The firewall and the doctor
Dec. 28th, 2016 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI'm floating in silent darkness. There is a curved wall around me, slowly constricting more and more. I can't tell if my eyes are closed or open.
I lose all sense of my body. The wall closes in. Directly in front of me, I see a light. It blinks slowly like the beacon on a radio tower.
My consciousness flickers. My mind feels ... scrambled somehow, like I can't string thoughts together. The feeling passes. The wall flies outward.
"I've just been passed through a firewall," I think to myself.
My body is back. It's daylight, and I'm standing on a patch of green, trimmed lawn. I look around and see it's a large rectangle, about 20 by 40 meters. Three sides of the rectangle end in a low picket fence. The fourth ends in a flat wall of granite, about 5 meters high. Beyond the fence I see a landscape that seems curiously jumbled. Steep rolling hills of grass run all the way to the horizon. Scattered all over the hills are slabs of granite and marble cut into columns and geometric shapes the size of houses. The horizon feels too close, like the planet is too small. The hills in the distance look blurry, as though the air is distorting them. I sense that it's not even a real landscape, but some kind of procedurally generated optical illusion designed to make the rectangular lawn feel less like a cage, and if I tried to step over the fence I would hit a wall -- or perhaps fall away into nothingness.
There is an alcove carved into the side of the granite wall, with a desk and two chairs inside. "Some kind of reception area?" I think. Next to that is a rectangular hole, the size of a doorway. "I'm not allowed in there," I think. "That's for staff only."
I turn away from the wall and am surprised to see another person standing nearby. It's an older woman I don't recognize. She's standing still, with a blank expression on her face. I watch for a moment and she doesn't move.
I walk around the lawn, exploring a bit. As I do, the details of the procedural terrain change behind the fence. The columns and other granite shapes acquire pastel colors one at a time -- bright metallic pink, bright metallic blue, and so on. The more I look at parts of the landscape, the more detail appears there, as though the illusion takes effort to produce and the entity or machine producing it is lazy.
I wander along the fence and find a few objects in the grass. Sadly I can't remember what they were.
When I turn back to the wall, I see men moving in and out of the hallway, consulting with each other, observing the woman on the lawn. They're dressed like doctors. There are additional subjects standing around as well. "What is this place for?" I think. "Am I even supposed to be here? Or perhaps I'm just not supposed to be conscious of this?"
I keep walking around, and discover other things sitting in the grass. I hadn't seen them before. I find an old electronic address printer, hooked up to an old audio recorder with a huge magnetic tape in it, being used for backup. I kneel down and open the lid of the address machine, and see some impressions left by keys, allowing me to read the last few things typed with it. Some geometric designs, some sequences of letters with a vaguely medical feel to them like diagnostic codes, and a mailing address. It's a woman's name I think - no one I've heard of - and the address is unfamiliar. "This is information I shouldn't be seeing," I think. I try to memorize it for later, but fail.
I walk forward a bit more and find a small, squat desk. Polished tan wood, grainy. In the cubbyhole under the top I find a large wind-up watch, like the kind my father used to wear. I take it out and walk away carrying it, but I only get a few steps and the front of the watch pops off in my hand. I look down and a few tiny metal rods and springs and washers are scattered on the grass.
I bend down and carefully gather then up in my hand. "I need something to put these parts in, and some way to wash them," I think. I walk a dozen more steps, and there on the grass is a plastic bin, with a lid. I drop the parts in the bin. A moment later, the bin begins to fill with water from some unknown source, like a conjuring trick. "That's convenient," I think, and pick up the bin.
But the bin won't stop filling with water. I hold the lid down, but it overflows, spraying water out the sides. The water is running out across the grass, soaking it. I feel wind blowing against my body. Up to now, the weather had been absolutely calm here. I feel a bit alarmed.
I back up a little bit, trying to understand what's going on, and get close to a man in a white lab coat who is sitting on the grass talking with someone else. He swings his head around with a very frightened look on his face, then relaxes and says "Oh, it's only you," and calls me by name. Apparently the staff here think I'm harmless, and are concentrating on other people for now.
The wind picks up even more, whistling past us, lashing at the puddles of water around me and spreading them out. "This wind really needs to die down," I think. A second later it stops, all at once, as though a giant fan has abruptly switched off.
"Whoah, that was odd," I think. "Can I control this environment?"
I concentrate again, and make the wind pick up to its previous speed, blowing the water around. Then I make the wind die. Then I will the plastic bin to stop producing water. It ceases instantly. "Interesting..."
