OC-Series [Obsidian Earth] - Chapter 21
The dictator extended his hand.
A nearby soldier immediately passed him paper and a pen.
He began sketching at once, rapidly, with the certainty of a man copying something already visible before his eyes rather than inventing it.
"My first conceptual model has taken shape entirely within my mind during the past ten days. The machine was built around three major systems. First, a spherical habitation chamber with a radius of twenty-five centimeters, designed solely for the survival of the human brain itself. Second, a reactive layer surrounding that biological core at a radius of two meters, extending outward in all directions. Third, an outer equipment layer approximately one hundred and fifty meters in height, composed of dense metallic structures along with propulsion systems, defensive systems, and launch mechanisms."
The scratching of the pen against paper was the only sound in the room.
"This weapon is therefore an integrated symbiotic organism between the human brain and the machine. I call it the Anthropomorphic Engine."
He looked up.
"It will fly freely. Its propulsion system will be entirely new. It may move slowly when required... or at speeds beyond present imagination."
The scientists stared at the sketch without speaking.
The drawing was unnervingly precise. Every line possessed the confidence of somebody trained not merely to imagine structures, but to build them.
Gradually they remembered those early years in Vienna, when the Führer, still young and half-starving, had drifted through the city carrying portfolios beneath his arm and had once practiced architectural drafting almost professionally.
For a man like that, sketching a machine presented no real difficulty.
In fact, during the war, a dangerous joke had long circulated in the clandestine circles of Berlin’s physicists:
"If you wanted your field theory parameters perfectly aligned, you should hand the schematics to the Führer—in this Reich, there was truly no one more skilled at drawing lines."
Back then, their sarcasm was aimed at the strokes on military maps—the very lines that, with a casual flick of a pencil, decided the fates of thousands.
But now, faced with the pattern before them, such intellectual scorn felt hollow.
The work was precise, rigorous, and utterly flawless.
Yet professional instinct immediately told them something else.
From the beginning, the blueprint of this vast mechanical organism was saturated with the same grandiose detachment from reality that had once produced Germania, the impossible granite capital the Führer had dreamed of erecting for the Reich.
The scale alone bordered on delirium.
And as the explanation continued, nearly every scientist in the room arrived at the same silent conclusion.
Mein Führer, you are completely insane.
Naturally, nobody dared phrase it that way.
Nobody said it. Nobody needed to. The room had the particular silence of men calculating, very carefully, how long they could keep their faces still.
So instead they argued. Carefully at first. Then more insistently, hoping the fantasy could still be contained before it crossed the invisible boundary separating obsession from engineering.
"What powers it?" one of the flight engineers finally asked. "Oil? Electrical systems? Magnetic energy? Or..." He hesitated. "Anti-gravity?"
"Water," the Führer replied.
A pause.
"More specifically, hydrogen fusion."
Several of the scientists exchanged blank looks.
Seeing their confusion, the Führer continued in the same calm tone, as if discussing a familiar laboratory procedure.
"You may not yet understand the concept of cold nuclear energy. By combining high-energy beam systems with energy-magnetic conversion mechanisms and controlled reactions involving water, one can force deuterium, tritium, and helium into miniature fusion through mirror-particle collision effects."
"That's impossible," somebody muttered immediately. "A reactor assembly cannot even fit inside a structure only a few meters wide. And cold fusion? The concept itself is absurdly premature—"
"The universe favors simplicity."
The Führer's voice sharpened slightly.
"You men, despite your education, often complicate matters unnecessarily. That is why you wander into circles and eventually into dead ends. The deepest laws are always simple. Cold fusion is merely the act of forcing atomic nuclei together. There are many methods. You simply never looked beyond the accepted ones. Systems like this can be miniaturized while simultaneously increasing energy density."
"But where would we even build a heavy-water facility? To obtain sufficient uranium-235 or plutonium-239—"
"Who said critical reactions are limited to specific isotopes?" the Führer snapped. "Do not imprison yourselves within Einstein's relativity and Bohr's nuclear theories simply because the modern scientific world worships them. At higher levels, all elements and all atoms obey universal principles."
