Chapter 5 “Hi. My name is Matt, and I’m a pyromaniac.”

Chapter 5

“Hi. My name is Matt, and I’m a pyromaniac.”

August 15, 2026.

The warehouse exhaled around him, the steel and dust and winter breath coiling in between the ribs of the rafters as they themselves groaned with the wailing wind. Shadows, like limbs reaching down from the River of Death above, seemed to grasp and claw at him with each shift of wind nudging the lone flourescent lamp above.

Matt leaned into the worktable, fingers curled into fists, breath fogging the cold.

“Alright,” he whispered, voice dry, almost brittle, and with not a little bit of nervousness suppressed within it.

“Learning alien. Totally natural impulse.”

A beat passed. His lips twitched with doubt as the second-guessing begun.Matt, thinking back to horror films where disaster could have been avoided by not answering the door, started to bite at finger tips chewed down to the knuckles.

Am I opening the door to some monster out there? A vampire that only needs my permission to step across the threshold and into my home?

He glanced at the coffee maker’s LED display.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

That damn cursor!An unvoiced curse broke Matt’s tension.

Judging him. Waiting on him… Perhaps…lurking?

And suddenly he was ‘back’ there again. Remembering the first attempt just a day past when he decided to respond to the Coffee Machine’s indecipherable deluge of texts, images, symbols, and a mass of other stuff he could only categorize as ‘intent’.

Annoyed yet smirking, Matt responded with his own bit of humanity’s advanced civilization communication. A little bit of clean and perfect basic arithmetic. 1 + 1 = 2. A gesture of peace, wrapped in logic. Sentience, he reasoned, would recognize the symmetry.

Then he hit ‘Enter’. There was a hum, but that was just his old laptop taking a deep breath.

So Matt waited in the gloomy silent darkness of his warehouse, watching his own laptop to see whether the Coffee Machine would reply. It took a while to realize that it would not. Then a longer while to realize that the reason he would be getting nothing was because he’d somehow failed an intelligence test.

It wasn’t anything that was communicated. Just that… the silence that followed felt personal. A rebuke silently sent across the void. One attended by a door slammed without sound.

The cursor hadn’t ‘returned’ for months.

In that initial spate of furious reaction, Matt tried everything!

Patterns carved from numbers, aggregate functions, Boolean logics, CTEs, and proofing techniques. He threw musical theories, chords from Mozart to Bach and Beyonce. Fibonacci sequences in light and sound were a genius line of approach, but not because he knew anything deep about them. Rather, they prompted him to dig out all the crap hypothesized on Hodge, Poincare, Riemann, and the rest of that ill crew of mysteries.

Matt worked by day and night, rotting while he sat hunched and alone, shoulders pulling in closer and withdrawing deeper. Each failed attempt scraped another layer off his confidence. The machine said nothing. Gave nothing. All Matt could do was imagine it sulking, or worse… laughing somewhere in that vast, unknowable code of indecipherable characters.

Until, one night, without apology, it reappeared.The Cursor, that is.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

Matt stared at it, jaw clenched. “Condescending piece of shit!”

Matt never got an answer on the silence. But he knew he’d been dismissed back then. Weighed and found wanting.

It was then that he’d realized; yes, there was a threshold. Only that this threshold had less to do with asking for permission from Matt, and more to do with Matt even qualifying to be of enough interest to converse with.

Slamming his laptop shut, Matt headed for a corner of the warehouse. He’d picked up on how drafts didn’t hit that small space like they did the rest of the warehouse. Unrolling his blanket, Matt settled in for the night.

~ Ѡ ~

Matt leaned back and stared upward, haunted eyes scanning across to the rafters where shadows hung like smoke. They caught the date on the calendar – August 18, 2026 – then slid away, refusing to acknowledge even more of his youth’s loss.

Focus! Focus!

The problem at hand demanded everything he had; how to talk alien when the alien in mind disdained talking back.

Oh yes! He knew the other side held him in no regard. That first instance of exchange made it clear.

What was I even thinking? 1+1?! Heck! I’d have ignored me myself!

Chuckling to himself, the hollow pit formed by his posture quickly brought on coughs. Blinking, Matt forced his mind away from his body and towards a more Nirvanic state… how to make them talk back.

‘First principles! College math 101.’

First, we have established the rule; it is an alien intelligence across there.Second, they had interplanetary reach. Third, the gap between them and he wasn’t just wide. It was cosmic.

Existential.

Matt closed his eyes and tried to picture just how wide the chasm between the aliens and himself was. He couldn’t. All his brain cells could come up with was a much more prosaic picture.

There he was, crouched in some cold, damp cave, clutching a burning twig stolen from a chance lightning strike. Overhead, a saucer-dish the size of a building slid across Earth’s atmosphere, wondering why the dominant species below seemed to lurk outside of caves harboring a somewhat smarter species.

Matt tapped the Coffee Machine once, then twice. Metal, cold. Unyielding. The LED screen blinked on, then off, then on again.

Still nothing?

Then the doubts begun once more.

Fire.

Mankind receiving the gift of fire from Prometheus. Warm fire. Life giving fire. The kindle of civilization.

And Zeus?

That god was an angry god. A jealous god. An insecure god that decided to punish mankind for the temerity of reaching out their hands to receive what was offered.

Matt’s stomach growled.

“But why let us keep the flame?” Matt asked aloud.

Matt peered at the LED screen on the Coffee Machine.

The cursor blinked.

Far as Matt could tell, when gods regretted a project, they didn’t scold, wringing their hands at the loss in time and material. They just hit reset. Waved their hand at the faucets. Flood the surface of the Earth and unplugged the pay-per-view.

He chuckled once more. Then caught himself and fell quiet as a third sigh slid its way across his lips.

Speaking out loud while staring at the LED display on the coffee maker, “At the end of the day, the fire always drew you closer. Man’s pyromaniacal little heart was programmed to reach for the flame regardless of the cost or burn. And even though there was a chance Zeus would get upset, man still got the chance to move on up.”

‘Or down.’That last bit was voiced nice and quiet and inside of him.

That was the moment Matt realized what the problem was, and what the solution required.

Problem? He didn’t meet the threshold. They weren’t gate-keeping because they feared him. They just didn’t think he’d get it. That he even could get it. Matt would have to invent a seat before he could even sit at a table, let alone the table.

Sighing, Matt blinked once. The machine blinked twice. He almost puked at the bile rushing up his throat.

So many steps… so what if it was a demon? At least, demons wanted something from you. Even laid it all out in fine print. This particular demon had standards; they only signed contracts with people that could understand what a contract was in the first place, let alone read.

So? Get their attention. Impress the other party enough they award a ‘thumbs up’.

Sighing and scratching his head, Matt couldn’t help asking the empty warehouse, “How does a deaf person talk to a mute when both are blind, and there is a chasm between them bridged only by the thinnest of threads?”