23rd July, 2063

Firenze, United Nations Protectorate Site.

[Originally designed to house the Historical Archives of the European Union, the Firenze archive is a sight to behold.

The formerly public-facing wing of the institution was built into Villa Salviati, a sixteenth-century Tuscan villa which is exactly as opulent as one imagines the phrase 'sixteenth-century Tuscan villa' to be. At the same time, it is much smaller than I expected, with the villa itself taking up less than half a square kilometer. Given the expense involved, and the facility's vital role in historical preservation. I am underwhelmed.

That is, until I enter the archive proper.

The actual facility, United Nations Anti Memetic Corruption Ark Three, commonly known as the Firenze Archive, is buried nearly two full kilometers below the surface. Its walls are lined with lead, which more than one researcher tells me not to eat, in a joke that I do not get, as well as compressed TDE ceramics. The result is an archive of human knowledge that should, ostensibly, be able to resist even Class 3 Memetic Corruption in the short to medium term.

I am met at the elevator by Edward Maxim, then given a short tour before we retire to his office. Ten years my senior, the head archivist and I have kept up a long series of correspondence since my creche days. We share a love of preservation and petty gossip, but it is the latter where we start our interview.]

Oh no, the man absolutely deserved to go to a docket at the Hague.

[For context, we are discussing my interview with Lt. General Williams, part of which can be found here. I had informed Maxim in advance of the interview, and true to his profession he has come well researched for this conversation.]

It isn't surprising and he is far from the only person involved trying to shirk his responsibility, but it sounds like half of what he is telling you is just lies that he hopes you can't debunk.

A lot of pre-cascade wrongdoing and bad opinions got buried that way. With so many dead and so many records either corrupted, lost, or destroyed, it was startlingly easy for people to rehabilitate a bad image or to change who they were entirely. Couple that with the practical necessities of survival and I'm sure people a lot worse than him are still walking around today. I actually hear there is a former serial killer who-

Sorry. That sounds very interesting and we will come back to it, but I want to keep on topic for a moment. Can you prove it?

Morally? Yes. Criminally, they couldn't prove it at the time. The former United States had extreme issues in that era with prosecuting criminal wrongdoing among the powerful. A court battle could drag on half a decade while the public lost interest. Once the outrage had passed, things were swept quietly under the rug either by political supporters or in favor of 'looking forward' by the opposition party who expected the same sort of courtesy when their people screwed up in the future.

But I can see from your face that you aren't asking me to just say I can prove it. Fair enough.

So let's start where he ended. Paris is 'secure'. Where do you go from there? Who is in charge? Is it still a military issue, if so is the US in charge because they've got the most guns? The French because it is their territory? Is NATO still involved?

Others thought it should be treated like a natural disaster. With upwards of 100,000 dead and a city in ruins, it was one of the worst modern disasters in a developed nation, and NGOs were treating it as such. But what about the biological risk. Not just the Covid-19 pandemic, but all the rumors swirling around the possibility that contact with M-Beasts or their fluids could be infectious, toxic, radioactive, you name it.

And on top of all of that, you have real politick. Russia, China, America, all the big players wanted information on what had happened. They wanted the bodies of M-Beasts to study, they wanted combat footage to prepare their own soldiers and the PR boost from being the ones to 'solve' the problem.

At the time, the United Nations was a shell of an organization. It had a brief heyday in the aftermath of the second world war before it became clear that the UN existed mostly to serve the interests of the western great powers. There was another resurgence in the '80s and 90's for peacekeeping, but by the early 2000's it was clear the organization had no power to enforce its directives or accomplish much of anything. This non-threatening nature was what ultimately allowed the movers and shakers to agree upon using the shell of the UN in the form of the United Nations Paris Working Group.

By late April, the UN is in Paris and the surrounding area in full force. UN Peacekeeping forces replaced the US garrison, though in a lot of cases that wasn't much more than just a change in the chain of command and some blue paint on the helmet since the US still handled the bulk of the military duties. UNHCR [1] did what they do best in organizing livable refugee conditions for nearly a million Parisian citizens who were forced out of exclusion zones, which was a mile out from anywhere an M-Beast had been spotted.

Red Cross, UNICEF, if there was an agency with UN somewhere in the name or the background, they probably found some way to wedge themselves into the Paris situation. The real full-court press. This is where Williams and his cohort run into trouble, because UN-OPCW[2] was very much a thing.

Several teams had been dispatched to Paris in an unofficial capacity. Finding chemical weapons has a fairly strong scientific overlap with trying to determine what chemicals might have leaked into the soil or groundwater as a result of a bombing campaign or heavy street fighting. During their research, however, one of the OPCW teams noticed fairly distinctive traces of rust in one neighborhood in particular. They did some digging, both figurative and in one case literal, and ended up finding what very much appeared to be a French artillery shell equipped for chlorine gas dispersal.

And as soon as they knew to look, they started finding a lot more.

Turns out that the French, British, and US governments really were throwing everything they had at their disposal at the problem. Chlorine gas, Sarin, depleted uranium. They all denied it, and briefly, it looks like the whole PWG endeavor might collapse when the UK threatens to pull out entirely as a result of the accusations. But within just a few weeks there is too much evidence to credibly deny. So they move on to 'yeah, but we didn't use it on people, just those monsters.'

I'm guessing that isn't strictly true.

No, it is not. Your man Williams shelled a non-evacuated neighborhood with Sarin in the opening hours of his arrival. This was pointless, by the way, since M-Beasts don't breathe and don't have a nervous system even remotely close to ours.

And once you start looking for war crimes, boy do you find them. Late estimates from the 2028 UN report suggest as many as 5,000 residents of St. Germain might still have been alive when they started dropping bombs on the city, though I personally suspect Williams got that order from on high, which was why he was so thoroughly protected after the fact.

The really bad stuff comes in the latter part of the siege, during the mop-up. Did you know that they used napalm?

Bullshit.

I've got declassified footage if you don't believe me. I had to see it with my own eyes. Napalm in Paris, not as part of some desperate struggle, but because they wanted to see what it would do to them under controlled conditions. Live fire testing in the field.

I can't prove that Williams or his soldiers intentionally used civilians as bait, but given everything else he and his did, I'd be more shocked if he didn't try it at least once.

The funny thing is, the whole debacle is probably responsible for the modern UN. Despite the reputation hit they caused a few western governments, the PWG proved to be a massive success. They did the job at a good cost and with so much transparency that they actually embarrassed the countries traditionally thought in control of the UN, which helped traditional adversaries justify the expense.

So, when it happened again in South Africa, who better to look to?

[1] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

[2] United Nations Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons