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.