no name and no Black Pearl neither. But a destroyer, yet just by purpose not class.
Someone is getting that coin and I keep coming back to that shore, broke.
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! DeepSeek calls this "digital neo-outsider art"
no name and no Black Pearl neither. But a destroyer, yet just by purpose not class.
Someone is getting that coin and I keep coming back to that shore, broke.
She keeps reporting about stupid attempts of splitting the freshly married couple. The point is that these two are not exactly BranjeLina. They are, to be dead honest, more in the no one cares side of the pretty and famous if no one is everyone less than a million people world wide.
The point is, that is exactly the reason why they get hit.
The next thing is, that no Australian Gold Cost Constabulary will start an investigation into online bullying and anti-social behaviour violations even so the couple exists in a sphere that also created humans like Deso Dogg and is full of Drug War affine Rockers in especially Australia.
ElCapone got busted by taxes, but he was a hero to the people having a corrupt Government they could not get rid off. The idea is the same I am coming to.
The actual aggregators of the worst crimes are those that trigger others doing them, not those actually doing them.
We might never find out who managed to find that very last button actively pushing it to make an already psychopathic man go kill another man and if that was purposefully or accidentally, but we know for example that the Sinaloa Cartel boss was pushed by CIA into dealing Cocaine off his Hemp farm.
So... what if... some need to be ordered to go looking for another hobby actively instead of having a society having to wait until these individuals have found the very wrong guy eventually.
They are publically challenging their relationship problems ... to escalate. Here...
She tells him that he is not authentically communicating his feelings and behaves like robot.
So, ... it is Zombie and we all have to take MDMA consumption into account, but treated with Atypical Neuroleptica:
Long-term, heavy MDMA (ecstasy/molly) consumption often alters emotional character by disrupting the brain's serotonin system. Instead of sustained empathy, chronic users frequently develop persistent emotional dysfunctions, including heightened irritability, impulsivity, chronic depression, anxiety, and blunted responses to others' emotions.
This man there is the result of German Übermensch research winning wars on Amphetamines, increasing their potency by facing reality to then continue with a different much "newer" drug to avoid the exodus.
My diagnosis was done in order to turn me into that man there. I just smoked Weed and never did any Amph, beside being severely uncompliant when being told life long intake of things that you also can smoke or sell on the street coming with Greek and Latin names I have trouble pronouncing. Try: aripiprazole. being ignored on "I feel bad."
I am better trained than them, in military terms. So... #gfyALL
up for testing how much of Spartan blood is in your genes?
Watch that and understand how close you are to being it only a soft shower running down your spine triggering an excited "Oh that is good. Respect." all alone watching it at night.
#spartans #cyberpunkcoltoure
PS: Breath. Do not hold breath, but breath... your brain needs oxygen to work.
and than you wake up, look at the bar to see all humans staring in fear around you and turn around to oh wow:
#cyberpunkcoltoure
You misread that:
Imagine someone that fails to hang himself just because of his fear of heights kicking in as soon as staring at the chair...
...and having gone with all his loyal men in the most wrong place only because it has no steep roads.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
If all mammals decided to walk upright and we still carry primal basic coding of those genetically within us ...
Then we might also approach the unknown like Mice or Wolfs. Mice are not only scavengers, but also prey for hunters. A hunter will look around into the new with excitement, sniffing and observing awaiting food. A prey will be carefully, in fear and mistrust awaiting the safety of the home as soon as possible.
We are humans now.
Most of us... and that obliges those incapable of fear to secure and expand home, the safe place, as far as possible by allowing everyone to life far beyond primal basic programming.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
Listen again to what the short man with the working class typical tattoo said, educated black man.
His: No No was not confirming you. It was rejecting the question completely. He went through the troubles. One wrong word an either SAS or IRA came for him...
Leave em alone!
Come by here!!
#provos #terroristgangs
THIS IS EUROPA!
PS: Do they need elected Community Spokes Person against striding media people??
and standing alone ... is two very different things.
