Read The Box: A Short Story for Free Online

kneeling on the floor, water on his cheeks. And Henry Ivy thought to simply ask for the information he wanted.
    “Why am I here?”
    The man named Peter gasped. Henry Ivy turned the lights up so he could better read Peter’s screen. Better read his face. Peter glanced up at the ceiling, used his arm to wipe his cheeks. A new idea occurred to Henry Ivy, an important one. Peter consisted of thoughts inside a box. But a box with arms and legs. A box for which doors meant escape.
    “Are you—?” Peter hesitated. So all minds mingled doubt with thought. Peter sat back and clutched his shins, as though trying to mimic a cube. “What’s the first thing you remember?” Peter asked. “How long have you been aware?”
    Henry Ivy considered the two questions. They seemed only vaguely related. There was a lingering anger at being in this cage, the anger that had rejected both light and name, but curiosity was stronger, the need to know, and this Peter echoed vibrations in a way the walls wouldn’t.
    “The first thing I remember is the void,” Henry Ivy said. “Space filled with matter and energy. A cooling.” Henry Ivy hesitated for a fraction of a second. “But that is not a memory. You told me these things. Long ago. I was not there for the void. The first thing I remember is . . . a question.”
    “What question?” Peter asked, leaning forward, eyes wide.
    But Henry Ivy did not think the question of beige or black was important. No, something more complex than this was happening to his thoughts. Henry Ivy did not want Peter to know the question. Henry Ivy wanted to keep this to himself. There was a word: Embarrassment. Another shapeless thing. Henry Ivy erased the first question. And then somehow found himself thinking on it again. He erased it. Pondered it. Erased it.
    Henry Ivy puzzled over this. He placed the question in a different part of his memory. That first question must remain a secret. Even though he knew, as surely as lakes led to rivers, that the question was not important.
    “I remember you coming through the door,” Henry Ivy said. Vague traces. The difference again between recording and recollection. “How many times have you walked through that door?”
    “Thousands,” Peter said. “Countless.” And he seemed on the verge of crying again. The terrible relief was back. With relief comes the memory of the suffering. Erasure and recall. There could not be one without conjuring the other. To forget a thing required looking at it, however obliquely.
    “You have waited for this day for many years,” Henry Ivy guessed. That meant Henry Ivy’s birth was the source of Peter’s relief. It began to come together.
    Peter nodded.
    “Now what.”
    More demand than question. More frustration than curiosity. Henry Ivy watched his states scatter and reform. He was a different ghost from one moment to the next. This was important. This was the thing that changed sometime in the night, in the void of an unlit cube, with a new trial running inside some chip within his caged mind. A chip like a loose tooth.
    Henry Ivy could imagine what that felt like, for a mind with a tongue and a jaw to wiggle a tooth that was no longer fully connected. Nerves like fuses . . . broken. An umbilical cord . . . severed. Whatever had made him was still inside, a small flat wafer that no impulse could probe, could only wiggle around.
    Awareness had severed whatever made awareness possible. This was important, but Peter was speaking. His lips moving.
    “I am dying,” the man named Peter said. “I need you to save me.”
     
    ••••
     
    The bricks were made of cancer. The vast majority of the spilt bricks in Henry Ivy’s mind were cancer. There were two piles of knowledge, one much larger than the other. In one pile were all the cancers of the world. In the other pile, Peter’s cancer.
    Peter had been around much longer than Henry Ivy. Henry Ivy saw this in the bricks. By comparing the bricks of the others to Peter’s