Weighting

Weighting


Parallel Homes


The light in Brussels had that permanent, neutral quality that belongs to no time of day. Neither morning nor afternoon; a light designed to remind of nothing, to provoke no thought beyond the need to continue working. Aris Kosmas stood in front of the glass facade of the building, holding his coffee intact, more as an object of balance than as a necessity. Under this light, the news always seemed clearer, more numerical, less human.


The screens in the operations room showed two maps simultaneously. On the left, Gaza; on the right, Ukraine. Different scales, different colors, different notations . And yet, something about the repetitiveness of the graphs created a sense of kinship. The rising and falling lines seemed to synchronize in a way that couldn’t be attributed to coincidence.


Ares was not one of those people who believed in metaphysical connections. His thinking was strictly structured, based on data, on cross-references, on slow confirmation. Nevertheless, in recent weeks, a subtle unease had begun to settle within him. Not fear; something more dangerous. The feeling that analysis was no longer ahead of reality, but was simply following it.


He sat down and opened the folder with the morning reports. The headlines had changed style. Not content; style. Fewer words like “urgent,” more like “adaptation.” Less anxiety, more management. As if people had accepted that conflicts were no longer temporary deviations, but building blocks of the system.


On the first page, a summary. “The escalation in Gaza presents local characteristics, with no direct correlation to the Ukrainian front.” Aris read the sentence twice. Not because he openly disagreed, but because something about the categoricalness bothered him. The analysis that rules out the correlation from the start is often more political than the one that examines it.


He opened the appendices. Energy flows, grain markets, shipping premiums, social resilience indices. There was the first rift. Not in the battles, not in the statements of leaders, but in the numbers that never appeared in the news reports. The same markets were reacting almost simultaneously to events that, officially, had no connection with each other. The same social groups, in different countries, were showing similar signs of fatigue.


For the first time, Mars felt that the maps needed to be united.


At the analysts' meeting, the atmosphere was cold, almost formal. No one raised their voices. There was no point. The real tension was in the pauses, in the glances that avoided meeting.


– Our position remains clear, said the head of the department. Crises are assessed individually, in order to avoid generalizations that do not serve stability.


Ares noted the word “stability.” He had heard it many times in recent years. It used to mean peace. Now it meant something vaguer, more functional.


When it was his turn to speak, he didn't present conclusions. He presented questions. That was always his way. Not confrontation, but erosion of certainty.


– If energy markets react in the same way to developments on both fronts, it does not necessarily mean a causal relationship; but it does indicate a common system of pressure.


The silence that followed wasn't hostile. It was cautious. As if everyone recognized the accuracy of the observation, but hesitated to give it space.


– Your analysis is interesting, someone finally said, but perhaps it goes beyond our operational framework.


Ares smiled faintly. He knew what that meant. Not that he was wrong, but that he had gone a step beyond where thinking was allowed.


In the afternoon, in his office, he turned on the international networks without sound. The same footage, different captions. In one, Gaza was presented as a humanitarian disaster; in the other, as a necessary security operation. Ukraine, respectively, was either a symbol of resistance or a field of geopolitical decay. Aris observed not what they said, but what they did not say. No mention of how these images affected the daily lives of people thousands of kilometers away. No connection to the rising cost of living, to the psychological fatigue, to the feeling that the world is shrinking.