This came to me while I was taking a bath. Here comes a theory, the Manufacturers (Or at least a significant chunk of the companies) plotted the release of the zombie strain Why? Let me get to that You see, with the whole thing involving space exploration and Earth's many out of world colonies, weapons, armor and other military goods have been left aside, and the defense market has fallen into the sidelines (The Graphene set was intended to be an exploratory suit, never really intended for combat.)  Big corporate companies focused on weapons manufacturing are basically screwed, since they have no clients anymore, they are left with two options: Try to salvage everything they can and adjust to the new market, which might be hard (HIKS, Critical Mass) or impossible (Rancor) for some, risking bankrupcy  OR Start a war and get the weapons buisness back in action. Now, a human on human war would be counter intiuative, since they could always trace the enemy's weapons back to their respective companies., but an outbreak? You can't really trace that one back. Where did they get the strain to make the virus? Rancor is a likely candidate, as they are experts with chemical and biological agents and are known to make highly controversial weapons. Why did the outbreak start in the space station where Outbreak happens? I belive that HIKS owns, or at least built the station for the Transfed. They could have performed modifications to the station to release the strain all over it, whilst disguising them as repairs. This also kinda explains why we see hostile infected mechs even before Combot is taken over. My list of possible companies involved in the plot goes as follows: Rancor, the engineers of the strain and the creators of several bosses that are far too advanced to be random mutation (looking at you Necrosis), HIKS, the providers of the space station and the digital strain of the virus, also a possible fund supporter, Critical Mass, same as HIKS, possibly fund supporters aswell, HVM, by far the largest company and the one that has the most to lose, big fund provider. I can't come up with the roles of the other companies  A sidenote: The VIP might be a CEO of one of the companies that didn't participate in the whole ordeal, or found something out. That should explain the sudden outbreak in his property, which is supposed to be in a safe place. This is like, a truckload of speculation, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Judge by yourselves