by John Shirley
“You guys don’t go in for extras, do you,” Fontaine observed. “Maybe a little decoration…”
“We will add more equipment later,” Dr. Suchong said, bending over the table. “Decorations are superfluous.” He selected a syringe and set about drawing a glowing blue fluid from a beaker. The man on the table looked at the syringe with frightened eyes; he writhed and made a mewing sound.
“In time, Suchong will add computers, such other devices.”
“Computers?” Fontaine asked. “What’s a computer?”
“Like … adding machine,” Suchong said, putting alcohol on Brougham’s shoulder. “But faster, smarter. Mr. Ryan has designs. We can take to Fontaine Futuristics … Now—injecting the solution we call EVE. It will activate the ADAM we have already incorporated into him…”
He injected Brougham’s shoulder with EVE. The man strapped to the table groaned and tried to pull away. Suchong relentlessly drove the syringe plunger home.
“We are ready,” Suchong said. “Please back away from subject…”
All three of them backed away from the man on the exam table, all the way to the door. “The subject” was muttering to himself. Visibly quivering in the leather restraints. Shuddering. Shaking. Till shaking became convulsing. He shrieked, and his back arched, bones audibly creaking. Fontaine was afraid the guy was going to snap his own spine.
“It’s coming out of me it’s coming out of me it’s coming out of meeeeee!” Brougham shrieked.
Then there was a sizzling sound—the smell of ozone and burning flesh—and blue electricity arced up, passing from the man’s restrained hands to his head, the arc crackling for a moment—and then it snapped up at the electric light—which burst and went out.
The room went dark. Black as the pit of hell.
“What the devil—!” Fontaine said.
As if the devil in question were responding to Fontaine, a reddish-blue glow surged up again, much brighter now, illuminating the room. The exam room strobed in and out of visibility, Brougham’s hands hissing great fat sparks that blackened the walls. The only light source was the eerie glow generated by the man on the table. A hissing sound filled the room. The glow in the man’s eyes began to pulse.
Fontaine shook his head, not at all certain of what he had gotten himself into. He realized he should have brought Reggie, maybe Lance too.
“Doctor!” Tenenbaum shouted. “The tranquilizer!”
Fontaine saw for the first time that Suchong had something ready in his hand—it looked like a gun, but when he fired it at the man on the exam table it made a soft spitting sound, and there was no muzzle flash. The man yelped, and Fontaine saw that a dart of some kind had shot into the man’s hip, where it waggled with his movements.
Those movements calmed … and the light diminished as the electrical glow ebbed away.
“You see,” Suchong said, “when mind shuts down, his power too shut down…”
“We should have insulated that lightbulb,” Tenenbaum said, reaching back to open the door, as the last of the electrical shine vanished.
The light from the hall indirectly illuminated the chamber, and the three of them approached Brougham, who once more seemed semiconscious, moving his head gently from side to side.
The experimental subject seemed relatively unhurt, to Fontaine’s surprise, though the man’s hospital gown was reduced to charred threads. “He should have gotten burned, shouldn’t he, with all that electricity shooting around in him? Maybe he’s all burned inside himself?”
Tenenbaum shook her head as she examined the experimental subject, taking his pulse. “No. He is not burned. This is part of plasmid phenomenon. He emanates the electricity but is not harmed by it. Not exactly … harmed.”
“So—what’s the practical use of this stuff?” Fontaine demanded. “How’re we going to make money on it?”
Tenenbaum shrugged. “Can be used to start engines, galvanize equipment that is missing power, yes?”
Looking closer, Fontaine saw there was a mark on Brougham—around his eyes. Not exactly scar tissue, but more like a thickening of the skin—a cancerlike growth across his face. Radiating outward from his eyes was a fanciful mask of thickened red tissue.
“You notice the extraneous tissue,” Dr. Suchong said, nodding. “Does not seem … lethal. But it is curious. Some subjects have more than others…”
“Some of them? How many of these guys do you have?”
“A few still alive. Come—this way.” He led the way from the chamber.
Fontaine was glad to get out of there. He might’ve gotten fried during that demonstration. “So—what did we just see? That was a plasmid, right?” He added wonderingly, “Lightning coming out of a man!”
