Another real story, based on real events in the finance and tech world. Names, companies, and details have been changed.

Title: Modern Architecture of Prison

On Tuesday morning, Dylan got ready for another day at the office. She followed the same habit she had for years: wearing the same clothes as always - jeans and one of two 'office' hoodies. Dylan couldn't be bothered to think about how to dress for the office and definitely didn't want to spend her money on clothing. Her colleagues assumed she had multiple versions of the same hoodies, and she let them believe it.

Once ready, she made her way to the office. She swiped her card at the door of the clinically looking entrance hall and found a space in the open-plan office. As usual, the fluorescent lights hummed a monotonous tune, the official soundtrack to Dylan's five-year sentence at 'Black Solutions'.

The hoodie she was wearing today, with its bold, orange Bitcoin logo, was her small, silent rebellion. It was like a little flag planted in corporate soil, a reminder that a world of decentralised, voluntary value existed beyond these corporate walls. A world she believed in. A world she was actively helping to create, while accepting one paycheck at a time from Black Solutions. At least, she thought, until she paid down the loan she'd taken out for 'home furniture' a few years ago - just after Michael Saylor announced he would leverage the fiat system to buy Bitcoin for MicroStrategy.

Today, her manager called her into a team meeting. They had secured a new contract for a project called 'Titan', a new project for a US bank. "Dylan," said the manager, David, gesturing to a seat. "Glad you could make it. We're excited to use your expertise for this project."

A man from Titan, a senior VP named Thomas, began a presentation. "Our customers need to be protected," he stated, his voice flat and cold. "They are moving increasingly large amounts of funds outside the regulatory space. We require an automated solution." A slide appeared on the screen. At its heart was a module: "Financial Transaction Monitoring & Flagging System."

Dylan's blood ran cold. David beamed at her. "Dylan, you'll be leading the development of the AI agents. We need your expertise in building resilient, autonomous systems."

Thomas from Titan looked directly at her, his gaze dropping from her face to the orange logo printed on her hoodie. A flicker of something - amusement? - crossed his features before being smoothed away. "Your agents," he continued, "will need to identify, analyse, and recommend for immediate blockage any transaction originating from or destined for known blacklisted accounts, as well as flag suspicious patterns in real-time."

Dylan believed in censorship-resistant money, in the idea that a transaction, once broadcast, was final. And she was being asked to build the digital equivalent of a border guard, an AI sniffer dog trained to hunt down and destroy the very thing she held sacred.

Dylan looked at the screen and at the expectant faces around the table. She looked down at the orange Bitcoin Logo on her hoodie, a symbol of freedom in a room full of architects for a new kind of prison. The project was starting next week.

Dylan nodded slowly, the motion mechanical. "Of course," she heard herself say. "We'll get on it."

The humming of the lights seemed to grow louder, filling the space in her mind. As she stood to leave, she realised the entry to prison was the debt. Her loan had been the first wall, and every compromise since had been another brick, mortared with fear and wrong rationalisation. @Simon Dixon

Does anyone has a link a German translation of the book "Fiat Food" by Matthew Lysiak?

People think Bitcoiners are taking huge financial risks, when it's the opposite. I'm terrified of what's happening in the world, and I know Bitcoin is the asset that will protect me, there is no better asset to own.

If you're the most risk-averse person on the planet, you should only have Bitcoin. If you're still worried, run a node, and if you want absolute certainty, run a few miners to give Bitcoin heartbeats. 🧡🧡

This story is based on real events in the finance/tech world. Names, companies, and details have been changed to protect everyone involved. I used AI to make it more entertaining. Just so you know. 🙂

The email from Finance landed with the soft chime of opportunity: "Project Genesis - £2.8M Approved." Alistair stared at the screen, the numbers swimming before his eyes. 2.8 million pounds. For agentic AI. He leaned back in his ergonomic chair, the one they'd bought during the "Quantum Leap" restructuring two years ago, and let out a slow breath.

His team of six, huddled in the designated "Innovation Pod" (a glass box with a dying ficus), looked to him for direction. They were the "Agentic AI Research Division," a title that sounded impressive until you remembered they'd never actually built an agent.

"So," said Priya, their lead engineer, breaking the silence. "We have the money. What's the business problem we're solving?"

Alistair felt the familiar knot tighten in his stomach. This was the ritual. The grand inversion of how things were supposed to work. The board, seduced by white papers and breathless articles about "autonomous digital workforces," had allocated the capital. Now, it was on them—the tech team—to reverse-engineer a reason for its existence. It was like being given a coffin and being told to find a worthy corpse.

"We're exploring the frontiers," Alistair said, the corporate-speak tasting like ash in his mouth. "The mandate is to research and develop a proof-of-concept for an agentic system that can... uh... dynamically optimize business workflows."

Priya didn't blink. "Okay. Which workflows? For which client?

And there it was. The question that could not be answered. They had no clients. They had no workflows. The ROI was a fictional number in a PowerPoint deck that had secured the funding. Their job wasn't to solve a problem; it was to build a problem sophisticated enough to fit the solution they were now forced to imagine.

For the next three weeks, the Innovation Pod became a factory for problems. They brainstormed. They whiteboarded. They drank endless lukewarm coffee. They came up with "Agent-based supply chain reconciliation," "Autonomous customer sentiment analysis," and "AI-driven contract lifecycle management." Each idea was a magnificent, gleaming edifice of jargon, built on a foundation of nothing.

They finally settled on "Nexus," an agentic system that would supposedly manage complex, multi-departmental project dependencies. It sounded plausible. It sounded expensive. It sounded like something that could burn through £2.8 million in research and development without ever needing to prove its worth.

Alistair presented it to the steering committee. He used words like "synergistic," "paradigm," and "cognitive orchestration." He showed them a slick UI mockup that their one designer had whipped up in a week. The UI was a lie, a beautiful, interactive fiction. The agents it depicted were lines of code in a git repository that didn't exist yet.

The board loved it. They approved the next tranche of funding for "Phase 2: Agent Simulation."

That night, Alistair stayed late. He walked through the empty office, past the desks of the "Quantum Computing Team" (who were now the "Blockchain Synergy Group" after the last company reshuffle). He thought about the tax money that flowed from his paycheck into the government's coffers, only to be routed back to them as grants for initiatives like this. It wasn't a company; it was a money laundering operation for incompetence, a perfectly circular system where public funds were transformed into private salaries for solving problems that didn't exist.

He sat back down at his desk and opened a new terminal window. He typed mkdir nexus_project and hit enter. The cursor blinked on the empty line, a tiny, digital heart waiting for a pulse. He had the money. He had the team. He had the mandate. All he needed now was a business case.