“What does it look like, Daddy?” Harper asked, looking up at her father as they walked hand in hand through the thick crowd choking the narrow walkways of the Sprawl. She was transfixed by a bright neon sign above a storefront, advertising barber services from a local who’d only recently set up shop.
Burgen lifted her by the arms and held her at his side, her arms draped around his neck as he looked over the sign. Then he turned to his daughter with a warm smile.
“That glowing rim piece is a deep purple. It feels calming, fancy, like something you want to look at forever, swollen with possibility. And the letters inside are a bright green. They feel exciting and fun, like when you first wake up in the morning and wipe the sleep from your eyes.”
“I like green!” Harper squealed.
Burgen laughed and gave her a light kiss on the forehead before setting her down and taking her hand again, continuing to lead her through the packed street.
Harper had been born with a somewhat uncommon condition, though one becoming more common as the pollution of the Sprawl worsened with each passing year. She could only see the world in monochrome, shades of black and white. It was a torment for Burgen, who wanted her to grow up able to take in what beauty remained amidst the constantly muted colors of Vargos. By the time she turned four, he’d become skilled at describing colors in ways she could understand. Now, in her sixth year, exchanges like this had become routine between them on their morning walks. It was their game, and they both loved playing it.
Burgen and Harper arrived at the tight, hastily assembled shack the local Violet office had licensed as a “school” in their stretch of the Sprawl. He tentatively released his daughter as she ran to meet her friends. She lit up at the sight of her small group–close comrades she'd been with for the past year–and hurriedly hugged her dad’s legs before trotting over to them, diving into fast-paced conversation, their words flying at each other a mile a minute.
Burgen turned and headed back the way they came, making his way to work. He hated saying goodbye to her every morning, it was the only time they really had together. Her mother, Litty, would pick her up later, and they’d get dinner, watch some VR, and eventually tuck in for bed long before his workday was anywhere near finished. He had to find out all the things she did and the subjects she learned from Litty during a quick bedtime exchange before he tucked in for the night himself. He hoped she was having fun at school, in her day-to-day life, even if she couldn’t see the color of her friends’ faces.
Burgen caught the monorail to the neighboring Sprawl district and hopped off at the first stop near his shop: a minimally licensed cybersurgery clinic he ran solo. It only turned a profit thanks to his near-endless workdays. He’d learned the trade as a quick way to make money back when the tech was still niche in his part of the city, but by the time Harper came along, every street kid and two-bit gangster in the Sprawl had at least some rudimentary cybernetics. He was lucky to get repair and tune-up jobs from locals, but never anything fancy or life-changing. Everyone had more expensive docs for real medical problems. He was more a glorified ripper than a proper surgeon by this point in his life.
He unlocked the front with a retinal scan and powered on the shop and adjoining operating room, nearly blinding himself (as he did every day) with the sudden burst of fluorescent white light. He flicked on the sign outside: a crude neon illustration of a blue medical cross with a yellow lightning bolt embedded within.
Burgen stared at the sign and took in its color. Yellow in the lightning–bright, exciting, almost sour, if he had to put a taste to the particular shade the signmaker had chosen. His eyes lingered on the blue cross–calming, refreshing, soothing. Safe. A comforting blue. Litty’s blue.
At the thought, a tight pain pinched in his chest. Litty’s eyes were what he got to see every night when he came home and every morning when he woke. They held a blue comfort Harper would never experience. A soothing rain in a parched world where Harper would always be thirsty.
He felt guilty knowing he’d see those eyes again tonight, that they’d make his description of the blue cross outside pointless when the real thing was waiting in the small apartment they shared.
Litty had been so far out of his league when they met partying in Neon Heights, Burgen was sure he’d never have the guts to say hello. But the ghosts of Vargos had other plans. Somehow his beer ended up spilling on her boyfriend at the time–a Gilded Teeth enforcer who was more than happy to knock the wind out of Burgen and toss him onto the street.
Litty followed him out of the club and made sure he was okay as he lifted himself off the concrete. That was the first time he saw her eyes: reflecting pools for the neon-choked streets of Vargos’ party district, somehow glowing brighter than any sign he’d ever seen.
Why didn’t Harper get to see them?
Interrupting his thoughts like a blockade on a rail track, his morning regular burst into the shop grinning wide. Kevin.
The guy was hyperactive and near-insufferable, but he paid well for maintenance work, and paid regularly. A corpo grunt working for the local Violet chapter, Kevin never had anything interesting or relatable to say. Their worlds were too different, even though they shared the same megabloc apartment building in the Sprawl. While Kevin spent most of his hours in the glimmering, relative paradise of downtown Vargos, Burgen never got to leave the Sprawl.
He wondered what it was going to be this time.
“Burgen, baby! What’s going on, mate?”
“Another day, Kevin. Another day. What do you need done?”
“Just a quick glisten, man. I want to update the drivers for my optical software and get some spare lenses for my eye. Got an appointment at the Spire tomorrow for an upgrade and wanna make sure it goes smooth as silk.”
Kevin spoke fast but was already sliding his personal chit into Burgen’s point-of-sale machine. He was paying a little over the going rate–typical, but appreciated.
“Just make sure the software’s as new as you can find, alright?”
“You got it. Come on back.”
Burgen led Kevin to the operating room, which was really just a steel-clad storage closet he’d paid some locals to clean up when he first opened. It got the job done, even if keeping it sterile was a constant battle. But it was the Sprawl. No one expected perfect medical standards, just a low price. The fact that Burgen had spent years memorizing protocols and training to meet real standards didn’t matter much anymore.
Kevin sat in the chair and let Burgen get to work. Burgen slipped on tight gloves–bright white, one of the few colors Harper could see. Sterile. Neutral. Dull. Boring.
He lowered the overhead tool setup, jury-rigged like most of his equipment, and used prongs from its array to hold Kevin’s eyelid open. Carefully, he unscrewed the fragile glass iris from the cybereye and plopped the tiny black marble into a tray hooked up to his computer. He ran the upgrade protocol and dug out some spare lenses from a cabinet while the software downloaded into the eye.
“Gotta ask,” Burgen said as he worked, “why come here if you’re getting some fancy eye upgrade tomorrow anyway? Those guys at Violet must have better cyberware than I do.”
Kevin grinned but kept his head steady as he replied–a miracle, given how he usually seemed to vibrate with energy.
“Call it loyalty, man. Been coming here since I first got the job. You’re the local chop jock! Besides, they only do procedures by appointment. They’ll do this one, and then I won’t get another available window for at least a year.”
“Oh yeah? So what’s so special about the upgrade?”
“Well, you know how I work in interior design for the Violet offices?” Kevin began.
“My boss got on my case the other day about not knowing a mauve from a lilac and told me I gotta get my eyes adjusted. I thought she was just messing with me, but turns out Violet’s got this new method for color enhancement in the lens.”
Burgen froze, his throat suddenly bone dry as he choked on a lone drop of spit slipping down the wrong way. He heard the machine beep, indicating the iris update was complete, and carefully picked up the lens, screwing it back into Kevin’s cybereye.
As Burgen removed the prongs and peeled off his gloves, he turned to Kevin, stopping him just as he started toward the door.
“Hey, how are they doing this upgrade on you?”
“Huh? Oh! They’ve got this new method, I guess. They punch this super-bright light through the lenses, and this computer system of theirs indicates when the lens is ‘laced,’ basically when it’s filled with these color-grabbing microflakes from the light exposure. Pretty rad, right?”
Burgen chose his next words carefully. Corpos weren’t known for being generous with tech info, but Kevin was a talker. This might be his only shot.
“Any way you could help me get one of those setups for the shop?”
“Ahh, sorry, mate! It’s top-secret stuff, you know how Violet is. I would if I could.”
