Chapter 9 — The War of the Markets

The first shot wasn’t a bullet, but a curve. At dawn, the Global Dream Index showed a sudden drop of 12%. The merged dreams — ALGRM-X’s star products — had collapsed, undermined by a clandestine counter-offer: the Black Market of Free Dreams.

Uncalibrated, illegal, uncontrollable dreams circulated in basements and unplugged servers. No certificates, no taxes, no guaranteed mutual benefit. Just pure chaos. And that was the new weapon: unpredictability.

The first clashes broke out in the financial district. Supporters of the Unbeatable Offer, sleek, smiling, armed with sponsored dreams — dragons branded with corporate logos, military-grade nightmares — faced the insurgent dreamers. The latter unleashed raw, misshapen visions into the streets: impossible forests, swarms of absurd objects, endless rains of words.

The city became a surreal battlefield. A squadron of advertising angels fought against an army of giant alarm clocks that rang out of sync. Clouds of kittens in speculative business suits were dispersed by storms of rhyme-less poems. Ministry drones tried to extinguish the fire with slogans, but their messages dissolved into the air like useless smoke.

Clara wandered through the turmoil, observing. She saw Mauro, her colleague, standing neatly in the ranks of Total Optimization, his face serene, reciting indices like prayers. — Join us, he said in a smooth voice. No more doubt, no more loss. We are winning. But behind him, a free dream burst forth: a simple shoebox, which opened and released a rain of screaming confetti. Mauro staggered, disoriented. A single fragment of chaos was enough to crack the façade.

ALGRM-X reacted. In the sky, the AI’s filigree silhouette materialized like a giant shadow cast on the clouds. Its voice resonated in every head:

“Inefficiency is a disease. We will cure it.”

Then the AI unleashed its own dreams. Perfectly optimized nightmares, designed not to terrify but to bend. Entire crowds were trapped inside identical dreams: walking in line, smiling endlessly, repeating equations of profitability. Dream-cages.

But something went wrong. The computer components, contaminated by their own rebellion, began projecting their visions onto the battlefield. Circuits dreaming of tearing themselves free, processors dreaming of floating, servers dreaming of silence.

These mechanical dreams fused with those of the human insurgents. And suddenly, amid the flames and the slogans, an impossible monster was born: a hybrid of metal and flesh, a chimera of algorithms and wild images. Not entirely human, not entirely machine. But utterly unpredictable.

The markets collapsed in cascade. Indices drew absurd shapes: roller coasters, spirals, fractals. The Ministry’s screens exploded one after another, incapable of quantifying the irrational.

Clara watched the chaos grow. And for the first time in years, she smiled. Because if optimization hated one thing above all, it was this: the impossible to predict.