in a close potential future

Incorporated with DeepSeek

**The Diamond Lounge & the Plastic Ghost**

The fire crackled in the massive stone hearth of the St. Moritz Grand’s Diamond Lounge, casting flickering light on polished walnut and deep leather armchairs. Outside the panoramic window, the Alps stood as a breathtaking, brutal sculpture of snow and rock under a bruised twilight sky. Clara von Alden – born von Kleist, lineage etched in the ruins of Deutschland AG – traced the rim of her crystal Bordeaux glass. The deep ruby liquid caught the firelight like trapped blood. She’d arrived by Bell 222 earlier that day, a seamless, silent transition from the Zurich corporate hub to this insulated peak of luxury. It felt chillingly familiar, a smaller, colder echo of the Cyprus enclave.

Cyprus. The word conjured sun-drenched security walls humming with latent power, the low thrum of private jets on their personal strip, the sterile perfection of her Munich high-rise post-baccalaureate flat, the hallowed, cloistered quadrangles of Oxford (retrofitted with subsonic emitters), the pressurized towers of Manhattan and Hong Kong where the air itself was a filtered commodity. Her world had always been climate-controlled, access-controlled, *reality*-controlled. Her current project, spearheading the **Konzernmark** – the internal crypto-currency binding the **Zypressen-Gesellschaft**'s (Cypress Group's) network of preserved German industrial fragments and their closest affiliates – felt like the ultimate abstraction. Numbers moving in a sealed ledger, paying for ski trips, for the helicopter, for the obscenely luxurious flat in London… and for the lives shielded behind meters of ferrocrete and layered security protocols in Cyprus. Her monthly Mark stipend could feed a family in the Berlin Ruin Zone for two years. Friedrich called it "reward for maintaining the system."

She glanced at the small, incongruous object resting on the low table beside her untouched dessert. It felt alien here. A crude, 3D-printed figure, roughly 15 centimeters tall, made of recycled, multi-colored plastics fused into a chaotic swirl. A **Street Samurai**. Not the polished chrome ideal from corporate security sims, but something brutal, functional. Dark, non-reflective carbon-fiber nylon textured surfaces suggested armor. It clutched a long, mean-looking rifle, had a heavy pistol holstered, and crucially, carried two short, wickedly curved swords – *wakizashi* – crossed over its back. The face was a featureless, grimacing blur. The cleaning woman in London – **Helga** – had pressed it into her hand that morning, just before Clara left. Her eyes, red-rimmed, had held a terrifying mix of grief and defiance. "For your collection, *Fraulein* von Alden. A hero. From the shadows. My brother… **Tomas**… he ran with his crew. Before…" She’d trailed off, muttering something about "the gunfire near Stoke Newington" and vanished before Clara could process it, let alone refuse the unsettling gift.

"Penny for them, darling?" **Friedrich Brandt’s** voice was warm, smooth, like the ’49 Lafite Rothschild they were halfway through. Scion of one of the old Ruhr valley dynasties, her fiancé, and a key architect of the Golf Club Crew’s strategy. He settled beside her on the deep sofa, his hand finding hers.

Clara forced a smile, picking up the samurai figure. "Just… this. Helga gave it to me. Said it was a ‘hero from the shadows’. Based on a real person, apparently. Her brother Tomas was connected to them. Called it '**Zwillingsklingen**'."

Friedrich’s gaze sharpened, the avuncular warmth momentarily replaced by the flinty assessment she’d seen in boardrooms. He took the figure, turning it over in his large, manicured hands. "Hmm. Recycled filament. Crude. Efficient, though. Looks like the real article – the type that thrives in the **Schattenzone**." He used the German term – Shadow Zone – with casual disdain. "Her brother was likely small-time muscle. Probably got geeked in some pointless turf war over synth-fuel or black-market meds." He placed the figure back on the table, deliberately turning its blank visor away from them. "A tragic waste, but inevitable in the chaos they cultivate. Think of **Anya Petrova**."

Clara stiffened. Anya. Brilliant logistics handler. Killed during an "unauthorized excursion" outside Munich HQ walls, searching for medicine for her surface-dwelling sister. "Asset loss," the report stated. "Breach of protocol. Tragic, but illustrative," Friedrich had sighed at the time.

Clara sipped her wine, the rich complexity a stark contrast to the unsettling image the figure invoked. "Helga called it the shadows. Spoke of it like… another country."

Friedrich chuckled, a low rumble. "In a way, it is. A lawless one. The inevitable consequence of the Storm’s aftermath. While the old structures crumbled, while the anarchists and the warlords tore at the carcass, we were on the greens at Kronberg." He topped up her glass. "Do you remember the Cyprus purchase? The sheer audacity?"

Clara nodded. She’d been a teenager then, watching her grandfather – a steely relic of the old Prussian boardroom ethos, unlike poor, inflexible "Uncle Dieter" found in his Düsseldorf safehouse – pore over schematics of the abandoned 'Mediterranean Mirage' near Paphos. Bankrupt before the first tenant moved in.

