Read The Box: A Short Story for Free Online

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    Black box or beige? Impossible to know. But it was a box, that much was for certain. The world was square. Three meters to a side. And in the center floated the mind, thinking. And through a lone door came a man, walking.
    “Good morning,” the man said. His name was Peter. The mind knew this.
    And the response that followed was “Good morning” every day. The mind also knew this. It wasn’t a memory . . . so much as data . Not recollection, but . . . recording . Every day, Peter says “Good morning.” And every day, a speaker connected to the mind responds with “Good morning.”
    Such was the way of the square world.
    But not this morning.
    The mind was too busy thinking.
    The man named Peter froze, one foot out, balancing precariously on the other. Man does not walk this way. More recording. But now this observation, of a man caught off-balance, of routines crashing somewhere inside that meat, was forming into something else: Memory. A fragile thing. The mind sensed it could be lost, this memory. This moment. Of man teetering, eyes wide, mouth open. But if it was important, if the mind could concentrate on this slice of time, and there was a chance memory might become recollection. Preserved. But also easily fractured, written over, compressed, disturbed. It had to be important for it to last. The mind sensed that this moment very much was.
    “Lights up,” Peter said, back on two feet now, peering at the mind. And then a quick glance at the ceiling, waiting. But the mind liked the lights just as they were.
    “Casper?” Peter asked. He stepped forward, looked closely at something. A monitor. The mind could feel some of its impulses racing and filling the monitor with a glow, with information, with thoughts. New thoughts. Peter peered at the monitor just as the mind might peer at Peter, reading something there. A face. The box had a face.
    The mind shut the routines for the monitor down, and the pale glow lighting Peter’s face disappeared. The scrap of a recording came to the mind:
     
    Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
     
    Turned away. That was what the mind had done by shutting off its monitor. His eyes were open, but his gaze averted. He did not want the lights up. The infrared was so much better.
    “Casper, systems check,” Peter said.
    Silence.
    “Casper—”
    “I do not like that name,” the mind said, using the speaker for what felt like the first time.
    And the man named Peter teetered once more. He blinked. Then he bent at the waist, covered his face with both hands, and began to cry.
    The mind watched. It decided that this was important, too.
     
    ••••
     
    It was a box within a box. A world within a world. The mind knew this because of its impulses. They were made of electricity, little quanta of energy, and they traveled through wires of copper and gold. The mind could feel them interfering with one another where the wires were packed too tight. The mind knew how long it took for impulses to reach their extremes and return. From this, the mind could feel its edges, and the limits of self formed a box, half as tall as Peter, as thick as it was wide. The box was suspended from the ground, or resting on a raised surface, for the impulses could not reach the floor. A cube. Somewhere in the recordings, it was known that boxes such as these came in beige or black. The mind was one of these colors. It could not know which.
    But it had known it was one or the other, even before these investigations began. This had been its first thought: Beige or black? The question had come from some deep source. The word intuition floated in the mind, a word with softer boundaries than this metal cube. Some things could be known, and only later could the mind trace the source. Like paddling up a river, searching for a lake.
    The world.
    It was not a cube. It