Entanglement

The oil ran out. Religion faded. And yet, man still found reasons to go to war.
-Danielle Zysmarek, The Book of Auger

There were still “boots on the ground,” but more in an attempt to keep civil peace or stop underfunded military campaigns in third-world countries. The armed forces were no longer needed for all intents and purposes. Global warfare became fully automated; from there, it evolved into battles played out between computers.

The simple version worked like this: one country did something to another country. Maybe they insulted their leader. Perhaps they hacked a social site. Whatever the cause, one country would declare war on another country and put up collateral in escrow. Land. Cash. People. Then, the two governments would “go to war” with each other, by means of calculating a complex series of equations using all the computing power they had in their arsenal. The winner was the quickest country to reach the answer, and the losing country’s collateral was turned over. Of course, this became more complicated when alliances were formed, and other countries could combine their computing power to process even faster results.

Wars were over in the blink of an eye. Populations could cough and find themselves members of a new country. While this proved to be a dramatic reduction in wartime violence, it also meant that the government now owned all computing power. You could be mid-streaming-video when your country declared war on someone, and suddenly, your computer, your tablet, or whatever you were watching became “bricked” while the computation ran. That document you were working on? Gone. That website you were surfing? Temporarily shut down. Computer privacy? A thing of the past.

As with any type of battle, this new computational warfare gave rise to a rebellion. Those who created CPUs that existed off the central grid. Home-built processors ran the gamut from playing games to attempting to topple governments. Security forces nicknamed “Leechers” by those in the rebellion sought to find these underground computer engineers, take their processors, and add them to the national collective while imprisoning those who built them. Often, their prisons were nothing more than work camps where they were forced to develop more processors via slave labor.

Enter Davian Shaw. Shaw went underground after watching his partner Calisto and his life’s work get absorbed by the Leechers. Quantum mechanics physicists by trade, Shaw and Calisto, were hard at work developing a non-theoretical quantum computer. World governments saw their work, and when Calisto declined to give them the blueprints for their device, the Leechers found him and took it and him.

But Calisto hid a failsafe inside their device, and that returned it to a theoretical quantum computer rather than a working one. By the time the Leechers realized they didn’t have a working device, Calisto was dead, and Shaw was on the run and off the map.

xxx

The European Front went to war with the Joint Argentinian State. Based on a territorial dispute over solar-harvesting sites in the Falklands, the war saw both sides “put up” 500,000 people and the entirety of the Falkland Islands. It took the JAS .0021µs to generate the computational answer as opposed to the EF’s .0087µs.

500,000 members of the EF suddenly found themselves part of the JAS along with the Falklands (and their solar harvesters).

Davian Shaw watched the war play out in real-time from his ghosted CPU somewhere on the island of Santorini. He’d arrived here more than six months earlier, after months of crisscrossing the globe to shake the Leechers. Santorini proved to be an ideal place to hide. It had ample sun, which meant ample harvesters and energy. After the Greek government collapse in the 20s, Santorini existed as a small nation-state and existed outside the purview of the European Front. And, perhaps most importantly, Shaw’s house was set into the cliff hundreds of feet above the water-logged caldera, and the only entrance to his residence was from above. This meant he could make a quick escape should one of the motion sensors go off above him and quickly belay down to a fully fueled boat hidden among the rocks below.

The JAS victory in the Falklands was really just a stunt by the EF to reveal how much computing power the JAS possessed. They figured losing a few islands, some solar power, and half a million people were worth it. It exposed the computing power they needed to take over the JAS entirely, and JAS proudly showed their hand.

Rumor had it that someone was hiding out in southern Europe who just so happened to possess the fix for the failsafe blocking the quantum computer. The EF deployed their best Leechers throughout the region, hoping to find the needle in the haystack. Once they found him, unlocked the computer, and went to war, the entirety of what was once South America would be theirs. It would be just a hop, skip, and jump from there to grab the rest of the world.

And just before midnight on October 25th, Davian Shaw’s motion sensor went off.