The Covenant, or Der Bund, was a group of Nazi loyalists and sympathizers dedicated to eugenics and genetic manipulation research, led by Wulf Konrad Fischer. Beginning with the work of notorious SS doctors Josef Mengele and Wolfgang Faust in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the Covenant fled Europe after World War II and established itself in the town of Nova Godói, Brazil, continuing their experiments with the ultimate goal of creating a breed of genetically enhanced soldiers capable of establishing and maintaining the Fourth Reich.
Operations[]
Headquarters[]
The Covenant's base of operations was deep in the Brazilian jungle, in the reclusive town of Nova Godói. A Bavarian village on the shore of a volcanic crater lake housed and supported the Covenant personnel. An island on the lake featured a centuries-old fortress that contained the Covenant's central laboratories, military barracks and stockpiles, and administrative offices.
Research[]
The Copenhagen Window[]
Much of the Covenant's research centered on enhancing through genetic manipulation the natural intuitive temporal sense of the mind. The Copenhagen Window was derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: the notion that the future is nothing more than an expanding set of probabilities, time lines of possibility, that continuously collapse into one reality as observations or measurements are made. While most people have only a fleeting sense of the immediate future, the Covenant sought to extend that temporal sense to see the dozens of branching possibilities–as if through a window–and pick out the most likely one.
Satellite Projects[]
In addition to their primary research at their facilities in Nova Godói, the Covenant operated several satellite operations that were loosely affiliated to their work. According to Fischer, Covenant research was subtle, complex, and wide ranging, forcing them to draw from many sources, which were mostly kept at the edge of plausible deniability. These projects included Project Aves at Longitude Pharmaceuticals, an involvement that Longitude CEO Charles Slade protected even years after faking his own death.
The Twins Brigade and Die Schwächlinge[]
The Covenant performed their experiments almost exclusively on twins. In the early stages of pregnancy, the genetic material in the two embryos was swapped–the best of both embryos was transferred exclusively to one embryo, while the inferior genes of both were moved to the other. The "good" twin developed into the ideal members of the "master race": blond-haired, blue-eyed killing machines, strong, intelligent, fearless, and cunning. From birth, they were educated, physically trained, and indoctrinated. As they came of age, they joined the Twins Brigade, an enhanced military unit comprised entirely of more than three generations of iterations of "good" twins, each iteration an improvement upon the last.
The "bad" twin, known as der Schwächling, was kept in underground in desolate conditions, raised for menial unskilled labor in the surrounding camps and fields, and as emergency organ repositories for their siblings. They were unnamed, instead assigned only a number and referred to collectively as "the defectives."
Alban Lorimer[]
The Covenant experiments reached their pinnacle with the twin sons of Helen Esterhazy and Aloysius Pendergast: Alban and his brother, der Schwächling known only as "Forty-Seven." Alban was the Übermensch realized, "creative and strong, beyond the petty considerations of good and evil," and capable of leveraging the Copenhagen Window to see the branching possibilities of a situation up to fifteen seconds into the future and select the most likely outcome.
As a "beta test" of the program's success, Alban was tasked with committing a series of murders in New York designed to pit him against the forensic and investigative skills of his father. When Forty-Seven escaped and found Pendergast, Alban's test parameters were adapted to include kidnapping his brother from Pendergast's Riverside Drive mansion. He succeeded, and the twins returned to Nova Godói with Pendergast in pursuit.
Tasked with tracking and killing Pendergast after the FBI agent was captured and promptly escaped from his Covenant captors in Nova Godói, an overconfident Alban instead elected to toy with Pendergast during their confrontations, and Forty-Seven–now named "Tristram" by Pendergast–led an uprising by the defectives and several of their siblings from the Twins Brigade, an uprising which ultimately led to the destruction of the fortress and the death or surrender of all of the Covenant scientists and soldiers. Alban himself, berated by Fischer for failing to kill Pendergast, sealed the Covenant's demise by shooting and killing Fischer and escaping into the Brazilian favelas.