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The Democratic Republic of the Congo Kinshasa University of Kinshasa campus April 1, 2015 There was no sound on the security feed, but Terrifica and Miss Americana could see what was happening well enough. The MIT scientists flicked a row of jury-rigged switches on the desk in front of them, bringing to life the machine before them. Row after row of panels lit up, vacuum tubes and relays flickering to life, and suddenly a long-dormant machine was alive again, casting a glowing light around the bunker that was its home. "It doesn't make any sense," muttered Dr. Carlos Perez, his long hair in the same ponytail he wore on the video. Crossing his arms, he looked away from the play. "VI has the computing power of a microchip! A _small_ microchip!" His labcoat, and his demeanor, had taken some beatings since the footage was taken two weeks earlier. "She may be the second oldest computer in the world, but the Vivre Informatique had no capacity for sentience! It just didn't!" Suddenly things were happening on screen - the scientists were talking to each other rapidly, their happy faces turning to alarm. Carlos's assistant Felicity was typing frantically at an Archetech laptop slaved to the system, a laptop that began flashing alarmingly, in time with the overhead arc lights in the basement they occupied. Suddenly the lights on VI began flickering in time with the laptop as well - and now, as the heroes watched, doors were sliding open on the far side of VI, doors disgorging primitive humanoid robots! At the sight of the robots, the scientists sensibly packed it in and fled, the camera feed cutting off as the red-eyed metal automatons began advancing toward their work station and the laptop that went with it. Pressing a few buttons on the digital playback, Felicity, who like the other half-dozen scientists looked tired and worn, pulled up a phrase on the laptop's screen. "MAINTENAT, JE SUIS LIBRE!" "We tried contacting the original project team," said Franklin Wright, one of the graduate students on the project, "but of course they're long dead! And most of the records about VI were destroyed during the wars hereabouts." "Those damn Belgians," muttered Perez. "Why would they build a computer _here_? Especially right after the war?" "To keep it from prying eyes," said Dr. Chambord, the goateed, bespectacled man who was one of two actual Congo natives on the MIT team. "The Congo was the jewel of their empire, a shining beacon of European progress in Africa." He sneered. "But no one cared to see the brutality at the heart of it then. Men died in building this. We found the records of it, in the old offices down below." "It's my fault," said Felicity Jones, looking very haggard. "I'm so sorry, I just...I should have pulled the plug! But when we saw those robots, we ran! We thought we were going to get our heads crushed!" "It's not your fault," said Perez, patting his assistant awkwardly on the shoulder before looking at Miss Americana and Terrifica. "But whatever is in there, it made it right through our firewalls and it locked down the whole Computer Science building. All our equipment, all the university's equipment, including the seized supertech from the wars, is now in the hands of a Belgian computer from 1946. That's when we decided to call you."