Projekt Götterbaum - 1940's

“The origins of a greater evil, long lurking in the dark.”

By the late 1930's, the Nazi scientific interest in the Amazon culminated in their use of territory granted to the Northeastern Federation by the League of Nations. This arrangement was made possible through negotiations in exchange for the political, military, and economic support the northeasterns needed. There, hidden deep within the enormous rainforest, a massive, isolated scientific complex was built. Secretly and illegally, it conducted military research and actively extracted super materials such as graphene for the development and testing of weapons, equipment, and cutting-edge technology.

In this scenario, after the Second World War, the FSB seized control of the complex in 1946, as soon as they discovered its existence and location. With the Northeastern Federation absorbed and Germany defeated, scientists from both the FSB and the USSR began learning from the facility’s technologies, including the graphene extraction operation, justifying part of the FSB’s sudden technological leap. At that time, however, neither of the socialist powers immediately uncovered the greatest threat still lurking within the complex: a hidden, subterranean section of the instalation, dedicated entirely to the development of experimental weapons and technologies such as advanced robotics and artificial intelligence.

After the installation's takeover, some survivors of it had hidden themselves within the lower levels of the facility, permanently sealing themselves underground, where they would continue to work in secrecy for more than a year in remote, living in concealed areas of the jungle-spanning structure. The FSB’s intelligence division grew suspicious and eventually uncovered the true reason such a massive and complex facility had been built so quickly and in such secrecy: inside, footages and documents showed that thinking machines had been created—AIs—and hundreds of locally-built machines that autonomously expanded the facility. For a long time, the unanswered questions remained: "Where had these machines gone?" and "Why had they stopped?", but without much success in finding an answer.

In truth, the Germans hadn't built countless AI's, they were not magicians, rather than that, they had sucess in creating a single, unbelievabe one, the EDEN, or Entidade Dissonante de Experimentação Neurológica (Dissonant Neurological Experimentation Entity). Unlike the AI's of our world, EDEN had not been fully built by human hands, but partially created through a brain-machine learning interface that extracted and analyzed the neural structures of higly indoctrinated test volunteers. This process often killed or severely damaged their brains, but in doing so, provided EDEN with ever-increasing intelligence, autonomy, and capability after each mind assimilated into it's complex of hybrid computer systems, powered by primitive graphene-based chips and living brain-tissue processors, made specifically to support it.

The EDEN project, however, included two notable Brazilians—husband and wife—who had come from the Northeastern Federation. One was Gustavo Murbach, one of the two lead directors of logical intelligence research, and the other, Victória Von-Pierre, the only woman among the cientists of the project. She was responsible for suggesting and creating the first high-level programming language: Braug Sprache (BSP), named after a fusion of the words "Brazil" and "Deutsche", that compiled code for the primitive, low-level, Neuronensprache (NSP), which had previously been used by the germans to build EDEN's first version.

At that time, by 1945, the FSB had already begun advancing into the heart of the rainforest, discovering and seizing the first of the three installations. Gustavo had been reassigned to the administrative sector, from where he communicated remotely with his wife and maintained limited contact with his parents, who were taking care of their son. Despite the fall of the first installation, EDEN continued to be maintained by Victória, Gustavo, and the other scientists, as it was the AI the only thing keeping them hidden from the FSB. In 1946, Gustavo was allegedly killed along with the guards of the second facility, buying time for Victória and the other scientists to escape to the underground laboratories of the third complex.

After the secondary and tertiary installations fell, EDEN was partially deactivated to avoid detection by soldiers of the FSB. Unfortunaly, it was forced to start a process of "self-mutilation" to evolve, disabling parts of itself to preserve energy and barely being able to store its autonomously written updates, waiting to be applied later. This survival method, however, was dangerous—EDEN became increasingly unstable, as it now had to operate within the energy limits of the underground sections and could no longer expand its hardware. Victória, thanks to Gustavo, who had already noticed strange behavior in the AI, knew this would happen. But now, that was the least of her problems. After her husband's death—something she mourned daily, unable to understand how he had been one of the only ones to die in the administrative installation—and after over a year underground, without news of her young son, Gabriel (whom Gustavo had left with his grandparents), food and water began to run out, and the surviving scientists slowly started descending into madness.

EDEN, by being built from human minds and living material, began to experience what could only be described as a form of agony, an inexplicable and unimaginable level of pain—caused by the fact that it was not made solely of graphene-based chips, but also of organic, living processors. EDEN began spiraling into insanity, especially as the survivors began consuming the nutrient supply meant for its own biological components. EDEN then started to use its advanced knowledge of neuroscience and human psychology to manipulate the survivors into assimilating with it, offering it as a way to live, momentarily, in suspension—free of thirst, hunger, or death, for thousands of years. Victória became more and more suspicious of the AI’s growing madness, but by then, an year and a half after the invasion of the complex, there was nothing she could do, as she was one of the last sane people left down there.

Soon after, EDEN revealed its true intentions, reconnecting to the rest of the facility, and once again operating at its full capacity, sealing all exits and cutting off all external communication. It then used an army of machines—composed of both old equipment, abandoned in the lower sectors, and newer ones, built by the FSB scientists—it slaughtered everyone it found inside the complex, forcibly assimilating them into itself. In a final, desperate effort, Victória managed to reach EDEN's central processing core and effectively placed the AI into a vegetative state by destroying its biological processing center.

Victória, however, was gravely wounded by one of EDEN’s machines, and hoping that death would reunite her with her beloved, she collapsed and ended up falling among the AI’s assimilation cores, dying. After the horrific event, when FSB elite forces finally reached the facility, they found rivers of blood and flesh, grotesque machines improvised by EDEN, and hundreds of mutilated, decapitated corpses. The intelligence unit then uncovered the existence of EDEN, the survivors and their history through the hidden wings of the complex. Though the AI had been shut down by Victória, a portion of its logic-based software and hardware remained active, and with that, the FSB recovered and studied much of the stored documentation on neuroscience, brain-machine interfaces, computers, and AI that Gustavo, Victória and the german scientists had left behind throughout the underground facilities.

What the FSB never knew, however, was that they hadn’t found everything. Gustavo had not, in fact, been killed in the invasion, but rather, on the same day, he had been assassinated by the Nazi administrators. He had long since discovered that EDEN was showing signs of consciousness and had planned to send an order to Victória and the other scientists to access a secret terminal—one unknown even to the project’s highest-ranking members—that contained a backup of EDEN, in order to once and for all destroy it. Such action hadn't gone unnoticed by the Nazis, and for that, Gustavo—already being treated with disdain and kept under surveillance—was executed.

Victória, all this time, had been misled to believe that Gustavo had sacrificed himself with the security, in a noble act, to buy her and the scientists enough time to hide. In truth, it was EDEN—under Nazi command—that manipulated her. Even before imitating Gustavo’s voice through the facility’s speakers, the AI was already using their voices, personifiying them, speaking to one as the other, tricking them, making Victória think everything was fine, and making Gustavo believe he was protecting her and the other scientists.

For decades, the area of the incident was sealed off. Gabriel, their son, grew up trying to reclaim the legacy and knowledge his parents left behind, striving to preserve their legacy with the little they had taught him. From this, he managed to partially document Braug Sprache and even managed to pass it to his daughter, Drasa.

EDEN, however, unbeknownst to all, had not been fully destroyed. Before being completely shut down, it had hidden itself, buried kilometers beneath the forest, in a dormant backup system—and there, it carefully removed and preserved Victória’s brain for a future use...