Top of Europe

Whereas "Top of Europe" is just a marketing nickname for the Jungfraujoch, a saddle between the Jungfrau and Mönch mountains in the Swiss Alps, only a few insiders know anything about the secret organization behind it: the privately held TopEU Institute, or "TEI" in short, headed by Balthasar Schnyder, a Swiss geoengineer who has increased his family-money with Swiss-Crypto-Valley-located Bitcoin startups and subsequent participation in national trickle-down economics.

When the first "artifact" was revealed from the melting glacier, TEI took the lead in financing its investigation that led to the discovery of the others around the globe, either under melting ice or washed away earth of now deforested harshland. Still unknown for their origins, those artifacts have brought not only incredible power but a lot of responsibility as well. Doing it wrong, and even TEI will be toast.

Whoever has placed this technology, it most probably has been to save the obviously still immature humanity from self-destruction.

Whether those "aliens" or ancestors have foreseen a cure TEI has found now for stopping the spread of further pervasive infrastructure destruction, remains speculative as well, but finally rises the question of whether TEI should intervene on the global scale at all or just use its know-how to survive as an island in an otherwise stone-aging, crumbling world. Taking the loss of at least half of the planet's population as a natural consequence for not developing intelligence and morals in parallel with technology is not an easy one to decide: Is potential destruction of ALL humanity by nuclear warfare or the misuse of the new quantum-tech really an argument to set them all back to the swamps and hope that the next civilization does better?

Who wants to be in Balthasar's skin to have this on his or her shoulders? Especially with the urge that every minute counts and that at the end of the day the thing will just unfold regardless of whether a decision has been taken or not. How humbling, when all the money of this world, all the connections, all the technology, cannot do anything to hold it back.