Join me for this week’s live reading of Chapter 4 of The Midas Protocol, titled “Auspicious Occasions.”
The Midas Protocol · Recorded live August 30, 2026
It’s the last workday of 1989, and Hank Raglan is stuck at Unalco World Headquarters while most of Pittsburgh is already mentally checked out for New Year’s. His career may finally be moving in the right direction, but his personal life is another story. Enter Benny Laws—Hank’s smart-mouthed coworker, office gossip, and lunch companion—who is more than happy to point out the obvious: Hank has a serious thing for Addison Moore. What begins as a quiet end-of-the-year office day turns into a character-driven chapter about friendship, attraction, ambition, and the strange feeling that life may be about to change. Hank and Benny leave the nearly empty Unalco offices, cross the Sixth Street Bridge, and head to Fu Ling for Chinese food, bad jokes, playoff talk, and one particularly memorable fortune cookie.
But the chapter also quietly keeps the larger machinery of The Midas Files moving. Before Hank and Benny leave Unalco, Hank spots Addison ascending toward the executive floor with CFO Connor Wallrose and a group of corporate guests. Among them is a tall, unnervingly observant consultant Hank has seen around the building before. Readers already know him. Mortimer Vanterpool. Hank does not. That brief moment places Hank remarkably close to one of the most dangerous figures in the series without either man truly entering the other’s story yet. At Fu Ling, the chapter settles into something more personal.
Hank admits that he wishes Addison liked him, Benny pushes him to finally ask her out, and a fortune-cookie joke hides a surprisingly important message: “You cannot love life, until you love the life you live.” For Hank, standing at the edge of a new decade, that advice may be more relevant than he realizes. After the reading, I’ll talk a little about the Pittsburgh setting, Hank and Benny’s friendship, the early stages of Hank’s attraction to Addison, and how an apparently lighthearted lunch scene quietly places several important pieces of the larger story onto the board.
About the Author
Matt De Reno
Matt De Reno is the author of The Midas Files, a Pittsburgh-rooted science-fiction thriller series exploring UFOs, secret histories, ancient technology, and the occasional problem caused by reality folding in on itself. In The Scratching Post, he writes about the creative life behind the books—storytelling, indie publishing, AI experiments, live readings, works in progress, and whatever strange idea has wandered into his notebook that week. Email him at
