When I stopped moving the phone for more than a couple seconds, icons started to pop up, info tags attached to different buildings and even points in the middle of the street. One icon had a pulsing red border around it, centered on the apartment building across the street from me. I touched it and it expanded to fill the screen. There was a photo of one Folker Horst, a stern, chubby man in his fifties with a thick mustache who looked a little like Stalin. The text explained that he’d been an anti-Nazi resistor in the 1930’s who’d fled to Russia and then returned to Berlin after the war before being arrested and disappeared by the Stasi in 1962. I touched the “More Information” button, and the text expanded to include a multi-branching family tree.
The names were too small to make out on the small screen, but I could see two names on opposite ends were pulsing red. I pinched to zoom in. The top name was this guy, Folker Horst, 1901 to 1962. The other name was a complete shock: Martin Manning, born 1989. Me. The murdered Folker Horst, who I’d never heard of in my life, was my distant cousin, on my dad’s side of the family, and the Berlin City History app knew it. Holy shit.
I doubted for a moment that the connection was real, but the family tree had everything right that I could verify—mom and dad’s families, oma, the older brother my dad never really knew, Uncle Leon. I tapped his name on the tree and saw his dates: 1938 to 1953. Twelve years older than my dad, he’d survived the whole war and then died when he was fifteen. Another fact about my life my phone knew before me.
A double-pulse alert vibrated the phone in my hand, which was already shaking a little on its own. I switched to the messenger app.
Ned: You ok?
I closed my eyes, counted to two, and dictated my response. “I’m moving, no worries.” Ned didn’t reply. He could monitor my movements in real time. I’d seen the set-up—six linked twenty-eight-inch screens with Google maps of thirty different cities, all keyed into the GPS units in our phones. His asking if I was okay was just Ned’s way of yelling, “Get back to fucking work.” I assumed he’d clicked the “Slack Meter” box on my work profile. Three clicks in one day, and I’d get a warning. Three warnings accumulated in one quarter and I’d get a Slack Badge, which meant losing one of my five vacation days and lowering the threshold for future warnings from three to two. And yep, there it came, the auto-generated ping indicating I’d gotten the Slack click. I picked up the pace and headed for my next stop.
Fueled by fear of being labeled a Gen-Y slacker once again, I hit my next target, a convenience store and Internet café owned by a wary, forty-something Turk. He listened politely and was having none of it, not even the free trial. I thought I saw a crack of light when I showed him the coupon features, but no dice. I bought a Berliner pilsner and some kibbeh before checking out “No Sale,” wolfing the meat pie down as I fast-walked to the U-Bahn station and caught a train downtown.
With twelve minutes to think to myself, I played with the Berlin City app some more, poking around the settings which, by default, were set to wide open. The thing pulled in data from my Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and LinkedIn. According to the “About” page, it also interfaced with the fully digitized archives of seventeen different Berlin museums and universities, drawing on an pool of 270,000 pictures. It was a massive undertaking, but I wasn’t surprised I’d never heard of it—not a coupon or a sales tool to be found in the whole thing, and it didn’t accept advertising. On the plus side, the whole thing was Open Source, so maybe we could get some value out of it for ThriftyCity. I tried to come up with some sales-oriented opportunity before I reached my stop, hoping to undo the damage from my demerit, but nothing came to me.
Mitte’s crowded, narrower streets were a sharp contrast to the football-field wide Karl Marx Allee. This was the center of Berlin, with a rich mixture of businessmen, shoppers, and tourists clogging up the sidewalks. The architecture was more classic Berlin as well—facades echoing the nineteenth century instead of Communist dream-palaces, with some more modern glass-and-steel structures scattered here and there. My assignments for the rest of the day were all up and down Wilhelmstrasse, one of the main North-South drags in downtown. My first stop was a four-star restaurant. Well, I gave it four stars in the demo I’d made for them—figuring anyone ballsy enough to charge twenty-three euros for a schmaltz and black bread appetizer must be good or they’d be out of business.
As I stood before the door, checking into the target on my phone, I got an alert from Berlin City, a bright yellow pop-up window that said, “Leon Manning, Your Uncle, Was 210 Meters From Your Current Location.” I blinked and didn’t do the right thing. Instead I touched the “Map” button, causing a map of the Berlin streets around me to take over the screen, a bright yellow dot with my uncle’s name just two blocks away. It was the opposite direction from my next sales calls, but the shiver of needful curiosity coursing through me would not be denied. No one talked about Uncle Leon. No one had even called him Uncle Leon before that moment. He’d died almost sixty-five years ago, but he’d lived right around the corner from me.
I figured I never closed the high-end restaurants anyway, so Ned wouldn’t know the difference. With a few swipes, I turned off the GPS on my phone. It was spotty, especially indoors, so he’d assume I’d lost the connection while inside, which gave me a good twenty minutes to go see my uncle. The place was close enough that I might even be within the error bars of cell tower triangulation. I screwed up my courage, squared my shoulders, and fast-walked up the street. It didn’t take even three minutes for me to come up to the imposing, clean-lined facade of a building identified on my phone as the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. It was neat and orderly, like much of downtown, and there were tourists milling about in the small open plaza, reading plaques and taking pictures.
My uncle’s yellow dot was on the other side of the plaza, and as I closed in the phone buzzed again. Panic that it was Ned checking up on me drew fear sweat from the small of my back, but it was actually a different kind of crisis. The Berlin City app was telling me that I’d entered a Crisis Point, and was wondering if I’d like to “Explore More?” I did indeed, and touched the screen to bring up the interactive augmented reality layer. My phone offered me two options, “1941 - Luftwaffe HQ” and “1953 - Worker’s Revolt.” The fact that this modern-day ministry had been the nerve center for the London Blitz was intriguing, but the 1953 date was pulsing and glowing red. Even without this unsubtle hint, I’d have chosen the year my uncle died.
Through my phone’s screen, the small plaza filled with black and white workers, East Germans massed outside what was then called the House of Ministries, angry about something. I swung my phone around the plaza, and there were photos of people in every direction. It was a strange effect, like standing in a sea of cardboard cutouts, but ones which magically turned to face you no matter which angle you looked at them from.
I’d never heard of mass protests in East Berlin, at least not before the Wall came down in 1989. I touched the “More” icon, and my phone froze for just a second. Then it started streaming a deep, serious-toned German male voice “Angered by inhumane demands for increased productivity from Ulbricht and other DDR leaders, workers throughout East Berlin went on mass strike, gathering here on June 17 with cries of ’Free Elections! Down with Government!’ This first and largest protest of the Cold War era in Berlin would not be matched until 1989.”
As I moved through the ghost crowd of angry workers, listening with growing anger and sympathy, I spotted a yellow halo around one of the figures across the street. I moved towards it, and as I got within a dozen meters, a tag popped up beneath the group photo. Only his head and shoulders had been caught in the old picture, a young man with light hair trimmed in an unflattering bowl cut. He had the same thin lipped, wide mouth as my dad (and me), and it was shut tight in a serious frown. The tag said “Leon Manning, 72% match. Can you confirm? 0 people have identified this person”
I couldn’t confirm. I’d never seen a photo of Uncle Le
on. When my dad and oma fled East Berlin, they’d left everything behind, including the family photos that had survived the war. Oma never talked about it, so I only had dad’s version to go by. Since he’d only been three, his story didn’t have much to it, and I honestly hadn’t thought or cared to ask him about it since I was a freshman or sophomore in high school. So no, I couldn’t confirm, but I knew it was him. So I hit “Yes” Yes, this was Uncle Leon. The app thanked me for my feedback.
I stood and stared at the blurry, pixelated ghost of Uncle Leon and wondered why he’d been here that day. He wasn’t yelling like some of the others around him. He looked worried though. And surely he’d been too young to be a worker, upset that his quota had been raised by 25 percent. I thought maybe he’d just been wandering by and stopped to see what all the fuss was about. I imagined oma in her apartment, my toddler father at her knee, waiting and worrying about her oldest son being caught out on the street.
