Conditional Reality

We built a wooden box. It screamed whenever we opened the lid, so we hammered the lid shut with nails fashioned from the hands of industrial era clocks. As soon as we released the box, it slipped out of our time and hurtled into the future. When we got to be about eighty years old we found the box again, washed up on the shore of our accumulated temporal foam. We pried loose the clock hands and opened the box. We heard whimpering. The box held hundreds of multi-colored stones. We reached in. Each stone melted as we touched it.