I forget all about the watch and the bin, and walk towards the reception area set into the wall. There are two people sitting behind the desk. They look vaguely Hispanic, and are talking to each other while they mess with the paperwork spread across the desk. Paying them no mind, I brazenly walk into the doorway cut into the wall, and stride up the hallway beyond. I concentrate to make a gale-force wind that will distract the people in the alcove, but the most I can manage is a stiff breeze. Not what I wanted, but enough to make them grab for their paperwork, which is enough to keep them from noticing me.
The hallway opens up into a much larger office area, with a number of cubicles, and windows beyond showing an office complex. People are everywhere, moving with purpose. Most of them are wearing lab coats. An old man with messy gray hair and a lab cost is standing near me behind a counter, talking animatedly with a muscular, tanned man in a police uniform and a hat. They are trying to decide what to do with a couple of uncooperative subjects.
The doctor notices me, and recognizes me. He knows I'm not supposed to be back here but he doesn't seem concerned. I walk up to him and he pauses his conversation with the cop.
"Why am I here?" I ask him. "And how long am I going to be here for?"
He holds up one hand. "Don't worry," he says, in a placating tone, "You'll be out soon."
"Could you be more specific?" I say, irritated.
"A couple of days," he says, and shrugs. "About one day."
On a counter between me and the doctor is a clipboard sitting in a paper tray. It has a large column of numbers, and some thick black lines next to each number, like a blank inventory form. At the top of the list, hastily written in large orange letters, is my name. Next to that is a description of why I am here -- at least, that's what I assume it is, but the writing is messy and I can't parse it.
I squint at the writing, and the doctor with the gray hair sees me looking, notices the clipboard, and hastily grabs it and holds it down behind the counter.
I turn to him and say, "Don't lie to me."
"Shit," he mutters. "You saw that, didn't you?"
"Come on," I say. "Just tell me how long this is all going to take."
The officer catches my eye and says "You'll be here about half an hour."
The doctor stows the clipboard and walks around the counter. "Come with me," he says.
I follow him back out of the hallway towards the rectangular lawn. There is a polished table set against the wall. The doctor hops up and sits casually on the edge of the table. I sit next to him, like we're two friends on a lunch break.
"I'm going to explain this whole thing to you," he says.
"How am I supposed to believe you when I know you've lied to me already?" I retort angrily.
"Just hear me out," he says.
He talks for a while. All I remember is that his description sounds unbelievable, and quite weird. The whole conversation has been smudged out of my memory.
As he is talking, I watch the lawn, and I observe my older sister being led out of the hallway by one of the police officers. He leads her to a thick-walled building about the size of a garden shed, with an opening on the side. Beyond the opening I see a flight of stairs going down into the lawn, which they both descend.
Just before my sister takes the first step down, she turns to me and mouths the words "HELP ME".
I look around again. Instead of a courtyard, I am in a large conference room, with several tables of different sizes and a herd of empty swivel chairs. Large bay windows show other rooms beyond, with flat office carpeting, including the thick-walled room, which is integrated with the rest of the walls in the building. A sliding glass door separates the conference room from the room leading to the stairway where my sister has gone.
The doctor and I are still sitting on the glass table. As he talks, I concentrate, and make the sliding door open from 5 meters away. Then I make the door close again. "I'm getting better at this," I think. "I need to practice."
I turn to the doctor and say, "It is normal for me to be able to move things with my mind here?"
He looks surprised and says, "No."
The glass door opens again and a large crowd of people in office attire pour into the room, picking out swivel chairs and gathering around the tables. Most of them are wearing suits. It's a high-ranking meeting. The swivel chairs run out, and one of the men hops up on the table next to me and the doctor. The doctor doesn't seem to care that we are crashing this meeting. I surmise it's an unwritten rule that the activity of doctors and patients is always of highest importance, and should never be interfered with. The employees in the meeting room seem used to this, and are more curious about me than annoyed.
"I still don't feel like I can trust you," I say to the doctor. I turn to the crowd at the largest table. "Can anyone else here explain to me why I am here, and what this place is?"
The man next to the doctor leans out, with a grin on his face, and addresses me. "Hey, maybe you're dead and this is hell," he says.
"No, that's not right," I say with an impatient sneer, leaning across the doctor to stare at him, "because if this was hell it wouldn't be so boring!"
The rest of the suits erupt into laughter. The guy nods as if to say "fair point," and leans back.
