Hypnovember - Day 5: Uniform
#46 of Hypnosis
Again wanting to play with the prompt, I chose "uniform" as meaning "same" rather than "clothing." This short leans just a little into a horror aspect, I feel.
A white cube of a room. Plain and simple. Neat and orderly. Uniform. A ceiling, unblemished except for a panel of light, meets similarly unblemished walls, which meet a floor whose only defect from perfection is the presence of the room's lone occupant standing upon it.
He is a deer, naked from the waist up. A bar code is dyed into the fur of his right arm, and the left arm similarly bears the number 524. He stares into white nothingness. He breathes. He does nothing else.
The room reflects the mind of it's occupant. The deer's mind is neat and orderly. And so the room is neat and orderly. He does only one thing, which is to measure the space between breaths. He has not deviated by more than a third of a second for hours. If he could think anything other than the measuring, he would no doubt be proud of himself.
Time passes. Nothing changes. The deer stares into the white and measures the span between breaths.
Then, a spot of blue along one wall. A stray thought in the mind of the deer. For the first time in nearly a day, the time between breaths shortens by two full seconds. The deer, seeing the flicker of blue in the corner of his eye, turns to look at it.
More thoughts come forth, inspired by the first, jumbling together in the deer's mind, cascading into a spray of color that explodes outwards from the initial dot of blue. Out dance radial lines of ever-shifting colors. Shapes grow in complexity as the thoughts behind them do as well. The deer glances away from the walls, down at the tattoos on his arms, and the question of what he has been doing writes itself on the wall in a smear of green turning yellow.
Then the colors start to fade. The deer looks up again and watches the lines retract. Shapes simplifying. Oranges and reds fade into whites and blacks. And when there is only black remaining, it shrinks until it disappears.
Once more the room is white and clean. As spotless and uniform as the mind it holds prisoner.
For so long, experimental subject 524 was told the room reflected his thoughts. He never noticed the moment when the room began to do what it wanted and his mind became the reflection.