by John Shirley
But Babcock had always seemed levelheaded—and he had two small girls to think of—plump little twins. Yet there was Babcock, using Incinerate!, making a ball of fire appear in his hands.
Toby Griggs had a look in his eyes that made Sam think of a rooster back home on the ranch about to jab a rival with its beak—that mean glitter in its little eyeballs. As for Babcock, it looked to Sam like the mesh of red welts on his head was pulsing in rhythm with his angry panting. A wavery column of hot air rose from the fire flickering over Babcock’s hands. Strange that the flames emanating from his fingers didn’t burn them—but plasmids were like that. It seemed to Sam that heavy plasmid use made people into something like rattlesnakes, not hurt by their own venom.
Toby and Babcock danced around each other, teeth bared, wild-eyed, drool running from the corners of their mouths, energies simmering in their raised hands. To Sam their threats sounded like babbling; like they were barely aware of what they were saying.
“Threatening me, Babcock?” Toby howled. “Is that right? Is it? I’m tired of you big slobs pushing me around! Why do you think I paid good money for this plasmid? I may not eat for a week, but I have power to keep plug uglies like you from throwing your weight around! I’m a new man! I can feel it! I’m no one to screw with now, Babcock! Back off or die!”
“Die? Me? I can burn you to a cinder! I swore I’d defend my family against anyone who threatened them, and I’ll do it!”
“No one’s threatening your family! You’ve been getting nutty from the moment you got that plasmid!” Toby snarled. “You can’t handle it! Maybe you took too much EVE and not enough ADAM—ya don’t know what you’re doing! You’re nuts, Babcock! Batty, crackers, crazy! Back off or I’ll put a charge in you that’ll turn your head into a thousand-watt lightbulb!”
“How are you gonna do that when you’re a burned-up cinder, Griggs, huh? Answer me that!”
Fire whirled restlessly, roaring in Babcock’s hands, as if it were eager to destroy.
Toby Griggs growled to himself and took the offensive. He twisted his shoulders about, grimacing with insane concentration. Electricity writhed from his fingers, crackling through the air at Babcock, just as Babcock’s wife—a pudgy, mousy-haired woman in slippers and a loose blue frock—came rushing up to him on her short legs, throwing her stubby arms around him. “Noooo, Harold!” she yelled. “Don’t do that! You’ll get us killed!”
Then she let out a pealing shriek as the Electro Bolt struck her and Babcock at once … an extra-big bolt of blue-white lightning—everything Toby Griggs could summon up.
Onlookers screamed as Babcock and his wife went rigid. The two of them were doing an absurd little dance together, locked in a fatal embrace as the current raged through them, sparking blue from their bared teeth. Mrs. Babcock’s hair stood on end; her dress caught fire …
Their eyes smoked and then boiled out of their heads. Their faces contorted.
The charge burst and sparks flew into the walls and floor as Mr. and Mrs. Babcock, flesh fused in a grotesque mock of marriage, fell in a limp, smoldering heap.
“Oh my God,” Sam muttered, staring at them. “They’re dead! Toby Griggs, what have you done!”
“You—you all saw it!” Toby said shrilly, backing away from the gathering crowd between the bunks. “He threw a fireball at my head! He was raving, completely out of his gourd! He was on a plasmid high! He can’t handle his plasmids, and he just … he tried to … tried to kill me! He…”
Then Toby bolted, dodging past grasping hands, out the front door of the suites.
Two little girls, the five-year-old Babcock twins, came tiptoeing up together, clutching each other in life as their parents clutched each other in death.
“Mommy?” quavered one little girl.
“Daddy?” quavered the other.
Two little girls. All alone now. Orphans. Two little sisters …
Fontaine Futuristics, Rapture
1955
“We have too few sea slugs,” said Brigid Tenenbaum, squinting into a microscope at a dead gastropod, as Frank Fontaine entered lab 23. These new research digs were bigger, roomier, with ports and windows, levels, and a balcony-walk looking down on the central concourse of Fontaine Futuristics. Tenenbaum turned, frowning thoughtfully to Fontaine. “Only special gastropod works for ADAM mutagen and base for EVE … and these, all gone.”
