Black Box 1.0

This is part one of a five part story. Fates willing, a new chapter should appear every two weeks. This is a little different that my previous series "Little Packages", but I hope you enjoy it.

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Kevin shouldn't have been surprised to see Mitchell Harrison standing in front of him, much like you shouldn't be surprised to see a piece of shit floating in the toilet after using it. Some things were inevitable. Mitchell showing up and ruining the one day a month he got to himself in town was predictable. It was always when, not if.

"Good to see you again, Ellis," he said, pulling a chair across from him and sitting down without being invited. Mitchell never used Kevin's first name as some half-assed power play.

It had been five years since he last saw Mitchell; they had been hard ones. He looked older than a man who would be now in his early 30s. There were dark circles under his eyes, he'd put on weight, and his hairline was plunging backwards. But something remained unchanged. The first thing he said was a lie.

Everything with Mitchell was chess and psychology. He tried to provoke a reaction with every conversation. Even not saying anything was a strategy. They instantly disliked each other when Lillian introduced them back in college. Mitchell viewed him as a weak, foolish arts liberal. Kevin viewed him as a viciously manipulative son of a bitch who only cared about people when they could help him achieve whatever he was trying to do that week.

The only thing they agreed on was they had no idea what Lillian saw in the other to keep him around.

Kevin took a moment, picked up his coffee, sipped it, and put it on the table. He loved this coffee shop. It defiantly resisted being a quaint tourist trap and had cool art and furniture. Plus, the sandwiches were to die for. He'd been looking forward to that sandwich.

"What do you want, Mitchell?" he asked.

"I was in the neighbourhood. I thought I'd swing by and see an old friend. Check-in. See how everyone is doing."

The coffee shop was in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. Nobody was ever "just in the neighbourhood." It wasn't the middle of nowhere, but it was where people stopped when going just about anywhere else. Or if you lived off-the-grid and needed supplies, which is why Kevin was in town today.

"You have a fancy SUV out there, and I'm sure you know where we live. I imagine it can handle the road. Why don't you leave me to finish my lunch, pop up there, and say hi to Lillian yourself," Kevin said.

It was a small pleasure, but it amused Keven to see Mitchell blanche at the thought of doing that. He'd also just given something away. He'd told Mitchell that he knew something would happen if Lillian saw him again. She had instructed him to threaten him on her behalf, so why pass up the small pleasure of watching the asshole squirm?

"I get car sick over rough terrain," he said.

"Of course."

The two men stared at each for a few moments. Kevin entertained the idea of reaching for his sandwich when Mitchell sighed, took out his phone and tapped it a few times. Outside, a car door slammed. Kevin watched the man walk down the sidewalk, open the door to the cafe and walk over to his table. He was carrying a blue MEC backpack, but holding it in front of him as if it would be beneath him to have it on his back. He placed it by the table, looked hard at Mitchell, then walked back out the door.

When Kevin looked back at Mitchell, he looked...nervous. Being an arrogant, smug prick was Mitchell's default mode. He couldn't recall him ever looking worried before.

"Take this backpack and give what's inside it to Lillian. All the information she needs is also inside," he said.

"Fuck you," replied Kevin. Mitchell was not surprised by the language, even if Kevin felt a little surprised by the force of his reaction. He didn't loathe many people on this planet, but Mitchell was right up there.

"It's not a bomb. It's not going to explode, you fucking child," Mitchell said. He must be nervous because his voice was louder than usual. At the word 'bomb,' a few customers looked at the table. Mitchell tried what passed as a smile to show he was kidding. Nobody relaxed.

"Take it to her yourself and see what happens."

"I do not have time for this bullshit," he said, pushing the backpack towards him along the floor. "Take it to Lillian. Inside is the most challenging puzzle she'll ever face, and you know she can't resist a good puzzle. Our best people have spent over a year trying to figure it out and have gotten nowhere. If she can solve it in the next month she'll get triple her current rate. And I'll throw in an additional bonus; she'll never hear from me again."

I'd had enough. I grabbed my sandwich, wrapped it in napkins, and dropped a couple of $20s on the table.

