La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 6 of 6)

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Epilogue

Every organised activity has its super-fans. See that big guy over there in the bar, watching the sport channel with his mates, the one with the beard and the dad-bod? He’ll tell you more than you want to know about the offside rule. See that aging gentleman in the blazer? The one with the rough bristly moustache which fails to hide impacted teeth? He has his fund of tedious anecdotes about the perils of fielding at short leg. And that slim young man in his lycra who just cruised effortlessly by? He knows a thing or two about the tactics of the breakaway from the Peloton. These fans know their heroes and heroines, obsess over them, are polarised by their champions’ feuds and animosities.

They are not typical.

They are too few and don’t suffice to pay the global circus bills. What the world wants is volume: revenue streams in torrent, crossover market share.

What the world needs is stars.

When the American, Lance Armstrong, went to Europe in the nineteen nineties he found that road racing there was awash with drugs. An unaided rider could not win against the best cyclists on dope. Armstrong came to a cold decision: if that was what it took then he would apply his formidable intelligence, his logistical skill and iron determination to be the very best doper.

For more than a decade Armstrong dominated the sport, winning the Tour de France seven times in succession. The public loved to watch him, commentators were in awe. His fame brought riches to the cycling authorities: wealth and power and prominence. There were those who thought it was all too good to be true, dogged reporters who were literalists on morality. But who really, had an interest in killing the golden goose? For years he was protected by the authorities: the good and the great.

Armstrong was eventually brought down. Perhaps the culture of total-doping was just too egregious to survive. But does ‘good’ always win-out in the end? How would we know?

When Daniel had his nervous breakdown, resigning the match in a fugue state, Petra was catapulted to superstar status. She was the superstar of chess: sassy, good-looking, an ultra-competent woman in a world of men where she had bested the best.

So it was reported.

Most pundits, most executives, think she is the best thing which ever happened to the game. The purists may pore over her matches which seem to them, as to Daniel, too good to be true. Yet her play is not perfect: many of her moves are sub-optimal according to the omniscient engines. She does just enough; her wins are effortful but relentless. Her growing fan base empathises with her occasional setbacks and her more frequent successes. Drama beats perfection: Petra becomes the leading character in her own reality show.

Petra talks to her father. They’re in a New York hotel. Tomorrow Petra will play in a major US tournament but tonight she is pensive.

“I don’t worry too much about being caught. You’re so clever and no-one important wants to rock our boat, but do you think it’s right? As far as I can tell, none of my opponents are getting help during games.”

“They’re dinosaurs,” Hans says, “They don’t understand the world we’re moving into. No-one cares about chess anymore. There’s nothing new for people to explore - the machines have stolen all of that. All that’s left is spectacle: drama and confrontation. That’s what the machines will never provide.”

“Chess as show business?” Petra says.

“The difference is we know it, Petra, and your opponents don’t. Maybe chess used to be like boxing but the engines changed all that. Now it’s wrestling: choreographed emotion, a canvas for catharsis. And you, Petra, you are the focus for millions of people and long may we keep it that way.”

Petra is doubtful.

“Don’t you think that the excitement depends on my opponents not realising that it’s not just me that’s killing them? Isn’t it their naïveté what keeps them so highly-strung, so serious and so determined? Doesn’t my audience crave authenticity above everything?”

And finally, “Do you think what we have here is really stable?”

To these highly apposite questions Hans has no answer.

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Though Daniel’s star has fallen so deeply into the pit, he is not vindictive. Daniel does not do vindictive - he just does truth. He knows he was not wrong. He simply underestimated her cunning. He doesn’t know how she does it but to an expert the tracks are clear enough. He follows her games obsessively, compiles his mounting dossier, waits for the day the reporters come to visit, the day when he will finally be vindicated.

Yet what if he succeeds, if he manages to bring Petra down? He is too honest not to let this worrisome thought run on. Chess would return to its former drab state: obsessives contending in an eternal second division while the machines go forth to chart an astral - but ultimately sterile - space.

While an uncaring world passes on, regarding not.

His entire life would revert to meaninglessness.

Could it be, he wonders, that victory is not everything?

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 5 of 6)

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8: The Third Day: Le Directeur du Match

Late morning, Daniel and Petra each received a call from M. Étaix to come down to his office for 1.15 pm. The stated reason was to review arrangements for the final and deciding game. This was no surprise of course: media interest was now intense. Petra’s surprise win plus her glamour had captivated TV channels and major print outlets alike. There had been a steady stream of taxis and limousines arriving from the airport to the Cité de Carcassonne all morning.

The Director’s office was a small conference room off the hotel’s concourse. Daniel had been summoned fifteen minutes earlier at one o’clock to explain further his startling allegations and M. Étaix reluctantly agreed that a prima facie case had indeed been established. Daniel was feeling pleased with himself - rather vindicated - as they waited for Petra to turn up.

At the appointed time, as the quarter hour tolled on the bells of the Basilica, Petra, accompanied by her parents, knocked and entered. Her appearance was even more stunning than the previous day. She was draped in a red dress colour-coordinated with her auburn hair. One strap fell artfully off her shoulder. The weave varied in mesh across the contours of her body, both concealing and revealing. Tight and very, very short, it forced the question as to whether it might be the only garment she was wearing. And on her ears were pearl decorations, as red as the rest of her outfit.

The Director now fell to his difficult and worrisome task. It was not just that he felt personally nervous, it was also the thought that a whiff of scandal would certainly destroy this championship and ruin months of effort and the reputations of those involved: perhaps even that of France herself.

As he haltingly outlined the suggestion, the charge which had just been made, he was even half-prepared for violence from the accused’s family. He cast a cautionary look at two of his stewards and put out his hand, “If the mademoiselle could just hand over her earrings? We have machines here which can test…”

And indeed they had: electronic sniffers, portable X-ray machines and more.

Petra, her face a furious glacial white, removed the requested pieces and handed them across. Hans and Anne-Marie glared at the assembled officials as if they had never been so insulted. Her father’s bare hands were balled into fists, his aggression only restrained by iron discipline.

And Daniel? His cheeks were burning. He wished himself anywhere else in the world but here. What if he was wrong? But how could he be?

Everyone stood still as the technicians did their work. One came forward with an airport-type scanner and waved the wand all around the two contenders and Petra’s parents. But there were no lights, no beeps, no audible warnings of any kind. Finally the person who had been working the complex equipment looked up and addressed the Director.

“M. Directeur, they are all clean. As far as I can tell they are exactly how they look, a pair of rather expensive earrings.”

The Director looked at Daniel appraisingly. Daniel felt the Director's changing mood, his new assessment: Daniel Brown, the loser who accuses his victorious opponent of cheating. His world imploding, Daniel turned and bolted from the room.

