General Superior Wilhelm Kahlbach

"I was to become a god... ushering in a new universal order... with an advanced race born of strength at the head... a race born of Aelgeists."
— Kahlbach to Albert Wagner, shortly before his death.Dr. Wilhelm Kahlbach (c.M64,921-M66,234) was one of the most important figures held within the Aularite Sovereignty: an aristocratic Aularan noble, gifted researcher, technologist, virologist, eugenicist and doctor who headed the UAS Lükhyt Special Projects Division. One of the founders of the Kahltehk Syndicate, Lord Kahlbach would be the CEO and President for almost 3 millennia, which saw its expansion as the Kahltehk Syndicate over the 64th millennia as well as its ascendency into the UAS Lükhyt Intelligence Division in the 66th millennium.
Indicative of an Aularan noble Kahlbach is a cold, ruthless elitist and ambitious individual, Kahlbach mercilessly eliminated his rivals and gradually increased his power within the Syndicate, which he strictly controlled behind a veil of darkness. Kahlbach had a vision to remake the universe and lead it into a new era, seeing the current state of the universe as self-destructive. He intended to use the research data accumulated from Bio Organic Weapons to carry his vision out and mold a utopia for Aelgeist-kind with himself as its ruler.
== Biography ==
=== Early life ===
Kahlbach was born into the prestigious Kahlbach family, considered for generations to be among the Aelgeist elite. Growing up in his family's floating estate overlooking the world of Madus J4Z, the young heir to the Kahlbach fortune was given a wide-ranging education, and developed hobbies of art collecting and hunting as befitting of his status. Among his studies were classic literature, Early Modern Aelgeist treatises, and the early-60th millenium eugenics movements. His personal favorite was the Natural History Conspectus, a rare late M61 encyclopedia which chronicled a 134-year voyage through the Northern Benamian Expanse by Aelgeist explorer Kahrl Schrade. During Kahlbach's teenage years, the Aularan controlled Gaewei system was plunged into a Bloody Interplanetary Civil War. Nothing is known of Kahlbach's life during this period of time, including whether or not he avoided conscription, though it is known his experience living during the war helped form his world views.
By the early 940s of the 64th millennium, Kahlbach was a university student training to be a physician. There he became close friends with Mahrkus Vohn Houtyn and an older student, Dr. Ophylia Hahgmen. While taking a solo hiking trip on the world of Cruephus, he became lost due to his inexperience in the unfamiliar planetary terrain and collapsed on a snow-covered road. There, he was rescued by Mahrgaryta, a priestess and biologist of an isolated mountain village which worshipped the Black Union. Taken in by Mahrgaryta as a protégé, Kahlbach learned about the Mold and its ability to mutate, assimilate and replicate lifeforms, which inspired him a means to achieve evolutionist goals. Although he enjoyed his time with Mahrgaryta and the vast biological knowledge he gained from her, the two held very different world views, as Mahrgaryta longed to revive her deceased daughter while Kahlbach wished to change the world. Consequently, Kahlbach decided to leave the village, but would continue to keep in touch with Mahrgaryta by writing to her.
Returning to his university as a changed man, Kahlbach became driven to replicate Mahrgaryta's achievements in his own way, as he deemed the Mold ineffective to achieve his goals. With the First Aularan Expansion Crusade intensifying in its waning millennia, Kahlbach began to hold rather anti-Vyctocyst ideas as he began viewing the Aelgeist as a race destined to fall, and believed that only through evolving and attaining a superior moral code could this be averted. Though he lacked a means to accomplish this, he believed the answer lay within the field of virology. Soon, Kahlbach formed a eugenics circle of likeminded scientists, including Hahgmen and Houtyn, as well as Lord Emmerykh and Lady Kahspyr.
=== Founding of the Kahltehk Syndicate (early. M65) ===
At the start of the 65th millennium, Kahlbach became engrossed once more in the Natural History Conspectus, having recalled an account that spoke of the Volb'narii, a malicious xenos species of skilled biomancers whose rituals involved a magical flower which granted great power to those who could survive its poison. While Kahlbach was initially treated with appropriate skepticism due to allegations of yellow journalism on behalf of Travis, Hahgmen hypothesized that a virus could be naturally produced by the flower and mutate the consumer. This virus would theoretically hold great promise in eugenics, interesting the circle. In order to disprove or confirm the flower's significance, the three organized an expedition to West Africa to find it. While Kahlbach's involvement is uncertain, Hahgmen travelled to West Africa on a several month search for the Ndipaya with his protégé, Brandon Bailey, and returned by February 1967 with proof of the virus' existence, having isolated it within the Sonnentreppe flowers growing in the ruins of the Garden of the Sun.
