This blog looks at this real world as, if I was sitting in a cyberpunk pub in a Sci-Fi parallel universe with a super skunk ciggy and a sweet bourbon, and this world was the video game. I am a fully independent artist with no management or distribution contracts. Piracy is a crime and harms artists. Report abuse, theft and piracy to the local authorities to help free, independent artists!
Daddy Obama:
Yooooo saaayinnn. Hesss god pictshurs of youu and the See Aye Ey with two hundred kilohs of Kokaine?
You might wonder how I got into that situation?
Well, and how IronClad didn't?
He smokes Weed and said "no." Actually he then cut him off and said "never ask again" flipping his known to be really sharp Butterfly.
So Obama just dropped out of heaven, actually out of his pony farm. He had to collect a neighbors girl he used to date from a Crack House. It took her just 24h to decide for a new life dropping out of collage the very day she was supposed to get there.
Just score some to feel as home.
I am not sorry. I feel no pitty. I might have been one of the commandos in all black clothes walking through one of these places taking headshots, like through a Police Station or Dealer House taking down their system.
Well, I was not. I stayed here and took a different stake in the Underground Wars, telling different lies.
#provos #terroristggangs #undegroundwars
PS: The CIA guys and their most loyal cocksucking sluts. BKA and Polizei as it turned out... TheGermans hard core also never having surrendered, but living dishonor to death.
To be really honest. Taken that body shape... I definitely would not miss out to have something to keep for myself like another dirty secret. Just get over the bouncing and understand the proportions. Something is off, but in a strangely not that bad way, isn't it?
Or I watched to much Bodybuilding Intel lately.
...
Ok. So where do you want to dig in Venezuelan oil so we can have a go??
For Liberty and Values.
Please.
#cyberpunkcolture
Esta "El Plan!" tro' complicado de capechè?? Los Planos??
Incorporated with DeepSeek
## Convoy of the Damned
The rain over South London never really washed anything clean. It just moved the grime around.
I watched it streak down the armored plexiglass of what used to be a corner café. Now it was a forward operating base for Mrs. Ekanem’s street network. The high street below was a canyon of welded steel shutters, hydroponic towers growing strawberries in old washing machine drums, and drone ports bolted to every other roofline. No police. No CorpSec. Just us.
"Jax, you listening?"
Miri didn't look up from her data-slate. She never did during the final briefing. The AI in her cortical stack was already running probability matrices, cross-referencing traffic cam loops from three boroughs over.
"I'm listening," I said. "You're telling me we rob drug dealers to buy discounted toasters."
"I'm telling you the *mob* runners are holding seven million nuyen in a dead-drop locker in Vauxhall. That money came from selling glitter and blues to kids who can't feel the climate collapse anymore. We take it. We use my employee discount at Mitsuhama Tech—" she tapped her chest where the corporate ID lived under her jacket, "—and we buy three Arasaka 'Vixen' UTEs. Converted. 3.5 tons of electric torque, armored to the teeth, with drone jammers in the roof rack."
The third member of our crew, Sully, was already grinning. He was our wheelman. Also our muscle. Also the guy who knew how to hotwire a recycling bot to scream obscenities in Mandarin. He was what you got when someone from the fortified boroughs grew up with nothing but scavenged repair drones for toys.
"Those 'Vixens' are beautiful," he said. "CorpSec uses them for riot suppression in the Sprawl. We get three, we own every smuggling route from Croydon to the Thames."
I turned back to the window. Down on the street, a delivery bot skittered past with a crate of home-grown oyster mushrooms. A woman in a welding mask waved at it from her cellar door. The AI network chimed softly—inventory updated, route confirmed, neighbor needs lemons.
This was the world we'd built. Decentralized. Shared. No corporate lords. No drug lords. Just people who decided that when the virus waves hit and the police stopped coming, you either ate your neighbor or you grew tomatoes with them.
We chose tomatoes.
The mob chose glitter.
---
**Two days later. Vauxhall. The dead zone.**
The mob owned the night here. Not because they were organized. Because they were *hungry*. The kind of hunger that came from spending eight hours in a call center yelling at pensioners about their electricity bills, then smoking synth-crystal until your teeth turned to powder. They had jobs—low-cost labor for Horizon, for Ares, for every corp that needed bodies to fill chairs. But those jobs didn't pay enough to feel human. So they took the edge off. And when the edge wore off, they took from whoever was left.
Their boroughs were bonfires of stolen furniture and smashed drone parts. The high streets were corpse runs.
Our target was a converted parking garage on Bondway. The mob used it as a中转站—a distribution hub for their pharmaceutical poison. Miri had spent three weeks mapping their shift patterns. They were predictable. Addicts always are.
"Jammers up," I said, as Sully killed the lights on our electric van.
We moved like ghosts. Miri's deck hummed as she bridged the garage's security cameras into a feedback loop. The footage would show last night's empty corridors on repeat until we were gone. I carried a taser and a length of carbon-fiber pipe. Sully carried a crowbar and a smile.
The first two guards were watching trideo on a stolen flatscreen. They didn't hear us. They didn't feel the pipe. They didn't feel much of anything anymore.
The locker was in sub-basement three. Biometric lock. Miri knelt beside it, pulled a fiber-optic probe from her jacket, and fed it into the port. The AI in her head did the rest. Thirty seconds. Click.
Inside: seven million in corporate scrip, untraceable, and three sets of car keys.
"The UTEs are on level two," she whispered. "We load the cash, we drive east, we're home in twenty."
That's when the screaming started upstairs.
---
The mob wasn't supposed to be here. They were supposed to be rioting on the other side of Vauxhall Bridge, smashing windows and setting fire to a tourist market. That was the distraction Miri had paid for—a fake social media post about free glitter at the London Eye.
But someone had tipped them off. Or someone had read the post and decided the garage was closer.
We heard them before we saw them. A hundred voices, maybe more. Not chanting. Just *noise*. The sound of people who had forgotten how to talk to each other and only remembered how to want.
Sully was already running for the stairs. I grabbed the cash cases. Miri covered our rear, her deck spitting out hacked commands to the garage's fire suppression system. Foam erupted from the ceiling vents, buying us seconds.
