The Atlantropa Articles

by Cody Franklin

  “You brought me because you couldn’t trust…me?” he says, confused.

  “I don’t know what is going on with you, Ulric,” I say. “I was expecting a Knight who took no pity on the Scavengers. I wanted a brother who could support me when I punished those savages.”

  Ulric looks back at me, then to the book in his hand, then back at me again. We say nothing for a few moments. Two armored men in the middle of this flat dry wasteland…arguing over a book.

  “This isn’t a joke,” I say, my tone becoming grim. “We do not have time to doubt the origins of the Reich. Doubt if the Führer was actually a black-haired inferior being. All that is expected of us is loyalty. Are you loyal?”

  Ulric takes a few seconds to respond. Through the radio I can hear only stuttering. I repeat it again. Louder. Fiercer. He recoils back and nods his head in agreement.

  “Good,” I say, before turning around and continuing onward.

  Fólkvangr

  The idea of some sickly-looking, black-haired sub-human creating the Reich is laughable. Could a non-Aryan, a man who looked nothing like us, really be one of the founders of our entire race? That wouldn’t make any sense. Why would somebody that wasn’t one of us want to create us?

  If anything, this entire thing was a misunderstanding. There is no reason to imagine that the man on the cover was Adolf Hitler himself. Perhaps it was just a warning. A symbol of a Jew? Something.

  It’s best to suppress this deep down inside. Yet it’s very difficult to think of anything else while walking in this wasteland. As evening comes, we reach another series of sand dunes. They are smaller than the others and so instead of a long climb, it’s simply an inconvenient incline from time to time. We are only two kilometers from Eagle Nest #13. Even from this distance, it takes up the entire world in front of us.

  Eventually, as the sun begins to set, we crest over a large hill overlooking the entire nest. I can see a long cloud trailing away underneath the large metal walls. It’s a ship. The wall makes even the largest vessels appear like beetles crawling around a simple staircase step. Sand flows like a wave across the kilometer of flat maintained desert, carried on by the wind until it clashes against the unmovable force of the steel barrier surrounding the complex of tall towers.

  The walls are the best defense against a Scavenger attack. Sadly, however, sometimes they are not enough. The sides are as ornate as the towers. Memorials are metal-worked into the façade of great stories in Aryan history. The Glass Wars. The founding of the Eagle Nest. The creation of the Atlantropan dams. Atop the thick walls are a series of turrets, watchtowers, and tall flagpoles, each flying a display of gold and red.

  “How much farther do we need to walk?” an exhausted Ulric asks.

  “About another kilometer,” I announce, my hands tightening around the straps on my duffle bag. Every step feels like needles are burrowing into my feet. My entire soles are covered in calluses. “That’s when our short-range radios begin to work on their frequency. Or, if they spot us, that’d be nice too.”

  As we walk down the large, gradual hill that makes up the bowl that the complex is part of, I think back to the military. To when we came down a hill much like this, as artillery fire rained down on us. Back then, I couldn’t imagine walking through that. Even in our vehicles it was catastrophic.

  We asked why we couldn’t all be put into hovercraft, but apparently the anti-aircraft fire was too much. Aegir Drops couldn’t be used either, because it was our own city and we’d need to rebuild. So charging the Eagle Nest was the plan. Like the Knights of old, charging against a walled defense, one of my friends said. He died later that day.

  Suddenly, the first crackle of radio fuzz fills my helmet speakers. My heart leaps. We’re getting close. I can’t feel the lower part of my body, or if I can, I’m certainly ignoring it. My tongue has become paper, scratching against the top of my dry mouth. It’s been so long since I’ve had a drink of my water. Every attempt to take off my helmet has been met with the bitter blast of the intense summer heat. Every drink steals time that can be spent walking. It’s not worth it.

