The conference gathered within one of the grand council rooms of the royal palace at Potsdam, beneath ceilings high enough to swallow conversation and walls crowded with the painted dead.
Frederick II—Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century warrior-king who had dragged Prussia into the ranks of Europe's great powers—watched from one side of the chamber with his familiar severe expression. Pale-faced and sharp-featured, with prominent eyes, a long nose, strong jaw and light hair swept back beneath the fashions of another century, he looked every bit like a man who had personally returned to judge what his descendants intended to do with the kingdom he had helped make powerful.
Other Hohenzollern kings and princes stared down beside him, preserved forever in uniforms, medals and expressions of permanent disappointment.
Queen Victoria occupied another place of honour, though not as the round, black-clad grandmother remembered from the end of her reign. This portrait showed a younger Victoria, still beautiful and vigorous, with fair skin, large light-blue eyes and smooth brown hair framing a face that had not yet acquired the heavy severity of old age.
Beside her stood a very small Prince Wilhelm of Prussia—the future Kaiser.
The boy looked almost comically unlike the moustached emperor now standing beneath him: fair-haired, pale and solemn, dressed impeccably and staring from the canvas with the wary expression of a child who suspected he was already in trouble. Victoria rested one hand firmly atop his head, fingers buried lightly in his hair, giving the unfortunate impression that the Queen was prepared to seize her grandson by it and drag him into good behaviour should he embarrass the family.
More than forty years later, the grown Wilhelm occasionally found the portrait irritating for precisely that reason.
Beneath the watchful eyes of Frederick, Victoria and several generations of judgmental ancestors sat some of the most powerful men in the German Empire.
Prince Heinrich represented the old naval aristocracy beside Tirpitz and the senior admirals. Moltke and Falkenhayn sat among the Army's leadership, while Chancellor Bülow, Foreign Secretary Jagow, Colonial Secretary Solf and other ministers and advisers filled the remaining places around the long polished table.
Maps covered much of its surface.
China, the Pacific, German New Guinea, Samoa, The Carolines and Marianas, Africa. Shipping lanes ran across blue oceans in carefully painted lines, linking islands that looked absurdly small once the entire world was placed beside them.
At the head of the table stood Kaiser Wilhelm II.
He had summoned them because the question could no longer be avoided.
Germany's relationship with the Ottoman Empire had soured almost beyond repair. The great vision of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway had become politically uncertain, perhaps impossible, and the influence Germany had spent years cultivating in Constantinople was withering away one cancelled project and abandoned investment at a time.
What, then, came next?
Did Germany attempt to rebuild the Ottoman relationship? Search for another continental route east? Strengthen its distant colonies? Expand the Navy still further to protect them? Or accept that the entire foundation of its eastern strategy had changed?
Wilhelm looked around the table and asked the room what Germany should do. And for once, nobody seemed eager to answer.
The old men studied the maps with stern expressions. Tirpitz stared toward the Pacific. Solf looked down upon islands he knew better than almost anyone present. Heinrich remained thoughtful. Moltke frowned as though somewhere upon the table there must exist a military solution waiting to be discovered.
Then Oskar stood.
Among the carefully dressed ministers and proper old generals, the Crown Prince as always looked faintly absurd—a pale-haired Goliath rising amid a gathering of stern old statesmen, as though someone had invited a heroic statue to take part in a cabinet meeting.
He examined the maps for another moment, his gaze passing from Qingdao across the scattered islands of the Pacific and the rest of Germany's distant eastern possessions.
Then, with all the seriousness of a man suggesting that an inconvenient railway station be moved several streets to the left, he offered his solution.
"Sell the East. Asia, Oceania—all of it."
Utter silence fell across the room.
Oskar simply sat back down, folded his hands and waited, his expression perfectly calm.
For several long seconds, nobody seemed entirely certain they had heard him correctly.
An admiral blinked. Someone's eye twitched. Bülow stared across the table. Prince Heinrich slowly turned his head toward his nephew. Wilhelm's expression hardened almost imperceptibly.