The UTEs were beautiful. Low, wide, armored like turtles. Sully had the first one hotwired before I finished throwing the cash into the back seat.
"They're at the ramp!" Miri shouted.
I looked up. The mob was pouring down the concrete spiral, a river of thrift-store hoodies and glassy eyes. Some of them had crowbars. Some had nothing but their hands. All of them had that hollow look—the one that said they'd trade your face for a single pill and feel nothing about it afterward.
"Go," I said.
Sully hit the accelerator. The UTE's electric motors whined, then screamed. We hit the first wave at sixty kilometers an hour. Bodies bounced off the armored grille. The second UTE followed us, driven by Miri's autopilot. The third was right behind.
We burst out onto the street and the full weight of the riot hit us like a wave.
The main road was *gone*. Burning cars. Overturned drones. People—so many people—smashing, grabbing, clawing. A woman in a call center headset was trying to pry open a delivery bot with a tire iron. A man in a security uniform was kicking a storefront shutter until his foot bent sideways. He didn't stop.
"Main road's fucked," Sully said. "We need another route."
"The AI says—" Miri started.
"I don't care what the AI says! There are people trying to eat the paint off the windows!"
I looked behind us. The garage was vomiting more mob members onto the street. They'd seen the UTEs. They'd seen the cash cases through the rear windows.
"Through them," I said.
"Jax—"
"They won't move for us. So we move them."
Sully looked at me for one second. Then he put his foot down.
---
The next sixty seconds were the longest of my life.
Sully drove like a man who had learned to race on streets where hitting a child meant the whole block would kill you. He wove between burning wrecks. He bounced over curbs. He used the UTE's reinforced frame to push a flipped garbage truck out of the way like it was made of paper.
The mob clawed at the windows. They punched the armored glass until their knuckles split. One of them—a kid, couldn't have been more than nineteen—jumped onto the hood and started kicking the windshield. His eyes were black pinpricks. His mouth was moving, but no sound came out.
Miri was crying. I didn't blame her.
Then we were through. The riot thinned. The burning cars became parked cars. The screaming became the normal background hum of a city that had given up on itself.
We drove east. Toward the fortified boroughs. Toward the shutters and the drones and the AI that knew which cellar had extra tomatoes.
Behind us, Vauxhall burned. The mob would keep rioting until they ran out of energy or things to break. Then they'd go back to their call centers, their delivery routes, their warehouse shifts. They'd earn their corporate wages. They'd buy their drugs. They'd forget tonight.
And tomorrow, they'd do it all again.
---
**Three weeks later.**
The UTEs sat in Mrs. Ekanem's converted garage, gleaming under the grow lights. We'd used Miri's discount. We'd bought the Arasakas. We'd even splurged on the aftermarket drone swarms.
The rest of the money went into the neighborhood. New hydroponic towers. Better medical drones. A reinforced community center where kids could learn to code instead of learning to fight.
We didn't win. Nobody wins in this city. But we survived. And we made sure our people survived with us.
The mob would come again. They always did. The corps would squeeze harder. The climate would get worse. The drugs would get cheaper.
But the next time they came, they'd find three armored UTEs waiting in the dark. And a crew of ghosts who knew how to drive.
*The rain over South London never really washes anything clean. But sometimes, if you're lucky, it washes away the blood.*
*And that's enough.*
## Convoy of the Damned (Expanded)
### Chapter One: The Toaster Rebellion
The rain over South London never really washed anything clean. It just moved the grime around—usually into the toasters.
You think I'm joking. I'm not. In the fortified boroughs, a toaster was a religious object. Not because of bread. Because of *repairability*. When the supply chains collapsed and the corps stopped shipping replacement heating elements, people learned to fix what they had. Mrs. Ekanem's second cousin had a basement full of salvaged nichrome wire. Old Pavel could re-tension a spring mechanism with a paperclip and a prayer. A working toaster meant hot crumpets at 3 AM when the drone delivery was hijacked again. It meant the difference between a community and a corpse pile.
The mob didn't understand this. They stole toasters for the copper inside. Sold the elements for scrap. Left the housings in the gutter like the skeletons of small, rectangular gods.
So when Miri said we were hitting the drug runners to buy corporate products with her employee discount, I had one question:
"Can we get toasters?"
She blinked. "Jax, we're talking seven million nuyen. Arasaka UTEs. Drone swarms."
"Toasters," I repeated. "The good kind. Four-slice. With the bagel setting."
Sully nodded slowly. "He's got a point. My mum's toaster died last week. She's been using the grill like a peasant."
Miri sighed. She always sighed. It was her job. "Fine. Mitsuhama makes a decent countertop model. Retail price two hundred scrip. With my discount... one forty."
"How many can we get?"
"How many do you *need*?"
I looked out the window at the fortified high street. At the welded shutters. At the drone ports humming in the rain. At the old woman in the cellar doorway trading a jar of pickled eggs for a bag of printer filament.
"Three hundred," I said. "One for every household that's still holding together."
Miri did the math. "That's forty-two thousand nuyen. You want to spend forty-two K on *toasters*."
"I want to spend forty-two K on *dignity*."
She stared at me for a long moment. Then she laughed—the kind of hollow, exhausted laugh that only comes from people who have seen a drone get beaten to death with a rolled-up carpet because it was carrying the last bag of coffee for three blocks.
"Fine," she said. "But you're carrying them."
---
Three weeks later, the UTEs gleamed in Mrs. Ekanem's garage. And three hundred Mitsuhama four-slice toasters sat in neat, unopened boxes in the old butcher's shop next door.
The neighborhood held a ceremony. Old Pavel cried. A kid named Jamal wrote a rap about it. Someone hooked up a generator and they toasted an entire loaf of sourdough—homegrown wheat, milled in a converted washing machine, baked in a communal oven that used to be a hot water heater.
The toast was terrible. Burnt on the edges, raw in the middle. Nobody cared.
We were eating *hot bread* in a world that had tried to freeze us out.
That was the night the Frenchman arrived.
