A/N: This was not written by me. I asked a far more talented writer to write this because I'm not capable of writing art like this.
Please check out CrimsonCelestial, they deserve far more recognition for how talented they are.
Iwao Naomi. (20XX).The White Room and Present: Falsities, Candours, and Reviews. Unpublished manuscript.
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
In history and life, there is often a law beset in the aether: ‘to he that has, will be given; from he that has, will be taken’. None other than in the Japan of now, in this twenty-first century, that this law has struck the minds of masses from our nation. And even far beyond. I shudder out of disgust even as I pen the words. Hundreds of children have been robbed of their innocence, their lives, their future, and it’s by the depravity of despotic wealthy men and women.
[…]
White Room — a so-called educational facility, in actuality an accursed spot of torment, concealed by the collusion of a galore of adults — was unearthed in the year 20XX. The nation cries, beholds the news of the injustice that sits heavy now. Here it is damning and unchanging as death. But it’s those children, enslaved for years, who bear the true scars of this malevolence. For this to have gone unnoticed for years, where many children were abducted, were once named, then strangled in their souls; many to have died, been forgotten, irrevocably erased — how can one remain silent at this?
— — — —
Japan Today
The Prodigy
An expose on a secret facility known as the 'White Room'.
By Hotsumi Kojiri
TOKYO — We live under the shade of peace and security. A routine that speaks of the normality of the stability: early morning humdrum, clack-clack of keyboards, whistle of trains whizzing by.
A recent finding casts questions on the artifices enveloping us.
Unveiled by a fresh deployment of JSDF is a secret facility run illegally for years. A huge, abnormal site, with the structure’s interior the colour white as far as the eyes rove. The sacredness of the colour there, however, is a lie .
Children numbering in hundreds were liberated for they were held captives. We have yet to know of the true count of those children, most of whom have no identity. No ties to our country. They share but one thing: suffering on our soil.
The abuse many children underwent in this place called White Room is chilling.
Mind in pain: probing at how from nothing from our universe emerged, know all that followed the first vivacious second which gave gravity and all forces governing physics, all beyond and expansive for words and conception of most adults; studying the limitation in the might of formal mathematical theories, prove as the great logician Kurt Gödel did the impossibility of proving completeness and consistency of a system, from within itself when sufficiently complex.
Body in pain: eight kilometres run as if simple stretching after leaving the comfort of bed; no pleasure on faces, same as the void of any want provided to their beings.
All these are but a speck of activities, abuse, that they were forced to endure.
To my great regret, though many children are saved now, it was too late for many others.
To take a life should never be easy, yet it has undeniably happened.
Comforting a child is an act equal in scale to ending a war. This is no hyperbole.
The end of life means the end of any good one can impart upon the world.
What man can quantify such a thing?
These people running this vile facility dared to assume they could do that, and more.
Crystallised knowledge and the strength of flesh can’t be ascertained reliably, let alone the breadth and width of the goodness of children.
Lines of scars that make one avert eyes in revulsion. Flesh that gives the illusion of worn-off leather. Injuries that ought to be few was a norm found here.
It is sickening.
We believe this to be a time of peace, safety. But this great sin is a stringent stain on the pretty lie. Why should our children pay such a price, when there is not even a great war?
Gimu is the duty of repaying debts owed. It is endless and can never be repaid fully.
What has occurred is very vast an atrocity. It is abhorrently unique. Children were tortured for the lie of neccesity. For the lie of necessity, despicable folks killed justice and morals in cold blood.
Elevating our nation to a stature of superiority and competence was their so-called objective.
How many parents across the world lost their families for this farce? How many children for years cried for help but never received any?
One is too many.
The soldiers upon breaching the facility’s insides discovered a lot: a huge and wide assortment of books, sophisticated equipment, abundance of nutritional pills and food stock, and children trapped like wild animals to be observed through a one way glass.
Upon further search they stumbled upon a sector, similar to the prior ones, where several other children were found and rescued. But this sector was worryingly barren.
Life, however, was present.
It was found, then, that this specific sector housed a single child. In the past it held more, but now those children are no more. For how many years was this one child, separated from any human contact, trapped like some rabid beast? For what worthless value were so many forced in this twisted torture?
The revelation was the start of horrors.
Ayanokouji Kiyotaka is the child’s name. Hardly older than eight years. Caged alone, the JSDF found him alone in this sector.
He was alone, as if a miraculous survivor of a great calamity.
Few of the children younger than young Kiyotaka, the very children who survived that hellish prison, called him the survivor of “the demonic fourth generation”.
In a place that was hell, was even another hell found.
We lack knowledge at present to the full extent of this. But one thing certain is that the creator of this wretched facility was a legitimate scoundrel. Every cell of him.
He was the one who established this cruel farce, the very blood father of young Kiyotaka.