Another man at the head of the big table says he is going to start the meeting on schedule, and the group begins to talk. Again, their conversation is only a smudge in my memory. I can tell they said things, but I have no idea what.
Instead of trying to listen, I make the sliding door open again with my mind, then make some papers fly up in the air, then make a row of hanging lamps spin around on their chains, trying to advance my telekinesis to larger objects. People in the room start to notice the chaos and realize something seriously weird is going on. The last straw is when I notice the current speaker is a snappily dressed woman about three feet tall, making some point to the rest of the group, and as she speaks I levitate her up out of her chair and send her drifting around the room in slow orbits, then set her back down. The meeting ends early and everyone gets up and hastily exits.
Beyond the open doors, I see my sister come back up the stairway, trailed by the same cop. I catch her eye and say "what's up?"
She shakes her head dismissively and says, "It's gone now. No worries. It's gone." In a few seconds she vanishes up the granite hallway.
"I'm going to see what's down those stairs," I think. "Maybe that will help me understand what's going on."
I hop down from the table and run over to the stairs. The doctor is gone. The stairs end in a long carpeted hallway that zigs and zags, then splits into two hallways. Doors appear on either side, most of them closed, the windows in them dark. With my mind, I will myself to be inconspicuous. I imagine myself dressed as a doctor, with an ID badge. A few nurses walk by me. One looks a little baffled by my presence but doesn't question it.
A large man stopps me. He is dressed in some kind of ceremonial African hunting gear, and holding a spear. He has large rings stacked loosely around his wrists and ankles. The most startling thing about him though is the shape of his head: It bulges upward and back, just above his eyeline, as though his skull is a giant kidney bean. He is tanned and hairless. He speaks to me in a deep voice, his face set as though he recognizes me and wants to know how I've been, but the language he speaks sounds like complete gibberish to me.
I speak gibberish back at him, in a conversational tone, willing him to understand that I am fine but trying to get on my way. It works. He nods and turns to go. As I watch him walk away, a group of three robots walk past him; old-school robots with square metal limbs, walking stiffly. I realize they too are inmates, like the man; like me. The robots have a steampunk motif, with bright blue heads shaped like upside-down teapots. "I wonder what their story is," I think.
"Oh well. One mystery at a time, eh?" I shrug and continue down the hallway.
Ten more steps on the carpet and ... I wake up.
I lose all sense of my body. The wall closes in. Directly in front of me, I see a light. It blinks slowly like the beacon on a radio tower.
My consciousness flickers. My mind feels ... scrambled somehow, like I can't string thoughts together. The feeling passes. The wall flies outward.
"I've just been passed through a firewall," I think to myself.
My body is back. It's daylight, and I'm standing on a patch of green, trimmed lawn. I look around and see it's a large rectangle, about 20 by 40 meters. Three sides of the rectangle end in a low picket fence. The fourth ends in a flat wall of granite, about 5 meters high. Beyond the fence I see a landscape that seems curiously jumbled. Steep rolling hills of grass run all the way to the horizon. Scattered all over the hills are slabs of granite and marble cut into columns and geometric shapes the size of houses. The horizon feels too close, like the planet is too small. The hills in the distance look blurry, as though the air is distorting them. I sense that it's not even a real landscape, but some kind of procedurally generated optical illusion designed to make the rectangular lawn feel less like a cage, and if I tried to step over the fence I would hit a wall -- or perhaps fall away into nothingness.
There is an alcove carved into the side of the granite wall, with a desk and two chairs inside. "Some kind of reception area?" I think. Next to that is a rectangular hole, the size of a doorway. "I'm not allowed in there," I think. "That's for staff only."
I turn away from the wall and am surprised to see another person standing nearby. It's an older woman I don't recognize. She's standing still, with a blank expression on her face. I watch for a moment and she doesn't move.
I walk around the lawn, exploring a bit. As I do, the details of the procedural terrain change behind the fence. The columns and other granite shapes acquire pastel colors one at a time -- bright metallic pink, bright metallic blue, and so on. The more I look at parts of the landscape, the more detail appears there, as though the illusion takes effort to produce and the entity or machine producing it is lazy.
I wander along the fence and find a few objects in the grass. Sadly I can't remember what they were.
When I turn back to the wall, I see men moving in and out of the hallway, consulting with each other, observing the woman on the lawn. They're dressed like doctors. There are additional subjects standing around as well. "What is this place for?" I think. "Am I even supposed to be here? Or perhaps I'm just not supposed to be conscious of this?"