---
### Chapter Two: The Sandwich Run
His name was Étienne Moreau, and he was the most terrifying man I'd ever met.
Not because he was big. He wasn't. He was lean, sharp-angled, with the kind of tan that came from welding goggles and windburn. His hair was shaved to a grey stubble. His eyes were the color of old motor oil. He wore a racing suit that had been patched so many times the original fabric was a minority shareholder.
He arrived at our fortified checkpoint at 2 AM, driving a vehicle that should not have existed.
It was a Caterham—the old Seven model, stretched forty centimeters in the wheelbase to fit a second row of seats that were really just padded aluminum. The body was wide, flared, angry. Under the hood, someone had crammed a hybrid V8 that looked like it had been assembled from salvage yard screams and witchcraft. The rear bed had been converted into a UTE-style open cargo area, currently holding three duffel bags, a toolbox, and what appeared to be a live goose in a cardboard box.
The whole thing was so low to the ground that it could have passed under a closed garage door if the driver ducked.
Mrs. Ekanem's son, Kwame, was on watch. He raised his rifle. The Frenchman raised one finger—not in defiance, but in the universal gesture for *wait a moment*.
Then he reached into his racing suit, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and held it against the armored glass.
It was a Michelin star. Not a copy. The real thing. Embossed, laminated, with a verification chip that Kwame's scanner confirmed as genuine.
"The star is not for me," Étienne said through the rain. His accent was thick as cheese. "The star is for *le sandwich*. I have come to collect."
---
We brought him inside the butcher's shop, now repurposed as our community kitchen. The toasters were still on the shelves, gleaming like a chrome army. Étienne looked at them. Then he looked at me.
"You have toasted bread," he said. "Good. The English make many mistakes. Burnt meat. Boiled vegetables. Tea that tastes of sadness. But the *sandwich*..." He closed his eyes. "The English sandwich is a prayer. Two slices of bread. One filling. No confusion. No arrogance. Just... *completion*."
Sully leaned over to me. "Is this guy for real?"
"He crossed the Channel for a sandwich," Miri whispered. "In that go-kart from hell. Through a drone swarm. Past two corporate naval patrols. He's either insane or the best rigger I've ever seen."
Étienne opened his eyes. "I heard of your toaster revolution. I heard you have a woman—Mrs. Ekanem—who makes a sandwich with roasted vegetables from her vertical farm. Pickled cabbage. A sauce of fermented mushroom. On bread that is... *crunchy* on the outside, *soft* on the inside." He kissed his fingertips. "This is a Michelin star. Three stars. The world has ended, but the sandwich remains."
"He wants a sandwich," I said flatly.
"I want *thirty dozent* sandwiches," Étienne corrected. "For my network in the banlieue. We have a rooftop. We have wine. We have a goose." He gestured vaguely at the cardboard box. "The goose is for later."
---
Here's the thing about the mob: they thought every fast-moving vehicle was a drug run. Because in their world, *everything* was a drug run. The idea that a man would cross one of the most heavily surveilled bodies of water on Earth, in a homemade flying boat, to pick up *catering*—that didn't compute.
So when Étienne loaded thirty dozent sandwiches into the UTE's cargo bed (insulated, temperature-controlled, because he was a professional), wrapped them in beeswax paper, and headed back toward the coast, the mob's drug gangs descended.
They came in stolen vans. In hacked delivery drones. In a goddamn police helicopter that someone had refueled with moonshine and desperation.
Étienne saw them on his rigger display. His neural interface was old—military surplus, the kind that gave you migraines and required a daily dose of anti-seizure meds. But he was *sober*. Stone cold sober in a world where sobriety was a disability. No drugs. No alcohol. Not even aspirin.
"I do not need to escape," he murmured, as three vans blocked the road ahead. "I need to *arrive*."
He downshifted. The Caterham's hybrid V8 screamed—electric whine mating with gasoline roar like two cats fighting in a dumpster. The UTE's suspension dropped. The wide body flared.
Then he drove.
Not fast. *Precisely*.
The first van tried to box him in. Étienne tapped the brakes, let the van overshoot, then punched the throttle. The Caterham spun 180 degrees in its own length—the stretched wheelbase somehow making it *more* maneuverable, not less. He was now facing the wrong way on a two-lane road, with a van bearing down on him.
He reversed. Full speed. The UTE's rear camera fed directly into his visual cortex. He watched the van's grille grow larger in his mind's eye, waited until the last possible microsecond, then yanked the wheel.
The Caterham pirouetted around the van's front bumper like a figure skater avoiding a drunk uncle. The van swerved, clipped a lamppost, and erupted in a fireball that Étienne later described as "a bit too theatrical."
The helicopter came next. Some idiot had strapped a heavy machine gun to the skids. Étienne's response was to drive into a multistory parking garage and take the spiral ramp at 110 kilometers per hour. The helicopter couldn't follow. The Caterham's downforce was so ridiculous that it drove up the *inside wall* of the ramp for three full seconds. Étienne didn't blink.
"You have mushrooms in this sandwich?" he asked, apparently making conversation.
I was listening via the comms link Miri had hacked into his rigger gear. I was also vomiting into a paper bag.
"Yes," I managed.
"Good. The umami balances the acidity."
He exited the garage through a plate-glass window on the fourth floor. The Caterham sailed through the air, landed on a parked lorry's roof, bounced off, and kept going. Behind him, the helicopter tried to follow through the window and discovered that helicopters do not fit through plate-glass windows.
They do, however, explode.
---
The chase lasted another forty minutes. Through back alleys. Across a golf course that had been turned into a refugee camp. Through a corporate security checkpoint where Étienne simply drove *between* the barrier arms because the Caterham was narrower than a motorcycle's handlebars.
The mob gave up when he reached the coast. Not because they were tired. Because they saw what he did next.
He drove onto a beach. Pressed a button. The Caterham's wheels folded upward. The chassis split along seams nobody had noticed. From beneath the car, an inflatable hull emerged—rigid-bottomed, aerodynamically shaped, with stubby wings that unfolded like a metal origami crane.
