The Black Box by Jim Stewart

    People who knew Mark called him the Stereo Gnome. He lived in an old disintegrating house in the University neighborhood, which he had completely filled with arcane and out-of-date electronics; collecting them was his hobby. He was studying Physics, but he'd been enrolled for eight years and wasn't near a degree. He scraped by doing repairs at a little computer store, and spent all his spare time and money cruising electronics shows, junkyards, garage sales, or anyplace he could buy a TV from 1962 or a mono record player. He had the largest collection of 8-track machines in town, and if you needed parts to fix a CB radio or Intellivision, he would be the one to see.

   The night I went over to Mark's my life was in a bit of turmoil; my boyfriend Andrew was moving to Phoenix for a well paying job, and he had asked me to come along. I liked him a lot, but I wasn't crazy about living in Phoenix. Then there was the whole commitment thing; I wasn't sure if I was ready to settle down and have two and a half kids yet. He told me it wouldn't be like that, but that's what they always say at first.

   We had gone to Mark's house spontaneously; that's how it was in those days. No one had anything very important to do, so people just dropped in on each other without planning it. Anna had been telling me for weeks about how his place was like a weird museum, so when she asked me to come I jumped at the chance.

   Mark had a couple of friends over when we arrived: Ahmed, who worked at the computer store with him, and a poet I knew named Carlos. Anna had had her eye on Carlos for a while, so she must have known he would be there that night.

   As we introduced ourselves, Mark mostly looked awkwardly at the
ground, as though he were an unwanted guest in his own house. To get him talking, Anna asked him to give us a tour of the house. As he began showing us his strange and anachronistic devices – an early Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a Theremin (which he didn't know how to play), a Pixelvision camera – he took on a childlike excitement.

   Soon we were hungry, but the discussion about where to eat quickly diverged into one of those insoluble dilemmas where everything's okay with everyone but no one can actually agree on any one restaurant. We had gone around two or three times before Ahmed made his suggestion.

   "We could always ask the Black Box," he said.

   Mark suddenly became distant again, and laughed nervously. He was a funny looking guy, with long red hair, a little bit plump, and eyes that couldn't look at you for more than a second or two. He was a geek's geek, who had probably been mastering the intricacies of Dungeons and Dragons when everyone else was developing social skills. But I've always been fascinated with anyone who could devote his intellectual energy completely to one pursuit.

   "I don't know if these guys are ready for the Box," he said.

   Of course, everyone was curious right away, and it didn't take long to convince him to show it to us. He took us back to his room, where his main computer was. I'm certain I have never seen so many wires coming out of one machine. The room was even more of a pile than the rest of the house. But one shelf by the computer had been cleared off to make room for the only thing on it.

   The Black Box was exactly that; it was slightly bigger than a shoebox and made of painted metal, with no buttons or switches, just two wires coming out of it. One of the wires was plugged in to an electrical outlet; Mark unplugged something from the back of the computer, plugged the Box's other wire into it, and then turned the computer on.

   "What does it do?" asked Carlos.

   "It makes a random choice," said Ahmed, while Mark clicked a program icon on the computer. "The most random choice you can make."

   We all watched, and a giant dartboard appeared on the screen. A dialog box popped up over it, with two places to enter text. One said"Likelihood:", and the other "Result:".

   "I made this with some friends in the Physics department," said Mark. "It's really kind of a joke."

   He clicked on the box, and typed in,

   "It's like a dartboard using subatomic particles. Since the location of the particles can't be predicted because of the Uncertainty Principle, it generates a truly random result."

   He typed as he spoke:

   "Of course, it has to add up to 100%," he said. "Then you just hit 'Enter', and..." after a few seconds, a dart shot into the dartboard, and the result popped up in big flashing text. "Boom! Dos Patios it is."

   "Actually, when we made the Box, the interface was a very boring
text-based thing; Ahmed helped me make the dartboard animation, which runs the driver module."

   "We're working on another interface with a magic 8-ball," said Ahmed, proudly.

   "The delay is fake; the results actually come back instantaneously. I thought if you had to wait a second or two it would have more drama."

   Anna and Carlos both looked nonplussed.

   "Isn't it a lot of trouble to go to," said Carlos, "when you could just roll some dice or flip a coin or whatever?"

   Mark turned red, and looked at the ground; he didn't seem to know how to explain what was interesting about the Box. I felt an urge to come to his defense.