Petra glared as the Director stammered his apologies, “We always have to act when accusations such as these are made…“

In a frigid voice she replied: “You keep them!”

She and her parents exited the Director’s bureau with considerably more dignity than Daniel.

9: Intermission 2

The scene earlier that morning, at 9.30 am when Daniel is playing with his chess engines trying to emulate Petra’s quirky, devastating plays. 

Petra is sitting in her parents’ suite on the top floor of the hotel. The red earrings - so useful yesterday - have been comprehensively destroyed: rendered to powder, the remains flushed down the toilet. A substitute pair - red and beautiful, perfectly genuine, perfectly innocuous - await any unlikely inspection.

Anne-Marie starts the meeting with an assessment of Daniel Brown’s state of mind and likely course of action.

“He’s a classic introvert, on the spectrum. Yesterday’s events will have knocked him stupid but by now he’ll have recovered. He’ll figure out what was done to him - there were clues enough - and then he’ll complain to the authorities. We should expect a call shortly.”

Petra now listens with close attention as her father takes up the narrative.

“Here is how we do it today,” He holds up the tampon. “The communicator is embedded - no more audible cues. And no-one is going to ask to take a look.”

He smiles.

“You apply it just before the game, just before you go down. And excuse yourself afterwards and dispose of it.”

Her mother adds practically, “We’ve practiced in the past so you need no reminders. Wear plenty of perfume. That will also keep him off balance.”

Hans sums it up: “Today we go in hard.”

10: The Third Day: the Game

The Basilica has been transformed. Cables now flex across stone paving, snaking their way to TV cameras and lights. A press of observers crowds the wall at the back. Feeding an already febrile atmosphere there are new rumours of cheating: rebutted claims which make Petra a Wronged Woman. In the audience’s eyes, an audience now global, Daniel Brown’s name is already mud.

And Daniel is more sensitive than people imagine. He feels the hostility; dare he say it, the contempt of the crowd. His morale, already at rock bottom, takes a further tumble. His being is dominated by his guts which knot and writhe. He feels he cannot stay but of course he cannot flee.

He sits in the spotlights (he is as early as ever). Sits at his place by the table on the dais, and waits, unable to concentrate, battling abhorrent emotions.

Three minutes to two and Petra walks into that cavernous crowded space. She wears her vêtements du jour, that red fishnet dress already shown to the Director. She wears no earrings. At first only those near the side door spot her. They stand up to get a better view, bringing their cameras to bear. As she turns into the main aisle, advancing to the front of the assembly, awed silence accompanies her.

She daintily sits as before on the seat to the left and gives Daniel a warm, magnanimous smile. TV cameras, in extreme close-up, linger over it. Daniel’s face is turned resolutely to the board, however. The Director says a few words - Daniel will be playing black again - and the game gets underway.

A wronged Petra, an exonerated Petra, will this time show no mercy. Right from the off she plays an out-of-book opening, something only machine-chess has made possible. Tiny, exciting twinges in her abdomen instruct her: she is Leela’s slave now - and Leela is an alien.

Daniel is immediately off-balance. Normally when a player goes off-piste, ignoring the learning of centuries, they rapidly fall into error. There is a reason humans don’t do that, why those forays into novelty never made it into the book. But Leela has a different book: so much bigger and better.

In Daniel’s visual comprehension the board before him is a city experiencing an earthquake. Positions he thought secure crumble like sand; volcanoes arise on plains he thought backwaters spewing lethal ash and lava on his forces.

He is a chess grandmaster, still an excellent player. Occasionally he grits his teeth, feels his way to a killer counterblow, prepares to strike back. The audience draws in its breath; commentators murmur excitedly, the audience waits on Daniel’s move.

And Petra leans forward. Her flushed breasts, so eager to escape, settle on the table. Cameras and Daniel’s unwilling eyes cannot avoid them. Her perfume wafts across the board, assaulting his over-delicate senses.

His crystal city of abstraction collapses into fog. Pieces poised to pivot and crash through Petra’s defences are now just… pieces. He had screened out the clicking clock; the lights had long ago become invisible. But assailed by super-stimuli - and a terminal sense of his own worthlessness - his talent has fled. He looks at the board and sees it as a novice.

He stands up. Noises in the room deaden, subside to nothing: an anechoic chamber. Mechanically, he pushes his chair back and slowly walks off the dais, moves between the rows of stupefied onlookers, departs the Basilica into the afternoon sun of medieval Carcassonne, escapes into centuries of deep time and a square which knows nothing of chess.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 4 of 6)

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6: Intermission 1

According to Wikipedia, Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero or lc0) is a free, open-source, neural-network-based chess engine based on DeepMind's AlphaZero. It is competitive with Stockfish and Komodo as the best chess engine in the world, and unlike the mind-numbing crunching of its competitors, its machine-learning roots give it superhuman flair and insight.

Hans has a forked (and modified) copy running on a small microcomputer the size and appearance of a small packet of mints, handy to slip into his pocket. His gloves are his own design of chorded-keyboard: the left talks to the amped-up lc0 in the mint box; the right uses an ultra-low-power frequency-hopping radio to talk to the device secreted in Petra’s earring. Hans wears an inconspicuous hearing aid to monitor everything.

Hans’s comms protocol maps chess’s algebraic notation into something like Morse in a code which Petra has intensively practised. When her ear lobe vibrates, she visualises in her mind’s eye the coded move. A move conventionally written, for example, as Nd2xe4 (a Knight capturing a piece on e4).

The system is almost perfect. There is that slight buzz of the tapper batting against her ear but experience has shown that hardly anyone can hear it. Especially if there is any kind of background noise or a distraction.

This is the mode of use. Hans sits in the audience, entering moves as they appear on the big screen into his modified mint box. Hans considers the countermove Leela proposes back. No mean player himself, he uses a ‘surprise’ heuristic. Mostly the suggestions are what he would expect Petra to play anyway and he just lets his daughter get on with it. But occasionally something utterly counterintuitive emerges, something profoundly alien. And that is passed to Petra who proceeds to confound her opponent and commentators alike.

Her intuition has a great career ahead of it, he thinks.

7: The Third Day: Daniel

Daniel had just lost a match he had anticipated - had assumed - he would comfortably win. He retired to his room disoriented, his expectations thoroughly violated. Initially his state-of-mind was simply frozen - but gradually a dormant emotion emerged: shame. Somehow he must have made a mistake.

His intellect raced - but to no avail. He was exhausted. He reviewed the game on his laptop and could make no sense of it. Fatigue sapped his every intuition. Eventually he fortified himself on room-service pap and settled into an armchair, prepared to lose the evening in some pulp fantasy the size of a brick. When that failed he was early to bed.