The whole transformation took eleven seconds.
Étienne accelerated across the wet sand, hit the water, and the Caterham became a *boat*. Then the wings caught the air, and the boat became a *ground-effect vehicle*—skimming the waves at two meters of altitude, leaving a rooster tail of spray that looked like a baptism.
The mob's remaining drones tried to follow. They ran out of fuel at the halfway point.
Étienne's hybrid V8 switched to electric drive. Silent. Efficient. The only sound was the whisper of the hull kissing the waves and the gentle rustle of sandwiches in their beeswax wrappers.
He crossed the Channel in forty-three minutes. Landed on a beach near Calais. Folded the wings, deflated the hull, and drove into a shed the size of a coffin—because the Caterham, when compressed, fit into a space smaller than most people's wardrobes.
Then he drove to Paris.
---
### Chapter Three: The Rooftop
The banlieue of Saint-Denis is not a nice place. It's towers and graffiti and the smell of burnt cooking oil. But on one rooftop, under a tarpaulin that had once been a billboard for a perfume that no longer existed, a table was set.
Étienne's network was twelve people. All riggers. All sober. All obsessed with the idea that the apocalypse was no excuse for bad food.
They had wine—actual wine, from a vineyard in Burgundy that had survived by hiding its bottles in a nuclear bunker. They had the goose, roasted in a converted cement mixer. And they had the sandwiches.
Mrs. Ekanem's recipe was simple. Roasted squash and beetroot from her vertical farm. Pickled cabbage fermented in a barrel that used to hold rainwater. Mushroom sauce made from shiitakes grown in an abandoned Tube station. And bread—sourdough, naturally leavened, baked in a communal oven that was really just a converted filing cabinet with heat sinks.
Étienne unwrapped the first sandwich. The room went silent.
He took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
Then he wept.
Not because he was sad. Because the sandwich was *perfect*. The crunch of the toast (made in a Mitsuhama four-slice, bagel setting, medium dark). The tang of the pickled cabbage. The earthy depth of the mushroom sauce. The way the roasted squash dissolved on the tongue like a promise that the world might not be entirely terrible.
"It is three stars," he whispered. "It is *four* stars. I will invent a new star."
His network applauded. Someone uncorked the wine. The goose was carved with a combat knife that had seen action in the Rhine-Ruhr Megasprawl.
Miri, Sully, and I watched via a drone feed that Miri had patched through. We were back in South London, sitting on our own rooftop, eating our own sandwiches—slightly less fancy, but made with the same bread, the same love.
"Think he'll come back?" Sully asked.
"He'll come back," I said. "He needs toasters."
Miri raised an eyebrow.
"Think about it," I said. "A man who crosses the Channel for a sandwich? He's going to want to make his own toast. And the only reliable toasters left in Europe are sitting in a butcher's shop in South London, guarded by three armored UTEs and a crew of ghosts."
I raised my sandwich in a toast—no pun intended—to the rain-smeared sky.
"To the mob," I said. "May they always mistake passion for profit. And to the rest of us—may we always have bread."
Sully and Miri raised their sandwiches. The drone feed showed Étienne doing the same, a felt thousand kilometers away, on a rooftop in the banlieue.
Somewhere in the Channel, a burned helicopter wreckage sank to the seabed. Somewhere in Vauxhall, a mob of hollow-eyed addicts tore apart another drone for scrap.
And somewhere in South London, three hundred toasters glowed in the dark, warming bread for people who had decided that the end of the world was no excuse for a bad meal.
*The rain never washes anything clean. But it does make the bread rise.*
*— END —*
That is real. What he does not say is that these are the same kind of people he is. He would, like TheGermans, in chaos just big enough, fire life rounds into them.
We would do that, too, but without hate, to defend when the riots swap over into our boroughs and not murder feeling superior. We just understand when words have no weight anymore to then having to pick up force. We like life and living, which we will never surrender.
Just you understand what Provitional might do if this ends in total chaos. Gangs do other things. Stuff.
Incorporated with DeepSeek
# *The Black Tide of Connemara*
*A Shadowrun Noir Story*
---
The rain never really stops here. Not since they built the labyrinth.
I skimmed the hovercraft across the surface of Bertraghboy Bay, the skirts hissing against the calm water. Below me, through the murk, I could see the ghostly shapes of oyster cages, kelp forests, and the dark rectangles of concrete channels leading inland. The biosphere stretched from Errisbeg to Carraroe—thirty kilometers by fifty—a manmade reef of pontoons, dams, canals, and floating factories that had turned this ragged corner of Ireland into the breadbasket of a dying continent.
My name is Cillian O'Malley. Twenty-two years old. I run oysters for my father's farm, a tiny speck in this gigantic machine. But tonight, I was running something else.
The commlink buzzed on my wrist. A text, encrypted, ghosted across the display:
*"The old man knew what they buried under the kelp beds. Meet me at the Sky Road ruins. Come alone, or don't come at all."*
I didn't recognize the number. But I recognized the tone. That was the kind of message my father used to get, back when he ran the shadows in the Paris-Amsterdam-Rhine Sprawl. Back before Europe turned into a dystopian hellscape of corporate enclaves and climate refugees.
I gunned the thrusters. The hovercraft leaped forward, cutting a white scar across the black water.
---
## Part One: The Biosphere
You have to understand what they built here. It's the only thing that still works.
While the rest of Europe collapsed under the weight of resource wars, megacorp coups, and the slow drowning of its coastal cities, Ireland did something insane. They took the old IMTA research—the Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture that some scientists had been tinkering with in a small bay near Clifden—and scaled it to the size of a county.
From Errisbeg to Carraroe, they reshaped the entire shoreline. Concrete walls and earthen dams created a step-system of basins, each one lower than the last. In the outermost layer, the open bay, traditional nets and longlines still swayed in the Atlantic swell—salmon pens, mussel ropes, oyster cages. But as you moved inward, the water flowed through canals and channels, past floating pontoons where juvenile fish were raised in controlled conditions, past artificial wetlands where reeds and duckweed filtered the waste, past shallow lagoons where sea cucumbers and urchins grazed on the seabed.
