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23
MATRIX SQUARED

29th May 2007. People were starting their Tuesday in Eislingen. One of Germany's countless anonymous communities where a broken traffic light or a stray cow may be the biggest news story for many months, Eislingen has a routine that is rarely disrupted. Life in Germany gets going an hour or two earlier than it does in Britain or America. By six-thirty in the morning there is already a steady stream of people on their way to work, dropping in at the local Tchibo café. Here they exchange what little gossip there is over coffee, topped unappealingly with condensed milk, but compensated for by creamy cakes or a smoked-ham weggle (a bread roll in Swabia's all-but-incomprehensible dialect).

Yet today was destined to be a special day in Eislingen, for the twenty-first century was about to arrive. Halfway down H. Street, Detlef Hartmann hauled himself out of bed, dimly aware that he had something important on his mind. With the mist still clearing from his brain, he checked his hushmail account for any encrypted messages and scanned his website to see if it required any maintenance. He found nothing untoward.

Then he remembered. His parents were returning from their holiday over the border in Austria. Action stations. He and his brother had just a day to clear up. Desiccated spaghetti stuck like industrial cement to the plates; ashtrays supporting small mountains of cigarette butts lay higgledy-piggledy among the beer cans, bottles and indeterminate items of clothing – a typical monument built by teenage boys when left to their own devices. Detlef decided to take a quick bath before clearing up and was just drying himself when the doorbell rang. He shouted down to his brother to open it.

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