October 11, 2025 · The Frozen Lotus Temple, Shooting Range · 06:10 CST
The temple's lower shooting range was the place he came when he needed the argument to stop running in his head.
It was a long, low room carved directly into the mountain's interior — bare stone walls, overhead lighting at the warm end of white, the smell of gun oil and ventilated air that never quite lost the cold undertone of the rock surrounding it. Three lanes. Moving target system on all three, the mechanisms running on smooth, quiet tracks. He had built this room during the first year of the temple's operational phase, after he had understood that what he needed in a base was not a gym but a space where the work of keeping his own operational capacity at standard was simply available rather than requiring a decision.
He had removed his sunglasses when he left the living area. They were on the bench behind him, neatly folded. Without them his face was completely Albert Wesker's face, but in here there was no one to perform for and no gap he was managing, and he was tired and frustrated and the sunglasses were a layer of management he did not have the bandwidth for right now.
He shot.
The USP's suppressor kept the sound manageable — the flat, controlled report of a subsonic round through a quality suppressor, repeated at intervals that bore no relationship to the intervals a normal human being could achieve. The moving targets tracked their programmed routes and were acquired and neutralised in the same motion, the gun coming up and tracking and firing in a single hydraulic arc that was not a series of actions but one continuous action expressed across multiple points. He worked through the first magazine without pause. He dropped it, loaded the second, and kept working.
It was not helping as much as it usually did.
The problem with the argument was not that he had been wrong. He knew he had not been wrong about the risks to Rebecca and the baby. The problem was that she had also not been wrong — about Romania, about the tremors, about the caloric deficit, about the CIED batteries — and he could not hold two correct opposing conclusions in the same frame without the processing load of it producing exactly this, which was a level of frustration he had not found an operational outlet for yet.
He emptied the second magazine. He set the gun on the bench.
He pressed both hands flat on the surface and looked at the three target lanes and breathed.
"You're faster than the last time I watched you shoot," Jill Valentine said from behind him.
∗ ∗ ∗
He had not heard her come in. Which was unusual. He registered the specific quality of that — not alarm, just notation — and turned.
She was leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded and the specific, level quality of Jill Valentine watching something she found genuinely interesting. She had the flowers still, he noticed. She had set them outside the door rather than bring them into a shooting range.
"The last time was Switzerland," he said. "Six months ago."
"You were faster than that then too," she said. "I mean faster than the time before that. There was a range session in the Italy operation. You were already doing things that had no business being physically possible. Now it's—" She paused. "The eye can't track it. You draw, acquire, fire, and the target is down before the visual cortex has finished processing the initial movement."
"Yes," he said. He turned back to the bench and began clearing the weapon — the automatic muscle-memory sequence of a man who had been doing this since before his hands were full size.
"I'm sorry I didn't notice you arrived," he said, without turning around. "I was occupied."
"I noticed," Jill said. She came and sat on the bench two lanes down, in the way she had that was neither intruding nor keeping a careful distance — just present, the comfortable informality of someone who had stopped needing an invitation some time ago. "Rebecca told me the essentials."
"She told you I was wrong."
"She told me she was going to Teach Mharcus. Which is the same sentence." Jill looked at him steadily. "She's right, you know."
"I know she's right," Alen said. He said it without heat, which was the specific quality of a man who has finished being wrong and has moved on to something quieter. "That is not the same as being comfortable with it."
Jill looked at the dark circles under his eyes. They were more pronounced without the sunglasses — the specific, settled depth of sleep deprivation that had been running long enough to become a permanent feature rather than a temporary one.
"She said you haven't eaten since yesterday," she said.
"I'll eat."
"When?"
The specific quality of that exchange — Rebecca's exact exchange with him an hour ago, the same rhythm, the same answer, the same follow-up question — registered in his face as the most fleeting possible thing. Not quite a smile. But close.
"Jill."
"I'm just saying."
He finished clearing the gun and set it on the bench and turned to face her properly. The ocean-blue eyes without the glasses had a different quality in this light — less contained, the analytical depth more visible, the specific intelligence in them clearer than it was when the black frames were providing their managed presentation.
"You've gotten used to being around me," he said.
"I have," she said. "Which is interesting, because six months ago I spent forty minutes in Switzerland with my hand on my weapon every time you turned your head at a certain angle. The face does something to you that you don't expect."
"I know."
"But it's not the same anymore," Jill said. She was looking at him with the specific, honest assessment of someone who means what she says exactly as she says it. "It is the same face. I'm not pretending it isn't. But the thing running behind it — the way you occupy a room, the way you speak, the way you respond when someone says something to you — it's different. He ran the ego constantly. You can feel the absence of it. It makes the face feel like a coincidence rather than what it is."
"What it is," Alen said, "is genetics."
"Yes." A pause. "You're also taller."
"You have said that before."
"It's still true."
∗ ∗ ∗
They sat with it for a moment. The range was quiet around them — the target system had completed its cycle and was waiting for the next activation, the mechanical stillness of something that had done its job and gone to rest.
