IT - Pieces in the Dark

Chapter 13 - The Room

Chapter 13  -   The Room

 

He was in a different place now, and it certainly was not ‘Kansas’ or ‘Wonderland’ any more. It was cold, stark, hard and brutal. The walls pulsed with real energy and a dark vibrancy at the edge of visible light. Occasionally things, or the walls, would close right in and then, the next moment, everything seemed an infinite distance away.

As he walked in further, his eyes became adjusted to the dark, and he could see billions of seemingly digital vector patterns and fractal streams through the walls and ceiling. It moved in waves, patterns, and in flowing motions as if alive with eddies of data, knowledge and energy.

A shared and negotiated distributed memory structure, an information database, memory records, which the ‘higher self’ programs on the ship accessed, modified, and refined through their current biological devices. It seemed to be a visual representation, much like in The Matrix film, of the actual programs within a system; but he was aware at the same time that it was his mind trying to represent something in the best, and most applicable way that it could.

This was the closest association available in his mind to represent something so vast and intricate that had no physical form or representation. He wondered if he was being represented in there somewhere; a tiny integrated glowing thought form, a  program star among the depths of a galaxy of billions of souls.

Yet, as in any dream, it was an interpretation of something in a way that was comprehensible to him, and one that he could visualise, or at least interpret, in some way that meant something. That ‘something’ presented in a context that was in some way familiar to him. The closer you looked at anything, the more intense the detail.  A never-ending macro hierarchy of micro complexity, deeper and deeper. Through into the walls themselves and on, almost into infinity. Almost but not quite.

Everything we have ever known was portrayed there; cities, countries, people, memories, events, in impossible detail. There was no scale here, and it felt as if he could stare into the glowing dots and see unlimited information in every one.

It was like looking at a night satellite movie of the world, but in three dimensions, with lights of cities interconnected with ley lines of intricate network pathways, routing energy and information, a glowing neural network in a vast mind to an almost infinite resolution. The surreal dreamland, virtual feel that he had become used to on the ship had gone, swapped now for a much more brutal, cold reality.

For a moment he was Neo, standing there in the darkness alone, with the energy flowing around him. His own life memories flashed before his eyes in a few seconds, in parallel synchronicity to the situations in The Matrix film, many of the roles and characters and scene events were now alarmingly coincidental to his own.

Then he abruptly changed back to being Sam again. That too was a message from something trying to tell him something or communicate a concept in some way, but very fast, hard and direct without the ambiguity or subtleness as before on the rest of the ship. He got the whole concept and meaning in a second, it was all there at once, clear, and then it was gone.

After a few minutes of physically forcing himself slowly down the corridor, like pushing against a strong wind, he emerged into a vast open room which was black and empty.

He could not see the walls easily, aside from the flows of lights and energy as before, but he could sense that they were there curving around him, as did the floor and ceiling like a lightless cave. It was hard to tell if the walls were only a few feet away or if he was inside some vast cavern. He could sense the walls but there was no sound reference to gauge distance. They seemed to be the same as the walls in the corridor, but more intense.