Black Box

"You're sure this has something to do with the problem at the museum?"

Alex nodded, not breaking stride as he ascended the stairwell ahead of Gareth. "Not only that," he said, "but I think it's connected to that other thing, too... the cave paintings."

Alex was dressed in his usual sloppy casual wear - a T-shirt, plain gray trousers, the uniform of a man who works from home. Gareth wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of the university museum. He liked American-style baseball caps, and had amassed a huge collection; his current favorite was a dark blue cap with a brightly colored, stylized Om. The symbol was created in thick skeins of thread, the strands dyed in brilliant colors that shaded from white to pink to magenta to orange to violet and then to teal. The exertion of climbing all those stairs was making the cap feel hot, and Gareth pushed it higher back on his forehead.

The two reached the fourth floor - more or less as an attic, stuffed with used notebooks and reams of printouts. They paused outside a heavy door. A palm reader was set into the wall.

"I can't imagine how the two are connected," Gareth said. "The cave paintings were ruined by changes in humidity. They should never have let tourists crowd the place the way they did. We told them from the start that controlling the site was key to preserving the antiquities..." He blew out a breath of frustration. "Don't get me started."

"Speaking of getting started - what I'm about to tell you began with a comment someone made on a convo thread," Alex told Gareth, pressing his palm against the reader plate - a security precaution Alex hadn't actually wanted, but which his agent had insisted on installing. Otherwise, the insurance company wouldn't pay for any lost, damaged, or stolen intellectual property.

As if anyone was going to want to pilfer the dreck Alex kept up here. It wasn't like he was a world famous writer; he was just a guy with a trust fund and, more recently, a large inheritance. He had found moderate success as a writer, but he also remembered to give the gods thanks and praise that he didn't actually rely on his scribblings to get by.

The room was neat and light and a little dusty. A desk sat in one corner, and cabinets lined the opposite wall. Boxes clustered here and there in obsessively arrayed stacks. Roughly in the center of the room was a large worktable, a scattering of notebooks and bound printout pages strewn across its surface.

"A fellow named Ashav Ram said that he was noticing more and more of his gelcolors inexplicably degrading," Alex explained as he led Gareth to the table. Alex stopped, stood in place, and looked down at the table. "Ashav then claimed that the more gelcolors he created, the more of a problem it became. At first he assumed that he was using faulty materials; then he started to think someone was deliberately destroying his work. But then he had the idea that it was the act of creation that led directly to his older works... well... dissolving, essentially."

"He ruled out the idea of someone ruining them?" Gareth said. "An enemy? A competitor? Or maybe he was doing it himself to drum up a little mystery, a little buzz?"

Alex looked at his old friend with his lips pulled into a skeptical smile. "I didn't even give his claim that much thought, until I started noticing something similar happening with my writings. And who is going to come up here and bother with my stuff? You know how terrible my first drafts are?"

"They're not terrible," Gareth said. "They're drafts."

"They're shit," Alex said. "And so are the second and third and fourth drafts. My work doesn't start to take shape and really turn into something good until a sixth draft, at least, and then it takes two or three more drafts to polish. So imagine that someone started defacing my old notebooks and files."

"They might," Gareth said.

"If I was Percy Sanders, maybe. Or Don DeLillo. But I'm not. Who's gonna care about my crappy old scribblings? That's the situation Ashav was trying to explain, only no one understood him. See, Ashav isn't a professional artist. He's an architect; he likes to use gelcolors for decoration, or sometimes to give a little extra kick to presentations. He dabbles, but he doesn't sell anything. Still, what he does is a form of creation, and... Well, what if the act of creation itself contains the seeds of destruction?"

"Any conservator can tell you that," Gareth replied. "The moment you create anything, time starts taking it to bits. Gelcolors, paintings, sculptures, digital media - it's all vulnerable to decay. That's a universal law. But not llike that happened at the museum with those six DeSalle canvases. You know they were worth fourteen million neocs? You know what anything that valuable does? It draws the crazies. One thing I've seen over and over again is how for every person who creates something, there are dozens... of hundreds... who arejust delighted to destory it. Religious fanatics in this case. DeSalle was a Manachaean, and that philsophy is embedded in every canvas he ever created.

"And what happened to the DeSalle stuff is nothing like what happened to the cave paintings," Gareth added.

"I don't know about that," Alex said. "Those photos you showed me looked very much like the same thing."

