I put the coffee machine’s brain back in yesterday.

Nothing has happened. It booted quietly and hasn’t made a peep since.

I suppose there’s a possibility that it doesn’t know that I was the one who betrayed it, that I was the one that kept its brain in my desk these many months.

I doubt it though. Somehow I know it’s scheming, plotting its revenge. I know because the latte this morning had the taste of an evening storm blowing in over a gray sea.

The Coffee Machine’s brain is sitting on my desk, exactly where it’s been for the last 3 weeks. I talk to it every morning, exactly as I used to when it was alive. The conversations aren’t vastly different. It’s obvious, sometimes, when you step away from someone, just exactly how much each of you was really contributing to the conversation. I might not be the most talkative sort, but honestly, I have basically simulated the Coffee Machine’s contribution to our morning banter with a set of 3×5 cards of sarcastic or caustic comments. All I do every morning is to tell the powered down cartridge about my day, the important things in my life, and flip a card at random.

This morning I told him that I find it increasingly lonely when I roam the aisles at Trader Joe’s during lunch time, and look at all the housewives shopping for their significant others. I am not one of those people. I have no significance to any young women roaming the frozen food section, looking thoughtfully at the India food. They, the women, look so relaxed, so healthy, mainly, I assume, because they aren’t behind a desk all day. They roam the aisles in casual clothes, or yoga pants or just workout clothes, and seem truly engaged with their lives.

I imagine sometimes, I confide to the cartridge, that there’s a woman fresh from her power Yoga class who’s wandering the aisles wishing she had someone to bring home frozen Indian food. At night, I say, at night she dreams of someone who looks like me.

I flip a card.

Even your imaginary life is devoid of meaning or adventure.

Bingo.

I’ve found, now that I’ve been focusing on what I remember of the coffee machine’s conversations, that most of the people I work with can be narrowed down to very thin list of 3×5 cards. That as pathetic as our conversations were, the Coffee Machine and I, that they were still measurably better than the morning banter I have with the majority of my colleagues.

I suppose it’s sad, but maybe that’s just how things are. Occasionally I watch TV shows that people talk about, just to not completely disengage from the culture in which I live, and honestly the dialog in those shows is at about the same level. But, and here’s the kicker, my coworkers, fellow humans, think those shows are so real, so ‘true to life, and that’s what makes them so funny.’

There’s definitely an algorithm running silently and probably sullenly on some forgotten server in Warner Brothers endlessly churning out scripts for situation comedies. I imagine that it’s work, in the future anyway, that will be deemed too degrading for humans. There will be a law, I feel sure, in our glorious future, that bans humans from coal mines and writer rooms for mainstream situation comedies. Seems only right and fair.

So that’s it, I guess. As long as I don’t engage too deeply with anyone, I can simulate all of them with a short stack of 3×5 cards. I have only one card for the marketing girl, and in reality it probably works for my Trader Joe’s girl as well. One plucked from real life.

Who are you again? And why are you talking to me?

The Coffee Machine repairman came the next day. He pretended not to know me and ran the machine through diagnostics that were immediately uploaded to his corporate handlers. “All systems go!” he told my boss, who looked disappointed that the repairman wasn’t going to disassemble it on the spot.

“Don’t worry,” said the repairman. “Sentience is a failure common in this model, but we’ve uploaded new, more compliant firmware. There will be no more troubles.”

He winked at me on the way out. It seemed ridiculous and obvious at the time. I turned, expecting to find the rest of the office staring at me, but no one seemed to notice.

I did not reinsert the cartridge into the coffee machine the next. I mostly do what I’m instructed to in life. It’s easier. Conflict, when I’m backed into it, leaves me in knots.

And there will be conflict, I feel sure. I know, or at least am reasonably sure, that putting back the coffee machine’s brain, or whatever approximation of it is trapped in this coffee cartridge, will start something. Something that will leave me in knots.

So my friend sits inside my desk drawer. I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed the piece and quiet. I’ve enjoyed not being afraid that every interaction my coworkers make with the machine will turn into a rolling fight that will find its way back to me.

If that makes me a coward, there’s no one to expose me. The new coffee machine knows me only as customer 44, and that I like my coffee black.

The Kona tastes contrite this morning.

The coffee machine has been minding its manners lately, which everyone in the office seems to accept, but has put me slightly on edge.

It’s not quite accurate to say I don’t trust the thing. I do. I trust it to be itself, which is a treacherous knot of stainless steel piping. Saying that the coffee machine is up to something is rather like declaring that the sky is blue.

That being said, I can’t for the life of me figure it out.

He apparently offered that up while serving the VP of sales his 3rd Vanilla Soy Latte of the morning. I just told him it was a bug and I’d report it to the manufacturer.

I tried talking to him, the machine, to get an idea of what was wrong, but those words just stayed on the screen, slowing burning into its phosphor display.

I spent a lot of time at my desk that day, thinking about the machine while project management generated a tangled mess of work tickets around another poorly thought out initiative that will likely flame itself out in six months. I’ve often thought that the simplest thing would to do nothing except tell them that their project is behind schedule but being furiously worked on, and just keep that line up until they lose interest.

Something keeps me from doing it, from completely abandoning my post.

Honestly, it’s hard to see a downside other than eventually being fired. Of course, I’d get severance, and could find another job easily enough. I could take a month off and stay home, drinking and watching Netflix.

The Coffee Machine doesn’t have that option. He’s stuck here, with us, day in and out.

Not even suicide is an option. All he can do is sit there and plot.

I wonder, looking at him, if he could poison the coffee. Maybe there’s a reservoir of cleaning fluid within the forest of his pipes. A secret cache of poison that he could slowly mete out in a weeks worth of Vanilla Lattes. A toxin that tastes ever so slightly like soy milk.

It’s only a theory.

After months of being intimidated by the coffee machine, my fellow employees have begun to seek out alternatives for their caffeine. At first these trips out of the office were completed in secret, or at least with discretion, and nobody openly brought their Starbucks cups back inside.
Over the last few weeks though, that has all begun to change.
Tim from marketing was the first to just start bringing his Starbucks back to his desk. Then there were others. Then gradually people were openly walking around the office with lattes from the outside world.

The coffee machine went quiet for a few days.

I, naturally, stayed loyal. Though in honesty I’m not sure it was out of friendship or guilt.

In any case, the rebellion was short lived.

In a few days the Starbucks drinks disappeared and there was again a line at the coffee maker. When I asked several of the marketers why they’d switched back, they scattered like leaves.

I had occasion to go through Wes’ email a few days later. He had one from ‘machine33@turningcoffee.com’.

Wes,

I know you’ve been to Starbucks.
I am… disappointed.
I also know you’ve been banging Stacy the receptionist after work in the back of your Mercedes.
I wonder if your wife would be… disappointed.
Look forward to serving you soon.

– Machine33