Incorporated with DeepSeek
# **DER DRECK, DER BLEIBT**
The rain didn’t fall. It *occupied*. For two years, it laid siege to the stone and soul of Würzburg. It wasn’t a storm; it was a climate state. The *Pegelstand* at the Alte Mainbrücke became the city’s fever chart, climbing past *hochwasser*, past *jahrhunderthochwasser*, into realms the digital signs couldn’t display. The Main was no longer a river. It was a spreading, brown stain, a lazy conqueror.
The newsfeeds, flickering on water-damaged screens in damp apartments, spoke in the calm, dead language of elsewhere.
*“Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde bezeichnet Ereignis als statistische Anomalie.”*
*“Bundesverkehrsminister verspricht Prüfung der Deichsicherung.”*
*“Klimawandel: Koordinierte EU-Strategie in Arbeit.”*
**“Koordinierte.”** **“Strategie.”** **“Bund.”** The words tasted like rust and betrayal. From their sinking city, the people watched Berlin—a glittering, dry spire a world away—and understood. They were not citizens. They were a *statistische Anomalie*. The anger was a slow, cold current, running deeper than the river.
***
**Leo** watched the water claim his father’s *Fachwerkhaus* in the Zellerau, inch by relentless inch. He was a failed *Kunststudent*, his portfolio full of augmented-reality sculptures no one bought, his account bleeding NuYen. The evacuation order was a relief. No more choices. He loaded his drone rig—his only asset—into a leaking inflatable and stayed. A ghost in his own ghost town.
**Marta** had been a *Krankenschwester* at the Juliusspital until the bio-scanner algorithms deemed her “pattern-recognition speed” suboptimal. The hospital, its lower floors flooded, became a fortress for the wired and wealthy. She was left with a case of stolen antibiotics and a resentment as sharp as a scalpel. The city’s sickness was now her specialty.
**Kilian,** called “Fischer,” but not for fish. He was a *Datenfischer*. Once a minor netrunner for a local hosting firm, the constant damp played hell with wireless signals. The drowned city became his private, hard-lined playground. He found he could track the secret movements of water, of shifting sediment, of crumbling foundations. He sold predictions: which cellar would flood next, which wall would slide. Business was good.
**The *Bullen*,** the last local cop, was named **Berger**. His patrol car was a flat-bottomed *Boot* now. His authority was a rusting badge and a pump-action shotgun. Berlin had forgotten to recall him. The *Polizeipräsidium* was a tilted ruin near the drowned Ringpark. He enforced the only law left: don’t make the drowning worse.
They were the leftovers. The flawed code in the system. The ones without the credit, the connections, or the will to flee to the neon jungles of Frankfurt or Nürnberg. The eternal rain washed away the pretense of society. What remained was the dreck. And the dreck began to cohere.
They met in the high places. The attic of the sinking *Rathaus*. The top floor of the *Kaufhof*, now a looted cave. They traded. Leo’s drone scouted dry paths. Marta treated fungal lung and despair. Kilian’s data told them where the *Stadtwerke* repair bots would fail next. Berger looked the other way.
Their common liturgy was hate. Not for the rain, but for the faraway voices that had called it an “*Anomalie*.” For the *Bundesbeamten* in their dry, heated offices who’d debated cost-benefit ratios while the limestone sucked itself full. Würzburg was built on wine and faith. Now it fermented in blame.
The final act wasn’t dramatic. It was geological. The saturated hill beneath the **Festung Marienberg** finally moved. It was Kilian who saw it first, squinting at his seismographic hack. A slide. Not of rock, but of the million tons of sand that had been packed into the castle’s *Graben* decades ago, a forgotten fix for a forgotten war.
It slid into the Main. From the other side, the liquefied filth of the Ringpark joined it. The river choked. Then it stopped.
The silence was more terrifying than the rain. The world held its breath. Then, with a groan felt in the bones of the city, the water found a new direction: sideways.
The *Heizkraftwerk* died in a spectacular short-circuit of blue flame and hissing steam. The B19 cracked like a dropped plate. The world went dark, then quiet, save for the lap of water against second-story windows.
Würzburg was no longer a city on a river. It was a city *in* a lake. An inland sea with Gothic spires as its reefs.
***
Months later. The rain has lessened to a perpetual drip. The new sea is calm, accepting. The *Versunkenen* are the only power. They operate from the ultimate high ground.
