Confession Roulette
"Now that councilors Walker and Lin have joined us, would you kindly explain why my assistant woke me up at six in the morning?" Chairman Yamamoto had a smile on his lips, but steel in his voice. At nearly one hundred and thirty years, he was the eldest of the High Command's council and had been reelected as its chairman for the ninth time last year. This privilege meant his armchair was placed at the head of the oval birch wood table on the top floor of New Endurance's central tower. There were nine replicas of it all around the world, each made of a different sort of wood. It used to be ten, but the oak table had been lost with the fall of Thornwall. Each of them were akin to shellfish, carefully surrounded by layer upon layer of wiretap-proof plating. The built in antenna array sent out its data to a network of unhackeable satellites. They were solely used for council communication; while smaller meetings took place regularly, the full council only convened once...