The Atlas Project

Corporal Riley was summoned to Yuan Shikai's office for the third time. Each visit had marked a further step down a path he never intended to walk. The first had been a probe, the second a seduction. This time, the pretense of a friendly chat, of a "business consultation," was gone entirely. The air in the room was cold and sharp with purpose.

Yuan Shikai was not seated behind his desk. He stood before a massive, newly installed map of the United States that dominated an entire wall. It was not a simple commercial map like the one he had shown Riley before. This one was terrifying in its detail, a military-grade strategic chart showing not just railways and cities, but topographical features, major industrial sites, power grids, and resource deposits. It was a nation's anatomy, laid bare for dissection. The map was studded with dozens of small, colored pins, clustered in specific, vulnerable locations. Yuan stood before it like a general planning a campaign, a dark, imposing silhouette against the vastness of Riley's homeland.

He turned as Riley entered, his eyes gleaming with a cold, intellectual fire. There was no welcome, no offer of tea. The time for seduction was over.

"Corporal," Yuan began, his voice cold and commanding, "your previous insights were most valuable. They have confirmed my deepest theories. The American nation is a titan, yes, but it is a titan with a glass jaw. Its perceived strength is its industry, spread across a vast continent. Its true weakness is the great distance that industry must travel to connect with itself."

He gestured expansively at the map, at the spiderweb of lines and pins. "Welcome to Project Atlas, Corporal. This is your new assignment."

Riley's mouth was dry. He stared at the map, at the pins marking places he knew—Pittsburgh, the Chicago rail yards, the mountain passes of the Rockies.

"The Emperor," Yuan said, a subtle, almost imperceptible note of disdain in his voice, "believes in wars of armies and navies. Clashing steel, sinking ships. It is a primitive, costly approach. I believe in a more elegant, more modern form of warfare. The war of economic strangulation."

He walked along the map, his finger tracing the path of the transcontinental railroad. "Why invade a country when you can starve it into submission? Why send a million men to die on foreign shores when a few dozen, properly placed, can cause the entire edifice to collapse from within? Project Atlas is a comprehensive, multi-phase plan to identify and create the means to disrupt the American industrial supply chain at will. We will not conquer America, Corporal. We will turn off its power."

Yuan turned to face him, fixing him with an intense stare. "And you, Corporal, have a vital role to play. You are no longer just a source of quaint trivia. You are to be this project's 'authenticity analyst.'"

Riley frowned, confused. "Authenticity analyst?"

"Precisely. My spies, for all their skill, are Chinese. They can bring me data—shipping manifests, factory output statistics, railway schedules. They can tell me what a system is. But they cannot bring me the soul of the country. They cannot tell me how it thinks, how it feels. You can. I will show you our operational plans, and you will tell me if they feel… American. You will tell me if the logic holds, if the psychology is sound. You will be my instrument for judging psychological feasibility."

He strode back to the map and pointed to a dense cluster of red pins in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. "Let us begin with your first task. Coal country," he said. "The black heart of American industry. Every steel mill in Pittsburgh, every factory in Detroit, every warship built in Philadelphia is powered by the coal torn from these mountains. And the men who work those mines… they are a special breed, are they not? Fiercely proud, independent, historically hostile to authority, whether it comes from a distant government in Washington or a wealthy owner in New York."

Yuan turned to Madame Song, who handed him a thick dossier, bound in black leather. He handed it to Riley.

"Our agents propose a coordinated operation. We will secretly fund the most radical elements within their miners' unions. We will use propaganda to amplify their existing grievances—low pay, dangerous conditions, the use of company thugs. The goal is to instigate a massive, coordinated strike at the height of winter. A strike so complete it would cripple American steel production for months and shut down the entire eastern seaboard. A nation that cannot build cannot fight."

He tapped the dossier in Riley's hands. "Read this. It contains my agents' profiles of the key union leaders, their psychological assessments, their proposed methods of approach. I want you to tell me where they are wrong. They see men as assets to be manipulated. I want you to tell me what will truly move them. Tell me which leaders are true believers, men who might be swayed by a powerful ideology of workers' rights, and which are merely greedy, venal men who can be bought with simple cash. Tell me which grievances are real and which are imagined. Tell me… how an American would do this."

This was the moment. The final, irrevocable step. Before, Riley had been able to tell himself he was just talking, just giving opinions to stay alive. This was different. This was active, willing participation in an act of sophisticated treason against his own country. He could refuse. He could throw the file on the floor, spit in Yuan's face like Captain Stone would have, and accept his fate—a return to the cold chains of his cell, to rot in the darkness until he died.

He looked at Yuan's cold, expectant face. He thought of the simple comfort of the books, the taste of the warm food, the quiet pity in Madame Song's eyes. He thought of the suffocating, judgmental silence of Captain Stone. A part of him, a broken, pragmatic part that he despised, admitted that he had already made this choice, piece by piece, over the past several weeks. Survival had its own inexorable logic.

With a hand that trembled almost imperceptibly, he took the dossier. Its weight felt immense, a physical burden on his soul.

Yuan Shikai permitted himself a thin, satisfied nod. "Excellent. Madame Song will provide you with a workspace, and anything else you may require. Pens, paper, more detailed maps. Read the file. Give me your analysis by the end of the week. Do not disappoint me, Corporal."

The title on the dossier's cover was stark, written in clean English block letters: "PROJECT ATLAS: PHASE ONE – APPALACHIA."

Riley was escorted by Madame Song to a small, adjoining office. He sat down at the desk, the heavy file before him. He opened it. He saw the faces of American men, miners with coal dust etched into the lines of their faces, union leaders with fiery eyes. He saw plans to turn their hopes and their anger into a weapon against their own nation. The words on the page blurred before his eyes.

He was no longer Corporal Riley of the United States Marine Corps. He was Analyst Riley of Project Atlas, Yuan Shikai's chosen instrument in a secret war his country did not even know was being fought.