Oskar merely waited for the room to do what old rooms always did when a young man said something unforgivable.
It didn't take long.
Moltke was the first to move—of course.
His chair scraped backward as he rose, indignation already settling across his face.
"Your Highness," he said sharply, "you cannot mean that. The Empire's eastern holdings may be scattered, but they are not worthless. Kiautschou—Qingdao—is among the most important overseas positions we possess. We invested years of diplomacy and enormous effort to acquire it. If we abandon it now, we announce to the world that Germany retreats the moment pressure rises. All our work will have been for nothing."
It was not only strategy in his voice. It was ownership. The possessiveness of an older generation that had spent decades colouring maps and then learned to regard every patch of German colour as something sacred.
Across the table, Wilhelm II's face had darkened—not with theatrical anger, but with something deeper.
Offence, memory, and the weight of years spent bending foreign courts to his will.
The Kaiser had fought for Germany's foothold in China. He remembered the Juye incident and the murdered missionaries, the seizure of Kiautschou, the diplomatic struggle that followed and the Eight-Nation Alliance marching into China during the Boxer uprising. He remembered Germany forcing itself into a world already divided among older empires and demanding to be treated as their equal.
Qingdao was not merely a port to him, it was proof.
Once little more than a Chinese fishing settlement, it had become a German city of broad streets, schools, churches, docks and carefully ordered administration—a small piece of the Reich planted upon the other side of the world through years of money, diplomacy and stubborn imperial will.
And Oskar had just suggested giving it away as casually as one might sell an unwanted house.
He did not blame his father for being angry.
To Wilhelm, abandoning it meant more than losing territory. It meant losing face. And among empires, face could sometimes matter almost as much as blood.
Yet Wilhelm restrained himself.
His son had said absurd things before. Far too often, those absurd things had eventually become policy.
So rather than dismiss him outright, the Kaiser gathered what remained of his patience and fixed Oskar with a cold stare.
"Oskar," he said, "I assume you have some grand plan yet again. So enlighten us. Why would you propose something so… un-German?"
Oskar smiled, not warmly or cruelly, it was the quiet smile of a man who had already performed the calculations and was now preparing to explain to everyone else why their cherished assumptions were about to become inconvenient.
He leaned forward over the maps, elbows near the edge of the table, and steepled his fingers like a judge preparing to deliver a verdict.
"Father," he said, "if war comes—and we all know it may—then the East becomes a trap."
Murmurs stirred. He continued anyway.
"The Anglo-Japanese Alliance exists. If Europe burns, Britain will not allow us free passage. Japan will not hesitate to seize what it can. Our East Asia Squadron will be isolated. Our men in Qingdao and our people in Oceania will be cut off—captured, starved out, or destroyed. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not gamble German lives on pride."
Moltke opened his mouth, but Oskar cut the space before the protest could become speech.
"Even if our fortifications are strong," Oskar said, "fortifications do not eat. They do not manufacture shells. They do not replace barrels, medicines, boots. A fortress without supply is not a fortress—it is a coffin with walls."
Tirpitz shifted then, slow and heavy, like a battleship turning its guns.
"Your Majesty," he said, choosing his words carefully, "Japan is not a small country anymore. It has proven itself a great power. It defeated Russia. Its navy grows rapidly. And its officers have studied our methods for years. If Japan strikes our eastern holdings, the distance alone will decide the outcome—regardless of bravery. Even a Moss Men garrison would run out of ammunition eventually if it cannot be supplied."
Tirpitz's eyes flicked toward Oskar—brief, measured.
"The Crown Prince's suggestion deserves consideration."
Moltke's nostrils flared.
"That is speculation," he snapped. "Japan may not even dare. We can reinforce. We can strengthen Qingdao. We have invested too much to throw it away like scrap."
Falkenhayn spoke next, calm where Moltke was sharp.
"Reinforce with what?" he asked quietly. "And through which sea? Even if we send men, how many can we truly send? How fast? How safely? The East is far. Too far. In war, distance becomes an enemy of its own."
Moltke scoffed. "What then if Japan attacks, we simply take back our losses after we win."
