BioShock: Rapture

Jesus with his long greasy hair and curly brown beard. He wore stained fishery-worker coveralls, his twitchy hands fiddling with that curved fish gutter he liked to carry. Naz was proof you could train a splicer, keep them in hand. Sort of. He was big on the SportBoost plasmid. Took way too much of it—but it kept him alert.

Fontaine knew he should feel safe. Lately, though, the closer he got to the Little Sisters, the more trapped he felt. The public-address announcement coming on at that moment wasn’t helping. The woman’s soothing voice was saying:

“The Little Sisters Orphanage: In troubled times, give your little girl the life that she deserves. Boarding and education free of charge! After all, children ARE the future of Rapture.”

Orphanages. It had suited his sense of irony, and maybe fed his bitterness, to create an orphanage.

Signaling Reggie and Naz to wait out in the hallway, he went through the double doors, the security bots rising up in the air at his approach. The bots scanned him and drifted away, whirring to themselves.

A few strides more and automatic turrets, looking like swivel chairs equipped with guns, swung to take him out, recognized his flashers, and settled back down.

Fontaine went down the hall to the little nursery-like cells where the girls were kept awaiting implantation—and harvesting. He looked through the window in the door and saw two children playing with a wooden train set on the floor of the rose-colored room. The “Little Sisters” developed a strangely uniform look, in their little pinafores, their faces and bodies remarkably similar thanks to a side effect of the sea-slug implantation. The sea slugs were like tapeworms inside them…

They’re not human anymore, he told himself.

After all, if you cut one of those kids, they instantly stopped bleeding. Cut off one of their little fingers, and the finger grew back, like she was some kind of lizard. The ADAM repaired them. That wasn’t human—they were superhuman, almost. They didn’t seem to get any older, either. They were in some weird state of growth stasis.

Brigid Tenenbaum came drifting up to him. She had that ghostly look about her again, like a stiff ventilator breeze might blow her away. Maybe he needed to resume their sexual relationship. But she was the one making excuses lately. Which was fine with him.

She looked through the window at the little girls. “They seem… okay,” he remarked. “I always worry we’re gonna get an inspection in here, people are gonna think, ‘Oh, them poor little tykes.’ But they don’t seem unhappy.”

Tenenbaum only grunted. Staring through the window, she took a cigarette from a pocket of her white lab smock and a holder from another pocket, united them, and put the holder in her mouth. Fontaine lit it for her with his platinum lighter. She blew the smoke into the air… but still said nothing. The hollowness in her eyes, the gauntness in her cheeks, making Fontaine think she was not so far from a “little sister” herself.

He went on, mostly to fill the silence: “But then we get people so broke in Rapture now they just turn their kids over to us.”

“The children are not… unhappy, as such,” Tenenbaum said, her speech carrying cigarette smoke slowly into the air. “Not in the usual sense of unhappy children. They barely remember family. Their minds—their minds are strange. The ADAM, the sea-slug connection—these make them strange. I find being around them very…” She cleared her throat. There was a wet gleaming in her eyes. “… very uncomfortable. Even with… with those things implanted in their bellies, they are still children. They play and sing. Sometimes they look at me…” She swallowed. “… And they smile.”

He glanced at her. Was she cracking up? “You get paid good, Brigid. Times are hard in Rapture. You want to continue to get that research funding, just accept what you gotta do for the check.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. Or she didn’t care. She just kept smoking, sucking through the holder, and gazing dreamily through the window at the two little girls, holding the smoke till her words carried it out. “They do not act so—unhappy. The Little Sisters. But—in their souls, they… Germans say ‘schmerzensschrei.’ They ‘feel the pain.’”

“Their souls! No such thing as souls.” He snorted.

“There are stories people on plasmids are seeing ghosts in Rapture…”

“Ghosts!” He shook his head disdainfully. “Lunatics! Where are you and Suchong in battling the side effects of the plasmids?” It was a key question for Fontaine—he figured the time would come when he’d need to use plasmids personally. Maybe a lot of them.

