The three great powers first sent rescue personnel, followed by three battalions of cavalry to help seal off the area, but none of it did any good.
With no other choice, the military urgently blasted the entrances at both ends of the canyon shut, turning it into a death trap. Meanwhile, the researchers inside this sealed bunker were still trying everything they could to develop an antidote, or rather, a treatment.
Then their efforts proved futile.
The researchers' only discovery was that anyone exposed to this biochemical agent for a short time, say no more than twenty-four hours, had a good chance of surviving if they did not mutate within the following five days.
At the end of the film, the female researcher spoke the words written on the film canister: "May God forgive us." Then the footage ended.
Dahlia switched off the projector and exchanged a look with Nick. After a long silence, she slowly spoke. "If we still have a chance of surviving after just a few hours of exposure, I think we should leave as soon as possible."
"A very good chance," Nick corrected her. "Even the most stable chemical agent has been sitting here for nearly eighty years. Whatever could degrade should have mostly degraded by now."
"But that still leaves the same question. Why didn't they bomb this place from the air and simply flatten it?" Dahlia frowned.
She walked over to a cabinet and opened it, finding various reagents inside. The labels beneath them read things like "Stage one sample" and "Stage three sample," but the row labeled "Final Samples" was completely empty.
Still, the spots where the reagent bottles should have stood showed that something had originally been there.
Nick pointed toward the small room at the end of the generator's other power cable. "I think the answer should be in there."
Dahlia followed his gaze and spotted an LCD monitor. Her eyebrows rose slightly. "That's not something that should have been around in the forties of the last century."
"Just like this backup generator that still works." Nick strode into the small room and, as expected, found a small server tower beside the monitor.
The room was filled with equipment and instruments, all completely out of place in this laboratory with its 1940s look. There was even a printer.
A few sheets of A4 paper lay scattered on the floor, covered in bloodstains that had long since dried. The disarray of the chairs showed signs of people struggling all over the room.
"Someone died here, but the bodies were taken away. It looks like these people evacuated in a hurry." Nick's detective instincts kicked in, and he quickly reconstructed the scene.
"This is a military computer. It should still boot up."
Dahlia reached for the power button as she spoke, but Nick stopped her. "Wait. There's a network cable plugged into this machine, and a camera mounted on the monitor."
The girl stared at him wide-eyed, her voice incredulous. "Have you forgotten those 'Big Ears'? Every signal around the canyon is jammed."
"Then do you remember that drone?" Nick's retort left Dahlia speechless.
Some drone models could indeed carry out missions automatically without remote-control signals, and the drone that could ascend and descend vertically inside the canyon certainly looked futuristic, but what if?
The network cable might only have been there to set up a local area network, but just because the military had deployed "Big Ears" to block signals and satellite surveillance did not mean they could not leave a back door.
Nick unplugged the network cable and covered the camera with a cloth before pressing the power button. Amid the nerve-racking sound of fans starting up, the screen successfully lit up. It was actually running Windows XP.
"Have you heard of Black Lake?" Nick asked, looking at the logo that appeared on the screen.
"It's a global private military technology company." Dahlia immediately pieced it together. "So the research is actually still going on. That's why the canyon hasn't been destroyed to this day. Does that mean it wasn't actually the military that hired us?"
"Perhaps it was at first, but clearly not anymore. Or rather, the original research project was subcontracted to Black Lake to continue certain aspects of the research."
Nick patiently waited for the system to finish its lengthy self-check and finally load the desktop, then began checking the files on the hard drive one by one. He soon found something.
A file on Gene Warriors showed that Black Lake was very interested in the unusual life-forms created by the mixing of different genes in the canyon. As early as twenty-two years ago, it had sent people into the canyon to try collecting various samples.
"That doesn't make sense. What era are we living in, and they're still working on gene-enhanced warriors? Shouldn't future battlefields belong to drones and robot dogs?"
Or T-800s. Nick mentally added this as he recalled the domestically produced robots that had already made Real Steel a reality before he crossed over, then continued opening the remaining files.
Sure enough, the newer files showed that the so-called Gene-Enhanced Warrior Project had been terminated because Black Lake had discovered a more enticing direction for its research: extending the human lifespan.
They had discovered that after merging with plants, those "Hollow Men" had survived in the canyon for more than half a century, yet could still run and jump. Even now, they were tirelessly trying to climb the cliffs.
So Black Lake had sent people to take all the "Final Samples" from this laboratory, but some sort of accident seemed to have occurred during the operation, forcing an emergency evacuation. Afterward, they continued using drones to collect various mixed-gene samples from the canyon, hoping to unlock the secret of immortality.
"It looks like they didn't know that the key to avoiding infection by this biochemical agent wasn't whether you inhaled the mist, but whether you spent too long in this environment."
Looking at the gas masks discarded beside the desk, Nick guessed that Black Lake's emergency evacuation back then had probably been prompted by mutations among the people who entered this laboratory.
If he assumed something more malicious, the people sent here might themselves have been expendable test subjects, just like...
"...Just like us. I think I know why Black Lake hired us." Dahlia instinctively grabbed Nick's arm.
"Yes, because we're all expendable." Nick finished what she had left unsaid.
Rivi, whose identity he had taken, was a loner with no one to speak of, while Dahlia had also botched her previous mission after being caught on satellite imagery. With her terminally ill father factored in, she was hardly any better off than Rivi.
"Nick!" Dahlia's grip on his arm suddenly tightened. Through gritted teeth, she said, "Promise me, whichever one of us makes it out alive, we'll make those bastards pay."
"Of course. This won't end so easily." As soon as Nick finished speaking, a sudden flash of inspiration crossed his mind. He thought he now had some idea what the so-called mission to save the world was about.
The mission was not asking him to kill a certain number of "Hollow Men," or destroy the entire canyon to prevent anything inside from getting out.
In fact, none of that mattered. Saving the world probably meant he had to destroy Black Lake in its entirety.
This damned company gave Nick an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Wasn't it just this world's fucking counterpart to the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil series?
Before you continue