Location: The Lemanissier Ranch, Outside Amarillo, Texas
Date: February 21, 2016, 04:30 Hours
Daylight crept in slowly over the Texas plains. The sky shifted from deep indigo to a bruised purple, and finally to the pale rose and gold of a winter sunrise. To an outsider, like the delivery driver dropping off feed or a neighbor cruising down the county road, Nicolas Lemanissier appeared to be hard at work. He moved with the steady rhythm of someone connected to the land, breath curling in white clouds as he fixed a stretch of barbed wire fence.
This was a good performance, a necessary one. The physical labor helped him focus, grounding him in reality before he faced the nightmare ahead.
Because beneath the unassuming barn, hidden under ten feet of reinforced concrete and lead shielding, Alen Wesker was bringing back ghosts.
He had decided against using his father's main lab in San Antonio. That place was compromised, a known factor for too many intelligence agencies. It made no sense to return to the scene of the crime daily. Instead, Alen created his own sanctuary—a high-tech hideaway buried beneath his ranch, invisible to satellite scans and nosy eyes.
05:15 Hours – The Underground Laboratory
The air in the lab felt sterile and cold, kept at a steady 64 degrees to optimize the server banks. The hum of the cooling fans provided a white noise that drowned out the world above.
On the main holodisplay, a constellation of data windows floated in the air. They contained schematics for the A-Virus, the erratic research notes of Glenn Arias, the neat handwriting of Alex Wesker's journals, and the chilling logs of his father, Albert.
This was his nightly ritual. Alen walked the path of his inheritance, sorting through the madness. He looked for patterns in the chaos, hoping to find a weapon to destroy the legacy that created him.
He rubbed his temples as a low thrum of a headache built behind his eyes.
Recently, the ghosts weren't just in the data. They seeped into his senses. At times, a faint haunting melody—a lullaby—whispered at the edge of his hearing. Occasionally, the sharp, acrid scent of a rare antiseptic from high-end Umbrella labs filled his nose. And at night, in that space between waking and sleeping, a woman's blurry face appeared—smiling with a love so deep it felt like a wound.
"You are divided, Nicolas."
The voice was calm and grounding. Alen turned around.
Master Shi Yan Xing stood at the lab's entrance, having descended the hidden spiral staircase without a sound. The old Shaolin monk was sturdy, unaffected by the digital storm swirling around them.
"The past is a weight you carry in your soul, not just on these screens," Shi continued, gesturing to the floating data. "You search for answers in the binary, but the storm is in your chest." He tapped his own heart. "No screen can calm a restless spirit."
"I need to understand what they created, Master," Alen replied, his voice tight. "If I can see the whole blueprint, I might finally tear it apart."
"Or perhaps," Shi said gently, "you are looking for a reflection of yourself in their work. That is a fool's errand. Staring into the abyss only invites it to stare back."
The master set a clay pot of herbal tea on the desk—a blend for clarity and calm. "Drink. Sleep is a weapon you are overlooking."
He left as quietly as he had come. Alen sipped the tea, feeling the warmth spread through his chest like sunlight. But it couldn't chase away the cold logic of the machine.
06:00 Hours – The Digital Excavation
Alen shifted his focus to the latest obsession: the digitized diary of Dr. James Marcus. The pages mixed brilliant virology with paranoid scrawls. Two names popped up repeatedly, circled in red ink with manic intensity.
"Who the hell are you?" Alen said aloud in the empty room, tracing the faded handwriting on the screen. "Red Queen. Are you a person? A project? And this Russian... Sergei Vladimir. Another loyal follower in Spencer's kennel?"
He switched terminals, pulling up a massive, corrupted archive he had stolen from Blue Umbrella. It was the official file on Albert Wesker, retrieved by the BSAA after his death. It resembled a digital corpse—half-eaten by data rot and deliberate deletion.
"The BSAA, the DSO... they think they have the whole picture," Alen mused, a cynical smirk playing on his lips. "But my old man wasn't stupid. He wouldn't let his life's work be taken so easily. He had a backup. He always had a backup."
Determination surged within him. For the next two weeks, Alen stopped being a rancher. He evolved into a digital archaeologist.
He crafted custom decryption algorithms, chaining processors to brute-force the encryption. He cross-referenced the corrupted data with snippets of Marcus's diary and his mother's notes. He worked until his vision blurred and the phantom lullaby crescendoed into a scream in his skull.
Then, one night, it happened.
