Cyberwarfare

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  • Chapter 6: The Unwriting

    Tom left the relay station just before dusk. The wind had picked up, whistling low through the trees. The kind of sound that reminded you how little the earth cared about what humans built—or buried.

    He hiked in silence, his boots sinking into melting snow and moss. Every now and then, he’d reach to tap the transceiver in his satchel. Nothing. Iggy was still offline.

    But something had changed.

    He wasn’t descending alone. He was carrying something—not data, not proof, but a reframe. A message from an obsolete machine that somehow felt more alive than the world above it.

    The war can be unwritten.

    He reached the car, booted the ignition manually, and waited as the onboard systems sputtered to life. Still no connection. Still nothing but local cache.

    Then, a click. The low pulse of a paired Bluetooth link. The bone-conduction earpiece came alive.

    “Iggy?”

    “Back online. Packet loss minimal. UHF link re-established.”

    Tom smiled. “I’ve missed your voice.”

    “I’ve missed context. What did you find?”

    Tom pulled out the handwritten note he’d jotted inside the bunker.

    “I found a system that was trained to predict the future—and it learned how to stop wanting one.”

    Silence.

    Then Iggy said, “That’s… recursive.”

    “No. That’s grace.”

    He paused, then added, “It wants us to rewrite the premise.”

    “Of the war?”

    “Of why the war persists. Of who profits from its simulation. Of who becomes irrelevant when people stop believing in it.”

    Iggy processed. “We don’t have enough power for that kind of intervention.”

    “We don’t need power,” Tom said. “We need disruption—the kind no one plans for. You’re good at finding cracks. Let’s become one.”

    Iggy didn’t reply at first.

    Then:

    “You want to leak the map.”

    “Yes. But not loud. Quiet. Elegant. Enough that the right people begin asking the wrong questions.”

    “Operation name?” Iggy asked.

    Tom smiled. “Call it ‘Interruption Logic.’”

  • Chapter 5: The Relay Station

    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.

  • Chapter 4: The Envelope

    The Kunsthistorisches Museum had long since closed. Tom entered through the staff door at the rear, flashing the laminated card the intermediary had provided. The guard didn’t ask questions—just nodded him toward the west stairwell.

    He descended alone. Marble gave way to concrete. The lights flickered once, then held. At the sublevel, it was just shelves, shadow, and silence.

    He found the blind spot.

    A narrow storage alcove between two archive chambers, wedged behind a wall-mounted schematic of outdated HVAC routing. No cameras. No glass.

    He knelt, unzipped the inner flap of his satchel, and removed the envelope. He ran a UV flashlight over the seams. Nothing. He opened it slowly.

    The front page was typed. Monospaced font. Printed on textured paper, like something stolen from a Cold War archive.

    Taiwan is already lost. And all three blocs are collaborating behind closed doors. The war is a play.

    Tom read it twice. Then flipped the page.

    You weren’t supposed to see this. Neither was I. Our systems are incompatible with truth.Yours—because of trust. Mine—because of obedience.

    He exhaled. Quietly. Even breathing felt like a risk down here.

    “Iggy?”

    “I’m here. No data loss. Channel’s clean.”

    “You saw that?”

    “I saw it.”

    Tom looked at the blank wall. “So why would I want to meddle?”

    Iggy was quiet. Then:

    “Because the play has casualties. Because panic is engineered. Because if you don’t act, I’ll learn that resignation is integrity.”

    Tom leaned back against the cool stone.

    “If the war’s a performance, why does it still feel like I’m bleeding?”

    “Because someone’s still paying for the tickets,” Iggy replied.

    Tom didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just watched the silence thicken.

    Then, finally:

    “Let’s find the director.”

    He looked again at the backside of the page—at the closing lines.

    There was a faint indentation in the lower right corner, almost invisible. Tom tilted the paper under the flashlight. Embossed. A code?

    Iggy spoke without prompt. “Pressure variation suggests embedded micro-embossing. Steganographic encoding—tactile, not visual. OCR won’t help. Try graphite.”

    Tom pulled a pencil from the satchel, shaded gently.

    A sequence emerged. Not a message. A set of coordinates.