The double pulse shook the phone in my hand, just enough to make the image vibrate. It was the bad pulse. I switched over to Messenger.
Ned: Where are you?
I assumed he wouldn’t ask if he didn’t already know. I ignored the text for the moment, whipping around and not quite running back towards the restaurant I was supposed to be selling in. I felt the phone pulse in my hand again, but didn’t slow down to look at it until I was standing outside the window, looking in on white table cloths and heavy wooden chairs.
Ned: ???
Ned: Martin?
“Sorry, was talking to chef,” I said to the phone. The voice to text software didn’t seem to mind that I was panting as I said it.
Ned: Where?
“We went for a walk so he could smoke,” I said. That seemed plausible, right?
I heard nothing from Ned for two and a half long minutes, during which time I stood there, catching my breath and staring hard at the damn phone.
Ned: Sale?
“He wants to talk to his partner. I’m going to come back tonight.”
Ned: No sale.
Did he mean me not closing the sale or him not buying my bullshit story? I took a page out of his book and decided not to respond since he hadn’t actually asked another question. Instead I activated Sales Tacker and checked out of the restaurant, dutifully marking “No Sale,” but scheduling a return appointment for 19:00 tonight. Trying to make the pitch during dinner rush wasn’t likely to work out at all, but I’d give it a go.
My next appointment was another souvenir shop, further along Wilhelmstrasse. Which was good news. The tourist joints were always the easy sells. I started walking in that general direction, even as I brought up Berlin City once again. I thought I might swing back through the plaza and try and get a screen capture of my uncle’s photo to send to my dad. I didn’t bother to turn my GPS back on. If Ned asked, I’d claim battery life concerns.
As soon as the app loaded, it gave me a new alert. “New possible facial recognition match for Leon Manning found. 37 percent Match.” I tapped the alert, and a map of downtown Berlin filled the screen, a glowing yellow pinpoint hovering right near the Brandenburg Gate, less than a kilometer from where I was standing. Now of course I wanted to check that one out too, even more than I wanted to go back to the plaza. I figured I was due my twenty-minute lunch break, even though I knew Ned hated us to take them when we were behind schedule like I was. I risked the slack badge and logged off for lunch, which automatically started the countdown timer on my phone. With 19:37 on the clock, I headed towards the Brandenburg Gate.
I followed the line of tanks down the road. They were old-model Soviet tanks, in black and white and two dimensions, and there were people throwing stones at them. Unter den Linden, packed to the modern-day gills with cafés, car showrooms, and tourist traps shown bright and airy everywhere but on my phone. Back in 1953, it was grainy and dark, with frustrated, angry German workers were throwing stones at Soviet tanks.
The street widened into Pariser Platz, the cleaned and restored Brandenburg Gate directly ahead, it’s four-horse chariot ready to gallop off and down towards me. But between them and me were three actors dressed as East German, American, and Soviet soldiers, charging five euros to pose in pictures with tourists. And there was a man on stilts, and another man in a bear suit for those who wanted less militaristic symbols of the city. Although I wasn’t sure what the stilts-guy had to do with anything. But through my camera, there was a sixty-years-gone crowd of angry workers.
I noticed that a slider had appeared along the left side of the screen, another time line for another Crisis Point. Moving it up or down changed the year, and with it the augmented reality laid over the pristine, tourist-friendly Brandenburg Gate I was standing before. I flipped to the twenty-first century and held the phone up, the gate’s three arches center-screen, and started to move the slider back from the present day. Ebullient Berliners atop the gate at night as the Wall came down gave way to Cold War-era East German guards, first in color, and then, further back in time, in black and white. Then battle-scarred Soviet soldiers transitioned into Nazis on their hate parade into jazz-age Weimar Republicans celebrating just being alive before the army of the Kaiser took their place.
