The Unpredictable Box
In the center of a village stood a box.
It was brass, square, and eight feet wide. A wooden ramp,
twenty feet long, led up to its rim. The villagers
placed fruits and flowers on the ground surrounding that box.
The box was there longer than the villagers could remember.
Some said the box was created by a god to thwart other gods
who created the universe and all its future in one day,
and that the box ruined their prearranged future because the box
was unpredictable. Anything else the god did would have been part
of the other gods' future because he, too, was part of their universe.
And the box unpredictably chose to stay in their village.
Others said the box could not have been created or made by anyone
because that would be contrary to its unpredictable nature.
For how can one claim to control or understand something
completely unpredictable? And how can one claim to create something
not understood or controlled? And therefore it must have simply
come into being, unpredictably, in the center of their village.
In the box, blocks floated in a shiny thick liquid. Symbols
were engraved on the blocks. In time the symbols were read
and became the village's written language. The liquid boiled
and shuffled the blocks into different configurations
which people determined were completely unpredictable
expressions.
The unpredictability of the blocks was a topic for zealous
intellectual debate.
Some held that the configurations that the box chose
were from a single sequence that had no patterns,
but was predictable and preset. The most famous of these theorists
later proposed that anything could be predictable
or unpredictable, depending on the observer's perspective.
Each of his followers lived alone and thereby achieved complete
unpredictability, because no one observed them and so there were no
perspectives in which they were predictable.
Others held that the blocks were not unpredictable. These people
looked at the stars and the weather to predict the blocks.
Some of them looked at the blocks to predict the blocks.
The most notorious of them visited the village and said, I hear
you have an unpredictable box. He then predicted the blocks
for one year, and disappeared.
It was unreasonable to claim the box was predictable. Those who
claimed it was, were considered to be fools or to be deliberate
corrupters. Those people's predictions of the box proved
to the villagers the box's unpredictability, because an unpredictable
box must be predicted on occasion, but unpredictably.
Reading the blocks every week for instructions gave the villagers
an unpredictable future. While reading the blocks, the future
was freest, but after reading the blocks the future steadily
became fixed. For this reason many villagers read the blocks more
then once a week. These villagers sneaked to read the blocks late
at night when the others did not read.
One man constantly read the blocks. People complained,
but he read the blocks even more. The villagers, therefore,
limited his time at the box. One evening he dipped his hand
in the liquid and removed a block so he could keep
it with him at all times. The villagers discovered his crime.
They brought him to the box and forced him to return the block.
He refused and jumped in to the box and disappeared.
The next day the box disappeared. No one saw it again.
The villagers mourned the box's disappearance. They tried
building new boxes, but an unpredictable box cannot be built.
They tried discovering new boxes. They cried for their future
and their box.