Matthew's eyes settled on Mother Miranda's projection and stayed there a moment longer than he intended.
What was she doing in a shareholder meeting?
In the source material, Miranda and Spencer had parted ways over a fundamental disagreement in purpose. Spencer wanted to reshape the world in his image. Miranda, for all her considerable power and centuries of accumulated knowledge, ultimately wanted something much smaller: to hold onto her corner of the world and bring her daughter back. In her own way she was less a megalomaniac than a grieving mother who'd had eight hundred years to develop some very extreme coping strategies.
The fact that she was sitting in this room meant something had changed. The version of Miranda he'd known from the games couldn't be read the same way anymore. He filed that away.
She seemed to notice him looking. She turned her head slightly in his direction.
Matthew moved his gaze elsewhere before she could pin him down.
He counted the room. Five shareholders including himself.
Spencer and Miranda he knew. The other two he didn't, which meant he had to read them from what was visible on screen.
The first was a middle-aged man in an American military uniform, the background behind him suggesting a military facility of some kind. So Umbrella has a branch inside the US military. Or the military has a branch inside Umbrella. Either way, that was a complication.
The second figure caught his attention for a different reason. He didn't recognize the person, but he recognized the symbol on the wall behind them. Ten interlocking rings in gold, with text running through them that he couldn't read from this angle.
The Ten Rings.
The board composition here was considerably more tangled than anything in the original story.
Spencer waited until everyone was settled, then spoke from his wheelchair with the measured pace of someone who had never once been in a hurry because time had always moved around him rather than the other way around.
"Now that everyone is present, we can begin." A pause. "The purpose of this meeting is straightforward. Dr. William Birkin has refused to surrender his G-Virus research to the company. The board has decided to move on this. He is to be apprehended and the research recovered."
"This assignment falls to your department, Matthew Lawrence."
"The priority is the G-Virus itself. As for Birkin, he's a talented man. If he can be brought back into productive service, that would be the preferable outcome." Spencer let the sentence sit unfinished. Everyone in the room understood the alternative.
"Your father and I were old friends," Spencer continued, his tone shifting slightly into something that might have been warmth on another face. "You inheriting his position means a great deal to me. That is precisely why this assignment matters. Don't disappoint me."
Matthew received this with a single flat sound of acknowledgment.
Old friends. Playing the personal angle with someone who had never met their own father. The man was genuinely something else.
"The mission isn't a problem," Matthew said. "But I do have a question before we move on. What's the budget for this operation?"
Spencer's expression shifted almost imperceptibly. "Two million."
"I appreciate that." Matthew leaned forward slightly. "When I took this position, I went through the department's financial records carefully. Compared to Research, Security is dramatically underfunded. We're currently operating at just enough to keep the lights on. I'd like to formally request an increase to the department budget." He paused. "Also, the reimbursement from the last operation is still outstanding."
Spencer looked at him for a long moment. The hands resting on the armrests of the wheelchair tightened slightly.
He'd thought the father was irritating. The son, apparently, came pre-assembled with the same quality.
"Fine," he said, after a moment. "I'll have Finance adjust the allocation."
"Anything else?"
"No."
The rest of the meeting was, from Matthew's perspective, background noise. Discussions about research priorities, stock management, media exposure mitigation. Standard corporate machinery grinding along.
One item was worth noting.
The military shareholder cleared his throat at a certain point and addressed the room.
"I want to flag an ongoing situation. We've had a series of containment failures at the Arklay Research Facility, the Management Training Facility, and the Raccoon City disposal plant. Zombie populations have emerged in the surrounding areas. They've been quietly dealt with so far, but the volume of biological waste has overwhelmed the local disposal infrastructure. As a result, there have been increasing sightings of various BOWs in the mountain regions outside the city."
"To manage the public relations exposure and protect ongoing operations, I'm recommending we deploy military units to quarantine the Arklay Mountain range. If containment becomes untenable, we can use the cover of a military exercise to run an artillery sweep of the area and eliminate the evidence."
Spencer gave it two seconds of consideration and agreed.
With military assets available, the situation in Arklay would stay buried.
The meeting closed. The projections disappeared one by one.
Matthew stood up and poured himself a glass of whiskey over ice. The first sip was caramel and smoke, the alcohol softened by the cold.
"Acquire the G-Virus," he said quietly to himself.
He stood at the window for a while, looking at the flat map of the target location on screen and the personnel file beside it. Then he set down the glass.
"Birkin's too valuable to just put down." He said it the way you say something you've already decided, not something you're still working through. "If I can bring him in on my terms..."
He left the conference room without hesitating and went directly to rally the USS unit.
HUNK was in the hospital, which meant Matthew was leading this himself. That suited him fine. There were things he wanted handled personally.
The G-Virus, first of all. Its design goal, according to what he'd read and remembered, was essentially godhood. The "G" was said to stand for God, which said something about how William Birkin thought about what he'd created. The virus was still rough around the edges, its current form more catastrophic than controlled. But catastrophic and unoptimized were exactly the kinds of problems the system existed to solve.
And then there was Birkin himself.
Spencer had said it plainly: the man was talented. Watching that talent get dissolved into a G-mutation because Umbrella's retrieval went badly seemed like exactly the kind of waste Matthew had no interest in letting happen.
If Birkin could be redirected rather than eliminated, the possibilities were considerably more interesting.