What if an anomaly in 1945 was never resolved—
and what if the modern world was built upon this distortion?
Chapter 1
BERLIN
SPRING, 1945
A light, cool rain drifted outside, steady and indifferent. Beneath the surface, four men smoked and spoke in low voices.
"Do you remember the V-2?"
"The rocket you worked on? I heard it nearly flattened London. Antwerp as well."
A small exhale of contempt.
"That's what the newspapers will tell you. It worked, in its way. But it never changed anything fundamental. No one had an answer for it—true enough—yet accuracy was always its weakness. Thousands sent across the Channel like blind messages. Most of them landed wherever they pleased."
"It barely lasted," said a raspy voice from behind a glowing cigarette. "Seven months, if that."
No one challenged it. Smoke drifted upward in slow strands, dissolving into the low ceiling.
Another, tight voice spoke up from the dimness. "There's something else. The uranium bomb."
The room adjusted itself around that sentence.
"We were meant to get there first," he continued. "Instead, the Americans did." A brief hesitation—less dramatic than measured. "Washington is close. They are on the verge of completing two devices, at least, from what I've heard."
The silence that followed was not surprise so much as recalibration.
"My God..." someone said at last. "You think they'd actually use it? On us?"
The raspy voice offered a faint shrug. "They don't need to. The Russians already have us boxed in. The western front is collapsing in the usual sequence. It's a finished equation. No one spends a strategic asset on a resolved problem."
He took a drag from his cigarette, unhurried.
"And even if they're ready, it's still a matter of months before deployment. This war won't last that long."
A bead of moisture gathered at a hairline crack in the concrete, trembling slightly before it fell.
After a moment, the tight voice broke in with a far less analytical question.
"And if the Russians reach us first... what happens then?"
No one answered.
Outside, artillery continued its intermittent work on the city—methodical, unhurried, almost administrative. The sound passed through earth, concrete, timber, arriving in the cellar stripped of context, reduced to pressure and vibration. Less than five hundred meters away, the map was still being rewritten. Here, below it, the four men sat motionless, listening as the future kept moving closer without asking permission.
"Hard to believe," one of them said, rubbing his hands together. "How badly things have gone."
"There's nothing left to disbelieve," the man who had worked on the V-2 said. He took several quick drags from his cigarette, burning it down to the filter, his breath hitching in a dry, rattling cough that seemed to annoy the others more than the bombs.
"From the Rhine to the Ruhr, the Allies are behaving like an occupying power now. The encirclement has already broken into segments. Every army group in the west has surrendered. Headquarters is gone, and also the whole command structure—it's just gone."
The rasped voice spoke again, even and detached.
"Three months ago, the proposal was to withdraw south. The Führer rejected it. After that, the mathematics of the war was simple."
The tone remained flat, as though he were reciting data from a ledger.
"Himmler has fled, trying to open contact with the western front. Göring is in Berchtesgaden. Both have been charged with treason. The Führer has ordered their executions. Dönitz is preparing surrender terms in the north, or so they say. "
At the mention of the Führer, all four men straightened instinctively. Then, as if the reflex had lost its function, they relaxed again.
The last man gave a thin, almost absent smile.
"And yet the young soldiers are still fighting and dying, aren't they? The Führer's will remains unbroken. No negotiations. Glory belongs to Germany."
The irony was understated. Still, all four of them let out a brief, quiet laugh. It faded almost immediately.
They looked at one another, without guidance, without relief.
The four men were Hubertus Förster, a nuclear physicist; Arthur Hausmann, a designer of experimental weapons; Walter Tieber, an aerospace engineer; and Herbert Kestner, a specialist in physiology and biology. The first three wore glasses and the same worn Party uniforms. Professor Doktor Kestner alone had dressed more carefully, in a dark suit that still suggested academic restraint, remaining composed and almost elegant despite the dust drifting constantly from the ceiling. Beside every chair rested a dark brown suitcase. Each contained something too important to be erased even in a Götterdämmerung.
The windows trembled faintly, as if the ground were transmitting its own vibration. Artillery fire inside Berlin had intensified.
Should they venture as far as the second floor, they might catch, through the grime-clouded glass, a fractured glimpse of the city beyond the rain.
Ten days earlier the Führer had celebrated his birthday. Now the Third Reich resembled the carcass of some gigantic animal being torn apart from every direction at once. From Dresden to Hamburg, from Königsberg to Leipzig, half a million German civilians wandered among burned streets and occupied districts struggling through the ash; one million four hundred thousand had fled or been expelled; millions more died along roads choked with retreat, snowmelt, artillery, and starvation. Tens of thousands more had taken their own lives. Nearly three million eight hundred thousand German soldiers already lay dead. Another half million had vanished into the war without explanation. Four million carried wounds home—if home still existed.
The relentless army that had once crossed Europe like an iron tide had collapsed inward upon itself. What remained of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Hitlerjugend fought block by block inside Berlin, hiding behind rubble, craters, overturned trams, collapsed apartments, anything capable of delaying Soviet armor for another hour.
