Heritage

Heritage (Chapter 57)

Chapter 57: Elena

Over the course of a week, Dante and I sifted through thousands of hours of documentation and video logs that chronicled the many experiments conducted by the scientists heading the project. We found out during the course of our investigation that the project was divided into three phases: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, after the very old, but still very popular Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

The fact that these phases were detailed extensively was a home run for Dante and I. Dante, of course, had to poke fun at the name choice, jokingly accusing them of plagiarism. It was a good laugh to break up the monotony of the situation. I seem to have forgotten how cheerful Dante is always able to remain in any situation, good or bad. It's easy to see how he was such a huge missing piece for so many years. Dante truly was the glue that held all of us together.

Inferno was the first phase of the process. This process involved much of the initial videos and documents we saw and read. These pieces explained the various experimentation procedures that were conducted over roughly thirty years until that particular facility was overrun by infected. A clear pattern was delineated from the evidence as to experimentation focus.

In the beginning, the scientists were tasked with basic duties involving exposure tests and culturing. After those were completed, the scientists moved on to more acute tests in order to determine what use, if any, the parasite would have.

In terms of medical improvement, they found nothing. The parasite had no effect on the known diseases at the time. No effect that is, until they began testing on cancerous cells. When the researchers applied the parasitic cells to the abnormal ones of cancer cells, it began to divide at an alarming rate. During one of the videos, Dante and I watched the process and the results were horrifying. In a matter of only a few minutes, the parasitic cells multiplied over the Petri dish and began spreading to the counter it was placed on.

Moments after that, it began to release tiny spores into the air. It became so violent in its replication that the scientists had to flash purge the room, frying the culture entirely.

After this test, they created a more controlled environment and began testing this combination on smaller and smaller of amounts of both cells. They eventually deduced that all it took was a one to one ration in order for the parasitic cells to multiply at such a rapid rate. That's one cell of the parasitic cells to one cell of the cancerous cells.

The word cancerous, however, was used as a broad term for abnormal cells within the body. This means that unless the host body is absolutely perfect on a cellular level, they would become infected. The scientists studied this effect on multiple other species and found that the results were the same across the board. During our research I wondered why the infection chose to affect both Leon and Ethan differently than most others. Unfortunately, there was no explanation of that within the files. It led me to believe that the difference happened on a genetic level as opposed to a cellular one, which remained untested.

With this information in hand, the scientists moved forward with their testing in to weaponizing the parasitic cells. This set of tests was much less successful than their previous ones due to the aggressive nature of the cells. The scientists primarily attempted to program the cells to target specific cellular sets.

This was rendered completely ineffective as, strangely enough; the parasitic cells would simply revert back to their original purpose. They eventually decided it best to instead focus on the aggressive nature of the virus. The scientists developed a process of synthetically creating a set of abnormal type cells that the parasite would see as the indicated target.

After developing this, the process was then turned over to weapons engineering in order to develop a delivery method. The files after this point then converted to encrypted military files. And while I will admit, they had a clever set of encryption protocols, there were still outdated and no problem for me to crack through. Weapons development had a rather easy time developing a method for delivery.