This book was an accident.

I was never aiming to write a book- I was never aiming to write anything but coherent notes about the most complicated case I had ever been hired for in my ten years of psychiatric therapy. Looking back on it, I now realize it was nearly as hard as dealing with the case itself; but that never occurred to me over the weeks and months I spent copying, re-copying, cross-referencing, adding to, paring down, and collating the sheer amount of information I managed to amass.

I didn't realize I even had a story until much later.

I was in New York about a week after the events at the Vatican; desperately trying to keep to myself what information I knew I had in the face of the entire world sent reeling.

I had an office in the Office of Nations' Affairs by then. I was a little late coming back from lunch- perhaps ten minutes- and when I passed Verena at the front desk, I wasn't expecting anything to be going on.

"Were you expecting Signor Vargas?"

I had no idea where that could have come from.

"No?"

"He's in your office."

So I spent a harried minute or so attempting to look more professional than I was prepared to before entering my office, hoping that maybe he'd been sent to explain, or ask for help on behalf of the other Nations to explain to their governments.

Lovino Vargas was there- looking through my notes. He didn't seem to care that I'd walked in and caught him doing something a little less than legal. He just turned the next page and kept reading.

"You're really not supposed to be doing that."

"You think I give a fuck?"

I knew I wasn't going to get the notes back from him until he was ready to give them up, but when I got to my desk I saw that he was reading the abridged version- the bare bones outline of everything I'd heard from my clients since my first meeting six years before.

I sat down at my desk and failed at fighting through my unease about the possibility that client confidentiality was being betrayed.

"You've got a lot of shit here that will never see a history book," Lovino told me after about fifteen minutes. He'd finished the notes by then and had been glaring- or maybe just staring hard- at the stack of paper for about three.

Now he was giving me the same look.

I wasn't sure what he wanted to hear, or if I should press the question of what I supposed to do with my knowledge.

"Are you sure it won't?" I asked. "With everything that's happened?"

Lovino held the glare for a few seconds, spat something angry out under his breath, turned on his heel, and left my office.

To this day I have no idea what he'd come to see me about.

That was not the start of this book.

Not for me, anyway.

My start came a few years later, when I received a call from Arenu Barbar at Hillcaster-Duvanti Publishing.

Despite a good deal of hard work, I had not been completely able to divorce myself from my sister's reputation and actions; though now I know better than to try.

My phone rang and I answered it. I wasn't expecting any calls, but I thought it might have been Rémy, and he'd been delayed at the meeting he was supposed to have before coming for a visit.

Before I could manage to say anything, a woman started talking.

"Keld Schumacher?"

"Yes?"

"This is Arenu Barbar from Hillcaster-Duvanti and I'd like to ask you some questions about your sister."

If there is one thing I hate discussing with people, it's my sister.

The conversation blew up after that point.

Rémy arrived just in time to hear me scream: "My family is none of your business!" and hang up.

One question led to another and soon enough, still furious from the call and not thinking entirely straight, I'd pulled out the abridged notes and all the supplementary material and was pacing around the room ranting while Rémy sat quietly in my armchair and looked through everything.

When he was done, he told me, voice carefully neutral: "You put a lot of effort into this. It's very… thorough."

"Of course I did!" I snapped back at him, and unthinkingly added: "This is my life's work!"

He helped me put everything away, and I was still out of sorts when he left.

The next day, Francis Bonnefoy showed up at my front door and asked for the abridged notes. I wouldn't let him take them, but he managed to wheedle his way into getting to read some of it. He sighed and smiled and tutted disapprovingly over portions for a few minutes before putting the pages down.

"This is the story Lovino told us about."

I told him it wasn't a story, it was his life and the lives of his friends and my case notes, if he wanted a story he should convince the others to call a press conference and explain why things were happening, but he let my words breeze right past him.

"Rémy told me you got a call from a publishing house… who was it?"

I refused to tell him. He let me get about sentence in before waving at me to stop talking.

"No no no, this will not do," Francis told me. "You must call this person back and tell her you have the information she wants."

I said I wouldn't and he said I would and it went back and forth for I don't know how long until Francis slammed his hand down on my kitchen table and pointed dramatically at me.

"You will call Ms. Barbar back because there is no one who can do what you can!"

I had to pause for a moment to try and figure out what he meant, but he moved straight on to his point.

"You know about what happened with us, with all of us, why the world has been turned upside down. No one else can tell it but you and Ms. Barbar wants information- if you do not tell her the truth, she will go somewhere else to get information on your sister, and the story will be incomplete! They will know only of what your sister did, and never suspect the connections- and the larger picture must be seen, Mijnheer Schumacher."

He stayed in my kitchen until I looked up Arenu Barbar's number on the publisher's website and called her back, despite my misgivings about confidentiality and the nondisclosure paperwork I'd signed as part of the job. The only thing that kept me from immediately hanging up when the ringing began was Francis lurking behind me.

"Ms. Barbar, this is Keld Schumacher," I told her when the line picked up. "I'm sorry for reacting the way I did when you asked about my sister."

"I understand," she replied. "It was rather crass of me, and I understand if you don't want to discuss-"

"I've been authorized to give you a better deal."

