"2040": Chapter One. DFT 21. The Zone

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

Morning over Munich moved according to schedule.

The drones came first. White capsules slid in perfect formation, dispensing pensions and fines. Then the towers ignited. Glass walls burned with the same short clips: the Payment Integrity Graph. About money. About trust. About democracy.

On the central square a panoramic screen lit up. A woman in her forties looked straight into the camera and spoke in a calm voice.

“In the world after the Liberty Blackout we cannot afford chaos. The Ministry of Financial Freedom protects your accounts, your rating and your future. PSD Five is not control. It is trust.”

The ad had played a thousand times. People walked past without raising their eyes.

Metro gates scanned wristbands. Coffee shops opened for the day and printed the first receipts. Algorithms selected the optimal daily plan for each person. The city moved the way cities move when they have grown used to the idea that something wise and invisible follows every movement of money and, as the news insists, does so objectively. Munich breathed with a calm, indifferent rhythm, the rhythm of a system convinced it has its hand on the pulse of everything.

Everything except what lay five kilometers to the north.

That was where Harmont began.

On the maps it was a nameless grey blot. In official reports it was a temporary restricted cluster marked as DFT-21. For those who walked its ruins it was simply the Zone.

---

Max de Vries earned his living by walking through the past.

He was tall, close to one meter ninety, and lean in a way that made him look like an antenna fixed on a roof. A face without expression. Faint lines at the corners of his mouth. He was thinking.

His glasses had dark frames and a faint photochromic tint that softened the bursts of advertising light which had given him migraines for many years.

He wore a brown jacket made of thick fabric, worn but reliable, with four pockets and a soft collar. It was not a brand, not tactical gear, just something that could outlive the person wearing it. Under it he had a dark grey shirt with the top button undone and faded grey olive trousers with reinforced knees. On his feet he wore plain leather boots, sturdy enough to climb over rubble and unremarkable enough to blend into an office crowd.

On his back he carried a narrow backpack the color of wet asphalt. It was not the dramatic field pack of survival movies but a compact urban frame pack, all hidden pockets and no unnecessary straps. To a camera it looked like a laptop bag. Something ordinary. Something safe.

In the right pocket of his jacket he kept earplugs in a small plastic case. In the left pocket he carried a smooth metal sphere the size of a walnut. His calming bead, as he called it to himself. Something to roll between his fingers when the world became too loud.

He was a stalker. That was the word used for the people who entered the Zones, the abandoned business centers, the closed universities and the sealed archives, and carried out the things the authorities preferred to forget. Documents. Transcripts. Old recordings. Books. Fragments of a world that still knew how to doubt. Everything that reminded people the world had once been different.

The pay was decent. Historians paid. Collectors paid. Paranoid clients paid. Max did not care who bought or why. He found the relics. They paid. It was enough to live on.

---

Eight years earlier, in the year twenty thirty two, Max had been a different man. He worked in a corner office on the twenty seventh floor of the Deutsche Bank Tower. He led a team of thirty specialists. His salary was the kind that stalkers did not even dream of.

Then the PSD Four directive arrived, and with it came a requirement. Banks had to hand over client data without a court order, based solely on an automated risk assessment.

Max read the draft once and then again. The pattern was too obvious. The courts were removed. The human filter was removed. Temporary measures were added. Temporary measures never stayed temporary.

He refused to implement the system. He told the board that this was not security. This was surveillance.

They asked him to leave. The documents said he stepped down voluntarily. The internal system added a line that mattered more. Unreliable. Not recommended for employment.

With that mark no legal job would open for him. Two paths remained. Keep quiet and starve. Or use his skills where they were still valued, away from the light.

Max chose the second path. He became a stalker.

---

His assignment today was simple. Retrieve a video recording of a United Nations Security Council meeting from September twenty twenty eight about the first PSD Three directives. A historian in Amsterdam had offered two hundred and fifty euro. A fair sum for half a day if luck did not turn.

The Deutsche Finanz Tower was one of the large Zones in Harmont. Officially it was a northern Munich cluster under long term investigation. For Max it was the building where, fourteen years earlier, he had still been someone. This tower once sent trillions of euro in motion. Now it held only dust, mold and the ghosts of previous decisions.

He checked his gloves, tightened the straps of his backpack and stepped through a break in the fence. Fifty four years behind him, eight of them spent in the Zones. His knees complained, but his body held.

The service entrance on the eastern side greeted him with a faint green light. The old code still worked. In the Zones time behaved strangely. Dead buildings sometimes preserved odd pockets of life.

Inside waited familiar darkness. Cold air. The smell of mold. Silence. Max switched on his flashlight, and its beam revealed a stairwell and a message on the wall:

They knew. They always knew.

Fourth floor. The server room. His former department had once monitored these nodes. Now Max was breaking into them for two hundred and fifty euro.

