Uplifted E-Book

Iris Wameling

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 107

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

This crime satire is told from the perspective of seven protagonists: the freelancer who escapes a serial rapist and encounters him again years later when he is elevated to star artist status with the help of a gallery owner; the appraiser whose expertise is ignored; the lawyer who enables the felon to live a free artistic life; the famous filmmaker who wants to redefine the world, and his art agent who tempts him into reckless investments. As in her debut "A Second Life," the author shows us how everything is connected, interdependent, and mutually conditioning, and how our lives, created from cosmic building blocks, can spiral out of control in their earthly fragility due to an accumulation of cosmic impacts.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Bibliography

Afterword

IMPRINT

Chapter 1

The Rise of the Earth

The universe: boundless, cold, black—a space of longing and terror at the same time. Catapulted into this infinite void, humans experience not vastness, but confinement. Nowhere else is the fragility of human life more apparent than in a space shuttle or space station, a high-tech cocoon and high-security prison in one, where every second of existence depends on machines functioning and people not letting each other down.

The Apollo 8 mission had the moon as its destination – and discovered the Earth in the process.

In December 1968, while the command capsule was orbiting the moon, astronaut William Anders pointed his camera not at the mission's target, but back. There, above the barren horizon of the moon, the Earth rose – a delicate, colorful ball of blue, white, ochre, and green, floating above the dead gray. The photo Anders took at that moment would make history as "Earthrise." It shows not just a planet, but a miracle, a vulnerable home, drifting in nothingness, inhabited by a species that separates itself with invisible boundaries.

In June 2024, at the age of 90, Bill Anders crashes into the sea near the San Juan Islands in the US state of Washington in a small plane that he alone occupies and pilots.

The man who gave humanity one of the most significant images of itself returns to the element from which all life originates.

"How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!"1, God said to his former favorite angel Lucifer, who dared to challenge him.

Chapter 2

The Freelancer

It is a beautiful day and a light that changes forever: not harsh, glaring, brutal, but vague, broken, and diffuse. It casts no shadows, forcing her to search for and find herself.

The on-board instruments show 30 degrees Celsius early in the morning.

This is shown in her logbook entry from August 5, 2015.

She loves to run, to run alone, to run away alone, to run away from everything alone, sometimes even from life.

She takes her cell phone with her on her runs so she can find her way around unfamiliar terrain.

Running has become an important balance to her life on board. When she is on a boat trip, she feels indescribably free. Not only free to moor wherever she feels like it, but also free to run back along the shores of lakes, rivers, or canals. This allows her to retrace the stages she has covered on the water on land. She chooses the riverside paths and towpaths along the canals and is always amazed at how much more beautiful the countryside looks from the water.

She always runs barefoot so she can feel the world and not lose contact with the ground.

Today, a landscape spreads out before her that Paula Modersohn-Becker could have painted, with a sky so infinitely wide and high that the earth below melts into a thin, brown strip. The light shimmers iridescently, soft and diffuse, as if it were the entrance to an invisible labyrinth in which she could lose herself. Tangermünde also presents itself in this way—at the once proud city harbor, which has now fallen silent. A barge that now transports tourists instead of bricks drifts upstream in slow motion, a few geese stroll along the riverbank. The Elbe landscape lies so peacefully, as if angels and seraphim dwelled within it.

Seraphim are known to live in seventh heaven, where they are tasked with planning and organizing the universe and all its planets, discussing the creation of humanity in the "Highest Council," and ensuring that evil creatures do not spread too far.

She falls in love with this landscape. Perhaps it is a hidden treasure map to an ideal world – or a silent warning against believing in its existence.

The Elbe floodplains constantly saturate the air with moisture, creating unique plays of light. Sometimes this haze makes the sky glow in a delicate violet.

From this serene seventh heaven, she is struck by the realization that cruelty and beauty, life and death are interdependent.

By the time she realizes that he is not following her by chance, she has long since lost herself in the labyrinth of the Elbe floodplains.

It is not a flirtation. It is not a game. It is a hunt. He is not a forester. He is a hunter. A man hunter. She is being hunted. In that one moment, in the blink of an eye, she realizes her hopelessness. She is trapped. She is sitting in a trap. She has been deliberately driven into this trap by him. It is a hunt. She is the prey.

"The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose a second, you have already lost your whole life. For it is no longer, it is only as long as the time you lose."

At the fork in the road, she deliberately chose this beaten path because it seems to meander openly and parallel to the riverbank behind tall reeds, while the marked path leads directly into the nearby forest.

At this junction, he came towards her on his motorcycle. She briefly thought that he might be a forester because of his olive-green clothing, even though the bright red of his off-road machine clearly contradicted this impression.

