Chapter 1 “Lost.”
Matt pushed the trolley slowly, its wheels squeaking across the warehouse’s concrete floor. The walk was more of a trudge than an amble. He simply felt too weary, and his soul bore a fatigue too bone-deep to hide.
Sitting for hours, answering inane questions while trying to force a smile in your voice; that took an unquantifiable toll on your body. It was soul-crushing, sapping at your will in a way no kind of physical labor could replicate.
Walking along rows piled mountain-high with junk was Matt’s way of winding down and recalibrating his mind. Here, in these hollowed rows, angling for stuff he could take back home, restore, and hopefully sell... it always helped chip the edge off of a job he could barely tolerate.
Chip, not blunt.
And so there he was; cart rattling in empty protest with faulty wheel squealing like a forlorn companion. A single flattened cardboard box lay in the tray like a castaway raft borne inexorably to nowhere. Matt hadn't meant to pick it up. He just didn’t like how bare the trolley looked before he hooked something.
Above, fluorescent lights buzzed, the same lazy strobe the warehouse had had since he’d started coming here… however long ago that was. It had been ages since Old Tom spared a thought, or cent, towards replacing or even fixing the cables and wires around the ancient warehouse.
A slight and quick smirk, barely registering in his mind, flashed across Matt’s face. He couldn’t blame the aged floor manager; rather, he appreciated the ambiance in a way. All he knew was that the old place and old remains resonated within his soul. At the end of the day, the lighting above were more than enough for the business at hand. Just bright enough to show the way. Dim enough to draw you closer.
Sighing, Matt gave his surroundings another look. The warehouse was a graveyard of humanity’s greatest and not-so-great inventions. Most of the stuff here, like himself, were now relics of an age long forgotten. Ovens, stoves, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, freezers, typewriters, air purifiers, fans, projectors, shredders, computer screens and CPUs… each had once been a staple in peoples’ homes and offices before being cast aside as useless.
Maybe that was why he kept coming to the place? He couldn’t deny feeling a certain kinship with the old e-waste facility. The banality of it all. Buy, repair, sell off; how different was it from working at the call center?
Glancing at a clock at the far end of his current row, Matt released another sigh. It was getting close to closing. Grunting, Matt picked up the pace a little.
Rounding the corner, Matt found himself trudging into an even dimmer aisle. The kind rarely tramped. Old Tom liked to use these for those goods too damaged to attract the interest of any but the most desperate.
Knowing this, Matt also didn’t want to spend all that much time. Head swiveling, he ramped up to quicker pace that almost made the junk blur across his eyes.
Rust. New rust. Old rust. In-between. A montage of metal in all colors blunted his vision even further. When he reached the end of the penultimate row, Matt turned the last corner.
Then he saw it.
~ Ѡ ~
It was a faint glint of metal, buried under a ripped tarp and discarded foam. Sharp and unnatural in this rust-thick back-end of the warehouse, there was no reason it stood out to Matt’s sight. It wasn’t dramatic, the way light caught on it. There was no spotlight from heaven. Not even an angelic choir.
And yet, he stopped walking.
All it was, was a sliver of reflected brightness. Light bouncing off from its surface, at the precise moment Matt turned that corner, from that particular spot he turned, coupled with his height? Perhaps... a chance event? Something where anyone turning at the spot, staring at the same spot, would have seen?
There was no answer his blunted mind could give then. And the moment to wonder passed as the light pulled at Matt. Called to him.
For a moment, he stayed frozen, frown on his face, trolley push bar under one hand, the second hand slightly raised without purpose. Matt blinked. Then shook his head to clear it of the cache making him lag.
Then his pupils constricted.
The glint seemed to have disappeared... but that wasn’t the reason for the consternation.
Up the aisle and slightly to the side, there was another figure. Tall, broad-shouldered, and in a worn jumpsuit and work boots, that figure was stopped too. And seemed to have eyes focused on the same spot further up ahead.