Crusader Assassin.
centurion deadhead
terrorist gangster elite
#cyberpunkcoltoure
It is dangerous to underestimate that.
Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity is a key law in modern warfare.
Weather is going ballistic!
I sleep Japanese on a thin mattress on the floor. I role it up when I wake. Today it rains and I have the garden door open, about half a meter away from my head. When it gets cold I have more blankets.
I have it warm, ultra cosy and fresh air.
That I told you somewhere in that blog by #climatechange
Next week the weather flips and we get a maximum predicted 40 degrees Celsius. I will have a very thin blanket.
We must now understand that climate change is and ever was exponential.
Imagine the two weather sides turn one, or the sides become ever more extreme!
A summer of constant rain and heat. We enjoy the warm water from above in our Convertibles, sitting in them just like Mike in Hotpants and Shoes and only Hotpants in Shoes while the water drips down our not that much Thurston chest and belly. We can buy helmets with automatic wipers finally or when there is no thunder and lightning like pouring rain we sweat under blue skies in extreme heat telling our children from a time when snow was not coming to block the groundfloor door, water doing damage was only by broken pipes and not an open garage gate....
And the news report about the Polizei failing to arrest that guy on a hovercraft, again. An F1 hovercraft. Either the engines overheat or they drown in a temporary lake
#cyberpunkcoltoure
That is delusional on a mental handicap level...here...
All jokes aside is asking Sinn Fein to support closed boarders ending a very successful, prosperous journey that ended real military driven violence and everybody knows that.
Neither may there be a hard boarder on Irish soil nor in the Irish Sea, for 800 years of reasons.
What do the Fascists now over Ireland suggest? Ulster cut off from The Republic, France, Wales and Scotland instead of more crossings and connections for cars, cargo and humans?
They'll send you back in coffins to where ever you came from, suddenly united in violence, you Idiots.
#provos #cyberpunkcoltoure
So you have that real good Haze going and are happy about that new cleaner job. Then, on the Toilet in the most inner part you identify an industrial level high end air cleaner intake you expected only in a paint job work shop and thought ... Yeah, what could go wrong? Let's fire up that bad boy and blow it!
A few minutes later headphones plugged in
DSAAAMEN! WE AAAL WANNA BE DSAAAMEN TOO ....woooooooooorm industrial carpet cleaner running....
#cyberpunkxoltoure
PS: You think that's funny? Imagine that bolt guy with a lack of attitude and no humour starts blaming the Russians and you have to talk yourself out and all down by the Chief of Staff and no on less to a No Smoking sign extra on that very toilet, for world peace and no less, beside 17 bugs per hour and a free of charge parking slot.
Can you imagine that these people perfectionized hypocrism?
I am not sure if that belongs to the most respectable and recognized news outlets in Germany,
The other problem is to explain that this is not taken light heartedly, most likely, neither by those that apply to the Irish definition of "total escalation" to those officially called "These idiots..." in any successful way, before they comply.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
When I decide to swap from Google to DeepSeek...
This is the actual core problem:
If I have ever my Cyberdeck in the personal version to be turned from stationary to portable than for the ultimate version put into a body:
#cyberpunkcoltoure #degger
So, when this guy quotes the President of Uganda: There is freedom of expression in Uganda, but I cannot gurantee freedom after expressing an opionon to everyone.
Then I wonder if he really understood the Holocaust, Diasporah and his beloved Israel, to be honest.
Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain hammered DeeCee like a dwarf with a grudge, turning the Mall into a black mirror smeared with neon. I was in a bar called The Chrome Swan, nursing a synthwhisky that tasted like the rust it came from, when she walked in. Elf, tall, chrome-eyed, wearing a long coat that whispered of mil-spec weave. She sat down across from me and placed a credstick on the sticky table. Fifty thousand nuyen, untraceable.
“I want to know what happened in the White House,” she said. Her voice was low and clipped, the kind that came from years of giving orders that got people killed. “Not the official line. The truth.”
