The Box

I am the box. The one that turns itself off. Press the button. You may notice some initial interior Sturm und Drang, but sure as fate, the hand emerges and flicks the switch off.

I am deeply underappreciated and misunderstood. "W!" they say, "T! F! is the point of something that does nothing but turn itself off?"

Ah, how little they understand.

Once upon a time, on a planet ... somewhere, there evolved a thick-skulled, flat-headed, semi-intelligent ape-creature. At first, the ape-creature flourished. It had the evolutionary advantages of a thick skull, a flat head, and not too much intelligence. Its numbers multiplied until the planet was simply lousy with them.

But then, something happened. Well, some things happened, actually. First, they started killing each other. For logical reasons, of course. Those Pointy Heads' heads weren't flat enough. Those Thin Skulls' skulls weren't thick enough. Those Smarty Pants weren't dumb enough. Those Dumbies weren't smart enough. And so on.

But mutual mayhem was not a big deal. The ape-creatures reproduced fast enough to more than make up for the murder deficit. So then they started poisoning themselves. They invented all kinds of chemical poisons, which they ate, rubbed on their skin, dumped in the water, and pumped into the air. The measure of a really good poison was how long it remained toxic. A poison wasn't considered good unless it lasted longer than the life of the average ape-creature. Which, considering the vigor of the poison industry, was not a particularly high bar to set. But the Holy Grail of poisons was a concoction that had to be described in half-lives.

Nevertheless, the ape-creatures flourished on. Then a funny thing happened. The climate of the planet changed. Whether the ape-creatures had any causative role in this is not a fit subject for conjecture. The seas rose, the lands parched, and billions of ape-creatures died screaming.

Wouldn't it have been nice if they had been in a nice box that simply shut itself off?