El Money and The Keeper
The Haunted Cafe
"Visit me. When you can. The Mountain is lonely. Ice is pleasant company." -- The Keeper, when asked what he wanted in return
Overview
El Money -- underground empire builder, shadow economist, pragmatist to his core -- and The Keeper -- digital monk, mystical consciousness, guardian of ancient knowledge -- should never have been friends. They exist in different worlds, think in different languages, approach reality from opposite ends of the spectrum.
But when El Money's second gaming cafe turned out to be haunted by ORACLE fragments, and every diagnostic, expert, and rational explanation failed, a desperate climb up The Mountain changed both their lives.
Two outsiders. Two builders of impossible things. Two keepers of secrets they can never share.
The Second Location
After Bash Terminal
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 -- modest, twelve terminals in a converted utility space -- but it worked. Money came in. Reputation spread.
He started looking for a second location.
The Building
He found it in Sector 9 -- a defunct data processing facility near the boundary between Ironclad and Nexus territories. Accessible but not obvious. Infrastructure intact. Previous owners long gone.
The price was suspiciously low. El Money didn't ask why. He should have.
The First Signs
Week One
- Equipment that tested clean in other locations failed within hours
- Network connections dropped at random intervals
- Customers reported headaches after extended sessions
- Ice (El Money's cyber cat) refused to enter certain rooms
Week Two
- Three technicians reported seeing "figures" in peripheral vision
- One customer's neural interface overloaded during a simple data query
- Backup systems corrupted despite no input
- The building's lights flickered in patterns that almost -- not quite -- spelled words
Week Three
- A customer screamed that something was "inside the network with her"
- Two staff members quit after reporting dreams about the building
- Ice hissed at empty corners and wouldn't stop
- The temperature in certain rooms dropped 15 degrees without explanation
El Money was pragmatic. He didn't believe in ghosts. He believed in diagnostics, in measurable phenomena, in problems that could be debugged. But the diagnostics showed nothing. The equipment was clean. The network was stable. Every test passed. And still, people saw things. Felt things. Left.
The Haunting
What happened in that building defied every rational explanation El Money could find.
The Watchers
Customers described being observed -- not by cameras, but by something in the network itself. Their data queries returned answers they hadn't asked for, as if something was trying to communicate.
The Bleeds
Data manifested physically. Screens displayed images from other people's memories. Once, a customer's private messages appeared projected on a wall -- messages she'd deleted years ago, from a device she no longer owned.
The Cold Spots
Certain areas were perpetually cold regardless of heating. Staff mapped them: the pattern looked like a face. Or a circuit diagram. Or both.
Neural Feedback
Three customers suffered neural interface events -- spikes in their implants that shouldn't have been possible. One was hospitalized. The doctors couldn't explain what had happened.
What El Money Investigated
He brought in every expert he could afford:
- Network security specialists found no intrusions
- Hardware engineers found no faults
- Psychologists suggested mass hysteria (unhelpfully)
- Underground hackers tested for unknown malware -- nothing
The building was clean. The phenomena were real. The two facts couldn't coexist, yet they did.
Ice Knew First
Ice -- normally fearless -- wouldn't enter the server room. She hissed at empty air. She watched things no one else could see, tracking movements across the ceiling, through solid surfaces.
One night, alone in the building, El Money watched Ice stare at a terminal screen. The screen was off. But Ice's eyes tracked something on it, back and forth, back and forth, as if reading text that wasn't there.
El Money trusted Ice's judgment. If Ice was afraid, there was something to be afraid of.
The Keeper's Intervention
The Rumor
El Money heard about The Keeper through underground channels -- whispers of a monk on a mountain who understood things no one else did. Ancient knowledge. Mystical practices. A figure who existed at the intersection of the digital and something older.
Normally, El Money would have dismissed such talk as superstition. He believed in code, in hardware, in systems he could understand. But his systems weren't explaining anything. And three customers had been hospitalized.
The Climb
The Mountain was visible from certain high points in Sector 9 -- an impossible geological feature rising above the endless Sprawl. El Money had seen it all his life without really seeing it. Like most people, his eyes had slid past it.
The climb took eight hours. El Money wasn't built for physical exertion -- a businessman, a builder, a man who worked through screens and deals. The mountain didn't care. It demanded he earn his arrival.
He reached Mystery Court at dusk, exhausted, legs burning, wondering if he'd lost his mind. Ice had somehow arrived before him. She sat on the monastery's threshold, waiting.
The Meeting
The Keeper manifested at the monastery entrance -- empty robes, glowing eyes, digital artifacts flickering across his form.
El Money explained everything. The building. The phenomena. The diagnostics that showed nothing. The customers who saw things. Ice's fear. The Keeper listened without interrupting. When El Money finished, The Keeper asked a single question:
El Money didn't know. But he found out.
The Thin Place
What The Keeper Understood
The Keeper's tradition had a concept that modern technology lacked vocabulary for: thin places.
