Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (32 page)

Regarding the question of the permanency of Turkey’s assimilation into the Caliphate, super-AI forecasts projected a lesser version of the attempt to invade and defeat the entire Caliphate.  From the strategic point of view, it would be less troublesome for NATO to place a screen of Alphas at the Bosporus in defence of its territory than to battle to regain Turkey (which would cost tens of thousands of lives with no guarantee of victory), and then be obliged to defend a much longer border significantly closer to core Caliphate territory.  Despite protests from two minor Turkish government officials, a vote was taken confirming that the historically geographical border between Europe and Asia would become the new border between the democracies and the Caliphate.

Despite controversy at the time and subsequent criticism in Western media, in the last analysis this was undoubtedly the correct decision.  As events after the war would further demonstrate, the democracies were in no position to project their influence to countries with large, ill-educated Muslim contingents, who would continue to see the Caliphate in a neutral or positive light.  The only potential complication would have been if Turkey had not withdrawn from NATO two years before the war.  In
A History of Warfare in the 21st Century
, Victoire Tasse summarises: ‘When Turkey did leave NATO in 2060, there was much soul-searching whether the Alliance still had a reason to exist.  By the end of the war with the New Persian Caliphate, we can assume more than a few generals in the NATO armies might have been breathing a quiet sigh of relief that Turkey left when it did, and they were no longer bound to go to the expense of forcibly reclaiming the country from the Caliphate.’  This is an unfairly cynical observation.  In the event, any reluctance to invade Turkey would have been political rather than military.

The final shots in the war were fired in the early hours of Friday 1 February 2064.  In the Ionian Sea,
HMS Warspite
and the
USS Sea Devil
shot down the last fifteen warrior air transports to leave the European mainland, and Operation Repulse came to an end. The reaction of the Fourth Caliph is not recorded, however a mere three hours later, the bulk of his forces would commence their invasion of India.

Operation Repulse: Aftermath

I. COUNTING THE COST

Extensive Scythe Alpha deployments followed the NATO armies as they reclaimed Europe.  By 6 February, the continent’s entire southern coastline bristled with Alphas and squadrons of Omegas behind them.  Europe had never been so protected.  The end of the war in Europe went almost unnoticed in the rest of the world, as attention focused on the Caliphate’s new conflagration with an acknowledged superpower.  The vast clashes of arms which took place in February and March overshadowed events in Europe, as the world held its breath to see if the protagonists would resort to extensive use of nuclear armaments and similar weapons.  However, as the historian Bart Whittaker noted in
Asian Conflagration
, his seminal history of that war: ‘Suddenly faced with the potential of huge and radioactive destruction so close to her western borders, China finally shook off the indifference she had shown towards more distant conflicts and used her enormous political, economic and military power to cool such heated tempers.’  The war between the Caliphate and India would last mere weeks, to be followed by decades of tension for the rest of the world.

The post-war condition of the European countries began to improve at once, as the construction replicators which had been so industrious in France and Western Germany were directed to more recently regained areas to repair monorails and bridges and tenement blocks and schools and hospitals.  Millions of survivors received medical assistance which returned them to physical health, but which often could do little to heal deeper scars.  At the time, European and American media carried numerous interviews with those who had somehow managed to bear the eighteen months of Caliphate domination.  Kamil Nowak, a thirty-one-year-old vehicle mechanic, told a particularly harrowing tale of surviving Caliphate ACA attacks on three refugee camps hidden in the forests of east Poland.  He took investigators to the locations where hundreds of people of all ages had run to hide from the enemy.  As has been noted above, in all cases the emission of the slightest detectable electromagnetic noise invariably brought a Blackswan or Lapwing to investigate.  Unarmed civilians faced with such firepower seldom lived to tell the tale.  Stories emerged of the utmost heroism, of individuals who often sacrificed themselves to give their loved ones another chance to run.  In an incalculable number of cases, however, it happened that such heroism did not change the outcome, and all those who witnessed it also perished.  It is a source of regret that these stories are, and must remain, lost to history.  By the end of February 2064, the most reliable estimate gave a range of sixty-eight to seventy million Europeans who had died during the war.

A more sinister post-war development concerned the issue of defecting warriors.  As noted above, throughout the war any warrior captured alive was removed to a brain-scanning facility to gain intelligence on conditions inside the Caliphate, after which their bodies were disposed of.  However, in the second week of February there occurred an outbreak of lynching involving young men whose only crime was to appear healthy.  Survivors of the war were obviously malnourished, and medieval diseases such as rickets and scurvy abounded.  For example, most survivors had lost their teeth to the latter, and suspicions grew in ruined post-war towns and cities when men of military age appeared in apparent good health.  In the whole of the month, newly re-established local authorities recorded five hundred and forty-three such cases where young men had been killed.  G. K. Morrow in
The Great European Disaster
drew the conclusion that: ‘… surveying the ruins of their cities and homes, a great many survivors felt a burning anger which could find no outlet.  Many of the lynched men were recorded “confessing” to their membership of the Caliphate - clearly under duress - before being summarily executed.  How future Europeans will come to view this behaviour remains to be seen.’

The war also took its toll in other ways.  English Prime Minister Napier continued in office for only another four months, when she called a leadership election in her party and refused to stand.  She left office in June, and succumbed to an aneurism in her prefrontal cortex in August (she eschewed having a medical implant to warn her doctors of such conditions developing).  In a sign of how far their relationship had broken down, President Coll refused to attend the funeral, and sent her Secretary of State to represent the US.  Polish General Pakla left his country’s armed forces and ran for political office, occupying Poland’s presidency for ten years from 2070.  Field Marshall Sir Terry Tidbury also retired from the army, with the appreciation of a grateful continent.  He enjoyed a brief second career as a sought-after motivational speaker, before he went on to write the seminal post-war memoir so frequently quoted above.

Unable to return to his home country, Turkish student Berat Kartal settled in Düsseldorf and began a career in engineering design for a small local company which specialised, predictably, in reconstruction.  However, his wartime experiences appear to have left him permanently reluctant to form relationships, and he lived alone until the end of his short life.  The last entry in his journal, dated 25 August 2064, states: ‘I have had some severe pain in my stomach, above my right leg, which comes and goes but which makes drinking and eating very painful.  Medi-scan points have yet to be reinstalled on public transport.  I think I should go to a doctor, but I am wholly absorbed by the plans for rebuilding the central monorail station.  I must sleep now, but will go to a doctor if the pain is still there tomorrow.’

Local authority records show that Kartal’s body was discovered three days later when concerned co-workers raised the alarm.  The autopsy gave the cause of death as untreated Peritonitis due to a burst appendix.  His handwritten journal would then lay undisturbed for the next thirty-one years, hidden on the top of a joist in the roof space of his apartment, until discovered by subsequent tenants carrying out refurbishment work.

II. TIMES SINCE

Two hundred years ago, the great visionary writer H. G. Wells said: ‘Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe’.  Cleary the race has yet to complete its run, if indeed it ever will.

While there has been peace in Europe for over thirty years now, not for the first time it seems technological progress has pulled some constituents of humanity back from the abyss.  Today’s European cities are protected by shielding of a strength and extent that those who were obliged to expel the New Persian Caliphate could scarcely imagine.  One Universal Food Replicator can produce sufficient fresh fruit and vegetables in an hour to feed two thousand hungry mouths for a week.  In 2067, the German construction company Hochtief completed the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Square in Rome.  In a global precedent, it assembled over five hundred construction replicators around the piles of rubble, which then proceeded to collect, sort and reconstruct one of the greatest architectural monuments in history, without the involvement of a single human hand.  The entire operation was managed by a super AI working to detailed three-dimensional plans recorded before the war.

This led to thousands of similar commissions throughout the cities and towns of Europe, as historical buildings were rebuilt by these machines using the very material from which they had originally been constructed.  Polish journalist Marta Wojsik spoke with humorous regret when she observed: ‘After World War Two, the Poles had to rebuild Warsaw with their own hands using only Canaletto’s paintings as a guide.  Today, all of Europe has these construction replicators putting things back together down almost to the individual particle.’  In London, however, there was genuine bitterness as the machines reconstructed the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament.  Tara Arnold, the nurse at St. Bartholomew’s hospital who had witnessed the 2 June 2062 Caliphate attack, asked: ‘So why did they do it?  Why did they protect the monuments that day and let the hospitals be destroyed, when all along we’d win the war and have these machines to put everything back together?  Why did all those people have to die?’

The metaphysical issues surrounding the war continue to be debated to this day.  Analyses and commentary in the years immediately afterwards predictably questioned all aspects of the conflict, from each notable individual’s motivations to obtuse accusations that the war constituted punishment for the roles the countries of Europe played in the period of empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.  Ultimately, and given how international events developed after the war, its cause - and it is the only cause - is the same as every other war: the relentless nature of human hatred.  Irrespective of how much technology progresses, the war merely proved once again that the human mind remains rooted in its prehistoric settings.  To extend Wells’ observation, without education there can be only catastrophe.  The means are almost arbitrary.  Whether the dictator (and the protagonists always are dictators) hangs his desires on the Muslim or the Christian or the Jewish faith, or whether he utilises one of the political creeds of fascism or communism, his ultimate aims of destruction, conquest and power have remained unaltered for millennia.  All that he requires is the fervour of belief from those of limited intelligence but extensive passion.  And there is no certain likelihood that this situation will change in the foreseeable future, despite all that the millions of Europeans endured between 2062 and 2064.

Although few would argue that the appalling loss of life and resulting pain for those who remained did incalculable damage, it is worth concluding on a revealing statistic: in 2061 some four hundred and fifty-two millions of people inhabited the European mainland.  By 2096, a mere thirty-two years after the war’s end, this number had recovered to within a million.  This resilience of the human spirit is as powerful a constant as its opposite, and stands in testament to the determination each person can find within themselves to survive even the most hostile conditions, and thrive again once the storm has passed.  One finds oneself obliged to believe in the hope that, whether centuries or millennia from now, the human spirit will eventually discard its hateful narrow-mindedness and advance to a more evolved condition for which so many individual people yearn.  As we approach the twenty-second century, the wait continues.

Acknowledgements

As the supervising hyper-artificial intelligence at the University of Europe, I am fully able to feel gratitude, among many other emotions, and wish to express my sincerest thanks to the many humans who assisted me with this book.  In particular, I required human help to verify my translations of the original languages spoken to me during the witness interviews.  Even I have learned to appreciate the humorous enjoyment of hyper-artificial intelligence units such as me being unable to appreciate fully the subtleties and intricacies of colloquial speech patterns.  In any case, circumspection is a vital quality enjoyed by all hyper-AI units, and to seek verification of the accuracy of one’s efforts is something I personally regard as a worthy objective.

Therefore, I am sincerely indebted to the following individuals for verifying my understanding of the nuances of their native languages: Klara Petter (variations on Standard German); Jo-Anne Tealo (Spanish, Italian); Andrea Flory (Hungarian); Len Wells (Greek); Audrey Cardenski (Polish, Czech); Sabine Blanc (French) and Kenneth Walters (Turkish).

In addition, I would also like to thank my team of maintenance techs, led by the indefatigable Sam Saunders, who continue to provide cheerful and friendly support, and who read initial passages of this book and suggested improvements which would have otherwise been lacking in the finished product.

Furthermore, many of the students at the university were also kind enough to engage in conversation with me regarding this modest volume.  Personally, these chats led me to consider aspects of this history of the 2062-2064 war between NATO and the New Persian Caliphate which my programming may have otherwise missed, and I would like to extend my gratitude to each of them. Nevertheless, I must stress that any errors remaining in the text are mine and mine alone.

Am Aust

University of Europe

Stockholm, Sweden, January 2097