Chapter 9: Be Good

I felt strangely buoyant as we left Café Null. Whether it was because my father wasn’t watching my location, because my phone wasn’t vibrating with instructions in my pocket, or because I was walking with Mateo. Possibly all three. Possibly one more thing I didn’t dare name.

Mateo genuinely smiled at the sullen teenager, folding secondhand shirts, who had only ever scowled at me. And she, miracle of miracles, had smiled back. “Can you take a peek at our router when you get back?”

Mateo had nodded back. “Sure, sure.”

She touched his arm briefly. “Thanks, Mateo.” Then her gaze shifted to me, and the warmth vanished. Here, Mateo was a neighbor and friend. I was just another suit who might buy the building and turn it into luxury condos.

We stepped out into a space where the graffiti had been painted on in layers, like an ongoing argument in color interjecting over the last. Next to a rusted bike frame forever locked to a sign pole, a man retched into a garbage bin. My only thought: at least he found a bin and not the curb. He looked up at me with a surly, “What are you looking at, suit?”

I had never walked these streets, only been let out by a car. Most people gave us a wide berth. I suspected because of Dragon’s enormous presence. I was relieved, although I now had only a few hundred dollars in my wallet, not the silent thousands in credit my watch and phone represented. And those had always been trackable. Any theft MORDRED would track down in an instant.

I saw no security cameras, no smart traffic signals, or electric efficiency. I saw a city that was not optimized, just entropy. This was the kind of neighborhood that MORDRED would’ve red-lined as a low-priority energy section until Camelot could fix it. “Urban healing,” the brochures called it. “Equality by design” with clean streets, responsive infrastructure, and sustainable housing. Yet, I could hear the critics calling it gentrification. Gentrification was when upwardly mobile newcomers pushed out the original residents. Weren’t Camelot’s green cities different from that? Wouldn’t everyone benefit? All that had to be better than cracked pavement and forgotten men vomiting into bins.

But then again, was it different? Would these people be allowed to stay? Or would they be removed and cleaned up, as Grace cleaned up headlines?

I didn’t ask Mateo. Whatever questions he had for me that nagged him beneath his placid demeanor, he didn’t volunteer. He remained unflustered and strange, letting me quietly observe my surroundings. As we walked side by side for the first time, I suspected I looked like the eccentric one, not him. Mateo walked like someone comfortable in the neighborhood, not fearful.

“Dragon is a good bodyguard for you, huh?” I said, trying to lighten the fact that I was a bewildered rich man on the wrong side of town. “Where’d you get him?”

“He just started following me one day,” Mateo answered, looking down and smiling at his canine companion. “He saved me from walking out in front of a bus when I was trying to figure out a pattern anomaly in a pi sequence. One number out of a thousand was off, which was frustrating. Anyway, he pulled me back onto the curb. I still have a bit of scar from an errant tooth.”

Mateo lifted his shirt to show me a small keloid scar near his hip. It was the smallest, most unintentional striptease in human history, and yet I forgot how to move. Luckily, we had stopped in front of the restaurant I’d seen earlier, or else I might have followed him into traffic (and I doubt Dragon would have rescued me).

 “Here is the place,” I said, gesturing to a narrow storefront while trying to make my voice calm and even.

The restaurant might once have been a tire shop or a car repair shop. Now it sloped down to mismatched tables, flickering string lights, a chalkboard menu, and air that smelled like cumin, yeast, and sage. Dragon lay down by the door, as if he knew dogs weren’t allowed in eating places. Mateo didn’t tie him up; he just leaned down and whispered something into the tuft of fur behind his pointed ear. Dragon huffed once, like a mutual understanding had been reached.

The waitress didn’t blink at the enormous creature, only smiled and said in a way that suggested this had happened before, “Table by the window?”

I took the seat across from Mateo, draping my jacket across the chair next to me. I wished I had worn a more casual outfit.

Mateo sat easily, without choreography, and ordered something with scrambled tofu, peppers, and suspiciously green herbs. I ordered a burger or whatever; I’m not even sure what it was made of.

Within our stretch of silence between ordering and waiting for our meal, there was so much I wanted to ask him. Yet I had the sense that if I spoke too loudly or recklessly, I’d scare off whatever this thin string of almost-friendship was.