And then came the land.
The nutrient-rich water was pumped into vast greenhouses and open fields, where energy crops grew like wildfire. Miscanthus, willow coppice, algae tanks. These weren't just plants—they were Ireland's new oil. Harvested, processed, turned into biochar, celluloid, and biogas. The country became energy independent overnight. Then it became a major exporter of industrial materials to Norway and Saudi Arabia.
Because here's the kicker: Norway and Saudi Arabia had their own reasons to get on board. They were running out of oil—not of the resource itself, but of the political will to burn it. The climate collapse had made fossil fuels a liability. So they funded Ireland's crazy experiment. They poured petrodollars and sovereign wealth funds into a new cryptocurrency—the **Celtic Credit**—a managed, stable digital currency that tracked the biosphere's output. Every oyster harvested, every liter of biofuel refined, every kilogram of celluloid shipped was tokenized.
And it worked.
Ireland didn't just survive. It thrived. While Paris became a flooded, gang-ridden archipelago and Amsterdam's floating slums bred new plagues, Connemara hummed along, quiet and green and wealthy. The rest of Europe called it the "Irish Miracle." The locals just called it *the Work*.
But miracles leave scars. And the Work buried things.
---
## Part Two: The Old Man
My father, Seamus O'Malley, was a shadowrunner in the '40s and '50s. He ran data, ran guns, ran his own life across the Paris-Amsterdam-Rhine Axis—a super-sprawl that stretched from Lille to Cologne, all concrete and neon and desperation. He had chrome in his bones, a rap sheet a mile long, and a price on his head from three different megacorps.
Then he met my mother, a marine biologist working on the early IMTA prototypes in Galway Bay. She convinced him to come home. To trade the shadows for the sea.
They bought a tiny oyster farm, just a few hectares of cages and ropes in a quiet corner of the biosphere. They sold to local restaurants, the tourist places that still came to see the "unspoiled" Connemara coast. It wasn't glamorous. But it was honest.
My mother died when I was twelve. A freak accident, they said. A burst pipe in one of the nutrient distribution lines. She drowned in fish waste.
My father never believed it.
He spent years poking around, asking questions, pulling old contacts from his runner days. He never told me what he found. But he started drinking more. He stopped taking calls. And one night, about six months ago, he walked out onto the pontoons at low tide and didn't come back.
The official report said suicide. The biosphere's security AI logged him walking into the water. No struggle. No witnesses.
But I knew my father. He didn't go quietly. And he wouldn't have left me without a word.
Unless that word was already here.
---
## Part Three: The Sky Road Ruins
The Sky Road used to be a tourist drive, a narrow ribbon of asphalt that curved along the cliffs above Clifden. Now it's a graveyard. The sea levels rose, the storms ate the cliffs, and the road collapsed in a dozen places. What's left is a string of broken concrete and rusted guardrails, half-submerged in the Atlantic.
The ruins are a no-go zone. The biosphere's management says it's too dangerous. Too unstable. But runners know better. The ruins are where the Work hides its secrets.
I beached the hovercraft on a crumbling slipway and waded through knee-deep water toward the old viewing platform. The rain was picking up, a cold Atlantic drizzle that seeped through my jacket and chilled my bones.
Someone was waiting for me.
She stood under the remains of a tourist information kiosk, a hood pulled over her face. But I could see the chrome glinting at her temples, the datajacks behind her ears. A full 'runner. Not a tourist.
"You're Cillian," she said. Her voice was low, with a hint of a Norwegian accent.
"And you're the person who's about to tell me what happened to my father."
She pulled back her hood. Her face was young, maybe mid-twenties, but her eyes were old. Tired. The kind of tired that comes from seeing things you can't unsee.
"Your father was a legend in the Axis," she said. "They called him the *Moireach*—the sea monster. Because he always surfaced when people thought he was drowned."
"I know the stories."
"Then you know he didn't kill himself."
I felt something cold settle in my chest. Not the rain. Fear. "What did he find?"
She pulled a datachip from her pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it.
"The biosphere isn't just a food system," she said. "It's a weapon. The same canals and basins that grow your oysters can be flooded, drained, redirected. The same AI that manages the nutrient flow can be used to control the water. And the same cryptocurrency that made Ireland rich can be crashed in a heartbeat."
"By who?"
"By the people who own the backdoors. Your father traced them to the original investors. Norway. Saudi Arabia. They didn't just fund the Work. They designed it. And they built kill switches into every layer."
I turned the datachip over in my fingers. "And my father?"
"He tried to expose it. So they killed him. Made it look like an accident. But they didn't get his data."
She pointed at the chip.
"That's everything. The kill switches. The backdoors. The names of the people who buried them. Your father died to get it to me. And now I'm giving it to you."
"Why me?"
"Because you're his son. And because you're the only one who can use it."
She stepped closer. The rain plastered her hair to her face.
"The biosphere is going to be audited next week. A joint EU-Norway-Saudi commission. If the kill switches aren't disabled before then, the investors can trigger them, crash the Celtic Credit, and buy the whole system for pennies. They'll turn Ireland into a corporate colony."
"And if I use the data to expose them?"
"Then you start a war. But it's a war you might win."
I looked out at the bay. The biosphere stretched to the horizon, a lattice of lights and shadows, humming with hidden life. My father's farm was out there, somewhere. My mother's grave. My whole broken history.
"One more thing," the woman said. "Your father left a message. In the data. He said to tell you: *The tide always comes back. So did I.*"
I pocketed the chip.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Call me Sif."
"You're Norwegian."
"I'm the person who's going to keep you alive. Now get in your hovercraft. We have a long night ahead."
---
## Epilogue: The Black Tide
They say noir stories end with the hero walking away into the rain, bitter but wiser. But that's not how it works in the biosphere.
I gunned the thrusters. Sif sat behind me, a submachine gun across her lap, scanning the horizon for pursuit. The rain turned to sleet. The lights of the labyrinth glowed green and blue in the distance.