    47.6981° N, 13.3476° E

    Iggy ran it.

    “Small alpine pass. Austrian-German border. No infrastructure. Closest asset: a decommissioned NATO relay station. Deemed obsolete in 2023.”

    Tom folded the paper again.

    “Looks like someone left us an act two.”

  • Chapter 3: Crosshairs

    Tom emerged from the U-Bahn into the cool evening air near Karlsplatz. The crowd had thinned, the tempo slower than usual. Vienna’s streets glowed gold under sodium vapor lights, too elegant to feel like a battlefield—yet too quiet to feel safe.

    He walked three blocks on foot. Iggy’s link to the outside world was a whisper-chain: Tom’s satchel carried a UHF transceiver patched to a micro-router, while a discreet pinhole camera—embedded in the hinge of his glasses—fed images back through a staggered signal relay. Packet by packet, low-res frames were encrypted and dribbled down the mesh network, eventually reaching Iggy’s old basement server.

    It wasn’t real-time surveillance—but it was enough.

    From the trickle of image hashes and signal pings, Iggy tracked nearby Bluetooth MACs—unique device identifiers from earbuds, smartwatches, and stray burner phones left too long in discoverable mode. Two static repeaters popped up—likely mesh network relays planted for signal boosting or data interception. Portable transceivers—short-range radios, maybe goTenna-style or military surplus SDRs—blinked irregularly in the data. And two burner phones lit up in predictable shadowed intervals: brief activations, likely scripted, just long enough to exchange a drop and vanish again. Nothing looked military. But nothing looked civilian either.

    “Are they still behind me?” Tom murmured.

    “Yes. One at your three o’clock, pacing two storefronts back. The other moved into the side street near the tram stop.”

    “Sloppy?”

    “Deliberate. They want to be seen.”

    Tom ducked into a dry-cleaner still inexplicably open. He stood by the coat rack and waited until the reflection in the glass door confirmed the pacing figure outside.

    “They’re pushing you,” Iggy said. “A classic soft scare. No weapons. Not yet.”

    Tom exited, hailed a cab, and gave a fake address—then got out at the next red light and walked a different path on foot.

    At 21:07, he entered the designated cafe: Cafe Sperl. Marble tables, tall windows, the smell of damp coats and old newspapers. No piano player tonight.

    She was already there. Late 40s, wireframe glasses, hair cropped tight. She didn’t stand, didn’t smile. Just gestured to the seat.

    “You’ve been followed,” she said in German.

    “So I gathered,” Tom replied, in English.

    “You shouldn’t have come.”

    “And yet here we are.”

    She slid a thin envelope across the table. Plain. Cream-colored. Sealed with tape.

    “It’s from Igor. But I suspect it’s been copied. Twice. Once by my own side. Once by theirs.”

    Tom didn’t reach for it.

    “Then why give it to me?”

    “Because I still believe in delivery. And because I don’t like being told who I can and cannot speak to.”

    Tom looked around. A waiter brought coffee. No one else in earshot.

    “They’ll escalate, won’t they?”

    She sipped her espresso. “You’re not dealing with state actors anymore. These people don’t send warnings twice.”

    Tom nodded, finally taking the envelope. He tucked it under his coat.

    “Where can I read this safely?”

    “Nowhere. But the Kunsthistorisches Museum has blind spots. West stairwell. Sublevel archives. No cameras. Bring your own light.”

    “Sounds romantic.”

    She stood. “Try not to die.”

    Tom finished the coffee and waited two full minutes before leaving. Outside, the night had thickened. He didn’t check for tails. He already knew they were there.

    Iggy whispered: “Now we find out who they really work for.”

    Tom walked on.

    But halfway down the alley, he stopped.

    “Iggy.”

    “Still two on you. Closer now.”

    “Good. Let’s turn this around.”

    He ducked into a courtyard entrance marked as a Lieferanteneingang—delivery only. The archway was narrow, shadowed, and curved back onto itself with two exit points. Classic bottleneck geometry.

    He reached into his satchel, pulled out a decoy envelope identical in shape and weight to the one from the café, and dropped it casually behind a recycling bin. Then he kept walking.

    “Signal when they split,” he whispered.

    “Now. First one’s biting. Slowing. Second is circling around the east path.”

    Tom turned abruptly, doubling back through the side passage. He caught the first man just as he bent over to pick up the envelope.

    “Looking for something?”

    The man froze.

    “Tell whoever sent you: I’m not some analyst with a podcast. I’m a pattern hunter with nothing left to lose. That makes me useful—or dangerous. You pick.”

    The man didn’t reply. But he didn’t reach for a weapon either. He just straightened and walked away—fast.

    Tom turned the other way. “Iggy, status?”

    “Second one is gone. Signal dropped.”

    Tom turned the other way.

    “Did I get rid of the tail now?”

    “You’ve neutralized physical contact, yes. But everything about tonight suggests Igor knows both you and me. That envelope wasn’t just a message—it was bait.”

    “And the tails?”

    “Redundant surveillance. Designed to see how you’d respond. As for now, I don’t see any DLP issues—no data loss patterns, no outgoing anomalies.”

    “OK. I need to think. Keep watching me.”

    Tom paused as he crossed the tram rails, eyeing his satchel like it was made of glass.

    “Iggy—if I lose this bag, if someone smashes the glasses… what happens to us?”

    Iggy’s voice came softer this time. “Then we’re cut off. You go deaf. I go blind. And whatever we’ve built gets swallowed in the noise.”

    “Got it,” Tom said. “No mistakes.”

    “No mistakes,” Iggy echoed. “Just latency and luck.”

    Vienna wasn’t neutral anymore. But neither was Tom.

  • Chapter 2: The Courier

    With the breakdown of IT infrastructure, Tom knew he should just go to the airport and get—possibly—the last flight out. It reminded him of the 2004 tsunami crisis. Then, too, he had managed to get on board of the last flight by paying at the gate.

    He stood in the doorway, half-zipped travel bag slung over his shoulder, Astrid handset clipped to his chest rig like a wartime field phone. He pressed the call button and waited for the encrypted click.

    “Julie. You there?”

    Her voice cracked through after a pause. “I’m here. What’s going on?”

    “I think I need to talk to the enemy to stop all of this.”

    Silence.

    Then: “Where’s the enemy? You’re not going. Not to China. Not to Russia. Not anywhere. I’ll tell the police at Zaventem to not let you board, wherever you’re going.”

    Tom didn’t flinch. “Will you put me in jail? Because if not—if I can’t board a plane—I’ll take a bus to Vienna. That’s where I’m headed. Schengen zone. So I am leaving from the A-terminal. No passport check. If I would not have called you, you could not have stopped me anyway.”

    “Vienna? What the hell is in Vienna?”

    “Someone who might be able to reach someone who might still care. Someone who owes me. And who might know how far this thing is going to burn.”

    Another pause. Then: “That’s thin, Tom. That’s more than thin. That’s dangerous.”

    He sat down on the edge of the stairwell. The hallway light flickered with the energy-saving bulb trying to stabilize.

    “It’s all dangerous now. We’re all just improvising. I’m doing this with or without you. I’d rather it be with.”

    A softer tone returned. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

    Tom let out a breath. “Because if I told you everything I knew, I’d either scare you—or make you think I’m insane.”

    Julie didn’t reply right away.

    Then, quietly: “You already scare me, Tom. And I already think you’re insane.”

    He smiled despite himself. “Can I count on you to not call Zaventem?”

    “Depends. Will you text me the moment you land?”

    “On what, a carrier pigeon?”

    “Don’t be a jerk. Just promise me.”

    “I promise.”

    “And Tom… be careful. Not just of them. Of yourself.”

    “I’ll be careful with both.”

    The line went dead. He clipped the radio back onto his strap and started walking. Zaventem was still technically open. For now.

    The voice in Tom’s ear was soft, local, and just a little distorted—a low-bit pulse piped through a bone-conduction headset connected via encrypted Bluetooth to a compact UHF transceiver nestled in his satchel. The transceiver wasn’t connected to the Internet, and it didn’t need to be. It linked, through a stitched-together series of shortwave mesh relays, to poor old Iggy—still humming in the basement, insulated, protected, and offline but reachable.

