Incorporated with DeepSeek
# Peak Normal
The rain came in like a collection agent.
No thunder. No drama. Just a steady, relentless drumming on the ivy that had swallowed your wire arc, on the leaves of the old pear tree, on the swales you’d cut into the slope three summers ago. The Main valley was dark, the Rhön microclimate doing what it always did now—wet winter, flash spring, furnace summer, then back to wet. The peaks had become the normal. You’d stopped calling them peaks.
You watched the trid from the kitchen window. The screen was cracked, the signal pirated off a Saeder-Krupp relay. The Allied German States were dissolving in real time. The Bundestag had voted itself out of existence. The chancellor had taken a board seat at a Frankfurt megacorp and sold the flag for a signing bonus. The eurodollar was dead. Corp scrip was the only currency that cleared. The SINless were being rounded up in Würzburg, in Aschaffenburg, in the sprawl. The nation was evaporating like a puddle on hot asphalt.
You had a name once. A SIN. A job. You were a wage-mage for a Rhein-Main corp, then a runner, then a ghost. Now you had a garden.
You’d turned the French parterre into an English forest. Box hedges gone wild. Roses replaced by Turkish rocket and Good King Henry. Rows of vegetables replaced by self-seeding chaos—miner’s lettuce carpeting the shade, corn salad volunteering in the cold frames, parsnips going to seed and coming back year after year. The ivy had covered the arc you’d built from wire and string, then covered the wire, then covered the string. It made a roof. It made a cave. It made a green hell in the wet year, a European jungle, and you’d learned to live in it.
The garden didn’t need much water. The swales caught the rain. The pond held it. The mulch kept it. The deep roots found it. The system was broken everywhere else, but here, in this valley, the feedback loops still worked.
You were drinking cold coffee when the fixer came.
She was elf-slim, corporate-clean, wearing a coat that cost more than your old cyberarm. She stood at the edge of the garden, under the ivy arc, and didn’t step in. Smart. The ground was soft. The swales were full. The garden was a maze if you didn’t know it.
“You’re hard to find,” she said.
“That’s the point.”
“My name is Kessler. I represent a client. Saeder-Krupp. Biotech division.”
You didn’t say anything. You watched a drone hover over the pear tree, small and black, its rotors beading with rain.
“They want your seed bank,” she said. “The polyculture. The self-seeding vegetables. The climate-adapted genetics. They’ll pay. Enough to get you out of this valley. Enough for a clean SIN. A condo in Frankfurt. Real water.”
“The garden isn’t for sale.”
“Everything is for sale. The nation just sold itself.”
“The nation was a corpse. The garden is alive.”
She smiled. It was the kind of smile that had a price tag. “They’ll take it anyway. You know how this works. The corps own the sky, the water, the law. They’ll send a team. They’ll burn the valley. They’ll scrape the soil. They’ll sequence the seeds. And you’ll be a footnote in a progress report.”
You looked at the ivy. It was thick on the arc, thick on the old oak, thick on the fence you’d stopped repairing. The ivy had been growing faster every year. Warmer winters. Wetter springs. Longer summers. It was a sign. It was also a weapon.
“Let them try,” you said.
She left. The drone followed her.
You spent the rest of the day preparing. Not with guns. Not with spells. With water.
You opened the swales. You deepened the pond overflow. You checked the berms. You moved the self-seeding vegetables—the Turkish rocket, the parsnips, the corn salad—to higher ground. You whispered to the ivy. You didn’t have a spirit pact anymore. You’d given that up when you left the corp. But the garden had its own spirit. You’d felt it. A slow, green, patient thing. It didn’t care about nuyen. It cared about water and light and seed.
They came at night. Two armored SUVs, black, no markings. Six mercs. Drones. Smartguns. Cybereyes. The rain was coming down hard now, a Rhön special, the kind that turned the valley into a sponge.
You were in the garden. You had a shotgun, old but clean. You had a mono-whip. You had a focus you didn’t use. You had the ivy.
The first drone went down when it hit the wire arc. You’d strung the wire under the ivy, thin and invisible. The drone’s rotors tangled. It fell into the swale and shorted out. The second drone saw you and fired. You were already gone, moving through the green tunnel, the ivy roof closing behind you.
The mercs came in on foot. They didn’t know the ground. You did. You’d cut the swales. You’d built the berms. You’d let the pond rise. The valley was a trap.
The first one stepped into a swale and sank to his waist. The mud was cold and thick. He screamed. You shot him in the face. The second one fired blind, hit a tree, hit the ivy. You came from behind, mono-whip singing. He dropped.
The third and fourth came together. You led them into the lowest part of the garden, where the ground was a false floor of leaves over water. They broke through. You didn’t have to kill them. The water did. The cold. The weight of their own armor.
The fifth was a mage. You felt her before you saw her. She was casting, trying to burn the ivy. You felt the garden resist. The ivy wasn’t just plant. It was a node. A slow, green, magical thing. The spell fizzled. The mage looked surprised. You shot her twice in the chest.
The sixth ran. You let him. He’d tell the story.
Kessler was in the SUV. You opened the door. She was reaching for a pistol. You took it from her. She looked at you with those corporate eyes, the ones that had never seen a real winter, a real drought, a real collapse.
“You can’t stop it,” she said. “The corps will come back. They’ll burn it all.”
“Maybe,” you said. “But not tonight.”
You didn’t kill her. You walked her to the edge of the garden. The rain was easing. The swales were full. The pond was overflowing into the overflow channel. The ivy was dripping.
“Tell them the garden is a mana node,” you said. “Tell them it’s toxic. Tell them the soil is contaminated. Tell them whatever you want. But tell them this: the seeds are gone. The polyculture is gone. The valley is dead.”
She looked at the green hell around her. The Turkish rocket. The Good King Henry. The miner’s lettuce. The ivy roof. The self-seeding chaos. She didn’t believe you. But she was cold. She was wet. She was alone.
She left.
You went back inside. You watched the trid. The nation was still evaporating. The corps were still carving it up. The SINless were still being rounded up. The system was cracking, failing, dying. You poured a whiskey. You looked out the window.
The garden was still there. The ivy was still growing. The seeds were still falling. The swales were still catching the rain. The peaks were normal. The normal was gone.
You were the last citizen of a country that no longer existed. You tended the garden. You let the ivy cover the arc. You let the parsnips go to seed. You watched the nation die.
The garden lived.
You were okay with that.
You did not surrender. You'll find your time to die.
Not today, not tomorrow, but certainly.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