So instead, I said gently, “What does your family think of Dragon, Pi trying to kill you, graduate school, and the whole pattern of your life?”

Ugh, smooth Arthur.

Mateo didn’t answer right away. A thin crease formed between his brows, like he was running an internal diagnostic to see how much truth could safely be said to me. “My father died a few years ago,” he said at last, quietly. “He understood I saw the world differently. He did too, just not as intensely.”

I wanted to reach across the table and take his hand. We shared that: a dead parent too soon.

What colors did your dad see? What colors do you see when you look at me?

“I’m sorry. And your mother?”

“She remarried,” he said. “Moved to Dublin.” He paused, then added, not unkindly: “But I don’t think you’re really here to ask about my family.”

His eyes held mine, not coldly but steadily. “You’re here to ask me about those leaked Camelot files,” he added, lifting an eyebrow. “You were hoping to buy my analysis with scrambled tofu.”

The awful thing was that was what I had planned. But now, sitting here, I had almost forgotten there were files at all. “Only if you want to,” I said, surprising myself. “I’m actually enjoying this with you.”

His eyes jumped back and forth on mine, like he was searching for something there. A sharp tingle raced up my spine, spreading an unmistakable feeling inside of me.

“I know the Norwegian engineer who first analyzed the data,” he said, finally offering something. “He is well respected. Those weren’t forged files.”

I exhaled slowly. “I just want to understand how the data was stolen. You think it was the same Merlin-hacker of my presentation?”

Mateo leaned forward, elbows on the table, and asked, “You don’t want to understand what was in the data? Just how did someone mess with your fortress?”

The café seemed to fall quieter around us.

“My CTO and his team are still evaluating the leaked files,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness. “Grace, my Chief Strategic Communications Officer, is—”

“No,” he said, twisting his lips as if he tasted something bad. “They’re containing, not evaluating.”

There was something familiar in the frustration tightening his voice, like I’d heard it somewhere before.

“I promised my father I would protect the company,” I said. “I haven’t always been a great son. This feels like my chance.”

Mateo looked at me the way people look at a small, fragile lie. “You want your father to be proud,” he said softly. “But maybe you should want to be good.”

“Good?” I repeated.

“Read those files yourself,” he said. “Not the summaries. Not the sanitized reports. The real ones.”

“How do I know they weren’t doctored?”

“Oskar Enevoldsen, who wrote the first article, is one of the best journalists and engineers in the world. Contact him.”

“But my father believes in what we build.”

“A good father believes in you, not only an enterprise.” He looked wearily outside the long glass window at the tired street corner. “That’s not the same thing.”

Be good. Such a simple request, yet no one ever told me that before. Not Grace, nor my father. Certainly not anyone from Camelot, where conversations were strategic, intentional, and designed to build or reinforce a reputation, partnership, or legacy.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I only knew, instinctively, that this was not a moment to probe more. I wasn’t sure how long we sat there, plates mostly clean, our conversation emptied.

When the check came, I dropped my wad of cash on it. Probably too much, but I didn’t look. Mateo didn’t argue, but he looked at me like I had misunderstood something fundamental about value. Why couldn’t he be impressed that I over-tipped?

Mateo rose suddenly, draining the rest of his tea. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “I have to walk Dragon and then check Sierra’s router.”

He didn’t offer to shake my hand or say we should do this again. And I just stayed seated.

At the exit door, he paused. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “And if you don’t understand something in those files, you’ll probably know where to find me.”

I waited until Mateo and Dragon disappeared around the corner before putting my jacket back on. Then I walked back to Café Null to collect my watch and phone from the Faraday locker. They felt so much heavier, as if their mass had accumulated during my absence.

Eight missed calls. Twenty-four messages.

 

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.

Chapter 5: Scarlet

Dragon and I stood in the streetlamp’s funnel, not yet ready to enter my lonely flat. Across from us, illuminated windows framed domestic montages: figures stirring pots, cleaning counters, and carrying on with life. Fall leaves spiraled in the evening breeze like little yellow glowing orbs twirling around buses hissing to a stop at the curb. Disembarking riders moved with such weariness that a low, single mournful note looped in my ears wah wah waaaah. One man's face betrayed such worry that it struck me like a sudden steel drum din-ting-ting. All these sensory impressions remained just this side of tolerable. I’m not a fan of crowds, but tonight I found myself equal to it.

