This is a trap! This is such a massive trap!
Think about it. Liv has walked into a basement with no cameras or other tech to use her power on. There's a big featureless room with a really thick door and a really strong bar (that her powers won't work on).
I don't know how, but someone has figured out her powers/weaknesses. This is a trap, and she needs to get out now.
The reason I laugh is that while I can think of several reasons I disagree with you, I'm forced to the conclusion that you're very much in the right to be pointing this out.
The Life Foundation has very little if any reason to think that we're coming. Even if they did know we were after them, I don't think they could have predicted
this exact attack vector with us coming
right to this place at this time. Not without some kind of clairvoyance or precognition or whatever. And building a large, seemingly permanent structure like this into the basement of your building isn't something you do on a whim or in a hurry, either; realistically they'd have needed to prepare this trap for us months in advance, well before we made the decision to do anything against the Life Foundation in the first place.
So either they have some
really impressive ability to predict the future, or this trap was originally designed with someone else in mind. After all, a prison cell designed to hold the Hulk can equally well be repurposed to hold Thor, and so on.
I could be wrong about the murderosity at play here. I wonder if the power washing is from bloodstains, but I don't think there was any signs of struggle that would follow someone being murdered, especially murdered hard enough the walls need cleaning. Nothing noted as dented or torn. The papers had no bloodstains but pages missing. It's odd that the Foundation tore out specific pages instead of just taking everything.
Hm. My impression is that until/unless they merge with someone, symbiotes are basically sapient goo-beings. As such, if you're trying to contain them without knowing a lot about their capabilities, it would seem like a very high priority to stop them from leaving tiny bits of themselves anywhere.
For instance, can they control bits of themselves that are detached from the main body? If you experiment you may or may not be able to tell- they might be having the bits play dead. They might be able to do sneaky shit like slip microscopic bits of themselves out on the ground to be tracked out on the researchers' shoes, gather up in a corner or something, and eventually have enough mass to spread out across a computer keyboard in a thin film and operate it.
This is very paranoid, of course, but when you're dealing with something that violates a lot of the laws of biology as you know it, and probably has superpowers, paranoia is an understandable trait.
So maybe the reason for the aggressive powerwashing and leaving the computers powered down when nobody's in the room actually doing work on the project is to reduce the number of potential points of attack and infiltration vectors for a microscopically small lingering threat?
