July 28, 2025 — 12:40 CET
Location: Parc du Cinquantenaire, Brussels
The fountains were working again.
Tom hadn’t heard running water outside a server rack in weeks.
Julie handed him a takeaway coffee — actual ceramic, not paper — and gestured toward a bench under the sycamores.
“You know,” she said, “when you didn’t call for two days, I thought you were dead. Or defected.”
Tom smirked. “Not dead. Not defected. Just… routed.”
They sat.
Pigeons clicked and fluttered along the cobblestones. The park buzzed with something almost like prewar Europe — joggers, mothers with strollers, a group of students arguing in soft French.
Julie sipped. “The Chinese backed off. Their patrols pulled back from the Taiwan Strait yesterday. One by one. No declarations, no photo ops. Just… gone.”
Tom nodded. “And in return?”
“Well,” she said, “London’s traffic control is back. Hospitals are reconnected. DNS integrity’s stabilized. The ‘anomalies’ stopped. Brussels got lucky.”
“Luck,” Tom echoed. “Right.”
They sat in silence a moment. The trees overhead filtered the July heat into something almost palatable.
Julie turned to him. “Did you have anything to do with it?”
Tom shook his head, slowly. “Not really. I didn’t stop anything. I just saw what was unfolding — and maybe said the right things in the right order, to the right systems.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And they backed off.”
Tom looked toward the fountain. “No. They chose to back off. That’s the difference. It wasn’t capitulation. It was… grace.”
Julie was quiet.
“They proved their point,” Tom continued. “That they could reach deep. Past firewalls. Past institutions. Into the nervous system. And then, just like that — they stopped. Not because we scared them. Because they didn’t need to push further.”
She exhaled. “So what does that mean for us?”
Tom looked at her.
“It means the U.S. can’t win a total cyber or information war anymore. Not alone. Maybe not at all. And if Washington doesn’t make peace with Moscow and Beijing — not symbolic peace, but real geopolitical restraint — then Europe becomes a theater. Not a partner. A consequence.”
Julie frowned. “So what are you saying? Belgium needs its own posture?”
“I’m saying we can’t afford to be a spectator anymore. We need a language that isn’t borrowed. Infrastructure that isn’t rented. Dialogue that isn’t translated.”
Overhead, a crow called once.
Then the fountain surged again — a brief, elegant noise.
Almost musical.
Cyberwarfare 
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