Sub-Basement Level 4 — Private Laboratory of Dr. Alex Wesker | 5 August 1983 | 04:22
The facility was the most honest place in the building.
Every other room in the Arklay complex wore a mask — the sterile professionalism of the upper labs, the orderliness of the administrative floors, the deliberate impersonality of the personnel quarters. Sub-basement Level 4 was different. It was Alex Wesker's domain in the truest sense: organized to her logic, lit to her preference, temperature-controlled to the precise degree she found optimal for sustained concentration. Nobody came here uninvited. Nobody came here at all without her prior knowledge and clearance. Even Albert had standing access only because she had allowed it, and they both understood the distinction.
The hidden room sat behind the third equipment bay — Daniel's work, three months of careful construction, the wall panels dressed to read as standard insulation housing on every thermal and acoustic scan the facility ran. Three meters by four. Soft lighting on a dimmer he'd calibrated to something warmer than the lab's usual cold whites, because even Daniel Fabron, who had seen the inside of Umbrella's least humane corners, had opinions about what a room housing a newborn should feel like. The air recycling connected to a separate line. Lucy had reviewed every centimeter before Alex came back from the clinic.
It was, by any measure, the most carefully constructed secret in a building built entirely on secrets.
At four in the morning, Alex Wesker was walking slow circuits of it with her son in her arms, and she was talking to him.
* * *
She had not planned to be awake.
Alen hadn't cried — this was established now as simply his way — but she had woken anyway, three minutes before he stirred. Her body had apparently decided, somewhere in the past seventy-two hours, that waking before him was a non-negotiable new function. She had lain in the dark for those three minutes, fully alert, listening to the almost-silence of the room: the faint cycling of the ventilation line, the distant hum of the facility's generator, the small, even breathing from the crib two meters away.
She had picked him up before he could do whatever he did instead of crying — that quiet, intent focusing of attention that was, she had found, more arresting than any sound might have been. She'd wrapped him in the blue blanket. Started walking.
The walking helped. She didn't know precisely why, or rather she knew the biochemical explanation and found it entirely insufficient as an account of what was actually happening when she held him and walked. The weight of him. The warmth. The way the blanket had picked up a scent she had no clinical word for — something specific and new, something that had not existed anywhere in the world five days ago — and the way her arms had rearranged themselves around this new weight as though they had been configured for it all along.
She was not a sentimental person. She had never been a sentimental person. She had made a careful study of the distinction between sentiment and clear thinking and had always come down firmly on the side of the latter.
Alen looked up at her from the blanket.
Those eyes. Ocean-blue and too steady for a face three days old — not the unfocused drift of newborn vision but something directed, patient, attending. He looked at her the way he looked at everything: as though cataloguing. As though deciding. She had cross-referenced the developmental literature on infant visual cognition three times in the past week and what she was seeing did not match the expected parameters for his age, and she had filed that away in the part of her mind that collected anomalies, right next to the absence of a birth cry and the grip strength that had made Hargrove blink twice.
She would study all of it. Later. When she was not walking slow circles at four in the morning in the dim glow of a hidden room.
Right now she looked at him and he looked at her and something in her chest did the thing it had been doing since the clinic — that unnamed, unclassifiable thing — and she let it.
"You are really something else," she said quietly. Her voice came out softer than she intended. "Aren't you. Little lion."
His hand moved — that small, searching motion, reaching toward her voice. His fingers found the lapel of her lab coat and held on with a grip that was, genuinely, too strong for seventy-two hours old.
She looked down at those fingers. She was not prepared, still, for how small they were. She was not prepared for a great many things about this, and she had decided to simply keep walking and let herself be unprepared, because there was nobody in this room to see it except a child who would not remember.
"Stubborn," she said, but it came out with something in it she had not put there deliberately.
* * *
She heard the door mechanism two seconds before it opened, which was two seconds of warning — enough to straighten her posture and let her expression reassemble itself before she turned around.
It was Daniel. Of course it was Daniel.
He had a coffee in one hand and his sunglasses were, inexplicably, on his head despite it being four in the morning in a room with no natural light. He stopped in the doorway and looked at her — at both of them — and the corner of his mouth moved in a way she recognized: the specific expression he had when something genuinely surprised him and he found it funny, and he knew she would not find it funny, and he was going to say it anyway.
"Well," he said.
"Do not," she said.
"I am not saying anything, Dr. Wesker."
