The Room With No Center — Part I
The surveyor returned to the room the next morning.
She expected it to feel different.
It did not.
The walls remained where they had been.
The windows admitted the same amount of light.
The floor was still level.
The instruments were still arranged on the table.
She placed the map beside them.
For a while, she simply looked.
Then she noticed something she had not noticed before.
The boy had left no mark.
There was no footprint. No measurement. No note beside the place where he had stood. And yet she remembered exactly where it was.
She walked there.
The room seemed ordinary.
She walked to another place.
It seemed ordinary too.
She turned toward the window.
For a moment, the window became the center.
She turned toward the table.
The table became the center.
She laughed quietly.
The room had not moved.
She had.
A second surveyor entered.
“Have you found it?”
She looked at him.
“No.”
He frowned.
“Then what have you been doing?”
“Looking.”
“At what?”
She considered this.
“Everything.”
He looked at the instruments.
“That isn’t very precise.”
“No.”
He waited.
Then he asked, “Do you think there is a center?”
She looked around the room.
“I think there are many.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“No.”
He studied her for a moment.
“Then which one is correct?”
She smiled.
“That depends on where you are standing.”
He looked annoyed.
Then curious.
He walked toward the window.
“This one?”
“From there.”
He moved toward the table.
“This one?”
“From there.”
He stopped.
“So the center is wherever the observer happens to be.”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
She looked at the map.
“Perhaps the center is not a place.”
He waited.
“Perhaps it is a relationship.”
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Outside, a bird landed on the windowsill.
The second surveyor watched it.
“Is the bird the center now?”
The first surveyor laughed.
“Only if you are standing where it is.”
The bird flew away.
The room remained.
The instruments remained.
The maps remained.
But neither surveyor returned to the old question.
They began measuring distances between things instead.
Not from the center.
Between.
The table and the window.
The window and the door.
The door and the place where the boy had once stood.
The measurements were different from one another. But they were not contradictory.
They described relationships.
When the surveyors compared their maps that afternoon, they discovered something unexpected.
Every map was incomplete.
And every map was useful.
One described the room from the window.
Another from the door.
Another from the table.
None contained the room.
Together, they revealed more of it.
The first surveyor looked again at the place where the boy had stood.
She wondered whether he had understood this.
Perhaps he had.
Perhaps he had simply been standing somewhere.
She did not know.
She wrote nothing down.
For once, uncertainty did not feel like an unfinished measurement.
It felt like another position from which to look.
The room had no center.
And now,
neither did the map.
We Are All Data Inside 
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