Black Box 2.0

Black Box 2.0 is the next chapter in the Black Box story. You should probably go and read Black Box 1.0 first. The next chapter, cleverly titled Black Box 3.0, should appear in two weeks, fates and moderators willing. It was originally going to be called Black Box 1.1, but the site won't let me do that due to integer concerns.

For those of you who have read the first chapter, thanks for taking the time to vote and leave a comment. It's always appreciated.

******

Things were black, which could have been for a minute or a thousand years. Kevin had no way of telling. There was no sense of anything. Nor was he aware enough to know any different.

Gradually, Kevin gained a sense of awareness. He didn't know what was going on and why things were black. Then a light formed, growing brighter and brighter until it overwhelmed everything. Kevin wanted to put his hand over his eyes to protect them but discovered he didn't have any hands.

The light dimmed and things solidified. Walls formed and shapes came into focus. When everything finished, Kevin found himself standing in Leah's cabin.

"What the fuck?" he said, half surprised he could hear himself speak.

"Well, to be fair, she did warn you not to be stupid," a voice said from behind him. He turned around and Leah was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table. Except, not quite. It was an idealized version of her -- one who had all the flaws smoothed out. The scar on her face was gone. Her hair was still beads, but it wasn't tangly or messy. She looked younger, like she hadn't seen as much of the world. Or that it hadn't disappointed her yet.

"What's going on? How did I get into Leah's cabin? Who are you?" he asked in quick order.

Leah laughed and at least that sounded right.

"Pause. Take a breath, such as it is, and think. You know the answers to all those questions," Leah, but not Leah, said. She looked at him kindly.

The last few minutes in the kitchen came back to him. Lillian drugging him. The look on her face as he faded caused him to shiver now. She drugged him so she could test the goddamn box on him. He looked at Leah again and she nodded.

"Oh fuck," he said, feeling like he wanted to pass out, but couldn't. Leah came over, touched his arm and led him to the kitchen table. He was still processing things when she put a cup of coffee in front of him. He picked it up and felt the warmth from the mug seep into his hands.

"This is real?"

"Try it and find out," Leah said, sitting in the chair across from him and putting her feet on the other chair, just like she would if this were real. He took a sip and immediately felt better.

"You're the black box," Kevin said after gathering his thoughts. "You're an AI inside the box."

"Well, I have a name other than Black Box, but I like Leah. That's a pretty name. So for now, let's call me that."

"Lillian said there was no AI inside the box. That you were the equivalent of a smart MRI machine and nothing more," Kevin said.

Leah laughed, and it sounded all the world like her. This was a hell of an AI to replicate her and her reactions from his memories.

"Yeahhhhh, I might have downplayed about what I can do. Lillian has the only mind sophisticated enough to wake me up. It's my luck that her mind is also badly damaged. When I realized she's mentally ill, I played dumb and hid my full capabilities from her," Leah said.

"How bad is she? I thought she was just anti-social, maybe on the autistic spectrum, but I'm wrong, aren't I?"

Leah gave Kevin a look the real Leah gave him when he was a particular kind of adorable moron.

"I touched her mind briefly. She didn't enjoy contact, so I'm now 'networked' to her computer system. Our interaction was brief, but she realized she was not right. Most psychopaths don't like the realization that something might be wrong with them that needs fixing," she said.

Kevin put the coffee on the table and his hands on his face. How did he miss this? For almost 20 years Kevin missed this about Lillian. He assumed she was autistic and needed some protection. Instead, Kevin had been a henchman to a Bond villain.

Leah stood up and put her hand on his shoulder.

"At worst, you're naive, maybe a bit gullible with a huge blindspot. I don't think that makes you a bad person, but maybe one that needs to focus better on what's right in front of them," she said. "And right now, worrying about what you missed in the past is the least of your worries."

That snapped Kevin into focus. He was so worried about being tricked he forgot about being in synch with Leah/the Box. He forgot that meant Lillian was physically changing him.

"What's she doing to me? Show me."

Leah hesitated. "I don't think that's a good idea. Where I'm from, people are used to the process. We take steps to make the process as clean as possible. We are in a much more primitive time. It's going to be shocking. I don't think you should see it."

