The Room: Day

    If you're lucky there'll be no clouds and the floor will be tiled in blonde sunlight the same color as the polished wooden planks; if it's windy the sunlight-tiles will be patterned in dark, dancing outlines of leaves from the delicate tree just outside the wall. There is never a cloth on the long white table in the middle of the room, so the patches of rainbow thrown by the candy-colored liquids in their clear glass bottles (all shapes and sizes) are never muddied. They shift and stretch with the passing of the sun like lazy cats, adding a little whimsy to an otherwise utilitarian room.
    This is not a room for relaxing in, for entertaining guests or even enjoying oneself particularly. This is a room for working in. The swoosh of early morning traffic is only faintly audible, as is the roar of an irritatingly nearby leaf-blower. Jazz leaks through from the outside world, perhaps from another work loft, and the serenity of the scene is blotted momentarily by two laughing shadows: young women passing by, dappling the silence of the empty room with their voices and the scent of their perfume.
    One deep breath and sharp hints of chemical move the surroundings farther away from the homelike, farther away from the distant scents of cooking delivery pizza and motor exhaust. If you stick your tongue out you can even feel the artificiality settling in layers over it. Everything here is smooth and glossy and squeaky-clean: flawless, neutral, impersonal. No textures to distract or interfere with whatever happens on that featureless desk. Even the shelves aren't the urban-steel frameworks one might expect in a workplace environment, but generic particleboard in white.
    The only off notes are struck by the apparatuses lining the walls and various surfaces. Black and full of gears, they hulk in ragged groups like metal crows with hunched shoulders, as if they're sharing secrets. Dozens of them caked in patina and grime that looks like it ought to smell unpleasant. You get the impression that someone comes around with a very small brush and sweeps up whatever flakes off the things at least once a day. It's not clear what the antiquated-looking machines are for, but your average observer would probably get the uneasy impression that they were meant for some purpose best not speculated on for too long.