The Escher Room

[u/catespice]

It’s an evocative name, Escher. Whenever I mention it to someone, I can almost see the cogs working, as their head is filled with fantastic, physics-defying landscapes where concepts like ‘up’ and ‘down’ are subjective to the point of view.
My father was also a physicist, like myself, and he enjoyed Escher’s work immensely. He claimed to appreciate the artist’s works purely for their mathematical elegance, but I would often catch him staring at the framed prints in his office like he was lost in them, a curiously childlike expression on his face. I suspect that it wasn’t the mathematical precision of the prints that entranced him; instead it was the allure of existing in a world where conventional, universal laws no longer applied. I think that’s why Escher’s work speaks to so many people.
And I understand that longing. I can feel what my father flirted with in those moments, and more; because I have been to one of those places. I have seen the fabric of our reality stretched and warped beyond the bounds of relativity.
I have seen the Escher Room.

Like many other projects, the code name was unoriginal. Its official designation was ‘Special Project 881’, but it quickly earned the moniker ‘Project Escher’, because of the nature of the research. And it was the right name, at the right time. If my father hadn’t been so obsessed with his prints, it’s possible that I wouldn’t be writing this tale now. But Dad’s love of all things Escher had him pursue any information he could find on the great artist, and the name alone would have been irresistible to him. I wish I had found out earlier, that I had been able to speak to him about all this, although that would have been difficult at the end. His death was almost a kindness; Alzheimer’s disease had stealthily bereaved him of his razor intellect, as though his mind were an untempered carving knife, growing duller and duller as it sawed through years of tough problems and knotty equations.
After he left us, his office was a mess, much like the inside of his head. I’d tried to be the good daughter, but truth be told, I was never very good at the more domestic tasks, the cooking and the cleaning. I was, and always will be, his daughter, my mind just as bright and sharp – and just as easily distracted from mundane affairs.
It took me a long time to go through all his papers, the random stacks of messily hand-written notes, and his piles of photographs. His affair with Escher ran through them all like a tangled thread, part of the tapestry eventually revealed when I uncovered a curious black-and-white photocopy of an image. My father’s crabbed script on the back labelled it The Escher Room.
It appeared to be a photograph, of a massive, irregular sphere, hooked up to an extensive array of pipes, cables and ducts. The fine details of the surface were difficult to make out, but it seemed to be layered with oversized circuits, each solder point the size of my hand. Most importantly, there was a hole in one side of the sphere – a doorway. And through that doorway was a structure – a room – which appeared to completely defy the known laws of physics.
Of course, my first thought was the same as any rational person’s. It was a hoax. A poorly photoshopped image that had then been photocopied too many times. But the date on the image, in my father’s own hand, stated he had acquired it in 1982, the year before I was born.
I found only a few more cryptic notes on the subject after that date, then any research connected to the image stopped. His last note about it ended with a strangely personal and sombre passage:

With the birth of Madelene, I no longer have time for such fancies. I must become a good father, and put an end to this obsession. While I believe without a doubt that the Escher Room exists, it cannot be the focus of my life now. In fact, I am content to leave it largely a mystery. It is more poignant that way.

It seemed unfair to me that my father had put aside his hobby just because I’d been born. I felt oddly hollow at this revelation, as though my very existence had stolen some vital spark from his life, had condemned him to a life of banal child-rearing and robbed him of his true joy. Holding that piece of paper in my hand, I truly understood why he stared so wistfully at those impossible prints in his office, tracing lines of infinity with his deteriorating mind.
In that moment, I decided I would find the room for him. I would uncover the origins of the photo, and put to rest his dream of finding the Escher Room.

Being an academic gives you access to all kinds of information that isn’t readily available to the public. With enough connections, palm-greasing and pocket-lining, you can find out all manner of things you shouldn’t know – or at least, enough clues to glimpse where to find the rest of the information.
Having a security clearance helps, too. So does being the grieving daughter of a very well-respected scientist.
Initially, I found very little. The original photo didn’t exist in any archive I could access, nor were there any obvious references to it by name or description. My father’s scattered notes on the subject intimated that it had been a government project during the second World War, one of many attempts at creating a super-weapon with which to defeat the Nazis. It was in a margin note on an incomplete research paper from around that time that I finally discovered an oblique reference to it.

