Dibs and Pigeon Costumes

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The elevator leads down to a room full of old technology that's covered in a thick layer of dust.

"This can't be the data-point, this technology is ancient," Natasha says.

"It could just be how it looks on the outside. It's probably much more advanced than you'd assume," I say, looking around at the massive computers and thousands of switches and buttons that give off a faint orange glow.

Natasha walks over to a computer and plugs the flash drive into a port. The whole room comes to life. "Initiate system?" The computer asks in a distorted electronic voice, and green letters type across the screen of one of the monitors.

"Y-E-S, spells yes," Natasha says, typing into the keyboard. She smiles when it works and the computer starts booting up. "Shall we play a game?" She asks in a low voice, turning around to face us with a grin. "It's from a movie that..."

"Yeah, I saw it," Steve cuts her off.

The screen lights up with a green pixelated face of a man. "Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1984." An old camera scans my face next. "I do not seem to have ze child in my database."

"Well this just reached a whole new level of creepy," I mumble.

"It's some kind of a recording," Natasha says.

"I am not a recording, Fräulein. I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am." The small screen beside the computer shows us a picture of a round, balding man with round glasses. He looks like an angry little man.

"Do you know this thing?" Natasha asks Steve.

"Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years."

"First correction, I am Swiss. Second, look around you. I have never been more alive. In 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body, my mind, however, that was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain."

I look down at my shoes and lift one up, inspecting the bottom of it. "That's... kinda disgusting."

"How did you get here?" Steve asks it.

"Invited."

"It was Operation Paperclip after World War II. SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic value," Natasha says.

"They thought I could help their cause. I also helped my own."

"HYDRA died with the Red Skull," Steve says.

"Cut off one head, two more shall take its place."

"Prove it."

"Accessing archive." The computer screen shows us old footage of Nazi Germany and HYDRA. "HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize, was that if you try to take that freedom, they resist. The war taught us much. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, SHIELD was founded and I was recruited. The new HYDRA grew. A beautiful parasite inside SHIELD. For seventy years HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed."

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