Status: Hiatus. This is going to be split into two more stories; the story of the girl and the story of the world's future.

The Mimic Feature

Keeping The Races In Check ; Part One ; TUs

When sunlight hits the available areas above ground, the flashes were of colour. There were many shades and hues, and many a person had gasped when they first saw the spectrum; though it was not its quintessence, its major qualities had still pervaded through the viewers. Initially, the machine used had not been an image-blaster initiated by a lens - rather, it was agreed that they should use a more holographic device. Chosen out of many holographic stamps was the VS2 from about a decade or two ago. It wasn't an intimidating object, with its smooth grey face and relatively crevice-free surface. It wasn't hard to handle, as it had three sets of five buttons to regulate each dimension projected. It wasn't too large or too small, being about the size of a chihuahua crushed to the height of a laptop (around an inch). In other words, something that the TUs wouldn't crush their frontal lobes about.

Such was the situation:
a group of the TUs with severe uncomfort with technologies were given the spectacle. They were, as most become, awed by the images of the world above them. It was so unlike their own; a world covered in filth (compared to the unchanging white sterilized one they lived in, that is) yet covered in the most amazing... the most desirable landscape of hues, which to the forever imprisoned TUs was like you or I finding a diamond the size of Mt. Whitney.
Now imagine what a torture it was for them to leave the VS2 and reemerge into their white tunnels. The majestic hallways of white marble and the grand white fountains and the white king-sized beds and the wonderful ironed white dress shirts and the helpful white pills and the precariously beloved white books and the white eye contacts and the white doors and the white rooms and the white chalkboards with dyed grey chalk and the white desks and the white hair bleach and the white mascara and the white nail clippers and the white white white white white white white white horizons and skies and twilights and moons and venus and nighttimes and panthers. Everything was the colour of every colour without a crystal facet to break the mixture into millions of pieces and millions of colours and hues and shades to reinvent the images they once saw in a white room with a white VS2 in white suits, but a room with a night sky sucking the mixture of hues and shades and colours, delicious colours out of the ceiling and then breaking apart that mixture into every gemstone equivalent seen by the naked eye in the lands above this white nightmare.
TUs walked out of this room broken people, without a gemstone equivalent to their name. There were never any people who got to see the images more than once, for the images are carefully edited to make sure only the VS2 and tech TUs are familiarized with are shown, lest panic ensue.
However, I'm sure you've realized that that reason is really no reason at all, and for some reason the TUs appear to be shown this to literally break them, tear them apart in a white nightmare. At least, that's what I believe.
That reason, the editing... well, if it has already been edited, then why can't they be shown the show more than a grisly one time? I once realized an addiction might be the cause, but such an argument was not accepted by the trusty Tolerance board. Unsightly bastards.

Today was our little girl's day to see the Visual Spectrum 2. She was within a company of twenty-three and three quarters (herself considered a quarter). Her height was 3'5", her eyes brown, her hair burgudy-garnet and tied with a bow, her legs bronze under her white dress. She was excited, a rather naive excitement, but there nonetheless. Her hipflask contained milk, a whistle upon her deep pink lips. She was riddled with energy, bouncing to the tune she created.

She stepped into the still-white room, leaving behind her old world of tomfoolery and childhood happiness based on ignorance. She left behind the dull ache of her faded memories of parents, her belief that they had resided in this exact world of white as she had thought she would, till their death. She left behind a sense of belonging, a sense of averageness, a sense of normality. She left behind assurance, a future, and the world of white, all without knowing what she would lose.

She took six steps and stopped dead. In the centre of a dais at the centre of a room sat a small little rectangle with a series of buttons along its inch-high front. The buttons were glossy and covered in a strange distorted film. We know it to be a plastic-y button cover to protect the metal front, but we are informed. She took a step closer to the tech, the other TUs too ill to even attempt such.

A central button glowed.

The girl raised her eyebrows at the pending gasps from the collection of TUs behind her. A smaller child cried, holding onto his parents' fingeres. The girl, who remained an unnamed descendant of a type of people who would have gladly left their counterparts but had a personality quirk of quickly feeling bound to their companions (like loyalty to the third degree), rolled her eyes at the tense air swirling behind her. She was not in the mood for tests or crying toddlers or whiteness or adults unable to approach a piece of technology considered to be extremely old and thusly ought to be used by these people.

Ah, but you and I, we know ought-to-bes usually are not as they ought to be, don't we?
I assume we do.

The girl took a lollipop out of her white apron. Even this candy remained colourless, with a hint of white in the clear sugar crystals. She sweetly turned around and handed the little boy the candy without taking a step, then spun around and skipped to the machine.

In glossy grey lettering, VS2 was printed upon the very top of the rectangle. There was a post-it-esque note underneath, with an arrow pointing to another white button, glowing dully. There was garbage-resembling handwriting on the white, unlined note. Being barely able to read, the girl made out "Press This" above the arrow. Now, you and I both know what garbage looks like, correct? By using the very American term garbage, I'm trying to convey the very American meaning of this word; to me, garbage does not simply mean rubbish. Rubbish is just rubbish, but garbage means a smelly, reactive pile of rubbish that contains unsightly bulges and putrid funks containing surreptitiously flowing waterfalls of hints to the contained deteriorating chemicals. Quite the sight, eh? Our little girl thought so, oh yes she did. Despite this gnarled and evil-seeming handwriting, she followed the instructions, and clicked the dully glowing button.

The doors shut, swinging and slamming much louder than necessary. The TUs winced, their sensitive ears beginning to ring at any noise louder than a current of air swishing over the cords in a voicebox. The Visual Spectrum 2 began to suck said mixture in said manner.