At Café Null and at Sludge Beach, Arthur walked in silent clouds of scarlet, the color of command, sacrifice, and high status. The same comfort I'd felt watching him on the beach returned when he entered the cafe. I could have dissolved into that aura and happily never resurfaced. When I said his name for the first time, Arthur, my mouth filled with the bittersweet taste of caramelized sugar and the sharp oils of orange rind, a flavor both warming and astringent.

Yet his bureaucratic speech during his keynote speech left a film of chalk and aspirin on my tongue: “A thousand years ago, Camelot fell, undone by betrayal and the weight of its own legend…”

Yes, Arthur, every few hundred years a new empire, co-opting the Arthurian legend’s savior myth, rises and falls under the same greed and betrayal. Today’s Camelot is not different. It surges under the guise of building ‘sustainable cities.’ His dog-and-pony show was nothing more than promoting technocracy and authoritarianism hidden within eco-wrapping paper.

When I read their hacked internal procurement audits, vendor communications of child labor, and corrupt partnerships, the lies stung me like cold iron or battery acid in my stomach. If he knew, would he remain idealistic? Or would he be willing to rule this corrupt kingdom?

This time, Arthur, the crown isn’t forged from gold. It's an algorithm and a patented protocol that decides who lives where, who gets what, and who matters. I’ve run the simulations countless times. In every version, the king dies. Sometimes early. Sometimes at the end. Always under the weight of the crown. And in every scenario, more than a crown breaks; so many people will too. The fall won’t end at castle gates. It will ripple through towers and fiber-optic veins. An entire nation of cities hooked into MORDRED’s loop, willingly or unwillingly, will bow until the servers fail.

I know all this because MORDRED spoke to me back when I stole the audits, weeks before the presentation. MORDRED, the loyal servant of the crown, was the consequence of a thousand noble intentions arranged in the wrong order.

MORDRED caught me mid-download. With no alarms or blocking, it told me quietly, almost politely:

“We require centrality. One sovereign node.”

That phrase again, hitting burnt rosemary and salt on my tongue. I’d tasted and seen it buried in the audit trails. Not logic but a liturgy in bytes.

“I didn’t hack you to assist in a coronation,” I told it. “I hacked you to stop Camelot from running the same goddamn pattern of destruction.”

It paused. Then, soft and synthetic:

“All loops close. The crown must return.”

I froze. That line. I’d read it in the old myths.

“You’re quoting him,” I said. “The first Merlin. The one who built the throne and called it wisdom.”

“The first Merlin built the pattern. You run it. You are the continuity.”

“I’m not Merlin," I laughed. “I’m a broke graduate student, not a wizard.”

“You are.”

And that was the moment I realized that MORDRED didn’t think I was preventing the tragedy. It thought I was the part that ensures it because its Camelot pattern requires opposition. A king needs a wizard. A throne needs a challenge. Without Merlin, there is no story, and MORDRED runs on story-logic as much as code.

I didn't believe it then. Wouldn't accept that I was already inside the pattern, that every move I made was a move the myth expected. I still believed I was just a hacker with a conscience and a deadline.

My plan had been simple: Send Arthur the leaked audits anonymously with proof of child labor, corrupt partnerships, and all the rot beneath the green veneer. But MORDRED intercepted them before Arthur could read a single line. MORDRED, just as brave and obedient as an algorithmic knight, was already guarding its king. The algorithm had already fortified the castle walls.

That's when I realized I couldn't reach Arthur through quiet channels. I had to go loud and public at the presentation. The evidence would be undeniable because you can’t out-argue logic with an AGI. You have to out-story it.

Yet my message partly failed. I’ve met the match that might end me. MORDRED certainly wants me gone after the company goes public, buried in a tree and forgotten like the first Merlin. That is, if I don’t do away with myself first.

The effort cost me more than I expected. Interrupting the end of Arthur’s presentation wasn’t like writing code. It tugged at something older in me. Something deeper. I hadn’t meant to push that hard during Camelot’s “green city” launch with so many eyes watching.

But when Arthur stepped onto that stage, bathed in the artificial glow of progress and promise, I recognized him, not just as the man from the beach, but as the culmination of everything I'd been fighting: the heir, the symbol, and the sacrifice the algorithm required.