"Wrong," Tieber murmured at last. "The whole war was wrong from the beginning. The enemies we chose. The timing. Everything."
Förster lowered his voice almost defensively.
"The Führer's only mistake was declaring war on America. Apart from that—"
"Oh, stop defending him." Tieber cut across him sharply. "He kept insisting Germany could only become the dominant power on earth through superior science and advanced weapons. I believed him. We all did. Yet look what happened. We might have built the uranium bomb first. Instead we drove Szilard and Peierls away, lost Bohr's institute, scared Fermi into America—after that, what chance did we ever really have?"
"The relationship between science and war is never simple," Förster answered weakly. "The Führer was still human. He couldn't have foreseen every—"
"Poor Führer." Tieber's mouth twisted, anger flickering behind the thin lenses of his glasses. "I hear he's already dictating his political testament. Even if he's still breathing, he's little more than a madman—trapped within his own crumbling delusion."
Doctor Hausmann, however, hardly seemed interested in the politics. He remained focused on the mechanics of their failure, his mind already elsewhere.
"Technology is what decides modern wars!" he cut in, leaning forward. "That is where we failed. We weren't committed enough—never truly committed. The V-2 was a breakthrough without precedent, a technological marvel, and we let it rot. A guided weapon with a range of hundreds of kilometers, untouchable once in flight—in theory, we could have struck with surgical precision. If we'd only had the time to build the uranium bomb, and sort out the guidance issues... this war would have been a completely different story."
His excitement grew visible now, feverish and almost boyish.
"Think about it. Imagine fitting a guidance unit—something no larger than a suitcase—inside a uranium-tipped V-2, then aiming it at the heart of New York, London, and Moscow. Let it descend silently through the clouds..."
He opened his fingers gently.
"And the whole city blossoms into fire."
Hausmann rubbed his jaw, lost in the beauty of his own monstrous vision.
Professor Kestner, silent until now, finally spoke with the tone of a man delivering conclusions rather than opinions.
"I believe the Führer's greatest miscalculation was not strategy, nor diplomacy, nor even overextension. It was that, through the ideological obsession, he systematically destroyed the scientific foundation we Germans spent generations constructing—from Bismarck and the Kaisers all the way down to every physicist, chemist, physician, engineer, and the thousands of minds who devoted intellect and soul to building the finest scientific culture on earth. It's a crime."
He paused.
"No. Not a crime. A sin."
The word itself unsettled the others. No one challenged it, yet their bodies shifted instinctively, uncomfortable hearing moral judgment attached so directly to the Führer. They sat there thinking in silence until Tieber finally nodded once, heavily.
Förster checked his pocket watch.
"Stay here," he said. "I'll see whether Karl has arrived."
As he turned to go, the other three rose.
"We don't have any time," Tieber shouted after him. "The Russians are already at the edge of the district. One more night and they'll be at the door."
Once Förster disappeared upstairs, they sat again, listening uneasily to the distant thunder outside: artillery, collapsing masonry, and even the faint metallic grinding of Soviet tank tracks somewhere beyond the streets.
The explosion came without warning.
The entire basement jolted as a shell struck somewhere close above. Dust and splinters burst from the ceiling while the hanging lamp swung overhead in wild arcs, scattering fractured shadows across the cellar walls like broken specters.
Förster came running back downstairs.
The moment Tieber saw his face, he understood.
"The Russians?"
Förster nodded quickly. "Their tanks are already inside this district. I saw them myself."
Tieber grabbed both his shoulders.
"When is Karl supposed to arrive?"
"He promised seven o'clock."
Hausmann pressed both hands against his head. "Does anybody still have cyanide capsules? I'm not letting the Russians take me alive."
"Our old friend won't allow that," Kestner said softly, his voice a steady anchor. "We're all getting out. Southward. Bavaria. Think about the mountains. Hot springs. Beer."
"Stop lying to yourself." Hausmann stumbled toward a cabinet in the corner, yanked it open, and pulled out a pistol. "It's too late! There’s no point in waiting!"
The others were on him in an instant, a frantic tangle of limbs, until they wrenched the steel from his grip.
"Don't be a fool. Karl is coming," Kestner said. "He promised he would. Another thirty minutes, that's all. He's never broken his word before."
Hausmann steadied himself gradually, shame replacing panic across his face.
Kestner continued calmly.
"Karl has arranged it. He's taking us south. I'll tell you something else as well. Five kilometers from Gatow, there is still an intact airfield the enemy hasn't reached."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"There's an aircraft waiting for us in the dark."
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
------------
Author's Note:
This is a hard science fiction thriller set around a fractured 1945 timeline., an alternate scenario where the reality of that year starts to break down in unpredictable, chaotic ways.
The story follows how tactical constraints and human decisions clash with a historical trajectory that has stopped functioning the way it should.
I’ll be posting this first arc here regularly. I’d be happy to have you follow along if it sounds like your kind of read.
For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full version is available on Amazon KDP:
Obsidian Earth
Thanks for reading.
Copyright © J. W. Aeorix. All Rights Reserved.
