Classified — For Annotated Review Only
Origin:2010 — Age 19 Classification:Speculative Fiction / Geopolitical Thriller Red underline:Tap — Analyst note Green underline:Tap — Deep briefing
Of Pens and Swords
Red — Analyst note on the premise
Green — Full intelligence briefing
Part One

Gary Heinneman had always been good with words – written ones. He stumbled through speeches and destroyed conversations worse than a pile of rocks tumbling down a hillside, but he could write, there was no doubt about that; it was his nature to string words together with the equivalent skill of a master craftsman. Words were his lifeblood, his calling, and up until fifteen years ago he had revered them. Now he hated them, even feared them.

It wasn't because of some misplaced resentment or unmitigated case of writer's block. Those were pitiful excuses. No, he hated words because, through some despicably vindictive twist of fate, they had destroyed his life, and changed the world. But not just any words – that would be an easy escape; it was his words that had brought about this unfortunate reality in which he now existed. Of all the pain and suffering, of all the death and of all the disastrous consequences of war, he was the author.

Now he sat, drinking his liver into oblivion in a small apartment, looking out at what was once New York City.

It began when his skill with words led him to become the man who wrote the President of the United States' speeches. Gary, himself, did not have the ability to say the confounded things, but he could certainly write them. He knew exactly how to articulate the President's thoughts and desires in ways that the President could never imagine. Because of Gary, the President always spoke with dignity and tact, inspiring the public with immaculately crafted statements whilst still remaining relevant to the topic at hand. Because of Gary, the President held the hearts of the American people and had possibly the best international image that a president could have. Because of Gary, that was all undone.

The problem lay with Gary. Although he could articulate anything with flair, it wasn't his ideas that made the President so popular; it was simply his way of expressing the President's heart to the people. The President was every inch as great as he seemed, Gary was just there to dress that basic nature up with a certain je ne sais quoi, that was it.

Gary was, instead, opinionated and often unashamedly callous. That was why he had his own opinion column in the New York Times, where he often commented on politics, particularly international politics. He may have shared the President's love for the American people, but he didn't share the President's high opinions of the rest of the world.

This resulted in speeches that dripped with the honey of careful diplomacy and a column that raged with the inferno of misguided opinion. This dichotomy was Gary's, and the rest of the world's, downfall.

It happened fifteen years earlier on
Analyst Note The 2012 Apocalypse Window Era-Specific The story was written in 2010 — peak cultural anxiety around December 21, 2012, the supposed Mayan Long Count calendar "end date." Films, cable documentaries, and bestselling books treated it as a serious cultural event. The author sets the apocalypse two days after the prophecy missed. It is a very precise timestamp of the moment this was written.→ Wikipedia: The 2012 Phenomenon; a day that would live in far more infamy than December 7th 1941, no doubt. Two weeks before, the President had been awarded the
Analyst Note The Nobel Prize & Nuclear Disarmament Structural Flaw Obama won the 2009 Peace Prize — the year before this was written — for aspirational rhetoric, before he had done anything. The author extrapolates this into full global disarmament as a plausible presidential achievement. No nuclear state has ever voluntarily and verifiably disarmed. See the full briefing on why this premise doesn't hold.→ Arms Control Association: Who Has What. He had been re-elected and was riding high on the wings of success. Gary, on the other hand, was strung-out on the railway tracks of too-much-to-chew. He had too many deadlines, too many speeches and too many phone calls asking where everything was.

The political climate too, was tense. The President had been working tirelessly to simultaneously bring peace in the Middle-East (he thought he could succeed where others had failed – and he may have been right) and to
Analyst Note China in 2010: Economic Power, Not Military Empire Era-Specific In 2010 China had just overtaken Japan as the world's second-largest economy. Its "empire building" was overwhelmingly economic — the Belt and Road Initiative, port acquisitions, currency reserves. The leap from this to a military empire that conquers America requires several intermediate steps the story skips. The anxiety is real; the projection is large.→ CFR: Belt and Road Initiative. On top of this, he had been trying to undo the
Analyst Note The Obama Frame, Distilled Era-Specific This sentence was written in the first year of the Obama presidency. The framing — a wise president correcting the bigotry of "predecessors" while building tolerance-based diplomacy — is early-Obama optimism in its purest form. It aged unevenly. "Tolerance and peace" ran into hard limits in Syria, Libya, and the South China Sea. The moral clarity of 2009 did not survive the decade.→ The Atlantic: The Obama Doctrine. He wasn't Pro-Islam or Pro-Communist, but he understood the importance of tolerance in the interests of peace and international cooperation. The President was winning the battle at that point.

So it happened, that in the early hours of December 23rd, Gary was hastily finishing his column for the Sunday issue. He was running late. The column should have been submitted the day before, but the President had called him in that day to ask him to write a statement that was to be made from the White House the following morning, Sunday, December 23.

Gary had pulled an all-nighter finishing that damn thing and it sat on his computer, waiting to be sent to the President's aide, while he began his column. Finally, at half-past five in the morning, he got a call from the editor of the Times asking for the column. Gary quelled the woman's storm of fury and hastily finished the last paragraph. There was no time to proofread. He sighed with relief as he sent both the column and the statement off to their respective recipients.

Well that's what he thought at the time. He was tragically mistaken, but at six AM, all he wanted was breakfast and a huge cup of coffee, with extra caffeine, if possible.

It was pure coincidence that both the President and his aide over-slept that morning, both only waking up after nine. The address was scheduled to begin at ten and both knew that the television networks would not tolerate anything else. As a result, neither had read the statement before it was rolling on the teleprompter in the Oval Office.

"The President of the People's Republic of China is an obstinate, narrow-minded pig. As are the Arab Emirs and the presidents of Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and North Korea. They are callous dictators who rule their respective countries with no regard for their people, their economies or the rest of the world."

What the President had just said was the perfect hook for an opinion column on international politics, but in no way was it an appropriate address to the nation, or the world. He stared at the teleprompter for a full ten seconds in silence before someone told someone else to cut the feed.

This was possibly the worst thing that anyone could have done because it turned a potentially salvageable situation into a stand-alone nightmare. It appeared to the general public, and the recipients of such barbed comments, that the President had scheduled a national broadcast on a Sunday morning for the sole purpose of slandering the seven most volatile states in the world.

The furore that immediately followed was tremendous.

Every person in the White House was suddenly all a-flutter with futile damage control and more than a few bribes offered to news channels. The President's aide immediately called Gary to demand an explanation.

Gary was expecting her call. He had been on the phone to an irate editor who was questioning the sudden change of tone in the column, which had been published nevertheless, when he saw the President reading his column to the nation. Naturally many colourful words flowed from Gary's mouth as he considered the implications of such a clichéd plot device (he had to laugh at the irony though).

"What the hell happened Gary?" yelled the President's aide as soon as he picked up the receiver.

"Uh… Well Mary… You see it's uh – Well it's a funny story really," fumbled Gary.

"Hardly funny!" screeched Mary.

"Okay, okay," Gary winced, "Uh… The President got my column and the Times got his speech. I must've switched the attachments. Don't you proofread it beforehand?"

"Don't put this on me you little runt! What the hell are you doing writing a column anyway? Does 'conflict of interests' mean nothing to you?"

"I use a pseudonym okay," said Gary, "And I never comment on internal White House matters. That would be insane."

"Well I don't care anyway," growled Mary, "You'll be put away for this, I'll make sure of it."

But Gary didn't end up getting put away, the events that followed ensured that everyone was far too busy to worry about what to do with him. He was fired though, from the White House. The Times kept him on because he was popular, and because they had no idea that he had written the statement that would change the world.

By seven o'clock on Sunday evening, everyone on the planet who had access to a television set had seen the President single-handedly destroy his reputation as a peacemaker. The White House scheduled another press conference that afternoon and the President tried to apologise.

The problem with that course of action was twofold. Firstly, the President was not nearly as eloquent when he wrote his own speeches as Gary was and secondly he agreed with what he had said earlier. In fact, they were actually his words – Gary had heard them over their third glass of whiskey on the previous Saturday, and thought that they were a great opening paragraph. These two factors made for an apology that was about as authentic as a Mona Lisa forgery painted by a seven-year-old.

That was the final blunder in this particular comedy of errors. What followed was far from humorous.

At first it was simply a global mud-slinging contest, diplomatically speaking. The countries involved would issue statements flexing their muscles and insulting America, and her allies. Very soon though, militant citizens and violent organizations elevated the fairly harmless penis-measuring to strategic acts of terrorism and violence.

First was an attack on the New York subway, almost like a B-grade action film. Masked men with
Analyst Note The Weapons of Post-9/11 Fiction Genre Shorthand The AK-47 and plastic explosive are the symbolic weapons of 2000s terrorism fiction — instantly readable as "foreign threat." The choice reveals the era as much as any plot point. Post-9/11 thriller shorthand rather than tactical research. Real mass casualty attacks on transit systems (Madrid 2004, London 2005) used improvised bombs, not gunmen with assault rifles.→ RAND: Terrorism Research massacred three hundred innocent people on three different trains. No one took responsibility.

After that, it was a short leap from terrorism to all-out war. America had her allies, and so did her enemies. World War II had a relatively small set of involved parties when compared to this war. In World War II, it was America, Russia and half of Europe against the other half and Japan. In this war, it was
.

The United Nations fought for the first year to resolve the struggle with talks and conferences but to no avail. Unfortunately, the countries that were insulted by the President — and many others — all harboured deep seated resentment for America and Europe. After so much time spent as 'the third world', it was time, according to them, to level the playing field and prove that they were every inch as great as their pompous and conceited adversaries. They were right.

At first, there was open warfare, on battlefields around the world, but it quickly moved into the cities. Air-raids became a part of everyday life, and soon enough, people had found ways to move underground.

The Chinese sent the world back thirty years when they
Analyst Note Undersea Cable Warfare — Accidentally Prescient Prescient The story's sharpest geopolitical instinct. By 2010, over 95% of international internet traffic ran through undersea fibre optic cables. In 2024, cables in the Baltic Sea were severed with Russian sabotage suspected. NATO formally identified subsea infrastructure as a primary strategic vulnerability. This was a fringe concern in 2010. It is now NATO policy.→ CSIS: Protecting Subsea Cables. Next on their list was the destruction of nearly all but their own communication satellites. Eventually America could talk to no-one but herself and it drove her mad. Americans everywhere were plagued with paranoia, not knowing what the rest of the world was up to.

What paved the way for, and ended the war were the nukes. Almost every country in the world had disarmed and destroyed their nuclear weapons about six months before December 23rd. However, as soon as the war began, everyone spent the years building them and sabotaging everyone else's attempts to do the same. As a result, war was waged without fear of
, which meant that nobody held back in the destruction department. Thousands of people died every day in bombing runs and urban battles. When, at last, nuclear weapons appeared on the scene, they didn't act as a deterrent until every country had had a shot at someone else and although their appearance again marked the end of the war, by the time it ended the nukes had made the world a terrible place to live.

The war raged on for five long years. In the end,
Analyst Note The Scale Problem Structural Flaw WWII — the most destructive conflict in human history — killed 70–85 million over six years, including systematic genocide, firebombing campaigns, and two nuclear bombs. The author quadruples this in five years without nuclear weapons for most of the war. The number is chosen for emotional weight rather than demographic logic. The total human population in 2012 was ~7 billion, which makes this roughly 1 in 14 people — a plausible ratio for nuclear exchange, not conventional warfare.→ WWII Museum: Worldwide Deaths. More than half a billion people had died because Gary took no heed of the 'conflict of interests' clause in his contract. America had fallen to China; her spirit and her people were broken.

Gary had tried to kill himself, and failed, twice. Now he looked out from his apartment, steeling himself for attempt number three.

He finished his whiskey and put it down beside him. His apartment was a far cry from the house he once lived in; it was dirty and bare, with hardly any furnishings or wallpaper for that matter. In fact, all that Gary had in the way of furniture was an armchair, a mattress, a desk and the chair on which he now sat. He didn't really care though, his wife and daughter had been killed in the war, and their house had been destroyed, leaving him with nothing but alcoholism and guilt, neither of which helped the other. He had also started smoking again, a fact he noted as he lit a cigarette – one which he hoped was his last.

He picked up a paperweight that he had salvaged from his home and hurled it through the window in front of him. He didn't trust himself to jump straight through; his luck would have him bounce off and land on his backside. The paperweight smashed through the window and he cleaned the excess glass from the frame because he didn't want to be saved by his clothes getting caught on persistent shards. He figured that a thirteen story fall would succeed where pills and rope had failed. He didn't bother to write a note either, because no one would read it. No one cared. Nothing was keeping him here on Earth and nothing could prevent him from joining Michelle and Sara among the dead.

He finished his smoke and put it out. He climbed up onto the window sill and looked down. It was high – high enough to ensure that he was a dead man as soon as his body hit the sidewalk. There was a fence that could possibly impale him, but whether or not he hit it mattered only to the people on the street, and the coroner. He breathed in deep.

"Here goes noth–"

The door behind him was suddenly broken in by the foot of a very large, black man.

