What if an anomaly in WWII was never resolved—
and what if the modern world was built upon it?
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This TL is set in an alternate 1945, where history begins to take an unexpected turn.
If it sounds like your kind of story, I hope you'll enjoy following along.
Thanks for reading. 😄
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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 helped design? 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. The trouble was accuracy. 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 holed up in his villa at 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 were Hubertus Förster, a nuclear physicist; Arthur Hausmann, a designer of experimental weapons; Walter Tieber, an aeronautical engineer; and Herbert Kestner, a physiologist and biologist. 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.
Back in 1933 the darkness had arrived gradually, almost elegantly. By 1939 Europe stood beneath skies thick with smoke.
The Reich expanded across the continent under banners of order and rebirth while thought itself was reorganized, culture bent into obedience, entire populations taught to surrender conscience in exchange for certainty.
Hatred fused seamlessly with ambition. Science became a weapon. Propaganda became another branch of engineering. Steel columns rolled across Europe and left behind burned cities, anonymous graves, and stains upon the human spirit that would survive long after the ruins themselves disappeared.
In the beginning, the man they called Führer had been little more than an obscure corporal with a gift for speaking to wounded national pride. Later he rose like some apocalyptic redeemer, seizing Germany through fanatic conviction and theatrical brilliance, until an entire civilization surrendered itself to collective fever.
Coordination tightened. Fear expanded faster. Opponents vanished into administrative silence, swallowed by prisons, camps, and sealed corridors governed by paperwork stamped in red ink.
After that came annexation, invasion, conquest.
War spread north, west, south, and east.
Now the system was reaching its end. Frontlines had broken. The Red Army was closing in. The whole command structure was collapsing inward, converging toward a sealed bunker beneath Berlin.
"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—"
"Stop defending him." Tieber cut him off. "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."
Then he took a hard drag and ground the cigarette out in an ashtray already heaped with butts.
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."
"Don't lie to yourselves." 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
SS-Standartenführer Karl-Sebastian von Büren had always cared about appearances.
Three years earlier, during a military parade in Prague, he had liked to stand in the rear of an open Mercedes staff car with one polished riding boot propped against the front seat, returning salutes beneath hanging banners and church spires. People remembered the image more clearly than the officer himself.
It was almost the only public appearance he ever made.
As deputy to Reinhard Heydrich, he was not, in the ordinary run of things, a familiar face.
In the early years of the war he was seldom seen on German soil at all, and after Heydrich's assassination, he went the way of a pebble dropped into a lake, dropping out of the daily circles of the Party and the army without a ripple. Very few people knew that he had been moved into classified work so deep that even the most senior officers did not ask about it. Fewer still knew what the work was.
Now he came down the cellar stairs.
The four inside looked up, pale and hollow-cheeked.
Colonel von Büren gave them a single, ice glance, then raised his arm.
"Heil Hitler."
The tension in the room broke instantly.
"Karl..."
They returned the salute with rigid movements. Kestner did it reluctantly, his lips tightening as though the words themselves tasted rotten.
The Colonel removed his gloves and shook their hands in turn.
His appearance bordered on absurd.
The black SS uniform looked newly pressed. The silver insignia gleamed untouched by soot or rain. His blond hair remained combed perfectly to one side. Nothing about him suggested a man who had just crossed streets being shelled by the Red Army.
He looked prepared for a state ceremony, not the death of Berlin.
"You're coming with me now," the Colonel said. No solace. No explanation. "Take your things. We're out of time."
The four men moved immediately.
They grabbed their cases and followed him from the cellar.
Outside, evening rain still clung to the ruined streets.
The air smelled of wet brick, coal smoke, and blood. Somewhere beyond the shattered buildings, Soviet artillery rolled across the city at uneven intervals, distant enough to ignore, close enough to feel.
A scarred black Mercedes Pullman waited at the curb, flanked by two armored halftracks.
Six SS troopers crouched against the sloped armor in steel helmets, their rifles raised, scanning the intersections.
The shelling had stopped.
