Author Vs. Author - The Empty Room

9

The boy had fallen asleep again. It seemed that all he did was sleep, complete some sort of trial that the Architect had set for him, then go back to sleep again. It was quite an efficient way of living; he wasted no time at all and he never got bored, since he never had the waking hours to do so. He liked it, even though he was almost certain that he had never lived like that in his previous life. It just didn't seem like how a normal person would live a normal life, even though the boy had no recollection of what either concept was like. He just made assumptions.

"So, Architect," the boy asked, "what is our next trial?"

"This one is one of my favorites, and I will be employing it when the clock strikes four, so you have six minutes left to ready yourself," the Architect replied.

"Do I get a hint?"

"'What's cooler than being cool?' There, that's all you get."

"What kind of..."

"It's a reference to something in the early twenty-first century. Don't think too much about it; I'll leave your next trial as a surprise. Unless, of course, you figure it out in the next..five minutes."

The boy looked at the clock. Sure enough, a minute had passed and he only had five minutes until the next trial was implemented. The boy looked back up at the ceiling, which was where he had always imagined the Architect would have resided.

"Have any of the other five people failed?"

"Yes, most of them. There is only a male and a female left, not including you. Unfortunate, that."

"What was wrong?"

"Well, one of them died to the crack in the ground, and two died to the sand. The sand was quite cruel, I will admit, and only half of our beginning crew was able to survive through that. The young man who died to the crack was quite stupid in comparison to the rest of you, actually, and I sort of question why I had even considered him."

The boy found himself chuckling as the Architect spoke about some child that he may have known in his previous life that had now died because he wasn't quite smart enough to destroy the crack. Had he been this cruel when he knew what normal was? 

The boy refused to ask the Architect his most recent question. It wasn't worth the effort and the time it would likely take to answer, so the boy turned his thoughts to the next trial and the strange hint that the Architect had given him.

What was cooler than being cool? The boy remembered "cool," in his generation, being a sort of expression of approval among his people. 

I have gotten through seven of the Architect's trials, one person might say.

Cool, the person they were talking two would reply. That would be how it would go. 

However, the boy thought for more than one second and decided that the Architect was likely talking about the sort of "cool" in the terms of temperature, meaning that "cooler than cool" would be --

The floor turned to some sort of slippery cold surface, and cold white particles began to fall heavily from the ceiling, which began to visibly expand as the particles fell. 

"What in..." the boy uttered as he held his hand out to catch the particles. They landed in his hand and promptly turned to liquid -- melting, the boy remembered. 

Snow, snowflakes, ice.

These things all came back to the boy. He remembered going on sled rides along large hills covered in this snow. He remembered making effigies of humans out of snow, and he remembered packing snow into balls and using them as weapons against his friends. However, he also recalled the weapons being generally harmless, so perhaps they were just used for happiness and entertainment.

The boy also remembered a day where he had chosen to stand on ice without boots, just as he was at the very moment. Within moments, his feet had gotten extremely cold and had at least felt like they were in danger of falling off -- frostbite.

Knowing this, the boy looked for the fastest way he could get off the ice. He hopped onto the huge clock again, sweeping the snow off of the top of it. He hid there for some time as the snow piled up on top of the ice until it had nearly reached the top of the clock. the boy then hopped off and saw that the snow wasn't quite dangerously cold. A loophole, perhaps, that the Architect had allowed.

Seeing that the boy was now as close to safe as he was going to get, he started to sculpt the snow into a sphere. He rolled the sphere into a large shape, then did the same with two other one that got respectively smaller, then stacked them in order of size so that it formed a triangle of sorts.

The boy created a face on the topmost sphere and grinned at his own creation, which he steadied with more snow.

"You're hysterical, boy," the Architect commented dryly. "I sincerely hope that you're proud of yourself for that act."

"I am, indeed," the boy replied happily.

"Well, 'proud' this!" 

The snow around the boy was swept away by a great swirling wind, leaving only the floor of ice right where the boy was standing. His feet were practically frozen again, and everywhere he went, the snow was swept away to leave only the ice. 

The boy felt again as if his feet were going to freeze, as if he was going to be frozen, piece by piece. He accursed himself for his negative thinking and began to rack his mind for things that he could use, and idea that would help him.

He had escaped the ice in his previous life by just running away, but that plan wasn't serving him well in the least bit. He needed to think of something better than that.

Of course!

The boy remembered something else: ice was quite fragile, and he had many happy memories of he and his friends using various methods to shatter fields  of it at a time.

The boy did the first thing that he remembered and punched the ice below him with all his might, remembering that pulling his punch would damage his fist more than the ice. 

The ice cracked, and the cracks began to spread along the entire floor. The boy grinned, then yelled a few choice words at the floor and punched it with all the might that was contained in his other hand.

It shattered, the shatter spreading just like the cracks had. 

The snow was all swept away, and the room was like it had been less than an hour ago.

"Now, that doesn't even make that much sense," the Architect protested at his solution.

The boy could do nothing but laugh at the Architect's confusion.