The Soul Box

“The Soul Box” was the first short story I wrote in this collection, and it was actually one of the first short stories I ever wrote. It has gone through a few revisions since 2022, but for the most part the story of a little girl reconnecting with her father has gone unchanged.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I decided to write such a gloomy tale about death and legacy, but I imagine it had something to do with my grandad’s passing a year prior. He was this monumental figure in my life, a true musical genius through and through, and I found myself wondering if I’d missed my opportunity to learn more from a great man. Very few truly great men have ever walked this earth. Some deserve a second chance. This must be the origin of my “Soul Box” – the desire to hear a deceased loved one’s voice once more, and the inadequacy I felt (and still feel) in the shadow of his enormous talent and legacy.

One of the most important things when planning any story is working out the lens through which your story is told – in other words, you need to pick an appropriate protagonist for the style and tone of the narrative. There was no doubt in my mind that a young protagonist would pair well with the themes of loss and generational trauma. As a reader, we can’t help but put ourselves in a young protagonist’s shoes, lamenting their innocent and oftentimes limited views of the world and the people around them.

But this presented me with the first problem of my planning process. If I was to write the story in first person present, commenting on everything from within the character’s head as it happens, a younger protagonist would prove challenging. Nobody wants a goo-goo ga-ga baby at the reins of an emotional story. It would completely suck out the weight and gravity of any confrontation or personal revelation. I needed a competent protagonist, one whom I could give a strong voice to whilst also leaning into their limited worldview.

And so, Abby Sewell was born. An accomplished inventor in her own right, taking after her father. This gave my Soul Box a whole new meaning – this was no longer just a story about a daughter reconnecting with a deceased father. This was about a young protégée proving their worth to their parent and mentor figure one final time.

The next problem to solve was much simpler. I needed a device that could bring back the dead, one that could be invented by a young girl within the confines of her bedroom and garden shed. It’s a metallic box that can capture a soul. It basically named itself. It’s inexplicable and mysterious by design – we never understand how Abby managed to invent a machine that can capture her father’s soul, but that isn’t important to the story. The story is about how she interacts with this soul and whether the Soul Box was worth inventing in the first place. You, dear readers, can be the judge of that.

It’s no coincidence that Abby’s journey takes her to a garden, a university and then a graveyard. I wanted to convey the three key milestones of life – birth, work and death. This is a story about death, fundamentally, and I thought it important for the story that Abby experienced the complete passage of life alongside her dead father. In a sense, she has to undergo death and rebirth in order to progress as an inventor, a daughter and a human being.

I want to end all of these “Author’s Notes” with a segment about the technology itself – specifically, whether we’ll ever see a form of this technology in our world. In the case of the Soul Box, I fear it’s already too late. Late singers like Elvis have their likenesses captured and holographically projected to crowds of adoring Vegas fans. You can ask Chat GPT to imitate the nuances of conversation with a dead relative, perhaps feeding it old text chains as a basis, and it will do your bidding without so much as a critical thought. 

I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to capture a soul and interact with it… but we’ve reached a point in history where our souls are no longer our own. Everything can be imitated. Your mind and personality and intricacies are a copy-paste away from mass consumption.

Whether we like it or not, soon we’ll all live forever.