The Room

The Room

He opened his eyes, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The harsh pure white of the room took some getting used to. The room he was in had four walls, a ceiling, a floor, a bed, which he was now sitting up on, and a table on the far side of the room. A single white ceiling light illuminated the geometric room, which he estimated to be about 3 meters in length depth and height. The clothes he was wearing seemed to follow the same artistic design as the room, being a simple thin white material that felt harsh and stiff against his skin.

He rubbed his eyes; they still hurt from the blinding light. After steadying himself he peered around again. Then he realized what was missing from the room. There were no obvious entrances or exits. Just four walls, the ceiling and the floor. He felt his heart start to pound as he considered whether the room was air tight, and whether he was in fact slowly filling the room with unbreathable air.

How long had he been asleep for? In fact, who was he, and how did he get here? The questions flooded his mind so quickly he had to sit down abruptly. He put the burning enquiries to one side and stood up again.

The table he had seen earlier had three things on it. The first of these was a piece of what looked like torn white cloth, which had one word written across it in black ink.

‘Do not play their game. You cannot win’

The pen lay next to it; it was a silver metallic ballpoint, with the end narrowing to a sharp point. It looked almost dangerous. He picked it up, and then suddenly wondered what his own name was. Nigel. He liked Nigel. Whether it was his actual name or not he didn’t know and in his current situation didn’t much care. He re-read the message, and couldn’t gleam any more wisdom from it the second time around. He guessed it was supposed to be some form of advice or guidance but without any ‘game’ that Nigel had been informed of, it seemed rather pointless.

After being lost in disappointment at the message for a second, Nigel suddenly remembered there was a third object on the table. It looked like a remote control but only had a single dial on it. Nigel picked it up; it was very light, and squinted at the circular dial. Its tiny arrow currently pointed vertically, and he could just make out twelve radial grooves around the dial, similar to the face of a clock Nigel thought. Nigel tried to remember what a clock was used for, but quickly gave up.

He looked back around the room, scanning for any details he may have missed. The white room stared back expectantly. He turned back to the remote control.

Suddenly, he heard a voice speak timidly from behind him.

“Err, hello. Who are you?”

Nigel spun around and saw a man dressed in the same white clothes as he was peering in at him through a circular hole in the wall that he was sure was not there a minute ago. Nigel opened his mouth to respond when he caught sight of the man’s face. He recognized his own features staring back at him.

“I’m Nigel, who are you?”

“I’ve seen you before. Just now, you spoke to me” The doppelganger replied, looking pleased.

It was about this time that Nigel decided he was dreaming, and marched straight back over to the bed and lay down. He screwed his eye up tight and put his hands over his ears

“I’m dreaming you’re not real I want to wake up I WANT TO WAKE UP I WANT TO WAKE UP!”

When he stopped shouting, the room replied with smug silence. The man in the wall had stopped talking, and in fact when Nigel sat up and looked back at the wall, it was as smooth as before, and the circular hole through which he had seen the man that looked remarkably like him had gone.

He wasn’t sure if I had been dreaming but at least things were now a bit more normal. Remembering the remote in his hand, he examined it again. That bit he obviously hadn’t dreamt. Struck with a sudden curiosity, he twisted the knob one notch anti-clockwise, and when he stopped turning, a light seemed to shoot from the end and hit the opposite wall.

The smooth white surface of the wall distorted and twisted apart, revealing a circular hole about two feet in diameter. Thrilled that he had discovered an extra part of the room, Nigel rushed forward and looked through. The man in the next room was facing away from him. His voice trembling slightly, Nigel leaning through the hole and spoke.

“Err, hello. Who are you?”

The man span around and looked right at him, and Nigel suddenly realized that it was the man he had just seen through the same hole several minutes previously. After several seconds the man replied

“I’m Nigel, who are you?”

Barely giving the man time to respond, Nigel continued “I’ve seen you before. Just now, you spoke to me”

Silence hung in the air for several seconds, before the man in the other room turned to lie down on his bed, and started shouting at Nigel. Surprised at the loud noise, and thinking this was rather rude for someone he had just met; Nigel took a few steps backward. As the shouting grew louder, Nigel fumbled for the remote controller, and twisted the dial back to the vertical position. The hole in the wall shrank back in on itself and vanished. Nigel ran over and touched the wall that had just reformed itself in front of his eyes, and was alarmed to see it was as smooth as before. How very odd, he thought, that a man that seemed so warm and sociable a few minutes ago, had turned so loud and obnoxious when he had seen him a second time, especially someone who looked identical to Nigel himself. Maybe it was his brother. He had heard of sibling rivalry before, but it was strange that Nigel would’ve been convinced that he never had a brother before he met him in the adjoining room.

Nigel had back down on the bed and studied the remote. Stuck for anything else to pass the time, he twisted the dial again, but this time twisting it all the way around 360˚ so that it pointed vertically again. The same as before, it fired a beam across the room that hit the opposite wall and twisted a 2 foot wide hole in it.

More warily this time of loud strangers, Nigel looked through the hole. It was another one of his white square rooms, with exactly the same arrangements of furniture, but this time the bed was occupied.

“Hey” Nigel called to him “I’m Nigel, who are you?”

The man didn’t reply. Maybe he’s a heavy sleeper, Nigel thought. After several seconds of waiting, Nigel plucked up the courage to climb through the hole. The man still didn’t stir when he walked right up to him.

The man’s face was again his own. Nigel’s first thought was that he had another twin, but then he started to think. He had been a sleep about 15 minutes ago, in the bed next door. Or was it next door? The other man that looked like him had inhabited another exact replica of his room, and now he thought about it, the things he said seemed awfully familiar.

And then it hit him. They didn’t just look like him, they were all him. He had experienced the same conversation twice from two different points of view. The device must be capable of opening some sort of time hole, through which the inhabitants of the room could talk to previous versions of themselves.

So here he was, asleep in front of himself. ‘Well’ Nigel thought ‘this would all have been a lot simpler if someone had just told me what was going on beforehand’. With this assurance, he tried to shake himself awake, but the Nigel on the bed didn’t move.

Then he remembered he still had the pen with him. If shaking wasn’t going to wake him up, then maybe a jab with the sharp end of his pen might. He held the pen in a dagger grip above the sleeping Nigel’s stomach, when a deafening sound slammed into his ears.

“ALERT, ALERT: SUBJECT WILL IMMINENTLY CAUSE TEMPORAL PARADOX BY SUICIDE. TEST SUBJECT TERMINATION COMENCING”

The sirens were so shrill; Nigel thought his ears were bleeding. He tried to process the words in the announcement, which just kept repeating over and over. “Test subject termination commencing”. Test subject? Nigel was a test subject? Nothing more than a lab rat? And now he was going to be terminated. The wailing sirens grew into one long solid block of sound. The corners of Nigel’s vision started to blur and he felt something warm and wet running out of his ears and down his neck.

He glanced back at himself asleep on the bed, who had remarkably not moved. He must warn himself; warn himself not to try and interfere, not to do anything. Not to participate in whatever scheme the organizers of this charade had set up. He reached down to the hem of his silky white t-shirt and ripped out a corner of the material.

Pulling out the pen, Nigel’s last actions before suffering a major brain hemorrhage were to scrawl two sentences on the scrap of cloth he had torn, and put the cloth on his own table.

‘Do not play their game. You cannot win’