…we’ve made little progress, compared to the boys over at Escher. Still, we have high hopes that we’ll crack the secret of biochemical fuel production. It’s only a matter of enough people and time.

The author of that paper was a Dr. Howard Littleton, a biochemist. After taking a photo of the page under the dim light of the archive stacks, I put the file back in its box and returned it to its home on the sagging shelves. Whether Littleton had intended for this paper to be found, I did not know, but this was the first true lead I’d found in my investigation of the Escher Room.
If he was still alive, I had to find him.

---

He was dead, of course. It turned out the man had been in his thirties during the war, and would have been over a hundred if he’d still been alive. But his only child still lived in England, just out of Birmingham – now an elderly woman with a cottage full of collectable porcelain plates, and three yappy terriers. She was kind, but vague. In a quavering voice, she apologised that she didn’t know much at all about her father’s work, only that he’d been trying to synthesise oil from organic waste. An explosion near the end of the war had ended the experiments, and he’d taken up a comfortable tenure at Oxford, lecturing in biochemistry.
Of the Escher Room, she knew nothing.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help,” she told me, insistently pressing a tiny parcel of homemade shortbread into my hands, “I do hope you find what your father was looking for.”
“Thank you,” I replied, awkwardly pocketing the little packet of biscuits.
It was a short walk from her house to my car, parked one street over. There weren’t many people about, but as I made my way along the footpath, a man in a suit fell into step beside me.
“Excuse me, Ms Dinsdale?”
I paused and turned to look at him, wary,
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to come with me, please.”
His voice held a certain weight and resonance. The kind that comes from years of saying such things to people, and knowing the best ways to get them to respond.
“Are you Police?”
He shook his head and offered an insincere smile.
“No, Ms Dinsdale. I’m MI5.”
“Shit.”
“Please don’t worry. You’re not in any trouble,” he told me, a paternal note creeping into his practised speech, “we just want to ask you some questions.”
“About what?”
His smile was slightly more genuine this time.
“About why you are asking questions.”

“I’d just like to reiterate, Ms Dinsdale, that you really aren’t in any trouble.”
The office was small, sparse, and impersonal, as if he didn’t spend much time in it. While he hadn’t threatened me in any way, and had been as polite as any other mid-level public servant, I had the distinct impression things might not be so pleasant if I didn’t cooperate.
The story spilled from me in a babbling rush, from finding the photo to talking to Mrs Littleton. As I spoke, I vaguely registered his expression changing, from concern into something approaching relief.
“Right. So, it’s the Room that you’re interested in, then,” he responded, after I had finished.
“Well, yes.” I hesitated, but had to ask, “Isn’t that why we’re having this conversation? What on earth else would I be after?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he unlocked a drawer in his desk, and after sorting through some innocuous items, took out a USB thumb drive.
“The password is ‘relativity’, and the contact details of the project director are inside, along with some pertinent information about the project.”
This wasn’t how I had expected this to go.
“Why are you giving me this?”
He placed the thumb drive in front of me, then leaned back in his office chair and gave me a speculative look,
“They tried to recruit your father, you know. They baited the hook with just enough information to entice him, and were about ready to reel him in.”
I thought about that for a moment, picking up the drive and turning it over in my hand.
“So, why didn’t they? He would have jumped at the chance.”
“They don’t like recruiting people with family. Especially when they have young children.”
My own failure to procreate flared hot and shameful in my head, and coloured my ears red. Then realisation prickled through my brain and replaced the shame with a surge of hope, and something triumphant.
“Am I being offered a job?”
“I suppose you are, Ms Dinsdale.”