Tirpitz's gaze stayed steady.
"And the men we lose?" he asked. "The ships? The trained crews? Those cannot be reclaimed with signatures. Even victory will not restore what the sea swallows."
Wilhelm II said nothing. His hands remained on the table, but his knuckles had whitened. He looked like a man listening to an autopsy of his own ambition.
Oskar let them argue a moment longer—Moltke's wounded pride, Tirpitz's careful hesitation, Falkenhayn's cold realism, his father's heavy, unspoken resentment—until it all began to blur together. Not strategy. Not statecraft. Just old men circling their own bruised egos, arguing feelings while calling it logic.
He exhaled slowly, rubbed a hand down his face, and leaned back as if the sound itself had exhausted him.
"Enough," he said.
The word cut through the room cleanly. Conversation died on instinct, like a pack going still when a stronger voice speaks. Oskar did not raise his tone. He never needed to.
"You are debating this as if the choice is between glory and cowardice," he continued. "It is not. It is between reality and theater."
Moltke's mouth opened.
Oskar raised a single finger without looking at him. "Facts first."
He tapped the table once, close to the map.
"Oceania. Our so-called empire in the Pacific. How many Germans live there in total? Roughly sixteen hundred. Not armies. Not settlers in any meaningful sense. Clerks. Traders. Plantation overseers. Police. A few hundred here, a few dozen there. Most of those islands are not German in practice—they are native land held together by paperwork and the hope no one notices."
He let the words settle.
"Many of the people living there do not even know they are under German rule. That is how thin our presence truly is."
He went on without pause, his voice precise, almost clinical.
"And how did we acquire much of it? Spain sold us the Carolines and the Northern Marianas after losing to the United States—because Spain could no longer hold them. Twenty-five million pesetas. About seventeen million marks at the time. Adjusted, perhaps twenty-five million marks today."
The number hung in the air. Small. Embarrassingly small.
"Twenty-five million marks," Oskar repeated, "for islands our own diplomats described as tiny, sparsely populated, and marginally productive. Their primary value to us is copra—dried coconuts. Resources we can obtain just as easily, and far more securely, in Africa."
Moltke stiffened. Wilhelm's eyes narrowed.
Oskar did not react. He was no longer speaking to pride. He was speaking to the cold hard logic of numbers.
"And then there is Qingdao," he said, his tone shifting—not softer, but sharper. "Kiautschou. Yes. Our jewel. Our symbol in Asia. I understand what it represents."
His gaze flicked to his father, briefly. Not accusatory. Simply acknowledging the years of effort and humiliation bound up in that place.
"But what is it in reality?" Oskar asked. "A fortress at the end of a rope we do not control."
He leaned forward again, fingers steepled.
"The city's population is roughly sixty thousand—overwhelmingly Chinese. Perhaps two thousand Europeans among them. And if war comes?" He shook his head once. "Our garrison is not an army. It is a siege waiting to happen. Even if we scrape together every available man—including naval personnel—we might muster four thousand defenders."
He let that sink in.
"Four thousand men cannot defend the pride of an empire against Japan's navy and Britain's sea power."
Tirpitz's jaw tightened as he considered it. Falkenhayn did not speak at all.
He was listening.
Oskar spread his hands, almost bored by the resistance, as if the argument had become predictable long ago.
"So what do we actually lose if we release the East?" he asked. "Not resources. Coconuts and phosphates can be sourced elsewhere. Not manpower—this is not the evacuation of millions. It is a few thousand Germans at most: clerks, planters, traders, garrisons, their wives and children. We can bring them home, or redirect them to Africa—where our holdings are contiguous, defensible, and worth the effort."
He let his gaze drift across the older ministers, daring any of them to argue with the map itself.
"Even now," Oskar continued evenly, "in Cameroon, my three Bauxi towns are expanding at a steady pace. Families of Workers are settling in. Cash crops are increasing. Timber, rubber, Bauxite, minerals—real resources—are flowing outward thanks to German trade with the natives."
