In a world shaken by crisis, one idea changed everything. This novel traces the rise of Trigonocracy—a new form of government that challenged the global order—and the quiet story behind its creation.
Told through the reflections of a war veteran, his children, and the generations shaped by reform, this novel explores how a single manuscript sparked a movement. But behind the author of this reform lies a truth few ever suspected: the idea was born not in the halls of power, but in the mind of a refugee child who had lost everything, yet dared to imagine a better world.
Blending historical fiction with philosophical depth, May We Trust is a story about resilience, anonymity, and the fragile line between progress and upheaval. It asks: if the world embraced an idea without knowing its origin—can it still claim to understand its meaning?
Excerpts from the Book
Preface
This work is based on real scientific research. For interested readers, and, more importantly, respecting the authors of the scientific papers, the underlying scientific papers are cited in the following:
Apaydin, K., & Zisgen, Y. (2025). Local Large Language Models for Business Process Modeling. In A. Delgado & T. Slaats (Eds.), ICPM 2024 Workshops (LNBIP Vol. 533, pp. 605–609). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-031-82225-4_44.
Berti, A., Kourani, H., & van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2025). PM-LLM-Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models on Process Mining Tasks. In A. Delgado & T. Slaats (Eds.), ICPM 2024 Workshops (LNBIP Vol. 533, pp. 610–623). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82225-4_45.
Buss, A., Kratsch, W., Schmid, S. J., & Wang, H. (2025). ProcessLLM: A Large Language Model Specialized in the Interpretation, Analysis, and Optimization of Business Processes. In K. Gdowska et al. (Eds.), BPM 2024 Workshops (LNBIP Vol. 534, pp. 221–232). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78666-2_17.
Kampik, T., Warmuth, C., Rebmann, A., Agam, R., Egger, L. N. P., Gerber, A., Hofart, J., Kolk, J., Herzig, P., Decker, G., van der Aa, H., Polyvyanyy, A., Rinderle-Ma, S., Weber, I., & Weidlich, M. (2024). Large Process Models: A Vision for Business Process Management in the Age of Generative AI. KI – Künstliche Intelligenz. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-024-00863-8.
May, S. (2024). Trigonocracy – A New Form of Government. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5068701[1](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5068 701).
Wang, L., Yang, F., Zhang, C., Lu, J., Qian, J., He, S., Zhao, P., Qiao, B., Huang, R., Qin, S., Su, Q., Ye, J., Zhang, Y., Lou, J.-G., Lin, Q., Rajmohan, S., Zhang, D., & Zhang, Q. (2025). Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/ 2412.10047.
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Ergo opus nostrum laudate!
Pugnatum est in secula.
[...]
Chapter 3: The Life of Asma S.
Long before the world learned what trigonocracy truly meant – long before the names Sam May or Lisa Laurent became known, and long before a world war was sparked in the name of a new form of government – a little girl was born, far from the places where one might expect such historic inventions to emerge.
She grew up in a poor neighborhood of a poor city in one of the poorest countries in the world. Or at least, one of the most dangerous. For thousands of years, the sand beneath her soon-to-be-walking feet had been soaked in blood. And in the so-called modern world, nothing has changed.
Asma grew up in the heart of the Gaza Strip. In a poor town called Deir al-Balah, located at the narrowest point of the Strip, where the distance between the Mediterranean and the neighboring military power was barely five kilometers.
Her parents were desperately poor, but they did everything they could to give their daughter a proper education. Of course, in this corner of the world, access to it was anything but easy. The decades-long conflict had subjected the population to the will of Hamas, and training for war against the enemy was often deemed more important than school lessons.
Still, her father managed to get her books and notebooks. The parents did everything imaginable to give her a better future.
Years passed, and Asma learned to read, write, do arithmetic – and especially English, as best she could. It wasn’t without danger for the family, especially for a girl her age, to speak in a foreign language so well. Even though her English was rudimentary, her parents warned her to practice the language only at home and only in whispers. She must never speak the enemy’s language on the street – people might accuse her parents of espionage.
Asma was a good child and listened to her parents. She cared for her soon-to-be sibling with the same attention she gave her books. At nine years old, she looked after her four-year-old brother while her father worked and her mother took care of the house. And while doing so, she was reading books about computer science. From time to time, she would look up a new word in a dictionary or glance over at the little boy playing with her old building blocks.
Day and night, she devoured one book after another. At school, she learned Arabic and how to interpret the Qur’an. At home, she read in English about how to program. Despite the contrast – and her parents’ fear that she might choose one path over the other – she found a way to reconcile both: her faith in the Creator and her desire to create something herself.
Still, she was often met with incomprehension when she tried to explain to her parents what she had learned. Her mother was too busy with the household, and her father came home exhausted from work. Of course, both had little energy to dive into a completely new world that her daughter was talking about. And then, of course, there was her little brother.
Gradually, her father could barely keep up with the books – her thirst for knowledge only grew stronger. But soon, she was able to quench that thirst with her phone. It was an old, second-hand device that had probably changed owners dozens of times. The scratched touchscreen didn’t bother her.
