The first time Eliza saw the colors, she was alone in her apartment. A shimmering patch of deep indigo appeared on her living room wall—vibrant and impossible, like spilled ink bleeding upward against gravity. She blinked, certain it was a migraine aura or a trick of the evening light.
The indigo pulsed once, then dissolved into a sequence: crimson, amber, a green so acidic it seemed to burn her retinas, then back to the indigo. The colors didn’t project onto the wall—they seemed to emerge from within it, as if the drywall had become permeable to something beyond.
Eliza backed away slowly, phone in hand, but didn’t call anyone. Who would believe her? She hadn’t been sleeping well since losing her job at the tech startup three weeks ago. Stress could do strange things to perception. She took a photo, but the wall appeared perfectly normal in the image—eggshell white, slightly textured, utterly mundane.
The colors disappeared after four minutes. She counted.
The second time came two days later. Eliza was brushing her teeth when a ripple of burnt orange spread across her bathroom mirror, gradually overtaken by a midnight blue so deep it seemed to swallow the reflection of her startled face.
This time, she set up her phone to record. Again, nothing appeared in the video—just her bathroom, her face growing increasingly panicked as she pointed frantically at the mirror. The colors lasted exactly seven minutes.
After that, they began appearing daily. Never in public spaces, only when she was alone. Always beginning with that distinctive indigo, like a signature. Always lasting for precise intervals—four minutes, seven minutes, thirteen minutes, then twenty-one. The Fibonacci sequence, she realized with growing unease. A mathematician’s calling card.
By the third week, Eliza had covered her apartment walls with sheets of paper, taking frantic notes on each visitation. The color sequences were becoming longer, more complex. She began assigning letters to different hues, searching for patterns, for meaning.
Sleep became a luxury she couldn’t afford. What if she missed something crucial? The isolation was crushing; she’d stopped answering calls from friends, afraid they’d think she was having a breakdown. Maybe she was.
“They want something,” she whispered to herself one night, staring at her living room wall where a particularly intense sequence had just ended. The indigo had seemed almost angry this time, throbbing with urgency.
The colors never appeared on screens, never on synthetic materials. Only on natural surfaces—wood, stone, glass, cotton. Things of the earth. Which made Eliza wonder if they—whatever they were—were searching for something authentic. Something real in a world increasingly artificial.
She had begun responding. Using colored lights, painted cards, even the limited palette of her clothing choices. Wearing red when the sequences contained predominant crimson tones. Blue when they skewed cobalt. The colors sometimes seemed to pause, as if considering her primitive attempts at communication.
Or perhaps she was imagining it. Perhaps she was simply losing her mind.
The morning she found the chrysalis, it was clinging to her bedroom curtain—iridescent, shifting through the same color palette she’d been documenting for weeks. Indigo to crimson to amber to that searing, painful green.
The chrysalis hadn’t been there the night before. She was certain.
It pulsed subtly, like a heart beating beneath translucent skin. Eliza approached cautiously, phone recording uselessly in her hand. As she drew closer, the chrysalis intensified its color cycle, quickening as if in response to her proximity.
She reached out one trembling finger, knowing she shouldn’t touch it, unable to resist.
The moment contact was made, a searing pain shot up her arm. The chrysalis dissolved, seemingly absorbed through her fingertip. Eliza dropped to her knees, clutching her hand as the colors—the colors—began flowing beneath her skin, racing through her veins like liquid fire.
For hours she lay curled on her bedroom floor, watching helplessly as her body became a canvas for the alien palette. Her skin remained outwardly unchanged, but beneath, she could see the colors moving, communicating, transforming.
When she finally managed to stand, everything had changed. The world looked different. Ordinary objects now pulsed with colored auras that she instinctively understood carried meaning.
Danger. Safe. Living. Dead. Ancient. Newborn.
The lamp beside her bed radiated a dull orange that translated instantly in her mind: artificial light, poor substitute, inadequate wavelength. The potted plant on her windowsill glowed a soft green that somehow conveyed both contentment and hunger.
Eliza’s hands shook as she realized what had happened. She hadn’t been chosen as a recipient of alien communication.
She had been converted into a translator.
The government scientists arrived three days later, after Eliza’s increasingly incoherent social media posts caught someone’s attention. Men and women in hazmat suits cordoned off her apartment building, evacuating her neighbors with vague explanations about a gas leak.
They approached her cautiously, their equipment registering nothing unusual about her physically. Their auras told a different story—tense yellows and anxious purples that screamed their fear of the unknown.
“Ms. Lake, we’re here to help you,” one of them said, a man whose nametag read Dr. Emerson. His words said one thing; the muddy crimson pulsing around him said another.
Capture. Study. Contain.
“You can’t see them, can you?” Eliza asked, fighting the urge to flee. “The colors. They’re everywhere. They’ve always been everywhere.”
The scientists exchanged glances. One of them was taking notes, her aura flickering with academic excitement that made Eliza nauseous.
“What colors, Ms. Lake? Can you describe them?”
