Day 19,989: 20Nov24
1,000 words, 5 minute read. With Claude Sonnet
The first time I tried on a phantom mask, I discovered that perfect vision comes with perfect clarity about how screwed up our world really is.
…but I should start with Ash – my best friend since we were kids, back when optimization was just something that happened to other people's parents.
Back when we still dreamed in color.
"Stop fidgeting, Nova," Ash whispered, his fingers steady as he adjusted the crystalline mesh against my cheekbones. In the cracked mirror of the abandoned mag-train station, I watched him work. He'd always been good with his hands – fixing broken drones, rewiring trace rings so we could sneak out past curfew. Little acts of rebellion that seemed meaningless until they took his sister.
The mask hummed against my skin, neural interfaces searching for purchase. My ordinary brown eyes flickered and slowly shifted, gaining the telltale metallic sheen of the Optimized. The HUD bloomed in my vision – waves of data that the "perfect" people saw every moment of their lives. But something was different about this mask. Through its enhanced display, I saw splashes of vivid strangeness bleeding through the city's standard grayscale overlay.
Ash's reflection watched me anxiously, his own unenhanced eyes still beautifully, defiantly blue – a shade that would be optimized out of existence next month. The neural web tagged him instantly: Ash Chen. Age: 15. Status: Pending Optimization. Predicted Social Value: 7.2. Chromatic Deviation: Significant.
"How do you feel?" he asked, the same way he had when we were ten and he'd convinced me to ride the mag-rails without safety protocols.
"Like I'm seeing..." I stopped, transfixed by a drift of crimson data streams that shouldn't exist. "Ash, why can I see colors? The optimization protocols stripped those from the visual feed years ago."
He smiled, an expression the HUD tagged as potentially disruptive. "This latest update found a way to break through their filters. Optimization doesn't just standardize our behavior – it literally drains the color from how we perceive reality. Makes everything uniform. Predictable. Perfect."
The station around us exploded with information and impossible hues. Every surface sprouted labels and warnings in regulated grayscale, but beneath them, I could see splashes of original paint, bursts of ancient graffiti, the true faces of things. A rat scurrying across the floor left a trail like an oil slick rainbow.
"We have two hours before the mask's charge dies," Ash said, checking his trace ring. The mandatory tracker glowed the approved shade of blue – the only color the Optimized were permitted to see. "Ready to crash a party?"
I nodded, then gasped as my HUD analyzed the gesture, suggesting appropriate social responses. This was how the Optimized lived – every movement quantified, every interaction mediated by algorithms that had been refining human behavior since the first neural enhancements twenty years ago. Since they decided that chromatic sensitivity caused too much emotional instability.
"Wait." I grabbed his hand before he could head for the exit. In the HUD, our point of contact bloomed with biometric data – his elevated heart rate, the slight tremor in his fingers, the oxytocin spike that matched my own. "The Harbingers... they're real, aren't they? The people who still see in color?"
He nodded. “They've learned to hide their brain patterns, to keep their natural color vision even through optimization. And they're growing stronger." He pulled me toward the station's exit. "But first, you need to see exactly what we're fighting against."
We emerged onto a street I'd known my whole life, but through the phantom mask, it was a revelation. Beneath the approved grayscale overlays, the world was burning with hidden color. Optimization hadn't erased it – just hidden it behind layers of perceptual filtering. The Optimized citizens walked past, their movements too perfect, their world a carefully controlled spectrum of approved shades.
"The party's at the Apex," Ash said, pointing to the looming tower that served as the heart of Optimized society. "Where I found the truth about what optimization really does to our minds. They're not just filtering reality – they're filtering out our ability to see beauty, to feel deeply, to dream in anything but shades of gray."
We unlocked stolen hoverboards from their magnetic rack as my HUD lit up with warnings about unauthorized transport access. The glowing city stretched before us, a maze of perfect lines and measured responses. But now I could see what they'd been hiding – a world so vibrant it hurt to look at, so beautiful it felt like waking up from a lifelong dream.
"Hey, Nova?" Ash said as we prepared to launch into the magnetic traffic streams. His eyes caught the dying sunlight, that impossible blue a reminder of everything optimization wanted to erase. "Whatever we find out tonight... I'm with you. Like always."
I looked at him – really looked, pushing past the HUD's analytical overlays. The neural web wanted to quantify everything about him, but some things couldn't be reduced to data. Some things needed to stay vivid, wild, colorful.
"All the way," I echoed, and we kicked off into the glowing night, leaving our gray lives behind with every meter of altitude we gained. Above us, the stars burned with colors I had no names for, natural light in a world drowning in artificial perfection.
We were about to crash the perfect party with borrowed vision and stolen transport, following the chromatic traces the evening had left behind. And maybe, if we were lucky, we'd find out what happened in the spaces between optimization and chaos, in the hidden spectrum where humanity still saw the world in all its beautiful, terrible colors.
I understood now why they feared color so much. It was honest. It was wild. And it showed you exactly how beautiful the world was before they decided to make it perfect.