War and Peace in 2026

von Ellis Thorne

112 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A nation can announce a war in a minute. A life receives the news one room at a time.

In October 2026, a coordinated drone and cyberattack severs the critical rail lines linking Poland to the Baltic states. Governments scramble to assign blame, and the ORACLE intelligence platform calculates an 82% probability of a second strike. Within hours, a rapid military mobilization begins-setting Europe on a collision course built entirely on a manufactured certainty.

Far from the sterile command rooms of Brussels, five people gathered for a lavish engagement dinner near Warsaw find their private lives violently entangled with the machinery of escalation:

One dinner party. One blackout. One number that was never true.

Adrian Voss has spent his life avoiding the family business. He writes essays about public shame from a comfortable distance, declining every invitation to join Voss Meridian Systems-the defense contractor his father built into an empire. Then, over soup at an engagement dinner, his phone lights up with eleven missed calls and a message that changes everything: Your father died at 20:41.

By morning, Adrian controls the most powerful prediction system in Europe. By the end of the week, he'll discover what his father spent two years trying to bury-that ORACLE's threat assessments aren't predictions at all. They're policy. And someone has been adjusting the numbers to make sure the right decisions get made.

"The confidence score is not merely a flawed statistic. It is the mechanism that makes atrocity administratively possible."

In the corridor between Poland and Belarus, Captain Theo Markovic-a hotel owner drowning in debt, a man who borrowed against his mother's money and sold his grandfather's watch to make payroll-has been mobilized. He is good at war in a way he was never good at peace. It is the first time in years he has felt like a man with answers instead of debts.

In Warsaw, cellist Lina Markovic plays Bach in a blacked-out metro station, and a stranger's phone camera turns her grief into a symbol for a nation. She wanted to be seen. She is about to learn the difference between being witnessed and being used.

And in Brussels, Advisor Julian Vale briefs a room of frightened ministers on a number he knows is manufactured-a figure that started at fifty-eight percent and was manually adjusted to eighty-two, because "a room full of frightened officials cannot act on fifty-eight." He tells himself this is responsibility. He has been telling himself versions of this for twenty years.

They will each discover the same truth: the systems we build to make hard decisions easier are the systems that make catastrophic ones inevitable.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175723329
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 254 x 203 mm
• Verlag: Independently published