Chapter 9: Years in a Lonely Cage

1991, Arklay Research Facility, Mid-Level Special Isolation Zone.

When Wesker's footsteps faded completely at the end of the security corridor, the air pressure in the entire isolation zone seemed to sink along with them.

The dull thud of the final alloy door closing sounded like a lock, sealing the research facility buried deep beneath the Arklay Mountains into an endless underground prison.

Chloe leaned against the cold alloy wall, staring at the empty corridor. For the first time, she clearly realized that the man who had always scrutinized her with cold eyes, yet in some ways maintained the last shred of order in the facility, had truly left.

The reorganization of the police department had pushed Albert Wesker to the forefront in Raccoon City. The last words he left for William Birkin, caught on the surveillance audio, fell clearly into Chloe's ears.

"Chloe is a sample of the highest value. She must not die, and she must not escape."

The order was cold, devoid of any warmth.

In Wesker's eyes, she was never a person, but merely a weapon waiting to be traded, an evolved being that could be controlled and utilized in the future. Yet even so, his presence had been like a thin shackle, restraining another man's madness.

Now, that shackle was gone.

The moment the restraint was lost, William Birkin's paranoia poured out onto Chloe without reservation. His wife, Annette Birkin, remained by his side, responsible for data recording, sample analysis, and experimental process control. She was calm, rigorous, and silent; she understood restraint better than William, but she too regarded Chloe as nothing more than inanimate research material.

The Arklay Research Facility was the core BOW biological weapon research base for the Umbrella Corporation. William's initial goal was to utilize the rare, stable mutation within Chloe to break through the bottleneck of controlling the T-Virus, providing key data for mass-produced biological weapons.

In his eyes, Chloe was a set of perfect data that could breathe, endure, and forcibly pull itself back to sanity from the edge of a berserk state. She was the only breakthrough for stable T-Virus mutation, and the ideal control sample for the G-Virus, whose genetic prototype he was extracting from within Lisa Trevor.

The density of experiments began to climb at a terrifying speed.

From the initial once-daily monitoring, it increased to three times a day, continuing throughout the night.

Cold needles repeatedly pierced her neck, spine, and arms, extracting blood and spinal fluid that carried a faint, active fluorescence; high-intensity electrical stimulation experiments forced the awakening of the dormant berserk factors within her; the pressure of the extreme-pressure chamber made her bones emit brittle, overburdened cracks; various unnamed S01 Inhibitors and berserk-inducing agents were alternately injected into her body, attempting to force out the virus's most authentic reaction on the edge of life and death.

William stood outside the bulletproof glass, his eyes fanatical yet indifferent.

As he recorded data, he would mutter to himself, his tone filled with a god-like obsession with the virus.

"Sanity not lost... physical enhancement... berserk state suppressible... This is the destination the T-Virus should reach."

"You are far more useful than Lisa. Lisa only has an immortal body, while you... possess controllable evolution."

Chloe never responded.

She simply gritted her teeth, enduring the excruciating pain as if her bone marrow were being churned, letting the virus surge, collide, and clamor within her, demanding to tear apart all reason.

Every time the precursor to a berserk state arrived, her pupils would be stained with a dark red, her strength would uncontrollably surge, her knuckles would turn white from the strain, and aggression would rush into her mind like a tsunami.

Yet every time, she forcibly suppressed it.

Not out of obedience, but out of clarity.

She knew that once she completely lost control, what awaited her would not be death, but more thorough imprisonment, crueler dissection, and eventually being dismantled into a pile of organs and cells available for research. She could not go mad, she could not collapse, and she could not become like that poor woman on the bottom floor who was always screaming in pain.

Pain became the norm, but loneliness was the true torture.

The special isolation chamber was a completely enclosed space. The alloy walls let in not a single ray of natural light, and the dark red emergency lights that remained on twenty-four hours a day stained everything with an oppressive and eerie hue.

Aside from the nutrient paste delivered at scheduled times by mechanical arms, and the cold experimental instructions when William appeared, Chloe heard no human voices.

The only things accompanying her were the continuous low-frequency hum of the ventilation ducts and the faint, ethereal roars drifting up from the very bottom of the research facility.

That was Lisa Trevor.

Chloe had never seen her, yet she could clearly perceive the suffering of that fellow creature. The wails of despair, anger, helplessness, and the collapse brought on by endless experiments pierced through layers of steel plates and concrete, like a thin needle repeatedly pricking Chloe's nerves.

They were two monsters in two cages—one being researched for an immortal body, the other for controllable sanity. Both had been stripped of everything by Umbrella Corporation, yet they did not even have the chance to approach or comfort one another.

Yet day after day, month after month, the research never made any breakthrough progress.

Annette reminded him calmly more than once: Chloe's mutation was a natural, isolated case; the genetic sequence could not be replicated, nor could it be used for BOW mass production or T-Virus improvement.

William was unwilling to accept it, but he had to face reality.

He could observe her, sample her, and torture her, but he could not replicate, reverse-engineer, or convert her stable characteristics into results.

All his frenzied experiments ultimately only resulted in an insurmountable wall.

This heavy sense of failure finally caused William to completely abandon his obsession with a perfect T-Virus specimen.

His gaze turned toward another path, one more dangerous and even more mesmerizing to him.

Completely breaking away from the T-Virus system to independently develop the G-Virus that belonged only to him.

And the source of the G-Virus was none other than Lisa Trevor, who had long been imprisoned at the bottom of Arklay and continuously had her cells extracted.

As the research reached a complete stalemate, his patience with the Arklay Research Facility was exhausted.

The T-Virus could no longer satisfy his ambition, and Chloe, this perfect sample that could not be cracked, was no longer his "destination," but had instead become the sole control subject for his future new virus project.

He began to leave Arklay frequently, traveling back and forth to the underground of Raccoon City.

He submitted reports to his superiors, applying to establish a higher-level, more private, and more comprehensive independent research institution.

He wanted to leave this cage in the mountains, go to a place that belonged entirely to him, and create a god of his own.

The plan for the NEST laboratory quietly took shape in his mind.