Chapter 5 is the continuation of the story of Josiah begun in chapters 1 and 2. But you might meet some characters you recognise from Jos' storyline...
What is the Square?
A geometrical object. Neat and precise, two-dimensional and utterly regular. Existing nowhere, if not in the mind.
Josiah had come to realise that it was also a place, a group of people, an ideal. And more than that - for many souls who had lost their faith it was home.
For Josiah however, it was an opportunity, a door opening before him. He could almost taste the success of his time machine, as he sipped on a black coffee and relaxed in a chair of real brown leather. The smell of cured animal skins was a real pleasure, as was the feeling of the chair beneath his fingers. Without a doubt, this was the most comfortable chair in the room - and there had been no shortage of choice.
Josiah had to admit that the Square was both exactly what he had hoped for and more, but also very, very different. The lounge of the Elegant Head summed it up completely.
The first thing you noticed upon entering the Elegant Head, as Josiah had noticed not a week earlier, was the sheer number of chairs - chairs of all varieties. There were sofas and armchairs, rocking-chairs and stools, fold-out chairs and inflatable chairs. Chairs made of wood and iron, of green plastic and animal fur, a chair made entirely out of human bones. The only thing there wasn’t, was a chair made of steel.
And that was the second thing that Josiah had noticed. He had been so accustomed to seeing them, he felt their absence as something palpable - there were no fists of steel on the wall, no boxes for Church offerings. Even the Provider was free from iconography - the sheer blasphemy still thrilled him as he drank his unblessed coffee.
After that, the details of the room came thick and fast, broke across his mind like waves across a boat, too much for your mind to quite take everything in.
The sheer vastness of the chamber, open to the sky above, with the bright light of the sun shining down upon you like summer. But between the Square and the sky were many metres of concrete. This was a false sky, reading off the ambient emotion of the room and setting itself accordingly.
Set into the regular walls, at irregular intervals, were small shaded alcoves, capable of being curtained and soundproofed off for private conferences and meetings. And other forms of experimentation. Sound could not escape but odours lingered in the red, velvet curtains.
The cooling remnants of coffee, cups of tea and smashed liquor glasses dwelt on some of the tables scattered about the room, alongside well-worn books on higher mathematics, spectral physics and biochemistry. There were books everywhere. They seemed to grow organically from the walls and were spreading towards the rather plain Provider in a menacing fashion.
And no matter the time of day or night, you would find the scientists. Some sat silently, reading huge volumes, sipping from whiskey glasses. Others smoked long brown sticks and paraded on the chairs, weeping softly. Josiah had even seen a grown woman dance into the room naked, screaming ‘Eureka’. No one batted an eyelid, and Josiah was trying to learn not to respond to anything he saw.
