September 19, 1998 — Sheena Island, Umbrella Tyrant Plant.
Sheena Island lay in the Atlantic Ocean.
After Umbrella arrived, the corporation developed it extensively, and nearly eighty percent of the island’s population ended up working for the company.
With Umbrella driving its growth, Sheena developed at a remarkable pace.
It might have been small, but it had everything a major city could offer—a picture-perfect company town in the middle of the Atlantic.
There were even plenty of restaurants and arcades, enough that tourists consistently came away impressed by the beautiful island.
Beneath that attractive exterior, however, Sheena Island was one of Umbrella’s beating hearts: a plant producing T-103 Tyrants, hidden beneath an abandoned mansion.
At the moment, the researchers inside the plant were barely keeping their eyes open.
Everything had changed since September 6, when that bastard Vincent Goldman took over as commander of Sheena Island.
Vincent did not treat people like people.
From the day he arrived, the entire island had become his personal kingdom, and anyone who opposed him ended up dead.
Even condemned prisoners needed for research could be killed for no reason at all, after which Vincent would fabricate reports about prison riots and send them to Umbrella Headquarters.
The researchers also knew perfectly well what had happened to the previous commander, so none of them were eager to get on Vincent’s bad side.
Still, he would not be able to throw his weight around for much longer.
Vincent’s behavior had finally crossed even the researchers’ moral line.
As Umbrella’s Tyrant production center, Sheena Island’s most important product was Beta Hetero Nonserotonin, a substance used to stabilize Tyrant modification.
Extracting it was exceptionally brutal: the subject’s skull had to be opened without anesthesia so the compound could be harvested directly from the brain.
At first, only death-row inmates on the island had been used for the extraction.
The researchers could live with that.
As far as they were concerned, the subjects were scum to begin with; if they died in an experiment, then at least their deaths had contributed something to science.
No one lost any sleep over it.
But Vincent grew increasingly extreme, until even they could no longer tolerate him.
He began abducting teenagers both from the island and from outside it, then subjected them to the same Beta Hetero Nonserotonin extraction procedure.
The researchers were terrified Vincent would silence anyone who objected, so no matter how disgusted they were by his inhuman actions, none dared speak openly.
Instead, they quietly documented evidence of his crimes.
Once their current experiment was finished, they intended to submit everything to Umbrella Headquarters and have Vincent Goldman removed from Sheena Island just as Dr.
Marcus had once been removed from his post.
Better yet, they hoped that paranoid animal would finally be dragged into court!
Naturally, none of the researchers who felt that way knew which of their colleagues could actually be trusted.
Vincent could easily have informants among them, so no one dared reveal their intentions.
With that demon’s temperament, exposing themselves would amount to signing their own death warrant.
The experiment occupying them now was a project Vincent himself had ordered: using the T-002 Tyrant as a base, they were to create the purest possible Tyrant, one possessing overwhelming physical strength and close-quarters combat ability.
To accomplish that, the bastard had cells carrying different genes placed together and forced them to destroy one another in a process not unlike raising venomous creatures in a jar until only the strongest survived.
The victor was then thrown into another round, and another, until a single superior strain remained.
Its genetic material would be incorporated into a Tyrant, completing the project.
The project had begun the moment Vincent took office.
Two weeks had already passed, and they were rapidly approaching the third.
During that time the researchers had been pushed to physical and mental exhaustion, barely daring to close their eyes and relying on coffee and tea to force themselves through a tedious experiment that might ultimately prove meaningless.
Now, no amount of caffeine could override what their brains were demanding.
Their eyelids grew heavier and heavier until, right at their stations, they finally fell asleep.
When they woke, they discovered that one cell strain had somehow survived the brutal selection process and emerged as the final victor.
To commemorate the historic moment, they named the gene carried by those cells the “Hypnos gene.” Culturing the Hypnos cells proved easy enough.
As the ultimate survivors of the cellular competition, their reproductive capacity was astonishing.
The next step was obvious: implant the Hypnos cells into a Tyrant.
If there was one thing Sheena Island never lacked, it was viable Tyrant hosts.
A test body was brought in almost immediately.
Combined with Beta Hetero Nonserotonin, the subject changed rapidly.
Its build became almost indistinguishable from an ordinary human’s, its skin turned blue, and the right hand developed the enormous claws characteristic of the Tyrant line.
That last detail was hardly a fatal flaw.
The Hypnos-T Type before them was close to the perfect B.O.W.
Umbrella had always pursued.
Put it in clothes, trim the claws, and even an ordinary person might fail to recognize what it was.
It could perform infiltration missions that no conventional Tyrant ever could.
The nature of the Hypnos cells also kept the Tyrant in a state of continuous genetic mutation.
To encourage further cellular growth while stabilizing the specimen, the researchers placed it inside a culture tank and reported their success to Vincent.
The tank containing the Hypnos Tyrant stood at the very heart of the Tyrant Plant.
On September 20, Vincent received word that the Hypnos Tyrant had been completed.
Ecstatic, he came down in person to admire what he considered his supreme masterpiece.
The researchers around him quietly backed away from the tank.
What had happened at the Arklay Laboratory two months earlier was still fresh in everyone’s mind: Albert Wesker had been impaled by a T-002 Tyrant’s claw while standing directly in front of its containment tank.
No one wanted to stand too close to a Tyrant, glass or no glass.
Nobody wanted a claw through the heart.
And Vincent’s so-called masterpiece was even worse.
He had pursued raw combat ability without giving the slightest consideration to control, creating something that could only be described as a monster.
Even the researchers who had made the Hypnos Tyrant were unwilling to stand anywhere near it.
Vincent, meanwhile, was already imagining his glorious future.
He pictured presenting the Hypnos Project and a mass-production proposal to the board, then rubbing his success in the faces of the Arklay and Paris laboratories.
That was when everything changed.
Inside the tank, the Hypnos Tyrant opened its eyes.
A massive blue claw punched through the glass as though it were paper, drove straight through Vincent’s body, and hurled him onto the floor like a dead dog.
The Hypnos Tyrant stepped slowly out of the shattered tank.
The researchers drew their guns.
Those who still had their wits about them knew better than to trigger the self-destruct system on impulse; once activated, it would reduce all of Sheena Island to ashes.
Bullets might not stop the monster they had created, but the plant still housed T-103s.
With those and their own firepower, perhaps they could contain it.
Yet the Hypnos Tyrant did not attack them.
Instead, it made absolutely certain Vincent was dead.
The researchers felt no pity for that freak—only vicious satisfaction.
If their own lives had not still been in danger, some of them might have cheered.
Unfortunately, the pressure radiating from the humanoid monster in front of them made laughter impossible.
Then the researchers noticed something different in the Hypnos Tyrant’s eyes.
Tyrants were developed as weapons.
A sense of self and genuine emotion were never supposed to exist in them; even excessive intelligence was something Umbrella normally worked to suppress.
What the Hypnos Tyrant had just done was not the behavior of an ordinary B.O.W., nor did it resemble the mindless violence of one running out of control.
It had acted from something dangerously close to emotion.
A moment later, the creature confirmed their almost insane suspicion when human speech came from its mouth.
“What’s the date today?”