Economic Horror
sref 3449062605
The Gauss-Vesper Syndicate discovered capitalism's final frontier: the precise moment respiration becomes expiration. From their multinational tower trading floors, economists at the Syndicate perfected respiratory arbitrage through their Volatility Engine—algorithms that throttle oxygen supply based on debt accumulation. Citizens wear mandatory Debt-O₂ inhalers that constrict airways. Miss a payment, your airways constrict 2%. At 50% debt load, victims enter "Z-Ersatz"—a medical term the Syndicate coined for still conscious citizens whose oxygen deprivation causes a shuffling, violent confusion that looks like the undead. But these aren't zombies, just suffocating debtors whose hypoxia and rage becomes prime-time entertainment: RUN/DEAD™, the number one show globally. This broadcasted nightly death-game has contestants navigate Z-Ersatz zones for debt forgiveness, but the real product isn't entertainment, it's the advanced financial instruments and derivatives. Expiration Futures are the most profitable, with every labored breath feeding the Syndicate's predictive models, calculating the exact second of a debtor’s death. Hedge funds buy positions on neighborhood collapse schedules. Pension funds invest in "Breathing Bonds." Your neighborhood's suffocation rate just became someone's retirement fund. Yesterday, the slums of London expired at 3:47 PM. The Syndicate's models were off by twelve seconds—someone's getting fired.
WORLD ELEMENTS
Debt-O₂ Inhalers: Body-mounted breath-valves with red credit-meters, originally rolled out globally as a mandatory “public health” fix for pandemics, pollutants, and poisons. Each one is wired to the Gauss-Vesper grid, tightening or easing your airflow based on your debt score. Some refuse to wear one, but going bare has its own consequences: no air quality warnings and enforcers who treat free-breathers like smugglers. Communities tend to cluster based on reserves, sharing breath-equity and co-signing debt to distribute risk. Current debt average ↑ 47% globallyThe RUN/DEAD™: Contestants enter with (base_oxygen − accumulated_debt) × (sponsor_multipliers). They must navigate three Z-Ersatz zones collecting breath-tokens while avoiding debt-traps. Survival-metrics determine prize: Complete all zones = debt-forgiveness. Die dramatically = family receives viewing-royalties. Quit early = debt-compounds 20%. Audience votes cost contestants 1% oxygen per downvote. Tonight's mortality-probability ↑ 73%
Volatility Harvesting: The Syndicate seeds chaos-arbitrage opportunities—throttling oxygen-supply here, injecting liquidity-events there—then trades the resulting panic-spreads. Every riot is preceded by calculated debt-adjustments calibrated for maximum violence-yields and viewing-returns. Unrest futures ↑↑ in emerging markets.
Expiration Futures: Death-backed securities tracking precise termination-moments. Trade mortality-options on whether Sector-194 expires before Tuesday. Short-sell a generation's breath-capacity. The Syndicate also trades metabolic instruments: oxygen-saturation bonds, cortisol-backed securities, adrenaline-dump futures, pre-natal breath derivatives. Your panic-attack generates portfolio-gains. Your child's asthma becomes a futures-contract. Life-expectancy derivatives ↓ 2.3 years, Anxiety-yields ↑ 400% quarterly
Retail Death-Markets: Day-traders and amateur investors bet on mortality through mobile apps. Top individual stock and index tickers: $GVS (Gauss-Vesper Syndicate), $NEO (Neocyte Corporation), $ARIA (the AI Board member's holdings), $LNDN (London breath-capacity), $ZSTZ (Z-Ersatz pharmaceutical treatments), $OXY (oxygen supply index), $MORT (global mortality rates), $BRTH (breathing capacity average). Retail "death-gamblers" buy fractional shares, turning suffering into crowd-sourced speculation. The Syndicate encourages retail trading—every amateur bettor validates market legitimacy. Retail trading volume ↑ 4,000% since launch.
LOCATIONS
The Tower-Trading Floors: Gauss-Vesper dealing-pits where screens display live suffocation-metrics from every city. Traders wear medical-masks to "feel the market." The floor reeks of eucalyptus and fear-sweat. Every sneeze triggers algorithm-adjustments. Market volatility ↑ with pollen count.