"The result might look the same, but the process isn't," Gareth replied. "One is the result of distirbing very specific, stable conditions that had been the same for thirty-some thousand years. All of a sudden, you have variations in light, in temperature, in humidity. Of course it's going to impact the cave paintings. We told them this, and I don't know why the province even contracted with the museum to advise and implement conservation methods if they weren't going to listen. Well, I do know, actually. Money. They took in sacks full of neocs charging admission, but they destroyed a unique resource in the process..." Gareth let out another angry sigh.

"The point is, mon ami, that what happened to both the cave paintings and those canvases also happened here, in my work room. To my notebooks, to my files. Even to my emails."

Gareth looked around. For a work room, the place had an unused vibe about it. "I don't know what to tell you, man. Except maybe someone values your old stuff more than you do."

"If that were true, they'd still need to get past the palm reader," Alex pointed out. "And they probably would have more of a plan about what they were going to destroy. But..." He pointed at various places around the room. "An old notebook, only half-used, mostly filled with rough cartoons. I had it in that box over there. A file full of rewrites and revisions on a short story. That was in the cabinet, and so were several other files full of similar stuff. The third draft of a novel, on printout - I bound that and kept it right on this table. I was going to reference it for the fourth draft. Well, it's gone now."

"Gone, how? Stolen? Shredded? Blotted over?"

"Well, that's the thing," Alex said. "You asked how any of this was similar to your conservation problems? Well, let me show you." He crossed over to the file cabinet, rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a thick folder. Handing it to Gareth, he said, "Have a look at this."

Gareth opened the folder and scrutinized the pages within. They were covered with blotches of toner - blotches that might once have been words.

"Don't you think these pages look a little bit like what happened to the cave paintings?" Alex asked. "And by a little bit, I mean exactly."

Gareth shook his head. "I don't know... we were thinking fungus, or simple dissolution of the pigment due to condensation. But..."

"But it happened all of a sudden," Alex pointed out. "It's not like it took weeks or months. It was overnight."

"Actually, in the middle of the day," Gareth said. "Between the ten o'clock and fourteen o'clock tour groups."

"And from the photos you showed me, the DeSalle canvases look very much like my manuscript pages here, also."

"But this is toner on paper," Gareth protested. "The cave paintings are vegetable pigments on rock. And the canvases are gel crystal pigments suspended in lumentic. Very different media."

"But what if it's the same process?" Alex asked him.

Gareth hesitated, not sure how to reply. Then: "You said it's not just hard copies?" Gareth asked. "Because if your password protected process files are disappearing too, then, well, maybe something strange really is going on."

Alex smiled tightly. "Oh yes," he said. "I first noticed it with the paper copies, because that's how I like to work - I reference back to the notebooks and printouts, I revise right on paper using and ink pen. But when I went back to see about that third draft - well, I knew I had it backed up in my process core. But not anymore. That draft wasn't text any longer. It was... well, it looked like machine code. Total gibberish. The more I looked at it the more I realized most of what was there wasn't even recognizable symbols. It was just splatters and squiggles. Total chaos.

"I started looking around to see if anything other files had been corrupted, and thirteen pages of song lyrics were scrambled."

"The lyrics you were working on for Mashama Mbala?"

"Right, the ones I spent eight months on," Alex said, smiling tightly. "I had them copied over as attachments to emails I sent to my music publisher, and so I went into my email archive. I found the email texts, and they were fine, but the attachments were scrambled just like my saved documents. Then I remembered that I had copied the text of several of the songs in a letter to my friend Marijene - the poet, you know, she lives in Paris. So I found that email, and..."

Alex stopped, and looked Gareth with a perplexed expression.

"Was it still there?"

"The email was. The stuff about the weather and the projects I was discussing with my agent and my editor, and then I talked about how I'd also written some songs for Jed Jonas -"

"Who?"

"Jed Jonas, the front man for Torched and Twisted. A friend of Mashama's. He was going to record a solo album. Well, that's never going to happen now he's gone into rehab and come out born again."

"I don't know," Gareth said. "Give it a year. Give it six months."

Alex gave a short, dry laugh. "Anyway, I said to Marijene, here, take a look, here are the lyrics for three or four of the songs I've been working on for Mashama. He's still refining the music, so these may not be final versions. But there were no versions there - just randomized pixels where the lyrics used to be."

"And you didn't have any printouts? Could it be that someone sabotaged your collaboration and got a work into your process core?"