The adults began to panic, but the children, with the aid of our little girl, sat down in the spiral of no-longer-white seats. The three of them managed to soothe their own parents merely by acting as literal examples of how the adults should have been acting. Funny how society has treated children for the many years it has existed...

The room was becoming a light grey, slowly sifting out the mixture and becoming a more medium grey.

The girl pursed her lips, examining the evolution with eyes widened to their limit, soaking in the procession. She knew this was a great day and her memory must serve her, because all who witnessed this left the company she knew and went to a particular version of the same TU vault parallel to hers in which resided the people who had already seen this. Hmmm.

The adults were seated in the spiral length behind the children. The dais was at the centre of the room and sat a mere foot off the neutral ground. Carved delicately into the floor were the spaces, very narrow spaces a foot wide and tapering to an end five to sex feet below the narrow seats, between the seats of the spiral. There were three walkways that cut the spiral that were at a neutral level. The neutral level of the room was between the levels of the furthest seats (six feet up off the neutral level) and the gaps between the rows of seats the spiral had (six feet lower than the neutral level). The dais at the centre, as I mentioned before, rose a foot off the neutral level. The seats were flat and stone, and all connected like a giant, winding bench with abysses between the rows the spiral created. When a person sat upon them, they had no back support, as almost no seats in the TU tunnels contained backs if they were built-in. This was as such because all TUs were given the rich lifestyles of people who were trained in yogi-esque ways, with healthy lifestyles to compensate for the fact that they were practically prisoners of their own minds, being unable to venture forth into the world that is theirs but theirs only in history, for if you are unable to enter the house you own because of an inability, is it really your house?

At this point, the room was almost pitch black. The girl gritted her teeth; someone in the room had an unforgivable nervous habit of clacking their long, no-longer-white nails against their seat. Despite the annoyance, she looked around her in awe.

The walls! The faux windows! The people's clothing! The ceiling! The VS2! The dais! The seats of stone! The intimidatingly large crevices between the seats! The corners! Her apron and shoes and dress and socks and buttons and nails and jewelry!

Nothing in this room is white any longer! There is no white!

And just as she twisted in her seat to clamber to the next row in front of her, the light was absolutely sucked out of the room, leaving her unable to see anything.

All of everyone's life, they'd been able to see everything. For there was always white lights to guide them into their dreams, and to guide them back to the colourless yet colourful (or rather, colour-filled, as it should be) reality that was their world. The lights were never turned off, as they resided in tunnels and had to make sure they would not evolve into blind humans, but rather people able to see better than the people on the surface.
Hmm, that comment was a little too packed with information, but take it as you may.
Such was the fear of the people on the surface that they would devolve the TUs, that the lights were made brighter every year of a Tus life. By their seventh year of life, they could stare at the sun without harming their eyes, but were probably unable of seeing anything in a dusk-level of light. By their fifteenth year, a day on the surface would have been like seeing by moonlight.
Most in their thirties would be considered legally blind on the surface. Once it was apparent that system was also making the TUs blind, the old seventh-year brightness became the standard.

The girl was frightened by the lack of sight, and stayed stock still and waited, keeping herself leveled and trying not to fall into the crevice she was barely managing to stay out of. She had been moving much too quickly when her sight was snatched, and the sudden stop created a backlash that caused her to hit one of the hard edges of the seat behind her. The ensuing pain annoyed her.

The Visual Spectrum 2 began.
♠ ♠ ♠
I'm fixing up chapter one a little bit, so if information repeats please tell me and i'll fix it.

Also, the Mimic Feature itself doesn't come into play until much later than i thought, considering this little girl isn't exactly the girl written of in the summary. The next few chapters will contain more random snippets of barely related facts about the world this takes place in because this world doesn't make too much sense at first, so... yeah. Thankies, enjoy, and I'm an extremely slow author who tends to write in grammatically tweak, but not necessarily incorrect, run-ons with too many commas. Yes, I know I use semi-colons and lists-using-too-many-sentences-and-too-many-ands-without-commas; that's called my horrible tenth-grade education and apathy towards pc english. I'll keep my traits, you keep yours. Deal?

Notes on this Chapter:
The mixture of all colours of LIGHT is a reference to the fact that white is a mixture of all different wavelengths of light (wavelengths determine a light's colour; the reflection of light off of an object determines an object's colour). Based on relativity, white objects are both colour-filled and simultaneously colorless because a white object reflects every wavelength of light back, giving it the appearance of being white, the mixture of every wavelength, even though it is reflecting all of the colours away from itself.

The reason everything in the tunnels is white is because, as I mentioned above, white objects reflect all light, and if you'll recall, surface people were afraid of the TUs evolving in a manner that made them blind when they emerged by sunlight. So the surface people used the one shade that reflected all light to make sure that the TUs' eyes caught all the light possible to adapt their eyes to bright conditions, as well as using very bright white lights.

Sorry for the format; I usually have many, many... a rather unusually annoying large amount of spaces between sentence-long paragraphs. Very annoying to read, especially because many of my sentences are feckin loooong (usually I don't do it on purpose, but this time I did x3) and filled with abuse towards punctuation and adjectives and many other parts of English I understand and love to fiddle with and prod and, well, abuse. I'm trying to stop because my twists and turns in the road of proper English make it impossible for people to understand what I'm saying, especially since I've started a horrible habit of abusing archaic English, which is hard to understand in the first place.

Sorry, i let my ambling begin. Enjoy. If you read this whole thing, buy yourself a cake and label it "Blut Lieb Mich Aber Ist Nicht Hier".