Endless September

ultrashort SF: last contact
The UFO was no bigger than a houseboat. The blurry photos were mostly a silhouette, not really a craft but an icon.
It didn't even travel, but manifested itself through Everett branching.
The aliens split up across as many timelines as the complexity of the world they visited. In less than a day, the whole Earth had been surveyed.
In most timelines, they seemed to focus on some remote area, a smudge on the horizon from a ship at sea, a dark visitation or nightmare in some crowded city apartment.
In some possible timeline, they visited EVERYONE.

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Along with many other problems, there is a useless dumb war going on in Eastern Europe at the moment. Like most major blunders, it was simply too awkward to reverse.
The weird thing is that much more could be done about our problems than we allow ourselves to believe.
Make a list of all possible sentences. Then, take those sentences that describe actions. Of all possible actions that could be taken, which one would be the most useful? It would go in many directions at once, islands in latent space and all that. Remote but larger incentives against the sacrifices.
For some reason, the simplest things can appear the most difficult. I wrote about this before. For decades now I can't even copy and paste or remove blank lines without time-wasting hassle. Oceans of lost time.
The world has always been inverted this way, but you can't talk about it. Instead of making things simpler, they add nasty control layers and bureaucratic complexification without end. All these things we don't understand but have to deal with are the reason that awareness even exists.

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I wrote a book called "Infinite Thunder" set in 2041, in a world that had an AI slowdown.
Because of some limit to Moore's Law, they even kept old CPUs and memory chips in service for many years longer, in remotely installed data centers. That meant that progress depended more on improving human minds, by inventing smarter (instead of brutally overpowered) mind extension software. And that in turn allowed for the existence of massive conspiracies, that themselves could be seen as "group minds".
Of course, tech limitations were used much more famously in the "Dune" series by Frank Herbert.

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Normally I love anniversaries.
After the hijacked airliner attacks of 2001, the most stressful thing was that nothing else happened.
I was furious because no one else was righteously furious. That was the real shock. Instead, there was a whole lot of maudlin sentimentality, that continues up to the present day (especially on Reddit).
It wasn't the start of a war, but an endless defeat. The first day of the End of News. And the majority went right along with it.