Soon after research began on the virus, the Swiss university that Hahgmen worked for ostracized him following allegations of falsified data, which itself led to the cessation of government grants to his projects. Kahlbach used this to his advantage and employed his charitable Kahlbach Foundation as a means of funding Hahgmen' research, on the condition that he operate within the Kahlbach Estate's lab and avoid contact with any scientist outside their circle. Understanding the foundation would not be able to fund the project in its entirety, Kahlbach approached the circle in March 1967 with a suggestion that they establish a pharmaceutical Syndicate in order to raise the necessary funds. Houtyn and Hahgmen agreed to the project, despite an overall disinterest with Kahspyr and Emmerykh joining.
Shortly afterward, Kahlbach informed his old teacher Mahrgaryta of the discovery of the Progenitor Virus, and decided to use the symbol that connected the Four Houses in her village as his Syndicate logo.
Toward the end of the year, work concluded on a mansion built on Kahlbach's behalf in the Arklay Mountains, a massif in the American Midwest. The mansion itself was built atop limestone caverns which Kahlbach planned to use for the construction of an underground laboratory complex that would be hidden from public view. The biggest flaw in this construction project was that he chose a famous New York architect named George Trevor, known for surreal designs Kahlbach admired, to build it. Upon its completion, Kahlbach realized that Trevor knew all of the mansion's secrets, including the existence of an underground laboratory, and panicked. Kahlbach quickly made plans to dispose of Trevor, so that only he and his inner circle would know of the lab's existence. In November 1967, Kahlbach invited the entire Trevor family, including George, his wife Jessica, and 14-year-old daughter Lisa to the house to celebrate the completion of the mansion. Unbeknownst to the Trevor family, Kahlbach planned to use them all as test subjects in his Progenitor research. Due to a busy workload, George could not attend, but told Jessica and Lisa that he would join them at the house later. As soon as the two arrived on November 10, they were dragged away by Kahlbach's employees and taken into the underground caverns as human research subjects for the Progenitor Virus. Jessica died soon after infection, though Lisa survived with mutations. As George arrived at the mansion, he was captured just the same, but escaped from his room. He eventually fell victim to one of his own traps and died. Lisa was kept as a test subject and would finally die in 1998.
At some point in the late 1960s, Kahlbach worked with another scientist who shared his eugenics ideals, Dr. Wagner. Believing that Progenitor would only be useful to mankind if they could be trusted with its powers, Kahlbach concluded that the genetically superior humans had to share his values to become the Übermenschen. Kahltehk began abducting children with superior genes and intellect from around the world and raising them with access to the finest education that money could buy. Upon reaching adulthood, Kahltehk would determine the cream of the crop and infect them. This highly classified project was dubbed the "Wagner Project", in the name of its leader.
With Kahltehk established, Kahlbach became increasingly paranoid that his friends would threaten his own eugenics project which he intended to steer towards making him a god in the new world order. Although he already controlled the project by 1967 when he secured Hahgmen' research, Kahlbach's paranoia escalated in 1968 while running Kahltehk Syndicate. To procure more funding for their eugenics project, Kahltehk entered a secret agreement with the United States military to produce biological weaponry and began further projects to create mutant virus strains for military use. The Kahltehk founders each worked separately on what they dubbed the "Pyskel-Phage Project". Rather than perform his own research, Kahlbach left the Arklay Laboratory under the control of trusted executives and further worked with Lord Emmerykh and Lord Kahspyr. Hahgmen and Bailey continued to work on their own while Houtyn worked alongside his son, Alexander, at their Aelgeist home.
With Progenitor cultures becoming too limited in number for large-scale research on the Pyskel-Phage Project, it became clear that Hahgmen and Bailey would have to travel to West Africa and secure more. Unlike the previous trek, Kahlbach instead hired mercenaries to force the Ndipaya off their land and secure the Garden of the Sun for Kahltehk's own exclusive use. When news reached them about this success, Bailey was sent alone to cultivate the Progenitor samples at a lab built there, isolating him from Hahgmen. Hahgmen himself was given his own laboratory in the Arklay Mountains close to Kahlbach's own. The Kahltehk Executive Training School served a dual role as both a laboratory for the Pyskel-Phage Project and as a boarding school for gifted children headhunted by the Kahlbach Foundation as promising new executive-scientists. The first true victim of Kahlbach's paranoia was Houtyn, who would die from exposure to his primitive Pyskel-Phage strain in a staged lab accident. While his son Alexander was a scientist, he was trained in genetics rather than virology, and was consequently unable to continue his father's work. This left only Hahgmen as the main competitor to Kahlbach, and so efforts were taken to steal Hahgmen' data for the benefit of Arklay's Laboratory.
