THE FLIGHT OF ROOM 114

Ancient Path

  THE FLIGHT OF ROOM 114

   
     After many years of hard work, one day you fill the hot air balloons connected to your room and gently lift away from all the other rooms in the city. 

                                                      Find a ladder back down.

Exhilarated by the view, you glide over the valley, a vast quilt of farms with packing sheds and processing plants and towns that develop around each nucleus of malls, fast food restaurants, box stores, and gas stations. 

                                             Open a closet door.

You glide over to the foothills, some regions of which still appear natural. You glimpse a network of trails preserved by cattle, and you amuse yourself by trying to map the paths, realizing that they must form an ancient web connecting Native American village sites all over the range, but the trails keep vanishing in the grass. 

                               Find a different path.

You go higher above the smog and notice all the cultivated and urbanized land where wetlands and lakes used to be, the dams on every river, the clear-cut forests and strip mines. 

                   Open a window.

You go even higher where the oxygen grows thin and see a huge fault and the opening of a volcano, the ocean in the distance. 

        Open a closet door.

Every now and then you hear jets and explosions, and you wonder how high you need to go to escape the wars and ecocides and disasters as, breathing through an oxygen mask, you approach the cold blanket of outer space.

AMUSEMENTS IN ROOM 228

Prison

THE AMUSEMENT PARK IN ROOM 228

     Room 228 contains a model of an amusement park where people watch endless variations of every imaginable entertainment. Crowds of visitors gawk at action heroes who battle with villains while, nearby, gourmet chefs reveal unusual dishes and dinosaurs drink from a pond. Vampires, werewolves and zombies are caught in various stages of descending upon their victims while singers compete with each other, the audience poised to vote. Wrestlers twist and turn into bizarre positions, their muscles straining and rippling while beautiful entertainers nearby have sex in unusual positions. Dead bodies wait for detectives, and the mafia is taking over as aliens and time travelers suddenly appear or disappear. At the edges of the park are battles and mass graves and concentration camps and people starving, which some watch in horror or curiosity or secret amusement. Tired of the murders and corruption, a few wander off alone, perhaps wondering if this is really their life while, here and there, a few people are staring at them.


Room 228 contains four other doors.  Choose one.

Door number one.
Door number two.
Door number three.
Door number four.

A SCALE MODEL OF THE MOUNTAINS IN ROOM 236

Mining Road

ROOM 236

     Room 236 contains a scale model revealing a section of the foothills during a drought, with large rocks and all but the most recently fallen trees--oaks, gray pines, sycamores, buckeyes, red-buds--accurately positioned. The reservoir is so low that the river resembles its former self. The slopes of the canyon, however, are stripped of life, except for a rusty crop of cockle-burs, which flourishes underwater, the seeds brought in by the first herds of cattle. If you examine the terrain carefully with a magnifying glass, you can even see ancient Native American trails stretching from one abandoned village site to another, where moss-covered pestles still protrude from the mortars of a few pounding stones. You can also still see in the floodplain the last crumbling asphalt of a road traveled before the dam was built, as well as old abutments where bridges spanned the river and its tributaries. 

Bottom of a Reservoir

     Buried under water for sixty years, a stone chimney still stands erect near pounding stones. Preserved by the cold water, dead trees still tower, stripped bare, almost black. Overgrown mining roads, sometimes built over ancient trails, wind around the hillsides above the denuded slopes, and in some places the collapsed mines can be still be found, often near Native American village sites. Below the dam are canals and ditches that spurred one of the first water wars in the valley, but no obvious signs of conflict remain. Not far from the river is a creek whose water irrigated the first bumper crop of wheat that attracted the railroad. Around the tracks, the city continues to grow. Not far away from the creek new houses are popping up, the city slowly leapfrogging into the foothills. 


There are four other doors in Room 236.  Choose one:

Door number One.

Door number Two.

Door number Three.

Door number Four.