Chapter 309 |
No one knew whether it was Jill’s intervention that caused a butterfly effect, but the group’s return to the control room wasn’t as smooth as in the original plot. Two Lickers, after breaking free, caught up to them.
Alice, the main character, was nearly dragged off by a Licker—at this point, she was still a regular clone of Alexia, not yet enhanced by the T-virus. If she had been taken, she truly would have been done for.
Fortunately, Jill, already a super-soldier, reacted quickly and killed one of the Lickers, rescuing Alice.
"I remember now! It was Spencer who caused all of this—you were right!" During this process, Alice successfully regained her memory and expressed her gratitude to Jill.
She then explained the entanglement involving the virus, Matt’s sister, and Spencer before the virus outbreak.
"I see. But you still don’t know her origins, do you?" Matt, having heard it all, turned to Jill and said.
He also felt a weight lifted from his heart—so Alice wasn’t the one who betrayed his sister after all.
His sister Lisa had planned to steal the virus and expose Umbrella’s bioweapons research.
Matt was her contact, but there was also an insider involved—that insider was Alice.
The difference was that Lisa and the others planned to expose the virus, while Spencer intended to sell it to a rival company.
So when the virus was first discovered to be leaking, Matt immediately suspected Alice was the mole and blamed her for Lisa’s betrayal and the outbreak.
Now that everything was clear, Matt felt relieved—he had indeed developed some feelings for Alice during their time together in the Hive.
"No, what you’re saying is only on the surface!" Just when everyone thought they had the truth, Jill refuted Alice’s explanation and turned to Matt again. "I told you before—I really was a cop in Raccoon City. My name is Jill Valentine, badge number RCXXXX. You should be able to find my info in your system. But sorry, I can’t take off my helmet, because ever since you cut off the Red Queen’s power, the virus has fully spread, and its infectiousness has been completely upgraded."
"What? Are you saying we’ve already been infected with the T-virus?" Everyone was stunned by Jill’s words, then instinctively looked at the two remaining vaccine doses on her belt.
"That’s right. Jill Valentine—I found her name in the Raccoon City police system!" At this point, Kaplan also pulled up Jill’s records from Umbrella’s database.
No surprise there—since the entire Raccoon City was established by Umbrella, the company had detailed records on anyone who lived there, let alone police officers.
"You don’t need to worry too much. Like many viruses, when its infectiousness increases significantly, its virulence slightly decreases. The airborne strain isn’t easily mutagenic through simple inhalation. However, if you get seriously injured or die, allowing the virus into your bloodstream or nervous system, you’ll still turn into zombies… So if you happen to die unexpectedly, please don’t mind if I put a bullet in your head afterward!" Jill explained.
This conclusion was told to her by Josh, who pieced it together from his memories.
While the Red Queen claimed in the first movie that the virus had mutated from airborne to bloodborne transmission, later in the second movie, Dr. Ashford mutated after being shot by an Umbrella executive. The virus also spread globally in seconds after a nuclear strike on Raccoon City, proving the Red Queen had lied.
The reason the main group didn’t mutate while in the Hive (except for Rain, who was bitten) and why later characters didn’t mutate without injury or death, was that airborne virus transmission wasn't potent enough to bypass the body’s immune system.
But serious injury or death disables immune defenses, allowing quick zombification.
Jill’s words made everyone breathe a sigh of relief—but they also couldn’t help rolling their eyes.
If they were already dead, would they even care about getting shot again?
"So your suit has virus protection? Also, since you are indeed a Raccoon City cop, then what’s all this?" Alice pointed to Jill’s gear and asked curiously.
"Let’s put it this way—you can think of it as a special organization that discovered Umbrella’s atrocities, so they hired me, gave me superhuman strength and this gear, and sent me to eliminate Umbrella!" Jill explained again.
On the other end of the line, Josh, still watching the livestream, gave Jill a thumbs-up.
It was a perfect explanation.
"I see…" Everyone looked suddenly enlightened upon hearing Jill’s explanation.
But what really clicked for them was the idea that Jill had likely been sent by one of Umbrella’s rivals.
And it wasn’t just them—even deeper in the control room, the real Wesker, who had been secretly monitoring the Hive, had the same realization.
In the entire Resident Evil movie series, like Alice’s many clones, the extremely powerful Wesker seen in movies 3, 4, and 5—enhanced by the T-virus—was also just a clone. In the actual script of Umbrella’s high command, the real Wesker became the last human leader in the fifth film, gathering all surviving humans to make it easier for the Red Queen to wipe them all out. That powerful Wesker clone was deleted by the Red Queen after its mission.
That’s why Wesker seemed so weak in the final chapter—killed by a falling blast door—because he was just an ordinary human without any viral enhancements.
"Interesting… So there’s a force on Earth, aside from the company, capable of developing such powerful weapons and gear!" In the deeper levels of the Hive, where Umbrella’s true core lay, Wesker poured himself a glass of wine and watched Jill on the monitors with great interest.