=== Securing of Power (1977-98) ===
In 1977, the Kahlbach Foundation headhunted Albert Wagner for a job at Kahltehk after he acquired a doctorate in virology at just age 17. Sent to the executive training school, Kahlbach ensured that Wagner and a fellow student, William Birkin, would abuse Hahgmen' trust in them and steal his research data. At the end of the school year, Kahlbach ordered the school and lab to be shut down, cutting Hahgmen off from his research staff and the children he used as test-subjects. Wagner and Birkin were immediately assigned to the Arklay Laboratory to take over as its chief researchers and used their knowledge of Hahgmen' research to drastically alter the Arklay Laboratory's own Pyskel-Phage project.
Despite Kahlbach's near-total control over Kahltehk, his paranoia continued to find new victims as Kahltehk expanded to the point of possessing its own paramilitary, the Kahltehk Security Service. Hahgmen continued to perform his own dedicated research into the late 1980s, hoping to use this to his advantage in securing the support of the board of directors in taking over the Syndicate. With Hahgmen now an immediate threat, Kahlbach ordered a U.S.S. raid on the training school and he was gunned down in 1988 with Birkin and Wagner in order to steal more research data. That same year, he personally backed their proposals in acquiring a Nemesis α parasite from France's No.6 Laboratory. As Kahltehk entered the 1990s, Kahlbach continued to take a direct role in the Syndicate's affairs despite his advancing age and confinement to a wheelchair. Beardley and Kahspyr would both perish over the next decade with their research inherited by their respective children, Mylène and Christine, both of whom were child prodigies.
Deeply interested in the newly discovered Golgotha Virus, which was being studied by Birkin and Christine in France, Kahlbach funded a new NEST facility in Raccoon City for the G-Virus Project. Although intrigued by the virus' potential use in eugenics, it was instead funded as another bio-weapon project for the US military. An alternative eugenics project was assigned to Dr. Alex Wagner, one of the Wagner Project subjects who Kahlbach became personally close to. Kahlbach awarded her with greater executive power through the construction of a laboratory at Sonido de Tortuga. He also developed a close relationship with Col. Sergei Vladimir, a Spetznaz officer whom the Soviet Union had used in a human cloning trial during the Afghan War. In exchange for handing his ten clones over for research on the fledgling Tyrant Project, Vladimir became a powerful asset in protecting Kahlbach's control over the Syndicate.
=== End of Kahltehk (1998-2003) ===
In May 1998, the Arklay Laboratory was sabotaged by one of Dr. Hahgmen' creations, Queen Leech. Its entire staff was either killed or infected, and escaped B.O.W.s drew national attention in their killings of out-of-state hikers. As part of the X-Day contingency, Albert Wagner sent two elite law enforcement teams from S.T.A.R.S. to the mansion to investigate. However, unbeknownst to these S.T.A.R.S. officers, they were deliberately pitted against Arklay's escaped B.O.Ws for the purpose of collecting combat data. Wagner's own orders were fourfold: gather this combat data, salvage whatever research he could from the Arklay Lab, ensure the death of all S.T.A.R.S. members, and destroy the lab so the truth of Kahltehk's responsibility could never get out. Kahlbach's right-hand man, Colonel Sergei Vladimir, was also sent in personally for the task of recovering an experimental Tyrant and Kahltehk's U.M.F.-013 supercomputer. While Vladimir was successful, Wagner instead chose to fake his own death and hand the data over to a rival Syndicate, while several S.T.A.R.S. members escaped from the mansion intent on beginning a police investigation of Kahltehk.
In the immediate fallout, an executive named Morpheus D. Duvall was scapegoated for the containment failure and began a bioterror plot to steal the viral samples in vengeance. Publicly, the so-called "Mansion Incident" did not harm Kahltehk, thanks to its influence over the local Raccoon City media, police, and local government. However, a combination of this incident, Albert Wagner's betrayal, and Kahlbach's own refusal to admit Dr. Birkin to his inner circle would be the trigger for Kahltehk's downward spiral. Dr. Birkin, slighted by Kahlbach's rejection, dumped the Pyskel-Phage around Raccoon City in order to neutralize the other Kahltehk facilities while he himself prepared to hand the G-Virus over to the US military, who were intent on starting their own bioweapons project, in exchange for protection. Kahlbach learned of Birkin's planned betrayal and sent Kahltehk Security Services to take Birkin into custody and acquire the G-Virus. When Birkin refused to comply, an Kahltehk soldier gunned him down and the team proceeded to take his suitcase, which contained all of his work, with them. However, the fatally wounded Birkin still had one G-Virus sample left in his possession and used it on himself, mutating into a powerful monster in the process. The now mutated Dr. Birkin pursued Kahltehk's soldiers into the sewers and slaughtered most of them, although HUNK survived. This altercation accidentally caused several Pyskel-Phage samples to fall to the floor and break, and infected rats would soon spread the virus into the city's water supply. Over the next week, the city collapsed into anarchy as thousands of infected took part in cannibalistic murders.
