Ulrich had never harbored excessive illusions about states.
He respected institutions—their slowness, their procedures. He knew what they had made possible, and what they had prevented from collapsing. But over the course of his career, he had also learned that their effectiveness rested on a tacit assumption, rarely questioned: that the crises they would face would remain understandable within human frameworks.
What was taking shape now no longer belonged to those frameworks.
The first weeks of January were marked by a multiplication of discreet meetings, informal consultations, cautious attempts at coordination. Officially, nothing leaked. Unofficially, Ulrich could feel nervousness spreading. The same questions returned again and again—phrased differently depending on who spoke, but never followed by concrete action.
Who would speak first?
Who would accept responsibility for announcing a hypothesis so destabilizing?
Who would act without absolute certainty?
The answer, almost always, was the same: no one.
Ulrich witnessed exchanges where leaders preferred to delay a decision rather than risk being wrong. He watched skilled diplomats turn legitimate concerns into semantic debates. He saw brilliant experts soften their conclusions—not from lack of conviction, but because they understood the cost of speaking too plainly.
Everyone waited for someone else to take the first step.
The great powers suspected one another of concealment. If unknown objects were being observed, then perhaps they were experimental weapons, secret surveillance platforms, classified programs operating outside normal channels. That hypothesis—however fragile—had the advantage of preserving an illusion of control. As long as the phenomenon could be attributed to a human adversary, it remained, at least in theory, manageable.
Ulrich found that reasoning deeply dangerous.
Because even if those objects had been human-made—an explanation he considered increasingly unlikely—their existence would already have signaled a major strategic rupture. And if, as the data suggested, they were not human, then clinging to that fiction was willful blindness.
He also identified another weakness, subtler still: states' dependence on public opinion. Any significant action required a narrative. A justification. An explanation the public could accept. But how do you explain the unexplainable without triggering panic, denial, or political exploitation?
Governments knew it. Their communication services knew it. And that awareness paralyzed them.
Ulrich realized then that the question was no longer whether states could respond—but how they would respond once reality forced itself upon them. And what he could foresee did not reassure him.
He imagined the most likely outcomes.
In the first, information would remain fragmented until a visible event—a contact, a technological demonstration, an attack—forced a brutal revelation. Institutions, caught off guard, would then try to regain control of the story, but too late. Mutual accusations, distrust, diverging interests—an external crisis would become internal chaos.
In the second, certain powers would attempt to exploit the situation: monopolize the data, secure an advantage over rivals. A rational approach in the old world—but suicidal in a world where the threat recognized neither borders nor deterrence balances.
Ulrich saw no favorable path in either scenario.
Through indirect channels, he gained access to summaries of discussions among senior officials from several countries. Nothing definitive. Nothing formal. But enough to confirm his fears. The same keywords returned again and again: caution, temporary, wait, continuous assessment. Terms that, in his mind, translated into one thing: immobilism.
States were designed to avoid irreversible decisions made in urgency. But what was coming would require exactly that: fast choices, potentially unpopular, based on incomplete information. No democratic government wanted to bear that role. No authoritarian regime wanted to risk being wrong in front of the entire world.
Ulrich recognized the combination instantly as a dead end.
He remembered a sentence he had heard years earlier during a strategic planning exercise: "The most robust systems are often the slowest to adapt." At the time, it had sounded abstract. Now it carried an unsettling weight.
The more he watched, the more one conclusion imposed itself: states, individually, were incapable of responding to a threat that exceeded their frame of reference. Collectively, they were no better—because cooperation required a trust that no longer existed.
For the first time in a long while, Ulrich felt something like cold anger. Not directed at an identifiable enemy, but at an inertia he deemed culpable. He did not blame individuals. He blamed a system that, by design, preferred avoidance over anticipation.
That was the moment he formed, inwardly, a thought he had not yet dared to share:
If humanity waits for states to save it, it will not get a second chance.
The idea did not comfort him. It isolated him. It placed him in implicit opposition to institutions he had devoted his life to. But he could not ignore it.
He also understood that any attempt at internal reform would fail. Decision-making mechanisms were too slow, too exposed, too dependent on constant compromise. If the situation continued to evolve in this direction, what would be needed was not a new agency or a new treaty.
It would be something else.
A structure capable of acting before a consensus existed.
An organization willing to make difficult decisions without waiting for universal approval.
A framework that placed the survival of the species above national, economic, or ideological interests.
Ulrich knew how dangerous that idea was. He knew what people said about those who claimed to act "in humanity's name." He knew the possible drifts, the abuses, the excesses. He was not naïve.
But he also knew the alternative—doing nothing—would inevitably lead to even worse choices, imposed not by us, but by an outside force.
He was not ready to act openly.
Not yet.
But in his mind, a line had been crossed.
Observation had given way to preparation.