Asma didn’t use her internet access to chat with peers or send pictures and videos around. She realized something more valuable: the internet held more books than she could ever hope to read in a lifetime.
Her father, for his part, was relieved. That one-time investment meant he wouldn’t have to buy more books for the time being.
So, at just thirteen, she dove headfirst into the seemingly infinite ocean of information, focusing on what fascinated her most.
Even her relatives rarely saw her anymore, the family gradually withdrew from their surroundings – and the eldest daughter grew up in near-total isolation. But that didn’t bother her much.
By the age of fourteen, Asma could have easily earned a university degree in computer science – her knowledge was that advanced. But two things stood in her way: her family’s poverty, and the fact that she had never been able to apply or test her theoretical knowledge in practice.
So her father spent a long time thinking about how he could support her. From her very first words, the parents had known she was gifted. They thanked God for it. But at the same time, they prayed for guidance – how to handle such a gift. They knew this was her ticket out of the pit they lived in. But how to get their daughter – and ideally their son as well – out of the Gaza Strip? That, they didn’t know.
Another year passed, and Asma learned how to build computers from scratch. By fifteen, she was already working on her own PC. The keyboard, mouse, and old monitor had long since seen better days. For a case, she had initially experimented with an old cage, but the dust and heat of the day kept causing the system to crash.
Then one day, she had an idea. When the family finally received a larger refrigerator from a relative, she asked her father to put the old one in her room. Unaware of her plan, he agreed – only to discover the next day that she wasn’t using it to keep food cold.
Asma had installed the computer components inside the refrigerator she had cleaned before. This way, it protected them from both dust and overheating. Only the external drivers and ports were mounted on the outside, connected to the interior through small, carefully cut holes in the casing.
As chaotic as the setup looked, it worked remarkably well. Asma could now upgrade her hardware at any time, swap out individual party, and give her talent free rein.
Her brother, however, didn’t think much of her talent. As a result, they often argued – either because he wouldn’t let her work or study in peace, or because he had once again pulled out a cable or broken something while playing. Like siblings do, they fought until their mother – or worse, their father – had to step in.
During the pandemic, a new opportunity opened up for Asma: with the shift to online learning, many universities made their lectures easily accessible on the internet. For the gifted young woman, it was no challenge to hack into university networks. She enrolled under a pseudonym, hoping to earn a university degree that way.
Her father was furious at first – but soon he understood that the ability to hack into a computer science program was, in itself, a kind of qualification. Besides, he couldn’t think of a better way out of poverty, so he let her continue. The only thing that bothered him was that she didn’t use her real name. She called herself Carl Schwarz – because she had learned that men with European-sounding names had better chances of success in life. Her deception would be less likely to raise suspicion that way.
She completed her courses at breathtaking speed and was about to begin her thesis – when the war broke out again.
It was October 7th, 2023.
In the months and years that followed, the Gaza Strip was nearly wiped off the map. Israel was left to act freely, confident in the military, financial, and political backing of its protector. But beyond the moral questions, the political debates, and the media profiting grotesquely from the spectacle of war – alongside the arms manufacturers and their shareholders – it was the fate of this one poor family that would prove truly significant to history.
In February 2024, Asma and her mother managed to cross the border. Her brother had died a month earlier, when a bomb exploded near their tent. Shrapnel tore skin from her father’s body as well, but he survived at first. Then, not far from the Egyptian border, death caught up to him. He died of sepsis.
There was no medical care. They couldn’t even bury him, fearing infection and death themselves. Through tears, Asma had to force her mother to leave her husband’s body behind. Driven by the ever-closer thunder of bombardments, they fled under the cover of darkness across the border.
It was written all over their faces that they were refugees. And although they had found themselves in another Muslim country, there was no talk of such a thing as Ummah. The war refugees were driven back across the border in droves, and so Asma had to steal clothes for herself and her mother, disguising them as local villagers.
When she returned to their makeshift hiding place the next morning – wedged between two rocks not far from the border – she collapsed to her knees. No one was there. Her mother had been discovered, most likely dragged back into the hell they had just escaped.
In less than two months, Asma had lost everyone she had loved. Her bitter, burning tears sank into the cool sand, while the warm rays of the sun urged her to keep moving. She changed clothes, buried the others in the sand, and walked toward the next village.
Her grief and horror were soon masked by the instinct to survive. Constant hunger and the fear of being recognized and caught as a refugee forced her to focus on the here and now.
She hitchhiked from town to town, begged, stole, and bartered her way from one meal to the next.
Eventually, she made it to Cairo, where she hoped to leap to Europe. But first, she needed money – and more importantly, an identity. Without documents – lost in the bombing along with her family – she had no chance.
But one thing had survived the bombardments and losses: her talent.
Now a skilled thief, she stole a laptop from a tourist. She gained access and hacked into the intranet of the Ministry of the Interior. After several hours of work, she wrote down the passwords and access credentials on a scrap of paper, slipped it into her back pocket, and deleted all data from the stolen laptop.
She sold it to a dealer and used the money to rent a small room.
[...]
- Citation du texte
- Waldemar Schwarzkopf (Auteur), 2025, May We Trust, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1668934
