The Room builds itself a set of ersatz emotions

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.

Sadly for the room, the emotional resonances from the rest of the building were rather limited. A professional (or enthusiastic amateur) sociologist might have put this down to the increasing tendency of young people to stunt their own emotional and interactional development as the world became increasingly dominated by technology and proxies for genuine face to face exchanges between real people. A historian or even an economist might have described this as the natural curve of development (depending on his or her political perspective), and rationalised it as being more efficient, as people de-personalised their decisions and interactions. A poet might have despaired at this loss of sensitivity, which was perfectly echoed in the art, music and other expressions of feeling (reality TV?) that people increasingly identified with, with faux-feeling, melodrama and vulgarity rising rapidly to the top and congealing, like scum on hot milk.

So it was these observed emotions, and imitated melodrama that the room fed itself on, as it unconsciously nurtured its primitive sensing apparatus. What could a diet of Big Brother's Little Brother's Big F*cking Deal do to a growing being? As thousands of parents throughout the land were soon to find out, somewhat horrific things for those unable to disassociate from its terrifying influence.

The poor room had not even the ineffective wishes of an aspiring parent to moderate the sewage being thrown at it.

However, one should not yet despair, gentle (or not so gentle, depending on your taste) reader. For there was hope yet. Somehow some strands of genuine creativity and fragile passion had crept through the barrage of insensitivity, short attention spans and farcical worship of the base and accessible. Especially in the music.

And it was this that was give us some glimmer of hope for the room, that it itself yet did not understand or feel. But as with many positive influences, one does not understand them, and perhaps would self-consciously reject them if one did grasp their fundamental impact on one's development and future self.

The Victorian schoolboy reading heroic tales of his ancestors and his contemporaries (perhaps even blurred together) has no understanding that these tales of self-sacrifice and courage are chiefly there to deprive him of the chance of protesting against his own sacrifice in some godforsaken hut on the north-west frontier, his throat (or worse) slashed open (or worse) by some 'savage' who his country has decided to oppress in order to make sure the cotton trader's international profits are not disturbed by the unpredictable pulses of tribal warfare and revolt.

The young girl, with a doll pressed into her hands, is unaware that this is part of a series of rituals that can only end in her loss of identity and potential in the interminable scrubbing of babies' bottoms.

The young god does not know he will be driven by destiny and myth to butcher his own family in order to renew the world again.

And yet all these horrific, corrupting influences are necessary for the species, the world, or the empire in turn to survive and prosper. Thus the insiduous needs of the status quo are impressed upon the child, the babe or the godling. In the case of the room there was no guiding force, no status quo to have its own needs taken into account either explicitly or indirectly. Thus, the room was able to develop in a true anarchic and dis-Freudian fashion, with no structures to ape or reject.

Which was just as well. It wouldn't have coped well with such a world.