Author Vs. Author - The Empty Room

2

The boy soon awoke -- well, in his perspective, he soon woke. It could have been hours, or even days, that he was asleep, but he didn't think that was plausible. He sure didn't remember ever sleeping much later than a few hours. Then again, he had no clue about what his life had been like before his life in the empty room, when he woke up and laid there for hours.

"Architect?" the boy called out. "I'm awake!"

"I know you're awake," the Architect replied. "Now, it's time for you to meet my newest pet. Well, first, I have to turn this thing on."

There was a sound like a faint click, and walls began to rise up all around the boy. He dodged around, wondering what was happening.

Walls connected, formed dead ends, and enclosed all around the boy. "What's going on?" he asked the Architect.

"I have made the room into a finite space, and I have turned it into a maze. This is to make it harder to escape Jensen," the Architect explained.

"Who is Jensen?" 

You'll see him in a few seconds. I'll just push this button, and..." There was another clicking sound, and a rumbling was heard from the ceiling of the empty room. The boy looked up.

A gorilla was falling down on him, plummeting to the center of the maze.

"How do I remember what gorillas and mazes are?" the boy wondered as he ran out of the way of the falling beast.

"Your memories will come back with observations that directly relate to them. It's possible to have a perfect mind wipe, which this isn't, but I figured that it might not be useful for you to not even remember a second of your life -- turn you into a child in a young teenager's body. It wouldn't be fair."

The gorilla turned towards the boy. It growled, and its eyes seemed to glow with rage. It roared, then chased after the boy.

The boy looked around. All that he could see were white walls that stretched slightly past his head, but he found an opening and ran for it. The gorilla kept after him.

The boy ran for all he was worth. He circled a wall and made a left turn, then right, then two lefts, and he kept running straight. He knew that he shouldn't dare look behind him, as the gorilla was likely smarter than it looked and would be able to find him quickly if he so much as dropped attention on where he was going for a second.

Eventually, after some more turns and circling, the boy found a place to hide. "The gorilla is Jensen, correct?" he whispered, hoping that the Architect would hear him.

"Yes, that is correct," the Architect whispered back. "And in case you're wondering how I can be so quiet, there is an implant in your ear. It allows me to track and speak to you."

The boy felt at both of his ears. He found a strange, smooth plate inside his right one and realized that it must have been the implant. He heard Jensen's roar, and it sounded nearby. He got up and ran.

The boy remembered something about hugging the left wall of a maze when you wanted to escape, so he grabbed on to the wall to his left and continued running. He heard Jensen roar from the direction he was going, however, so he turned around and held on to the new left wall.

Finally, the boy heard from behind him that Jensen was right on his tail. He increased his speed and made a few sharp turns due to his hugging of the left wall. He hoped that he didn't have to turn around and change walls, because he felt as if he was drawing closer to the exit as time went on. 

The boy heard a crash, but he refused to turn around. He reminded himself yet again that if he turned around, that would be the one time that Jensen appeared in front of him. Something from the boy's past had made him learn that, but he couldn't remember what. Still, he ran as quickly as he could.

What was he going to do? Jensen wouldn't give up the -- 

Jensen leaped from a path to the boy's right and landed right in front of the boy. The boy shouted, then got an idea.

Suddenly, a memory returned to him. Something about a hay maze at some sort of farm. It came back to him, the meanings of those terms.

He had remembered being with his friends -- more humans, but he couldn't remember their names -- and how they had gotten lost in the maze. The bales -- stacks of hay -- were about as tall as the walls of the maze he was in right now. The boy remembered he had gotten an idea. 

The boy had grabbed onto the top of the bales and leaped over them, running in a straight line, until he had found the exit. His friends had followed him, and he remembered one, a female, had said, "...You cheater." She had said something before that, perhaps his name, but he couldn't remember. How inconvenient.

Yet life still went on. The boy looked at the wall next to him and hopped onto it, then carried himself over it. Jensen ran around the wall, but by the time it would have reached the boy, he had already leaped over the next wall.

"You cheater," the Architect commented, but the boy ignored him. He kept running, leaping over walls, and every time he leaped, he saw the exit. He went towards that place, running over straights and leaping over walls, until he finally reached it. 

He walked through the opening that was the exit, but Jensen still chased after him. Past the opening, however, was a huge object. It was standing on some sort of iron pedestal, and it itself was a black iron tube, one end closed and rounded, and one end open.

"A cannon," the boy remembered, muttering to himself. He saw multiple black iron spheres -- cannonballs -- and a bag of black powder next to it, and he remembered what to do.

He remembered having studied thousands of different things that pertained to the past, and cannons were one of them. The boy used one cannonball and the black powder to load the cannon. 

As Jensen ran on the final straight, perfectly in view, the boy found what he remembered to be a matchbox and a wick on top of the cannon. 

He took a match out of the matchbox and lit it just how he remembered. 

He took aim right at Jensen and prepared to fire the cannon.

Suddenly, memories flooded him again. Memories of controversy, of dark times back in the early twenty-first century. Around the time when that one country with the strange candidates for leaders began to collapse. Something about a dead gorilla.

Well, a dead savior of the two worlds is much more important than a dead gorilla, the boy thought to himself, and lit the cannon.

A few seconds later, the cannon fired, and the cannonball resulting went straight and true for Jensen. It hit, and ripped straight through the gorilla.

The gorilla fell, dead, and it levitated back up towards the ceiling. The Architect's doing, no doubt.

After that, the cannon and the maze lowered into the ground. 

"Nicely done," the Architect noted. "In a few moments, we head over to the next test."

"Hooray," the boy replied calmly.