She didn’t respond. Fontaine felt a flare of anger, took her shoulder, turned her sharply to face him. “You listening to me, Tenenbaum?”

She looked quickly away, stepping back, refusing to meet his eyes. Her voice was monotone, with perhaps a trace of amusement. “Are you trying to frighten me, Frank? I have been to hell in my time.” She got all dreamy again. “I did not find tormentors there. More like kindred spirits… but these children—” She looked through the window again. “They awaken something in me.”

“Something—like what?”

She shook her head. “I do not wish to speak of it. Ah—you wish to know about… side effects? Yes. ADAM acts like a benign cancer. Destroying native cells and replacing them with unstable stem versions. This instability— it transfers amazing properties, but…” She sighed. “It is also what causes damage. The users, they need more and more ADAM. From a medical standpoint—catastrophic. But—you are a businessman.” She gave her peculiar little smile. “If you take away side effects—not addictive, perhaps. Not addictive, you don’t sell so much.”

“Yeah. But we need two strains of the stuff. The best stuff—for people like me, when the time comes. And the regular plasmids for everyone else. You work on that, Tenenbaum.”

She shrugged. She stared at the children, becoming dreamy again. After a moment, she murmured, “One of the children—she sat on my lap. I push her off…” She touched the glass of the window, before going on, letting smoke drift slowly from her mouth as she looked languorously through the glass. “… I push her off, I shout, ‘Get away from me!’ I can see the ADAM oozing out of the corner of her mouth!” She closed her eyes. Remembering. “Her filthy hair hanging in her face, dirty clothes, that dead glow in her eye… I feel—hatred.” Her voice broke. “Hatred, Frank. Like I never felt before. Bitter, burning fury. I can barely breathe. But Frank…” She opened her eyes and looked at him, for one surprising instant. “Then I know—it is not this child I hate.”

With that, Brigid Tenenbaum turned suddenly on her heel and strolled distractedly away, back toward the lab, trailing cigarette smoke behind her.

Fontaine stared after her. She was cracking up. Maybe he should have her taken out. But she was too valuable. And Ryan would be making his move. Everything was almost in place…

“Mr. Fontaine?”

He jumped a bit, startled by Suchong’s voice. Turning to the scientist as he bustled up from the other direction. “Christ, Suchong, you don’t need to sneak up on people like that.”

“Suchong is sorry.”

“The hell you are. Listen—what’s going on with Tenenbaum? She losing it or what?”

“Losing… it?” Looking the same as ever, each hair in place, his glasses polished, Suchong gazed placidly through the window at the sight that had so moved Tenenbaum. It was as if he were looking into a cage containing lab rats, which was, of course, just what he was doing. “Ah. Perhaps so. Suchong sometimes thinks she loses… objectivity.”

“Speaking of nutty females—you follow up on that one I told you about? For that special project?” This was what he’d mainly come here for today.

Suchong glanced up and down the hall. None of the assistants were in earshot. This was top secret. “Yes.” His voice was barely audible. “You were clever to put the listening device in this Jolene woman’s rooms. She spoke to one of her friends, a woman named Culpepper. This woman Culpepper, she tries to educate Jasmine. Talks to her about Ryan. To convince her he is the great tyrant, and so on.”

“Yeah, Reggie told me; he went over the transcripts. You think he doesn’t tell me everything first? Culpepper’s turned against Ryan. And Jasmine Jolene’s pregnant. Or maybe I should say Mary Catherine’s pregnant—that’s her real name. So—did you make her the offer?”

He bowed. “Tenenbaum made offer—she accepts! Money. So she doesn’t need Ryan to live. In exchange for the fertilized egg. Ryan’s baby! She came to lab, Tenenbaum extracted diploid zygote!”

“The what? Oh—basically, the kid, right? Prefetus?”