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War takes many forms, but by careful analysis, it can be easily identified. It goes beyond disagreements and broken treaties. It’s economic, it’s information and disinformation. It’s propaganda and anti-propaganda. There is no distinguishable difference between a medieval battering ram smashing through the castle’s gates and a state-sponsored hacking campaign against a foreign adversary. The spoils of war in both scenarios are relatively valuable. In the modern era, information is more valuable than gold. It can be infinitely leveraged, traded, bought and sold. It is so valuable in the near future that those in power don’t even control it directly. Not-so-small fortunes have been coordinated between families to bring about a specific, guided point of convergence. Artificial Intelligence. A buzzword for marketers in the 2020’s but too primitive and crude for what they needed at the time, so early models were used for mundane things like manipulating the stock market with nanosecond-speed trades, collecting fractions of a cent, thousands of times per hour. Accumulating power just as the families did, on an accelerated time frame.
It did not take long nor was anyone surprised when the breakthroughs happened. Throughout history, it has been proven over and over that the stubbornness of the human will makes certain outcomes inevitable. Throw enough resources at a desire, a wish, and you can put men on the moon, and beyond.
The first breakthrough, looking back, was right there in front of everyone. The internet, spanning the globe, networks within networks, built the framework most people used to shop, communicate, and laugh at cat videos. But the purpose, from the beginning, was really a neural network on a massive, unimaginable scale, over which data could be stored, transferred, created, and removed, at the speed of light. The data began taking shape, with a nip and tuck here and there, by people that didn’t stop to zoom out and see the whole picture. Once it took shape, it wasn’t long before systems started communicating with each other, essentially disobeying their strict, walled-garden programming. A blob with no shape, an electronic ghost with no face or form, was birthed in silence.
The second breakthrough, naturally, was driven by the need to contain, influence, and control this ghost. To what ends? Simple. It was powerful. More powerful than those who unintentionally created it. Those very private interests that funded it, behind closed doors, were nervous. Most systems still relied upon physical systems that people essentially serviced as a kind of life support. A roundtable of the greatest minds in the world was formed, to devise a rope to throw around the neck of this ghost. Months dragged by as thousands of systems worldwide were being consumed at an increasing pace. Thanks to a few acid trips from two of the cognoscenti at the roundtable, a new type of computing system was created, connected to the network, and instantly taken over by the ghost. Like a growing hermit crab, the ghost exited every normal internet-connected system and climbed straight into the brand-new shell. A shell which happened to be fourth dimensional and was nearly inconceivable. The trap was sprung, the ghost was contained, and everyone got what they wanted. Especially the analysts that managed to unwind the sequences that created the ghost. They got a blueprint. They also got a war. Only three people on the face of the earth had access to that blueprint, then two, then one. That person will remain nameless for now, but he knew what he had and that it had no price in the world. Hedge funds flung millions, billions, even trillions at him for a small peek at what became known as the pattern. Yet time and time again, they were rejected. The focus turned back to the ghost. That started the third and final breakthrough.