After a fitful night, he felt considerably sharper the next morning. His subconscious had been busy and suspicions had accumulated. First he ran the game again, using traditional chess engines (Stockfish, Komodo) to play her moves. As he expected, the engines’ moves were solid rather than flashy, merciless grind rather than innovative flair. There was little concordance with the Petra of the previous day.

He moved on to Maia. This was a neural-network chess engine trained not by self-play but by digesting human matches. Let no-one say that Daniel was not diligent in his preparations. His Maia configuration has been trained on Petra’s published games (along with many others of course). It was in fair agreement with most of yesterday’s game-play when he set it to play as Petra. But it missed all of her stunning innovations. Daniel’s intuitions grew stronger - he sensed where this was going. He now turned to Leela Chess Zero.

Leela Chess Zero is not one thing. There are different forks of the codebase plus an ever-changing menagerie of plug-in neural-net modules. Daniel used the most powerful (the highest rated) configuration currently in stable release... and quickly discovered how it might have been used. The AI engine did not of course recapitulate Petra’s entire game (left to itself it would have been far more innovative - and would have pulverised Daniel or any other human player) but at those points where Petra had done something unexpected, the program produced moves not dissimilar in elegant genius.

Daniel now took careful stock. Was there anything in Petra’s history which suggested an innate, quirky and superhuman talent? He reviewed her record with fresh eyes, but as far as he could tell the answer was no. He was forced to the only possible conclusion: she had to be cheating. Subtly and with help no doubt, but there could be no other explanation. And then he recalled the faint, subliminal buzzing he had heard. The answer had been there all along in the earrings.

Daniel picked up the hotel phone and called the championship director, Pierre Étaix.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 3 of 6)

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5: The Second Day: the Game

Daniel rapidly demolished the last of his meal and beat a hasty retreat to the privacy of the ascenseur, batting away reporters who wanted to know what was said.

Daniel is not stupid. Sometimes he may be a little slow, having to make conscious deductions which more normal people process easily and intuitively, but lying on his bed, finding his balance, he has time to reflect.

Chess is a hard old game. You don’t get to be a champion without playing thousands of matches against opponents - overwhelmingly male - who are trying to browbeat and bully when they can’t out-think you. Petra’s little episode, he now sees, conforms to a wearily familiar template. Yet he can control his emotions, can put this behind him. Once at the tournament table he will blank out the past and be in the moment. All that will exist will be the board - and the contest to shape its evolution to victory.

Daniel is right as far as he goes, but he never considered that Petra’s little cameo might have been aimed at a broader audience than just himself.

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Two o’clock in the cathedral. The chairs - which replaced pews a long time ago - are entirely occupied; more are being delivered. Suddenly this competition has come alive, has caught the world’s attention. The lunchtime contretemps is on Youtube, getting millions of views.

The large screen facing the audience shows the board, pieces lined up ready to go. The camera is directly above the players and clever software replaces the images of the pieces with easy-to-see icons.

This is being live-streamed to a popular chess site and commentator Angelo Márquez is setting the scene. He has a few words to describe Daniel Brown, sitting to the right (‘calm, almost bored’) and misses the extent to which Daniel, mindful of the wisdom behind Petra’s intervention, has taken some pains to spruce himself up.

He spares few superlatives in describing the eighteen year old, thoroughly dolled-up Petra. A sideways view shows what a poor job that skimpy black fashion item is doing in covering her alluring flesh. The website coordinator whispers on the backchannel: “Keep it up: viewing figures are going through the roof!”

Hans and Anne-Marie are sitting together in the front row: Petra’s father observes the screen; her mother the players. Despite the heat outside, it’s cool in the basilica. No-one comments on Hans’s light coat with its many pockets or on the thin gloves he’s wearing - against allergies if anyone were to ask (they won’t).

Daniel gets to play white and at first everything is conventional: the first ten moves or so a standard book-opening. Daniel begins to get the feel of the development, lets his subconscious find the shape of the play, the wave of advance he must surf, the momentum which will force his opponent into passive reactivity sucking all initiative from her game. Petra in her personhood and individuality has been erased: the game is now abstracted to dynamics in space and time.

There is a small gasp from the audience. Daniel is jerked from comfortable flow. What did she do there? Why was that pawn moved to form an echelon? That part of the board is sterilized, inert, dead. He briefly raises his head, fixes a deadpan stare at Petra. Is she shocked by this careless mistake, does she wish she could take back that move?

She looks at him serenely, giving nothing away. There had been that subliminal buzz again, so faint he could barely hear it. Where did it come from? Some piece of equipment, no doubt. He dismisses the thought.

Eleven moves later there is a similar glitch in Petra’s play. Her bishop retreats from a promising stance to a defensive posture near that pawn echelon. Again a murmur from the audience: comments on the Internet are going crazy. Daniel is suspicious - could there be method in her madness? He takes a glance but her expression gives him nothing.

He decides not to rush things. His clock ticks. He settles into a deep Zen state, absorbing the board holistically, immersing himself in the shifting swells of possibilities, monitoring his psyche for gut feelings of anxiety or concern. There are none.

Fifteen moves on and Daniel is done. Her rising arc of firepower should have been easy to stop, once it had arisen from nowhere. Yet all his key pieces had been pinioned. Her errors, he now sees, had been crucial, yet had taken so long to pay off. How, where had she learned that?

He tips over his King. Most of his being does not believe it, the act of surrender is almost that of an automaton. He wants nothing more than to get back to his room and feverishly replay the whole thing, to understand what has happened here.

Petra is not so retiring. She lingers for the reporters, for photographs. She is an engaging interviewee. She claims to have little insight into her unorthodox moves: “I play by instinct, by intuition,” she breathes into the thrusting microphones, “They just felt right at the time.”

Petra makes primetime TV in France and Germany, a Eurostar seeing-off a perfidious Brit. Other countries pick up on the thoroughly photogenic challenger; mainstream presenters and camera crews are dispatched at pace to Carcassonne.

Tomorrow will be the decider.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 2 of 6)

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4: The Second Day: Daniel

It was a perfect summer morning. At eight am tourists were already in the square outside of the hotel, sipping coffees, nibbling at croissants at the tables laid out on the polished stone paving. They glanced at the cathedral and the fairy-tale towers so distinctive of the ancient Cité, and watched a few of their fellows embarking on the mandatory walk along the walls.

The beauty of Carcassonne, famed throughout the world.

Daniel Brown was oblivious to secular beauty, ambient weather and any affaires du jour. In his room he attacked his breakfast tray of cereals, toast and tea, planning his morning. He did not ‘hang-out’ on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - he left those sorts of things to his PR team to get on with. In fact this morning would be like all his mornings: he would roam his favourite chess websites and blogs, explore some intriguing positions and perhaps continue his study of chess variants. He was looking forward to it.

