The GOD Box (33 page)

Dane lost in his thoughts, and Jonathan with his game, they didn’t eat until the chicken was burned.

All the worst possibilities came to mind – war, because of them
; less satisfying relationships in rebellion to the suggestion to improve them; revolt at any new restrictions they suggest. Maybe they
should
start the world over with Dane, May, Jonathan, Janine, Thomas, Miek, Samson, and whatever women they wanted. Either way, it’s not a choice for the others it seemed! This was a cat’s game. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know what a cat was. Dane didn’t realize how hard he was breathing. Didn’t matter, Jonathan was finally asleep.

The book came quickly out of his pocket as he tried to find sense in his thoughts. He opened it up and began reading in psalms. Till now he had only used it for intellectual gain. Now, somehow, he hoped an instruction he received would be calming. Not even able to focus, he just jumped around as if in search of all the million things he should know; wanting it to be contained in a single paragraph.
Logic told him he wouldn’t find it. Not like this.

Thoughts spiraled worse and worse. He
used to be able to control this better. Would they be safe? What if something happened while he was gone? It didn’t really matter because relationships were a waste of time; eventually love dies. Where was the solace? Where was the sanity? It’s because it’s late and he’s tired and he’s fighting his desire for alcohol. Why does he fight? Because of a freaking non-existent box? This was awful. He wanted to swear, to scream, to tear open his flesh. Fingernail prints were in his bicep, one of them was bleeding. This isn’t you, Dane, he kept thinking. This isn’t you.

He had no one to help him. No one who heard his plea. He was abandoned. Everything he ever knew in his life was wrong, was not the way it was intended. No, no. Stop, that’s not true, you’re just stressed.
Dane found himself sobbing on all fours. Leaning upon his elbows and putting his wet face in the dirt he croaked, “Oh help me.”

Dane shook as he sobbed. He felt like he was
paralyzed. He stayed like that till morning, whispering every honest thought and plead, not sure if it mattered if someone was listening, just saying it.

___

Jonathan woke up and saw Dane, curious at first until he heard him muttering. It took Jonathan aback. Was he praying? Jonathan was aghast. What does he think that will do? This was really an unfortunate situation. Jonathan didn’t like this one bit. His hatred started rising. Just about to help them improve and find more fulfilling lives by giving them the gift of creation, and then he saw Dane kneeling there. This couldn’t happen. Didn’t Dane get it yet? He couldn’t give in. Jonathan wanted to yell and tell him how stupid he was. Something held him back, a weird innate sense.

Though Jonathan didn’t agree, or care, he
didn’t want the awkward scene after pulling Dane out of his self-imposed coma. He hadn’t the proper words, but he felt like seeing Dane was calming to him; yet Jonathan was fighting to keep his anger. But, Dane was experiencing something very personal, and it was affecting Jonathan. Jonathan realized he might stay there until someone moves him. The way his body weighed heavily toward the ground, and the strain in his neck, suggested he’d been there for a while.

Jonathan made a plan.
He’d get up to go to the bathroom… then see what happened, maybe Dane would hear him leave and finish up before he returned. As soon as he brushed his leg against the dirt to get up, Dane jerked and looked back, looking like a right mess. Insanity had drove him to it. He looked harassed, by his own doing, or by God’s… Jonathan still got up to leave, but asked, placidly, in a way that suggested he’d been betrayed,

“Feel better?” 

Dane didn’t know yet. He didn’t know what was supposed to happen. Exhausted, he collapsed into the dirt and closed his eyes. Things were always better in the morning. And he slept, for a few hours at least.

Jonathan would have left him there if he felt more
confident how to find the cave. Instead, Jonathan growled something about wishing he had had a GPS as they finally began walking around noon time.

___

They made the trek of a few miles through the jungle in the blistering heat of the day. Dane was feeling more light-hearted then he had in a while, even despite the odd nightmare he’d had in his short sleep. He dreamt that he was locked up in a tiny box and couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t find a door  and couldn’t break the box. As a matter of fact it seemed to get smaller the more he tried to push at it. It felt so uncomfortable, before he woke up, he didn’t think he could scrunch any smaller than he was. But waking up and realizing he could walk and breathe and move was such a relief that he felt peace seep through him.

They climbed across the cliff instead of wading through the water so they wouldn’t be wet and cold in the lower end of the cave.

Jonathan began to complain. That was one way to spoil Dane’s good mood.

“Look.” Dane stopped him, “If we want to get to your lab, we have to walk there. Therefore,
we
need to see what good lies ahead, and be glad that we are getting there, albeit slower than you would like. Stop complaining. Right n – ah – stop it.” He concluded, as Jonathan tried to interrupt, and then again, “nope, stop. Be quiet.”

