diversity of skin, hair, and eyes. Everyone was the same: grey. What’s more, the problem extended beyond the disappearing colors. Something more important vanished with them: the soul.

I remember the day I first saw the color of my skin, or rather, the day I realized I did not have it anymore. I was at the university, a young color scientist, one of the last. We studied the pigments that once gave the world its vibrant life. We studied the science behind why we were all made so beautifully different, and yet so wonderfully the same. That day, I looked in the mirror and I saw someone different, nothing but shades of grey staring back at me. My skin, once a rich caramel, had turned to the same colorless expanse as the rest of the world.

They warned me, of course. It would happen. They said the colors would go first, and then the very core of humanity would fade with them. It wasn’t until later that I learned the truth.

The rebellion came quietly at first, almost imperceptibly. A whisper in the wind, a shadow in the corner of your eye. Soon it grew louder, more insistent. A group of people tired of living in a world of grey, desperate to find the colors again. They said the government held the power to restore the vibrancy we once had, but only for the privileged few. The elites, the ones with the resources, the power, the control.

For everyone else, it was a life of grey, of sameness, of loss.

I had heard the rumors about what lay beneath the government’s vaults, the labs, the hidden chambers where the experiments had taken place. The very experiments that had robbed us of color. I had always dismissed them as conspiracy theories, as the ramblings of those who could not accept what had happened. Now, as I joined the rebellion, I knew they were true. The government held the key to restoring the color to the world, but they were not about to share it with the masses.

I made a choice. I would fight for color again.

I met the rebellion in a crumbling warehouse. The rebellion was not an army, but a group of broken souls, people who had given up on the world as it was. There was Prue, the leader, a woman who wore her grey skin like armor, but whose eyes still held fire. Then there was Jude, a former artist, whose hands had once shaped vibrant canvases, but now lay still, worn by years of despair. There I was an ex-color scientist, the last hope for returning the world to its original state.

One night, as we gathered around a table strewn with maps and plans, Prue looked at me with her sharp eyes. “We know how it happened,” she said, her voice grating in the dim room. “It wasn’t natural, was it?”

I nodded, my fingers tracing the cracked edge of a map. “No. It was an experiment. A scientific failure.”

We had heard the stories. There was a time when the government nearly found a method to control color, injecting it into the air to influence how we see things. The experiment went terribly wrong. The formula had drained the colors from the world, from our skin, from the very essence of human life. In its place? Nothing. A hollow existence of grey.

“Why did they do it?” Jude asked quietly, his voice tinged with sorrow.

“They wanted to control it,” I said, my voice trembling with a mixture of anger and regret. “They thought color was a source of division, which it led to inequality. They believed that if everyone saw the world in grey, then no one could be different, right? It was their twisted idea of equality.”

Prue’s brow furrowed, her lips curling into a tight line. “And what happened to the people who didn’t fall into the grey?”

“Their color was taken from them. Cast out and forgotten, they faded from the world. But…”

“But?” Prue’s voice sharpened eager for more.

“The government didn’t just want to erase color from society, they wanted to own it. Now, only the powerful, the elite, get to see the world in color. The rest of us? We’re left in the grey.”

The words hung in the air. Jude’s hands clenched into fists, and Prue’s jaw tightened. We were all fighting for something we could barely remember, a world of color, of life, of individuality.

We infiltrated the government’s central facility weeks later. The journey there was quiet, tense, with only the occasional whisper of footsteps. As we skirmished through the underground labs, my heart pounded. We found the machine, a monstrosity of wires and glass tubes flickering with dormant energy. There was no time to admire it. The sterile halls rang with the echoing blare of alarms.

In hesitation, I thought, if we brought back color, would we simply recreate the old divisions. Was this truly liberation, or just another form of control? The question nibbled at me, but it was too late to turn back now.

Then I saw them, the captives. Dozens of people, their color trapped in containment units, their bodies alive but faded into ghosts. Among them, my own sister. I had thought her lost, erased with the others who resisted the grey.

She looked at me, her lips parting in a whisper. “Don’t let them decide who gets to see the world.”

The choice was no longer abstract. I could leave the world grey, keep the illusion of forced equality, or I could bring back color, knowing the cost it might have.

Prue’s voice broke through my thoughts. “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

“I hope so,” I whispered. The weight of the decision was crushing. What was the point of liberation if it meant repeating the same mistakes?

“I’m not leaving here without freeing them,” I said, my voice steady despite the chaos inside.

Jude activated the machine. With a surge of light, color burst forth, not just in controlled streams, but also in wild waves that shattered the grey. My sister gasped as her skin bloomed back into its deep, rich tone. The world outside pulsed with hues, wild and untamed.

The alarms blared. The government would come. We had no time. I looked at my sister, then at Prue. Someone had to stay behind; someone had to make sure the machine would not fall back into the wrong hands.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, approaching the console.

Prue’s eyes widened. “Wait, no!”

I was already moving. I locked the system, setting the machine to destroy itself once the work was done. No time for goodbyes. I met my sister’s gaze one last time before the doors sealed, and I was alone with the machine, the hum of its power surrounding me.

Outside, the world was waking up in color again. Inside, the grey swallowed me whole.

In the stillness of the facility, with only the hum of the machine to keep me company, I found myself reflecting on what color had always meant to me. When I was a child, it was just something beautiful, something that brightened the world. Now, I understood: color wasn’t just aesthetic; it was identity. It captured our unique experiences and stories. It wasn't just about making the world less bright when I erased it;

Color, in its truest form, was freedom-the freedom to exist as we truly were, to be seen and understood. Yet it also divided us—a tool used to build walls—to separate us by our skin, our wealth, and our class. The thought of restoring color brought both hope and fear. Could we bring it back without reopening those old wounds?

As the machine hummed, it hit me that the world ahead would never be the same, and perhaps. that was exactly what it required. The power to choose, to embrace all, and ourselves, flaws was the real color we had been missing all along.

Outside, color returned. Inside, I was left with the grey, the uncertainty, the weight of the choice I had made.

The rebellion had won. The cost of choice, paid in full.