The grand escape
Blue's quest to find answers and break out of his box.
Today was the day. The boy named Blue had been plotting and planning for weeks. The day for the 'grand escape' had arrived. He had had enough. Enough of the grey walls of his tiny cube. Enough of the silence. Enough of the food capsules. Enough of the prodding and poking on his skin. And, enough of not knowing the truth.
They say that Blue was lucky. That fate had given him the rarest, most royal colour when he was brought into the world. Ever since that fateful day, Blue was put in a box, quite literally. Alongside his tiny abode, were the cubes of other cohabitants who were born with different "hues", but none were as bright as Blue.
Blue was bright, not just in his appearance, but also in the way his mind worked. He was never thrilled about being labelled and instructed on how to live. When he was only seven, he had convinced himself that he and his cohabitants were mere puppets in a controlled environment. Every time he examined the slight shifts in the ceiling of the “Realm”, the subtle movements under the ground, and the ghostly noises beyond the mysterious hatch, he got closer to the truth.
When he turned twelve, Blue bravely stepped out of his cube once and saw a Supervisor without her helmet on. The Supervisor looked nothing like him, or like any of the others who lived in the Realm. Her skin did not radiate, and she was chewing on something white and slurping a brown liquid. Blue grew more curious since all he had consumed in his life was water, food capsules, and medicine.
When he was caught staring, he got punished for a whole year. He was force-fed a red substance that made his vision blurry. The Supervisors thought he would forget what he saw, as did the few other curious inhabitants before Blue. But, Blue remembered. Since then, he thought of nothing but climbing out of the hatch to see where the Supervisors went, what they ate, how they lived, and to know what was beyond his world.
So, he carefully and diligently observed the Supervisors and their movements every day. When he was fourteen, he knew all of their schedules, down to the second. He counted the time between every visit, memorised the paths inside the realm on his daily supervised walks, and made a mental map of his escape route. He even identified a short window of time when no one would be watching him.
Blue had begun pondering over and over about his decision, days before the grand escape. He understood why the other hues in the Realm never stepped out. He understood why they never uttered a word to each other as they peeked through their windows. He knew they were scared of the unknown. They did not trust each other. They were comfortable in their routines. They had accepted that the trajectory of their lives was no different than the hues that came before them. They witnessed their colours fading as days passed, and did nothing about it. However, Blue had a spark in him that would never fade. He understood, even empathised for them, but did not accept that this was the life that he was meant to live.
On the day of the grand escape, he pretended to sleep, but stayed alert. When his window finally arrived, he leapt out of his bed and crept outside his cube. He walked barefoot through the ice-cold pathways in between the other cubes, hiding from leering eyes. He peered into them, hoping one of the hues would be brave enough to join him. But, he was alone in this quest.
Blue made it to the end of his mental maze, which was a dead end. He heard hurried noises behind him and an alarm blaring in the distance. He knew they were going to find him soon and his heart was racing a million miles a minute. He had to somehow reach the hatch 10 feet above his head but he couldn't see a path, nor could he go back. He looked up, and noticed small indents staggered across the length of the wall. He realised that all he needed to do was to climb to freedom. He leapt to the first step, and the next, and several more after that. He felt very out of breath, but he was too close to the end to give up.
Blue finally made it to the hatch. He pushed, with all his might, to heave the door open. And when it finally did, a bright, blinding light streamed in. It felt warm and it made him happy. In that instance, Blue felt yellow, like the light that he was seeing for the first time.
The day that Blue saw sunshine, was the day that all of the other hues were rescued. He had uncovered an illegal underground human experiment led by a large cosmetics corporation. They were kidnapping orphaned babies and manipulating their DNAs to make their skin colourful. The company would have earned billions from selling a drug that could change people’s skin by preying on their insecurities. But the drug came at the cost of thousands of children who were trapped underground.
When the grand escape was over, Blue had unleashed upon the world different shades of human. They were colourful not just on the outside, but on the inside, too. The social discourse about labels and beauty standards that followed changed the world forever. And, Blue, who was at the forefront of it all, shone brighter than ever. Only this time, he might have looked blue, but liked to introduce himself to the world as Yellow.