The Transcriber Part 4

The Transcriber Part 4

It happened when he completed the tenth page. It had been incredibly hard work, considering it was the first time he had written something, if you could call what he did writing, of course. He was as much a writer as a primary school student doing one of those image enlargement exercises for maths with the grids is an artist. But it seemed to him that his epiphany was justified – that innate feeling of self-confidence that compelled him to put pen to paper had resulted in the addition of a blue button on the wall directly in front of his bed, as if it was meant to greet him in his transference into consciousness once again. Having no knowledge of any higher order thinking and completely ignorant of the perils of curiosity as well as any fallacy of causation and affiliation between preceding and subsequent events, he was genuinely interested into why this object had mysteriously appeared, and just after he had completed ten pages of, to him, unreadable text. And so Josef Karringer approached the button, slightly wary for any change in his immediate surroundings. But there was none, and he made it to the button unscathed. Josef Karringer had never seen a button used before, so he examined it with the most meticulous technique, gliding his palms over the button, which was the size of a decent golden crumpet, and appreciating the curves, the delicate construction and the way it which it was connected to the wall.

By chance, he exerted too much weight towards the front of the button and it gave way, as typical buttons do, and slid inside the wall, before returning to its original position when the applied pressure was no longer there. Josef was stunned, unsure as to exactly what he did. He knew that something was going to happen. It was inevitable.

Inevitability didn’t show up for about 20 minutes, and even when it did, it was barely noticeable at first. It took the form of a slight rumbling resonating from outside his room to begin with, but the sound grew, becoming more insistent – and closer - with each passing minute. By the time the object responsible for the sound reached the room with the green walls, Josef Karringer had already passed out, sedated by a light green mist that had been released from miniscule slits in the floor that served as the central delivery system of the complex in which the room with the green walls stood.

The gas was extracted from the room, a hidden compartment in the roof opened, and an object dropped out and landed in Josef Karringer’s outstretched hand. It was a small box, enclosed in festive wrapping, and tied with a neat red bow. And it was vibrating.