"2040": Chapter 8. The Future of Banking & Payments

Welcome to the world of my prognostic novel "2040" – a future that could come to pass… but absolutely should not.

In the previous chapters: Munich, 2040. Minister Liberton built a system that knows everything about you and calls it protection. Max de Vries found the drive of murdered journalist Anna Kravchenko.

Jamie Müller saw his missing father’s name on that drive and wrote: I’m in. In Davos, Mia van Doren watched a colleague get taken away for asking one inconvenient question. She made contact with Sophie Clark. Address: Munich. Azam bar.

One of the sources of inspiration for the detailed development of Chapter 8 was the piece of the excellent Substack author Carey Lening (Privacat), who will appear in this chapter in a cameo role, playing herself in 2040.

A brief primer before we step into Sophie’s apartment.

Without it, you will not understand why Sophie Clark is sitting in the dark at 21:47, doing something punishable by twenty years in prison in 2040.

As you may remember from Chapter Six, it all began when people wanted convenience. As usual. No one thought then about the price they would one day pay for frictionless living and all the little financial perks that came with it. Now it is far too late to think about that.

So.

Europe, 2040. Banks still exist. Three of them. Three large systemic banks for the entire continent: Deutsche European Bank, UniCore, and Northern Alliance. They do not compete. Competition was abolished in 2036 under the banner of “financial stabilization.” Now they simply service the graph. Like three cashiers in a store where someone else arranged the shelves a long time ago.

Electronic Money Institutions, EMIs, also still exist on paper. Three hundred and forty of them, according to the latest official statistics. Most are subsidiaries of those same three banks, renamed to create the illusion of variety. Fintech with a human face. Very convenient.

And then there is the underground.

The underground did not appear because people are romantics in love with crime. It appeared because, in 2037, as you may remember, the Payment Integrity Graph was granted the right to make retrospective corrections. Which means this: the system can enter your past and rewrite it. You bought something three years ago. The system has now decided that purchase was improper. The money is withdrawn today. No court. No appeal. Just a smile and the word verified.

Eight million people in Europe are served by the underground. Not mobsters. Not terrorists. Schoolteachers from Schwabing. Small business owners. Journalists. Doctors who once said the wrong thing in a professional group chat. These are people to whom the system once said no, and who decided the system could go to hell.

The underground is not an organization. It is an ecosystem. Mesh networks, illegal EMIs, tax loopholes between jurisdictions, and people like Sophie Clark, who know the architecture of the system from the inside and use it against itself.

How do you get into this ecosystem? There is no advertising. No website. Word of mouth in the Zones, at flea markets, in hair salons that still take cash. Someone whispers to someone, and after three handshakes you find a point of contact. The points are small shops, dry cleaners, flower stalls across Munich. You walk in, say the password, leave an envelope of cash. €23 a month. In return, you get a contract. Anonymous, legally worthless, but enforceable through the one asset the Payment Integrity Graph still cannot seize: reputation.

An underground EMI that breaks its contract is a dead underground EMI. Not morality. Just a business model.

---

Klenzestrasse, third floor. 21:31.

Outside, it is an ordinary Munich evening. Someone is walking a dog. Someone is staring at their phone with the expression of a person whom the algorithm has just offered exactly what they wanted, and that makes them both happy and afraid, but the happiness wins by a narrow margin, so they tap buy. A drone from the Ministry of Financial Freedom makes its routine pass overhead, a white capsule, quiet, professional, almost invisible. The Ministry calls them “urban assistants.” At first people objected. Then they got used to them. Then they stopped seeing them.

Convenience always wins.

Until it loses.

In the apartment on the third floor, the radio murmurs with the static of the news. Not because anyone is listening. Because silence in an apartment is also a pattern, and a pattern is data.

— …Minister Liberton today addressed an emergency briefing of the European Financial Council. The Minister emphasized that the new bill on licensing payment institutions is aimed exclusively at protecting…

— Protecting... Lucas repeated in the tone of a man hearing that word for the three hundred and ninety-sixth time and understanding less each time how it ever made it into the dictionary.

— Turn it off, Ren said.

— Can’t. Traffic.

— Then lower it.

Lucas lowered the volume. Liberton went on speaking, now softly, almost intimately, as if he were explaining to Lucas personally why he ought to feel grateful.

— …Verden Space Industries has confirmed the launch of a new phase of its orbital program. Investments will total…

— Eighty-three billion, Sophie said without looking up from the screen.

— …eighty-three billion euros, said the radio.

Ren looked at Sophie.

— You can read minds?