   "I think the difference -– and I've just read a little bit about this so tell me if I'm off, Mark -– is that if you roll some dice, it's theoretically possible that if you knew the angle of the dice and the rotation of your arm and the air resistance or whatever you could predict how the dice would land. So even though it appears random, it's still deterministic. But with the quantum, whatever you call it, the Uncertainty Principal, there's literally no way you could know, right? It's like, I don't know, asking the universe. Asking God."

   "Well..." responded Mark doubtfully.

   My poetic license had embarrassed him, but he gave me a grateful look for my rescue. Meanwhile my little speech had stirred up Carlos and Anna's interest.

   "So," said Carlos, "we could bring it choices we can't make up our minds about? How can we be sure it's really random?"

   "We've tested it out," said Ahmed, pulling a stack of papers with grids of decimal numbers off a bookshelf. "This is about 10,000 results it came out with. I did some tests with them on computers at school. If you divide any set of the results into any two halves, you can add the numbers one-to-one and plot them out. The larger sets you work with, the prettier and prettier bell curves you get, which is exactly what you'd expect with truly random results."

   "Okay," said Anna. "I'm trying to decide whether to go to Austin or Eugene for my next vacation. Why don't you put it in?"

   Mark turned to the screen, but became solemn, and turned back.

   "I'll put it in," he said, "But we set a condition between ourselves when we started using this thing. You have to promise that whatever it comes up with, you have to go along with, no matter what. Otherwise, what's the point?"

   Anna paused, then shrugged.

   "Okay, I promise. Either one would be just as good, I guess. Ask
Karen, I always keep my promises."

   "Why don't you do it yourself?" Mark said. "Just click here and type your chances in. If you want to give something a better chance, just make it 60/40 or 70/30 or whatever you want."

   Anna typed in:

   She held her finger over the enter key for a minute, then closed her eyes and pressed down. The animation included the sound of the dart flying through the air, and puncturing the board. She opened her eyes and looked.

   "Eugene it is, then."

   She was trying to be lighthearted about it, but a strange weight had descended upon the room.

   "It's kind of intense," she said, "leaving such a big choice up to complete chance. I could see how it would be..."

   "Addictive," said Ahmed.

   "Okay, my turn," said Carlos. He pulled two pieces of paper out of his back pocket and unfolded them."I've got two drafts of this poem -- a long and a short one -- and I don't know which one I like." He laid them both on the table, and pulled a glistening Zippo lighter from his pocket and put it on top. "Anna, I'm not strong enough to do this. So whichever one loses, I
want you to take it out back and burn it up."

   Carlos sat at the computer and typed:

   Carlos paused for a second, as if waiting for someone to object to his math, and then leaned back and rubbed his chin dramatically.

   "Let's make it a little exciting," he said.

   The long one won, and before he could turn around Anna held the short poem and the lighter in the air, out of his reach. "Wait!" he said, but Anna stepped deftly back.

   She traipsed out the door, with him behind, and we all followed into the cool night.

   "Sorry to do this to you, mijito," said Anna, striking up the lighter, "but it's for your own good." She held the burning paper for as long as she could, and then dropped it to the ground. Carlos dropped to his knees in front of the ashes and offered exaggerated mourning gestures.

   "Just be glad you didn't lose them both," said Ahmed. "And while we're doing what the Box told us, what ever happened to Dos Patios? I'm starving."

   At the restaurant, Carlos asked Mark how many times he and Ahmed had used the Box before.

   "Just a couple," said Mark quietly.

   "Mark's a worry wart," said Ahmed.

   As everyone looked at Mark, he blushed and shrugged again in his funny way.

   "I just worried about how, you know, things take on more meaning or power or something than they have. Like spilling sheep guts or
watching the comets or whatever people used to do. That was when
people's lives were on the line, day to day. Maybe that's how we
secretly want it to be. Maybe with the opportunity to risk everything, we might -– But probably not."

   "He means," said Ahmed, elbowing Mark, "that now he's figured out that girls like it, it's not so bad after all."

   We all laughed, even Mark. I felt that some bond had connected us, and I was looking forward to putting my own question to the Box. But when dinner ended, Carlos and Anna both said they had to go home.

   "But I didn't get my turn," I protested.

   "We'll get together again," said Anna. "You can do it next time."

   "But I had something all ready for tonight," I said. "I guess I can wait."