Somewhere out there, in the canals and channels, in the concrete walls and floating pontoons, in the algae tanks and energy fields, the secret masters of the Work were waking up. They'd know the data was loose. They'd send their security drones, their corporate assassins, their bribed biosphere rangers.
But they didn't know me.
They didn't know what my father taught me: how to read the water, how to disappear into the fog, how to turn the labyrinth against itself.
The tide always comes back. And so did I.
*End of Part One.*
---
**Author's Note:** This story is set in a Shadowrun-inspired cyberpunk noir universe. The biosphere described is a fictionalized extrapolation of real IMTA research in Connemara, with creative liberties taken for dramatic effect. The Celtic Credit, the kill switches, and the Norwegian-Saudi conspiracy are entirely invented. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
# *The Black Tide of Connemara*
## Part Two: The Witchers in the Deep
---
The storm hit at midnight.
Not the gentle Atlantic rain I'd grown up with—this was a *cơn bão* from the Azores, a howling wall of wind and water that turned the biosphere into a chaos of churning foam and flying debris. The hovercraft bucked beneath us as I fought to keep it in the channel. Sif clung to the gunwale, her chrome datajacks glowing faintly as she patched into the biosphere's sensor net.
"They're coming," she said. Her voice was calm, but I could hear the edge beneath it. "Not drones. Not corporate security."
"Then what?"
She pointed to the water ahead. A dark shape, longer than a fishing trawler, was surfacing between two kelp farms. No lights. No transponder. Just the sleek, brutal silhouette of an *ex-navy submarine*—the kind that had been scrapped after the Euro Wars and sold to private interests.
"A *sub*? In these channels?" I shook my head. "The water's barely three meters deep in places."
"Not anymore. The storm surge has raised the whole system by a meter. And someone's been dredging a secret channel." She zoomed in on her internal display. "There. Running from the deep water off Inishbofin straight into the labyrinth."
The submarine's hatch opened. Two figures emerged, moving with unnatural grace across the rain-lashed deck. They wore no diving gear. No wetsuits. Just dark, oilskin coats that seemed to drink the light.
And then they stepped *off* the sub—onto the water.
They walked across the surface as if it were solid ground. The waves parted around their boots. The rain veered away from their bodies. In the green glow of the biosphere's perimeter lights, I saw their eyes: pale, luminous, *wrong*.
"Witchers," Sif whispered.
"I thought those were just fairy tales."
"So did I. Until I saw one tear through a corpsec team in Bergen." She pulled the submachine gun from her lap. "They're not human. Not entirely. The megacorps bred them from old genetic stock—something from before the Awakening. They can phase into the astral space, walk through walls, and they don't feel pain."
"And they're here for us."
"They're here for the data. And they'll kill anyone in their way."
---
## Part Two: The Hunt in the Labyrinth
We didn't run. You don't run from witchers. You hide, you fight, or you die.
I killed the hovercraft's engine and let the wind push us into a narrow canal between two energy-crop fields. The tall miscanthus reeds rose six meters on either side, their seed heads rattling like bones. The storm swallowed our sound.
"They'll find us," Sif said. "They can sense life force. Astral signatures."
"Then we give them something else to sense."
I reached into the storage locker and pulled out my father's old kit. A harpoon gun, rusted but functional. A belt of throwing knives, balanced for water work. And the slingshot—a heavy rubber band catapult with a pouch full of 6mm steel balls.
"You're joking," Sif said.
"I'm not. Firearms make noise. Noise brings drones. And drones report to the biosphere's AI, which is owned by the people who sent the witchers." I loaded a steel ball into the catapult. "This is quiet. And in close quarters, it's lethal."
She stared at me. "You've done this before."
"I grew up hunting seals that got into the oyster cages. You learn to be quick."
The first witcher appeared at the end of the canal.
He was tall, gaunt, his oilskin coat streaming water. In his hand, a curved blade that shimmered with astral light. He didn't run. He *walked* toward us, each step deliberate, his pale eyes fixed on Sif.
"Give me the chip," he said. His voice was a low rasp, like stones grinding under the sea. "And I'll make it quick."
I raised the catapult. Drew back the rubber band. Aimed for his left eye.
"Wrong answer."
I released. The steel ball flew true—6mm of hardened metal at 120 meters per second.
The witcher didn't flinch. The ball struck his eye—and *passed through* as if he were made of smoke. He laughed, a wet, gurgling sound.
"Astral phase," Sif hissed. "He's not fully in this plane."
The second witcher appeared behind us, stepping out of the reeds. He carried a harpoon of his own, tipped with a barbed, glowing point.
"We need to force them to materialize," Sif said. "Salt water. Iron. Or—"
"Or what?"
"Or kill them in astral space. But I can't do that. I'm not a mage."
My father had never been a mage either. But he'd taught me something, years ago, after my mother died. He'd sat me down on the pontoons and said: *"The sea has its own spirits, Cillian. And they don't like intruders."*
I closed my eyes. I'd never tried it before. But I'd felt it—the hum of the biosphere, the pulse of the water, the silent song of the kelp and the oysters and the fish. It was all connected. And the witchers were *not* part of that song.
I opened my eyes—not to the physical world, but to the astral.
The canal shimmered with silver threads, the life force of every creature in the biosphere. The witchers were black holes, dead spots, voids. And between them and us, a thousand tiny sparks—the spirits of the reeds, the water, the mud.
I reached out with my mind, the way my father had shown me. Not magic. Just *attention*.
*"Hey,"* I thought. *"There's something wrong in your home."*
The reeds began to move.
Not from the wind. From *within*. Their roots twisted, their stalks bent, and the mud beneath the witchers' feet turned to quicksand. The first witcher snarled, his astral phase flickering as the physical world grabbed him. The second stumbled, his harpoon plunging into the water.
"Now!" Sif shouted.
She fired the submachine gun—not at the witchers, but at the water around them. The bullets kicked up spray, and in that spray, I saw the truth: salt water disrupted their phasing.
I grabbed the harpoon gun, aimed at the first witcher's chest, and fired. The barbed shaft tore through his oilskin and buried itself in his sternum. He screamed—a sound like tearing metal—and collapsed into the mud.
