camelot_exe

Chapter 3: Café Null

A cold, pearly fog settled over the familiar coastline and lingered among the reeds. After a series of technical breach meetings that left me feeling powerless, I walked to the Sludge Beach again, shoulders tight with tension.

I had lied to myself about why I had returned to the shoreline. By the time my shoes hit sand, I knew I wasn’t blowing off steam; I was waiting for the roaring sound of a dog named Dragon bringing with him that dark-haired stranger. I hadn’t forgotten him. It had been only a brief meeting, but his image lingered in my mind.

Yet the man and his dog didn’t appear, as they hadn’t every other time I wandered there since.

Disappointed, I stood for an hour at the edge of the water as it stretched lazily in and out, in and out. I resisted the urge to flip up to handstands in the sand, kick the waves, and do other things foolish and out of character. But I’d never been childlike like that, not as a boy, not at this age. The sole heir of an important business executive had to be groomed to be a serious man. I dug my heel into the wet grit and watched the foam curl around it, trying to pin down the unrest twisting in my gut. The only rebellious thing I could do right then was ignore the phone in my pocket buzzing and blinking like a discotheque.

Even that I couldn’t do for long. Duty prevailed, and I glanced at my phone, one message from Grace and one from my buddy and company sales rep, Percy.

Grace sent me a link to a 7-carat pink-emerald ring in a diamond-haloed platinum band. As perfect and beautiful as she was, the ring was a bargain at 1.2 million. I would propose to her, eventually. When I was ready. Which I wasn’t.

Percy’s text message came tagged with a company encryption signature.

Percy: My hacker contact confirmed a meeting. He says he’s seen that kind of breach before.
Percy: We are meeting him at Café Null.

I stared at the message, thumb hovering over the reply. I liked Lance and trusted his credentials. But trust only went so far when our “air-gapped” system got breached with no trace, no signature, and no suspects. Percy knew I couldn’t say it aloud in front of Father or our shareholders, but I needed a second opinion, preferably from someone as smart as our seven-figure corporate techs. And someone from the outside as Father could not find out.

Arthur: Café Null isn’t showing up on maps?
Percy: Let me ask him.
[...]
Percy: Says it’s inside a secondhand clothing store called Past Perfect.
Arthur: The future of Camelot Enterprises hinges on someone sitting behind a bale of clothing sold for $5 a pound? 😂
Percy: 🤷‍♂️
Percy: He says he’s only waiting an hour. Meet you there soon.

I pocketed the phone, turned from the waves, and walked toward the café hidden within last decade’s moth-eaten polyester blazers.

The thrift store was fluorescent-lit, and, as I imagined, it smelled like mildew and a cheap scented candle wrestling in a sweaty schoolyard. Racks of garments hung arranged by color with occasional tags that read “vintage,” “retro,” or “$2.” I pulled out a T-shirt that read “2030 Regional Pickleball Champions” and laughed.

I paced from one end of the uneven floor to the other, searching for the café. Whatever material lay beneath my feet (perhaps linoleum in a former life) seemed to grow more faded with each step of my tailored shoes. Leaving Camelot Enterprises always left me feeling like I'd wandered into a street party wearing a tuxedo.

At last, my pride surrendered, and I approached a teenage girl to ask directions to Café Null. She leaned against a display case of mismatched salt and pepper shakers, all bearing the scars of heavy use. With her jet-black hair and t-shirt featuring some obscure band I'd never heard of, she had the unmistakable look of someone employed by this kind of establishment

“I’m looking for Café Null?” I asked, a little embarrassed. What if this were a Percy joke? I wouldn’t put it past him.

The girl took out one AirPod and gave me a look like I’d just asked the stupidest question of her day, which was probably saying something. In the seconds that followed, I already planned how I was going to throttle Percy into oblivion.

“You go through the door next to the dressing room,” she finally said, the ‘duh’ implicitly added.

“You mean next to that curtain over there? That’s a dressing room?”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, like the surly teenager she was. Now I wasn’t just asking dumb questions; I was officially the dumbest person she’d ever met.

“Thanks,” I muttered and walked toward the door that separated the thrift store from the hacker paradise. I expected to walk into a temperature-controlled room filled with blinking servers, men in hoodies, or some kind of hacker speakeasy.

A cheerful chime announced my entrance into what appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary café. The overhead lighting was warm and inviting. The walls had innocuous vintage photos of people drinking coffee, the kind usually found in finer restaurants. A menu chalkboard above the counter listed drinks like “Drip Coffee,” “Macchiato,” and “Arnold Palmer” in stylized handwriting. A barista with blue hair and a heart tattoo on his finger was steaming milk. The espresso machine hissed over ambient background music.

