An interesting day.

I woke up this morning with a sore foot and decided to check out those nearby buildings which seemed to have doors.

This was a little frustrating. The buildings I could get into were either completely empty or incomprehensible. Sometimes both. For example: there was one hemispherical structure, made of seamless glossy-white, about ten metres across. When I found the door and went in I discovered that it was the top half of a hollow sphere. The inside glowed gently in that way that these buildings all seem to.

The door opened onto a little balcony half-way up the sphere. Other than that, the sphere was completely smooth and empty. The balcony was surrounded by a safety railing, and mounted on a post was a little pedestal, only a few centimetres across. When I wanted at it, the sphere slowly started to darken and swirling lights began to fill the empty space. Streamers of red and green and violet, slowly twirling in place, distorting and fraying as they did so. All this in complete silence. Wanting at the pedestal again caused them to fade away and the lights to come up.

Pretty? Sure. Take it to Earth and you could charge admission. Use? Who knows? I spent half an hour watching the lights and left.

The blunt spiral I’d seen the first day turned out to be an office block. I think. The door opened readily to reveal a warren of offices around a central well, ramps spiralling up and down the well to get at the different levels. Each office was a reasonable size, had its own window, and was completely featureless; floor, ceiling, walls, all the same glossy-white. The ceiling glowed slightly and the floor was roughened slightly for traction, but that was it.

I did find one item of interest there; the doors (just vacant apertures) and the ramps were the right size and gradient for humans.

Another building was a series of concentric disks stacked on top of each other, each one smaller than the one below, forming a stepped cone. The door led to a featureless circular corridor encircling the building; opposite the door was a ramp that led me up to the roof of the bottom disk. Opposite the ramp was another door which opened into the second level, where the whole process was repeated again, and again, until finally when I limped up the ramp on the eighth level and opened the door I found myself on a circular catwalk at the very peak of the huge conical space inside the building. Miracle of miracles, this one wasn’t empty. Instead, it was filled with a complicated tangle of machinery, pipes and wires and crystal rods and support structures and organic-looking metal chambers, all in one huge mass, spreading its bulbous pseudopods through the vast space, and all wrapped around a single crystal column that pointed straight up the centre of the building. It stopped a few metres below me, aimed directly at the empty space that catwalk encircled. It was all quite silent and inert. There was, of course, no way down except the way I came.

After a few hours of this I came out of an empty building that was three cubes glued together and saw that off on the horizon, black clouds were massing. They were rising fast. In fact, as I stood and watched, I could see them move visibly, and lightning flickered constantly. There was no audible sound over the surf, and it was only then that I noticed that there were no bird-things on the sea front any more.

I immediately set off back towards the Hotel. It was about a kilometre and a half away, and with my leg I couldn’t walk very fast, and the storm front was moving extremely fast. I realised, when I was approaching the Hotel and watching the storm boil towards me, that I wasn’t going to make it. Regardless of the pain, I managed a kind of lurching gallop and I’d just reached the door when with a roar like God’s Own Express Train it hit the island.

I’m sure that if I hadn’t been sheltered by the mass of the Hotel I’d have been blown away. The winds were that powerful. As it was, the wall of air knocked me over, and as I cowered on the ground I could see by the illumination of continuous sheet lightning the forest practically knocked flat.

I frantically wanted the door open and crawled through. Unasked, it slammed to behind me, cutting the noise off like a knife; and as I picked myself up and looked back, I realised just what I’d missed. The storm—the term hurricane is inadequate—had picked up an ocean of water and was now dropping it on the island. The view was almost completely obscured by water pouring against the window; almost completely—I could just see, far off, a vast halo of electrical mayhem surrounding the Generator’s tip…

Had I still been outside, I would probably be dead by now. Drowned, crushed, or battered to death.

Inside, the Hotel’s incredible soundproofing cut the storm down to a faint whisper. But the floor was shaking…

I went on up to my room. I couldn’t even tell which floor it was on today. All the apartments’ windows faced the sea side, and the constant batter of water against the black-glass surface made it practically opaque.

The bathing pool surface was covered in little ripples. Up here the building’s shaking was more pronounced.

I sat and watched it for a couple of hours.

It was odd. When I thought back to my narrow escape, I felt… scared in retrospect. If I’d tripped on my shoelace, or fallen over a clump of grass, or slipped in some mud, or just stopped to watch the front for just a few more seconds, I could very well not be here now. The way the Hotel door had snapped shut behind me was preying on my nerves. A safety system? If I’d been just a little bit later, would the door have opened for me at all?

But now, in the Hotel and the apparent safety of my exotic, high-tech beach themed apartment, which now had the temperature turned up and the lights dimmed, listening to the muted thunder of the storm spending its energies on the apparently impervious structure of the building, I was not scared at all. In fact, I felt strangely comfortable and cozy.

I wondered whether I’d put my trust so completely into this place that it had completely blanketed my sense of fear. I had no way of knowing whether I was safe. At any moment that black-glass window could smash inwards, sharpened splinters ripping me to shreds that would then be pounded flat by the raging storm…

No. I didn’t believe it.

That scared me, just a little.

Eventually I ordered a meal, which I now can’t remember the contents of, soaked my foot in the pool again, and dozed off in the chair in front of the balcony window. I woke up a bit later in time to eat dinner and go to bed.

As I dictate this, the storm is still pounding at the window outside. I have successfully resisted the temptation to open it, just for a second…

I wonder what could be driving a storm of such colossal magnitude. Perhaps this planet’s terraforming needs work.

[transmit]

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