Warm lamplight filled the room as Matthew lay stretched out on the hotel bed in his bathrobe, eyes moving across the system panel floating in front of him.
The interface was clean. Three functions, nothing more.
[Season Pass] [Lab] [Inventory]
The Season Pass worked on a simple enough principle: complete tasks or accumulate points through daily actions, and once you hit the specified threshold, you unlocked the corresponding tier reward. The T-Virus sample he'd just received was one of them. The Pass ran on a six-month cycle, resetting at the end of each season, though the more points you banked in a given season, the richer the rewards available in the next one.
Matthew scrolled through the current season's reward track and his expression went flat.
Zombie Dogs. Zombie Crows. Lickers. Hunters. Tyrants in various configurations.
"What exactly," he said to no one in particular, "is the theme here supposed to be?"
If the system hadn't been hammering the phrase public welfare at him from the start, he'd have assumed he'd accidentally signed up to be the villain.
Beyond the Season Pass, the other two functions were straightforward. Inventory was storage, nothing fancy. The Lab was more interesting. Spend system points, and you could modify, optimize, or fuse items in your possession.
That last part made him sit up.
"So if I had enough points," he said slowly, thinking it through, "I could theoretically strip out all the downsides of the T-Virus and keep only what's actually useful."
He pulled the vial from inventory and dropped it onto the Lab's workbench.
The moment it landed, the interface lit up.
Please select an experiment type.
Optimize: Spend system points to improve an item's existing properties or remove negative effects.
Modify: Spend system points to customize an item's function to your specifications. Some modifications require additional materials.
Fuse: Spend system points to combine two items. Low compatibility may cause failure. Additional points can be spent to improve success rate.
Matthew selected Optimize.
The thing about zombies was that they were never really the point. The T-Virus was designed as an evolutionary catalyst and a cost-effective bioweapon platform. The undead were just what happened when the intelligence degradation side effect ran unchecked. A spectacular failure mode that overshadowed everything else the virus could theoretically do.
The system confirmed what he'd suspected.
Removable drawbacks: zombification, lethargy, high lethality, low intelligence retention, high transmissibility.
Upgradeable properties: stamina, cellular regeneration, strength, neural reflex speed.
A grin crept onto his face before he could stop it.
In the Marvel Universe, the gap between the powered and the powerless was brutal. Billionaires had Iron Man suits. Accidents turned people into gods. The average person caught in the crossfire was just a casualty statistic. If he didn't find a way to become something more than ordinary, sooner or later some catastrophe was going to turn him into a footnote.
And the path forward was sitting right in front of him.
One agenda. Three items. Public welfare, public welfare, and more public welfare.
Umbrella was a minefield, but it was also a platform. Used correctly, it could be the foundation for everything that came next.
The thought hit him with a sharp, clean jolt of excitement, and then, almost immediately, the energy drained right out of him.
That was the transmigration crash. The adrenaline of arriving in a new world, processing an impossible amount of information, making life-altering decisions before midnight, and now lying in a very comfortable bed in a very expensive hotel room. His eyelids felt like they'd been filled with wet sand.
He had more he wanted to figure out. He just couldn't keep his eyes open long enough to do it.
He was asleep before he made a conscious decision to be.
The knocking woke him.
Three sharp knocks. A pause. Three more.
"Mr. Lawrence? Are you in?"
Three more.
"Mr. Lawrence?"
The accent was unmistakably London. Crisp, precise, cutting cleanly through the door.
Matthew peeled his eyes open, rubbed the corner of one with his thumb, and shuffled over to answer it.
The woman standing in the hallway was not what he expected at this hour.
Tall, with black hair pinned into a clean chignon, and eyes the particular shade of blue that made you think of frozen lakes. The suit was fitted and expensive. Gold-rimmed glasses sat on the bridge of her nose with the kind of careful precision that made them look intentional rather than functional. The whole picture landed somewhere between formidable and elegant, and the single beauty mark beneath her right eye pulled it all together in a way that was difficult to look away from.
When she saw the door open, the composed expression warmed into a practiced smile and she extended her hand.
"Good morning, Mr. Lawrence. I'm Eleanor Ross. Your father's personal assistant, the one he trusted most."
Matthew blinked, shook her hand on instinct. "Hi. Ross."
He leaned out past the door frame to check the hallway. Just her.
"Come in," he said, and stepped aside.
He wasn't worried. If she'd come to do something unpleasant, she wouldn't have knocked this loudly and announced herself by name. She'd have picked the lock and handled things while he was still unconscious. That was how Umbrella worked, in his understanding of it.
He waved her toward the sitting area, ducked into the bathroom to splash water on his face, then came back and put together two cups of coffee. Simple, unhurried. She accepted hers with a polite sip.
"Mr. Lawrence," she began, "as of six o'clock this morning, the equity transfer agreement your father left you has taken effect. You are now officially a member of Umbrella's board of directors."
She let that settle for a moment before continuing.
"Which means, practically speaking, that the responsibilities your father held within the company now fall to you. I won't pretend that isn't a lot to take in." A brief pause. "I intend to help you get up to speed. Partly because it's my job, and partly because I would prefer to remain employed."
She reached into her bag and produced a laptop, setting it on the table in front of him.
"Your father kept you at a distance deliberately. When you were born, there was a period of significant internal conflict within the company. He made the calculation that acknowledging you would put you in danger, so he didn't. The result was that you grew up without any of the advantages his position could have provided." She folded her hands. "That changes today."
"This is a summary of the departments he managed and the projects he oversaw. I thought you should see it."
Matthew, still in his bathrobe with one leg crossed over the other, reached over and took the laptop with the mild reluctance of someone who had been hoping for at least one full morning off. He scanned the document.
Theodore Lawrence. Former NATO arms contractor. Co-founder of Umbrella Corporation alongside Oswell E. Spencer, James Marcus, and Edward Ashford. Original shareholder. Oversight: corporate security division.
"Security," Matthew said.
That explained a few things. The other shareholders hadn't made a move on him overnight, which meant either his father had left some protection in place, or the security division itself was the deterrent. Probably both. Because left to their own instincts, Umbrella's founding members would have had him dead before the ink dried and divided the shares among themselves.
He glanced at the timestamp in the corner of the screen.
November 30, 2007.
He did the math quickly. "That puts us about a month out from the start of Iron Man."
He typed Raccoon City into the browser before the thought had fully finished forming.
The results came back thin. Scattered, inconclusive. Nothing that resembled the outbreak he knew.
Either it hadn't happened in this version of the world, or someone had done a very thorough job of making sure it couldn't be found.
He closed the laptop.
"All right, Ross." He stood up and rolled his shoulders. "You said you'd help me get oriented. No time like the present. Take me to the office."