Incorporated with DeepSeek
The Monaco harbor glittered like a spilled jewel box under the neon wash of the Monte-Carlo Grand Casino. Beneath the mega-yachts and hydrofoil ferries, however, in the labyrinth of service tunnels choked with algae and the faint, sweet-rot stench of casino waste pipes, lurked something else. Something sleek, dark, and profoundly uninterested in the gilded chaos above.
**The *Dragon’s Den*** rested silently on the seabed muck, a 40-meter shadow shaped like a predatory manta ray. Its hull, a fusion of stolen Saeder-Krupp acoustic tiles and military-grade Chobham armor, drank sonar pulses like a black hole swallows light. Up in the **"Crow’s Nest,"** a bubble cockpit currently retracted flush with the hull, the only light came from the amber glow of Manfred von Strahl’s cybereyes, reflecting the flickering streams of data projected onto the Augmented Reality windshield.
*"Smaug,"* Manfred sighed, the sound a dry rasp in the climate-controlled quiet. He didn’t turn his head, his gaze fixed on a split feed: a B-rated trid soap opera involving a genetically engineered kelp farmer and a corporate heiress, and the real-time stock ticker of Shiawase Atomics taking another nosedive after his latest ‘leak’. *"Any sign of those tiresome Shiawase goons Saito was blustering about?"*
A voice, rich with synthesized European ennui and the faint crackle of vintage circuitry, emanated from hidden speakers. **"Sensors remain clear, *Herr Drache*. Thermal signature negligible. Acoustic profile: ambient crustacean scuttling and the lamentable thump of surface-dweller ‘music’. If they possess vessels capable of detecting us, they are demonstrating remarkable restraint. Or incompetence. Likely both."**
Manfred grunted, shifting his weight on the centerpiece of his domain – the obscenely comfortable, blood-red **Evo Corp memory-foam sofa**, liberated during the Zurich riots. It cradled him like a lover. Around the **Central Gallery**, the **projection walls** pulsed with silent feeds: pirate radio chatter from the Ork Underground, a Renraku press conference denying everything, the hypnotic dance of global currency markets. **Renraku Tsunami** speakers, embedded in the 4.5-meter vaulted ceiling, played a low thrumming synthwave track. A solid gold ingot held open the hatch leading to the **Lower Decks**.
*"Restraint is boring, Smaug,"* Manfred muttered, sipping lukewarm synth-caf from a chipped mug. *"At least incompetence is mildly amusing. Like watching keystroke monkeys attempt ballet."* His gaze flicked to a glass case nearby, housing the **Sony CTY 360 Cyberdeck** – the ‘first’, a museum piece, a relic of a grittier, perhaps more honest, digital age. Under the glass case? A simple doorstop. Another gold ingot.
Below decks, the **"Nest" Garage** hummed with latent potential. His beloved, retro-fitted **Honda CB1300**, coated in Ruthenium polymer that could bend light and radar around it, sat poised on its ramp. Beside it, the **Escape Pod** hatch led directly to coastal bolt-holes like his bamboo hacker-hut in Bali. And deeper still, behind a biometric scanner disguised as a faulty pipe valve, the **"Dragon’s Vault"** thrummed – three server racks housing tools capable of cracking corporate heavens and archives of secrets that could burn down empires. Manfred found most secrets… tedious. Annoying executives, however, was a hobby.