He did not smile. He did not need to.
"Also our losses there are negligible. Since restructuring administration under my system, we have not lost a single German to native uprisings. Discipline is firm. Incentives are clear. Alliances are maintained. We govern effectively as protectors, not oppressors."
A faint pause.
"The tribes now exercise greater autonomy among themselves. And yes, that has led to conflict between them." His tone remained clinical. "It is unfortunate. But it is no longer Germany's problem, as they are now free to do as they please."
He leaned forward just slightly.
"The point is that our African holdings have real weight behind them. They have value, they can be supplied. They can also be defended. And they can be made even greater with some more investment. And in my opinion that is an empire worth investing in."
His fingers tapped the table once, softly.
"Oceania and Qingdao are symbols. Africa is substance."
His tone never rose. It didn't need to.
"So yes," Oskar said, and the words were almost casual, "if we let go of the East, what we lose is face."
Moltke's cheeks colored. "Face matters—"
"Yes," Oskar cut in, still perfectly even. "It matters. I do not deny it. But I refuse to have German men die for pride dressed up as policy."
The room went quiet in that particular way it always did when a truth was stated plainly enough to insult everyone at once.
Oskar's voice didn't soften. It sharpened.
"But do not misunderstand me," he said. "This is not abandonment. It is conversion."
He tapped Qingdao on the map—one precise touch, like placing a seal.
"Kiautschou returns to China. Openly. Formally. We stop pretending we can hold it in a European war. In exchange we secure what matters: commercial privileges, investment guarantees, and legal protection for German firms and nationals. Germans remain there as merchants—not as a garrison waiting to be buried behind a wall."
His eyes moved around the table, collecting faces.
"And if war comes, German nationals can move inland under Chinese authority instead of dying at the end of the world so Berlin can boast it still owns a port."
Wilhelm's face tightened as if he'd swallowed iron.
Oskar did not flinch.
"And yes," he added, anticipating the moral outrage before it formed, "we make it explicit: no official missionary provocations. No imperial sermonizing that turns commerce into a crusade. We trade. We build. We invest. The port becomes leverage—not bait."
Then his finger slid across the Pacific, over the scatter of islands like crumbs spilled across an ocean too wide to police.
"As for Oceania," Oskar said, "the only power in the region strong enough to truly secure those islands—and the only one likely to accept them—is Japan."
Moltke's eyes sharpened, the old reflex of outrage arriving on time.
"To Japan?" he snapped. "That is madness. Britain will snarl. The Americans will glare. The French will protest."
"They can protest," Oskar said. "But the Japanese will still accept it—because they will understand what it is."
He leaned forward slightly, not to intimidate, but to make the room listen.
"A once-in-a-generation offer," he said. "A legal transfer. No war required. No fleet required. No blood required. Japan will not be offered such a gift again."
His voice stayed level, but the meaning underneath it was naked: take it clean now, or take it dirty later.
"And if war comes," Oskar added, "Japan will seize those islands anyway. The only difference is whether we gain something first—or lose men and ships and receive nothing but humiliation."
Tirpitz spoke at last, low and careful, like a man testing ice.
"And what price, Your Highness?"
Oskar's mouth did not smile, but his eyes did.
"More than Spain ever received from us," he said. "And enough that no one can pretend it was charity."
He let the sentence hang—just long enough for them to picture it: headlines, outrage, envy, the sheer weight of it.
Then he set the number down like a paperweight.
"Japan's state budget sits on the order of a billion marks," he said. "They can afford one hundred and twenty million for the entire package—if it is presented properly. And those funds do not vanish into ceremonies and medals. They go into what matters. Africa. Infrastructure. Fortifications. Rail. Production. A German Empire that can actually be supplied when Europe ignites."
He looked around the table again—at men who still treated prestige like armor, and at a Kaiser who carried trophies like both crown and wound.
"And if the public screams?" Oskar asked.
He shrugged, almost lazily.
"Let them scream at me. I will take the heat. Father—you present it as goodwill toward China and Japan, consolidation of German holdings, strategic foresight. An act chosen from strength, not forced by defeat."
