Incorporated with DeepSeek
The stale, damp air in the Boom-Bap Bunker vibrated with the subsonic thump of a classic *Bad Company* track. Raz, his fingers tracing the worn grooves of a vinyl sleeve older than he was, felt the bassline resonate in his hollow stomach. Outside, the crumbling concrete jungle of the Aylesbury Estate in South East London wasn't jungle anymore. It was a corpse picked clean. The UK? Gone. Dissolved into competing Corp Enclaves and lawless zones like theirs. National support? A bitter joke. Even the pizza delivery gigs required Corp ID scans now, filtering out anyone from a "designated instability zone" – which was basically everywhere that wasn't gleaming Canary Wharf or gated Surrey suburbs.
"We're ghosts, bruv," Kira muttered, hunched over her cracked tablet, scrolling through increasingly bleak mesh-net feeds. "Ghosts with empty bellies and a sick sound system." Their hidden cellar, a relic of better rave days, was their only fortress. Walls lined with 200 precious vinyl records, servers humming with pirated MP3s, speakers salvaged from dead clubs. But the music was running out, just like the food. The toxic crews – Viperz, Corp-puppets running synth-coke and black-market cyber for the desperate wannabe-rich in their fortified penthouses – were circling. Join or starve. Or worse.
Then, the Provos arrived.
Not the balaclavas and Armalites of the old newsreels. These were hard-faced men and women in practical, worn gear, driving battered electric vans plastered with peeling, incongruous logos: "Community Aid – Belfast to Brixton." Their leader, Maeve, had eyes like flint and a voice that cut through the grime. "We're here under Article 3, Section 2b of the Good Friday Agreement," she announced to a skeptical crowd gathered in a graffiti-tagged courtyard. "Mutual support. Cross-community development. Still legally binding, far as we're concerned."
It started small. Honest. Food collections. Maeve had contacts – old socialist networks clinging on in Northern England, sympathetic smallholders in Kent bypassing Corp supply chains, even a few rogue Catholic charities operating in the shadows. Vans arrived with crates of root vegetables, tinned fish, real flour. The Estate breathed a sigh of cautious relief.
The Corps struck back fast. Tesbury’s (the Corp that swallowed Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and the concept of choice) issued a global procurement notice: *Any supplier found diverting resources to non-ID verified zones will face permanent contract termination and asset forfeiture.* Smaller suppliers folded overnight. CorpSec drones started buzzing the collection points, scanning faces, logging plates. A "Community Aid" van was firebombed outside Croydon. The message was clear: Old treaties meant nothing. Charity was bad for business.
Maeve didn't flinch. She just looked at Raz, Kira, and the other hollow-eyed youth. "They want a war? Fine. But it ain't 1972. This war's fought in the shadows, street by street, byte by byte."
**The New Provos:**
The Community Aid logos vanished. The vans got stealthier, their electric motors muffled, paint jobs shifting to urban camo. The Provos became less an army, more a *syndicate* of resistance cells. Brixton. Lewisham. Peckham. Each housing estate, each block of crumbling flats, became its own fortified node, loosely networked. Their goals weren't united Ireland anymore; they were **survival** and **autonomy** for their people against the Corp chokehold. They were protectors.
* **Protection:** When Viperz tried to muscle into the Aylesbury, demanding "taxes," they met coordinated ambushes. Molotovs from rooftops, nail strips on escape routes, sudden EMP bursts frying their cheap cyber. Not open warfare, but brutal, efficient gang skirmishes. The Provos used knowledge of the estate's maze-like walkways, sewer access points, and jury-rigged mesh-net comms. They fought like cornered rats, but smart rats.
* **Provision:** Food runs became covert ops. Routes changed hourly, communicated via encrypted bursts on pirate FM frequencies Raz helped set up, piggybacking on the Boom-Bap Bunker's powerful transmitters. They targeted Corp middle-management enclaves on the fringes, hitting small distribution hubs with lightning raids, vanishing before drones arrived. They traded salvaged tech from dead Corp outposts with Silas's network via encrypted Radio Silas relays – London tinned pilchards for Parisian antibiotics.
* **Platform:** The Boom-Bap Bunker became more than a rave den. It became **"Station SE1: Underground Airwaves."** Raz and Kira, fueled by stolen Corp power cells, blasted their drum and bass across South London, interspersed with coded messages, CorpSec patrol warnings, rallying cries, and Maeve’s calm, fierce commentaries exposing Corp lies. Their sound became the heartbeat of the resistance.
**The Sprawl & The Jump:**
Word traveled south, through Silas's ghostly channels, whispered on Riggs's rare low-altitude passes. It reached Naples.
Southern Italy was a different kind of hell. Corp abandonment had left it baking, humid, plagued by rising seas and crumbling infrastructure. The real Italian Mafia, the Camorra, had adapted. Gone were the days of *just* toxic drug dealing. Under Don Vittorio "The Accountant" Rossi, they pivoted to **logistics** and **sanctuary**. Naples became a hub. A sprawling, chaotic, vibrant node in a vast underground network – **The Sprawl**.
