Credit: Justin Randall

Sally stuck to their new routine with the same determination that she'd brought to the done box. She proposed he didn't shower until he squirmed with the wish to clean himself. She refused to make love. She fed him liquorice and forbade him to brush his teeth.

"Your smile is gone," she said one night. "No more Buddha." She, too, looked exhausted.

In his rare moments of leisure, Bob couldn’t help but chuckle. Here he was, chasing what he'd run away from in the first place.

When he first started counting again, it felt like coming home. He splashed the cold water in his face and reached for the towel. The cloth caressed his face, exuding artificial ocean scent.

"One, two," the brow, "three, four," the cheeks, "five, six," the chin, "seven," the nose.

And warmth. He was done.

Bob looked at himself in the mirror and wondered when he'd lost himself. Had he ever simply wanted anything that was neither absurd (like saying a number) nor primitive (like having clean teeth)? He thought of Sally pushing the red button.

He washed his hands, the full treatment, until his fingertips shrivelled, remembering his homunculi--the old one cracking his whip, and the new one, too easily moulded. Where was his own will? Had it dried up under the blazing heat of the others' commands, like a rivulet in the desert?

Bob didn’t want Sally to find him before he was done, so he drove to the Fat Racoon trailhead, two hours from home. He made sure no one observed him and walked into the woods. When his shirt was moist with sweat and humidity, he sat down next to a muddy creek.

He retrieved the done box, which looked like a toy in his hand, the red button grotesquely big. A thought pulsed through him--what if it's a decoy? What if it never worked?--but he remembered the effect too well.

He had asked Dr Morgan why he couldn’t push the done button himself. "I thought the point of the exercise was to put me back into the driver's seat?"

For once, Morgan cast aside his genial manner. "No." He pushed the done box out of his reach. "If you signal to yourself that you are done, pushing the button will become part of your done criterion. You'll become addicted. We ran simulations suggesting that an agent signalling to itself will push the button more and more often, until finally they are caught in a catatonic state of saying done infinitely. You don't want that."

Bob put his feet in the mud without removing his shoes. His finger played with the button. He remembered the Buddha-period, the peace it had brought him. Perhaps a catatonic state of being done wasn't bad.

And at least he would be the one pushing the button.

Not the homunculus. Not Dr. Morgan. Not Sally.

He, Bob, decided he was done. He pushed the button, again and again, for as long as he could.

At first, nothing changed. Hot mist rose between the ferns. A woodpecker drilled into a dead tree. A sluggish rivulet trickled through the mud.

Everything around him struck Bob as abstract, old structures too well known. A web of possibilities grew around him, actions he could take, but he had already done everything that could be done. He became entropy, a black hole of collapsed possibilities, cold lava.

Then a whispering sound made him prick up his ears and raise his head. The rivulet picked up strength. Water oozed forward, tentative at first, then faster, glimmering in the sunlight. The clear liquid picked up leaves and twigs, dug its way through the mud.

From afar, Bob smelled his childhood, the abundance of simply wanting. He remembered dried apples, his mother's arms, and running between the cornfields. He sat still, watching the river erupt and saunter down the slope. Finally, he lifted his hand and dipped it into the water.

He was done. His life had begun.