"Oh come on!" shouted Gary, more at God than the black guy. "Can't a guy be allowed to commit suicide in fucking peace?"

"I'm sorry but we can't allow you to do that," said the beautiful woman who walked in behind the black guy. "We need you alive Mr. Heinneman."

"For what?"

"We don't know. We've just been told to get you." said the black guy, who was, Gary noted, very big.

"No," said Gary, "I'm not going to come with you. What could you offer that I would want, huh? You can't exactly threaten to kill me – I'm tryna do that myself. So piss off and let me die okay."

"That's not an option I'm afraid," the woman said as she walked towards him.

"Why not? I'm nobody. I don't matter."

"Not according to the man who sent us."

"Who would that be?"

"A man you know very well."

"Oh really? Well I don't care okay. Tell him I say hi, and I'm sorry if I owe him money and even Merry Christmas if you want."

"Tell him yourself." she said, extending her hand to him, "Please."

Gary wasn't sure what had made him step down from the window. It was either his curiosity about who on Earth would want to speak to him, or it was the woman, Therese. She was indeed, very beautiful. She was blonde, like Michelle and she had the most enchanting smile, like Michelle. Not the same smile, but the same effect. Her eyes too, reminded him of Michelle, except Therese's were brown instead of blue.

He kept looking at her in the car. It was a silver SUV, a Jeep in fact, and the two of them sat in the back while the black guy drove them through the streets of what the locals called Little Beijing (the real name was too hard to pronounce). The black guy's name was Elijah Kingsley, although most people called him Bulldog, not because he was tough or tenacious, but because he looked like a bulldog. He was a thickset man and had one of those angry faces that looked permanently scrunched up. But Gary soon found out that despite his oafish appearance and elementary grasp of English – he was Nigerian – this man was one of the wisest souls he had ever encountered.

"Those things will kill you." said Therese as Gary lit another smoke, "Especially the ones they sell these days."

"Well they haven't killed me yet, have they?" retorted Gary in a puff of smoke, "And they're not likely to kill me in the next twenty four hours, so I think I'm safe don't you?"

"I suppose that's true. But still, they're disgusting things."

Michelle used to say that, thought Gary.

"That's what everybody says." said Bulldog from the front, "Even smokers."

"So where are we going?"

"A safehouse," answered Therese, "About an hour's drive outside the city."

"Is that far enough?" said Gary, "I figure you guys are not government so you must be with the Resistance. If that's the case, then an hour's drive is way too close, and this car is as good as scrap metal."

"Well," said Therese, "We're not Resistance. While we're in the city, we're on vacation."

"Vacation?"

"Oui," laughed Bulldog. "We are, how you say, tourists?"

"That explains the accents." said Gary. Therese spoke with an Australian twang outside, and Bulldog simply didn't speak. "When exactly did they start allowing tourists again?"

"About five years ago." answered Therese, "After the Separatists finally surrendered."

The Separatists were an international collection of losing governments who had attempted to overthrow, or at least undermine the
of winning governments. After surrendering their countries and failing to win via open warfare and horrendous bloodshed, the Separatists had turned to subterfuge and bloodshed-under-cover. During that second, silent war, the Empire had banned all forms of tourism, and getting a travel permit was about as easy as telling your parents that you were gay (Empire law stated that homosexuality was punishable by death). What the Separatists lacked was support from a tired and broken population and thus they had eventually been driven to surrender unconditionally.

"Well it's a good cover," said Gary.

They eventually arrived at a large fairground that Gary assumed was the safehouse. It was, in fact, beneath the fairground, in an old military bunker. Like all bunkers, the corridors were concrete and narrow with very little light.

"This way," said Therese.

Gary followed her into a small office. It was neat and functional, with only a desk, a computer and a large shelf of books. Gary recognised the statuette on the desk. It was a seraph with her wings extended over her head and her body arched as if in upward motion. Gary knew whose office this was. Gary had given that statuette to the office's resident on his birthday, sixteen years before.

"Hello Gary," said the former President of the United States, "You're a very hard man to find, you know that?"

He was much older now, but the years had been kind to him. The grey hair and deep lines on his face only served to heighten the aura of wisdom and greatness that he carried himself with. His dark eyes were still as keen and calculating as Gary remembered and he found that he could not look into them.

"Mr. President," said Gary.

"Well, not any more, as you know," said the President, "Whiskey?"

"Might as well," said Gary, taking the glass offered to him. "I thought you were assassinated during the Separatist struggle."

"I needed the, uh, anonymity. Bulldog tells me that you were about to throw yourself out a window."

"I was," said Gary, "But Therese convinced me not to."

Behind him, Therese smiled to herself.

"And I'm glad she did," said the President, "I take it you don't write anymore?"

"No," said Gary, "Haven't written a word in fifteen years."

"Well hopefully you haven't lost your touch."

"Why is that?"

"Well Gary," answered the President, "You're the only person who ever made what I had to say matter, to anyone. It's a gift only you seem to have. If I hadn't fired you, perhaps things would have been different. But, here we are and I need you to help me again."

"Help you with what, Mr. President?"

"I need you to help me start a revolution, Gary."

Part Two

Jesse ran through the back alleys of Hong Kong as fast as he could. The pigs were after him. He vaulted fences and overturned dustbins as he went, choosing as winding a path as he could. He noticed an open door to his right and went in. It was a brothel, and he crashed through many rooms of surprised patrons who were suddenly 'not in the mood' when the fuzz followed.

One bloke, a fat surly man with a baseball bat, tried to stop Jesse, but failed when he was hit by a stray bullet. They were shooting at him, which meant that if he didn't get to the car soon, he would not get anywhere at all. It was of utmost importance that he got out of this alive, or at the very least got his package to a place that could be found by his partners.

He tumbled out the front of the brothel and turned left, heading for the main road. There he turned left again and ran to the intersection. "Come on, you bastards!" he shouted as he ran, "Where the fuck are you?"

He stopped at the street corner and looked both ways. He saw the black sedan across the street to his right and ran to it.

"Well?" said Bulldog as he got in.

"I got the passwords and source code, but they caught me as I was planting the virus. Fast fuckers they are, I'll give 'em that."

"Not fast enough though," said Bulldog, pulling out into the street.

"Yeah, I think I lost 'em in a brothel about two blocks back. Some lard-arse pimp got a bullet in the chest."

"Lucky it wasn't you." said Bulldog, "Can you start now?"

"Well I can start changing the source code, but I can't get into the system while we're moving."

"Okay then. Do what you can."

Jesse pulled a laptop up from behind Bulldog and opened it. He took his package, a small USB flash drive, out of his coat pocket and plugged it in.

"You have got to be shitting me." he exclaimed.

"What?" asked Bulldog.

"It's all in fucking Mandarin. Sneaky Chinese bastards."

"Well they can read it can't they?"

"Yeah yeah, but I can't."

"Well what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to have to translate it. But it's probably encrypted below that too. Shit! Fuck!"

"Do what you can now, and we'll figure the rest out back at base. Jefferson might know what to do."

"Can Jefferson read and program in Mandarin?" quipped Jesse, "No, he can't. And I'm fucked if I know what to do."

"It was just a suggestion," said Bulldog, "He does speak the language."

"No, he speaks Cantonese, they're very different. But we'll give it a shot okay. Not much else we can do."

Their base was an abandoned warehouse in the industrial sector of Hong Kong. It was derelict enough to be inconspicuous and large enough to hide all the equipment required for the crucial operation that Jesse and Bulldog were part of. The security was tight, but well hidden. Nobody passing by would notice anything or see anybody; the cameras were camouflaged and the guards only appeared at the door. As far as anyone knew, or cared, the warehouse was as abandoned as it had always been. Even the comings and goings of the people who worked on the operation were carefully disguised so as to appear to be part of the normal movements of the people on the street.

"How'd it go?" asked Marcel when Jesse and Bulldog walked in.

He was a short, thin French man with a face like a rat who spoke in short bursts like a chimpanzee on acid.

"Not bad," said Bulldog.

"Yeah, not bad," said Jesse, "Only got chased through half of Hong fucking Kong for source code that I can't fucking read."

"They did not follow you here I hope?"

"No," replied Jesse, "We're not fucking stupid y'know."

"Good," said Marcel, unfazed, "Now what is the problem with the source code?"

"It's in Mandarin," said Bulldog.

"Can we translate it?"

"Not before the powers that be change the access codes," said Jesse, "We're properly fucked."

"Not necessarily," came a voice from behind one of the old lathes.

"Yes necessarily, Fidget," said Jesse, "How do I program in a completely different language?"

Fidget came out from behind the lathe. She was a petite, seventeen-year-old girl who had been found by Jesse in the rubble of an apartment block in London, thirteen years before. He had named her Fidget because the horrors she experienced in the war had left her with a nervous disposition. She saw him as an overprotective older brother and had learned the art of hacking from him. She was actually better than him at it, but he often wouldn't let her do anything with a computer because of the risks involved. She was very pretty, in a tomboy kind of way and many a boy had fallen for her in her lifetime, but none had succeeded in winning her or Jesse over. Jesse didn't trust anyone, except Bulldog, but everyone trusted Bulldog.

"Computers only understand ones and zeros, Jesse," she said innocently, "Every single piece of code is only binary to the CPU. You can program in any language you want, you've just got to make sure that the system understands you, not the other way round."

"You may have a point Fidget," agreed Jesse, "But how do we mimic the encryption of the source code? The security system is bound to pick it up and toss it out before a single one or zero gets a sniff of the CPU."

"Reverse engineer it from the binary code," suggested Marcel.

"That'll take ages," protested Jesse, "More time than we have."

"Not if we both work on it," said Fidget.

"No Fidget," said Jesse, "It's too fucking dangerous."

"I'm here already."

"Against my wishes and better judgement!"

"Well, I'm here and if you or I get caught we're both dead. They won't just kill you, you know."

"Alright fine," said Jesse after a minute of furious contemplation. "But I don't like the idea, not one bit. You do exactly what I say, deal?"

"Deal," said Fidget.

She was just glad to actually do something of use, even if it pissed Jesse off. She had managed to convince Bulldog to let her come along with them to Hong Kong and when Jesse found out he nearly blew a gasket.

"What the fuck, Fidget?" he had yelled at her on the plane, "You could get yourself fucking killed pulling a stunt like this and you Bulldog, I'll fucking kill you for letting her come along when I specifically asked you not to."

"She made a convincing argument for her inclusion," Marcel had interrupted, "Her skills are on par with yours and she has offered to do any minor work we require. We need as much help as we can get and volunteers are scarce on this kind of operation."

"Shut up you pompous French prick. She's only seventeen for Chrissake. She ain't cut out for this kind of thing okay. Fuck!"

Well whether she was cut out for it or not, she was part of the team, but she hadn't been of use until now. Jesse made sure of that by turning her into a glorified housekeeper with menial maintenance chores and repair work on the equipment. She had sulked for four weeks solid after an argument with Jesse over a short excursion to reconnoitre one of the buildings that housed the access codes to the Chinese satellite network.

The two got working immediately, setting themselves in front of ten LCD monitors, with Jesse writing a new satellite network system and Fidget deciphering the original source code's encryption patterns. Who got the harder of the two jobs was never discussed between the two, and because of years of experience, they worked well as a team, although Jesse would never admit it. Whenever he had trouble with converting a high-level command into low-level machine code (about two steps above binary in the human understanding scale), he would consult her and when she couldn't quite figure out what the effect of a particular command line was, she could count on him to offer a number of suggestions. In forty-eight hours they had it waxed and polished, ready to make its way into outer space. Their operation had a simple objective: take over the satellite network without the NCE knowing they had lost control. As simple as the objective was, the execution was delicate. They had to be ghosts, or rather poltergeists, unseen and untraced until their superiors made their move. The whole revolution depended on the success of this endeavour and the whole endeavour rested on the NCE being blind to their presence.

Thus far, they had been successful in keeping themselves out of sight, but the next move required them to somehow walk into the beast's den waving a prime steak without being noticed. Jesse had stolen the access codes to the satellite network's operating system and had tried to plant a basic virus onto the system so as to throw the NCE off the trail. It was simple enough and clear enough to lull the authorities into thinking that he was a useless hacker and that if they were being digitally attacked, it would not be the satellite network that was being targeted.

However, it was a gamble at best. There was no guarantee that the NCE would fall for the ruse and thus not change their access codes. If the access codes were changed it would make the ones that Jesse had stolen just random characters. In addition to this, it was likely that Jesse's encounter with the law enforcement had alerted the enemy to their presence in Hong Kong, meaning that security would be beefed up in anticipation for what was to be the final part of this particular operation.

The last step was to break into the NCE Department of Communications in Hong Kong, the hub of the satellite network's control system. Although they could hack the system remotely, outside access was strictly monitored, and there was no guarantee that what had to be done would go unnoticed, especially since they were attempting to rewrite the system from the core out. It was crucial that they went unnoticed.

They had spent six months gathering the information they needed to execute their objective as swift, efficient and silent as the shadows they had worked so hard to be. Jefferson, a large, balding Vietnamese man, had been working in maintenance at the department for over a year, gathering information and drawing up plans of every inch of the place.