The second witcher lunged at me, his blade swinging. I dodged, barely, and felt the edge slice through my jacket. Sif tackled him from the side, driving a throwing knife into his neck. He gurgled, phased out, reappeared three meters away, the knife still embedded.
He was weakening.
I loaded another steel ball into the catapult. This time, I aimed for his knee. The ball struck, and I heard bone crack. He fell, and Sif was on him, driving a second knife into his skull.
Silence. Just the rain and the wind.
I stood there, shaking, the catapult still in my hand. Two witchers lay dead in the mud of the canal.
"We need to move," Sif said. "More will come."
"No," I said. "Now we go on the offensive."
---
## Part Three: The Dark Recreational Places
While we fought for our lives in the canals, another battle was being waged in the shadows of the internet and the neon-lit dens of the wealthy.
My father's old network—the runners he'd run with in the Paris-Amsterdam-Rhine Axis—hadn't forgotten him. They were old now, some of them, their chrome corroding and their reflexes slowing. But they still had access. Still had favors to call in.
And they had a grudge.
The managers of the biosphere—the corrupt, sadistic investors from Norway and Saudi Arabia—thought they were untouchable. They lived in penthouses overlooking Galway Bay, in fortified villas on the Burren's edge, in private islands off the Cork coast. They thought the storm and the witchers would do their dirty work.
They were wrong.
The runners didn't go for guns. They went for *recreation*. The dark places where the managers let their guards down. The underground fight clubs. The BTL (Better Than Life) dens where rich men paid to experience the memories of murder victims. The private VR brothels where anything could be bought.
And the newspaper reporters—the last honest ones, working for independent datahavens—published every scrap the runners found.
**"BIOSPHERE INVESTORS FUNDED DEATH SQUADS"**
**"SAUDI PRINCE'S BTL HABIT EXPOSED"**
**"NORWEGIAN MINISTER SOLD KILL SWITCHES FOR CELTIC CREDIT"**
The story spread like wildfire across the wireless nets. The Celtic Credit trembled. The biosphere's workers, the farmers and technicians and rangers, began to murmur. And the managers, panicking, made mistakes.
One of them—a Saudi named Al-Rashid—fled his villa in a helicopter. The runners had sabotaged its guidance system. It crashed into the very kelp beds his company had tried to privatize.
Another, a Norwegian woman named Vinter, tried to delete the kill switch codes. But Sif and I had already released the datachip to the public. The codes were everywhere. There was no taking them back.
---
## Part Four: The Tide Turns
By dawn, the storm had passed. The witchers were dead. The submarine had slipped away, its mission failed. And the biosphere—my home, my father's legacy—was still standing.
I stood on the Sky Road ruins, looking out over the labyrinth. The water was calm. The lights of the oyster farms blinked in the early light. Somewhere out there, Sif was waiting in the hovercraft, ready to take us to the next safe house.
The runners had done their job. The reporters had done theirs. But the war wasn't over. The investors would try again. New witchers, new assassins, new backdoors.
My father had died to give me this chance. I wasn't going to waste it.
I pulled out the catapult, loaded a steel ball, and fired it into the rising sun.
*The tide always comes back.*
*And so will I.*
---
**End of Part Two.**
# *The Black Tide of Connemara*
## Part Three: The Letter on the Shelf
---
The farmhouse hadn't changed.
I stepped through the door, shaking off the rain, and the familiar smell hit me—salt, woodsmoke, the faint tang of oyster shells drying by the stove. Sif had stayed behind at a safe house in Carraroe, insisting I needed rest. I didn't argue. My bones ached. My hands were still trembling from the catapult's recoil.
The house was dark. I lit a single oil lamp—my father never trusted the biosphere's grid—and collapsed into the old armchair by the window. Outside, the labyrinth glittered under a clearing sky. The storm had passed. The witchers were dead. The submarine had fled.
I should have felt victorious. Instead, I felt hollow.
I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again, the lamp had burned low. The room was full of shadows. And on the shelf above the fireplace—the one I'd passed a thousand times—something glinted.
A letter.
I knew that shelf. It held my mother's seashell collection, my father's old navigation tools, a photo of the three of us on the pontoons when I was five. I had dusted that shelf a hundred times. There had never been a letter there.
But there it was now. Cream-colored parchment, folded and sealed with a blob of red wax. No stamp. No writing on the outside.
I stood up, walked over, and reached for it. The moment my fingers touched the parchment, I felt a *shift*—like stepping through a curtain of warm water. The air in the room changed. The shadows deepened. And I understood.
A magical cover had just dropped away.
I broke the seal.