He leaned back, hands folding again as if the verdict had already been stamped and filed.
"This is not retreat," he said. "It is refusal to be overextended—calculated, deliberate, and meant to improve Germany's position if the world finally loses its mind."
For several seconds, nobody answered.
The room had allowed Oskar to speak largely without interruption, but silence did not mean agreement. Around the table sat men who had spent much of their lives building the very empire he now proposed dismantling in Asia, and once the first shock faded, objections began coming from almost every direction.
Solf was among the first.
To him, the Pacific colonies were not meaningless dots scattered across blue paint. Germany had spent money administering them, years negotiating for them and no small amount of diplomatic capital defending its claims. Germans had settled there. Plantations had been established. Ports improved. Trade developed. Even blood had occasionally been spilled beneath the Imperial flag.
If profitability was the problem, Solf argued, then Oskar of all people had no right to complain about lack of development. Give him ten years, German capital and a few thousand settlers and he could probably turn half those islands into prosperous little colonies. Harbours could be deepened. Wireless stations raised. Coastal guns installed. Fisheries developed. Naval bases established.
Germany had already endured crises with other powers—America among them—over Pacific influence. To surrender everything now for money and vague promises of goodwill seemed almost insulting.
His language toward the Japanese and Chinese grew contemptuous as he spoke, reflecting prejudices that hardly disturbed most of the older men around the table.
Oskar alone felt the words sting somewhere deeper than they should have. He allowed none of it to reach his face.
Then Tirpitz raised the military objection.
He was more sympathetic to Oskar's reasoning, yet even he wondered whether distance necessarily required withdrawal. Distance could also be answered with ships, wireless stations, fortified anchorages, larger ammunition reserves and a Navy powerful enough to keep the routes open.
The Imperial Navy was already stronger than it had been ten years earlier.
And it was still growing.
If Oskar's promised improvements in engines, gunnery, communications and ship construction appeared as expected, Tirpitz argued, then perhaps the answer was not to retreat from the Pacific but finally possess the naval strength required to defend it.
If a great war came, Germany did not necessarily have to lose at sea.
Perhaps Britain should be the power worrying about distant colonies.
Moltke was less diplomatic.
By Oskar's logic, he argued, Britain ought to begin auctioning half its empire merely because Germany might someday threaten it. France should abandon Indochina because Japan possessed a fleet. Russia might as well surrender Siberia because it had already demonstrated its inability to fight Japan properly once before.
Empires could not be governed according to the principle that anything difficult to defend should simply be abandoned.
Moltke remained convinced that in a general European war the German Army could defeat France and Russia. The men of the Admiralty possessed growing confidence in the Navy as well.
Perhaps some distant colonies would be isolated. Perhaps some would even fall temporarily.
So what?
If Germany won the greater war, Germany would recover them afterward—and possibly acquire the colonies of the defeated powers besides.
Men would die, ships would be lost, yet that was war.
Why surrender before the first shot had even been fired?
More than a few heads nodded at that.
Confidence in the Empire had rarely been higher. German industry was booming, the population was growing and Oskar's inventions seemed to make the nation stronger with every passing year. To many of the men around the table, the idea that Germany should voluntarily retreat from anywhere seemed almost contrary to the entire direction of history.
Then Wilhelm raised the objection that troubled him most, which was Asia itself.
The Kaiser returned uneasily to an old fear he had spoken of before—the so-called Yellow Peril.
Japan had already defeated Russia and was modernising with alarming speed. China remained divided, humiliated and comparatively weak, but behind that weakness stood more than four hundred million people.
What if one day those hundreds of millions truly unified? What if they industrialised?Modernised? Armed themselves?
Europe treated the Asian powers lightly now, but Wilhelm did not entirely share that confidence. Civilisations that possessed such enormous populations did not need to remain weak forever.
And Oskar proposed strengthening both. Return Qingdao to China. Sell the Pacific possessions to Japan. Give one sovereignty and goodwill, the other territory, prestige and strategic reach.