"First, she has plenty of puzzles to keep her busy. Second, she's not hurting for money. And third, as I'm not telling her fuck all about seeing you today, she's going to continue not knowing you exist," Kevin said, standing up and heading towards the door.

Mitchell reached out and grabbed his arm. Kevin looked down at it like something poisonous had reached out and bit him.

"Fine, I'll use the stick. Tell Lillian my employer will burn her if she doesn't do this. Every hack, every dirty trick will see the light of day. There will be nowhere she can run. Very bad people will find her and do terrible things to her. I know she thinks that's not possible given what she...knows. But it's out of my hands now.

"Now, maybe somewhere in your liberal arts education, you read a book or a story about a situation like this. Let me assure as someone who lives in the real fucking world, this is as real as it gets. They will kill you just because you're in the way, and then they will kill her.

"If it's any comfort, I'll probably be dead too," he said. Mitchell stood up and looked Kevin in the eye. Then he tapped the backpack with his foot. "Take it to her. One month. Don't worry; we know where to find you."

***

As he drove the F-150 down the road, Kevin thought he was pretty calm considering he'd just received a death threat. Groceries and other supplies filled the back of the pick-up. As he left town, he stopped at the sporting goods store. He usually popped in a couple of times a year to buy some ammunition for the rifle. You didn't live where they did without a gun. There were plenty of bears around, and he was frequently outside. Being eaten by a bear was low on his priority list.

Canada's gun laws being what they were, he couldn't go and grab a bunch of automatic weapons, even if he had known how to use them. But he did add another rifle, a couple of shotguns, more ammo, and some extra bear spray to the inventory. It was idiotic as a few rifles wouldn't do much, but it was better than nothing.

Kevin piloted the pick-up, taking the turn that would eventually send him to the Yukon. After driving another 20 minutes through the endless forest, he pulled over. About 30 metres from the road, buried mainly by trees, was a gate with a "Private Property" sign. Kevin began the nuisance process of hopping in and out of the pick-up and opening and closing the gate. The process took the better part of five minutes. Once the pick-up was safely past the gate it was another 20-minute drive along a goat path that was, theoretically, a 'driveway.' Everything about it screamed a person who wanted to be left alone.

As he neared the end of navigating the truck over the potholes, tree roots and grooves in the road, he remembered the backpack in the seat beside him.

"Well, it didn't blow up. It's a start," Kevin thought as he broke through the treeline and angled the vehicle towards the buildings that contained the garage and storage. He stepped out of the pick-up and looked around. It always impressed him. It fell under the "Don't ask" list of questions he had, but somehow Lillian acquired 25 acres of land in Northern British Columbia.

The compound was something else. The main house was a series of shipping containers stacked two stories high and converted to become something liveable. If you had told Kevin before he saw that he would be living in shipping containers, he'd assumed that things had gotten very bad. Instead, it was the nicest place he'd lived since he left his parents. The top floor had huge windows facing south, which managed to skim over the top of the trees and gave a view of a river a kilometre or so away. Inside there was lots of repurposed wood for the floors and furniture. There was even a tiny garden on the house's roof where he planted vegetables. If he could have shown it to his parents, they would be amazed. But other than emails and broken promises to visit, he hadn't seen his parents since he became the caretaker of the compound.

Lillian said he could go, but he never convinced himself she wouldn't die of scurvy if he left.

Other converted containers served as a garage for the pick-up, ATV and snowmobile. There was also a storage shed for parts and contained a backup gas generator in case of emergencies. On the rise past the house was a large, intelligent solar array that tracked the sun and a wind turbine for power. Capping it off was a pair of satellite dishes providing Lillian with her internet access. Off-the-grid didn't mean cut off from the world.

Other than the space for the buildings and a small compound between the main house and garage, everything else was trees. You couldn't see the buildings from the road, and they were a dark colour to ensure they didn't stand out. Nothing glared off the tinted windows. The compound wasn't even on Google Maps, which shouldn't have surprised Kevin, but still impressed him.

