Notes Chapter 2025 Boxes
World building
2025-boxes-origin-and-repurposing
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Is there an airship departing in the far distance? Do the boxes drop in a airfoil configuration, or perhaps an origami parachute, then just before they hit the ground, break the bonds keeping them together and bounce gently into position. This would perfectly foreshadow the last scene where the box monster appears as a giant robot. Exposition in between about the magnetic bonds between them that Gerry imagined might have be a way to hack them, using electromagnets and weird tesla coil variations. Lots of Tesla lore about in heaps, because eventually he found the mycelia and concentrated on that.
This needs a visual connection between Joe and the boxes, at some point he could ride by? Box foreground Joe on bike background. Clear visual differentiation between interface and RL
However we get from the previous scene to this, whatever Joe is doing with the boxes, the connection is the sound of the janky bicycle. That sound gets us from the blackness to the bright sunlit green of the field and the boxes, boxes, boxes! Joe could be looking into the sky and obviously not paying attention to the road, he's looking into the interface, the road is a sidebar window in his awareness. Got it! Shoot this across the east farm field, dead Bela Lagosi, we don't need a close up of Joe, he's the Alien we initially only glimpse. A flash of teeth, a shadow.
Maybe the time lapse and normal speed sound crickets and so forth, no birds. After a few shots, we hear the bicycle, getting louder, then we hear his voice and the boxes respond. use whacky box jargon and when they respond we'll understand that he's commanding them, that's elite geeky language and a form of subtle exposition, no?
As Joe rides along, he passes clusters of boxes. Relief boxes are scattered across fields, within forests, by lakes and streams. Each box flashes and flickers with surface mediatronics, alternately identifying it's contents and displaying ads for defunct and obscure consumer products that hint at the zenith of a vanished culture. They offer a bounty of civilization rebooting resources, both for the long and short term.
5/2/25
Joe's original vision for the boxes was as communication network between the people to the daughters, phone booths allowing the people to ask for intercession, advice, boons. But because of Gerry's tinkering the boxes become a self aware super intelligence. What happens to the other daughters? IDK. Christina and Gerry are subsumed into Veronique's physicality in the hallucinogenic realm when the split happens.
[A connection between the boxes and UJ. Establish they are networked computation, that Joe has root on. The rest of the Clique see them as surveillance on the survivors, a control mechanism, but Joe is creating a legacy he can bequeath to the DOGs, a way for them to commune with the people, to advise, instruct and guide them, the boxes would be oracular, each a temple, a place to pray and be heard. The network once established must be trained and taught, and that's what Joe is doing with the prompt challenges. The DOGs and their magic / technological augmentation, of course gods have tech, humans have bodies after all, the Arthur Clarke paradigm. The boxes are of humble materials, ubiquitous, available, yielding boons and succor.]
Admin UJO has
Propagate enhancements over routine network traffic.
• After propagation of prompt challenge by Admin UJ0, global gestalt would experience pseudo sentience enhancement of 3% on Grant scale from 7.74 to 8.77. Grant results based on improvements in Interpretive surveillance, audio and visual acuity and efficiency of data extrapolation. •
"Resume Prompt challenge,
a corrugated hempboard box coated with a weather resistant polymer. stark black against the beige.
As Joe rides along, he passes clusters of boxes by the roadside, in fields and on the floor of the forest.
[list] The people recognize them as allies, boons, and helpers in the fairly recent and abrupt transition from convenience to self responsibility. Hoarding is pointless, the shower of boxes continues to belch from the bellies of robot dirigibles almost weekly in most populated areas, less frequently in the wilderness where the People rarely go, except to track and hunt. The waterproofed hemp board boxes are both structural and light, able to survive being dropped from altitude without damage to their contents and open easily for child.
Where do the boxes come from? The rumor is that a very rare bird, a humanity loving super-trillionaire as measured in the long gone USD, had secretly constructed underground manufacturing and hydroponic centers, fully automated with robotics and pseudo cognition, and programmed to continuously produce the boxes and their bounty without human supervision. These centers were said to linked via deep tunnels to raw material and rare earth mining operations. Another theory suggested that factories were archaic 20th century thinking, and that matter compilers were a reality, devices that could assemble any product directly from atoms and molecules that would be readily available from adjacent bedrock or sipped from the atmosphere.
Others of a less optimistic bent, said that the boxes had been manufactured before the wild times and that the inventory was finite and eventually would run out. They advised developing indepence from the boxes, and a mistrust and rejection of the "system". This view had was briefly ascendant for a year or two, but eventually faded with the regularity of the box drops. Eventually only a minority advocated for and practiced a difficult and oft hungry self reliance, while the People who accepted the boxes had a much easier time.
Notes - The boxes have to be established as an appreciated phenomena by the People, so that burning them later will be sufficiently shocking. Yes they are a surveillance and control network (The Lives of Others) so perhaps burning them eariler in the story would make sense and the prepper contingent proved correct, but later they are again misunderstood to be evil when they are the opposite. When subsumed by the divinity, they are transformed into a sacred presence. The paradigm of subservience and dependence to a false protector to reliance and trust in our true nature, or fullness. That's what the people eventually must discern. At the end, the boxes could tell the history to the people, tell the DOG story all over again. A field of boxes, flashing and then in synchrony "Once upon a time..." And eventually the burning ends.