— No. They’ve been saying the same thing for five years. Sophie finally looked up from the data on her screen. Eighty-three billion. Not one rocket. Not one launch. But every quarter, a new press conference with new graphics. Verden is a genius. He sells the future to people who are afraid of the present. Best business model imaginable.

— Because the future can’t be audited, Lucas said.

— Exactly.

— …Mr. Verden stated: “I grew up in a world where your freedom depended on a document and the mood of a man in uniform. I promised myself that if I ever had power, I would build systems that liberate. This is my promise to every citizen of Europe: the horizon belongs to you”…

Sophie paused.

For one second, exactly one, Verden’s voice did what only virtuoso liars can do: it sounded true. Genuinely true. Even though he was saying it all in a five-thousand-euro turtleneck, with such sincerity that even lie detectors would climax. He was not just a liar. He was an artist.On the second of the three matte displays, the Payment Integrity Graph pulsed green. Green transaction lines flowed across Europe like blood through the veins of a very healthy and very tightly controlled organism. Munich pulsed brightest of all. Three million people, three million financial histories, three million data points, all digested by the graph every eight seconds.

Incidentally, in 2026 a top-end workstation means a large 4K monitor and perhaps a second screen to make you feel important. In 2040 it looks fundamentally different. Three matte flexible displays, not glass but fabric. They roll up into tubes, unroll across any surface: desk, wall, ceiling, if that is your preference.

On the third display, Ren unrolled something older. Not data. Not a live feed. Not a graph.

An article.

The fabric held the text with an almost embarrassing tenderness, as if long-form writing itself had become an antique object by 2040. No optimization layer. No adaptive overlays. No mood-synced interface. Just a title, plain black type, preserved from a quieter internet:

THE LADDER TO NOWHERE… (Substack, 2026, by Privacat)

Lucas glanced over.

— That thing again?

— It explains the motive better than half the leaked architecture.

The old article sat on the cloth display like a strip of recovered skin from a previous civilization. Sophie read only the highlighted lines. She did not need the rest.

• First they offer assistance.

• Then they become habit.

• Then infrastructure.

• Then the profile becomes more important than the person.

For a second, nobody spoke.

Outside, somewhere above Munich, a Ministry drone moved through the dark with the polite silence of a machine that no longer needed to frighten people in order to govern them.

Lucas exhaled through his nose.

— Privacat saw it early.

Sophie looks at the green lines on the display and sees what no one else sees: seams. The places where one protocol was stitched to another hastily, badly, because Liberton had deadlines and ambitions, while his engineers had chronic sleep deprivation.

Every seam is a window.

A small one. Three seconds at most.

But that is enough.

---

21:47:34

Marta Schmidt’s request arrived three hours earlier…. Marta Schmidt was a client. Not a symbol. Not a metaphor. Not an excuse for a speech about injustice. A client, with a contract, an account number, and the right to technical support under clause 4.2 of the agreement. She paid €23 a month in cash, through a flower stall on Müllerstrasse, and in return received exactly one thing: protection from the system’s retrospective corrections. Sophie was not an activist. She was an operator. An operator fulfills the contract. That is called professional reputation, the only currency in the underground that the Payment Integrity Graph cannot devalue.

So. Marta. Forty-three years old. A German-language teacher. Payment score 831. A model citizen. No red flags. Eight months ago she bought a ticket to Istanbul. An ordinary flight. She probably brought back spices and took a picture by the Bosphorus. Maybe she told her students about Turkey.

Yesterday: retrospective correction. €3,127.

Why? At the check-in queue, Marta stood 1.4 meters away from a subject with a risk score of 67. They did not speak. They did not look at each other. They simply stood in the same airport line, because that is how airports work. They have lines.

Associative risk score: activated.
Correction: verified.
Appeal: impossible.

Marta wrote to the official portal. Four days later the portal replied:

“Correction verified. Review impossible.”

This is eight million stories. Marta is simply next in line today.

— Lucas. What cycle is the graph on?

— Twelve-minute pool. Next one at 22:04.

— Window at 22:01.

— Ninety seconds. Can we make it?

— I’ve done it in forty.

Lucas did not ask under what circumstances. A smart man.

While Sophie gets ready, let me explain the mechanics quickly. It is beautiful, and it would be a sin not to.

You cannot just “send back” €3,127. This is not a bank transfer. It is an architectural operation. You want to move water through a wall without making a hole. Sounds impossible. It is not, if you know where the wall is cardboard.