Leo’s drones buzzed like mechanical bees, mapping the new coastlines. Marta ran a clinic from the dry *Schönbornkapelle*, battling plagues born of stagnant water. Kilian was their shadow, his senses in the dripping cables and failing sensors. Berger was their reluctant sheriff.
On a day the old calendar called **Erntedankfest**, Kilian found something in the deep-time archives of the castle’s own servers, something predating the corporate datalocks. A fragment. An American military transmission from 1945, the last time the castle had fallen. A bored GI talking about a holiday called Thanksgiving. About being stuck in a captured German castle, eating strange food, thankful just to be alive and for the silence of the guns.
The idea took root in their wet, cynical hearts. It was absurd. Perfect.
They gathered in the **Rittersaal**. The vaulted ceiling was stained with damp, the portraits of prince-bishops fuzzy with mold. Berger shot a wild *Ente* from the new marsh. Marta had scavenged canned *Kürbis* and packets of stale *Gewürz*. Leo used his last power cell to project a feeble, flickering hologram of a cornucopia on the vast, empty fireplace wall.
They lit a fire in the great hearth. The smoke rose, seeking a chimney that still led to a free sky.
They did not pray. They sat on broken furniture, listening to the fire crackle over the ever-present whisper of water below. They ate the stringy, gamey bird and the sweet, spiced mush.
“The Americans,” Leo said, his voice echoing in the stone hall. “They won. Then they went home. They gave thanks and left.”
“We lost,” Marta said, not looking up. “And we stayed.”
“Who’s left to thank?” Berger grunted, picking at a tooth.
Kilian, his eyes reflecting the firelight like a cat’s, smiled a thin smile. “Ourselves. For not being them. For not being the ones who looked at a map, saw a *statistische Anomalie*, and drew a line through it.”
The silence pooled around them, deeper than the water in the streets.
“For the fire,” Leo said, finally.
“For the dry stone,” Marta added.
“For the data that remains,” Kilian whispered.
Berger raised his flask of homemade *Schnaps*. “For the dreck that holds.”
They ate. In a drowned castle, in a drowned city, in a country that had written them off, they performed a borrowed ritual for a harvest they did not reap. They gave thanks not for plenty, but for persistence. Not for grace, but for grit. They were the losers, the left-behinds, the rotten timbers of a fallen world.
And in the flickering firelight, in the heart of the fortress that had seen empires and armies and ice ages come and go, their quiet, bitter feast felt, for the first time in two long years, like something almost like a victory.
# **DER STILLE BURGHERR**
While *Die Versunkenen* carved out their damp kingdom from chaos and reaction, another will was already at work in the drowned city. Older. Colder. Deliberate.
He was called **Albrecht**, though no one living spoke that name. His family name was etched on a stone in the *Kiliansgruft*, a lineage of *Franken* knights that predated the prince-bishops themselves. They had not been nobles of court, but of *geheime Schutz*—secret keepers. Their charge: the watershed. The sacred geometry of Main, Tauber, and limestone. For generations, they had maintained hidden *Wasserstollen*, flood channels, and infiltration galleries, a shadow hydrology meant to protect the city from itself.
Albrecht, the last, had read the climate models not as abstracts, but as a verdict. He saw the two years of rain not as a catastrophe, but as a **correction**. The city had sealed its veins with concrete, filled its aquifers with sand, armored its shores with arrogance. The *Bund* and the corps would only accelerate the death with their brittle, centralized solutions. He predicted the collapse to the month.
And he prepared.
While Leo was mourning his father’s house and Marta was being deemed obsolete, Albrecht was already **disappearing**. He liquidated the family’s remaining assets into untraceable crypto, not to flee, but to buy. He acquired, through shell identities, specific, seemingly worthless properties: a half-collapsed *Bootshaus* upriver, a derelict water-treatment control kiosk in the Ringpark, the mineral rights to a played-out quarry north of the city—all points on his ancient hydrological map.
His fortress was not a bunker. Bunkers are static, screaming targets. His was a **network of covers**.
**The Principle of the Hidden Cover:** In a world of satellite surveillance and drone sweeps, the most powerful fortress is one that does not appear to be one. It is a pattern of natural features, innocent ruins, and ambient data-noise that, when activated, forms a system. A single tree is not a fortress. A forest, with specific trees wired to communicate and a canopy that scrambles sensors, is.
### **The Quiet War of Stone and Silicon**
The tools of his rebellion were a silent marriage, a sacrament between the bones of the earth and the ghosts of the machine.
