The year was 3037 in Unitary time, Way had just started high school, and outside the now aging walls of her home city grew an even more ancient wall of trees whose canopies towered over the valley she grew up in.

Way was lost.

metaphorically so.

Staring at the smooth grey walls of her room, she puzzled at the feeling of emptiness within her, trying to understand it's point of origin. 'When had it started?' she wondered. Why wasn't she happy like everyone else? Her family was content with their lives, as were her neighbors and friends. Her older sister liked to sing along with the jingles that came over the radio while she steered her Maghover scooter to work. The government Ads for jobs in the tech industry, and the Ads selling "handmade" textiles and "organic" toiletries, played as often as the music, and Way couldn't bring herself to enjoy them. The mechanical notes and repetitive messages bored her.

Her sister was 23, and lived in an apartment just above them. it was a simple matter of stepping into the public Maghover lift, and telling the AI to go down a floor, and then her sister was in their home. Working in a fashion design studio, she strove every day to make the most efficient, streamlined clothing possible, and occasionally the most vibrant, glowing, and intricate designs for the upper crust, the government officials and their families, to flaunt the success and stability of their city in front of the other city leaders of their planet.

Way lay in her room, on the smooth plastic floor, and looked up at her hovering bed, it's magnet powered machinery hidden behind a seamless outer shell. Her room was sparse except for a few places of small clutter. The floor was bare of any furnishings, all the shelves and such folded out from the wall or the ceiling. Half of her data-crystal cubbies were unusable, filled with soil and mulch, the green leaves of the little sprouts within them the only color in her quarters. The only color in nearly their whole apartment, really.

The apartment was all in shiny greys, sometimes accented with white, as were the rest of the apartments in their complex, and pretty much every structure in the whole city. It was so fashionable to be Nuovo-futurist that the more fashionable people even got their skin and hair and eyes dyed in monochrome. Way's older brother had his hair prematurely greyed in college, when he'd finally saved up enough for the genetic alteration.

Turning her gaze to the planetary travel posters on her walls, she saw the hex codes denoting the colors of the planets, and wondered if their cities were as grey as hers. This thought led back to the sprouts in her makeshift planters, and their vibrant green. The planet she lived on was no more monochromatic than the ones advertised in greys on her walls. The animals in the woods weren't grey like her neighbor's square fish, or the mini polar bears in the City's zoological garden. Her siblings didn't believe her when she told them, but she knew, she'd seen one before. it had been tall and four legged and the bright color of rust. When she first spotted it, it noticed her too, and she'd spent what felt like hours staring into it's eyes, paler than the sky but just as vibrant, and full of life. And then it turned and was gone, swallowed up by the underbrush.

She had wanted to know it's name. Animals used to have names; scientific ones in archaic languages, common ones like those used today, and sometimes even personal ones. Way hadn't dared chase after it though, she knew the forest was forbidden. She wasn't even supposed to be near the edge, but her emptiness chased her forward, towards the wild unknown. The thrill of it was the only thing that seemed to put a smile on her face, but she had to be careful, people who weren't happy with their lot in life got punished.

That had been in the afternoon, and she'd since brushed off any evidence of nature, snuck back through the decaying wall of steel and concrete that surrounded the city, and sat down to a dinner of dry nutrient bars and electrolyte water. Now Way got up from the floor, and went to bed dreaming of wild creatures with secret names, and towering walls made of trees.