The Grayscale Syndrome

CW: Mass death, suicide, apocalyptic themes

The Grayscale Syndrome

“This is the Friday night edition of the Critical Mass podcast with Ava Winslow. I would ask how everyone is doing, but that seems too ironic, even for me. I know how everybody is doing. And it appears we’re not going to make it, are we? I mean, it’s been what? Two, three weeks since the Grayscale Syndrome affected the whole world? Half of us are dead from homicide or suicide. Half of us are insane, or almost insane. With no one to maintain the electrical grid, this will be my final podcast. I suggest you hoard matches, lighters, anything that produces fire unless you want to live like our ancestors did before they discovered fire.”

Ava Winslow looks out the window of her apartment bedroom at the silent, empty street three stories below her. Wind gusts blow plastic bags and generic trash like ghost town tumbleweeds. Cars sit everywhere, chaotically abandoned like jigsaw puzzle pieces dumped out of a box. Some have doors hanging open, revealing empty seats and ripped out dashboards. Others have been flipped over on their sides, metal carcasses of beasts killed for no rational reason. Fragments of broken windows hang like transparent stalactites in storefront frames. Ava’s gaze finds an occasional dead body lying on the street and sidewalks, but she feels nothing. Bodies have been reduced to nondescript, gray lumps of various sizes and lengths. The world is now a borderless, black and white photograph, flat, dimensionless, dying, the laminated version of the aftermath of nuclear war.

“So, four billion people lost the ability to see color several weeks ago. Since then, how many conspiracy theories about the Grayscale Syndrome have you heard? How many do you believe?” Ava laughs slightly, rubbing her forehead and sighing. “So, let’s get some of the crazier ones out of the way before we start talking seriously about what may have caused the syndrome and if scientists will ever find a cure. First of all, I know it’s hard to think objectively anymore, but I want to tell you to understand that this isn’t some punishment by God for whatever you think he’s mad about. The devil didn’t take away our color vision, either. That’s all bullshit. If a sky god—or a subterranean god—wanted us to suffer, they wouldn’t do something that causes insanity, mass suicides, and murders. Only the living can suffer.”

Ava Winslow recalls the first time she looked in a mirror after the Grayscale Syndrome attacked the world’s population. This is what I would look like if I were a cement statue, she had thought. Light gray skin, medium gray hair, dark gray eyes. She remembers scanning her apartment wildly for hours, searching for a hint of color anywhere, squinting, blinking, rubbing her eyes over and over again, until a rippling sense of disorientation and panic forced her to drop to her knees before she fainted.

Then the psychological impact of the Grayscale Syndrome began cannibalizing society into a wasteland of psychotic skeletons. Fear metastasized faster than facts, and in the absence of scientific explanations, people weaponized narratives awash in supernatural salvation and the promise of a blissful, eternal life with God. Riots erupted in major urban centers, driven by a volatile mix of paranoia, delusional thinking, and the deepening schism between ideological groups. Hospitals collapsed, overwhelmed by thousands of frightened people. Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Beijing, Moscow—they all devolved into a dystopia ravaged by fires, homemade bombs, people losing their minds, possessed by murderous rages.

Military scientists frantically studying the Grayscale Syndrome in bunker laboratories discovered fairly quickly that the disorder was not inherently neurological, viral, bacterial, induced by toxic anomalies, or proliferating like some kind of weird mass psychosis. It seemed to be an advanced engineering anomaly, a phenomenon that exceeded humanity’s technological abilities. This led scientists to theorize that the Grayscale Syndrome may be extraterrestrial in nature and that nothing could reverse it. One scientist, obviously distraught and succumbing to the bleak inevitability of extinction, simply posted on X: Irrelevance, thy name is humanity.

Suddenly, Ava hears her phone beep with an incoming text message. She stares skeptically at the gray square lying on her gray desk for a moment, wondering if she is hallucinating. No one has called her for days. Sliding her arm over her desk to grab the phone, she feels something painfully sharp prick the soft, fleshy part of her lower arm. Silently, she mouths “ouch,” turns her arm sideways, and sees a trickle of blood—black blood—crawling down her arm. At that moment, Ava would have cut her arm from elbow to wrist if she thought the blood would have been red again.

Ava wipes the blood away with a tissue and stares at the text message. Gray, black, and white memories abruptly cast themselves in her mind like midnight shadows, images of the last ordinary day she wasted without knowing it was the last ordinary day she would waste—ordering Chinese, scrolling social media sites for interesting things to talk about on her next podcast, talking to friends about a promising blind date she had last weekend, seeing everything in colors that she now grieves for as though they were loved ones that died.

She reads the bizarre text message repeatedly, forcing herself to analyze and dissect every word, scouring the syntax for some hint of human error that would expose the message as a hoax:

We have transmitted this message in every language spoken on your planet. What your world calls the Grayscale Syndrome is the result of our releasing a cortical disrupter swarm into your atmosphere, capable of crossing your blood-brain barrier and suppressing activity in V4. Removal of your ability to perceive color has induced the expected psychological breakdown of your society.

Survivors will be relocated to a designated planetary environment and reintroduced alongside a curated ecosystem of various flora and fauna. Repopulation of the environment will eventually result in a unique evolution of chromatic vision that adapts to this achromatic environment. You will hear from us again soon.

Ava’s hands are shaking almost convulsively by now, but she manages to punch W, H, and Y--and then hysterically hits the question mark until there are three separate lines of question marks.

Message sent.

Message undeliverable.

Message sent.

Message undeliverable.

Ava is still hitting the send button when they finally arrive.