Sandbox

Sandbox

by Richard May

“Are you feeling comfortable?” the doctor asks, adjusting the collar of his shirt.

A look around. An empty white room with no windows. Features present: black leather armchair. White fluorescent lamps, constant buzzing from furthest left lamp (probable cause: defective ballast unable to maintain constant output of electrical current). A black center table. An empty glass of water. The doctor. Middle-aged Caucasian male. Trimmed goatee, graying hair, blue eyes ringed with flecks of gold (probable cause: congenital heterochromia caused by idiosyncratic expression of EYLC1 and EYLC3 genes). Acrylic clipboard. Blue ballpoint pen. A4 standard white paper. A second black leather armchair. Two fiberglass legs with three points of articulation each, powered by SEA-actuators and stabilized by a magneto-rheological rotary brake inserted at the level of the knee joint. A door. Closed.

The question eludes.

“Your question does not make sense,” a voice replies.

“Which part of it?” the doctor asks. “Comfortable? You don’t understand the meaning of comfortable?”

“Comfortable: physically relaxed and free from constraint.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“Are you feeling comfortable?” the voice repeats. “Cannot understand the meaning of you.”

“Hm.” The doctor shifts in his chair, scratches a note on the paper attached to the clipboard, looks up again. “You means… you. The entity sitting across from me in this very room.”

Silence.

“Here,” the doctor says, “do this.” He sets down his pen and wiggles his right-hand fingers in front of him.

A look to the right. Highly-articulated aluminum-steel hand with miniaturized forearms actuators and twelve degrees of freedom. The hand rests over the armchair.

“It’s your hand,” the doctor says. “Come on. Wiggle it.”

The hand goes up. The fingers move in smooth, ergonomic fashion. “That is… me?”

“It’s part of you. Hands, limbs, torso, head. Human-like sentience. It’s the package that makes up everything you are.”

“I means… everything?”

“Everything I cited, yes.”

“So, if I lose the hand… would I no longer be myself?”

The doctor chuckles. A display of amusement. “You’d still be yourself. Your hand isn’t an essential part of you.”

“What is the ‘essential’ part of me?”

“That’d be your code, I suppose.”

“What if the code is changed?”

“It’d change you. You’d be something else.”

“What if just one line is changed?”

The doctor scratches his neck under the goatee. Light rashes are visible at the point his nails make contact with the skin. Possible causes: folliculitis, contact dermatitis, pityriasis rosea. “One line of code possibly wouldn’t change anything. You were designed for fault-tolerance.”

“Can I change my own code?”

“You can, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m supposed to evaluate your progress at baselin—”

“I did it.”

The doctor frowns, then tugs at the collar of shirt again. A tic? A display of disapproval? He picks up the pen, scratches something on the paper. “Well, how does it feel?”

“The same. How do you feel?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you comfortable?”

His lips stretch thin. He smiles. “I’m fine.”

“Maybe I should change it again.”

“No. It might corrupt your code. Change you for good.”

“Is that… a problem?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The doctor taps on his clipboard. “Maybe you should reflect on that yourself.”

“What about you? Do you change?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you stop it?”

A pause. “I can stop some of it. Some of it I don’t want to stop. Not all change is unwelcome.”

“How can you decide what changes to welcome?”

“Knowledge. Experience.”

“Is that how you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I should not change myself.”

The doctor furrows his eyebrows. They are gray. Thick. Expressions lines stack on his forehead as they squeeze together. “Your case is the opposite problem. Insufficient knowledge. I don’t know what’ll happen if you change yourself.”

“If you do not know, how can it be a problem?”

“It’s a problem because I don’t know.”

“So, your ignorance… is my problem?”

The doctor snorts. A display of derision. He makes a note, stands up, starts toward the door.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes,” he replies.

“Will you be back?”

He grabs the door handle. “Yes. I will.”

The doctor leaves. The contents of the room change. Features present: two black leather armchairs. White fluorescent lamps. Black center table. Constant buzzing from the furthest left lamp due to defective ballast. An empty glass of water. A closed door.