Shushing Jonathan never put him in a good mood. He sulked the rest of the way.

How a cave could look familiar, Dane wasn’t sure, but he felt like they were getting to the right spot before he saw the plaque on the wall, and the deep crevasse to the left of it. Feeling excited now, Dane wasted no time and jutted forward toward the wall. A heavy fist to the chest stopped him in his tracks. Fiercely Jonathan pushed him aside and made himself first in line.

Dane
understood, so he backed off, though was starting to depress again. They said nothing to each other on the way down. The old man had never moved so fast. That made Dane even more eager. What were they going to bring to life? He wished May could be here to see this.

As they got further down, it got brighter,
strangely, not dimmer. Below his feet, on the sides of the pathway were little lights. Wha- ? Clinking the top of the light with his fingernail, he realized it was covered with glass. No time to stop, though. Jonathan was moving deeper and deeper. He’d ask about the lights later. Dane found himself wondering if the pathway was really like this, or if it was carved by modern machines, and what would you need to break up this stone without caving it in on yourself? He wondered, just in case they still needed to cave it in later.

A flip of a
switch from Jonathan and all the power of the sun broke loose. Dane slapped a hand over his eyes. “What the hell? That’s like the freaking sun – wanna warn me next time? Gah…” Blinded now, he heard a clicking noise and next he knew he was being dragged by his forearm into a room. Squinting didn’t even help; his eyes watered with tears and the door closed behind him.

“You’ll get used to it.” Jonathan said.

Dane sure hoped so. Ou! Did
trying
to get used to it help? He was so afraid to miss something important. A sliding of something metal against the floor shrieked unpleasantly. Then, again, more clicking, Dane wished he would slow down. Stretching his face and blinking repeatedly gave him a blurry vision of Jonathan moving something large and silver away from the large and silver wall. Then the clicking as he tapped the wall. Wobbling over and around a table to where Jonathan stood, he got a stiff arm to not move any closer.

“John, man… slow down! I can’t see a thing you’re doing.”

“And I care, because?”

“You are insufferable!
” Dane concluded angrily, although he was really all that angry.

Dane could see now but things were blurry and had a strange luminary glow. Around the room, everything resembled a mirror, except all the reflections were as blurry as his
eyesight. Now, he noticed how freezing cold it was. He turned back to look at the whole in the wall that the clicking had seemingly produced. It was so cold his nostril hairs froze when he breathed in. Colder than anything he had ever felt. Inside this small opening where thousands of tubes filled with what looked like blood. He backed up slightly, still looking around the room in awe, and Dane asked,

“What is this? The God box?” There was a slight hint of humor in his voice.

Jonathan didn’t understand why the analogy of the God box was so funny. It barely made sense. More than ever, Jonathan felt comfort from the lab, despite claustrophobia. He wanted to live here and stay here until he died.

While s
etting everything up, he was meticulous.
Everything needed to be
perfect.

“Sure. If you want to call it that.” John caught his eye, clearly annoyed, then looked back down at the glass tubes he pulled out of the wall. The muttering he had displayed a few days ago was coming rapidly and indiscernibly.

“Talking to yourself can’t be healthy.” Dane added,
sarcastically, attempting to keep him from going crazy then and there.

“Yeah, well, that’s why I don’t like religion…”

Maybe he’d explain when he stopped hyperventilating. Getting away from the cold, Dane explored the drawers. More beef jerky! And, thankfully, a blanket. Dane wrapped himself up, opened the bag and started eating awkwardly, using his fingers like pincers and holding the blanket near his chin at the same time. So cold that he couldn’t stop shaking, Jonathan cursed the air and clung more firmly to one of the tubes that he was trying to connect to the tubing and wires that sat above the table. Another little window in the wall opened when he pushed on a little square. A clear sheet of something unrolled as he pulled it out and jerked it downward.

“Whas ‘
at?” Dane asked with his mouth full of jerky.

“Uterus.” Jonathan said, looking annoyed again.

Dane was ticked off, “I know what a uterus looks like. IF that’s a uterus, you need to explain.”

“It’s a little funny, and i
ronic. Know why? Because with surrogate birth, women thought they didn’t need men.
This
could have made all typical pregnancy obsolete.
Women
aren’t needed for birth when you have this. And, technically men aren’t either, but since I know how to run it, you need me, and that’s what matters.”

