Antarctica

Chapter Three

Veronica’s official title at the lab was Research Director, which meant she supervised all the scientists working in the lab, and was in charge of all the research they did. Alexander’s position was listed as Director of Operations, which was a more fluid position that enabled him to deal with the administrative aspects of the lab while also being heavily involved in the scientific side as well. On paper, Alexander outranked his wife, but everyone believed that Veronica was the one calling most of the shots. Jack Shaw was the Facility Manager, and his responsibilities included maintenance, construction , and general upkeep. As Shaw himself often pointed out, was not a scientist. Like Veronica, he reported directly to Alexander, but also like her, he was given significant leeway to run things as he saw fit. Together, the three of them ran the lab.

The meeting currently in progress had been called by Veronica, but Alexander was the one giving the presentation. Shaw was not present. In attendance were all eight scientists currently working full time at the lab. Alexander and Veronica had been working at the lab for five weeks so far, and had managed to increase staffing from six to eight. The two most recent arrivals had only been there for a few days.

Maurice Aubrey and Gerald Clancy, the two other senior scientists each assigned the position of Research Team Lead, already knew what the meeting was about. The other six were about to get quite a wake up call. There was Roger Cartwright and Lewis Forsythe, the two Americans that Alexander met the day they arrived in Antarctica, and two biologists named Winston Miller and Geoffrey Underhill, men who had previously worked at the Umbrella facility in England. The last two and most recently-hired scientists were Vanessa Montanari, an Italian chemist, and Marcelo Calderón, a young biologist from Spain, both of whom had previously worked in Umbrella’s new facility in Paris.

Alexander stood at the head of the conference table with his hands resting casually in his pockets. Like the others, he wore a typical white lab coat.

“All of you have signed an agreement not to disclose the details of the work that we are doing here,” he began. “Those of you familiar with such documents might have noticed that ours was somewhat more aggressive and explicit about what you can and cannot disclose. You were also all informed before coming here that the scientific work done in this laboratory is highly sensitive and very state of the art. I am here to tell you personally that what happens here in this laboratory can never, under any circumstances, be revealed to anyone who does not work here and have the proper security credentials. I cannot stress enough the vital importance of this.”

He paused briefly, surveying the crowd. He had their full attention, and so he continued, his voice slightly more gentle than before. “Some of you already know what I am about to show you. As for the rest, allow me to introduce you to the future of biological science.”

He picked up a small remote control from the table and used it to turn off the lights. A video projector installed in the ceiling came to life, displaying a bright Umbrella logo on the wall behind him, an octagon made of white and red triangles.

The projector clicked and the image changed to show a simple photograph of a flower, which appeared to have eight irregularly-shaped petals. The photo was black and white, and there was little context to show where it had been taken, but the image was clear and distinct, showing that the photographer had tried to get as perfect a photo as possible.

“This flower is called the sonnentreppe flower,” Alexander said. “It’s a member of the Asteraceae family, and its binomial name is Solis Gradibus. The plant was extremely rare and is currently extinct in the wild. It was so rare, in fact, that it was only known to exist in one place on Earth, a deep cave on the coast of eastern Africa in Tanzania. Very few people ever knew it existed.”

Alexander began to slowly pace around the table. He spoke with a casual, relaxed tone to his voice, as if recounting a harmless personal anecdote instead of revealing the Umbrella Corporation’s most closely-guarded secret. “The sonnentreppe flower only became known to modern science within the past decade,” he said, “but its existence was known to the native tribes of that region for many generations, possibly as far back as two thousand years. Those tribes called it the ‘death cave flower.’ For those of you familiar with German, the word sonnentreppe roughly translates as ‘stairs of the sun,’ which in my opinion is a much more pleasant-sounding name.”

Some of the scientists chuckled softly, and Alexander smiled a bit. It was always his way to make people feel comfortable. He felt that putting his audience in a positive mood would help them deal with the information they were about to receive. He pressed a button on the remote and the projector switched to the next picture, which appeared to show an awkward angle of a rocky wall with an opening at the top, lined with hanging vines.