Dr. Suchong paused in the barren metal corridor under a naked yellow light and rubbed his hands together.
Fontaine and Tenenbaum lingered with him in the hall, all of them a little shaken up. Fontaine glanced through an open door into a small, cluttered lab where one of the nondescript sea slugs squirmed in a bubbling aquarium on a table seething with fluid-filled tubes.“Suchong is most impressed by plasmid possibilities! Powerful electrical charge, drawn from atmosphere, can be used to activate machines—or to attack enemies! Maybe for self-defense against sharks when our men work in sea! That Brougham—he cannot control it. But soon Suchong will improve stem-cell communication with the nervous system! Soon a man can control this power! And other powers!”
Fontaine found that his pulse was racing with a mounting excitement. “What other powers?”
“We have found special genes, can be changed with stem alteration, using ADAM—so a man has power to project cold, as Brougham project lightning! Power to project fire! To project rage! To make things move—with power of mind alone!”
Fontaine looked at him. Was he in earnest—or was this a sell job? Was Suchong trying to con him? But he’d just seen a sample of plasmid power. “If that’s true, ADAM is the ultimate score. ADAM—and EVE. It’s fuckin’ amazing.”
Tenenbaum nodded, looking through the door at the sea slug in the aquarium. “Yes. The little sea slug has come along and glued together all the crazy ideas I’ve had since the war. It can resurrect cells, bend the double helix—so that black can be reborn white, tall can be short. Weak can become strong! But we are just beginning … there is more we need, Frank. Much more…”
Fontaine grinned—and winked at her. “You’ll get whatever you need! Fontaine Futuristics will transform Rapture! I feel it in my bones.”
Tenenbaum looked curiously at Fontaine—right at him. But he suspected she could look right at him only because she was thinking of him as a specimen. “Really? You feel that in bones?”
“Nah, that’s just an expression—what I’m saying is, this is going to go big. And it’s got to be presented big. I’m going to buy space from Ryan Industries … and we’re going to move Fontaine Futuristics out of this dump, into the best-designed location in Rapture! It’ll look like the inside of a mansion, with lots of décor and sculpture so that people’ll sense the power behind those doors!” He broke off, shaking his head. Thinking that he was starting to sound like … a businessman.
Won’t have to do it long, he told himself. The bunko possibilities in this one are all about selling something to people they only think they want—until they’ve got it. And once they’ve got it—it’s got them. Meaning I’ll have ’em in my hip pocket.
Suchong glanced at the sea slug—and licked his lips. Something was troubling him. “But Mr. Fontaine—there is danger.” He looked gravely at Fontaine. “Danger in using ADAM—and in developing plasmids. You should know before proceeding. Come this way. You shall see…”
They went down a metal-walled corridor, feet clumping on wooden planks. The air at this end smelled like raw chemicals and curdled human sweat. They came to a steel door stenciled
SPECIAL STUDIES: KEEP OUT.
Suchong put his hand on the knob …
“Perhaps we should not go
in!” Brigid Tenenbaum said suddenly, not looking at either of them but holding the door shut with the flat of her hand. She stared at the closed door.
“Why?” Fontaine asked, wondering if they were planning to lock him up in there. It occurred to him that maybe he should be careful around scientists who strap random people to tables and inject them with things …
“It is dangerous inside—perhaps diseased…”
Fontaine swallowed. But he made up his mind. “There can’t be any part of this I don’t know about. It’s all my business.” He wanted plasmids—bad. But he needed to know what the risks were. If this was something that exposed him too much …
She nodded once and stepped back. Suchong opened the door. Immediately, a disturbing, unnatural smell emanated from the room. It was a scent Fontaine would expect from exposed human brains when the top of the skull was sawed away …
His stomach lurched. But he followed Suchong one step, just one, into the room. “We try to mix some genes from sea creatures with human,” Suchong was saying. “Give man powers of certain animals. But…” The musty, ill-lit rectangular chamber was about thirty-five feet by thirty, but it seemed smaller because of the shifting heap of the thing that dominated it. Clinging to the walls opposite Fontaine was something that might’ve once been human. It was as if someone had taken human flesh and made it as malleable as clay—bones and flesh made pliable—and plastered it onto the wall. Beaded with sweat, the mass of human flesh seemed to simply cling there, spread over two walls and a corner. A bloated face muttered to itself, at the center of the creature, near the ceiling; several human organs were exposed, including a heart and kidneys, damp and quivering, dangling like meat in a butchery from crust-edged gaps in its body, the creature’s big limbs …
“What the hell!” Fontaine blurted.