**The Low-Tech: The Stone’s Memory.**
His work began in the absolute dark, in the gut of the hill. The medieval *Wasserstollen* were not just tunnels; they were the castle’s forgotten kidneys, carved by long-dead engineers who understood gravity and fear. Forgotten by everyone but the lineage sworn to memory.
Albrecht worked with hand tools in the total, crushing blackness, his world defined by the scrape of the pick, the grit in his teeth, the cold seep through his gloves. A headlamp cast a crazed halo on moss-slick walls. He wasn’t digging; he was **excavating a promise**. Each cleared stone was a word from an old oath. The silence was so complete he could hear the groaning of the saturated hill around him, the distant, muffled drip of the city’s dying breath above.
He reinforced the arches not with steel, which would scream on sensors, but with a lignin-based bio-polymer he cultured in vats hidden in the quarry. It was grown from a fast-sporing fungus, a whitish, root-like mesh he injected into cracks. It hardened like ironwood, bonding with the ancient stone, becoming indistinguishable from it. These tunnels, once drains for siege-era fear, became his submerged highways. A man could walk upright in them, the only sound the swallow of his own breath and the faint, echoing trickle of the future being born. They led everywhere and nowhere, a secret vascular system for his silent heart.
**The High-Tech: The Invisible Army.**
His laboratory was a clean-room sealed inside a rusted shipping container, sunk into the foundations of the derelict *Bootshaus*. Here, the drip of water was banished. The air hummed with filtered sterility. Under the glow of bioluminescent panels cultivated from deep-sea jellyfish genes, he assembled his legion.
The **‘Gravel-Crawlers’** were his masterpiece. Each was a speck, a grain of simulated silt. Under a microscope, they revealed a horrifying, beautiful complexity: a carbon-filament lattice for structure, a microbial fuel cell that fed on organic decay in the water, and a nano-processor smaller than a human cell. Their programming was sublime in its simplicity: *Seek. Bind. Neutralize. Sleep.*
He released them from hidden ports, millions at a time, a cloud of benevolent dust poured into the murk. They drifted on the currents, indistinguishable from the lake’s own filth. Their task was not to fight, but to **subtract**. Like microscopic priests, they performed a rite of purification. They latched onto molecules of mercury, lead, industrial solvents, and the ghostly phosphates from a million drowned detergents. Using catalyzed reactions, they broke bonds or built cages, dragging the neutralized waste down to become inert sediment. The lake’s poison was being quietly, inexorably, laid to rest.
Simultaneously, his code slithered into the corpse of the city’s network. The dead water-quality sensors, their casings crusted with mollusks, were jolted awake. He hijacked their dying transmission protocols, feeding them a loop of pristine, boring data—pH stable, toxins nominal, oxygenation optimal. To any corp satellite or drone making a passive scan, Würzburg’s lake read as a dead, stable, uninteresting sump. He painted a mask of normalcy over the miracle.
**The Biotech: The New Flesh.**
The final act was one of creation. In hidden greenhouses powered by benthic thermal taps, lit by the same gentle bioluminescence, he grew his gardeners.
These were not ordinary reeds or mussels. They were tailored lineages, their genes spliced in silence. The reeds had hyper-porous stems and root systems like fractal lace, designed to suck heavy metals from the silt and sequester them in crystalline structures within their cell walls. The mussels filtered water not by the liter, but by the cubic meter per hour, their modified gills secreting enzymes that broke down complex hydrocarbons into harmless base elements. The algae were cyanobacteria strains tuned for explosive oxygen production, blooming in sudden, deep-green surges that then died back to feed the next cycle.
He planted them at night, from a silent electric skiff. A clutch of mussels here, a rhizome of reeds there, a vial of algal bloom poured into a stagnant backwater. They spread. They did what life does: they consumed, they grew, they reproduced. A new ecology, designed for a single purpose—to heal—began to stitch a living fabric across the drowned city. The water, once a broth of decay, began to clear. Not to the sterile clarity of distilled water, but to the vibrant, tea-stained clarity of a healthy wetland. Light penetrated deeper. Fish, native and resilient, began to return to the cleansed edges.
His war was not one of fire, but of filter. Not of seizure, but of seepage. While the *Versunkenen* above clung to their bitter, human island, Albrecht below was engaged in a act of profound, patient alchemy. He was turning the monument to Germany’s failure into the seedbed for something else entirely, his tools whispering a single truth: the most powerful fortress is not the one that withstands the siege, but the one the siege forgets is even there.
