Chapter 4: Merlin's Almanac

The models ran at 4:47 a.m., which was when Merlin ran them.

Not because the hour was strategic — though it was — but because at 4:47 a.m. the servers carried a different quality of silence, the kind that had nothing to do with noise and everything to do with competing minds. By nine o'clock, three hundred engineers would be thinking inside Camelot's infrastructure, their queries and commits and authentication handshakes creating a kind of cognitive weather that Merlin's instruments had to parse around. At 4:47 the building was empty except for the overnight security rotation and the soft mechanical breath of the cooling systems, and the models could breathe too.

He had not slept.