BioShock Rapture

“He continues his smuggling. We have secret Christian groups forming, a result of those blasted Bibles. Letters may be going out from Rapture. He’s selling weapons to Lamb’s bunch too! I thought I had an understanding with Fontaine—but he’s gone too far. While I was buying fish futures, he was cornering the market on genotypes and nucleotide sequences. He’s become too powerful—and that makes him too dangerous. For all of us. The Great Chain is pulling away from me, Bill. It’s time to give it a tug…”

“Right,” Bill said, resigned to it. “When’s this great, glorious raid coming about anyway, guv’nor?”

“Oh—two days. The twelfth, if all’s well. Sullivan and I have organized a large cadre to carry it out—heavily armed. But we’re not telling them where they’re going till we get there.”

“Well maybe I can help, guv. What’s the strategy?”

“I’m telling as few people as possible about that—no need for that hurt look, Bill; it’s not that I don’t trust you. But if Jasmine’s place was bugged—what else might be? You could be overheard talking about it to me, or Sullivan. We’re going to keep this under wraps. The fewer know about it, the better. We must try to be more … secure about it this time. And hope they’re not waiting for us when we get there…”

Fontaine Futuristics, Lab 25

1958

“Quite astonishing, the rate at which the child is growing,” said Brigid Tenenbaum, staring at the toddler lying in the transparent bubbling incubator.

“Yes,” muttered Dr. Suchong, as he pored over the biochemical extract results on the clipboard in his hands. “Mr. Fontaine will be quite pleased. Also—may have implications for all mankind. Children—so vile. This one … not child for long…”

They were in a cramped laboratory space lit by a yellow bulb—the door doubly locked, the air stale, smelling heavily of chemicals and hormones and electrical discharge.

The naked little boy floated on the lozenge-shaped incubator on a table between them, his sleeping face above the liquid. The child was in a kind of trance within the thick fluids.

Little “Jack” seemed older than he was—and that was as per schedule. The accelerated-growth program was really remarkable. Perhaps Suchong was right—it could lead, someday, to entirely sidestepping the need for a childhood in future children. They could be grown with fantastic acceleration and taught with conditioning—as this child was being taught. Flickering lights, recorded voices, electrodes sparking his brain imbued him with the basics of learning—the ability to walk, memories of imaginary parents—that would have taken years to accumulate normally. He was a tabula rasa—anything they wished to imprint on him could be pressed into the yielding tissues of his young brain … just as Frank Fontaine had requested. She had heard Fontaine refer to young Jack here as “the ultimate con.” The backdoor entrance into the well-protected fortress that was Ryan. Jack had been, after all, taken from Jasmine Jolene’s uterus, extracted as a tiny embryo that was just twelve days past being a mere zygote …

“I must complete the W-Y-K conditioning,” Suchong muttered, setting the clipboard on the table. “The child must be set in bathysphere soon, sent to the surface … Mr. Fontaine has a boat waiting already…”

She frowned. “What is this W-Y-K?”

Suchong glanced over at her in rank suspicion. “You test me? You know I am not to tell you everything about conditioning!”

“Oh yes—I forgot. Scientific curiosity is strong in me, Suchong.”

“Hmph, woman’s curiosity, that is more to the point…” Suchong tinkered with a valve, increasing the flow of a hormone into the incubator. The child twitched in response … its legs kicked …

What, she wondered, were they doing to this child?

And then she wondered: Why are such thoughts troubling me?

But they’d troubled her increasingly. Their work with the little girls; this work with this child. It was beginning to stir memories in her. Her childhood. Her parents. Kind faces …

Moments of love …

It was as if all the exposure to children called to some child locked within her own breast. A child who wanted to be set free.

Set us all free, whispered the child.

She shook her head. No. Sympathy, caring for laboratory subjects—that was a scientific hell she would not enter.

Unless, perhaps—she was already there …

Neptune’s Bounty

1958

“Crikey, how many men d’we have here?” Bill asked, a bit awed by the numbers of heavily armed men massing in front of the broad, steel-walled corridor outside Neptune’s Bounty.

Bill was carrying a tommy gun; Sullivan had a pistol in his right hand, a hand radio in his left. Cavendish had a shotgun in one hand and the Rapture version of a search warrant in the other. “Lot of buggers for a raid, Chief, innit?” Bill asked. “We really need all these blokes?”

Sullivan muttered, “Yeah. We do. And there’s a lot more moving in on Fontaine Futuristics.”

“Fontaine Futuristics—what, at the same moment?”