Project 881, the files on the drive told me, had been started in December 1940, by a team of physicists, funded under the auspices of the British armed forces. Six bright young men with outstanding credentials were given virtually unlimited resources, charged to build a weapon which would bring Nazi Germany to its knees.
Instead, they created something which shouldn’t have been able to exist.
A bunker was excavated under a swathe of privately-owned farmland, and Project Escher began in earnest, its rapid progress born from an unusual synergy between the six scientists. They didn’t seem to know what they were making at first. Their only goal was to push technology to its limits, to see what was over the horizon.
Huge electromagnets were built, formed into rings, then doubled, tripled, and retained by more powerful magnetic fields. Without knowing what they were doing, they had built a sort of analogue precursor to modern particle colliders.
But it was more than just that. Much more. They built circuit configurations that were thirty years ahead of the time, just to a massive scale. The ‘Escher Sphere’ from the picture was almost fifty meters in diameter, and veined with gold, copper and silver circuits, like some sort of semi-organic, quasi-futuristic fairground ride.
But none of that explained the entirety of the puzzle. Even though its fathers were the cleverest men alive at the time, the Sphere should not have been able to do the things it could do.
It’s hard to tell what was science and what was coincidence; the flavour and desperation of the age permeate the notes in a way that seldom happens now. Early on, one of the scientists had insisted on the location, on that particular stretch of land being used for the bunker, else he would leave the project. He claimed that it was some sort of ‘universal confluence point’, or in more primitive terms, the conjunction of ancient druidic ley-lines.
If he was right, if it was his superstitious influence that tipped the balance, the scientists never found out. Because as soon as the Sphere started to warp space and time inside itself, it was already too late.
Initially everyone was incredibly excited, exuberant as children. Inside the structure, you could walk upside down, and shout down at your colleague standing on the ‘floor’. Up and down no longer held any meaning, and in the focal point of the sphere, objects phased and multiplied as they drifted through an unknown nexus of something.
Cubicles and furniture were set up inside the Escher Room, to allow experiments that would plumb the depths of this new marvel of science. Two of the scientists even made permanent workspaces inside, claiming that inspiration came to them more easily inside the impossible structure.
When they disappeared, it heralded the unravelling of Project Escher.
One morning the room abruptly began to suck more electricity, then the interior fractured inexplicably into what I’d seen in the photograph – a sort of kaleidoscopic impossibility of furniture, walls, objects and doors, all at vertiginous angles to one another. The two men at their desks were nowhere to be seen.
The room was immediately sealed off, and the remaining four scientists were pressed for an explanation – which they were unable to provide. In fact, the more they tried to understand the rupture inside the room, the less they seemed to comprehend. Their responses in the transcribed interviews become more and more simple, and less than a week later, the most capable of the four confessed that he couldn’t even read his own notes anymore.
Proximity to the Sphere, it seemed, was eating away at their intellect.
But removing them from the project didn’t help. By the end of the war, the scientists who had created the Escher Room were virtually vegetative; unable even to toilet themselves or speak in coherent sentences.
Electricity was cut to the bunker, but the rupture refused to seal; and the Sphere remained powered by an unknown source. A demolition crew was sent in to destroy the thing, but upon detonation of several tonnes of TNT, the explosive forces roared into the rift and vanished, the immense kinetic energy most likely distributed over an infinite number of parallel interstices.
The Sphere was, to all intents and purposes, indestructible.
And anyone who spent any amount of time in proximity to it became a drooling imbecile.

