The communal feeding hall in Moscow's Factory District 9 was silent except for the slurping of paste.
Thousands of workers sat at long metal tables. They wore identical grey jumpsuits. They drank from identical tin cups.
There was no conversation. Talking burned calories. And calories were rationed by the Algorithm.
Jake stood on the catwalk above, hidden by shadows. He watched his people eat the grey sludge that kept them alive.
"It works," Lysenko whispered beside him. "Mortality rate is down 40%. The synthetic protein is easily digestible."
"They look like prisoners," Jake said.
"They are survivors," Lysenko corrected. "The German blight destroyed the wheat. Without the paste, they would be corpses."
Jake looked at the faces below. Blank. Empty. They weren't living; they were fueling.
"Is this the future?" Jake asked.
"It is efficiency," a small voice said.
Yuri stepped out of the shadows. He was holding a clipboard. At six years old, he looked like a miniature bureaucrat.
"Caloric intake is optimal," Yuri said. "Work output is steady. The system is stable."
Jake looked at his son. There was no pity in Yuri's eyes. Only data.
"They aren't machines, Yuri," Jake said.
"They function better when they are treated like machines," Yuri replied. "Emotion causes waste. Anger burns energy. We removed the variables."
Jake felt a chill. He had built this system to save them from Hitler's poison. But he had created a soulless hive.
"We need to give them something else," Jake said. "Something more than paste."
"Like what?"
"Hope," Jake said. "Flavor."
He turned to Lysenko.
"Add sugar," Jake ordered. "And synthetic berry flavoring. Make it taste like summer."
"Sir, that will reduce the nutritional density..."
"Do it!" Jake snapped. "Give them a reason to swallow it without gagging."
The Atlantic Ocean. US Naval Task Force 58.
Admiral Nimitz stood on the bridge of the USS Enterprise.
"The blockade is useless," Nimitz said, looking at the grey ocean. "We send them food, the Germans poison it. We stop the food, they eat paste."
"The Soviets have gone isolationist," his intelligence officer said. "They closed the borders. No radio traffic. Just... silence."
"They are up to something," Nimitz said. "Stalin doesn't sleep."
"Sir, radar contact. High altitude."
"Missile?"
"No... it's a plane. Massive. Moving at Mach 2."
Nimitz raised his binoculars.
High above the clouds, a white contrail cut the sky.
"It's a reconnaissance flight," Nimitz said. "They are watching us."
"Shoot it down?"
"At 60,000 feet? Our fighters can't touch it."
Nimitz watched the trail.
"They are mapping the ocean," he realized. "They are looking for something."
The Kremlin. The Map Room.
The map on the wall was new. It didn't show cities. It showed ocean currents and thermal layers.
"The Atlantic is a desert," Menzhinsky said. "But the Arctic..."
He pointed to the top of the world.
"The ice caps are melting," Menzhinsky said. "Global temperatures are rising. Probably from the dust of the Moon impact."
"And?" Jake asked.
"Under the ice... there is oil. And gas. Massive reserves."
"We can't drill under ice."
"We don't need to drill," Yuri said, walking into the room. He climbed onto a chair to reach the map.
"We use the submarines," Yuri said. "The new ones. Nuclear powered."
"We don't have nuclear submarines," Jake said.
"We have the reactors from the failed rocket program," Yuri said. "We have the hulls. We fit them. We create mobile drilling platforms."
Jake looked at the boy.
"Who told you this?"
"The logic dictates it," Yuri said. "Surface resources are compromised. We must go deep."
Jake looked at the map.
"If we claim the Arctic," Jake said, "we control the energy for the next century."
"But the Americans claim it too," Menzhinsky warned.
"They claim the surface," Jake said. "We will take the bottom."
Washington D.C. The White House.
Hoover was looking at a prototype. A small, black box with a screen.
"What is it?" Hoover asked.
"Television," the RCA executive said. "Broadcast pictures. Into every living room."
"Propaganda?"
"Entertainment, Mr. President. Comedy. News. Distraction."
Hoover smiled.
"The Russians have grey paste," Hoover said. "We will give our people moving pictures. We will show them the American Dream in black and white."
He touched the screen.
"Build the transmitters," Hoover ordered. "And point the big ones at Europe. Let the signal bleed over the Iron Curtain. Let the starving Russians see our fat housewives and shiny cars."
"Psychological warfare?"
"Envy," Hoover said. "The deadliest weapon of all."
Moscow. The Apartment Block.
Sasha sat in his dark room. He was wearing the copper helmet.
He wasn't flying a plane. He was listening.
The helmet picked up radio waves. Static. Morse code.
And something new.
A hum. A carrier wave.
And then... sound. Music. Jazz.
And voices. Laughing.
"What is it?" his mother asked, seeing him smile.
"It's America," Sasha whispered. "I can hear them dancing."
He closed his blind eyes.
"It sounds... colorful."
The Kremlin. Jake's Office.
Jake was reading a report on the new "Arctic Ghost" submarines.
The door opened. Taranov entered.
"Boss, we found something."
"A spy?"
"No. A transmission. High frequency. It's cutting through our jamming."
He placed a tape recorder on the desk.
Jake pressed play.
A jingle played. Cheerful. American.
Drink Coca-Cola! Ice cold!
Then, the sound of a sizzling steak. Laughter. A game show host giving away a washing machine.
Jake stared at the recorder.
"They are broadcasting ads?"
"They are broadcasting wealth," Taranov said. "The people... the ones with illegal radios... they are listening. They are hearing about fridges full of food while they drink paste."
Jake felt a surge of anger.
"It's poison," Jake said. "Worse than the fungus. It's hope for things we can't give them."
"Jam it," Menzhinsky suggested.
