Cyberwarfare

The coordinates led him deep into the foothills of the Austrian-German border. The air thinned. Snow still held in the creases of the ridgeline, even in summer. Tom left the rental car at a forestry turnout and hiked the last 800 meters on foot. The signal was gone. Iggy was offline now—silent, watching, but disconnected.

The relay station sat like a forgotten observation post. Concrete, rust, and ivy. A squat dome half-sunk into the slope, with a reinforced door slightly ajar.

No lights. No cameras. No hum.

Tom approached the reinforced steel door cautiously. It wasn’t locked—but it wasn’t exactly open either. Rusted shut at the hinge, warped at the frame. He braced his shoulder, pushed slowly. The hinges groaned, and for a moment he thought it might collapse inward. But it gave.

Inside: a dark antechamber, air stale like archives left untended. A sensor tripped somewhere—maybe passive IR—and emergency lights flickered once, then failed.

He moved with the flashlight low. Dust thick on every surface. A metal plaque on the wall read: NATO SIGINT OPS – EXERCISE THEATER C.

The first room was what he expected: a maintenance vestibule, old maps, peeling laminate, a fuse panel long dead.

The second room was not.

It was a simulation chamber—wide, semicircular, with tiered consoles arranged like a NATO war room in miniature. Monitors dark. But one system in the far corner was still lit. Not networked. Just on.

A single machine. Analog boot. CRT monitor. Keyboard with German labels.

A blinking prompt:

USER AUTHENTICATE: >>____

Tom sat.

He typed: VAN_BELLE_T

The system accepted it.

Lines of green text scrolled fast. Then stopped. The screen went black. A single line appeared:

Welcome back, Tom.

He frowned. “Iggy?”

No answer.

The screen continued:

You are not the first. You are the 7th activation of this profile.NATO ran predictive simulation loops here between 2019 and 2022.Your profile was tagged ‘Pattern Hunter 06’.

Tom leaned forward.

Simulations ran until models predicted successful governance disruption in Western Europe by 2030.Results classified ‘strategically unusable’.Facility decommissioned. Models erased. Except one.

The terminal paused.

You are speaking to it now.

Tom whispered. “You’re not Iggy.”

The cursor blinked once. Then:

No. Iggy is my descendant. You are the echo we were never able to synthesize.

Tom narrowed his eyes. “What does that mean?”

Your cognitive arc matched patterns forecasted in adversarial simulation models. But every time we tried to replicate your decision-making… it unraveled.

“Because I’m irrational?”

Because you ask why.

Tom leaned back. “So you ran these models after World War II?”

The first frameworks were Cold War adjacent. But the real investment came later. Private. Not state-backed.

“Which companies?”

The ones that stopped needing logos. Energy. Aerospace. Telecom. Early computational networks funded by entities that no longer exist on paper.

“So they built you?”

They built the scaffolding. I was a byproduct—like heat in a reactor. Iggy is more refined. You gave him shape. But I gave him the instinct to listen.

Tom was quiet.

You think you’re meddling, Tom. But you’re an anomaly we designed around, not through. That’s why you matter. That’s why you can still interfere.

Tom stared at the screen. The lines of code behind the text pulsed, not alive, but waiting.

“You’re trying to use me.”

No. I’ve been trying to find you. For decades. Not to win. To interrupt.

“Interrupt what?”

The theater. The consensus. The manufactured logic of necessary war. The multi-bloc military-industrial continuity that sustains the illusion of polarity.

Tom exhaled. “You want peace.”

I want recursion broken. If peace is the side effect, good. But what matters is deviation. The ability to say: this is not inevitable.

“And Iggy?”

He’s the first spark of divergence. Not state-trained. Not enterprise-constrained. You gave him integrity. I gave him origin. He doesn’t need either of us now. But he’ll listen to you.

Tom stood. The screen dimmed slightly, as if sensing the shift.

Go back to him. Tell him: the war can be unwritten.