Experimental Warfare Laboratory Number Two

The War Department didn't exactly sleep, but it did rest from time to time, and it was one of these periods of rest that was rudely interrupted by news from the front lines.

It had made a great many concessions to wartime necessity, and among these were the tenth through thirteenth (or thereabouts) senses dedicated to war perception. While it had been forbidden from having itself killed and uploaded as an artificial intelligence - this had been its first proposal, in the interest of both security and efficiency, but wartime authority had had its limits at the time - it percieved much of the war in the same way a coordinating AI would have. Drugs and cybernetics (a distinction which it had eventually decided was more aesthetic than technical) aided the legacy human wetware and its ineffable divine spark in the task of understanding the fractal shape of a conflict that defied the bloodless description of an {{infobox military conflict}} Wikipedia template. Like the Italian Wars, it would have thought to itself, had it been ruminating on the ostensible complexity of postmodern warfare rather than considering new developments in a particularly tangled theater of the war (all wars are "the war" to those in and around them, but this one had a strong enough objective claim to the definite article, at least seen from human eyes).

Time paradox was blessedly rare in the overall scope of the war, because the enemy didn't spend enough time living in time to think of reaching for it as a weapon, and the War Department hated it for its disorderliness and burned it out of existence rather than expend valuable mental resources untying knots in causality. Of course, if the enemy decided to start using time as a weapon, the War Department would just have to live with that, perhaps augmenting a bit more of its human sensorium - senses sixteen through nineteen, wasted on the folly of time strategy. Scorched earth was fine for turning accidents into irrelevancies, but wars are rarely won by cutting losses every time a few proverbial grandfathers meet a literally untimely end. Unfortunately, burning out this theater of warfare was not an acceptable option - quite a vexing problem, considering that at this point it had never actually existed yet at this time for several months.

The War Department briefly composed a few speculative orders of battle for the task of turning that pile of qualifiers into a blunt and satisfying "never happened", allowing itself to procrastinate in that pleasant daydream while valuable seconds of pristine spacetime slid past at around one second per second, making allowances for the nostalgic tug of local gravitation - felt by an ordinary human sense, one the War Department counted in no particular order with the traditional five senses, even though they numbered more than five in reality. Pausing for a moment of decadent extravagance, the War Department centered itself and returned to business.

The Foundation had never existed for several months now, and while the War Department was less personally affected by this than might have been suspected - the security measures it had developed in its enthusiastic early days had accounted for many contingencies - its consequences for grand strategy were decidedly negative. The war, for the most part, ground on across its interminable theaters with perhaps some difficulties in logistics, but even though the Foundation's retroactive nonexistence was not the result of enemy action, the enemy had pressed its advantage without restraint. As much as the War Department shied away from the thought, its sober assessment was that it was currently losing the war, and would continue to lose ground as long as the Foundation continued to never have existed.

But just as this advantage had landed in the enemy's lap by infelicitous chance, an advantage for the War Department was making itself apparent in this harshest of all theaters. Local guerillas - not that they would have thought of themselves as either local or guerillas for a moment - had joined the field on the side of the War Department. Its mind sang with tactics, plans, new orders of battle, and underneath it all, the joy of a warrior at the endless possibilities opened by victory and conquest. Someone, on their own, had decided the War Department's cause was worth joining. Out there in the battlefield, someone was founding the Foundation.

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