Interlude

In 1909, in return for financial aid, Tsar Nicholai II granted an association of British and French noblemen access to the Tunguska event site. These individuals acquired the first sample of a primitive bacteria. One of the members, a powerful, but reclusive founding member, petitioned to have the sample destroyed, calling it a "Primordial remnant", one humanity was not ready to contain, should it be allowed to prosper.

The matter was voted upon, and the dissenter was overruled.

The noblemen would gain no valuable insight from that sample, but cultivated it nevertheless as a scientific oddity. After 1945, their successors, now including scientists from Germany and the United States, took another look at the Tunguska strain and, thanks to research performed in Poland during the war, found that it had the ability to not only remember genetic markers, but recombine DNA and RNA into viable and nonviable configurations.

It could be used to exterminate specific ethnic groups. Again, there was only one dissenting vote to such a line of research, and it was overruled.

Carnival I, a classified project located in Springfield, Alaska, found, in 1963, that the Tunguska strain rejected harmful genes, foreign and native. In other words, when they attempted to introduce faulty genetic material in chimpanzees and dogs, the virus refused to implement the change and even used its existing repertoire of genetic material to correct malformations, increase intelligence, reduce depression and generally improve the test subjects in every way it could.

It wished to help, not destroy, but in their hubris, the shadowy organisation viewed this cure to all ills, this key to accelerated human evolution, as a failure.

In 1964, the U.S. Government allowed Carnival II to proceed with human testing in Hope, Idaho. They used infrared lasers to wipe the virus' "memory", before providing it with faulty genetic samples, cancer cells, heart disease, taken from asian and african individuals, and inoculated the entire population with what they called DX-1118 A "Redlight strain".

The virus had no effect for 998 days. Children born in that time, however, were malformed, but not in the way one would have expected. The children appeared to be incomplete prototypes of something close to human, and getting closer with every failed iteration, with the next to last one living three years, only to die with the rest of the town in 1968, when the Redlight virus within Elizabeth Greene and her unborn child forced massive and grotesque growth in muscular and cerebral tissue in every last resident, enslaving them and forcing them to protect Greene from capture.

Ultrasounds and infrared patterns emitted from Greene like pheromones, as well as traditional human pheromones charged with viral cells, allowed a hive-mind like behaviour, far more complex and fast paced than any insect. Greene could even, in moments of sanity, alter the shape of servants seemingly at will, though she remained unable to alter the cells in her own body to any significant extent.

Ultimately, Greene was caught. The organisation, now calling themselves "The Templars" or "Templar Industries" in the UK, realised it could not keep operating on American soil without a believable front, therefore, it assembled Blackwatch with the help of Vietnam war veteran General Peter Randall and his CIA contacts.

In order to continue their research on Elizabeth Greene without direct involvement from Blackwatch, a U.S. Army regiment subject to Presidential and Congress authority, the Templars also created GenTek Inc. in 1989.

Dr. Mathieu Doublet, lead researcher in project Carnival I and resident of the underground town of Springfield, Alaska, was supposed to join GenTek in 1998, but the Redlight strain in Springfield proved as uncontrollable as the one in Hope and all residents were slaughtered. Robert Cross, a U.S. army specialist, led a Delta force unit in the town to recover Dr. Doublet, but ended up wiping the entire town out instead.

He was subsequently recruited as a Captain for Blackwatch.

GenTek, under Raymond McMullen, made no progress with Redlight, the Tunguska Strain, Greene or her child, Callsign PARIAH, for almost a decade, until two researchers, Alex Mercer and Karen Parker, joined the team.

Mercer "created" the Blacklight strain from samples taken out of green's bloodstream, wiping the Redlight strain's genetic code with focused Ultraviolets and allowed it to repair itself to a form closer to its original.

Unbeknownst to him, the entity's desire for symbiosis now came with a degree of self preservation. It had been damaged twice, its hosts destroyed and its very identity rewritten. If it had a will of its own by that point, that will was nothing but fear, pain and hate.

Mercer continued his research, focusing on a possible cure for cancer and other diseases, unaware that any hope of such a Panacea had been lost when the primal strain from Springfield was also converted to Redlight.

GenTek's goal remained weaponization and, through Karen Parker, they were able to create DX-1118C, a "smart" viral agent, capable of killing instantly or remaining dormant depending on circumstances and unable to cross large bodies of water or subsist for more than an hour without a host.

Alex Mercer found out and decided to expose GenTek, the Templars and Blackwatch, but was intercepted at Penn Station and, before dying, released DX-1118C… Which killed everything in close proximity, but did not otherwise spread or manifest itself in a meaningful way, as it instead focused on trying to "fix" the deceased Alex Mercer.

It remains unclear if it opted to do so purely out of survival instinct, or because it felt a degree of kinship with Mercer, but the results were unprecedented. The virus' ability to hijack human anatomy and elevate it to near god-like levels caught all of the Templars by surprise, all save for one.

Had the virus not betrayed Mercer, halted his evolution in favour of a candidate without desire to spread violence and destruction, the Dissenter himself might well have stepped in and purged all traces of Redlight, Blacklight and Whitelight from the world.

Once James Heller had eliminated and reclaimed all sources of Blacklight, leaving Dana Mercer and John "Pariah" Greene as the only two other carriers of the Redlight strain, the dissenter broke away from the Templars and made the entity an offer through its three carriers.

Forty thousand years later, with the dissenter at his weakest, the galaxy in chaos, this deal has come to an end, and carriers have begun manifesting themselves again.