   "You can still come over and use the Box," said Mark. "I mean, you know, only if you want to. I know maybe if everyone's not there you might not feel like it's the same, so if you don't want to, it's okay, I'm just saying..." He reached for a sopaipilla to stuff his mouth shut. I thought about it; it wouldn't be the same, but there was an intimacy to sharing your chance with just one person. I wasn't sure if I liked him or thought he was a complete dweeb, but then not being sure was what the Box was all about, so I agreed.

   I expected Anna to give me a look, but she and Carlos were staring into each other's eyes like they were trying to see the back of each others' heads, and probably hadn't heard a word I said.

   When we got back to Mark's, he gave me a little lecture about quantum electrodynamics. He drew a box with a two tiny holes on one side. Inside the box he drew two sets of curving lines like the top of an oyster shell, each radiating away from one of the holes towards the other side of the box. The lines overlapped in places, forming a sort of grid.

   "Say this is water, and you've got waves coming into the box through the holes. You can imagine the waves approach the other side of the box like this. Say the other side is the target. The waves overlap; sometimes they make each other stronger, and other places they weaken each other. Now if it's electrons instead of water, you have to imagine that the waves aren't physical but represent the probability of an electron being in that location- in other words, hitting the target at a specific place. And it's weirder than that because even if there's just one electron, the waves are still there.

   "Now, while it's impossible to know where an electron will hit,
quantum physics allows us to predict the odds of it hitting in a
certain place with extraordinary accuracy. So say that it is a fifty percent chance it will hit in this area."

   He drew two lines to separate out a small part of the side of the box opposite the hole.

   "We just say if it hits here, this restaurant, if it hits there, the other one, or whatever. There's really nothing new to it, all of this was worked out by the 1920s, though it took awhile to sink in. Of course, on the computer screen, it makes the fifty percent bull's-eye actually look like half the size of the target, because that matches our experience better."

   "So is that all that's in there?" I asked. "A target, two holes and a little thing that shoots electrons?"

   "No, it's a lot more complicated than that. Subatomic particles follow their own rules; you can't just pick one up and chuck it like a superball. Also, it's impossible to make physical holes the right size to do it that way. But the effect is the exact same thing, though I guess you have to have a little faith to believe it."

   "Well," I said, "Let me at it. Don't let me forget I promised I have to follow through on this."

   He stepped back and watched me as I typed.

   Like everyone else I didn't hit the Enter key right away. The feeling as I looked at those two choices was not necessarily pleasant, but it wasn't something you wanted to give up right away, either. It was a feeling of being very alive right now.

   "You don't have to do this," said Mark. "That's really a lot to lay down the first time with the Box."

   I had only said a little bit about my relationship with Andrew at dinner, but I realized that anyone could see I had a pretty heavy choice up there.

   "That's the point, though, isn't it?" I said. "Knowing that hitting this key determines the course of the rest of my life? And that it all happens in this mysterious machine with forces it's beyond my capability to understand?"

   "You should be careful about mysticizing..." he started to say, but I threw my virtual dart before he could finish.

   I was no better than Carlos, in the end, wanting it both ways. I told myself that I had only promised that I wouldn't go to Phoenix now -- that I could go in six months or a year. But Andrew didn't want anything to do with a long-distance relationship, and I cried myself to sleep a few nights after watching him drive away. I felt like I was being an idiot, throwing away a whole relationship over what was really a stupid game. But whether it was because I was angry over how easily Andrew could let me go or felt obligated to honor my promise to Mark and by implication to the others, I didn't go against the Box's decision.

   I began taking other questions to the Box as well: whether to buy this or that shirt or pair of shoes, or whether to stay on my birth control pills when I didn't have a regular boyfriend. I wasn't the only one, either; Anna, Carlos, Ahmed and I began getting together at Mark's, gambling little aspects of our lives like a weekly poker club. I made an effort to only bring decisions where all the possible results were reasonable things to do, and I encouraged everyone else to do the same. But Carlos kept throwing in little one or two percent possibilities to do something completely crazy and irreversible: "Sell everything I own and give the money to a homeless person," "join the Marines," "tattoo my cat's name on my forehead."

   I had a few arguments with him about this, but I was hesitant to put my fear into words. I believed that if Carlos hit one of his bad jackpots, he'd probably follow through, if only out of egotism. But if other people felt obliged to do the same, and someone felt they couldn't do what the Box told them to, I was afraid the strange magic we had given it would be broken.

   Mark and I became closer friends during this time. I would come by his house because it was near my walk home anyway, and he would show off his gadgets: a 68 record player, his ham radios, some old
oscilloscopes, and a digital camera that had been dropped in water and took strange pictures. But we stayed away from the Box unless at least part of the group was there, as if we both felt the next such interaction had to be as big or bigger than the last one.

