Two things you need to understand. The human eye is VERY sensitive to variant color gradients. We can't always register that difference and we almost never can name it, but we're far more sensitive then the standard 256x256x256 scale we talk about in computers. The second is that different monitors, phones and TVs will display the same colors differently. If you have dual monitors that are different brands, you can see this simply by dragging a colorful image from one monitor to the other.
Why are these important? I'll get to that in a minute.
My name's Max and my wife is Kelly. We've been together for three years so we're passed the newlywed stage. I would hardly say we're in a rut though. It's just that when we see our unmarried friends with their newest SO, we often feel just that twinge of jealousy. However, it turns out I've discovered the key to a happy life. Well, I stumbled upon it, I suppose. Let me back up a little.
Now I could tell you all the wonderful, generic things about my wife. She's a hot little brunette with smoldering eyes, a rockin' figure and breasts that are, at least in my opinion, utter perfection. But none of that is particularly important to the story. Imagine her however you want. It's your head. The thing that IS important to the story is that she was born with a rare condition known as Macular Entropophy. It's the kind of thing that's incredibly hard to diagnose because it doesn't get caught in any of the standard tests. You're not blind. You just see the world differently. VERY differently. The condition is caused by a misfiring of the cones in your eye and the textbooks will tell you that it manifests as people seeing in randomly scattered colors. But a moment's worth of thought will tell you that's crazy, right? Everything we see is bounded by colors. If the colors were "random", you wouldn't be able to see objects, just a colorful static.
My wife describes it more like everything is comprised of shifting, rainbow like hues. She still sees all the objections just fine. It's just that everything, even a plain red sheet of paper is a shifting mass of color variants.
Needless to say, the way my wife dressed in college was... eclectic. Her parents had tried to convince her to only wear black and white shirts and jeans, arguing that there'd never be a conflict that way. And she did that for 18 years of her life. Then she got to color and while other girls were cutting loose by getting drunk at frat parties, my some-day wife cut loose by buying whatever clothes she thought looked cool. She never matched. Not once. Those people that say a stopped clock is right twice a day have never seen my wife's college wardrobe. Green skirts with purple and yellow shirts. That kind of thing. It was invariably gaudy. And when it wasn't gaudy, it was cringe inducing. One day all of our friends remember she managed to wear a pair of brown shoes, brown slacks, a brown shirt and a brown belt all just slightly different shades of brown. She looked like if the UPS man wore an outfit from four different decades of the company's history. It ALMOST worked but it was the almost that made it fail so spectacularly.
In college, it wasn't much of a problem though. Ultimately everyone is a little weird in college. Where it became problematic is when she got into the real world and started job hunting. Suddenly first impressions and interviews became important.
So when an option for an experimental treatment opened up, she was quick to respond. And that's really how the story starts.
"Okay, so tell me about how it works," she said, gripping my hand excitedly. I'd been with her to a couple doctors before and I knew she'd seen many, many specialists before we met. The verdict was always the same. Nobody would touch this thing. It was too rare and too weird for any doctor to be interested in it.
This doctor, however, was different. Her daughter and mother both had the disease. And by some miracle, it had skipped her over. But that still meant her daughter might pass it along and she had basically devoted her career to curing it. "Okay, so sedate you to stop eye movement and then inject these into your eye," she said, holding up a small vial of liquid.
"Those are the nanobots?" I asked, looking at the vessel of clear liquid. I couldn't see anything other than pure water.
Doctor Jenkins frowned, "Nanobots makes it sound very science-fiction. They're not tiny little robots. They're actually much more similar to the mRNA vaccines that came online a few years ago."
"So they're biological?" I asked.
"Nooo," she said, "Not exactly. But they're not robots either. No processors. Nothing like that. They won't replicate or anything and she'll need periodic resupplies every 4-5 years for the rest of her life because of that."
"So what do they do?"
"They operate like RFID receivers but for light. They'll bond with her cones and slowly slide down the optic nerve, finding the locations where the signals are misfiring and taking over," she said, showing a schematic on the wall. "Everyone with this disease has a different compromised section of their optical system. It's why diagnosing it and fixing it is so hard. Basically, each of these little guys is designed to work their way through the neurons until they find a neuron that misfires. Then they just replace that neuron. That'll make the signals consistent and allow her to resolve colors clearly."
"It sounds kind of freaky," my wife said. I squeezed her hand.
"I know. And I understand your reluctance."
"It just sounds like you're going to reprogram my brain," she said, looking up at me. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead gently.
"Whatever you want to do is fine with me," I told her.
"It's not reprogramming your brain, Kelly. It's just fixing some neurons somewhere in that optical chain."
"I guess...," she said skeptically.
"I'll give you both some time to think about it. Fortunately, the procedure only takes about twenty minutes and most of that is simply sedation," she said, walking out and leaving us alone.
"What do you think, Max?"
