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.