The Room rumbles on

In any case, the Room had not experienced this feeling. The Room had simply heard, broadly and simply. "How did it hear?" I don't hear you ask. The answer is and was obvious. It could not have grown ears, nor developed some sort of dolphin-like sonar. Rather, it had somehow gained the ability to receive feelings from others, to detect the emotional resonance in their activities and to distil it.

So we can deduce that not only was someone listening to New Order somewhere in the concrete anonymity of the block of flats, but that someone had been responding deeply to the music. The Room's sensitivity in using this brand new ability was still nascent and pre-pubescent in nature, and so the subtlety (assuming there was any) of that emotional response simply eluded it.

The Room lacked the ability to analyse these simplistic communications. It thus started to develop a cluster of consciousness around its emotional 'receptors' which began, slowly, even imperceptibly, to form connections and networks. This would form the basis of the Room's gradual expansion of consciousness, built around what was effectively a psychological sensing organ, however conceptual.

Over a short period of time (naturally undefined as the Room could not yet perceive, let alone measure it) the Room received increasing numbers of such responses and signals, in various alien forms, which allowed it to contrast happiness and sadness, as well as the somewhat different triumph and despair. Love and hate had not made themselves clearly known to the Room yet so many of the emotions were perceived only in a cloudly, incomplete fashion. This was probably because the Room did not understand mating, having no reproductive organs and having met no mate, and that it had no reason to hate, having never been hurt or threatened. Thus its gradually growing set of emotions and contrasts was heavily distorted by its fundamental difference with our own nature.

The nodes were still growing, and had become sufficiently sophisticated to move themselves to align better with the source of whatever sound was being perceived. This movement could be detected by someone watching the Room all day, but nobody ever noticed.

Even more of the Room

...For the Room was sterile and immobile, crippled by its own bizarre composite, half-real nature.

Before long, the total lack of feedback was corrupting the purity of its original hope. The Room, having never experienced the reassuring glow of propaganda, or the numbing sweetness of dope, was unable to sustain its rather fragile, if simple, expression. "If only it could speak, or write, or even think properly," I can imagine you would say if you cared. But you don't, and in any case it couldn't.

Without support, without structure and most importantly of all without love or the past experience of love, hope was doomed.

The Room almost sighed as its first expression withered, and half-died (as it could not really die, being an expression of a barely existing consciousness). But the Room had gathered some momentum now and could not be so easily stopped from expressing or connecting. The next happening was to be less predictable, less easily dismissed by those who had no insight beyond that granted to them by nature.

Five floors up, in another room (but not a Room), a person, possibly another poet (but not the Poet), had activated a music playback system. It spoke in words as well as mere noises. These words echoed into the Room with a strange ease, a disturbing doubling of their existence. Without the accompanying noise the words may have proved unfamiliar even to those who knew them, and the Room definitely knew them not.

But the Room perceived them. It did not understand them, not least their subtleties and hidden messages, nor yet their context, but the words spoke unto the Room and lo, they did say:

"Heaven, a gateway, a hope"

This chimed with the faded hopes of sometime ago. But the Room lacked memory and so the chiming was a rather uncomfortable side-effect of this perception, being nonetheless the third manifestation of consciousness. Maybe the room's hope had been its own unformed and unreal subconscious overhearing (or overperceiving?) the words before they actually registered. I'm sure you know the feeling well.

Imagine you are watching a movie in your own tongue, but sub-titled with a language bored into you at school. Your eyes see the titles and you feel you can form the words before you hear the original sound, thus thinking yourself very clever. In reality, this is an illusion (unless you actually paid attention in school). You do not really understand the words but the confusing proximity makes it appear more plausible.

In any case, the Room had not experienced this feeling. The Room had simply heard, broadly and simply. "How did it hear?" I don't hear you ask. The answer is and was obvious.

More of The Room

..Here the consciousness, not the political system, was genuinely all inclusive, and thus here there was only one – both trader and politician, doctor and assassin, cop and robber – if somewhat confused.

But no unity, however unfamiliar and however unusual, can long survive a lack of common purpose. With no shared fora for a debate, with no sources of biting satire and no free press to speak of, the Room's development of shared ideals was tepid and idle to the point of despair.

Indeed, were the Room to have had access to the concept of despair it seems likely that this would have become its bloody standard, its sacred emblem. If only the dusty (and, it must be said, unread) copy of Camus had chanced to fall open on a critical page, revealing the concept in all its glory, then the Room would have found a goal. But Camus remained unread and unfallen. The Room found another raison d'etre.

Strangely, for a consciousness so derived from decay and neglect, it was to be hope that it chanced upon. How exactly this occured eludes explanation, but, suffice it to say, one day the Room (silently) announced to itself that it hoped things were ok.

Now, to others, filled with myriad bitternesses and the sweet overflowing sense of time and thought, this may seem a trivial thing. I assure you that it was and is not. In the course of time it may of course become trivial, in the way that a child's first tears and cries are swallowed up in the lifetime of his emotions, concealed and revealed, but that their meaning to his parents is more than can be told with words. That fullness of time is not yet upon us, and so we must pretend that we can understand the importance of the hope that became the heart of the Room's existence.

The very essence of the sadness that the hope that had been born was that, of course, things were not ok. How could the Room's consciousness lead to anything other than tragedy? How could the Room's simple and all-consuming wish be met with anything other than despair? For the Room was sterile and immobile, crippled by its own bizarre composite, half-real nature.