It’s Like…
Colors. 1,450 words, 4 minute read. With Gemini.
The hum of Lab 3B was usually Aris Thorne’s baseline, the sound of quantum mechanics tamed and put to work. Tonight, it felt like the universe holding its breath. He, Lena Petrova – whose mind processed astrophysical data with the cool precision of a supercomputer – and Jian Li, whose doctoral thesis on exotic matter condensates was already legendary but whose hands now visibly trembled as he adjusted a micro-caliper, were gathered around the central containment field. Inside, UM-17, a fragment of matter forged in pressures mimicking a magnetar’s heart, pulsed with a faint, internal energy.
“All pre-pulse diagnostics green, Professor,” Jian’s voice was a strained whisper. “Gravimetric distortions are… nominal, if one can call forces that could crush this building ‘nominal’.” He re-checked a readout, his brow furrowed. “The wave function is stable, but… it feels like listening to a song just before the beat drops.”
Aris nodded, his own heart thrumming a counterpoint to the lab’s machinery. He’d spent a career chasing the edges of the possible. “The universe loves a dramatic overture, Jian. Lena, engage the terahertz initiator. Let’s see if UM-17 wants to sing.”
Lena’s fingers danced across her console. "Initiator sequence engaged. Full spectrum cascade in three… two… one…"
The pulse was silent, invisible. For a beat, UM-17 remained inert. Then, it didn’t just glow; it became.
An effulgence bloomed in the chamber, a phenomenon that punched a hole in Aris’s understanding of ‘color.’ It was not merely a new shade; it felt like a new dimension of sight. His mind, a meticulously ordered library of spectra and wavelengths, crashed. Language, his tool for dissecting and disseminating reality, shattered into useless fragments. This was not something to be described; it was something to be experienced, and the experience was so overwhelming it bordered on the spiritual, or perhaps the terrifying. It had the apparent texture of a sound, the emotional weight of a forgotten, primal memory, and a depth that suggested it was a window rather than a surface. The very air around the display seemed to shimmer with sympathetic, impossible hues.
“Jian… status?” Aris finally managed, his voice sounding distant to his own ears. He felt… unmoored.
Jian was pale, staring. “Professor… the full-array optical sensors… they’re saturated but not in an overload pattern. They’re recording… something. But the chromatic analysis software is caught in a recursive error loop. It’s like trying to tell a calculator to divide by zero, but with light.” His hands fluttered uselessly over the controls. “The data streams are there, the numbers are pouring in, but they don’t mean anything in our current lexicon.”
Lena, who had once calmly talked a panicked flight controller through landing a damaged probe on Mars using only telemetry and a hunch, let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Aris,” she said, her voice hushed, the usual iron replaced by something akin to awe. “Its emission profile… it’s not just off the charts, it’s playing a different game in a different stadium. The sheer… presence of it.” She shook her head, then her pragmatic reflexes kicked in. “We need to isolate the signature. Quantify the energy states.”
Aris nodded, but his mind was still reeling. The beauty of it was an ache, the impossibility a sudden, yawning chasm beneath his feet. He had sought the new, and the new had found him utterly unprepared.
The following weeks were a blur of frenetic activity and profound, internal stillness for Aris. The scientific world was, predictably, electrified. Attempts to communicate the discovery, however, were an exercise in escalating frustration. Barty Milligan, from the university’s PR department, a well-meaning man whose primary understanding of color seemed to come from Pantone charts for university branding, was an early casualty.
“So, Dr. Thorne,” Barty had chirped, iPad aglow, “if you had to put it in a nutshell for the layman? Is it an ‘ultra-violet’ in the literal sense? Or more of a… a really intense kind of gold, maybe?”
Aris felt a familiar wave of despair. “Mr. Milligan,” he began, trying to marshal his thoughts, “imagine you have lived your entire life in a world of only two dimensions. You understand length and width perfectly. Then, I introduce you to a cube. How would you describe ‘depth’ to someone who has no concept of it, no referential framework?” He saw the blank look. “This… color… it’s not an extension of our known spectrum. It’s orthogonal to it. It’s like trying to explain the smell of rain to a fish.”
Later, a renowned digital artist, commissioned by a science magazine, spent a week with the team, equipped with the most advanced rendering software. She left, defeated, her final output a series of beautiful but frustratingly conventional abstract swirls. "The light behaves," she’d said, packing her equipment, "as if it doesn't agree with our physics of light. My software can't fight that. It’s like asking me to paint the sound of a bird singing."
Lena, observing Aris’s mounting distress, tried to shield him. She handled most of the technical briefings, her reports precise, data-rich, and utterly devoid of any attempt to describe the subjective experience of the color itself. “The emitted photons exhibit quantum entanglement with variable dimensional states, resulting in a perceived visual phenomenon not correlative to standard tristimulus values,” she’d told a panel of bewildered grantors. One of them had asked if it would make a good stealth coating.
Jian, tasked with mapping the mathematical underpinnings, found himself staring at equations that were elegant, internally consistent, yet described something he couldn’t visualize or connect to any known physical constant. His anxiety now had a new, terrifying focus: the fear that he was charting the geography of something fundamentally beyond human ken.
Aris found himself in a state of intellectual exile. The initial, pure ecstasy of witnessing the color, that raw, untainted moment of direct communion with a new facet of reality, was now overlaid with the static of incomprehension – his own, and the world’s. He would sit for hours in the lab, the color pulsing from its containment, a silent, luminous entity. He’d once thought that discovery was about finding answers. Now, he understood it was often about finding newer, more profound questions. The very act of trying to name it felt like a betrayal, an attempt to cage a phenomenon that was inherently free.
The grant renewal application lay on his desk, a stark reminder of the world’s need for digestible labels. The section: "Provide a concise, accessible description of the observed phenomenon and its potential significance."
Lena found him there, staring at the blinking cursor. She placed a mug of his preferred Earl Grey on the desk. "They're not asking for poetry, Aris. Just a signpost."
"But any signpost I erect will point in the wrong direction," he said, his voice flat. "It will diminish it. It will make it… mundane." He picked up a pen, then set it down. "This color, Lena… it’s like it knows our language is insufficient. It’s mocking our attempts to categorize it."
"Perhaps," Lena said softly, her gaze on the faint, otherworldly glow that even now seemed to leak from the powered-down containment unit in the adjacent room. "But my grandfather, who was almost completely blind by the end, he used to ask me to describe sunsets. I'd tell him about the oranges, the reds, the purples. He’d nod and say, ‘Ah, so like a warm, gentle fire then?’ It wasn't accurate, not by a long shot. But it gave him a sliver, a feeling. Sometimes, a feeling is all we can share when the reality is too vast."
Aris looked at Lena, then back at the form. The weight of all the unsaid, the unshareable, pressed down on him. He thought of that first, breathtaking moment, the universe casually unveiling one of its infinite, hidden facets. And then he thought of the confused faces, the inappropriate analogies, the reduction of wonder to marketable soundbites. A profound weariness settled over him, the fatigue of a translator asked to render an epic poem into a single, common word.
He picked up the pen. With a sigh that was a quiet admission of defeat, or perhaps an acceptance of a fundamental human limitation, he began to write. He bypassed all the complex terminology, all the caveats, all the scientific honesty that screamed within him.
"The visual phenomenon," he wrote, his hand surprisingly steady, "while possessing unique spectral characteristics currently under detailed investigation, can be broadly understood by the layperson as appearing, under standard observational conditions, somewhat like green."