  The battery on my suit begins to flicker. We’ve just barely made it. Another half-day of walking and this armor would have given out. Ulric and I would have been cooked alive in our own armor. Yet for now I am met with the relief of a second voice crackling into my helmet, this one female, deeper than Ulric’s.

  “You are trespassing into Eagle Nest #13 territory, state your name or we will open fire,” the woman states.

  Even the threat fills me with joy; my legs almost give out, but by now I assume they are just used to the motion of going up and down.

  “This is Captain Ansel Manafort of the Howling Dark,” I say with bated breath, my heart pounding in my chest with every word. “Our ship went down and we request immediate assistance. We need a ship tow.”

  “Why are you not in a Camel, Captain Manafort?” she asks.

  “We hit a mine. There wasn’t enough time to walk back.”

  “We’ll send out transport for you, wait right there,” she says, before the radio goes silent.

  Ulric looks at me.

  “What did she say?” he asks.

  “They’re coming.”

  I take a happy breath before my knees give out and I flop down onto the soft sand as if it was a warm bed.

  Just like earlier, I awake with a jolt and swing my head wildly to see where I am. I passed out again. I open my eyes pull myself off of the ground. Ulric leans by my side with his hand on my shoulder. I ask him how long I was out.

  “About thirty seconds,” he says, his voice sounding as equally drained of emotion as mine.

  “Guess I didn’t know how tired I was,” I chuckle it off, patting my hands across the front of my body, which is now caked in fine orange dust. The sand falls off and is carried by the wind.

  As we look toward the series of tall ornate towers, I notice that one of the gates, a large archway with heavy steel doors, parts ways. It pushes away the sand around it as if it were merely kicking a small pile. If Ulric and I were closer, I imagine it would seem like a tidal wave rushing forward to envelop us both.

  When the doors finish opening, something begins making its way through. The small ship that was making the cloud of smoke veers away as the behemoth emerges. A large gray beast migrates its way through the large gateway, just small enough to squeeze through the massive portal. It appears more like a moving island than an actual ship, and that’s the point. That is how we are going to tow the Howling Dark.

  “What is that?” Ulric says in amazement.

  “That, Ulric, is a Fólkvangr,” I declare in relief.

  Ships breaking down or being damaged in the Kiln aren’t rare occurrences. Since they are hulking bits of metal in the middle of the desert, it just isn’t practical to try to fix them in the middle of a dangerous place. So to remedy this problem, we have the Fólkvangr. A mechanical marvel at least three times the size of the Howling Dark. I would know, although I’ve only once had the chance to see one with my own eyes. It’s more of a mobile city than anything else. A dock that comes to ships in need and transports them to safety.

  The ship has no roof; in many ways it’s shaped like a square bowl. In the center is where the damaged ship goes, and the Fólkvangr then brings it back to the Eagle Nest.

  You would expect something so large to move slower than the average ship. It would just make sense. Instead, it can cover the same distance in a day as even the Howling Dark. It’s quite a rarity to see one, and we’re lucky that we broke down near a Nest that has one.

  As it makes its way toward us, the sand beneath my feet begins to jitter and shake. Millions of tiny particles all jumping around from the rumble of the Fólkvangr’s treads. Thick clouds of black smoke erupt from its pipes like a volcano traveling across the desert sea.

  Ulric and I simply stand in
awe of the machine barreling toward us. The deep roar from its engines is deafening, even from a kilometer away. After a bit, Ulric simply decides to sit down, but I still stand. I need to keep up the appearance of a Captain, even if I did just trudge through the desert to get here. The roar becomes louder, shaking the ground and us along with it. Before we know it, it is upon us. Its exterior is more like a wall than a ship. Flags and banners fly from its edges, as if we were about to enter a small castle.

  It soon blocks out the sun, casting a long dark shadow over us. The gargantuan machine stops not too far from us and lowers down a small ramp. Ulric and I trudge our way up the railed steel contraption, making our way toward a tall but thin doorway. The rumbling does not cease for a moment, so I hold onto the bars for support, or else I fear I’ll tumble off into the sand below.

