Lena raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who said it was a poem.”

But Lena wasn’t smiling. She pointed at the screen. The map had glitched. For a single, horrifying second, the display didn’t show roads. It showed a heat-map of data density: Paris glowing red, Brussels pulsing orange, and between them, entire countries rendered as gray, featureless voids. The had drawn a continent of attention , not of land. If a place wasn’t important enough to store, it didn’t exist.

The next morning, he popped the SD card out. He handed it to Lena.

Martin, a cartography PhD student, had little interest in the device for navigation. He was obsessed with how it thought.

“It’s a data ghost,” Martin whispered, fascinated. “The map is lying to us because it’s cheaper to tell a lie than store the truth.”

For two hours, they drove by dead reckoning, the TomTom flashing a desperate red ‘?’ over its frozen blue arrow. Lena wanted to turn back. Martin insisted they push forward. He had a theory: if they kept heading southwest, the device’s -polygon model of major roads would eventually reassert itself.

He realized what the numbers really meant.