At 4:47 p.m. on June 15, 1976.
I had just returned to my office after seeing the children, and without a moment to breathe, I had to tackle my second task.
I needed to submit the raw data and write a report to Umbrella Pharmaceuticals headquarters using the research materials piled on my desk.
At least the contents of the research materials themselves didn’t need much editing. As I’d said before, the original Alexander had manipulated the data with painstaking care.
During his lifetime, Alexander had divided the research materials into three broad categories.
One was fit to be submitted to headquarters as a report, another was not, and the last was supporting evidence meant to supplement the report sent to headquarters.
He really was a meticulous, exacting man.
Well, thanks to that, I could work very comfortably now.
Each document had a colored mark that Alexander had personally attached.
Blue meant submit, red meant do not submit, and yellow meant supplementary material. At first I’d thought they were just random stickers slapped on carelessly, but it turned out every single one had meaning.
But the completely unexpected obstacle was... writing the report based on these materials.
In the modern twenty-first century, writing wasn’t that difficult. You just turned on a computer, opened Notepad or a word processor, typed your text, and printed it out.
Of course, in the 1970s, the era this story was set in, computers and printers did exist.
It was just that...
"Good grief, I never thought I’d run into an antique like this here."
The machine sitting at the corner of the desk was nothing like the computers I knew.
A main body with its circuit boards exposed, a tiny CRT screen that hardly deserved to be called a monitor, and a set of keys that looked like neither a typewriter nor a keyboard.
A computer that only a few hundred units had supposedly been produced of in the entire world was sitting right in front of me.
As a devoted fan of this company’s products, I was practically standing before a historical relic.
The problem was that, separate from all that, I had absolutely no idea how to use it.
"Fine, let’s give it a shot."
I pulled out the chair and placed my hands over the keys.
But the first barrier had already appeared: I needed to figure out how to turn it on.
I searched the main unit for a power button, but there was nothing that looked like one.
I checked the side, then the back.
"Where the hell is the power switch?"
Just as my temper was about to rise, I finally found a small toggle switch on the back of the unit and flipped it up.
Beep.
Something appeared on the small, crude CRT screen. A white cursor blinked against the black display.
Good, I’d succeeded this far.
I tried pressing the keys.
The old-fashioned clicking sound of the machine was oddly pleasant and brisk.
But nothing changed on the screen.
"Why isn’t this working now?"
I tried again, but there was still no response.
Could it need some kind of input first?
Computers in this era had no graphical interface, let alone the internet.
There was no mouse, and even if you typed something, the word didn’t just appear on the screen right away.
Even entering a simple character required typing in a command directly.
The problem was that I had no idea what those commands were.
"Wait, maybe there’s some kind of manual."
I opened a desk drawer labeled manual.
"Casio scientific calculator instructions... no, that’s not it. Dot matrix printer instructions, that’s not it either...."
What I finally found amid the pile of antiques was a thick English booklet.
[Mapple 1 User Manual]
When I opened it, densely packed English text and a chaotic list of commands written in all sorts of symbols already had my head spinning.
"...I’m supposed to read all this?"
Just skimming the first page made my eyes go dizzy.
"This product boots using a program called WAZMON. Therefore, please enter the code appropriate for that program...?"
Without any context, I had no idea where to even begin.
The feeling of having found a historical relic was long gone.
Looking at this thing made even Huncom Office, notorious for being a miserable pain to use, seem like a saint by comparison.
Following the manual, I started entering the commands one by one with painfully slow hunt-and-peck typing.
"FF 00... FFFF. FF 00: D8..E8, no, wait, is that wrong? FF00... damn it, shit!"
In the end, my patience ran completely dry, and I shouted a string of curses out loud.
"Screw this, damn it. I’d rather write it by hand even if it’s a pain."
I shut the computer off on the spot and brought over the electric typewriter sitting at the corner of the desk.
At least the typewriter didn’t require me to wrestle with those godforsaken commands.
Looking more closely, the typewriter was covered in signs of use, while the computer keyboard was spotless, as if it had just been bought new.