  Grand Truths

  This whole incident delayed our voyage by weeks. The sweat poured down my head every night as I struggled to fall asleep. Images of the Scavenger ship tearing holes into my faithful Howling Dark plagued my thoughts. Something deep inside told me that it was all because of me. Ulric was right. I really was too arrogant, confident that things would go perfectly. Another voice in my head tried to overpowered the first. It struggled to tell me that there was nothing I could do, and that this was just an unlucky situation.

  I knew which voice was right though, and that was why I had two weeks of sleepless nights. The best that came out of the situation was that the crew was alive and well. The cheers erupted like a stampede when I arrived back to the Howling Dark in the Fólkvagnr. The crew knew what it meant. It meant they were saved. The broken and contorted ship was slowly lifted inside the massive hull of the Fólkvagnr, broken tread and all.

  That burning sensation of guilt waged war against my stomach as I saw such a lovely vessel dragged unceremoniously to be repaired. Apparently we had gotten there just in time. Volker explained that they sent a second Camel, but just a few hours later we arrived in the Fólkvagnr. If he and the rest of the crew blamed me for the incident, they did a fantastic job of hiding it. I knew that if I was in their position I wouldn’t have been so forgiving.

  Every night I knew that men died because of me and that I could have prevented it.

  After a half-day of travel, the Howling Dark was brought to the docks of the Eagle’s Nest for repair. The process to fix a broken tread was supposed to be “simple” but the steps were still slow and lengthy. This period of cooling down and “relaxation” only confronted me with all the mistakes that led me here.

  For two weeks, I frequently returned to see the ship being brought back into fighting trim. I tried to get at least some glimpse of progress. To see whether the tread had been fixed, whether the glass had been replaced. Maybe I wanted to relieve my guilt by seeing the ship getting fixed up. Maybe I came back so often because I hoping they would say she was ready for us to get back underway.

  The Eagle Nest was more than happy to accommodate the entire crew of the Howling Dark and fix up all our damage. They told me that we did a lot of good fighting with those two ships. Said there was no knowing what kind of damage they could have done to a smaller vessel.

  We got a hero’s welcome, if you will. A place to rest, a place where I could tend to my wounds. The crew was forgiving, the indoor city was welcoming, yet I knew that I didn’t deserve any of it.

  My knee had healed up a bit: all it needed was some tending to by the Nest physicians. They told me that after a week I would be able to put some weight on it, to test it out and make sure that everything felt alright. So I use this as an excuse to go for walks around the Nest. Maybe clear my brain.

  I stand here in the central hub of the main Eagle Nest tower. Crowds of women, children, and men trying to get to work hurry around me. All of them have a place to be inside this massive cylindrical tower. Their footsteps clatter against the brown marble. The scene reminds me much more of a city square than the center of a building. There is no ceiling exactly. Instead, the tower is simply hollow, extending a thousand meters above my head.

  As I peer up, I see bridges crisscrossing from one side of the tower to the other, the vital horizontal connections of this vertical city. Through these metal beams, rays of sunlight filter down from above, a reminder that the sun still is present here and that we still are in the Kiln, no matter how much the well-dressed civilians of this place attempt to think differently.

  My knee begins hurting me again, so I decide to have a little rest next to an ancient stone fountain with statues carved in the likeness of the Eternal Führer and the original Aryans. They are the epicenter of this entire Nest complex. Beneath these gray figures is a pool of teal-blue water which flows around their feet, just like the crowd flowing around the fountain itself.

  I glance at the statue, looking at the tablet in Adolf Hitler’s hand. At the words engraved on it:

  The Atlantropa Articles

  “Quite the statue, isn’t it?” a voice echoes behind me. I take my eyes of the plaque to see Ulric, looking nothing but disheartened. Bags have collected underneath his half-opened eyes. His beard has become disheveled and his hair unkempt. I’m hit with an immediate odor that warns me he hasn’t had a proper bath in at least a couple of days.