The weight of tragedy in the stones and streets within my view made me feel both lucky and sad. To have escaped all that, to have lived a life free of even needing to know it ever happened, much less suffer through it—that made me lucky as sin. The sadness came when I came to suspect what I’d been brought to this point to see. I slid the time line back to the black and white, Cold War-era layer, the one marked 1953.
A yellow haloed figure was falling to his knees in the middle of the platz. A line of East German cops were firing into the crowd, and it looked like the young man had stepped forward to hurl a stone, which he still held tight in his left hand. My first thought was to wonder aloud, “Huh, my uncle was left-handed too.” It was my uncle. It was certainly the same boy I’d seen outside the Ministry building. I moved up close to him, the phone held before me. Around me, at least a dozen others were holding phones or cameras as well, taking pictures or maybe looking at their own historical realities.
I don’t imagine many people ever have to look at a photo of a loved-one’s murder. To say an uncle I’d never met, who’d died almost thirty years before my birth, was a loved one seemed crazy. But that didn’t mean I didn’t feel it. And that didn’t mean I wasn’t outraged at all he’d lost in that moment, and all my oma had lost, and my father, and me.
The phone vibrated in my hand, the image of my uncle and his comrades being shot by the Volkspolizei shivering in response. It was a message from Ned. A Slack Badge, awarded without comment. There went vacation days. Another one, and I’d lose 20 percent of my commissions for the next week. The colorful, stupid fucking Slack Badge taking the place of my uncle’s murder on my screen was so ridiculous, so utterly petty, that I laughed out loud. Not an odd sight these days, someone laughing at their phone, but I didn’t care if the tourists around me did think I was some sort of nut. I figured I’d be a nut to put up with this insanity.
Ned’s petty tyranny lost all meaning and definition when seen through the lens of real oppression. The polizei wouldn’t shoot me no matter how much Ned wanted them to. My uncle had stood up to tanks with just cobblestones. Ned wanted more sales, I’d make him more sales.
I copied the photo of my uncle being shot, opened up the Thrifty City sales app, and started creating a New Business:
Name: Workers Revolt
Location: Berlin and Everywhere Else
Business Type:
Est. Revenue: Millions Dead and Counting.
Promotion Type:
I attached my uncle’s death shot as the Location Image and uploaded it to the server. Then I started on the next one. From where I was standing I could see the exact sites of a thousand different crimes. Maybe a million.
Name: D
emocracy Destroyed
Location: Reichstag and all of Central Europe
Business Type:
Est. Revenue: Billions if you’re making tanks and bombs and poison gas.
Promotion Type:
I uploaded that, and then started trying to figure out something poignant to say about the Berlin Wall. I was working up to the Holocaust. My phone buzzed, a text from Ned.
Ned: ?
I ignored it, deciding on “Name: Dreams Divided,” and it buzzed again.
Ned: ??
Two question marks. He really was mad. I knew the next Slacker Badge was on its way and decided to step into the punch. “This is what’s important here, Ned,” I dictated to the phone, my voice dripping with acrimonious venom. “This is what the fuck matters.”
Ned: ?
“Fuck!” I yelled at the question mark, then started to dictate. “This is what fucking tourists need to see. This is where my uncle died making a stand.” The voice-to-text software replaced the “fucking” with “####” but I sent it anyway.
I was ready to throw the phone as hard as I could at the Brandenburg Gate if he sent another question mark. Out of the corner of my eye, about fifty meters away, I could see a cop eying me. Wouldn’t that be ironic. But he just stared, and no guns were drawn. I had that on my uncle anyway. The phone buzzed.
Ned: I get it.
“You get what?” I asked, but didn’t send.
Ned: We need to be culturally sensitive.
Ned: Let’s effort this new proposal of yours.
Ned: We’ll do historical events. An educational component. It’s a good plan.
My outrage started to dissipate in a gust of confusion. My first question was, why wasn’t I fired. And if I wasn’t fired, that meant, well, it meant I could make car payments. And student loan payments. And I had health insurance still. And all those things. That was good, right? It didn’t feel good though. It felt like a tire wrapped around my neck. But how could I quit when Ned was being reasonable with me?
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 26