Incorporated with DeepSeek
# Neon Jungle Requiem
Rain slicked the permacrete like liquid obsidian, neon bleeding into every puddle—crimson, electric violet, the sick green of a toxic spirit’s eye. I adjusted the collar of my armored longcoat and watched the gate iris open. The compound was a fortress carved out of an old-world hillside that had no business still existing in this sprawl, but that was Klein’s style: he bought history and re-skinned it in chrome.
“Show the cinema,” Ali muttered into his subvocal. The ork’s tusks were freshly capped in synth-ivory, grin wide as a credstick. “Cameraman’s rolling. We’re live in five.”
“This is a bad idea,” Julian’s voice crackled over the encrypted link. Our samurai was already inside, posing as a technician, tapping into the house’s security grid while we played tourist. “Target’s got more wards than a corporate arcology. I’m picking up ritual traces in the east wing. Something old.”
I glanced at the gorilla. It stood twelve feet tall in the courtyard, carved from obsidian and inlaid with pulsing veins of bioluminescent moss. The King of the Jungle’s mascot. A sign of power, or a warning. In this neighborhood, they meant the same thing.
“Steady,” I sent. “We’re guests of the great Philipp Klein. Act like it.”
Ali’s grin didn’t waver as the inner door hissed open and the man himself swaggered out—mid-forties, ageless, skin too smooth, eyes too sharp. Black synth-silk suit, no tie, a platinum lobster pin on his lapel. Klein embraced us like brothers, his German accent buttered over years of transnational corp-speak.
“Welcome to fucking paradise, babies,” he said, arms wide. His aura flickered at the edge of my astral perception: golden, but with black veins. Geased, maybe. Or worse, one of the blooded.
Ali and I played our parts. We gushed over the lobby—the champagne, the Plein Monopoli board with its stacks of corp scrip, the framed portraits of naked metahumans posing with his branded lobsters. Klein called it his “Lobster Lounge.” We called it stage one.
He gave us the tour. The G-Wagens with flickering quantum plates, illegal in any sector that still pretended to have laws. The swimming pool with its perfect mirror surface, a scrying pool big enough to drown a lesser dragon. The infinity ceiling above the bar, projecting a sky that never ended—just like the debt of anyone who crossed him.
Julian, pretending to calibrate a holo-cam, signaled danger: *three guardian spirits, two razorgirls, one cyber-troll in the basement with a minigun that’s seen action.* Klein’s “family truck” was a matte-black combat vehicle with reactive armor. The kids—Rocket and two smaller ones—giggled somewhere upstairs, but their laughter had an off-key timbre. I caught a whiff of ozone and blood through the air filters. The pirate ship he was building in the new wing wasn’t just a playground. It was a weapons platform, a floating drug lab anchored to a geothermal vent.
Klein led us to the pink lounge, all velvet and hand-painted wallpaper with birds that moved when you weren’t looking. He talked about dreams while I studied the samurai armor in the corner—authentic, pre-awakening, the blade still humming with a bound spirit. He said the way was the goal. He said material things were a trap. Easy words for a man with a dozen souls trapped in his vault.
I asked him about “the Bubble,” the new street drug that was turning the sprawl into a graveyard of grinning corpses. Users experienced a perfect dream life—time stretched to years in their minds while their bodies wasted away in hours. The source was here, in this jungle, and I needed the formula.
Klein’s smile never wavered. “You want to see my secret, ja?” He gestured toward the obsidian tower I’d spotted on the way in—a twisting twelve-meter pillar of mirrored glass, a giant’s hourglass filled with swirling iridescent mist. “We call them the Bubbles. You can watch them forever and never get bored. They change with the light.” He touched the glass, and inside, faces pressed against the surface—silent, screaming. Prisoners of his fantasy, slowly dissolving into raw mana that fed the drug pipeline.
I felt Ali’s rage spike across the link. Julian was already moving, blade ready. But Klein just tilted his head. “Yesterday’s price,” he said softly, “is not today’s price.”
The lights died. The tower shattered. In the sudden dark, I heard the wet snarl of the cyber-troll activating and the high, cold giggle of a child right behind me.
Michael Mann in chrome and blood. That’s the gig. No heroes, just survivors trying to steal a dream before it eats them alive.
I drew my pistol, its smartlink burning red against the neon rain now pouring through the broken roof. Ali’s shotgun roared. Somewhere, the King of the Jungle laughed, and his voice echoed through every speaker in the compound: *Don’t hate the player, hate the game.*
And the game was only just beginning.
