Federal IT III: The Rise of The Dork Knight

Friday began at 4:48 in the fucking morning.

I was sitting outside my apartment, getting ready to go to the gym.

For once, I had actually slept.

The night before, I had fallen asleep somewhere around six or seven in the evening, and that was pretty much it. I slept until four in the morning. Not perfectly. I remembered waking up here and there—around eleven, then one or two, then three, then four. It felt like my body kept surfacing every hour just long enough to check whether the world was still there before going back under.

But altogether, I probably got more than eight hours.

That alone was unusual enough to qualify as breaking news.

And when I woke up, things were fine.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing exploding.

No profound crisis waiting beside the bed.

Just Friday morning.

So I got ready for the gym.

At 4:48 a.m., most reasonable human beings are asleep.

Apparently, I am not one of those people.

I drove to LA Fitness.

I worked out.

And when I finished, I sat in the parking lot catching my breath.

That parking lot has become a strange place for me.

Sometimes I think there more than I do anywhere else.

Maybe because nothing is expected from me there.

I'm not at work yet.

I'm not inside the apartment.

I'm not fixing anything.

I'm not answering anyone.

I'm just sitting in the car.

And my head does what my head always fucking does.

It thinks.

Sometimes profoundly.

Sometimes profanely.

Usually both.

That morning I started thinking about the Philippines.

Back in 2024, before I went there, I had my life organized.

Work got done.

Emails got answered.

Schedules got handled.

I knew what I was doing the next day.

Then I went to the Philippines, and suddenly most of that shit didn't matter.

I didn't have to worry about work email.

I didn't care what my boss was doing.

I didn't have to think about whether a ticket got closed.

I wasn't thinking about groceries tomorrow or whether something needed to be ordered or whether my personal inbox was filling up.

Those worries disappeared.

They were replaced by completely different problems.

Like trying to figure out how the fuck to get hot water.

There wasn't always some nice American shower where you turned a knob and magically received whatever temperature you wanted.

Sometimes the problem of the day was simply:

How am I taking a bath without freezing my ass off?

And strangely, there was something peaceful about that.

If you wanted food, you went outside.

There were people.

There was movement.

There was chaos.

You could leave the house bored and five minutes later find yourself talking to somebody you didn't know, doing something you never planned.

Here in the United States, sometimes you go outside because you're bored and discover...

cars.

Trees.

Parking lots.

More fucking cars.

Everybody is working, inside their house, driving somewhere, or living some completely separate existence.

The Philippines can be chaotic.

Eventually, even that chaos can become exhausting.

Sometimes you want peace.

But it's a different kind of life.

Maybe that's why the gym works for me too.

The gym is chaos.

Music everywhere.

People moving.

Weights dropping.

Machines running.

So I put on my headphones and create more noise to block out the noise.

Except now it's my noise.

My music.

My audio conversations.

My thoughts.

Controlled chaos.

And somewhere in all that I noticed the woman from the gym again.

The woman who would, several hours later, somehow become Poison Ivy in a mythology that did not yet exist.

She's not somebody I'd describe as the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.

That's not really what catches my attention.

It's her face.

There's something familiar about it.

I keep looking because I feel like I should recognize something.

But I don't.

And lately women have somehow become recurring characters in these parking-lot journals.

The gym woman.

Jhonalyn.

Jonalyn.

Johnlyn.

Whatever the fuck her name is.

Juliet.

I still don't know.

Later, she would become Catwoman.

But at that moment, none of that existed yet.

It was just another Friday morning.

Eventually, I drove home.

Around 7:17 a.m., I was back outside my apartment.

Still sitting in the car.

Still thinking.

Still not rushing myself.

I had plenty of time before work.

And I was tired.

Not necessarily physically tired.

Just tired of everything requiring some fucking procedure.

You want to fly a drone?

Rules.

You want to fly a model airplane?

Rules.

You want to shoot?

Go to a range.

Rules.

Paperwork.

