It was not the most productive way to spend the last 45 minutes.
The room was stifling. The air hung. You could eat it, it was so heavy.
Slide after slide after slide. Click, shuffle, click, shuffle, click.
The latest one, rotated in place from an endless spool, depicted a greyness much like the last half dozen but apparently this one sported a yellow hue in one of the four corners. It was impossible to tell which.
This was a Rorschach test for those with glaucoma. This was a method in which the tiniest alteration was so minuscule that it was to be invisible to the naked eye.
This was splitting the atom purely so you could split the stuff that fell out.
Pointless as it was, without the absolutely correct grey/gray being unveiled in the vast reaches of the ‘above’ - for which these bipedal creatures should be walking under - the people of the world known as Earth would spiral into behaviours not yet studied.
This was the purpose. Grey/gray skies meant many things to the feet walkers. To the shoe-d folk, a blanket of grey could shape time and space. More so than even love, life, laughter (pronounced lovi, lifi, laugta in our language) skies could bend wills. And we bent their’s often.
For studies, not for fun, you understand. Though sometimes the studies were fun.
They would dash about madly when rain fell unexpectedly. They would look up and mutter barely audible cuss words if they forgot their rain protection satellites.The smaller ones would jump in tiny pools of water, much to the dismay of the larger caregivers. Traffic density would increase. And tempers would fray.
Grey/Gray.
Infinitesimal ranges of mood and cognitive adjustment were almost as limitless as grey tinged with blue, light and dark, grey upon grey upon gray.
The same shade of it, really, mixed with a little of the magic of suggested change. A hint of a difference.
There were Fifty, a baffingly famous book that those who possessed a mere two eyes had exchanged for a strange currency, had said. The book was wrong.
There were millions of shades. And the book also was not about the ‘above’, though there was a lot about what went on in the different ‘below’.
Rotate.
Shuffle, click.
Grey, a dash of off-white, just off-centre. A flash of blue in the bottom right...your fifth eye was drawn to possibility of a dark, ribald grey forming at the edges.
Claustrophobic. Dangerous.
THIS WAS THE ONE.
