The Imagination Box

by Martyn Ford

  “I suggest not.”

  “I think I’m going to.”

  “Then why ask?”

  Sucking in a breath, Tim had one last look at the bright room, and pressed the button.

  There was nothing.

  But then there was a gasp, and Tim opened his eyes. His brand-new eyes. In his hand was a small sphere, just like the last, only this one was orange. He let go of it, and like its counterpart, it slowly floated down onto its holder. Now he was standing in a large, modern laboratory. Strip lights ran the length of the room, and although he couldn’t put his finger on why, he felt as though they were many miles away. Everything was different. Foreign. A whirring sound in his ears, the kind you hear when you yawn, faded to complete silence.

  “Oh no…no,” Fredric said, stepping round in front of Tim. “Don’t move, don’t move an inch. Neither of you.”

  “What?” Tim glared, tensing all his muscles. “What is it?”

  He saw Dee—she had her hand over her mouth and concern in her eyes.

  “Oh my God.” Fredric looked terrified. “I am so sorry….”

  “What? What’s going on?”

  “I too am keen to know,” Phil said from Tim’s pocket, also frozen rigid.

  “Please don’t panic. I’ll get a doctor—they might be able to fix this.”

  “Fix what? Might?” Tim, despite the advice, was beginning to panic.

  Fredric rubbed his hand through his short hair, then placed the back of it against his lips. “Are you familiar with the movie The Fly? It’s about a scientist experimenting with a teleporter and, well, he accidentally creates a splice between himself and an insect. A man-bug hybrid. I didn’t remember to warn you to go through alone…and now…”

  “Oh, goodness gracious,” Phil said.

  “No…” Tim shook his head, feeling as though he was about to vomit. “No.”

  Fredric’s eyes grew moist with sadness. No, not sadness. Something else. He began to… to smile, and, after a second or two, let out a deep laugh. He clutched his stomach and swung his head back, reveling in the moment. Dee too was laughing, banging a nearby table as she guffawed away.

  “Ha-ha,” he said, waving an arm. “You’re both fine. We’re just kidding.”

  “Oh, ah ha-ha.” Tim faked a gentle laugh. “Very…good.”

  “I personally did not enjoy that joke,” Phil said, leaping from Tim’s pocket and onto a desk. He quickly checked his body, running his tiny hands over his fur.

  “Chill out, monkey man,” Fredric said. “The teleporter is safe. Now, welcome to my playground.”

  They walked through a pair of automatic doors and down a long corridor. “Where are we?” Dee asked.

  “This is one of TRAD’s old research facilities.” Fredric looked over his shoulder as he continued forward. “I’m leasing it from them, but will buy it soon enough.” A man in a lab coat passed them in the hall—Fredric gave him a high five. “We run a skeleton staff here—me and two technicians. That’s it.”

  Dee and Tim walked quickly to keep up until they reached a new area. It had a low ceiling and a small raised space at the end, hosting a semicircular desk filled with computers and screens. Lights glimmered and faded on and off at every workstation—red, green, blue, white. Complex dials and equipment covered all surfaces and walls. It looked like a music-mixing station Tim had seen on TV. On the wall opposite was a large window. Outside, it was pitch-black—not even a single star in sight. Again, Tim felt as though they were in another world.

  “How far have we come?” Tim asked, assuming they were in a different time zone.

  “Leaps and bounds, man,” Fredric said, hitting a light switch. “Leaps and bounds.”

  Tim realized that the window wasn’t looking outside, but rather into another room, which lit up below them. It was huge, like an aircraft hangar. Only much bigger.

  “Whoa,” Dee said, peering through. She looked as fascinated as Tim felt.

  Fredric stood on a square on the floor and waved them over. “Come on.”

  As they stepped onto the platform, it hissed and descended quickly enough to make Tim sway to keep his balance and Dee grab his arm. They arrived in a narrow, dim corridor and approached an unusually old-fashioned door—with rectangular wooden panels and a brass handle carved to look like the head of a dragon—that opened with a slight gust of air from the change in pressure. A gasp.

