Oikobezoar

`/rebuild the perfect home 8k detailed trending on artstation`

A server buried twenty feet under my garden computes for every house on the block. There's a hatch in the road that leads down to the old cistern where it runs, casting its calculating glow on the moss and cement. 

`/rebuild porthole windows soft fuzzy meadow –interior: all`

All images courtesy of Midjourney AI

I wake and the door to my bedroom is no more. This is not entirely surprising; falling asleep, I watched it seal up, the walls gradually puckering under the whisper of lamplight. Night-shifting is my lullaby. 

The new room is imperfect. Several corners of the ceiling blend into the wall, and the floor pulls up at its edges. The two portholes (which replaced the door) are framed unevenly. I clamber through one, artificial petals flaking from my hair.

I can't sleep anymore without nanobrick humming beneath me. A lifetime of insomnia has been quieted, quieted by the rhythmic changing of the house. A temperamental werewolf, hooked to my own inner moon, wonderful and often disappointing; I walk through today's home, already typing anxious changes into my console. 

`/rebuild vivid gothic psychedelic greenhouse –interior: living-room`

The sightless are said to treasure a resolute constancy in the arrangement of their spaces. We would not make good roommates. In fact, I have never lived well with others, never tolerated the sameness of their unfluctuating intimacy. 

I can remember the blueprint of every house I've ever lived in. I can recite the transformations of my current home, trace the path each room has wandered, detail its family history: how it has cloned itself, expanded, contracted, absorbed or been absorbed. They orbit and split, flowing like bubbles in oil.

The novelty of each strange change wears off, but novelty itself never grows tiresome. 

`/rebuild rose window hubble deep field detailed complex sharp –exterior: skylight`

I am an architect. A dinosaur, some would claim, but programmable nanobrick hasn't actually obsoleted us. The nanobrick is unpredictable, sloppy, a rough approximation of form as interpolated from two-dimensions. It cannot hold a shape in its mind like a human, and it cannot rotate a polyhedron. It builds not with a vision of the whole, but one microscopic voxel at a time, hewing improvisationally. It is limited by unsophisticated constraints that exist to guarantee structural integrity. 

Yet I find much inspiration in it. It mimics any material, any style. What better way to dream? Its constructions are the gestalt's hypnagogia. 

`/rebuild jellyfish dance 1960's magazine photography –appliance: sofa`

There is much to learn from how fully they change the world, play with light and perspective to immerse the visitor in a pixelated realm, or in the flatness of a tapestry. I walk every morning through mists of my own making: halls that seem painted, or impossibly real. 

The wrongnesses I find — and they are always numerous — I remake. The house falls like sand in my wake, each pattern giving way to another, particles turning like dust storms as the server under my garden computes. The perpetual rebuilding makes my cottage feel much larger than it is. 

 These homes, pejoratively known as blockstones, are pure cubes of programmable nanobrick. The whims of fashion have deemed them low class, and they are necessarily smaller, and lack a certain reliability compared to, for example, unions of nanobrick with cement shells or robotic understructures — but nothing is more versatile. 

`/rebuild concept art of a cliffside villa designed to resemble pink clouds –exterior: all –omit: skylight`

This home is a short-term memory palace, a reflection of my mood, my ruminations, the darting fish at the surface of my attention. I do not keep extensive notes; the walls are my reminders, and when I close my eyes and walk backwards through their architectural history, I can perfectly infer past states of mind.

My synesthesia is unusual; it works upon the world. Every thought has a corresponding space, one I struggle to make real, coaxing the nanobrick with keywords and descriptive tricks. Calculating and recalculating, capturing each frame of a self. 

Understand: this house is a model of my brain. As such, it is so very very important that every detail is progressing towards correctness. Today, I find something deeply troubling: a room of unknown provenance.

`...`

Cramped, uncannily bright, inclined, crooked. The carpet stops and ends at random, and the space — the air itself — is yellowed. A chair sits in the corner, so black I can't tell whether it's facing me or the wall. 

On my console I page through my command history. It may have been a side-effect of some algorithmically difficult reorganization. (The nanobrick is unpredictable.)

I pull up the master blueprint, where, strangely, the room is listed as `bedroom-true`. 

Something unpleasant stirs within me. I type a few quick commands, and resolve to sleep. Tomorrow, the house will be different. 

`/rebuild ancient abandoned roman aqueducts carved into a coral reef –interior: all`

I wake up. My home is a drained ocean, biological and grotesque. The floor springs, deeply carpeted in orange, and kelp muntins above crenelated pillars guide the light through undulating glass. 