What if Germany discovered several decades from now that it had helped create the very powers Europe would then struggle to contain?
Prince Heinrich understood the concern. So did many of the others.
They did not reject Oskar's argument completely. Consolidation made sense. Avoiding unnecessary German deaths made sense. Turning liabilities into money and diplomatic goodwill certainly sounded attractive when phrased neatly enough, but the conclusion still seemed absurdly extreme.
And throughout all of it, Oskar's expression never changed. That eventually became more unsettling than the arguments themselves.
He listened. He allowed Solf to finish. He allowed Tirpitz to question him. He allowed Moltke to practically accuse him of dismantling the Empire through cowardice and let his father speak at length about the future danger of Asia.
No irritation appeared, no uncertainty. Oskar merely sat there with his hands folded, watching them one after another.
Eventually the objections weakened, then stopped. And the room turned toward him again. Even Moltke seemed to understand now. The Crown Prince had not finished.
Oskar smiled.
"You are all thinking too small."
Several expressions immediately hardened.
Calling the leadership of the German Empire narrow-minded rarely improved a meeting.
Oskar continued anyway.
He explained Germany's present position in Asia using an analogy so ridiculous that several ministers initially believed he was mocking them.
At the moment, he said, Germany behaved like one child among many fighting in a schoolyard over whose mother baked the finest pie.
Britain insisted its mother's pie was superior. France disagreed. Russia tried stealing slices when nobody watched. Japan wanted a place at the table. America guarded its own kitchen.
And Germany had spent years screaming that its mother could bake a damned fine pie as well. And perhaps she could, but that was not the point.
The clever child, Oskar argued, stopped fighting. He befriended everyone instead. Then he could visit every house. Taste everyone's pie. Learn everyone's recipes. Sell ingredients to their mothers.
And, if fortune was particularly generous, perhaps become acquainted with a few attractive older sisters while he was there.
Prince Heinrich laughed.
Wilhelm stared at his son as though reconsidering several parenting decisions. But beneath the absurdity lay Oskar's actual strategy.
Germany did not need to own every piece of land from which Germans wished to profit. It did not need a German flag above every harbour.
What Germany needed was access. Commercial rights, Mining concessions, Factories, Hotels, Holiday resorts, Banks, Railway shares, Warehouses, Electrical companies, Plantations, Shipping contracts, and of course land.
A German company operating inside British territory could profit from Britain. Another in China could profit from China. German resorts could serve Japanese tourists. German banks could finance American projects. German engineers could build railways for people who might otherwise have regarded Germany as a rival.
Why own one pie when Germany could take a slice from every kitchen? That was the real meaning of withdrawal, not isolation, but positioning.
Germany would cease being another territorial competitor in East Asia and attempt instead to become the useful outsider—a state with business everywhere and soldiers almost nowhere.
Returning Qingdao would give China something almost no European power had willingly given it before: territory back.
That memory might purchase more Chinese goodwill than another generation of German gunboats ever could.
Selling the Pacific islands to Japan would produce a different effect. Japan would become stronger. Australia would dislike that. New Zealand would dislike it. The United States would watch Japanese movement across the Pacific with considerably greater suspicion. Britain would find itself wondering whether its useful Japanese ally was becoming a little too useful.
China would watch Japan. Japan would watch China. America would watch both. Britain would watch everyone. And Germany would trade with all of them.
Oskar did not pretend this would create eternal peace. Quite the opposite.
He wanted a balance.
Britain had spent centuries ensuring that no single European power became strong enough to dominate the continent. Germany could encourage something similar in Asia—not through armies and occupations, but by ensuring enough independent powers existed that none could swallow the region without confronting another.
Japan could restrain American ambitions. America could restrain Japan. China, once stronger, could restrain both.
Britain would remain entangled through its colonies and alliances. Germany would remain one step removed. Friendly where possible, useful everywhere, and committed nowhere unless German interests genuinely required it.
There were holes in the idea.
Jagow identified several immediately. Solf found more. Moltke looked as though he could happily spend the remainder of the evening finding fifty. But before the objections could begin again, Oskar raised one hand.
