My Diary

2002-11-15

You will be pleased to hear, Dear Listener, that I am now speaking to you from the lap of luxury. I'm sitting in a extremely comfortable chair, sipping fruit juice and admiring the sea from my balcony. You see, the Hotel is a hotel.

It was absurdly simple, really. I went down there first thing, grimly determined to open as many doors as I could and try and find something on this island that did something. The Hotel foyer was as blank and featureless as it had been the evening before. I tried all the doors again, wanting as hard as I could, with no luck. The pedestal was completely inert. I tried touching it, rubbing it, pretending it was a Star Trek transporter panel (which it vaguely resembled) ---- nothing.

At least I finally remembered how things worked around here, and wanted at it. I'm not sure what it was that I wanted, or even if it cared, but it worked; the black-glass surface lit up with writing in an indecipherable script and the outline of a handprint. I slapped my hand down onto the glass and ---- the room turned on.

It was incredible. The lights came on and softened to a comfortable yellow. The walls changed colour to a muted green, and started rippling as if water was running down then. Multi-coloured sculptures unfolded in the air, and a faint sound started. Not music, but a slow, patterned sound as of surf, or water falling. Streamers of cloud appeared, swirling slowly in an insubstantial vortex, centred on the pedestal. Through the black-glass door I could see that the Fountain had become Visible, a cascade of silver light. I stood with my mouth open.

Eventually I looked down at the pedestal again. The black surface had been replaced with, apparently, a sandpit. I ran my hand across it; it felt like sand. I tried to pick some up and the sand evaporated between my fingers.

An illusion, I thought shakily. Glowing writing appeared, hanging in space a centimetre or so above where the glass used to be. I couldn't read it, but there was a handprint, this time a palm-shaped hollow in the sand. When I put my hand against it, one of the doors lit up.

I started to feel nervous. What had I just done? Checked myself in to the hotel? Booked for an appointment at the euthanasia clinic? Would I be better off heading outside, running as fast as I could for the hills, and living out the rest of my life on berries and small animals?

Instead I walked with a little trepidation up to the door. It faded away as I approached, revealing a little cubby. It had the same water-effect walls, but was otherwise featureless. I stepped inside, there was a faint jolt, and the other side of the cubicle faded away, to reveal my apartment.

It was a big empty space, grey and featureless, with a floor-length black-glass window overlooking the sea. From a height of about six stories, I saw when I walked over. Well, it beat stairs.

The only thing in the entire place, other than the familiar black-glass door out, was a hand-sized red jewel in the centre of the room. I picked it up, and it started glowing gently.

In a kind of daze, as if I knew exactly what I was doing, I wanted at it, and watched the room unfold about me. Soft textures, a smell of orange blossom, the sound of trickling water and vines on the walls. There was furniture of a kind, but it wasn't familiar to me. Suddenly overwhelmed, I walked over to the window and wanted it. The black-glass faded away under my fingers and the sea air rolled in.

I spent the rest of the day in the room. I had spent so much time outside that I hadn't realised just how nice it was to be indoors for a change. Besides, it was fascinating.

The room was deceptively simple to control. Want at something, and it would change. Wanting at the ceiling would change the light level. Wanting at the walls would change the décor. I already knew how to open and close the window.

But there was more to it than that. On the circular glass table in the centre of the room were the rest of the controls: a few small sculptures, made of bleached driftwood and shells. Some of them were simple. Wanting at the sea shell made the background sound change. The fruit made food appear. (And when I say appear, I mean it would materialise out of thin air. But more on the later.)

There was a widget made of a piece of wood with a chip of glass stuck in it. If I wanted at it, it changed colour. If I wanted at it while it was touching something, whatever it was touching became that colour. There was a stick, jagged at one end and smooth at the other. Wanting at this did nothing, but like the colour-changer, wanting at it while it was touching something changed the texture of the object. There was a scrap of yellow cloth. If I wanted at that, it would shed an identically-sized piece of green cloth. Wanting at the green cloth made it disappear. I had some trouble working out what these were for until I found the next item, an L-shaped piece of wood, which changed the size of things. And there were more.

The entire room was completely mutable. Armed with the right tools, which were all right there on the table, and a strong will I could make the room do anything I wished. I could pull the walls and floor like taffy. I could fill and empty pools. I could create furniture and banish it again with a flick of my mind. I could change the environment from blazingly hot to, and I tried this, below freezing. It actually started snowing before I brought the temperature up again.

I was aware, however, just how crude my control was. For example, I could not control the colour of the colour changed. All I could do was to keep changing it until it was the hue I wanted. I could not control what kind of food the room brought me, but had to rely on the unseen chefs.

Ah, the food.

I was ravenous. I had been living for five days on fruit, and for some time before that on paste. I wanted something solid. I used the wooden pineapple-ish to summon a meal, ate it, and repeated the process.

The first time they gave me a bowl of what seemed to be shredded potato and bacon, fried with onions and garlic until the bacon was just crisp and the potato was tender. This came with a glass of water with a touch of some cordial in it, and a bowl of big, crunchy ice crystals flavoured with something sharp and tangy.

The second time they gave me a big round flatbread, still warm from the oven, and a dozen little pots of cream cheeses and patés. That came with milk and a dried pork sausage.

Of course, it wasn't exactly potato or bacon, but something similar. I had suspicions that the flatbread had never seen an oven, and the milk certainly didn't come from a cow. But to be frank, I didn't give a damn. It was real food, it was delicious, and I ate it.

It was only later that I had thoughts about the origins of the food. When I ordered it, it would materialise in a rippling of distorted air a few seconds later. Was it created elsewhere and transported here, or was it just another figment of the room's imagination? Was my belly full of amino acids, sugars and proteins, or patterned force fields? Could I actually get nutrition from the stuff?

Well, only one way to test it.

The rest of the day I spent in the bath. I had been living in the same set of clothes for over a week and I smelt. The bath was a big sandy pool, and I'm ashamed to say that I fell asleep in it. When I woke up I found that the water had jellied around me, keeping my head out of the water, and the room had cleaned my clothes.

In fact, it had cleaned them so well it had sucked all the dye out of them. They were spotless white. A little surprising, but hey, they were clean.

Dinner was a rich stew of some meat, with the first completely alien food I've seen yet: instead of potatoes or chips, there were long, thin things like roast breadsticks, but some kind of tuber. The tasted a bit like a peppery roast potato.

And now I think I will finish my fruit juice, put out the light and go to bed. It's late and that bed looks incredibly comfortable.

Things are certainly looking up.

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