The historical passages draw on public records and attributed reports through 6 November 2026. The historian, the delegate, the land registry and both possible futures are imagined.
A week in October
Nobody conquered us. We signed.
In the small hours of 14 October 2026, on the Huliaipole front in Ukraine, drone crews began losing the link to their aircraft. The 7th Air Assault Corps reported that at 110 to 120 kilometres an hour the connection could go for ten to twenty seconds. The aircraft kept moving. One unit cancelled some of its missions.
Every autumn I give my students the Ukrainian file with the newspaper names covered. How long did the link go down? They can answer in seconds. Who ordered the limit? Now they want the newspaper names back.
The service was Starshield, the military relative of Starlink. Ukrainian officials put the nominal ceiling at about a hundred miles an hour. Reuters traced the order to the White House. CBS reported that Elon Musk had decided after conversations with administration officials. No signed order in the public record settled the question. On 24 October Ukraine’s defence ministry reported stable connections above 400 kilometres an hour.
There is a piece of paper I wish explained those ten days. It is a US defence agency’s order to SpaceX, with about $138 million obligated and a description in capital letters. BEST EFFORT SUBSCRIPTION & TERMINALS - UKRAINE. Even its potential end date fell six months before the incident. It tells us what someone once agreed to buy for a country at war. It cannot tell us who set the speed limit.
The crews had their service back. What stayed with me was a question about the purchases that went smoothly. Looking back from 2036, what had a country acquired in ten years of paying the bill?
What the buyer keeps
A student once objected to the title of this course. Her country bought its wheat abroad. “Does that make us a colony at breakfast?” I asked what her government could do if the merchant changed his terms. “Which merchant?” she said. “We buy from three.” I had forgotten to ask where else she could shop.
For any investor in the Abu Dhabi project, I would put two documents on the table. The first is the announcement. G42 would build a one-gigawatt computing cluster inside a five-gigawatt campus. OpenAI and Oracle would operate the cluster. The second is an American regulation. In July 2026 Washington eased some of its chip export controls for the Emirates. Two UAE-based companies could receive specified advanced chips without an individual export licence. That authorisation would expire on 6 April 2027 unless Washington acted again. The rule set out how they could apply to retain their status if they had not become US companies by then.
The International Energy Agency gives a data centre one to three years to build. Planning, permitting and completing new grid infrastructure can take five to fifteen. Those are general lead times. At the committee table I’d want the figures for this particular cable. When do we earn back the cost of bringing power to the site? Which chip orders rely on those two approvals?
Suppose fresh permission delays a shipment by six months. The cable is paid for. Move the income from those machines six months to the right. In what year do we get our money back now? A man can argue all morning over half a percentage point and initial a much larger assumption tucked away in a footnote.
A subscription looks simpler on the books. You pay the fee and the work gets done. Ten years later the supplier has the fees and a better product to sell elsewhere. I’d spend a morning with the people who paid those invoices. If the supplier left on Friday, which jobs could they do for themselves on Monday?
In June 2026 the United States instructed Anthropic to suspend foreign nationals’ access to two models. The company could not establish everyone’s nationality quickly enough. It took both models offline for everyone. Think of the customer in Jakarta. His account was paid up. He still could not get an answer.
My student could buy her wheat elsewhere. I’d call a bargain colonial when leaving becomes unaffordable and someone abroad gains a continuing say in how the country governs its people.
Who teaches the machine?
Let my student buy her loaf in India and pay the baker by scanning his code. If the payment went through UPI in October 2026, it was one of more than 25 billion transactions that month. The National Payments Corporation of India ran the network. The banks that moved her money played by rules set in India. That same year India’s government told Parliament that its shared AI computing programme relied on globally sourced processors. My student would need two colours for India, one for the bank and another for the AI laboratory.
When the Latam-GPT team introduced its model in February 2026, the American suppliers were easy to identify. The researchers had started with Meta’s Llama and used Amazon’s computers. Libraries and universities had helped assemble material from Latin America and the Caribbean for further training. To see what the researchers had gained, I’d sit beside the person marking the examination.
Suppose the question is about the history of the examiner’s own town. An answer can be written in excellent Spanish and get the town quite wrong. Who gets to mark it wrong? Take a librarian who has spent twenty years collecting the books on which the machine was trained. Does she now have to buy a subscription to find out what it says about her town? Or can she help set the questions, mark a wrong answer and keep the corrections? In either case somebody can hire the same computer for the afternoon.