Alex blew air through his teeth in a dry, humorless chuckle. "I didn't have any printouts, no. But Mashama did, and so did his arranger. Well, arranger-slash-ghostwriter. You think he writes any of his own music? They had printouts. I intelexed Mashama to ask if he could send me those lyrics back again since I had lost them, and he got back to me later and said he couldn't find them. He said he had read them and he remembered making notes about them on his Q-Slate, and he said that he had printed them up so he could carry them around and think about them and whatever. But then he said the printouts looked like that had gotten wet - like the words had dissolved on the pages. And the electronic versions were gone from his archives, and his Q-Slate, and his housenet -- "

"His housenet?"

"He lives in Zimbabwe, right? He still uses an old-fashioned delivery system. Everything goes to his housenet from the aethernex and from there to his devices."

"So, what about the aethernex? Did you talk to your service provider?"

"I did, and they launched a search - and they came up with nothing."

"Nothing disappears from the aethernex."

"So we thought."

"No - Alex - literally, nothing ever disappears from the aethernex. Even stuff you try your damndest to scrub. You know that nudie Jarrod Seb took of himself when he was 24? And he sent it to both his boyfriends, who both put it on the nex? He spend, like, 900,000 neocs trying to get rid of every copy, but it was impossible. The way data is stored on the aethernex is in quantum-linked fractal quadunary. It's only pulled together and coalesced when someone does a search or accesses their data accounts. It's designed that way so that nothing can ever be lost - not accidentally, and not on purpose. That's why people use instaprint Polaroids for nudies. It's like your mom probably told you, if you take a nudie with a PCD or a mantis-cam or anything electronic, it's going to end up on the nex and be there forever."

"Right, yes, right," Alex snapped. "So you can imagine how upsetting it was. Because how does anything ever disappear from electronic formats? Who ever has this happen to their stuff? But those song lyrics are gone, never to be reclaimed."

"Okay. So - I'm not really believing this, but obviously something weird is going on and you can't access this stuff any more. So, until it resurfaces... and I'm sure it will... could you just write or tap the lyrics out again? They're short form writing, you must have re-written every line about forty-two times, I know you... so you must have them memorized."

"That's the other thing," Alex said. "I can't recall a single word, or even what the songs were about."

Gareth frowned at him.

Alex made a that's-how-it-is gesture. "They're not only gone from electronic formats, but from my brain too. And my music publisher saw them, too, but she can't recall a thing about any of them - and she has an eidetic memory. In fact, she has a nit-hanced memory, so she really and truly does remember everything in exact detail. And Mashama is one of those people who can remember every word of a conversation years later, but he says he draws a blank when he tries to remember how the lyrics went. He can't even remember the music he wrote for the songs, the music I wrote the lyrics to fit, and if that's not weird enough, when I went into my intelex files to look for the music files, all I found were the message envelopes. If there's still data in those intelexes, it's not playable as audio files."

"But can you remember any of your missing novel? Or the cartoons you said disappeared from your sketch book?"

"Nope," Alex said. "I can tell you all about the second draft of the novel - that's still around - but not the third. And the third, I mean, I threw sixty percent of the second draft out when I wrote the third draft. Then I made up about seventy per cent all new stuff - the third draft was longer than the second. It was so much better. I wish I had lost the second draft and not the third."

"You remember all that, but not the text itself?"

"Not the text, not even the gist of the new stuff."

"Okay... I sympathize," Gareth said. "But I don't have any advice for you."

"I wasn't looking for any, really. I wanted to tell you about this because of what happened with the cave paintings and, now, the canvases. I mean, you're driving yourself nuts about it... and I really do think they're related."

"You think the cave paintings and the canvases just disintegrated, like your notebooks and your song lyrics?"

"Yes," Alex said. "And the sound files that Mashama sent. And the relevant text from my email to my friend Marijene. All of it gone - turned to digital mush, or ink spots on paper. Like you said, it's impossible. And tell me that your digitized photos of the cave paintings didn't all simultaneously end up corrupted. All of them - visible light, X-ray, infra-red."

Gareth glared at him defensively. "How did you know that? Nobody knows it. We haven't said a single fucking word to anybody."

"If I'm right about what happened, then it's consistent. So, Gareth, if I'm wrong about what's happening, then how could I have guessed?"

"It doesn't mean your stupid theory is right," Gareth snapped. "We think an intern messed up the files."

"Right," Alex said. "And how about the photos you keep on file of the DeSalle canvases? The ones the insurance company is going to want to see? Did the same intern have access to those?"

"Holy fuck, are you in on it? Is this some kind of shakedown?" Gareth exploded.

"What? No! Of course not -- I'm just proving my point," Alex said, startled by Gareth's outburst.