And when she hears him turn around after their encounter, she instinctively runs along the seemingly open path behind tall reeds, not the forest path from which he came, wondering only why he immediately turns around and follows her. Did she do the wrong thing? Does he want to reprimand her as a forest ranger?

And had he been watching her from the darkness of the forest for a while?

Shortly before, she had received a completely unnecessary call from a bank advisor, stopped, felt disturbed during her morning run, and was distracted as a result.

She couldn't have foreseen that this footpath would lead to a swampy little headland, a peninsula surrounded by tall reeds, and end in a small roundabout, a meeting place, a campsite with traces of a fire and barbecue area.

Now she stands breathless in the middle of this space surrounded by tall reeds. When she turns around to run back out of this dead end, he is already lurking at the exit, blocking the way back with his motorcycle. The engine is off. And while he watches her intently, he calmly lights a cigarette. It takes a while because his lighter isn't working.

He remains calm and seems well prepared. For what? He seems to know the place from which there is no escape. All around are dead water and swamps behind tall reeds, and he is blocking the only access and return route to the shore with his motorcycle.

She freezes. She can no longer think clearly and instinctively tries not to look him in the eye. Although he cannot see her eyes behind her large, mirrored sunglasses, she knows the effect her gaze has. She trembles and is completely unable to make an emergency call or dial the number of her beloved. In a panic, she holds her phone to her ear and pretends to be on a call, hoping that no one will call in this situation and that a ringing tone could give away her maneuver.

She pretends to be having a completely trivial phone call, a supposed appointment, looks in his direction seemingly unintentionally and absent-mindedly, and slowly begins to cautiously and seemingly randomly close the five-meter distance between them.

He smokes his cigarette and continues to watch her intently. He has all the time in the world.

She tries to estimate how long it will take him to start the engine. It's an old motorcycle. It needs to be restarted.

She ends the pretend phone call with the exclamation, "Let's do it!" and simply starts running—right past his motorcycle, close to the reeds.

She is a good runner and knows that she must now use her head start before he can restart his motorcycle. And she also knows that as a runner – staying on the path – she cannot escape him on his motorcycle. Before he appears, she must have long since veered off the path into the reeds or bushes without leaving any traces. She is running for her life.

Behind her, it is still quiet.

Finally, she reaches a suitable spot, a dense, secluded embankment that she can penetrate without breaking branches and leaving traces. She throws herself into the knee-high grass behind it and remains lying on the ground, pressed down, as she hears the engine noise slowly approaching, becoming louder and then quieter again.

She stays in her hiding place and is finally able to call the person she loves. She talks completely in ly incoherently. He can't understand her, nor why she is whispering.

But gradually he realizes that she is in danger.

He has remained on board their yacht, which is moored away from the river in the city harbor surrounded by high quay walls. He realizes that she has run upstream and is now coming to meet her on the bank.

She stands up carefully. Only now does she notice that she is bleeding, dirty, and scratched. She does not run back to the path, but continues to wander through the grass toward the riverbank. On a sandbank, she spots a couple with a large dog. She waves to them excitedly. The couple realizes how distraught she is. They saw the motorcyclist. He made an unpleasant impression on them, and yes, he is not a forest ranger.

The man leaves his wife behind and runs up the embankment to her with his dog. She tells him about her escape. He is alarmed and immediately willing to accompany her until she is safe with her husband.

She is relieved, but asks him to leave the dog behind to protect his wife.

He introduces himself and tells her that he meets up with his hunting friends in this area every year. The hunt is supposed to start tomorrow. He wanted to enjoy today's beautiful weather with his wife on the banks of the Elbe.

He also tells her that he once ran into his daughter at night, who called him and asked for help because she was being followed on her way home.

Despite reporting the incident and providing a good description of the perpetrator, he was not identified and the case was closed. He can well understand her fear. And the motorcyclist had already struck him as strange because he had driven past them twice as if searching for something.

And as a hunter and hunting ground owner, he knows that despite his camouflage clothing, this man is neither a hunter nor a forester.

Her partner waves to them from afar. She waves back and lets him know from a distance that she is in safe company. She now advises her protector to make his way back to his wife as quickly as possible. He agrees and is reassured because he now knows she is safe, and says goodbye.

According to the logbook entry of August 6, 2015, they leave the harbor 24 hours later.

Chapter 3

The Impact

"A black meteorite shoots down from the sky. The German Space Center calls it an extremely rare event."3 The black rock from outer space lands near Tangermünde, smashes through the roof of a former brickworks, and kills a dog. Several witnesses report seeing a flash of light followed by a dull thud.

The supposed meteorite is searched for for weeks. It is found by chance when a neighbor notices a smell of decay and calls the police. They find a black stone in the abandoned and decaying factory rooms next to the dog's corpse, which had obviously smashed through the factory roof and killed the dog.