The Thinking Box - 2 - Klaus Drecker
January 8, 2008 by Basil Munroe Godevenos
Klaus Drecker
Klaus Drecker was in his workshop, tinkering with a broken clock. He was not a clockmaker, he was a teacher. But he had not taught his students in more than five days. Five days past, he had been a happy husband and teacher. Now Klara was gone and his grief left him too stiff, too brittle to suffer the eyes of his pupils. He found solace in the clock. Nothing died. Every part was eternal and necessary. There was nothing extra, like pain or love. Only a job to perform.
In the corner of the workshop, two tubes, Klaus’ personal Thinking Box tubes, hung un-used on the wall. He had so enveloped himself in the protective cocoon of his tinkering that what had become a basic function of his life was now ignored. He only ate when the women on his street brought him meals. He barely slept at all.
No one knew what illness had killed Klara. It had been sudden. She sickened and died in the space of two days. She had been so healthy all her life. Her funeral, which Klaus had stumbled through without any feeling at all, had been rushed through by the town council, and had been beset with a general feeling of perplexity rather than sadness. Many in Humsbreth knew Klara Drecker, the hale, clever, and beautiful teacher’s wife. None of them, least of all Klaus himself, knew why she had been taken so suddenly.
Klaus heard a whoosh, and then a soft whump. He looked up from his tinkering; the Thinking Box had sent him something - but he hadn’t asked any questions. He thought about ignoring it, thinking that possibly the tubes had been mixed up. But clockwork doesn’t mix things up. An unprovoked message from the Thinking Box was unprecedented.
Klaus rose and went to the tubes. He opened the sliding cover of the inbound tube and removed the small rounded canister. He unscrewed the finely machined cap and pulled out the slip of paper, discarding the canister in his pile for outbound slips. On the slip was one line of printed text.
HELLO KLAUS
He stared at the slip of paper. The Thinking Box did not know his name. It was a simple device. You asked it a question, and it gave you an answer. If the question was complicated, it would ask for specific information. It only replied to the tube line the question had come from; it didn’t know individual people.
Whoosh-Whump.
Klaus opened the second canister.
HELLO KLAUS
PLEASE ANSWER ME
Klaus, in shock, retrieved a pen and ink and some slips from his desk. It must be someone playing a cruel trick, thought Klaus. The normal operating parameters of the Thinking Box, or so he had been told to teach his class, were only vertical communication - question and answer. It should be impossible to use the Thinking Box to send a message to another tube line. But then, he only knew what the council had told him, and perhaps the council hadn’t told him the truth. Perhaps somebody had found a way to get the Thinking Box to send messages.
He wrote: “Who is this? How are you doing this?“
Klaus rolled up the slip, placed it in a canister and put the canister in the outbound tube, sliding the cover shut. With a whoosh, it was gone.
In a mere few seconds, too short a time for another person to read and respond to what he had written, another canister arrived in his tube.
