Part 2
July 27, 1981
Today a ten year old girl was appointed as senior researcher at the South Pole Laboratory. Her name was Alexia Ashford. I was twenty-one years old and Birkin was nineteen.
Irritatingly, the rumour about Alexia of the South Pole monopolised discussions amongst Arklay's researchers. The Ashford name was legendary to the old staff who had been at Umbrella long enough to remember. Whenever the research came to a standstill they always said If only Dr. Ashford were still alive. Certainly Dr. Ashford was a great scientist, one of the original research team who discovered the Founder Virus and the originator of the T-virus project. However, he died soon after Umbrella was established. Thirteen years has passed since his death. What was the point of expecting anything from the Ashfords? In fact, the South Pole laboratory, which was founded after Dr Edward's death by his son, had so far yielded no results.
So, not much can be expected from the granddaughter, Alexia. However, from that day, our dotard subordinates started saying If only Ms. Alexia were there.
It seemed like there was no potential for future development in this lab, as long as we had staff like those bunch of idiots, who could only judge people by their genealogy, instead of using their own sense of values. Those fools could never take initiative and would remain as minor researchers even though they had one foot in the grave. But I was different, I had good judgement.
If I, as the chief researcher, had become emotional, the development of the T-virus would have been delayed even further. To achive results, one must stay calm and make sensible decisions whatever the circumstances.
An idea came to me - The success of the research relied on how to handle those ancient gentlemen. As they could drop dead at any moment, wouldn't they be most useful if we were to use them for the most dangerous experiments. The art of management is to utilise everyone beneath you. However, Birkin was becoming a nuisance. His reaction towards the Alexia rumours was so pathetic.
Although he never said it, he took pride in becoming the youngest ever chief researcher at the age of sixteen. But this ten year old girl had smashed this figurative trophy to pieces. It must have been the first time he had felt defeated. He could never approve of someone who was younger, with breeding, and a woman. It was unimaginable that he was being affected by a personnel reshuffle in such a far away place, where there had been no achievements for so long. After all, he was still a kid. Immature as he was, I needed him to pull himself together. Over the last three years our research had reached the second stage.
By then, the T-virus was becoming stable enough to be used to create Living Biological Weapons, better known as Zombies. However, the virus would never be able to modify the human gene one hundred percent - there are compatibilities between the virus and the genes because no one person's genes are exactly alike.
Ten percent of humans would make a lucky escape and not develop the disease, even though a zombie infected them with the virus. There was nothing we could do about this, no matter how hard we tried. If it had a ninety percent success rate then it was good enough to use as a biological weapon. But Spencer didn't seem to be satisfied. Our boss wanted a stand-alone weapon which could wipe out an entire population. But, what for?
Essentially, the virtue of biological weapons was the low development costs. But our Living Biological Weapon was becoming extremely expensive. Spencer would never have chosen this path if he was looking for financial rewards. If manufactured for use in conjunction with an orthodox weapon, it would have made a handsome profit. But to keep the research going to make a stand-alone, exterminatory weapon did not make business sense.
Why did he continue ignoring the costs? If his aim was to monopolise the entire war industry by changing the very concepts of war, perhaps I could agree a little bit. I still didn't know what his true intention was.
Apart from Spencer's intention, Birkin was engineering a living biological weapon with an increased emphasis on its ability to fight. He was trying to create it not only through mutating human genes with the T-virus but also by adding another creature's genetic information. The fighting living biological weapon would kill all human beings, including those wearing body armour, or equipped with biological warfare suits and those humans who escaped from death through infection. It was later called The Hunter. But we had to suspend the experiments for a while - to protect the specimens from Birkin.
Birkin, who had this meaningless anger directed at Alexia, started acting abnormally. He worked through the night at the lab time after time and repeated disorganized experiments one after another. Me and my staff collected biopsy samples as quickly as possible before the specimens could die, but we couldn't keep up with his speed. The Manager of the Laboratory supplied the new specimens as if nothing had happened, but they didn't survive long.
It was Hell. But she, the female specimen survived the hell. She was twenty-eight years old by then and had spent fourteen years in this lab. The numerous injections of the Founder virus she had received over the past fourteen years would have left her bereft of any logical reasoning, but if she still had any mind left, death would have been the one and only thign she wanted.
But, she has continued to live. Why was she the only one to survive? The experiment data did not highlight any difference between her and the other specimens. We needed much more time to find out the answer to that question.
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