The thing’s beak clicked and muttered in response.
Fontaine turned and dashed from the room. He went five paces down the hall and, feeling dizzy, gagging, came to a stumbling stop, leaning against Rapture’s cold metal bulkhead.
He felt a surge of relief when he heard the door of the Special Studies room clang shut. Tenenbaum and Suchong strolled up beside him, Suchong with his hands casually in his coat pockets, looking faintly amused. Tenenbaum seemed almost humanly concerned for him.
“So…” Fontaine swallowed bile. “You got this process under control or not?”
“We do now,” Tenenbaum said, looking thoughtfully at the yellow overhead light. “Yes. We will not be producing more of … those.”
“Then—I want you to do something for me. Kill that thing in there. Incinerate it. No traces left—I want no bad publicity. I want more plasmids like the one that makes lightning. But more variety. More controllable … easy to package … Stuff that makes a man smarter, stronger. The stuff that makes us money. You understand? Money!”
Ryan Amusements, Rapture Memorial Museum
1954
Stanley Poole stood at the outer edge of the small crowd waiting for Dr. Lamb to begin. Discreetly passed-out flyers in maintenance station 17 and Apollo Square advertised “A Free Public Lecture by the Eminent Psychiatrist, Dr. Sofia Lamb, on a New Hope for the Working Man.”
The lanky, swan-necked blonde in the modish horn-rims stepped up in front of the museum’s Rapture Grows tableau, with its stylized images of Rapture’s founding workers. She gazed at the little crowd like a prophetess, her benevolent expression condescending but motherly, her smile infinitely knowing. She pressed the button to start the museum tableau’s recording. A friendly male voice intoned, “After the platform is secured, work progresses at an astounding rate. Designed to be the foundation of Rapture, workers toil around the clock to create the metropolis you see today.”
“Do you hear that?” She clasped her hands behind her back and chuckled ironically, making eye contact with the small crowd—mostly low-level workers, all listening raptly, though Poole realized that Simon Wales was there too. “That recording,” Sofia Lamb went on, “is a compact little insight into Rapture! ‘Workers toil around the clock to create the metropolis’! And in the Laying the Foundation exhibit, right over there—what does the recording say?” Her voice was mockingly arch as she recited: “‘Engineers work to overcome obstacles, such as diamond-hard rock, obstinate sea life and unexpected casualties!’ Think about it, my friends—how much needless suffering have we taken for granted?” She shook her head sadly. “Unexpected casualties? Oh, Andrew Ryan fully expected them! He just didn’t care! A great many lives were lost in building Rapture—those lives were sacrifices to the ‘god’ that is the human ego! Ryan’s ego! The common man and woman in Rapture is overworked and underpaid; they’re left exhausted. They toiled around the clock to create this city—but how much of what they created do they really share in? What did Andrew Ryan really offer—but paper? A little something called Rapture dollars … mere documents, paper money! Paper for paupers! And precious little of that! Who, I ask you, really owns Rapture? The people who built it? or the plutocrats who control it? The many—or the few? You know the answer!”
A good many in the crowd were nodding. Some frowned, unsure—but most seemed convinced. They’d been thinking something of the sort themselves, Poole supposed. Here was someone who said it right out loud … Dr. Sofia Lamb. A psychiatrist—using her psychology on the common man.
“This woman Lamb is becoming troublesome, Poole,” Ryan had said. “See what she’s up to. Stay discreet…”
If Ryan could hear this, Poole thought, he’d blow his carefully barbered top.
