Welcome to the Life-or-Death Escape Room

It’s called climate change, and we’re running out of time to solve it.

The mid-term elections are over, and the Democrats have regained the House, but the rest of American political reality remains intact. Meanwhile, the campaigns barely touched on the most important issues of our time: war, climate change, and the fracturing of the international community.

So, let’s consider these larger issues from a different angle.

Let’s step from the voting booth into a different space altogether: an escape room. This is, however, no ordinary escape room like the ones that have become so popular in cities around the world. Here, the stakes couldn’t be higher: life or death. You might want to give it a pass, but you don’t have a choice. There’s only one door and you have to go inside…

You’ve done enough escape rooms to know the drill by now. You are escorted into what seems like an ordinary room. There’s a table and a chair. On the table is a book. As soon as you step across the threshold, the door closes behind you. You hear the lock click into place.

You are now trapped in a room with four strangers. Three of them look as concerned as you are. The fourth is nonchalant.

The instructions this time are a little different. As with other escape rooms, you have a certain amount of time to figure out how to get out. Also, you know that clues to the puzzle are hidden somewhere in the room. Figure them out and you’ll be able to unlock the door.

But here’s the difference: The temperature in this room will go up a degree with every minute that passes. If you and those four strangers can’t figure out how to stop it from rising, you’ll succumb to heat stroke. In other words, if you don’t escape in the allotted time period, you’ll die.

You immediately set to work looking for the clues. Maybe one or two are in the book on the table or maybe a code is carved on the underside of the table. Maybe you need to use the chair to climb up close enough to scrutinize the crown molding near the ceiling. Three of the strangers are doing what you’re doing: trying to uncover clues.

The fourth is leaning against the wall, looking relaxed. “It’s just a joke,” he says to no one in particular.

“I already feel it getting warmer in here,” you respond.

“It’s just your imagination,” he replies. “Power of suggestion. Fake news.”

The clock is already ticking. It can’t be your imagination. It’s definitely hotter in the room than when you first entered. You’re sweating. Everyone’s sweating, even the leaning man. “Temperatures naturally fluctuate,” he comments. “It might be going up now, but it will go down again. Count on it.”

“Don’t listen to him,” says the teenager in your group. “He’s just a jerk.”

She’s right and there’s no time to try to persuade him either. The four of you are now uncovering one clue after another, which brings you to the truly challenging part: cracking the code. Each of you contributes something: the teenager quickly solves a quadratic equation, the stay-at-home mom translates that Japanese phrase, and the aging literature professor recognizes the quote from Dante’s Inferno.

And once the four of you use this code to open a panel you’ve discovered beneath a loose floorboard, you finally get the chance to apply your engineering knowhow to the situation. You personally figure out how to reset the thermostat hidden inside it and so manage to slow the rise in temperature. It’s not much perhaps, but it’s a start.

You’re working smoothly together now. Only through cooperation have you been able to get this far. Problem is, it’s still too warm in the room. The 70-something professor is now crumpled in the corner, breathing heavily. You only have one bottle of water to share and a couple of nutrition bars and there are still more puzzles to solve. The teenager is urging you on—and little wonder, she has her whole life ahead of her.

But here’s the catch. You’re getting tired, all of you.

This Hot Room is only the latest and greatest challenge you’ve faced. You’ve been doing escape rooms now for what seems like decades, each challenge evidently more urgent than the last.

You were relatively young when you first stumbled into this craze. In the War Room, you were trapped with two heavily armed men pointing high-powered weapons at each other. In the Pandemic Room, you were all infected with a deadly virus and had to find an antidote. Most recently, you were locked in the Autocrat Room with a raving narcissist who believed he was the king of the world and who had his finger on a very real button that could destroy you, him, and everyone else.

Yet somehow you managed to extricate yourself from each of those rooms—only to find yourself trapped in this one. You should be tired!

You can’t even believe it: Only now is the reality of it all beginning to dawn on you—that you’ve been proceeding through a series of nested escape rooms, boxes within boxes, that have led you here, to the ultimate box.

In this Hot Room, time is running out, resources are scarce, and you have to listen to an idiot leaning against a wall doing nothing, and acting as if this were a delightful sauna, not a potential coffin.

You suspect that this is the human condition, this endless succession of crises. Civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history. One culture after another has failed to figure out the riddle inscribed in its environment. Some didn’t even realize that they were on the verge of collapse until it was too late.

But this is different. Each previous time, it was just one part of the globe—the Mycenaeans, the Khmer, the Mayans, the Romans—that grappled with its communal fate.

Now, you’re addressing the fate of the planet. This Hot Room, you’ve come to realize, is Earth itself. And there’s nothing on the other side of the door except the cold, cold void.

To solve the riddle of this ultimate escape room means performing a genuine miracle. You have to stop the temperature from rising. You have to multiply the water bottles and the nutrition bars. Most challenging of all perhaps, you have to prevent everyone from giving in to despair.

So, you take time out to do what you’ve always done in such situations. You did it at work to rally your discouraged colleagues. You did it for your children at bedtime to dispel the nightly terrors.

By John Feffe – TomDispatch

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