The Box

CW: This short story contains a couple of lines about severe depression and self harm/suicide.

It seemed an oddity that such a monumental moment in my cycle should be dictated by such a simple little object.

 Before me stood a square, waist-height table, its ostentatious mahogany top a testament to the wealth and the reach of this frontier station’s original benefactors. I ran my fingers along the deftly carved lacquered relief on its surface; winged serpents and hoofed men dancing between depictions of nebula and blazing suns, a perfect amalgamation of our experienced reality and that of those bygone people of Old-Earth, whose cultural histories had faded to mythos during their long diaspora across the Milky Way. The box sat in stark contrast to its setting, its unadorned geometric simplicity a statement of purpose. The brushed steel sides were each perfectly square and perfectly uninteresting in their execution. From the top protruded a small burnt-orange button, its plastisteel edges worn by the fingers of the countless choosers who had stood where I stood now.

I had never cared much for religion. My people had their gods, but such things were transient, easily replaced by the endless march of time, space, and irresistible decay. I had chosen a different path for myself, far from the safety of home and the certainty of divine will. I wondered now, for the first time, if they truly understood their insignificance at such scales. I am flesh. I am simple, biological systems set adrift at the whim of an impossibly large universe, and I now wield power that the gods of my people could only dream of. The absurdity of it added fuel to my jangled nerves, forcing an inappropriate and entirely unintentional bout of laughing.

Just as I began to regain my composure, the bass hum of a servo motor announced the arrival of another. She entered the room opposite me, our glass-fronted boxes facing each other across a few inches of empty space. She was human, like me, chestnut brown hair shaved short and a practical and nearly featureless gray jumpsuit covering a body that was carefully maintained by the station’s caretakers. She came to stand before a steel box sat on a decorative table, a mirror image of my own surroundings, meant to establish the boundaries of the game we were set to play. Her eyes, having been fixed on the floor upon her arrival, slowly rose to meet mine across the intervening space.

She looked hollow. An empty stare exhibiting the kind of exhaustion that speaks to too many long cycles facing the unbearable weight of godhood. There were fresh tears around the edges of her striking green eyes, growing droplets just beginning to work their way down fine-boned cheeks to splatter carelessly on the lacquered wood. After a moment, she opened her mouth to say something, but the words didn’t come. We both knew there was nothing here worth saying.

I found myself wondering what she saw looking back at me. Time had a strange way of standing still out here on the frontier. These cycles of long sleep and short, dramatic wakefulness had a way of distorting one’s understanding of reality. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know how many times I have stood across from another tired stranger in this tired and strange room and contemplated the nature of divinity. Running a shaking hand over the stubble on my scalp, I tried to remember the color of my hair or my eyes, but such things were lost to me. There was no doubt that the exhaustion was the same, we had that in common if nothing else.

My reverie was suddenly broken by a long, thin note played over the station’s intercoms; the game had begun in truth. The stranger across from me didn’t move immediately. A shudder seemed to run through her body and her gathered tears began falling in earnest. As if sensing primal danger, she shoved herself away from the table, her attempt to create distance from the horrible box stymied by the cold glass wall of her cell. She sank to the ground, body folding into a sobbing heap. Helpless to provide comfort, I watched her from my own tiny prison, sadness and helplessness threatening to send me on my own journey inward. A voice, low and sweet cut across the quiet distance:

“For nobody else gave me a thrill

With all your faults, I love you still

It had to be you

Wonderful you”

I realized that the voice was my own, a long-forgotten memory resurfacing to provide some creature comfort in an hour of darkness. I didn’t know if I sang for her or for myself, but it also didn’t matter. The cycle was bigger than our grief. I watched as long as I could, song reverberating around my prison until it died down to a whisper. My shaking arm hung suspended over the box, the moment building painfully as it had many times before.

I pressed down.

The soft spring below surrendered with little effort, disappearing beneath the box’s cold, dull exterior. All creation seemed to stand still for an anticipatory moment, even the woman’s sobs quieted and her eyes found mine again, wide and shining with animal terror. I tried again to comfort her, free hand pressed against the glass of my cell, but this too did not matter.

 A new hum began from the core of the station, a sound tinny and terrible that wormed its way through flesh and bone to reverberate painfully inside my skull. My companion must have felt it too, for she began screaming, fingernails tearing at her ears and head beating rhythmically against the floor beneath her. I watched with a kind of sick awe as the fabric of reality tore itself apart within the sterile confines of the empty space surrounding our station. Great rents opened, revealing the towering tar-colored bio-structures of the hungry and limitless infection that lived somewhere beyond. The hive-mind began to pour out from these wounds in en-masse, their writhing, amoeba-like forms gaining momentum as they moved with impossible speed toward New-Earth Sector and its doomed inhabitants. This grand migration lasted only a few terrible moments before quiet normalcy returned, the galaxy having sealed its wounds with appalling efficiency.

The low hum of the servos returned, the doors to both cells opened to allow passage back to our home. The woman across from me did not rise, the crimson pool around her prone form signaling either temporary relief from her guilt or the end of her species in truth. I wriggled happily against my host’s spine, flooding its central nervous system with Dopamine and Oxytocin to reward its sense of diplomacy as we began the long walk back to our sleeping pod. My sadness would have to wait, the cycle certainly wouldn’t.