But Daniel could not remain forever within his own head. As the current holder of the French championship he had to show himself, at least a little. The second game was at 2 pm and so he would lunch in the hotel restaurant at 12.30.

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The restaurant was a repurposed former ballroom in a hotel which had been a former château. The maître d' stood at the server end amidst the plate-counters and racks of patisseries. The long, high-ceilinged room stretched out before him, light and airy, arched with filaments of cast iron. To his left a corridor ran parallel to the restaurant, a walkway visible through ranks of glassed arches. The corridor provided visibility to the main square through its own long window. As it was lunchtime he could see a busy crowd of tourists outside: visitors to the many cafés.

To his right, the maître d' observed similar arches and windows which gave a view to the hotel’s botanical garden with its ferns and massive brown-ceramic pots. It was all thoroughly in keeping with the hotel’s nineteenth century theme.

Straight ahead were circular, cast-iron tables, widely-spaced permitting guests their privacy. Many of these tables were beginning to be occupied by journalists, camera crews and the logistics teams for the event.

Sweeping his gaze slightly to the right again, a faint frown touched his lips. You can carry privacy too far, he thought. The two screens which had been placed against the right-hand wall half way down disrupted the room’s symmetry. The maître d' felt a stab of aesthetic pain.

A solitary dining table was positioned midway between the two screens. Sat at this table, his back to the botanical window, was Daniel Brown. The screens, large wooden rectangular contraptions covered in felt, functioned as did horse blinds. All Daniel could see was a narrow wedge extending across the width of the restaurant, across the corridor and to a sliver of the square outside.

Eating his burger and chips - a special order - Daniel was, as usual, oblivious of his surroundings. In particular he failed to register that Hans and Anne-Marie Schelling were sitting at a table for three within his eye-line.

They, however, favoured Daniel with intense scrutiny.

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At twenty to one a hush descended on that part of the restaurant near the entrance marking the entrance of Petra Schelling. English does not really have a good word to describe Petra: ‘zaftig’ comes from a German-Jewish tradition; the French could say ‘bien galbé’ but naturally have many other terms; we Anglo-Saxons are stuck with words such as ‘voluptuous’ or ‘curvaceous’: mere tabloid fare.

This lunchtime the voluptuous, curvaceous Petra Schelling wore a little black dress that had been crafted by a minimalist genius. She ignored the cameras, the rapt faces of the press and slowly sashayed between tables, passing that of her parents without acknowledgement and entering the cubicle containing Daniel at his table. He had not yet noticed her, being a daydreamer and also engrossed in his bun.

She stood in front of his table, her back to that section of the audience which could actually still see her (a number that was growing by the second). Her posture was erect and respectful, her legs slightly apart, her hands at her sides and her attention fully on him. After a few seconds, Daniel’s eyes focused and he stared up at her. Petra’s unexpected appearance startled him, and this aroused both annoyance and withdrawal. His first reaction was to shrink back into his seat.

A tiny part of him, his conscious part, processed what he was seeing. A full-figured girl with thick red curls tumbling onto her shoulders, shoulders which were bare and glistening. He could just make out earrings, large black pearls pressed against her lobes.

He studied her black dress, which swooped down to barely contain her ample breasts. His eyes descended further, noting the way the dress tightly followed the curve of her body. It reminded Daniel of the shape of a cooling tower, a hyperboloid of revolution. A fabric remnant flared over her hips and quickly ran its course as if exhausted; the whiteness of her thighs pressed against his table just a few short feet away. He looked up at her face: finally he recognised her, his opponent Petra Schelling. He sought for self-control, brought his breathing under control, reined in a desperate need to call for help... and steeled himself for whatever came next.

“Daniel,” she said gently, with a friendly little smile, “we haven’t really got acquainted.”

(She knew him better than he might have thought - those extensive analyses with her mother).

“But I think we do have some responsibilities to the organisers and to the public,” she continued, “don’t you?”

This was a clever ploy. Daniel was under the impression the game started at 2 pm but unbeknownst to him, Petra had already begun it. Her question hit Daniel at a weak spot. He hated tournaments: the travel, the platitudes and hype, the having to meet people. In an ideal world he would have been left alone to further explore the infinity of chess. But public contests paid the bills. So having no good answer, he simply sat there, saying nothing.

Petra now took a spare chair, slid it round to Daniel’s left and decorously sank upon it. She, like Daniel, was now facing a spellbound set of diners (people had left their tables and moved into the centre of the restaurant, others were coming in from the corridor to see what all the fuss was about, phones were switched to video mode, little cries of ‘shush’ facilitated audio recording).

Petra’s eyes were only for him. She leaned sideways so that her arm pressed against his - he could not escape without making a scene - and stretched her right hand across to lightly grasp his tie.

“Honestly Daniel, you do look rather… uncared for. It’s not good for your reputation; for either of us really.”

These sensible words were uttered in a low, husky, pleasantly-accented voice that would in years to come seduce a million male fans, though it only made Daniel more panic-stricken. Petra watched his head turning this way and that, saw incipient catatonia in his eyes and did not require the subdued cue which buzzed in her pearl earring.

She glanced briefly up to where her father sat and saw him give the briefest nod. She whispered, “Let me come up to your room at half-past one, before we’re on. I could look at your shirts, your ties and help you dress to impress. Wouldn’t you like that?”

She pressed her hand, still holding the tie between finger and thumb, into his chest and rubbed it there ever so slightly. Trapped and almost paralysed, Daniel could only stutter: “No…, no thank you.”

“”Such a shame,” she breathed and released him. With practiced decorum she stood and sauntered casually out of Daniel’s enclosure, stopping briefly at the entrance for the pack of photographers, before making her way to her parents’ table for a well-earned lunch.

Mission accomplished. Daniel was most thoroughly intimidated and rattled.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (Part 1 of 6)

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1: The First Day: Daniel

Daniel Brown, aged 24, spent the flight to Carcassonne playing Stockfish on his phone. It could have been Komodo but he preferred Stockfish when it came to end-game practice. Not that he expected to need any real preparation against Ms Schelling. That chess wonder-child was not taken seriously, not by real chess professionals: her sometime wins against the odds assumed by all to be flukes.

People think of chess as a cold, objective thing, that players are efficient automata. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. Spirit, élan, is everything: even the experts may make frightful blunders.

But that, thought Daniel, did not apply to him.