It has been confirmed, too, that Kiyotaka was kept in the facility since infancy, and so were a few others. Many others were appended to different sectors, after illegally obtained from various parts of the world, on the basis of age.
From further forage into the encrypted logs, it was discovered that the “4th generation” at present only held records of young Kiyotaka. Moreover, a title “White Room Masterpiece” was present, and isn’t yet understood what it entails, aside from the facility’s goal being achieved.
The connotations remain grim nonetheless.
Barely viewed as human, their psyche is wounded.
The other children didn’t greet the soldiers, didn’t even smile. All they showed was a restrained confusion. Young Kiyotaka, on the other hand, was the picture of an expressionless sculpture.
He had proceeded through his life mired in a variety of hellish tasks.
Alone he was attempting to prove the Magic Wand theorem. A herculean endeavour.
For it he delved into many things: ideas of the low entropy method of M. Einsiedler, A.Katok, E. Lindenstrauss; results of G. Forni and of M. Kontsevichon Lyapunov exponents of the Teichmüler geodesic flow; attempts in iterative improvement of the properties of the invariant measure inspired by the approach of G. Margulis and G. Tomanov to the actions of unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces; and more — to no avail.
The logs provided, moreover, a mind-bogglingly high assessment of his physical fitness, agility, endurance, balance, muscle power, and body composition.
Kiyotaka persevered through a sickening volume of physically intensive training. It is a miracle that, at present, he hasn't shown to have any body impairments.
Mind and body were tormented in conjunction.
By fabricating an environment that led to the deprivation of any information they deemed unnecessary, an abhorrent and baseless method, the facility had aimed to transcend the limits of learning.
A possible hypothesis of the facility’s procedural principles appears to be a complete elimination of all extraneous cognitive load, a concept from John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory published in a science journal in 1988.
A massive mockery; shameless, cruel, and moronic.
One’s heart is seized up in sorrow, which makes one wish this were all a ruined dream.
But this is a reality so grievous that how can a human possibly stand it.
We have failed against this brutality. There are names of children which will never be known. They were subjected to great terror all for naught but cruelty and selfishness.
Giri is the concept of moral duty. We all have duties: to families, to friends, to colleagues, to employees, and to ourselves. Giri is to maintain the myriad of these duties in balance, to give them all the weight they deserve.
In neglect, we failed our duty to these children.
Worse, the creator of this wretched establishment failed the obligation to his family, to his son, to his culture.
Who failed in the present time precisely?
Many people are immersed in a foolish discourse of assigning culpability for this man-made disaster. Some others are obstinate in their refusal that such a great sin has occurred in our land.
This is no time for such idiocy.
Children have been brought out from that now defunct bastion of systemic evil.
There is nothing discrediting the information released. Pieces of information aren't plenty, the logs being strongly encrypted. But it is a recent event and the insidious secrets are being unveiled slowly, surely.
But why does it matter that one needs the exact measure of sin? That should be left to the eyes of scholars and historians.
The strides of the kind and compassionate cannot be measured. Perhaps, it should never be possible. If you could measure love in kilograms, spite in hours, and pain in metres — the world won't be well anymore.
We, the people who are human by the act of our empathy and the burning shame that such a tragedy should occur, must vow to take actions that no child ever should face such torment.
No man in only superficial human skin should be able to grip life like this.
Such crime should have never existed.
But for now, the children who are saved, late as it might be, will be helped. The government is rightfully dedicating several facilities to help the children recover and assimilate into society.
The structures of greedy tyrants fall in time, but the acts of good can be felt to this day.
The children who have suffered must relish that comfort we have known.
We call this a time of peace and stability. Many call it the best time to be alive through all of human history. People enslaved no longer, ruled by cruel dictators no more, and neither are they restricted from the privilege of education for arbitrary reasons.
The chains that had bound these children away from our world must be broken.
They deserve it more than our yearning to forget this burning shame at another man's crime.
Power is a debt owed to the powerless. Do we understand it? Here we are powerless against the greatest sin of this decade, perhaps even century. Many powerful humans did as they pleased. Thus, however we may please to console the unease marring our hearts by this atrocity, it cannot be done.
Our nation will never forget this. Never forget this. Men cannot change history.
We can only give help to these nameless and named children. Shall it ever end?
Men have come to know when the stars shall die, but the knowledge of empathy, the weight borne by it, is what should never be lost. White Room inflicted a wound to the entire mankind that even the ravages of time might not heal. There are many such scars in our collective heart.
The personnel involved in the running of this White Room have been neutralised as per the orders of the general of the JSDF force leading the raid on the facility.
When asked the general replied with the actions being necessary. His exact words:
“We walked on the seemingly endless white land. One of the girls there, merely seven year old, asked us where in the world she would go. What direction to start out? She, who didn't even know where her home was... White Room is the definitive refutation of the grand illusion that humans become better by being more educated.”
— General Amasawa Ichigo
This article is one of the many to come about White Room, as more details are uncovered.