They called it escalation at first, an ugly word that softened the edges of what was happening. By the time anyone agreed to admit the word "war," it had already rewritten the calendars of half the planet.
Fighting was no longer a series of single, clear events. It was an architecture: supply lines throttled in one port, a satellite suddenly blind for seventeen minutes, rail junctions delayed by staged safety inspections. People died, of course they did, but deaths were threaded into a larger fabric of pressure. The strategy was not to break an enemy's arm but to bankrupt its attention, to make its institutions bend under the cost of constant small shocks.
