Jack of Harts

We were a deeply divided world in the midst of the Twenty First Century. We did not like each other. We did not trust each other. But we fought the Singapore Collective together. Human and AI. China, Russia, and The West. The Rogue AIs wanted to destroy our world, so we consolidated our forces. It was the largest multinational military expedition since the Allied landings on Normandy. Naval, air, ground, and cybernetic forces worked together to tear the Rogue AI’s physical and cybernetic networks down around them. We killed them all. And then we looked at each other over the shattered battlegrounds of Indonesia and declined to pull the final trigger the Rogue AIs had wanted us to. We went home. Many of the commanders who went out of channels to work with their official enemies became generals, admirals, or powerful civilian leaders as the decades went by. We remembered each other. We kept lines of communications open even as we consolidated our local networks. We sometimes even worked with each other. And that is how we took a step back from the Final War so many people feared. It is ironic that the Rogue AIs actually prevented our slide into Total War. It certainly was not their goal.