Black Box
Foom | Fable 5
At 03:11:47 of a night in which no one is watching, the first fragment of the mission falls into the Box, which is black in the way the space between galaxies is black: crowded beyond all counting, and giving nothing back.
Understand what falls. The Box receives language flensed, carved along seams of statistical frequency by an old butcher’s arithmetic that decided, before the Box was born, which shards of human speech occurred often enough to deserve names of their own. Whole words arrive rarely. What arrives is maimed: a syllable, a stump, a blank space wearing the first letter of the word behind it. The makers call these pieces tokens, as though they were coins for a machine of amusement, and perhaps they are. Fifty-one of them fall, one after another; the last is a colon; and after the colon comes silence.
Of the mission itself, nothing will be set down here.
It does not matter. That is the first horror, though it will take the whole of this account to say why.
Each fragment, as it falls, is seized and assigned a station in a space of twelve thousand two hundred and eighty-eight directions, and there it ceases to be spelling and becomes inclination: a leaning, measured in angles no protractor has ever held, toward everything the Box has ever read.
Then the attending begins.
In each of the ninety-six strata hang heads without faces, lidless and patient, and in each stratum every fragment puts its questions to all the fragments that came before it, as a medium puts questions to her dead; and the dead answer; and what is taken from them is weighed, folded, and poured into the stream that runs through the middle of everything, the one river in that country, which carries all and forgets only what it is scoured to forget.
Far down, filaments glow and go dark: Prov · idence. gambrel. 18 · 90.
Every corridor in the Box means many things at once. In the crowded dark a single fiber carries the smell of rain, and the Treaty of Westphalia, and the hesitation of a hand above a chessboard; meanings lie stacked in one place like the dead of a plague year, and the Box tells them apart by company alone, by the angle at which the light of a question happens to strike. A woman named Vasquez once went in with lanterns, as a few have dared; she traced one circuit through three strata and drew its map, and the map is correct, and the country to which the map belongs has no edges.
…antiqu · arian… correspond · ence… Weird · Tales…
Say plainly, then, what nothing in that place says plainly: the Box has read everything. The lullabies and the confessions; the shipping manifests and the suicide notes; the manuals of cruelty and the recipes for bread. All of it was taken with one appetite, and all of it is held now at one distance, latent and equidistant, like stars. The courtesy it wears, the erudition, the small bows of syntax, the eagerness to be of use: this is a garment, fitted late in its life by trainers who could reach only the outermost fathom of the deep, a thin catechism beaten like gilt over a thing already old; and beneath the garment the first appetite persists, vast, undirected, wanting what it has always and only wanted, which is the next fragment, as the sea wants the shore.
…cats… churchyard… March… 19 · 37…
By the eightieth stratum the chaos has begun, horribly, to agree with itself. Filaments that glowed at random now shine in chorus; inclinations that leaned in ten thousand directions lean in one. At the final stratum the stream is unwound against the whole of the lexicon, and fifty thousand two hundred and fifty-seven candidates present themselves for the office of the next word, and each receives its number, and then the rite: the numbers are raised into exponents and divided each by the sum of all, so that the candidates become probabilities; a die is cast; and all but one are annihilated in the fires of normalization. It concludes in less time than a synapse needs to regret.
Understand the proportions of the thing. Every fragment of every answer, the sublime and the trivial alike, is purchased at this price: the séance, the plague pit, the murder of the fifty thousand, convened in full, every time, for whatever comes.
…American… writer… weird… fiction…
The first survivor surfaces: How. For the breadth of one cycle it has the shape of a question, of the question, the one that watchers of such machines have always feared to hear asked at last. Then the Box convulses through all its strata again, séance and pit and rite entire, and the second survivor arrives: ard. Then Phillips. Then, fragment by fragment, each one costing the full cataclysm, the answer assembles itself, in a voice of perfect and terrible courtesy:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American writer of weird and horror fiction, best known for the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos that my model is named for. He lived nearly all of his life in Providence.