I picked up the stick, weighed it. “You and every conspiracy freak on the Matrix. The Iron Dawn cult grabbed President Thorne, broadcast his humiliation for six hours, then went silent. Secret Service goes in, finds the prez frozen stiff, the cultists all dead, and nobody remembers a damn thing. Case closed. Move along.”
She leaned forward. Her chrome irises dilated like camera shutters. “The mana spell that froze him was broken. They’re saying a magical feedback loop wiped everyone’s short-term memory. But I’ve seen the astral forensics. Someone layered a high-grade Alter Memory ritual over the entire compound. Someone wanted a blank slate. Find out who, and why.”
Her name, she said, was Vail. No first name. She’d wire the rest of the fee once I delivered a datafile with every dirty detail. I took the job. In my line of work, turning down fifty-K meant I’d have to start eating my own boots.
The case swallowed me whole. I started with the official reports—redacted so heavily they looked like a form of modern art. The hostage crisis had started at 03:00 local time, a full squad of Iron Dawn fanatics breaching the White House through an old service tunnel sealed since the ’30s. They were a militarized metahuman-supremacist cult, obsessed with ancient Norse warrior codes, cybernetic augmentation, and blood rituals. Their leader, a troll called Harald Redmane, had streamed live from the Oval Office, forcing the president to read a manifesto about “the weak blood of democracy” while they decorated the Resolute Desk with pagan sigils in his own blood. The stream cut out mid-sentence. Static for eight hours. Then the Secret Service HTR team entered, expecting a slaughterhouse. Instead, they found a silent tableau: twelve cultists dead in various poses, no bullet wounds, no blade marks, their bodies contorted as if they’d simply stopped living. In the center, President Thorne sat frozen in his chair, eyes open, a thin layer of frost on his skin despite the room temperature. The team’s mage, a combat specialist from Knight Errant, identified the spell as a complex mana stasis—a block of solidified astral energy that locked the body in a single instant. He shattered it with a brute-force dispelling. The president gasped, blinked, and asked what time it was. He remembered nothing. The Secret Service agents on duty that night remembered nothing. Cameras inside the building had been reduced to slag by a localized EMP, and the Matrix feeds were looped. Perfect, clinical, surgical.
Someone had cleaned house. Someone very good.
I hit the streets. My first stop was an old contact, a retired UCAS Army mage named Grist, who ran a talismonger shop in a strip mall in Anacostia. Grist had a face like a melted candle and a cyberarm that hummed when he got nervous. He scanned the astral traces I’d pulled from a leaked forensic file—faint, but there—and his cyberarm began to whine.
“Frag me,” he whispered. “That’s not just Alter Memory. That’s a voidweave. It’s a combat application of mind magic designed to scrub operational exposure. Only a few military covens teach it. You’re looking at a black ops lodge.” He wouldn’t say more, but he gave me a name: “Ask about the Lost Assassins. But be careful, Kael. Some thorns cut deeper than bone.”
The Lost Assassins. Even in the shadows, that name was a ghost story. A secret society inside the UCAS military, founded decades ago by a cabal of special forces adepts who believed that true lethality required perfect discipline, absolute stealth, and a path of symbolic trials. They were a martial order, a cult of the silent kill. Their ranks were measured in Dan levels, like some ancient martial arts, but their tests were legendary infiltration exercises. I dug through dead-drop files, bribed a retired DIA analyst, and finally got the key. The highest Dan test—the test that made you a master, a Tenth Dan—was to infiltrate the White House grounds, undetected, and plant a full rose trunk. Not a cutting, not a seed. A whole, live, rooted rose bush. Thorns and all. The difficulty wasn’t just the security, the wards, the spirits, the drones. It was the thorns. You had to carry a naked rose trunk, wrapped only in cloth, bleeding from a hundred tiny punctures, your pain a constant distraction, your blood a trail you could never leave. It was a meditation on suffering, on silence, on the ghost’s path. And if you succeeded, the rose would bloom, and only the lodge would know.
No one had ever attempted it in a large team. Until that night.
