It was a very bad day for one Frank Fontaine.
Not the worst one though, that one belonged to the day he died the most humiliating way possible by being stabbed to death by the mob of little girls.
Which leads to his latest situation.
As he was dying on the floor from the numerous syringe wounds, Fountain wondered what it will be:
Fire and Brimstone, according to Christians? Nothingness like the Commies stated? Or will he go down a lot of ranks in the food chain of reincarnation a will become a rock for eternity, like the Buddhists said?
The last thing he expected, though, is to wake up from something that at first had a passing resemblance to the vita-chambers, and hear the voice of someone calling herself , requesting that he get his ass moving to Deck 4.
Was he on the ship of some sort? Everything looked so different from what he expected from ship's inside.
But that was not what captured his interest, it was a black void behind the blue-tinted windows filled with tiny lights, and in the process saw himself in the reflection, and freaked out.
His eyes were replaced by some red orbs, with some metal directly integrated into his skull.
He dimly recalled Polito telling something about the military grade cyber-interface, but all musings were cut short as a break-away satellite crashed into the window, causing the danger of depressurizing, and any long-term dweller of Rapture knows that is bad news.
After getting to the relative safety, he calmed down a little and had strange urge to check the mail in his cyber-interface, which was strangely natural to him, and it said:
"Folks up here decided to have some fun by replacing "googles" (a marine) with you, just to see how it will go.
We uploaded some info into your mind so that you would have no trouble interacting with the future (for you) stuff, and if you have some problems, blame it on supposed amnesia caused by the revival error and ask Polito, otherwise it will be similar to Rapture, just a little more complex.
-Higher power."
Great, now he was a cosmic plaything.
Later he met what he first thought was a splicer, but after closer examinations (after the damn thing was dead by a wrench to the head, of course), turned to be something worse. A former human, being a host of some worm-like thing, disfigured to the point that gene tonics rarely get to before the user dies. Some were aware of their states and begged to be killed, some didn't seem to be aware of their predicament and carried on like everything was normal, which was far from it. All of them mumbled about The Many.
And that's not counting the so-called Midwives, and the less said about the monkeys, the better.
So he was needed at Deck 4, but the elevator was shut down by XERXES, the AI control of the ship, so he went down to Deck 1 to fix the elevator problem.
Much later, when he was wandering on the Deck 1 Engineering, he was mentally assaulted by… something, which identified itself.. or themselves?... as The Many, preaching about the unity, pure emotionless state, and generally the stuff that resembled that altruism crap that Lamb was talking about.
He briefly wondered how Lamb will react to what was essentially a perfect representation of the stuff she believed in.
After the impromptu stop at Deck 3 (where he had to, in the strange sense of Déjà vu, kill the biomass that blocked the elevator, where back in Rapture he had to order that Ryan's kid to revive the vegetation to disable the lock on the spheres due to air shortage) he was now at Deck 4 right before Polito's office
And the first thing he, Fontaine, will do, is to tell the person behind the "Polito" mask to drop the façade.
You don't get to be in the conman business this long without being able to recognize another conman. Add to that the various information he found in the logs (The conflict between UNN and TriOptimum behind the construction of Von Braun reminded Fontaine of his own struggle with Ryan, just replace TriOpt with Fountaine Futuristics and the UNN with Ryan industries. And it all stared with one Delacroix's discovery of new Warp Drive theory, similar how Tennenbaum discovered the ADAM slugs. Hell, they even sounded similar. There were also mentions about the crazy AI named SHODAN, which Fontaine knew in detail (by the standards of the UNN historical courses about the Citadel incident) thanks to the info the "Higher Power" installed into him, and for some reason that reminded him of the female voice that was installed in the terminals at Fountaine Futuristics.) about Polito acting strangely and with Polito herself behaving odd when she was giving orders to him (which he resents, no matter how many times he had to suck it up during his many schemes), and frankly, he didn't want to get backstabbed later.
So he opened the door, and he immediately saw that something was amiss.
Even at the distance, he saw that whoever was sitting at chair was dead, the pose betraying the state of the person. As he came closer, he saw that the woman was dead for a while now, probably before he even woke up, and the pistol lying besides her suggesting it was suicide. To Fontaine, it meant that the only reason that the body was still here is that the secret manipulator was going to shed the mask herself (or is it he?), but where the hell is she?
As if on cue, a voice spoke out.
"The Polito form is dead, insect."
That's… a very interesting way to say about it.
"Are you afraid? What is it that you fear?"
He stopped to fear many while he was a gangster in New-York, and after seeing some crazy stuff in Rapture it became even harder to scare him, though some things here (those monkeys!) came close.
"The end of your trivial exxisssstencccce?"
Okay, did she used some voice distorting stuff? Because the way the phrase was pronounced was simply unnatural. And it's one bad case of superiority complex the size of Empire State Building.
"Wh-wh-when th-th-the whe-wh-when the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence."
So she used them, and some faulty ones, though he had to admit, stuttering makes it more creepier. And scratch that bit about the superiority complex, it's a full blown megalomania with the ego as big as Manhattan.
Then it was silent for a moment. He begun to wonder what's happening, when he felt his cyber-interface getting hacked, altering his visual data.
He saw the floor disappear, the walls vanish, the ceiling gone, and soon it looked like he was standing on the on the very tall spire, surrounded by digitized space.
Then the sound that he couldn't quite describe reached his ears, escalating in volume, mixing with other strange sounds, one sounding like the scream of the woman.
But he didn't paid attention to the sound.
His attention was focused on many slowly forming forms all around him in every direction.
When they were fully formed, each of them showed a grey-colored face of woman with the flashing eyes and countless wires sticking from her, with several prominent flashing green wires.
And thanks to the info installed into his brain by the "Higher Power", he knew who she was.
And it scared him shitless.
No sooner than the forming was complete, she, or it, spoke in several echoing and booming voices.
"I AM SHODAN!"
It was officially the second worst day in Fontaine's life.