A sharp silence descended.

"'Authorized'?" she asked. "What do you mean?"

Francis, listening in carefully, spoke before I could reply.

"Tell her you can write it."

I shook my head frantically at him, but it didn't help.

"Tell her you worked for the European Union and now you work for the United Nations and you are employed to be the Nations' psychologist and that you can tell the world why the Vatican happened, how the Second Unification came to be, where the ships came from- all of it."

I covered the phone with a hand and hissed: "France!"in indignation, but he fixed me with a look I'd seen before- the look of a Nation giving an order.

"We know the people have to be told," he said. "And we haven't decided how, but we've agreed we must. You have most of the basic work done already, and we can arrange for you to learn the rest."

I still could have told him no. I still could have hung up on Ms. Babar.

I could have done a lot of things.

But in that moment I remembered the countless sessions I'd had, the things I'd been told, the people I'd met, what I'd learned. I remembered Lovino, standing on the other side of my desk, telling me that what I'd written- what I knew- would never be in history books, because these sorts of things never were.

But the world had changed, hadn't it? Shouldn't this, as well?

I realized that if I didn't do as Francis had told me to, the stories of the Nations whose lives were so intimately connected to the whatever dry list of facts that would appear in the history books would never get a chance to be known. The truth would stay untold, or else be laboriously dug up and haphazardly pieced together and argued over until no one would ever be able to tell what was conjecture and what wasn't.

So I repeated what Francis had told me to say to Arenu Barbar, and during the flurry of questions that followed, I realized that I was doing the right thing.

Arenu Barbar was the Head Editor for Hillcaster-Duvanti Publishers in Brussels. We spent a solid week on the phone discussing everything we could possibly think up to ask each other and hashing out some initial guidelines for how the book would go.

Meanwhile, without input from either of us, France presented his impromptu solution to the other Nations and their children, who worked the idea over.

I told Arenu I'd never written a book before and she dismissed it, saying there was a reason editors had a job. She'd handle the manuscript personally.

I was more than happy to let her handle the technical aspects of writing I had no experience in. I gave her only one demand for the book itself, word passed on from Canada- whenever a draft was finished and edited, before anything else could be done with it, it had to be approved by the Nations.

Arenu had no end of objections to this- it would compromise my vision, it would bias the story, international politics would have everyone trying to make themselves look better and it would never go anywhere.

I told her that I was writing about their lives, and they had the final say about what I got to tell the world about them.

We didn't speak for a month after that, but I started on the first draft despite this, and Arenu called me back when I was halfway done to agree to my terms.

In the end, there were only two official drafts of this book.

The first was written by expanding and cutting away at my abridged notes for eighteen months, adding in what personal recollections I had and the ones I gathered from interviews of the Nations and their children, before sending it off for editing. There are roughly one hundred copies of this draft in existence- my copy, the copy Arenu edited, and one for each Nation who had more than a background appearance in the story.

The deliberation over the first draft took up a full two months of meetings that I was later told ranged from a full day's session in the UN itself to five minutes in a back alley of some Alpine village hiding from the consequences of a joke gone wrong.

Eventually, I got two copies of the manuscripts back, one with Arenu's edits and a collective one from the Nations, covered in Zell Beilschmidt's handwritten annotations.

The second draft took nearly three times as long as the first. There are three copies of that draft- mine, the one with Arenu's edits, and one group copy from the Nations, completely unmarked except for one word on the title page.

'Wait'

We waited seventy-nine years and eight months to publish the book you now hold in your hands.

I often asked why we had to wait when I had been all but ordered to write the book in the first place- especially when the point of the work was to inform the public, and some of the information was already being given, in fits and spurts. The answers I got ranged from "It's still too soon, Herr Schumacher, I'm sorry," to "Because we damn well told you to!" .

I think I know the true reasons.

They are twofold-

One, force of habit. It's a hard thing, to stay deliberately in the background for centuries, and then decide to tell the universe things you never intended for a wider audience. To open yourself up for censure, and critique, and ridicule; to air your shame and your fear. It's easier not to.

Two, protective instinct. Many of their children are dead or dying now, just as I am, and this is their story and their lives just as much as it is their parents. Much of the information not directly related to the political situations I gathered through interviews with them- at least half of this book is theirs; and I'm certain that their parents wanted to give them as much privacy as possible.

If you take nothing else from this book, please, know that the one thing that can never be doubted about Nations is that their children are very dear to them, and they love them greatly, whether they are still in this world, have departed for the next, or relocated to another completely.

Some of the names in this book you may have heard before- many you have not, and never will again. All of the things you read within, no matter how far-fetched they seem, actually occurred. I have done my best to portray the events as they happened, using the information that was reported to me. No names or characteristics of any persons have been changed to preserve anonymity. All facts not relating in the majority to personal experiences are verifiable through the public record.

I hope you the history I have to tell in these pages means as much to you as it does to the people who lived it.

Keld Schumacher
Amsterdam
May 2135

Author's Notes

This story was original written for the technical capabilities of AO3, and can be found in that format at the AO3 URL /works/663283/chapters/1210259