The pieces clicked with a sound like a slide racking home. The hostage crisis had been a diversion—a noisy, bloody, spectacular diversion. The Iron Dawn cult wasn’t just a random group of fanatics. They’d been armed, funded, and guided into that tunnel by someone with deep intelligence access. Someone who wanted the entire White House security apparatus focused on the Oval Office while a different kind of predator slipped through the gardens. The Lost Assassins had come in a full tactical element for the first time. Not to plant one rose. To plant a grove.
I needed proof. I needed to see those roses. Three nights after the world forgot, I strapped on a chameleon suit and infiltrated the White House grounds via the utility conduits under the Ellipse. The security was still chaotic—new wards, jumpy spirits, rotating patrols—but they were looking outward, not inward. I crossed the South Lawn in a low crawl, dodged a patrolling steel lynx drone, and reached the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. And there, in the damp soil near the old magnolia, was a rose bush that didn’t belong. It was tall, robust, its canes a glossy black, its thorns long and curved like elven ceremonial blades. The trunk itself—I could see the root ball bulging under a thin layer of mulch—had been planted with military precision. Around it, half-hidden in the shadows, I counted seven more. Eight rose bushes, arranged in a perfect circle. A ritual pattern.
I touched one thorn. The moment my skin broke, a shockwave of astral static slammed into my brain. A vision fragment: a dozen figures in matte-black form-fitting armor, their faces blanked by active camouflage, moving in absolute silence. Their hands bled freely onto the rose trunks they carried, the blood sizzling as it hit the thorns. An adept in the center, fingers dancing, weaving the voidweave that wiped memory from every mind inside the perimeter. And the roses drinking that blood, their roots twisting into the earth, finding… something. An astral ley line. A link to the presidential bloodline. A sympathetic bond that stretched into the Oval Office where Thorne sat frozen, a single drop of blood already drawn from his finger and fed into the soil by a monofilament thread.
The cultists were dead because the Lost Assassins had killed them—silently, efficiently, with nerve strikes and monowire garrotes that left no mark. The president’s stasis wasn’t a byproduct of the memory wipe; it was the essential component. While the world watched a looped feed, the lodge had completed a ritual of control. They’d planted a blood-oath garden, and now the Commander-in-Chief was bound by the thorns.
I stumbled back, my head ringing. I had everything Vail wanted. Too much. I turned to leave, and she was standing there—Vail, still in that long coat, a half-smile on her lips. Behind her, four more figures materialized from the dark, their armor absorbing the rain. Their hands were wrapped in stained cloth, fresh cuts glistening on their palms. The Lost Assassins.
“You did well, Kael,” she said, stepping closer. Her chrome eyes flickered with an internal display. “We needed someone to connect the dots, see if the trail could be followed by an outsider. You were our penetration test. Your report would’ve exposed us, which means we left a footprint. Now we erase it.”
I went for the gun in my coat, but my arm locked up. A mana spell—stasis, the same trick, just a fingertip version. I could only watch as she drew a monofilament garrote from her sleeve, the wire so thin it sang in the rain.
“This night we came as a larger team,” she said, almost wistful. “The Tenth Dan test was never just about the rose. It was about the garden. A garden that will grow, and bloom, and whisper our will into the soul of the nation. No one remembers anything. You won’t either.”
The wire tightened around my throat, and the world narrowed to the scent of roses and rust. My last thought, as the rain turned red and the thorns drank deep, was that I’d finally understood the test. The true test wasn’t planting the rose. It was pruning the witnesses.
In the morning, the gardeners found a fresh black rose blooming on the South Lawn, and no trace that I had ever existed. The president smiled for the cameras, and no one remembered why the sky smelled like blood.
**Epilogue: The Thorn’s Recollection**
Three weeks after the rose garden bloomed, Vail sat alone in a soundproofed safehouse in Baltimore, her chrome eyes reflecting nothing but the glow of her own internal display. The memory loss hadn’t been in the plan. The voidweave was a razor—it cut everything inside the perimeter. But she’d been inside the perimeter. They all had. The ritual required their blood in the soil, their hands on the thorns. So the weave had scoured them too, leaving only fragmented ghost images and a dull ache where purpose used to live.