He still was not finished. Because, he explained, they were misunderstanding something even greater. They kept asking whether Germany should look east. Or perhaps west. Whether its future lay in Africa, Asia, the Pacific or Europe.
Oskar's answer was none of them.
Germany's ultimate future did not lie east. It did not lie west. It did not lie north or south. It did not even lie entirely upon Earth.
Then Oskar reached inside his coat, and placed a small red book upon the table.
The atmosphere in the room changed immediately.
Several of the older men recognized it. They had seen versions of that battered little notebook years before, when Oskar had still been a strange young prince filling pages with impossible machines, foreign writing and diagrams that sensible men had dismissed as nonsense. The problem was that some of that nonsense now existed.
Oskar opened the book, and yes, some of its earliest pages were almost embarrassing.
There were childish sketches of armoured monkeys, a remarkably cheerful panda running a noodle shop, and page after page of ideas ranging from merely strange to completely ridiculous. Business plans appeared beside jokes. Crude drawings of tanks had been scribbled years before anyone in the room possessed a proper word for such machines. There were aircraft that had once seemed physically impossible, strange medicines—including one whose principal achievement was making a man embarrassingly hard—and futuristic factories where endless conveyor belts carried plush rabbits beneath the supervision of impossibly muscular blond Germans with heroic moustaches.
One particularly enthusiastic drawing showed several of those same Germans operating an enormous machine as it bored directly through a mountain, while a crowd of women stood nearby cheering them onward for reasons Oskar had apparently considered self-evident.
The book was full of such things. Absurdity beside brilliance. Jokes beside genuine inventions. Ideas that should have belonged to dreams sitting only a few centimetres away from technologies that now existed throughout Germany.
Many pages had been crossed through with heavy lines or marked with small notes in the margins.
Done, Works, Too expensive, Improve later.
Some of the strangest drawings no longer looked strange at all, because Germany had already built them.
Then, as Oskar turned farther into the book, something changed. The handwriting became cleaner. The jokes grew less frequent. The diagrams sharpened.
Loose ideas became systems, and systems became sequences—one technology deliberately leading toward another.
Better metallurgy led toward stronger engines. Stronger engines toward turbines. Turbines toward machines none of the men around the table could yet recognize.
Primitive electronics branched into increasingly complicated calculating devices. Aircraft became faster, sleeker and stranger with every page, their wings changing shape as their engines evolved beyond anything currently flying over Europe.
Then came cities.
Not fantasies of golden palaces or impossible towers, but places drawn with enough detail to suggest Oskar genuinely expected someone to build them.
Broad, clean avenues filled with motor traffic. Towers of steel and glass climbing over orderly neighbourhoods. Elevated trains passing above crowded streets. Machines performing household work once left to servants. Vast airports where ordinary people boarded aircraft capable of carrying them across continents as casually as trains now carried passengers between Berlin and Munich.
The farther Oskar turned, the less the book resembled the ramblings of an eccentric child.
It began to look like a roadmap.
Then he turned farther still, and Earth itself began disappearing from the drawings.
Rockets rose from enormous launch towers. Machines circled the planet. Stations hung above the Earth like artificial stars.
There were drawings of men enclosed inside strange suits standing beneath a black sky.
The Moon appeared again and again.
One of the oldest pages was almost comical: a crude rocket, a tiny Oskar and two flags planted upon the lunar surface—one German, one red—with the childish note beneath them: Germany First, or China. Depends how things go.
A few of the men almost laughed, but then Oskar turned the page.
Years of calculations had accumulated behind the joke. Stages, fuel, weights, trajectories, pressure vessels, life-support concepts, guidance systems.
Technologies that did not yet exist linked carefully to technologies Germany was already beginning to develop.
The childish dream had become a roadmap.
Beyond the Moon came Mars. Beyond Mars, questions rather than answers. Habitats. Artificial environments. Ideas for changing worlds that could not yet support human life. Questions about how far mankind might travel if science continued progressing long after every man presently sitting around the table was dead.