Governments also spoke of bringing their data home. Senegal opened a national data centre in Diamniadio in 2021, built by Huawei with financing from China’s Export-Import Bank. It gave Senegal a place to house government records on its own soil. Estonia had done something almost opposite. Under a 2017 treaty it secured protection for state data and information systems housed in Luxembourg. The treaty treated them as Estonian archives. One state had acquired a building at home, the other an enforceable right abroad.
Whose sky is it?
In January 2026 Iran cut most of its international internet connectivity. During the blackout Filterwatch reported that Starlink still worked in places, intermittently and under interference. Consider what a few minutes of connection might mean to somebody with family abroad. A message saying that a son had come home would have taken almost no bandwidth. There was no useful substitute for it.
Tehran had a case in law. A private transmitting terminal required authorisation from the state to whose jurisdiction it was subject. Iran had given these terminals no such authorisation. It had taken its complaint to the International Telecommunication Union years before the blackout. In October 2026 the Radio Regulations Board urged Norway and the United States to get the unauthorised transmissions disabled. It asked Iran to locate and deactivate terminals where it could. The Board concluded that the World Radiocommunication Conference planned for 2027 was the appropriate forum to take the issue further.
I have an imaginary delegate take a seat at the conference in Shanghai in 2027. She represents a small coastal country which owns no satellites. On the journey she reads a British licence issued to Network Access Associates. It requires the operator to retain the means to disable individual terminals. Before she left, her minister had asked whether the thing was technically possible. She can at least answer that part of his question.
In her notebook she writes that a government ought to decide whether a transmitter may operate on its soil. She likes the sentence. It would do very well in the brief she has to send home that evening. In February 2026 Ukraine’s defence ministry had reported that Russian terminals were being blocked under a verification scheme. What government would willingly give up the power to make such a distinction?
Then she comes to the January reports from Iran. Her own mother has a habit, when her children travel, of demanding a message the instant they arrive. She remembers finding this tiresome on the very journey that brought her here. She looks again at the sentence she means to send home. When she wrote “country”, she meant her minister. Reading it back, she finds herself thinking of her mother. I leave her there, pencil under the word.
The first renewal
My land registry belongs to an imaginary country. One morning in the spring of 2027 its finance minister went downstairs to see the queue for herself. The visitors at the front stood up. Those at the back, supposing the office was at last ready to see them, stood up too. The minister had wanted, for once, to see the office on an ordinary morning. It took her a moment to understand what she had done to it merely by coming down the stairs.
The registrar showed her a pile of deeds. A change of alphabet had left the same man with one surname on his deed and another on the tax roll. The clerks generally knew where to look. What took the morning was looking there, parcel by parcel. A foreign supplier had shown them software that read the scans and laid the likely matches side by side. A clerk would still decide whether the two names were one man’s. The deeds would stay in the country. The fee was within budget. In the northern books, where half the backlog lay, the pilot had worked particularly well.
I ask the class who would keep those people waiting while the ministry bought hardware and trained engineers. Very few hands go up. I’d have signed, too. The minister signed. In the first year families that had been visiting the registry for months were able to sell.
Eighteen months later the supplier gave sixty days’ notice that it was retiring the model. The replacement read the new alphabet better and the old one differently. The ministry still had every scan. It took four months to find out which matches a clerk in the north could safely sign. In the meantime they went back to the books.
One clause got a closer reading the second time round. The clerks could report a bad match and the supplier could use the correction to improve its service. Nobody had asked for those corrections back in a form another system could read. One clerk recognised a mistake she had corrected the year before. She corrected it again, on the ministry’s time and with rather less good humour.
Sixty days had seemed ample to the minister when she signed. In 2026 Anthropic gave developers two months to move off one model. Google gave them eleven days for a preview model. A local supplier could also have retired a model. A judge could settle a boundary dispute, but on day sixty there was no promise of continued service for a judge to enforce. Banks and insurers in Europe had a clause she could use. Under a law passed by the European Parliament and Council, covered firms had to provide for a transition in contracts for technology supporting critical or important functions. The supplier had to keep the service running while the firm moved. The registrar copied the provision. In the margin she wrote, “Time enough to leave.”
The second appropriation
For three years the registrar had wanted a district counter to save applicants two buses each way. Now she also wanted a reserve model, two engineers and a share in the neighbours’ machine. At the budget meeting she put the engineers on top. The minister reached underneath for the bus timetable.
“If we give you the counter, how soon can you open?”
“Monday. The council has offered us a room.” The pride in her voice surprised her. It had taken all winter to get that room. How was the minister to guess she had come to ask for the machine?
“And how would we know the other money had been well spent?”
Give her a Tuesday. She would disconnect the office, put the northern books through the reserve and bring back the day’s signed deeds. The neighbours would have to honour the agreement even when their hospitals wanted the machine.
“Last time, in those four months, how many sales fell through?”
The registrar knew the number was nowhere in her papers. She turned a page all the same. A deed carried over from March to April had a line in the book. A purchaser who went away in March and bought another house left her nothing to count. Across the table the minister took that last turn of the page for the promise of a figure. She leaned forward. How much simpler the decision was about to become.
“I don’t know,” the registrar said.
The first year I taught this meeting, I priced the engineers, the machine and the room. A student asked what wages a shop assistant lost coming in to register a deed. I had allowed for every salary round the table. Downstairs, people had whole mornings to give away. At any rate they did on my sheet. I changed it the following autumn.
Here are the two votes. In both histories it is a Tuesday in 2036. On Monday the supplier’s government had required it to move overseas registries to its newest hosted model. At home the previous version still ran. A woman has come to register the sale of the house her father left her. The buyer’s bank will release the money when the transfer is registered. In her bag are the deed and a tax receipt. Her father’s surname is spelt differently on each.
FIRST ENDING
The subscription
The district counter opened the following Monday. By 2036 it had been there long enough for people to forget which minister had found the money. The neighbours had never settled which country’s hospitals would go first if several needed the reserve machine at once. No finance minister had been willing to pay a share without an answer.
The daughter had pressed the tax receipt under a dictionary overnight. Her father used to fold his receipts lengthwise to fit his wallet, and after all these years the paper still rose along the middle. The clerk took it in her hand. “He always did that,” she said. It gave the daughter a small shock of pleasure that somebody here remembered him. Then she wished the clerk would get on with the sale. She had taken trouble over this appointment precisely so that they needn’t spend the morning talking about her father.
The new model returned two parcels against the father’s name. The clerk needed the chain of earlier entries before she could certify which parcel the daughter had inherited. The old model used to find it. The new one left out a reference to the adjoining lot. She caught the omission because she knew the district. There might be another on a page she knew less well.
“I can bring you the other receipts,” the daughter said. “There’s a whole tin.” Already she was thinking of the bus back, the key in the kitchen drawer, the absurd pink flowers on the lid. She was halfway home in her mind before she saw the clerk shaking her head. More receipts would tell them that her father had paid his taxes regularly. The clerk believed that already. It was the owner of the adjoining lot whose name she had to be sure of. Somewhere there was another owner who had no idea his land had come up for discussion that morning.
The clerk entered a request for a manual search. On the slip, beneath the number of the central office, she wrote her own extension. “Ring me. Otherwise you’ll have to tell them all of this again.”
Out on the pavement the daughter rang the buyer. The bank had given him until Friday, he said. Would another week be enough? She turned the search slip over, as though the clerk might have written a date on the back.
SECOND ENDING
The bargain
In the other history the district counter took three more years to open. Its rent and wages had gone to the reserve. The bus fares were paid out of other people’s pockets. The partners agreed how much computing time each could claim. They ran a different model on their own machine under a separate licence. The new rule applied to the foreign supplier’s hosted service. The ministry could still run its reserve, with the clerks’ corrections. It had also secured time to move if the service ended. The engineers were paid even in years when ministers had trouble remembering why.
That morning the daughter took the receipt from her bag. It rose along the same crease. “He always did that,” the clerk said. Before the daughter had time to decide whether she wanted to talk about her father, the screen returned the same two parcels. The clerk entered the discrepancy in the daybook and called the second officer over. They had done this before, on Tuesdays when a perfectly good system was switched off and everybody in the queue wanted to know why.
The reserve had taken a copy of the index the night before. It brought it up slowly, one book at a time. Beside the old lot number was a cross-reference initialled by the woman who had taught the clerk to read the northern books. She had retired years ago. The clerk turned to the page she had marked, and the two officers bent over the marginal entry the rented model had missed. A strip of land had been taken for a road. The lot number had changed that year. The second officer fetched the survey and checked it against the entry. When the clerk turned the survey round, the daughter put a finger on the bend where her father used to leave his car.
“Right there,” she said, and began to laugh. Her father had parked on that bend for thirty years, although each of his children had explained in turn why it was a wretched place to leave a car. The second officer waited courteously for her to explain what was funny. It would have taken too long. She took her finger off the survey so that he could sign.
The daughter thanked them and folded the receipt along its old crease. After she had gone, the clerk put the survey with the signed entry. She would be glad to have the rented service working properly again. In the meantime she could finish this one herself.
That afternoon she registered the sale.
Amazing piece, as usual. We are witnessing history in the making.