We are Alsterians. It is more likely than not you will find us repellant. Hear us out before you arrest poor Izaak.

This is a flare in the dark.




We know where you were on Von Rohe’s day, BDM. You did what you had to do to save Rheinland and her people. You prevented the revolution from plunging Rheinland into total collapse. You made the only act you could.

For this, and many more great patriotic acts, you have our love.

Do you have an institutional memorandum, BDM? You were founded to serve the Kaiser edict, to be liberal with the law to enforce conservative values. That you did. But the most mischievous of spies cannot deter the the will of a sufficiently populated mob. You cannot assassinate a thousand thousand. Cannot save bastion that does not exist.


You exist for the preservation and the perpetuation of Rheinland against foreign agitators, economic warfare, and cultural sublimation - against internal political dissident movements and unpatriotic separatists who would do the powers-that-be ill. Who would brand us with a slave marking and call it reform.

Who does that remind you of?

Luckily for you, this is a three-way line.



Liberal with a small el, not a big one. Being liberal with the law is not the same as being liberal with the polity. You know that.

Yes. This is called discretion. Less eyes. Less war-weary military pilots tired of being a human breakwater against the red tide.

The voice you’re engaging with now is not that of a few field activists on the end of the Federal gun. Boxes are for archetypes, Agent Hoffman. You’re too smart a man to be mislead by preconception. Yet these metaphysical Boxes of yours have semiotic function; they tell us who you are, why you are. Boxes are commutable. A box can be dealt. A box can be grasped.

It is through frames we understand each other.

You will comprehend that there is a distinction between the CTO of an industrial juggernaut and the shelf-stackers, reaction-welders, floor-sanitisers that the juggernaut crushes under its wheels. That is the division between us, Riehl and her squadron. She is a pawn. We? We are the players. Gunda knows how to lead men and shoot them. She can keep them in this world, and take them out again. We ask no more of her. Expect no more of her.

We are not plundering - not your taxpayers, nor anyone you care for or have a mandate to serve. When has Kruger ever complained to the intelligence services about a Unioner terror problem? Give but one example. One.


It is simple. We want to defend our fatherland against the Bundschuh, against the Outcasts, against the foreign yolk. We ask for no public union - no great declaration of nobility. If you find us breaking Rheinland law on a one-to-one basis, you may treat us as any other criminal - we would expect no less.

This is not a plea for amnesty. This is a request to share information. Call it a tip-off. Stooge-pidgeonry. Informants. We scrape the belly of the underworld - we are amply equipped to brief you on its contents.

Do our causes not align?

Agent.

I was under the working assumption that representatives of the Buro spoke German as a first language.


Goodbye.


I apologise for wasting your valueless time.