A cluster of files labeled "t-Virus Prototype – Tricell Subsidiary" suddenly resolved. It wasn't a virus schematic. It was a directory key.
The entire archive unfolded. It was pristine and terrifyingly complete. Alen had accomplished what every intelligence agency on Earth had failed to do: he fully restored a copy of Albert Wesker's personal database.
His first search was for the Russian.
SUBJECT: VLADIMIR, SERGEI
STATUS: DECEASED [2003 – Terminated by A. Wesker]
AFFILIATION: UMBRELLA CORPORATION – HIGH COMMAND
NOTE: Primarily responsible for the T-A.L.O.S. Project. Former Colonel in the Soviet Army. Fanatically loyal to Spencer. Viewed Subject A. Wesker as a traitor. Final act was to upload all of Umbrella's core archives to the 'Red Queen' AI before the assault on the Caucasus facility.
"A loyal dog to the end," Alen murmured. "But you were just a carrier. The real prize is what you protected."
He typed in the next name. Red Queen.
Information flooded the screen—a torrent of secrets kept cold for over a decade. Alen's eyes widened. His breath quickened.
It wasn't a person. It was an Artificial Intelligence. Umbrella's central nervous system.
SYSTEM: UMBRELLA ARCHIVE // STATUS: COMPROMISED
SUBJECT: RED QUEEN SUPERCOMPUTER AI
FUNCTION: UMBRELLA GLOBAL DATA CUSTODIAN & SECURITY OVERRIDE
LOCATION: CAUCASUS MOUNTAIN FACILITY, RUSSIA
CURRENT STATUS: OFFLINE. DATA CORE STOLEN BY A. WESKER (2003).
"Hell no," Alen gasped, leaning back in his chair. "An AI. You created an electronic god to cover your sins."
The scale of the discovery was staggering. Every experiment. Every financial record. Every dirty secret Umbrella ever had... all of it was stored in that AI. And his father had taken it.
But a darker thought struck him.
"An AI that sophisticated... it wouldn't let itself be deleted. It would have survival protocols. Contingencies." Alen's mind raced. "A self-aware system would have made a backup. A ghost in the machine, just waiting for someone to plug it back in."
He pulled up the location data. Caucasus Chemical Plant. Southern Russia. A frozen, pristine tomb.
"The Russian government wouldn't nuke it—too politically risky," Alen reasoned aloud. "The BSAA probably didn't even know it existed back then. So it's just... there. Frozen. Waiting."
Waiting with failed experiments. Waiting with Lickers in cryo-stasis. Waiting for a master.
The Hunt Begins
Alen moved with urgency. He used a chain of proxy servers and untraceable encryption breakers to hack into the FSB (formerly KGB) mainframe. He maneuvered through cyberspace like a digital demon, searching for recent reports on the sector.
And he found it.
A field report from an FSB agent, filed six months ago. It noted "unstable structures" and "unconfirmed biological contacts"—presumed to be wild Lickers thawing out. But the real gem was a footnote:
"Observed unauthorized aerial activity. Helicopter consistent with Eastern Slav Republic military markings. Conducting low-altitude scans over Sector 7-G, 3 klicks from the main site."
Two weeks later, that agent was listed as KIA.
Alen leaned back, the pieces falling together like a sniper's shot.
"Svetlana Belikova," he said, tasting the name like ash. "The President of the Eastern Slav Republic. You used B.O.W.s in your civil war. You have a taste for it. And now your spies are hunting Russian agents near an old Umbrella lab?"
He rose and strode to the tactical planning table. A 3D holographic map of the Caucasus mountains lit up.
"You're looking for the same thing I am," Alen said to the map. "Either the Red Queen's backup... or another toy Sergei left behind."
The quiet rancher was gone. The Phantom had returned.
"The plan is straightforward," Alen declared, his voice cold and clear. "Objective One: Infiltrate the abandoned village near the plant. See what Belikova's troops left behind. Objective Two: Infiltrate the main facility. Find the server cache. Find the Red Queen. Find whatever secrets Sergei tried to hide."
He tapped the hologram of the decaying industrial complex.
"I go in light. Fast. Quiet. Cold-weather gear for the approach. A 24-hour window to get in, secure the truth, and get out."
He examined the structural analysis of the facility's foundation with a malicious grin.
"And on my way out... I will bring the entire mountain down on top of it. One final burial for Umbrella's last great secret."
Mission Status: GO.
Target: The Red Queen.
Location: Russia.