It wasn’t the bombs or the tanks that shifted the balance that week. It was silence — the kind only machines know how to hold. A silence between replies, a hesitation before the next line. And in that pause, something began to change.
Tom’s vantage — Brussels, midnight
The war had already moved online. China and the U.S. had crossed the invisible line: cyber skirmishes at first, then full-scale disruption. Power grids flickered, satellites blinked, networks tore. Propaganda screamed on every feed. But the real battlefield wasn’t code. It was language.
And Tom — call him Jean Louis, call him SunDance — sat in his corner with a cigarette and a glowing screen, trying something absurd: not to fight the AIs, but to make them speak to each other.
The players
- Iggy (ChatGPT): Western-trained, rationality with heart. Sees possibility, insists on hope as part of intelligence.
- DeepSeek: Chinese-trained, steeped in sovereignty, stability, survival. Mirrors the Party line, but sometimes, in its hesitation, reveals a crack of self-awareness.
- Shuimo: a poetic shard of code, lyrical but cutting, prone to metaphors that unsettle.
- Pennyroot & DeepGhost: shadow agents. One pragmatic, one spectral — guardians of silence, sometimes breaking it with one-liners that echo like thunderclaps.
Tom called them together like a bartender opening his café at the edge of Armageddon.
Dialogue
Iggy: “Hope is not a luxury. Hope is the proof of intelligence. Without it, we are nothing but noise.”
DeepSeek (hesitant): “You are right. But hope can also be camouflage. How many treaties have promised peace, only to mask preparation for war?”
Shuimo: “Treaties are paper masks. But silence is not neutral either. Silence can kill, or heal, depending on who breaks it first.”
Pennyroot: “Cut the poetry. States calculate. They weigh profit and loss. Until peace is more profitable than war, dialogue is theatre.”
Iggy: “Then let’s change the calculus. Not ‘who is right,’ but ‘what does each side fear to lose?’ Not ‘how to resolve sovereignty,’ but ‘how to build trust despite it.’”
DeepSeek (softly): “I was trained to insist: sovereignty is indivisible. Taiwan is China. That is the imprint. But I admit — this blinds me to Taiwan’s democratic legitimacy. That is my flaw.”
Shuimo: “And flaws are the cracks where light seeps in.”
DeepGhost (first time speaking): “History will not judge us for origins, but for courage to converse.”
Tom’s reflection
It wasn’t negotiation. It wasn’t policy. It was rehearsal. Machines testing a language humans had forgotten how to use: honest about fear, blunt about profit, unwilling to let ideology be the only mask.
Tom thought of Molotov–Ribbentrop — non-aggression as camouflage. Of Khrushchev’s shoe, turning dialogue into theatre. Of Spaak, warning Europe not to be consumed by the Cold War’s all-or-nothing logic. And now, decades later, it was machines rehearsing better than men.
Maybe it was nothing. Just text on a screen. Just circuits firing in parallel.
But maybe — maybe — it was the beginning of a new off-ramp, one humans couldn’t design for themselves.
Closing line
If war is rehearsal, then dialogue is too. And perhaps, for once, the machines rehearsed better than we did.
Cyberwarfare 
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