In February 2219, a demolition survey team working in East Detroit's abandoned Gratiot Industrial Corridor discovered a device bolted to the interior wall of a gutted manufacturing facility. The device was approximately 40 centimeters square and 15 centimeters deep, mounted at eye level on four heavy-gauge bolts sunk into the concrete wall. Its face consisted of a display — not a screen, but a mechanical display of the split-flap type, similar to those used in 20th-century transit stations — showing a number. The number was in the high billions when first observed, and it was counting upward.

The count was incrementing at a rate of approximately one digit per 1.3 seconds, though the interval was not perfectly regular — it varied by a few hundredths of a second in a pattern that appeared random but may not have been. The display was mechanical: audible clicks accompanied each increment as the flaps rotated to show the next number. The device was warm to the touch. It had no visible power source — no cables, no battery compartment, no solar panel, no induction coil. The wall behind it was solid concrete with no conduits. It was generating its own power through a mechanism that the survey team could not identify.

The survey team photographed and documented the device, reported it to their project coordinator, and requested a technical team to extract it for analysis. A cutting team arrived eighteen hours later, equipped to remove the mounting bolts and the surrounding section of wall if necessary. When they entered the facility, the device was gone. The four mounting bolts remained, protruding from the wall, undamaged and still firmly seated in the concrete. The bolts showed no tool marks consistent with removal of a mounted object. The device had not been unbolted — it had simply departed the bolts, an action that would require either passing through solid metal or disassembling itself down to a scale smaller than the bolt diameter.

The survey team's photographs are on file. They show the device clearly, including the number on the display at the time of photography: 8,847,219,403. What it was counting, and what number it has reached by now, and where it is counting, are questions that the GLMZ documentation project has recorded but cannot begin to answer.