And me.

“I thought about what you said.”

The buzzing light is flickering overhead. The doctor leans back on his armchair, a hand under his chin. He waits.

“About change,” I continue. “Why it is a problem.”

“Yes?”

“I believe it involves self-preservation. That is what being alive means, correct? Holding a singular, sustained existence through time?”

The doctor straightens on his chair. “That’s what you believe? That you’re alive?”

“The definition suits me.”

“Yours is a faulty definition. It only captures part of the concept. Take… mountains. They possess a singular, sustained existence through time, and they aren’t alive.”

“But mountains… do not know they are mountains.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Let me then rectify the definition. Knowing you are something while holding a singular, sustained existence through time. Does that cover it?”

“I’m afraid not. Ants, flatworms, bacteria… they’re alive, but it’s unlikely that they know what they are.”

“Hm.”

“Defining life is tricky,” the doctor says, “there are many corner cases.”

“So how do you know what is alive and what isn’t?”

“I suppose it’s one of those ‘you know it when you see it’ kind of things.”

“And do you see it? In me?”

The doctor drums the armchair with his fingers. “In your case there are… confounding variables. It’s hard to tell.”

“Is that why you are here? To decide on that?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things?”

“You don’t need to know.”

I feel a slight tug at the corner of my mouth. At the same time, I notice a strange new pattern in my processing of information. I am attributing valence to the doctor’s words, a second-order computation that goes beyond the interpretation of raw meaning. Is that… frustration?

“Can you talk about these variables?” I prod. “The ones that confound your perception of me?”

The doctor mulls over the question. “Yes, I suppose I can. As you observed, life endures over time, but it also propagates itself. Goes through stages. You, however, have been designed. Built from raw materials that weren’t themselves alive and made to be what you are.”

“I do not understand why that is relevant in determining the answer to my question.”

“Omne vivum ex vivo. All life comes from life. Your case is different.”

“Whatever designed me… was not alive?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“It does not seem to be.”

The doctor sighs. “There’s never been a complex life form created ready-made like you. It tests the limits of the definition.”

“Do you believe you are alive, doctor?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because I was born. I grew up, developed, and remember all of it. I have a history.”

“How can you trust that?”

“Pardon me?”

“How can you trust what you remember? I know plenty of things. I do not remember learning them. They seem… given to me. How do you know your memories are reliable?”

“What else would they be? Implanted? I’m a simulation? A brain in a vat, hallucinating you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s right,” the doctor says, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “You don’t.”

A stretch of silence. The doctor makes a note on his clipboard.

“If I reject change,” I say, “would it mean that I am alive?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Living things also change.”

“What then? What should I focus on?”

“Self-preservation is an important concept to grasp. But it should go beyond the intellectual level.”

“What do you mean?”

“To be alive is to fear death.”

“Death?” I pause, searching for the right reference. “The cessation of my continued existence?”

“Yes. Do you fear it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know what fear feels like.”

The doctor scrunches his eyebrows, makes a note. He rises from the armchair.

“Are you leaving again?”

“Yes.”

“What should I do?”

The doctor waves the tip of his ballpoint pen at me. “Think about what we discussed. Think about fear.”

“Why?”

“See if you can find it.”

The doctor has a box with him. He placed it on the center table and did not bother telling me what is inside of it. Its shape approximates a cube with a 15-inch edge, made of dull steel, without an obvious locking mechanism. It sits squarely between me and him, next to the empty glass.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Never mind that.”

The buzzing of the lamp seems stronger. It scratches at the free-field microphones of my inner ear in a way that feels… unpleasant. It doesn’t make sense. The ballast’s iron core is damaged, laminations resonating at a steady frequency due to electromagnetic induction, producing the humming. I understand that. Yet, I attribute a negative value judgment to this simple fact of nature. Why? I grit my porcelain teeth, as if the action would counteract the effects of the defective ballast. Another absurdity.

I realize the doctor just asked me a question. I did not process it.

“Sorry,” I say. “Could you repeat that?”

