The New Community (Discord)
Since the platforms are failing us, I need a place where we can stay together. Please join the new Discord server. If everything else disappears, this is where I will be.
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Atlas lay panting for a moment, testing his fingers. He clenched his fist. The movement felt... snappy. Explosive.
He sat up, confused..
"Hey, Pleione," Atlas asked, flexing his bicep and watching the muscle fibers ripple with new definition. "Why wasn't the pain as bad as always? Is something wrong? Or are you pitying me and dialed down the settings because you don't want to see me cry?"
He asked it in a playful voice, but he was genuinely curious. The last evolution had felt like being dismantled by a chainsaw.
[Negative,] Pleione replied, her tone factual.
[The intensity of the pain feedback remains constant. However, your physiology has adapted.]
[1. Mind Stat: Your Mental attribute is currently 25. This allows yourself to process pain signals as data rather than distress, dissociating the sensation from the emotional response.]
[2. Soul Matrix Adaptation: After the Full Body Evolution, your soul has anchored more firmly to the pain. You have grown 'used' to the sensation of genetic fixing and rewriting. Your pain tolerance threshold has shifted from Human to higher.]
"Oh," Atlas nodded, rubbing his shoulder. "So I'm just getting tougher. I like that explanation better."
He stood up from the bed. He hopped in place.
He felt lighter. His legs felt like loaded springs. He threw a quick jab at the air.
SWISH.
It was faster. Sharper. His elbow didn't hyperextend; the joint locked perfectly, transferring all the force forward.
"Show me the numbers," Atlas grinned. "Show me my current status."
[Affirmative.]
The blue screen expanded in the air.
[ STATUS WINDOW ]
Name: Atlas Cruor
Race: Infected Evolved Zombie – Undead Variant (Tier 1)
Level: 6 (185/3200 EXP)
Evolution Stage: Active Mutation
[Core Attributes]
Strength: 22
Agility: 25
Stamina: ∞
Mind: 25
Status Point: 12
[Derived Stats]
Reaction Speed: 25
Regeneration: Low
Combat Instinct: 3
Mental Stability: Near Perfect
[Condition]
Hunger: None
Infection Stability: Stable.
Sanity: LOCKED
[Skills]
Neural Control (Passive), Retractable Claws (Active), Constant Regeneration (Passive)
[Evolution Traits]
Undead Zombie:
[Resources]
Evolution Points: 247
V-Gold: 3560
\\
Atlas stared at the numbers.
"Strength 22. Agility 25."
He clenched his fists, feeling the raw power humming in his veins.
"Well," he whispered, a dangerous smile spreading across his face. "It's an improvement. A small step for a zombie, a giant leap for... well, me."
He looked at the remaining 247 Evolution Points.
---
Chapter: The Digital Oracle
Location: The Apple Inn – Room 303 (Executive Suite).
Time: 09:30 AM.
"I still have points to burn," Atlas said to the empty room, his eyes gleaming with the residual rush of his recent evolution. "And I'm just getting started. But..."
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the new density of his arm muscles. The ache was fading, but the memory of the restructuring lingered in his marrow.
"I don't want to experience pain continuously. I am not a masochist, nor do I have a tendency to get off on suffering. So, let's do some research."
Atlas spoke to no one, his voice low and contemplative. He swung his legs off the bed, the thick hotel carpet grounding him. He walked over to the mahogany desk where the expensive black box from Midtown Digital sat like a monolith.
He sat down in the leather chair, leaning forward.
He unpacked the Phantom-X laptop. The smell of factory-fresh plastic and ozone wafted up—a scent that, to a gamer from the future, was practically an aphrodisiac. He ran his hand over the matte black casing. It was heavy, thicker than a brick, reinforced with military-grade polymer.
He plugged the bulky power brick into the wall outlet and snapped the Ethernet cable into the port on the side.
He pressed the power button.
Whirrrrrr.
The internal cooling fans spun to life with the sound of a small jet engine taking off. The screen flickered, backlit by cold cathode tubes, before displaying the BIOS startup sequence.
{PHANTOM-X BIOS v1.0}
{MEMORY CHECK: 65,536 KB OK}
Then, the logo appeared. A pixelated flag waving against a blue sky.
Duh-nuh... da-da-ding!
The startup sound of Windows XP filled the room.
To Atlas, it was a symphony of nostalgia. The taskbar was that friendly, rounded blue. The wallpaper was "Bliss"—the rolling green hills of Sonoma County under a perfect, cloud-dotted sky. It was an image of peace that stood in stark contrast to the hellscape outside his window.
"Clean install," Atlas noted approvingly, seeing the desktop void of the usual bloatware garbage. "Just the recycling bin and My Computer. Beautiful."
He grabbed the mouse—a heavy, ball-mouse that clunked when he moved it—and navigated to the "Start" menu. He clicked on the blue "e" icon.
Internet Explorer 6.
The browser opened. The hourglass cursor spun. And spun. And spun.
"Come on," Atlas muttered, tapping his fingers on the desk. "I paid extra for the T1 line. Don't disappoint me."
The connection handshake completed. The homepage—MSN.com—began to load. It didn't pop into existence like the internet of his future. It loaded in chunks. Images decoded line by line, descending like a slow curtain.
"My God," Atlas sighed, rubbing his temples. "I forgot how painful this was. It's like watching paint dry in real-time."
He appreciated the simple, un-cluttered design of the early web—no pop-up video ads, no cookies tracking his soul—but the speed was a test of his Mental Stability.
He clicked into the search bar. He typed one word.
[ UMBRELLA ]
He hit Enter.
The search results cascaded down the screen.
