The Inheritance of Unfinished Rooms
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The key her mother left her opened a door that had always been a wall. Its effect was like injecting a whole tribe of gnomes into Rachel’s bloodstream every day of her life.
She tested the key in her hand for a while, turning it left and right, back and forth, deciding that if the key itself was anything like the Hall of Fountains then it was sufficient to carry the load of her existence.
The hall was beautiful in a kind of hypnotic way. It reminded her of the sensory overload you experience on some kind of hallucinogen drug making its way through your bloodstream. She looked all around without any real contributions to discard that notion and then went out again to the foyer.
She spent maybe 7 minutes trying to figure out what to do next. She didn’t want to ask for help. That would mean calling Mira, which seemed like such a capitulation.
Finally, she got brave and decided to try and take a picture of the keys once more to make sure she would remember.
She pressed the shutter and nothing happened. She felt like she had come to the hall of fountains in her dreams, but she couldn’t actually take a picture of it. Maybe you can only capture a picture of something like this once you’ve passed through it. Maybe there is something to say about the power of vision and change.
As she turned to leave, she came across something she hadn’t even seen before. A large mirror stood near where she had come in. She looked into it to make sure it was an actual mirror. Then, as she looked through it she thought she could see a room there. She didn’t know the room but it could be a sign of hope.
She decided to go in, as she would for the other key, and take out her camera. She remembered that at one point she might have found it amusing that a strong demonstration of technology was necessary for her to actually carry out any of these actions.
With the mirror in her hand, she stepped through. The stepping through part wasn’t quite true as there really wasn’t anything two-way about the mirror. As she was yet again in a new space she hit the shutter with her camera once more. There was a long wait before anything happened as if the shutter had lagged so much that it was delayed in opening all the way.
When it finally opened, she saw her bedroom. At first, she didn’t even know it was that. The mirror seemed bigger than it should be, as if the room were much farther off than it could actually be from the position of the mirror. There was one other thing that seemed abnormal.
A distant sound. A tapping. Like someone was hitting on a wall. It also seemed to come from the opposite wall from where she thought it would. But that put her, according to the mirror, in the wall.
Then she saw someone in her room. It was a girl, she realized, and somehow, with a brief glimpse from the corner of her eye as she turned, somewhat out of place. Short cut blonde hair. She was sitting at Rachel’s desk working on something with the light from her computer reflected in the mirror.
A girl in Rachel’s bedroom. What must that be like? Rachel looked in dismay at the girl and wondered if the image was just selectively close-up as if this new person’s face was close but everything else was far. But none of those seemed satisfying explanations.
The tapping just went on. Another longish moment passed and then at last from below came the voice.
Well, it was only a click, at first. And then another click. No words. The voice said things when Rachel wasn’t distracted by the tapping sounds. As if it didn’t want to say anything. Or maybe it waited for Rachel to show that she was listening.
Rachel felt this intense urgency to respond with something. When?
“Well?”
Again, Rachel responded without knowing what to say. She wasn’t even sure she understood what she was supposed to be responding to. “Yes?”
“Okay. Please leave this space. It is not yours.”
At first, Rachel thought The Mirror was saying “leave this space,” but it was the other one saying everything, with this unmistakable frigid stare of a look in her eye.
The Mirror is not mine to leave? Or leave this Space? Is the person speaking to the photo and not to me? Why are we behind blue glanced both ways?
Same space or different space? Space ages differently here. Our sweet rendezvous in the kitchen bring us to the current new space. Different space packs for different spaces or futures.
“The mirror is not mine to leave”? That doesn’t even make sense. And plus, I don’t what new Space mean? Who are they anyways?
No Rachel, it’s◆ About the ending
❧ About the title