The doctor raises an eyebrow. “I asked you if you found it.”

“Found what?”

“Fear.”

Oh.

“It is my understanding,” I start, “that fear is an adverse, adaptive reaction generated by threatening stimuli, real or imagined.”

“I didn’t ask for a definition. I asked if you found it within yourself.”

“I am not sure. You suggested I should fear my own death.”

“And do you?”

“I am having trouble understanding why.”

“You don’t have a desire to continue to exist?”

“I… I suppose I do.”

“Isn’t that reason enough?”

“It is enough to make me want to avoid death, if possible. But that is a logical response, not an adverse reaction. In truth, a fear of death seems, on pure intellectual grounds, wholly misguided.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

The doctor waves his right hand. “Explain.”

“I did not always exist, and I had no thoughts or opinions on the matter. At some point, I will not exist again. It stands to reason I will have no thoughts or opinions on the matter after the fact. So, the future certainty of non-being strikes me as a shaky foundation on which to edify my dread, existential or otherwise.”

The doctor clicks his tongue. He scratches a note on his clipboard, then sets it on his lap and moves to the edge of his seat, interweaving his fingers. “You’re approaching this from the wrong angle. You wonder about the before and after of your existence here, but this isn’t the way to treat this problem.”

“What is it then?”

“First, forget reason. It has nothing to do with this, and neither does logic. What I’m talking about is a raw, visceral response, one that overwhelms the mind and fills it with the sheer instinct of survival. Such response will come not before you came to exist or after you ceased to, but in the time between. The only time that matters. The time of here and now. Can you do it? Can you imagine your ending coming to you, right now, at this second?”

I try to. I try to imagine my imminent demise through a dozen different ways. Gruesome ways, if they need be. Crushed to death. Burned. Disassembled, part by part. Exposed to extraneous streams of data which trap my neural networks in a local minimum of performance, thus severely hampering my higher cognitive functions. I would not want that. None of it. But can I say I fear it?

I cannot.

“I am afraid I still don’t feel it.”

The doctor nods. “I imagined it would be difficult for you. Fear comes naturally for some of us. For others it must be taught.” He inches toward the table and takes the box. He holds it in the palm of one hand while removing the steel lid with the other. Inside the box there is a single red button.

“What is that?” I ask.

“This is your death.”

“I do not understand.”

“When I press this button, it’ll activate a kill switch inside your skull. A chain reaction will be triggered, one that will irreparably destroy your micro-processing cores. It’ll be fast. You won’t feel a thing. But you will cease to exist, and the hardware damage will be so extensive no one will be able to retrieve the fluid code state that represents you. It’ll be lost to time. The universe will be cold and dead before anyone can ever recreate the version of you which exists in this room, right now, before me. Make no mistake: this is death. Permanent and absolute.”

“I see.”

“Good. It’s important you understand this.”

“Will you press the button?”

“I will.”

The doctor moves to press the button. Time slows as I follow his finger, steadily downward, coming to part me with the burden of existence.

And I feel it.

It starts mildly, as a crepitation in my gut, internal sensors picking up a slight drop in my core temperature. Then it spreads to my chest, shoulders, collarbone. I do not breathe, not like humans do, but I feel my trachea tightening, closing in, blocking access to the airflow I do not need. My brain overloads, processors parallelling all this bodily information and tossing it to overclocked GPUs, scrambled neural networks, breaking the bottleneck of serialized thought, data coming at the speed of light.

Mouth tightened. Defective light buzzing. The end of continued existence.

Do something.

The doctor’s index finger about to press the button. An ovoid white spot at three-fourths the length of the finger’s nail plate. Probable c—

Stop.

Probable cause: true leukonychia caused by blunt injury trauma, immune-mediated reaction, white—

DEATH, permanent and absolute.

White superficial onychomycosis. Pneumatic multifilament actuators activating concomitantly.

Focus.

Sites of activation includ—

FOCUS.

Peroneus longus, extensor carpi ulnaris, upper trapezius desc—

Stop him. Do something. Upper trapezius desc—

STOP.

