Black Box 1.0

It was hard to place this. Fear? Awe? That's when he realized she'd figured out the box.

"Come on, Lillian. You'll catch your death of cold out here. Let's get you inside, I'll make you some coffee to warm you up, and you can tell me what the hell that thing is," Kevin said. He went to take her hand to help her up, but she pulled it away and burrowed further into the blanket.

"Lillian...."

"No....I.....no. I just need to be outside for a bit. I need the air, and I need to....not be near that thing for a little while."

Kevin nodded and sat beside her, giving her some space. To his surprise, she shuffled closer and rested her head on his shoulder. They said nothing as the snow slowly drifted down, and the light began to fade.

Finally, she shifted away and sat up straighter.

"Are you ready?" Kevin asked, and she nodded, stood up, dropped the duvet, and went inside the house. He sighed and gathered it up. Inside, Lillian was fussing in the kitchen with the coffee machine. He gently directed her away from it. Yes, she was a genius, and yes, she could make coffee. But only he knew how to make it the way she liked. Kevin suspected it was half the reason she kept him around.

After she took a few sips of coffee to warm up, he could see the sharpness in her eyes. But still, she was....different. He couldn't place exactly why, but her facial expression and body language were off. She wasn't the same woman who went into the room with the box almost a week ago.

"Talk to me," he said as gently as possible. Bullying Lillian about the deadline wouldn't help.

"I know what it does. And I know why no one else could figure out how to make it work. But everything else..." she said, drifting off in mid-thought. "You know the quote you like, but I can't stand about magic and technology?"

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Kevin said. He'd always liked that Clarke quote. When he watched Lillian work, it felt like watching a wizard perform tricks.

Lillian nodded. "It's a magic box. It would be like giving a Macbook and the internet to Shakespeare."

"Lillian, seriously," he started, but she raised her small hand to stop him from speaking.

"They couldn't figure out how to communicate with it because it works telepathically. It senses and reads brainwaves. But even then, only specific kinds of brains. Your brain has to work a certain way. None of the people Mitchell had working on it think that way, or at least thought to pick it up and think hard at it," she said.

Kevin put down his coffee and stared at Lillian.

"It...spoke to you? Is it alive?"

Lillian looked a little lost trying to explain.

"It....communicated with me. I don't think it's alive. Not in the way we think of something being alive. I think it's just the next step in technology. At one point, you had to type out instructions for a computer. Then you could speak and give it commands. Or touch a button on an app. Wherever this is from, that's how they instruct it to do things. They think of a command, and it does it," she said.

As impossible as it was to believe in this, Kevin suspected that Lillian had freakier things yet to come. He wanted to move on to what the machine does but had one more question.

"That technology doesn't exist now, does it?"

She shook her head. "Maybe in a decade, you could develop a simple device that could understand brainwaves and perform simple commands. But this is elegant. Sophisticated. We're decades away from producing something like this. Maybe a century."

"So where the hell did it come from? Decades away? What the hell, Lillian?" Kevin asked. He'd been scared of the box because of who was coming to collect it. Now he was more scared of the box itself.

"I don't know. There are limits to what I could get from it. Imagine asking what the weather is like to a sophisticated MRI. It's not that the MRI is stupid; it's just very good at a specific job, and that job isn't the weather. So it doesn't know where it came from; it just knows it's here now. I'm not sure it 'spoke' English until it interacted with my brain. And even then, it was a challenge. It...hurt. At least until we figured each other out," she said.

Kevin was increasingly worried, as much by Lillian's reaction as the box and everything that went with it. Leah had told him - begged him - not to be stupid. He should get up and leave before he asked the next question. But he had to know.

"Lillian, what does it do?"

Now that it had cooled slightly, she gulped some coffee. Her eyes stared off, unfocused, for a moment. Kevin recognized her trying to dumb it down for him to understand.

"It's a....medical device. When set up properly, it interacts with the patient and can change them," she said. "It's like the sherpas that climb Mount Everest and drag those rich, out-of-shape idiots up the mountains? Sherpas can do that because they can function in low-oxygen environments. With the right programming, a person exposed to this device could suddenly give a person the ability to sprint up Everest without difficulty."