“Sonnentreppe is actually the name of the cave where the flower was found,” Alexander continued. “A German explorer named Henry Travis is credited with the discovery of the cave in the 1870s. You see, the cave descends downward from an ancient sinkhole to a depth of thirty meters underground, but it’s exposed to the sky and gets daylight even down at the bottom. That’s where the sonnentreppe flowers grew. The rocky protrusions along the edge of the cave reminded Henry Travis of stairs, so he named the cave the Stairs of the Sun. According to his records, he only went down into the cave once. He took some notes and made some quick sketches before he left, and for almost a century, those notes were the only known information about the cave or the flowers.”

He clicked the remote to show the next picture. Now the wall showed a group photo of about a dozen people. They were posed rather far from the camera and the image was slightly blurred, as if the photographer had inadvertently moved the camera just as the picture was taken. Arranged around the group were tables, tents, crates, and other supplies. Like the other photos, it was in black and white.

“Seven years ago, Umbrella funded a research expedition to Africa for the purpose of studying and taking samples of rare local flora. Much of the African continent has still only been lightly explored by western scientists, and there was optimism that new and revolutionary medicines might be discovered, or other scientific advances and discoveries could be made.”

Alexander continued his walk around the table and paused for a moment, looking up at the wall. “I was the head of that expedition,” he added, almost as an afterthought. The figures in the photo were too far away, and the image too blurred, to really make out the faces of the individuals gathered in front of the camera, so it was hard to tell which one was Alexander. He did not bother to point himself out. Instead, he switched to the next photo.

This one was of a young man wearing a light jacket and a wide-brimmed hat. He had a satchel slung over his shoulder and was grinning for the camera. Several others were in the background, which also showed thick foliage. Clearly, the picture had been taken during the expedition.

“This brave young man is Irving Paternoster,” Alexander said. “He was one of the most talented young scientists I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.” After another pause, Alexander added somewhat somberly, “Had things worked out differently, he might be the one giving this presentation right now instead of me.”

He went to the next picture, which was another photo of the cave, showing a bunch of sonnentreppe flowers clustered on a small mound directly underneath the opening of the cave far above. At this point, Alexander returned to the front of the room, facing the other scientists. He stood off to the side of the projector screen, but his shoulder blocked part of the projector, casting a shadow behind him.

“When we investigated the cave, a few members of our team explored the deeper sections but found nothing of interest except bones. Some of the bones we believed to be human. We speculated that over the years, people had accidentally fallen into the cave and been unable to climb back out, and had eventually died there. Irving Paternoster was part of the team, and he spent several hours down in the cave, examining the sonnentreppe flowers. The photograph shown earlier was one of the ones he took. He handled the flowers, took dozens of samples, and worked in close proximity to the plants for an extended period of time.”

Alexander took a short breath. His mood had shifted, and he no longer spoke in a casual or nonchalant tone of voice. “Less than two hours later,” he said gravely, “Irving was dead.”

One or two people gave an unexpected gasp of shock, and he heard someone else mutter an expletive under their breath. Veronica, sitting at the other end of the table with her hands clasped in her lap, just watched Alexander impassively. She had not been out with the team that day, instead remaining at camp to organize their gear and plan out their upcoming itinerary. Alexander was forever grateful for that little bit of luck. But she had witnessed the aftermath and knew all the terrible details.

Alexander crossed his arms and looked at the floor. “Irving had begun to complain of weakness and lightheadedness before they even left the cave. By the time the team had managed to pack up their gear for the trip back to camp, he was too weak to walk by himself. We sent someone to run back and ask for medical assistance, but Irving passed away before they returned.”

He scratched absently at his cheek and raised his head again to regard his audience. “The symptoms were not consistent with a heart attack or a stroke, or an allergic reaction, or anything else of that nature. Immediately, I and the other members of the team suspected that Irving had been exposed to some kind of toxin. As I’m sure all of you know, when working in the field, dealing with rare plants and animals, you can be exposed to all manner of toxic substances. None of the other men who entered the cave had any symptoms at all. Irving was the only one, and he had been working with the sonnentreppe flowers.

“I ordered the samples and all of Irving’s equipment to be isolated. From that point on, anyone touching the flowers had to wear gloves and a mask, and no one was to return to the cave without protective gear. We had to assume the sonnentreppe flowers, or perhaps something else inside the cave, contained an extremely dangerous toxin, so dangerous that exposure could be lethal in a very short period of time.”