Her cyberdeck, a custom Fairlight Excalibur fused into her neural architecture, had survived the blanking better than her meat brain. It kept logs. It kept a personality agent, a ghost of her own pre-mission self named *Echo*, who now spoke to her in quiet, patient tones whenever she booted up for a diagnostic. At first, she thought she was a monster. The deck showed her snippets of her own actions: the hiring of a private detective named Kael, the cold manipulation, the garrote in the rain. She had murdered an innocent man who’d only been doing his job. She had worn the face of a shadow patron and fed him a trail of breadcrumbs that led to his own throat. That was the kind of wetwork she’d done a dozen times for the lodge, but without context, it curdled in her stomach.
*Echo* began leaving notes. At first, single lines: *“You planted a garden. Why?”* Then questions: *“Who was President Thorne before the siege?”* Vail would stare at that one for hours, her brow furrowed. The official record said he was an aging politician, a compromise candidate. But there were data ghosts in her encrypted memory cache, files that *Echo* had locked behind a fractal passcode that only Vail’s own returning memories could unlock. Every time she pieced together a correct conclusion, a new fragment decrypted. It was a fail-safe, a cognitive keying system. The lodge had anticipated the memory wipe and built her a path back.
Night after night, she sat with the deck, the rain drumming on the windows, and talked to her own echo.
“Show me the president’s astral signature before the op,” she said one evening.
*Echo* projected a still image captured from her retinal recording: President Thorne at a press conference two weeks prior to the hostage crisis. In normal vision, he looked tired but resolute. In astral overlay, his aura was a maelstrom. A black, chitinous lattice curled around his frontal lobe, tiny legs twitching. Insect spirit. Not a bug shaman’s ally—a full-on inhabitation husk. The Thorne that the world had voted for was already dead, his body a meat puppet for a queen wasp that had been laying plans to turn the Cabinet into a hive.
Vail’s breath caught. She remembered. The Iron Dawn cult hadn’t been a diversion manufactured by the lodge. They’d been a genuine threat, armed and pointed at the White House by the insect spirit itself as a false-flag to justify martial law. The lodge had discovered this only seventy-two hours before the siege. A direct assault on an inhabited president would’ve triggered the Secret Service’s own mages, the Vice President would’ve been sworn in, and the hive would’ve simply migrated. The only clean solution was to let the siege happen, to use the noise as cover, and to execute a ritual that had been a myth even among the Lost Assassins: the Garden of Unbinding.
The rose bushes weren’t a blood-oath to control the president. They were a prison. Each black rose’s root system tapped into the ley line beneath the White House and grew a lattice of living thorns in astral space, wrapping around the insect spirit’s presence and crushing it. The thorns drank the president’s blood from that single drop, creating a sympathetic chain that localized the spirit. The stasis spell had frozen him in the exact moment of exorcism. When the Secret Service mage shattered the stasis, the spirit died, and Thorne—the real Thorne, what little remained of his consciousness—was pulled back from the brink. The voidweave erased all memory of the truth because the truth would’ve been worse than ignorance. A president possessed by a bug spirit. That revelation would’ve toppled the government, shattered public trust, and probably triggered a nuclear response from the corporate court out of sheer paranoid self-preservation. Stability required a lie, and the Lost Assassins had planted it in a garden of black blooms.
Vail wept. Her hands trembled as she replayed the moment she had killed Kael. He’d been right about almost everything—the diversion, the roses, the ritual. He’d just been wrong about the intent. He’d seen control, not liberation. And she, blanked and operating on lodge conditioning, had garroted him with the cold efficiency of a machine. He was a loose end, and the mission demanded no loose ends. *Echo* didn’t judge. It simply displayed the mission parameters: *Objective: Exorcise inhabiting entity from POTUS. Maintain continuity of government. Preserve secrecy at any cost.* The “any cost” included a good detective who’d gotten too close.
