The Icebound Clocktower and Other Noise Inspired Stories

The Looking Glass Station

Warp Speed, Binaural Harmonic Generator, Osmosis

A floating, white web of tunnels and buildings drift silently around earth. At the top is a set of rooms with everything a person would ever need, underneath is like a maze that tapers off into a single room at the center, with a few smaller rooms scattered elsewhere among the crisscrossing hallways. A few odd constructions jut out from it, looking like things like engine rooms and storage.

Looking inside the living portion of the space station, specifically the bedroom in this case, is the only sign of habitation in the otherwise empty vessel. Clothes are haphazardly draped over a folding screen and around/in a wicker hamper. There's a window taking up much of the left side wall, its clean white curtains pushed aside to look out into the infinite starscape outside. Papers litter the chrome-framed desk at the end of a large round (unmade) bed with a fluffy white comforter, far too many pillows, and dark green sheets that match the walls, trim on the furniture, and pretty much anything else portable in the room. There are other drawings and attempts at what looks like maps on the walls. By the door is a bulletin board covered in neon sticky notes with a small container full of markers pinned to it. Shoved in a corner next to the wooden full-length mirror is a bin of clay and other craft supplies, recently used. The creations made are on a tray in the kitchen waiting to be baked. From the evidence shown, the person here is more of an artist than an astronaut, probably female, and fairly young.

There is a sitting room of a similar design, with enough room to seat eight, set up around a coffee table. More papers and things are piled around here, and there are archways leading to the kitchen and a small room full of books. Other than that is a gym and a bathroom, a room with a teleporter that requires a password the one living here doesn't have, and a glass-domed ballroom with a sound system to play whatever the girl desires, and is the only living space without gravity. These rooms are empty for the moment, as the girl is currently hard at work figuring out the maze.

This is no ordinary maze; it is designed to test a different kind of thinking. The hallways lead to short-range portals, disguised as mirrors. She soars through the clear tubes in zero gravity, propelled by special boots supplied to her, keeping an eye out for the stray, smaller little robot nasties that weaseled their way in two weeks ago and scampered off before she could catch them. There's a strange, cold, tickling sensation as she passes through them, and they ripple and light up at her touch. She marks the ones she hasn't passed through yet on both sides with their own specific color and records the passage on her device. Looking out the window of one tunnel she can just see her desired destination two floors down, but one wrong move and she's practically back to the start again. She's been figuring this place out for months now, with some help from her 'teacher' and her pen pals, but she feels she still has a ways to go.