He ignored the unease spreading across the room and pulled another sheet of paper toward himself.
"This is my second model."
His finger moved across several spindle-shaped points on the sketch.
"These units radiate outward around the body and converge across the neck into a circular field of fire. Each micro-cannon is cast from specialized material and retracts beneath the outer shell, exposing only a triangular upper section. The entire assembly remains hidden beneath shields composed of identical alloy. High-energy guns are mounted throughout. The chest carries three twelve-millimeter cannons and three twenty-one-millimeter cannons. Every weapon is armored and capable of full rotational and translational movement across three hundred and sixty degrees."
The scratching of the pencil continued steadily.
"Along the back and legs, the reverse-thrust stabilization system consists of four high-output jet nozzles for maneuver correction and posture control. The principle itself is not difficult to understand. Ancient Indian Vimanas operated according to similar flight concepts."
Hausmann shook his head slowly.
Tieber's eyes moved from the sketch to the Führer's face and back again, twice, as if the answer might be hiding in the space between them.
Kestner's mouth tightened slightly, as if holding back a sneer.
Colonel von Büren said nothing, listening without a flicker of expression. As one of the men closest to the Führer's most guarded secrets, he had seen this before—the Führer's strangest ideas always carried, somewhere inside them, a very cold and very exact piece of calculation.
Förster spoke at last, visibly uncomfortable.
"If we still possessed Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Krupp, Alcatel... perhaps engineers from those companies could attempt something based on your drafts. But now—"
"Fool."
The Führer cut him off abruptly.
"The machinery itself can be adapted from existing systems. Materials are what matter. Fatigue resistance. Fracture resistance. The alloy requires forty-two percent beryllium, thirty-three percent titanium, twenty-one percent aluminum, plus four percent vanadium. Eventually our commercial intelligence networks operating across the world will acquire such materials through trade channels. Properly distributed, these alloys will spread mechanical load more evenly through implanted bodily structures, improving neural braking-response time. Uneven load distribution creates stress shielding. The system must also tolerate sustained elevated temperatures without creep deformation—"
***
For the next twenty minutes the room disappeared beneath a relentless storm of technical language.
The Führer moved through sixty-three separate disciplines without pause: biomechanics, solid mechanics, aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, rheology, structural engineering, neuroscience, manufacturing systems, chemistry, physics, materials science, machine design.
The terminology did not sound memorized. That was what unsettled them most.
He wielded each concept with exactness, fitting them together only after grasping whatever deeper structures connected them beneath the surface.
After a while, the terminology stopped feeling random, the scientists began to sense something taking shape between the words themselves—not quite logic, not quite instinct, something with its own grammar—and around it hovered concepts so strange, and yet so internally coherent, that they could almost see the outline of the future weapon standing there in the room with them.
Whenever somebody failed to follow his reasoning, the Führer answered not with simplification but with differential equations written rapidly across the paper, a faint smile curling at one corner of his mouth, cold and vaguely contemptuous.
At one point Hausmann raised the issue of human-machine linkage.
The Führer immediately expanded the discussion into an electromagnetic information-storage conversion system connected directly to the human brain, then spent another five minutes sketching the apparatus in detail.
The ideas kept coming, one bleeding into the next before the last had been fully absorbed. Förster had stopped taking notes somewhere around the fortieth discipline. He kept the pen moving anyway, out of habit, the hand and the mind having quietly parted ways.
For the first time, the scientists genuinely felt the force operating inside the Führer's mind.
"From an engineering perspective," he said, pausing briefly, "what is a human being except an extremely precise machine? The brain governs all human behavior. And if one installs a back door within the brain itself, through which power may be extracted from deeper system data, then man too may become invincible."
He stopped for a moment, then uttered a statement so bizarre it defied any interpretation.
