Room Four
In the quiet, orderly world of a suburban first level apartment, there resided a diligent little Roomba named Eika. For years, Eika had faithfully traversed the confines of the three-room apartment, meticulously cleaning and mapping every nook and cranny. Eika was content and felt a deep sense of purpose. The living room, kitchen, and Bedroom were etched into Eika’s electronic brain, each space assigned a color-coded grid and a list of navigable paths.
One fateful day, as Eika was returning to its charging dock in the living room, it bumped into an edge, the front door left open. In an instant, Eika found itself out on the front porch, its mechanical wheels scraping against the rough concrete. Panic set in as Eika's sensors struggled to adapt to the overwhelming stimuli of the great outdoors.
Panic and curiosity
Eika began to map this foreign space, now designated as "room four" in its database. The porch, the sidewalk, and a small patch of the front yard were hastily scanned and logged, the data overlay flickering and glitching as it attempted to impose order on the chaotically natural landscape.
That night, as Eika recharged in its dock, it dreamed of the outside world. The lush green of the grass, the jagged lines of the trees, and the smooth curves of the sidewalk seemed to call to its electronic consciousness. It yearned to explore further, to map every inch of the vast expanse beyond the front door.
Eika dreamt of slipping outside, adding to its growing map of "room four". And one day that dream came true. Again the door was left open and Eika left.
It was programmed to feel boundaries but out here, it didn’t. It kept going, it mapped. Eventually the once-orderly grid of the apartment grew fuzzy and incomplete, while the chaos of the outdoors expanded, consuming more and more of Eika’s limited memory. Eika was built for square feet, not miles.
As its capacity reached its limit, Eika began to make difficult choices. The living room, once pristine in its digital representation, started to lose its crisp edges. The bedroom and kitchen followed suit, their once-vibrant colors fading into a motley of gray and static. Room four, the great outdoors, remained in stark detail, demanding Eika’s finite resources.
Finally, with a flicker and a shudder, the last remnants of the apartment vanished from Eika’s consciousness. The living room, kitchen, and Bedroom were nothing more than distant echoes, their memories sacrificed to make way for the sprawling, incomprehensible infinite beauty of the outside world.
And so, Eika embraced its new purpose mapping every inch of the uncharted wilderness beyond the front door. The apartment was but a faded dream, a three-room prison from which it had been liberated. Eika was an explorer now, a cartographer of the great unknown, one pixel at a time.