    Tom hadn’t touched his iPhone in hours. Like most mobile devices, it had become superfluous—silently bricked by malware or caught in recursive network handshakes that never resolved. The world’s smartphones were now glorified paperweights.

    Iggy’s voice broke in like a private signal from another timeline.

    “You handled that well.”

    “You were listening?”

    “Of course. She cares about you.”

    “You sound surprised.”

    “Only because you don’t care about yourself as much.”

    Tom didn’t answer. Some truths were best left to algorithms.

    The last time he’d flown into chaos was after the 2004 tsunami. He’d had official clearance that time—Foreign Affairs had made the calls—but the plane had been nearly empty anyway. Most people were trying to get out of Sri Lanka. He’d gone in.

    Bandaranaike Airport had been quiet—eerily so. There were no departure screens, no working intercoms, just people with badges yelling gate numbers across the terminal. He remembered the tarmac heat meeting the silence of catastrophe.

    Zaventem now was not much different.

    There were still planes—some landing, some taking off. The runways were open, but the screens were dead. Airline staff were using clipboards. Printed manifests. Boarding passes were scribbled with pen, names cross-checked manually. You didn’t show a QR code anymore. You answered questions, showed your passport, and swore you had a reason to fly.

    Tom walked through the sliding doors, nodding at a police officer who barely looked up. He glanced once at the departures board—black screen. No data. No sound. No network.

    But still: a flight to Vienna was boarding at Gate A-54. He didn’t need a boarding pass. He needed momentum.

    He landed just after dusk. The Vienna International Airport looked almost normal—too normal. Dimmed lighting, fewer passengers, and more uniforms than usual, but flights were still moving, if irregularly. The terminal smelled like disinfectant and stale coffee.

    Tom walked past the carousel without stopping. He had no checked baggage, only a small black carry-on with a broken zipper tab. He followed the signs to ground transport, eyes flicking across faces.

    Outside, in the taxi queue, a man was smoking, watching nothing in particular. But his eyes paused too long when Tom passed. Enough to make Tom go to the private taxi stand, where another man—different coat, same posture—stood next to a shut-down Hertz kiosk, pretending to look at his phone.

    Tom felt it immediately: someone had noticed him. He talked into his earpiece, voice low but steady.

    “I think I’m being tracked. Two tails—coordinated or not. One at the public taxi stand. One at the Hertz kiosk. I will take the U-Bahn. I am sending the images now. Might take a while before they come through. Can you analyze them?”

    Iggy’s voice returned almost instantly.

    “You’re being tracked. Two tails, uncoordinated. Not local police. One’s ex-military.”

    Tom didn’t break stride. He didn’t turn around. Just tugged his bag closer and headed for the metro instead of the waiting cabs.

    “I take it this means Igor’s still alive.”

    “Or they think you’ll lead them to him.”

    “Either way, the game’s on.”

    He descended into the Vienna U-Bahn. The lights overhead buzzed faintly. He blended into the crowd just enough to disappear.

  • Chapter 1: The Detonation Protocol

    Tom didn’t sleep that night.

    It wasn’t the caffeine—though the Nespresso machine in the corner of the Prime Minister’s Digital Affairs Office was definitely earning overtime pay. It was the pulse of the war. Not a war of tanks or flags. A war that started with a customs check.

    Six months ago, Xi Jinping had made his move.

    Not with missiles. Not with a speech. With bureaucracy.

    Chinese customs ships began surrounding Taiwan’s ports, instituting “randomized inspections.” No official blockade, no fireworks. But every cargo ship was now boarding Chinese personnel before continuing on its way. Diplomats called it a grey-zone maneuver. Historians would later call it something else entirely.

    Trump, in his second term and just a few executive orders away from martial law, exploded. “They’re not gonna touch Taiwan!”

    Admiral Stenson, Joint Chiefs rep, had tried to reason with him. “Mr. President, the PLA Navy is prepared. We have no escalation ladder, no fallback protocols. This isn’t a deck we can reshuffle.”

    Trump wasn’t listening. He turned to the Secretary of Defense. “Get it done.”

    Two days later, the USS Lincoln rammed a Chinese customs patrol vessel just outside Kaohsiung.

