The Ural Mountains, a spine of iron and stone dividing Europe from Asia, bore witness to a perpetual twilight. Not the gentle, fading light of sunset, but a somber, metallic gloom that seemed to seep from the very rocks. Here, nestled deep within a valley carved by glaciers and forgotten by time, stood NII-42, more commonly known as "Iron Mountain." A misnomer, perhaps, for while iron ore indeed pulsed beneath the surface, the mountain itself was more concrete than crag, a brutalist monument to Soviet ambition.
Dr. Anya Petrova, her face illuminated by the flickering glow of cathode ray tubes, surveyed the control room. A cavernous space, it hummed with the low thrum of generators and the relentless clatter of impact printers. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic vines, connecting the various consoles and terminals to the leviathan that lurked at its heart: the M-222, a mainframe computer of such scale and complexity that it occupied an entire wing of the facility. Project Dusha's home.
Anya ran a weary hand through her thinning auburn hair, streaked with the premature gray of sleepless nights and anxieties she dared not voice. The air hung thick with the scent of ozone and stale coffee, a familiar perfume that clung to her lab coat like a second skin. She adjusted her spectacles, peering at the cascading lines of code scrolling across the monitor before her. Decades of research, of calculations made and discarded, had all led to this moment. An attempt to breathe life into the inanimate, to forge a soul within the silicon.