A hush descended on the backroom space.
Two men.
One glint.
Matt was first to move. Even as he moved, Matt rubbed at his chest. There was a ‘rat’ inside his rib cage, needling and stabbing and urging him to move faster. To get ahead of the other figure. To reach there first!
Seeing he would not make it, something dark that rose from deep within Matt. Something he thought he’d lost… gone... long, long ago.
“Hey! Hey man, hold up!”
Matt shouted in a hoarse cry louder than the warehouse was accustomed to.However, the man in front wasn’t paying him any heed. Instead, their pace slowly but steadily drew closer. Nearer to that glint’s origin.
Matt’s heart’s beat kicked up a notch. Unbidden, a flicker of thought imagery flashed in his mind.
Rowers, chained to rings hammered into decks below, fiendishly working to heave and pull. Backs glistening in sweat, a drummer’s pounding roar was the only god their hearts could obey. Across their ship’s hull, desperate eyes spied another ship, its own bows aimed at their own flank. It was a race of winners live, loser sink into the abyss.
Then Matt was back in the narrow passage.
“Dude! Hey! I think you dropped something.” Matt called out again. It wasn’t work. Then, a flash in his mind made him change tactics.
Matt quickly reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve a hundred dollar note as he called that out. “Buddy! You drop a C-note?!”
It worked!
“Uh, what?” The guy finally turned towards Matt. When he saw Matt, something flashed across his own eyes, a shadow of a cloud or something. A dimming of light or fortune.
Seeing there was no one but the two on the aisle, the shabby-looking guy zeroed in on Matt’s lone figure... and the hand held out and clutching a familiar note. Somehow though, turning also happened to block all but a hand’s span of space between the row and back wall of the warehouse.
“Uh, yeah! I think that’s mine. Wasn’t paying attention back there.” The man muttered just loud enough for the approaching Matt to catch.
Close up, Matt saw his secondary target respond with an embarrassed half-grin-half-grimace on his graying face. The man’s face scrounged up, puffy, worn, and likely battling a hangover even this late – or early – in the day.
Bad liver there. Something else too.Matt thought, thinking back to Dad’s last few months.
Reaching level with the guy, Matt deftly maneuvered his own cart so it could just nudge and push past the other’s in the narrow space between corridors of spilling junk. At the same time, Matt, with note in hand even more visible, angled the arm to the right before dropping it just before his cart ‘nudged’ that of the other guy out of the way.
“Oh! Sorry man!” Matt said, the apology real even, as he watched the other man’s eyes trail the falling note. The other guy, unconsciously releasing his own hold on his cart’s bar to flail at the note, unknowingly released his own fate.
Eyes widening with a light that was absent before, Matt pushed harder, passing the man’s cart.
That was when Matt saw it; it was an old coffee maker.
No reason why he knew that that was what he was going after. Something told him that the coffee maker was what had caught his eye.
The thing was more dirty than broken. Its sides bore what could only be accrued from decades worth of scratches, scarring, pits, and tool marks. The barely visible electronic display was covered in a layer of dirt caked over it. With the rest of the grime, oil, and whatever else was on it, how could he have seen it really?
Matt didn’t ask. And again, the moment passed as he reached down and lifted the battered coffee maker up and into his hands.
The weight momentarily surprised him for some reason. Not that he expected anything; it just felt odd on his hands and arms. Turning it all around, upright, and downright, his eyes told him something more; there was, indeed, absolutely nothing remarkable about the thing.
“Hey buddy, I think you cut me off back there.”
The other guy was then somehow and suddenly beside him in that brief moment of time that had passed since Matt had taken control of the find.
Nodding but distracted, Matt simply placed the broken machine into his cart before pushing on, his gaze never once lifting from his find. His unremarkable yet strange find.