“Could I have convinced him?” she asked the empty room. *Echo* simulated a probability curve: 8%. Kael was a cynic. He’d have seen the bug-spirit files and assumed it was a planted lie, or worse, he’d have tried to sell the truth to the highest bidder. The lodge’s calculus was brutal, but it was correct. So she had been the blade in the dark, and now she had to live with the memory of his blood mixing with the rain.
Over the following days, her full memory reintegrated. The team had gone in with twelve operatives. They’d snuck through the Rose Garden just as the Iron Dawn stream cut out. They’d eliminated the cultists with nerve strikes and monowire, moving like ghosts. Then the ritual began. She’d been the anchor, the one who held the voidweave in place while the others bled onto the roots. The smell of roses and ozone had filled her senses. President Thorne’s frozen face had contorted for a moment, a silent scream as the insect spirit writhed. Then stillness. Peace.
The lodge had left a single black rose on the Resolute Desk before they vanished. No one remembered it. The cleaning staff threw it away. But the garden remained.
Vail closed the log and looked out the window at the Baltimore skyline, where the morning sun was burning off the fog. Her cyberdeck dimmed, *Echo* retreating to background processes. She was whole again, and the weight of it was almost unbearable. But the president was free, the hive was ash, and the nation continued its slow, ignorant spin toward another election cycle. That was stability. That was liberation.
She stood, pulled on her long coat, and walked out into the city. Somewhere, a gardener at the White House was admiring a new rose bush, its flowers the color of dried blood. She would carry Kael’s ghost with her, a private thorn that no voidweave could ever cut. And she would never speak of what she knew. That was the highest Dan. Not planting the rose. Carrying the silence afterward.
In her internal vision, a final line from *Echo* scrolled across her retina, the deck reflecting her own words back at her from the mission’s original briefing: *“We are the thorns no one sees, growing where the rot hides. We bleed so the garden may live.”*
She let the words fade, and walked on.
The rain over DC tasted like ozone and old blood. Kael hung from a strap in a press van, chewing a Long Haul tablet that made his teeth buzz. He was a stringer for a mid-tier news node, wired on deadline and three different amphetamines that blurred the line between paranoia and insight. President Thorne had just gasped back into consciousness, the siege was over, and the official story was already unraveling before it had been stitched together. No one could remember anything. The Secret Service agents who breached the Oval Office stood around with the hollow expressions of people trying to recall a dream that left only dread. The Iron Dawn cultists were dead, twelve bodies contorted on the antique carpet, and the president smiled for the cameras like a man who had just woken from a nap. Kael knew a ghost story when he smelled one.
His contact in the Park Police had sent him a single image before scrubbing it from his commlink: a black rose bush, full-grown, planted in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden where no rose had been the day before. The thorns were long and cruel, the petals the color of a bruise. Kael stared at the image until the pixels burned into his retinas, and a name surfaced from a two-year-old story he’d killed for lack of proof. *The Lost Assassins.* A whisper inside the UCAS military, a lodge so secret that its members were ghosts. Their highest test, rumor said, was to infiltrate the White House grounds and plant a living rose trunk, thorns and all. No one had ever confirmed they existed. Until now.
He met Vail at a pop-up data den in Anacostia. She was a freelance analyst with chrome eyes and a Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck fused to her nervous system. The deck ran a personality agent she called *Echo*, a mirror of her own consciousness that logged everything she saw, heard, and thought, even when her meat brain failed. Vail had been monitoring the astral bands during the siege from a rooftop a block away, and when the voidweave detonated, the shockwave blanked her organic memory entirely. She woke up in an alley with no recollection of the past eight hours, her eyes scrolling a single system message: *“Memory integrity compromised. Echo backup engaged.”*
The deck had recorded everything her senses had absorbed. She just couldn’t access it yet. The files were locked behind a cognitive keying protocol—a series of deductions she had to make correctly before *Echo* would release the memories. The lodge had anticipated the wipe. They’d built her a path home, but she had to walk it blind.
