A Gray Interlude

After the bombs fell, the world turned gray. Not just in the distance, although you could only see an arm’s length ahead of you. But when you looked at the ground, where there used to be green grass, brown dirt, the blue of the tropical sea, everything was gray.

I think it was probably the ash. It covered everything, and stayed in the air, coloring our clothes, our hair, our faces. Long ago we fought about differences in skin color. Now we were all gray. We used to have structures and a society. Farms, factories, offices, churches, shops, houses. All gone now. Everyone became a scavenger.

Once, billions of people inhabited the earth. Different races, different countries, different languages, rich, poor, idle, hard-working, starving. It’s hard to imagine that now. Everywhere is the same. Everyone (in those rare places where people still exist) speaks the same language. The language of the overlords.

We didn’t know who or what they were. We never saw them. But we believe that they are the ones who bombed the earth, and they have never denied it. In a few days, everything was gray dust, and we were all starving and dying of thirst. Then the overlords decided to feed us. Each morning there were containers of food and water on the ground for us to find. The containers, of course, were gray. So was the food. Perhaps the overlords just didn’t see color like we did.

So we were reduced to a lifetime of crawling around in search of care packages from unseen overlords. They spoke to us from time to time. Like a celestial PA system. The sound was all around us, deus ex machina, the voice from the burning bush. At first we didn’t understand it. But key sounds kept coming up. “Food has arrived.” “Water has arrived.” We learned like children absorbing their first language.

Strange diseases emerged. We all coughed of course, that was a given. The strange foods and the water gave us stomach problems for weeks. But then we fell ill with fevers, bleeding, stiffness in our bodies. That was when we first heard “Medicine has arrived.” We saw that there was something new in the containers, but we didn’t know what to do with it. Was it to be ingested, rubbed on the skin, or something else? Finally, they must have observed our confusion. “Medicine is food.”

Now we were learning the language. Slowly, painfully, because it was a one-way communication. But we noticed that we only heard the announcements if we were close to a container. Perhaps there was some sort of sensor that was triggered by our proximity. If we didn’t hear a message, we kept wandering around until we did. Each message always sounded the same to us, no matter how many times we heard it, so it may have been a machine speaking to us.

We know they were observing us. That’s how they knew when we were sick, and how often we needed fresh food and water. The temperature varied very little, and rain and snow had ceased to exist. But as the months went by, we became more aware of the cold. “Cover has arrived.” I remember finding a container with some kind of blanket in it. Gray, of course, so it matched the overall décor. The material was stiff, not soft, but it kept us warm.

Finally, we started to realize that people just disappeared. Usually older people, or those who were sick. One day they were there, wandering around in search of containers, the next day they were gone. I saw an old man fall to the ground, and I waited there to see what happened next. When I awoke the next day, he was gone. Vanished in the night, like the containers. We had never found the remains of the billions who died when the bombs fell, but we had assumed they were just covered in the gray dust. Now it seemed the overlords kept the planet tidy.

People are people, and even in these dire times, we were drawn to each other. Physical attraction was minimal. We were all gray and dusty, we wore rags, and our conversation was limited to searching for containers. But life goes on even when it’s not clear that living is worthwhile. Babies were born, and some of them improbably survived. A birth was an explosion of color. Babies came out covered in blood and fluid, and for the first few hours they weren’t gray. We saw them as our hope for the future, for the return of color to our world. They suckled on gray, dust-covered teats.

After a while, the overlords apparently realized the infant mortality rate was too high to maintain the sparse population. “Baby care has arrived.” This was a hit-and-miss operation, since they didn’t target those containers to people who might need them. Still, we stockpiled those items for future use, and eventually there were supplies for babies everywhere we went – you just had to search in the gray dust to find them.

Some people formed families to raise children. Some women raised children by themselves. The children were told stories of the time before the bombs fell, when the world was full of color, when trees grew out of the ground, animals roamed the land, and big cities towered above us. Only the old languages had words for these things. But they also learned the language of the overlords, which spoke of all the things that mattered.

One day, a new announcement was broadcast. We couldn't understand it at first. But we quickly realized it was a countdown. The same noises each time, but with one different sound at the end. This new announcement was “Water from above in ___ hours.” We found that out when the countdown finished.

At first, we were terrified. This was not a gentle rain. It was like a monsoon, as if someone had upended a bucket of water above us. It didn't last very long. It was probably a training exercise. The next time we heard that announcement, we immediately tried to gather together and shelter ourselves under blankets. The second time, the rain fell for hours. The gray dust around us darkened in color, and the gray of the air paled. The third time, it fell for days. And then something truly horrifying happened. There was a reddish glow above us. It was so alien, we didn’t know what to make of it. There were children who had never seen such a color. The adults found it far more vibrant than their memories of color on old earth.

After a few more rainfalls, we worked out that this unfamiliar light was from the sun. We hadn’t seen the sun for years, and the nuanced color was a shock to us. We remembered it as a white light, or a yellow ball in the sky, or salmon-colored clouds at sunset. This new sun was a reddish-yellow as it burned through the clouds of gray dust. We watched in awe as its color changed minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day.

We started to see greater distances. I remember the day we saw mountains on the horizon. The whole concept of distance had been lost to us. I remember seeing a blue sky as if for the first time. We dropped to our knees in wonder. After a year or so of this strange new world, the gray ash on the ground began to sink into the earth. The brownish earth reappeared, bringing with it the first shoots of green.

The overlords made more announcements. We still couldn’t see them. No strange entities stalking across the land, no massive spaceships in the air or on the ground. But they slowly revealed our world to us. They reduced the containers of water as regular rains came and rivers started to flow. There was one announcement that seemed to mean “You will need these.” The containers that came included tools for farming. Then tools and wood for building. Then one day, the announcement came but there were no new containers. Instead, we saw animals in the distance. We could not believe our eyes. Some time later, containers delivered tools for hunting.

The containers of food became smaller. The overlords wanted us to start feeding ourselves. We became hunter-gatherers, and we tried to farm crops.

When the gray had completely disappeared from our world, the announcements had almost stopped. We heard one final announcement, which played over and over for days. We think it meant “Goodbye.”

We have never heard from them since. But when the spring rains come, we repeat their messages “Water from above. Water has arrived.” When the harvest comes or we slaughter an animal for food, “Food has arrived.”

And in the mornings, when the red sun breaks across the land bringing warmth and color to our world again, “Goodbye.”