Rows of lifeless machines stood covered in dust. He found the marking: VAR twenty twenty eight, video archives, third row on the right. He connected a portable reader. The screen blinked and the progress bar began to move.

That was when something changed.

Not a sound. Not a movement. A shift in the silence, as if someone in the empty space had paused to breathe. Eight years in the Zones had taught him the difference. There was silence, and there was the silence of another presence.

Max turned off the reader at once. He listened.

A faint sound came from the floor above. A soft creak, almost plaintive.

No patrols had been here for years.

Another stalker, perhaps. The unwritten rule was simple. If you saw someone else, you stepped back. The territory belonged to no one. Trouble helped no one.

Max climbed the stairs.

The fifth floor was empty.
The sixth was the last before the technical level.

The door of office 607 moved gently in the draft.

He pushed it open.

The room had been overturned. A desk on its side. Broken glass. Wind moaning through a shattered window.

On the floor he saw tracks. They were fresh.

And a floorboard had been shifted aside.

Under it lay a narrow gap between the beams. A hiding place.

It was empty.

Max was about to close the gap when he noticed a thin scratch at an angle no beginner would check.

He reached deeper. Old habits from his years in security. Always check twice.

His fingers touched metal. A second hiding place, deeper than the first.

Max pulled out the container. Aluminum. Watertight. Heavy. On the lid was a faded message written in marker:

Twenty twenty five. For those who come after.

His heart jolted. This was not an artefact. It was something more. His fingers froze on the container.

Inside lay a Western Digital four terabyte drive sealed in an antistatic bag. And a note.

To the one who finds this.
My name is Anna Kravchenko. I am a journalist. If you are reading this then I am no longer alive. This drive contains evidence. How the system of control began. Who planned it. The PSD Three directives were not protection. They were the beginning of an attack. I do not know who you are. But if you found this then the Zone has chosen you. Find someone who will believe. Find someone who will not be afraid. Find someone who can use this. Truth must survive.
A. K.
Twelve December twenty twenty seven.

Max read it twice.

He remembered her. A journalist who wrote about the directives and the dangers of centralised financial power. She vanished at the end of twenty twenty seven, three months after Max implemented the first data protection system inside Deutsche Bank.

He had thought she exaggerated. The directives were temporary. The crisis would pass. The rules would be lifted. He had been naive. Five years later he was removed for refusing to cooperate.

Kravchenko had known the truth from the beginning. And she had left proof.

Max looked at the drive. Four terabytes. If her words were true this was not a relic. This was an explosive.

You did not earn two hundred and fifty euro for something like this. You died for something like this.

He closed the container.

And then he heard what he had been waiting for since the staircase.

A sound.

Not from above.

From the corridor.

He switched off his light and held his breath.A soft step. Careful. Drawn out.

Too light for a police officer.
Too steady for a stalker who feared being caught.

Someone else was here.
And that someone was not running. That someone was searching.

Max tightened his grip on the container.

He understood he had to leave now.

He chose a moment, slipped in the opposite direction and descended two flights at once. Muscle memory carried him. In less than a minute he was outside.

Rain was beginning. The air smelled clean, like a promise that rarely came true.

Kravchenko had written that the Zone had chosen him.

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps a former head of security who knew the inner workings of the system and a stalker who knew how to find what the system tried to bury was exactly the person who was meant to discover this.

He bought a coffee at a state terminal. His rating flashed on the screen.

Seven hundred four of one thousand. The terminal added a polite warning that caffeine would lower his rating by zero point three.

If the system knew what he carried in his backpack, it would not warn him. It would block his card forever.

Max took out an old phone that had never touched a network. He switched on the recorder.

“Fourteenth of November, twenty forty. Artefact from twenty twenty five discovered. Source is journalist Anna Kravchenko. Contents are evidence of the design of the control system. I do not yet know what to do with it. But I will not sell it.”

He turned off the recorder. He looked at the sky.

Eight years earlier he had walked away from Deutsche Bank because he refused to become part of the machine. Eight years he had survived by selling fragments of the past to those who collected them.

But this fragment was different.

For the first time in many years Max felt that a path lay ahead.

He would not walk it alone.

He knew a name. He had heard it in the shadow channels. A young analyst. Difficult. Inconvenient. Someone who asked the questions that ministries feared.

Jamie. He had not yet learned the surname.

But it was a beginning.

Max turned into a side street and pulled the backpack closer to his shoulders.

He had come for two hundred and fifty euro. He was leaving with something that could change the entire city.

Or bury it.

Nothing in the Zone ever happened by accident. That was what the old stalkers said.

And today Max was beginning to believe they were right.

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20 chapters of total immersion in the fintech dystopia “2040” – a world brimming with cunning, intrigue and dark secrets on one side… and courage, sacrifice and heroism on the other.

The more clearly we see what our real world could turn into, the greater our chances of making sure the world of “2040” never arrives!