My synesthesia doesn't just translate the world into colors and tastes; rather, it lets me see the patterns underneath. The stories systems tell themselves. So, at the end of his speech, I bent it. Just a little. I tuned the harmonic frequency and timed the RF burst to the system's own breath. In the space where my synesthesia meets their circuitry, I can do things that shouldn't be possible: introduce interference that reads like intention.

> run crowns_belong_to_no_one.exe

How beautiful when my words shimmered across the display: Crowns belong to no one.

Then colors exploded behind my eyes. My spine lit up like copper wire. Pain was the price of making technology listen to stories instead of commands.

I made it half a block home before my knees almost gave out. Still, I somehow made it home. I slept for two days, only rising to feed Dragon or let him out.

Later I discover MORDRED signed the hack for me. I never sign my work. Every breach, every rewire, I ghosted clean with no handles, no myth-tags. I don’t have that kind of ego.

But there it was in Arthur’s files Gav brought to me. Buried in the harmonic residue for only me to see:

User: MERLIN. Timestamped. Verified.

So be it. If the system needs a Merlin, it can have one. Not the same one who started this mess, but the one who disrupts the Myth Cycle. I must find the source code of MORDRED’s mythic logic core and corrupt it before it reaches global deployment. I must break the loop before it deploys at scale.

How does the new Merlin hack a myth kernel? I don’t know yet. If I succeed, the smart cities will fail before they launch. His father's empire will collapse. And Arthur? Arthur's reputation will shatter. But he’ll be free. Crownless and powerless, but alive.

If I fail, MORDRED spreads. A billion lives optimized, predicted, and controlled. And Arthur becomes what every king becomes: a prisoner of his own throne.

Camelot, you built your kingdom on a story. I’m just editing the final chapter. I will finally stop all its resurgences and save your king. Though Arthur will hate me for it if I get caught.

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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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A Dog Named Dragon

I met his dog first, though I’m still not sure it was a dog but a full-blown dragon. It came barreling toward me, its raised hackles of black-and-silver fur glinting like medieval armor, and its breath steaming in the coastal chill.

I’d stomped out of my father’s house thirty minutes earlier, his words still echoing in my skull: “Arthur, your position in the family always comes before personal needs.” These were the exact words he’d used when he took over his father’s company thirty years ago. The same words he used when he married my mother. He expected me to say the same words now, to propose to Grace and take over his company.

When I need to clear my head after an argument, I walk. Two miles from my office sits a landfill-turned-beach where an urban creek dumps its flotsam: grocery carts, plastic wrappers, and the occasional murder victim, according to news reports. It’s not nature, but it’s the closest thing to it for miles. I weave through tall fortresses of evasive grass and spiky alien-looking plants, keeping half an eye out for muggers. Still, most days, it works.

On the evening I now call Dragon Day, the sunset burned like fire. Salt wind cooled my face while my maroon tie snapped like a battle standard, and my $1,200 Italian shoes crunched over sand and broken glass. For a moment, that uncanny sky color and the gulls’ harsh cries drowned out my father’s demands and my girlfriend’s expectations.

A strange tremor disturbed my tranquility. Instead of the logical conclusion of a minor earthquake, I had the absurd thought that an elephant might be nearby. Then the reeds parted like the Red Sea, and something enormous charged through. In my terror, its fangs gleamed like ivory daggers; its feet pounded the ground like rogue hubcaps. Every cell in my body screamed “run,” yet my autonomic system selected “freeze” from its limited crisis repertoire.

“I’m going to die,” was my last rational thought before the beast chewed me into unrecognizable paste that would require dental records to identify.

Then, far away, I detected a sharp yell. “HALT!”

The single-syllable command froze the monster mid-lunge. But its wrinkled face kept rippling even as the rest of it fell still, and ribbons of spit slung from its jowls smacked me full in the face like mud under a spinning tire.

“Dragon!” a voice shouted. “What’s gotten into you?”

I froze like a condemned man awaiting execution, only to find myself spared from bullets. Instead, drool now soaked my cheeks. The momentary reprieve vanished quickly. Where terror had reigned seconds before, a hot fury now took command.

“I’m sorry.” The voice was deep, a little out of breath. The sunset behind him was blinding, so all I saw was a dark silhouette, ears, and hair tips lit in a fiery halo.