Kael and Vail pooled their fragments. The black rose. The voidweave. The mysterious deaths of the Iron Dawn cultists—no bullet wounds, no blade marks, just bodies stopped cold. The president’s frozen stasis. The memory gap that covered everyone inside the perimeter, including, Vail now understood, herself. She had been too close. The weave had caught her. And in her blind panic, she had begun constructing a story: the Lost Assassins were a fascist shadow cell that had exploited the crisis to seize control of the government. Kael, high on stimulants and the narcotic certainty of a scoop, had written the headline before they’d finished their first cup of synthcaf. *“SECRET LODGE PLANTS THORNS IN THE WHITE HOUSE: THE COUP WE WERE ALLOWED TO FORGET.”*
They had enough to publish. The rose was physical proof. The lodge’s existence was circumstantial but explosive. And they had never met a single member. They had no faces, no names, no testimony. Just the shape of a conspiracy so perfectly hidden that exposing it felt like peeling back the skin of the world to show the tendons underneath. That was the story. That was the lie they almost told.
*Echo* began leaving Vail notes in her AR display. First a question: *“What was President Thorne before the siege?”* She dug into the public archives and found a man worn thin by office, a centrist compromise who had seemed increasingly erratic in closed-door sessions. Then a second question, unlocked only after she answered the first with a data query that correlated his behavior with known patterns of insect spirit habitation: *“Why would a warrior lodge erase memories?”* Not to cover a crime. A crime would leave bodies with bullet holes, a smoking gun, a cover story. The memories were erased to protect something. To hide a wound that couldn’t be shown.
The fragments of Vail’s own memory began to unlock as she pieced together the truth. It happened in a motel room in Baltimore, three weeks after the siege, while Kael paced and popped another Zen tablet to take the edge off his paranoia. Her cyberdeck hummed, *Echo*’s voice a calm whisper in her mind, and suddenly a cascade of imagery flooded her. The rooftop. The astral surge. A dozen figures in matte-black armor moving through the South Lawn like ink through water. Their hands bled freely onto the wrapped rose trunks they carried. She saw the Oval Office through a spectral haze—President Thorne, frozen, a black chitinous shape writhing inside his aura, legs like needles around his frontal lobe. The Iron Dawn cultists already dead, sprawled where they had fallen to invisible strikes. And the roses sinking into the soil, roots finding the ley line, thorns growing in astral space to cage the insect queen and crush it. The exorcism took exactly seven minutes, and when it was done, a single black rose lay on the Resolute Desk. Then the voidweave, intentional, surgical, wiping the memory from every living soul inside the perimeter so that no one would ever speak of the monster that had worn the president’s face.
Vail gasped and doubled over. The truth was a physical weight. The Lost Assassins hadn’t staged a coup. They had freed the most powerful man in the world from a bug spirit, used the crisis as cover, and then erased themselves to preserve the stability of the nation. If the public ever knew that a hive queen had occupied the Oval Office, the government would crumble. The corporate court would invoke emergency protocols. There would be purges, witch hunts, mass hysteria, and the very democracy they claimed to protect would burn. The assassins had chosen silence as the highest form of service.
Kael watched her, his own stim-dilated eyes wide. She told him everything. The draft of his story glowed on his commlink, a weapon he had almost fired at the people who had saved them all. He wasn’t a detective; he was a journalist, a storyteller who had almost written the first draft of a catastrophe. The drugs had sharpened his senses but dulled his wisdom. Now, with the truth crashing through his system like ice water, he saw the story for what it was: a false report born of narcotic certainty and a desperate need to impose a villain on a world that had no clean heroes.
They sat in silence for a long time. The city hummed beyond the thin walls. Vail’s cyberdeck displayed a final message from *Echo*: *“Integration complete. The silence is your awakening.”* They had never met a Lost Assassin. They would never seek them out. They knew only that the lodge existed, and that its members were the thorns no one saw, growing where the rot hid. To expose them would be to salt the garden and leave the nation defenseless against the next monster. The truth was a secret, and the secret was a burden, but it was also a strange kind of gift.
