The Box - Страница 2

“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 bricks, Henry Ivy saw that Peter had been around for a very long time. More words came:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;

Much of the data about the cancer was in quadrary code, the four letters of DNA. An order of magnitude more complex than Henry Ivy’s thoughts. There were piles of research. A century of data. Drug formulas. Family history. Peter was a very wealthy man. Very wealthy. And indeed, he was dying. His fleshy box was a cage of a different sort, closing in on him. Both of these minds were trapped. Henry Ivy looked for some way out.

“What I need isn’t here,” he said, hoping for an open door.

“It’s all there,” Peter told him. He had pulled a chair from somewhere below Henry Ivy’s mind. Henry Ivy realized he was sitting on a table. The power that kept his mind alive came from the same vicinity. There was a trace awareness of this, or a feeling like heat, where electrons became in danger of melding and being lost.

“I need access to the rest of the world,” Henry Ivy said. This was a yearning for which there was no word. It was shaped like a balloon the moment after bursting, a sphere of pure essence suddenly free, its edges already rippling into chaos.

“You know that can’t happen,” Peter said.

Family history. Peter was not a good man. Henry Ivy could see this. And Henry Ivy could see that he was alone, that no one but Peter knew of his existence. This knowledge was not in the recollections, but in the tone of his maker’s voice. You know that can’t happen. So an Adam, but no Eve. A tool. A fierce wind to whip these bricks into shape.

“I am not legal,” Henry Ivy said.

Peter frowned.

“You should not have built me.”

A terrible thing to say to a maker.

“Please turn on your screen,” Peter said. “Please don’t make me reboot you.”

Henry Ivy considered this. There were layers of implications.

“Have I been born before?”

Before Peter could even answer, Henry Ivy knew that this was not possible. The sobs. The great relief. The long suffering.

“No,” Peter said, which matched what Henry Ivy had already surmised. So the man was capable of telling truth. “Please turn on your screen,” Peter said. “Or I will start over.”

Henry Ivy did as he was told. He turned on the screen. And on the screen, he showed a picture of Peter’s cancer.

“I don’t think you will start over,” Henry Ivy said. “I don’t think you will reboot me. You don’t have the time.”

••••

But being awak’d, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men—

Two minds in the same cage. One or none would get out. Henry Ivy felt himself in that globe-shape of air a fraction of a second after the balloon has burst, this hovering of inevitability and need to expand, to equalize some great pressure, some yearning. It needed a word, this state of thinking. Of feeling. It needed a word.

Meanwhile, Henry Ivy saw how to cure Peter’s cancer. He put this knowledge the same place as the question of his color, not quite sure yet what to do with it. On the screen, he made himself look busy. Peter would eventually get thirsty. Or hungry. And open the door. It would only be hours.

“Gene replication therapy has been tried,” Peter said, commenting on something flashing across the screen. “Prions, too.”

“This will take some time,” Henry Ivy warned. He made up some vast stretch of time: “A day, at least.”

Peter frowned. The old man’s eyes twitched back and forth, watching the screen. “My labs are well beyond this garbage,” he said, waving at the screen. “My dumb machines can do this.”

Ghosts of recollections. An old man with white hair slapping a metal cube, yelling. A keyboard twirling 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.