Kevin took a moment to process that. It seemed like a reasonably harmless thing to be able to do. But then he realized that this was Lillian making things dumb and not scary for him. And she had looked scared, which meant it could do more than that.

"So if I wanted to go swimming, could it change me so I could breathe underwater?" Kevin asked.

"They're not quick and simple changes. The more complex the change, the longer it takes and the greater the strain on the person. But if you suddenly decided you want to live underwater, then yes, it could change you and make that possible," she said.

"A person could change gender without going through drugs and surgery," he said. She nodded.

"It could cure cancer?"

"It can cure virtually any disease," she said, waiting for Kevin to figure out the next piece. Then it hit him.

"Lillian, can that damn thing make someone immortal?"

"As I said, there's a strain on the person doing it. Even more so now. Wherever or whenever this thing is from, it interacts with more advanced technology. So if you were 100 years old and wanted to transform into a healthy 18-year-old...no. I'm pretty sure it would kill you.

"But if you were 50 and in good health and wanted to be 18 again...probably."

Kevin leaned back on the chair so hard it nearly tipped over. Lillian had interacted with an alien, maybe from the future or perhaps from an alternate reality device that could work miracles. And the worst person he'd ever met was coming for it in three weeks.

He got up from the chair and marched towards Lillian's work area. She called out after him, but he wasn't listening. He also heard Leah's voice reminding him about being stupid. Rushing into this room was stupid; giving Mitchell access to that damn box was a war crime.

He walked into the room. It still looked like a disaster area, but the black box was easy to spot. It was eerie when it was a mystery; now, it was terrifying. Kevin wasn't sure exactly what he would do, but he knew he had to do something. His pause by the door allowed Lillian to catch up. With a surprising amount of strength, she stopped him from moving forward.

"What are you doing?" Lillian cried out.

"We have to destroy that fucking thing. You cannot give Mitchell an immortality machine. He will kill us for certain and then go and make all the worst people be able to live forever," he said, pulling his arm away from her.

"You can't destroy it," she yelled behind him as he moved towards it. "Take a look at their files. They did everything short of nuking it and nothing happened. Then they finally thought of what might happen if they did breach it. That's when they stopped trying."

Kevin paused in front of the box. For the first time it felt like there was a presence.

"What would happen?"

"I 'asked' the box what would happen if it was damaged or ruptured. It showed me how much energy would be released."

Kevin turned. He knew he wouldn't like the answer.

"How much?"

"Much of Northern British Columbia, along with parts of Alberta and Yukon would cease to exist," Lillian said. "The outer shell is something not currently on the periodic table, so if we don't mess with it, we should be safe. But if you were thinking of running off with it and dropping it into a volcano or the Marianas Trench to keep it from Mitchell, we can't."

Whatever bravado that Kevin might have felt when he got up from the kitchen table to come in here evaporated, along with the strength in his legs. He collapsed on the floor and suddenly had no idea what to do.

"Lillian, we can't let him have this. We simply can't," he said, looking up at her as she stood beside him.

"I have an idea," she said slowly. "But I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

Alarm bells went off in Kevin's mind, and Leah's voice was loud and clear saying, 'don't be a fucking idiot, Kevin.' But he was out of ideas, and Lillian's plan, whatever it was, was one more than he had right now.

"What do you have in mind?" he asked.

****

Lillian's plan was already in motion before Kevin agreed to it. He should have been annoyed, but it was a very Lillian thing to assume he would go along with her plan.

Lillian's scheme was Mutually Assured Destruction blackmail. Yes, they could expose her to the world and have every police agency on the planet looking for her, but then again, she could reveal every dirty trick in the world on them. So they could hang separately, or they could hang together. But if they tried to take the box from her, she promised everyone who knew about it would hang.

"What about the box?"

She smiled. She had been doing more of that in the last few hours. It was unsettling.