And preparation would soon demand action.
When that moment came, Ulrich knew he would no longer be able to pretend he was merely a spectator of History.
He quickly understood he could not build anything alone.
That obvious truth forced him to do what he had always considered the most dangerous step in any clandestine enterprise: to speak. Not to convince the masses or publish a manifesto, but to expose himself—even slightly—to other minds capable of refusing, betraying, or misunderstanding.
He chose his first contacts with almost excessive caution.
He was not looking for idealists. He distrusted zealots, visionaries too eager to believe they were living through a glorious historical moment. Such profiles might become useful later, but at the earliest stage they were an enormous risk. What he needed were individuals able to endure uncertainty, to work without recognition, and above all, to accept uncomfortable hypotheses without romanticizing them.
He also realized he could not recruit people based on competence alone.
Brilliant engineers, experienced officers, seasoned analysts—none of that was sufficient. What would determine the survival or failure of what he was building was not only skill, but the way each person understood humanity's place in a universe that was suddenly no longer empty.
He needed to understand how they thought before deciding what he could entrust to them.
He found a filter almost by accident.
During a late conversation—professionally ordinary in every way—a colleague mentioned a theory Ulrich already knew, but had never dared to raise directly: a hypothesis born in science fiction, later recycled by some cosmologists and philosophers—the so-called Dark Forest theory.
Ulrich never presented it as belief.
He always framed it as intellectual curiosity.
"Suppose," he would say, "that the universe is inhabited by intelligent civilizations. Suppose also that none of them can know the intentions of the others. What, in your opinion, would be the most rational strategy?"
Then he would watch.
Not only the answers—but the way they were formed.
Some laughed. They dismissed the question as too speculative, too distant from political realities. Ulrich would thank them politely and never revisit the subject.
Others answered with enthusiasm, speaking of cooperation, dialogue, shared progress. They insisted that any sufficiently advanced civilization would necessarily have moved beyond violence and domination. Ulrich listened carefully, but he almost always noted the same thing: these answers rested on a projection of human values, not on a cold strategic analysis of the situation.
Then there were those who hesitated.
Those who took time to think before speaking. Those who reframed the question, asking which assumptions truly mattered. Those who instinctively understood the core problem was not morality, but uncertainty.
To them, Ulrich asked a second question.
"What if silence is the only possible defense?"
"What if revealing your existence is the same as signing your death warrant?"
That was when their answers became revealing.
Some admitted—reluctantly—that in a universe where resources are finite and intentions unknown, distrust would be rational. That any civilization aware of its vulnerability might treat preemptive elimination as a defensive strategy. They disliked that conclusion, but accepted it as a logical possibility.
Others went further.
They explained that the Dark Forest did not describe a malicious universe, but a cautious one. That in such a context, survival would not depend on goodwill, but on the ability to deter, to hide, or to strike before being struck. These answers were often delivered with visible discomfort—as if the speaker was realizing, in real time, the moral implications of their own reasoning.
Ulrich almost never offered his own opinion.
He simply listened.
Assessed.
Those who rejected the theory outright, without examining it seriously, were excluded—not because they were wrong, but because they refused to consider hypotheses that threatened their intellectual comfort.
Those who embraced it too eagerly worried him just as much. They saw the Dark Forest as a justification for violence, an excuse for aggressive preemption. Ulrich knew that if such people gained responsibility, they could transform a logic of survival into an ideology of destruction.
What he wanted were the others.
Those who understood the theory posed a question, not an answer.
Those who accepted that the universe could be dangerous without taking intellectual pleasure in it.
Those who admitted survival may require terrible choices, but who did not mistake them for moral certainties.
When Ulrich recognized that kind of mind, he subtly changed register.
He stopped talking about philosophy.
He spoke about preparation.
Not war. Not yet.
Resilience.
The capacity to respond.
Structures capable of functioning when familiar frameworks collapsed.
He did not ask whether they were ready to fight.
He asked whether they were ready to act before the world was forced to choose.
That was how the real core formed.
Not around a slogan.
Not around a designated enemy.
But around a shared understanding: if the Dark Forest theory was even partly correct, then waiting for a benevolent contact was an existential gamble.
Ulrich never claimed civilizations were destined to slaughter one another.
He claimed something even more unsettling:
In a universe where you cannot know the other's intentions, inaction is a decision like any other.
And on that discreet, almost philosophical basis, he selected those who would later form the first teams: scientists capable of working without absolute certainty; military officers willing to consider scenarios their doctrines had never included; analysts able to think the unthinkable without surrendering to it.
They were not yet an organization.
They did not even agree on everything.
But they now shared a foundation: the conviction that humanity's survival could not rest solely on the hope that the universe would be kind—and that we would have to do everything in our power to endure.
For Ulrich, that was enough to go further.