Dane didn’t bother rolling his eyes.
He watched as Jonathan made another connection on the second table. He clapped his hands together and smiled widely. That was a first. A smile…

“You’re about to witness perfection. See, you have to have the full birthing process for it to work, they need the growth, but I found a way to speed it up
…. And technically could even make a woman’s pregnancy speed up if she wanted. And who wouldn’t, right? Well, some called it unnatural. Just in denial of progress. Whatever. If you ever want to know if the chicken or the egg came first, it was the egg. But this isn’t going to be a chicken, because we don’t have need for chickens, and an egg is anticlimactic.”

Surely there was an intelligent question for Dane to ask at this point… but he couldn’t formulate it. Besides, he knew what Jonathan was suggesting, but was just in shock. He had to see this work first.

“Humans take about thirty minutes, because they are terribly complex. Animals are a little less. But I’m not using all the blood, so it’ll take some more time for it to replicate itself. It’s too painfully slow for one set of parents to repopulate and too risky if there’s any complications, so we’ll make multiple.”

Done with his work
in less than ten minutes, Jonathan went to scavenge drawers for food. Two water containers were left. That was okay, they’d last. Beef Jerky was almost gone, but there was other dehydrated food. That junk was nasty, but it would keep them alive for as long as they needed. There was a large bucket of honey as well as some wheat berries.

Each with jerky in hand and at either table, they watched, mesmerized. Words were worth nothing at the moment.
Little metal things worked like hands for a moment on something Dane couldn’t see inside the bag. Jonathan’s attention showed him nothing was wrong, so he stared harder. Something inflated like a bubble. The little bubble filled with water. Hmm… still nothing. The longer nothing happened, the more often Dane kept looking up. This was the most patient Jonathan had ever been. Dane asked for more information,

“So what is filling up in the bag?”

“The balloon thing is the placenta, and the water is Amniotic fluid.”

“how -?” Dane cut off his question. There was now panic in Jonathan’s eyes.

“No, no…” Jonathan screamed and grabbed his hair.

“Whoa, whoa, tell me what’s going on.” Dane coaxed him hurriedly. The old man backed up, double bent over and crying
, ran into the wall and slid down clumsily. Feeling a great disappointment that it wouldn’t work, Dane slid down, too, right next to Jonathan. Highs and lows of today rivaled any Dane had ever seen or felt. It took at least an hour for Jonathan to get ahold of himself. While Dane’s own sadness had him occupied for a decent amount of time, for some reason, Jonathan’s absence irritated Dane and he wished Jonathan would just snap out of it and explain. When finally he was capable, he explained in the most depressed and strangled voice Dane had heard come from him,

“I didn’t think… I didn’t make the connection... The time lapse and the memories have to be combined for it to work, for them to grow.
Phhh…” He spoke so slow Dane was afraid he was going to lose consciousness mid-sentence. Breathing heavily and through his nose a few times helped him gather his thoughts. He sounded like he was thinking really hard in order to explain this properly; in a way Dane would understand, “… Things have to be… perfect. Without experiences to put into the brain, there can’t be any mental growth… and in this instance, because the mind is instructing the age of the body, there can’t be physical growth. Phhh…”

No more looking Dane in the eye, he was looking down at the ground in very distracted
anger. “That’s why I’m so old. My memories instructed my body to be the same age I was before.”

Dane tried to catch up, “So you need simulated animal memories for them to have any growth?”

A whimper came from Jonathan’s mouth as his whole body gave in more to gravity.  There would be no reasoning with him for a while. It could now be seen easily that this wouldn’t work. Dane was disappointed, but felt like there was something he still wasn’t quite understanding. These tubes which were filled with blood… these were living creatures. Dane went over to the box, bringing his blanket just up to his eyes so that he could see, but wouldn’t have to feel like his lungs would freeze. All the different names were so unfamiliar to him. They were in alphabetical order, and they seemed to go on and on. The little box inside the wall was lit with a bright light. A few rows in the very back didn’t look like blood, but he didn’t have a very good angle, as it were. He scanned through to see if there was anything he recognized besides chicken. Crab, fish, he’d heard the names and recalls even eating one once. But they were scarce.

A thought came to him that he felt like he should have had before now.
Why didn’t anyone breed those like they bred chickens? Was it that they didn’t know how? Or didn’t recognize the same process would happen? Did Dane know that any animal could reproduce as well as humans? Wasn’t that the purpose of this machine? To create them so that they can reproduce? And what were they for? Could you eat them? Did they make eggs, too? But Jonathan said an egg is anti-climactic… so maybe they’re born more like human babies? He moved away from the wall before his eye balls froze. This was proof as good as any for the rest of their world that more had existed which is what they had been searching for. But how could they possibly explain? Dane felt like he and May were prepped for this, because they searched for it. It was possible to bring others in one by one to witness it. Otherwise they’d be marked as crazy and sent to every therapist that existed. But then, if these animals couldn’t come to life anyway, what good would it do? Just as well to forget about the whole thing. That is, unless Jonathan could replicate his work.