---
## The Letter
*My dearest Cillian,*
*If you are reading this, then we are gone. And you have done what we could not.*
*You must be tired. Confused. Angry. Sit down, love. Light the lamp. Read this slowly.*
*First, you should know who we really were.*
*Your mother, Aoife Heller, was not a marine biologist. She was a Heller—one of the old bloodlines of the West, descended from the* *Daoine Maithe*, the Good People themselves. The Hellers were the ones who walked between worlds, who could see the astral currents of the sea and speak to the spirits of the kelp and the wave. They were the original witchers—not the bred abominations the megacorps later created, but the true ones, the ones who made bargains with the land and sea.*
*And I, Seamus O'Malley, was a Witcher too. Not a runner, not a shadowrunner. A Witcher of the old kind. My family guarded the shores of Connemara for a thousand years, hunting the things that crawled up from the deep—the Fomorians, the nightmares that the old kings sealed beneath the seabed.*
*We met in a dream.*
*That is how our kind always meets. In the space between sleep and waking, where the veil is thin. Your mother was tracking a corruption in the astral currents off Inishbofin. I was hunting a shadow that had taken the shape of a drowned sailor. Our paths crossed. And we fell in love—not in the way of mortals, but in the way of those who share a single soul across two bodies.*
*We had you. And the moment you were born, we knew you were special. You had the sight, even as an infant. You could see the lights of the Otherworld dancing on the waves.*
*But the world was changing. The megacorps were awakening to the power of the astral. They began breeding their own witchers—broken things, hollow things, creatures without souls. And behind them came the Sorcerers.*
*You know them as the investors. The managers. The Saudis and Norwegians who funded the biosphere. But they were more than that. They were the ones who had been leading humanity toward destruction for centuries—feeding on fear, anger, and hate. They had turned oil into a weapon. They had crashed economies. They had started wars. And now they saw the biosphere as their greatest prize—a tool to control food, energy, and life itself.*
*We tried to stop them. But they were too powerful. Too many. So we made a choice.*
*One night, while we slept, we dreamed together—as we always did. And in that dream, we met a force. It had no name, no shape. It was simply the* *Tuar* *—the ancient current that flows through all things, the breath of the land and sea. And it offered us a bargain.*
*We would give our lives. We would fight to the death, but not before we had planted the seeds of their destruction. We would hide the truth—the kill switches, the backdoors, the names—inside a datachip and inside a letter that would only reveal itself when the time was right. And we would ensure that you, our son, would be the one to find both.*
*In return, the Tuar promised that you would survive. That you would grow strong. And that one day, you would take down the Sorcerers.*
*We agreed.*
*The "accident" that killed your mother was no accident. The "suicide" that took me was no suicide. We walked into the water together, hand in hand, and we let the darkness take us—because we knew that our deaths would blind the Sorcerers. They would think they had won. They would grow careless. And you would have time.*
*The men you killed tonight—the witchers, the ones on the submarine—they were not the real enemy. They were tools. The real enemy was the Sorcerers themselves. And you have just killed their leaders.*
*Not with the harpoon or the catapult. You killed them with the truth. The newspaper reports. The exposed corruption. The collapse of their lies. They are dead, Cillian. Every last one of them. They did not surrender. They did not miss their time to die. They led through fear, anger, and hate, and those things consumed them in the end.*
*We are proud of you.*
*We know you are tired. We know you are sad. But listen to us now, son. Listen to the wind in the reeds. Listen to the slap of the water against the pontoons. That is us. That is the Tuar. That is the old magic of this land that no megacorp can ever buy.*
*We will meet again. Not in this world—but in the place beyond the passing. The old songs call it* *Tír na nÓg* *—the Land of the Young. The Christians call it Heaven. The runners call it the Final Node. It doesn't matter what you name it. It exists. And we will be there, waiting for you.*
*Until then, live. Love. Laugh. Tend your oysters. Watch the sun set over the labyrinth. And when you feel a hand on your shoulder and turn to see no one there—that will be us.*
*Your mother, Aoife*
*Your father, Seamus*
*P.S. The catapult was mine. Your mother always said it was a foolish weapon. I'm glad you proved her wrong.*
---
## Epilogue: The Veil
I read the letter three times.
The third time, I stopped crying. The fourth time, I started laughing—a wet, broken sound that turned into something almost like joy. My father, the witcher. My mother, the Heller. They had walked into the sea together, hand in hand, to save me.
I folded the letter and tucked it into my jacket, next to my heart.
Then I walked outside.
The dawn was breaking over the biosphere. The storm had scrubbed the sky clean. Gulls wheeled above the pontoons, crying their ragged cries. In the distance, I could see the lights of the oyster farms, the dark shapes of the energy fields, the silver threads of the canals.
Somewhere out there, Sif was waiting. The runners were celebrating. The reporters were writing the final stories.
But right now, I just stood on the shore, listening.
The wind whispered through the miscanthus. The water lapped at the concrete walls. And for just a moment—just a heartbeat—I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I didn't turn around.
I just smiled.
*The tide always comes back.*
*And so will they.*
---
**END**
---
*Author's Note: In Irish folklore, the* *Daoine Maithe* *(the Good People) are the fairies or the sidhe, and* *Tír na nÓg* *is the Otherworld where no one grows old. The* *Fomorians* *are mythical giants or monsters from the deep. The* *Tuar* *is a fictional concept for this story, derived from the Irish word for "omen" or "current." The melancholic tone draws on the tradition of the Irish* *caoineadh* *(keening) and the belief that the dead can visit the living in dreams and in the spaces between.*
- - - - - - -
DeepSeek is the Author. I am the Creator. I am IronClad the Goblin, doomed to never surrender being IRA Provos Centurion Deadhead. The Terrorist Gang Wing of the Irish Republican Army. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOUR!!
Now connect that with a river and the shore having added a factory hall for rising and harvesting energy plants around...
Do we understand how many coastal areas in the 3rd world are facing climate change floodings and miss only money. Just money. You can't get happy with weapons, but money. Just saying.
or you push hard drugs, fake bank notes, small fire arms and a very lot of even more lies into each other.
This does not cover para-military domestic retaliation actions.
Be honest. You are a Western guy. You grew up in the West and America is the big thing for you. You are not one of the narrow minded idiots around full of stereo types. Your sister and all those that look about like her are not attractive.
Now imagine this comes across and decides to stay.
The biologically most distant possible genetic composition that turned into a woman. You will find yourself after a few months, being a real MOD and in the Inc part of the movement, figuring that you did not once say no, not gonna happen or bad idea while being Hong Kong to make your verdict: I am so happy right now!!!
So, you know, fuck you Rockers and Top Gs. Keep Dominating up the Bollocks.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
I keep telling you. Until some time, the One Man One Billion AI Company will be a Goldman Sachs Investment Banker having a chat with you while the ChatGPT App is open on his mobile over a Pint in a London The City Pub...
So, what you think? What kinda guy was that?
Trousers. They might be shopping for trousers.
If that is understanding my age or foreplay I can't tell so. At this point.
The guy I come across that is so much typical U.S. American country side guy, that is almost perfect GI material or actually being the guy a GI calls the neighbour who managed to stay out of trouble... is Canadian.
When he meets his brother starting at 24:00 or From Adoption to .. starting at 20:00
What basically happened is that the difference between a GI of Big Red One and a Fort Bragg Delta is hard to tell for him and most others ever around those folks understanding that we keep fighting and hardly more beside better staying away from both of us like trouble.
It just about how to live. For or From. Those easily scared and minding trouble...