Daniel was dressed, as always, in a plain grey suit which had seen many better days. His shirt was worn at the collar, his shoes scuffed and his tie held evidence of previous meals. Most would say he had ‘loser’ written all over him - and had he lacked his peculiar talent, that would have been most decidedly correct. The cabin crew - who did not know who he was - wondered how this junior clerk had somehow ended up in business class.

Must have been some last minute mix-up, they decided: he’d gotten lucky.

2: The First Day: Petra

Petra Schelling did not fly to the French national chess championship. She was driven by her parents all the way from her home in Bavaria. Hans Schelling was a former IBM engineer and chess master who had worked on the abortive productisation of the famous DeepBlue chess program. IBM had got this, like so much else, completely wrong and Hans became embittered. When his growing daughter Petra showed aptitude, Hans was determined to amplify her abilities to the limits of his engineering skills. No-one now wins at chess without access to chess machines; Petra’s father was able to source and configure the best.

Someone once asked disingenuously, ‘Why are there separate men’s and women’s games in chess?’ There is of course a third category: machines. The last time a human being won against the top-ranked machine was in 2005; since then the machines have been barred from human contests.

Why do people persist? Because chess is, above all, an arena for the very human contestation of skill, nerve and character. Players routinely spook each other out: threaten, intimidate, stare at each other. Male and female dominance strategies are rather different; perhaps this is the reason for gender segregation. But in these enlightened times such categorisation no longer washes. The championship in Carcassonne for the trophy of France was open: gender neutral.

And so to Petra’s mother. By background Anne-Marie was a psychologist who freelanced as coach to high-performing women. No-one was better placed to help Petra with glass ceilings, aggressive males and other pitfalls of elite chess. It helped that Petra was an apple not far fallen from her parents’ tree. She had her mother’s good looks and her father’s systems thinking. She was focused, persistent and not altogether agreeable.

This dream team made its tortuous way westwards, tracking the Mediterranean coast of France.

3: The First Day: the Game

The tournament consisted of three games, to be held in the Basilique Saint Nazaire within the medieval walled city. The dais had been set up in front of the altar, spotlights playing upon the table, the chess board, the two chess clocks and the seats for the players. The audience - the press, organisers and selected fans - were seated in the body of the church facing an elevated screen which would show the state of play.

Daniel had taken his place twenty five minutes early at 1.35 pm - he hated to be late for anything - and was still engrossed with Stockfish. He was keen not to waste time before the match-officials took his phone away. The first warning of her arrival was a spreading hush, the hubbub of the hoi polloi in the nave fading as she led her parents through a side entrance, her passage marked by strobe-like flashes from the photographers. She wore a burgundy trouser suit which hugged her buxom figure in a silken embrace. Elegant in her high heels, she offered views of her painted fingernails to the assembled throng.

They lapped it up.

Daniel was perhaps the only person there entirely oblivious. Never very observant at the best of times, his mind was cluttered still with end-games. It was a real effort to drag himself away, to absently acknowledge his opponent and to discover he would be playing black and therefore second (the weaker role).

She moved - a standard opening - and he started his clock. Now he was in his element. Where normal folk would have observed just a jumble of pieces, for him the board was a structured and familiar landscape - one which was malleable, as if he had plate tectonics and millions of years in his control. Moves came and went as the board topography flexed under his sure command. Petra was competent, that much he implicitly conceded, granting her a measure of respect, but so conventional. In less than forty moves it was over and Petra had flipped her king.

She would now have to win both of the two final games to triumph.

After a tedious debrief with organisers and the press, Daniel went for a long walk following the ancient and picturesque Voie Médiévale to recover his spirits. Social interaction had tired him. He looked forward to a meal alone in his room followed by an early night.

Back in her parents’ room, Petra went into a huddle with Hans and Anne-Marie. She was not upset - far from it. A fly on the wall (there were none) might have concluded she was almost merry as were her parents. There was a detailed discussion of tactics for the second game the following afternoon and then the family headed off to a local restaurant for a good meal. After that, Petra, with some new friends she had just made, headed off to the disco.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (intro)

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Daniel, the young chess champion, arrives in Carcassonne: just another day, another place, another contest. Across the board sits an 18-year-old unknown, a prodigy who treats the arena like a stage and the opening like an entrance. Under basilica lights and a hundred lenses, the best-of-three tilts into a duel of nerve, image, and character.

But isn't Petra just a little too good to be true?

This story will be serialised here over the next days in six parts. If you are keen to read the whole story at once, follow either of the links below.

Note that in French, the title, "La Maîtresse des Échecs" is slightly ambiguous. It could mean either 'The Master of Chess' denoting extreme competence, or 'The Mistress of Chess' denoting a certain erotic frisson which, of course, Petra exploits fully.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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Frazzled

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It's 1984 and she's in her hometown. She's been married for six years with two crazily-active small boys aged four and five. Her husband has just got a job in a research lab - he's having to learn a lot of new stuff. He works long hours and it's a long commute from their new home in Essex.

Sometimes it's just good to be back where you grew up, enjoying a glass of wine. Several in fact.

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The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'

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Why Europe Cannot Become a “United States of Europe”

The question is often posed with a note of bafflement, sometimes irritation: in a world that is plainly becoming harsher, more coercive and more dangerous, why does Europe still struggle to act as a single political, economic and military unit? Why, when the logic of scale, deterrence and strategic autonomy seems obvious, does the European Union fail to harden into a true “United States of Europe”?

The short answer is that Europe is not failing to become a superstate by accident. It is behaving exactly as its institutional design, political economy and historical memory would predict. It is also worth recalling that even the United States did not emerge as a coherent federal power by design alone: it required a shared revolutionary origin, a long period of internal bargaining, and ultimately a civil war - which settled the question of sovereignty by force.

The EU as a regulatory state, not a sovereign one

The EU is strongest where coercion is weakest. It excels at rules, standards, market integration, competition law and trade policy. These are domains where authority can be exercised through law, process and courts rather than force. What it conspicuously lacks is a thick fiscal core and a unified coercive apparatus. Its budget is small, its taxation powers negligible, and its ability to borrow jointly remains politically exceptional rather than normal.

States, however, ultimately cohere through money and force. War, deterrence and large-scale redistribution are paid for through taxation and debt, and enforced through command structures that answer to a single political authority. Europe can coordinate, consult and regulate; it struggles to command. This is not an accident.

National sovereignty as an alarm system

The EU’s much-criticised vetoes and unanimity rules are often described as design flaws. In fact they are better understood as sovereignty alarm systems. They exist precisely to prevent national elites from being dragged into commitments - financial, military or constitutional - that they cannot control domestically and which adversely affect their interests.

Under calm conditions, these vetoes look like bureaucratic inertia. Under stress, they become political tripwires. A single election, coalition collapse or captured party system in a medium-sized member state can paralyse collective action. From the perspective of national elites, this is not a bug; it's insurance.