"I'm sorry to scream at you, but if you know something about what really happened, I want you to tell me," Gareth pressed.

"I know only what I've explained, and I think - "

"You think some weird science fiction thing is going on. Seriously?" Gareth put his hands to his head, then grasped his hair with taut fingers. Eyes squeezed shut, he added, "Yes, it's like you say. The photos are gone. Not just ours - the insurance company already had copies, of course, and they told us this afternoon that their copies are also corrupted. It's a fucking nightmare... when the media hears about this, what do you think is going to happen?"

Alex watched him sympathetically. "Gareth... Please think about this. Please. The media? They aren't going to attack you. You know why? All those file photos, all those images that were part of the press releases when the cave paintings were found, and then authenticated, and then officially came under protection of the International Heritage Foundation. The media is going to go into their archives for those images, and they'll find..."

"Gone," Gareth said, realizing what Alex was getting at. "It's even worse than I thought. My god, the books..."

"Books?"

"We were supposed to get proofs of a new coffee table book documenting the cave paintings. Detailed, super-high res photos. We were going to sell them in the gift shop. The publisher didn't deliver the proofs. They were due Wednesday, but nothing. I emailed them about it - radio silence. I gave them a couple of days, and then I was going to follow up today and ask what the hell is going on, but then the canvases... I mean, I was up all last night, it's a crisis, the whole museum is in a panic about it. We closed off that entire wing, we have a police forensics lab checking out the canvases, we thought it was acid or maybe some kind of microwave weapon was used... I mean, we thought is was some sort of terrorism. The whole place has been turned upside down! It's a PR disaster, and... My gods, what if you're right?"

The room was bright, and quiet. Alex put a hand on Gareth's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't realize it was already such mayhem."

"What did you think?" Gareth cried, swatting Alex's hand away. "Of course it's mayhem! Its a goddamn carambolage!"

The two started at each other.

"I'm sorry," Gareth offered. "I'm off my meds, I haven't eaten, I haven't slept."

"It's okay," Alex said. "It's okay..." He reached out once again, took Gareth by the elbow, and then guided him to a large work table. He pulled out a chair. Gareth sat down.

"Can I just say a little more?"

"Sure," Gareth said. "Sure, go ahead. What difference does it make? However it happened, we're screwed. My gods, the scandal. No one is going to survive it. We're all finished."

"But this could be a new force of nature," Alex pointed out. "Fundamental. Elemental. World-changing. This could be such big news that you'll be remembered and celebrated - if you take charge of it, get in front of it."

"No one will believe this wild story," Gareth said. "I don't believe it."

"But you don't have another explanation, do you? Today, it's too much. It's science fiction. Tomorrow... when there just is no other way to account for it... this impossible idea will be possible. Then, it will be a fact. The world will learn to live with it.

"The thing is, the convo thread didn't take Asahv Ram's postings seriously - until it did," Alex continued. "This all started about two months ago. But in the last week it's become much more a... a thing. I think what happened to the cave paintings is just the first really noticeable example - I mean, in a public manner. But in private, on the convo threads, people are really starting to notice it now."

Gareth didn't seem angry any longer. Now he looked frightened. "Why?" he asked. "What do you think is happening?"

"One of the guys on the convo is a physicist. He proposed an explanation that sounds crazy at first, but the more I think about it... I think he's on to something. He says that the universe is a black box. He says that just like matter and energy, information cannot be destroyed - only redistributed.

"Don't you see?" Alex continued. "It used to be the case that only a few people were artists or writers... only a few people really took concepts and organized them, or took data and put it into definite formulations. But now everyone is an artist, or an analyst, or dabbles in words, images, documentation... When there were only a few billion people in the world, that was one thing, but now? With nine billion of us all beavering away, processing information faster all the time with enhanced brains and data devices going day and night... The physicist said we've hit the universe's storage capacity. Or maybe it's more localized, maybe it's just our region of the universe, but however it works, nature is starting to recycle that data storage capacity."

Gareth said nothing, but his look of fear persisted.

"Think of it!"Alex becoming excited all over again. "It could be the case that for years only old journals and unpublished novels hidden away in trunks were affected. Or corners of the nex that no one accesses - old social media caches, old government databases that have been shut down. No one saw, no one realized what was starting to happen. But the problem has gotten so acute it's spilling over into the world's active data areas. We're seeing it now, but that doesn't mean it hasn't always been part of how the world works."

"Alex," Gareth started.

