From tried to keep quiet about the room. Not out of fear of what people
would say, but more out of what he thought was kindness—no one ought to
experience that. Yet he was still tempted to go back, to revel in the
silence for a little longer.
Wayside found the room the day after.
The first thing he did was run out and tell someone else. They then told
someone else, who told someone else.
So when From heard about it
second hand, or fourteenth-hand, he could only sigh. There was little
else he could do. He hoped no one else got tempted into staying there,
into taking comfort in the room.
Many of the others were creeped
out immediately upon entering it. Either because of the ominous nature
of knowing they might have been watched the whole time, or that the one
who watched was no longer there, or that the room was as silent as it
was, or that it was so dark, so, so dark.
When Cometh entered, the
first thing she did after noticing the screens was fiddling with the
control panel below them. The others warned her, but she argued that
they ought to know everything this place could do.
At first, the
screens flickered to different parts of the facility, seeing even more
cameras, that wasn’t visible at first. Soon, they were about thirty of
them in there, all watching up at the large screens, all around the
chair, standing two meters away from it as if it was made of fire. From
didn’t even have to tell them—they all knew as well that the chair was
not friendly.
Switching through more channels, they found rooms
they almost couldn’t conceive to be here, atriums full of plants, trees,
greenhouses with fruit and vegetables, stables with horses, zoos with
animals scattered about in false habitats, all covered in the unnatural
darkness of the Up Above, shimmering down at them like it always had.
They
all struggled with the realizations as Cometh kept flipping through,
finding more and more views, newer cameras to switch to, always
something else, always something different, until she switched again and
some of them turned dark. Then some more of them, then, after another
press, some more. And they were all dark, all shimmering at them with
the hollow spiteness of the Up Above.
At first they thought there
really was cameras up there, contrary to From’s first impression. Yet,
looking closer, they didn’t see any movement up there, which was
unlikely if not impossible—almost always some of them were exploring up
there now.
And then Cometh flicked again and there was a gasp, a
breakthrough in the silence of the room they all seemed to adhere to as
if by command:
The last camera on the feed showed a white landscape,
a vast expanse beyond anything they had ever seen inside here, so vast
it couldn’t possibly be with a roof—and it was bright, so bright, and so
white that the Up Above couldn’t possibly begin to cover it.
They stared, enthralled.
This
was outside. It was noisy and hard to see, white and with only a few
shapes in the distance, contouring to be something else than what they
knew. Yet, they all knew it as soon as seeing it, as if they had always
known: There was an outside, and you could go there.