"You were about to say something."
"I was about to say—" He paused, gestured vaguely at her and the infant and the entirety of the situation. "—that I have worked alongside you for four years. I have seen you conduct interrogations. I have seen you walk into a room where an escaped test subject had already killed two security personnel and handle it with less visible emotion than most people bring to a bureaucratic form. And now you are walking in circles at four in the morning talking to a three-day-old in that voice." He took a sip of his coffee. "It is a little bit funny, non? Just a little bit."
Alex looked at him with the particular flatness she reserved for people who were right about things she wished they were not right about.
"Get in or get out, Daniel. You are letting the temperature differential in from the corridor."
He got in. The door sealed behind him.
"Where is the little one? I cannot see him behind that blanket."
"You are not holding him."
"Dr. Wesker—"
"Five minutes. And if you drop him I will make the paperwork for your disappearance look like an accident."
"That is the most maternal sentence I have ever heard." He set the coffee down on the equipment shelf and crossed the room with his hands already held in the correct position, because Daniel Fabron, whatever else he was, prepared for things. "Come here, then. Let me see this nephew of mine."
"He is not your nephew."
"He is close enough."
She transferred Alen carefully — both hands, supporting the head, watching Daniel's arms accept the weight — and then she made herself step back, which was harder than she expected. Her arms wanted the weight back immediately. She recognized this as biochemical and chose not to find it embarrassing.
* * *
Daniel looked at Alen.
The expression on his face was worth seeing. She had seen Daniel Fabron operate under genuine pressure — seen him stay composed in situations where composed was a significant achievement — and she had never seen him look quite like this. The easy, wry competence simply vacated his face, replaced by something much simpler. He looked down at those blue eyes, and Alen looked up at him, and Daniel's mouth opened slightly and then closed again.
It took him a full ten seconds to speak.
"Dr. Wesker," he said, very quietly. "I have seen a great many things in this line of work. Some of them I am still working to forget." He looked at Alen. "I have never seen anything like this."
"He has that effect," Alex said. She kept her voice neutral. She did not entirely succeed.
Alen was looking up at Daniel with the same attending calm he brought to everything — cataloguing, assessing — and then his gaze shifted, and found the dog tag hanging at Daniel's chest, and locked onto it.
The small hand moved.
Daniel looked down at his own chest, then at the hand, then at Alex.
"Is he—"
"He sees something new," Alex said. "He does that."
Alen's fingers found the tag and closed around it. The chain pulled taut. Alen examined what he had found with complete, focused attention — turning it slightly, feeling the edge of it with his fingers, the way much older hands investigate unfamiliar objects.
"Oh," Daniel said. He said it the way people say things when they are not tracking their own responses anymore. "You want that, do you, little one."
He unclipped the chain from around his neck and let Alen take it fully. The boy held it in both hands now, the metal tag pressed between his palms, still examining. Still quiet. Still — and this was the thing, the consistent thing — not upset. Not overwhelmed. Not reacting the way every piece of developmental literature said a three-day-old should react to novel stimuli.
Just curious.
"Your child," Daniel said, "is an anomaly, Dr. Wesker."
"I know."
"I mean this in the best possible way."
"I know that too."
He transferred Alen back to her, carefully, with the conscientiousness of someone handling something irreplaceable, which was accurate. Alex took him and held him against her shoulder and felt the immediate, irrational rightness of having him back there, and did not comment on the irrationality because it was four in the morning and she had had three days of very little sleep and she was giving herself certain allowances.
* * *
"He did not cry when he was born," Alex said."
She had not decided to say this. It came out because Daniel was the only person in this building she would say it to.
"I know. You mentioned."
"Not the way people mention things. I have been thinking about it." She moved to the crib and laid Alen down, settling him against the mattress, tucking the blue blanket around him with a precision she recognized was more thorough than strictly necessary. His eyes followed her hands. "Every infant cries when it is born. The literature is entirely consistent on this. It is a reflex — laryngeal stimulation, the shock of cold air, the abrupt environmental change. He breathed immediately and strongly, and then he made one sound — one — and it was not a cry. It was not distress. It sounded like—" She paused, which was something she rarely did in the middle of a sentence. "Like an announcement. And then he stopped and looked at the room."
"What does Albert say?"
Alex's expression did not change. Which was, in its way, a change.