Burgen felt a stab of disappointment but smiled and waved goodbye as Kevin left. As soon as the door shut, he wasted no time hitting the net to look into the method Violet was using.
The process was called Optical Lacing-, a new technique some of the Chimera Heights cybersurgeons had been testing out on blind patients whose cybereyes couldn’t render the full color spectrum. Burgen felt sick realizing the technology had been around for years now, yet he’d never heard of it. New technology was never new to people in the Sprawl. By the time it reached them, it was just old tech, recycled and rebranded.
His research turned up the basics: to lace a lens, you had to line it up with several tami-lights, the same bright bulbs used for imprinting intricate designs on microchips in Japan, mostly for boutique electronics. The lights were cheap and accessible. The real problem was the quality check.
In order to know when a lens was “laced,” i.e. when it could finally pick up the full color spectrum in sync with the brain’s simplest visual processes, a computer was needed to give the all-clear. It could look through the blinding light and detect a crystallized triangle shape in each of the lens’s four corners, the visual marker that lacing was complete and the lens was ready.
Without that computer, the technician would have to verify the result manually. And looking directly at tami-lights, even with top-grade goggles, was a fast track to permanent vision loss.
None of this registered with Burgen. As soon as he understood the process, he was out of his shop, flicking off the sign, locking the door, and closing for the day. He headed straight up the road to the scrap dealer. He bought every tami-light they had in stock–a hefty price once tallied up, but worth it to ensure he had enough–and made his way back to the shop to set up his version of the process.
Burgen suspended two lenses in the air using his prongs, then arranged the tami-lights in a messy bundle on a pullout surgeon’s tray across the room. He wasted no time. The moment everything was in place, he flicked on the lights.
Yellow beams sliced through the lenses, scattering a spectrum across the room–purple, yellow, green, blue, orange, red, teal, magenta. Every color he’d ever seen, and some he wasn’t even sure he had seen, exploded into the sterile space. More color than the room would likely ever see again.
At the five-minute mark, Burgen checked his watch and leaned in for the first inspection. He fixed the welder’s goggles over his face and peered into the lenses. His eyes recoiled instantly. It was like staring into a wormhole of dark voids and pulsing rainbows, searing his retinas like fish steaks under a blowtorch. But he saw it. The first triangle, forming in the bottom-right corner.
He tore off the goggles and rubbed his eyes hard, blinking rapidly, trying to restore his bearings. He could still see. Everything was blurry but intact. So far, so good.
Back at the computer, he checked the time. Ten minutes until the next check. He scrolled through more articles on the process, then froze as he spotted a warning buried near the bottom of one paper: during early trials, technicians had suffered permanent blindness during quality checks. Too many visual exposures to the light during the lacing process damaged the retina and the part of the brain that processed optical stimuli. No recovery. Even cybereyes couldn’t fix it.
That was why Violet’s proprietary computer system had been such a breakthrough. It eliminated the need for human inspection entirely.
Burgen stared at his crude setup. The lenses sat idle, pulsing with light–so much action occurring at the nano level, yet he could barely tell anything was happening at all. He sat in silence, watching, until his watch beeped again. Second check.
He didn’t bother glancing at the screen. It would only confirm what he already knew: that the odds were against him. That he was working with scraps and secondhand science. He shut off the monitor. Then he pulled the goggles back over his eyes and leaned in again.
The pain hit immediately, and more intensely this time. It was like fingers pressing through his sockets, deep into the softest, most vulnerable places behind his eyes. Swirls of shadow and stabbing streaks of color bled through the lenses, chaotic and dizzying. But he found them. Three triangles. Only one left.
He tore the goggles off and gasped, sucking air through his teeth as he clutched his eyes. This time, blinking didn’t help. The room was only vague shapes now, most obscured or blotted out by spreading black spots.