The €3,127 is split into 184 micropayments, from €0.11 to €47.83. The amounts are intentionally irregular, because the graph looks for patterns and symmetry is a pattern, and to hell with symmetry. Each fragment goes through a separate gateway in a separate jurisdiction: Lithuania, Malta, Cyprus, Romania, Iceland, and nine other countries where there is precisely a one-transaction gap between local law and PSD5. At the moment of protocol switching, SEPA hands off to SWIFT, SWIFT has not accepted yet, the API is already querying, and for three seconds the payment disappears. It exists in no registry. The graph sees an app freeze.

Three seconds of blindness.

Across fourteen jurisdictions.

One hundred and eighty-four times.

Liberton’s engineers spent four years and several billion euros of taxpayer money building a system of total control. Sophie found its holes in the first three months. Not because she is a genius. Because they were building for PowerPoint presentations. She was building to make it work. Liberton hired people who know how to make beautiful slides. She knows how to do the things no slide can ever show. As they say, the difference is in the method.

— Starting, Sophie said.

---

21:54

The eighty-third micropayment.

The second display flickered.

It did not freeze. It did not reboot. It flickered. Like a person who tells the truth out loud for one second and instantly regrets it.

Three point two seconds.

Liberty Financial International balance:
−€4,700,000,000

Negative four point seven billion.

Then another flicker. Sophie took the screenshot on reflex. Recovery. €127 billion. Positive now. Everything is fine. Move along.

The room went so quiet you could hear Lucas not breathing. Ren slowly stepped away from the window.

— What. Was. That, Lucas said.

— Reconciliation gap. The system was updating a version. Different nodes were seeing different states.

— By four and a half billion?

— By four and a half billion. Someone took that money. The system is hiding the hole. To an external observer, everything is in perfect order. Liberton sits at dinner with a glass of Riesling, looks at the balance, €127 billion, all splendid.

— And the four and a half, where is it? Ren asked.

— Good question, Sophie said. A very good question.

— Finishing the operation.

Marta Schmidt received her €3,127 at 22:14. In the morning she will open her app and see status recalculation. She will exhale. Maybe she will think the system sometimes works after all. Maybe she will even tell a friend, you know, I filed a complaint and they gave it back. The friend will say, see, the main thing is to trust the system…. No one will ever know.

---

23:34

Lucas was asleep. Ren had gone on an external perimeter check.

The second failure came without warning.

2.8 seconds.

This time Sophie was ready. Her finger was already on the screenshot.

Thousands of transactions. Werden Space Industries → Meridionale Logistics, Costa Viola Investments, and eight other names that smelled of Calabria. Fragmentation: 1,847,293 micropayments.

Sophie stared at the number for a long time. Because she recognized it.

Not the operation. The method. The principle of fragmentation with jurisdictional distribution, which she had developed in 2031 as a tool to protect citizens from abusive transactions. It later became part of PSD4. It also got fifteen people killed.

And now someone had used that method to strip Liberton’s ministry of several billion and frame Calabria for it.

This was not the mafia. The mafia does not work with this kind of geometric precision.

This was someone who understood the architecture. From the inside. Possibly better than she did.

Timur Weiss.

She had seen the name in the data for months, out on the periphery, in the shadows, like a stranger’s silhouette behind frosted glass. She had never grasped the scale.

Now she did.

She typed into the mesh:

Anna Kravchenko’s drive. Who has it?

Seventeen minutes of silence.

Then one line:

Maximilian de Vries. Munich. Azam bar. The only blind spot in the city. Careful. Paranoid, but not an idiot.

Until 21:00 the following evening: twenty-one hours.

---

Azam bar.

We have been here before, in Chapter Four. Max and Father Bernard, oak tables, seventeenth-century stone vaults, the smell of wax and old wood, six tables, and an owner who accepts only cash and never asks unnecessary questions.

Nothing has changed since then. Nothing changes here at all, not since the 1730s, and that is exactly what makes it safe. Systems of control fear two things: unpredictability and archaism. Azam was both. Bavarian baroque as the finest firewall of the twenty-first century.

When Sophie entered, Max de Vries was already there.

Same table by the load-bearing wall. De Vries sat in the corner like an old spider that had survived too many boots. Back to stone, eyes on the door, right hand near his pocket, a reflex you cannot buy for any number of bitcoins. Fifty-four years old. Looks sixty-five, thinks forty. He watches the way a sapper watches an unfamiliar wire, not with fear, but with professional curiosity. The timer is already running.

— De Vries.

— I know who I am. His voice was dry, stripped of ornament. The Archivist said you saw graph failures. Show me.

Direct. No preamble. Paranoids do not waste time on small talk. They test immediately.

