European Council 2050

The European Council gathers in 2050 in the twentieth month of an illness nobody has been able to explain. It spreads through ordinary contact, hides for years before it shows, and takes the mind long before it takes the body, leaving patients awake, mobile, and unreachable. Three facts about the protein that causes it have never been reconciled with anything in the biological record, and the earliest tissue samples cluster along the debris footprint of an atmospheric entry event in 2031 that three national agencies investigated as an ordinary meteor and closed inside the year. Europe found out second, and that is the shape of the whole crisis. The Union does not own the compute its hospitals and borders run on, it has never seen the code inside the neural interfaces a hundred and eighty million of its citizens wear, and the only test that identifies a carrier depends on a reagent made at one facility outside its jurisdiction. Internal borders are going back up one government at a time, and the states that hold the compute and the answers are offering both on terms Europe would have refused two years ago. Delegates will represent EU heads of state and government, forced to decide what the Union is willing to do together, what it will permit its members to do alone, and whether those two answers can be made compatible. This is a full crisis committee, with a front room for formal Council debate and a back room for the private deals, rivalries, and pressure campaigns member states will use to protect their own interests.