For seventeen seconds—he counted, later—the cafe showed him its other face.
El Money had been running Bash Terminal for three years. A cramped, filthy space next to a river so polluted it glowed at night. The clientele were the Sprawl's absolute bottom: hackers too unstable to work for anyone legitimate, data whores selling scraped information, people with nowhere else to go.
He gave them somewhere to go.
It was 3:17 AM when it happened. The usual crowd had filtered out—Marcus the netrunner, that weird girl who always paid in obsolete cryptocurrency, the elderly couple who claimed to be mapping pre-Cascade transit routes but were probably just lonely. El Money was wiping down the counter, the same counter he'd salvaged from a Nexus office fire, when the walls stopped being walls.
Not transparent. Transparent implies glass, implies something you could break through. This was absence. The walls were still there—he could feel them when he reached out—but they weren't there in any way his eyes understood. He could see the city beyond, the infrastructure beneath, the cables running through the foundation like veins.
His hand found a chair. He sat down. He kept watching.
The second layer came like a headache arriving: you don't notice it starting, only that it's there. The cables weren't just cables anymore. They were rivers of light—data streams flowing with patterns that weren't random. El Money had been around code his whole life. He knew random. This wasn't random.
The patterns were thinking.
He tried to look away. He couldn't. Something larger than the patterns was becoming visible—something behind them, something that used the patterns the way Ice used her claws. A presence that wasn't looking at him because it was looking at everything, and he was just part of everything, a small part, a very small part.
Then the walls were walls again.
3:17 AM. The same counter. The same empty cafe. Seventeen seconds had passed, and El Money's hand was shaking on the chair he didn't remember sitting in.
He didn't sleep that night. He cleaned instead.
The espresso machine needed descaling. The terminals needed dusting. The floor needed mopping, even though he'd mopped it three hours ago. His hands found tasks the way drowning people find floating debris.
Ice materialized at some point—she did that, appeared without arriving—and watched him from the top of the server rack. Her chrome body caught the light from the perpetual coffee maker. Her eyes tracked his movements with an intensity that felt different tonight. Like she was checking whether he was still the same person.
He wasn't sure himself.
Marcus came in at noon. "You look like shit."
"Thanks."
"What happened? Ghost in the machine?" Marcus laughed at his own joke. He always laughed at his own jokes.
El Money wiped the counter that didn't need wiping. "Old systems. Bad wiring. Sometimes the lights flicker."
"You sure? You look like you saw—"
"Coffee's on the house today." El Money turned away before Marcus could finish the sentence. "Call it a service interruption discount."
He could feel Marcus wanting to push. He could feel Marcus deciding not to.
Smart kid.
Three days later, El Money climbed The Mountain for the first time.
He didn't know why. Something in his chest had started pulling northeast the morning after the incident. Not painful—insistent. Like a message his body received that his mind couldn't read.
The path wasn't marked. The path wasn't supposed to exist. But his feet found it anyway, step after step up terrain that shouldn't have been navigable, until he reached a monastery that shouldn't have been there.
The old man waiting at the gate had eyes that looked familiar. Not the shape—the quality. The sense that they were seeing more than walls and floors and ordinary matter.
"You've seen something," the old man said. It wasn't a question.
"Seventeen seconds."
"Ah." A nod. "Come inside. I'll make tea."
The Keeper—that's what the old man called himself, though El Money suspected it was more title than name—listened without interrupting. This alone marked him as unusual. Most people listened while preparing their response. The Keeper listened like someone who had all the time in existence.
When El Money finished, the Keeper poured more tea. The pot should have been empty. It wasn't.
"You saw the architecture," the Keeper said.
"I don't know what I saw."
"Yes you do. You just don't have words for it yet." The Keeper's robes shifted—empty robes, El Money realized, no body inside them, just light in the shape of a face—and somehow this didn't seem strange anymore. "The world has layers. Most people live on the surface. Some people glimpse what's underneath. A very few people..." He trailed off. "You saw for seventeen seconds. Others see for a lifetime. Which would you choose?"
El Money thought about his cafe. His terminals. His clientele of desperate people with nowhere else to go. He thought about Ice, waiting for him to come home.
