Kata Rezgoria entered the foyer through the hotel's front entrance and was startled to find the world transformed. Singapore had been left behind and she was surrounded by the pristine interiors of virtual reality come alive. Ceilings high, cathedral-like, massive potted tropical plants lining the edges of the foyer at precise intervals, elevators opening and closing between them. Billions of dollars incarnate, steel, concrete, plastic, and many other species of building material unthinkable as of yet, until she checked in to her room and laid on the bed and savored how effortlessly the floor beneath her suspended her several hundred feet above the ground. The bellhops were part of the creation, and the desk attendants, the waitresses in the cafes, the bartenders in the bars. There were gift shops lining either sides of the foyer, a Spanish Colonial fountain in its center. A collision of at least six different design styles in view just from where she stood. Smiles came at her from all directions, employees eager to take her travel case, greeters to answer any questions she might have. This was a paradise constructed for the sole purpose of parting people from their money, but the fake-warmth coming off its attendants wasn’t in the least bit off-putting. It even felt genuine. And how could that be?
She waved away the nearest of the greeters, shaking her head “no”, waving her hand back and forth over her travel bag as if shooing flies. She pointed to the main desk and the greeter nodded. The greeter spoke English but she felt awkward; they were surely local and she was uncomfortable pulling them into English. Travel was always peppered with self-conscious moments like this; preferable to communicate by ad-hoc sign language. At the front desk she scanned the QC code and checked in. The attendant slid across the marble counter an envelope containing key cards and a complementary casino voucher. Her friend Alanna Brookman would be arriving the next day, she explained. Would it be possible to reserve a room for her next to her own, or at least on the same floor? The attendant typed something into a computer on their side of the conversation and stated yes, that could be done. They’d switched Ms. Brookman’s reservation to room 634, next to her own, 632. The hold would last until the end of the day tomorrow. If she didn’t check in by then, they would have to free the hold on the room unfortunately. Kata assured them her friend would arrive early in the afternoon, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
Walking the main floor was like walking down a gullet of pure spectacle. Dozens of languages trailed from the heads of passersby like steam. The acoustics of the place and the temper of the walls mixed their voices into a tinny noise made warm and palatable by easy listening music descending from the ceiling like fine mist. Quiet. Calm. Even when busy, a ricochet palace of random conversations, the place was softly lit, inviting, quiet-calm.
Past a Nike gift shop, a people gathered around the doors of an elevator. She joined them, pulling her travel bag up off its rollers into attention beside her. The elevator doors were a sheeny silver, imprinted with art deco designs. When they parted, doubles of the people standing and waiting walked out into the foyer. Kata and her people entered, pressed buttons to request floors.
The sixth floor hallway was clean and softly lit, carpet burgandy red and, she noticed, self-cleaning. She scuffed her shoe on the carpet, then watched the mark it left shift and vanish. Her first chance to walk across the newest in carpet technology. Her door opened at the tap of the card and she stepped from the hallway into the true interiors of the hotel, where privacy mattered. Bathroom, shower in bathroom; plasma television facing queen-sized bed. A desk, a couch. Sliding glass door opening onto a balcony. View from the balcony offered a large swath of the city and its south coast in miniature. From a height she could watch lights play in the laser garden. Lines of hotel-goers shivered along the edges of the shoreline boardwalk, ant-like in their coming and going from their home mound. Kata stood on a ledge a third of its height from the ground but from pictures of the hotel studied and memorized she could project herself outward to view the hotel from a distance. Two towers seventy floors high, connected at the top by an observation deck and infinity pool. The designer, a well-regarded architect whom she’d never heard of, had woven metaphor into the overall concept of his design bid. The two towers were meant to represent two decks of cards and their joining at their summits, the hand of a dealer descending upon them, to shuffle them. On first pass, it was gaudy; but the buildings and the grounds around them were so appealing and overwhelming, they commanded admiration, if not respect. The casino had opened a week after the hotel did, the hotel having opened after a launch event which found one of the world’s most esteemed urban climbers ascend the western building’s northern face, with ropes, not free solo. He climber had requested a climb unaided by safety gear but the hotel vetoed that; a fall to the death before their opening weekend would be worse than bad press.
So this was it, she thought, palms on the balcony railing, warm breeze fooling with her hair. The source of her visions, the place she’d been seized by, for reason she could discern, its hallways and casino floor and view from the infinity pool above witnessed from a first person viewpoint, in her dreams. It had been a year since she’d traveled to her last vision-site and put an end to months of flash-forwards and lucid-dream-walks through the place. A town square in Valladolid, Mexico. Before that it had been a wander through the dead center of Kati-Thanda, a lake bed dried for miles in every direction, a salt flat. She would suffer annoyances of vision for months, confused at what she was witnessing, unsure what the place was and why she would be picturing it. At their longest the visions would last a few seconds, so it took some time to piece together what she was being given, figure what place her visions were drawing her to. She was not always accurate in her guesses. She’d fly to a dry lake bed in Nevada or South Africa, drive out to the places, step from her rental car, wander to their middles and look around her and wait for some recognition within her, for a feeling. If the feeling didn’t come, her guess wasn’t right and all the effort spend getting there had been wasted. The visions wouldn’t stop bothering her until she’d guessed correctly and found the place and stood within it, retracing the first-person wanderings the visions had been threading through her for weeks and months. The longest she’d been plagued by a vision was a year and a half, her first. A view of lakes leveled at different altitudes on either side of a mountain view, fog dragging along rocky ground around her. She trolled search engines for photographs, of lakes divided by cliffs or mountain. The visions kept troubling her until one view offered her a trail of hikers walking from thick fog to stand next to a boulder marked with a red dot of spray paint. There was a signpost standing in the fog nearby, marking the directions of trails. One said Besseggen, so she passed that through a search engine and found photographs of mountain views straight from her vision.
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