Deep in the bowels of NEST, beneath the buzzing lights and reinforced concrete that smelled faintly of bleach, rot, and institutional fear, Dr. William Birkin moved like a man whose brain wouldn’t shut the fuck up. His fingers tapped the side of his clipboard with a pen he refused to replace despite the ink running dry days ago. It didn’t matter. The weight of it, the pressure against his palm, clicking it over and over again; those were the constants. The rhythm kept him sane. Ish.

Five strides from the centrifuge to the workstation, turn, five strides back. His lab coat dragged along with every turn like a cape, stained at the cuffs. Nobody here was going to say shit to him about it. The G-Virus was his. Every culture, every sample, every cell that twitched and screamed under the microscope—that was him.

And now Umbrella had the fucking nerve to imply he was behind schedule.

Behind schedule.

He snorted at the terminal as he typed a sequence into the secure bio-compartmentalized containment system. "Get bent," he muttered, voice low and hoarse, lips cracked from too much black coffee and not enough sleep. "I'll give you your results when the genome stabilizes and not a second before."

The data scroll began its crawl across the screen. Protein bonds, cell regeneration spikes, rejection rates. The numbers weren’t perfect yet, but they were getting closer. Closer every day.