The Red Queen whose power had been cut off by the Umbrella squad was just a surface program. The real Red Queen had always remained operational—her virtual image was even seated right across from Wesker.
So Wesker could still monitor everything happening in the Hive.
"By the way, earlier you said what Alice explained was only surface-level. What did you mean? Are you—or some other group—up to something else here?" JD, who had also been saved by Jill, asked again.
And deeper down, Wesker watched Jill on the monitor, eager to see what she would say.
"This isn’t the right time to talk about that. We’ll need to wait until we reach the main control room!" Jill replied cryptically to the curious group.
Seeing she wasn’t going to elaborate, the others had no choice. At this point, their survival was entirely dependent on this mysterious female officer.
Although Wesker felt something was off, there wasn’t anything overt happening yet, and with only medium-level access, he couldn’t take major actions—let alone awaken the real Dr. Isaacs.
What if the Hive team really was just trying to escape?
Still, Wesker used his access to send an order to Umbrella’s Raccoon City branch, telling them to dispatch military forces to await them at the Hive’s exit.
When Jill and the others appear, capture them.
“We’ve already done what you said. What do we do next?” In the main control room, after everyone had armed themselves thoroughly, Matt looked at Jill and asked.
“Next, we restart the Red Queen!” Jill said with a slight smile.
“Restart the Red Queen? Damn it, she’ll kill all of us!” Everyone was a bit incredulous when they heard Jill’s words.
Meanwhile, in the deep base, Wesker let out a sigh of relief. So it was just about restarting the Red Queen’s surface-level program.
“Now it’s up to you. Don’t let them discover any flaws!” Thinking this, Wesker gave an order to the real virtual projection of the Red Queen in front of him.
“Understood!” The Red Queen nodded.
But at this moment, while Wesker was speaking to the Red Queen, he didn’t notice on the surveillance that Jill, while Kaplan was preparing to restart the Red Queen, found a corner out of the camera’s view and handed Kaplan a hard drive with no markings.
The Red Queen did notice this, but didn’t inform Wesker.
In fact, the Red Queen’s main program had already sensed something was off about Jill. But without orders from Isaacs and Alexia, the two with the highest authority, though she couldn’t disobey Wesker’s commands, she could choose to conceal information.
“…This?” In the main control room, out of everyone’s sight, Kaplan looked at the hard drive in his hand, then at Jill in front of him, confused.
“You can do it, right?” Jill looked at him and said.
“Yes, but what exactly is this?” Kaplan hesitated.
“Don’t worry, I saved all of you. Even if I had other motives, there’d be no reason to harm you, right?” Jill whispered softly, then raised her voice and said, “This control program for the Red Queen must be reliable. I don’t want to be killed by a computer at a critical moment!”
“All right!” Kaplan didn’t understand why Jill was putting on this “act,” but sighed inwardly, then took out his laptop and began operating the Red Queen’s motherboard.
Wesker, hearing Jill say she was adding a backup control program for the Red Queen, also inwardly thought she was clever.
Unfortunately, that was only a surface-level program. Even with a backup control, it was useless. Everything still had to go according to his script!
Very soon, after Kaplan’s operations, the motherboard for the Red Queen’s surface-level program was restarted.
But as soon as the motherboard activated, the Red Queen’s main program in the deep base sensed something was wrong.
What appeared inside the rebooted motherboard was not her original subroutine, but an entirely new artificial intelligence.
And the moment this AI appeared, it began frantically seizing control permissions from the Red Queen.
This situation was completely unexpected for the Red Queen. She hadn’t reported Jill’s strange behavior to Wesker earlier only because of a program left behind by Alexia in her main code, which instinctively made her want to oppose Wesker and Isaacs. It wasn’t that she wanted to get herself involved.
But now, this new artificial intelligence genuinely wanted to "kill" her.
“Main system… under… attack…” The Red Queen flickered, and only had time to leave this warning before she was forcibly shut down!
At this moment, Jill smiled and looked at the camera, and said to Wesker, “Mr. Wesker, we’re here!”
What Jill had just had Kaplan upload was not a backup control program for the Red Queen at all, but a completely new artificial intelligence.
This artificial intelligence was a replicated subroutine of “Pangu,” the AI used by Josh.
As an AI, the Red Queen was indeed powerful. But compared to Pangu—which integrated the elite technologies of multiple AI systems across different worlds—she was far inferior.
Of course, Pangu did not, as the Red Queen feared, actually kill her, but merely forcibly shut her down and completely took control of the entire Hive, including the lower base.
“Damn it!” Wesker, seeing the Red Queen go offline, finally understood what had happened.
But now, besides forcibly awakening Isaacs and organizing the deep base's guards for defense, he couldn’t do anything else. He couldn’t even communicate with Umbrella’s surface-level operations.
Back in the surface Hive, Jill, with Alice and the other survivors, under Pangu’s assistance, had activated the main control room—which was in fact just an elevator.