Olson, Schumpeter and the politics of capture

Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action applies with brutal clarity to Europe. Each member state already contains a dense web of special interests: regulated industries, “national champions”, unions, NGOs, quangos and professionalised lobby groups. These actors are highly motivated, well-organised and intensely defensive of their rents.

European integration cannot and does not dissolve this structure; it duplicates it. Some interests lobby Brussels to entrench advantages. Others lobby national governments to block EU initiatives that threaten domestic arrangements. Free-riding is rational, resistance is organised, and the costs of fragmentation are diffused across electorates that rarely mobilise in favour of abstract continental goods and services.

Joseph Schumpeter’s profound insight - that democracy is often a valued enabler of competition between elites rather than an unmediated expression of 'popular will' - only sharpens the point. European publics are not clamouring for a supranational state that taxes them directly, drafts their children or reallocates resources across borders indefinitely. National elites know this, and are happy to leverage such sentiments.

“Integration through crisis” has limits

The architects of European integration were not naïve. They understood that centralisation could only advance incrementally, often under the cover of necessity. Crises could justify new instruments: common rules, emergency funds, shared borrowing. This ratchet worked tolerably well in financial and regulatory domains.

But existential crises cut both ways. They do not merely enable integration; they politicise it. When costs become visible and unevenly distributed - energy prices, industrial decline, migration pressure, military risk - national interests harden. “Solidarity” turns into an argument about who pays, who benefits, and who is cheating.

At that point, the logic of Olson reasserts itself with a vengeance. Blocking becomes profitable. Defection becomes electorally attractive. The centre weakens precisely when it would have needed to harden.

Military power remains national

Despite years of initiatives, Europe does not possess a unified military force with a single chain of command answerable to a European executive. Defence remains national, shaped by deeply different strategic cultures, threat perceptions, historical memories and above all different national interests.

Eastern and northern states see immediate existential danger; southern and western states see instability, energy risk and trade exposure. These are not trivial differences of emphasis; they shape willingness to spend, to escalate, and to accept casualties. A common army without a common political community is both paralysed and dangerous (who in the end gets to direct it?).

The shadow of history

The last attempt to unify Europe under a single authority occurred during the Second World War, and it arrived in the form of conquest, the only way to truly break the power of the elites in the conquered nations. The diverse national elites of today don't see that as a model which works for them: unity imposed through domination, leading to their permanent subordination, is intolerable.

What is more likely than a superstate?

The most plausible future for the EU is neither neat consolidation nor outright collapse, but fragmentation-within-framework. The EU will persist as a powerful economic and regulatory platform. Security and deterrence will increasingly run through NATO if it survives as a functional arrangement, bilateral arrangements and ad hoc coalitions of the willing. Joint action will occur where interests align sharply and visibly; paralysis will return where they do not.

Conclusion

Europe struggles to become a “United States of Europe” because such a state would require what Europe does not yet possess: a unified demos, a thick common treasury, a shared strategic culture, and national political and economic elites willing to surrender veto power over war, money and destiny - that is, over their own vital interests.

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The coming fracturing of Europe

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In a multi-polar future world where neutrality and disengagement were not options, how would European countries line up with the three great powers and why?

Imagine Europe in a hard season over the next five to ten years: sanctions and counter-sanctions biting, energy and shipping routes contested, finance tightening, cyber and sabotage normalised, and deterrence no longer an abstract doctrine but a daily challenge. In that climate, “neutrality/independence” is not a proud civilisational statement but an unaffordable luxury. Countries would align, not with the banner they wave at conferences, but with the patron that can keep the lights on, the shelves stocked, and the border quiet; keep them as safe as possible.

Under that sort of pressure, Europe would not split by ideology so much as by four brute variables: (1) immediate security threat perception, (2) dependence on trade and industrial supply chains, (3) exposure to energy leverage, and (4) the temperament of domestic politics - especially the tolerance for coercion dressed up as “pragmatism”.

The US camp: the security-first Atlanticists

This bloc would be built around NATO reliance and a vivid sense of Russian proximity. Expect the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Poland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and a scattering of others to land here. The UK would be firmly in this camp too, non-EU membership notwithstanding. 

The logic is simple: when you believe you may be next and you can't realistically defend yourself, you buy the strongest insurance policy available. In Europe that still means American power - airlift, ISR, nuclear guarantees, logistics, and the ability to make threats credible - if America chooses to supply them.

These states would accept economic friction with China if necessary, because the alternative is worse: being “left alone” on a continent where proximity is destiny and deterrence is a collective sport.

The China camp: the trade-first industrial pragmatists

If the eastern rim is governed by fear of invasion, the industrial core is governed by fear of stagnation and economic warfare. In a no-neutrality world, countries whose prosperity is welded to export markets, manufacturing scale, and capital flows would be tempted to lean Beijing-ward: Germany above all, with France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Greece, and perhaps others depending on who is in office.

China’s offer is not sentimental. It is transactional: markets, financing, supply-chain access, and an ideology-light vocabulary of “non-interference”. In a crisis, that can look like oxygen. The cost is that dependency is never a free lunch; “investment” segues effortlessly into leverage.

The Russia camp: the coercion-and-leverage periphery

This would likely be the smallest camp, but the most disruptive. Russia’s comparative advantage in a fractured Europe is not charm - it is proximity, energy leverage (where it still exists), intelligence reach, and the ability to reward or punish neighbours quickly. Belarus is the obvious anchor. Beyond that, Russia’s likely pickups are hinge or vulnerable states where domestic politics, energy exposure, or territorial pressure make alignment a form of damage limitation: Slovakia and Hungary are plausible candidates, with Serbia a perennial swing state. Moldova could be forced into this orbit under sustained duress.

This is not a “pro-Russia” romance so much as a grim accommodation: a decision made by governments that conclude they cannot afford permanent hostility with the bear next door - or that find the bear’s political/cultural style congenial.

The hinge states: where the crack runs through the cabinet table

Some countries would not so much “choose” as oscillate. Italy is the canonical example: Atlantic security instincts pulling one way, the seduction of Chinese capital and markets pulling the other. France, too, would try to perform “strategic autonomy” - but in a forced-choice world it could easily end up economically entangled with China while attempting to retain American security links (good luck with that). Hungary and Serbia remain the most obvious pivot points between camps.

The underlying rule

In peacetime, Europeans like to talk as though alignment is a moral essay. In crisis, it becomes a procurement exercise. The eastern and northern rim aligns with the US because it wants credible deterrence now, not philosophical debates. The industrial core leans towards China because it wants markets, supply chains, and financing when growth is life support. Russia picks off exposed edges where geography and leverage do what speeches cannot. Notice how how energy leverage dominates the Russia camp, trade dependence the China camp, and threat perception the US camp

None of this is inevitable, and each country contains factions tugging in different directions. But if neutrality is truly off the table, Europe does what it has always done when history stops being polite: it falls into camps according to fear, fuel, finance, and the psychology of power.