**His Goal was not survival, but succession.** He wasn't hiding from the gang; he was **gardening around them**. Their territory in the Altstadt was his buffer, a chaotic human shield. Their movements on the surface distracted from the silent transformations below the waterline.
As the water cleared, magical energy shifted. The fetid, despairing *mana* of the poison swamp began to dissipate. In its place rose a cleaner, wilder, more resilient flow—the *mana* of a recovering wetland, of a system fighting back. This attracted a different breed of Awakened.
**The Shaman over the Wizard:** Corporate wizards sought controlled leylines and structured astral spaces. The new lake’s mana was raw, organic, and tied to the life within it. **Shamans** heard the spirit of the recovering water—a wounded but resilient entity they called *Mutter Main*. They came, not to dominate, but to commune. Albrecht, through cut-out identities and anonymous data-drops, guided them to clean, powerful nodes he’d cultivated.
**The Outlaw over the Criminal:** Criminals serve a system, extracting value from its cracks. **Outlaws** reject the system itself. As the lake became cleaner, it attracted those who wanted to live *outside*: neo-anarchist aquaculturists, gene-splicers growing adapted crops on floating gardens, hermetic scholars in houseboats. They weren't building a market; they were building a **commons**. Albrecht provided passive security—his sensor net would anonymously warn of corp scout drones—and let their culture grow.
**The Renegade over the Hired Gun:** Hired guns sell their violence for NuYen. **Renegades** have a cause. Ex-corp security disgusted by their employers' ecological rape, former *Bundeswehr* engineers with a grudge, ideologues seeking a place to test new social models. They found a functioning, if hidden, infrastructure here. Albrecht would sometimes let them 'discover' a cache of pre-placed tools or a hidden dry dock, steering their passion to defend the nascent ecosystem.
**Albrecht watched the Thanksgiving in the Rittersaal.** A micro-drone, shaped like a water beetle, clung to a damp tapestry. He saw their bitter solidarity, their fragile fire. He did not despise them. They were useful. They were **part of the ecosystem**. A hardy, territorial species that kept out larger predators.
From his primary *Deck*, hidden in a watertight vault within the quarry, accessed only via the flooded tunnels, he monitored it all. Screens showed the lake's vital signs: oxygen levels rising, toxin counts falling. A map displayed the growing, self-organizing settlements of outlaws and shamans on the new shores, blissfully unaware of the hidden hand that curated their habitat.
He tapped a key. In a deep, quiet part of the lake, a swarm of his Gravel-Crawlers activated, diverting a nutrient flow to a struggling bed of purification reeds.
The knight’s war was not one of bullets or blades. It was a war of **context**. He was not fighting the megacorps head-on. He was making the ground—or rather, the water—upon which their model of control could not stand. They needed pollution to sell clean-up, scarcity to sell water, chaos to sell security. He was quietly, patiently building clarity, abundance, and order—a *natural* order.
His castle was the entire lake. Its walls were the clarity of the water, its moat the loyalty of those who found sanctuary in it, its keep the deep, ancient stone from which he operated. The *Versunkenen* ruled the ruins of the past.
Albrecht was cultivating the future from the shadows, one purified liter at a time.
### **The Silent Shepherd**
The purification of the water was only the foundation. Albrecht understood that a functioning ecosystem was not a museum diorama; it was an engine, a turbulent, breeding, dying, living mass. Stability would come not from sterile balance, but from wild, teeming surplus. His next phase was not cultivation, but **inoculation**.
**The Fish.**
The cleared water was a void begging to be filled. From the sprawl of Frankfurt, a city choking on its own hyper-density, he sourced his first stock. Not from corporate aquaculture vats, but from the black-market aquariists in the stinking *Fischmarkt* alleys, who traded in everything from glow-koi to gene-spliced piranha. He bought hardy, native dace and chub that had been living in toxin-laced runoff canals for generations—fish already pre-hardened by apocalypse. In the dead of night, from his skiff, he released them into the deep, clean channels near the old power plant ruins. They vanished into the gloom.
He then introduced the engineers. A population of common carp, their modified gut flora tuned to aggressively stir the nutrient-rich sediment, releasing locked-up energy for the new base of the food chain. He watched on sonar as the first shoals began to dance, their movements creating currents, their waste fertilizing the reed beds. The lake was no longer a passive basin. It was digesting.
