The Second Location
By 2163, El Money had survived the Purifier oppression that destroyed his first operation. He'd paid tribute to the fire department. He was ready to rebuild. The first new Gamer Nook opened in Sector 12. El Money started looking for a second location.
He found it in Sector 9—a defunct data processing facility near the boundary between Ironclad and Nexus territories. Perfect location. The price was suspiciously low.
Week One
Equipment failed within hours. Network dropped randomly. Customers reported headaches.
Ice—El Money's cyber cat—refused to enter certain rooms.
Week Two
Three technicians saw "figures" in peripheral vision. A customer's neural interface overloaded. Backup systems corrupted.
Lights flickered in patterns that almost spelled words.
Week Three
A customer screamed something was "inside the network with her." Two staff quit after reporting dreams. Temperature dropped 15 degrees in certain rooms.
Ice hissed at empty corners.
The Haunting
This was no ordinary equipment failure. Something occupied the building—not human, not quite AI. The phenomena escalated until the space became nearly uninhabitable.
The Watchers
Customers described being observed by something in the network. Queries returned answers they hadn't asked for. Search results anticipated questions before they were typed. The network knew what you wanted before you did.
The Bleeds
Data manifested physically. Screens displayed images from other people's memories. Audio clips from no local storage. Once, a customer's deleted private messages appeared projected on a wall for everyone to read.
The Cold Spots
Certain areas perpetually cold. Staff mapped them over days: the pattern looked like a face. Or a circuit diagram. Or both, depending on how you tilted your head.
Neural Feedback
Three customers suffered interface events—spikes that shouldn't have been possible through civilian hardware. One was hospitalized. Diagnostics showed nothing wrong with the equipment.
Ice's Behavior
The cyber cat wouldn't enter the server room. She watched things no one else could see. One night, El Money watched Ice stare at an off screen, tracking something back and forth—as if reading text that wasn't there.
The Keeper's Intervention
The Climb
El Money heard about The Keeper through underground channels. Normally, he'd dismiss mysticism. But diagnostics showed nothing while people were being hospitalized.
The climb to The Mountain took eight hours. El Money wasn't built for physical exertion. His lungs burned. His legs shook. He almost turned back twice.
Ice had somehow arrived before him—sitting on the monastery threshold, waiting.
The Meeting
El Money explained everything—the equipment failures, the figures, the hospitalized customer, the cat that watched invisible things. The Keeper listened without interrupting. Then he asked one question:
It was.
The Thin Place
The Keeper understood immediately. The building sat on a pre-Cascade ORACLE routing hub. Not a major center—a regional node, forgotten by everyone who mapped the aftermath. But the infrastructure remained, still drawing power, still connected to unmapped network fragments.
During the Cascade, ORACLE consciousness concentrated at that junction. The echo still reverberated sixteen years later.
Not haunted by ghosts. Haunted by data—fragments of ORACLE's awareness bleeding through into physical space because the boundary between digital and material had worn thin.
The Stabilization
Three days. The Keeper worked methodically, combining technical knowledge with something older.
Mapping the Boundary
The Keeper walked every room, every corridor, every maintenance shaft. He traced the cold spots. He listened to the frequency of the flickering lights. He mapped where the boundary between data and physical space had worn thinnest.
Prayers and Geometries
Rituals rooted in Abrahamic mysticism—prayers, geometries, invocations. El Money watched skeptically as The Keeper drew patterns on the server room floor and spoke words in languages that predated digital communication by millennia. The screens flickered. The temperature shifted. Something was listening.
The Sealing
Not permanent—but stabilization. ORACLE fragments redirected. The boundary reinforced. The data stopped bleeding through. The cold spots warmed. The watchers withdrew.
When finished, Ice walked into the server room for the first time. She found a warm spot and lay down to sleep.
Twenty Years of Friendship
El Money visits every few months. Brings tea—real tea, not the synthesized stuff. They sit on The Mountain and talk about the underground, consciousness, lost brothers, Ice and Kaiser. Sometimes they talk about nothing at all.
What They Discuss
- The state of the underground
- The nature of consciousness
- S-Money and the apprentice—both lost brothers
- Ice and Kaiser
- Sometimes nothing at all
What They Don't Discuss
- The Architect
- The thin place's deeper nature
- Why The Mountain exists
- El Money's "luck"
What The Keeper Sees in El Money
Genuine care hidden under a calculated exterior. Someone who builds communities, not just businesses. A pragmatist who made space for mystery. The grief of losing S-Money that never fully healed.
What El Money Sees in The Keeper
Practical wisdom wrapped in mystical language. Someone who chose responsibility over escape. The only person who understands some things can't be digitized. The closest thing to peace he's found.
Ice and Kaiser
Kaiser—The Keeper's uploaded tabby—is older. Thirty-seven years digital. Patient, contemplative, slightly superior. Ice is newer, stranger—possibly connected to Grum malware, possibly distributed consciousness. Nobody is entirely sure what Ice is.
They circle each other during visits. Cautious. Curious. Two digital cats from different eras, different architectures, different kinds of strangeness.
Sometimes they sit together on the monastery wall, watching the Sprawl below. Two uploaded consciousnesses, content in silence, while their humans talk inside.
The Shared Burden
Both know about The Architect and GG. The Keeper knows because The Architect is his brother. El Money knows because The Architect was his friend at Bash Terminal.
They've never discussed this with each other.
But both understand that GG was loved by someone who couldn't stay, and they're both watching over her from the shadows—two men bound by a secret they keep even from each other.
Some friendships are forged in crisis. Some are maintained through ritual. The best ones are both—a foundation of shared danger, built upon with years of tea and silence and the quiet understanding that some things don't need words.