  “You’re finally out of your room,” I say to him, looking straight into his glazed-over eyes. He nods. After the ship was rescued, Ulric became a recluse, shutting himself off from the crew. The only time he appeared was when the ship had to be repaired and he moved his operations to one of the many rooms the Nest had set aside to accommodate us.

  While others were out and about, drinking and whoring, he stayed in his room. Despite my best efforts knocking on that door every day, he would not answer.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking…and reading,” he says, his voice struggling to maintain itself over the roar of the crowd. “I’ve done nothing but compare and contrast both versions of My Struggle. Two different versions of Hitler. What does it mean, Ansel, if this isn’t true?” he points a hand to the central figure of the display. “If this depiction we have of the Führer as an actual Aryan…is just a myth?”

  We both look at the towering Führer, his long stone robes flowing over and touching the tip of the fountain pool. In his left hand, he holds a document up high for all to see; chiseled onto it are those three famous words: “The Atlantropa Articles.” His right hand, stretched confidently out at waist height, cups an eagle with majestically spread wings. The bird looks as though it is prepared to fly.

  “You don’t know it’s a myth. You can’t change your perception based on a single book. It was just a picture.”

  “There was more than one picture…” Ulric says. “There are supposed pictures of Goebbels, Göring, Himmler…none of them…” He looks as though he is about to burst into tears. “None of them looked Aryan at all. They weren’t like us…”

  I raise my eyebrows, confused at what he was saying. “What are you getting at?”

  Ulric sits down next to me on the bench in the center of this massive tower. We both looked out into the traffic of blonde, happy Aryans mindlessly making their way about on their day.

  “They all had black hair, dark eyes…” he chokes out. Reaching into his pocket, he takes out a couple of wrinkled old pictures and places them into my hands. I hold them before me, and my eyes go wide at what I see. My mind draws a blank.

  There was the man in the old book: he looked short and stout, with his arm extended out toward the crowd in the same salute we do today. It most certainly looked like any rally we would have had when I was a child in the capital. The entire crowd was signaling him. This was their Führer. There could be no other explanation. The same red-and-white flags hang behind him and the golden eagle as well. It felt so familiar…and yet…not. Like a dream where just the little aspects were off.

  I look at another picture and see a group of unimpressive men dressed in brown uniforms. The
y looked nothing like the Aryans of today. Dark hair, round bellies, and at the center was the same man again. All in the picture look at him with a sense of admiration.

  My mind races attempting to decide how to process this. I can’t agree with Ulric. This is his livelihood. It would destroy him. I don’t even know how to comprehend it. Is it a trick? Are these photos true? Not saying another word, I simply hand the pictures back to Ulric.

  “So what do you think of that?” Ulric asks me, his voice lined with desperation.

  “I’m thinking that it could be anything,” I lie. Ulric scoffs at this idea.

  “Think about it. This is why…this is why we don’t have records of the Reclamation…why we only have that depiction of Adolf Hitler,” he points a shaking finger at the statue. “I have a theory…”

  “Stop it,” I say.

  “I have a theory that for some reason the Reich over the years just shifted out what the Führer must have actually looked like for something that resembled the Aryans of today more… I know that sounds…crazy. I don’t know…it probably took generations…people might have just forgotten…”

  “It does sound crazy,” I say. “How would people just forget what the actual Führer looked like?”

  “I don’t know…” he mutters, “how can people forget about that song? Sometimes, if something is lost, future generations will never know that something is missing in the first place.”

  He takes out the two copies of the book. The black haired man in the photo stares back at me with beady eyes. “Look…” Ulric contemplates, scouring through the pages of the older book, “there is no mention of the dams in here. No talk about uniting Europe under the guiding hand of Aryans…there is…nothing that reflects our modern philosophy…protecting the tribe…”