"Can I ask you something?" Jill said.
"Go ahead."
"Rebecca mentioned — not in detail, just touched on it — that your brain processes faster than Albert's. Even than Alex's." She held his gaze. "She said you experience the world differently. That you don't just react faster, you process differently. What does that actually mean?"
He was quiet for a moment. Not the hesitation of someone deciding whether to answer — the specific, internal quality of a man who is trying to find the correct approximation of something that he does not have a calibrated external language for, because he has always been inside it and has no other reference point.
"The standard model," he said, "is that a normal human being reacts to a physical stimulus in approximately 150 to 300 milliseconds. That is the neural pathway from stimulus registration to motor response — the signal travels from the sensory receptors up the afferent pathways, gets processed in the relevant cortical regions, and comes back down as a motor instruction. That is the biological architecture. Albert's Progenitor integration compressed it. His reaction time was measurably below 50 milliseconds under documented conditions — significantly faster than any unenhanced human, fast enough that normal combat-trained opponents could not predict or counter his movements before they had already occurred."
"I remember," Jill said, with the dry quality of someone who has personal experience of this.
"Mine operates at a different order of magnitude," Alen said. "Not a compression of the same pathway. A different architecture."
He turned and picked up a spent casing from the lane floor. He held it between his fingers.
"The Progenitor-symbiotic nervous system in my case is native — it was not imposed on an adult human neural architecture that had already completed its development, the way Albert's integration was. It developed alongside my neural architecture from conception. The result is that my processing does not run the standard afferent-efferent loop at high speed. It runs a parallel processing architecture where stimulus registration and motor response are handled simultaneously at the cortical level rather than sequentially."
Jill frowned. "You're saying the signal doesn't wait in a queue."
"Correct. Standard neural processing is sequential — the brain handles one computational priority, hands off to the next, and so on. The latency adds up. My Progenitor-native architecture distributes the processing across multiple simultaneous streams. The sensory data, the threat assessment, the spatial calculation, and the motor instruction are all running in parallel rather than in sequence. The result is that when you watch me react to something, you are watching the end of a process that was already completing before you registered the beginning of it."
"Nanoseconds," Jill said.
"Not precisely, because the neuron itself cannot fire in nanoseconds — the electrochemical transmission has a physical floor. But the effective decision-making latency — the time between environmental input and committed motor response — is in the range of single-digit milliseconds. Under combat conditions, with full Progenitor activation, possibly less. The limiting factor is not processing speed. It is the speed of light through the neural fibre, which nothing biological changes."
"Which is why you can phase," Jill said. "The spatial movement."
"The spatial-phantom movement is a separate system," he said. "What I just described is baseline neural architecture — what I am doing in this room, without any Progenitor activation beyond standard. The spatial movement is the Progenitor management system operating at a level that temporarily desyncs my physical presence from standard spatial reference. The processing I just described allows me to calculate the destination and the commitment simultaneously. Without the processing speed, the spatial movement would be uncontrolled. With it, I can place myself with precision that Albert's brute-force speed could not achieve because he was always navigating a path. I am not navigating. I am selecting an endpoint."
Jill was quiet for a moment. She looked at the spent casing in his hand.
"Your mother," she said carefully.
"Had more raw cognitive capacity than Albert," Alen said. "I have said this before and it remains correct. Alex Wesker could hold more parallel analytical frameworks simultaneously than anyone else in Umbrella's documented history. Spencer gave her the full architectural vision specifically because she was the only person he trusted to understand it completely. Albert was strategically brilliant within a defined framework. Alex operated across frameworks simultaneously."
"But?" Jill said. She heard the pause before it arrived.
"But her intelligence was self-referential," Alen said. He said it without particular feeling, the flat accuracy of a man stating a fact he has made his peace with. "Every calculation she ran concluded with Alex Wesker as the endpoint. The T-Phobos project, the consciousness transfer, the puzzles she left for me to find — even her generosity, such as it was, was ultimately in service of Alex's design. Her intelligence was extraordinary and it was pointed entirely at herself. That is a significant constraint on what it can accomplish."
"And yours isn't," Jill said.
"I don't have a personal transcendence project," he said simply. "I have work. The work is not about me. The intelligence is therefore available for the work."
He put the spent casing down on the bench.
"I will not pretend I do not know what she was," he said. "She was worse than Albert in some respects. More deliberate. More willing to do things to other people's minds that Albert, with all his contempt for human life, would not have done. I have read the Sein Island files. I have spoken to Moira Burton. I know what she did." A pause. "I also know what she did not do, which was hand me to Spencer. Those two things are both true."
"Both things," Jill said.
"Both things," he confirmed. "I am not going to resolve them. I am not trying to."
Jill nodded. She had the specific quality of someone who understands that some things are not meant to be resolved and who respects that without needing to say so.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Can I ask one more thing?" she said. "Completely different subject."
"Go ahead."