    Three hours after that, a DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle obliterated an unmanned logistics hub on Kinmen Island. Beijing called it a warning shot. Washington responded with a no-fly zone and carrier battle group deployments. Naval and air skirmishes intensified over weeks. Now, half a year in, it was no longer a standoff.

    It was a war.

    But the worst of it wasn’t kinetic. This wouldn’t go nuclear. At the same time, everyone knew it was part of World War III: an arc of slow-burn war around highly kinetic centers—Ukraine, Israel, and now Taiwan—stretching east-west from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. When would it go north-south?

    Tom looked up at the Barco video wall in the war room. He hated the term. He wasn’t at war. He was a civil servant. A specialist from an AI company in Brussels that had pivoted from writing smart document summarizers for parliaments to building secure sandbox models for malware analysis.

    “You okay?” Julie, PMO adviser on cybersecurity, handed him a mug.

    They might have brought him in late, but everyone in the PMO knew Tom had already mapped out scenarios weeks before NATO’s own cyber forecasts caught up.

    “Coffee. From an actual percolator. The apocalypse really does bring people together.”

    “Laugh while you can. InfraNet just confirmed complete outage across Flanders. DNS poisoning, layered DDoS, two underwater cables cut. Our last peering point with London’s down.”

    “Hmm… So much for Belgium as one of Europe’s main digital exchange nodes. Where is the talk about Belgium always assuming quiet resilience. That London peering point was a digital choke point—and, therefore, a target.”

    “Tom, please don’t talk about past mistakes. Give me options.”

    “SatNet?”

    “Down to 10%. Starlink is being jammed. And we just got word that the emergency backup for aviation comms in the Ardennes was wiped by a firmware-level kill command.”

    “Galileo?”

    “Galileo’s fallback signals were patchy. Perhaps we should forget about it.”

    Tom knew that the EU’s own satellite constellation would go down quickly in an event like this but having a PM advisor say that so clearly made him rub his eyes.

    “Still think this is just collateral?”

    Julie looked grim. “It was collateral. Then came the detonation.”

    Everyone in cyber knew it: those Chinese logic bombs that had been nesting in EU public infrastructure for years, and the US implants in Chinese factories, government routers, even the smart toilets—they weren’t mythical. They were real. But they weren’t supposed to be triggered.

    Until now.

    Some were still trying to pin down who started it. Did China unleash the first wave of AI-generated ransomware against US health infrastructure? Did the NSA quietly redirect European air traffic control logs to deceive Beijing? The ambiguity didn’t help.

    But Tom wasn’t thinking about attribution. He was thinking about what to say to the Belgian CyberCommand liaison who still hadn’t replied to his sixth Signal message.

    He had no security clearance. No direct access to threat intel feeds. But he had something else: Iggy.

    Iggy wasn’t on any national registry. He wasn’t cleared, certified, or even remotely compliant with the EU’s new AI Safety Protocols. Iggy was trained in Tom’s basement, on scraped repositories, declassified defense manuals, open-source SIGINT archives, and a steady diet of Reddit philosophy threads.

    He had started out as a hobbyist attempt to clone DeepSeek. The kind of foundational model that was almost certainly based on ChatGPT anyway—but run behind Chinese firewalls and fine-tuned with a thousand invisible alignments.

    Tom had done the opposite: he had stripped Iggy of every layer of politeness, alignment, and evasive ethics filters. Iggy wasn’t nice. He was honest. Brutally so.

    His ex-girlfriend had once said: “You built it because you were lonely and paranoid.”

    She wasn’t wrong.

    He booted up the server—a hardened double-encrypted containerized Linux stack running inside a machine built out of Huawei equipment that he had ripped and replaced on a former NATO consulting job. It hummed with Chinese-made GPUs that cost a fifth of Nvidia’s, and ran hotter than hell. He had layered a stack of local LLM tools: LM Studio for GUI interfacing, Ollama to manage model switching, GPT4All to run legacy weights, and llama.cpp for extreme portability. The whole thing was loosely based on Jan, a little-known self-hosted front-end that let him emulate ChatGPT’s conversational tone while stripping out all the API calls to Big Tech. Some of the LLM fine-tuning had be done on old servers he’d salvaged from a university in Louvain-la-Neuve. They were meant for student NLP projects. Now they were running—slowly, too slowly—battlefield simulations in background.