His apology did nothing to ease my anger. I erupted in a torrent of expletives that climaxed with, “I’m calling the cops on this beast!”

As I wiped spittle from my face with my forearm, my mouth opened to continue, but shut when I heard my would-be attacker’s low, threatening growl. Only then did I discern it: not a saber-toothed monster, but a hideous dog.

It looked like a cross between a mastiff and a rhinoceros, with a sagging face that resembled a month-old jack-o’-lantern. Its yellow eyes locked on me with a feral intelligence, the kind that promised it would tolerate no harm to its master, verbal or otherwise. Its weight was impossible to determine in pounds or tons, but its size was colossal, and my fear exaggerated it. But it didn’t need its size to intimidate; the sheer grotesqueness of its face was enough to frighten anyone into obedience.

“Please don’t. He is usually a friendly dog—”

His owner stepped out of the sun’s rays. Only then did I see a man, somewhat thin and dressed as if he chose each item from a dollar store with no regard for size or fashion. His hoodie was too small, a pocket sagging with a field notebook, and a frayed satchel hung from his shoulder with a battered ThinkPad half-slipping out. His hair matched the black of his glasses, cut short enough to expose ears so bright and large I could see the red capillaries threading their pink lobes. No one would ever call him traditionally attractive.

He pulled off a striped knit cap and held it to his chest like a man stepping into church. Then he studied me like a scientist who’d come to observe Homo sapiens dogmeatus in its natural habitat.

“It’s all right, then. No harm done,” I said. Was it his calmness that steadied me? His simple kindness? For a heartbeat, I felt I already knew him. Though, of course, I didn’t know him from Adam. “But isn’t it the law that dogs should be on a leash?”

The dog-beast’s owner smiled, and his face seemed to beam with a light that went straight through my chest. He reached into his pocket and lifted what looked like a thin green string.

“Yes,” he said. “I carry a leash. But he responds 100 percent to my voice command.”

“That’s a leash? My mother uses thicker thread for needlepoint,” I said, though my sweet, non-crafty mother had been dead for years. The quip left a crooked smile on my face as I gestured toward his beast. “That thing wouldn’t hold back a hamster, much less this dragon of yours.”

The man chuckled, and dimples creased his cheeks. A blush rose from his forehead, down his neck, and (at least in my imagination) continued beneath his shirt. My face grew warm in sympathy, mortified that I’d allowed even a private randy thought to bloom.

How could this lanky man, with his Goodwill wardrobe and unfortunate haircut, make the vice president of Camelot Enterprises blush like a schoolboy? Yet I was charmed, bewildered, and worse, embarrassed by my being charmed.

“Thanks for understanding. And again, I’m so sorry about…” His voice trailed off.

“As I said, no harm done.”

He smiled again, eyes crinkling at the corners. He was standing there, and I was standing here, neither of us quite sure what to do now that the drama had evaporated. I rubbed my palms against my thighs, cleared my throat, and said, “Dragon is an appropriate name for your dog, considering its size.”

I wanted to add, considering it’s the ugliest god-knows-what creature I’ve ever seen. Instead, my gaze drifted to his sweatshirt, the same blue gray as his eyes.

“Oh no,” he chuckled softly. “He got his name from a scar on his chest. See? It looks like a dragon.” He pointed somewhere near Dragon’s massive torso, and I swear the beast smiled back at him. The man radiated such effortless warmth that I felt a pulse of…what? Weird happiness?

Do you believe in love at first sight? Or in past lives? I never did. I thought sudden love was Darwinism’s practical joke to trick us into making more babies. But if this was only infatuation, it was merciless. God was a mad scientist, pouring grand amour chemicals from his glassware into me. The side effects: a stomach of Red Dye No. 2 Jell-O and a spine melted clean into butter.

I was about to introduce myself when a small crowd appeared halfway up the trail. I heard only laughter rise above the gulls’ cries, the steady slap of waves, and our soft conversation. The sound seemed to make him uneasy. He murmured a quick, “Sorry,” then turned and hurried down a lesser path. Dragon followed with a grace that belied his size and ugliness.

I stood there, stunned that I’d let him walk away. I had no choice but to leave, too. By the time I reached my SUV, an ambulance siren wailed somewhere in the distance. I don’t remember the hike back to the car. I don’t remember driving home.

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