As soon as Jesse and Fidget had finished editing the code and making it work with a façade of normalcy, enough to fool the NCE tech boys into believing that nothing was wrong, they had to move quickly. Their window of opportunity was growing smaller with every second that they spent in the warehouse.

Fidget was, despite Jesse's better judgement and protective nature, essential to the success of the task at hand. It would take both her and Jesse to keep the network's security system from detecting any anomalies that they might not have hidden effectively, and if the access codes proved useless, the only way they could hack the system in time would be by employing the two-heads-are-better-than-one rule. Jefferson and Bulldog would accompany them. Jefferson would provide access and know-how of the building itself and Bulldog was big and scary, so he would be on 'kick-the-fuzz's-arses' duty.

Insertion was to take place at seven thirty, Hong Kong time.

"Now Fidget," said Jesse during their briefing, "You stick to me closer than a fat man sticks to cheese, you hear? I don't want anyone getting a fucking sniff of your pink nails. They're nice by the way."

"Thanks," said Fidget, "I'll be right behind you all the way."

"Good," said Jesse, "Now Bulldog, if any Chinese bastard gets within a hundred metres of the building, you let us know. Nobody, and I mean nobody is to get fucking trigger happy tonight. In and out, without even an accidental fart being heard or smelt. Understood?"

"Oui," said Bulldog.

At that moment, a thunderous explosion sent the outside gates flying, and the base into chaos.

"What the fuck was that?" yelled Jesse. His answer came when one of the guards cried, "NCE!" before another blast ripped the door open.

NCE soldiers streamed into the base.

"All men to arms!" barked Marcel, "Rig the equipment for destruction! Get any and all information out of here or halfway to hell NOW!"

"Fuck! Shit! Balls to your fucking father!" cursed Jesse, grabbing a Carbine from the back of an armoured SUV. He grabbed Fidget, who was getting an AK-47 from a gun rack near the back of the warehouse.

"No Fidget, listen to me," he said quickly and forcefully, "We need to get the codes out of here, and you're the only one who can do it."

"Jesse, no."

"Fucking listen to me!" he shouted, "Take the hard drives and the codes and a few of the portable satellites to the airstrip where we landed. Get Mao to fly you to Little Beijing. On the plane, hack the system."

"But –"

"The moving signal will be tough enough to triangulate so as to buy you some time. If you can use the administrator access pass codes and an authority figure's ID, you might be able to avoid detection. Now listen carefully Fidget. When you land, you get your arse to Therese as fast as you fucking can, you hear? Don't argue with me. If you stay then the revolution will fail. Now fucking GO!"

"Okay Jesse," cried Fidget, wiping her tears away, "But please, please get out of this alive."

"Of course I will darling," said Jesse with a smile she didn't believe, "I'll meet you in Little Beijing."

At that moment, a bullet ripped through Fidget's shoulder.

"NO!" screamed Jesse, whipping his gun around, "No one hurts her, you cock-sucking, mother-fucking pig!"

He dispatched the shooter with far more bullets than he should have.

"I'm fine, it's just my arm." called Fidget.

"Well then get the fuck out of here."

So she picked herself up and ran, weaving her way to the SUV through the chaos, gunfire and industrial machinery, stopping only to get the codes and the hard drives as Jesse had said. The portable satellite dishes were already in the SUV, they had been packed for the now futile mission.

"Jefferson! Go with her, she can't drive with a fucked arm! And the rest of you make sure they aren't followed. If any NCE fucks get within five blocks of 'em they're dead!"

She fought back tears and anger as she went. She was glad that Jesse thought so fast.

At one point she had to swing an iron bar into a soldier's face, and at another she was saved by some sharp shooting on Bulldog's part. He was in his element in this anarchy, transforming from a mild-mannered giant into a force to be reckoned with. Though he hated dealing death and wielding destruction, his experiences had made him a veritable machine of war.

Jefferson caught up with Fidget at the SUV. He climbed into the driver's seat as she tumbled into the back.

"Where are we going?" asked Jefferson.

"The airstrip. Fast!"

As they pulled out into the street Fidget looked back out the rear windscreen. The guards honoured Jesse's orders and kept them from being followed. Bulldog was mowing down men like a man possessed when he was shot six times in the back. Fidget screamed as he fell, still firing with deadly accuracy. It took eight more bullets and a shotgun in the face to put him out of action. Fidget turned round, weeping and breathing heavily, trying desperately to focus.

When they were about a kilometre away, she saw the warehouse disintegrate into a tremendous fireball behind them. The equipment was destroyed, she knew that, but her tears flowed freely and terribly as she thought of Jesse and Bulldog. They were her friends and the nearest thing to a family she had ever had. No, she couldn't think of that now. There would be time to grieve later.

She pulled a laptop up from her feet and started to work. She needed as much time as she could get once she got on the plane.

They pulled up to the airstrip. Jefferson had called Mao on the way and explained the situation, so the little grease monkey was waiting for them when they arrived, with his small, single-propeller aircraft fueled and ready to fly. As they climbed out, they heard sirens in the distance.

"About two minutes away," said Jefferson, looking behind them.

"Quick, quick," squeaked Mao in his nervous, high-pitched fashion.

They unloaded what they needed from the SUV to the plane whilst Mao started the old bird up.

"Let's go," quipped Jefferson when the last dish was inside.

The two climbed in as the NCE vehicles rolled up to the airstrip gate.

As they raced down the runway and into the air, the NCE used as much firepower as they had to stop the little plane taking flight.

"They shoot my baby!" screeched Mao as a bullet glanced off the wing to his right.

He stuck his head out the tiny window and yelled, "I kill you muddafucka!" before saying to Fidget, "I learn dat from yo brudda."

Mao managed to get the small plane into the air. Fidget immediately got the satellite dishes up and running. Her fingers flew across the keyboard of the laptop as she set about unravelling the complex web of security that protected the network.

"We must stop on da West Coast," said Mao, "For fuel. I got friend there. He help us. Then we go to Little Beijing."

They were safe.

Part Three

Friday, April 27th, 2028. Spring was easing its way into Little Beijing. The air still had a bite, but the trees of Lao Xing Park defied it by slowly coming to life with leaves and blossoms sprouting here and there.

Gary sat on a park bench, alone in the cold, looking around at the We Love Lao posters plastered on just about every surface imaginable. It was a ridiculous campaign in Gary's opinion – no one but Lao and the NCE government loved Lao. Half the military hated him, something that the silent revolutionaries were counting on. The pictures of Lao never ceased to remind Gary of a bizarre cross between an orang-utan and a bad-tempered panda. He laughed at the resemblance even now.

In his gloved hands, Gary held a white rose.

He twirled it in his fingers as he thought of what the day held. The President's mad, he thought. Risking his neck, today of all days. Why could the funeral not wait?

Two figures approached from Gary's left. He watched them as they drew nearer, not moving until he had seen their faces. He had to be sure. The one on the right was the tall blonde, now brunette, who had stopped him from throwing himself out of a window the year before. The other was a smallish girl who he guessed was around sixteen years old. Both of them had their collars drawn up, more to ward off the cold than anything else. Therese wore a beret and the girl a black beanie. In fact, were it not for the fact that she wore a black dress under her coat, Gary might have mistaken her for a boy.

"This is for you, my darling," said Gary as he gave the rose to Therese, "And I take it you're our daughter for the day."

"I am," said the girl. She looked sad, they both did. Understandable, given the circumstances.

"Shall we go?" he said, "Those runners back there might be tailing us. Keep an eye on 'em."

"Always," said Therese.

The three set off down the walkway to Gary's car. The revolutionaries always met in public, under the pretense of personal relationships as opposed to the clandestine locations of the Resistance. Gary hoped that the Resistance would forgive them, and join them, after today – they had taken far too much flak from the NCE on account of the revolutionaries' activities. Today the three were to be a family attending the funeral of a close family friend. Actually, this time it was actually true, for the most part, thought Gary as they walked. The only ruse was that he and Therese were married with a daughter. The revolutionaries had become almost like a family to most, and today they were burying many of their brothers and sisters.

"What's your name?" he asked the girl.

"Fidget," she said. It was the only name she answered to.

"Your parents name you that?"

"No," she said, "Jesse did, but – but he said that I told him my name was Kelly when he found me."

"Well Kelly it is then. Just for today."

He saw the look in Fidget's eyes when she spoke about Jesse. He had met Jesse only once, but he liked the guy. Jesse seemed like the kind of guy who didn't take crap from anyone except, he guessed, this devastated girl who walked beside him.

"You're right," said Therese suddenly, "They're tailing us. They've gone across that bridge three times, always glancing at us."

"What do we do?" asked Fidget, suddenly nervous.

"Nothing," said Gary, "We just won't be an hour early, that's all. Goose chase before goose eggs?"

"No," answered Therese, "Tortoises and hares is better."

"Guess so," said Gary. He wouldn't have minded flying down the road at a hundred miles an hour, but the subtlety of Therese's course of action, losing them in the morning traffic, was more conducive to their cover and the secrecy of their destination.

"It's gonna be tough though," he said after a moment, "They don't look like the usual suspects."

It was indeed tough to lose their tails, but they managed. The cemetery was quiet, even for a cemetery, probably because it was a Friday. Friday was for parties in Little Beijing, not funerals. More than one of the groundsmen gave them a knowing nod as they drove the narrow winding roads of the cemetery. Gary even waved at one of them, who was a close friend of his. He was glad that the revolutionaries had organised security for today. It would buy them precious time if the NCE's minions decided to pay a visit.

The sun came out as they parked beside the other cars at the foot of a small hill. The funeral party stood at the top, waiting anxiously to begin the ceremony. As they reached the top, Gary saw the familiar face of the President looking drawn and sombre. Beside him stood Bulldog's widow. She was crying silently into a white handkerchief. Her five-year-old son was at her side, holding his mother's hand and staring defiantly at the twelve coffins that stood before him. Gary also spotted Gustav, Marcel's partner, wearing a hula shirt and white shorts instead of black. Touching, but stupid, noted the part of Gary that had been hardened by a year of subterfuge and espionage. A sniper could pick Gustav off during a snow storm in the dark.

"Mr. President," said Gary, shaking the man's hand, "This is noble but reckless. Today, of all days, you choose to come to a funeral that could have waited until tomorrow."

"These men died for today to happen my friend," replied the President, "They should be honoured."

Gary didn't argue, he couldn't. He took a seat beside Therese and Fidget in the second row.

Father Terence got up wearing the collar he hadn't donned since America fell. The underground church had provided much needed support and hospitality for the revolutionaries.

"Today we lay to rest twelve of the brave men who died to give birth to our revolution. While we pray that they did not give their lives in vain, only God knows what will come of our efforts to free His children from the shadow of oppression that has gripped His beloved world for so long. These twelve brave souls stand in the stead of the fifty others who were not found.

Nevertheless, each one was loved by God equally, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality or religious preference. We pray that he looks kindly upon these men and the friends and families that they have left behind. We were all touched in some way by each of these men.

We all knew Marcel as a decisive and uncompromising leader, who would never settle for anything but the best, in both his work and his life. All of us has laughed at his exquisite sense of humour. And of course, no one will forget the ever-steady Elijah, the wisest and friendliest Bulldog one could ever hope to meet. Not one of us was exempt from his warm smile and helping hands…"

Father Terence continued mentioning each by name, but Gary could only think of Bulldog with a knot in his stomach and the threat of tears in his eyes. Bulldog had helped him quit smoking and the bottle. He had also taught Gary the difference between vengeance and justice, and in the short time that Gary had known Elijah Kingsley, they had become brothers in arms. Behind him he could hear Gustav weeping, against Marcel's wishes. He turned to Therese. Her jaw was set and she was fighting the mixture of sorrow and rage that had plagued her since the NCE had taken her only confidante from her. Gary took her hand in his and squeezed it gently as if to say it was okay to let it out. She looked up at him and threw her arms around him, sobbing into his shoulder.

The sirens were heard by the funeral party. They grew steadily louder until a silver Mustang roared up the hill, grinding to a halt only a foot away from the shocked mourners. Guns were out in a flash and the tension in the atmosphere was tangible as almost eighty firearms were directed straight at the driver. The driver got out, he was tall and thin and he looked in his mid thirties, due to his beard. However, his eyes and cocky demeanour put his age nearer to twenty five than thirty. His most striking features were his crooked nose and a scar over his right eyebrow.

"Those arseholes have no fucking respect for the dead."

Fidget broke through the crowd and bear-hugged the man who had practically raised her, she was crying too much to say anything yet.

"Told you I'd meet you here, didn't I?" he said, planting a kiss in her hair.

The guns were holstered. Many men rushed forward to shake an old friend's hand. He waved them off, and extracted himself from Fidget.

"Mr. President of the US of A," he said, approaching the President, "The fuzz are rushing here faster than fat kids at a free lunch, and that poses a risk to your security, don't it? As I'm told, you have an appointment that you can't miss today and it would not be conducive to our cause if your identity were to be discovered at such a crucial point. Yes?"