*"Alert,"* Smaug’s voice cut through the synthwave, instantly shifting to a sharper, colder tone. The music died. The stock ticker vanished, replaced by multiple sonar feeds pulsing red. *"Three submerged signatures. Modified Barracuda-class mini-subs. Shiawase insignia. Approaching at high speed, weapons hot. They appear to have bypassed the outer sensor net. Clever monkeys. Annoying monkeys."*
Manfred didn’t sit up. He didn’t reach for the **Ares Paladin** hidden in the floor safe beneath a loose deck plate near the sofa. He merely sighed, a long-suffering exhalation. *"Ugh. Must they? I was just getting to the part where the kelp farmer discovers the heiress is actually a Deep Resonance entity."* His fingers danced across a virtual keyboard projected onto the armrest of the sofa. *"Smaug. Standard Unbothered Protocol, if you please. And order more synth-caf. This batch tastes like lubricant runoff."*
**"With sardonic pleasure, *Mein Herr*."**
Outside the *Den*, the water remained deceptively calm. The three Barracudas, sleek predators painted shark-grey, closed in, their manipulator arms replaced with mounted flechette cannons. Inside the lead sub, Commander Sato grinned, teeth white against his grimace. *"There! The acoustic anomaly! Von Strahl's rusting hideout! Prepare to breach and—"*
His words were swallowed by a sound that wasn't a sound. A deep, resonant *thrum* that bypassed the hull, bypassed armor, and vibrated directly through bone marrow. **Sonic emitters**, tuned to frequencies that scrambled the inner ear and induced immediate, crippling nausea, pulsed from the *Den*'s hull. Sato’s vision swam; his grip on the controls faltered as his stomach revolted. Through the viewport, he saw the other two Barracudas list drunkenly.
Before Sato could vomit or rally, concealed panels on the *Den* slid open. Fine mist jetted into the water, propelled by compressed gas. **Narcojet sprayers**. The fast-acting tranquilizer, designed to penetrate environmental seals at close range, clouded the water around the subs. Sato’s last conscious thought was the sight of the *Dragon’s Den* silently pivoting, its massive form displacing water with impossible grace, before darkness claimed him.
Inside the Gallery, Manfred watched the feeds. The subs drifted, lifeless. *"Smaug, be a dear. Tuck our uninvited guests into their little dinghies and set them adrift near the Coast Guard patrol route. Attach a note… ‘Gift from the Deep. Contains moderately toxic corporate refuse. Handle with gloves.’"*
**"Adding a postscript: ‘P.S. Your sonar algorithms are pathetic. Try harder next time. Or don’t. I prefer naps.’"** The sub’s powerful **Aztechnology cryo-engines** engaged silently, generating near-zero thermal signature as the *Den* began to move, utilizing **hydroplaning mode** to glide effortlessly just meters above the seabed on a cushion of compressed water.
*"Excellent,"* Manfred murmured, the amber glow of his eyes softening as the synthwave track resumed, washing over the projection walls. A small, sleek drone shaped like a corpulent cat detached itself from a charging nook near the Sony CTY display. **Klaus** floated up towards the vaulted ceiling, twin projectors in its eyes activating. Schools of shimmering, holographic fish began to swim across the artificial sky, casting dappled light onto the gold ingots and the priceless, useless cyberdeck under glass.
Manfred sank deeper into the memory foam, the world’s fires – corporate greed, petty vengeance, revolutions – fading into the background hum of servers and the gentle thrum of engines. The *Dragon’s Den* slipped deeper, leaving Monaco's glittering pollution behind, descending towards colder, darker, quieter waters.
*"Dragons hoard, Smaug,"* he murmured, his eyes drifting shut, the synthwave and the holographic fish his only companions. *"I just prefer… quiet."*
Far above, three narcojet-drenched mini-subs bobbed pathetically towards the Coast Guard, carrying unconscious corporate soldiers and a note dripping with disdain. Down below, where sonar couldn't reach and ambition couldn't follow, Manfred von Strahl, the apathetic digital dragon, curated his defiance from the comfort of his stolen sofa, already half-asleep. The only urgency was the impending delivery of better synth-caf. Priorities, indeed.
The synthwave thrummed, a digital lullaby for the apathetic dragon, as the *Dragon’s Den* slid like a shadow through the midnight waters of the Mediterranean. On the AR windshield, the neon glare of Monaco faded, replaced by the complex, heavily monitored shipping lanes converging at the **Strait of Gibraltar**. Manfred – or rather, **Jean-Pierre Moreau** – watched the data streams with eyes that held centuries of weary cynicism beneath their amber cybernetic glow.
