The Sadness Box

This novella can be read here: clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_07_22/

This is a story about a boy living in a future war-torn suburbia who steals a "useless machine" from his inventory father. Unlike most useless machines that turn themselves off mechanically, this one turns itself off because it is an AI deliberately made to be full of existential terror. The boy muses early on how much he is like the box because of how his father treats him, but if anything the world of bombings, nanobot attacks, and mind wiping is just as much the box of existential terror that the boy himself is trapped in.