Sofia Lamb paused thoughtfully, then pointed at the ornate walls. “Rapture looks like a great big palace at times, doesn’t it? It abounds in luxury—but where’s housing for those who maintain it? You’re crowded into places like Maintenance Seventeen! But that’s traditional in a palace, isn’t it? There are the luxury quarters for the elite—and then there’s the little cubbyholes under the stairs where the servants live! Palace servants have always outnumbered kings and queens! Yet we blindly continue to serve them! My vision of a new, united Rapture is revolutionary—yes, revolutionary! I say it proudly! And yet all I’m bringing is a new spirit of cooperation, my friends. A new shape for love! Cooperation, in a place like Ryan’s Rapture, is transformative, and the word I’m bringing is a sacrament, the beginning of a new church of cooperation. I have had an inspiration that seems to come from some cosmic place of certainty—and it is telling me that Rapture’s foundation on competition is cracking! Competition is division, my friends. A house divided cannot stand!” As she spoke, Poole noticed, she became more intense; her nostrils flared, her eyes flashed, her hands fisted. She radiated charisma—just as Ryan did. But her magnetism was somehow powerfully maternal. Poole glanced at Simon Wales and noticed he seemed totally captivated by Lamb. She went on, declaring loudly, “We must evolve to heal Rapture—and we will heal it by redesigning it from within! We will create a true utopia—and utopians fit to live in utopia! We will build a unity that will thrive, even as the surface world fails! But the new Rapture will not be based on greed—it will be a collective based on sharing! What is the collective? It is the body of Rapture! Therein will lie its truth! An end to the burden of mindless competition—a turning to cooperation, altruism, community—and communality!”
Holy cow, Poole thought. Ryan was going to flip. The boss was caught between a rock and a hard place. Ryan was officially against censorship—so how could he censor this woman? But from what Poole had heard about the secret structures being expanded in the Persephone Project, Ryan had a plan for taking care of Red organizers …
As the speech ended he turned away—and spotted someone at the back of the crowd he hadn’t noticed here before—a man with dark glasses and a hat covering his bald head.
Poole knew him, despite the man’s attempt at going incognito. It was Frank Fontaine. And Fontaine had a mighty thoughtful look on his face …
* * *
Frank Fontaine wasn’t aware of Poole watching
him. He was mesmerized by Sofia Lamb.
The woman’s amazing, Fontaine thought. What a con artist. She was a grifter with two or three college degrees—he had to admire her. “What is the collective?” she’d said. “It is the body of Rapture!” Good stuff. You could plug almost any feeling you wanted into that. Conning one guy at a time wasn’t much challenge.
But a whole crowd—conning a whole population. Man, that was a thing of beauty.
This Lamb woman knew how you got “the people” on your side. Figure out what was bothering them and use it as a kind of harness, and pretty soon they’re pulling your wagon for you. Smart. “But that’s traditional in a palace, isn’t it? There are the luxury quarters for the elite—and then there’s the little cubbyholes under the stairs where the servants live! Palace servants have always outnumbered kings and queens!”
Smart—give ’em something to repeat to one another. “We’re like the palace servants, living under the stairs, see?”
This Dr. Lamb was going to be too much competition, of course. In time he’d have to see to it that Ryan got the info he needed to arrest her. Meantime, she was inspiring him, along with the crowd. Only, not the same way …
He’d do it all his way, of course. She was kind of the female version. His own version of radical leadership would be very different.
Maybe it was too early to really get going on it. But he could start to plant the seeds. Get it growing. And in time—harvest.
Andrew Ryan’s Office
1954
Bill found Andrew Ryan at his desk. “Mr. Ryan—I have that maintenance report.”
Ryan glanced up. “Oh, Bill, have a seat…” He looked back at the folder in his hands as Bill sat down across from him. The folder was marked CONFIDENTIAL. “I just want to have another look at the end of this one … I had Stanley Poole look into some things … this Lamb woman is a problem…” He flipped a page. “Bringing that woman in was bad judgment…” He grunted to himself, closed the folder, pushed it aside, and opened another. “Yes. Poole’s also found out something about Fontaine’s new venture he’s calling Futuristics … Seems quite … pregnant with possibility … Take a load off while I sort through this…”