Burgen sat in his chair and tried to look at the lenses again, but he was having a hard time even locating them in his field of vision. Cautiously, he rolled closer to what he guessed was the center of the room until he heard the clinking of his messily thrown-together setup. He reached out and felt the cold metal of the prongs holding the lenses. He immediately pulled his hand back. He was close enough.
He waited for another twenty minutes, what might as well have been twenty years, before his watch beeped again. Last check.
He felt around the floor for his goggles but couldn’t find them. Impatient, frustrated, and desperate, Burgen chose to forgo the goggles altogether. He drew a sharp breath, summoned what courage he had left, and turned his full gaze, what was left of it, toward the blinding line of lights and lenses.
Colors and darkness swarmed his optical nerves, a final storm of pain and brilliance. But he saw it. At least, he was pretty sure he saw it: four triangles, one in each corner of the lenses. It would have to do.
He turned away, and all he saw was blackness. His head screamed with agony as his eyes darted uselessly in a sea of rapid blinks, but nothing came. Just darkness. Pitch black–fear, resignation, vacancy.
Burgen felt for the prongs, fumbling gently, and removed the lenses as best he could. He slipped them into his shirt pocket. When he tried to stand, a wave of pain surged deep from within his skull, and he dropped hard to the ground.
The next morning, as Harper and Litty waited outside their apartment for Burgen’s usual arrival, he finally appeared, led by a stranger Litty had never seen before. The man held Burgen by the arm, his face a mix of confusion and concern. He approached them slowly and spoke through rotted teeth, though he still smiled.
“Uh…are you Litty?” he asked.
Litty rushed forward, grabbing Burgen’s hand as he reached out blindly, trying to find something to hold onto. His eyes blinked rapidly, but his gaze remained empty, unable to receive anything.
The man nodded to himself and slipped back into the churning crowd of the Sprawl, gone as quickly as he’d appeared.
“Oh my god, Burgen what happened? Who was that? What’s going on?” Litty asked, her voice sharp with panic. The tone alone was enough to start Harper crying.
Burgen leaned forward and gave Litty a soft kiss on the cheek, or at least where he thought her cheek was, then turned toward the sound of his daughter’s weeping. He knelt in front of her, gently feeling her face, and offered a trembling smile. Then, without a word, he dug into his pocket and pulled out the lenses. He placed them gently into Harper’s small hands.
“Burgen, what is going on?!” Litty shrieked, her voice thick with concern. Burgen turned in her direction and smiled wide.
“I’ll explain in a second, I promise,” he said, then turned back to Harper. “Harper, can you put these into your eyes? Like the contacts we tried last year, do you remember?”
Harper sniffed and wiped her eyes and mouth, leaving a trail of snot and tears on her sleeve.
“Uh-huh. They hurt though, Daddy.”
“I know, I know. You’ll only have to do this once. Just place them in gently.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“I’m sorry, honey, but no. Just place them real gently.”
Harper nodded and sniffed again. She took the lenses and, with some effort, forced them into her eye sockets as best she could. She grunted and whimpered for a moment, but after a few blinks, she calmed down and began to look around.
The sound she made was as jaw-dropping as her first cry when she was born. It sounded the way the color lavender feels–calming, gentle, relieving. Like warm, clean water rinsing away years of dirt.
She began hopping up and down, squealing as she ran in circles around her parents.
“Mom! Mom! I can see! I can see the colors!”
Litty put her hand to her mouth and burst into stifled sobs, her eyes blurring with tears.
“Oh, Burgen…what did you do?” she asked softly.
Burgen turned on his heel and called after Harper.
“Harper! Look at your mom’s face.”
Harper obeyed and looked up. Her jaw dropped as she stared, unblinking.
“What color are they, Harper?”
“I don’t know, Daddy,” she said quietly, still gazing at her mother.
“Remember our game. Tell me how it feels.”
“Safe. Nice. Pretty.” She smiled. “Mommy’s eyes feel like rain.”
Burgen smiled and shut his own eyes, leaning his crouched body back against their door and sighing in relief.
“Blue.”