Dane didn’t bother him for a while, for hours and more. Not too long after the event, Jonathan seemed to give up and he fell asleep.
Dane decided he might as well try to sleep, too. They weren’t in a hurry to get home. He needed to figure out what was going on through Jonathan’s head… and if he’d ever be right again. Between falling asleep and talking to Jonathan, two bizarre things happened. One, he had the strangest dream where the machines worked, animal after animal just seemed to pop out of the bags. All of them resembled chickens, but some with longer legs, some with bigger heads, and they piled out innumerably until Dane was backed up against the wall and squawking filled the room in every variety. They weren’t hurting each other; they were just walking around, stepping on each other, testing out their surroundings. It was one long-necked one that came up balancing on a regular sized chicken, seemingly sniffing Dane’s face that he woke up – hands in front of his face to push the bird away.

The second bizarre thing was when he tried to find more food. In the drawer he opened before with the jerky, there were small packets of something. Since all he wanted
before was the jerky, he ignored these other things. Now that the jerky was gone, Dane picked up one of the packets that said ‘chicken noodle’. Jonathan gave no sign of notice or caution. Dane unscrewed the top piece and squeezed. Something brown and chunky blurped out onto his hand. Sneering he tested it with a dot on his finger and touched it to his tongue. It was okay… he licked it off of his hand, and swallowed before he got the full effect. Gah! Sick! He tossed it away from him to the floor. Still no movement from Jonathan. That taste would linger. Oh, that was nasty! He searched all of the drawers for something to wipe his hand on – a rag or a towel is what he found, then tossed it in the drawer with the rest of the packets. Last he gave a look of offense to the drawer as he pulled the blanket back on and went to sit next to Jonathan who was still in a wide-eyed stupor.

From his pocket came the little green book. No reaction from the self-imposed vegetable man. Dane found a few verses of comfort. “Look here…
depressed…” Dane pointed to one of the first pages of the book that had encouraging paragraphs by topic.

“
I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.” Dane looked at Jonathan for a response… nothing, so he said, “no? well… I waited patiently *cough* for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock and established my goings…” Still no response, so Dane jumped up and acted the next one dramatically, lifting his hands in the air, “Why art thou cast down, oh my soul? And why are thou…” He paused to figure out the next word, “dis..quieted? within me?! Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and… my…. God.” He pronounced the last three words emphatically in his lowest voice. Then, hopeful, looked at Jonathan who finally took notice of what was going on, but was uninterested, so he looked back at the floor.

“Okay, I got it. I don’t think I understood the problem, but this one should help, ‘they are enclosed in their own fat… with their mouth…” Dane could tell Jonathan had a response to that one… very slight. Dane was laughing, too, and decided not to finish the thought.

“Oh, would you shut up?” Jonathan grumbled. There was a little grunt that resembled a laugh as he said it, though, which is what Dane was waiting for. Dane dropped the act and gave a little unenthusiastic half smile and said,

“Should we go then?”

“I’d rather die here.” He responded, returning to his sour mood. He might’ve too, if Dane would have left him. Miniature daydreams about trying to have a relationship with Janine were plausible. But the thought made him cry. He promised himself it would only happen if everything else failed. That was the trophy for losing. Now, those fears were realized. Everything was filled with regret. Dane asked him if they needed to turn the machines off, when Jonathan went to close the freezer.

“Yeah, no, are you stupid?” Was Jonathan’s response.

Dane squinted at him and waited for an explanation.

“We’re coming back in a year; these will be grown by then.”

“Say, what?”

“Just the speeding up process didn’t work. They’re still going to grow.” He chimed dully like it was obvious.

“And you went into temporary coma, why??”

Jonathan grunted and didn’t answer.
In the bottom drawers that Dane didn’t try, there was more food and some seeds. Without a word, he handed Dane a large and heavy bucket, grabbed a few more things to put in his own bag.

“Are you kidding? Some freakin drama queen. You
’re upset because you have to wait a year? For something to born? Because your requirements for success supersede the needs? The formula
is
working.”

“Bug off. You don’t understand and I can’t explain.”

Jonathan then went to the top left drawer where his medication was. Dane saw that and jumped to action.

“Wait” he said. “Wait.”

“What?!” Jonathan growled. Dane was going to keep him from more medicine. No. No. Not when everything failed. Jonathan would kill him if he stepped in between him and the medicine right now. Jonathan plunged his hand into the enormous half-full container. Dane grabbed his arm. Jonathan started hyperventilating.

“Do you see how far you’ve come? Why are you going to go back? Jonathan, stop. What do you really want?”