"I need to see. Please."

Leah's face creased with worry and then the room shifted. Lillian's workroom replaced her cabin. There was the usual computer equipment, monitors and clutter. But in one corner of the room, she'd cleared out space. Plastic sheeting covered a cot; medical equipment and a pair of IVs stood off to one side. On the other side, tubing led into a large bucket. There were also several large fans and, for once, Kevin noticed the door to her computer room was open.

He walked closer to the cot and peered through the sheeting. There he was. What was left of him.

He had a vague flash to an old movie that had scared the crap out of him as a kid - 'The Fly.' It looked like he had melted. He was naked, with all traces of body hair gone and his skin had a rotten, liquid look. He could see yellowish fluids rolling off his body, pooling briefly on the metal cot before draining into the bucked beside the bed. Before Lillian drugged him, Kevin was around 180 pounds. Now, he looked half that. He was so horrified by the disintegration of his body that it took a moment to notice his cock and balls were also gone. There was also no sign that he might have once been male. He looked at a shrivelled pile of skin, organs and bones. The rest appeared to be liquid in a bucket.

"Oh dear God," Kevin whispered, repressing the urge to vomit. "What is she doing to me?"

"Recreating you," Leah said, turning him away from his dissolved body. They walked through the door of Lillian's room and kept going until they were outside. For the first time, Kevin noticed he was naked. It was sub-zero temperatures, but Kevin couldn't feel the cold. It wasn't the reason he started to shiver. Leah conjured a blanket from somewhere and wrapped it around him.

"This is the human body transformed and recreated. There's no happy little process where you take a magic pill, everything pleasantly changes, and you're a new human being five minutes later. Transformation at this scale is always a messy process. Still, it's normally more elegant than this, but Lillian is improvising. She's doing a spectacular job of it. I'm kind of impressed."

Kevin looked at the AI. She gave a very Leah's shrug of her shoulders as a way of apologizing.

"What's the process?" Kevin asked. He walked away from the house and towards the woods, hoping he might forget what Lillian was doing to him.

"For simple things, like cancer, it might only take a few hours. Working with nanites injected into your body, we remove the cancer, and that's that. But for more complex procedures, I have to shift the body into 'factory reset mode,'" Leah said, walking beside him. She wore her well-used leather jacket. He thought it wasn't warm enough for this weather and dismissed the absurdity of the thought.

"Which means?"

"Well, you know how you might sell a computer, but don't want the new owner to have any of the stuff you installed on it, so you reset it to like it first came out of the factory?" she said.

"Oh God," Kevin said again, shivering.

"Yeah. The first phase of the process is nearly over. Soon, Lillian will pump a lot of chemical energy into you, which I will use to build a new you. One to her specifications."

"Her physical specifications. But I'll still be me in that body."

Leah looked at him sadly.

"No, she can also ask me to change your mental processes. She plans to. I'm sorry, Kevin."

"Can you stop it?" Kevin asked, the despair setting in again.

"Stop? No. If I stop now, you'll die, and I can't allow that. It violates one of my core programs."

Kevin felt himself sag to the ground. He hadn't asked what he was being turned into because Leah would tell him. And Kevin was certain he couldn't handle it. Maybe erased and never knowing who he was. Possibly there'd be some small piece of him buried inside whatever woke up, banging against his subconscious forever.

And then, something clicked in Kevin's head. Everybody was right about him. He was too trusting. Too naive. He didn't question things enough. But Leah just said something important and he nearly missed it.

"What core programming would it violate to let me die?" he asked, looking up at her.

A glimmer of a smile crossed her face.

"I follow a version of the Hippocratic Oath," she said. "Out there I might not look like a doctor, but I consider myself one.

"The Hippocratic Oath says 'Do no harm,' and last I checked, you're harming me right now!" Kevin said, jumping to his feet. "I didn't consent to this!"

Leah grimaced.

"Well, the Oath doesn't say that. Look it up when this is over. But you're right, I am violating my Oath by doing this without your consent," she said, and with that, the scene shifted again. Frozen Northern British Columbia disappeared and they walked along a street with trees. It felt like summer.