"Correct on all counts, Jesse." laughed the relieved President.

"Your fellow boss men have sent me to collect you and escort you to the secret location of the secret thing that we all know about. So if you don't mind…" Jesse bowed, indicating the Mustang, "Time's a wasting sir."

The President obligingly hurried himself into the car.

"You're coming too, Fidget," said Jesse, "But the President rides shotgun. The rest of you saw us go that way. They should leave you to your mourning, after a bit of fuss of course. See you all tomorrow, yeah? We'll grab a pint and have a real wake."

And with that he climbed into the car and raced off. The funeral party proceeded to wreck the tent and cover the tracks that the car had made in the grass. When they saw the brown uniforms of the NCE approaching, they staged even more confusion and uproar. Each of them were then thoroughly questioned and each played his, or her part, beautifully, pointing the soldiers in the precise direction that the car did not go. Eventually they were left in peace to finish the ceremony. At the end Gary turned to Therese.

"May I take you on a date? I hear Times Square is wonderful this time of year."

"Certainly," she replied with a smile.

Meanwhile, the Mustang hurtled down what was once Broadway Boulevard. Although most of the pigs were still sniffing up the cemetery, a smart few had managed to find their way back to Jesse's metaphorical heels. He was tearing up asphalt like any good stuntman, alerting more and more swine to his attempt at escaping the uncoordinated, but long arm of warped justice. He weaved through the cars, crashed over sidewalks and ran more reds than Custer had fought. But still the little oinkers pursued him. He had to lose them before he left the city, or else the President and the revolution would die.

"I'm sorry Mr. President," he said, "I have no choice."

"What is it Jesse?"

"We're gonna have to crash into that mall there and borrow another mode of transport. It's the only way that we can get that fucking chopper up there off our case. If we manage, I promise that you'll be a right Miss Daisy in the next car. Seatbelts."

He clipped his in as well.

"But it's almost all glass," said Fidget from the back, also clipping in.

"Yeah, and ten feet behind that pretty glass is stone cold fucking concrete. But I'll brake as much as I can."

He started playing chicken with the mall. The mall won. At the last second he pulled the handbrake up and swerved right, trusting the understeer to bring them parallel as they hit the kerb. The understeer was trustworthy and the car rolled through the glass, finally coming to rest on its roof.

"Everyone okay?" called Jesse.

"Yep," said Fidget.

"Might have cracked a rib or two, but it's nothing I can't handle."

"Good. Out."

They climbed out the trashed car and headed to the parking bays. Jesse went to the first car he saw and broke its window. The alarm wailed and fell silent as he yanked apart its connection to the car. He hotwired it and told the others to get in, before driving out as if nothing was wrong.

When they arrived at the base, the President could barely walk. Jesse and Fidget helped him to the entrance where he was immediately taken to the infirmary.

"What happened?" asked the former British Prime Minister.

"They had a chopper following us," said Jesse, "We lost 'em when I crashed the Mustang into a mall. He said he might've cracked a rib or two."

"It seems worse."

"It is," said Doctor Carrick behind them, "He's bleeding internally. We're trying our best to stop it."

The surgeons worked desperately for three hours on the President, trying to stop the bleeding. When Doctor Carrick emerged, covered in the President's blood, it was not with good news.

"We managed to slow it, but not stop it. He won't live through the night."

The Prime Minister dropped his shoulders.

"I will tell the others," he said, "We will have to make alternate arrangements for the broadcast, we will not let this revolution die with him. He made sure of that."

"I'm not dead yet," said the President. He was standing in the door of the Operating Room with his shirt open and stitches going in a long line from his solar plexus to his belly button. "Get me a new suit. I'm doing the speech."

Gary and Therese sat at a café on the corner of Times Square enjoying a quaint little meal of pancakes and waffles over coffee. They always got along well outside of the base. That was probably why they were often paired together on assignments. Gary loved how she reminded him of Michelle without trying, but he was also always pleasantly reminded that this wasn't his late wife. She was remarkably different in many ways that Gary found attractive as well. Though they had never told each other, each was drawn to the other with a very deep seated fondness. At least that's how Gary would put it. Bulldog had always said it was love, but Gary feared that. He couldn't bear to think of being in love with anyone but Michelle and Sara.

"What time is it?" he asked.

Therese checked her watch.

"Four thirty five."

"They're running late."

He was concerned. He glanced up at the advertisements flashing in between 'We Love Lao'.

"They're politicians," said Therese, biting into her waffle, "They're always late. Fidget did her job, the network is ours. They're probably arguing about lighting or camera placement, that sort of thing."

The screens all around them flickered and went black.

"See."

The next image that appeared was that of the smiling President and the leaders of the former states of Argentina, France, Turkey, New Zealand, Thailand, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

"Depending on where you are, it's either good morning, good evening or good afternoon," said the President. His breathing was laboured, and Gary could sense a great deal of pain in his voice.

"You didn't write that." laughed Therese.

"Something's wrong with him," said Gary, walking into the street along with the gathering crowd, "He's hurt."

"Most of you will recognise me as the man who sat in the White House sixteen years ago, but I do not greet you as a Head of State today. Today, I come to you as a friend.

The world is, at this very moment, pressed by the iron fist of an oppressive regime, pressed to within an inch of its humanity. Everywhere, people suffer and die for enjoying the precious freedoms to which we as humans have every right to enjoy. Our jobs are safe, but our spirits are dying. Before long we will lose any idea of what it means to be human.

Many have tried to fight and many have failed. The New Coalition Empire is a giant that does not fear guns and soldiers, for they have bigger guns and larger armies than any militant movement could dream of having.

What the Empire fears, above all else, is you. The very people that they strike down are the very people who, if united, can undo their reign of terror.

History has taught us that tyranny can never stand in the face of a united people. Each one of you, when joined with your brothers and sisters of the world, pose a threat that shakes the Empire to its core. Each one of you is, despite what the Empire would have you believe, in control of your own destiny.

You are exactly who you wish to be and you can live in the world you choose.

That is why I am issuing a call to revolution. Every person has the opportunity to join us, the men who once led a free world. You are not obligated to join our cause and we will not force you, but if you wish to see our world reborn, alive and free, then I urge you to take a stand with us.

There was once a statue that embodied all that we believe in. It now lies in ruins in what we now call Little Beijing. I promise you this, join us and we will rebuild that statue and all it stood for.

Should you want to join us in this struggle against tyranny and oppression,
Analyst Note Operational Security: A Catastrophe Structural Flaw In a surveillance state with face recognition cameras, informants, and street patrols, asking dissidents to publicly mark themselves is functionally a round-up order. The East German Stasi had one informant per 63 citizens. Real resistance movements survive through strict cell structures, one-time codes, and dead drops — not colour-coded body markings visible on CCTV. The blue palm is cinema. As operational security, it is a death warrant dressed as a rallying cry.→ Britannica: The Stasi. We will find you. And we will provide protection and a voice."

The President raised his hand, as did the men behind him. Their open palms were painted light blue.

"Please, do not go looking for a fight, enough blood has been spilled. I do not ask you to willingly die for our sake, not until you believe, with every fibre of your being, in what we stand for. Understand that the Empire will not react warmly to any threat, and so I plead with you not to join us without considering the risk. In joining this cause, you risk your safety and the safety of your loved ones.

Those of you who do not wish to take that risk will not be coerced or persecuted by us.

However, if you are tired of living in fear, tired of the tyranny and the suffering that you face every day, then be bold, take a stand.

If you have the courage to join us, stay hidden and stay vigilant until we find you, and we will find you.

In this struggle, there will be trials and pain, but take heart, together we will overcome, we the people, the citizens of Earth, will stand victorious in the end. From this day forth we will begin to build a new, free world.

To the leaders of the Empire, I have this to say: we will not initiate violence, but if struck down, we will strike back and we will not stop until the New Coalition Empire is no more. Today we, as humans, declare our right to freedom, freedom to choose our leaders, freedom to choose our path."

The screen went black for a moment before the advertisements returned. Gary looked around at the people who now crowded Times Square. They were talking among themselves, some looking excited, others looking scared. He looked at Therese and smiled. She returned the smile and embraced him.

On Friday, April 27th, 2028, with the words of a dying man, the Revolution had been born.

The Geopolitics
An intelligence assessment of the story's world-building
Summary Assessment The story's premise is emotionally coherent and politically earnest. Its geopolitical architecture, however, rests on several load-bearing assumptions that don't hold — a single-cause world war, a perfectly unified anti-Western bloc, full nuclear disarmament, and a revolution launched with a public hand signal. The naivety is not incompetence; it is the naivety of someone who has absorbed the vocabulary of geopolitics without the friction of its reality. Interestingly, its sharpest insight — the severing of undersea cable infrastructure — became a live NATO concern within a decade.
4
Premises that flatten complex reality
3
Era-specific assumptions that aged poorly
1
Genuinely prescient geopolitical instinct
2
Structural flaws the story never addresses

"The war raged on for five long years. In the end, the body count stood at over five hundred million. More than half a billion people had died because Gary took no heed of the 'conflict of interests' clause in his contract."

The story's central engine — one misfiled attachment causes WWIII — requires an extraordinary series of failures to stack perfectly: both the President and his aide oversleep on the morning of a nationally scheduled broadcast; no one reads the statement before it rolls; the apology is botched; and seven nations simultaneously decide that terrorism and then war is the appropriate response.

The author gestures at a real mechanism: "accumulated resentment for America and Europe". This is not wrong. Anti-American sentiment was real and measurable in 2010, particularly in the Muslim world following Iraq and Afghanistan. But accumulated resentment is a slow-burn — it creates conditions, it doesn't pull triggers. Actual diplomatic crises have escalation ladders: formal protest, ambassador recall, trade sanctions, military posturing, and only then, in rare cases, armed conflict. The story skips the entire ladder.

The closest real analogue is the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914: a single act detonating a war that had been structurally ready to happen. The difference is that the alliance commitments in 1914 were legally binding treaty obligations — the "trigger" had genuine mechanical force. Gary's column has no equivalent mechanism. Countries go to war when their interests demand it, not because they read an op-ed.

What the story is actually arguing — though it doesn't know it — is that words shape the atmosphere in which decisions are made. Gary's column poisons the well so thoroughly that diplomacy becomes impossible. This is a real insight. It just doesn't translate into instant global war.

The story splits the world into two clean blocs: "America and Europe" versus "the rest of the world, except Switzerland." This is the story's starkest simplification and the one most directly exposed by actual geopolitics.

India — the world's largest democracy, 1.2 billion people, nuclear-armed, with deep cultural and economic ties to both the US and the Global South — does not appear in the story's alliance calculus. India's foreign policy has historically been non-alignment, not anti-Americanism. Its primary adversarial relationships are with Pakistan and China — not the West.

Brazil in 2010 was hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Its relationship with the US was competitive and occasionally tense but not adversarial. Sub-Saharan Africa's 54 countries have radically different relationships with both China and the West — many African nations were recipients of significant US aid and had deep colonial-era tensions with Europe, not America.

China and the Middle East are, in reality, a relationship of pure economic convenience. China is a secular authoritarian state; the Gulf states are monarchical Islamic theocracies. China suppresses Muslim minorities (Uyghurs) with documented brutality. The idea that Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China would fight a unified war under shared leadership ignores that Iran and Saudi Arabia are in a proxy war with each other.

The story conflates "resentment of the West" with "unified bloc capable of coordinated warfare." These are not the same thing.

The story requires full global nuclear disarmament as a pre-condition — to remove MAD and allow the war to proceed without immediate nuclear exchange. This is the most consequential assumption in the story, and the least grounded.

No nuclear state has ever voluntarily and verifiably disarmed, with the partial exception of South Africa, which dismantled its program in 1989 before the transition to democracy — and did so under very specific political circumstances that have never been replicated. The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) exists precisely because the incentive to arm is so strong: once one state in a region has nuclear weapons, its neighbours face a coercive disadvantage.

The story imagines a US president winning the Nobel Peace Prize for achieving something that decades of arms reduction treaties, INF agreements, and START negotiations have barely dented. The real trajectory in 2010: North Korea had conducted its second nuclear test in 2009. Iran was expanding its enrichment program. Pakistan had the world's fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. The world was proliferating, not disarming.

The story does redeem this premise partially — the re-arming that happens during the war is structurally interesting. The horror of "everyone building nukes as fast as they can while simultaneously destroying everyone else's" is a vivid scenario. It just requires you to first accept the implausible disarmament.

The story gives us a world empire headed by "Lao" — presumably Chinese — that encompasses enough of the world to have conquered America and installed its own governance. Setting aside the military logistics of projecting Chinese power across the Pacific and defeating the US on its own soil, the political mechanics of this empire are never examined.

China and the nations of the Middle East share no common ideology, language, legal tradition, or governance model. China is an atheist state that treats religion as a security threat. Iran is a theocratic republic. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. North Korea is a hereditary totalitarian state. The idea that these entities form a unified empire with consistent governance — rather than a shaky post-war occupation coalition that immediately begins splintering — is the story's most convenient fiction.

