By everyone’s accounts, the black boxes appeared at midnight when everyone’s backs were turned. Featureless, a nearly perfect black, impervious to all assault and graffiti, and exactly a meter in each dimension as far as anyone could measure, maybe three dozen of them –that we have found, at least – had appeared in the blink of an eye in various spots around the globe. What made these boxes particularly odd before… well, before they did what we later found out they were for… was that that’s precisely what they did. They appeared in the blink of an eye, while everyone’s backs were turned, in some of the busiest, most heavily-trafficked places in the world. There’s one in Times Square now, one sitting pretty under the Arc de Triomphe. There’s one lit up in Shibuya, and another by the side of the Shosse. There’s one still sitting right in the middle of the subway car in Seoul where it appeared that night, undisturbed but for the train’s usual motion.

They didn’t appear only in such places, though, no. One sprang up – and I use that term so, so loosely – outside Vancouver, and another two landed at Princeton and MIT. Another pair were found in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Lagos. A handful wound up in seemingly random places on the earth’s crust, or under its waves. One was perched, watching, perhaps, or mocking, right on Everest’s peak. Another crashed into five satellites when it appeared in Low Earth Orbit. Stunningly to some, not a single one appeared at a holy site – nothing at the Wailing Wall, or at Mecca, or beneath the pope’s balcony at Saint Peter’s square; no enigmatic black cubes found the next morning by the Ganges, at Stonehenge, or at Lumbini.

And then, without warning, they turned on.

All six sides of the cubes – we know this because despite being unliftable, one landed on the roof of the Louvre – lit up with the same name, some Third World dictator, I forget which, transliterated into a dozen scripts. The man was stupid enough to send a press release for immediate release, boasting of his clear success, that he would rule the world one day. And the next day, he was dead, claimed by a simple heart attack. No foul play involved, just… gone, randomly, as people are wont to do. And fully 23% (by some estimates) of the violence against civilians in the region vanished overnight, because he wasn’t around to command it.

The next name was one of some warlord, somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, and he took a bullet the next day; his entire push failed without him, saving the lives of tens of thousands of would-be refugees. Then there was the name of a prominent Thai official, later found to be facilitating the slave trade and siphoning off the profits, who choked on his satay.

The next name was one of a famous and well-decorated American military commander, and he prayed fervently as everyone on earth, looking on, held their breath… and nothing happened. He credited his born-again Christian upbringing with his survival… that is of course until a day or so later he was deployed to Uzbekistan… you know how that’s going. At any rate he’s dropping by for an inspection of the barracks in Samarkand. An insurgent sniper – no one really knows, still, who it was, or why he made his fateful choice – lines him up in his crosshairs and takes him out. And the next day the US, royally pissed, starts bombing runs like never before, here Bukhara, there Qarshi, once, and again, on Tashkent… and the uprising was like no one has ever seen, before or since. Insurgent anger is a powerful thing.

It seemed, now, like the torch had been handed off to us. Down they went, one every few days, a US congressman, a religious extremist leader, a handful of dictators. People began to notice patterns in whose names came up – it wasn’t a random process. The kinds of people whose names were plastered in foot-high letters were the kinds of people who caused massive human suffering on a wide scale. Someone pointed to the congressman’s voting record, for torture and inequality, and against gay rights. Another cluster of people started making connections as to the design of the cubes – how they were designed so that anyone could read them, and that, for the most part, most of the people in the world could reach or see them.

The killings went on. Betting pools started, all over the world, as to who would be next or how the next person would die. It became a crime in 73 countries punishable by death to have your name show up on the box. The black boxes became the subjects or participants in conspiracy theories, political cartoons, and college essays. And the rate of the deaths was only increasing, by the end of that first year. Where once dictators who oppressed millions and traffickers who bought and sold millions were once put to the sword, now the janitor for the Manhattan Project was found and killed at his Kentucky home; those who had hurt merely hundreds or thousands were put to death.

The world is on fire now. The boxes never told us who good people to get rid of were – only who the current best people to get rid of were. And we who remain know now only too well the difference. A man was killed yesterday, and no one knows why. Perhaps he cheated on a girlfriend once, or stole something out of his company fridge. No one will know now. We sought to create a better tomorrow through the purging of clear evil, and we never spared a thought as to when we would finally cross the line, or to when we should finally call a halt to it all. And through it, we kill, and kill, and kill, hoping that the next death will finally make it all right.