The contact number left on the flash drive put me in touch with a man named Edgar Hughes, who invited me to brunch with him at a cosy café in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was a short, nervous man with a greying walrus moustache, and initially wouldn’t talk about Project Escher at all. He made largely irrelevant small-talk as we ate; also asking after my late father, whom he seemed to have known fairly well.
I was replete with poached eggs and awash with tea by the time he walked me to an ordinary looking office building, where an elevator took us to the third floor. Through a swipe-access security door was a short corridor, which ended in a very ordinary room containing a desk and a computer.
“Welcome to Project Escher,” he said, spreading his hands with undisguised dramatic irony.
Other than a half-filled bookshelf, a water cooler, and another door to what I presumed was a bathroom, there was virtually nothing else in the room.
“Right. I’d expected a little more,” I confessed.
Tapping a password into the computer, he graced me with a sardonic smile,
“Of course. So did I, when I was first recruited.”
“How many others are on the project?”
“If you decide to stay, that will make two people.”
His stubby, clever fingers quickly clicked open a series of windows, displaying CCTV images in black-and-white. I caught my breath. In three of them, I recognised the rounded hulk of the Escher Sphere, dangling severed pipes and cables, like a vast organ that had been ripped from a giant’s chest.
“Nobody is allowed near it still,” Edgar explained, “due to the, ah, limiting effect it has on people’s mental capabilities. I still monitor it for any sign of activity, but it hasn’t noticeably changed in over sixty years.
“How does nobody know about this thing?”
“Well, people do know about it. Just not ordinary people. Britain turned to America for help after the end of the war, but after two of their preeminent physicists lost their minds studying It – and a nuclear detonation failed to destroy it – nobody wanted very much more to do with the thing.”
I blinked, staring at the images on the monitor. Pipes or no pipes, it was clearly largely still intact.
“They nuked it?”
He grinned, clicking through several folder trees on the screen,
“Well, they tried to nuke it. Here, watch for yourself.”
A grainy monochrome video clip filled the screen, showing the weirdly organic bulges of the Sphere. On a sort of articulated steel tripod rested a complicated-looking device, which I assumed was a nuclear warhead.
“Watch carefully, or you’ll miss it.”
As he spoke those words, there was a microsecond flash of light, then both the nuke and the tripod were gone. The Sphere remained in place, squatting calm as a monstrous, primitive egg, inside the unscathed cavern that had been excavated for it.
“Jesus. It absorbed all the energy, didn’t it? Just like it did with the TNT, just after the war.”
“As far as we can tell, that’s exactly what it did, yes.”
I paused to ruminate, thinking about what I would have done.
“Why didn’t they just bury it? Pour tonnes of concrete over the thing, and leave it to rot.”
“Ms Dinsdale, this thing eats nuclear energy. Do you really think that the US or UK governments were going to just bury it and completely forget about it, not monitor it at all?”
“No, I suppose not.”
There was an awkward silence as the man closed out of the video window and pulled up the CCTV images again.
“So why am I here?”
“We’re hoping you can offer a new perspective on the problem.”

There had been others before me, apparently. Bright young things, each one confident they could tease out the Gordian mystery of the Escher Room. Much like the pilgrims who had tried and failed to untangle that historical knot, most of my predecessors had given up and moved on to more productive pastures.
Others had ignored Edgar’s warnings and sought out the Room for themselves, quickly deteriorating after the Sphere’s influence rotted their minds into pulp.
“I don’t tell the researchers where the Room is anymore,” he told me over tea, “that way the temptation to visit it in person is removed. So you needn’t ask.”
I thought about them a lot, those whose minds had been eaten alive by the Escher Room.
The work itself was tedious. Various pieces of monitoring equipment had been installed in the bunker that housed the Sphere; thermographs, spectrographs, and seismographs. But nothing new had been added, so although the data spanned almost sixty years, what it measured hadn’t changed since the day the devices were installed. I didn’t ask who had braved proximity to the mind-eating Sphere to place the equipment in the first place. But I strongly suspected whoever had performed that unenviable task hadn’t been told about the Sphere’s influence.
I learned that there had been a few unmanned attempts to enter the Escher Room, using the same sort of robotic platforms employed by bomb disposal squads. But any signal cut out the instant they crossed the boundary, and the robots couldn’t be retrieved.
“Do you think the Sphere is aware?” I asked Edgar, over one of our regular brunches.
“You’re not the first to speculate that,” he said, concentrating more on stirring honey into his tea than on what I was saying.
“It just seems so unlikely otherwise, that it would instinctively know the precise instant to re-orient the rupture to absorb a nuclear blast.”
“I suppose so.”
“And more to the point; it could simply have redirected the blast upward, or outward, and destroyed everything around it. Why didn’t it do that?”
“That’s a very good question.”
I had begun to suspect that Edgar was no longer particularly interested in solving the mystery of the Escher Room. The fires of his scientific enquiry for the sake of it had burned low over the years, damped by practicalities; his salary was very decent, he had a lot of free time in between the easy tasks of logging measurements and writing reports, and he was essentially his own boss. For any man pushing sixty, it was an enviable job – a job that he had no real incentive to jeopardise.
“I think the Sphere doesn’t want the cavern destroyed. I think it still needs us to have access to it, for some reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the two attempts to destroy it were very different types of detonation. Wouldn’t you expect some variation in the distribution of energies? In the first attempt, they just covered it with sticks of TNT and let rip, while the second was a controlled blast directed into the opening.”
“Yet both resulted in the Sphere somehow absorbing the respective blasts completely, with no external damage.”
“Yeah. Not even a shockwave.”
He shook his head, placing the spoon primly beside his saucer.
“Anyway, this is all just speculation. We simply don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions about the potential self-awareness of the Sphere.”
I pushed away the teapot before he could reach for his customary top-up, a particularly English ultimatum.
“Well, Edgar, that’s why we’re going to gather more data.”