**The Rabbits.**
The hilltops and drier islands were silent, overgrown with tough sedges and volunteer barley from shattered *Biergarten* planters. He needed grazers. Not to consume, but to **disturb**. In the abandoned greenbelts on the fringes of the Nürnberg sprawl, where scrubland fought concrete, he set live-traps. He caught wild rabbits—scrawny, fierce things with metal shavings in their fur and a preternatural wariness. He transported them in breathable, dark boxes, calming them with subsonic pulses.
Released at dusk on the slopes of the Nikolausberg, they froze, then vanished into the brush. Within months, their warrens perforated the hillsides. Their nibbling kept saplings in check, allowing low, flowering herbs to establish. Their droppings seeded the soil. They were agents of chaos, and from that chaos, diversity began to sprout.
**The Dogs and Cats.**
This was the cruelest part, and the most necessary. The sprawls produced waste, and the most poignant waste was living. In Frankfurt’s underworld, where cyber-hounds fought in pits and cats were considered pest-control, he found his agents. He didn’t take the sleek, the owned, the chipped. He took the broken. The three-legged shepherd dog left to die behind a stim-den. The litter of kittens drowning in a flooded gutter. The old, half-blind Rottweiler whose owner had been shipped off to a corp-war.
He brought them to the quarry, to a dry, warm cavern he’d prepared. Marta, the ex-nurse, never knew her stolen medical supplies were being supplemented. Albrecht used a veterinarian med-drone, programming it with stolen skillsofts. He healed what he could. He installed basic biomonitors, not to control, but to observe. And then he released them.
They did not form a pack, but a **constellation**. The dogs, territorial and bewildered, claimed different islands. The cats became silent ghosts in the ruins of the *Sanderau*. They were not pets. They were self-replicating, autonomous guardians. The rabbits taught them to hunt. The dogs kept feral human scavengers—the truly feral, not the communal outlaws—at bay. The cats controlled the rodent population that threatened his seed stores. They were a layer of living security, paid for in kindness and a chance to live, their feral loyalty more reliable than any wage.
**The Bees.**
Pollination was the final lock to pick. He could not have a flowering meadow without architects. In the soffits and wall cavities of a hundred abandoned houses in the *Zellerau*, he placed his hives. Not box hives, but **symbiotic colonies**. He used a resilient, gentle Carniolan strain, but he coated the interior wood of each chosen cavity with a pheromone paste laced with gentle memetic code—a subliminal command: *This is safe. This is home. Build here.*
He seeded the meadows with clover, borage, and viper’s bugloss—plants that exploded with nectar. The bees found them. They swarmed from the drowned suburbs, claiming the new pastures. The air over the flowering islands began to hum, a sound that had not been heard in Würzburg for decades. It was the sound of a machine built by a million tiny, golden-crowned engineers, a sound that spelled *future*.
**The Reaction of the Emerging Communities.**
At first, the outlaws and shamans noticed only anomalies. A fisherman—an exile from the Rhine Corporate Zone—caught a dace that was firm-fleshed and clear-eyed, not the usual mutated, tumor-ridden thing. He showed it around the floating market on a pontoon of lashed-together *Boote*. Suspicion was the first reaction: Was it safe? Was it a corp trick?
Then the children of the reed-house dwellers started seeing rabbits at twilight. Then a shaman, deep in a trance to commune with *Mutter Main*, felt not just the water spirit, but a new, skittering, fertile vibrancy in the astral space over the islands—the complex, beautiful mind-song of a beehive.
Myths began to grow faster than the reeds.
“The lake is healing itself,” a grizzled ex-soldier turned aqua-farmer would say, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette on his raft. “It remembers what it was.”
“No,” a shaman of the Clean Waters would whisper, her eyes reflecting the flicker of bioluminescent algae. “*Mutter Main* is forgiving us. She is sending us gifts. The fish. The bees. They are her blessings.”
They began to institute their own, unspoken rules. No hunting the rabbits on the Nikolausberg—it was seen as a sacred meadow. No disturbing the quiet, watching dogs. The honey, carefully harvested from accessible hives with reverence, became a sacrament, a trade good of immense spiritual and caloric value.
They did not see Albrecht’s hand. They saw a miracle. And in protecting that miracle, they began to codify a new culture. A culture of stewardship, born not from doctrine, but from grateful observation. The valley was no longer just a hiding place. It was becoming a **habitat**, and they, its unknowing, devoted priests. Albrecht watched from the shadows, his heart a cold, satisfied stone. His army was complete: not just of machines and plants, but of believing hearts. The fortress walls were now made of faith and wildflowers, and they were stronger than any plasteel.
