For them, it is: if it doesn't go one way it goes another way. So, they don't lose at all. So, how do you avoid something like smartdust - nano-sized measurement robots - falling from the sky and landing on everything, even your hair and in your nostrils? It is smart dust that supposedly gives the sky an occasional iridescent glow.
You see, the building of the Panama canal was financed by placing the dead bodies of the workers in the double-bottomed barrels that were shipped and sold to London for research - 20.000 of them. While in London they scooped 60.000 poor and homeless for the same purpose. Those were the beginning days of medical clinical research.
I don't know if it's any different now. It just looks different and the technology is different, so the adversaries could be more hidden and distant.
And, if you place two seemingly un-connected texts together, like the one about smartdust and nano-bots and Secret Convenant, then the future looks far more dystopian than just a peacefully beautiful day in the woods may offer to see at present.
Plants and animals will show us that there is something absolutely wrong going on, but we might not figure out what it is and from where it comes until it's too late. In 2018 quite some fruit started appearing as Siamese twins - a horror look. So, what's next?