Chapter 3 - Framework

For a moment he forgot he was cold and wet and really could have used that cup of coffee he was anticipating and went straight to the panel from the day before, to check if it led to the same place. 

In all honesty, he held no hope for consistency and expected to see an unfamiliar sight, so the image of the interstitial wall space with the lit flashlight on the shelf right in front of him caught him by surprise.

See, when one faces chaotic patterns, it’s not their strange and aberrant behavior that throws one for a loop. That is to be expected and bows to logic. 

It is the consistency of behavior inside the chaos that can drive a person insane, more precisely, the local, provisional consistency, for one must understand that chaos plays by rules too, just rules we can never postulate, because doing so would inherently contradict their very principles, and which only apply for as long as we expect them not to. 

The second we’re locked into a pattern of behavior and committed it to mind, it will change. 

The fact that the unfortunate subject is always caught on the wrong foot by the unpredictable substance of disorder, a characteristic he should learn to expect after a certain number of experiments, is due to the intrinsic limitations of the human mind. 

We can’t function in a world with no organizing principles. The mind is structured, language is structured, the fabric of space is structured, time is structured and directional. One just can not conceive of the absence of causality.

Worried that he might forget which pattern that was, he propped the panel door open with a chair and ran to the bar to see if he could find anything, a pencil, a marker, something to write with. He wrestled up a piece of chalk and wrote LIBRARY on the panel, let the door close, and opened it again to check. The double wall was still there.

He figured that was probably not going to last, but left the label on the panel anyway, because it was the only clue he had so far. 

He checked the panel he had opened the day before, which still led into a pitch black void, but he couldn’t tell if it was the same pitch black void from two days ago or a completely different one, so he shrugged, marked the panel with an x to remind himself that he went through it before and went back to the bar.

He was tired; he was hungry, his body was aching, his clothes were still damp, and he noticed with displeasure that he direly needed a bath. 

‘This is going to be a problem,’ he thought, deciding to eliminate at least the one variable of the equation for which he hoped he had a solution. A quick search through the bar area yielded a tub of frozen soup, whose sight made his mouth water with anticipation and made his body feel warm and comfortable already. There was a wall-mounted microwave on the back of the bar to heat it up in.

‘At least I won’t have to subsist on cold cuts for the rest of my… whatever the heck this is,’ he mused, waiting for the soup. He remembered the rice casserole from the day before and had an irrational urge to go back through that panel and see if there was any of it left, but thought it would probably be gone by now, even if the panel led to the same place. Besides, there was no reason to believe that time kept the same schedule in the world of the blue ringed sun and he’d probably have to spend time with the ‘wife’, which felt most awkward, so he resigned himself to the microwaved delicacy that was now ready to eat.

He must have arrived back early, he thought as he gulped down the soup, too hungry to worry about it being too hot. The lights gave no warning of dying down, so he figured he might have some time to rest and make himself comfortable as best he could under the circumstances. He finished his soup, washed the plate and placed it on the drying rack, wiped the bar clean and went to explore the back room, inside which he found a few surprises. Even though the establishment didn’t look like it would have a need for it, the back room revealed a full commercial kitchen, complete with lockers and showers and a large washer and drier for the chefs’ outfits, which he could see hanging on a rack not too far from where he was standing. Some of the locker doors were open, and he noticed that someone had left a track suit in one of the lockers. He hesitated for a moment, reluctant to borrow a complete stranger’s clothes, but exhaustion and physical discomfort got the better of him; he showered, changed, grateful to feel clean, warm and dry again, dumped his clothes in the washer for a quick spin and went back into the lounge to read a magazine before it was time to move them to the dryer.

This little domestic routine put him in such a good mood that he forgot about his travels and the fact that the lights could dim at any moment, with no schedule or warning. He made himself comfortable on a couch with an old Country Living magazine and his head had barely touched the soft cushions before he went out like a light.

He woke up disoriented and stared in disbelief at the weird outfit he was wearing, slowly starting to remember the events of the day before and surprised the lights were still on.

‘Maybe they come on and off automatically,’ he figured. ‘Maybe I don’t have to leave here for a while. I could definitely use some rest.’

With that thought, he turned over and went back to sleep. He woke up again a few hours later to an insane racket of pots and pans and raised voices in the kitchen, so loud it could raise the dead. It made him jump off the couch in a panic, not knowing what to do, worried that the people in the kitchen, whoever they were, were going to put him to the question for squatting in their workspace. He threw himself at the panel closest to him and emerged on the other side of it inside a space that was a chiral replica of the one he just left, only without the benefit of company.

His legs still shaking from the shock, he tried to compose himself and walked into the back room to make sure there was nobody there. He noticed the washer had just finished its cycle: it contained his clothes. Without giving it a second thought, he grabbed them and put them in the dryer and then went straight to the bar to fix himself a stiff drink.

How many copies of this room were there? It hadn’t occurred to him that this room he thought of as the only constant in the game was in fact a collection of identical, and in this case, not exactly identical, copies of itself. Did it matter at all whether the space he was in was the same as long as it looked and felt the same to him? 

He rushed to the panel he’d just emerged from and marked it MUZAK LOUNGE, opened it barely ajar to verify whether it led back to the room with the noisy kitchen and was met with absolute silence. The rules of chaos hard at work. His head dropped to his chest in a dejected, helpless gesture. He wanted to erase the label from the door and stopped himself right before he had the epiphany that the labels were not identifiers of unique instances; they were identifier lists for instances, and that charting the lists themselves could yield some useful answers. He also pondered on the fact that having those lists build up to a usable sample would take a lot more days than he wanted to consider, and that even if those lists were populated enough for a proper analysis, the analysis itself still could, and probably would yield bubkes. 

Still, when you’re tasked with sorting out a mountain of beans into shapes and colors, there is no practical benefit in waxing philosophical over the magnitude and futility of the enterprise when you have no alternative to it.

On a whim, he checked the door that said LIBRARY, and which was now on the opposite side of the room, to see if that was still staying consistent for now and breathed a sigh of relief when he glimpsed the flashlight through the door he’d cracked open just an inch.

Satisfied with the progress he checked to see if his clothes were dry, changed back into them and put the track suit in the wash, to have it clean if future needs arose, poured himself another drink, which he doubled this time, and settled down in a chair to finally read his magazine. It wasn’t Country Living. It was the daily newspaper. And it couldn’t possibly have been from today, because even if he’d lost track of time with all this nonsense, he was pretty sure that history had advanced far past 1947, because he could remember mobile phones and space shuttles. Maybe somebody abandoned this newspaper in the lounge a long time ago and nobody bothered to throw it away. He got up to check the rest of the periodicals, but there wasn’t a single one with a date more recent than 1947.

‘Time slices!’ he had a revelation. ‘They are not copies. They’re time slices of the same continuum.’ He almost congratulated himself on discovering the unifying law that governed his universe when reason called him back. ‘But then why would this room be a mirror image of itself?’

The rules of chaos had struck again.