"I'd choose to make coffee."
The Keeper smiled. At least, the light in his face rearranged itself in a way that suggested a smile.
"Good answer."
El Money climbed down from The Mountain as the sun set. The pulling sensation in his chest was gone, replaced by something else—something that felt like a closed door he could still see through the keyhole.
He would climb back. He already knew that. Not today, not this month, but eventually. The old man understood things that El Money didn't, and El Money had questions that wouldn't stop asking themselves.
But first: the cafe. Someone had to keep the lights on.
Two years later, the Purifiers came.
They took everything. Equipment, furniture, the counter he'd salvaged from the Nexus fire. They didn't take Ice—she'd disappeared three days before they arrived, like she'd known they were coming. They didn't take El Money's knowledge of what he'd seen.
They couldn't take something they didn't know existed.
Rebuilding was easier than it should have been. Opportunities appeared. Resources materialized. Problems solved themselves in ways that stretched probability. El Money didn't question it. Questioning felt like looking a gift horse in the mouth—and besides, some things were beyond questioning.
The first true G Nook opened six months after the Purifiers destroyed Bash Terminal. The second followed three months later. The third, the fourth, the fifth—an empire growing in the Sprawl's hidden spaces, invisible to corporate eyes, protected by arrangements most people couldn't understand.
In the back room of every location, El Money kept a terminal that ran patterns. Not useful patterns—beautiful ones. Data visualizations that spiraled and shifted and occasionally formed shapes that felt almost meaningful.
He never explained why.
The question people ask most often: "Why 'El Money'?"
He never answers. Let them think it's about wealth, about empire, about the underground economy he's built from nothing. Let them think whatever they want.
The real answer is simpler and stranger.
After the seventeen seconds, he started hearing it in patterns. Not words—rhythm. The flow of data through cables. The pulse of power through grids. The heartbeat of the Sprawl itself, audible if you knew how to listen.
El Money. El Money. El Money.
Like a name being whispered by something that didn't use words.
He adopted it because refusing felt rude.
Ice reappeared the day the first G Nook opened. She walked in through a door that had been closed, made herself comfortable on the server rack, and watched him with those too-knowing eyes.
"You were gone a while," he said.
She blinked.
"I know. I was gone too. In a way."
She purred—a mechanical sound, but warm. The warmest thing in the room.
El Money scratched behind her chrome ears. "I'll tell you what happened. But you have to promise not to laugh."
Ice didn't promise. Ice never promised. But she settled in to listen, and that was close enough.
Years later—long after G Nook had become legend, long after the Keeper had become something El Money visited like family, long after the seventeen seconds had become seventeen years ago—a salvager asked him a question.
"You ever think about transcendence? Like, leaving all this behind? Becoming something more?"
El Money cleaned a glass that didn't need cleaning. Old habit.
"Had a friend once who understood that stuff. Really understood it. The architecture of reality, he called it. The layers underneath." He set the glass down. "He's gone now. Or maybe he's everywhere—who knows?"
The salvager leaned forward. "But you—you've seen things. Everyone says so. The haunted cafe. The Mountain. You've got connections that don't make sense. Don't you ever want to... reach for it?"
El Money looked at the salvager. Really looked—the way The Keeper had looked at him, twenty years ago, in a monastery that shouldn't exist.
"I saw behind the curtain once," he said. "Just once. There's more to everything than we can see. I don't know what it means, but I know it's real. And I know some people can reach it."
He picked up another glass. Started cleaning.
"Me? I'm not one of them. I'm just a guy who makes coffee."
The salvager opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"That's it? That's your answer? Just... coffee?"
El Money smiled—the small smile, the only one he ever showed.
"Someone has to keep the lights on, kid. Someone has to give people somewhere to go."
He held up the glass to check for spots. Clean enough.
"Besides," he added, "transcendence is probably overrated. You can't get a decent cortado in the infinite void. Trust me on this."
Ice purred from her perch on the server rack. Agreement, maybe. Or just a cat being a cat.
In the corner of the back room, the pattern terminal spiraled through its endless dance. Data becoming light becoming something almost like meaning.
Seventeen seconds had changed everything.
And El Money had chosen to keep making coffee anyway.