Redshift

West Berlin, Germany – April 15, 1975

The sounds of the pounding feet echoed off the alleyway as Heidi and Rikard ran for their lives. They had played too loose this time and now the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA and the Grenzschutzgruppe 9, or GSG 9 were on their trail.

And too close to shake. They would not be escaping to East Berlin tonight and would probably find themselves within the walls of Stammheim Prison. They could hear the police sirens as the Polizei Berlin and Kripo tightened the net.

Hilda was at home, with an unsuspecting babysitter. They had told her they were going to dinner and a movie, not attempting to assassinate Horst Herold when he too was attending a movie.

It was too bold by far, but the opportunity was there and the timing was right. Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Gudrun Ensslin had all been sent there while awaiting their trial. A well placed decapitation of the Kripo now would hamstring the prosecution and help buy time for an escape attempt.

But they had been betrayed and now they were hoping beyond hope to get to the small apartment on Bernauer Straße. The tunnel ran from a dilapidated outhouse and would emerge on the other side of The Wall in the utility room of their apartment building in East Berlin. Maintaining real DDR citizenship helped keep an escape route open. The Stasi was all too happy to not look in their basement for the right price and even some American cigarettes from time to time, but that relationship was one sided at best. The first sign of trouble, they’d disavow the couple and destroy the exit.

The Deutsche Demokratische Republic, or the DDR was the government of East Germany during the cold war. The name translated out to the German Democratic Republic, pushing the idea that the East Germans had a say in the government that Moscow imposed on them after World War 2, and supported politically since. While the rest of Europe was liberated from the Nazi regime, the East Germans just traded fascism for Soviet style socialism. Even worse, the Gestapo, officially Geheime Statspolizei, was essentially rebranded as the Stasi, or the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit. While the Stasi was less violent that the Gestapo, you could survive encounters with the Stasi, normal East Germans found the Stasi had crept into places in society the Gestapo never did. They traded violent brutality for an oppressive presence.

And it was because of that, Heidi and Rikard were willing to operate in the West. Socialism was an ultimate good they both believed. They had food, shelter, and could raise their child without fear of want. So long as they worked. Heidi’s family had been split between East and West when The Wall came up, and she saw the struggles of good Socialists in the West and vowed to spread Marx and Lenin’s message to the rest of the world. By peace if possible.

But the Bourgeoise had turned it violent and so by war was the path she took. Rikard was just an ideologue and a romantic. He believed in Socialism and believed that if he helped Heidi, he’d be supporting the woman he loved.

Tonight, though, everything was falling apart. They still had a mile to go to Bernauer and the sirens were too loud.

“Halt!” Came the shout from behind them. The German officer’s voice sounded different, more bourgeoise and tainted by Western media. “Place your hands up and turn around slowly.

The click of the hammer being pulled back on the BKA officer’s gun echoed off the buildings in the alleyway.

Rikard looked at Heidi, both shaking. There was only one talking, maybe they had caught a break and could get away from him and still make it.

Rikard lurched to run and a chorus of shots rang out.

Heidi hadn’t moved an inch. She hadn’t come to the same conclusion as Rikard. She thought only of Hilda and she was willing to take her chances.

But the bullets tore into her just as they ripped apart Rikard’s jacket, throwing him to the ground. She felt weightless as the ground came up to catch her, darkness swelling.

By the time her body hit the ground, she was already gone.

Another mile away, the BKA knocked loudly on their apartment door, waking Hilda and her babysitter. The babysitter brought the crying infant to the door with her and screamed when she was ripped from her hands as officers streamed in to search for evidence.

The story ran on the news the next morning and faced little attention. In the West, it was just another couple of terrorists who played a stupid game and got a stupid prize. For those in the East, it was just another example of the horrors of Capitalism, and was painted as such by their state media.

For the Zeitler family, this was where their suffering began. Hilda entered the West German foster system—an institution that would become infamous for hidden abuses after Dr. Helmut Kentler began placing children with known pedophiles. It was his ‘grand experiment’. The cruelty she endured hardened her and led her to use tenderness and affection as commodities to be traded.

She repeated those abuses on her own daughter, born in 1990 and died by suicide in the late 2010’s, while doting on her son Sven—spoiling him and excusing his violent outbursts. The state of Baden-Württemberg finally took notice of Sven’s mental illness, but only after he was caught abusing his son, Erik.

Erik grew into a timid young man, the fire of life beaten out of him by the father he despised—and a mother who hated Sven enough to hate her own son as well—leaving him just bold enough to speak of Sven’s brutality with quiet venom. This was the legacy Erik left to his son, Reinhardt: a family line that began with boldness, only to have it beaten out of them across three generations. Erik, growing older and more disillusioned, was no longer timid, yet neither was he a man of action. He now lived only to satisfy needs; ambition, he believed, was a luxury for better men.

Reinhardt refused to inherit that defeat. He was born with a spark his father neither nurtured nor tried to extinguish—something entirely his own.

The streets of Berlin were his. He had built up his network, managed each piece with efficiency and tolerated no deviation. He admired Heidi and Rikard, those people born a 100 years before him, and used them as inspiration for how to really live. He’d killed his father using that thirst for life. Not maliciously, but out of pity. His father was a soulless corpse with a heartbeat. When he’d turned and saw Reinhardt pointing the gun at him, he barely blinked. He left this world with a sad look of disgust and, Reinhardt believed, a disappointment that it had taken that long.

But now, ten years later, he ran one of the more lucrative private automated-trucking systems in Berlin. Germany’s nationalized firms still dominated the long-haul infrastructure, but private operators were more flexible in the cities and states. The Autobahn belonged to the Fatherland; Potsdamer Straße was Reinhardt’s.

This morning he walked the line of autonomous trucks, checking for damage as much as making himself visible to the loaders and maintenance crew on his docks. While TransWerk Deutschland—TWD—had largely gone fully automated, he still kept humans on staff if only to have immediate emergency response. A conveyor belt couldn’t repair a jammed sorting gate. Mostly, though, he hated the way capitalism had turned labor into a contest between people and machines.

“Chef, wir haben ein Problem,” one of the workers called, stepping from behind a truck. “This one was broken into. We found this on the floor.”

Inside lay an elderly man, unconscious, dressed in clothes that looked like something out of old American-Indian films.

“Was anything stolen?” Reinhardt asked, glancing at the stacked deliveries. He assumed the truck had been recalled because of the unexpected weight.

“Doesn’t look like it.” The worker lowered his voice, uneasy. “And the door was still locked. I don’t know how he got in.”

Reinhardt frowned. “Are you saying someone broke in and then locked him inside?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

The stranger stirred, mumbling something that sounded like English. Reinhardt’s school-boy English was long gone.

“Grab me a translator,” he said, leaning in to listen anyway.

A minute later the worker returned with a small device shaped like an old hearing aid: an earpiece connected to a slim box behind the ear. The paired units used AI to translate speech in real time, improving as the conversation went on.

Reinhardt slipped the device into his ear while the worker gently fitted the other into the old man’s. At first the words came haltingly as the software struggled to parse phrasing.

“Ich muss ihn finden. Ich muss Grady finden,” came the translated voice in Reinhardt’s ear: I must him find. I must Grady find. The clumsy literal translation made Reinhardt scowl.

“I’m sorry—who are you?” Reinhardt asked, more interested in why the man was in his truck than in whoever ‘Grady’ was.

“I brought back his device,” the man rasped, barely lifting his head. “I brought it back before—”

A wet, racking cough cut him off, followed by a deep sigh … and then silence.

“My God, Boss,” the worker murmured, removing his cap. “I think he’s not breathing anymore.”

“Great. Just what I needed.” Reinhardt stepped back, pacing. The Polizei were the last thing he wanted in the middle of operations. “Send the truck out and have it stop somewhere less public. Tell the cops to collect the vagrant’s body there.”

“Yes, Boss.” The man climbed out of the truck and handed Reinhardt the object the stranger had mentioned, trading it for the earpiece. “I grabbed this from him—it doesn’t look like something a homeless man would own.”

Reinhardt studied the device: old, early-2000s-era plastic, scratched but the glass screen still clear. What puzzled him most was the display: beside a red button marked RETURN glowed a string of numbers formatted in the annoying American style—month/day/year.

It read: 5 / 27 / 1233.

“I’ll be in my office,” he muttered. “Handle the body.”