Montgomery Keene

Freelance investigator. Reluctant adult. Full-time pain in the algorithm.

Monty Keene is the kind of guy who reads scientific journals for fun, corrects the captions on museum plaques, and once hacked a smart thermostat out of sheer boredom (he claims it "started it"). He doesn’t trust machines that make decisions, people who like meetings, or anything described as "cutting-edge" without at least three footnotes.

Armed with a cracked tablet, a third-hand VPN, and an unholy alliance of spreadsheets and snack wrappers, Monty has a nose for patterns — especially the kind no one else notices. He’s deeply allergic to authority, suspicious of consensus, and has a long-standing feud with automated customer service systems. Robots are cool, he’ll tell you. Just not the ones watching you back.

He doesn’t work for anyone, but he’s got a knack for showing up just when the data starts misbehaving. Ask him what he’s investigating, and he’ll flash a grin and change the subject. Ask again, and you might get a five-hour monologue about behavioral anomalies in drone flight patterns that definitely weren’t weather-related.

Rachel calls him a liability. Monty prefers the term “independent asset.”

“Technically, no laws were broken. Morally? Also no. Probably.”