Alexander clicked the remote again. The image switched to another photo of the flowers, this one a very close up image. Alexander turned around to look at it for a few seconds, and then faced the other scientists once more. “Our assumption was correct. The sonnentreppe flower is deadly to human beings. Touching the petals with cuts or open sores on your hands, or getting the plant’s oily secretions on your mucus membranes, or ingesting almost any part of the plant, is fatal. There is no cure or treatment. In fact, it’s deadly to all animal life. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the sonnentreppe flower is undoubtedly the most dangerous and deadly plant on Earth.”

He paused again. If he didn’t before, he definitely had their absolute attention now. “You might be wondering what all this means. Surely, the existence of a poisonous plant is not something that would require you all to sign non-disclosure agreements. I said before that the sonnentreppe flower is extinct in the wild. The truth is that the Umbrella Corporation is in possession of the only remaining samples of the flower, and the existence of those samples is a secret that must never leave this facility. As far as the rest of the world knows, the sonnentreppe flower is completely extinct.”

Another click of the remote, another new image flashed on the wall. It was not a regular photograph. This image was taken directly from a microscope, showing a slide with some cells, something that would be familiar to even an undergraduate biology student. But the scientists in this room were experts, and they knew right away that this was no normal slide. Alexander watched their faces as they studied the image and tried to figure out what was wrong with it.

“What you’re looking at is a regular human skin cell,” he said. “As you can see, it’s been damaged and the cell has entered lysis. Under regular circumstances, the cell would be dead, but this cell still has some biological function. This is because the cell has been exposed to the sonnentreppe flower. To be more precise, it has been exposed to the toxin that dwells within the flower. But it’s not a toxin, it’s a virus. The sonnentreppe flower is the host for a virus that we have named the Progenitor.”

Some of them were already starting to shake their heads in confusion, opening their mouths to voice the questions they almost certainly had. Alexander could feel the tension in the air, and he sympathized with them. In their position, he would have been utterly confused by what he was seeing and hearing. He clearly remembered the year of work it took to unravel the sonnentreppe’s secrets, but that had been a slow increase in knowledge over time, one small incredible discovery building on the next. Learning all of it in the space of a single presentation like this would have been a shock.

He cut off any comments. “What I am about to tell you may be hard for you to believe. But in the coming weeks, you will learn it for yourself. The Progenitor is a virus unlike anything modern science has ever seen. A damaged cell infected with the Progenitor can be healed down to a subcellular level. The virus can actually reverse lysis and return limited biological function to dead cells.

“Umbrella has been experimenting with the Progenitor for the past six years. This entire facility was built for the express purpose of studying it. All of you have been chosen to join a very select group of dedicated scientists. The research we will perform here will be at the very cutting edge of science, and I believe it will change the world.”

But the presentation was not over. Alexander clicked the remote once more, returning the projector back to the start of its program. The wall lit up with the Umbrella logo. There were no pictures to go along with the next part of Alexander’s presentation.

“However,” he said in a dark tone of voice, “there is something else you must know. Again, you will find this hard to understand, perhaps impossible to believe. The Progenitor virus is one of the most deadly viruses on Earth, and yet it has the ability to heal damaged cells. The key to understanding this apparent contradiction lies in the legends of the sonnentreppe flower from the African tribes that I spoke of earlier.

“As I said, they called it the ‘death cave flower.’ The cave itself, they called ‘dibwa iti fufuka,’ which roughly means ‘the pit where the dead belong.’ The locals avoided the cave at all costs and considered it a forbidden place. According to their ancient legends, the cave was a gateway to the underworld, a place where souls were trapped in between life and death. Anyone who went into the cave would die, but their corrupted spirit would remain to haunt the cave.”

Veronica was the only other person in the room who knew what Alexander was about to say. Even Aubrey and Clancy didn’t know. Some of the other researchers in England didn’t know. Only the people who went on the expedition knew what had happened.

“Those are the legends. But like all legends, they have a grain of truth to them. In order to fully grasp the ramifications of the Progenitor virus, I need to explain to you what happened to Irving Paternoster. I was there, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. The Progenitor virus tragically took his life, but none of us were prepared for what happened after that ...”

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