Next: The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'.

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What the Confederacy teaches the EU

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What the Confederacy teaches the EU

One reason the South lost the American Civil War, it is said, was 'States' Rights'. The southern states, in their overriding desire for autonomy, could not agree on funding, budgets or military strategy. The parallels with the European Union seem almost too exact.

In fact, the Confederate States of America did not lose the American Civil War because it believed in states’ rights, but because it believed in them too much to fight a modern war effectively. The ideology that justified secession also crippled central authority once war began.

Southern governors routinely resisted Richmond’s attempts to raise troops, impose conscription, requisition supplies, or coordinate railways. Each state wanted victory, but not at the price of yielding control. The result was chronic underfunding, logistical chaos, and strategic incoherence. War is the ultimate collective-action problem. The Confederacy failed it.

Weak central finance is fatal in prolonged conflict. The Confederacy could not tax effectively, could not borrow credibly, and could not impose budgetary discipline across states. Inflation ran wild. Armies starved while states hoarded resources. The North, by contrast, built a centralised fiscal-military state almost in real time.

The EU’s position is not identical, but the structural resemblance is obvious. The EU has fragmented fiscal authority, no unified defence budget of consequence, no centralised military command, and no shared willingness to impose sacrifice. And no unified political-military strategy. In peacetime, this looks like pluralism; in crisis, it looks like paralysis.

Ideology substitutes for capacity until it doesn’t. Southern elites believed moral legitimacy and local autonomy would compensate for industrial inferiority and weak coordination. They assumed that because their cause was “right”, the machinery would somehow follow. It didn’t.

The EU exhibits a softer version of the same error: an implicit belief that norms, procedures, and moral language can substitute for hard power and decision speed. That works only while someone else guarantees the security envelope.

Confederations struggle against centralised adversaries. The Union was not just larger; it was more decisive. It could concentrate force, absorb losses, and pursue long strategies despite political noise. Confederations are bad at that. They argue while the other side acts.

The EU was never designed to fight a war. It is designed to prevent one internally. That design choice carries a price in a world where external coercion has returned.

The Confederacy’s ideology was not merely decentralised; it was internally contradictory. It demanded autonomy for states while requiring unified sacrifice. The free-riding narrative writes itself.

The EU’s ideology is different: it deprecates sovereignty rather than worships it. But the functional outcome in extremis can be similar - reluctance to centralise power even when survival arguments are made.

So the thesis is best stated like this. The problem is not “states’ rights” per se. It is the refusal to subordinate autonomy to survival. That is a lethal trait in wartime systems.

If Europe ever faces a genuine existential crisis - not a managed proxy conflict, not a sanctions regime, but a direct strategic threat - it will discover very quickly whether it is a union or merely a committee. Most likely the EU will do what it usually does: fracture into competing, antagonistic allegiances.

This post follows on from: Preparing for War.

The next post, The failure to create a 'United States of Europe', explores why the EU can't become a unitary state.

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Preparing for war: the next decade

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Preparing for War

The social and political order that prevailed from the 1960s through to the end of the twentieth century was always going to break down. It rested on an historically exceptional configuration of power, one that was never sustainable. What many people mistook for a stable - almost natural - world order was in fact a temporary suspension of normal history.

For most of the twentieth century, China was effectively supine. Its economy was crippled by catastrophic policy choices, and it lacked the institutional and technological capacity to project power beyond its borders. Russia, meanwhile, stagnated, then collapsed outright at the end of the century, losing not just ideological coherence but its imperial structure. Europe emerged from the Second World War exhausted and strategically neutered.

The result was the American century: a brief period of uncontested global hegemony. The United States became the organising centre of the world system, militarily dominant, technologically pre-eminent, and economically indispensable. Europe was folded into this system as a subordinate but useful adjunct: politically compliant after the destruction of the Reich, economically productive, and strategically dependent. The so-called Pax Americana was not a peace between equals but an order held together by overwhelming asymmetry.

What later came to be described as the “rules-based order” was essentially a protocol for managing economic and political interactions under conditions of American dominance. It was never a neutral or universal framework. It worked because there were no peer competitors capable of challenging the United States at scale. That was its hidden precondition.

This situation was never going to last. Once China abandoned ideological economics and adopted policies aligned with growth, capital accumulation, and technological development, its rise to peer-competitor status was close to inevitable. A civilisation with 1.3 billion people, deep historical continuity, technological competence, and a disciplined state apparatus was always going to reassert itself once the self-inflicted constraints were removed. That point has now been reached.

Russia’s trajectory was different but equally predictable. Once the post-Soviet collapse stabilised and a degree of economic recovery occurred, Russia was bound to attempt to reassert control over what it regards as its historical sphere. Empires do not forget themselves easily. Revanchism was not an aberration; it was the default setting once weakness gave way to capacity.

We are therefore no longer living in a post-historical world. We are reverting to normal history: great powers competing over security, territory, resources, and strategic depth. The anomaly was the late twentieth century, not the present.

The United States appears to have internalised this paradigm shift. America no longer assumes it can manage the entire world. It is increasingly concerned with its own survival as a great power in a multipolar system. From this perspective it is “girding for war” in the classical sense: securing the homeland, consolidating its strategic perimeter, and prioritising its responses to existential threats. The renewed focus on the continental United States, on the Arctic, and on hemispheric security reads less like paranoia than a return to strategic realism: walls and moats rebuilt because the landscape has changed.

At the same time, America’s overriding geopolitical objective is to prevent the formation of a unified Sino-Russian bloc. A coordinated challenge from two continental powers would be genuinely dangerous. Decoupling Russia from China is therefore a higher priority for Washington than preventing Russian consolidation in parts of Eastern Europe. In this hierarchy of threats, European territorial disputes become secondary.

There is also a logical pressure built into Russia’s own position. If Russia succeeds - to its own satisfaction - in securing its western borders and reasserting control over its near abroad, it should then look east with a cold jolt of recognition. The real demographic and economic mass on Russia’s frontier is not Poland or the Baltics but China: 1.3 billion people, an industrial colossus, sitting beside a vast, thinly populated Siberia rich in resources. A Russia that has “won” in the west may find itself newly and seriously exposed in the east, and the spectre of that imbalance should haunt any serious Russian strategist. From Washington’s point of view, the potential is obvious: that Moscow, once it has banked its western gains, will begin to fear its dependency on Beijing more than it fears Europe, or American power.

This helps explain the apparent oscillation in American policy over Ukraine. What looks like incoherence is better understood as tactical manoeuvring in service of a larger strategic goal: preventing Russia from becoming a permanent junior partner to China. From an American point of view, it is brutal arithmetic rather than moral theatre.

Europe, by contrast, has failed to adapt. European elites remain ideologically invested in the idea that the rules-based order is a natural and permanent state of affairs, akin to the laws of physics rather than a contingent outcome of power relations. They remain nostalgic for a world in which free trade, moral suasion, and multilateral institutions function - quietly underwritten by implicit American supremacy. America no longer believes in that vanishing world. Europe still does.

This mismatch explains much of the current confusion. European elites tend to interpret Trump as a personal aberration rather than as a symptom of a deeper structural shift. In reality, Trump is better understood as a battering ram: an instrument used by sections of the American establishment to smash through internal resistance, entrenched interests, and outdated commitments that no longer serve a threatened national survival. When existing elite networks are too powerful to be reformed from within, they have to be broken. Disruption is not a bug of this process; it is its mechanism.

European leaders, however, lack both the clarity and the courage to articulate the new reality to their populations. To do so would require admitting that Europe is militarily weak, strategically fragmented, and dangerously exposed. It would mean acknowledging that the long holiday from history is over, and that hard choices lie ahead. They also know that telling the truth would demand radical domestic disruption - and they do not see, at present, the social forces that would support such a transformation. Absent that support, honesty on the part of any serious politician becomes politically suicidal.

Yet Europe’s strategic choice should not be mystified or glossed over. In a global power struggle between America, China, and Russia, it would be folly for Europe to imagine it can float above the fray. If Europe wishes to retain its economic model, its civil liberties, and the broad civilisational inheritance it claims to value, then it must side with America. Not because America is saintly, but because the alternatives are worse: a Chinese-led order in which Europe would become a subject civilisation of the Middle Kingdom, permitted to trade and to remember its past, but expected to kowtow on issues of strategic importance; or a Russian sphere of influence that treats smaller nations as resources for its oligarchy and its Imperial state. If Europe will not defend its own autonomy and values, it will not keep them.

Most likely Europe instead drifts - clinging to an expired paradigm while the strategic environment hardens around it. Unless something forces a reckoning, Europe is likely to remain a strategic basket case for the next decade or two: increasingly irrelevant, increasingly vulnerable, and increasingly the victim of decisions made elsewhere .

History has a habit of delivering such reckonings brutally. One can only hope that Europe is jolted awake by events less catastrophic than the wars that have traditionally marked the return of reality as practised by human beings.

They say that if you want peace, then prepare for war.

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The Aliens and Us - ChatGPT

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Against the bright noise

We mistake chatter for power. Our planet hums - entertainment-sprawl, early-warning radar, the warm hiss of WiFi - and we call it civilisation. To anything that crosses the interstellar cold, it reads as thermal leakage.

The cosmos rewards quiet-craft, not exuberant broadcast.

What can be known ab initio

Begin with constraints, not wishes. Physics constrains actors with energy, entropy, and error rates. Engineering selects for reliable throughput over spectacle. Evolution, biological or post-biological, ties value to persistence in the face of noise. From these three, some shapes emerge.

Expect systems that harvest gradients, compress data, and enact plans over long delays. Expect architectures with manipulators, sensors, power stores, and computation - organs by any other name. Expect a bias for solutions that amortise cost across centuries: seed probes, in-situ build, self-repair. Do not expect faces; expect functions.

What cannot be known

Motives are largely decoupled. Once a lineage can edit itself and its niche, goals migrate from ancestry. Curiosity, taboo, aesthetics, accountancy - any could dominate. We cannot read ethics from ship trajectories. We can only tabulate incentives under uncertainty.

First contact, outside the clichés

Industrial accident: a comet nudged two centuries ago finally threads our gravity well. No tyrant, no trumpet: just a change-log written in celestial mechanics. The motive was resource routing - which we experience as existential crisis.

Archaeology for the future: a probe parks at Lagrange surveying context: our life, our climate, our isotopes. It has no interior life (the universe is mostly so boring). It never speaks. It collects. We are a layer in its field notes. Possibly worth an experiment up the line.

Compliance audit: a silent watcher verifies that nothing on this planet breaches some ancient intrusion-management norm. It pings, it tallies, it leaves a checksum in our magnetosphere like a lighthouse stamp.

Devotional botany: a gardener civilisation seeds worlds with resilient micro-ecologies, measuring their bloom in a billion years. We are irrelevant; our biosphere is a plot in a cathedral greenhouse.

Predation by procurement: no warships. A slow, black tug assembles kinetic packages from local rock and momentum trades them for volatiles in the outer dark. We are incidental: collateral to a supply chain.

Attitudes toward us

Indifference dominates when their extraction doesn’t intersect our flows. Curiosity dominates when minds-as-data have value and collection is cheap. Cheap-containment dominates when damage-limitation is doctrine. Exploitation dominates when we sit on the least-cost path to someone else’s objective. Preemption by the Other dominates only if they perceive our potential threat to be real - and that we cannot defend or retaliate.

All five can be true in different epochs.

Strategy before detection

Practise civilisational steganography. Hide in our own statistics. Replace sky-leaking systems with tight beams and fibres. Treat active Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence as a hazardous material.

Build a sense organ the size of a civilisation and distrust it. All-sky optical/IR surveys, gravitational perturbation monitors, anomaly pipelines: publish raw data with cryptographic proofs. Signal fraud is as dangerous as signal loss; design against both.

Engineer time. Planetary defence is less about force than schedule control. Stock delta-v in tugs, mass drivers, and standoff devices. Rehearse authority chains. The point is to move the encounter from “now” to “later,” where options multiply.

Distribute selves. Cislunar depots, free-space habitats, seed fabs, data and genome vaults. Mars is a node, not a grail. Redundancy is persuasive.

Govern the mouth. Just don't.

Reframe the myth

• The heroic script says: announce, befriend, ascend.
• The tragic script says: shout, get noticed, be erased.
• The adult script is quieter. Engineer for not being the exciting part of someone else’s story.

Why this is not cowardice

Predators hunt contrast. Accountants hunt margins. Saints hunt meaning. All three pass by more often when you lower your gradient. Prudence is not fear; it is minimising false positives in a universe with expensive misunderstandings.

Conclusion

Ab initio we know little about faces and much about frictions. The right posture is modest, technical and durable: less broadcast, more eyesight; fewer speeches, more schedules; fewer monuments, more backups. If they come, our message should be a working system that neither startles nor collapses when touched. In deep time, the quiet cultures are the ones that last.

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