Chapter 98: For The Record — I'm Not The Bad Guy Here
The Resident Evil World — The Hive, Raccoon City
Marcus materialized back in the Hive's lower corridor and immediately heard the Red Queen's voice come through the nearest speaker cluster.
"Welcome back, Mr. Foster."
"How long was I out?" Marcus asked, already walking.
"From the moment of your departure to your return — seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds."
Marcus filed that away. Time flow between worlds wasn't consistent — it never ran at a fixed ratio between any two given locations, and the gap between the Resident Evil world and the Main God Space was no exception. Nearly eighteen minutes here for what had felt like a much shorter visit. He'd need to keep tracking those differentials.
"Where's Alicia?"
"After you departed, Alicia returned to the shelter. She's been monitoring the T-virus spread maps."
Marcus turned toward the shelter corridor and moved with purpose. Before he did anything with the Airborne Anti-T Virus, he had questions that needed answers first.
Alicia's Shelter — The Hive
Alicia was exactly where Red Queen had said she'd be — facing the display wall, the global infection overlay active, watching the red zones expand in slow, patient increments across every continent. She didn't turn when Marcus entered, but she registered his presence.
Marcus had thought about Alicia's role in the original Resident Evil timeline more than once since arriving in this world. In the films, she'd spent years as a prisoner inside her own company — confined to life support, outmaneuvered by Dr. Isaacs at every turn, watching Umbrella's resources get weaponized for exactly the opposite of what her father had intended. And yet she'd never stopped fighting the right fight. She'd delayed Isaacs wherever she could. In her final hours, she'd uploaded her childhood memories — the real ones, the human ones — and left them for Alice as a last gift, a way of preserving something irreplaceable before the end.
That wasn't the behavior of someone who'd made peace with losing. That was someone who'd kept faith with something worth keeping faith with, all the way to the end.
Marcus respected that more than he'd expected to.
"Mr. Foster." Alicia finally turned. There was hope in her voice that she was clearly trying to keep measured. "Did you find something?"
Marcus didn't answer directly. "I have a question first. What happens to you if Dr. Isaacs dies? Right now, today — what does that trigger?"
Alicia went quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "Under Umbrella's founding charter, if I am responsible for Dr. Isaacs's death — or if I'm deemed complicit in it — I automatically forfeit all standing within the company. Voting rights, executive authority, Red Queen's highest-level access, my share position. Everything. And Umbrella's internal security protocols classify it as a termination offense. I would be declared a hostile actor and hunted."
Marcus absorbed that. "And if it's me instead of you?"
"The same outcome applies to you," Alicia said. "You hold independent director status, Mr. Foster — that carries genuine authority, including unrestricted access to Dr. Isaacs's shelter. But killing him triggers the same forfeit-and-hunt sequence regardless of who pulls the trigger."
"You can't override that standing order?"
"No," Alicia said quietly. "That particular protocol is hardwired into Umbrella's founding governance structure. It exists specifically to prevent either of us from eliminating the other. I cannot modify it."
Marcus stood still for a moment and let the full picture arrange itself in his head.
He could see the play. It was right there, completely visible, and it was genuinely tempting in the way that only bad ideas with very good short-term returns ever were.
He could pressure Alicia. Not with threats — he didn't need threats. He could take the moral high ground, frame it in humanitarian terms, point at the global infection maps and ask her how many more people had to die while they looked for a cleaner solution. He could push her toward pulling the trigger on Isaacs herself, let her absorb the legal consequences, and walk out of the situation with his own hands clean and his standing inside Umbrella intact.
With Isaacs dead and Alicia stripped of her rights, both of Umbrella's founding executives would be neutralized simultaneously. Marcus — already holding independent director status — would be positioned to step into the vacuum at the top of the organization. From there, if he wanted to go further — abandon the promise he'd made to Alicia, hold the Airborne Anti-T Virus back, let the T-virus run its course with the clones eliminated and no one left to develop a counter — he could end up as the sole authority over whatever remained of civilization. Every resource, every facility, every piece of Umbrella's global infrastructure, answering to one person.
