The Oracle Coffee Machine – Worship, But With Foam

Sometimes it is easier to pause for a while. I still have 100 pages of Pearl to write, but thought a light-hearted diversion into my next novel would be a useful ice-breaker.

So here is a snippet from Part One of The Numbers.

Interlude: The Oracle Coffee Machine – Worship, But With Foam

There are coffee machines,

and then there is The Oracle.

It stands alone in the corner of the break area,

gleaming, too clean, like it was designed to summon caffeine, not deliver it.

No one installed it.

No one refills it.

No one knows where the grounds go.

But it always works.

⸻

The Oracle is a WMF 9100 S+ Pro

or something that resembles it after four dreamlike upgrades.

Its interface runs on what appears to be retired fighter jet UI.

You don’t press buttons.

You engage coffee strategy.

Josh once called it:

“A machine that makes coffee like it’s writing poetry in Klingon.”

⸻

Spurious Fact #1:

WMF stands for Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik.

But insiders know it really means:

“We Make Feelings.”

⸻

Bev insists the Oracle doesn’t use beans, but emotional residue—

that it harvests forgotten thoughts and steams them into americano.

Jay claims the milk wand is sentient.

⸻

No one has ever ordered a decaf from it.

Once, someone tried.

The machine printed a receipt that read:

“This is not who you are.”

⸻

In contrast:

Downstairs, in the secondary kitchen (aka Exile Nook),

sits a rust-colored Bunn drip unit that smells like tax documents and hurt feelings.

Next to it:

An army of orange-handled flasks, lined up like retirement home mascots.

Spurious Fact #2:

The orange lid means “decaf” in ANSI coffee protocol.

But really, it means “You’ve given up.”

⸻

The Oracle, by contrast, never speaks.

But its display sometimes shows messages like:

“Existence Confirmed. Brew Now?”

Or:

“You hesitated. Would you like something bolder?”

Or (rarely):

“You are enough. This is your latte.”

⸻

Josh once dreamed it made a drink called The Silence.

No one’s ever found that option.

⸻

Spurious Fact #3:

The original WMF espresso algorithm was based on weather prediction software

and contains a hidden Easter egg where, on certain solstices, the crema will form a QR code that says:

“The beans remember everything.”

⸻

Kara says the Oracle saved her life during Q2.

Jay says it knows who’s leaving before HR does.

Josh once stood in front of it, unsure whether he wanted coffee or absolution.

He pressed flat white.

The machine made a sound like a sigh.

Pearl- Draft Cover Mk 2

 

Testing cover ideas for Pearl. I've finally gor the tailcode right, but it took some effort. FX-P. Here's another bit from the Work in Progress...

First Sight

 

RAF Scampton, February 4, 1944

Dawn, ground visibility: 20 metres

Group Captain Wakefield stepped outside his office.

The fog was even worse that morning. It clung low, thick as wool, swallowing sound before it travelled. Someone joked in the mess: “Even the sun’s not reporting for duty.”

But on the runway, in the cold watch of morning, he stood with his coat buttoned high, collar turned up, gloves held in one hand.

He hadn’t intended to be there. But he couldn’t sleep. Too many letters unfinished. Too many names without forms yet.

He heard the engines first.

Not the rumble of Merlins—they had their own rhythm. Familiar. This was smoother. Lower. Almost beneath hearing. Like a breath inhaled and held.

At first, he saw nothing. Just the fog.

Then—

A silhouette began to form. Low. Wide. Lancaster profile—but wrong.

•           The wings: too smooth.

•           The belly: sleeker than standard.

•           The paint: no shine, no markings.

•           No serial. No name. Just the tailcode:

FX-P

She coasted down the runway in perfect silence. No screech. No rattle. No brake hiss. As if the air itself moved aside to let her pass. One ground crewman crossed himself. Another whispered: “She’s too quiet.”

Wakefield narrowed his eyes. The fog drifted, parting in swirls around her frame—not lifted by wind, but displaced.

He stepped closer. From the side, he could see the bomb bay—closed, but flush to the fuselage like a sealed scar.

No rivets.

No panel seams.

No visible controls.

Just the spiral. Barely visible. Etched like a watermark near the nose.

The ladder dropped. The hatch opened.

No one stepped out.

Not yet.

Behind him, his adjutant spoke, voice just above a whisper.

“She doesn’t look built.”

Wakefield shook his head.

“She doesn’t look… tired.”

That was the strangest thing. Every other aircraft on the base bore the wear of war—soot, scratches, history in their skin.