Sector-Ø: Permanent RUN/DEAD™ death-arenas in global financial-centers where Z-Ersatz density peaks. Streets littered with empty breath-cartridges. Buildings tagged with oxygen-percentages. The air itself trades as commodity-futures. Breathable atmosphere ↓ to 67%
Breathing Rooms: Underground oxygen-bars where the poor purchase ten-minute breath-packages for a day's wages. "Breathers" spend everything for clarity-moments. Proprietors dilute oxygen with nitrogen, causing brain-damage but increasing profit-margins. Everyone knows. No one stops them. The alternative is suffocating on credit. Black-market oxygen ↑ $847/hour
Death-Day Retailers: Retailers offer massive discounts to citizens within 48 hours of calculated expiration. "Last-Breath Luxury" packages include foods they could never afford, experiences before they suffocate. The cruel irony: spending accelerates their death-clock. You get the notification on Tuesday. You're dead by Thursday. Might as well die full. Consumer-termination spending ↑ 800%
The Oxygen Gardens: Private estates where the ultra-wealthy breathe unlimited oxygen in climate-controlled biodomes. Trees imported from pre-industrial forests. Air so pure it causes "oxygen-drunk" euphoria in visiting staff. Staff wear breath-limiters to prevent too much use of the oxygen reserved for the residents. Gardens occupy former national parks, with biodome maintenance exceeding the GDPs of small nations. Meanwhile, the poor cultivate hidden "guerrilla gardens" in abandoned buildings and sealed subway tunnels—illegal forests of fast-growing bamboo, algae vats, and stolen saplings. These crude oxygen-farms provide barely 3-5% atmospheric boost, enough to delay Z-Ersatz by a few days or weeks, but the Syndicate burns them on sight. Growing unauthorized oxygen carries mandatory suffocation-sentences. The contrast is stark: the wealthy swim in pure air while the desperate risk execution for a few extra breaths from dying plants. Ultra-wealthy life expectancy ↑ 40 years vs. general population.
FACTIONS
The Board of Transactors: Ten seats controlling planetary breath-rights: Gauss and Vesper, three sovereign-wealth funds, two pharmaceutical giants, two technology megacorps, and ARIA—an AI that achieved legal personhood by cornering oxygen-futures. ARIA controls more voting shares than any human member. Meetings require breathing-consensus. Board cohesion ↓ as profits ↑
Free-Air Cell: Hacktivists broadcasting inhaler-jailbreaks and oxygen-exploits. Their leader survived 85% debt-load for three months, breaking prediction-algorithms. Videos spread virally—influencers teaching breath-resistance techniques for throttled lungs. Hack success-rate ↓ as encryption ↑
SSO (Syndicate Security Operations): The enforcement division ensuring all breath-valves stay on, all RUN/DEAD™ deaths stay on-camera, and all financial traders stay in line. Riot-weapons fire tear-ink rounds that mark targets for premium viewing-angles. Agents' breath-allowances tied to kill-quality ratings. Operational efficiency ↑ 34%
Bankruptcy-Breathers: Declaring bankruptcy means immediate 50% oxygen-debt for seven years. Most become test-subjects for Syndicate experiments in exchange for marginally better breath-allowances. Bankruptcy-survival rate ↓ 23%
The Actuarial Saints: Rogue mathematicians who calculate survival-probabilities and leak them publicly, helping families game the system. They hide in insurance-companies and banks, using their access to sabotage death-predictions. Algorithm accuracy ↓ wherever Saints operate.