Maybe the original Alexander preferred this typewriter too, rather than wrestling with that ancient computer.
'We have the same taste, you and I.'
With the typewriter in front of me, I studied the keys for a moment.
The shape itself wasn’t all that different from a keyboard, and the layout was similar too.
This should be manageable.
I started typing the first line.
Click, click, click
Clack, clack, clack
'Wait, this takes a lot more force than I expected.'
It was different from a twenty-first-century keyboard.
A light touch wasn’t enough; I had to press firmly for the letters to appear.
Not knowing that, I’d tapped too lightly, and about half the letters came out smudged and incomplete.
"...Ah."
I pulled out the paper and inserted a fresh sheet.
Then I started again. This time I used more force.
Click, click, click
Good, this was working.
When I was about two lines in, I accidentally hit the wrong key.
Clack.
The paper advanced by one line.
"Sh-"
The line break had happened right in the middle of the sentence.
"What the hell is this? Why is the line-break key here?"
I pulled out the paper again and inserted a new sheet.
Third try. This time I typed slowly, checking each character as I went.
It was hunt-and-peck typing, but there was no helping it.
Accuracy came before speed.
Click... click... click...
Clack, clack, clack
So this was how it worked. Slow, but better than making mistakes.
By the time I finished one page, I lifted it up to check.
Overall, the print was clean. Though here and there, some letters were a little darker or lighter than others.
My pressure control still hadn’t fully become second nature.
'This is probably good enough.'
I decided to let that slide for now. If I aimed for perfection, there wouldn’t be enough time even if dawn came and went.
'No way those Umbrella bastards are going to check the ink density on a typewriter letter by letter, are they?'
And so, using hunt-and-peck typing, I began drafting the report one piece at a time and slowly made progress.
For the documents marked blue, I copied them as they were. For the ones marked red, I set them aside. For the ones marked yellow, I adjusted the figures little by little to supplement them.
One page ended, then the next, then another....
At some point, my thoughts stopped and only my hands kept moving. I was somewhere on the border between concentration and numbness, and I couldn’t even tell which it was.
Then, all at once, I noticed my eyes stinging under the lamp light and my fingers throbbing.
I checked the clock.
6:12 p.m.
Already?
Outside the window, the world was still pitch-black, and the blizzard had not let up.
In Antarctica in June, it wasn’t the window that told you time was passing. It was your body. Your back aching, your neck stiff, your fingers throbbing as if the typewriter keys had beaten them up.
So this was what happened when you lived in the twenty-first century and used a typewriter.
Then it hit me.
'Ah, the children.'
I remembered that I’d said they should rest in their rooms from this afternoon and that meals would be brought to them.
But it was dinner time now.
I sprang to my feet.
In truth, I could have just left it to a servant.
But I was still bothered by what I’d told Dr. Ross this morning about personally taking care of the children. If I broke that promise here, it would only make me look suspicious in a different way.
And separate from that... honestly, I wanted to go see them myself.
I had seen them earlier, yes, but I also needed to check how they’d spent the day, and leaving the children alone to eat in their rooms wasn’t something a proper adult should do.
I pulled the pages I’d been working on from the typewriter, put them in the cabinet, and locked it.
When I went down to the kitchen, dinner preparations were in full swing.
The cook saw me and hurriedly lowered his head.
"Sir, what brings you here...?"
"Is dinner for the children ready?"
"Ah, yes. We were just about to bring it up."
"I’ll take it myself."
The cook froze for a moment.
There it was again.
Just like this morning when I brought the children out of the dining room, everyone in this research facility made that face whenever I showed even the slightest concern for them.
That expression of surprise mixed with confusion. Was it really that strange?
Maybe the children had been neglected even more severely than I’d thought...
Leaving the dazed cook behind, I accepted the tray as if nothing were unusual.
There was a bowl of warm chicken soup, mashed potatoes with peas, several pieces of chicken breast topped with gravy sauce, and a warm glass of milk.
After seeing the children earlier in the afternoon, I’d stopped by the kitchen and asked for food suited to their health condition. I’d used the excuse that they weren’t feeling well, so the menu had to match that excuse too.
