Chapter 3 “Found.”
Chapter 3
“Found.”
September 27th, 2025.
It was in the dead of night, at an hour so ungodly no one honest should have been up and about, when the impasse broke.
Matt, was sitting in his dim kitchen. He had the one light on to save on electric bills. Half-drunk on fatigue and whiskey, his fingers absentmindedly working the knobs for the millionth time.
Tilt, press, turn.
Pause. A bleary-eyed review of the notes and he was back at it.
Press, twist, hold.
Just as he was about to pause again, there was a sudden yet gentle shudder. The machine made a quiet pop, then a small, almost invisible panel on the back slid inward with a even softer click.
Dazed and beat as he was, Matt didn’t gasp. First, he blinked, his brain registering that something had changed. Then another blink as his brain registered the register. A final blink was his reptile brain prodding the limbic one into motion.
Matt retrieved a screwdriver and a flashlight, laid out a towel, and slowly lifted the rear casing away. Throwing an eye up at the dim light coming from the bulb above, Matt gritted his teeth, pulled out a fresh set of batteries and inserted them into his headlamp. Then he glanced at the Phillips screwdriver he’d grabbed for some reason, and set that down.
For a few precious seconds, Matt sat back, twitching hands rested on his lap, and stared at the open thing.
This is it! Matt exulted!
Touching the now open coffee maker, Matt spent the next three hours just lifting and touching bits and pieces of the innards. The coils. Plates. Tubes. Control board. Filter. Reservoir. Drip tray. Boiler.
Rubbing his hands, Matt knew, knew, he had passed the hurdle. Crossed the threshold. Solved the great riddle. Understood that he had been weighed, measured, and found passing. All that remained was to slowly take the thing apart and find what made it tick.
A quick frown, one he himself barely registered forming, flashed across his brows. Something about what he was seeing seeming odd. Shaking his head, exhilaration and exultation over-rode all else.
Matt pulled off the gloves, rubbed his hands in rubbing alcohol, then pulled the gloves back on again. Finally taking a seat, he brought his notebook closer then paused.
Freeze the moment!
Leaping up to rush to the bedroom, Matt scrabbled and rooted around one of the boxes under his bed. There lay an old phone, one he’d worked hard to kill off the possibility of it ever sending a signal outwards. With a few clicks, and then a full, forty minute video, Matt preserved the moment for eternity. Then, setting aside the old phone with religious care, Matt turned back to the prize.
Then... there was no then.
Inside, it was all... normal. There were normal looking wiring… save that some of the connections strangely attached to the inner walls of the coffee maker. The tubes looked a little weird too; none attached themselves to the water reservoir or pump, while some went into the heating element and right up against the strange looking aluminum coil. Another small coil looked like it handled heating… problem being that the coffee maker now had two coils with no way of discharging heat to anywhere it would be needed.
The most normal thing was was a single capacitor, albeit one that looked a little swollen. Matt’s eyes shuddered as he gazed upon the printed circuit board, jaws agape at the mass of relays, sensors, connectors, resistors, tiny capacitors, and diodes on the thing. Wondering at whether this belonged to a smart missile or something, another shudder passed through him as he realized that the circuit board was not attached to anything but was instead suspended in a void with but a wire fusing it to the bucket filter.
A strange calm descended upon Matt as he realized why he’d frowned earlier.
The innards had no mini-tesseract. No strange orb. No gooey, organic matter with wires sticking from it. Not even gooey, organo-metallic matter cushioning the wall panels from shock. No alien glyphs. No strange metals humming with quantum energy. Basically… nothing out of the ‘ordinary’, save for the ordinary stuff that were extraordinarily put together.
Matt blinked. He’d read somewhere that blinking was the body’s way of rebooting the mind.
Then he checked again, only to find the results remained the same. Worse, this refresh showed there were no hidden compartments. No false walls. Not even some clever integration or miniaturization to conceal stuff.
It looked like a coffee maker… just that there was nothing special about it.
~ Ѡ ~
September 30th, 2025.
Matt left it open for a day. A second. Then a third. Three days up on the roof of his apartment’s building, soaking in the Sun. Three days strolling the park in shorts, a vest, bathrobe and boots.
Then he was back at the puzzle afresh.
Matt picked up his non-responsive multimeter.
Tried running current directly to the board. Tried replacing the capacitor. Re-soldered two joints. Cleaned contacts. Reinforced the heating element. Checked for a fuse, then replaced it anyway. Then put back in the original.
Still, the machine remained inert.
No hum. No flicker. No sign of life.
And yet…
Matt couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching.Watching on. No malice. Not even with intent. The Coffee Machine was a Sphinx. One with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa ‘smile’ on its face, promising puzzles beyond reckon.
~ Ѡ ~
The calendar still hung on the wall.Several pages curled at the bottom, months out of order. None torn away.
Boxes crowded the floor. Some open. Some crushed flat. Anti-static bags spilled their contents across the workbench: coils, knobs, wires with handwritten labels. A few parts were missing from their packaging. Most weren’t.
Matt stood, feet encased in safety boots, amid the mess. He was holding a small brass knob between his fingers, staring at the thing as if expecting something. He turned it once. Set it down. Picked it up again. Then dropped it into a box without looking.
The Coffee Machine sat on the bench, closed up again. Whole. Waiting.
Matt stepped closer. He pressed his palm to its side, then pulled back. His hand was clean. He stared at it for a second longer than necessary before wiping it on his jeans anyway.
He reached for the machine again. Adjusted one knob. Then another. Paused. Backed off. Removed the first knob entirely and replaced it with a different one. The click echoed too loudly in the room.
Matt froze.
He stared at the machine. Something about it felt wrong.
He twisted the knob back out. Replaced the original. The feeling eased, but his shoulders sagged.
The apartment lights flickered as something heavy kicked on elsewhere in the building. Matt didn’t look up.
He turned in a slow circle instead, eyes tracking the room. The walls. The corners. The piled debris. His jaw tightened.
The Coffee Machine sat unmoved
“You win,” he said. The word barely made it out.
He swallowed, then his voice snapped.
“You stupid. Fucking. Piece of crap.”
Matt stepped back. Inhaled. Then lunged.
His boot struck the machine hard, square on the side.
The sound ‘felt’ wrong. Not metal. Not impact. A dull, dead thunk, like dropping something heavy onto packed earth.
The coffee machine didn’t dent. The wall behind it did.
The machine had punched clean into the drywall, embedding itself deep into the plywood partition. Dust burst loose from the ceiling. Matt staggered back, coughing, breath tearing out of his chest.
The Coffee Machine sat there in the wall as if it had nothing to do with being in the wall.
Matt collapsed onto the couch behind him, hands braced on his knees. His breathing slowed. His eyes stayed locked on the thing in the wall. He rubbed his face once. Hard.
Then he stood and plodded to the bedroom. A moment later, he wadded out, dragging flattened cardboard boxes. He returned without looking at the bench. Set the boxes down, propped one open and taped the bottom together. Reached for foam wrap. Lifting the machine from the wall, he seated it inside the box. Folded the foam over it. Once. Twice. Taped the seam shut.
As he pressed the final strip of tape down, light bled through the cardboard.
Green. Blue.
Matt froze.
He tore the box open.
The display glowed beneath the foam. Symbols surfaced one by one. Not letters. Not numbers. Shapes layered too tightly to be decoration. Curves within curves. Lines folded into themselves.
Matt’s hand trembled as he reached out. His fingertips brushed the surface… only for the display to go dark.
Matt stared. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Then his knees gave out. Hitting the floor hard, his chest heaving. He pressed a bone-wire thin palm to his sternum, the other resting against the blank display.
That night, he stayed there, breathing against the silence.
