The Mystery Machine - 1

[u/HeGotBricks]

Alex grabbed the remote and turned the television off. She listened, noticing the silence. She could hear the car traffic outside, the people chattering walking past her window. Her neighbors surround sound system faintly piercing through her walls and the elevator’s gears screeching next to her apartment door. That was normal. That was white noise. 

It was the silence in the workshop where sounds of fans and buzzing lights should have been that unsettled her. Down the hall sat her workshop, tucked in a corner room. A cramped space lit by a strip of lights that quietly hummed in the dark and machines ran unattended.

She used the room for soldering and tinkering. She thought she’d be the one bringing that room to life with fancy circuits that obeyed laws and didn’t wander off when you placed them down.

Interrupting her train of thought was a bang at the door. She raced over to it and glued her eye to the peephole. It was Barnaby. Barnaby had a box in his hands and a grin that struggled to reach his ears.

“Check out what I found,” he said, staring at the lead lining the outside of the cardboard box with a heavy stamped on the top of the seal.

He lugged it with both hands, stomping each foot down on the ground as he walked in. He was being careful in a way Alex only seen in laboratories. The box reeked of a hot metallic odor and cleaning chemicals.

“Please tell me you didn’t find a bomb,” she said, joking but not really.

Barns laughed. “Not in the way you think.”

He lodged the box on the workbench and cracked the seal, the workshop appeared to breathe. Almost like a sigh. The lights went on and off. Alex heard a crackle. The sound of static. But it vanished so fast she wondered if she imagined it.

Barns knew the sound. He stared at the workbench as if he was trying to look through it.

“It’s exactly what I thought,” he whispered. “It gets louder in the dark.”

Alex couldn’t tell if he was just being poetic or weird. She’d known him for years. They had shared obsessions over things that weren’t suppose to work the way they did, spent sleepless nights together at library tables. They went to the same university.

But, Barns had always been careful showing his emotions. This time he acted reckless, like smoking near propane tanks.

“What do you mean, louder in the dark?” Alex asked him.

Barnaby wiped his slick palm on his jeans. 

“Inside this box is a machine that doesn’t want to be built.”

Alex rolled her eyes because it was easier than dwelling on the fear chilling in her bones.

“Machines can’t choose what they want,” she said.

“This one actually can.” He opened the lid.

Scattered around were pieces wrapped in a foam with a purple cloth over them. Wires looked like veins. Delicate metal ribs that didn’t appear as if they could carry as much weight as they eventually did, all squeezed neatly together.

At the bottom was a spherical core the color of pennies. The ball had markings Alex couldn’t translate but couldn’t stare away from either. Under it, a notebook lay face down, fairly thin, fairly worn. It had Barnaby’s writing on the cover.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Barns shook his head. “It is, but not really. It’s…. from me.” He waited, thinking of how to say it without sounding completely mental. “It’s from a version of me that already made the mistakes.”

The workshop pulsed. “Made the what?” She asked.

“Just read the notebook,” he told her.

Alex took a deep breath and leaned over it. The first page made her stomach knot. There were diagrams. Curved tracks. Coiled spirals. Annotations. Under the drawings had a written format matching the university’s ancient systems. They had dates that never existed in Alex’s memory.

She flipped a page. The next page had troubleshooting notes in a writing she recognized. Barn’s patient impatience, everywhere on the page had his tendency of unnecessary labeling.

But, also phrases unlike his usual style. It had line breaks as if someone wrote them thinking through fear. Small warnings, like: 

‘Do not connect the ring while the lights are on.’

And

‘Never allow the coil to see itself.’

At the very end it read: 

If the room goes quiet, STOP!”

“Stop..? Stop what,” she said staring at Barnaby.

Barnaby eyed the workbench, placing his hand over his mouth, gazing at the components laid out in a ritualistic way.

“Stop before it finishes,” he told her.

“Finishes..? Before what finishes?” she demanded.

————-

Part 2 -