Behind, the other guy seemed confused; a quick peek at Matt’s find on the cart told him it wasn’t the it from a fading memory. Turning back to the mound, he lifted a section out. Then another. And another. Frown receding from his fudged face, bleary eyes scanning the section, the man was left alone in the aisle.
As for Matt… Matt didn’t even remember how much Tom asked for the broken thing. Didn’t even remember how he got back to his small apartment, prize in hand.
~ Ѡ ~
Home barely deserve the name.
The apartment sat two floors above a laundromat. Across the alley was a karaoke bar, its flashing lights blaring at his window even as off-tune voices battered at his ear-drums through most of the night. What was worse was that whether asleep or otherwise, Matt would hear the old city coughing through his walls in all forms; squealing brakes, drunken laughter, engines backing up, the static buzz of failing neon, and dogs barking.
The apartment itself smelled faintly of cat-piss, frozen takeout, time, and desperation. The color of city rain had permanently grimed into the floor times. Repainting the walls would make things worse. Not that Matt wanted to; such a commitment seemed to spell doom in a way more final than keeping up with payments for health insurance.
The place was a low-budget arrangement of utility and accident. Secondhand couch, beaten-up workbench, thread-bare and mismatched curtains, fridge that overclocked, and a laptop that worked only when you pressed the power button just so.
Now though, there was a new addition; the coffee maker, sitting on his kitchen counter like it had always belonged there.
Matt stood across from it, hands resting on the cheap plywood bench-cum-dining table. A frown, one that deepened by the second, grew on his face.
There was nothing of the presence from back at Old Tom’s warehouse. Nothing of that something that demanded he reach it before the other man did.
Stepping closer, Matt gave the old coffee maker an experimental nudge. Then drew closer to lift it an inch or two from the bench’s surface. The thing still felt as heavy as any of half a dozen other coffee machines he’d worked on since college.
Stepping back, Matt circled it once, then twice. The frown deepened into a fissure as he failed to catch a hint of the glint that drew it to him.
Shaking his head hard, Matt pulled his eyes away from the puzzle, choosing to stare at the wall calendar instead. An old trick he’d trained his mind into doing since long ago.
The distraction worked… of sorts.
It couldn’t possibly be November, could it? Matt asked himself.
Checking with his phone confirmed that the page was two months back. Matt reached up to rip off the old months.
Then, smirking to himself, he jotted down:
February 15th 2025.
On this day, nothing remarkable happened.
Mirth passing, Matt re-focused on his find, his mind having recovered a little. With a massive heave, a list of to-dos, notes, and questions cascaded.
He hadn’t plugged it in. Or cleaned it.
It had no nameplate. Or a serial number.
Screws at the back were a non-standard, hexagonal design. Likely custom. Base was strange too: it seemed to dip and swell like a ripple locked into metal. There was a port that might have been for power, but the shape was foreign, like someone had drawn it from memory after glancing at a real plug once, a long long time ago.
That design to the port was a unwelcome discovery; it would be harder to track down the manufacturers.
Matt exhaled through his nose, slow and steady. His heart quickened at realizing that he had more than a visual puzzle in hand. From the port’s design, he was sure of it. Toss in the base and back? No commercial enterprise would have spent so much on flourishes like that. There had to be blueprints or something online.
Grinning to himself, Matt imagined himself among the earliest of French explorers in Giza, staring at the Sphinx’s head barely jutting out of the sand. A strange puzzle, yes, but also welcome. Good enough to write stories about for the folks back home.
Turning to head into the only other room in the apartment, Matt’s hand paused at the light switch.
Light, light, light…
Recalling his actions back at the warehouse, Matt almost felt guilty. Not that there was something morally wrong with how he’d acted; it just felt somehow …wrong.Like a memory one wanted forgotten.
Shrugging, Matt flipped the switch to off. Sure, acting the way he did made him feel he’d taken something away from another. Maybe. Still, the fact that he did succeed at it was a vindication all on its own, no?
