THE 216TH FLOOR

OVERVIEW

The 216th floor is the building's third confirmed impossible floor, after the Tenth Floor (upward, voluntary, pleasant) and Floor B-13 (downward, hostile, not). It differs from both in one important respect: it was not discovered by accident. It was installed — by request, on purpose, following instructions received in a vision.

SW8's premises have four storeys and one basement. This remains true. The 216th floor is one of them.

DISCOVERY — THE ORACLE'S INSTRUCTION

The floor first became reachable following a Thursday meeting of the Ministry of Grace, during which the Blue Oracle of Grace received a vision. The vision, as minuted, was specific and administrative in character: it commanded her to "have the lift given a new control panel, with more buttons than the building has floors."

The Ministry treated this as it treats most of the Oracle's instructions — calmly, and as a facilities request. A new lift control panel was fitted, carrying several buttons beyond the building's actual floor count. It turned out that no construction, no shaft extension, and no further rite was required. Adding the button was enough. A panel button labelled 216 was installed; pressing it took someone to a 216th floor that, until the button existed, had not. The other surplus buttons remain unpressed and are not, at this time, to be experimented with.

THE ASCENT

When the 216 button is pressed, the lift accelerates hard — the firm, ear-popping surge associated with the express lifts of very tall buildings — and continues upward for a duration entirely consistent with travelling past two hundred and six intervening floors. Then it stops, the doors open, and you are on the 216th floor.

• The ascent feels like genuine vertical travel: sustained acceleration, the pressure change, the long climb. By the clock and by the body, the journey accounts for the missing floors. By the building, the missing floors are not there.
• No one has visited any floor between the 10th and the 216th. They are not on the panel, and the lift does not pass through them in any way a passenger can act on.
• Attempts to halt the lift at an intervening floor — emergency stop, prising the doors, pressing other buttons mid-ascent — have all failed. The car does not stop until 216. The emergency stop, pressed during ascent, is logged as having been "noted and declined." Facilities have stopped pressing it.
• The descent is unremarkable and always returns you to the lobby, regardless of which button you press to leave.

THE FLOOR ITSELF

By contrast with the ascent, the 216th floor is almost aggressively ordinary, and genuinely nice to work on. It comprises 72 office rooms, each fitted with three windows, and each a perfectly conventional office: network ports, desks, chairs, fluorescent lighting. Everything works. The network ports connect. The lights are the same slightly-too-cold tubes as every other floor.

At the centre is a large communal breakout area — sofas, a television, full kitchen equipment, several coffee makers — of the kind a company spends a refurbishment budget aspiring to. It is, by unanimous report, the best space in the building to actually get anything done.

Among the recreation-area fittings is one nobody on the facilities team remembers ordering: a music-production machine — a composition workstation, its chassis lettered PHONOTOPE — that was simply present the first time the floor was entered, powered on and waiting. Like everything else up here it is completely and unremarkably functional: a synthesiser bank, a step sequencer, microphone sampling, multitrack layering, and lossless export, all working exactly as labelled. Staff use it on breaks, and it keeps whatever you make.

• The total floorspace occupies, by careful internal measurement, at least twelve times the footprint of the building. The 72 rooms, the corridors, and the breakout area do not fit, and are nonetheless all present, all reachable, and all the size they appear.
• The floor feels, from the inside, solid — properly built and well supported. There is no sense of vertigo, flexing, or provisionality. It is the least uncanny-feeling of the building's anomalies; you would never guess, standing in it, that it is not simply a very good floor of a very large building.
• The view is magnificent. The windows look down over London; on a clear day you can follow the Thames out past the Estuary to Southend. Whatever height the lift's ascent implies, the view is consistent with it.

EXTERNAL OBSERVATION

From inside, the 216th floor is unambiguously there. From outside, it is unambiguously not.

• Every attempt to photograph the 216th floor from outside the building has failed. There is nothing above the fourth storey to photograph; the camera records sky.
• Drones flown to the altitude at which the floor is calculated to sit pass through the volume the floor occupies, encountering no glass, no structure, and no turbulence. Their footage shows open air and, far below, the same London the windows show — from the wrong, empty height.
• The 72 rooms have, between them, 216 windows. From the inside, each looks out on the city. From the outside, none of them exists to be looked into.