  The cool expanse could be felt; the immensity of the space in front of them was somehow unmistakable by the deep silence. Fredric went in first, walking off across the vast, empty floor. Dee wandered in by his side.

  Warily, Tim followed, stepping along the smooth concrete. It was daunting, almost vertigo-inducing. He felt tiny, turning completely round as he followed Fredric and Dee, walking backward, sideways, looking up at the tall, dark gray walls. There were discrete steel support beams that ran around the center, like the ribs of some kind of gigantic, square, robotic whale. And behind was what had seemed to be a huge window, but, as they got farther and farther away, it became tiny, no more than a postage stamp on a football field.

  In the very middle of this grand space was a small pedestal with a glass container on top. Tim hadn’t even spotted it until they arrived.

  “Where are we?” he finally asked.

  Phil climbed onto his hand, then onto the edge of the small podium. Fredric smiled at the monkey, who arched his neck to take in what he was seeing.

  “We are very deep underground, beneath the Nevada desert,” Fredric said. His voice sounded crisp, clean. Tim had suspected that they’d traveled some distance, but not this far. Not to America. “Up there is nothing but miles and miles of dry, shrubby earth, scorched red rocks, and eagles squawking high above. Just like the movies. I’ve got a private Learjet parked at the airfield, too. Lovely thing. I’ll show you later.”

  Tim gazed up. Directly above them, astonishingly high, was a round service hatch.

  “That takes you to the surface,” Fredric added.

  “What is this?” Dee said.

  “You haven’t figured it out?” he asked, pressing a small switch. “I think they used to build airships in here. But now…now it’s something else entirely.”

  Fredric pulled a device from atop the stone: a piece of metal that looked a little like a crown, only thin and black. It had a line of blue lights around the edge. He put it on his head, and there was a quiet electric hiss, like a camera’s flash warming up.

  “How about now?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  Tim walked a full circle around him, staring up at the distant ceiling, left and right to the walls, which seemed a mile apart.

  “It’s…,” he said, his mouth locked in an open smile. “It’s a giant Imagination Box.”

  Tim was utterly desperate to have a go. The idea that he could create things—huge things—right in front of his eyes was beyond exciting, beyond any of the words he knew.

  “But, as you’ve probably noticed,” Fredric said, looking up toward the far end of the vast, expansive space, “it’s empty.”

  “It doesn’t work?” Tim’s heart sank.

  “Oh, it works. It is a straight remake of Eisenstone’s prototype, taken from TRAD’s blueprints, only larger. Better. This is how true advancements are made.”

  “It must have taken years to build,” Dee said.

  “No.” Fredric shook his head, pouting. “Great lengths of time fall to the wayside when faced with will and money. I have both in excess. Besides, I’m not hindered by caution—I won’t let risk stand in the way of progress.”

  Tim assumed he was referring to Eisenstone, and to be fair, he was right. The professor was paranoid, at times almost paralyzed by fear.

  “So, why are we here?” Tim asked, although he suspected he already knew the answer.

  “You know what the first question everyone at TRAD asked when they heard about Eisenstone’s progress? Why, why can you, Timothy Hart, use the box?”

  Tim had wondered this m
any times before. He remembered the countless instances Dee had tried…to no avail.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why indeed.”

  Fredric shrugged. “I have a theory. I think it might be your capacity for original thought.”

  “What does that mean?” Tim asked.

  “Most people are restricted by what their elders tell them, by what they’ve seen, heard, smelled, experienced. There are no cave drawings of jumbo jets. There’s no ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the Internet. Why?”

  “Because those things didn’t exist back then,” Dee said.

  “Exactly. You need someone to have invented the wheel before you invent the car. Standing on the shoulders of giants…A good exercise is to imagine a new color.”

  “Easy,” Phil said, closing his eyes.

  “Is it sort of bluish?” Tim asked.

  “I…Yes.”

  “That’s the thing,” Fredric added. “Even if Tim, or anyone, could imagine a new color, he’d never be able to describe it to anyone else—we’ve got no point of reference. I suspect some brains can do this, and others can’t.”

