Oblong Box

© Oonah V Joslin

The oblong box was a mystery. It had apparently been in the museum forever – an unsubstantiated find from some very ancient strata. Impervious to extremes of heat, cold, pressure and radiation, it had survived brute force and bomb blasts. The box conformed to no known standard of measurement. Indeed, each measurement taken deviated from the previous one but one could say it was roughly the size of a coffin. It had long been housed in the deepest vault, hidden in darkness. Yet even in the dark the black casket could be somehow sensed. Unseen, it still held a fascination - for its blackness was such that it manifest as an absence of more than just light – an antithesis to being.

“Has no one's tried to open it?” asked the physicist.

“Tried, yes,” replied the curator and he outlined the various attempts.

“What's it made of?”

“Something black.”

“I can see that - what?”

“We don't know.”

“Ah… Has it been scanned?”

“X-ray, PET, you name it.”

“And…?”

“Nothing.”

“Can't be nothing. Must be something. Even a vacuum is not, nothing , you know.”

“Well nothing is what showed up. Maybe it's magic.”

“I don't believe in magic. Maybe it's got Schrödinger's cat inside.”

“Well we'll find out soon enough.”

It was almost unheard of for the designer of an experiment to be allowed to visit the space station to oversee a project personally but in this case the curator could not allow the artifact out of his sight and the physicist had attracted his own funding, so an exception was made.

The plan was to run a range of frequencies that would cause the box to vibrate. It was thought that when the correct frequency was reached, the two halves would separate - like opening an Easter egg and they hoped to sample the goodies, whatever they might be, inside.

The curator and the scientist entered the protective booth. The curator offered his hand, “Dead or alive then…shall we?” and the resonator started running frequencies.

At a level, unimaginably low, inaudible to any creature, the lid of the oblong box groaned open. Suddenly stars were rushing towards them. A bulge appeared on the side of the Earth. Matter was being pulled in from all directions as smoothly as if it were a silk being pulled through a gloved hand. Earth shattered. The Milky Way unraveled and the black hole, imprisoned by its rival at the centre of the galaxy from time out of mind, grew and grew - and fed.