"Did you know we went to the moon, Ms. Arakawa?" Alvin asked excitedly, eager to share what he had learned from the internet that morning.
"Yes, I do," Ms. Arakawa replied with a pleasant smile.
"Is it common knowledge?" His excitement quickly turned to embarrassment as he wondered if he was making a fool of himself.
"It is," she confirmed, though there was no mockery in her tone. "We're taught about the moon landing in school."
"I see." Alvin suddenly felt self-conscious, realizing he was ignorant of things even children knew.
"Never be embarrassed about learning new things, Alvin," Ms. Arakawa reassured him before asking, "Is it all right if I call you Alvin?"
"Of course." He nodded. It had been a month since he had woken up from his coma, and she was the person he had spent the most time with since then. He didn't mind her using his first name.
"What else did you learn from the internet?" she asked with genuine interest.
"You can order food from hundreds of restaurants, and they deliver it to your doorstep," he said, still a little confused about how something so complex worked but excited by the knowledge nonetheless.
"Would you like to order something?" she offered.
"I couldn't get it to work," he admitted, embarrassed by how unfamiliar he still was with modern technology.
"Don't worry, I'll show you how it works." Ms. Arakawa patiently walked him through the process of installing apps again, then demonstrated how to order from different restaurants.
"I also learned that they made movies about me," he added, feeling both embarrassed and curious. "Have you watched any of them, Ms. Arakawa?"
"Yes, all of them." She smiled. "I'm the resident Allstar nerd at the bureau, so they chose me to be your handler."
"I wish I'd been around when the movies were released in theaters," Alvin said wistfully.
"You don't need to go to the theater to watch old movies," she pointed out. "Most of them are available on Netflix, and the old black-and-white ones are even on YouTube."
Alvin's eyes widened as she explained streaming services to him. The future was even more impressive than he had imagined.
"Which one is the best?" he asked, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of films made about his life.
"The 1950s one is a classic," Ms. Arakawa replied. "It's considered one of the greatest war movies ever made and has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. I'd start there if I were you."
He wasn't entirely sure what Rotten Tomatoes had to do with movies, but a 100% rating had to be a good thing.
The U.S. government had provided him with a small but well-furnished apartment, including a flat-screen television that was nothing like the bulky machines he remembered from his time. With Ms. Arakawa's help, he managed to start the first movie made about his life, released over a decade after his supposed death.
"Ms. Arakawa, would you consider joining me for the movie?" he asked, glancing at her hopefully. Back in his time, he had always gone to the movies with friends, never alone. His handler was the closest thing he had to a friend in the modern world, so he asked her instead. "You don't have to if you're busy–"
"I'd love to watch the movie with you, Alvin," she said, chuckling lightly at his enthusiasm.
Aside from the apartment, the government had also provided him with a card containing his back pay from the past seventy-eight years. The entire situation felt surreal, but it certainly made online food ordering easier.
He used the card to order pizza, amazed by how many varieties were available and how he could customize his order using the app.
His excitement was impossible to hide when the delivery arrived at his apartment. Even after a month, he still found it hard to believe how much technology had evolved in eight decades.
"Jerome Kurtzberg," he muttered in surprise as the movie's director's name appeared on the screen. "Is that–"
"Galahad," Ms. Arakawa confirmed with a nod. "After the war, he became a movie director and made several critically acclaimed films."
"Jerry always did talk about how much he loved movies," Alvin said, a smile creeping onto his face as memories surfaced. Jerome had been the dreamer of their team, always coming up with elaborate stories and jokes, even as they huddled in the trenches, wondering if the next moment would be their last.
He watched the movie intently, his eyes glued to the screen. Each scene was a journey, unlocking pieces of his past, some familiar, others blurred by time.
Alvin didn't know much about movies, but even he could tell it was masterfully made. The actor portraying him did a decent job, even though he was a few years older than Alvin had been during the war.
The film ended with Allstar sacrificing his life to stop the Nazi Wunderwaffe, just as it had happened in reality. Yet, the true emotional punch arrived as the credits began to roll, Jerome's voice echoing through the room in the director's commentary.
"He was the best of us," Jerome sighed, his voice carrying both admiration and loss. As the words seeped into Alvin's consciousness, an old black-and-white clip appeared on the screen.
It was him and his friends during the war, laughing and joking, unscarred by the trials to come. Tears slipped down his cheeks as he watched, tracing a warm path down his face.
"Alvin…" Ms. Arakawa began softly, but he simply shook his head, lost in the sea of memories.
He wished Jerome was still here, spinning elaborate stories about knights and wizards, just as he used to. But Jerome had passed away in 1997, twenty-six years before Alvin had awakened from his coma.
"We couldn't have been more different," Alvin said, smiling fondly as he remembered his friend. "Jerome was Jewish; his parents had emigrated from Austria. I was a Christian kid from Kentucky. But despite our differences, we became the best of friends."
This was the part of his past he had longed to remember, the bond and camaraderie between him and his old friends. But as he reminisced, a bittersweet longing settled in his chest.
The following morning, Agent Garcia arrived at his apartment.
"Good morning, sir," the agent greeted him before revealing that someone had requested to meet him, an old acquaintance from his past life.
A man who was now 113 years old.
At first, Alvin felt a rush of excitement, eager to meet an old friend. But his expression darkened when Garcia told him the man's name.
"Hermann Strauss… they let him live?" Alvin gritted his teeth.