"Albert said magnificent. And then he gave him back and walked to the window and stayed there for a while thinking about something he did not share. I know that look on him. Something in Alen made him uneasy." She looked at Alen in the crib. "Which is — notable. Albert Wesker does not do uneasy."
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
"He is his father's son as well as yours," he said finally. "That could mean many things."
"Yes." She straightened from the crib. "I have cross-referenced his behavioral pattern against every developmental profile I have access to. Nothing fits. He is too calm. Too observant. He does not startle at sound. He tracks movement with his eyes in a way that is weeks ahead of expected development. He refused formula — completely, without fuss, but completely — and will only accept what I can give him directly or the bottle when I hold it. No one else." She paused again. "He is three days old and he already has preferences."
"Three days old and already stubborn as his mother," Daniel said. "I see the resemblance."
She looked at him. He looked back, the picture of innocence.
"My working hypothesis," she said, choosing to let it pass, "is that the Progenitor modifications in his bloodline — from both of us — have produced something in his neurological development that I do not yet have a framework for. The absence of fear response would be consistent with certain viral enhancement patterns. But it may also be something else entirely. I gave birth to him three days ago, Daniel. Give me time to understand my own child."
"Naturellement," he said. "Take all the time you need." He picked up his coffee from the shelf. "Now. I understand you have a task for me and Lucy."
Alex turned to look at him directly.
"He is not like other infants. He will not cry and reveal the room. He is calm and he will stay calm. But I cannot be here every hour. I have meetings. I have research obligations. I have—" She paused, and something briefly crossed her face that he was too careful to draw attention to. "—a great deal of work to maintain the appearance of nothing having changed. So yes. I am asking you and Lucy to be here when I am not. On rotation."
"You are asking me to babysit a secret Progenitor-lineage infant in a hidden room in an Umbrella laboratory."
"Yes."
"For an indeterminate period of time."
"Until I find a better solution."
He looked at the ceiling. He looked at Alen in the crib. Alen was still holding the dog tag, examining it with complete concentration.
"Oui," Daniel said. "Fine. Of course. Yes." He pointed at her. "But you owe me something for this, Dr. Wesker. I am not sure what yet. I am keeping a list."
"You are already keeping a list," she said. "You have been keeping a list since 1980."
"It is a very long list." He moved toward the door, then stopped. Looked back at Alen. The expression came back — that simple, unguarded thing. "He is going to be something, you know. Whatever he is. Whatever this—" He gestured at Alen's general existence. "—turns into."
Alex looked at her son. At the dog tag still held carefully between his small hands, still being examined, still interesting.
"I know," she said."
"Your dog tags—" she started."
"Leave them." He waved a hand without turning around. "Let the boy keep them. Gift from his great-uncle. He seems to like them, non?"
"You are not his great-uncle."
"I am his closest available approximation." The door opened. "Goodnight, Dr. Wesker. Or good morning. It is almost five, so — both, I think."
The door sealed.
Alex stood alone in the room with her son.
Alen had the dog tag raised now, examining it in the low light with the same patient, unhurried attention he gave everything. His blue eyes tracked the slight movement of it, caught the gleam of metal, decided it was still interesting. He would do this until he tired of it, and then he would do something else, and he would do it quietly, and he would be fine.
He was always fine.
She pulled the chair from beside the equipment shelf and sat next to the crib. She did not pick him up again — he did not need to be picked up, that was not why she sat there. She sat there because she could. Because it was four-fifty in the morning and in three hours she would be back in a white blazer walking the corridors of this facility as though everything was exactly the same as it had always been, and nobody would see any difference, because she would not allow any difference to be seen.
But right now nobody was watching.
She rested her arm on the edge of the crib. His hand moved — searching, finding — and his fingers closed around her index finger with the same grip that had surprised Hargrove, the grip that was too strong for three days old. He held on and kept looking at the dog tag.
She let him hold on.
She did not have a name for what she felt sitting there. She had decided, some time in the past seventy-two hours, that she did not need one. It was enough that it was real. It was enough that he was here and she was here and the room was quiet and the facility above them was sleeping and nobody knew and nobody would know.
For now, this was hers.
She stayed until the light started changing in the ventilation panel that faced east — the faint, indirect grey of a morning she couldn't see — and then she tucked the blanket more precisely, kissed her son once on the forehead in the manner of someone doing something they have never done before and are surprised to find they know how, and went to shower and change and become Dr. Alex Wesker again.
Alen held the dog tag while she was gone.
He was always fine.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR