WHITE LIGHT.
And then....
....WHEN THE LIGHT fades, she sees she's in a dingy room.
The air is close, stuffy.
It hasn't circulated for a very long time. She imagines this is what
the air inside a pyramid must smell like. Or a very dry underground
cave.
Above her, a bare, dim bulb
hanging on a string.
In the light from the single
bulb, she can see a desk and a chair. And also stacks of books beside
the desk. And walls lined with bookshelves.
The bookshelves are filled
with books, and DVDs, and CDs, and videotapes. But the light near
the bookshelves is dim, and so she can't make out titles.
The floor is covered in
gray tile.
She walks up to the desk.
On the desk, sits a computer.
The computer appears to
be on, but the screen has been turned off to conserve energy.
SHE HEARS A sound, a drone. Or more like a whine. It's constant,
harsh. Not quite piercing, but definitely not relaxing. At
first, it appears to be a single tone. But when she listens to it
carefully, she finds she is able to pick out ascending and descending subtones,
types of harmonics, other drones and almost voicelike effects that have
been created through the interaction of a constant sound bouncing off itself.
Like the eternal whine of tinnitus.
She looks down at the desk
and sees, on a slanted platform, a small card. She looks at the card.
It reads:
NOTHING HERE IS very dusty. Not that this place has been kept clean, far from it. This room isn't dusty simply because the air is so still, so close. There's very little life, if there ever was life, here. In order for there to be dust, there has to be life. Or disintegration. Or at least motion.
AND SHE WALKS past the desk, to inspect the walls.
Where there are no bookshelves,
there appear to be posters. But in the bad light of that single dim
bulb, she can only make out fragments of words and images.
Posters over posters.
Posters of bands, of movies-- possibly. Also drawings that look like
they might be from Japanese cartoons: cute girls with big eyes, their faces
partially obscured by even more posters.
And, out of the corner of
her left eye, she sees a glimmer of light.
SHE TURNS TOWARDS the glimmer, and strains to see more.
The glimmer appears to be
coming from a doorway. She walks towards to doorway.
And, the closer she gets,
the more the doorway begins to define itself. It turns into the entrance
to a corridor.
And she walks to the entrance,
and she squints to see inside-- darkness, and rows of tiny lights.
And she hears humming sounds,
and she gropes to find a light switch. Finds one. Turns it
on.
When her eyes adjust to
the sudden appearance of rows and rows of fluorescent lights, she sees
computers.
On both sides of the corridor,
on metal racks, hundreds of computers.
And the racks and the computers
stretch into the distance. The corridor seems to go on forever.
EACH COMPUTER HAS a corresponding monitor attached. The computer
stands upright, and the monitor sits beside. The lights on the monitors
are all on, but the monitor screens themselves are dark.
The racks are gray, metal.
Each monitor has a small
green light.
And, again, no dust.
She reaches for the first
monitor. Presses the button under the screen. The monitor comes
to life.
ON THE SCREEN, she sees a rotating human form. Male, generic, but not very well defined. And, above the rotating form, in red block letters, the word:
SHE REACHES TOWARDS another monitor. Turns it on. The rotating form on this screen is female. Again, the form is generic, not well defined. A simple human shape. And the letters above it read:
STEPPING INTO THE corridor, she activates monitors. She activates them in sequence. As they light up, she sees more spinning forms:
SHE WALKS DEEPER into the corridor, turning on random monitors, now:
AND NOW SHE'S standing in a huge tile covered room. The tile is
dirty, brown.
And, she thinks to herself,
it looks like a food court of a university. But there are no food
kiosks. In fact, the stretch of tile she is standing on seems to
be (as near as she can tell) infinite.
And, it is white, porcelain
tile, actually, not brown.
And, in fact, the food court
doesn't have any kiosks because it in no way resembles the food court of
a university.
And, actually, it isn't
tile she is standing on at all, it's more like a grid. Like an infinite
expanse of graph paper.
And, above her: a cold night
sky filled with stars.
And the stars are going
out, one by one.
She watches them.
And when the last star finally
goes out (it actually takes quite some time for this last star to go out,
and her neck is sore now from being tilted back for such a long time),
she begins walking forward.
And, strangely enough, even
though the sky above her is black and starless, she can still see.
This, she thinks, is a desperate
place.
And to her right, in the
distance, hovering above the grid, she sees what looks like a rodent and
a bird spinning together, the two locked in what looks like a perpetual
state of combat.
Mouse and Eagle, she thinks,
yeah yeah I get it. Ha, ha, ha....
And she walks forward, past
the battle raging above. And she uses the mouse and The Eagle as
a kind of pole star, continuing forward but looking behind, and watching
them slowly shrink as they recede.
And she continues walking.
And the mouse and The Eagle
get smaller and smaller.
And then the mouse and The
Eagle are gone.
And now, out here on the
grid, she's all alone.
So she aligns herself with
one of the grid-lines, and continues on....
Next: A beginner's guide to the reconciliation
of good and evil....