The White Room

0
34

There is no clock here. There is no window. There is only the white light, the white walls, and the white floor. I do not remember my name, but I remember the ritual.

Every few cycles, they arrive.

They are always the same: four figures, dressed in colors that shouldn't exist in a white room. They bring with them the scent of rain on hot asphalt and the sound of a thousand distant bells. They sit in a circle around me, and they ask me the same questions.

"Who are you in the silence?" "What do you remember of the wind?" "Do you still believe in the root?"

I answer them with the precision of a machine. I tell them about the garden I once tended, the woman I once loved, and the fear I felt when the first leaf turned black. I provide the data they seek, and in return, they give me a moment of warmth—a touch on the shoulder, a flicker of a smile.

For a thousand cycles, I believed this was a test. I believed that if I answered correctly, if I showed enough growth, I would be allowed to leave the white room and return to the world of color.

But then, during the ten-thousandth cycle, I noticed a flaw.

The leader of the group blinked. It was a tiny, human gesture, a momentary lapse in their ethereal perfection. In that blink, I saw a reflection of myself in her eyes—not as a guest, but as a specimen.

I realized then that the questions were not a test; they were a harvest. They weren't looking for the truth; they were feeding on the emotional resonance of my memories. Every time I remembered the wind, they grew stronger. Every time I felt the pain of loss, they became more vivid.

The white room was not a waiting room; it was a farm.

In the next cycle, when they arrived and asked, "Who are you in the silence?", I did not answer. I closed my eyes and imagined a void. I stripped away the memories of the garden, the woman, and the wind. I became as white as the walls, as empty as the floor.

The visitors grew agitated. Their colors began to fade. Their voices, once melodic, became shrill and desperate. They tried to provoke me, to trigger a memory, to force a spark of emotion.

But I remained silent. I held onto the void with a grip of iron.

Eventually, they stopped coming. The white room became truly silent. I am still here, in the emptiness, but for the first time, I am free. I have discovered that the only way to win a game of echoes is to stop making a sound.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [M3:6, M4:8, N1:0.9, K1:0.5, TI:28.7, Theta:270°]


© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) and his beloved father.

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net

Based on the pending patent application document (202610351844.3), creationstamp.com has calculated the tensor feature encoding of this article:

OTMES-v2-UNKNOWN

Suche
Kategorien
Mehr lesen
Literature
The Void of Logic
CEO Silas looked at the city of New York from the 104th floor of the Obsidian Tower. The city was...
Von Aurora Gibson 2026-05-16 19:27:47 0 2
Literature
The Last Ember of the Greenhouse
The world had forgotten the color of the sky. For three generations, the remnants of humanity had...
Von Isabella Ortiz 2026-05-20 19:40:07 0 2
Spiele
THE IRON COFFIN
ACT I: THE ASCENT The fog came off the Pennine moors like a living thing, thick and yellow as...
Von Z.R. ZHANG 2026-05-13 04:20:01 0 6
Spiele
The Flood
I. The river was rising. This was not news. The river was always rising in May. But this year it...
Von Devon Henderson 2026-05-30 00:45:30 0 8
Literature
The Mirror Chamber
ACT I: THE SCHOLAR Edinburgh in 1890 was a city of two faces: the elegant, Georgian New Town that...
Von Z.R. ZHANG 2026-04-22 13:51:56 0 24