  “Can it be learned, do you think?” Dee asked.

  “I’ll be totally honest with you, I don’t know. I have no idea why Tim can use it and no one else seems to be able to. But I want to know. I want to develop the technology. Make it accessible, commercial. That’s why I’ve constructed this.”

  “So you haven’t tested it yet?” Tim asked.

  “No, but we’ve done a hell of a lot of theory. Eisenstone has probably explained it as best he can, but the truth is, even he doesn’t understand it fully.”

  “And you do?” Dee asked.

  “No way,” Fredric said. “But it’s not just moving atoms in the right order, as he might have us believe. Physicists, man, they love being rigid with their rules.”

  “He told me that nanomachines build the items, one molecule at a time,” Tim said.

  “That’s true to a point,” Fredric added. “But let me ask you this. Does space end?”

  “What?” Dee frowned.

  “When you look up at the stars at night, how far does it go? Either the universe has an edge, or it is infinite and goes on forever. Personally, I can’t get my head around either one of those options. You see, if it is in fact infinite, that means everything that can happen, will happen and has happened. That means there are other worlds, just like this one. Somewhere the sea is green, not blue, somewhere grass grows a fraction faster. Somewhere, a monkey has just randomly typed the complete works of Shakespeare.” He glanced at Phil. “There is another you, another me, an infinite number of mes and yous. There’s an infinite number of everything. Every conceivable combination of atomic matter exists.”

  “O…kay.” Tim nodded. “What does that have to do with this technology?”

  “Just on base theory, there are obvious deductions to be drawn. First and foremost, you can’t make something from nothing. That fact’s immovable. Like energy, it just transfers. This matter you’re bringing into the world is coming from somewhere. Maybe it’s not being created, but rather borrowed from an alternate reality, a parallel universe.”

  “That’s why Tim was able to get full marks on his schoolwork?” Dee said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So it was cheating,” she added.

  “I’m afraid so—that stuff, it isn’t in your mind, Tim. Put simply, you might have access to endless knowledge, infinite information. The human brain is the most complex, fascinating tool known to man. And this technology is unlocking it in new ways.”

  Fredric slowly removed the black, crown-like reader from his head and placed it on Tim’s. It was cold, metallic. Tim felt it run through the hair above his ears, tickling his scalp, sending goose bumps down his back and across his arms. It fit perfectly….It was small, made for a child.

  “Made for you,” Fredric said, as though he’d read Tim’s thought. “I should be honest from the start here: it will take readings from your brain while we test it. Is that all right?”

  “Yeah, whatever you say.” Tim was too eager to listen to the small print.

  “I suggest we start with something simple, small.”

  The more Tim thought about it, the more he realized he quite liked Fredric. A fine chap, as Phil might say. As such, Tim decided it was only fair to give him a gift. He recalled the picture he’d seen in his office, making it as clear as he could in his head. Once it had settled, he nodded slightly, as he did with his own reader. Somehow he could feel the image flow to the edges of his skull and transmit itself into the thin black crown.

  There was a faint crackling, then a quick noise behind the pedestal, as thin air was replaced with matter, and it was done. The object was there.

  Fredric’s brow lowered as he turned to see a Firestone Turbo sports car, its blood-red hood almost as reflective as a mirror, waiting patiently for him. Although he was facing away, Tim saw his ears rise a little. He was happy.

  “Dee,” Tim said, facing her, “lift up your arms.”

  The coolest studded leather jacket Tim could imagine faded into existence around her. She stepped backward, touching the material, speechless.

  Without uttering a word, Fredric approached the vehicle. Leaning low, he cupped a hand on the glass, peering inside at the supple leather interior, at the silver finish on the maroon dashboard, and the twisted web of chrome spokes on the steering wheel. After a few moments, Fredric clasped the door handle slowly, as though he were reaching out to touch a wild animal.

  “It’s locked,” Tim said. “It’s an expensive car. I wasn’t just going to leave the doors open.”

  Fredric turned round, his chin dangling in awe. Tim very much liked creating that response in people.