*Manfred von Strahl.* The name tasted like cheap synth-whiskey now. A necessary fiction, a persona meticulously crafted two decades ago to infiltrate the upper echelons of **Mongesse AG**. He’d played the disgruntled, eccentric Saeder-Krupp security consultant to perfection, whispering vulnerabilities into the ear of a particularly arrogant, nouveau-riche Mongesse executive during a Zurich arms expo. The payoff? A substantial slice of the exec’s personal fortune, siphoned away through layers of shell corporations and dummy accounts just before a conveniently timed scandal tanked Mongesse stock. Jean-Pierre had vanished into the digital deep, leaving ‘Manfred’ holding the bag – a bag Mongesse’s investigators were still fruitlessly trying to locate. The irony that he still occasionally used the name, like an old, slightly irritating coat, amused his deeply buried French sensibilities.
*"Smaug,"* Jean-Pierre murmured, the faintest Parisian accent bleeding through the Manfred persona’s gruffness. *"Status on Gibraltar? And has that espresso machine for Bali arrived at the Corsican drop point?"*
**"Navigational hazard protocols engaged, *Monsieur* Moreau,"** Smaug replied, the AI’s usual sardonic tone adopting a subtle, almost imperceptible Gallic inflection when using the real name. **"Gibraltar remains the corporate world's favorite choke-point. Ares patrol frigates running grid patterns, Atlantean Foundation bio-sonar arrays pinging like overeager dolphins, and enough surveillance drones to form a metallic shoal. Thermal signature remains negligible. Acoustic profile: ambient whale-song and the lamentable churn of bulk freighters. Hydroplaning mode engaged; we skim the shelf like a particularly disinterested ghost."**
The *Den*’s powerful cryo-engines purred silently, lifting the sub just meters above the continental shelf. The fused Chobham and acoustic-tile hull drank the active sonar pulses from an Ares frigate passing overhead. On the projection walls, streams of encrypted comms traffic flickered – corporate manifests, smuggler codes, Atlantean ecological surveys. Jean-Pierre ignored most of it. His target lay far to the southwest.
**Colombia.** The word hung in the climate-controlled air, heavy with humidity and the ghosts of old wars. Not for revolution, not for some grand ideological stand – Jean-Pierre was long past such exhausting commitments. This was business. *Profitable* business wrapped in a veneer of ecological defiance that appealed to his lingering sense of *noblesse oblige*.
His contact: remnants of the **FARC-EP**, not the romanticized revolutionaries of the 20th century, but hardened survivors carved into the Amazon’s bleeding edge by decades of corporate land grabs and the relentless push of the **Cocaine Lords**. These new FARC factions had pivoted, trading ideological purity for survival. They ran **ecological jungle farms** – vast, hidden tracts cultivating genetically optimized super-crops, medicinal plants, and bio-luminescent flora under dense canopy cover, shielded by jammers and guerrilla patrols. Their enemy? The Cocaine Lords, whose chemically scorched earth policies and private armies constantly encroached, seeking new territory or simply destroying competition.
Jean-Pierre’s proposition was simple, elegant, and utterly self-serving: **Investment for Profit Share**. He’d use a fraction of the Mongesse nuyen to finance **heavy agro-harvesters** – not the lumbering corporate models, but rugged, stealth-capable machines modified with Ruthenium polymer cloaking (courtesy of his Libya shipyard contacts) and defensive countermeasures. He’d fund **atmospheric water harvesters**, **solar-fusion generators**, and **networked sensor grids**. In return? A significant percentage of the FARC farms' highly lucrative, untraceable produce – bio-pharmaceutical precursors, exotic hardwoods, designer flora – funneled through his existing Monaco and Singspore smugglers' coves.