“We’ll have to cut back plasmid production,” Fontaine said gloomily, looking at the remaining sea slugs squirming in the aquarium. Ugly little fuckers. “Couldn’t we breed the little bastards? Create more sea slugs with, what do you call it, animal husbandry?”
“Perhaps in time. But very slow process, much experimentation, maybe years. Better is to increase individual sea-slug production of mutagen—of ADAM. This can be done more quickly—if we use host.”
“A host? Oh … Maybe we can hijack a ship, send you down the sailors.”
“We try adults already. Two subjects. They sickened and died. Screaming—very noisy. Irritating. One of them reached to me…” She looked in wonder at her hand. “Tried to hold on to my hand. Begging, take it out, take it out of me … But children! Ah—it likes to be in children. The sea slug is happy there.”
“It’s happy … in children? Well—how’s it work exactly?”
“We implant sea slug in lining of child’s stomach. The sea slug bonds with cells, becomes symbiotic with human host. After host feeds, we induce regurgitation, and then we have twenty, thirty times more yield of usable ADAM.”
“And how do you know it works so good on kids?”
Dr. Suchong answered him as he pushed a gurney into the room. “Suchong and Tenenbaum experiment on this child!” Stretched out on the gurney was what appeared to be a sleeping child, a rather ordinary little white girl in a dressing gown, strapped to the wheeled hospital bed. She was perhaps six years old. Her eyes opened—she looked up at him sleepily, gave him a distant, fuzzy smile. Drugged.
“Where in hell you get that kid?”
“Child was sick,” Tenenbaum said. “Brain tumor. We tell parents maybe we heal. We implant sea slug in her abdomen, inside. It cures her tumor! We keep her tranquilized—she talks in her mind to sea slug…”
As if in response, the little girl lifted a hand—and touched her own belly caressingly.
Tenenbaum gave a little satisfied grunt. “Yes. She will be productive.”
“You intend to use this child to create a new plasmid base…” Fontaine shook his head. “One child? Will it be enough? The market for it is exploding! People are going wild for the stuff! I was going to start major marketing, stores, maybe even vending machines…”
“This is tester child,” Suchong said. “We need more, many more. Implant, feed, induce regurgitation—much mutagen produced, much ADAM. Better if not tranquilized. We must prepare hosts for this. Condition them!”
“How come it … it likes children?” Fontaine asked. He could almost feel a sea slug squirming in his own belly. Sheer imagination, but the thought nauseated him.
Tenenbaum shrugged. “Child stem cells are more malleable. More … responsive. They bond with the sea slug. We need children, Frank—many children!”
Fontaine snorted. “And where are we supposed to get those? From a mail-order catalogue?”
Dr. Suchong frowned and shook his head. “Suchong has not seen such catalogue. Not needed. Two children available already. Orphan girls. Babcock twins. They stay with people in Artemis Suites—their parents dead. Both parents killed by plasmid attack. And they are girls, the right age—perfect! We pay to bring them here.”
“Okay; they’ve got to be kids—but why girls?” Fontaine asked. “People are even more protective about little girls.”
Tenenbaum winced and turned back to the microscope, muttering, “For some reason girls take sea-slug implant better than boys.”
Fontaine wondered what little boy they’d experimented on to determine that and what had become of him. But he didn’t really care.
He didn’t.
And in fact—there was one place that could supply children for all sorts of things. “So—just girls, eh? That’s okay; that’ll just be fewer bunks in the orphanage.”
“Orphanage?” Tenenbaum blinked in puzzlement. “There is an orphanage in Rapture?”
Fontaine grinned. “No, but there will be. You just gave me the idea, with this thing about the Babcock orphans. I’ll donate the money for the orphanage! Yeah! ‘The Little Sisters Orphanage.’ We’ll get our adorable little plasmid farms … and we’ll train ’em up right. We got to do this soon! I’ve got more orders for plasmids than I can fill in a year!” Something about the idea energized him. He felt a kind of shudder, almost a release go through him as he thought about it. Orphanages. Like where he’d grown up. Orphanages leading to money. And money … leading to power. “Money and power, Brigid. Money and power! It’s all right there, low-hanging fruit for the plucking … in a gatherer’s garden.”
