Down the Tube VII End

Before I came here I remember seeing a film on the internet of a man who was trapped in a lift for over 40 hours. I remember watching and round about hour 38 thinking ‘don’t worry you’ve only got a few more hours to go’.

If only someone was observing me now and thinking the same thing...

Down the Tube VI

Years ago I worked in a bank and the manager retired. We had to have two cocktail parties, one for the staff and colleagues and the other was for customers and the staff came too. When the new manager arrived we did the same again. I was younger then and had more than my fair share of dry martini and champagne. They had caterers who bought in the most delicious looking canapés. They weren’t delicious at all, they were filled with a kind of sludgy mixture of various shades and quite tasteless. I think that the only reason they got eaten was because we were all drinking far too much and didn’t care.

The food I receive in this place is the same stuff I am sure. I eat when I’m hungry because I am hungry and that’s all. Oh if I could have just one juicy, crisp apple…

Down the Tube V

How do you measure time when there is no day or night? Sleep is not reliable. Everyone has had nights which last forever and nights where it’s morning almost as soon as your head hits the pillow. I remember reading somewhere that if you are deprived of day and night your body adapts to a 21 hour cycle. How many of those have I had by now?

I did wonder about using hunger to measure time. I’m not even sure that I’m fed at regular intervals. I started to exercise doing what gymnastics I could think of. I try to sing to give me some rhythm to work to. If I’m being observed I must make a comical site

Down the Tube IV

You may well ask how am I communicating this information to whoever might read it. On the table is a computer which I can use to write. I’ve created calendars and graphs but my writing disappears when I’m asleep so I’m sorry if you’ve read this before. I’m not really sure how much I remember now. Not long after I entered the room I examined the computer for wires etc but found nothing. My access to the computer is restricted, I can’t explore the memory. If I try the lighting becomes uncomfortably bright. I do know that I can write what I like because I’ve experimented with insults gibberish and anything else I could think of to test the system.

Down the Tube III

Eventually the slide did come to an end. I was disappointed that there weren’t various shelves with objects on to look at along the way, like Alice had seen. My landing was reasonably soft, fortunately and a cover slid quietly over the chute entrance. I think that at first I was probably relieved that there was no one there. The relief didn’t last long as I was soon preoccupied with how I was going to get out.

Explore isn’t really the word I can use as there wasn’t really much to explore. There was the mattress on the floor where I had landed and a table with a chair. The walls floor and ceiling were all the same faded yellow colour. It was difficult to distinguish where walls became floor and ceiling it was so uniform. I have never been able to work out how the light system works at all. I do know that the light changes as I ‘behave’ myself. If I please whoever is controlling the room the light becomes more comfortable to my eyes. At one end of the room was a partition behind which I found a toilet and shower. Any necessities appear to arrive through a hole in the wall system but on first view I could not see any form of hatch. I spent a long time studying before I caught objects arriving and departing.

I have plenty of time just for observation.

Down the Tube: II

Perhaps I should start with how I found myself here in the first place. I went to bed as usual one evening, though thinking about it, slightly earlier that my habitual hour. You know the sensation of falling you sometimes get when you are dropping off? Well that’s how I felt, I jerked awake and discovered that I was inside some sort of large tube, it was sloping enough for me to slide gently downwards propelled by my own weight. I wasn’t alarmed at the sensation, but more by finding myself in a totally unfamiliar situation. Alice in Wonderland occurred to me; Was I falling inside a technically designed rabbit hole?

The slide seemed uncomfortably long to me. My thoughts moved from amusement, fear, anger and back to fear again. Who or what would I find at the end? Why?

Down the Tube: I

When I was a child I lived in a village that was far away from any library. Fortunately my mother had a good friend who possessed bookshelves full of all types of books. I remember going home every Friday afternoon with armfuls of new books to read. At the age of 8 I already had a reading age of 13, according to tests which had been done at school, so it wasn’t long before I left childish books behind and was devouring science fiction and fantasy. I remember one day a school friend of mine looked up from the childish, illustrated book of Cinderella she was reading to tell me that science fiction was rubbish: ‘It will never happen’.
‘Why’ I wondered ‘did some people think that stories had to come true?’
Fortunately, as I was growing up I gravitated towards adults who understood my need to absorb new ideas and words.

Some of the books I read were collections of short fantasy stories. I think they might have appeared monthly and my mother’s friend had had a story published in one issue. A story I especially remember was written by an author supposedly shut in a room with nothing except a typewriter. He was expected to turn out reams of pages of writing in exchange for being deprived of day and night and fed tasteless purée. An interesting exercise if you think about it.

How was I to know that some stories do come true eventually and I was destined to take the place of that long ago writer? I wonder how many others have passed through here and how long they stayed, were they let out, sane or insane or did they die completely disorientated?