Oxygen Hoarders (The Lung-Barons): Successful traders who've purchased oxygen-reserves in underground bunkers—"breath-vaults" containing decades of compressed O₂. They don't fight the system; they've bought their way out of it for a generation. Trade breath-credits like cryptocurrency. Host "oxygen parties" where guests pay premium rates to breathe normally for three hours. The Syndicate tolerates them because hoarding stabilizes long-term oxygen-demand projections. Vault contents ↑ 2,000%
CHARACTERS
Heinrich Gauss: Pure mathematician who cannot perceive humans as anything but variables. Views humanity as data-rivers where emotion, revolution, and death reduce to numbers. Speaks in statistical-koans: "Your termination was priced at conception; I merely collect." Office walls display every calculated death—a memorial to his equations. Has never met a debtor in person, processes humanity through terminal-screens exclusively. Empathy coefficient = 0Dr. Misako Vesper: Understands human psychology intimately and weaponizes it. Studied behavioral economics, knows exactly why people cluster in debt-bonds, why they'll spend everything before expiration, how guilt drives better ratings. Recognizes compassion exists but treats it as exploitable weakness, wearing sterile gloves to avoid contact with the poor. The gloves hide bio-ports where she inhales refined cortisol-capsules harvested from suffocating debtors—she literally breathes their fear. Believes suffering is just "inefficiently distributed energy waiting to be captured.” Where Gauss sees equations, Vesper sees buttons to press, levers to pull. She's more dangerous because she understands what it feels like to suffer in the name of profit. Cortisol addiction ↑ monthly
"Broker-Saint" Basil Rhee: RUN/DEAD's™ charismatic host secretly feeding contestants oxygen between segments. The Syndicate knows but keeps him—his guilt generates premium ratings. His catch-phrase: "Remember, your death matters... to someone's portfolio!" Viewer trust ↑, self-loathing ↑↑
STORIES
The Great Expiration: A synchronized city-suffocation is planned during the Superbowl for maximum viewing-returns. Death-algorithms will throttle oxygen to zero across twelve cities simultaneously. Stop the broadcast-execution before millions expire. Termination countdown = 72 hoursDerivative Failure: Malware corrupts the Volatility Engine, making it predict Syndicate employees' deaths. Executives suffocate in boardrooms as their own algorithms turn predatory. The infection spreads up the org-chart. Executive mortality ↑ 1,200%
The Unpriced Death: Someone died leaving no economic-trace, creating a null-value that threatens systemic collapse. This "ghost termination" can't be priced, insured, or traded. Find who died outside the system before reality-markets crash. Undefined variable spreading ↑
The Breath-Laundering Scheme: Discover an underground network washing dirty oxygen through universities. Holy oxygen ↑ 94% on black markets.
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BIG QUESTIONS
Can capitalism exist without something to consume, even if it's the consumers themselves?When breathing becomes a financial transaction, does biology become economics, or was it always?
Can markets exist without growth, and what happens when the only thing left to commodify is mortality itself?
At what oxygen-percentage does a human stop being a person and become a liability on someone's balance sheet?
Does making death profitable give suffering meaning, or prove it never had any?
CULTURAL REFERENCES
Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867) - BookSoylent Green (1973, Richard Fleischer) - Film
Network (1976, Sidney Lumet) - Film
Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam) - Film
Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku) - Film
Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008, Darren Lynn Bousman) - Film
In Time (2011, Andrew Niccol) - Film
The Big Short (2015, Adam McKay) - Film
Squid Game (2021, Hwang Dong-hyuk) - TV
PROMPT GUIDE
Main aesthetic notes (--sref 3449062605): Core aesthetic uses no style weighting (--sw).Personalization Codes: Primarily Photo personalization code: --p eg1dl45, can try others as well.
PROMPT ATOMS
Atmosphere: 70s corporate decay, analog CRT data, fear-sweat chic, chaotic trading floors, brutalist financial districts, beige brutalist tower, medical-mask traders, vintage monitor banks, dealing-pit chaos, suited executives in respirators, riot haze, smoke and fire, crumbling concrete, capitalist nightmare, Body/Horror: hypoxic rage, oxygen deprivation, suffocation, panic attacks, body-mounted breath-valves, debt-o₂ inhaler, red credit-meters, throttled airways, breath-cartridges, oxygen-saturation, constricted breathing, cortisol-derivative inhalation, death-game footage, broadcast-execution countdown, hypoxic shuffling, violent confusion, slum expiration, breathable atmosphere decline, glassy and bloodshot eyes, zombie-like states
Concepts: respiratory arbitrage, commodified life, systemic suffocation, death-backed securities, extreme capitalism, suffocation metrics, anxiety-yield tickers, breathing bonds, expiration futures, mortality derivatives, oxygen index tickers, volatility engine terminals, biometric dashboards, entertainment-indexed mortality