The Room – Chapter 1
Two small newborns, Sandra, and William rocked and swayed from side to
side in their beds. The room they occupied was white from floor to ceiling and
void of any fixtures. A mechanical arm reached down holding a bottle and fed
each in turn. Somewhere off in the distance voices could be heard conversing in
the kind of topics one would normally hear on a radio.
Time went on and by the age of two,
the children were transported to a playpen in a nearby room. Here, they had
various toys that kept them amused. A short time later the two children were
introduced to a screen that displayed real and animated visuals accompanied by
various sounds and voices. Most commonly, objects were shown in the centre of
the screen and were usually surrounded by a black or white backdrop. It wasn’t
long before the children began to speak short sentences: mimicking the voices
they heard.
Soon after, ‘Grey’, entered into their lives.
Grey was a ‘voice’ that spoke to them personally and could be heard from
the screen and hidden speakers placed around the room.
This voice became their virtual father. As the children grew, they came to
know him not only as their father but
also as their teacher and companion.
Years passed and during this time Grey nurtured and fostered their intellectual
faculties through virtual games and conversation.
The two children turned into young adults and from this time they began to
experience events that turned their lives upside down.
Sandra and William lived in a small home, made
up of five rooms. This place, their home, was the only place that they had ever
known. They did not have any knowledge of what was outside the walls that
surrounded them.
As terrifying as that
might sound to the ordinary person, this was not a phenomenal fact in the two
adolescents’ worlds. Although William and Sandra grew up surrounded by only
white walls, they were not frightened by what they did not know.
Their home was quite large, and it gave the pair a lot of room to
move around. The structure contained sleeping quarters, a dining room, a hygiene
area where they bathed, and washed, along with various study areas. The
structure also provided them with food, water, reading
materials and stationery, all of which were
shuttled to wall compartments via pipes in the walls.