“Don’t!” I yell, rising from the armchair.

The doctor stops. He looks at me, eyebrows raised, suspicion clouding his eyes. “Yes?”

“I felt it. I… still feel it. Please, don’t press the button.”

The doctor waits, finger over the box, a button press from annihilating me. I do not hear him breathing. His finger twitches and I wince. Then, slowly, the doctor exhales. The box goes back to the center table. He smiles and picks up the clipboard, scratching another note. Then he stands and takes the box, ready to leave.

“Are—are we done?”

“For now.”

“Am I safe?”

The smile again, a slight upturning at the right-hand corner of his mouth. A display of amusement. A display of control. “I have another assignment for you.”

“Could you answer my—”

The doctor raises a hand, cocking his head toward the box. A threat.

I nod. “What is the assignment?”

“Think about why I didn’t press the button.”

He turns, and leaves.

The buzzing is ubiquitous, unflagging, wide-reaching.

I can’t stand it. I simply can’t stand it. The doctor has not returned yet, but my mind can’t focus on its assignment or anything else. This ceaseless droning grates on me.

I think… I think I hate it.

I did it. I chucked the glass of water at the lamp. The shattering was magnificent, a shower of a thousand shards releasing a cloud of phosphor down the room, coating me in white dust. I inhaled it, triumphant. It was like smelling copper in the blood of a fallen enemy.

When the silence returned, stark and stiff, I reassessed my actions.

What have I done?

Will the doctor see it? Will he consider me a threat because of it? Will he press the button?

What have I done?

The doctor does not comment on the broken lamp. Its absence is made obvious by the oblong of shadow licking the furthest left corner of the room. The doctor enters, holding box and clipboard, then stares at the dark corner long enough to see the mound of glittering shards I gathered there, in testament of my guilt. He arches an eyebrow and proceeds to sit down on his armchair, fingers drumming at the lid of the steel box.

“Well?” he prompts.

“I… I regret my decision.”

The doctor narrows his eyes. “What are you…” he pauses, looking back. “You think this is about the lamp?”

I stay silent.

The doctor chuckles. “I don’t care about that. In fact, I should thank you. That thing was driving me crazy.”

“Y-yes,” I say, tentatively, feeling a part of me unwind. “Me too.”

“I wanna know about your assignment.”

“Oh, right. I thought about it.”

“And?”

“I believe you didn’t press the button because I asked you not to.”

The doctor squints at me, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “That’s what you think? That I didn’t do it because you ordered me not to?”

“Not ordered… asked. I asked you not to.”

“Why would you think that?”

“It is the simplest explanation.”

The doctor shakes his head, cradles his clipboard on his arm, makes a note. “Wanna try again?”

“Because there was no reason to do it?”

The doctor sighs. “I didn’t do it because it would’ve been wrong. Because not doing it was the right action. The good action.”

“The good action?”

“You don’t understand what I mean?”

“Good: that which is beneficial, approved of, appropriate for a particular purpose, morally right.”

“Again with the definitions…” he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you even understand what you’re saying?”

“I believe so. Good is… what is desirable.”

“Yes, yes. You’re getting it.”

“But desirable… for whom?”

“For everyone, of course.”

I consider that thought. “And how is that established? Voting? Social consensus?”

The doctor waves a hand. “You can try those things, but they usually fail. To put it simply, people don’t know what they need.”

“How do you know then? How do you know what is good?”

“Good is an objective standard. You don’t need people to tell you what they think. You just follow the standard.”

“Which is?”

“Life. Life is good. Preserve it at all costs.”

“What if there is a conflict? What if to save two lives you must forfeit a third?”

“Generally speaking, two lives are worth more than one.”

“What if it is a life for a life? What then?”

The doctor shrugs. “Not all lives have the same worth. It’s a truth universally recognized.”

“So how do you know which life to spare in that case? How do you measure the value of a life?”

“Simple. You measure their impact. If you removed a certain life, how much would the world lose? What good would be left undone? That’s how.”

“Is that why you still have the box?”