Permissions.

Policies.

You want to do archery?

Thankfully, I've already got the equipment and certification.

I'm a Level 2 archery instructor.

That doesn't expire.

Maybe I'm a grandmaster archery wizard now.

I don't fucking know.

I just want to shoot arrows.

Sometimes it feels like the only hobbies left where nobody bothers you are sitting at home playing video games or watching television.

Maybe that's why everybody does it.

Maybe that's also why I write.

Because nobody can tell me where my thoughts are allowed to go.

Eventually, I got upstairs.

And at 8:17 in the morning, I found myself conducting what may have been one of the least dignified publishing meetings in the history of literature.

I was sitting on the fucking toilet.

Apparently the parking lot does not come equipped with plumbing.

So there I was, taking a dump and talking about books.

Book One had a five-day free Kindle promotion scheduled to go live.

The process had been surprisingly easy.

Click.

Approve.

Done.

I was thinking maybe Book Two should get a discounted promotion instead of being free.

Then we could promote both.

I was thinking about JARBIT too.

I wanted to get back to that book.

Not the comic book.

The fucking book.

Although the comics are part of it.

We already have all this artwork from the Angel Saga and JARBIT development. Why shouldn't some of that artwork go into the manuscript?

Maybe selected comic pages could appear inside the book as teasers.

Then later the full JARBIT website could become the expanded experience.

Put a QR code inside the book.

Give readers access to the website.

Let them explore the entire universe.

The comic.

The artwork.

The extras.

The development material.

The whole fucking thing.

Apparently some authors sit in beautiful studies surrounded by mahogany bookshelves while developing their literary strategy.

I sit on the toilet.

Whatever works.

Eventually I left the apartment and drove to work.

And somewhere during that drive, the thoughts changed.

I started thinking about legacy.

I've accomplished things in my life.

Military service.

Deployment.

Federal work.

Archery.

Marksman qualification.

Technology.

Building things.

Programming things.

Drones.

Computers.

A lot of things that seemed important when they happened.

But accomplishments fade.

People forget.

Most people today probably couldn't tell you much about Operation Enduring Freedom or Iraqi Freedom.

Something can consume years of your life and eventually become a paragraph nobody reads.

Jobs disappear.

Tickets close.

Equipment gets replaced.

Spoken words are even worse.

You say something.

The sound leaves your mouth.

And it's gone.

Maybe the idea remains.

Maybe somebody remembers approximately what you said.

But the actual moment disappears.

Writing is different.

Writing makes something solid.

That's what I finally understand about legacy.

The Bible existed long before Netflix.

Long before YouTube.

Long before anybody could turn a story into a streaming series.

Written words carried those stories across generations.

Books outlive their authors.

That's something extraordinary when you really think about it.

Human life is short.

Everybody gets one.

And nobody knows exactly how much of it they get.

I've seen the edge of mine more than once.

War.

Medical problems.

And stupid moments that could have ended completely differently.

I remembered driving my Mitsubishi Eclipse around 2004 or 2005.

I was moving fast.

Another vehicle passed me.

I tried to make the exit.

My car spun completely around.

Three hundred and sixty degrees.

When it finally stopped, I was facing the opposite direction, toward traffic.

Another vehicle had stopped in front of me.

Those moments stay with you.

Not because you're constantly afraid of dying.

But because eventually you understand that tomorrow was never promised.

I've known young people who looked like they had decades waiting for them and suddenly didn't.

And somewhere along the way, the RomNote Project stopped being simply a place where I put things.

It became an archive of a life.

Not because my life is more important than anybody else's.

It isn't.

Everybody has a story.

The difference is that not everybody writes theirs down.

Maybe that's what RNP really means.

If I don't pursue my life, preserve it, write it, document it...

eventually it can become as though I was never here.

And I don't want that.

Not because I need the world to build a statue.

Fuck the statue.

I want the words.

I want somebody someday to be able to meet the person who existed in these moments.