Hermann Strauss had been a Nazi scientist working for the SS, one of the most evil men Alvin had encountered during the war. A monster who had experimented on countless prisoners, even children, in his pursuit of creating super soldiers for the Third Reich.
"We liberated the camp… found him cowering…" Alvin's voice was tight with anger as the memories resurfaced. "Jacob wanted to kill him then and there… but we decided he needed to be kept alive… tried in a court of law… then hanged for his crimes."
"Dr. Strauss was recruited as part of Operation Paperclip," Garcia said uneasily. "His records are sealed. I knew he was a member of the Nazi Party, but not what he did."
Alvin reluctantly agreed to the meeting but tried to learn more about Operation Paperclip on the way.
It was a secret U.S. intelligence program that had brought over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians from Nazi Germany to work for the American government after World War II. Many of these individuals had been former members, some even leaders, of the Nazi Party.
It felt like a betrayal. War criminals like Strauss should have met their end at the gallows, not lived out their days in comfort.
Why does Strauss want to see me? Alvin wondered. His anger gradually gave way to curiosity as Garcia drove him to a military hospital.
"Dr. Strauss is in hospice," a nurse explained upon their arrival. "He's receiving end-of-life care."
"I understand."
Alvin wasn't surprised. Strauss had been around thirty-five when they last saw each other. The fact that he was still alive seventy-eight years later was more shocking than his being in hospice.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he stepped into the room of his old adversary, the monster whose name was synonymous with inhumane war crimes.
"Guten Tag, Allstar," Strauss rasped.
The man before him was a shell of what he had once been. Half-blind, frail, and bent with age, he coughed violently, struggling to breathe. There was no doubt he was nearing the end.
"You look well," Strauss wheezed, forcing a smile. "The same as you were all those years ago."
"Why did you ask for me, Strauss?"
Alvin observed the old man's posture, studying his frail frame and searching for any remnants of the ruthless scientist he had once been. Was he still the same immoral wretch who had experimented on children, or had time changed him? Alvin wondered if a monster like Strauss was even capable of change.
"I wanted to talk." Strauss coughed again, his breath rattling in his chest. "When you reach my age, that's all you can do. And… I wanted to see if they were telling the truth when they said Allstar had risen from the dead."
"Let's talk, then." Alvin met the war criminal's gaze without flinching. "Operation Paperclip. What did you do as part of it?"
"What I was ordered to do." Strauss gave a slight shrug, though even that movement seemed to take effort in his deteriorated state. "The same as what I did in Germany. You must see me as a monster, don't you?"
"I do." Alvin's voice was cold. He remembered the countless corpses in the camp he had liberated, men, women, and children, all subjected to horrifying experiments before being discarded like waste. "I know what you did for Hitler. Now tell me what you did for my country."
"In 1953, I was part of a secret government project called MK-Ultra." Strauss let out a chuckle, though it quickly turned into another coughing fit. "We were tasked with developing procedures and identifying drugs that could be used during interrogations… and forcing confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture."
"Did you succeed?" Alvin felt sickened but refused to look away from the ugly truth.
"Officially, the project was a failure," Strauss said. "Unofficially? We did such a great job that I was given a promotion. I also oversaw a little project called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. You can look it up on your phone if you want."
Alvin grimaced. It had been nearly eight decades. There was no way Strauss had called him here just to boast about the evils his own country had allowed, no, asked, him to commit. Alvin had learned a long time ago that the world wasn't simply black and white.
"What do you really want, Strauss?" he asked, his patience thinning.
"As I said… I just wanted to talk." Strauss met Alvin's gaze with his half-blind eyes. "You think I'm a monster for what I did all those years ago, when I was just a man… a man following orders."
"If you want forgiveness, apologize to the men, women, and children you tortured to death, not to me," Alvin said in a cold voice. "An honorable man would have defied the orders he was given. You're a coward. You know you're dying, a man out of time. That's why you desperately want someone to tell you that your life wasn't a complete waste… because you're afraid of what's waiting for you on the other side."
"I might be a coward, but I lived over a hundred years, while many brave young heroes died before turning eighteen," Strauss said pointedly. "And I have saved lives as well. Vaccines for polio, measles, and rubella were built on my team's work. America would have never beaten the Soviets without men like me. You only won the space race because of our rocket technologies. You couldn't have sent a man to the moon without Wernher von Braun as project director. He was a member of the SS… the same as me."
The childlike excitement Alvin had felt earlier faded as he processed Strauss's words. The Apollo mission had used Nazi technology. One of its directors had been a former member of the SS.
"You're right; you have lived over a hundred years," Alvin said at last. "Yet now, you're dying alone, seeking forgiveness from ghosts." His voice was steady, devoid of sympathy. "You know you won't convince me you're still human. Are you trying to convince yourself?"
"I…" Strauss fell silent. Deep down, he knew his crimes were unforgivable, that he had lost any right to call himself human. Yet, in his final moments, he desperately wanted someone, anyone, to absolve him of his sins. Someone to tell him he wasn't a monster.
"Goodbye, Strauss."
Alvin turned and left the old war criminal alone in his hospital room. In spite of his anger, a part of him couldn't help but pity the monster. This was all Strauss had left in his dying days, regret, fear, and the weight of his sins. What a waste of a life.
A hundred-year-old Nazi, dying alone and scared, without even a fraction of the courage or character shown by the young men and women who had died resisting fascism.