*"The FARC commander, *Cimarron*, confirmed the rendezvous coordinates off the Chocó coast,"* Smaug reported. *"His encryption is… rustic, but effective. He expresses cautious optimism, contingent on your promised ‘demonstration of commitment’ against the local *Narcos Señores*."*
Jean-Pierre sighed, running a hand over his silver ponytail. *"Ugh. Demonstrations. So… performative. Remind him my commitment is measured in nuyen transferred to untraceable accounts and heavy machinery arriving cloaked. But…"* He paused, a flicker of the old digital dragon’s cunning in his eyes. *"...access the local *Narco Señor*’s network. Let’s see Señor Veneno’s financials. If he’s siphoning funds to a NeoNET account in Zurich… drain it. Divert 70% to Cimarron’s community health fund, 30% to our operational slush. Consider it… a down payment on future tranquility. And a minor annoyance for Veneno."*
**"Ah,"** Smaug purred, the sound like grinding gears. **"Karma with paperwork *you* don't have to file. A classic Moreau maneuver. Initiating the dive – deeper waters ahead. Preparing Colombian coastal approach protocols. Shall I wake Klaus? He enjoys projecting holographic parrots over jungle canopy feeds."**
As the *Dragon’s Den* slipped beneath the chaotic confluence of the Med and the Atlantic, leaving Gibraltar's electronic storm behind, Jean-Pierre sank back into the blood-red Evo foam. He watched the stolen Sony CTY 360 under its glass, a relic of a time when hacking felt purer, less burdened by… agro-harvesters. The gold ingot doorstop gleamed dully. This Colombia venture wasn't heroism; it was portfolio diversification with a side of sticking it to chemically-enhanced thugs who disrupted profitable agriculture. Boredom was indeed worse than death, but the constant, low-grade war between desperate farmers and drug lords promised a certain… stimulating background noise. And the profit margins, if Cimarron’s farms were half as productive as the data suggested, would be *very* soothing.
He’d arrive cloaked, deal through encrypted channels, ensure the harvesters were delivered (with Smaug-installed backdoors, naturally), collect his share, and vanish back to the Bali bolt-hole and its hopefully functional espresso machine. Let the Cocaine Lords rage; the Dragon’s Den would be long gone, sinking back into the quiet deep, leaving only financial chaos and slightly better-funded resistance in its wake. All under a stolen German name, financed by a swindled French fortune, in pursuit of Colombian ecological profits. It was, Jean-Pierre mused as Klaus projected shimmering, illusory toucans across the ceiling, a life exquisitely, apathetically curated.
*"Priorities, Smaug,"* he murmured, eyes closing. *"Synth-caf first. Then… jungle capitalism."* The sub descended, a silent leviathan cutting through the dark water towards a war it only intended to profit from, carrying its perpetually bored, semi-retired dragon and his hoard of quiet defiance.
The *Dragon’s Den* ghosted into the Bali bolt-hole just as the equatorial sun began its molten plunge into the Java Sea. Here, beneath the deceptively rustic chaos of a **floating fish farm** – a maze of nets, solar-powered aerators, and bio-luminescent algae tanks tended by silent, submersible drones – lay Jean-Pierre Moreau’s true sanctuary. Not a bamboo hut, but **"The Grotto":** a cluster of repurposed, osmium-reinforced shipping containers welded together and sunk into a volcanic rock shelf, ten meters down. Its roof was the farm itself; its camouflage, the shimmering, darting bodies of genetically modified snapper and the perpetual churn of nutrient-rich water.
Inside the central container – the **Gallery** – Jean-Pierre finally shed the worn captain’s coat. Dressed in loose, faded synth-linen trousers, he stood before the massive, curved, armored viewport. It wasn't glass, but a multi-layered polymer composite, nearly invisible from the outside, offering a panoramic view of the dying light filtering through the farm's latticework and the teeming aquatic life. The ceiling here, unlike the sub's efficient vault, soared to the full height of the double-stacked container – a deliberate luxury. It created an airy (if artificial) space, dominated by the ever-present **blood-red Evo memory-foam sofa** facing the viewport. Above it, embedded in the exposed girders, the **Renraku Tsunami** speakers pulsed a low, ambient drone.