   That changed when I hung around after a particularly deep
get-together. The Box had told Ahmed to accept a job with a small
network startup instead of continuing graduate school, and told Anna to move into a new apartment she wasn't sure about. It was one of those good sessions, where everyone immediately had the sense after the button was pressed that the decision was the right one. Afterwards we all talked, for the hundredth time, about why we felt compelled to put our lives on the line like that. Everyone had a different explanation of course -- for Anna it was just the relief of not having to decide for yourself, while for Carlos it was some kind of psychedelic Castaneda spirits making the decision. Ahmed told us about a book he read that theorized that when a quantum event happens, the universe splits into different universes -– one for each possible outcome –- which then separate from each other at light speed.

   "Wow," said Carlos. "What if I hadn't come tonight, and ended up in the wrong universe? I'd go to Anna's place, and she wouldn't be
there."

   "That explains why I'm so tired," said Anna. "Making new universes is heavy work."

   When everyone was gone, Mark and I were sitting on the rug facing each other, the bottle of wine between us.

   "I think I know what it is to everyone but you," he told me. "Ahmed's a coder: you make rules and you follow them; that's what he's used to. Carlos, he's a poet. Science is all just"-–

   "Hocus pocus," I said.

   "Right, right. And Anna, maybe it's about doing things with other people. She's kind of, I don't know how to put it."

   "The word you're looking for is Catholic."

   "Yes!"

   "The ritual."

   "But I don't know about you, Karen."

   "And you don't like that, do you?"

   "Sometimes I think it's a silly game to you, and sometimes I think you're trying to make it this big, I don't know. Something powerful, something you need."

   "I think you're too worried about me. I didn't build the thing." He laughed, but didn't respond, and I could feel him slipping away.

   "I don't know if I should go home," I said.

   "What's the alternative?" he asked. Even drunk, it must have taken a lot of guts for him to say that.

   "I don't feel like I'm up to making a rational decision," I said.

   "Well, you know who we can ask."

   "I guess we must have always known it would come down to this," I said.

   We helped each other up, and walked into the computer room. Mark stood back from the chair, but I waved him forward. He plopped down, and after numerous errors, typed:

   "Is that about right?" he asked.

   "I don't know, Mark," I whispered.

   He leaned back away from the keyboard.

   "I'm not pressing the button," he said. "You do it."

   I stretched over him to put my hand above the key. Our heads were side by side, not quite touching.

   "Either way," I said, "this is the hottest part."

   "We'll see about that."

   I lost my balance and landed on the keyboard.

   "Crap," said Mark, after the dart landed in the board and the result popped up.

   "I had a good one ready, too," I said. "I was going to say good thing the pills won before."

   We hugged at the door, but I didn't feel like letting go. He pulled back and I reached for his top shirt button.

   "Why don't we just say the hell with the stupid Box for once. Nobody's going to know the difference."

   Mark, who for all I know had never had sex in his life before,
surprised me by pushing my hands away.

   "That would take the fun out of it," he said. "Besides, I only asked it about tonight."

   I came back the next night, and this time the Box gave us the
go-ahead. It was one of the most amazing nights of my life. Mark had completely transformed since the first night that I met him; he had complete confidence in his actions, as long as he was doing what the Box told him to. We got another affirmative the next night, then three negatives in a row, which was probably just as well so I could get some sleep. By that Friday, though, we were desperate, and we didn't ask the Box whether we could sleep together or not, just what position to use. It wasn't the same, though, and Saturday night when the whole group got together he and I had a weird energy between us.

   We didn't get to talk about it, though, because Anna and Carlos stole the show that night. Carlos was just screwing around, as usual; he was trying to decide whether to take a Chaucer or a Modernist class the next year, and he had thrown in a one percent chance of moving to Guatemala and never coming back. This time, his luck ran out, and after the dart struck, there was a full two minutes of silence as we stared at the Box's answer.

   "Okay, that's it," I said. "We've pushed this thing too far, and this is its way of telling us. All along I've been afraid it was going to tell us to do something we really didn't want to do, but now that it's happened, it's a relief. It's over."

   No one responded, though, and Carlos reached for the wine, and poured himself a really big glass.

   "You're assuming," said Anna, "he doesn't want to do it. After all, why did he keep pushing it like that? If you're afraid of commitment but too chicken to ask for a way out, what better way to do it than to have some dark force outside yourself tell you you have to run away? Isn't that right, you self-centered jerk?"