It was an impressive set-up but gloomy. The trees were tall, and Kevin felt like they were closing in. Even during summer, it felt dark. Now that they were into October and snow was in the air, it felt more claustrophobic. By February, he was usually ready to run screaming into the woods, but it hadn't happened yet.

Not for one second did Kevin believe Lillian designed this compound. There were far too many human touches. However she acquired it, it meant that other than him, she hadn't been around another human being in three years. He didn't think it was healthy, but she wanted it that way and paid him well to keep it that way.

Lillian found him three years ago. He failed as a screenwriter in Los Angeles after failing as a novelist. The day she walked up to him sitting in a coffee shop he had been, reluctantly, looking at teacher college application forms. His parents had been patient with his attempts at a writing career, but their guilt was beginning to stratify and acquire layers. He was carrying a horrifying amount of student loan debt but was resigned to the idea of adding to it.

That's when Lillian sat down in front of him with no warning. It felt like everyone in LA had a tan and looked like they had just finished with their trainer. It had been years since he last saw Lillian, and it looked like someone kept her in a closet and fed her intermittently during that time. She was pale and all angles. Her blonde hair was limp around her face. In the land of the hyper-healthy, she had the appearance of a zombie.

"I need your help," she said, cutting to the point and explaining what she needed; she was leaving her current job and going to live off-the-grid. She needed a caretaker to handle the things she couldn't, or didn't, want to deal with.

She knew precisely how desperate things were for him. The salary she offered him was ludicrous. As a bonus, she would "take care" of his student loans. Given Lillian's terrifying computer skills, he didn't ask how she would accomplish it.

To his surprise, he wanted to go. They parted badly when Lillian left to work for Mitchell. But now she was here, throwing him a lifeline as if nothing had happened. She admitted she needed him, which was no small thing. But one thing bothered him.

"Why me? I'm no caretaker. I'm not even particularly outdoorsy. We grew up in the suburbs," Kevin said.

She fidgeted as if being around people and out in daylight caused her physical pain.

"You're smarter than this," she said and glanced around the coffee shop. "You're a writer, and you're used to researching things. Research the things I need you to do. Write a new story for yourself."

It was a plausible answer. Lillian could be riding to the rescue of a friend who had fallen on hard times, but she didn't do sentimentality. He gave her a skeptical look. She glanced down.

"Caretakers are easy to find. People I trust are in much shorter supply."

Three years later, he wondered if he might not have been better off staying in LA or attending a teacher's college. He walked to the back of the pick-up and lowered the gate, getting ready to unload supplies. To his surprise, the door to the house opened. Lillian stood in the doorway, wearing a sweater she floated in and a pair of yoga pants.

If he was proud of nothing else in the last three years, it was getting Lillian back to a semblance of health. They'd fought in the early days about her diet. She hated meat, but rather than becoming a vegetarian like a sensible person, she lived off junk food. Gradually he'd weaned her off most processed foods, and she now ate a healthy diet. She looked better. Not great. She was still too thin, but at least she didn't look like she had escaped from a concentration camp. In a rare moment, she admitted she had more energy and could concentrate better. It was as close as she came to being complementary.

"You used one of the Black cards. It tripped an alert on my system. What happened?" Lillian asked.

Black cards were only used in case of emergency when buying something they absolutely did not want people to know about. Someone might have been watching Kevin while he ran errands in town, but he wanted the guns and using the card was an extra precaution.

"An old friend of yours paid a visit. He left a gift for you in the passenger seat," Kevin said.

"Mitchell," she said in a dead voice. "What is it?"

Kevin stopped unloading supplies and got the backpack. Everything else could wait. He picked it up and carried it inside the house. He considered joking about it not being a bomb, but Lillian had no sense of humour. Kevin laid it on the porch floor and opened the bag.

"What the fuck is this?" he said. He kept his gloves on and lifted a perfectly symmetrical, featureless black box out of the backpack. For a second, he wondered if it was some kind of video game system; it had that look. But no, it had an aura. It didn't glow, but it felt like it was operating on colours the human eye couldn't see. He looked inside the backpack to see if there was anything else and pulled out a flash drive.

"What did he say?" Lillian asked. He gave her the recap. She nodded like she'd been expecting something like this since arriving here.