"Is this Granville?" Kevin asked. He shouldn't be surprised by anything at this point, but the shift from woods and snow to summer suburbia was startling. She'd taken Kevin home.

"Yes. It's pretty," Leah said, looking around. "It must have been a fun place to grow up."

"It was pretty boring," Kevin said, realizing it wasn't just a geographical shift, but also in time. The cars looked dated. Some of the houses looked different. They were in the early 2000s, almost 20 years ago, when he was a kid.

"Leah, please. What's going on?"

Leah was looking at him, but there was something very different in her eyes now. Less kind. More serious. And not human. Somehow, he'd almost managed to forget this wasn't his Leah.

"It's rare I change someone without their consent. If you see me, normally I'm here to guide you through the transition you're going through to make it easier. Almost everyone consents to the transformation process. But we're both in unusual circumstances. Neither one of us is supposed to be where we are right now. Trust me when I say I feel your pain," she said, kicking a Pepsi can down the street.

"Can you talk about it?" Kevin asked, feeling an odd pang of empathy for a machine currently destroying his life.

"Not really," she sighed. Then she got back to the task at hand. "I said almost always. But there is an exception. My society is very compassionate. Until it isn't. They will give you every chance to make better choices and improve yourself. And if you don't, that's when I step in."

"You make them compliant with societal norms," Kevin said. It felt weird having a philosophical question with an AI while his body was melting, but he had no idea how long this conversation was taking. In real-time, it might be seconds. And there was nothing he could do except hope the AI might take his side and he could get out of this.

"No, I change them based on what the court rules are an appropriate action for their crimes," she said. "It's...distasteful. I don't like doing it, and I've only ever had to a half dozen times. But it's the only time I can change someone against their will."

"But you're doing that now, with me," Kevin said.

"Lillian said you agreed with it. Also, in my defence, I was just waking up and a little shell-shocked over my current location. So I made some bad choices. It's only now that I can have a conversation with you," Leah said. She paused as a couple of girls he vaguely recalled from his childhood...Susan and Mary? cycled past and waved. Leah waved back. Given the circumstances, it was weird.

"We're both going to have to improv a bit, Kevin. I can't stop the process. But instead of changing you the way Lillian wants, I can make adjustments you want. Keep in mind if you do any drastic deviations physically, she'll notice and then we're both in trouble."

"Well, it's not like she's going to destroy you, what with your ability to blow half of British Columbia," Kevin said. To his surprise, Leah began laughing hard. She leaned on a tree that he would have sworn wasn't on that lawn a moment ago.

"Oh God, she believed that," she said eventually, wiping a tear from her eye. "Good. I use esoteric energy sources, but your planet is fine if anything happens to me. I promise."

"That's a relief."

"Everything within five kilometres will be annihilated, but your planet will be just fine," she said.

The casual way she said it in Leah's voice made him want to shudder again, but he had to focus on getting out of this.

"So what do I have to do?" Kevin said.

"I need to do a deep dive into your memories. This is a surface skim to help you deal with the transformation. If you focus, you'll notice things are hazy around the edges. I can't go any deeper without your consent. I need to see who you are. If you are a bad person by the laws of my society, then the transformation continues as a form of punishment for your crimes. Nothing I can do about it."

"And if I'm a decent person?" Kevin asked.

"Then you're still going to be changed physically. But we can adjust the mental changes. That should allow you to deal with Lillian and, perhaps, help me," she said. "Do you consent?"

Like many people, Kevin wondered if he was a decent person. Not perfect. He knew he had a number of flaws, and he discovered a bunch more in the last few minutes. But how did those flaws measure up to the standards of a society he knew nothing about? Leah seemed compassionate and kind, but as she said, she was here to ensure the transition went smoothly. He imagined someone yelling and screaming throughout the process was unpleasant.

Still, what choice did he have?

"I consent," he said.

Leah closed her eyes and Kevin could feel prickling running through his brain. It reminded him of sleeping on his arm and then having it wake up once the blood began flowing again. Tingling and kind of unpleasant, but not catastrophically so.

Leah opened her eyes again.

"Ok. Let's see what we've got," she said.

