Colour fades away
Good times here today
Here most everyday
Meanwhile you would say
That I close my eyes
Colour
Fades to grey

In the late 1900s, there was a sudden outbreak of autism in a small province of South Korea. Babies were born who couldn’t tolerate lights, who couldn’t process sounds, whose brains had moulded into a single hemisphere. Children who were previously little bundles of boundless energy suddenly became deathly silent and introverted. Women who could previously go through entire novels in a single day couldn’t read a word if they tried. Men who sat all day in one place, working on their laptops and writing reports suddenly became hyperactive, unable to stay in a single place.

Many attributed it to contamination of water.

Others attributed it to bio-weapons used by North Korea.

Some attributed it to a sudden genetic drift.

Nobody knew the actual reason.

But the government had to do something about the sudden rise in mentally unstable people, so they established the Gonjiam Mental Institute.

Gonjiam, because it was built in a hurry, had horrendous architecture. Needless to say, it fell apart one unfortunate day, and every soul in the place was killed or terribly injured.

Gonjiam went under a huge renovation, to replace the broken building and bring it back into use. But once it was finished, nobody sent their unstable loved ones. They didn’t trust a place where hundreds of people had died.

The government decided to use it for mentally unstable criminals.

And so, over the decades, Gonjiam slowly filled up.

One day, it met a very famous, very popular, very disgraced doctor.

The doctor had woken up one morning, muscles still sore from the wholly-satisfying previous night of ing his beautiful girlfriend, to policemen at his door.

They had spoken to him in gentle, calming tones. Tones that had only served to infuriate him. He had resisted them, so they arrested him. He had ed a rich man’s wife, so they put him in a mental hospital.

But the doctor was not a foolish man. He was clever, he had contacts.

One night, he snuck to the ward