To: Moriarty and kin.
From: Armin Jansen, der Alster Union.
Subject: A house of cards.
Guten Tag.
It is curious how a house that has spawned so much economic largess - the parasite for all other Sirian enterprise, can become a place of peace. Arbiters and Interrupters alike walk the bomb line between competitive interests. It is us, the middlemen, who prevent the universe from falling apart. We render those interests… commutative.
You, for cardamine. Us, for artefacts. The two hands at the end of a very long arm connected to the push-pull of untold millions of bodies and minds. In our end theatres, there is little distinction between us. What for you ends up on the street, for us emerges in the vault, the offshore bank, the laboratory. We conduct our trade whilst undermining those who have forced us here, out on the sea-stack, watching the law crumble around us under its own weight.
We are both the victims of the neocons. Of globalisation - of the mistake of false paternalism. Money is madness - a nothing created through the attachment of value. It is all we have. Be you socialist, nationalist or anarchs-communist, we fight the globalists by redirecting their end product. We siphon - money, assets, steadily sealing the zip-ties over the arterial tissue till hearts pop in their boardrooms. Our fascination is the local war - not pirate enterprise waged, out there, beyond the green, on the far side of the edge wall. That’s just a means to an end, Hackers. A glorious end.
The hackers hold a great many chords with innumerable puppets behind them. You are information brokers - you cheat at cards. We have much to benefit from working with you, as you do, in turn, from us. What you are for software we are for hardware. Molybdenum and Duralumin, gold and silicon.
We construct, craft. You code, manipulate, re-root. We have a shipyard. You, unless you’re hiding something remarkable, which you may yet, do not.
Apart from physical and ideological worth, there is the obvious… tactical… advantage to our collaboration. Whilst we may tryst with your Maltese allies, if rarely, within the Sigmas, we have no interest in conflicting with the Orange Alliance within the… remarkably faux named, house of Liberty. You need not lecture us on trust. We balance a tenuous, treasonous relationship between the self-interested Dorians and the disgustingly Marxist Hessians on a glass thread. All it would take would be the whisper of a lie to destroy the greatest smuggling enterprise in the Rhein.
You see; we thrive on falsehood too, Lane Hackers. Should not the truth dealers and the professional liars, thick as the thieves we are, find a common cause? We stand to write a good many wrongs together. Agiera and Republican cast us out. Made a criminal caste from good men. Intelligent men.
And now, in Texas, in Hamburg, they will pay.
We propose a formal reinstitution of positive diplomacy between the Lane hackers and the Die nationale Gewerkschaft der Alster und der fünfte Reich, explicitly for the purpose of causing the maximal possible economic damage to the Liberty Rheinland trade artery. If war between our houses was an atrocity, it indirectly succeeded in attaining what five hundred years of guerrilla warfare could not - crimping the Hamburg pass into a single trade lane. Together, we can guarantee the fall of hudson. Together, we can cut the globalists down.
Our resources and shipbuilding assets are at your disposal, should you require them, Lane Hackers. Till then, I remain your council.
Regards,
Armin Jansen.
First contact representative and Diplomat-in-Chief of der Alster Union, Pacifica Base, Bering.