The colonist spent her free time roaming her new world, looking for anything to break the monotony, the sea of bleak stone and dust. Even the colony habitats, expanding as more colonists arrived, seemed to blend in with the stark and lonely planet.

But she wandered for a bit every day, without fear of getting lost, thanks to the comforting presence of the GPS in her helmet viewfinder, the cemetery never far out of sight either. Hoping to see something else, something new.

She had walked for quite some time when she saw the first glint of light. She approached and arrived suddenly at an archway of stone. She peered inside. Wonderful things!

She was reminded of that centuries old movie, about a girl and her dog who were blown by a tornado into a strange new world exploding with color.

The archway led into a quarry, long left alone, as if the miners suddenly stopped working, left, and never returned. Gems of myriad colors gleamed from the walls. Flowers, mosses, lichens formed a rainbow of delight. Oh magnificent splendor! Her breath quickened.

She found herself a comfortable space of grass and moss and laid herself down, awash in the beauty, content at last.

***

“What happened?” The other colonists whispered as the body was brought in by the EMTs.

“Air tank ran out,” was the explanation.

“I know what happened,” an older man surmised. “It’s the gray, you see. No color, no beauty. If we don’t see it, we lose hope. The gray just gets too much.”

Another tombstone was added to the colony cemetery that day, as gray as the others, and soon it would be covered with dust, and lost to sight.