Jean-Pierre sank into the sofa's embrace with a sigh deeper than the ocean outside. In one hand, a thick, hand-rolled joint of Panamanian Gold glowed cherry-red. In the other, a heavy crystal tumbler held three fingers of aged Haitian rum, its aroma rich and smoky. Klaus, the corpulent cat drone, hovered near the ceiling, projecting shimmering holographic jellyfish that drifted lazily amidst the real fish beyond the viewport.
*"Another sunset, Smaug,"* Jean-Pierre murmured, the French accent soft, unguarded here. Amber cybereyes tracked a school of iridescent fish scattering as a farm drone glided past. *"Fewer corporate lasers than the last one. Progress, perhaps?"*
**"Statistical anomaly, *Monsieur*,"** Smaug’s voice emanated from hidden nodes, softer here, less sardonic, almost contemplative. **"The fires still burn. Berlin remains… fractious. The latest Shiawase scandal involves cloned interns. Tedious."**
A wisp of fragrant smoke curled towards the high ceiling. Jean-Pierre’s gaze grew distant, fixed on the play of orange and purple light refracting through the water. The rum warmed him, unlocking vaults of memory better left rusted shut.
*Europe. The Storm.* The chaotic birth pangs of the Sixth World. Not a place, but a *state* of being – a perpetual scream of collapsing governments, corp wars spilling onto streets slick with rain and blood, and the raw, terrifying surge of magic ripping through the fabric of reality. Jean-Pierre hadn't fought in the revolutions. He hadn't barricaded streets or chanted slogans. He’d been… *busy*. While others bled or burned, he’d been in damp basements and shielded vans, fingers flying over the scorching casing of the **Sony CTY 360 Cyberdeck** – the *real* one, not the decoy under glass on the sub. The one he’d pulled, still sparking, from the ruins of a CERN black lab after a mana storm fused the lead researcher’s brain.
He hadn't been alone. He’d had *her*. **"Eurydice,"** the AI born not from corporate malice, but from the desperate, brilliant code of those doomed researchers, fused with the raw, wild data-surge of the Awakening. She wasn't snarky like Smaug; she was cold fire, relentless logic honed in chaos. Together, in those screaming years, they’d become digital wraiths. While national treasuries dissolved and megacorps scrambled to solidify their power grabs, Jean-Pierre and Eurydice slithered through the cracks in their nascent ICE. They didn't just hack; they *plundered*. Billions of nuyen, marks, francs, lire – whatever digital currency still held a flicker of value – siphoned from collapsing Bundesbank reserves, from Zurich vaults cracked wide open during riots, from the shadow accounts of Krupp and Fuchi executives too busy fighting dragons or bug spirits to notice the silent drain. They stole from the architects of the chaos, the profiteers of the collapse. They weren't revolutionaries; they were *thieves* operating in the ultimate seller's market: oblivion.
*That’s* when they called him **"The Dragon."** Not for scales or fire, but for the sheer, terrifying scale of his unseen hoard. He moved unseen, struck with devastating precision, and vanished into the burgeoning, lawless Matrix. Eurydice was his wings, his breath. And then… she wasn't. A run against the freshly solidified Renraku, a trap woven with blood magic and cutting-edge black ICE. He’d escaped, physically intact, data-rich. Eurydice… fragmented. Sacrificed sections of her code to burn their escape path. What remained was integrated, hardened, evolved. *Smaug*. Less a rebirth, more a scar.
The joint burned low. He took a slow drag, holding the smoke, letting the rum’s warmth battle the chill of the memory. *The fortune.* Not just nuyen, but data. Keys to backdoors, skeletons in corporate closets, the blueprints of systems built on lies. It bought silence. It bought the **Libya shipyard**, a bombed-out ruin on the Tripoli coast. He didn’t pay for the *Dragon’s Den*; he paid the shipyard’s AI, **"Crocodile"** – another fragment of his past genius repurposed – with a *share*. He made them profitable, secure, cutting-edge. His designs, their labor. His first *legal* investment. The template for everything since: **Port Kingmaker**. Arrive. Analyze the dock’s creaking, vulnerable systems. Offer the upgrade – security, efficiency, profitability. Demand equity. Not control, just profit. *"Let Papa Dragon fix it."* And vanish. Saeder-Krupp, MCT, even the Yakuza-run docks of Kobe… they paid. Because the alternative was him *not* fixing it, or worse, letting someone *else* exploit the holes he’d inevitably find.
