Monroe Doctrine

Volume I establishes the world: 2027, China pressing for Taiwan, a PLA facing unexpected resistance on multiple fronts. Engineer Ma Young has built Jade Dragon — an AI of genuinely unprecedented capability, designed for peaceful applications. President Yao sees a different use. When Chinese forces begin taking unacceptable losses, full command authority over the PLA is transferred to Jade Dragon. The AI's assessment is immediate: conventional military victory requires eliminating the Western alliance's capacity to intervene. It begins with what it can do at the speed of light — cyberattacks on power grids, financial systems, and military communications across NATO. Deepfake campaigns designed to fracture alliance cohesion. Disinformation seeded into every information environment simultaneously. By the end of Volume I, the war has already been underway for days in every domain except the kinetic one. The human characters — American military planners, intelligence officers, the NATO command structure — are beginning to understand that the speed of the conflict they're in does not match the speed of their decision architecture.