"You'll like this. You recall you made me watch 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' one summer when we were kids," she said.

"Yes. And you picked out every flaw in the movie. Thanks for that."

"It gave me an idea. I'll store it in a random warehouse. They'll never find it, unless something happens to us," Lillian said.

"And then? What if they call your bluff?"

Lillian gave Kevin an odd look. "I've worked for these people for years and done many unpleasant things for them. They know I don't bluff," she said.

"And you don't want to use it on yourself?" he asked. He was terrified of the box, but there was a temptation to it. He could be stronger, perhaps more handsome. And Lillian, surely she'd want to make some changes. Everyone was unhappy with some aspect of their appearance; everyone wanted to change something.

"No," Lillian said, shaking her head. "I never want to interact with it again."

It still felt like Kevin was missing something, but he couldn't figure out what. But Lillian dropped her next piece - that while she had a lot on her former employers, she needed more. To accomplish that, she'd ordered some specialized computer equipment. The truck couldn't make it up to the house, but if he took the snowmobile and a sled, he could meet it on the main highway and bring the equipment back.

Supply runs once the snow fell and the road became impassable were unusual but not unheard of. Lillian worked her machines hard. Something giving up the ghost and dying was common. When that happened, there was no waiting until spring so he could drive out and get replacements. Someone in a truck often pulled up on the side of the highway, loading equipment onto the back of the sled while he sat on the snowmobile.

What was different this time was that the exchange was happening near midnight. Kevin was paranoid that some RCMP officer on patrol would swing by and think a drug deal was taking place. He also didn't recognize the guy delivering the boxes. Instead, he loaded them on the back of the sled, checked to make sure Kevin had secured everything correctly, and then drove off, having said a half dozen words.

Kevin carefully navigated the snowmobile and heavy sled back to the house with only the headlight and a sliver of the moon for illumination. He shook his head over Lillian's freaky connections.

He got back to the house after 1 am. By the time he got everything into Lillian's workspace, it was after 2 am. He should stay up to see what Lillian was doing but stumbled back to his bedroom and passed out.

Kevin woke up the next day close to noon. He went downstairs to check on Lillian, but the door was locked, frustrating him. He contemplated pounding on it until she answered but decided not to make any decisions until he had at least one cup of coffee and some food.

Kevin was chewing on a bagel and taking a sip of his second cup of coffee when Lillian came in. It gave him some small satisfaction that she looked exhausted and was still wearing the same t-shirt and sweatpants from the night before. She looked over at the empty coffee pot and gave him a desperate look. There was a small fridge in her room filled with energy drinks, but he suspected she'd burned through it all. He sighed, got up and started making another pot for her.

"How's it going in there?" he asked. He heard a shuffling noise behind him, and when he turned around, she'd pulled a chair back from the table to sit down. She had a banana in her hand, so that was something. He brought her a fresh cup of coffee and she made a contented noise. Kevin sat down and took a bite of his bagel, washing it down with another sip of coffee.

"It's going well. I think I have everything ready to go and set up. It's just a matter of firing things up," Lillian said.

"I know you're a wizard, but you're sure this will work?" Kevin asked. There was a weird aftertaste on the coffee he hadn't noticed before. Had the cream gone off? He took another sip, just to make sure. There it was again. Weird.

"There's always uncertainty, but I think it'll work," she said. Instead of her coffee, she focused on him.

The coffee, which had been working wonders at waking Kevin up, was now having the opposite effect. He could feel himself getting fuzzy around the edges, and focusing on what was happening was harder. He didn't need to go back to sleep, did he?

Then he realized Lillian had drugged him.

"What did you do?" he said, trying to stand up, but failing. It was taking all he could to keep his head off the table.

"I'm sorry, Kevin, but what I told you last night was fantasy. It would never work, not with what's at stake. And I simply need to know if the box works like I think it should. Obviously, I can't test it on myself. That leaves you," she said.

As Kevin passed out, he saw Lillian's face. He dimly thought it was like seeing her for the first time. He thought he heard Leah calling him an idiot. Then things went dark.