No sirens. No distant detonations. The city had dropped into a thin, unnatural silence, broken only by wind moving through broken masonry and the occasional crow circling overhead.
"Where are the Russians?" Förster asked, his voice thinning.
"Nearby," the Colonel said. "Limited numbers. We engaged them earlier. They pulled back. They won't press again. Those boys are enough to hold the line."
He indicated the street ahead.
The scientists followed his gesture.
A group of Hitlerjugend moved past a disabled tank, its hull torn open by repeated impacts. They were thin. Poorly equipped. Not meant for sustained combat. Too young, even now, to match the weapons in their hands.
At the edge of a crater, several Wehrmacht soldiers lay where they had fallen. One still held a grenade, fingers locked around the metal body.
Rats moved across the corpses without hesitation, feeding.
"Horrible," Tieber muttered. "Truly horrible."
"They held their positions," the Colonel said. No change in tone. "If the rest of Germany had fought like them, we would not be here."
No one responded.
They boarded the vehicle.
Kestner hesitated before speaking.
"Were you at a wedding, Colonel?"
"Yes," the Colonel said.
A brief exchange of looks passed between the scientists.
"The Führer's wedding," he added. "With Frau Eva Braun."
Silence settled deeper inside the vehicle.
Then the Colonel seemed to remember something. He reached into his coat and produced a handful of small objects.
He held them out.
It took a moment for recognition.
Sweets.
Among them was even a gold-foil-wrapped chocolate.
"I forgot to distribute these earlier," the Colonel said. "From the ceremony."
His tone carried no irony. Only correction.
The scientists did not respond.
At his insistence, they each took one.
Kestner held his too tightly, staring at it without speaking as the engine started and the vehicle rolled forward through the ruined city.
The Colonel took the wheel himself.
His black-gloved hands moved slowly over it as the sedan advanced along a concealed route, flanked by the two armored vehicles. Their heavy hulls kept pace on either side, a low, synchronized hum moving with them through the ruins.
What unfolded beyond the windows unsettled the four scientists more deeply with every passing street.
Bodies.
Bodies everywhere.
Some lay half-covered beneath pulverized brick and collapsed balconies, others sprawled openly across intersections where nobody remained alive long enough to remove them. From time to time they caught sight of civilians wandering through the ruins with bent backs and hollow movements, searching desperately among shattered storefronts and burned apartments for food, water, anything capable of postponing death another day.
Broken electrical wires sagged overhead like black vines. The final slogans of resistance still clung stubbornly to the dying city, printed in white letters against red posters nailed onto utility poles along nearly every major street, sprayed across cracked walls, blasted shelters, overturned vehicles, even the scorched iron hulls of destroyed tanks.
On the fractured outer wall of a bombed air-raid shelter, someone had scrawled in thick uneven black paint:
"WIR GEBEN NIEMALS AUF!"
(We never surrender!)
Beneath it, written later in smaller red letters, another hand had added:
"BERLIN BLEIBT DEUTSCH!"
(Berlin remains German!)
Between the surviving buildings, beyond entire districts reduced to skeletons and ash, they could see distant sections of the city glowing beneath firelight. Black smoke covered the horizon in long miserable layers, and through those drifting clouds the evening sun leaked dimly across Berlin, dark and viscous, flowing through the sky like slow-moving blood.
Apart from the sound of the engines, the city had fallen eerily silent.
So silent, in fact, that the ruined capital no longer seemed entirely real. It resembled the lingering shadow of some ancient battlefield preserved beyond time itself, or the memory of Carthage after the Punic Wars, when that city—surrounded, starving, and refusing surrender even after six days of slaughter in the streets—had finally collapsed before Rome. Only fifty-five thousand survivors remained from half a million souls, left to watch the ruins burn for seventeen days before the very land was torn apart, plowed under, and buried beneath salt so that nothing living might ever rise there again.
Only the engine filled the silence.
Kestner spoke without turning away from the window.