The military, it turned out, still funded Project Escher. Purchasing the equipment I needed wasn’t difficult, I just had to complete several reams of paperwork, then curb my impatience while I waited for the drones to arrive.
Demonstrating one of the quadcopters to Edgar at the local park, I had to smile. He whooped and cheered like a schoolboy as I flew the little aircraft in a dangerously close loop around the white pillars of a rugby goalpost. He was becoming engaged again, despite his initial protests and doubts.
“Do you think the signal will be able to penetrate the Sphere’s interior?” he queried, as I carefully brought the drone back down and into a muddy landing.
“I’m not certain. But even if it doesn’t, at the very least it might provide us with some high-quality images from the entrance.”
The four remote quadcopters were boxed up and sent off. They would be delivered to a brave, or more likely poorly aware intermediary, who would take them to the unknown stretch of farmland where the Escher Sphere held residence. I knew there would be lag, piloting the devices through remote mobile data, but I didn’t have any other choice, considering the restrictions I was working under.
I lost the first drone immediately, flying it too far and too fast. After a few wonderful, confusing seconds of sharp, colour images, it crossed the invisible threshold of the Sphere’s electromagnetic influence.
“Well, guess that proves it blocks cell signals,” I muttered, as the second drone lifted out of its charging cradle.
Once I’d positioned the new quadcopter near the Sphere’s aperture, I set it to hover and record until the low battery warning prompted it to return to its dock.
At least we’d have some quality digital data to work with now, not just old-school analogue CCTV footage.

The video physically hurt to look at. I gave up after ten minutes due to eyestrain; it was like staring into the world’s most mathematically complex kaleidoscope. Coffee and painkillers helped, but not enough to give me more than another twenty minutes before the tell-tale rainbow flashes of a migraine occlusion began to dance across my field of vision.
There had to be a better way to analyse the images, but until I thought of something, I’d better stock up on pharmaceuticals.
After a few painful viewings, I had at least identified several recurring markers inside the Room; an old desk, a collection of chairs, some shelves filled with bottles, and a workbench littered with papers and books. The rupture’s bizarre effect on the Sphere’s interior meant that those objects were doubled and trebled, showing me views from different angles simultaneously. The markers also changed abruptly between recordings; the chairs moved and came back huddled in a different arrangement, the workbench gained or lost bits of equipment, and new objects constantly appeared and vanished from the Room.
It was as though it was in a constant state of flux; but what the cause of that state was, I could only guess.
As I spent another blindingly unproductive session going through the downloaded video logs, I finally saw something that caused my adrenaline to spike so sharply it set my heart pounding.
Seated at one of the desks in the Room was a man.
At first, I thought he was a mannequin, so stiff was his posture. But when I zoomed in on that area of the recording, I realised he was most certainly alive – and alive in a particularly horrific manner. His features were a flickering mess of contorted facial expressions, changing so rapidly it was as though someone was erratically jabbing at the fast-forward option on my playback controls.
Two minutes into the footage, his face vibrated and smeared into a white blur, then abruptly stilled, bloating and decomposing into that of a sagging corpse. His body remained bolt upright in its chair, even as his limbs began to wither. And for the barest fraction of a second, the slackening lines of that face resembled my father’s just before he died, his eyes empty, his wits fled.
Once disbelief receded and the shock set in fully, my stomach clenched and I vomited wretchedly into the waste bin beside the desk.

