The Quiet Divide

"Rainy Days Ahead," announced the text box at the bottom of Dr. Riley's display. "3 inches of rain expected this Friday." For a moment, he imagined himself as one of those old-time newscasters—the ones that actually read you the news from a teleprompter back when television wasn't a museum term. He could see himself sitting behind a wood-veneered desk with a big cherry-red seven floating behind his head. "Let me tell you something, Linda, I’ve been tracking storms for thirty years, and I’ll give it to you straight—this is unlike anything we've ever experienced.”

Dr. Riley was, of course, thinking of a different kind of storm. Mother Nature could hurl the ocean at coastal cities every couple of years like an elephant spraying flies off its back, and just like the flies, we'd come out of it relatively unscathed.

The storm on Dr. Riley's mind was the kind humanity produced of its own nature every couple of centuries. It was the bottled-up rage and emotion of every little man realizing he wasn't holding the ladder, waiting his turn to climb—he was a rung at its base, used and stepped on.

Naturally, the ones at the top of this ladder enjoyed the breeze and the view from their lofty heights and didn't want to go the way of Roman aristocrats.

Something had to be done to quiet the malcontents.

Dr. Riley was one of thousands of doctors, scientists, researchers, and, of course, religious leaders given enormous grants—and in the latter case, "donations"—to find a cure for this outbreak of "class consciousness" that had spread like wildfire through lower castes.

This, after the legions of algorithms had failed to put down the rebellion that ironically had spread through the very social networks that had been created to prevent this sort of crisis. How very much like the Romans: once bread and circuses failed to appease the masses, they turned to sharper instruments of persuasion.

When Dr. Riley had been told that no expense would be spared in preparing a suitable place for his research, his major request had been for a stunning view. Not the demand a hotshot banker might make for a corner office on the 20th floor. Dr. Riley was not motivated by vanity or self-indulgence, he was a practical man and had a practical reason for his request. His laboratory—on the 20th floor of an impossible glass building had the seamless quality of glazing poured over a cake, it was designed to give the viewer a panoramic view of a landscape that, as far as the eye could see, was undisturbed by man.

Dr. Riley believed that inducing in a person the feelings he had experienced as a young boy, spending countless summers enjoying his parents' vacation home—"the world and all its wonders have been laid here for my benefit and mine alone"—would be the ideal environment to help him isolate that part of a human in which their self-importance resides.

Give a man the world, and he will believe it belongs to him.

Take it away, and he will learn what part of him refuses to let go.

In laboratories and research centers all over the nation, experiments like his were being conducted on volunteer test subjects desperate enough to trade their dignity—and possibly their health—for a sum that men like him might spend on a pair of socks or a cocktail. He had read many reports on the almost juvenile “solutions” being tested on these unsuspecting victims—everything from mass chemical castration to introducing sedatives into the public water supply. It gave him small comfort to know that at least his success would put a stop to such needless suffering.

His work as a neurovirologist—most specifically his research on viral effects on sensory processing pathways—had paved the way to his "elegant solution." The problem was psychological: a basic tenet of society was that all men are equal. This phrase could be seen on discarded poster boards or spray-painted on walls after a police force had disrupted a "peaceful protest" with canisters of tear gas and rubber bullets. If they had been equal, there would be no need to protest.

Dr. Riley’s solution was found in that one word: "created."

And although he wasn't one who believed in the creation of man as a singular holy event, he believed that what he had created would be humanity's salvation.

The problem was never inequality. It was perception. The discontented masses lived in a kind of luxury their ancestors could never have imagined—no fields to till from dawn to dusk, no pox-ridden frontiers, no generations lost to famine. And still, they found a way to be dissatisfied. An entire population staring at abundance and claiming to be lacking.

Resentment spread like a disease.

He had found the cure, that cure was a virus.

Color, he understood, is not simply seen—it is constructed. The eye does not deliver reality; it delivers data. Wavelengths strike the retina, are translated into electrical signals, and sent inward, where the brain assembles them into meaning. What people call “color” is not in the world at all, but in the interpretation.

So he rewrote the interpretation.

The virus did not attack the body. It produced no fever, no lesions, no measurable illness. It slipped silently past every defense and settled within the visual cortex, threading itself into the delicate pathways that translate light into experience. There, it interfered—not by destroying the system, but by altering its conclusions.

Neural signals still arrived from the eye, intact and precise. But the brain could no longer resolve them into color. Reds lost their warmth, blues their depth, greens their vitality. Eventually, all hues collapsed into a narrow, desaturated spectrum—washed, muted, indistinct.

The world remained unchanged.

There was no need to poison water or dilute the gene pool. That was crude. Inefficient. Unsustainable.

Simply remove color, the sharpest divider of all.

A child born into that world would not feel deprived. Given a few generations, there wouldn't even be a memory of what had been lost.

And without that…

What was left to inspire a person to believe that they could rise above their station, or fill them with a longing to fulfill some unrealized dream?

Even religious leaders could be brought into the fold. They would adapt quickly; they always did. A colorless world could be presented as another divine test. A veil. A condition placed upon humanity, and somewhere within that story, there would be a promise:

That the faithful might one day see clearly again, and that obedience might restore what was broken.

Dr. Riley had made sure there could be no cure.

Hope worked best when it was just out of reach.

The virus had not yet been released—not to the public. But the dramatic difference between the children who had received the virus as infants and the control group who had not was undeniable.

Those at the top would never inflict this on themselves.

Their world would remain untouched. Their children would inherit it as it had always been—rich, vivid, full of difference. The meek would inherit less.

A cleaner divide than any wall could ever create.

Not enforced.

Not spoken.

Simply… true.

Give a man the world, and he will believe it belongs to him.

Take it away, and he will fight to reclaim it.

Remove the ability to see it at all…

…and he will never know it was his to begin with.

He stood alone, watching the world settle into place.

"Dr. Riley," it was Linda, "are you sure you want to do this?"

His brooding interrupted, he shifted into the present.

"I am, Linda. Let’s begin."