Sophie placed the burner phone on the table. Screenshot one. Screenshot two.

Max looked for exactly twenty seconds. Then at her. Then back at the screenshots. Something in him was working, quietly, methodically, like a second processor.

— Reconciliation gap, he said.

— Yes….

— Timestamp on the first: 21:54:07. On the second: 23:34:22. Gap of one hour forty minutes. He raised his eyes. You monitored it the whole time?

— Yes.

— Using whose token?

— Lucas Ferreira. Former ECB engineer. Left in 2038. Token was never revoked.

Pause.

Max took out a burner of his own, same model as hers, Sophie noticed, and typed quickly. Then he laid it face down on the table. The pause changed. It was no longer evaluative. It was waiting.

Forty seconds later, the phone vibrated. He checked it. Gave the faintest nod, mostly to himself.

The Archivist had confirmed it.

For the first time that evening, Max looked not at Sophie, but past her shoulder, toward the side chapel beyond the bar.

There, half-veiled by a carved column darkened by centuries of candle smoke, sat a woman with a rolled cloth display, a heavy ceramic mug, and a cat of no distinguished lineage whatsoever sprawled across her lap as if it owned the sanctuary. Mixed-breed, mottled, one ear nicked, deeply uninterested in geopolitics.

The woman herself looked like someone who had spent twenty years telling powerful people that no, this was in fact a terrible idea, and being ignored by all of them in turn. Black hair shot through with silver. A little heavy in the shoulders. Pale face. Sharp, tired eyes. Not theatrical eyes. Legal eyes. The kind that had read too many policy drafts, breach reports, and euphemisms for surveillance to be impressed by any of them.

She rested one hand on the cat without looking down. The other lay beside the rolled display and the cooling coffee.

Sophie followed Max’s glance and felt recognition arrive in an odd order.

Not the face. The byline.

On the edge of the cloth display, before it curled back into shadow, she caught the preserved header of an archived post: Privacat.

She looked at Max.

— That Privacat?

His mouth shifted by perhaps one millimeter. Then he turned to Sophie.

— The fragmentation pattern in the second failure, he said. One million eight hundred forty-seven thousand micropayments. Do you know whose method it is?

— Mine, Sophie said.

That stopped him.

— Yours.

— I developed the principle in 2031, when you still believed in fair elections. It became part of PSD4. Someone used it to rob Liberton and frame Calabria.

— And you came here because…

— Because I want to know who. And because you have Anna Kravchenko’s drive.

Max looked at her for a long time. He was reading her face the way the graph reads transactions, looking for a pause half a second longer than normal. Finally he pulled out a flash drive. Old, scratched, marked with an A on the side. Three years of Anna Kravchenko’s life. All the rot of Liberton, Verden, and their pet banks inside one piece of plastic.

Max glanced toward the door. Jamie Müller came in and read the room in three seconds. Eyes on the perimeter. Max’s table by the load-bearing wall.

He sat down. Looked at the screenshots. Then at Sophie for one second longer than necessary.

— Reconciliation gap.

— We know, Sophie said.

— I saw the same thing three weeks ago. Logged it as a technical artifact.

— It’s not an artifact.

— I understand that now.

— How do you have access to graph monitoring?

— An outdated token.

— Whose?

— Someone smarter than both of us put together, who never changed his password after 2038.

Jamie kept looking at her for another second.

— Bureaucracy, he said.

— The revolution’s best friend.

For the first time that evening, Max almost smiled. He placed the flash drive on the table.

— This is a copy, he said immediately. The original is elsewhere. If they take you on your way out, I lose a copy. If you are who you say you are, you now have everything you need. Anna Kravchenko. Three years of work. Full architecture: Liberton, Verden, Weiss, corruption in the ECB.

— That’s why they killed her, Jamie said softly.

— Yes. Max looked at the flash drive. Which is why I do not carry the original in my pocket. I am not an idiot.

Sophie took the flash drive.

Three people in a bar beneath a seventeenth-century church. Outside, Munich lived its ordinary life. Someone walked a dog. Someone cheerfully tapped accept terms on another app update without reading what exactly they were accepting, as people always had, as they would tomorrow and the day after. The drone moved over the rooftops with calm, methodical precision.

Inside: coffee, silence, and the moment all three of them felt at once.

There it was.

That point in a story after which its direction changes, not because no one can still stand up and leave, but because each of them had made that choice long ago.

Each in their own moment.

---

---

I highly recommend subscribing to Carey’s newsletter. She specializes in data protection and information security, and writes about complex systems at the intersection of technology, law, and politics.