Color

Mark only had vague memories of what colors were, having lost the ability to see them when he was a young child after being hit by a car. He remembered being very upset about it at the time, and having to struggle just to understand where he was going and what he was looking at for a long time. But that was over thirty years ago, and he had sense become well accustomed to the gray world that he lived in. He could see the subtle differences in shading that allowed him to tell when a traffic light was telling him to stop or when to go, and whether or not his cheese had begun to mold. There were very few things that he could not get by without color - mostly things like work clothing in companies that required you to match a certain style.

On occasion he dreamt of a world of color, but the colors were old and muddy - they blended together in strange ways, and he could tell that things were wrong, though he didn't fully understand why or how. And when he awoke, he would be in a cold sweat, and hardly remembered what it was he had seen. While some other color blind folk might have considered dreams of colors to be miraculous and worth celebrating, to Mark they were little more than nightmares.

But when he was told about a company that was working on corrective lenses that would reinstruct the brain on how to interpret colors, he found it hard to say no to. He tried not to, but he could not help but look back on the days of his youth from time to time, when he had been just a bit more normal, and the world had seemed to have more life to it. He was never sure if that was simply because he had been a child, or if it had something to do with the loss of color. He had always relegated himself to never being able to know, but perhaps...

It was all still mostly theory, extremely experimental and needed heavy testing - and he was perfectly willing to do some of that testing. When he told his boss about it, the old man was ecstatic, and told Mark to let him know whenever he needed days off to be a part of the experiment. It wasn't that his boss pitied him for his color blindness, but it was hard to say no to something like that.

Two years went by of visits to Aperture Inc., with little progress to show for it. Mark had tried on a few dozen kinds of glasses and contact lenses, grown use to the heavy lights, and even made a few friends with the staff members. On a good day, their inventions made certain grays lighter or darker, and one time he even thought he saw the color green. But most of the time nothing happened. But that never stopped Aperture, and it never stopped Mark from testing.

And one day he donned a pair of glasses and nearly had a heart attack. There was red. Bright and vivd red, more than anything that he could remember, and it was in everyone's faces. Varying amounts and shades, but it was there, without doubt. He had heard people talk about it so many times, never understanding, but it was as plain as day.

It was a great breakthrough. The company published its findings to great fortune, attracting new testers and customers, and a great number of investors.

But Mark benefitted the most, because he got to keep that first pair of glasses.