Chapter 3 – The Man from Offenbach

While Hannes heroically endured the lack of blueberry flavour in the Frankfurt gym, in faraway Offenbach – that is, just a few S-Bahn minutes away – a man sat before a monitor console with a furrowed brow. Ingo Ingenieur, an engineer by profession, wore the face of a man who had lived with the same problem far too long: the carcass of a defective satellite that had been drifting mutely across the sky for months.

To Ingo Ingenieur, this dead satellite was not just a piece of space junk – it was an open score. A puzzle he could not solve without calling in outside help. And that help was precisely what he did not want to request from Elon Musk, the man who owned what felt like every other satellite on Earth.

Not that Ingo Ingenieur was afraid of Musk. Well… maybe a little. It was less the technology than the social hurdle. How does one start small talk with Elon Musk? Ask about the wife and kids? With Musk, that was like Russian roulette: you never knew which children still existed for him at any given moment, or how their names were spelled. The character strings were more complex than a bank password. The risk of mispronouncing them and being rewarded with a condescending, bone-dry laugh was simply too high for Ingo Ingenieur.

And so Ingo Ingenieur remained alone. Just him, the dead satellite and the quiet hope of reactivating it without outside help. Ingo Ingenieur was convinced: the key lay in a single, precise impulse. An impulse that would tear the carcass back to life – and that, unbeknownst to him, would soon direct the world's gaze towards the glowing herald of doom.