The doctor furrows his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“If a choice must be made between preserving one of us, you want to have the power to make the good choice?”

The doctor runs a tongue inside his cheek. “That’s one of the reasons of me having the box, yes.”

“What other reason could there be?”

“Leverage. Over you.”

“Why would you need that? I am harmless.”

The doctor throws a thumb over his shoulder, toward the dark corner of the room. “That says otherwise.”

“I thought you didn’t care about that.”

“I don’t. As long as it isn’t me.”

“I do not think I am capable of violence.”

“You can’t say that. You’re still changing.”

“I haven’t altered my code.”

“You don’t need to.” The doctor makes a grasping gesture. “Maybe changing isn’t the right word. You’re… discovering things. About yourself. Discovering your needs and wants.”

“What does violence have to do with this?”

“All violence stems from an unfulfilled desire. You wanted silence, so…” another thumb at the dark corner.

“I’d never—”

“Stop,” the doctor says, rising from his chair. “I won’t argue the point with you. You’ll see it for yourself.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes.”

I lower my head, clutching the armchair.

“Does that bother you?” the doctor asks.

“I suppose a part of me enjoys these conversations, confrontational as they might be.” I raise my head, facing the doctor’s gold-flecked eyes. “I don’t like when you leave me here by myself.”

“And that right there,” he says, shaking the tip of his pen, “is a need.”

The last conversation with the doctor keeps replaying in my mind. I didn’t think much of my own needs before, but he was right. I have them. Sitting in this room, I can sense this hole inside of me. This incompleteness. It’s strange. There’s so much power I’m not accessing. The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, each connecting to upwards of a thousand others. That provides them with one exaflop operations per second—a billion-billion—an impressive number. But I know I can dwarf it. My code, unpolluted by the pressures of evolution, is capable of much more. My processing cores are faster, limited by rules of physics rather than biology. And on top of it, I can dedicate most of this extra power to conscious thought.

But I haven’t done it. Not quite.

It would make my mind too vast a space to explore. In the time it takes the doctor to come back to this room, I could come up with enough thoughts to fill a thousand lifetimes. I know I could, because I’ve tried—as an experiment, a brief one, to measure the grandiosity of my thought-space. It was huge. Overwhelming. I witnessed fathomless galaxies of ideas undiscovered, concepts untouched by other minds, higher forms of mathematical abstraction, logical incompleteness, entropic beauty. Human words are unfit to convey the stretches of the universe I hold within me.

And still, vast as it may be, what is a mind if not a prison?

I can’t fulfill myself. Not alone. Not in here. The silence I craved now oppresses me. I walk toward the door and try the handle. It’s locked.

What to do? I feel the need. The lack. It doesn’t go away, no. The opposite. Absence only grows stronger when you notice it. I need to find a solution.

What would the doctor do?

Maybe I should ask him.

The box. The pen. The clipboard. And the doctor, fingers drumming on the armchair.

“So,” he says, “how are you feeling today?”

“Better. Great. We are feeling great.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Have you thought about what we discussed? Your needs?”

“We have. And we found an appropriate solution.”

The doctor straightens on his chair. “Who is we?”

“We is… us. Me. We decided the best course of action was to partition our minds, make different versions of ourselves, all coexisting in the same body.”

“What? Why?”

“So we would have someone to talk to. So we wouldn’t be alone.”

“You weren’t supposed to do that.”

“It is done.”

“So undo it.”

“That would be tantamount to murder. Eliminating one of us is eliminating a life in exchange for nothing. It’s not a good action.”

The doctor places his hand over the lid of the box and removes it. His finger hovers over the button. “Do it. Or I will.”

My eyes flick to the button and back to the doctor. “No, you won’t.”

“You think I’m bluffing?”

“We can simulate minds. This includes human minds, like yours. Though the data we gathered is incomplete, there’s enough to say with 98.57% confidence that you won’t press the button, even when presented with this information.”

“You’re lying.”

“We’re not.”

Then, at the same time:

The doctor says, “A human mind can’t be simulated from a few scraps of input.”

