August 5–6:
Preparations for the Copenhagen concert are underway, though it’s difficult to call it “preparation” in any spirited sense. The city is quiet—too quiet. A smooth, slow, gray place, where even the birds fly in formation. Everything and everyone feels sedated. Not chemically, just… culturally. The surveillance is so thick you could bottle it, and I’m fairly sure you can get on a government watchlist here for smiling at the wrong statue. Though honestly, that’s redundant—everyone’s already on at least one list. Or twelve.
Halo, of course, insists on her usual cultural immersion routine. Sightseeing, handshakes, interviews with local artists. Vanya is losing her mind trying to schedule magical protection for it all. If I didn't know better, I'd say she's taken a mild interest in the Principal's well-being. I’ve taken to sipping corporate-grade espresso and pretending I’m on vacation. The perks of being the man with the plan.
August 7:
Concert day. The stadium is full, but not with fans in the usual sense—mostly bureaucrats, affiliated families, and a handful of approved influencers. The kind who know better than to go off-message. Halo had insisted on full simsense transmission rights and total artistic freedom. The SSU agreed, somewhat reluctantly, because the alternative was no show at all.
To her credit, Halo chose not to provoke. She could have critiqued the suffocating surveillance state, or the absolute homogeneity of public life. Instead, she turned the spotlight on older ideals: shared pride, historical continuity, collective achievement. She managed to find the heart inside the machine and sing to it.
Naturally, this means the Matrix is now flooded with accusations that Halo is shilling for communism. Again.
August 8:
Short hop across Skagerrak to Oslo, where the so-called “private concert” is set to take place in Bygdøy—the neo-Nordic purity district. Picture a high-budget LARP village where less than 2,000 citizens live out a curated fantasy of Norse tradition, untouched by modernity or foreign influence. The place is all longhouses, runestones, and suspiciously well-groomed wolves.
We spend the day acclimating. Halo will be performing for a tight crowd of SU dignitaries. It’s equal parts political theater and cultural display. But the content? Entirely hers. She leans hard into the mythic and magical—the stuff people whisper about but don’t say out loud in the Union. Spirits in the fjords. Old gods that never left. Blood oaths and wyrd fates. The audience, to their credit, listens.
After the afterparty, Halo and I bid Astrid Nygård farewell. She’s in high spirits. So are we. We'd like to stay longer, but Berlin is just around the corner, and we must be off. Also, it'll be nice for the Grey Suits to spend some quality time together without everything being streamed. Let their hair down, so to speak.
August 9:
Just as we prepare to depart, the Matrix glitches. Not just a hiccup—widespread blackouts, scrambling, and outages across the Union. No one knows what’s going on. The Matrix fills with theories, as it always does. But for now, we board our flight, leaving the cold whispers of the North behind.
Touchdown in Berlin—early morning. Time to reboot.
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