Chapter 7 “The Search for the Rosetta Stone.”
Chapter 7
“The Search for the Rosetta Stone.”
October 27th, 2026.
Matt leaned into the creaking chair, fingers interlaced behind his head, and let his eyes drift over the copper lattice of the inner cage.
The way the lattice caught light unevenly caused him to reflect over its structure. Every seam marked a decision, and every bar a cost already paid. By themselves, those links and webs and connections were nothing particular. Nothing remarkable. But, put together, they represented a monumental shift in the way he approached reality.
Just like with his work.
There were no breakthroughs worth naming. Nothing that announced itself. Not even a hint of progress to be seen with parsing through the dense, senseless mass of code the LED display kept throwing at him.
Superficially.
In exchange for his pains, he’d learned things. Hard things. Beautiful things. Great things. Things that elevated his own coding and engineering experience to new levels. What he’d gained was competence of a quieter sort. Problems that once stalled him now yielded, slowly but reliably, to patience.
And his mental state had improved as well!
His phone no longer stayed silent for days at a time. Brief messages with his mother. Careful replies to names he hadn’t used in years. A few tentative greetings sent and returned.
The debts remained, unmoved by any of it. Grimacing, he left that thought where it was. Some problems demanded attention; others waited.
Matt swiveled slowly in the chair, watching light from a cracked window cast dull stripes across the concrete floor. A sigh of satisfaction escaped his throat before he could catch it.
Feels great, being able to seat so solidly on a surface! He couldn’t help think to himself. Squirming and shifting his ass, the light activity took longer than was decent. Then again, with the boils gone, what mattered decent behavior?
He adjusted his weight once, then again, lingering only long enough to confirm nothing protested.
He breathed out slowly.
Beyond the lattice, the LED display continued its restless flicker. Shapes assembled, dissolved, reassembled. At times they felt intentional. At others, merely incomplete.
Easing even deeper into his reckless pose, Matt’s mind reached for familiar anchors: fleece, cloud, foam glimpsed from altitude. Just then, a stream of images flew past as he was staring across at the output the camera captured from the LED display. It startled him, almost enough to throw him off the chair.
Was that latest image a sheep’s fleece? A low-resolution thundercloud? A top-down view of ocean foam?
Prompted, Matt went into the cage, pulled out another chair, then, with a few taps on the keyboard, pulled up a replay of the last sequence captured.
The resolution refused to cooperate. The display never sharpened, never clarified. That made him frown and bite his healing lips. There was no way of knowing; pixels were hard enough to make out even across the best of displays. And this particular seemed to relish Matt’s confusion.
The urge surfaced briefly to strike the carafe and shout at whatever lay beyond it. It passed though. Not because of anything Zen within him, but rather due to a sane one; he remembered the wall giving way, the dead sound of impact, the ache that followed even across steel-toed boots. That was enough.
A ping from his desktop prompted him to also take a break and leave the cage. The last two days had been wasted in brainstorming, the result of his hitting another bottleneck. He reached for his phone on the shelf beside the mattress. The caller ID drew a small, knowing curve to his mouth.
Matt didn’t even have to fake the joy in his voice! “What’s up, Cas? You got something new?” Without waiting for a replay, he added, “You know you’re my guy. Just don’t tell me it’s another monster. I’m stretched thin.”
~ Ѡ ~
October 31st, 2026.
A few days later, Matt was back at it again.
“Really?” he murmured, leaning in until the LED glare caught his glasses. “Interdimensional signal encoding,” he added, tasting the phrase like a joke, “and you give me an LED lightboard.”
A short laugh bounced off copper and concrete, thin in the cage. It died quickly. He let the silence settle back in, as if sound itself cost something.
He stood, joints complaining, and stretched until his back gave a reluctant pop. Off the platform, he crossed to the corner where the battered kettle and the backup coffee maker waited like tools that behaved. The real machine remained on the workbench, faintly humming. It gave nothing away.
He scooped instant grounds into a cracked mug and pressed the backup unit’s buttons with more force than the plastic deserved. Buttons clicked. Cause met effect. He trusted that.
While the coffee brewed, a thought surfaced from somewhere he hadn’t been looking.
Had he ever brewed anything in the alien one?
He blinked, as if the question had come from across the room.
No. He hadn’t.
And he wouldn’t start now!
He looked at the coffee machine across the cage. It sat as it always did; mute, matte, and entirely too unconcerned with human caution. Whatever powered it, he wasn’t putting it in his mouth.
People always touched the wrong thing first. Marie Curie… fiddling around with ores and crap… I bet she licked her fingers once too often.
When the mug steamed, he began to pace the perimeter. The coffee’s heat followed him in small, breathing plumes. His mind moved the way his feet did: circling, avoiding the center, skirting the same locked door from different angles.
Maybe it wasn’t their failure? Maybe it was his? Maybe the images were never meant to be read like images.
He pictured someone on the other side, clipboard in hand as they took notes. An observer with patience that measured in decades or centuries, watching the animal in the cage attempt language.
“Just because an ape can talk,” Matt whispered, “doesn’t mean it has anything worth hearing.”
The line sat in his mouth like something he’d learned the hard way. If he were the observer, he wouldn’t want back fuzzy cloud pictures as proof of contact. Not if anyone serious was waiting on results. There had to be barriers. They would want more than noise. Whatever waited on the other side wasn’t there to be entertained.
No.
Whatever sat behind this had weight. Dimensional travel didn’t happen on spare change. Weight demanded returns.
He’d seen how power behaved when no one was watching. Smile and nod and shake hands with Green Peace; dump toxic waste by the gigaton on the sly. Public virtue. Private arithmetic. Corners cut with clean hands.
He stopped walking and tried to think of the last time the world had discovered something new and stayed interested after the first wave of excitement.
The Andaman people!
It started with a news frenzy. Then the adjectives piled on like souvenirs: exotic, primitive, simple, natural. Soon though, with no new discoveries coming in, interest flagged. Then the quiet afterward. The world moved on.
He sipped, grimacing at the burn.
The burn faded. The frustration didn’t. Understanding the imbalance didn’t make it kinder. Silence was still silence.
He lowered the mug and looked at the machine. “I know what this is,” he murmured. “Anubis. Soul vs. feather.”
A laugh escaped him, joyless. “Except, game’s rigged,” he said. “And you fail the moment you spill anything.”
He left the cage and went to the mattress. His phone was where he always kept it. He checked the balance, watched the five digits hold steady, and felt his breathing slow as if the number itself could keep the walls in place.
What am I missing? he thought. Think.
~ Ѡ ~
Later, Matt sat beneath the copper dome again, the quiet whir of filtered fans broken only by the intermittent tick of his backup clock.
A thought surfaced, prompted by the shape of the space around him.
What if the images weren’t meant to be read at all, but filtered?
In the Isekai stories he’d devoured over the years, it always began the same way: sudden contact with a higher realm. Encountering realms that contained everything imaginable, along with things no one had thought to ask for. All that was required of the protagonist was some task, trivial or impossible, to unlock fortunes drawn from nowhere at all. As a reward, they became intermediaries, trading across dimensions until they belonged to both sides.
Matt let his gaze travel across the cage.
If communication wasn’t the problem, if it never had been, then perhaps the fault lay elsewhere. Perhaps it was a matter of offering something worth hearing.