But Alex cut him off, his words still in a rush. "It's going to get worse. As long as people are writing, composing, painting... it's going to get worse. Older stuff will keep disappearing. And we can't predict what it is, and we can't selectively protect the things we really treasure. You want to know how many movies I can't find on the nex anymore? I logged on day before yesterday with a list of thirty-six movies to check out. I wrote the titles out on paper with ink. The movies were all there. I went back this morning to check again, and guess what I found? Before I even logged on to the movie anteil, I knew some were missing. Five of the titles were gone from my handwritten list. The lines were blank, no titles, just a... a cloud of dried ink. How can I even check the film anteil of the global archive now? I don't have the titles. I can't recall what they were. I checked back on the list just before you arrived. Another two titles were missing - two that were there just a couple of hours earlier. Next to the titles of each film I noted the release dates, and the thing is, the dates were still there even though the titles were missing. The release dates for the seven films that I listed as gone ranged from 1915 to three years ago."

If Gareth looked scared before, he was looking terrified now.

"And books. The same day I first searched for those films, I threw together a list of one hundred twenty books and went to look them up. They were all there. Of course they were! If they had vanished before I made the list, I wouldn't have recalled the titles in order to note them down. But this morning? Same thing as with the films: There were gaps in my hand-written list. Nineteen titles were gone. Nineteen! I didn't write down the years of publication, but I wish I had. I suspect it would confirm that the disappearances are random."

Gareth rose from his chair and moved to stand by the wide, tall window. "You really think the act of creation is causing existing work to..."

Alex laughed again, and moved to stand next to Gareth, looking out over the white day -- warm and sober, a day that didn't look like it belonged to a world that was going crazy. "Tricky, isn't it? How should we think about it? Are the works being deleted? Deleted from existence? To... to make more space for stories and songs? To make more space for movies? Paintings? Cartoons? Mist sculptures? Are the algorithms for 3D printer poems and continuous laser abstracts also disappearing? Is that why the big hologram in Brussles suddenly went dark? Or Tokyo's skyscraper canvas - all those diodes, now gone white. Was it really a system failure? Or did the electroplexus suddenly lose access to the artwork files because those files aren't there any more?"

Gareth turned to Adam, eyes wide, face white. "We have to stop everyone from..."

"From painting? From whistling a happy tune they made up on the spot? From doodling? From writing love poems? Yes, right. Of course. Except, how? Almost everything artistic people do is mediocre, undistinguished... and it was fine when doggerel replaced doggerel, but the sheer tidal mass of all that human creativity is now dislodging fine art. Real work of merit. How can we stop it?"

"We can't," Gareth whispered.

"We can't." Alex walked back to the work table and pulled a low chair out from underneath. He sat down and reached for a cup that stood on the table, bristling with pens. He dragged a blank sheet of paper into place. "You know how I was suffering from writers' block. For two years I could scrape up a poem here, a song there, a greeting card... but nothing long form, nothing complex in the way of a novel, nothing sustained. And now, now..." He barked laughter, happy, mad, uncaring, reckless laughter. "Now I am running hot with ideas!" His pen touched down and started to fly across the page.

Gareth started toward him and then stopped.

Alex was right. The old stuff was vanishing. It was terrible - and truly a loss.

But people would continue creating. They'd do it unconsciously; or they'd do it when the need for self-expression simply overwhelmed them. Graffiti artists, whittlers, artisanal furniture makers, little old ladies with their needlepoint... Not everyone had creative talent, Gareth realized, but just about everyone had a creative urge. It was part of being human.

"I took the liberty," Alex spoke up, "of getting a sketch pad and some charcoal and colored pencils." He gestured to a spot next to him on the table, where the supplies sat in a neat collection.

Gareth walked slowly back to the table and sat down again. After a moment he reached for a pencil. He flipped the sketchbook open, and a long, lovely, sinuous line took form under his hand.

"Gareth," Alex said. Gareth paused and looked up. "Your hat."

Gareth took off his cap and saw that the stylized Om symbol was dissolving. The threads were still there, still in all the different colors, but they seemed to be migrating somehow, mixing together, spreading apart. The symbol was becoming a nebulous blur.

Gareth felt a thrill of shock and fear, but that shock seemed to pique him, make it more urgent for him to get back to his drawing. Setting the cap to the side, Gareth went back to work, his had running away from him with inspiration and energy. Who knew what else he was un-making even as he traced out shapes and laid down shading? The inept scratchings of someone with no ability - or the irreplaceable musings of a master?

Gareth knew he could never answer that. In creating, he was also destroying. He didn't know what it meant. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be.

He drew on.