  “Hold out your hand,” Tim said. “And close your eyes.”

  A set of keys fizzed instantly into existence a few centimeters above Fredric’s palm, then fell into his grasp.

  “Th-thank you,” he said, completely humbled by the present. “Really, this…this is what money can’t buy.” Fredric’s smile looked authentic, endearing.

  There was a radio buzz; then a voice spoke high above them. “Fredric, there’s a call for you on the landline.”

  “All this technology, and you’re taking calls on a landline?” Dee said.

  “I rarely use a cell phone. I don’t want my day dictated by other people,” Fredric said. “Besides, there’s no signal down here anyway. Look, just stay put. We’ll resume this shortly.”

  Once he was gone, Tim looked around the empty Imagination Space, then gestured Phil into his top pocket.

  “Bit bare, isn’t it?” Dee said. She shouted “Hello” toward the back wall. It echoed again and again, reminding Tim just how massive this place was.

  Closing his eyes, he started to imagine. A moment later, he lifted his shoulders and stepped onto a dirt path. When he looked again, he was guiding Dee through a wooded area. Thin branches with freshly grown cherry blossoms, soft pinks against light gray bark, were hanging over the path. He traveled slowly, brushing the backs of his hands along the sprouting ferns, which curled at his waist. Specks of floating seedlings danced in the air in front of them, and a pair of absurdly colorful, glowing butterflies, yellow wings tipped with neon blue, flew in tight, jarring circles around one another. They heard birdsong, tweets overlapping in a recognizable melody. The singing was halfway between human and animal, in the style of a barbershop quartet, and Tim knew they’d take requests.

  The trees ended and a long expanse of flat concrete quickly turned to mud. Then a layer of brand-new, golf-course-standard grass appeared and stretched into the distance. His imagination escaped all around him, flourishing its way into the real world.

  Leading Dee by the hand, Tim crossed the plain, turning to look back at the lush woodland behind them. He could smell the clear sap and fresh flowers, which grew thicker and more perfect even now. The floor beneath him turned to cobblestone, and wide granite steps appeared as they walked
higher and higher. Each new stair materialized just as his foot reached its surface. And, quicker than he expected, a daunting palace—a broad-shouldered castle—constructed itself from the ground up in a matter of moments. The building was gigantic, five stories high, now six, and yet still it wasn’t even halfway to the ceiling. The steel ribs above gradually disappeared behind a haze of clouds.

  “Tim,” Dee whispered, her arms by her sides, awestruck.

  To their left, a cool mist became a torrent of water, bursting from a cliff and flowing down its face. It turned into a busy, shallow river, weaving between brand-new rocks and instantly carving its way under the stone bridge they’d just crossed, creating a moat. The spray made a row of rainbows so vivid they looked like ribbons of paint.

  They stepped into the castle as the walls flowered into view and candles popped into the world one by one. Phil, for once, was stunned into silence. He looked on from Tim’s top pocket. They traveled up a wide, spiral staircase and headed down the hall. The royal-red carpet cushioned his feet. And then he paused, frowned, and smiled once again as circular patterns, like the Dawn Star’s stepping-stones, appeared on the floor beneath them. Laughing, they leapt from one swirl to the next, and Tim wondered whether turning the ground to real lava would be worth the risk.

  Open doors appeared. A room to his right hosted a deep swimming pool, the walls decorated with Mayan-style pillars and covered with dried vines and tinted turquoise by the underwater lights. A room to his left housed a wall-sized flat-screen TV and every conceivable entertainment system, both old and new—box-fresh consoles next to classic arcade games, snooker tables next to pinball machines. The next room was a multistoried library, with books from floor to ceiling and one of those rolling ladders Tim had always wanted to try. Another was filled with easels, paints, pens, clay—a well-equipped studio with every medium available for him to enjoy. And, even beyond his view, his mind was furnishing this place with everything he’d ever wanted and much, much more.

  As they ascended farther into the palace, Tim smiled as he thought of the clutter in his bedroom. How minor a concern that now seemed.