He heard the door open and turned to see his bodyguard come in, grimacing. He’d left Reggie standing at the door outside Fontaine Futuristics—now his hand was clasping his right biceps, blood streaming from his fingers. “Say, anybody got any bandages here?”
“Reggie!” Fontaine stepped to the door, looked down the concourse. Saw no one. “What happened? You hurt bad?”
Suchong was already methodically sponging off the wound on Reggie’s arm.
“Ouch! Oh, I’m not hurt bad. But I’ll tell you what—somebody shot at me. Kind of at random, seemed like. The prick. I shot back, but I think I missed him. He took off.”
“Shot at you … you mean a constable?” Fontaine asked.
“Don’t think so. I wasn’t doing anything to make a constable shoot at me. And he didn’t have a badge. Loopy-looking plasmid-head with a pistol. Spots all over his face. It’s been like this lately—random shooting. Ryan’s started putting in those security turrets, to keep these guys in check. You’ll want to get one of those babies for this place. Camera with a machine gun that picks out targets. I dunno how it … ouch, Doc, shit!”
“Suchong is so sorry,” Dr. Suchong said, not sounding sorry as he wound a bandage tightly around the wound.
“Like I was saying, I dunno how the turret thing keeps from killing the wrong people. All I know is—on and off all day there’s been gunfire. Plasmids … that’s the reason I don’t use that stuff. I don’t like firing my gun without a goddamn reason.” He winced again. “Waste of good bullets.”
Andrew Ryan’s Office
1955
Andrew Ryan was standing at the window, looking broodingly out at the lights of Rapture shimmering through the sea, thinking: Steps will have to be taken … I have tolerated too much …
“You wanted to see Poole?” Sullivan asked, coming in with the ratlike little reporter.
Ryan nodded and sat at his desk. Stanley Poole and Sullivan sat across from him. “Well, Poole? What’s your report about this Topside character? People are talking about him as if he’s a hero—but he’s an outsider, as I understand it…”
Sullivan frowned. “I could’ve got you the dirt on him, Mr. Ryan.”
“I know, Chief. But your men are sometimes too … obvious. Poole here has a strange gift for being ignored. Well, Poole?”
Stanley Poole licked his lips nervously. “Yes sir, well, near as I can find out, this guy they’re calling Johnny Topside—he’s a deep-sea diver. There was some snoopers out here, you remember; our subs made sure they stopped snooping. When they went missing, why, he came out to see what was going on. Went down at the main lighthouse and found a way in. One of the air locks, I guess. People are pretty impressed with him, making his way here. Acts like he’s on his own, just wants to help. He’s asking about missing girls, seems like…”
“Is he? What is his real name?”
“I’m sorry—he’s being cagey about that. Seems like he prefers an alias. Changes ’em around. Sounds like a secret-agent type to me. G-man is what I figure—hell, how’d he get all the info on boats missing in this area, all that stuff, if he didn’t have connections?”
Ryan pinched the bridge of his nose. He was having small, annoying headaches, more and more often. Hearing that there might be a government agent in Rapture made his head redouble its throbbing. “You got anything on him, Chief?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Same impression. I haven’t found out his name either. Easy enough to do. I can take him over to the new facility…”
Ryan snapped his fingers. “Precisely what I had in mind. He’s an outsider. Who knows who he’s affiliated with. We cannot let a random outsider wander about in here, asking questions … Arrest him immediately, Sullivan. And while you’re at it bring in that wretched Lamb woman. Poole here reports she may be connected to our confetti bomber. I’ve had enough of her Marxist babbling. She’s turned half the maintenance workers against me.”
“You want her charged with something?” Sullivan asked.
“No. I want her to simply … disappear. Into Persephone. Let her followers feel abandoned.”
Sullivan nodded. “You got it, Mr. Ryan.”
“Lamb’s got a daughter,” Poole pointed out. “Girl named Eleanor.”
“Does she? Well, find a home for the girl, Sullivan.”
Poole shrugged. “That colored woman, Grace Holloway, looks after her sometimes. She’ll take the kid…”
“Fine, fine,” Ryan said, with a dismissive wave, “let her take the kid. For now. The child may be of use later…”
Apollo Square
1955
“Spider Splicers, that’s what they are,” Greavy said.