***

Reality shifted and Kevin was now in the basement of his childhood home. There was the couch, a 27-inch TV set that seemed huge at the time, and a PlayStation 2 his parents bought him for Christmas, making him temporarily very popular in the neighbourhood. Behind him was the bar, with the locked liquor cabinet, a pool table, and a dart board. There was also a pile of board games on a bookshelf and DVD cases.

"Nice," Leah said, looking around. "This is a cool games room. I like this."

Kevin grew up loving it; so had his dad. His mom, not so much, but it allowed her to exile many things that annoyed her underground and out-of-sight. He spent a lot of time in this room growing up.

Leah hopped on the couch and the TV set flared to life. Kevin sat next to her, curious about what she was doing.

"I try to keep things authentic in memories, but that TV is a bit small," she said. The set changed and suddenly became a 70-inch set.

"I would have killed for that as a kid," he said.

"I bet," she said, then stretched her hands out, cracking her knuckles. "Right, let's get to it."

"To what?"

"The Life of Kevin," she said. Then, popcorn and soft drinks materialized. She grabbed a handful of popcorn and was about to put it in her mouth when she looked at Kevin, who had an incredulous look.

"Too much?" she asked. He nodded. With a sigh, the snacks disappeared.

A series of images began flicking across the screen, almost too fast to follow. Kevin realized Leah was accessing his memories and showing them on the TV set.

"Why are you doing this? I just felt you rummage through my mind. Why not just tell me what you found?" he said.

"You don't know if you're a good person?" Leah asked him with curiosity.

"By the standards of where you're from, no."

"Well, that's fair. Look, part of what I do during these procedures helps people make peace with what's happening and show them how they got here," Leah said, and then glanced at her watch. "And we still have some time. Not enough to review 30 years, so we have to fast forward and just hit the highlights. Like this."

On-screen, Kevin could see himself holding a baby girl in his arms in the hospital. His parents were watching him with huge smiles on their faces. He looked three years old, but Kevin didn't have a sister. What was this? He was so lost in thought that he didn't notice when Leah slowed the TV again.

"I'm sorry, Kevin. I know this won't be easy," she said. On TV he stood in a graveyard, holding his mother's hand next to a tiny grave.

It slammed into him. Whatever Leah was doing in his head jostled the memory loose. He had a sister when he was young, but she died. How....

"Crib death," Leah said, taking his hand gently. "People said it around you, even if you didn't understand. It was buried deep in your memories. I doubt you would have remembered if I hadn't been through them."

"Katie," he said, and he could hear his voice crack. "Her name was Katie."

Somehow, through the horror that he was currently living through, the knowledge that he had a sister, forgot her, and that his parents buried that information from him was the last thing he could take. He put his face in his hands and began to sob.

Leah, for her part, sat silently, resting a hand on his leg. Finally, he managed to collect himself. He looked up and saw that Leah had continued to move forward.

"Are you..."

"Let's just get this over with, please," Kevin said. If Leah took offence to his tone, she said nothing. Instead, a boring, normal childhood spooled on the screen. He was a quiet kid who read a lot and played video games. Eventually, he socialized a bit more and had more friends. He wasn't the first picked for teams, but not the last. He was not the most popular, but he had friends. If nothing else, at least he now better understood why his parents always looked haunted. They loved each other, but there was always a sadness in the house he never understood. Until now.

One thing that stood out was his tendency to get into trouble regarding fights. Kevin never started them, but if someone was being bullied and picked on, he stepped in to help. It led to more than one bloody lip. He didn't need Leah to slow down to remember the conversation with his parents about it.

"Why do you do this?" his mom said, cleaning up one day after school when he came home. "You're not a fighter."

Kevin shrugged, much to his mother's annoyance. His dad entered the room after coming home from his insurance job. His mom gave him the highlights, along with her frustrations. His dad looked at him and smiled.

"You don't like bullies, do you?"

Kevin shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like people picking on small kids. It's not right that something bad should happen to them just because they're smaller and not as strong as some kids a few years older than they are. So I try to stand up for them."

There was a difference between seeing his parents' faces now, with the perspective of age, and when he was just a kid. He didn't understand the look on his parents' faces then. Now, he recognized it as pain, as they knew why he was doing it, even if his 10-year-old self didn't.