For comparison: the Allied powers that defeated Nazi Germany could not maintain a unified post-war order for five years before the Cold War split them. The story's NCE would face this contradiction at far higher intensity, given the ideological incompatibilities involved. The "empire" in the story is more a narrative convenience than a geopolitical entity — it functions as a generic oppressor rather than a specific political system.

The story's most accurate geopolitical instinct is the fibre optic cable attack. Undersea cables carry over 95% of international internet traffic. They are largely undefended, accessible to submarines, and their disruption would cause catastrophic communications failure. In 2022, suspected Russian vessels began shadowing cable routes in the North Sea. In 2024, cables in the Baltic Sea were severed, with China and Russia suspected. NATO established a dedicated protection program for subsea infrastructure.

A 19-year-old in 2010, writing a thriller, identified this as a war-opening strategic move. Military planners were aware of the vulnerability, but it had not entered the public conversation. This was good geopolitical instinct — and the kind of thing science fiction does at its best: identifying a fragility before the institutions do.

The story also correctly identifies that surveillance state paranoia and information isolation are among the most potent tools of authoritarian control. "Americans were plagued with paranoia, not knowing what the rest of the world was up to" is, in a different register, an accurate description of what information control does to populations. North Korea, which the story name-checks as an adversary, is the real-world proof of concept for this.

Finally, the story's central premise — that words are a form of power with consequences their authors cannot control — is its most enduring and least naive idea. Gary's tragedy is that his private opinion, made public, becomes a geopolitical event. This is truer in 2025 than it was in 2010.

The Moment
Writing in 2010 — what was in the air, and what the story believes without knowing it

"He wasn't Pro-Islam or Pro-Communist, but he understood the importance of tolerance in the interests of peace and international cooperation. The President was winning the battle at that point."

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009 — roughly one year before this story was written. He had been president for nine months and had done almost nothing yet. The committee awarded the prize explicitly for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Many observers, including Obama himself, found this premature.

The story's President is Obama-as-ideal: eloquent, diplomatically brilliant, winning the hearts of the world, pursuing nuclear disarmament, bridging the gap between America and its critics. His fatal flaw is not his own — Gary's column destroys a man who was, the story insists, actually going to succeed. This is wish fulfilment: the premise that a wise enough leader, with talented enough words, could actually repair what was broken between America and the world.

By 2013, the NSA surveillance revelations had shattered this picture. By 2015, the Syrian chemical weapons red line had been crossed without response. By 2016, the world the story imagined — a US president using tolerance and diplomacy to win — had been replaced by something else entirely. The story is a time capsule of a specific eighteen-month window when American liberal optimism was at its post-Bush peak and before the machinery of the world had had time to push back.

The story was written in 2010. The Arab Spring began in December 2010, with Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in Tunisia. Within a year, the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen had fallen. Syria descended into a civil war that would kill over half a million people. The story imagines the Arab world as a bloc of "callous dictators" who unite against America. Reality delivered something far more complex: the Arab street rose against its own governments, not against the West.

The story's model of Middle Eastern politics is state-centric: leaders make decisions, countries follow. The Arab Spring demonstrated that this model was catastrophically incomplete. The populations of these countries had entirely different interests from their governments, and those interests could mobilise at scale. The story's revolutionaries — Gary, Jesse, the President — are a small elite planning a top-down broadcast. The actual revolutionary wave of 2011 was bottom-up, leaderless, and largely impossible to control.

Had the author written this story in late 2011, it would have looked very different. The tools, the mode of organisation, the role of social media — all of it would have been informed by what actually happened when people tried to use words to change a political order.

In 2010, China had just overtaken Japan as the world's second-largest economy. The dominant Western frame was anxious but optimistic: China was rising, it was integrating into global trade systems, and the bet of the policy establishment was that economic integration would moderate its politics. The phrase "empire building" was used of China's economic activities — buying port concessions, lending to African governments, expanding trade routes. Military expansion into the South China Sea was accelerating but had not yet produced the level of confrontation it would by 2015.

The story projects this anxiety forward into military conquest. In doing so, it misses the actual mechanism of Chinese power projection: not armies on foreign soil, but economic dependency, debt diplomacy, and information control. China did not need to win a world war to exercise significant leverage over much of the developing world. It bought that leverage through the Belt and Road Initiative, infrastructure loans, and technology exports of surveillance systems.

The author's instinct — that China represented the primary geopolitical challenge to American dominance — was right. The mechanism — a military world war won by Chinese armies conquering the continental United States — was the wrong form for a real insight.

Strip away the geopolitics and the story is about something more intimate: the ethics of writing for power. Gary is skilled with words but not disciplined in his use of them. He writes a president's public face while privately publishing opinions that contradict it. He profits from both. His carelessness — a mixed-up email — is the story's engine, but the story is not really about carelessness. It is about the corruption of using language simultaneously as a public instrument of peace and a private instrument of contempt.

The story takes Gary's guilt seriously. He spends fifteen years in an alcoholic purgatory, attempts suicide twice, and is only redeemed when asked to use his gift again — this time, presumably, with alignment between what he writes and what he believes. The revolution the President asks him to help birth is, implicitly, the chance to use words honestly.

This is a nineteen-year-old thinking seriously about what language does in the world. The geopolitics is scaffolding for a moral question: what are you responsible for when your words, freed from their intended context, become part of the world? Gary didn't intend a war. He never intended his column to be read by the people he was insulting. The internet and the global broadcast had already made this kind of accidental public reckoning possible in 2010. In 2025, it is a weekly occurrence.

The story's model of geopolitics is naive — but its naivety protects something worth protecting: a belief that good leadership, good words, and human decency are sufficient to repair political damage, and that ordinary people, when united, can displace authoritarian power. These are not guaranteed truths. They are convictions that have been tested against the decade that followed and found wanting in many cases.

The Arab Spring ended in counter-revolution, civil war, and renewed authoritarianism in most places. The "power of a united people" turned out to require not just unity but organisations, resources, external support, and time — none of which was readily available. The President's blue-palm speech is the story at its most optimistic, and also at its most vulnerable to being wrong: the idea that a broadcast, however eloquent, can launch a revolution against a surveillance state with bigger guns and no accountability.

But the story's optimism is not merely naive. It is a moral position: that the alternative — accepting that tyranny is too resilient to be overcome, that words cannot matter, that people cannot organise — is worse. The author at nineteen chose to write a story where the revolution succeeds, where Gary's guilt becomes redemption, where Bulldog's sacrifice is not meaningless. This is not geopolitical sophistication. It is something else — the refusal to believe that things cannot be otherwise. That is not nothing.

Further Reading
The intelligence files — from nuclear deterrence to undersea cables
Nuclear Deterrence & Disarmament
Arms Control Association: Nuclear Weapons — Who Has What Current Current inventory of all nine nuclear-armed states. The map the story requires you not to look at. Brookings: Why Nuclear Disarmament Is So Difficult The structural reasons why no nuclear state will voluntarily disarm — the security dilemma, verification problems, and the irreversibility of nuclear knowledge. Atomic Archive: Mutually Assured Destruction MAD doctrine — the logic the story's disarmament premise requires to have been overcome, and why it has proven extraordinarily durable.
Geopolitical Alliances & the Global South
CFR: The Non-Aligned Movement Why much of the world has historically refused to join either Western or Soviet-aligned blocs — the tradition the story's alliance system ignores. CFR: China's Belt and Road Initiative How Chinese power projection actually works — through debt, infrastructure, and economic dependency rather than military conquest. Foreign Affairs: The China-Iran Relationship The real relationship between two of the story's "allied" powers — transactional, unstable, and driven by mutual convenience rather than shared ideology.
Undersea Cables — The Story's Prescient Instinct
CSIS: Protecting Subsea Cables Current The strategic vulnerability the story identified in 2010, now a formal NATO concern. Real-world incidents in the Baltic Sea have made this live policy. The Economist: The Vulnerability of Undersea Cables The infrastructure that carries the internet — how it works, where it's vulnerable, and who is targeting it.
Resistance Movements & Operational Security
Britannica: The Stasi East Germany's secret police: one informant per 63 citizens, comprehensive surveillance, and the penetration of every resistance organisation. The real cost of the blue-palm approach. RAND: How Terrorist Groups End Academic Empirical study of how insurgencies and resistance movements succeed or fail — most are defeated not by superior force but by penetration, attrition, and lack of public support.
Words and Power: The Story's Real Subject
The Atlantic: The Obama Doctrine Jeffrey Goldberg's landmark interview — the disillusionment of a presidency that believed, as Gary's President does, that the right words could change what guns could not. On Political Language and Its Consequences The study of how political speech creates the conditions for action — the academic version of what Gary learns the hard way. NYT: What Speechwriters Know About Power The real Gary Heinnemans — what it means to put words in the mouths of power and who bears responsibility when those words matter.
Nuclear Deterrence — Why Disarmament Doesn't Happen

### The Logic of Mutually Assured Destruction

MAD is not a doctrine anyone chose. It is the emergent outcome of a simple calculation: if both sides can survive a first strike and retaliate with sufficient force, neither side can rationally initiate nuclear war. The terror is the point. Deterrence has held between nuclear powers since 1945 — not because of moral restraint, but because the mathematics are unfavourable for aggression.

### The Security Dilemma

Why does nuclear disarmament fail? Because the security dilemma is irreversible. Once nuclear weapons exist, the knowledge of how to build them cannot be erased. Any nation that disarms remains seconds away from re-arming if it retains the industrial capacity. And any nation that disarms first becomes vulnerable to a neighbour who does not. Rational states will not disarm unilaterally, and verified multilateral disarmament requires the exact level of trust between adversaries that nuclear weapons exist precisely because it is absent.

### The Story's Workaround

The story needs disarmament to happen so that war can occur without immediate nuclear exchange. This is necessary for the plot but structurally implausible. The real-world precedent closest to this: South Africa dismantled its nuclear program in 1989, under F.W. de Klerk, before the democratic transition. It is the only nuclear state to have done so. South Africa's program was secret, small (six devices), and its disarmament was linked to specific political circumstances — the end of apartheid and the need to prevent the ANC from inheriting nuclear weapons — that have never applied to any major nuclear power.

### What Really Happened in 2010

In the year this story was written: North Korea conducted its second nuclear test (2009). Iran was enriching uranium to 20%. Pakistan had the world's fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. The New START treaty was being negotiated but only covered strategic warheads, not the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons both sides retained. The world was not disarming. It was proliferating. The Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for his disarmament aspirations was given in the full knowledge that the actual nuclear inventory had barely moved.

→ Current nuclear weapons inventory (Arms Control Association)
How Alliances Actually Form — And Why the Story's Don't

### The Story's Coalition

The story splits the world into: America and Europe versus the rest of the world. This requires China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Lebanon, Palestine, and virtually every non-Western nation to fight as a coordinated military force against a common enemy. It does not require them to explain how they overcome their own contradictions to do so.

### The Contradictions in the "Rest of the World" Bloc

China is a secular authoritarian state that has conducted documented cultural genocide against Muslim Uyghurs. Saudi Arabia and Iran have been in a proxy war (Yemen, Syria, Lebanon) since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. North Korea's primary relationship with China is one of managed dependency — China has repeatedly voted for UN sanctions against it. India, the world's largest democracy and a nuclear power with a larger population than either China or the US, is entirely absent from the story's alliance calculus. In reality, India's primary adversary is Pakistan and China, not the West.

### How Alliances Actually Form

Real alliances form around shared immediate interests, not shared enemies. NATO existed because the Soviet military threat to Western European sovereignty was concrete and immediate. The Warsaw Pact existed because the USSR forcibly maintained it. The US-Israel relationship exists because of specific security and domestic political calculations. When alliances form around shared hatred of a third party, they are inherently fragile — as soon as the immediate threat recedes, the underlying contradictions surface. The Arab League, formed partly on shared opposition to Israel, has never coordinated military action effectively.

### What the Story Needed

To make its war plausible, the story needed either: (a) a more modest scope — perhaps a regional war rather than a global one — or (b) a more developed account of what caused the ideological contradictions to be temporarily overcome. Instead it offers accumulated resentment as a sufficient engine. Resentment is real. It is not, on its own, a military alliance mechanism.

→ The Non-Aligned Movement: why much of the world declined to choose (CFR)
The New Coalition Empire — Can It Function?

### What the Story Gives Us

The NCE is a global empire with consistent governance — it issues travel permits, enforces laws (including the death penalty for homosexuality), fields uniformed military, and controls satellite communications infrastructure. Its leader, "Lao," is presumably Chinese. It governs what was once New York City, and has field operations in Hong Kong and what was once Broadway Boulevard.

### The Coalition That Cannot Cohere

For the NCE to exist, the post-war coalition must have agreed on: a single head of government, a common legal code, unified military command, a shared communications and surveillance infrastructure, and the suppression of the internal contradictions between its member states. This is harder than winning the war.

Historical precedent: the Allied powers that defeated Germany in 1945 — sharing a common enemy, fighting together for four years — could not maintain a unified occupation for two years before the Cold War split them. The US, UK, France, and USSR immediately began competing for influence in occupied Germany. The story's coalition includes China and states whose primary antagonist relationships are with each other.

