The Colour in Your Space

The Colour hit in 1928. It wasn’t the kind of color you think of as a color, but a Colour, with a “u,” and a capital C. There wasn’t really any better way to describe it; it was massless, formless, just... a new Colour. It royally fucked up a farm when it first hit, warping plant and animal life and killing the owners in a pretty damn gruesome way. I’ll spare you the details; some Hovercraft guy wrote a lot about it.

We didn’t know much about it back then. In fact, we knew only a few things:

1. It came from space,
   
   
2. It turns things grey, crumbly, and real dead,
   and most interestingly, and profitably,
   
   
3. It causes much, much faster growth of everything.
   That’s why
   
   
4. was the most important part: In 1958, we found out how to capture it. It just took a little alterations of some nuclear shit; take a little Cherenkov blue, some nuclear green, the orange of fission, and bam: Coloured light, ready and able to be shone on crop after crop of corn, wheat, soy, potatoes, you name it. Sure, they’d all turn grey and brittle after a few weeks; but nobody notices grey and brittle shit when it’s in your cereal, your ice cream, your burger, your clothes, and your haircare products. It was perfect for processing; Coloured stuff is practically identical to the real thing, it’s just bigger, shakes a little, and ends up looking bright Coloured.
   
   And that’s when we learned about
   
   
5. Chickens that ate Coloured corn first started getting bigger, but also ate that shit like candy, right up until they got grey and brittle, then fell over dead, begging for more corn. The Colour, when it’s broadcast on animals, addicts the everloving shit out of them. The chickens would get about four feet tall before croaking, and made for some great profits for about nine years.
   
   It was in the '60s that we finally learned the most fun part:
   
   
6. It works on humans. Not to the same extent; those farmers were absolutely saturated with the stuff back in the '20s, and it still took them a few weeks to die painfully. But in little doses, flashing strobelites aimed at political prisoners, drops of Coloured dye in the water supply, Coloured laser sights on rifles for ‘Nam, people go apeshit for the stuff. In studies done in the late '60s and early '70s, 97% of consumers exposed to a single flash of Colour will continue to seek out Coloured products of any and all sorts at 50 times the normal rate, including shit they’d never use before; hell, Reagan won the election off using a Coloured ad campaign!
   
   And it turns out the effects are otherwise barely noticeable in small doses; takes like 50 years of constant exposure to get the results that happened to that family, a.k.a. the Gardner effect. Supreme Court cases kept upholding the use of Coloured materials; might’ve had something to do with 3 judges getting caught on camera wearing Coloured clothes and drinking Coloured Cola, and 2 more receiving some decent payoffs from Pepsi-Co and American Eagle. So now, even though it’s tacky, we’re all wearing Coloured shirts and eating Coloured fries and watching Coloured TV—in small doses, of course.
   
   It’s only the ones who eat Coloured shit every day, who buy hand-me-down Coloured clothes because normal colors are too expensive, who drink the water the US Government poured gallons of Colour into sixty years ago, who end up turning into plaster statues. It’s only the homeless out under Coloured billboards, the people who ride Coloured busses, the prisoners who get Coloured uniforms who start really experiencing the Gardner effect, growing twice their normal sizes, shaking uncontrollably, and crumbling to pieces on the street.
   
   
7. The Coloured people don’t matter.