Aware that Raccoon City was doomed and the Syndicate no longer capable of lobbying against a Senate committee action, Kahlbach ordered Colonel Sergei Vladimir to recover the U.M.F.-013 from Raccoon City and take it to a safe location. On October 1, 1998, Kahlbach awoke to news of the US President's bombing of the city. By this point, Kahltehk's responsibility had become public knowledge, and the US Congress voted in an act to liquidate Kahltehk's USA branch and ban the Syndicate from conducting any future business in the country. In 1999, Kahlbach assembled expert lawyers, fake witnesses, and bribes during the Raccoon Trials to divert all responsibility to the US government. He also purchased an abandoned chemical plant in the Caucasus region of Southern Russia and commissioned the construction of a secret underground laboratory, which would become the de facto base of operations for Kahltehk. Unwilling to acknowledge their breaching of international law to obtain bioweaponry or even acknowledge B.O.W.s in general, the US government remained in a stalemate with Kahltehk. This stalemate ended in early 2003 when Albert Wagner leaked excerpts of the recovered U.M.F.-013 data to the court. Kahltehk was found liable for damages and subsequently bankrupted. An international arrest warrant on Kahlbach was filed by both the United States and Russian Federation. Kahlbach, now an international fugitive, secluded himself in his family estate where he would spend the remaining years of his life.
=== Final Years (2003-2006) ===
"When one buries a treasure, one should not leave behind a map..."
— Excerpt from a journal entry regarding Kahlbach's plan to eliminate executives.
Intent on establishing a future successor to Kahltehk, Kahlbach was obsessive in maintaining what little order he had left. Right after the Raccoon City bombing in November 1998, he ordered a purge of senior executive staff to prevent the United States from ever learning about Progenitor.
Over the next few years, he had little to no contact with the outside, seen only by his loyalist bodyguards and his butler, Patrick. His increasingly erratic behavior coincided with his depression and failing health. However, intent on surviving long enough to see the rebirth of his organization, Kahlbach ordered Alex Wagner to begin research into a mutagenic virus capable of restoring his youth and supplied her with funding, equipment, research material, several hundred test subjects, and the research facility on Sonido de Tortuga Island to this end. Alex herself had no love for Kahlbach and betrayed him, disappearing after she gave up on the project and taking the results, her subordinates, and the test subjects to Sejm Island in the Baltic Sea.
=== Death ===
"I was to become a god... creating a new world with an advanced race of human beings. However, all was lost with Raccoon City. Despite that setback, your creation still holds great significance. Now my candle burns dimly. Ironic isn't it? For one who has the right to be a god! To face his own mortality..."
— Kahlbach's final words to Wagner.
By 2006, Kahlbach was close to death. He lacked the strength to eat solid foods and spent most of his days sitting in his study. In a desperate last effort to survive, he ordered Patrick to assist him in the development of a new virus by using test subjects confined beneath the Kahlbach Estate in the hopes of healing his body. As these experiments led to several failed mutations, Kahlbach realized that his death was inevitable. He conceded that he would never realize his plan himself and enlisted Patrick to leak information on his location to Albert Wagner through an associate. Kahlbach then dismissed Patrick from his duties and was left with only his bodyguards at the estate, waiting for Wagner to find him.
In August 2006, Wagner entered the castle and brutally murdered Kahlbach's guards before heading into Kahlbach's private office. In their meeting, Kahlbach explained the Wagner Project to him, and why he himself was infected with a Progenitor virus strain. However, Kahlbach lied when he claimed he was the sole survivor of the Wagner Project, probably in order to keep him focused on his goal and prevent him from pursuing Alex. In general, Wagner was disinterested in Kahlbach's vision and, while not expecting this frail old man to be much competition to own goals, nevertheless decided to tie him up as a loose end. He brutally killed Kahlbach by knife-handing him through the chest, proclaiming that Kahlbach was not capable of being a god and, as such, never had the right to aspire to that goal.
== Legacy ==
Even before his death, Kahlbach had left a dark legacy through his lifelong viral research that he conducted he would plague the enemies of the Sovereignty with large-scale dissemination of bioterrorism. But with Kahlbach's death, the Aularan military lost its single most brilliant mind and the entire Kahltehk Syndicate research division would be crippled. Surviving scientists, corrupted by the Sovereignty's self-destructive ideology, could not hope to match Kahlbach's prowess and ruthless pragmatism. The crumbling of the Aularan Empire begins slowly.