“Three is very good, a very good number. Resilient. Almost impervious!”
“Five is good too, but so common and worn.”
He took a sip of the iced tea, a Morse ring of condensation left on the table in drips and dashes.
“Eight is nice… the whole Fibonacci series is very nice. Not like those powers of two, so soulless and bulky.” slowly shaking his head and gesturing to the skyscrapers on either side of the tiny garden, “like these.”
“Compound interest.”
“Going places…”
The quiet settled again and the birds overtook the traffic.
“Not to say that two isn’t a good number. He had humble beginnings. Fibonacci, you know.”
“11 is good.”
“Primes are good…”
“but lonely.”

I come in to the office abnormally early, my mood black as my nerdy t-shirt, a relic of a defunct corporate handout. The once flashy logo cracked and faded on the sleeve. My sleep, plagued by jittery dreams as if sourced from a scratched phonograph endlessly skipping back seconds to replay what would be my final act.
I am granted admittance through the act of swiping my ID, a near meaningless hi-tech sacrament repeated without reflection. I avoid the elevator and turn counter clockwise, winding up the stairs numbering each tread in my mind. 13 stairs to a flight, 2 flights to a floor, 5 floors to my level. I pace an additional 14 steps to the second carded gate I must pass. 144 paces in all. 12 squared, and the 13th Fibonacci number. I must pass this portal with more than a perfunctoral scan of my badge. I place my thumb on the altar of plastic, “I am me”.
With a tinny click corroborating my existence I push into the priory of geekdom. I’m not as old as some, but I remember a time when the pre-dawn glow would have been a greener monochrome. Out of the corner of my eye I see the sleeping monitors their surfaces reflectively dull and speckled with dust. I pass another old-timers cube, his monitors’ sleep function overridden and dancing with a simulated waterfall of Matrix code.
I turn counter-clockwise once more at the end of the aisle to my low-traffic station. My monitors alive and endlessly drawing and redrawing what would seem to be a layout of aged European cities. As I fall into my Aeron Chair the screens awake seemingly in anticipation. I drop my hands to the keyboard in another holy rite and my fingers affirm my password without the aid of thought.
For the first time I hesitate. I have little inkling what derangement led me to this juncture, but I find my inquisitiveness overrides all caution. Maybe it’s the endless knocking of near-do-wells and outlaws at my digital gates. Somehow I got the idea in my head that maybe there was more to the endless, mindless probing. Possibly it was one too many Laundry novels; some Pratchett predilection that posited the path I now undertake.
Many things are unnatural, and most have consequences. I begin my work of undoing to weaken the world. Opening an xterm I use secure shell to connect to another machine and invoke the virtual machine manager. The manager spawns a Windows minion in a new screen. Inside the virtual windows machine I call upon xming and SSH back to my desktop completing the unholy circle. Machine alerts begin to register in my task bar and I see the load begin to spike under a deluge of requests for admittance. I feel I can hear the nameless horrors I’m about to receive. One last command to type before my newly profaned processors perish. My hand hovers over the enter key…