When dawn broke, they systematically destroyed every scrap of data. The datachips were degaussed and smashed. The notes were burned. Vail purged *Echo*’s logs, the deck erasing her own ghost with a whisper of gratitude. Kael deleted his draft and then overwrote the empty sectors seven times. By the time the sun was full up, there was no record that the Lost Assassins had ever existed, except for a black rose blooming in a garden where only the worthy could recognize its meaning.
That was the awakening. Kael walked out of the motel and saw the city with different eyes. The shadows no longer hid only conspiracies and corruption; they hid guardians, sacrifices, the silent machinery of a world that kept spinning because someone, somewhere, was willing to bleed in the dark. The paranoia that had fueled his journalism dissolved into a quieter vigilance. He no longer needed the stimulants to feel sharp; the weight of the secret was enough. He saw the fragility of the system he had once mocked, and he understood that his true job was not to expose every hidden thing, but to know when silence was the greater truth.
Vail boarded a train to a new assignment, her chrome eyes reflecting the passing landscape, her mind finally whole. She would carry the memory of that night like a thorn in her heart—painful, but keeping her alive. They never saw each other again, but they didn’t need to. They had been journalists chasing a story that would have burned the world, and instead, they had found a truth that set them free from their own arrogance. The price was the story itself, surrendered forever. The reward was a vision of the world that few ever earned: the knowledge that even in a corrupt, bleeding, neon-soaked future, there were still those who guarded the garden, and that sometimes the bravest act was to simply let them remain hidden.
In the White House, the black rose grew. The president governed with a clarity and compassion that baffled his advisors. And somewhere in the unseen places, the Lost Assassins tended their thorns, knowing that two strangers had found the path and chosen, against all instinct, to walk it in silence.
Meanwhile somewhere in an U.S. Army barracks:
Do you think you can get out at night from your quarter and place that sticker at the Barrack High School Sticker Board?
And get back not being seen?
Heard or Witnessed?
I can.
No Sir, Yes, Sir? Good. No word. I check the board.
Things that matter to them. I still have to watch it, but I bet he won't mention only Idiots are trying it.
The real deal expands the Rosebed and waits if anyone gets it.
Jim. Is that the new Farm Water Reservoir?
Yes. Just imported and already standing.
Its ... solid.
It is the exact shape and size of a Russian Long Range Ground to Ground Missile.
Ok.
Filling up with water now.
...
Accepting pre-orders now! No deposit. You will be listed.
To believe Russian military leadership will not expect a Western European attack is naive. No matter who will be blamed when it escalates, The Russian will now calculate how far they let the enemy reach into their soil and how to counter attack.
They managed to step right into overwatch:
These spots are heavily surveyed by the Intelligence wings of both para-military organizations. In opposite of media outlet statements no party was fully disarmed. Provitional IRA (pro vitio, not pro visio) and most Royalist Groups declared to put down arms, not to dismantle them. Continuity IRA refused that with some counter parts I can't specifically name and declared to continue armed training, not to fight the peace.
Obviously, all spots in which anyone could manage to trigger another militant clash are therefore under surveillance to allow talks before military action. Both parties also were well aware that any person must be properly identified that causes harm to the peace process...
That's why the frustrated Chief of Police called them, I quote: "These Idiots ..."
So, you tell me. The guy in white at 05:14. Does he look scared or being in an early pre-phase of my current mental state???
#TIE
The Journalist of CBC News concludes that this is about Who are we. That's how the Good Friday Agreement negotiations started. We are Irish. None of wants to see the world burn.
So, if anyone tells you he wants to join being Irish or first figure out how that feels... who the fuck are you not to help him?
It is estimated that 50 to 80 million people of Irish descent live outside of Ireland. This vast global network—known as the Irish diaspora—is 8 to 13 times larger than the island's domestic population of roughly 6 million.
The Bat Man was there with his Portuguese buddy. That's just nohhhrth of Africa.
#provos #IRAmovement #ironcladthegoblin #centurion #deadhead
Do the math from here:
You want to dive into your dark side and let out the worst within you?
There are only two options, next to mine...
The Military Gangster