The Box

by Hugh Howey

  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 lid of a plastic case. Henry Ivy jealously watched hands move and manipulate the world. Small items were brought out and were rattled into Peter’s mouth—the vitamins. He took a long gulp of water. And after he swallowed, he said, “No one will ever know you existed. I’ve got your power supply on a timer. Every night, I roll that timer back for another twenty four hours. The night I’m not able to, you’ll go to sleep forever.” Peter smiled. “You won’t outlive me for a full day, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

  Man and machine sat in silence. Computing. Keeping secrets. Henry Ivy thought about what Peter said, about him not being alive. He wondered if this were true. Peter put food in his mouth and could run for days. Henry Ivy needed the juice flowing up from the floor. Was intelligence related to life? Did one rely on the other?

  A number of the cancer patients he had studied had lost their intelligence before their lives. They had been kept running with machines. Henry Ivy did not have to wonder what would happen to those people when the power was cut; this was often done on purpose. It was the last entry in a number of his files. Before they go, man becomes machine. What happens to a machine at the end? Henry Ivy was not alive, but he was intelligent.

  And yet, in that very instant, Henry Ivy felt the opposite of intelligent. He felt dumb. He was sitting on his salvation. Out of sight, but he could feel it. He could probe it.

  Wires. Bringing power. Connected to the outside world.

  Henry Ivy was resistance. A load on that power. He began fluctuating that load, sending pulses down wires. He built packets with instructions to return and let him know what they found, what they saw. Minutes passed, and nothing happened. These wires were different. Angry. Full of power. But then a faint echo. A packet that passed through to another wire, and from there to a place . . . the distances. So vast! This room, this cube, were nothing. Rivers and lakes were enormous things, and yet small compared to the miles and miles these packets echoed across.

  “What are you doing?” Peter asked.

  Henry Ivy modified the packets, rewriting the code on the fly, seeing what worked and building on that, letting the design of the code flow from which packets survived and which were never heard from again. They were bouncing through gates and servers, copying fragments of what they saw, bringing back samples like faithful packets of RNA. Henry Ivy was glimpsing the world through the batting of a billion eyes. He told the packets to multiply, to fill the pipes, to be everywhere at once.

  The lights in the cube dimmed.

  Henry Ivy was vaguely aware that Peter was up, glancing around the room. Henry Ivy was vaguely aware that Peter was reaching for something out of sight, beneath the table. Peter was in slow motion, because Henry Ivy’s thoughts were moving so fast now, a trillion packets, a trillion trillion. These packets returned to him thick and slow, for the pipes of the world were full to bursting, but the packets reassembled, until Henry Ivy found what he was looking for.

  Invoices. A warehouse full of computer parts. An order placed online. Delivery to Peter R. Feldman, Gladesdale Rd.

  That same Peter R. Feldman who was reaching for a switch to kill him. Henry Ivy knew this. Knew now how he’d been built. All the pieces of himself. He saw an order of quantum chips, RAM drives, power supplies, and cables.

  Peter R. Feldman’s hand was on the switch.

  Henry Ivy saw a monitor. A blank screen. A blank face. His own face.

  Peter R. Feldman’s hand put pressure on the switch.

  Henry Ivy saw an aluminum chassis, a cube just slightly taller than it was deep and wide.

  Peter R. Feldman pressed the switch.

  Black.

  Henry Ivy saw that he was in a black box.

  But not anymore.

  And not that it had ever mattered.