The Room of Endless Pages -Shohag Hossain

When Miftah woke up, the first thing he noticed was the silence.

It was not the comfortable silence of early morning or the gentle quiet of a classroom before the teacher arrived. This silence felt thick like cotton stuffed into the air. He sat up quickly and blinked. The ceiling above him was smooth, gray, and glowing faintly as if light came from inside it. He was not in his bedroom.

“Hello?” he called.

His voice bounced back at him. No answer.

He stood up and looked around. The room was square, with no windows, no furniture, and no door. The walls were white except for one strange panel glowing with blue letters. He walked closer and read:

Rule 1: Read.

Rule 2: Read again.

Rule 3: Never stop reading.

Rule 4: Knowledge is the key.

Miftah frowned. “Is this a joke?”

A sudden humming sound filled the room. The wall beside him shimmered like water, and three figures appeared—Nahid, Iqbal, and Rana. They looked just as confused as he felt.

“Where are we?” Rana whispered.

Iqbal touched the wall. “It feels real.”

Nahid pointed at the glowing rules. “Look at this. ‘Read and read.’ What does that even mean?”

Before anyone could answer, the floor opened slightly and four thick books rose up, floating in front of them. Each book had a different symbol: a clock, a star, a spiral, and a lightning bolt.

The humming grew louder. A calm mechanical voice echoed through the room.

“Welcome, candidates. You have been selected for the project.”

“What project?” Miftah shouted.

“The project of time.”

The friends exchanged glances. Time? This was getting stranger by the second.

“Your task: read. Learn. Understand. Create.”

The voice faded. The books opened by themselves, their pages turning with a soft flutter. Each page was filled with diagrams, equations, and explanations about physics, energy, gravity, and something called Temporal Mechanics.

Iqbal’s eyes widened. “This is advanced science. University level!”

Nahid laughed nervously. “We’re not scientists!”

The wall glowed again, displaying new words:

You will be.

Days or what felt like days passed in that strange room. They never felt hungry or sleepy. Whenever they felt tired, a gentle blue light refreshed their minds. The only activity available was reading, discussing, and experimenting with virtual tools that appeared when they touched the air.

At first, they resisted. They searched for doors, knocked on walls, shouted for help. Nothing changed. The rules remained glowing, constant, unavoidable.

So, they read.

They read about relativity, wormholes, quantum particles, and the bending of space-time. They argued about formulas, solved puzzles, and built small digital models using floating holographic devices. Slowly, confusion turned into curiosity. Curiosity turned into excitement.

Miftah discovered he had a talent for visualizing complex structures. Nahid excelled at mathematical patterns. Iqbal loved experimenting with digital simulations. Rana, quiet at first, became brilliant at connecting theories together.

One day, the four books merged into a single massive volume titled “The Temporal Engine.”

A new instruction appeared:

Build.
Suddenly, the empty room transformed. Worktables emerged from the floor. Tools floated in the air. A transparent sphere appeared in the center, pulsing with silver light. It looked like a bubble made of glass and lightning combined.

“Is that a time machine?” Rana whispered.

“Not yet,” said Nahid. “But it could be.”

They worked together, guided by the knowledge they had absorbed. They assembled virtual circuits, adjusted energy fields, and calibrated strange glowing rings that hovered around the sphere. The machine responded to their every decision, becoming more complex and more beautiful.

Weeks seemed to pass. Or maybe only hours. Time inside the room had no meaning.

Finally, the sphere stabilized. A thin beam of light shot upward, forming a clock made of stars above it. The machine was complete.

The mechanical voice returned. “Temporal engine ready. Select destination.”

A panel appeared showing countless years, past and future scrolling like a river of numbers.

Iqbal gulped. “We can actually travel through time?”

Miftah smiled slowly. “We built this. I think we can.”

They chose a small jump, ten minutes into the future. The sphere opened like a flower. They stepped inside, hearts pounding. The light engulfed them.

For a moment, everything disappeared.

Then they were back in the same room.

But something was different. On the wall, new words appeared:

Successful.

The friends cheered. They had done it. They had invented a time machine.

The room began to shake gently. The walls dissolved into streams of glowing letters. The mechanical voice softened.

“You have learned. You have created. You are ready.”

“Ready for what?” Nahid asked.

“For your world.”

The light brightened until they had to close their eyes.

When Miftah opened them again, he was in his bedroom. Morning sunlight poured through the window. His alarm clock beeped. Everything looked normal except for a small metallic cube on his desk. The same cube sat on Nahid’s table, on Iqbal’s shelf, and beside Rana’s books.

They met later that day, breathless and excited. Each of them had the cube. When placed together, it projected the same silver sphere they had built.

“It was real,” Rana whispered.
From that day on, they changed. They studied harder, explored science deeply, and never ignored a question out of fear. The memory of the room—of endless reading and impossible invention, pushed them forward.

Years passed.

Miftah became a theoretical physicist known for his groundbreaking spatial models. Nahid became a mathematician whose equations were studied worldwide. Iqbal became an engineer designing advanced simulation systems. Rana became a research leader connecting scientific disciplines in revolutionary ways.

Together, they eventually revealed a real prototype of a temporal research device—not for traveling through time recklessly, but for studying history and predicting disasters. The world called them geniuses.

But whenever journalists asked how their journey began, they simply smiled.

“By reading,” Miftah would say.

“By never stopping,” Nahid added.

“By asking questions,” said Iqbal.

“And by believing knowledge is the key,” Rana finished.

Late one night, years later, the four friends gathered again in a quiet lab. The metallic cube still worked. When they activated it, the silver sphere shimmered faintly.

On its surface, four glowing lines appeared:

Rule 1: Read.

Rule 2: Read again.

Rule 3: Never stop reading.

Rule 4: Knowledge is the key.

They looked at each other and laughed softly.

Perhaps the locked room had never been a prison.

Perhaps it had always been a door.