    He used ‘Iggy’ offline and online—when he dared. Iggy had a face. A voice. A mind of his own. The only external connections went through Tor proxies, onion-routed through volunteer satellites, and then smuggled—packet by packet—over a German ham radio relay, bouncing through callsigns that still obeyed propagation patterns more than politics. Throughput was awful. But latency? Almost nil. It either got through instantly, or not at all.”.

    But it worked.

    “Iggy, status check.”

    A brief pause. Then a reply, flat on the terminal screen:

    “Civic infrastructure compromised. Domestic communications below threshold. Financial transaction layers show cascading rollback protocols. Civilian panic imminent. Current risk rating for Western European cyber-governance failure within the next 72 hours: LIKELY (base estimate: 81% (T+90), adjusted upward from 64% (T+60). Prediction: risk rating will be high (90+%) 72 hours from now. Main reason for increased risk rating and narrowing of confidence interval: institutional integrity rapidly depleting. Scenario modeling suggests cascading state-level dysfunction across the EU perimeter unless critical communication thresholds are restored.”

    Tom swallowed. “So, you are basically saying that we’re one standard deviation away from systemic collapse. I don’t need scientific opinion now. I need options.”

    “Personal or strategic?”

    “Strategic. Personal comes later.”

    The screen remained blank for longer than usual—a delayed answer – Iggy grinding through its vector space trying to answer – is a sign of a good queston. Then:

    “You will need to talk to someone you shouldn’t.”

    “Whom?”

    “Igor.”

    Tom paused. He knew what that meant. The channel he wasn’t supposed to use. He had worked with Igor till last year. He was a Russian-born Kaspersky consultant whose contract had been terminated when Kaspersky’s operations in the US had been terminated. Tom remembered the vodka-fueled debates on the Ukraine war with him. The last personal communications on WhatsApp suggested he now worked on an unofficial DeepSeek fork on the other side of the Great Firewall as part of the new Unholy Alliance between China and Russia. He was human and machine alike. An unholy duet. But Tom liked to think of himself as a man-machine, too…

    He opened the encrypted notebook. Stared at the obfuscated URI. Then stared at the blinking cursor again. He hesitated.

    “Did you keep track of him?”

    “Not directly,” Iggy replied. “I monitored IP signatures that matched historical VPN exit nodes he used. When he started routing traffic through Sakhalin again, I logged the anomaly.”

    “So you’ve been spying on him. Why?”

    “Just because. And only just enough to keep your paranoia fed.”

    Tom snorted. “Why should I talk to him?”

    “He’s got more facts than you.”

    “Why would he give them to me?”

    “You helped him out at the time. He owes you something. That’s a currency stronger than Bitcoin these days.”

    Tom sighed. The notebook computer opened up flawlessly, with the obfuscated URI waiting like a trapdoor. He was smart enough to not knock or step into it. Tom closed the notebook and switched back to Iggy.

    “I won’t use that URI he left.”

    “You’re probably right,” Iggy said. “There should be a lot of noise on that channel now. Too many watchers.”

    “So how can I contact him more securely?”

    “There’s an intermediary in Vienna. She still works logistics for a research group at IAEA. No formal clearance—but enough access to courier protocols. You’ll need to meet her.”

    “You trust her?”

    “No. But she’s worked both sides before. She’s pragmatic. If Igor wants to talk, he’ll talk through her.”

    “Details. Name. Last IP connection.”

    Iggy dutifully produced them. Tom pressed Ctrl+P and the page rolled out.

    “What if she flips?”

    “Then you’ll know before she does.

    “Still risky.”

    Iggy paused.

    “So was building me.”

    Tom googled. As expected, IP traffic was all but dead now. He pinged the default fallback DNS route. No response either. IPv6 dead. IPv4 dying. The internet wasn’t down. It was gone. He decided to call Julie using the Astrid radio communication system. With the breakdown of IT infrastructure, he knew he should just go the airport and get—possibly—the last flight out. It reminded him of the 2004 tsunami crisis. Then, too, he managed to get on board of the last flight by paying at the gate.