The room froze.
Even Moltke no longer looked angry, he looked unsettled.
Everyone there already understood there was something unnatural about Oskar's knowledge. Too many impossible things had become ordinary beneath his hands for anyone to dismiss it anymore.
But this was different. These were things he had not yet built. Things no one had ever seen. Things perhaps no living human being other than Oskar had seriously imagined with such clarity.
And yet the old pages offered their own warning.
Once, automobiles, advanced radios, antibiotics, modern aircraft and half the industrial world Oskar had created had occupied those same impossible pages. Now they stood outside the palace windows.
For the next several hours, the imperial conference became something closer to a classroom.
Old generals who had commanded armies listened like schoolboys.
Admirals leaned over diagrams of vessels that sailed where no ocean existed.
Ministers asked questions Oskar often could answer only partially, because even his memories did not contain every bolt, equation or discovery required to build the future.
He did not claim Germany could reach the Moon tomorrow, or in five years, perhaps not even in twenty. But he intended to reach it.
If the men around the table ate properly, exercised, listened to their doctors and made good use of the medicines Oskar's laboratories continued producing, some of them might even live long enough to watch it happen. That thought silenced them again.
Only then did Oskar return to the little islands scattered across the Pacific maps.
That was why he found their obsession almost amusing. He was not planning the German Empire around the next ten years. He was planning what Germany might become fifty years from now, or a hundred.
Africa mattered because it possessed immense territory, resources, energy and room for development close enough to Germany's principal sphere to justify investment. Europe mattered because Germany itself stood there.
Those were foundations worth strengthening.
But Oskar did not dream of covering every island and coastline on Earth with German settlers simply to make the map prettier. His ambitions were considerably larger.
One day, if he succeeded, Germans would not merely plant flags upon Pacific islands. They would plant them upon whole new worlds.
By the time the conference finally drew toward its end, opposition had not disappeared.
Solf remained troubled. Moltke remained skeptical. Tirpitz still wanted detailed naval studies before surrendering anything. Jagow warned that Britain, America, Japan and China would each react in ways no plan could entirely predict.
Yet the room had changed.
Prince Heinrich openly supported examining Oskar's proposal. The gamble was enormous, he admitted, but there was logic beneath it. Germany might lose territory while gaining freedom of movement, money, goodwill and the ability to concentrate its strength where strength could actually be used. Others gradually came to similar conclusions.
Even Wilhelm's resistance weakened.
The Kaiser had spent much of his life dreaming on a grand scale. Now, staring at sketches of German flags upon the Moon, he was forced to confront the irritating possibility that even his dreams had been provincial.
Then at last he made his decision.
Oskar would be allowed to proceed. Not to sell the colonies by personal decree, not yet.
The ministries would examine the legal questions. The Admiralty would prepare its assessment. Solf would calculate precisely what Germany was surrendering. Jagow and Bülow would determine what could realistically be demanded from China and Japan.
And Oskar would take his argument beyond that room. To the Reichstag, to Germany, and to the people whose Empire he intended to reshape.
Wilhelm warned him that convincing politicians and newspapers to surrender German territory voluntarily would not be easy.
Oskar merely smiled.
That answer worried his father more than confidence should have. Films were already being prepared, cartoons, articles, maps in new books, pamphlets. Stories explaining overextension, trade and the future of German power.
Imperial Image Works had material in production. The Imperial News Network had journalists waiting.
The Church of the New Dawn possessed priests capable of making almost any idea sound like a moral obligation if given enough warning.
Oskar had not come to the conference hoping someone might approve his idea. He had come prepared to sell it.
The meeting ended without a treaty, without a sale and without any announcement to the outside world. But the direction had been chosen. Germany would reconsider the East.
And somewhere beyond the palace walls, without anyone else yet knowing it, Oskar's machinery was already preparing the German people for what came next.
The decision itself would soon shock the world. For now, however, the little red book closed.
And beneath the portraits of kings who had spent their lives fighting over pieces of Earth, Oskar rested one hand upon a book filled with plans for leaving it one day.