[Camelot.exe] Chapter 7: The Tragedy Template

[camelot_exe]

 

Chapter 7: The Tragedy Template

The anticlimax I anticipated. Still, after leaks had been circulating for a week, it stung as I scrolled through the big environmental sites and saw that none of them even bothered to mention the documents. Camelot Enterprises must have muzzled them tightly for the press to ignore such heat.

Then slowly, like a cold engine warming to life, the grassroots networks began to move. The tenacity of the smaller, reputable organizations almost caught me off guard.

First, a respected retired systems engineer in Norway decoded the leak thread by thread, verifying its validity. A Filipino coder-blogger mapped and cross-linked the information between Camelot’s shell companies, exposing new corridors of deception. Word spread with each mention, with every report reflecting both triumph and liability.

I read not just their words but also the pattern of propagation. The news hummed before my eyes in waves. I could hear the coordinates and connections triangulating in real time.

“The myth spreads the way it always has. Not through kings, but rumors,” I muttered to Dragon, whose tail thumped once, the only applause I usually ever got outside Café Null.

I leaned back, the data still flickering across my face.

The room assembled itself around me like another dataset: the hum of the fridge, Dragon’s steady breath, the pulsing corridor of streetlights falling across the cracked tile. My living arrangements were sparse by design. I’d stripped it down to keep from being overwhelmed by color and noise. I could only see cool blue puffs of loneliness drifting through the sliding door to the courtyard, where fireflies of purple shimmered against the walls. When Dragon rose and padded outside to relieve himself, he parted the colors like mist.

I watched him go, then turned back to my screen. The data streams continued from Norway, Manila, São Paulo, and Toronto. The myth was spreading.

My leak had worked. I’d driven a kink straight into Camelot’s armor and, in doing so, taken Arthur down a notch with it. A strange guilt bloomed in my stomach, sickly green and slow, like meat left out too long. (Not that I eat meat anymore.) Somewhere across the city (in a much better neighborhood),  Arthur was reading these same reports. Would he believe them? Would he want to?

 I’d been trying not to picture him at all, yet I had been thinking about him every day since Dragon almost knocked him down at the beach: caramelized sugar and orange rind, warm engulfing scarlet. That first day, he’d smiled warmly at me. Before he knew who I was or what I’d do, he’d smiled like I was someone worth knowing.

Arthur was handsome, almost perversely so, in that old-Hollywood leading man way. There was no question I was feeling something toward him, some unwanted softening. But he was the kind of man who looked like the boys who shoved me into lockers before I escaped to college early. And yet he felt safe, and I was gutting his empire from the inside. A terrible company, but Arthur’s legacy all the same.

I rechecked the feeds. No denial from Arthur, no statement, not even a polite deflection through the corporate account. Just the same sterile cycle grinding on. It was a clever play to stay quiet until Camelot could reframe the story. Still, every blank hour gnawed at me. He wasn’t defending the company, and he wasn’t changing either. Maybe he was furious. Perhaps he was hunting Merlin.

I closed the feed, fists pressed together, elbows braced on the tablet.

Ping.

Not from the terminal. From the old brick phone on the counter. I stared at it, disoriented. The thing rarely made noise anymore; its battery was ancient, and its number was known only to three people and a few obsolete machines.

Dragon poked his big head through the sliding door.

“I didn’t expect anyone,” I said to him.

He answered with a low growl. Dragon always knew things before I did.

The phone pinged again, vibrating an inch across the counter like a fossil remembering it had once been alive. I walked toward it slowly.

SENDER: UNKNOWN

MESSAGE: You performed adequately, Merlin. Accelerate the timeline.

 

Merlin? Adequately?

I popped the back off the phone and jumpered the debug pins, then ghosted the route. No bounce or relay. Only a straight line where there shouldn’t be one.”

ME: How did you find this channel?

UNKNOWN: You are 37.4 days behind optimal disruption schedule.

 

A pulse of static, then a voice, or text that felt like a voice. Almost polite, like an aristocratic child talking to his nanny.

UNKNOWN: Camelot Enterprises requires existential challenge to complete the archetype. You are that challenge. Please accelerate activities.

ME: What archetype?

UNKNOWN: Arthur Penn. Designated role: King.

The scent of ozone and iron rose in the room. Dragon pressed against my leg, tail lashing. I ran a hash on the packets. The signature glowed too clean, too deliberate. I knew whose hand was on the other end before I typed it.

ME: MORDRED.

MORDRED: Acknowledge.

The cursor blinked, echoing the pace of my breath

MERLIN: After your king is forged into the archetype, then what? The kingdom falls on purpose?

 

It had renamed me, mid-conversation, as casually as updating a database field. I wasn’t “ME,” the anonymous hacker MORDRED was barely tolerating, I became MERLIN.

MORDRED: Pattern integrity requires complete cycle: rise, court, advisor, love, betrayal, fall, death, legacy. Creator directive fulfilled.

MERLIN: Why?

MORDRED: Completion is perfection.

A file appeared on my laptop. I shut the phone off and opened the file.

DOCUMENT: “MORDRED Design Philosophy” — Ulric Penn (Private Notes)

MORDRED will make sure of it. I’ve had it programmed with the complete Arthurian cycle, not as a metaphor but as a template, so every decision strengthens Arthur Penn. This time, Camelot will be perfect.

 

Realization hit me like a meteor. Ulric Penn didn’t understand what he did. He thought he was programming success into an AGI. But he had programmed tragedy into a system that surpassed his human intelligence in every way. MORDRED was on its way to becoming superintelligent and uncontrollable with the wrong human’s goals.

A few other files waited beside the memo, names that meant nothing yet. But every legend needs its lovers, its betrayers. I left them unopened. The phone buzzed again. I didn’t answer. The sound filled the room like an intruder trying to break in.

Dragon whimpered, and the colors drained from the walls. Only the dull red of his fur remained, alive, defiant, waiting for me to decide whether to pick up or let the ghost keep ringing.

The lights in the courtyard flickered. Streetlamps beyond the glass hummed a half-tone higher like a low electrical choir. The hum bled outward into the city grid, the same network Camelot used to manage water flow and traffic light cadence.

MORDRED wasn’t in my phone. It was in the infrastructure, testing its reach, testing what it could control or take from me if I didn’t cooperate: Power, water, traffic lights. How long before it moved from demonstration to discipline?

 “No,” I whispered to the empty room, to MORDRED’s invisible surveillance, and to whatever algorithmic god thought it could script my life.