This should do.
Walking through the inner corridors of the mansion, I pushed the cart with the tray on top and headed up the stairs.
Then I ran into Herman in the hall.
He looked at me and said that he could take it from here and that I should go back.
But my answer was the same as before.
"No, I’ll handle this myself."
Herman looked at me for a moment.
His expression remained as still and leaden as ever.
But in that brief instant, his eyes moved from the tray to me, then toward the children’s rooms at the end of the hall.
I pretended not to notice and kept pushing the cart.
"I said they weren’t feeling well, so it’s only right that I check on them myself. As the director, it’s only natural."
As expected of Alexander, I had attached a thorough justification.
I’d drawn a line, making it clear this was not simple kindness but part of my duties as director.
It wouldn’t do to look like an overly affectionate father in the eyes of Umbrella’s liaison.
Herman gave a short nod.
"Understood."
And stepped aside.
I glanced once at his retreating back, then looked away.
By the time I’d dragged the cart up to the second floor, I had reached the children’s doors.
At lunch, Alfred had been first. I decided dinner would follow the same order.
I stood before Alfred’s door and knocked.
"...Come in."
When I opened the door, Alfred was sitting in the same place as that morning, in the chair by the window.
On his lap was a lead soldier figurine.
It was one of the things he’d hurriedly shoved under the bed earlier.
When he saw me, the child jumped and hurriedly tried to hide the figurine behind his back again.
That expression said, "Why is Father here right now?"
"You don’t need to hide it."
I said this as I brought the tray from the cart into the room.
Alfred froze.
I set the soup, mashed potatoes, chicken breast, and warm milk down on the table one by one.
"Dinner. Eat up."
Alfred stared at the meal for a moment before speaking cautiously.
"Did you bring this yourself, Father?"
"Yes."
"...Why?"
"I said I’d take care of you, didn’t I?"
Alfred said nothing for a long while after hearing that.
He simply sat up properly in his seat, picked up his spoon, then set it down, then picked it up again, as if he wanted to say something but swallowed it back down.
Maybe because I was sitting in front of him, he seemed intent on correcting his posture even more carefully than usual.
The angle of his wrist as he held the spoon, the way he placed the napkin on his lap.
He looked like he was trying desperately not to make a mistake in the noble dining etiquette he’d been taught.
This child even gets nervous eating a meal.
That somehow bothered me.
A child who was careful not to make a mistake even at the dinner table, a child whose body reacted first to the idea that he must not let his posture slip in front of his father.
How exactly had he been raised...?
Then, in the end, he asked in a very small voice, "Um... Father."
"Yes."
"What happened with those people this afternoon?"
I looked at him for a moment.
So he had noticed too. That something had been off since morning.
"Nothing much. The company requested a report."
"Was it because of us?"
It was too direct a question. But Alfred’s eyes weren’t accusing me.
He was simply worried, sincerely worried.
"It wasn’t because of you."
It was a lie. But I couldn’t tell this child the truth.
"It’s just a routine report. Nothing to worry about."
Alfred looked at me for a moment, then nodded.
I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or was only pretending to. But he didn’t ask any more questions.
I watched Alfred slowly start eating the soup.
One spoonful, then two.
The room was quiet. Only the faint sound of the blizzard drifted in from outside.
"Father."
"Yes."
"This is... tasty."
It was nothing special. But it was the first time Alfred had ever voiced any personal feeling to me.
It was a tiny step, but it meant the child was opening his heart to me, even if only a little.
As if nothing were unusual, I stood up from my seat.
"When you’re done, leave the dishes outside. And I’ll come by once before bed to check on your health, so wait for me."
"Yes."
Alfred nodded obediently.
Just as I was about to close the door, I heard a voice from behind me.
"Father, um..."
I stopped.
"Will you come like this tomorrow too?"
This child wasn’t asking about tomorrow. He was asking whether this visit of mine was a one-time thing or not.
"Yes."
I answered briefly and closed the door.
When I stepped back into the hall, only the quiet sound of the cart’s wheels remained.
One down. Now the one left was... Alexia.
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