It starts with a virus that makes us see glitter. The color red in her hair and for a second a shine of glitter shimmers inside it. One red spark and only for a second. 

Strange, novel, beign and contagious. It spread without ever being to much of a bother. At some point we tampered with the disease. Iteration after iteration. It was a weapon, a mood stabilizer, a life style choice. A man made disaster. 

The terror of seeing the faces of your loved one turn into vague flecks of indistinct light. The money made from elective surgery to replace the optics of the eye with honest to God lenses. Cameras as they'd come to be known were the first people in 200 years to see the world the way it actually was. 

Drugs originally meant to correct the discrepancies with what we could see and what was really real gave way to specific interactions that made things more pleasant to look at. Like how the moon always looks closer than it is so would a person's eyes. An emotional delusion aesthetic. EDA could make people sprout wings or immit dark smoke depending on your particularities. These were people incapable of lying to themselves about their own emotions and not legally allowed to operate heavy machinery. EDs they were called. 

In 2272 anno domini another destructive wave of rapid mutations made this curious uncontactable contagen more caustic and nearly catastrophic. The EDs particular delusions could be passed from one to another. People who saw the world like a sketch book could kiss people who saw the world like a painting but they could never take that kiss back. In times like these we'd see the rise of PODS. No acronym this time it's short for pod people. They walk amongst us I what is essentially space suits. 

By 2400 things took a sour turn for the worst. Our taste buds became completely unreliable as an entire species. Even in distant space colonies free from all that was previously detailed. Some said it might have been a large scale electromagnetic blast that silently tore through our solar system and for one reason or another stops our brains from processing anything but varying levels of sourness. Perhaps it is a constantly emitted signal from the sun or maybe it originates from a device at the center of the earth, the abandoned randsome of our senses by some dark enclave that died from a gas leak, yes maybe still to this day their is a skeletal finger laying just half an inch short from the off switch. 

Were born deaf. In a shimmering pool of light.