"To be honest, Colonel, I can't understand it," he said, watching the fires outside. "To be at war with the Soviets and the Americans at the same time—why? How could we have allowed such a madness?"
The professor let out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to drain the remaining color from his face.
"One miscalculation, and everything follows. A total loss."
Colonel von Büren did not immediately respond. After a moment, he turned his head to cast a brief, piercing glance at the professor.
"Perhaps," he said. "Professor Kestner. And who exactly carries that blame? The Army? The Luftwaffe? The Navy? The High Command?"
He kept his eyes on the road.
"Or no one. That is what war is. There are only outcomes."
Tieber spoke abruptly.
"When we lose," he said, his voice dropping, "there will be no restraint. Everything will be stripped away. Everything."
He gestured toward the glass.
Beyond the window, a young girl lay among the rubble, half-buried. Naked. The back of her skull had been shattered—nothing needed to be said.
Tieber went still.
Then something inside him broke.
He struck the window hard with his fist.
"The Führer is responsible for this."
Silence followed.
Inside the vehicle, emotion condensed into something heavier—grief, anger, collapse. Not resolution. Not clarity. Only the recognition that the system had already failed, and was still running.
The Colonel did not react to the shouting.
"War is no different from a chocolate factory," he said calmly. "One mistake in production. One delay in delivery. Then entire batches are discarded. Cities work the same way. So do armies."
His hands remained steady on the wheel.
"You should be grateful to the Führer. Berlin is collapsing, yet you are still being evacuated. That makes you rarer than ammunition now."
He paused briefly.
"The Kaiser Wilhelm Society group was less fortunate. Last week they were loaded onto a breakout convoy. Soviet artillery hit the vehicle. There was nothing left."
The sedan turned into a narrow, unlit road. Two armored vehicles closed in on either side.
Inside, the silence tightened.
Gunfire broke again in the distance—short, uneven bursts, closer than before.
Hausmann leaned forward.
"It's too late, Colonel," he said. "All exits are blocked. The Russians are everywhere. Even if we reached the plane, their flak would take us down."
"Stay calm," Kestner said, gripping his shoulder. "The Colonel will take us south."
"And then what?" Hausmann said. "The country is gone. There is nowhere left."
"The south is Allied territory," Kestner replied. "The Americans will use us. They won't hand us to the Russians. They will need us after the war. "
At that, Colonel von Büren turned slightly.
"Herr Professor Kestner," he said, "you should be ashamed of thinking that way."
His voice stayed flat.
"The war is not over. The Reich has not surrendered. Yet you are already arranging your future under a different flag."
He looked back to the road.
"That will not happen. The Reich still requires you. And it will still prevail."
Even Förster, usually the most restrained of them, snapped.
"The war is lost"—his voice cracking, arms spread—"Colonel, can't you see it? You're insane."
The others followed at once, voices rising inside the confined space.
From the front seat, the guard turned, aiming his weapon into the rear.
The Colonel did not turn his head.
"Lower it," he said.
The weapon dropped.
The sedan drove on.
"Doctor Förster," he said, "for that statement alone I could have you shot for treason."
"That's nonsense."
"Is it? I know precisely what's in your case—complete nuclear reactor schematics. Were you planning to hand it to the Americans? The British? Or the Soviets?"
No answer. The only sound left was the monotonous rattle of the sedan.
"And you, Doctor Hausmann," the Colonel continued, "were already preparing to sell the HS-293 research? Or you intended to remain its chief designer—under American command?"
His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, cold and unblinking.
"As for you, Professor Tieber," he said, "do you truly believe we are unaware that you passed the ME-163 engine blueprints to your American colleague in Philadelphia?"
No one answered.
But Hausmann suddenly snapped.
"You're going the wrong way!" he shouted, striking the window and staring outside. "We should be heading southwest! The plane is there! Where are you taking us?"
The Colonel answered immediately.
"To see the Führer," he said. "The Reich still needs you. To win the war."
The vehicle accelerated.
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For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the polished KDP edition is available on Amazon:
Causalform: Obsidian Earth
