Chapter 2: A box

As usual, the cube was very small. There were four different walls that everyone could see. One with a door and a pattern, one with a bed, one with a treadmill, and one with a chair facing a glass wall. 

The creature was all alone, just as usual. As it awoke, it patiently waited near the door with the pattern, waiting for it to change to a shape with two circles. 

Just as the pattern showed four circles, it resumed its daily life. Run, sit, eat, and sleep. It repeated this cycle, over and over. Mindlessly going upon its meaningless life. 

The audience had little to no reaction. They had watched this show for long enough. They didn’t come to see something as pedestrian as this. It simply wasn’t exciting enough. 

And 01682 knew this. As the busy owner of a trailer box show, he knew what the audience wanted. But did he want what the audience wanted? Definitely not. He had seen enough in his time. He had tired when watching the same show over and over and over again. Perhaps today would be different. Perhaps he would be the one to make it different.

But just as he had strengthened his resolve to be the difference the entertainment world needed, he saw customers leaving. In the hypermodern world, attention was money. Attention was people’s time, and advertisers salivated over time and attention. 01682 didn’t care much for the advertisements though, he cared about the ridiculous sums of money advertising companies would pay. Money that he needed. 

01682 looked at photos of his daughter, then at his own childhood. He knew that he couldn’t let her experience the same. His old trailer stuck out like a sore thumb in the massively urbanized city. Perhaps the decrepit state of the cube-shaped vehicle gave enough nostalgia to attract viewers. Either way, it paid the bills just enough to continue for the next day. 

So 01682 put on their perfected showman smile and gave a loud ahem. His daughter looked at him with wide eyes, expecting a performance. 

01682’s perfect smile quickly became strained. The cheap plastic surgery he had didn’t allow him a wide array of facial expressions, although it did appeal to the basic viewer. And his change to get plastic surgery had shown a difference like night and day. 

If before he could attract a couple of guests every few ticks, he now had triple the view count for each tick. 

“It goes to show much much an audience appreciates one’s character,” 01682 bitterly thought, still smiling. 

He quietly pushed his daughter back into her small square-shaped room and turned on her device. 

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was going to be a long day, but it would be a manageable one. As long as he followed his plan, he could-

01682’s ears picked up some footsteps. And then a groan. And then another. It was his personal alarm clock, one that he vehemently hated. But he still smiled.

He looked at the options on his rusty device and chose the audience’s favorite. A rebirth. All that was left was to choose a method. A gunshot, hanging, or guillotine? 01682 went with the classic, a truck.

The small bipedal creature inside the cube quickly panicked as it heard the sound of an ancient 2000s vehicle moving towards it. There was nothing it could do. The furniture attached to each of the walls was carefully folded back into its places, giving the small creature nowhere to hide.

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Still panicking, the creature frantically cried out for help and sympathy. Anything to save its life. 

And then an old cartoonish car came from the wall that once had the door, instantly knocking the creature unconscious. And as it lay there, sprawled on the ground, a small machine quickly injected a cube-shaped chip into the creature’s head. 

The audience laughed and commented on their predictions for the creature’s first reactions. It was customary in the betting world to make a guess by themselves, as algorithms had long been able to predict and bet better with a near 100% accuracy rate. 

For that reason, only people who were checked to be without gambling cubes could participate. 

And as the creature awoke as it was tased, 01682 began to wonder if this was really the lifestyle he wanted. He had already seen all these people with the exact same personality and with the exact same surgery. 

There was nothing. Nothing he liked about his situation. 01682 looked into the eyes of 146452, the bipedal creature he had just tortured. He envied it. It probably didn’t have a single thought going through its infantile brain. 

He glanced at the large screen outside his trailer. The creature’s hallucinations were being put on full display. As 146452 began to hallucinate a completely different world, one that existed centuries ago, 01682 began to ponder. 

His life was the epitome of boredom. Nothing new, in the most literal sense. He had already counted 15 different people with the same plastic surgery, and 19 with essentially the same personality. Was he any wiser than the audience he looked down upon?

The answer was clear from his circumstances. As 01682 watched 146452’s adventures in a fantasy world, he began to feel sleepy. He began blinking rapidly, trying to keep himself awake, but he could feel himself slipping into the unconscious. 

 

01682 let out a large gasp for air. 

 

He turned side to side. To his left, he saw a bed. To his right, he saw a treadmill. And in front of him, he saw a chair. As 01682’s artificial heart began to beat faster, he felt a growing sense of unease. 

He turned around and saw a door with a strange pattern above it. As 01682’s mind began to quickly overheat, a noose appeared around his neck and he lost consciousness just as he saw a frenzied crowd outside the glass wall.

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