I keep walking around, and discover other things sitting in the grass. I hadn't seen them before. I find an old electronic address printer, hooked up to an old audio recorder with a huge magnetic tape in it, being used for backup. I kneel down and open the lid of the address machine, and see some impressions left by keys, allowing me to read the last few things typed with it. Some geometric designs, some sequences of letters with a vaguely medical feel to them like diagnostic codes, and a mailing address. It's a woman's name I think - no one I've heard of - and the address is unfamiliar. "This is information I shouldn't be seeing," I think. I try to memorize it for later, but fail.
I walk forward a bit more and find a small, squat desk. Polished tan wood, grainy. In the cubbyhole under the top I find a large wind-up watch, like the kind my father used to wear. I take it out and walk away carrying it, but I only get a few steps and the front of the watch pops off in my hand. I look down and a few tiny metal rods and springs and washers are scattered on the grass.
I bend down and carefully gather then up in my hand. "I need something to put these parts in, and some way to wash them," I think. I walk a dozen more steps, and there on the grass is a plastic bin, with a lid. I drop the parts in the bin. A moment later, the bin begins to fill with water from some unknown source, like a conjuring trick. "That's convenient," I think, and pick up the bin.
But the bin won't stop filling with water. I hold the lid down, but it overflows, spraying water out the sides. The water is running out across the grass, soaking it. I feel wind blowing against my body. Up to now, the weather had been absolutely calm here. I feel a bit alarmed.
I back up a little bit, trying to understand what's going on, and get close to a man in a white lab coat who is sitting on the grass talking with someone else. He swings his head around with a very frightened look on his face, then relaxes and says "Oh, it's only you," and calls me by name. Apparently the staff here think I'm harmless, and are concentrating on other people for now.
The wind picks up even more, whistling past us, lashing at the puddles of water around me and spreading them out. "This wind really needs to die down," I think. A second later it stops, all at once, as though a giant fan has abruptly switched off.
"Whoah, that was odd," I think. "Can I control this environment?"
I concentrate again, and make the wind pick up to its previous speed, blowing the water around. Then I make the wind die. Then I will the plastic bin to stop producing water. It ceases instantly. "Interesting..."
I forget all about the watch and the bin, and walk towards the reception area set into the wall. There are two people sitting behind the desk. They look vaguely Hispanic, and are talking to each other while they mess with the paperwork spread across the desk. Paying them no mind, I brazenly walk into the doorway cut into the wall, and stride up the hallway beyond. I concentrate to make a gale-force wind that will distract the people in the alcove, but the most I can manage is a stiff breeze. Not what I wanted, but enough to make them grab for their paperwork, which is enough to keep them from noticing me.
The hallway opens up into a much larger office area, with a number of cubicles, and windows beyond showing an office complex. People are everywhere, moving with purpose. Most of them are wearing lab coats. An old man with messy gray hair and a lab cost is standing near me behind a counter, talking animatedly with a muscular, tanned man in a police uniform and a hat. They are trying to decide what to do with a couple of uncooperative subjects.
The doctor notices me, and recognizes me. He knows I'm not supposed to be back here but he doesn't seem concerned. I walk up to him and he pauses his conversation with the cop.
"Why am I here?" I ask him. "And how long am I going to be here for?"
He holds up one hand. "Don't worry," he says, in a placating tone, "You'll be out soon."
"Could you be more specific?" I say, irritated.
"A couple of days," he says, and shrugs. "About one day."
On a counter between me and the doctor is a clipboard sitting in a paper tray. It has a large column of numbers, and some thick black lines next to each number, like a blank inventory form. At the top of the list, hastily written in large orange letters, is my name. Next to that is a description of why I am here -- at least, that's what I assume it is, but the writing is messy and I can't parse it.
I squint at the writing, and the doctor with the gray hair sees me looking, notices the clipboard, and hastily grabs it and holds it down behind the counter.
I turn to him and say, "Don't lie to me."
"Shit," he mutters. "You saw that, didn't you?"
"Come on," I say. "Just tell me how long this is all going to take."
The officer catches my eye and says "You'll be here about half an hour."
The doctor stows the clipboard and walks around the counter. "Come with me," he says.
I follow him back out of the hallway towards the rectangular lawn. There is a polished table set against the wall. The doctor hops up and sits casually on the edge of the table. I sit next to him, like we're two friends on a lunch break.
"I'm going to explain this whole thing to you," he says.