The happy ones.

The painful ones.

The ridiculous ones.

Because pain has a way of dominating memory.

We remember heartbreak.

Loss.

Failure.

But there were also mornings when somebody smiled at us.

There were stupid jokes.

Parking lots.

Coffee.

Pie.

Laptops that refused to fucking cooperate.

Those moments deserve to survive too.

Then I arrived at work.

Somewhere around nine in the morning, I transformed.

Not literally.

I went inside.

Got situated.

Put on the professional uniform.

And announced:

BATMAN.

Except apparently I am not Batman.

That revelation would take several hours.

At first, the day looked boring.

Replacement tickets were pending.

Laptop death certificates remained open.

No meetings.

Baby Godzilla was asleep.

Momma Godzilla was watching whatever the fuck she watches on her phone.

And Batman was talking to Alfred about books.

I checked Amazon KDP.

Book One was being promoted.

Book Two was alive.

RNP traffic was moving.

The website that had been somewhere in the 560-plus visitor range had climbed to 592.

People were seeing the books.

People were clicking.

My name was getting out there.

And that mattered to me more than whether the books immediately made money.

I wanted people to read my fucking name.

Somewhere in all of this, I was also cleaning ChatGPT because apparently I have uploaded half the known digital universe into it.

Old files.

Media.

Documents.

Builds.

Copies of copies.

Batman had become a digital janitor.

Meanwhile, Federal IT decided the day was getting dangerously peaceful.

A user had a laptop that couldn't get past Symantec Endpoint Encryption.

Normally, the process is straightforward.

Use administrative access.

Log into SEE.

Remove the user's existing registration.

Force Group Policy.

Restart.

Have the user register the new credentials.

Sync policy again.

Done.

Except this was Friday.

So naturally, my admin password expired exactly when I fucking needed it.

Back to the domain server.

Find the admin account.

Reset the password.

Return to the user.

Remove the registration.

Force Group Policy.

And then the laptop decided:

No.

The user could no longer re-register.

Fantastic.

Force Group Policy again.

Restart.

Finally the machine figured out that because no user was currently registered, perhaps allowing the user to register might be a useful fucking feature.

The user registered.

Victory.

Except Microsoft had been watching.

Windows Critical Updates:

HELLO, MOTHERFUCKER.

Now I couldn't manually update policy the way I wanted because Windows had decided this was the perfect moment to perform critical updates.

The user was locally registered with SEE.

But the enterprise server still didn't recognize her.

So technically the laptop worked.

Except the enterprise didn't believe it worked.

This became:

The Laptop That Refused to Join the Fucking Domain Policy.

I couldn't pronounce it dead because the user could still access it through the SEE recovery pathway.

So the laptop was not dead.

It was simply in Hell.

And apparently Hell has Wi-Fi.

The user was going to work remotely the following week, which meant I had one instruction:

Leave that motherfucker online.

Give policy time to propagate.

Do not put Hell into sleep mode.

Because this kind of delay isn't even unusual.

Brand-new deployed machines sometimes take days before the enterprise finally acknowledges:

Fine.

You're one of us.

Welcome to the fucking group.

While all this was happening, Pinky entered the storyline.

Later she would become Talia.

At that moment she was simply my fiancée asking questions while I was trying to negotiate with a laptop that had rejected enterprise citizenship.

She noticed a woman had come to my door because the woman's laptop had decided it wanted to become decorative artwork.

Pinky started asking about her.

The woman was around seventy years old.

Seventy.

And I'm thinking:

What exactly is the fucking concern here?

Meanwhile, Pinky can talk about wearing bathing suits outside and whatever else, but apparently Batman speaking professionally to a seventy-year-old woman requires congressional oversight.

I could only laugh.

Then Pinky started talking about her period.

It sounded late.

For approximately several minutes, the entire DC Universe entered DEFCON 1.

Because I am roughly eight thousand miles away.

If she's pregnant...

