Elvin's Bio

Someone said that a story is great when the villain is great. If that's true, the Impossible Mission series has a quite compelling story to tell, the fight against a very interesting man with terrible, fascinating motivations. His backstory in the manuals of IM1 and IM2 was sometimes contradictory and often comical. The following biography, though unofficial, aims to be complete and coherent. Oh, and it adds a lot to what we knew.

1964: Elvin Leonard Isaac Kohlbauer is born in Los Angeles, CA, son of Abraham “Atombender” Kohlbauer - a German physicist of Jewish origin who fleed nazi Germany, emigrated to USA in 1936 and worked in Los Alamos from 1940 - and Georgina Caswell, a much younger american woman who was a former student of Abraham in the early Sixties.

1979: at the age of 15 Elvin is already a full fledged nerd of informatics, pioneering in hacking with his IMSAI 8080. His favourite videogame in the sparetime is Giggling Penguin Invaders From Outer Space In The Vicinity of Ursa Minor, an obscure - and very poor - Space Invaders clone. He is literally obsessed with it. Sources tell that one fateful day, after a multiple days marathon without sleep, he is just a penguin away from beating the maximum score of one hundred billion points: at 99,999,999,785 points he aims at the last penguin when the power fails. The long gaming session is lost and he'll never be able to achieve a similar score again. It is believed that the event snaps something in his mind and triggers an insatiable thirst for vengeance against the whole of humanity: the world will pay for the injustice he has suffered. The version of those facts told by Elvin himself is quite different and more honorable: he recounts the story of the traumatic loss of a very advanced A.I. program called "Elvin Jr." he was working on when the power cut happened.

1987: at the age of 23 he graduates in Computer Science with honors. The same year he formally changes his surname to his father’s nickname in Los Alamos, “Atombender”, when he was a key scientist in Oppenheimer's team working on the first nuclear bomb. Elvin is proud of his father's deeds back in the '40s.

1991: at the age of 27 Elvin gets a second PhD in Robotic Engineering.

1997: at the age of 33 is appointed Professor in Robotics and A.I. development at UCLA.

1998-2003: since the late Nineties Elvin leads a double life: while a respectable Professor in the daytime, he spends all his nights hacking, violating every network protection system. He uses all his abilities to break into databases, mainframes, private networks, especially banks in order to transfer funds to his own bank accounts.

2004: at the age of 40 he has already accumulated a fortune raiding the computers of financial institutions. But this gargantuan amount of resources is only a starting point for his plans.

2016: at the age of 52 he delivers a shocking speech to the Texas Academy of Science in which he advocates the need to exterminate all Earth's population through any mean. Many seem repelled but some cheer enthusiastically, seeing it as the ultimate hope to save Earth from global warming and extintion of animal species, i.e. saving it from mankind.

2017: at the age of 53 prof. Atombender publishes a paper titled “On the necessity of life extermination”. The perspective changes for many followers, as animals seem to be included in the horizon of Elvin's death plan.

2018: at the age of 54 he disappears, hiding underground in total seclusion with the only company of his robots. There he builds his stronghold, thanks to the almost unlimited economic resources amassed in the previous years.

2022 - at the age of 58 he starts a systematic work of hacking aimed to breach the security of all the main military computer installations around the world; an effort so subtle and elusive that the authorities never manage to identify who’s responsible, until the end, until it's too late.

2025 - at the age of 61, under an assumed name, he purchases from the U.S. Government the grounds of the the Sawtelle District in Los Angeles, five miles west of UCLA, in anticipation of possibly building another future stronghold, a chance that shall become reality in a few years.

2026 - at the age of 62 he totally devotes himself to the pursuit of the launch codes for all the nuclear missiles of USA, Russia, China, India and France. In what later will be called the “Impossible Mission”, Elvin is arrested thanks to the brave efforts of Agent 4125. After a fast-track trial, he is imprisoned for life in the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, on the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a “supermax prison”. It is expected that he will soon receive the death sentence, but that’s not immediately applicable because of the moratorium on death penalty both in California and Colorado.

2027 - at the age of 63, after just a year spent in prison, Elvin manages to escape with the help of his robots, programmed with a convenient built-in emergency protocol to free their master and creator in case he would be held captive in prison. The evasion is particularly spectacular. Prof. Atombender and his intelligent machines vanish very quickly.

2028 - at the age of 64 he starts the building process of the eight towers on the grounds he acquired in L.A., under the fake identity of a respectable builder who appears as the legal owner.

2030 - at the age of 66, it is revealed that the mastermind behind the construction of the eight towers is Elvin Atombender himself and that he is back at work in the renewed effort to break the launch codes for nuclear missiles. Agent 4125, under the new alias Bravo 29, is called back to duty and tasked to track down and - if necessary - kill Elvin, in what shall be called in the subsequent years the “Impossible Mission 2”. The operation is another success and Elvin, desperate, rather than getting caught a second time, chooses death jumping off the top of one of his towers. The long fall kills him and the case is dismissed. Actually his robots, minutes before the authorities appear, extract the brain of Professor Atombender, which has remained almost intact, from the still warm corpse with the sinister purpose of preserving at least his consciousness, possibly forever.

2030-2034 - once found a convenient hideout, the robots act as a hive mind, a collective intelligence which coordinates its efforts to achieve two goals. The first is to make Elvin immortal, digitizing his mind and merging it with the A.I. of the robots. The second goal pursued by the machines is to avenge their master reviving his plans on a bigger, even more menacing scale, something deadlier than a global thermonuclear holocaust. They design a massive space station, gather resources for years (after having used all the immense wealth accumulated in the previous three decades by Elvin) then, finally, build a giant construction yard in outer space hidden from the eyes of the world by a cloaking device. It's the greatest undertaking man has ever attempted, except it hasn’t been attempted by men but by robots instead, though guided by Elvin's mind.

2034-2060 - for 26 long years construction work for the space station proceeds in absolute secrecy in a stable geostationary orbit beyond satellites and space debris, where nothing can detect it and nothing can hit it randomly revealing its presence.

2060 - at the age of 96 (though technically dead for thirty years) Elvin is back as the most frightening threat to the world: his space station is pulled out of invisibility to radars, thermal and optical devices and finally revealed to the world, while being moved to an orbit closer to Earth. Agent 4125 is too old to be recalled to service but that's not true for his young clones. It's time for the third and final effort to stop Atombender, a mission already christened "Impossible Mission 3".