"How am I supposed to believe you when I know you've lied to me already?" I retort angrily.
"Just hear me out," he says.
He talks for a while. All I remember is that his description sounds unbelievable, and quite weird. The whole conversation has been smudged out of my memory.
As he is talking, I watch the lawn, and I observe my older sister being led out of the hallway by one of the police officers. He leads her to a thick-walled building about the size of a garden shed, with an opening on the side. Beyond the opening I see a flight of stairs going down into the lawn, which they both descend.
Just before my sister takes the first step down, she turns to me and mouths the words "HELP ME".
I look around again. Instead of a courtyard, I am in a large conference room, with several tables of different sizes and a herd of empty swivel chairs. Large bay windows show other rooms beyond, with flat office carpeting, including the thick-walled room, which is integrated with the rest of the walls in the building. A sliding glass door separates the conference room from the room leading to the stairway where my sister has gone.
The doctor and I are still sitting on the glass table. As he talks, I concentrate, and make the sliding door open from 5 meters away. Then I make the door close again. "I'm getting better at this," I think. "I need to practice."
I turn to the doctor and say, "It is normal for me to be able to move things with my mind here?"
He looks surprised and says, "No."
The glass door opens again and a large crowd of people in office attire pour into the room, picking out swivel chairs and gathering around the tables. Most of them are wearing suits. It's a high-ranking meeting. The swivel chairs run out, and one of the men hops up on the table next to me and the doctor. The doctor doesn't seem to care that we are crashing this meeting. I surmise it's an unwritten rule that the activity of doctors and patients is always of highest importance, and should never be interfered with. The employees in the meeting room seem used to this, and are more curious about me than annoyed.
"I still don't feel like I can trust you," I say to the doctor. I turn to the crowd at the largest table. "Can anyone else here explain to me why I am here, and what this place is?"
The man next to the doctor leans out, with a grin on his face, and addresses me. "Hey, maybe you're dead and this is hell," he says.
"No, that's not right," I say with an impatient sneer, leaning across the doctor to stare at him, "because if this was hell it wouldn't be so boring!"
The rest of the suits erupt into laughter. The guy nods as if to say "fair point," and leans back.
Another man at the head of the big table says he is going to start the meeting on schedule, and the group begins to talk. Again, their conversation is only a smudge in my memory. I can tell they said things, but I have no idea what.
Instead of trying to listen, I make the sliding door open again with my mind, then make some papers fly up in the air, then make a row of hanging lamps spin around on their chains, trying to advance my telekinesis to larger objects. People in the room start to notice the chaos and realize something seriously weird is going on. The last straw is when I notice the current speaker is a snappily dressed woman about three feet tall, making some point to the rest of the group, and as she speaks I levitate her up out of her chair and send her drifting around the room in slow orbits, then set her back down. The meeting ends early and everyone gets up and hastily exits.
Beyond the open doors, I see my sister come back up the stairway, trailed by the same cop. I catch her eye and say "what's up?"
She shakes her head dismissively and says, "It's gone now. No worries. It's gone." In a few seconds she vanishes up the granite hallway.
"I'm going to see what's down those stairs," I think. "Maybe that will help me understand what's going on."
I hop down from the table and run over to the stairs. The doctor is gone. The stairs end in a long carpeted hallway that zigs and zags, then splits into two hallways. Doors appear on either side, most of them closed, the windows in them dark. With my mind, I will myself to be inconspicuous. I imagine myself dressed as a doctor, with an ID badge. A few nurses walk by me. One looks a little baffled by my presence but doesn't question it.
A large man stopps me. He is dressed in some kind of ceremonial African hunting gear, and holding a spear. He has large rings stacked loosely around his wrists and ankles. The most startling thing about him though is the shape of his head: It bulges upward and back, just above his eyeline, as though his skull is a giant kidney bean. He is tanned and hairless. He speaks to me in a deep voice, his face set as though he recognizes me and wants to know how I've been, but the language he speaks sounds like complete gibberish to me.
I speak gibberish back at him, in a conversational tone, willing him to understand that I am fine but trying to get on my way. It works. He nods and turns to go. As I watch him walk away, a group of three robots walk past him; old-school robots with square metal limbs, walking stiffly. I realize they too are inmates, like the man; like me. The robots have a steampunk motif, with bright blue heads shaped like upside-down teapots. "I wonder what their story is," I think.
"Oh well. One mystery at a time, eh?" I shrug and continue down the hallway.
Ten more steps on the carpet and ... I wake up.