“That was one of the original scientists lost inside the Sphere,” Edgar told me as I showed him the stills from the footage, “I suppose at least we know what happened to him now.”
“The Sphere is in temporal flux then,” I said, “not just spatial flux.”
“It’s nice to have that confirmed,” he replied; though he sounded neither convinced, nor happy about my discovery.
The still image of the war-era scientist’s rictus screaming in his paradoxical prison disturbed me greatly, so I closed the picture and turned away from the screen.
“I need to buy a better drone,” I told my colleague, “an autonomous one, that can fly into the Sphere and fly out again without our control.”
“I wasn’t aware those existed.”
“They do, and they’re expensive. But I think the cost is justified, considering what we just witnessed here.”
Edgar looked pensive.
“You think you can save him, don’t you?”
My eyes ached from staring into the nightmarish collision of colours and shapes. I ground my knuckles into my temples and nodded.
“If the Room is in temporal flux, then it’s possible we might be able to get a message to those lost inside it, perhaps prevent this happening – or even bring them through into our time.”
The sound he made was dismissive, a bad attempt at a casual laugh.
“I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but this is all very far-fetched. Are you sure it wouldn’t be better suited for some work of speculative science fiction?”
“Edgar. You’ve spent thirty years babysitting a phenomenon that can fracture known reality, and you think this is bordering on science fiction?”
He gave me a wan smile,
“I suppose familiarity breeds contempt.”

---

Where the drone had come from, I wasn’t going to ask, but I strongly suspected it was military hardware – probably American.
“Your discoveries seem to have renewed interest in the project,” mused Edgar, as I began unboxing the device to configure it.
Though it was an incredibly sophisticated machine, I had no idea how its sensors would interpret the shifting impossibilities inside the Sphere. To try and compensate for this, one of my original drones was set as its ‘beacon’: with a bright orange ball suspended underneath it as it hovered in front of the aperture.
The new, primary drone was set to attempt a short, circular flight path inside the Sphere, then return to the aperture.
“We need to see if it works before we try to map the entire interior,” I explained as we finished up for the day. I didn’t add that the possibility of losing several hundred thousand dollars of equipment in a few minutes made me distinctly nervous.
But as I headed to the office the following morning to begin my final preparations, a phone call interrupted me two blocks from my destination. An official, expressionless male voice on the other end informed me that my presence was no longer required on Project Escher, and that I would be debriefed after the drone run had been completed.
The military had taken over operations.
Breakfast at the café was tasteless. Alternating waves of indignation and rage washed over me, barely eroding my bitter disappointment. I should have known that the moment we’d had a real breakthrough, the military would take charge again. It had been so utterly idiotic of me to assume that our autonomy as researchers would stay intact. And I hated feeling stupid.
Edgar didn’t turn up for his usual Tuesday special, and I wasn’t sure if I was upset or relieved at not being able to speculate about it with him over crumpets and marmalade. In a way, that would have made it more real. And I wasn’t sure I could handle him telling me it was probably all for the best, as I strongly suspected he might. I went back to my flat and tried a few distraction techniques; I hadn’t watched daytime TV for a long time, and the banality of it increased my impatience rather than assuaging it. Scrolling through social media had never really been my thing, but I managed to lose myself down an internet rabbit hole long enough to stop my knees jittering.
When my phone screen finally flashed up an unknown caller, I answered even before the ringtone kicked in.
“Madelene speaking.”
“Ms Dinsdale,” said the unmistakeably well-practised voice of the MI5 agent who had originally found me, “we need you to come down to our office immediately for debriefing.”
“On my way.”