My dreams, in which I was a mansion, and the strange room was a creature stalking my hallways, melt away in this vista of simulated nature. (Do my nightmares seem absurd? Often I feel more structure than human.)

I am rarely compelled to go outside. There is more variety in nanobrick than in my little neighborhood; my domain is a universal greenhouse, capable of supporting jungle or desert, of matching the wild shapes of the karst. Organic chaos is a relief from the angles of that yellow closet, as it has at other times been a relief from my own mind, so preoccupied with herding squares.  

Yet, as always, the flaws jump out — flaws that both distract me from my work, and drive me towards it. 

`/rebuild a room in which I will finally know peace, magical realism fantasy –interior: studio`

I work late into the night. These sessions always leave me nervous; the house will remain as I left it, having been in stasis all day. Frightening in its stillness. 

Presently, I am designing a slaughterhouse. Its form is constrained by efficiency, by the location of tools, which its masters will memorize with their bodies, by the necessary flow of a carcass from the freezer to the table. There is no allowance for the imprecision of generated environments. It must be crisp and optimized, and, lest one claim this is only an engineering puzzle, it must be beautiful. 

A place of work, no matter how mundane, should elevate the soul. I can make the floor of the abattoir sound-dampening tile, moss-green (to complement the blood) and set with firefly-stone. Tall eastern windows, like those of the old manufacturing lofts. Style the sanitizing UV lights after garlands of wisteria. 

It is a blessing to be absorbed in one's work; but as I exit the studio, in the early hours, my heart races, anticipating the sinister familiarity of a home unmoved.

I know immediately that something has changed, and for one small moment, I am relieved.

`/destroy bedroom-true`

Impossibly, yesterday's final request failed to execute, leaving the yellow blister alive in my house. It peeps like a jaundiced eyeball from the end of a corridor, radiating malevolence. 

It's all I can do to stay awake. I stumble to my bed, my console, and enter a delirious flurry of commands; then I sleep, but only after feeling the nanobrick thrum alive beneath me. 

`/rebuild a home without evil without evil without evil –all`

I wake. I do not remember my dreams; but for a moment it's as though a second, sickly eyelid has failed to open, and I am in the yellow room. I blink it away. 

The nanobrick still rumbles. It calms me, as does walking through my half-formed home, under the fine waterfalls of silt shed by its ceilings. Metamorphosis takes time, first to brew in the server's mathematical crucible, then for the instructions to percolate across the nanobrick, and finally for the particles themselves to move and build. I pull my index finger through the whitish dust, and watch it twinkle for a moment before each speck accelerates away. 

There is lunar ethereality to an unmade house. The floors are oily, skittering marble. Piles of nanobrick seethe upwards like milky ferrofluid, creating pillars. Pale dunes travel. This is the moonscape through which I hunt the yellow room. 

I cannot find it, but I sense it, and indeed `bedroom-true` remains listed on the master blueprint. I turn uselessly through the shifting labyrinth, coated in chalky proto-material like a ghost haunting my own halls. Little motes fly off my skin, beaming towards their destinations. 

I exit the building, nanobrick particulate peeling off of me as I pass the threshold, and circle it. Twice is enough; the perimeter does not match its interior. There is an inaccessible tower to the North, a sealed bubble in which, I am certain, the evil room resides. It sickens me, the thought of this encysted closet traveling through my home; invisible, unchanging, malevolent. 

A dark thought surfaces; for how long has this room been manifest, hidden, in my memory palace? I contemplate the blueprints of old, and perceive the holes in them. The holes that could have sheltered the abomination — this intruder into my memory, into my palace, this promise of a horrible, stagnant core to myself.

I return inside, prepared to tear down a wall, but there is no need; like sand curtains, the barriers to the tower have parted, revealing a staircase atop which the yellow room glowers. Upon the bottom steps I sit, and experiment, growing nauseous at my console as the hours pass. 

`/rebuild porcelain teacup 19th century toby mug arabesques floral –interior: bedroom-true`

`/rebuild spaceship command center a glittering console and windows overlooking nebulae, original star trek screenshot –interior: bedroom-true`

`/rebuild blue green aqua seagreen sapphire anything but yellow::-200 –interior: bedroom-true`

The thing degrades and reforms, again and again, ignoring my commands; or, perhaps, reading into them identical ugliness, finding in some subliminal quality of my pleas permission to remake itself. Is the nanobrick corrupted? Has the great buried mind of the server gone insane in its crevice, nurturing evil in the ancient cistern under the green? 

My yellow mausoleum inches down the staircase, riding collapsing waves of dust; and around me, the rest of the house, its construction deferred by the recomputation of the room, finally solidifies.