"The operation here. The intelligence network, the satellite architecture, the Night-Wing, the temple, Teach Mharcus." She looked at him. "The funding. I have been wondering for a while and I have not asked because it felt intrusive, but — where does it come from? I know what Albert left. The Tricell assets were dissolved after Kijuju. What's left?"
He looked at her for a moment with the specific quality of a man deciding how much of a true thing to say. Then something shifted in his face — not warm exactly, but the closest thing to it that appeared when he found a question genuinely entertaining.
"You think Albert left me money," he said.
"I thought it was possible—"
"Albert knew I existed," Alen said. "He was present at my birth. He came to Alex's sub-level laboratory every Tuesday for six months and stood in the corner and watched her run developmental assessments on me. He knew. He simply made no provision for me because making provision for a child was not how Albert Wesker operated." Something in the quality of the pause that followed was the nearest thing he got to a laugh. "Albert Wesker leaving a financial legacy for a son he had observed once a week for half a year and then walked away from. No. I would not use it if he had."
Jill waited.
"There was an operation in December 2011," he said. "I was still operating under a cover identity — John Michael Kane, Blue Umbrella contractor. The operation was called Phantom Exhumation. I was running intelligence work on Sein Island in the months after the BSAA declared the facility cleared. The clean-up teams had gone through the surface levels. They had not gone through what was underneath."
"Alex's private archive," Jill said.
"Her private archive," Alen confirmed. "The genuine one — not the operational files, not the research documentation that Umbrella and various successor organisations had been chasing pieces of for years. The personal archive. A diary going back thirty years. Her financial architecture. Her investments, her accounts, the network of legal and semi-legal instruments she had built between 1989 and her death in 2013." He paused. "The archive also contained the first complete documentation of my origin. My birth. The sub-level. The six months before she placed me with the orphanage."
He said the last part without emphasis, the same register as everything else — the specific quality of someone for whom this information has been integrated long enough that its weight is structural rather than acute.
"I found $12.4 million in liquid capital distributed across Swiss accounts, Cayman holding structures, and Singapore instruments," he said. "Account structures she had built under names that did not connect to Umbrella or to the Wesker identity. She was meticulous. No one had found it because no one knew to look for it specifically — they were looking for bioweapon research and viral sample caches, not investment accounts."
"$12.4 million," Jill said.
"It was more than sufficient to begin. I have been managing it carefully since 2011." He looked at her steadily. "The majority of the ongoing operating budget comes from legitimate investment income. Rebecca's idea — she was correct that the safest and most sustainable financial architecture was one that did not require black market involvement and that would not produce unusual patterns in intelligence financial monitoring."
"What kind of investments?"
He paused.
"Agricultural operations," he said. "Several fish processing facilities in Norway and Iceland. A group of toy manufacturing companies across Southeast Asia."
Jill stared at him. "Toy factories."
"Rebecca's specific suggestion," he said. "Her argument was that the toy industry had stable long-term demand, low regulatory complexity compared to pharmaceutical or technology sectors, and sufficient geographical distribution to make the income appear appropriately diversified. She was correct. The fish processing was also her idea. She said it was unlikely that any intelligence analyst would look for the financial backbone of a black ops operation in a Norwegian salmon facility."
"She is not wrong about that," Jill said.
"They generate consistent returns," he said. "The operations are entirely legal. The people who work in them have no connection to anything I do. The income funds the equipment, the intelligence architecture, the medical supplies, and the operational costs without requiring a single transaction that would register as anomalous."
Jill was quiet for a moment.
"Toy factories," she said again.
"Rebecca has strong opinions about sustainable financial planning," Alen said.
"I can see that."
He almost smiled. It was the same almost that had appeared in the previous exchange — something that did not quite arrive but that indicated it was aware of its own possibility.
"She named one of the Norwegian facilities," he said. "I asked her not to. She named it anyway."
"What did she name it?"
"I am not going to tell you that."
Jill laughed. Not the polite, social laugh — the genuine, slightly startled kind that comes from something landing when you were not braced for it.
"We've had quite a conversation," she said.
"Yes," he said. He picked up the sunglasses from the bench and held them in his hand, looking at them for a moment, then put them on. The ocean-blue disappeared behind the black lenses. The managed presentation reasserted.
"Breakfast," Jill said.
"Yes."
"Rebecca made me promise I would bring you back."
"I know." He picked up the USP and holstered it. "She also told you to tell me breakfast was ready and that I had not eaten since yesterday. Which was true then and is still true."
"It was a complete briefing," Jill agreed.
He pulled on his coat — the same deliberate motion, the collar settling around his jaw, the armour of it returning around the version of himself that walked through the parts of the world that were not this room. He looked at the range for a moment — the three lanes, the target system waiting at rest, the spent casings lined up on the bench where he had set them without thinking about it.
Then he walked toward the door and she fell into step beside him, and they went back up through the mountain toward the living area and whatever was left of the morning.
∗ ∗ ∗
— END OF CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO —