I don't want to write this chapter.
Here's the truth of that. I've been writing a book about people getting extremely creative with a new class of weapon — AI-generated satire, meme-videos as diplomatic instrument, the whole creative arms race that showed up in 2026 — and I could very happily spend five hundred pages walking you through that story without mentioning, in a load-bearing way, that under the creativity is an actual war with actual dead people whose actual deaths didn't happen inside a joke.
But the book doesn't work if I don't.