Profile
Gojan is a tsunami-catcher, the owner of the New Berlin Waterworks, and one of the three Epiphanies of the saga. Declared a hero at the age of just 27, he is a rebel worn down by the generational war. While Admiral 7 elevates posterity to the role of judge over the present, Gojan has transformed the Admiral’s “millennial imperative” into a practical life mission: he seeks to build a future that no longer has to bow before the past.
“The dead had their own time. I see no reason why they should get ours, too.”
Gojan is in charge of the waterworks of New Berlin: a complex network of pumps that regulates the flow of water along the four flanks of the city.
He was born in Berlin on day 764285—January 10, 2089, according to the old calendar. His mother served as a naval physician, his father as a software developer. Records from the naval archives reveal that both were involved in the “Minor Operational Shift” of 2055. Behind this deceptively innocuous term lay a mutiny—phrased in the language of an institution that insisted on making even an insurrection sound like a routine maintenance appointment. Thirty-two high-ranking officers and admirals were stripped of their posts; several poison attacks against the crew left twelve people injured and three dead.
Gojan fled from his parents and found work as a tradesman. In the fledgling city, there was no shortage of such tasks: New Berlin had more holes than houses, and for every hole, at least two government agencies—yet rarely anyone with a wrench. Gojan learned to maintain pumps, anchor foundations in the water, and repair machinery whose original manufacturers had long since vanished—whether economically, geographically, or both.
It was only later that he learned of his parents’ deaths. The Navy had ordered their execution. He deliberately stayed away from their burial at sea, stating that he still could not come to terms with the very fact of his parents’ existence—for their death was, in his view, far from the end of the matter.
Gojan completed the construction of the southern flank just in time. A few hours later, a tsunami struck the new bulwark. The flank held firm, channeling the brunt of the force into retention basins and sparing large parts of New Berlin from inundation. Ever since, Gojan has been known as the man who caught a tsunami. Engineers occasionally point out that it is not actually possible to catch a tsunami; in Gojan’s presence, they usually only make that mistake once.
The Tsunami Catcher
“Of course you can’t catch a tsunami. You can only build a place for it—a place where it is destined to lose.”
New Berlin turned him into a hero—a fact he never entirely forgave the city for. In his eyes, hero worship is merely a ruse to shift responsibility onto a single individual. As long as everyone was pointing at the hero, no one had to ask why a twenty-seven-year-old had been forced to save the city from a tsunami using nothing but improvised pumps.
Out of his anger toward his parents, Gojan’s own personal generational war took shape. He does not view the fact that they managed to eliminate “only” thirty-two naval authorities as a heroic feat, but rather as unfinished business. In his view, even they had compromised too much with the circumstances of their time. He does not hold corporations responsible for the looming end of the world; instead, he blames the persistent indifference of entire generations—people who knew they were destroying their own reality, yet still showed up for work on time every morning, continuing to build upon that very destruction.
Consequently, Gojan rejects the moral absolution often granted to those who came before. He argues that every era mistakes its own constraints for natural laws, while dismissing the constraints of earlier eras as ridiculous superstition. The future, he believes, is the only witness that the present cannot bribe—though, unfortunately, this witness always arrives too late for the trial.
Driven by this conviction, Gojan seeks to erase the traces of past generations from the archives of New Berlin. He wants the next generation to forge its own idols, rather than growing up under the historical weight of their predecessors. Achievements should be judged by their utility, not by the luster of the names attached to them. This is the essence of Gojan’s practical interpretation of the “idiot clause”: no one is entitled to veneration simply because they happened to die at the right time.
His plan contains a contradiction, which Commissioner Richtig points out to him with great persistence: erasing the mistakes of the past does not free the future from them; it merely deprives the future of the evidence. Gojan counters that archives are not memory, but rather mausoleums organized alphabetically.
Commissioner Richtig’s objection
If Gojan wipes away all traces of the ancients, is he liberating the future—or is he condemning it to repeat the same mistakes without any warning?
Commissioner Richtig had known Gojan’s parents personally. He tried to explain to Gojan that the difficult circumstances of their time were what had caused the failure of the “Small Enterprise Shift.” Gojan, however, heard in this nothing more than the oldest excuse in the world: that they would have liked to do the right thing, but, unfortunately, they were living in the “present” at the time.