I scanned the room, underwhelmed. No one looked overly weird; instead, they seemed aggressively average. But I learned later that almost everyone here was at least semi-legendary in cybersecurity forums.

Percy’s blonde cue ball head was easy to spot. He had beaten me here. Sitting next to him was a guy who looked like he could fix your router or sell you fake premium IDs. Late twenties, maybe, wearing a T-shirt of a tech startup I didn’t recognize. He didn’t look like a genius, I thought. But his eyes and jittery movements were fast, like someone who saw the world in binary code.

After introductions and coffee orders, I explained to Percy’s hacker, “Gav,” what had happened and showed him redacted logs, metadata, diagnostics, and a high-res grab of the altered presentation screen from the event.

“This should be full of red flags. Instead, it’s suspiciously boring for this kind of switch,” Gav said, stirring his cappuccino and then using his tiny spoon as a pointer. “Okay, see here? The system thinks nothing happened. No packet spikes, no access flags, no heartbeat skips. Let me look at the video again.”

“We were told the system was air-gapped,” Percy added. As a salesman, this wasn’t his area of specialty, but he was clearly invested now.

Gav laughed at that, then returned to seriousness, index finger tapping the screen. “That shimmer? That’s not your projector; it’s layered render injection.”

“I was told it was a visual glitch,” I said. “A ‘non-persistent anomaly.’”

Gav snorted and sipped his drink. “That’s corporate for ‘we got nothing.’”

We waited as he kept looking, squinting, with little grunts here and there. Then he looked right at me. “What did you feel?”

Sweat formed on my brow despite the temperature-controlled café. “The stage pulsed beneath my feet,” I said. “Different rhythm, like a second heartbeat. I remember thinking of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart when I felt it.”

“That wasn’t a glitch. That was a pulse injected straight into your event infrastructure.” Gav gave a low whistle and leaned back in his chair, eyeing me like this might be a prank. “A subharmonic feedback loop.”

“What?” Percy and I asked in unison.

“That line right there? That’s what tipped me off. Looks like a normal spike in the power pattern. But the frequency’s weird. Not random. It’s a subharmonic of your system’s internal refresh rate.”

“In English, please.” My heart rate had to be 200 at this point.

Gav looked genuinely impressed at his discovery. He tapped the side of his cup, eyes darting as if he were rewatching the hack in his mind. “A feedback loop rides under your system’s normal rhythm, low enough to slip past your alerts. Goddamn, this guy is more than a genius. He’s a magician.”

"So, it definitely was hacked?"

Gav was almost too excited to speak. He waved his spoon wide, nearly hitting a passing barista. “Yes. But it’s technically not a hack into your system but a sidestep. Like holding up a mirror in front of a security camera. Just long enough to fool everyone. Clean. Reversible. And when it’s over? No prints, no footprints, no trace.”

We were all quiet for a moment within the normal sounds of a café. This was beyond all of our wildest imaginations.

“I mean… damn. That was beautiful,” Gav finally said, still looking over the logs.

“Is there any way to stop this from happening again?” I asked, running a hand down my face and slumping in my chair, the weight of the unanswered questions and tech mumbo jumbo finally catching up to me. “Can you help?”

Gav chuckled. “Dude, this is beyond even me. There are only one or two people I know who might understand this stuff. And that’s a heavy might.”

“Where can I find them?”

“Well, you’re lucky. The best one is presiding over in that corner.” He waved his spoon like a wand toward the back of the café. “The one and only synesthesia genius, Mateo Ixpac.”

“Synesthesia genius?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow. “What does that even mean?”

Gav leaned in, lowering his voice. “He sees numbers as colors and shapes, sometimes even smells and tastes. Mateo sees code like a landscape. He doesn’t just read systems. Man, he feels them.”

“Right,” I muttered. “And I once knew a guy who said he could talk to pigeons.”

“Joke all you want, but he’s the real deal,” Gav said, mildly offended. “And don’t knock pigeons. They recognize patterns and make decisions like an AI model.”

I didn’t say anything; it was too ridiculous. A man who feels code? That sounded like mysticism wrapped in tech jargon. The kind of thing Father would’ve dismissed as soft-headed “woo-woo” nonsense.

But the memory of that pulse beneath the stage still echoed somewhere in my bones. For a fleeting moment, I thought I could feel the remnants of that rhythm in my chest as a faded, throbbing warmth.

Curiosity got the better of me. I turned in the direction of Gav’s spoon. What I saw stopped my heart.

Mateo Ixpac: Legs crossed, quietly reading a hardcover book while a matte-black ThinkPad, beaten and worn like a beloved volume of spells, lay in front of him.

And under the table, half-lost in the shadows, lay the dog. Dragon’s amber eyes were glowing and fixed on me.

Mateo Ixpac was the man with the dog named Dragon.

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