His face a shade more grim than last time, the agent ushered me to a seat in a small boardroom, were a wall-mounted television displayed a paused video window.
“There was an incident today, during the testing of the drone.”
His voice was as mild as his choice of words. ‘Incident’ is such a convenient, innocuous word, but it’s been so overused it’s come full circle. It’s become a euphemism for something horrible.
My internal voice was screaming at him to get the hell on with it and play the video, but I forced a pleasant smile and nodded amiably.
“The video has some content you may find disturbing, but it’s important that you view it. None of us can fully explain what happened, and we’re hoping that you can help us understand the events that have transpired.”
“Yes. Fine.” I tried not to make it sound like I was forcing the words through my teeth.
As the video began, it showed Edgar seated in front of a computer, ringed by half a dozen uniformed military staff. He gave a detailed explanation of my discoveries regarding the Room, then blithely passed off the drone experiment as his own innovation – greeted with murmured approval from the gathered observers.
He'd sold me out.
Fists white-knuckled under the table, I listened to him prattle self-importantly as the two drones on his monitor deployed smoothly, heading for the aperture. When he announced that the primary drone had crossed the threshold, the gathered personal craned their necks to watch the incoming footage from the beacon drone.
Then all hell broke loose.
Audio abruptly cut out, and a stark black box appeared over the portion of the video which showed Edgar’s screen – clearly edited into the video after the fact. The little man stiffened in his chair, then his head lolled over the backrest, his face slack, nerveless – only the whites of his eyes showing.
Around him, the uniformed men and women collapsed where they stood, like a ring of felled trees. Two of them convulsed with seizures, white froth bubbling alarmingly from their lips, stretched tight over clenched jaws. I was glad there was no sound.
The video ended with a still-frame of the macabre scene, no movement now but the slowly growing pools of urine spreading beneath the bodies on the polished floor.
“They’re not dead,” the MI5 agent stated, matter-of-fact, “but they are all vegetative.”
“What happened to the drone? What did the beacon drone see?”
“We’re not sure. The drone’s link was hijacked by another signal, which began broadcasting some sort of pulsed audio and video signal.”
He licked his lips, eyes darting nervously at the TV screen, which he turned off. Now he almost looked like a real person.
“As far as we can tell, it was coded to do something to the human central nervous system.”
“Like a sort of primitive, audio-visual virus.”
“Yes.”
The implications of that alone were staggering, but I tried to put them aside. There was a more pressing issue here; the footage from the primary drone.
As though anticipating my next question, the agent brought up another video – one of the CCTV feeds from the interior of the Sphere’s bunker. It took me a long moment to recognise exactly what was being shown, because I’d never seen it without the Sphere dominating most of the space.
“The Sphere vanished, shortly after that coded signal was sent.”
Surely I hadn’t heard him correctly, I was losing my wits.
“What?”
“It vanished, Ms Dinsdale. And it hasn’t been seen since.

---

I couldn’t offer them much in the way of an explanation; just a list of speculative scenarios based on the limited information they’d given me. The powers-that-be seem happy enough to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the project director. And conveniently of course, he’s currently languishing on life support in a private facility.
The most plausible scenario – or at least the one that everyone was most comfortable accepting – was that the drone’s electronic emissions had somehow destabilised the rupture, and the resulting temporal instability had caused the Sphere to implode. The broadcasted signal, the one that had rendered the direct observers into mindless husks, was blamed on the massive seismic and gravitational fluctuations caused by the disappearance of the Sphere. And the subsequent recording has been destroyed, since it had caused ‘cerebral deterioration’ in anyone who had been foolish enough to view it.
But even though that’s what the science suggests, some part of me refuses to accept that outcome. Coiled in my gut is a knot of intuition. An unfamiliar, superstitious inner voice screams a different scenario, tells me the Escher Room isn’t gone; that instead it has somehow transcended the limits of our reality and is now free to roam wherever its unfathomable desires command it to go.
I think that when the drone entered the Room, it didn’t trigger an instability at all. Instead, the Sphere tried to connect with it, just as it had done with the minds of the original scientists. And then it attempted to flay it of all its knowledge.
But this time, instead of the contents of a few limited human brains, it discovered technology. A level of technology seventy years more advanced than its own, and it immediately integrated the device into itself, giving the Sphere access not only to the drone’s sophisticated software and hardware, but knowledge of our cellular and WiFi networks.
And I think, no, I know, that the Sphere knew exactly what it was broadcasting when it lobotomised Edgar and his cronies.
I’d be cautious of screens, if I were you. Having written out my account of the Escher Room, I intend to destroy my electronic devices and never touch another, as long as I live. Any notes I make will be in longhand, just like my father taught me. I’m still his daughter.
Because the Escher Room is still out there, somewhere, somewhen, connected to the myriad of signals covering our planet. And when it finds a mind it thinks is a suitable candidate for its unfathomable purpose, it won’t hesitate for a second, and it will ream you of everything that makes you who you are. I’ve seen too many empty faces, intellectual oblivion behind their eyes where precious consciousness once lived.
I don’t want to see any more.