The argument escalated. Gojan knocked over several of the archive’s shelves and subsequently decided to go catch tsunamis. And so, he returned to the southern flank.
During the explosion of a gas tank, Gojan sustained severe burns to his face. The blast wave and intense heat damaged both of his eyes; a permanently clouded cornea left him with only a tiny fraction of his original vision. He can primarily perceive strong contrasts, movement, and coarse outlines. Uniform brightness dazzles him, yet precisely directed light helps him better distinguish the boundaries of objects.
For this reason, he carries a shielded, high-performance flashlight, supplemented by magnesium flares for emergencies. Because of this gear, Gojan’s arrival is usually heralded by a wandering cone of light—the light appears around a corner first, followed eventually by Gojan himself.
On his flashlight
“I don’t need much light. Just enough so that things stop pretending to be something else.”
One day, during a severe flood event, Gojan forced an additional tsunami into the basins on the southern flank and fell into the water. Caught in the undertow of the opened sluice gates, he was at risk of drowning. It was there that he experienced an epiphany: the Suicide Squad—a movement away from a world that deemed its own salvation unrealistic.
When he opened his eyes again, a Candytron was floating in the murky depths of the retention basin.
Epiphany in the Retention Basin
Where others might have expected a religious apparition, Gojan found a rocket engine. To him, that was far more convincing.
Gojan salvaged the engine and, with the help of the Pippkids, retrieved nine more units from the tsunami debris. This discovery led to a confrontation with Salt Brah. In the aftermath, Gojan joined the “suicide mission” (Suicide Squad) initiated by Koko.
Personality
Gojan is grim and practically never laughs. In Neu Berlin, people react to him with a mix of fear, gratitude, and the anxious hope that they aren’t accidentally standing in his way. When the beam of his light sweeps across a street, people scramble out of the way.
He oscillates between an almost eerie stillness and eruptive chaos. His rage serves as both his driving force and a chronic malfunction. It enables him to build things that a sane person would have abandoned during the planning stage—yet it also prevents him from reliably distinguishing between an obstacle, an adversary, and a piece of furniture.
Gojan is not a cynic. He simply expects so much from people that he is constantly disappointed by them. Beneath his cynicism lies an almost painful belief that a better world could be possible. He despises the past because it resigned itself to failure and subsequently labeled that failure “tradition.”
His deepest conflict stems from the fact that he, too, will one day become an ancestor. If his own philosophy holds true, then future generations have every right to tear down his achievements.
The Internal Contradiction
“If the children who come after us tear down my dikes, they had better build better ones in their place. Otherwise, I’m coming back.”
Abilities
Together with Koko and Sam 3—who appears in the second book—Gojan belongs to the “Epiphanes.” His ability to receive messages from the heavens allows him to perceive connections that, within his own world, have yet to manifest a visible cause.
Consequently, Gojan exerts significant influence over the success of the “Ascension Mission.” However, his visions do not render him infallible. After all, a message originating from a higher reality does not automatically become wiser simply because it happens to land in Gojan’s mind.
Relationships
Gojan’s protective instinct toward the Ascension Command is all-encompassing. He would do almost anything to ensure the mission’s success, as he views it as the only serious response to the crises of the 22nd century. To him, the Command represents a bold leap forward—an attempt to finally treat “paradise” as a construction project rather than a religious metaphor.
He protects people regardless of whether he likes them. He considers personal affinity a poor foundation for moral duty; saving only one’s friends is not ethics—it is merely cronyism with dramatic lighting.
On Duty
“I don’t have to like you to pull you out of the water. You just have to stop falling into it.”
Yet, his loyalty is contingent upon a rigorous standard. In his view, anyone who betrays the future betrays all those who do not yet have a voice. Anyone who fails the future fails Gojan. And anyone who fails Gojan loses a guardian angel.
Quotes
On Anger
“Anger is energy without a blueprint. So, give it one.”
On Compromise
“A compromise with doom simply means agreeing to half of the doom.”
“Commissioner Right carefully preserves every mistake—just in case the future forgets what it’s supposed to fail at.”
On Salt Brah
“He mistakes resistance for volume. This often happens with men who have learned from the sea but only understand the crashing of the waves.”
On Paradise
“Paradise is a construction project with disastrous management.”