Eliza laughed, a sound bordering on hysteria. “That’s the problem. You don’t have words for most of them. Your eyes can’t even perceive them.”
Dr. Emerson stepped forward, his hand extended in what was meant to be a reassuring gesture. “Why don’t you come with us? We have better equipment at our facility. We can help you understand what you’re experiencing.”
Lie. Experiment. Dissect.
Eliza backed away. “I understand plenty. They’re not invading. They’ve always been here, watching. We just couldn’t see them.” She swallowed hard. “Until now.”
Another scientist moved toward the window, gesturing outside. “There are reports coming in from all over the city, Ms. Lake. You’re not the only one seeing these… phenomena. We need to understand what’s happening.”
Eliza’s attention snapped to the window. Outside, the sky was changing. Not in a way the others could perceive, but to her enhanced vision, vast swirls of color were gathering above the city, communicating in complex patterns that made the sequences in her apartment seem like childish scribbles.
They were mobilizing. Organizing. Preparing.
And through her new perception, Eliza understood something terrible: the aliens hadn’t reached out to communicate with humanity. They’d been communicating with Earth itself all along—with the oceans, the forests, the atmosphere. Humanity had just been an inconvenient infestation, too primitive to perceive their presence, too destructive to be tolerated indefinitely.
The chrysalis had been a test. A way of creating a bridge between worlds. And now that bridge was open.
In the weeks that followed, more people began seeing the colors. Always those who were alone, vulnerable, seeking connection. The homeless man who hadn’t spoken to another soul in months. The widow who’d withdrawn from society after her loss. The teenager who spent his days isolated in virtual worlds.
The perfect vessels—already alienated from their own kind, already seeking something beyond the human experience.
The CDC called it “Chromatic Syndrome,” a pathology of perception likely caused by a new designer drug. The WHO declared it a pandemic of hallucination. Religious leaders named it divine revelation, the faithful seeing God’s true palette for the first time.
None of them understood what Eliza now knew: it was recruitment.
She had stopped speaking to the government handlers who monitored her every move, stopped trying to explain as they ran test after useless test. Her blood showed nothing unusual. Her brain scans were textbook normal. According to every scientific measure, Eliza Lake was perfectly healthy.
Except for her insistence that colors were communicating with her. That they had plans. That humanity’s time was running out.
On the evening of the autumn equinox, Eliza slipped away from her surveillance detail. It wasn’t difficult. They’d grown complacent, convinced she was harmless—delusional but not dangerous.
She made her way to the city’s largest park, where hundreds of others like her had gathered. None of them had communicated with each other directly—they didn’t need to. The colors had guided them, had told them where to be and when.
They stood in silence as the sun set, watching the sky transform. To ordinary eyes, it was just a typical sunset—perhaps unusually vivid, but nothing miraculous.
To Eliza and the others, it was revelation. The entire atmosphere seemed to peel away like the skin of an orange, revealing the vast, ancient consciousness that had enveloped Earth since its formation.
Colors beyond human comprehension cascaded across the heavens, speaking directly into their transformed minds:
We have waited. We have watched. We have mourned as your kind poisoned our host. The equilibrium cannot hold. A choice approaches.
Around Eliza, the gathered converts began to change. Their skin remained human, but beneath it, the colors flowed more intensely, rewriting them on some fundamental level. Some collapsed to their knees, overwhelmed. Others raised their arms in surrender or supplication.
Eliza remained standing, tears streaming down her face as understanding flooded her consciousness. The aliens hadn’t come from distant stars. They’d always been here, existing in wavelengths humans couldn’t perceive, living in symbiosis with Earth itself.
Until humanity’s industrial age had begun disrupting that symbiosis, forcing them to adapt, to find new channels of communication. To find ambassadors who could bridge the gap between worlds.
Or perhaps, she thought with growing horror, to find replacements.
As darkness fell completely, the gathered converts began moving in unison, their bodies now pulsing with synchronized colors. They were becoming a single organism, a unified consciousness that was neither human nor alien but something altogether new.
Eliza hesitated on the periphery of the group, still clinging to her individuality, her humanity. The colors within her sensed her resistance, intensifying painfully, demanding surrender.
In the distance, she could hear sirens. The authorities were coming, but what could they possibly do against something they couldn’t even perceive? How do you fight an invasion that exists beyond your spectrum of understanding?
The colors within her pulsed in response to her thoughts:
Not invasion. Evolution.
Eliza took one last look at the city lights in the distance—artificial, inadequate substitutes for the true light that now filled her vision. Then she stepped forward, joining the circle of converts as the boundaries of her self began dissolving into the greater whole.
The last truly human thought she had was a question without an answer: Had first contact been made with humanity at all? Or had Earth itself finally found a way to communicate with its most destructive inhabitants—through emissaries that existed beyond human perception?
The colors offered no clarification. Only the inevitable transformation that comes when worlds collide and only one can survive.
As her consciousness merged with the others, Eliza realized that the colors hadn’t been a message.
They had been a warning.
Feature Photo by Magda Ehlers
The Confusing Middle 