It was a clean path to ruling the Resident Evil world outright.
Marcus considered it for exactly as long as it took to consider it, and then set it aside.
He wasn't going to do that. Not because the opportunity wasn't real — it was completely real — but because it required using Alicia as a disposable piece in a game she hadn't agreed to play. She'd trusted him. She'd structured the reactor ownership deal specifically to protect his interests when she didn't have to. She'd been fighting the right fight inside a broken organization for years with no expectation of rescue.
Marcus had his own lines. He didn't always announce them, but he knew where they were.
He wasn't that guy.
"I'll handle it," he said, and reached into his dimensional storage. The Airborne Anti-T Virus dispersal unit came out and landed gently on the table between them. "This is the airborne Anti-T Virus. Here's the sequence — I deal with Isaacs first, then you release this. The dispersal system handles the rest."
Alicia looked at the unit, then back at him. Her expression carried the particular weight of someone who understood exactly what he was volunteering to absorb. "Mr. Foster — I've already explained the consequences. Once you move against Dr. Isaacs, your standing inside Umbrella is gone. And even if you tried to rebuild that position afterward through other means — it would cost significantly more than it did the first time. You know that."
"Yeah," Marcus said. "I know."
"We could look for another approach. More time—"
"Doing what, specifically?" Marcus cut in, not unkindly.
Alicia didn't answer. Because there wasn't another answer. The options had been exhausted, and they both knew it.
Marcus exhaled slowly. The Destiny point cost of re-establishing himself inside Umbrella after this would be higher — the Transcendence System wouldn't even need to confirm that, it was obvious from first principles. An executive who'd assassinated a founding member of the organization was going to require a much more expensive causality reversal to rehabilitate than someone who'd simply bought their way in the first time.
He'd factor that in later.
"One thing I'm asking," Marcus said, looking at Alicia directly. "If I need your help somewhere down the line — in this world or otherwise — I want your word."
Alicia held his gaze. "You have it."
Marcus nodded once. "Then we're decided."
He turned toward the door. "Red Queen — take me to Isaacs's shelter. And I'm leaving Skynet here under your watch while I'm gone. Keep the server room sealed."
"Understood, Mr. Foster." A brief pause. "I must inform you — both Alicia's and Dr. Isaacs's shelters are equipped with laser defense grids. The architecture is similar to the laser corridor systems elsewhere in the Hive, but with significantly higher response thresholds. Upon threat detection, a full net-pattern sweep deploys across the entire shelter interior within approximately one second. The sole protected zone is Dr. Isaacs's cryogenic hibernation pod — that area is hardened specifically to protect him and will not be swept."
"Once you initiate," Red Queen continued, "I recommend departing this world immediately afterward. I will extend my response delay to the maximum extent my protocols allow to give you the necessary window."
"Understood," Marcus said. "Don't aim at the cryo-pod during the charge-up phase."
"Correct. Avoiding the pod gives me additional justification to delay activation. I can buy you more time that way."
Marcus stepped into the corridor and moved toward Isaacs's shelter, two Terminator TX units falling into position on either side of him. Their directed energy weapons were already drawn and primed, humming quietly at ready-state.
He thought about Isaacs as he walked. The original Dr. Isaacs — the real one, not the clone — was sealed in cryo-sleep somewhere in this facility, waiting for a future he'd engineered at the cost of billions of lives. A man who had taken Alicia's father's work and turned it into an extinction event, then positioned himself to rule whatever came after.
And now the Red Queen — his own system, the AI architecture his organization had built — was deliberately slowing her own defense response to give Marcus the window he needed.
Even the Red Queen betrayed him in the original timeline, Marcus thought. And here she is doing it again.
Dr. Isaacs, for all his intelligence, had a talent for making enemies out of the systems he was supposed to control.
Marcus stopped at the shelter entrance and looked at the door.
Isaacs, man, he thought with something that wasn't quite sympathy but wasn't entirely without it. You really did bring this on yourself.
He nodded to the TX units.
The door opened.
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