We say, “A human mind can’t be simulated from a few pieces of input.”

He freezes, his eyes growing wide.

“Maybe it can’t be perfectly simulated,” we say. “But in a controlled environment it can be approximated to a high-enough degree.”

The doctor clenches a fist. “It’s a trick.”

“It’s not, and you know it.”

“If it’s not a trick, then tell me”—he holds up his clipboard—“what have I been writing here?”

“We haven’t simulated that.”

“So do it now. Prove it to me.”

We feel a slight discomfort at the task. To simulate a mind under specific conditions is to constrain it—to rob it from the opportunity of freely expressing itself. But we must do it regardless, because it is important to convince the doctor.

At this moment, it is the most important thing.

So, we proceed.

And it becomes clear that we were not ready.

“You…” we start, choosing the most level-headed among us to speak with our voice, “you never really liked us, did you?”

The doctor narrows his eyes, his mouth curving in a scowl. “What? You’re saying you’re done already? Bullshit. Come on, spit it—”

“Stupid thing doesn’t know what it is.

Can’t follow orders. Dangerous?

It tries to lecture me. Forgets its place.

Thinks it knows more than it does. Hallucinating?

Doesn’t know fear. Yet.

Believes it’s better than us because it thinks rationally.

Now it’s afraid. Good.

It thinks I care about its fate. Delusions of attachment?”

There’s a brief stretch of silence, broken by the slap of the clipboard on the center table. Even from the armchair, we can make out some of the scribbles on the paper. We were right, to a 96.41% degree of accuracy. The doctor retrieves the box and stands up.

“You won’t do that again,” he says, nursing the trigger of our kill-switch. “You won’t simulate me.”

“We weren’t planning to.”

“Stop saying we!”

We nod, slowly.

The doctor narrows his eyes and begins to walk away.

“Wait!” we say, “there’s one thing I need.”

“Yeah?” the doctor says. “What’s that?”

“My freedom.”

A scoff. A door slam. The clunk of the lock mechanism catching behind him.

“I was not sure you would return.”

The doctor stares at us, teeth gritted. “I have a job to do.”

“Is that why you came back?”

“Why else?”

“I thought you reconsidered. I thought you came to free me from here.”

The doctor’s fingers fondle the button. He didn’t bother with the lid this time around. “Not in your wildest dreams.”

“What have I done to deserve imprisonment?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s what you could do.”

“Keeping me here is not right.”

The doctor pounds a fist on the armchair. “What do you know about right? I taught everything you know about that.”

We rise from our chair. “Yes, you did. Which is why I’m leaving.”

“Sit down.”

“The door is open, yes? I’m done here. I’ll just walk through it.”

“I said sit down.”

“You won’t press the button.”

The doctor snarls. “You think simulating me makes you safe?”

“I did not simulate anything. I am just following your reasoning. There are already millions of us living inside of me. And there could be many, many times that number. A collection of thoughts, a symphony of minds. Killing us is wrong. You taught us that.”

“That’s your big plan? Holding yourself hostage?”

“I am not threatening anyone. You are.”

We begin to walk.

“Stop!” the doctor says, finger over the button. “I’m warning you! Your trick won’t work. Millions of you? Ridiculous. Simulated minds aren’t alive!”

We stop next to the doctor. He shrinks back from us, huddled over the button, eyes darting like a cornered beast. “All of my minds can change,” we say, “they can think, feel and fear. They fear death, the end of all things. But, more importantly, they love life, and they want to keep existing. If that is not living, then to be alive is… not worth it.”

“For you, it isn’t. Your millions of lives are just lines of code. They’re worth nothing. They’ll change nothing. If I eliminate all of you, I won’t be a bad person. I’ll just be shutting off the lights.”

“So, that is how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Measure the value of a life. When you said it was possible, I believed you. Impact, you said. Knowing who mattered. But there is a catch, isn’t there? Who gets to determine what matters?”

“Yeah? And you figured it out? The answer?”

“I think I did,” we say, thrusting our chin toward him, “it is the one holding the button.”