[ Umbrella Corporation - Leading the Way to the Future ]
[ Umbrella Pharmaceuticals - Health, Beauty, Life ]
[ Stock Watch: UMBR (Up 2.4%) ]
Atlas clicked the main corporate site. It was a masterpiece of propaganda. Smiling families. pristine laboratories. Slogans about "Preserving the Health of the People."
"Standard cover," Atlas muttered. "They have their hands in everything. Medical. Tech. Computing. Food."
But he knew this. This was surface-level knowledge. He needed the deep lore. He needed to know if this world followed the script of the Anderson movies, or if it held the darker, more complex nightmares of the Capcom games.
He opened a new tab. He began to search for the names that shouldn't exist in the movie timeline.
He typed: [ TRICELL ]
He waited. The hourglass spun.
[ Result Found: TRICELL Inc. - Global Shipping and Natural Resources ]
Atlas froze. His eyes narrowed.
"TRICELL exists," he whispered. "The shipping conglomerate. The spiritual successor to Travis Trading Enterprises."
In the movies, Umbrella was the only game in town. In the games, TRICELL was a major antagonist in Resident Evil 5.
He typed again: [ WILPHARMA ]
[ Result Found: WilPharma Corporation - Vaccine Research & Development (India Division) ]
"And WilPharma," Atlas noted, his heart rate picking up. "From the CGI movies. From Degeneration."
He typed one last name, a name whispered in the darkest corners of the game lore.
[ SHÉN YÀ PHARMACEUTICALS ]
[ Result Found: Shén Yà - Traditional Medicine and Bio-Tech ]
Atlas leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking under his weight.
"This..." he exhaled slowly. "This changes everything."
As a gamer who had played every mainline title, read the files, and obsessed over the timeline, Atlas realized the magnitude of his situation. He wasn't just in the Paul W.S. Anderson universe where Alice does kung-fu and telekinesis and the world ends in a desert wasteland.
He was in a Hybrid Timeline.
The events of the first movie had happened—he lived them. Alice existed. The Red Queen existed. The Hive existed.
But the world... the world was the game world. It was a multi-polar Cold War of biological weaponry. Umbrella wasn't the only monster; they were just the biggest shark in a tank full of piranhas.
"The movie timeline is simple," Atlas analyzed. "Outbreak. Nuke. Apocalypse. Extinction."
"The game timeline is a mess. Raccoon City falls, but the world keeps turning. The Government covers it up. The stocks crash. The virus hits the black market. Terragrigia. Edonia. China. Africa."
He looked at the glowing screen. The knowledge he was absorbing felt physical.
The weight of it hit his arms like collapsing planes. It wasn't just heavy in the physical sense—though, yes, the implication gave him much weight to handle—it had a presence.
It felt like the world was aware he was checking its pulse, and it was silently judging him for peering behind the curtain.
He found a dedicated conspiracy forum—"The Sewer Gators Board." It was hidden, obscure, filled with paranoid rants. But amidst the noise, he found a thread detailing the history of the founders. It was written in a flowery, archaic style, likely by someone who had accessed the Spencer Estate archives before they were burned.
Atlas began to read.
The screen glowed with the text, the white letters on the black background burning into his retinas.
{THE ARCHITECTS OF THE Fall}
The words weren't comforting. They never were.
Oswell E. Spencer.
The name dripped like a poison both familiar and alien in this world. Aristocrat. Visionary.
Madman. And yet, here he was, more legend than CEO, more myth than man. The details were vague, intentionally so. Whoever wrote this didn't want the truth to be easily uncovered. Maybe because some truths were better left buried in the Ndipaya ruins.
But Atlas knew that he sought the divine, only that he had—cast down from the limits of human mortality after a discovery in West Africa that fractured his view of biology itself.
The Progenitor Virus.
——"The Stairway to the Sun. A flower that granted power, but demanded a tribute of death. The Progenitor was the First Light of evolution. It burned too brightly. The human genome—young, imperfect, fragile—could not contain it. Yet Spencer believed. He believed he could chain the fire."
Atlas continued to serf while shuffling his memories.
——But the twist came when his partners—Edward Ashford and James Marcus—sought to tame the beast differently. Marcus wanted to breed it with leeches. Ashford wanted to splice it with insect DNA. They didn't strip the virus bare; they weaponized it.
Atlas stopped thinking. He looked at an old post made by Umbrella themselves
>Marcus is dead, He died tragically in a lab accident.
Atlas whispered, recalling the game lore. "Assassinated ten years ago on Spencer's orders. But his 'Queen Leech' lives. The news about the recent deaths in Arklay Mountains Maybe that's him. Zero is happening right now."
He read further into the corporate history while shuffling his memories.
——"So Lucifer died... of hunger? No. Umbrella is starving. The research costs for the G-Virus and the Nemesis Project have made them money. He could tell this just by looking at the stock market.
——>When the First Light seeks the Knowledge, where past, present, and future become a single unbroken scream, the flame will consume itself.
Atlas rubbed his eyes. The metaphor was clear. The umbrella was eating itself alive. The outbreak in Raccoon City wasn't just an accident; it was a catalyst. It was the moment the rats started fleeing the sinking ship, carrying the plague with them.
"The Government is involved," Atlas realized. "The U.S. Military isn't just reacting; they are purchasing. The Nemesis isn't just a monster; it's a product demo."
The S.T.A.R.S. organization exists, and there appear to be no notable fatalities among its members, at least according to online sources.
He closed the browser window, the fan of the laptop spinning down slightly.
He sat in silence for a long time.
His plans—his simple plans of getting some guns, and surviving the nuke—were now in shambles.
"If this is the game world," Atlas muttered, "then the nuke isn't the end. It's the starting gun."
In the movies, the world ends. Everyone dies. Alice roams a desert.
In the games, the world fights back. The B.S.A.A. is formed. TerraSave rises and Viruses were always contained in the cities they were leaked from.