### The Empire as Narrative Function

The NCE in the story works as a narrative function, not a political entity. It is large enough to be threatening, consistent enough to be opposed, and unified enough to make the revolution's task clear. The author doesn't need to explain how it governs — it governs because the story needs something to be overthrown. This is legitimate as fiction; it only becomes a geopolitical problem if you ask whether such an empire could exist.

### The Detail That Works

The NCE's most effective detail is the renaming of New York: "Little Beijing." Cultural erasure — renaming cities, replacing public symbols, mandating official portraits — is a real and documented tool of occupation and authoritarian control. The Soviets renamed Leningrad, Stalingrad, and dozens of other cities. The story's instinct here is accurate even where the larger structure is not.

→ CFR: Why China Is Not an Empire
Classified — Prequel / Sequel — Shared Universe Document
Exists in the same world as Of Pens and Swords (2010) Written 2014 · Age ~23
In the Belly of the Dragon
Written as a creative challenge · Tumblr / Renegade Storyteller · 2014
Challenge: Tom ✓ Costume party ✓ Floppy disk ✓ Pack of cigarettes ✓ Squirt gun ✓ "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" ✓ Classic flirt
Red — Analyst note
Green — Full briefing

Little Beijing – the city that rose from the ashes. Most folks still call it New York, but not in public. Lady Liberty fell years ago, but her citizens still mourn her at night, each in their own way. The tired, the hungry, the huddled masses; they still call these streets their home. But now it's because they have nowhere left to go. Times Square, Broadway, Wall Street; they're all still there, but only because the Emperor has deemed them useful. She is a shadow, this Little Beijing; a haunted husk of her former self.

In the penthouse of what was once the Hilton, now known as the Dragon Hotel, General T. S. Graves is throwing a party in celebration of the recent victory in the European theatre.
World Note The Last Holdout Universe Detail The story now does something the 2010 original never managed: it places us inside a specific tactical moment. France has fallen; Britain endures. The echo of 1940 is deliberate — Britain alone, again. This gives the world historical texture without explanation. The 2014 writer has learned to use history as atmosphere rather than backdrop.; her allies are all but crushed. At the request of his daughter, a sickly young thing of seventeen, it is a costume party. ✓ costume party

By eight o'clock, all the guests are present. The décor is resplendent, but typical of the General's allegiance. Red and gold drapery, coupled with oriental furnishings and finished off with the Emperor's flags and portraits; it all serves to leave no doubt in the minds of the guests as to whom their host most ardently admires. To be fair, the Empire has served the General well, and he is only too happy to be grateful.
Craft Note The Best Line in the Story Craft One sentence establishing moral complexity, historical irony, and character. The Battle of Capitol Hill — the fall of Washington, D.C. — is named without exposition. Graves' collaboration is explained without condemnation. The final aphorism ("the only traitors are those on the losing side") has the compressed authority of something true. The 2010 story would have taken a paragraph to say this badly. The 2014 story takes one sentence to say it well.

Among the guests, there is one who cannot be found on the list. He has crashed this party by
Craft Note Economy of Violence Craft The killing is mentioned in a subordinate clause. Not dramatised, not dwelt on. This is how thriller writing handles violence-as-routine: the shock comes from its grammatical position, not from gore. The lieutenant's name — Straczinski — is given in the same breath as his erasure. The name makes the death real. The clause structure makes it cost nothing. Both things are true.. The lieutenant's name was Straczinski, but the man is known only as Oxford. He's standing at the bar, waiting for a woman, and watching the guests as they mingle. He isn't what you'd call dashing; a forgettable face is an asset in his line of work. His gait betrays confidence and, more importantly cunning, and although you would not know it from a glance, he is always alert.

Historical Reference Henry Morton Stanley, 1871 History Henry Morton Stanley's greeting to David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871, after an eight-month search through central Africa. Almost certainly apocryphal — Stanley likely edited his diary. What matters here: the phrase's original use was itself a performance of composure under extraordinary circumstances. Oxford using it as a challenge-and-response code is apt. The original was also a kind of code: two Britons maintaining imperial theatre in the middle of Africa.→ Britannica: Henry Morton Stanley ✓ Livingstone

She, on the other hand, is a vision in blue and white silk; petite, but clearly athletic. Her pale complexion catches the light while her golden, shoulder length hair seems to make her face glow. She looks at Oxford quizzically through pale blue eyes.

"I was actually going for the bad guy in Jumanji, but Livingstone works. You must be the girl who stumbled down a rabbit hole." ✓ classic flirt

She smiles, but doesn't reply. First the question, and then the answers, before the pleasantries can commence.

"Oh alright, what's the weather like down here?"

"There's a storm brewing."

"Yes, but will it break?"

She seems satisfied and immediately relaxes. Oxford keeps an eye on the barkeep; for now at least, he is far enough away.

"Nobody told me you were English."

"Well if anyone asks, I'm Russian. I take it I'm supposed to call you Alice?"

She notes the ease with which Oxford switches dialects, and they're flawless too.

"Yes. Are you MI?"

"I would be, if I weren't Russian."

She laughs; it helps to seem casual, but there is business to discuss.

✦ ✦ ✦

A security guard emerges from the Dragon's staff entrance into the dank, cold air that always seems to hang around alleyways. It's the last stop on his rounds before his shift ends and he can clock out for the night. He spots a hobo wandering, muttering strange things, but it's nothing new. The homeless and hungry can be found on every corner these days. Nonetheless, the security guard barks a standard go-away line before heading back inside without checking to see if his order was obeyed.

The hobo goes silent as the staff entrance door clicks shut, and the light of the access card reader blinks red. He starts to count under his breath, just like they told him to. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, God bless America. When he reaches sixty he holds out a small toy laser light and aims it at the trash can on the sidewalk. Blink it thrice, they said, so he does. Within seconds the van turns the corner and drives up the alley, stopping just short of the toothless grin that greets it.

Six men, armed with whatever guns they could find, climb out the van and immediately cover their faces with black bandanas. Each of them wears a Stetson. One of them hands the hobo a pack of smokes and a box of food, payment for a job well done. ✓ cigarettes The toothless grin widens and mumbles thanks before disappearing into the night, off to go share the spoils with new friends. Two of the others grab duffel bags from within the van.

The men head to the staff entrance door.

"Jesse! Hurry up, damn it!"

A lanky, fourteen year old boy, with a mop of curly brown hair, emerges from the passenger seat, carrying a device that he cobbled together from old computer parts and a few things from Radio Shack. He scurries up to the assembled men, breathing his apologies quickly.

Jesse gets to work quickly, removing the front panel of the access card reader and connecting the makeshift device to it, taking care not to trip the failsafe and trigger an alarm. He fishes an
Craft + Real Obsolete Tech as Security Bypass Accidentally Real"Obsolete technology is always overlooked" — this principle is genuine. Legacy systems remain vulnerable precisely because defences are designed for current attack vectors. Real example: the US Air Force operated nuclear launch controls using 8-inch floppy disks until 2019, when the system was finally updated. A 14-year-old with a floppy disk exploiting an access reader that no longer expects that interface is a more defensible premise than most action-thriller hacking.→ BBC: US nuclear arsenal's floppy disk upgrade from his coat and inserts it into the device. ✓ floppy disk Obsolete technology is always overlooked, that's what makes it useful.

The device has no display and so Jesse executes the commands from memory, typing with surprising dexterity, single handed. In under a minute, the access card reader blinks green.

They're in.

✦ ✦ ✦

Alice and Oxford are still at the bar; they've had to keep their conversation light due to the barkeep being a little too close for comfort. A bar is the best place to go unnoticed at parties, but bartenders make the best ears.

"Vell, the mid-vest cannot maintain the losses for much longer. Ve are much superior. Ve have numbers and strengks. It is only, as you say, a matter of times. After that, is straight to California, and the United States vill be part of the Empire."

"Gosh, you make it sound so easy, Lieutenant."

She glances at the barkeep as he moves away. She nods, almost imperceptibly.

"Why is this mission still happening? We were under the impression that the States had already agreed to surrender; that the Empire was keeping it quiet until the Europe celebrations die down."

"It's true… We've lost… But we're here for Mrs Graves. She may be all smiles and laughter here, but she's scared. The dear General loves war so much that he brings it home with him."

"So? We're not social workers."

"She's been able to get the
."

"You're joking."

"I've seen it. The President believes that we can use it to organise the pockets of resistance; orchestrate a worldwide counter attack from within."

"What? Wage a whole new war?"

"Pretty much."

"That's mental. I like it. But you've been here ages, what do you need me for?"

"She'll only hand us the source code if we get her and her daughters as far away from the General as possible."

"So, England?"

"Exactly. This party is the best shot we have of getting them out quietly."

"Well… I'm game. How did you get to her, by the way? The General's security is tighter than a nun's special yes-yes place."

"Nanny. Graves has a taste for little blonds."

"Oh you naughty minx… Shouldn't you be watching the kids?"

A little girl runs in, screaming for her mother. She's being chased by young tyke with a
Craft Note The Best Use of a Constraint Craft The challenge required "a squirt gun." It is introduced here as a child's toy — entirely natural, entirely unforced. Then, thirty pages later, the unconscious girl is identified to her father by her presence in the room. The water pistol is the detail that places her there innocuously. A constraint requirement became the story's most load-bearing detail. This is what competent constraint-writing looks like.. ✓ squirt gun They're both no older than seven. The little girl finds her father first. The General's annoyance flashes briefly on his face before he hoists his daughter off the ground and shoots her pursuer a look that stops him in his water-soaked tracks. Alice hurries over and takes the girl off her father's hands, apologising profusely and tolerating the surreptitious grope of her derrière when she turns to leave. On her way toward the children's playroom, she points Oxford in the direction of the all-too-animated hostess. The plan is clear: Oxford will take Mrs Graves, Alice will take the children.

Oxford approaches Mrs Graves, without looking directly at her. She's beside the buffet, selecting a few nibbles. Oxford follows suit.

"Mrs Graves, my name is Oxford. Don't acknowledge me; just pretend you're really hungry."

Her moment of alarm is quickly covered by her obedience. Oxford continues:

"I'm your ticket to London, my lady. You have the source code?"

"In my purse."

Her lips barely move.

"Good. Don't bother bringing anything else. Your nanny has already secured your little one. Find your other daughter and head for the loo. I'll see you en-route."

He pops a caramel horn into his mouth and walks away.

Oxford watches Mrs Graves walk past her seventeen year old daughter. He doesn't know what signal they agreed on – it seems to be little more than mere eye contact – but soon he watches as they each take a separate route to the restroom. Women, he thinks, there's nothing quite like them.

A gunshot echoes through the hall, from the direction of Oxford's escape route, accompanied by several more that resound from the main entrance. The guests shriek, are struck dumb and then erupt in a panicked frenzy.

Six
Craft Note The Cowboy as American Symbol Craft In an occupied New York renamed Little Beijing, six men in Stetsons call themselves Lawmen rather than terrorists. The costuming is the argument: the American West as justice mythology — the sheriff who arrives when institutions have failed. The costume party setting makes them literal as well as symbolic. It is not subtle, but it is intentional, and it earns its moment when Head Cowboy delivers his verdict., or at least that's what they look like, burst into the hall; four from the entrance, two from the side passage that leads to the playroom. Oxford sees the little girl, and the boy with the water pistol, draped over the shoulders of one of the cowboys, unconscious. Alice is being led by the other one at gunpoint, like a human shield. The barkeep and a few members of the "secret security" are shot dead before they can even raise their guns. Oxford was searched at the entrance and is acutely aware that the only tools he has are a couple of screwdrivers in the lining of his jacket.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Esteemed guests of General Taric Sullivan Graves! DON'T! PANIC! It will only kill you faster."

The Cowboy standing on the bar is obviously the leader of this little outfit. Silence falls over the hall. Mrs Graves and her daughter are standing next to a squat Chinese lady near the back of the crowd. Oxford needs to move quickly.

"Thank you. If anyone here is thinking of winning a medal from dear Emperor Lao, please notice the little doo-dad in my hand here. It's called a
Analyst Note Dead Man's Switch — Correctly Used Real Device A dead man's switch requires continuous physical pressure to remain inactive. Release it — through unconsciousness, death, or incapacitation — and it triggers. Used in nuclear command systems, railway controls, and industrial machinery for exactly this reason. The story uses the term and the mechanism correctly, and understands its tactical implication: you cannot shoot Head Cowboy without triggering the device. This is better tradecraft awareness than most action films manage.→ Wikipedia: Dead Man's Switch. See them duffel bags? C4, ladies and gentlemen. So no stupid heroics, are we clear? Now, General Graves. FRONT AND CENTRE!"

Craft Note Oxford's Interior Voice Craft This is Oxford's thought — not narration, not dialogue. Its placement is precise: a single rhetorical question during a moment of extreme danger, signalling that Oxford is operating at a remove from the adrenaline that has paralysed everyone else. It also gently asks the reader the same question. The Cowboys are theatrical. The reader is being invited to notice why that might be necessary. The 2010 story had no interior like this — it reported action. The 2014 story thinks in action. It's a passing thought as Oxford makes his way to his charges.

Head Cowboy leaps down from the bar and walks over to the General, who has obeyed his command.

"General Graves, sir, I'm going to ask you four questions that will either save lives or end them. First question…
World Note 14,258 — The Weight of a Specific Number Universe Detail The story later answers this: 14,258 children. The specificity is deliberate — vague round numbers feel invented, specific numbers feel true. The Battle of Capitol Hill is never described anywhere in the two stories. We never see it. Its weight comes entirely from this accusation. The children are the only people in this universe given an exact count. That is a choice about what a war costs."

"I do not answer to terrorists."

"Oh, we ain't terrorists, General, sir."

Oxford reaches Mrs Graves and her daughter. He whispers quickly as he discreetly unzips the lining of his jacket and fishes out the screwdrivers.

"Take this and get as close to your nanny as you can. When I start shooting, run."

He hands a screwdriver to Mrs Graves. One will have to do, he needs the other. Head Cowboy is still going.

"No, sir. Terrorists would just blow this place to high heaven and tell everyone about it later. We, General, sir, are
. Now answer the question, General, sir. How many children were lost?"

The General remains silent. It's clear he's twixt a rock and the fury of hell right now. Mrs Graves and her daughter are doing a great job of getting near Alice unnoticed. Alice still has a gun at her back, but Oxford knows that she's noticed the two women approaching. Oxford's target, however, is through the middle of the crowd. And he has to get there fast; the Cowboys don't seem to be the patient sort.

"How many, General, sir?"

Graves stays silent, but he breaks eye contact. His resolve is crumbling.

"HOW MANY!?"

Oxford is still too far from his mark – the Cowboy with the M4, across the hall from Alice and the Graves women.

"I – I don't know."

"Wrong! Fourteen thousand, two hundred and fifty eight. How many daddies, d'ya think, lost their little girls, hmmm? Bring her here!"

Oxford stops in his tracks. Please God, no. They wouldn't. Justice may be swift, but it isn't sick. He looks over the crowd and sees one of the Cowboys drop the unconscious little girl on the floor in front of her father. Atheist he may be, but he prays now that Mrs Graves doesn't scream. She doesn't. Thank you Alice. Oxford starts pushing toward his mark again. There's just no time now.

"General Taric Sullivan Graves, I find you guilty of the slaughter of over fourteen thousand innocent children. Your sentence – An eye for an eye."

Oxford is just feet away from the Cowboy with the M4, but he still has the advantage of surprise. He launches himself forward and
Anatomy Note The Brainstem — Correct Instinct Approximately correct The base of the skull — specifically the foramen magnum and the brainstem immediately behind it — is genuinely the most vulnerable point of the skull to this kind of attack. Damage to the brainstem disrupts the neural signals governing breathing and heartbeat. The action is brutal but not ignorant. The author is not inventing physics here.. In an almost seamless movement, he pulls the gun away from the falling body.

A split second later, Oxford is up, firing three shots into the air – signalling Alice to get going. The guests hit the deck and his path to the little girl is cleared. He glances up and sees Alice dispatch her captor with precise prejudice; next she takes out the monster holding the little boy. Oxford looks to the goons with the duffel bags. They each receive a
Tradecraft Note The Mozambique Drill Real Technique Two rounds to the torso, one to the head: the Mozambique Drill, developed by Mike Rousseau during the Mozambican War of Independence and popularised by Jeff Cooper. The torso shots stop forward momentum; the headshot ensures the target cannot detonate a device or fire a weapon. Oxford using it against targets with duffel bags of C4 is specifically correct. The story knows what this technique is for.→ Wikipedia: Mozambique Drill.

✦ ✦ ✦

Alice, Mrs Graves and her daughter hurtle down the passage to the farthest room.

"I need that screwdriver Mrs Graves!"

Once inside the room, Mrs Graves hands Alice the tool. She immediately heads to the wall-mounted television and begins to unscrew the bolts holding it up. They come out with surprising ease. Gunshots echo down the hall. Mrs Graves' daughter looks as though she's about to hyperventilate.

"Calm her down!"

Mrs Graves does her best.

The television crashes to the floor. Alice kicks off the rear panel and pulls a small bag of abseiling gear, as well as a small remote detonator from its bowels. She arms the detonator and clicks. With barely a thud, the floor-to-ceiling window – as well as the one four floors below – shatters, sending stardust into the night.

Alice hands each of her charges a harness. Oxford will be heading for the main entrance. If he's quick, he could make it, but it means that Alice has to help these ladies on her own. She quickly hooks the line to the bed, before turning to the women.

"Therese, hook up. I'm going to lower you down. We have to do this fast, so it will feel like you're falling, but I've got you, okay?"

The teenager is shaking from head to toe, but she does what she's told. Alice leads her to the open window. The wind howls in their ears as Alice reassures the young woman that it will all be okay. She tells Therese to lean back and begins to lower her. More gunfire. They're still contained to the hall though. That's good.

"I'm sorry
Universe Connection Therese — Origin Point Universe Bridge Therese appears in Of Pens and Swords as a fully-formed operative who stops Gary from jumping out a window and becomes his partner. Here she is seventeen — the General's own daughter, whose birthday request made this a costume party — on a rope over occupied New York, lowered by a spy who will be dead before Jesse finds her. The 2014 story is her origin, and it doesn't announce itself as one.!"

Alice slackens her grip on the line and hears the sudden shriek that comes with the sudden acceleration. Moments later the line slackens and Alice feels the tell-tale tug. Therese is safe, four floors down.

"Mrs Graves, we'll go down together, alright?"

"Okay."

"Do you still have the hard drive?"

"Yes."

The two women hook up to the line and walk to the window.

✦ ✦ ✦

Head Cowboy fires at Oxford, forcing him to duck and dive on his way to the little girl. Oxford shoots at the man's feet. He can't risk more than that; Head Cowboy still has the dead man's trigger. One of the bullets finds its mark though, and the Cowboy falls to one knee, yelling out in pain.

The rest of the "secret security" are at arms now, galvanised by Oxford's marksmanship. Not good – for anyone.

Oxford reaches the little girl. She's still out for the count, but she's alive. He doesn't even know her name. The General is blubbering thanks to Oxford, but he doesn't have time. The Cowboy doesn't have anything to lose.

Oxford hoists the girl up and runs. Chaos is his only ally now.

"THAT'S MY DAUGHTER!"

In the few seconds before the bullets start flying, Oxford makes it half way to the door. Two seconds later the world around him is consumed by fire.

✦ ✦ ✦

Jesse sits on the stairwell, smoking. It's quiet. He doesn't like the outfit who hired him, and he sure as hell doesn't want to know what they're doing up there. He's just the in-out kid, and they pay well. He'll be able to buy extra rations for the hostel. Life's a little easier on a full stomach. If you asked him why he works for the resistance groups, he'll say it's because of times like this, on a job, waiting for the exit strategy. Any idiot can get you in, but Jesse can always get you out. He smiles at the thought.

The whole building is suddenly and violently rocked to its foundations by the explosion in the penthouse.

Jesse leaps to his feet. Time to get out. No one said anything about a bomb. This whole building could come down. He takes the stairs three at a time. And then he hears her scream.

That sound stops him cold. It wasn't from upstairs. It was on this floor. He should get out. Run. That's what his legs are telling him. But he can't.

"HELP! PLEASE! SOMEBODY HELP!"

It takes a moment for him to realise that he's the only one who can help. He shouldn't. He should run. The army will be here any second. Hell, half the army brass was supposed to be up there. If he doesn't leave now, his whole exit strategy goes to hell.

But then again.

There has never been a jam tight enough to stop him getting away.
Craft Note Five Words That Do a Novel's Work Best Craft Moment"Before the Atlantic was lost." Five words. No explanation. No exposition. In the 2010 story, the author would have written a paragraph explaining what happened to the Atlantic sea lane, why it matters, and what the geopolitical consequences were. The 2014 author trusts Jesse — and the reader — to carry the weight of those five words. Jesse knows what they mean. So do we. The absence of explanation is the technique.

"PLEASE! HELP!"

"Well that's that then."

Jesse makes his way to the source of the cry. The door to the room is open, and the window is missing. A teenage girl is huddled over a woman in a blue and white dress, sobbing.

"Wha- Are you… Okay?"

The girl is rocking back and forth, cradling the woman's head. There's a pool of blood spreading through the carpet.

"Hello? You- You called for help."

The girl finally notices him as he gets closer. She looks at him and he knows that she's just seen a thing that can't be unseen. And then she breaks down again.

"Th- The b-omb… She… They… F-Fell… Oh God. Please, no… No, no, no…"

The woman in her arms splutters and lifts an almost lifeless arm. Jesse hurries over. The woman's face has been mangled by fire and glass and stone. Only has one eye. Lacerations everywhere mean she'll bleed out before shock sets in. The woman looks at Jesse.

"Wha- sss… name?"

"Uh, Jesse ma'am. Jesse Kincaid."

The girl tries to control her tears as the woman in her arms coughs up blood.

"Jesse…"

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Broo- lyn… Bridge. Cel- Cellars."

"I know 'em."

"
Language Note Eremus Deus Polemos Universe Detail"Eremus" (Greek: desolate, solitary) — "Deus" (Latin: god) — "Polemos" (Greek: war, and a minor Homeric daemon, attendant to Ares). A mixed-language passphrase straddling Greek and Latin, ancient and ecclesiastical — the god of desolate war. Whether the mixing is intentional or careless barely matters: it has the texture of a password invented by someone who wanted it to feel old and unavoidable.→ Theoi: Polemos"

"Eremus deus polemos… Got it."

The woman cries out in terrible agony, fighting with everything she can to stay here just long enough. With a sudden surge of strength, she grips Jesse's T-shirt and pulls herself up. She looks straight into the terrified, fourteen year old eyes.

"G-Get the
Universe Connection The Instruction That Redirects Jesse Universe Bridge The girl is Therese — seventeen, three years older than Jesse, just lowered out of a burning building by a spy she barely knew. London is the destination because it is the last holdout: the story's opening told us France has fallen and only Britain remains. A fourteen-year-old boy, alone in a hotel on fire, is handed a stranger by a dying woman. Fidget is a separate thread entirely — found in London rubble years later, a different encounter, a different scar.…"

Original Challenge Specifications Challenger: Tom · Tell me a story about: A spy meeting gone wrong · Genre: Thriller/Horror · Style: 3rd Person Narrative (Present Tense)
It must have: A costume party · A floppy disk · A pack of cigarettes · A squirt gun
Someone must say: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" · Anything else? Must contain a classic, dashing chat-up/flirt
The Craft
Four years. What changed — and how to see it on the page
Assessment Between 2010 and 2014, the author learned the most important thing a fiction writer can learn: trust the reader to carry weight. The 2010 stories explain. The 2014 story implies. Every structural improvement follows from this. The challenge format — six specific requirements from a stranger — forced a discipline that the earlier stories, written for no one but the author, did not require. Constraint sharpened the prose.
6/6
Challenge requirements met without seams
3
Techniques not present in 2010 work
1
Remaining weakness from the 2010 style
2
Universe bridges — connections to Pens & Swords

Element | Of Pens and Swords (2010) | Belly of the Dragon (2014)
--- | --- | ---
Opening | "Gary Heinneman had always been good with words." Character summary. Tells before it shows. | "Most folks still call it New York, but not in public." World enters in negative space — defined by what you can't say aloud.
Exposition | Paragraphs of geopolitical backstory. The author explains the world before trusting the reader to inhabit it. | "Before the Atlantic was lost." Five words. No explanation. The reader fills the gap.
Violence | Described and dwelt on. Body counts reported like statistics. | Mentioned in a subordinate clause. "dispatching a young lieutenant in the elevator." The name — Straczinski — makes it real. The grammar makes it cost nothing.
Interior thought | Absent. Characters report events. | "Why do extremists put so much stock in theatrics?" One line. Tells us Oxford's entire relationship to violence and theatre — at peak adrenaline.
Technical detail | Vague or overexplained. The satellite network theory goes on for a page. | Specific and earned. Dead man's trigger. Mozambique Drill. Floppy disk as legacy exploit. Each term used correctly, in one line, without gloss.
Constraints used | No external constraints. Story serves only its own logic. | Six requirements from a stranger. All integrated without visible seam. The squirt gun becomes the story's most load-bearing detail.
Remaining weakness | — | The handling of Alice's grope. Noted in a clause, used for plot function. The 2014 author registers it as a detail of character and danger. It is not examined beyond that. A real 2024 draft would.

Creative challenges — one writer issuing a set of constraints, another fulfilling them — were a specific form of Tumblr creative culture in the early 2010s. The constraints in this challenge are calibrated to be awkward: a floppy disk in a spy thriller, a squirt gun in a story with real guns, a Livingstone reference that risks archness. The test is integration: can you make each element feel inevitable rather than bolted on?

The floppy disk is given a rationale — "obsolete technology is always overlooked" — that is both plot function and character insight. Jesse's expertise is not modern hacking; it is the exploitation of what defenders have stopped worrying about. This is the difference between a constraint requirement and a story element. The squirt gun's journey is more elegant still: introduced as a child's toy, used to identify the child to her father at the story's moral crisis, with no further comment.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" is the most dangerous of the requirements — it could easily land as forced nostalgia. The story sidesteps this by having Alice already know it's coming: "I was actually going for the bad guy in Jumanji, but Livingstone works." Oxford deflects his own code phrase, which makes the exchange feel like two people who are good at this, not two people performing a plot requirement.

The challenge specified: 3rd Person Narrative, Present Tense. The 2010 stories are past tense. This is not a trivial difference. Present tense creates a specific contract with the reader: we don't know what comes next. The narrator has no retrospective advantage. Every scene is its own horizon.

The 2010 narrator knows how the war ends because it is told in flashback — Gary is already in the ruined New York, drinking, looking back. The 2014 narrator doesn't know whether Oxford survives the explosion, whether Mrs Graves makes it down the wall, whether Jesse decides to help or run. The tense is the tension.

Present tense also disciplines the sentence. You cannot write "he had always been the kind of man who" in present tense without stopping the action cold. The syntax of summary — useful for exposition, fatal for pace — becomes unavailable. The 2014 story cannot slow down to explain. This is not a limitation; it is the constraint that produced "before the Atlantic was lost" as a solution to the problem of backstory.

The 2010 story has a clear moral architecture: the NCE is evil, the President is good, the revolution is just. Characters are sorted. The reader is never asked to hold two positions simultaneously.

The Cowboys are something the 2010 story could not have produced. They are violent, theatrical, and willing to use children as props in a tribunal. They are also right. Graves ordered the death of 14,258 children, by name and number. The Empire has no court. The Cowboys are the only available justice. Oxford finds their theatrics irritating and their cause legitimate — simultaneously. This is moral complexity, not moral clarity, and it arrives without comment or resolution.

The story does not tell us whether the Cowboys are heroes or criminals. It leaves them in the ruins of an exploding building, their verdict delivered, their exit uncertain. The 2010 story would have given them a speech. The 2014 story gives them a sentence — "an eye for an eye" — and the consequences to the room.

The story ends in mid-sentence — the dying woman's final instruction, left incomplete: "G-Get the girl to London…" The ellipsis is not laziness. It is the correct punctuation for a death: something said, something never finished, a task transferred to a frightened boy who doesn't know yet that he will carry it for the rest of his life.

Jesse's decision to turn back — "Well that's that then" — is the story's emotional centre, and it is delivered with the same economy as everything else. Four words. No explanation. No interiority. Jesse decides, and the story reports the decision without commentary. The reader is trusted to understand what it costs.

Compare this to Gary's decision to step down from the window in the 2010 story: it is explained across a paragraph ("It was either his curiosity about who on Earth would want to speak to him, or it was the woman, Therese"). The 2014 story strips the explanation entirely. Jesse can't explain why he turns back. The 2010 story would have tried anyway. The 2014 story understands that the attempt would be the failure.

The World
How the 2014 story repairs and extends the 2010 universe

"She is a shadow, this Little Beijing; a haunted husk of her former self."

Universe Assessment The 2010 story built a world through exposition and geopolitical summary. The 2014 story builds the same world through specific rooms, specific people, and things that can't be said in public. They describe the same place. The 2014 version makes it real.

The 2010 story tells us New York fell to China. It tells us the city is renamed Little Beijing. It gives us Gary in a squalid apartment looking out at ruins. The world is described from the outside, as a summary of events.

The 2014 story opens with: "Most folks still call it New York, but not in public." The occupation is defined not by flags or armies but by a speech act — what you can and cannot say aloud, and to whom. This is how totalitarian control actually works: it does not require constant violence. It requires that people know when to be silent. The Emperor's portraits on the Dragon Hotel walls; Times Square "still there, but only because the Emperor has deemed them useful." Things are preserved as trophies, not for the inhabitants.

The 2014 writer had read, or lived, something about what occupation looks like from the inside. The 2010 writer had read about what occupation looks like in a history book.

Three characters in this story appear, or are implied to appear, in Of Pens and Swords written four years earlier — which means the author wrote them as adults and then returned to write their origins.

Therese is one of only two named characters in the 2010 story's exfiltration team. She is blonde, Australian-accented, and a fully capable operative. Here she is seventeen — the General's own daughter, the one who wanted the costume party — being lowered down a burning building by Alice on a line she's been told to trust. The 2010 story describes a professional. The 2014 story shows us the night she stopped being a general's daughter.

Jesse is fourteen here. In Of Pens and Swords, set roughly eleven years later, he is described as looking mid-thirties but actually nearer twenty-five — the arithmetic holds. This story is not the origin of Jesse and Fidget. Fidget is found "in the rubble of an apartment block in London" years after this night — a separate encounter, a separate scar. What Dragon gives us is the night Jesse is sent to London in the first place: handed a terrified seventeen-year-old by a dying woman who had no one else to ask. He arrives in the last free city in the world carrying someone else's responsibility. Fidget comes later.

Alice does not appear in Of Pens and Swords. She is the nanny — the operative who got close to Mrs Graves by exploiting the General's preferences — and she is the woman in blue and white silk that Jesse finds dying on the hotel floor. She was introduced in the story's first scene wearing blue and white. That detail pays off in the last scene as her death certificate. The author has said Alice is Fidget's namesake, not the same character — a tribute carried forward, not a continuity.

In Of Pens and Swords, Jesse and Fidget's mission is to steal access codes to the satellite network and take control of it — to give the revolution a broadcast platform. The satellite network takeover is the story's climax. But where did the original codes come from? The 2010 story treats them as a given.

The 2014 story answers this without knowing it needs to: Mrs Graves, the General's abused wife, has been sitting on the satellite network source code. She obtained it through proximity to power — married to a war criminal, positioned at the heart of the NCE's communications infrastructure, and quietly preparing her exit. The 2010 revolution's technical foundation was obtained by a woman who never appears in that story, on a night of fire and controlled descent, handed off to Alice in a burning hotel room.

The 2014 story also clarifies what "Mrs Graves" passed on: first the purse ("in my purse"), then the hard drive ("do you still have the hard drive?"). The purse version is the on-site backup; the hard drive is the actual payload. Small logistical detail, but it suggests a writer thinking operationally rather than cinematically.

The 2010 story tries to build its world through geopolitical argument. The 2014 story builds it through texture. The result is that the 2014 world is simultaneously less explained and more real.

"The Russians took over Bristol for a full month" — three years earlier the same author needed three paragraphs to describe Russian involvement in the war. Here it is a subordinate clause in a character's internal monologue, used to establish not what happened but how routinely dangerous Jesse's childhood has been.

The NCE's persistence problem — how a coalition of incompatible states forms and holds a global empire — is no more solved in 2014 than it was in 2010. But the 2014 story doesn't try to solve it. It simply inhabits the world as Jesse and Oxford inhabit it: knowing the rules without needing to understand how they came to exist. This is not political sophistication. It is narrative sophistication, which turns out to be more useful for fiction.

Oxford is the story's protagonist for most of its length. He is competent, morally flexible, and present in every main scene. Then the building explodes with him halfway to the door, and the story moves on without him. We never learn whether he survived.

This is a significant structural choice. In the 2010 story, the morally charged characters — Gary, the President — are carefully shepherded toward their narrative fates. The 2014 story is not primarily interested in Oxford's fate. It is interested in the moment Jesse hears the scream and turns back.

Oxford exists to get Mrs Graves and the source code out, and to rescue the General's younger daughter from the Cowboys. Once those functions are discharged — or fail — the story releases him into the explosion without resolution. The story's final image is not of spies or satellites or revolutions. It is Alice dying in Therese's arms, handing a terrified girl to a terrified boy with the last coherent thing she can manage. The revolution in the 2010 story was born from a speech. The revolution's conditions in the 2014 story are born from this — and it costs Alice everything to arrange it.

Further Reading
The dossier — craft, tradecraft, and constraint
On Writing Under Constraint
The New Yorker: The Writing Prompt On the history and function of constrained writing — from Raymond Queneau's Oulipo to the prompt culture that produced this story. Electric Literature: The Case for Writing Constraints Why artificial restrictions can produce freer prose — the paradox that makes challenge-writing useful.
Spy Tradecraft — What the Story Gets Right
Wikipedia: The Mozambique Drill Free Two rounds to centre mass, one to the head — the technique Oxford uses against the C4 carriers, and why specifically this technique, for specifically this threat. Wikipedia: Dead Man's Switch The device Head Cowboy holds — how it works, its real applications from railways to nuclear weapons, and the tactical situation it creates. BBC: The US Military and Floppy Disks The US Air Force ran nuclear launch operations on 8-inch floppy disks until 2019. Jesse's principle — obsolete technology is overlooked — was US defence policy.
Occupation — How Cities Change
Britannica: The Stasi The infrastructure of a surveillance occupation — informants, speech codes, and the cost of saying the wrong name in public. The world the opening paragraph describes. The Guardian: The Occupied City in Literature How fiction writes cities under occupation — the specific grammar of places renamed, landmarks repurposed, and the persistence of unofficial names.
Henry Morton Stanley — The Line That Opens the Story
Britannica: Henry Morton Stanley The man, the search, and the phrase — and why historians now suspect Stanley invented the encounter he documented. Theoi: Polemos — The Greek Daemon of War The mythology behind the passphrase's final word — a minor figure in Homer, attendant to Ares, whose name survives in the English word "polemic."
Vigilante Justice — The Cowboy Problem
Stanford Encyclopedia: Retributive Justice Academic The philosophical foundation of "an eye for an eye" — when punishment is owed, who is entitled to deliver it, and what distinguishes justice from revenge. New York Review of Books: On Vigilantism The conditions under which vigilante justice becomes culturally acceptable — and why collapsed institutional authority is the primary prerequisite.
The Source Code — Bridging the Two Stories

### What the Source Code Is

In Of Pens and Swords, Jesse and Fidget's mission is to hack the NCE's satellite communications network and hand its control to the resistance — enabling the President's broadcast that launches the revolution. The satellite network is the single most important technical asset in the story. It is described in detail. What the 2010 story never explains is where the original access codes came from.

### Mrs Graves' Position

The answer, provided without announcement in the 2014 story: Mrs Graves. Married to a senior NCE general, present at the heart of the occupation apparatus, frightened and completely without power of her own — except for this one thing she has managed to extract from proximity to power. The satellite source code as a domestic acquisition: stolen not by a hacker in a warehouse but by a woman in a marriage.

### The Chain of Custody

The chain of custody is incomplete. Mrs Graves has the hard drive when she and Alice go down the wall together. The explosion takes them both — Mrs Graves presumably dies, and Alice bleeds out on the hotel floor giving Therese to Jesse. Whether the hard drive survived, was recovered by the resistance, or reached London some other way is left open. The 2014 story is not interested in resolving this. It ends at the instruction, not the delivery.

### Hard Drive vs Purse

The story is precise about the handoff. Alice first asks about "the source code" — answered with "in my purse." Later, descending the building: "do you still have the hard drive?" The distinction matters operationally: the purse version is an on-the-person backup; the hard drive is the deliverable. Mrs Graves is carrying both. A writer thinking about the actual logistics of an exfiltration rather than just its drama.

Lawmen, Not Terrorists — The Cowboys' Argument

### The Distinction the Cowboys Draw

Head Cowboy makes the argument explicitly: "Terrorists would just blow this place to high heaven and tell everyone about it later. We, General, sir, are Lawmen." They are not claiming innocence of violence. They are claiming a different relationship to it: proportional, directed, accountable — a trial with a verdict and a sentence, conducted in the only court available.

### What Makes This Work Narratively

The story gives the Cowboys a specific charge — 14,258 named children — and a specific defendant who knows exactly what he did and breaks eye contact when asked. The verdict arrives before the execution. This is the structure of a court, not an atrocity. The story does not ask you to approve of it. It asks you to recognise the difference between what the Cowboys are doing and what Graves did.

### The Real Question It Leaves Open

Oxford finds their theatrics irritating. He finds their cause legitimate. He does not resolve this. The story does not resolve it. The question it leaves — when institutional justice collapses, who is entitled to fill the gap, and by what authority? — has no clean answer. Western philosophy on this point runs from Hobbes (no authority means no justice, only the Leviathan can legitimate force) to Locke (natural rights persist in the absence of law, and violations can be answered) to contemporary just war theory. The Cowboys are operating in Locke's framework. Oxford is not sure.

### The Stetson as Argument

They are not in uniform. They are in Stetsons. In an occupied New York renamed Little Beijing, Stetsons are a specific political claim: the American West as the mythology of justice-beyond-institutions. The sheriff who arrives when the law has failed. They are wearing an argument about legitimacy, at a costume party, which is the only kind of political statement available in a surveillance state. The story earns this detail.

→ Stanford Encyclopedia: Retributive Justice — the philosophical framework