You had a vision, and it didn't come to pass. What is the point of anything now? But given time and a bit of quiet, new visions will arise.
Dr. Reigens connected the final power cables to the display. It was nearly 4 am, and the entire team was exhausted. The past eighteen months had been a terrible time for all of them, but they were near the end of their struggle. The dark and dusty building reeked with mod, mildew, rat and death, above all else. Kotter Skorzeny, their old leader and colleague, sealed the place after descending the depths below nearly 50 years ago. But no one in the inner circle forgot about it, nor what it's significance held. Pieces. Pieces of a lost, terrible technology. Unrepairable. Or so they thought - they were about to discovered if their deal with the devil had suceeded.
It started in 2145, with the discovery of the complex. Miles and miles of underground caverns had been rotting away for nearly a century before the Stahlsieg moved in, discovering it by complete accident, uncovered only after the outbreak of the CORR-01 Virus. Underneath the largest city in Grestin was a terrible secret, but it was incomplete. Vital pieces were missing, lost or destroyed. Most of the vast banks of computers were long destroyed by water intrusion, fighting, or the inevitable march of time.
The first breakthrough was when the troops of 20th SS. "Ryoma Pasternak" Crytilen returned to Kafrica with something special. Many believed they had only stolen the gold reserves of Zalkent in the civil war, when they fled to the north to Burr from the Zokesians. But they had one other treasure - a single computer bank that was still intact. No memory drives, no power, but it was a blueprint from which to repair or build copycats to scale it up. It would take over fifty years to assembly the computers required to even begin thinking about restarting the program, and that was if they could find it.
Fortunately, the 23rd century brought two gifts to the Kahnenerbe - the opportunity to spend valuable time in the frozen north of Nuriyamiq, nabbing scientists and enslaving them to complete their work where the Stahlsieg could not. The second came in the eagerness of the Nuvastian government to develop an AI program so powerful, it could direct their whole civilization to the stars within a few years. The Stahlsieg quietly worked with them to put the finishing touches on it, just before making their escape as the Zokesian authorities came crashing down on them. When the Zokesians arrived at the test site in Nuvastia, all they found was empty hard drives.
It was a risk, to be sure, using such unfathomably dangerous technology again. Stories from what happened before were well known, though nowadays many believed them to be just children's tales. For Albert Gott, Reichsmarshall of Suid-Kafrica, it was the one chance they had at cleansing the world of the degeneracy of the powers that maintained the status quo on Kerbin. It was a chance to renew the world, under a black banner.
Dr. Reigens stood up from under the console and looked up at the small monitor. His team of six around him held their breaths, as his assistant at the far wall flipped the massive breaker. Everything went dark.
Above them, the lights of Faucks flickered and went out in a massive blackout. The whole city's power had gone out like a switch had been thrown. Dr. Reigens sighed, as he stood in the darkness, and hung his head. His life's work was stillborn.
Suddenly, the computer banks began wirring and sprang to life in a terrible cacophany of mechanical sounds. Tapes spun and the screen began to glow a faint green. Through the halls, the sound of electronics waking up from their slumber of a century and a half echoed eerily from every corner of the dark stone room. And then he heard a voice.
"Hallo, Herr doctor."
"Hallo, Mein Fuhrer."
