Chapter 23: The Protocol, Released

He drafted it himself.

No communications team, no legal review, no preliminary call with Bedivere. He sat in the conference room at Camelot at seven-fifteen on Friday morning with the door closed and a cup of coffee going cold beside his laptop, and he wrote the announcement the way he had written the original Excalibur white paper eleven years ago: in one sitting, without looking up, the words coming out in the order they needed to come out.

The room had a whiteboard along one wall with the remnants of someone's architecture diagram still on it from earlier in the week, arrows and boxes and a label in red that said OPEN QUESTION. He had not erased it. He found it clarifying.