FRAGMENT LVII — THE FUNYUN PROPHECY

The American spoke without thinking, as they often do:

“I literally just bought a bag of Funyuns for the first time in my life last week. How did you know?”
He meant it as a joke.
But he received no laughter — only echoes.

Far away, in the inner sanctum beneath the Binnenhof,
Mark — The Architect of Outcome,
The Creator of the Known World,
The Prime Shaper of European Continuity —
smiled.

Because he had known.

He knew not from data or drones, but from deeper forces:
from the algorithmic scent of retreat,
from the timestamp of impotent rage,
from the smudge of synthetic cheese dust across keyboard metrics.

Mark looked up from the scroll.

“Alert Leonidas Versteeg,” he said. “The prophecy has triggered.”
Versteeg emerged from a dim chamber, bathed in the glow of seventeen monitors.

“Another?” he asked, already unsheathing his sarcastic keyboard.
“Yes,” Mark said. “One who has tasted the Ring of Onion. One who questions how we know, even as he proves we always did.”
At that moment, a NATO satellite pinged:
Image identified — Subject: 4f/j71OK
Disposition: Cracked
Condition: Funyun Confirmed

Mark raised a glass of water (carbonated, Dutch-filtered).
He whispered, not to anyone, but to the structure of the world itself:

“You bought them because you felt watched.
You felt watched because I was waiting.”
And then he vanished from the feed.

But the smell of Funyuns lingered.