The Lineage and Elpis

The Lineage

Every virus ΜΝΗΜΗ runs descends from one organism, and every part of her world begins with it.

Year	Event
1966–1967	Ozwell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus find the Progenitor virus in a West African flower the Ndipaya called the Stairway of the Sun. Flowers grown anywhere else never carry the virus, and no one ever learns why.
1968	The three found Umbrella as a pharmaceutical front for Progenitor research. Ashford dies the same year, killed by the virus he was studying.
1978	Marcus combines Progenitor with leech DNA and creates the T-Virus.
Early 1980s	Alexia Ashford binds Progenitor to an ancient virus found in a queen ant and creates T-Veronica. Her father, Alexander, is its first human subject. He survives as the thing the Antarctic staff called Nosferatu.
1980s	Umbrella's Arklay laboratory builds the Hunter line: reptilian DNA bound into human embryos by the T-Virus.
1988	Marcus is assassinated on Spencer's order by his own protégés, William Birkin and Albert Wesker. Umbrella Europe begins the Nemesis Project.
1988 onward	Wesker and Birkin implant the Nemesis parasite, NE-α, into Umbrella's longest-held test subject, Lisa Trevor. Her body consumes it. From what it leaves behind, Birkin spends the next ten years developing the G-Virus.
Mid-1990s	Beneath the Raccoon City orphanage, in a laboratory he calls ARK, Spencer finishes Elpis, and seals it away.
1998	Umbrella Europe implants NE-α into a T-103 Tyrant. The parasite takes no human host, but it takes a Tyrant. The result is the Nemesis-T Type.
September 1998	The T-Virus reaches Raccoon City. Birkin, shot by Umbrella's own soldiers, injects himself with the G-Virus. The city falls over a little more than a week.
1 October 1998	At sunrise, a single missile destroys Raccoon City.
2003	Umbrella collapses under the weight of the Raccoon Trials. Its research scatters to buyers, thieves, and successors.
2009	In the old Ndipaya lands, Wesker and Tricell finish Uroboros, a strain that judges its host: it adapts to a few and consumes the rest.
2011	Alex Wesker completes T-Phobos, a strain that sleeps until its host is afraid, and then rewrites them.
2012–2013	Carla Radames, who has been building it since 2001 from T-Veronica and G, turns the C-Virus loose on the world through Neo-Umbrella.
2026	Beneath the ruins of Raccoon City, in the facility called ARK, Spencer's last creation is unsealed.

Elpis

In the last years of his work at Umbrella, Spencer built one thing that was not a weapon. He called it Elpis: an antiviral able to neutralize every viral weapon descended from his own work. He developed it in absolute secrecy, in a laboratory called ARK beneath Raccoon City's orphanage, finished it in the middle of the 1990s, and sealed it behind a fail-safe that would destroy it if the wrong password were given. The password was Hope.

The missile that erased Raccoon City in 1998 was not only meant to burn an outbreak. Those who pushed for it, the Connections among them, wanted ARK buried and Elpis with it.

In 2026, Elpis was found and opened. What it does was proved on the people around it: a man who had made himself something more than human injected it and was made human again, his gifts gone with the virus. Survivors of Raccoon City who had carried the lingering mutations of the T-Virus for twenty-eight years were cured.

Then ARK fell. In its ruins, after the rescuers had gone, two soldiers killed the last of the forces left to guard the site and went in for an objective of their own. No one has said who sent them, or what they carried out.

Someone watched them do it, and did not move.