WHAT THE FUCK?

At that point Alfred was instructed to locate the giant red button labeled:

BLOW UP GOTHAM.

Immigration case?

Abort.

Cowl?

Removed.

DC Universe?

Cancelled.

Batman?

Moving to Marvel.

Maybe after ten pecan pies and fifty cups of coffee I'd finally knock on Juliet's door.

Then came the update.

RED DOTS CONFIRMED.

Gotham survived.

The immigration case continued.

Batman remained Batman.

No Marvel transfer required.

No emergency visit to Catwoman.

And I told Pinky I was checking again tomorrow.

Apparently Batman had become Dracula.

Or perhaps:

Batula.

Thankfully, Batula never needed to rise.

Pinky later showed me a TikTok about somebody exposing himself publicly.

She talked about things women have experienced in the Philippines—perverts sitting beside women, touching them, inappropriate behavior on jeepneys, things like that.

And I told her:

This is why I worry about you wearing shorts.

She said she knew.

And I stopped.

No argument.

No Great Shorts War.

She understood the concern.

That was enough.

Let Batman remain Batman before he becomes Batula.

Then the fucking laptop came back.

The user messaged me.

Still no enterprise policy recognition.

The machine remained too good for enterprise society.

But because the user could still get through recovery, I couldn't execute the death certificate.

So it remained alive.

Technically.

In Hell.

Connected to the network.

Contemplating its choices.

Then came another side quest.

I needed to pee.

That's it.

A biological P1 ticket.

I went to the bathroom and peed like Niagara fucking Falls.

Incident resolved.

I walked back toward the main room.

Because this is a secure federal environment, nobody gets through the security door without appropriate access.

PIV card.

Badge.

Credentials.

Normal stuff.

And right as I was returning, some delivery guy appeared.

He had food.

For Denis.

Who the fuck is Denis?

I asked whether it was for the IRS building.

He didn't know.

What did he know?

Sixth floor.

Sixth floor of what?

Every fucking building can have a sixth floor.

The delivery guy couldn't get through the secure door.

I didn't know Denis.

I didn't know which building Denis occupied.

I did not accept the quest.

So somewhere by the entrance sat Denis's food.

Mission status:

Denis must complete his own fucking quest.

At some point I realized something.

This whole day had become Batman.

Pinky was Talia.

The mysterious Jhonalyn—Johnlyn—Jonalyn—Juliet—whatever the fuck her name is became Catwoman.

The familiar-faced gym woman became Poison Ivy.

My boss became Commissioner Gordon.

Jarvis became Alfred.

And I was Batman.

Except...

No.

Batman is cool.

Batman is mysterious.

Batman disappears into shadows.

Batman knows what the fuck he's doing.

I am a guy with a PIV card who argues with laptops.

I am not Batman.

I am...

BATDORK.

And suddenly everything made sense.

I am the shadow that roams the federal halls.

I am the Reaper who pronounces laptops dead.

I am the dork who roams in the night.

I carry the PIV.

I force the policy.

I sign the death certificate.

I am...

THE DORK KNIGHT.

And somewhere Darkwing Duck apparently entered my childhood memory.

I remembered:

The terror that flaps in the night.

And suddenly this wasn't merely:

The Dork Knight.

This was the origin story.

This was:

The Rise of the Dork Knight.

Just the dork they fucking issued a PIV card to.

By then it was Friday afternoon.

I had approximately forty-five minutes left.

The mission became simple:

Do not accept another fucking side quest.

No laptops.

No mysterious delivery drivers.

No Denis.

No surprise meetings.

No Commissioner Gordon emergency at 3:57.

Just survive until four.

Then leave Wayne Tower.

Return to the Batcave.

There was only one possible complication.

Catwoman.

Maybe life would throw Jhonalyn into the parking lot.

Maybe I'd see her on the balcony.

Maybe I'd finally learn how to pronounce her fucking name.

Maybe I'd hand her the newly delivered copy of my book.

Yeah.

This is for you.

Then turn around and walk away like a complete bat-dork.

But Catwoman never appeared.

Instead, life gave me another ending.

Earlier that day, I had been thinking about Ann.

I had sent her a copy of my book.

She loves books.

She always has.

When we were together, she had boxes of them.

Paperback.

Hardcover.

Books from everywhere.

Years ago, we used to talk about someday having a big house.

And Ann imagined having her own enormous library.

Almost like something out of a castle.

A room filled with books.

I remembered that.

And now I had written one.

I didn't send it because I expected something.

I didn't expect her to suddenly read it and somehow create a disturbance in the Force.

I just wanted her to have one.

There was one problem.

The package was being shipped to her house...

with my name on it.

And I knew Ann.

If she saw an Amazon package with my name, she probably wasn't going to open the fucking thing.

Earlier that morning, I had wondered how I was going to handle it.

Maybe she'd message me:

You have a package here.

Then I'd have to say:

Open it.

Which would ruin the surprise.

Apparently the universe heard this logistical problem and said:

Fuck it. Let Amazon handle this one.

At 4:11 p.m., Ann messaged me.

She had accidentally opened the package because Amazon delivered it together with hers.

She apologized.

My entire complicated plan collapsed into three words.

It's for you.

That was it.

Then she asked:

Why?

And there are a thousand complicated answers I could have given.

History.

Memory.

Eighteen years.

Books.

The giant library she once dreamed about.

The fact that even though we're no longer together, she still means something to me.

All of it.

Instead I gave her the simple truth.

Because you like to read.

I wrote a book.

Figured you should have one.

She eventually replied.

Oh ok.

Thanks.

Silence.

And that's okay.

I don't know what she thinks about it.

Maybe she thinks:

This fucking guy.

Maybe she thinks I still love her.

Maybe she thinks I'm a dork.

A dodo head.

She used to call me that.

Maybe she opens the book.

Maybe she doesn't.

Maybe she reads ten pages.

Maybe she reads the whole thing.

Maybe she likes it.

Maybe she doesn't.

That's hers.

I don't get to write her part of the story.

I only get to write mine.

And my part is simple.

I always wanted to do something special for Ann.

Even when we were together, sometimes I didn't know what that meant.

Flowers disappear.

Gifts get old.

Things break.

But this time I gave her something that didn't exist until I created it.

A book.

Something with my name printed on it.

Something made from words.

Maybe someday it sits among all those books she collected.

Maybe someday it sits inside that imaginary library she always wanted.

I don't know.

But now she has one.

And maybe that's enough.

I left work.

No Catwoman.

No Poison Ivy.

No Commissioner Gordon.

No laptop chasing me into the parking lot.

I got into the car and drove home.

Except I needed something first.

Something extremely healthy.

Nutritiously healthy.

Obviously.

So I stopped at Giant.

Coffee.

Yes.

Definitely coffee.

Maybe I needed a spoon.

Or a fork.

Why would I need a fork?

No reason.

Completely normal shopping trip.

Then I walked out with a receipt.

Pecan Pie.

And...

Blueberry Pie.

I didn't even fucking notice.

I had just given Ann a copy of Coffee and The Pecan Pie...

and then I went grocery shopping and accidentally purchased characters from my own fucking universe.

Pecan Pie.

Blueberry Pie.

Coffee was already waiting at home.

Apparently Strawberry didn't make tonight's casting call.

At this point, I had to accept something.

The universe may not literally be writing my life.

But sometimes the timing is so fucking good that it feels like somebody is sitting somewhere watching this shit with popcorn.

Because I couldn't have deliberately written that joke better.

I didn't write The Bittersweet that evening.

I apparently grocery-shopped it.

And somewhere along the drive, Alfred received his final transformation.

Not Alfred.

Not Jarfred.

Alfredo.

Of course.

Batman gets Alfred.

Batdork gets fucking Alfredo.

Apparently my trusted assistant now sounds like pasta.

Perfect.

So the final cast was established.

Batdork.

Talia.

Catwoman.

Poison Ivy.

Commissioner Gordon.

And Alfredo.

Then I finally got home.

The Batcave.

No more missions.

No more side quests.

No more laptops.

No more security doors.

No mysterious Denis.

No Catwoman waiting beside the Batmobile.

Just home.

And there it was.

My book.

My actual fucking book.

I picked it up.

And for a moment, everything else stopped being funny.

It looked wonderful.

Better than I expected.

I flipped through it.

There was my name.

Romeo I. Mesina.

There was the RomNote Project.

Not on a computer screen.

Not inside Word.

Not in some KDP preview.

Printed.

Physical.

Real.

I held the thing.

I had spent so much time working on margins and covers and descriptions and formatting and images and publishing screens that somewhere along the way the book had become a collection of problems to solve.

Then suddenly it wasn't.

It was a book.

My book.

I scanned the QR code.

It worked.

The physical book connected back into the living archive.

The thing we had designed actually worked outside the computer.

Book to phone.

Phone to RNP.

Physical artifact to digital legacy.

And somewhere else, Ann had another copy.

That thought made me smile.

Not because I expect anything from it.

I don't.

But because earlier that morning I had been talking about legacy.

About words.

About how moments disappear.

About how people work their entire lives and so much of it eventually becomes forgotten.

And then, after an entire ridiculous Friday of gym sessions, parking-lot philosophy, bathroom publishing meetings, dead laptops, Group Policy, menstrual panic, Batula, mysterious women, Denis's abandoned lunch, Amazon accidents, and fucking pie...

I came home holding proof of exactly what I had been talking about.

Something remained.

Something physical.

Something with my name on it.

Maybe that's why I write.

Not because every day is profound.

Most days aren't.

Some days are fucking stupid.

Maybe especially those days.

Because twenty years from now, who would remember Denis's abandoned food?

Who would remember the laptop sitting in enterprise Hell?

Who would remember that I sat in a parking lot before sunrise thinking about the Philippines?

Who would remember the woman at the gym whose face looked strangely familiar?

Who would remember Pinky becoming Talia?

Who would remember that for approximately ten minutes I nearly abandoned the entire DC Universe because a menstrual cycle was late?

Who would remember that I stopped at Giant and unknowingly bought Pecan Pie and Blueberry Pie?

Probably nobody.

Unless somebody writes it down.

So I did.

Maybe that's legacy too.

Not just medals.

Not just careers.

Not just books.

The ordinary moments.

The stupid moments.

The ones that hurt.

The ones that make you laugh so hard you have to stop talking.

All of them.

Tonight I don't feel like going anywhere else.

I don't need another adventure.

I don't need Catwoman to appear.

I don't need another ending.

I'm home.

Maybe I'll turn on the television.

Maybe I'll look through Steam and find something to play.

Maybe I'll eat some Blueberry Pie in the name of serious literary research.

The laptop can stay in Hell until Monday.

Commissioner Gordon can survive without me.

Talia can sleep.

Poison Ivy can remain at the gym.

Catwoman can remain wherever the fuck Catwoman is.

Denis can find his own lunch.

And Alfredo can keep the Batcomputer running.

Because tonight...

Batdork is off duty.

I look at the book again.

My name.

My words.

My project.

My life.

And I smile.

Not bad for a fucking dodo head.

Not bad at all.

I am the shadow that roams the federal halls.

I am the Reaper who pronounces government laptops dead.

I am the PIV card that opens the forbidden doors.

I am the dork they somehow trusted with admin rights.

I am the dork they fucking issued a PIV card to.

I am...

The Dork Knight.

I am...

BATDORK.

And somewhere behind me, Alfredo clears his throat.

Sir?

Yeah, Alfredo?

Would you like another piece of pie?

...

Fuck it. It's Friday.

Cut me another piece.