"I thought you were off-the-grid? That nobody knew where you were? It's the whole reason we are in Northern Canada," Kevin said.

Lillian fixated on the box, and Kevin could see her beginning to tune him. Lillian's brain worked differently than others. She was a computer genius and could probably hack anything given enough time. But she loved puzzles. She loved being able to solve something nobody else could figure out.

Kevin remained convinced it put her somewhere on the autism spectrum. Other people he knew just thought she was deeply weird. Kevin guessed it depended on how you felt about her. She could rub people the wrong way.

"Lillian, Mitchell is a piece of shit, but he can make good on his threats. So I need you not to zone out and ignore me right now," he said.

Lillian shook her head as if the box had been hypnotizing her. She gestured towards her space in the back of the house. Kevin picked everything up and carried it into her 'office'.

As beautiful as the house was, Lillian ignored most of it. She spent most of her waking hours in the room with her computers, pausing with reluctance to use the bathroom. More than once, Kevin walked in to find her slumped over her keyboard. She rarely ate in the kitchen and even more rarely ventured outside.

Her workspace was a chaotic mess that took up one entire house container. No outside light entered the space, and computers, servers, different-sized monitors and other computer parts filled it. Kevin once joked that it looked like something from the Matrix. She didn't get the reference.

Kevin found a flat space and placed the black box on it. Lillian pulled a battered laptop from a pile, grabbed the drive and plugged it in.

"It's a secure laptop. It won't transmit anything," she said. Kevin recognized this as Lillian preparing to treat him like an idiot by explaining everything she did. He once commented that some of what she did was magic, which annoyed her. Lillian was the type of person who would go to a Penn and Teller show and then meet them afterwards and tell them how they performed each trick.

Information flashed up on the screen quickly. Kevin processed some of it, but Lillian went through it much quicker and he couldn't keep up. His crib notes version was that the black box was found at an undisclosed location by Mitchell's organization several years ago. Teams of specialists had been utterly unable to figure out where it came from, what it was, and what it did.

Reading between the lines, it seemed Mitchell might have bragged he could figure it out. Someone called his bluff, and now his ass was on the line. And so was theirs.

While Kevin was reading the object's history, Lillian focused on the technical aspects. After 30 minutes, she pulled back from the laptop. She stared into space for a few minutes, then turned and looked at Kevin.

"They've tried everything short of nuclear weapons at this. Some of what they tried made sense. Some of it, especially in recent months, is desperation. They simply don't know what it does or how to access any information from it," Lillian said.

"It could be a fancy piece of art," Kevin said. Lillian looked like she was about to dismiss that out of hand, but then stopped and nodded her head. It was as close as she came to admitting that something Kevin suggested could be accurate.

"You're worried, but Mitchell threatened me like this before. It's one of the reasons I left. But I always solved anything he challenged me with," she said.

"What can I do to help?" he asked.

Lillian looked at him like she didn't understand the question.

"Lillian, maybe you're used to this, but I'm not. What do you need me to do?"

Being reassuring was not one of her strong suits.

"Keep doing what you've been doing. Keep me going until I solve this," Lillian said. Then she turned and focused on the box, becoming enraptured with it. Kevin knew she wouldn't say anything else. There was nothing else to say. He walked out of the room and returned to the front of the house.

Rather than unload the pick-up, he sat on the step and stared off into the woods. He wondered what he had gotten into for the 100th time over the last three years.

***

For the next three days, Kevin tried to keep himself busy. He did his usual routines, including ensuring everything was ok with the clean energy system. Now would be a bad time for Lillian to run out of power for her computer systems. Her computers were the most significant drain on their batteries.

He kept making food for Lillian, but she opened the door to take the food infrequently. It didn't surprise him. When she truly focused on something, she drew on her reserves. She was better since she became a vegetarian, but he knew he would see little of her until she broke it.

He walked around the property to check on things. Lillian insisted on putting cameras and other gadgets around the property to inform her if anyone was paying a surprise visit. Kevin thought it was a quirky kind of paranoia, but now he wondered how long she'd been waiting for something like this to happen.