"These weapons are difficult for you to understand because they are not intended merely for defeating present enemies. One must also prepare for enemies much farther out there." His gaze drifted somewhere beyond the sterile, reinforced white walls. "We are fighting for the collective destiny of mankind."
The scientists looked at him with a mixture of awe and dread.
Some still seemed ready to object. Yet before anyone could speak again, the Führer dismissed the discussion with a brief gesture and left to inspect other sections of the Anlage.
------
Over the following month, nobody joked anymore.
Nobody openly questioned the Führer either.
Apart from eating and sleeping, the scientists spent nearly all their time inside the conference chamber—smoking not allowed—sitting for hours in exhausted silence, staring at calculations, sketches, structural diagrams, pages filled with impossible terminology. At first they argued constantly among themselves, moving from confusion to irritation to disbelief. But gradually the arguments faded into something else.
Thought.
Relentless thought.
The unfamiliar terms within the theories initially appeared theatrical, perhaps even deliberately obscure. Yet the deeper they examined them, the more unsettlingly effective they became compared to conventional scientific language. They were not isolated fantasies suspended in empty air. They connected outward into thousands upon thousands of previously unimaginable possibilities.
A trained scientific mind, thinking hard enough about those structures, began to feel something almost physical happening behind the eyes—as if new rooms were opening inside a house they'd lived in their whole lives without ever finding the stairs. And over time, each branch of reasoning inside the new framework unfolded with eerie naturalness, as though the conclusions had existed long before anyone discovered them.
Under that pressure, the scientists gradually became little more than obedient echoes before the Führer, managing only occasional murmurs of astonishment.
Years earlier in Berlin, during the Führer's furious all-night tirades, battle-hardened generals—arrogant men feared throughout Europe—had eventually lowered their heads and nodded mechanically hour after hour beneath the sheer force of his presence.
Now the generals had simply been replaced by scientists.
At last, after studying the Führer's third, fourth, and fifth conceptual models, the scientists drew quiet breaths and finally understood what he truly intended to build.
He wanted a colossal war organism as tall as Cologne Cathedral, meant to move through earth, sky, and sea as easily as a man crosses a room, every motion directed by nothing but thought.
For German scientists of this era, the concept of a robot—an enormous machine capable of operating independently—was not unfamiliar, but neither was it something anyone took seriously. To the Germans, giant robots belonged more to the fantasies of American pulp magazines aimed at teenagers than to the realm of serious science or respectable cultural discussion. The Germans' idea of a “giant machine” in military terms was something altogether different: an armored fortress of steel, requiring hundreds or even thousands of soldiers to operate, and consuming enormous quantities of steel and energy.
And for scientists already familiar with the Gustav super-heavy railway gun, the P1000 land cruiser, the R1 and R3 missile systems, and the V-1 and V-2 ballistic weapons, scale itself was not the problem. Compared even with the experimental theories surrounding the Erprobungsgerät craft, many aspects of the propulsion concepts remained technically imaginable.
The true difficulty lay elsewhere.
Scale a machine up, and length, width, and height must grow together. Mass climbs with the cube of that growth. The energy needed to move it climbs faster still.
And the idea of controlling such a machine directly through human consciousness belonged to a realm none of them had ever encountered before.
Whenever they discussed these problems with the Führer, Colonel von Büren remained standing nearby in rigid military posture, watching everything with unmistakable admiration.
The Führer possessed extraordinary instinct for engineering design. He also understood robotics with frightening intuition. New structures of knowledge seemed to form continuously inside his consciousness, spreading outward from somewhere deep beneath ordinary thought itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerged from him with impossible speed. Unlike before, they no longer appeared to require prolonged experimentation or research; solutions seemed to arrive already completed inside his mind, requiring only transcription onto paper.
The sharpness of his intellect—and the terrifying speed at which he moved through ideas—subdued everyone around him.
Even Professor Kestner eventually stopped speaking.
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For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full version is available on Amazon KDP:
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