Don Vittorio saw London, especially the Corp-abandoned South East, not as a lost cause, but as *vital territory*. The motorway network – the M1, M25, M20 – was still largely intact, just poorly patrolled outside Corp zones. It was a lifeline. A corridor connecting Leeds’s struggling industrial remnants, through the Midlands, down to the Channel Ports, then – crucially – across to Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt. A subterranean Silk Road for people, data, and survival goods.
The problem? **The Jump.** The English Channel. Now a CorpSec moat patrolled by Ares Logistics drones, monitored by AI, crossed only by the colossal, hyper-secure "Euro Channel" tunnel trains and approved freight ferries. Access required deep Corp ID verification and hefty fees. For the undocumented, the mutated, the rebels? A death sentence.
**Running The Jump:**
This is where the Sprawl's ingenuity met the Provos' desperation and the Camorra's resources.
1. **The Diversion:** The Provos became masters of distraction. A carefully timed attack on a CorpSec drone maintenance depot in Dover. A mesh-net hack causing chaos in the Euro Channel booking system. Raz blasting disruptive noise on frequencies known to interfere with proximity sensors. Anything to draw eyes and resources away from a specific stretch of coast or a few minutes of tunnel vulnerability.
2. **The Conduits:** Not tunnels, but *misuse*.
* **The Ghost Ferries:** Ancient, near-derelict roll-on/roll-off ferries, bought for scrap val Incorporated with DeepSeekue by Camorra fronts, sailed by crews paid in gold and anonymity. They'd hug the French coast, transmitting spoofed IDs, then make a desperate, silent dash across the busiest lanes under cover of electronic fog generated by tech smuggled from Silas or built in the Boom-Bap Bunker. Success rate: 60%. Losses were factored in.
* **The Container Slide:** Inside the Euro Channel freight trains. Containers owned by Camorra shell companies, packed not just with goods, but with people. False walls. Life-support pods disguised as industrial machinery. Bribed low-level Corp inspectors turning a blind eye for a hefty slice of Bitcoin. Nerve-wracking hours in pitch darkness, hoping the automated scanners glitched or the bribe held.
* **The Coastal Crawlers:** Modified, silent electric landing craft, based on old lifeboat designs, running submerged just below the surface on moonless nights. Navigating minefields (both real and sensor-based) using stolen Corp charts leaked by sympathizers within Ares Logistics itself. Landing on deserted Kent beaches met by Provo patrols in stolen CorpSec ground-effect vehicles.
3. **The Fake IDs:** A cottage industry. Léa in Paris, using decks influenced by the American's trade, crafted near-perfect digital ID ghosts. Kira in London sourced biometric data from hacked Corp databases or stolen commlinks. The Camorra provided the physical artifacts – forged Corp security passes, retinal scan overlays, even temporary neural implants mimicking ID verification pings. Good enough for one, maybe two crossings before burning the identity.
**Atmosphere: The Fractured World**
* **South East London (The Frontline):** The air crackles with tension and bass. Tower blocks are fortresses. Graffiti isn't art; it's territory marking and encrypted comms. The constant thump from the Boom-Bap Bunker is a defiant heartbeat. You trust your block, your Provo cell. Strangers are scanned, CorpSec drones are tracked like birds of prey. Food is scarce but shared. Hope is a fragile thing, built on stolen moments of music, a successful Channel run bringing medicine from Paris, the grim satisfaction of repelling a Viperz incursion. It's a world of sharp edges, constant vigilance, and unexpected solidarity.
* **The Corp Enclaves (The Fortress):** London is a city of islands. Canary Wharf glitters, a monument to sterile efficiency. Surrey estates are lush green prisons. The air is filtered, the news curated. Corp citizens live in constant, low-grade fear – fear of the "Contaminated Zones," fear of market fluctuations, fear of the unseen networks they know are moving just beyond their scanners. Security is omnipresent but brittle. They see the Provos as terrorists, the Sprawl as chaotic criminals. The Jump is a security breach to be plugged, not a lifeline to be understood. Their world is comfortable, predictable, and utterly disconnected from the human cost of its existence.
* **The Sprawl (The Artery):** From the flooded streets of Naples to the rain-lashed industrial graveyards of Leeds, the Sprawl hums with hidden movement. It’s not a nation; it’s a *nervous system*. Silas’s ghost traders flit between nodes. Camorra freight moves under cover of darkness. Provos runners carry encrypted data chips alongside sacks of potatoes. The American’s V8 roar might echo through a derelict Autobahn service station. Riggs’s Baron whispers overhead. It’s dangerous, fragmented, often brutal, but it’s *alive*. It’s the messy, resilient counter-flow to the Corp’s sterile stagnation. The air smells of salt, diesel, ozone, and desperation, but also of possibility.
Raz cued up another record, the needle hitting the vinyl with a satisfying *crackle-hiss*. A coded message pulsed beneath the opening bars of the track – coordinates for a drop zone near Folkestone, timings synced to a predicted CorpSec shift change. Kira monitored the drone feeds. Maeve coordinated Provo lookouts along the M20. Somewhere, deep in the Naples heat, Don Vittorio calculated the profit margin on a shipment of Dutch bicycles destined for a Parisian *banlieue*, paid for in South London drum and bass exclusives and Le Doc’s latest antiviral compounds. The Jump was running tonight. The Spiderweb held. For now.
