The Hive's auxiliary server room hummed with the steady pulse of failing infrastructure—a sound Dr. Isaacs had grown intimate with over the past seventy-two hours. Those pesky strips of white light hummed above him, casting everything in sickly blue. The temperature held steady at 52 degrees Fahrenheit, because apparently his cybernetic cooling system preferred the aesthetics of slow death to comfort.

He watched a colony of beetles scatter across a water-damaged terminal. Umbrella's genetic work. Even the insects had standards these days.

His synthetic composite materials wrapped in regenerated flesh he called fingers moved across a haptic interface that displayed the last authenticated network nodes. Seven remained. Seven out of an organization that once spanned continents. His predictive algorithms calculated their utility with cold precision. Four were redundant. Two were compromised. One might actually matter.

Above ground, the world was doing exactly what he'd designed it to do: collapse. The anti-virus had failed to propagate. The T-Virus remained.

But there was a problem wearing his face, and that problem was getting clever.

The other clones weren't following protocol anymore. Free will was such an inefficient mutation. One of them—probably Delta-7—had been transmitting unauthorized coordinates to hostile parties. Betrayal was almost funny when you'd anticipated it thirty-seven seconds before it happened.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor outside. Someone was moving through his domain with more desperation than sense.

"I suggest you identify yourself before the security protocols do it for you," he called out to whoever it was.