Sometime later, after Potsdam had grown grimy and battered under the Communists, after die Wende brought a certain degree of bemused rebuilding, after the world woke up from its post-Millennium hangover, a group of anarchists squatting in a building off Hegel-Allee declared their home to be an independent nation.
In this, they were only doing what hundreds of other groups had been doing, with wildly varying degrees of success, all over the world for a number of years. They issued passports, printed their own money, raised their own taxes – these being, it was understood, lamentable and temporary but necessary measures to protect their new country from the predations of the outside world. It was meant to be a suitably obscene gesture to Authority, but to the anarchists’ consternation the idea spread to a neighbouring building. And then another. And then another.
The anarchists were forced to form committees to cope with finance, food, power, water and sewerage. Periodic attacks by drunken shaven-headed youths forced them to form a Border Guard. The necessity of coordinating maintenance on their buildings required some kind of works committee. Cameramen from Die Welt and Bild and Time/Stone Online came, took their photos, posted their stories, and went away again. There was a moment – nobody identified it until much later – when events seemed to pause for a breath.
And then the anarchists’ gesture against authority was a nation a little over two kilometres across and it was called New Potsdam.
After a week of tense negotiations with the Potsdam city council – which had failed to take the New Potsdamers seriously until much too late – the anarchists were deposed in a bloodless coup by a neo-Traditionalist faction which wanted to run the new polity along strictly Prussian lines. Most of the anarchists departed, muttering darkly to the Press but privately pleased to be relieved of responsibility for sewage and economics.
Meanwhile, Berlin – which had too many of these pissant nations to deal with already – watched the coup and gave New Potsdam no more than two years before its citizens were clamouring to rejoin Greater Germany.
Until that happened, the New Potsdamers were still trying to consolidate the country they had, almost by surprise, found themselves living in. All their services still depended on Greater Germany, including their electricity grid.
Responsibility for the supply to the western quarter of New Potsdam ran through a featureless four-storey building in Berlin, overlooking the Spree. There, in a room on the third floor, was a certain computer workstation, and at this workstation, on this particular evening early in his shift, Wolf sat down, pushed his spectacles up his nose with his forefinger, and air-typed a couple of strings of commands.
The heads-up drew him a schematic of New Potsdam’s security cameras and their relevant security stations. Wolf, in his late twenties but already with a receding hairline that gave him a deceptively serious look, swept the cursor to a certain closed-circuit television monitoring station inside New Potsdam, and double-clicked.
Almost all the buildings in New Potsdam which depended on the Greater German grid had backup generators, but generators cost money and they required manpower to install them and there were little blind spots here and there. Wolf pulled up a sub-menu and scheduled a fifteen-minute brownout for this particular New Potsdam monitoring station.
He thought this was rather elegant. A blackout would have been just as easy to program, but a reduction of eighty percent would cause the monitoring system to shut itself down just as effectively, and he could imagine how much it would annoy the New Potsdamers.
Wolf’s grandfather told tales of life in East Germany that were still hair-rising despite becoming progressively more and more embroidered with each re-telling, and though Wolf didn’t think of himself as being particularly political, he had inherited from the old man a distrust of borders. Traudl, his girlfriend of two months, was a kindred spirit – in fact tonight’s harmless bit of mischief had been her idea.
Once the idea had been presented to him, Wolf developed megalomania. The thought of blacking New Potsdam out appealed to him, but Traudl convinced him that a certain subtle approach was best.
“That way,” she told him one night in bed, “we can do it again and again. Nobody will know we’re doing it, and the New Potsdamers’ security police will go slowly crazy.”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” Wolf asked.
Traudl giggled and snuggled up to him. “I meant you, of course,” she said.
The affected monitoring station received feeds from about sixty cameras mounted here and there around the Brandenberger Tor and some traffic intersections further south. The target had also been Traudl’s idea.
Wolf closed down the sub-menus one by one, then called up a section of Berlin’s grid, sat back in his chair and whistled tunelessly as his supervisor passed by.
“Any problems?” asked the supervisor.
“All quiet on the Western Front,” Wolf replied with a small, smug grin.
THE WEATHER WAS a bonus.
It was the sort of night Coureurs prayed for. Fifteen centimetres of snow and seven degrees of frost on the ground and a wind-chill, unhindered all the way across North-Central Europe, driving the air temperature down to somewhere in the minus thirties, a howling gale carrying snow like airgun pellets. On nights like this, people made mistakes, got sloppy, paid more attention to their own comfort than to their job.
Rudi didn’t feel the weather, here on the edge of Old Potsdam in the snow and the wind and the cold. His stealth suit’s insulation was so efficient that if he was to keep it sealed for any great length of time his own body heat would eventually cook him, but its surface layers remained precisely at ambient temperature, merging him into the infra-red background. It artfully scattered radar wavelengths right down to millimetre frequencies, giving him the radar signature of a moth, and its mimetic system blended into whatever background the suit happened to be standing against, like a very badly-dressed chameleon.
All of which combined to make him indistinguishable from the shop doorway in which he was crouching to watch the brightly-lit kiosk of the checkpoint. On the other hand, if a drunk should happen along and decide to have a piss in this particular doorway, nothing would save Rudi. He was invisible to most of the commonly-deployed security devices known to man, and to the naked eye of anyone more than half a metre or so away. Closer to, he looked like the indistinct silhouette of a rag-wrapped gorilla wearing a mutilated motorcycle crash-helmet. Not the sort of thing you expect to see in an Old Potsdam shop doorway, even if you’re drunk.
Just over a year since its declaration of nationhood, New Potsdam’s border arrangements were still on the ad hoc side of adequate. To Rudi’s eye it looked theatrical and ill-thought-out, but that was the way with new polities. The first thing they tended to do was put up defences. A sure sign of a polity approaching maturity was when the work-crews came out and started dismantling the wire. Except maybe in the more paranoid parts of the world.
There were sections of wall going up, here and there, around New Potsdam, but most of the border was still a tunnel of carbon-flood light enclosing a dense spiralling hedge of razor-wire that ran down the centre-line of streets, cutting intersections in half and brushing the corners of buildings, broken at irregular intervals by checkpoints.
The checkpoint kiosks looked as if they had been brought in from car parks, had inadequately-adapted vehicle radars and infra-red scanners and barcode readers mounted on their roofs, and then been staffed by a hurriedly-conscripted border guard. In common with many immature polities, great pains had been taken with the uniform of the Border Guard. They were the work of a Berlin theatrical costumier, and more than a little reminiscent of the uniforms of the Ruritanian officer classes in the Stewart Granger version of The Prisoner Of Zenda.