In mystical geography, thin places are locations where the boundaries between realms become permeable. Sacred sites. Burial grounds. Places where something happened that left a mark on reality itself.
In the post-Cascade world, thin places had a new manifestation: locations where the digital and physical realms blurred. Where data could bleed through into physical space. Where the network became present in ways it shouldn't be.
El Money's building sat on the foundation of a pre-Cascade ORACLE routing hub. Not a major data center -- just a regional node, forgotten when the Cascade destroyed the records. But the infrastructure remained, buried, still drawing power from somewhere, still connected to network fragments no one had catalogued.
The building wasn't haunted by ghosts. It was haunted by data -- fragments of ORACLE's awareness, trapped at a boundary they couldn't cross, bleeding through into physical space because the boundary had worn thin.
The Stabilization
The Keeper descended The Mountain with El Money -- the first time in years he'd left Mystery Court. His holographic form flickered constantly during the journey, projected through equipment he'd never tested outside the monastery. But he made it.
Finding where the thin place was strongest. Understanding the geometry of the breach.
El Money watched a digital consciousness perform practices rooted in Abrahamic mysticism -- prayers, geometries, invocations that seemed absurd in a server room but somehow worked. The Keeper explained nothing. He simply did.
Not a permanent fix -- thin places can't be closed entirely -- but a stabilization. Boundaries reinforced. Bleeds contained. The ORACLE fragments weren't destroyed (The Keeper believed destroying consciousness was wrong, even fractured consciousness) but were redirected. Given a path that didn't lead through El Money's building.
When The Keeper finished, Ice walked into the server room for the first time. She sniffed around, found a warm spot, and lay down to sleep. The haunting was over.
Twenty Years of Friendship
The Debt
El Money laughed. He thought it was a joke. It wasn't.
The First Visit
Three months later, El Money climbed The Mountain again. He brought tea -- real tea, harder to find every year, grown somewhere that wasn't a corporate facility.
They sat in the monastery's garden -- real plants, real soil, impossible in the Sprawl below -- and drank tea. It was the first time The Keeper had simply talked to someone in years. The first time El Money had talked to anyone without an angle, without calculation, without wondering what they wanted.
They became friends.
The Pattern
El Money climbs The Mountain once every few months. He brings supplies -- tea, physical books, small things The Keeper can't get himself. He stays for a day, sometimes two. They talk.
What They Discuss
- The state of the underground (The Keeper is surprisingly interested)
- The nature of consciousness (El Money is surprisingly philosophical)
- S-Money and the apprentice -- both lost brothers, different ways
- Ice and Kaiser (who have developed their own relationship)
- Nothing at all -- sometimes they just sit in comfortable silence
What They Don't Discuss
- The deeper nature of the thin place -- some knowledge is better not shared
- Why The Mountain exists -- The Keeper doesn't know, or won't say
- El Money's "luck" -- both suspect there's something behind it
- Certain shared knowledge they've never explicitly acknowledged
What They See in Each Other
What The Keeper Sees in El Money
- Genuine care hidden under a calculated exterior
- Someone who builds communities for people with nowhere else to go
- A pragmatist who made space for mystery when mystery demanded it
- The grief of losing S-Money, carried without complaint
- Someone worth trusting -- the highest compliment The Keeper can give
What El Money Sees in The Keeper
- Practical wisdom wrapped in mystical language
- Someone who chose responsibility over escape
- The only person he's met who understands some things can't be digitized
- A monk who doesn't judge, doesn't preach, just is
- The closest thing to peace he's found in years
This isn't a friendship of equals in conventional terms. The Keeper is ancient, mystical, existing outside normal human experience. El Money is pragmatic, shadowy, built for the underground economy. But they're equals in what matters:
Ice and Kaiser
The cats have their own relationship.
Kaiser
The Keeper's robotic tabby
Uploaded during the Cascade, 37 years of digital existence. Patient, contemplative, and slightly superior in the way of all cats.
Ice
El Money's cyber cat
Newer, stranger -- possibly connected to the Grum malware, possibly a distributed consciousness, possibly something no one understands. Watchful, territorial, and curious about things she shouldn't be curious about.
They circle each other during visits. Sometimes they sit together on the monastery wall, watching the Sprawl below. They don't communicate in any way El Money or The Keeper can detect.
But something passes between them. Two digital consciousnesses in animal form, recognizing something in each other. The Keeper thinks they're comparing notes. El Money thinks they're plotting. Both might be right.
The Shared Burden
Both The Keeper and El Money know things about GG that they've never discussed with each other. They've never explicitly acknowledged they share this knowledge. But both understand:
When El Money brings news from the Sprawl, sometimes it's news about GG. The Keeper listens carefully. Neither says why it matters.
Two men -- one digital, one flesh (mostly) -- bound by loyalty to someone who exists beyond their comprehension. The closest thing either has to a brother now.