But this one— She looked like she’d just arrived from a place where time was still clean.

A breeze moved through the airfield then. And for just a second, the fog pulled back enough to see her whole—

FX-P.

Dark as mourning. Silent as breath. Waiting, not to take off…

…but to begin something different.

Pearl - a draft cover and a context setting excerpt.

I've been working on the Pearl novel for longer than declared and I think I have around 150 pages to go. Time for a draft cover and some early feedback from ARC readers.

Here's another snippet from the opening section.

The Shape of What’s Coming

 

First the flak: predictable, vertical punctuation—the Wagnerian boom-boom of mid-century certainty.

Like Victorian calligraphy completing the day’s logbook in smoke and shrapnel.

Then the maps: still legible, still loyal to topography.

Targets. Grids. Borders. Logic.

All of it—before V-2 rockets

September, 1944. A month like a broken gear.

A V-2 rocket fell on Charentonneau, a Parisian suburb too sleepy for apocalypse.

Then another—Chiswick, West London. Three dead. Seventeen injured.

No warning. No siren. Just a sudden hole in the neighbourhood’s collective now.

The V-2 didn’t buzz like its pub-crawling little brother, the V-1 doodlebug.

No slow grind of dread. No audible clue.

No music.

It simply was.

It arrived before it was possible to hear it.

It broke chronology.

A bomb that didn’t just explode—it unravelled cause and effect, left them flapping in the wind like blackout curtains in a pressure wave.

“It came from above,” someone said.

“But it felt like it came from the wrong direction.”

Somewhere in Kent, a flight officer scribbled in the margin of a telemetry sheet:

“If it lands before we hear it, does that mean it already happened?”

The analysts asked for new physics.

The generals asked for new doctrines.

And somewhere behind both, Pearl—always Pearl—was quietly reclassified.

No longer tactical. No longer strategic.

Temporal.

She would not intercept the rockets.

She would not predict them.

She would learn to remember them in reverse.

Roughly 1,400 V-2 rockets hit London between September ’44 and March ’45.

Another 1,600 or so found Antwerp, Liège, and the rest of the bloodied map.

Of the ones aimed at London:

•           1,358 impacted.

•           The rest drifted, misfired, or vanished into unknowable elsewhere.

•           Death toll: 2,754 souls.

•           Injured: over 6,500.

•           Payload: one ton of Amatol, falling faster than sound, faster than belief.

•           Defense: none.

No sirens. No interception. No theatre. Just arrival.

~ ~ ~

Flight Profile:

It begins in smoke and prayer.

Absurdly vertical launch, defiant of gravity, guilt, gods.

For the first few seconds: a fire-drenched roar. Enough to rattle silverware, shatter theology.

Then—pitch over.

Not much. A few degrees. Just enough to say I am not ascending. I am choosing.

At altitude—engine cuts. Silence.

From here on out, it’s pure mathematics. Newton’s ghost at the controls.

A parabola. A falling idea.

No steering, no guidance, no regret. Just ballistics and will.

And the nose dips. And the arc curves. And somewhere beneath it, history looks up too late.

Top speed: 5,760 km/h.

Time to impact: five minutes.

Plenty of time to be too late.

No sound.

No siren.

Just crater.

 

And after: dust. Smoke.

The sound finally arrives, a crude joke told backward.

Then the crater fills with questions.

A mother without a kitchen. A letter that never got posted. A wristwatch embedded in a wall.

~ ~ ~

 

Psychologically?

The V-2 was a weapon from the future, delivered by a regime that couldn’t imagine one.

It rose like a prayer.

It fell like a verdict.

It didn’t target soldiers. It targeted expectation.

It rewrote the social contract: no more shelter, no more warning, no more orderly timelines.

The bomb fell first. The fear arrived second.

And sound came last, like a reluctant narrator.

Technically?

•           Altitude: ~90 km

•           Range: ~320 km

•           Guidance: Inertial

•           Fuel: Ethanol, liquid oxygen

•           Payload: ~1 ton of Amatol, plus whatever ideology could be packed into silence

But the numbers are irrelevant.

What matters is the arc. Gravity's rainbow.

It connected Wernher von Braun’s laboratory to a child’s bedroom in Bethnal Green, in one continuous sentence of math turned murder.

The V-2 was not just a weapon.

It was a gesture.

A curve in spacetime.

An equation you could feel in your bones.

Proof that gravity could be militarized.

And Pearl—quiet, listening—took it in.

Not as a threat.

As a lesson.

The future doesn’t arrive.

It falls.

And Pearl was built to catch it.