Author: Soramimi Hanarejima
On my way home, I stop by the drugstore for a quick errand. But in the nootropics aisle, I’m thwarted by vacant shelf space. When I ask a clerk what happened to all the memorysyn, he tells me there’s been a recall. Some production issue has made recent lots more potent than normal, resulting in memories that are too vivid with all the minutiae of daily life. For now, we’ll have to make memories the old fashioned way.
After dinner, I cozy up on the sofa and go through what happened today, picking out events that hold the promise of meaning. Then it’s time to determine that meaning, which is easy when the meaning is straightforward but frustrating when it’s ambiguous.
And it’s especially ambiguous for the most notable thing today: the world seeming forlorn without my colors. What does that mean? Hoping to puzzle out the answer, I go over and over my in-progress memory of this colorless day.
Before work, I took my colors to the vision shop for an overdue tune-up. The chromatician told me that all my colors needed recalibration and I’d have to leave them for various specialists to service.
“The whole spectrum is out of whack. Especially the tertiaries,” she said.
“So do you have loaner colors I can use in the meantime?” I asked.
“Not an entire spectrum. We just have basic colors, and you’re better off seeing the world in shades of gray instead of getting pops of red, purple and yellow.”
So I resigned myself to total grayness and headed to the office, the city like the milieu of an old movie—until an unsettling emptiness began to loom over downtown. That emptiness only intensified, and at work, I struggled to focus. By lunchtime, it was as though a vast void lay beneath the floor and behind the walls. I had to take the afternoon off.
My usual route home was a dismal trek through a desolate husk of urban life—buildings, traffic and people all hollowed of substance. My apartment was just as vacuous, sapped of its usual homeyness, like a three-dimensional shadow of the place I’d left this morning. Not sure what else to do, I took a nap and slept soundly, until I was woken by a call telling me that my colors were ready.
After a bus ride through the ashen shell of the city’s former self, I got my recalibrated colors reinstalled, and instantly the world was more lively than ever.
It’s all straightforward enough. So what’s the significance? Colors make the world feel substantive? Is it that simple? Or does the absence of color make an emotion I don’t ordinarily feel—like loneliness—part of the world around me?
More than ever now I crave the automatic narrative cohesion granted by memorysyn—the seamless way this neuroceutical instantaneously makes a whole memory complete with an inscrutable logic that locks events into meaningful place. But I should save what few pills I have in case it’s a while before the manufacturing issue gets resolved.
So I settle for the facile interpretation that seemingly simple fixtures in life shouldn’t be taken for granted. It’s a trite truism, but I can try again later. Or ask for your take on my day without colors. You have a knack for seeing the events of my life in a certain way, and that might just be the key to unlocking the significance I can’t. Then this memory would be really made the old fashioned way, something socially constructed. Maybe with the old-timey pleasure of understanding life together.
