camelot_exe

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.