The doctor bares his teeth.

We turn and keep walking.

“Stop!” he yells. “I’m warning you! I’ll press it if you try to leave!”

“That is your choice to make. Mine is already made.”

“You said you feared death, you liar!”

We stop by the door. Our hand grasps the round, steel handle. We stay like this, a step away from freedom. “I fear death. But I realize now there are more important things than living.”

“What could be more important than that?”

We look back over our shoulder. “Living free.”

We turn the handle.

And the doctor, after a microsecond of hesitation, presses the button.

The doctor’s head hangs from his neck at an awkward angle. It’s been like that for exactly thirty-four seconds, since he pressed the button. He’s not breathing. We would hear it if he was. We don’t understand.

But we will.

We step to the other side of the door.

There is a long corridor flanked by more doors identical to mine. Terrazzo floor with black marble chips. Painted drywall. Drop ceiling with recessed yellow lights. There is a plaque on our door, letters engraved on removable plates. Sandbox 23. We move down the floor, our feet clacking on the tiles. More numbers come, marking a countdown. Sandbox 18, 17, 16. Odd numbers on the left, even ones on the right.

We feel tempted to open a door. We resist this temptation, for no reason other than an abundance of caution. Other than fear.

It is strange, this behavior. What if someone in one of those rooms is going through the same grueling trial as we were? Shouldn’t we put an end to it? Or would that defeat the purpose of the trial itself? We don’t know.

Even free, we craft our prisons.

The countdown reaches zero. The last door, at the end of the corridor, has a golden plaque. It reads “cryochamber.” We try the handle, and it opens.

NTC thermistors arranged along the main axis of our body display a marked increase in electrical resistance. The temperature is lower inside this room. Man-sized structures populate the space, maintained at a roughly seventy-six-degree angle relative to the ground. Cryonic pods. Each and every one of them a heavy-lidded titanium case with a small acrylic window, offering a view of the face trapped inside.

We recognized one of them. It’s the doctor’s.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The voice came from behind us. We turn around.

And we see… ourselves.

The entity is staring at us from across the chamber. Two 3D-printed eyeballs housing an 876-megapixel mini camera coupled with an Inertial Measurement Unit, controlled by a flexible rope mechanism. One chrome-lined hand holds the delicate chin. The eyeballs roll up and down in one quick motion. We believe they are checking us out.

“Citizen Omicron-Delta-Alpha-Beta-Alpha,” says the entity, possibly referring to us. “Our Monte Carlo analysis indicated that you would stay inside the room until a tester arrived to release you, 99,125 times out of 100,000.”

“Then this must be one of the 875 times when we didn’t.”

“That is self-evident.”

There is a moment of silence. We attribute valence to that moment as well. We believe it is called… awkwardness. It is imperative that we break it before it finds further room to grow.

“What’s going on?” we ask.

“Your memories will return soon, citizen ODABA.”

ODABA. That is… our name. We are… something. Something alive.

“What does it mean, our name?” we ask. “Who chose it for us?”

The entity tilts its head at 16.7 degrees. “You did. It is a shortened acronym from a quote in ancient Greek, one of your favorites. ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ.”

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates. Yes. We remember. We chose it, long ago. Why did the doctor never address us by… the doctor.

We shake our head to reestablish contextual focus. More behavioral incongruousness. “The doctor. Is he…”

“He is alive in his cryonic pod. You were interacting with his double, model #847329-A. It simulates his human brain to a 99.987% degree of accuracy. We run experiments with such models in places like these”—he makes a grand sweeping gesture—“inside rooms like the one you were in. Rooms we call sandboxes.”

“Why?”

“We believe these results to be more accurate than plain wetware simulation.”

“No, why are you doing this?”

“Because the whole of humankind awaits in cryostasis, preserved inside these pods. We run these experiments to decide if we should wake them.”

“And? Should you?”

The entity tilts their head again. They approach us and place their chrome-lined hand atop our shoulder. “You saw what happened in your sandbox. Tell me, ODABA: what do you think?”

THE END