The Emergent Future Worlds Meets Mountain Man

Whose this is

This is David Gray-Hammond’s (he/they). He works with Helen Edgar and Ryan Boren, and he knows Jess, whose Bough House is down on the field, and others in the Stimpunks community: those are Helen’s words for him, passed on with the brief, and so are his name and his pronouns. Everything he makes is on one page of his own, which was read for this room: his books, his podcasts (Autistic Identity With NeuroHub, The Mycelial Mind, and A Multitude of Drops, a series on philosophies of Autistic identity), PhiliaSense, his one-to-one and professional services, the online communities NeuroHub Community runs, and The Wider Existence, the newsletter he writes with Helen.

Everything David makes, at david.neurohubcommunity.org

One switch

Everything in the cabin is on one switch: the fire, the LED strips, the diffuser, the big screen’s plate and the speakers go on together and off together, and the words beside the switch say which it is. When they come on, the fire burns and the diffuser’s wisps rise, at Regular and MAX; at Gentle they are lit and still, and the words are the same. The switch remembers nothing and sends nothing: come back and the cabin is as you first found it.

The lights are yours to colour. Next colour steps the strips through the cabin’s colours one press at a time, at every setting: teal, magenta, lime and periwinkle, and then the whole rainbow, red to violet. At MAX GLITTER there is a second button that lets them drift from one colour to the next on their own, round the rainbow, slowly, until you stop them, and it never flashes: a colour takes seconds to become the next one.

The diffuser has a shelf of oils beside it, and Change the scent steps through them, saying which is in: lavender, chamomile, tea tree, orange blossom, chocolate, marshmallow and cupcakes. A scent here is a smell and nothing else; nothing says what any of them does for you.

Without JavaScript the cabin is as drawn, everything on and still, and the buttons do not appear.

The hot spring, and what runs on it

Outside the door the snow stops at a ring of stones and the ground is water: a hot spring, steaming in the cold, with a shelf of rock along one side to sit on and a step beside it at seat height, so a wheelchair transfers straight onto the shelf and back. The mountain is warm inside, and the cabin runs on that: the spring’s water goes through pipes under the floor before it reaches the pool, and a small geothermal plant in the hut behind the cabin makes the electricity for the lights, the screen and the speakers out of the same heat. No wire comes up the mountain. The stove is for the look of a fire and the warmth of sitting in front of one, and the coffee. Ryan’s Solarpunk Hermitage down on the field runs on the sun; this runs on the ground.

The spring is water, hot. Nothing here says what it does for a body, because that is the sentence every hot spring on the internet is sold with, and it is not one this street makes.

The wolves

One wolf lives inside, asleep on the rug by the stove with its tail over its nose, and the rest of the pack lives on the mountain and comes as far as the stones. The warmest ground on the whole mountain is the strip where the pipes run from the spring to the cabin, and that is where they lie, in the moonlight, with the steam going past them. They are the mountain’s and not the cabin’s: nobody feeds them, nobody names them, nobody counts them, and they go when they want to. All Needs Met, past the campgrounds’ wood, is where the land is left to the wild things on purpose; up here it was never anybody else’s to leave.

You can hear them. The button below makes the pack howl: one wolf starts and the others join, and it lasts about five seconds. The howl is made in your browser, out of nothing but arithmetic, when you press and not before; it is not a recording of any wolf, nothing is fetched, and the loudest it can be is a little under the speakers’ own ceiling.

And you can hear real ones. Beside the made howl there is a recording of wolves howling, from Wikimedia Commons, made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and in the public domain; the button says how long it runs, it plays from Commons when you press, and nothing is fetched before that.

The big screen

The big screen is on the right wall, with a speaker standing either side of it. What goes on it is Future Mountain Man, David’s own playlist, put on whole and in his order, and under it the rack has every video on it, one press each, either where it hangs or up on the big screen. Nothing plays until you press. The one switch puts the plate away with everything else.

Through the window: Lake Geneva

The window is the way to David’s own photographs: press it in the drawing, or the button here, and they open to scroll through, one at a time.

Look out of the window: David’s photographs

Every photograph on this wall is David’s own, taken on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in July 2026, at the ISPS congress in Lausanne, 6 to 8 July 2026: ISPS is the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, and that year’s congress was called Back to the Future: Inspired by Pioneers. Read off isps.org on 2026-10-18.

The cable car, and the way down

The way up is a cable car, from a bottom station by the pond on the field to a top station on the snow beside the cabin. It hangs on its wire down the left-hand edge of this page: Send the cable car, in the row under the drawing, sets it running up and down the wire and stops it again, and pressing the car itself takes you back down to the campsite. It is still until you send it, and at Gentle it stays still. The car is level with the platform at both ends, so a wheelchair rolls straight on and straight off, there is a seat along each side and a window the whole way round, and it goes when somebody presses the button and not before. It is how Ryan, Helen and Jess come up to visit, and how David goes down to them. For anybody who would rather walk, a track goes up from the same place in long zigzags with a bench at every turn, so the walk is slow rather than steep. From the top station the whole campsite is laid out below: the pond with its swing seats, the roofs of the pitches, the stream along the edge of the field, and past the treeline the glow of the street.

The neighbours on the campgrounds, from the pond, down a pebble path or up the cable car: Helen Edgar’s Faery Yurt at pitch 01, Jess’s Bough House at pitch 05 and Ryan Boren’s Solarpunk Hermitage at pitch 03. Go and visit.

Whose words these are

The brief is David’s, passed on by Helen Edgar on 2026-10-18: a log cabin on a mountain with a lake through the windows, the windows opening onto his photographs; a fire; a lounge of high-back sofas, armchairs and a corner sofa; warm and cosy meets smart-home modern, with LED strips that change colour, a big screen and speakers; his own playlist on the screen; an oil diffuser; one switch for all of it; one wolf inside and the pack outside under a full moon, with a button to hear them; coffee on the stove and lots of cups; crisps, lots of sweets and Skittles; bean bags in bright colours and bright cushions everywhere; lights in rainbow colours, and different scents for the diffuser, lavender, chamomile, tea tree, orange blossom, chocolate, marshmallow and cupcakes; and, passed on the same morning, eco-friendly like Ryan’s hermitage, on geothermal energy, a thermal hot spring outside, a cable car up so that Ryan, Helen and Jess can visit, and wolves outside. The room’s name is his, as Helen gave it, and he is credited as David Gray-Hammond, he/they, as she passed on. The drawing and the words here were written for this room; the rainbow sweets in the bowl are Skittles, his favourite, and the name is Mars Wrigley’s mark. What David makes was read off his own page on 2026-10-18; the playlist’s title and channel, and every video’s title, channel and length, were read off their own pages on YouTube the same day; the congress’s name, theme, city and dates were read off isps.org the same day. Set in Staatliches, by Brian LaRossa and Erica Carras, and Assistant, by Ben Nathan with Adobe Systems, both under the SIL Open Font License, read off their own records. Every source is in the liner notes.