“Spider what?” Bill asked.
“Splicers, Bill,” Ruben Greavy repeated. “Splicers. That’s the common term for real plasmid addicts.”
Fascinated, Bill watched the two splicers, a man and a woman, moving on all fours along the sides of a tramcar. They were crawling on the wall like bugs, defying gravity. “Seen my share o’ plasmid users,” Bill allowed. “But this … sticking to things like bloody bugs … Going too far, maybe.”
“Going too far is the splicer way,” Greavy said dryly. “They all go rogue in time. They’ve gotten obsessed, this bunch. They’re all about their plasmid splicing. Injecting Fontaine’s mutagens, looking for EVE to activate it…”
Bill McDonagh and Ruben Greavy were standing by the tram tracks in Apollo Square, watching the tram go by. Adhering like geckos to the metal sides of the slowly moving trams, the spider-splicer couple was ordinarily dressed, but their heads and cheeks were knobbed with ugly reddish welts, growths from abusing ADAM and EVE.
Shifting his heavy toolbox from his left hand to his right, Bill reflected on how tempting plasmids were. He could use that wall-climbing power for getting at difficult-to-fix places in Rapture. He could use the new telekinesis plasmid to move objects about, adding an extra pair of invisible hands to a job. One man could do the work it would normally take three to do.
But Bill knew better. Some could take them and stay more or less sane for a while. But keep taking them—and you eventually went barking mad.
He watched as the male spider splicer grinned clownishly into the tramcar from its roof, head dipping to stare upside down in a window, leering at the passengers cringing back from him. “You lovey snuggle ducks!” he yelled hoarsely. “You little chocolates in this chocolate box of steel!” He cackled something more that Bill couldn’t hear as the tram trundled away from him and Greavy. But he could see the giggling woman reaching in through a window, clutching for someone’s arm …
A gunshot cracked from inside the tram, and smoke drifted out the open window as the female spider splicer jerked her arm back. She screeched in pain and fury, and her splicer partner fired his own gun into the window while clinging upside down. Then the tramcar slipped from sight beyond the kiosks.
Bill sighed and shook his head. “Out of their ever-lovin’ bloody minds, they are!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Greavy said
thoughtfully. “But I think of it as part of a Darwinian process. This madness, these side effects—they’ll die of it, eventually, fighting each other, perhaps. A possibly necessary winnowing in Rapture. Ryan and I knew something of the sort would come—some vector of purging. Eventually plasmids will be developed with fewer side effects. These early users are like guinea pigs…”
Bill glanced at Greavy. He’d never liked the man much, and that sort of comment was one of the reasons. “We’d best get to that inspection You think we should call the constables about that gunfight?”
Greavy shrugged. “There are so many gunfights now, so much antagonism—the constables can’t deal with most of it. Ryan’s attitude is that if two consenting adults want to duel, let them.”
Troubled, Bill led the way across the tracks and down a short stairway. Workers hoisted a big sign into place at the entrance to a new institution built into a leased space. The sign, with silvery metal lettering, read:
FONTAINE’S
CENTER
For the Poor
Framing the lettering was a relief sculpture, one on each side, of hands reaching down, to pull other hands upward …
“Never thought I’d see that in Rapture,” Bill muttered, as they paused to watch. “A charity!”
“Shouldn’t be here at all,” Greavy said, frowning. “Just makes things worse. Charity trains people to be dependent. It’s in the natural order of things for people to strive and fail—for a good number of them to fall by the wayside, and … you know. Just die. Fontaine’s Center for the Poor!” He snorted skeptically. “What’s that a front for?”
“Anybody else, I’d give ’em the benefit of the doubt,” Bill said. “With Fontaine—I’ve got to wonder what the bastard is up to…”
“Politics,” Greavy murmured. “Political allies. Maybe his own little army—the army of the poor…”
“He’ll have no shortage of poor to draw on,” Bill said as they moved off. “Artemis Suites and Pauper’s Drop are stuffed with blokes out of work—and if they work, they still feel crowded and underpaid. Not everyone can start their own business. And if they do, who’ll clean the toilets?”