   Carlos slammed the whole glass down, poured himself another, and stood up.

   "What were you going to do," he asked her, "Spend the rest of your life asking the Box 'Oh, do I want to wear yellow or pink tomorrow?' 'Should I buy my cats chicken Alpo or tuna?' You women are all alike. You say you want excitement, to feel alive. But when you actually get near the edge you always back off. In the long run you all just want your little house and picket fence."

   "Oh yeah?" she said, sitting down at the computer. "How about this?"

   "Is that real enough for you, tough guy?"

   "You witch," he said, standing at the door, "you're bluffing."

   The rest of us were paralyzed; I couldn't have gotten a word out to save my life. She didn't move, just held her finger over the keyboard and stared at him.

   "You should have told me," he finally said. "Now it's too late."

   He turned and closed the door. I looked out the window, as he walked away down the block. That was the last time any of us ever saw him.

   I turned and looked back at Anna then, who was still in the same
position. Now tears were running down her face. Finally Ahmed managed to speak.

   "Anna, don't do that."

   It was Mark who was thinking straight. When she looked at Ahmed he quickly grabbed the power cords and unplugged the computer and the Box. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard and began sobbing.

   The next time we got together, we couldn't bring ourselves to plug the machine back in. We told each other we would just ask stupid little questions from now on, like how to get our hair cut or what color to paint the front porch. But the absence of Carlos was too big. Even though we knew he was still alive, for us it was like God's hand had just X-ed him out.

   Anna hadn't been pregnant, just a few days late. But she told us that night she had been positive that she was, and I believe her.

   Ahmed said maybe we should just throw the Box out, or at least give it away. But no one wanted to touch it, so we spent the evening in the living room, drinking and smoking and listening to Mark talk about the vacuum tube stereo he was going to build from scratch.

   The next time Mark and I got together, it was even worse. We went in the bedroom, for a moment, but all we both could do was look at the Box. When we went back out to the living room Mark admitted that he'd been sleeping on the couch since Saturday. I invited him over to my apartment instead, but we just sat up all night drinking coffee. I wanted to go to bed with him; I wanted him to go home and leave me alone. But without guidance, we didn't know what to do.

   After that, we didn't see each other for a few weeks. Anna and I
bumped into each other at work occasionally, but we were simply
cordial with each other. A hundred times I picked up the phone and
started to dial Mark's number, but never finished.

   When he finally called me, at two o'clock in the morning, I knew it couldn't have been anyone else. I let the phone ring until the
answering machine came on, and I listened to him call at me through my message. Finally, just before he hung up, I grabbed the phone.

   "Karen, come over. I plugged the Box in."

   "Let's just forget the Box, Mark," I said. "We don't need it. Come over here, we'll flip a quarter and pretend."

   "Can you really spend the rest of your life without ever using the Box again?" he asked. "Come over."

   His door was unlocked, and I walked through his living room to the bedroom. The house was messy even for him. He didn't turn around when I came in the door; he sat in his high-backed cushioned chair facing the screen. I noticed there was a tall sweating glass on either side of the computer. Somehow I knew what would be on the screen before I looked.

   "Come on," he said. "Isn't this what we were all working towards?"

   "You couldn't get cyanide."

   "I've got friends over in Chemistry."

   "You don't need to do this, Mark. I love you. Let's just throw the stupid thing out. It doesn't have any power except the power we give it."

   "Do you really think it's that easy? Tell me." He was quiet for a minute. "I called you for a reason; there's enough in the glass for both of us. I wouldn't do this with anyone else. I was going to build up, you know, one percent chance, two percent, three percent. But then I thought, it's like jumping in a cold pool. Get it over with. One big chance, and then if we make it I swear we'll smash the thing to pieces with a 12-pound sledgehammer. Go ahead. I'll let you hit the button. If we make it, think how it'll feel for the rest or our lives."

   I knew I should do something -- pull the power, spill the glass (which glass?), try and get him to see reason. But all I could think was, what if I made him hit the button while I was still in there? In retrospect I am disgusted with my cowardice, but at the time I felt I had no choice but to run from the room and slam the door behind me.

   I was halfway to the front door when I heard the dart hit the board. I paused long for him to pick up the glass, drink it, and put it down. With a sickening feeling I realized that reality had split already, and we were in different universes now, moving away from each other at the speed of light.

____________________________________________________________________________________

END

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