"We can't jam the whole spectrum," Yuri said from the corner. He was building a house of cards. A perfect pyramid.
"Then what do we do?"
"We give them our own picture," Yuri said.
"We don't have televisions."
"We have the sky," Yuri said.
He knocked the pyramid over.
"Project Aurora," Yuri said. "We use the orbital mirrors. The ones the Germans wanted to build."
"To burn cities?"
"No," Yuri said. "To project images. Giant holograms in the clouds. Heroes. Victories. The face of the Leader."
Jake looked at his son.
"You want to turn the sky into a movie screen?"
"Why watch a small box when you can watch the heavens?" Yuri asked.
Jake thought about it.
A god in the sky. Watching. Smiling.
"Do it," Jake said. "Blind them with light so they don't look at their empty bowls."
The Arctic Circle.
The Soviet submarine K-1 dove under the ice pack.
Captain Ramius (no relation) watched the depth gauge.
"400 meters. Nuclear reactor stable."
"Sonar contact," the officer said. "Ice keels above."
"Deploy the drill," Ramius ordered.
The sub didn't carry torpedoes. It carried a massive thermal drill on its belly.
It settled on the ocean floor. The drill spun up.
Heat melted the rock.
They were tapping the vein.
"We have flow," the engineer reported. "Oil. Pure crude."
"Fill the bladders," Ramius said.
The sub began to fill external rubber tanks with oil. It was a tanker and a thief.
"We are drinking their milkshake," Ramius smiled.
Berlin. The Bunker.
Hitler lay in his bed. He was skeletal.
"The Americans are broadcasting jazz," Goebbels complained. "Degenerate noise."
"And the Russians?" Hitler wheezed.
"They are projecting lights on the clouds. Faces of Lenin. It scares the peasants."
Hitler laughed. A rattle in his chest.
"Circus tricks," Hitler said. "Bread and circuses."
He grabbed Goebbels' hand.
"Is the blight spreading?"
"It has reached France. The vineyards are dying."
"Good," Hitler whispered. "If I cannot have the wine, no one shall."
His eyes glazed over.
"Eva..." he mumbled.
Then his head fell back.
The room went silent.
Goebbels checked for a pulse. None.
"The Führer is dead," Goebbels announced.
He didn't cry. He walked to the desk. He picked up the phone.
"Activate Protocol Götterdämmerung."
"Sir?"
"Release the remaining stockpiles," Goebbels ordered. "Open the canisters in the cities. Berlin. Hamburg. Munich."
"But sir... those are our cities."
"If the Reich dies," Goebbels said, his eyes burning with madness, "the German people do not deserve to live."
He hung up.
He pulled his Luger.
He looked at the portrait of Hitler.
"Wait for me, my Führer."
BANG.
The Kremlin. Midnight.
"Hitler is dead," Menzhinsky said, bursting into the room. "Suicide. Goebbels too."
Jake stood up.
He felt... nothing. No joy. No relief.
"And the war?"
"The Wehrmacht is collapsing. But..."
"But what?"
"The SS is executing the Götterdämmerung order. They are gassing their own cities. Mass suicide."
Jake closed his eyes.
"Madness," he whispered.
"The Americans are moving in," Menzhinsky said. "Patton is racing for Berlin. They want the scientists. The tech."
"We can't let them have it," Jake said. "The German rocketry data. The biological research."
"We are too far away," Menzhinsky said. "Our tanks are stuck in the mud in Poland."
Jake looked at the map.
"We don't need tanks," Jake said. "We have the sky."
He turned to the radio operator.
"Contact the K-1. Tell them to surface."
"Sir? They are in the Arctic."
"Not anymore," Jake said. "They are fast. Tell them to head for the North Sea. Hamburg."
"A submarine can't take a city."
"It can if it carries a message," Jake said.
"What message?"
"Tell the German scientists," Jake said. "Tell them we have food. Not paste. Real food. From the Arctic oil trade. Tell them we have heat. Tell them if they come to us, they live. If they wait for the Americans, they get put on trial."
"We are lying?"
"We are recruiting," Jake said. "I want the brains. Before the Americans buy them with Coca-Cola."
Hamburg. The Docks.
The city was burning. SS death squads roamed the streets.
A group of scientists hid in a warehouse. They were terrified.
Then, the water in the harbor churned.
The K-1 surfaced. It broke the water like a black leviathan.
The hatch opened.
Captain Ramius stood on the tower. He held a megaphone.
"German Brothers!" he shouted in broken German. "The West wants to hang you! The East wants to hire you!"
He pointed to the open hatch.
"We have warm bunks! We have vodka! Come!"
The scientists looked at each other. Then at the burning city behind them.
They ran.
They scrambled onto the sub. Dozens of them. Engineers. Chemists.
Ramius welcomed them aboard.
"Dive!" he ordered.
The sub slipped beneath the waves just as American tanks rolled onto the pier.
Jake had stolen the intellectual wealth of the Reich right from under Hoover's nose.
The Kremlin.
Jake poured a drink.
"Hitler is gone," he said.
"Now it is just us and the Americans," Yuri said. He was playing chess against himself.
"Yes," Jake said. "The final round."
He looked at the window.
Outside, the holographic projector was testing. A giant, shimmering red star appeared in the clouds.
It looked beautiful.
But Jake knew it was just light.
"Papa," Yuri said. "Checkmate."
Jake looked at the board.
The White King was trapped.
"Who is White?" Jake asked.
"Hoover," Yuri said.
"And Black?"
"Us," Yuri said. "Because we move in the dark."
Jake shivered.
His son wasn't just playing chess. He was practicing.
And Jake wasn't sure if he was the King or the Pawn anymore.