Today, a Tuesday of the June variety, a blue man awakes. Donning his blue clothes, he leaves his blue home and enters a blue Mercedes, painted a shade he custom ordered featuring a light blue metallic flake on a dark blue base coat, which the salesman assured him was the only such example north of the 49th. Waking slowly, he prepares himself for another typical day in the lab as he makes his way westward, the blue crosses of traffic signals interrupting his passage as a blue sun rises slowly in his rearview mirror. This man will invent red today.
Spooling up his DNA printer, the man synthesizes a fresh batch of DNA sequences he’d been working on the night before. Within the hour, the machine’s status light blinks blue and the fruits of its labor are ready for insertion into a carrier virus, a procedure which takes the rest of the morning. After lunch, the man returns, loads a CC’s worth of virions into his syringe, and injects it into the spine of a blue lab rat.
The rat, an hour after the injection, is placed in a box with two LEDs. This rat, even disregarding the indecency it has endured, is a special rat. It is a rat trained to expect food upon the blink of an LED. It is a rat with a job, the man thinks as he sets up the experiment. This rat is a good rat that does its job, he remarks; his students would do well to follow its example. The left LED blinks, and the rat scurries towards it. The man rewards its admirable performance, jotting down a successful control test on his clipboard. There have been many successful control tests.
The man presses the button for the right LED. The right LED remains unlit. The rat scurries towards it. The man blinks twice, and drops his clipboard.
Months pass, primate trials show success. Ethics review board be damned, the man thinks, my time has come. I will be the first, I will see what no man has seen, what monkeys and mice should never have seen before us. He calls up two trusted grad students. Able to offer aid should things go wrong, he thought, but not likely to protest his attempt. Fortunately for him, one of the two students fancies himself a bodybuilder, and volunteers to pin the man down while the other prepares an epidural. A searing pain erupts in the man’s back, coinciding with a searing regret, but what’s done is done.
Over the next hour, his vision goes fuzzy, then goes black, his retinal cells shutting down before his very eyes. His mind races as he panics, only for his salvation to come as slowly, but surely, he starts to see again. The blue of his lab and his student’s worried faces are equally reassuring and concerning, but he tempers the fear of failure by reminding himself that the monochromatic blue office lighting would offer him no confirmation. He runs to the rat’s enclosure. He blinks the right LED, and for the first time in human existence, he sees red. He can see what no human before him could ever see, he alone has the privilege of being the first to experience the world anew, seeing the birthplace of humanity as billions soon would, of ushering in a new age. With childish glee, he runs past the dumbfounded students (to hell with them, dirty freeloaders!) and throws open the front doors of his lab building.
And all he sees is blue, for blue is the only color the sun shines.