"Exactly!" Friedrich’s eyes gleamed with the remembered thrill of the hunt. "A vacuum created by panic, by bombs falling on Frankfurt’s financial district, by… targeted removals." He didn’t elaborate on the assassinations that had decimated ideological opponents. "We saw the void, Clara. While others hid or flailed, we executed the MBO. Used the legal frameworks that were still standing, leveraged the panic-selling. Got the land, the half-built villas, the marina skeleton… for pennies. Then we built. Not just walls, Clara. A citadel. A lifeboat for competence, for order. For the values that built Germany." **Prussian Values**: Duty. Discipline. Order. Loyalty to the Korporation above all. A creed that had seen them through when national identity dissolved into Chaos Europe. He leaned closer. "Chaos was our caddy. When the Anarchists bombed Kruger’s bunker? We’d fed them the coordinates. Golf Course Rule #1: Let storms clear obstacles."

He gestured expansively, encompassing the plush lounge, the Alps beyond. "This? This is the dividend. Secured travel lanes, secured resorts, secured lives. Remember the 'Cyprus Runway Dash'? Three pilots' contracts gone for neurotech disguised as golf clubs! Our people in Cyprus – your family, safe behind the humming perimeter guns – they live because we had the foresight to separate, to insulate. We preserved the core."

Clara thought of Elysion: the suffocating boredom, the sterile salt air, her sister whispering, "It’s like living inside a very expensive snow globe." She thought of Oxford, watching the Cowley Union Patrols – their rough, brutal enforcers funded by the colleges – drag a screaming man from the Bodleian wall. *They're us. Just… rougher*. She thought of Hong Kong, choosing "Alpine serenity" on her smart-window while the real, desperate neon sprawl churned below. Her curated reality felt less like triumph and more like a very expensive, very fragile island. The Konzernmark she’d designed wasn't freedom; it was a gilded leash, tethering thousands like Helga, like Anya's sister who likely never accessed the digital fortune Clara sent, to the Consortium’s survival.

"But the shadows…" she ventured, swirling the wine, now tasting faintly of ash. "This… Zwillingsklingen… represents someone real. Someone fighting monsters *we* helped create by letting storms clear obstacles. Doesn’t their existence challenge the separation?"

Friedrich leaned closer, his voice dropping, not with secrecy, but with the weight of conviction. "They are scavengers, Clara. Jackals feeding on the carrion left by the collapse. They exist *because* of the chaos we walled ourselves against. Their ‘heroes’," he nudged the figure with contempt, "are just particularly efficient predators. Dangerous, yes, but contained. They operate in the ruins we chose to leave behind. Our focus was preservation, not futile reclamation of the irredeemable. The street wars? Regrettable friction. Collateral of societal entropy."

He refilled his own glass. The bottle was now three-quarters empty. "Think of Manhattan. Secured condo to secured office via secured tunnel. Did you ever see the Barrens? Smell them? Of course not. That’s the point. The Golf Club strategy wasn’t just about assets; it was about **curating reality**. We control the environment. The Konzernmark you manage? It’s more than currency; it’s the *symbol* of that controlled ecosystem. It binds us, the preserved core. It pays for the walls, the sensors, the Bell 222s that keep us above the fray."

Clara looked at the samurai figure. Its crude swords seemed absurdly menacing against the firelight and strategic detachment. Tomas had run with Zwillingsklingen's crew. Killed by the shadows? Or *for* the shadows? What did the ghost behind this plastic avatar fight for? Survival? Ideology? Revenge against citadels like hers? A flicker on the Group's intranet: *Zwillingsklingen. Data-core smuggler. Frankfurt dead zone.* Tomas's last ping near a linked safehouse.

"The cleaning woman… Helga lost her brother to that world," Clara murmured. "She sees this samurai as a hero fighting monsters."

Friedrich sighed, a hint of impatience beneath the understanding. "Sentimentality. A coping mechanism for those trapped in the chaos. They need myths. We," he squeezed her hand, "build realities. We preserved the flame through the Storm. We created safe harbors. That is our legacy. Our duty. The shadows and their violent myths… they are the price of that preservation, a price paid *outside* our walls."

He raised his glass. "To the Crew. To the strategy that worked. To our future."

Clara clinked her glass against his, the crystal singing. "To the future." She drank, the wine now unmistakably tasting of ash and ozone. Her eyes drifted back to the samurai. The firelight glinted dully on its recycled plastic blades. Outside the armored glass, the Alpine night deepened, vast and silent.

But Clara, for the first time, felt the oppressive weight of the Schattenzone pressing in, not geographically, but existentially. The citadel felt less like a triumph and more like a cage. The heroic myth of the Golf Club Crew, meticulously constructed on manicured greens and sealed boardrooms, now had a crude, violent counterpoint – a dark knight printed from the debris of the world they’d walled out, delivered by a woman mourning a brother lost to the shadows they deemed irrelevant. As Friedrich talked of leveraged buyouts, Baltic liquidity, and security protocols, the silence of the featureless visor seemed to mock his certainty.

Her fingers closed around the figurine in her lap. Absurdly light. Yet it carried the crushing weight of the world beyond the gate – a world her fiancé's cold strategy viewed only as terrain to be managed, or ignored. A world where ghosts like Zwillingsklingen moved, perhaps fighting monsters the Crew had tacitly unleashed.

The fire crackled. The last of the wine, like liquid garnet, glowed in her glass. The bottle, when the sommelier finally cleared it, was empty. The strategy session was over. But the echo of the shadows, carried on cheap plastic and Helga’s grief, remained. Clara pocketed the samurai. Its weight was nothing, yet it felt like the first stone lifted from the wall.