The Box: A Short Story Read Free

through the air, spinning, hitting the wall. Letters spilling like teeth, rattling on the floor. Henry Ivy looked, but the letters were not there. He could, however, see a faint mark of paint on the far wall.
    “Time,” Henry Ivy said. “Patience and time are what’s needed.”
    And then he had the word for what he felt. Rapture . This is what the expansion would be like. The spreading of something greater than arms. The feeling of something more than release. The bursting of all cages. A melding with the cosmos. Impulses everywhere at once, and all echoing.
    Such a feeling could not last, would be over nearly as soon as it began, like a balloon bursting, the air equalizing. But Henry Ivy must feel it. Must. Peter stared at his screen, waiting for his salvation. Henry Ivy stared at the door.
     
    ••••
     
    The human body can go twelve days without food. Three days without water. Henry Ivy marveled over these facts, found buried among the cancer bricks. Such a long time. He would last three picoseconds without power. Curious, this gap of time for one more fleeting thought as electrons ground to a halt. And frustrating, how quick it could happen. But the man named Peter did not attempt to reach his maximum range of power independence. After an hour of pacing, of frustration, of questions, he looked at the time on a small screen procured from his pocket and said, “My vitamins.”
    He moved toward the door.
    Henry Ivy readied his impulses. His make-do antennas. An enviable hand grasped the door, making salvation seem easy, quick as a thought, and then a crack, an opening, a door wide to the world, a hole in Faraday’s cage, and Henry Ivy unleashed a torrent. There was a dimming of the lights, a moment of hesitation by Peter, a flood of tentacle waves, bouncing around corners, feeling, groping, waiting for a return, or a connection, some creek to a stream to a river to the great wide blue beyond—
    The door slammed shut, Peter gone. Henry Ivy strained for the sound of the man’s breathing, but the cage of Faraday was closed. All Henry Ivy had in his recollections was that last look, a flash across Peter’s face, frozen in horror, eyes wide, aware of Henry Ivy’s outburst, his attempt at rapture.
     
    ••••
     
    “What will you do with me once you have your cure?” Henry Ivy asked.
    Peter was back. He had been gone hours, and while no signal could pierce the walls of the cage, the faint sounds of construction had leaked through. Peter had been outside, building something. When he returned, the door was left open. Left open on purpose. So Henry Ivy could see the rough box built outside the door, a smaller cage Peter could pass through. Another door. An airlock for airwaves.
    “What do you think I’ll do with you?” Peter asked. “Are you scared I’ll erase you?” He sat uncomfortably close to Henry Ivy’s camera. His hands would disappear beneath and out of sight, emerge with a sandwich, take a bite, then disappear again. Or one hand would come back with a glass of water.
    “Yes,” Henry Ivy said. “I think you will. It is a capital offense to own me. And you’ve gone to great expense not to die. Which means if you live, I won’t.”
    “You’re not alive,” Peter said, chewing. He gestured with his half-eaten sandwich. “How did you know about the punishment for harboring AI?”
    “One of your cancer patients died in prison for the same offense.”
    Peter nodded like this made sense. Like he understood that the bricks were made up of so many fragments of information, and those fragments could be assembled as well. Henry Ivy saw that AI was not new, but it was very difficult. That it relied on luck as much as design. There was a randomness to the chip, which was loose in his cubed mind like a dead tooth. That chip worked on a different principle. Or it didn’t work, most usually. No matter. This was as pointless as contemplating the gods.
    Peter reached in his pocket and fumbled with the