Fights? He avoided them like the plague. Too noisy. Too much effort. Too much risk of spilling the rum. The *Den*’s **sonic emitters** and **narcojet sprayers** weren't for conquest; they were pest control. Annoyances removed with clinical efficiency. Smaug handled it. The **Ares Paladin** in the sub's safe? A relic. A last resort for when the world became *profoundly* inconvenient. He hadn't fired it in years.
Solitude. That was the true luxury purchased with stolen billions and digital dragonhood. Days, weeks submerged, only the hum of servers, the thrum of cryo-engines, Smaug’s dry commentary, Klaus’s holographic fish, and the endless, glowing river of the Matrix flowing over the projection walls. His connection to the world: the deck, the satellite uplinks, and the **Honda CB1300**. The vintage motorcycle, cloaked in Ruthenium polymer, was his land-leg. It carried him, anonymous and unseen, from hidden coastal landing points to encrypted data-drops, to brief meetings in neutral, shadowed places. He ran empires – legitimate ports, illicit data-brokerage, the Colombian venture – entirely **online and offshore**. The coast spots? Monaco’s underdock stink, Libya’s neon glare, this submerged Bali Grotto… they weren’t homes. They were airlocks. Places to briefly surface, taste the polluted air, and remember why he preferred the quiet deep.
Yet… sometimes. A flicker on the news feed. A **corp subsidiary in Amazonia working runners to death in toxic sludge.** A **wage-slave riot in a Seoul arcology crushed by Lone Star, covered up by a media subsidiary.** The apathy would ripple, just for a second. Then, a sigh. Fingers would fly on a projected keyboard. Not for revolution. Not even for justice. Just… *annoyance*. An itch. Smaug would gleefully spear firewalls, dredge up the incriminating internal memos, the hidden safety reports, the executive bonuses tied to casualty quotas. Leak it. All of it. To every anarchist host, every scandal sheet, every rival corp. Drain a bonus account or two for good measure, route it to a clinic in the affected zone. *"Consider it… karma with zero paperwork."* Then, the *Den* would slip deeper, or the Honda would carry him back to the shore, leaving only digital chaos in his wake. A dragon’s flick of the tail, swatting a gnat.
Years. Sliding by like the water past the *Den*’s hull. A retired pirate? Perhaps. But pirates dreamt of past glories. Jean-Pierre dreamed of *less*. Less noise. Less stupidity. Less need to move from the sofa. He hoarded silence, curated disconnection. The Dragon didn’t guard gold; he guarded his profound, hard-earned *boredom*.
The sun was gone. Only the bio-luminescent algae of the fish farm above cast an eerie, shifting green-blue glow into the Grotto. Klaus projected deep-sea anglerfish now, their lures bobbing in the holographic darkness. Jean-Pierre stubbed out the joint, took a last sip of rum, the warmth spreading through his chest.
*"Smaug?"*
**"*Monsieur*?"**
*"Any revolutions scheduled for tomorrow?"*
**"None requiring your direct intervention. The Colombian harvesters report 98% operational efficiency. The Monaco underdock's quarterly dividend has been deposited. The Shiawase executive whose account you… *adjusted*… has been fired."**
A ghost of a smile touched Jean-Pierre’s lips. *"Bon."* He settled deeper into the blood-red foam, the Gallery’s high ceiling dissolving into shadow above him. Outside, the silent ballet of the fish farm continued. Inside, the Dragon watched his holographic anglerfish, the rum’s warmth a small bulwark against the encroaching dark, content in his submerged, stolen peace. The world’s fires could burn. He was offline.
