A/N: This has been in the works for a long time, ladies and gentlemen. I should probably explain a thing or two before I begin, just to put this in context - feel free to skip the intro if you're not interested.
I hate Burial At Sea. I really do. I ragequit over the plot no less than three times before finally giving up and watching someone else's playthrough, but there are too many things to talk about, too many problems to address without turning this fanfic into a review. But putting aside the fact that the plot requires Elizabeth to lose to a bog standard Big Daddy, putting aside the contrived attempts to waft controversy away from Daisy Fitzroy, putting aside the fact that Elizabeth's so-called redemption ends up making her responsible for the civil war, putting aside the fact that the game couldn't be bothered to make Sally anything other than a living plot motivator... there's two major points I need to address.
First of all, Columbia should be gone. The end of Bioshock Infinite made it abundantly clear that the only way to stop Columbia from "drowning in flame the mountains of man" is by wiping it from history. It. Should. Be. GONE. This isn't just a matter of saving New York; at Comstock House, Future!Elizabeth announces that once the surface world is conquered, they're moving on to the rest of multiverse. Why is this not important?
Secondly, I found the explanation behind Vigors really boring. Before Burial At Sea, one theory/explanation wafting about the internet suggested that the Vigor were actually derived from Elizabeth's powers, and I liked that because it kept the city's strengths tied to the exploitation of Tears. The whole business behind "drinkable plasmids" just seemed lazy and uninspired: it felt like a cheap way of justifying the use of flasks instead of syringes - take a look at the anachronistic Kinetoscopes lurking around Rapture for more sloth. More to the point, the effects and visual design behind Vigors just don't match plasmids - why bother to add the flickering effect of the Tears to the powers if Tears weren't involved?
So, this new story essentially flies in the face of everything that happened in Burial At Sea. If you liked Burial At Sea, good for you. If you want to defend it, please do. If you want to correct me for misunderstanding a key point, do so. If you want to flame me for hating Burial At Sea, PLEASE DO IT. I desperately need to know that someone out there gives more of a damn about the game than the developers. And please, forgive me if elements of the story sound like me trying to justify less agreeable aspects of BAS; as much as I just wanted to let my issues with the game rest and create a whole new narrative in this fic, my subconsciousness had other ideas.
So, with that out of the way, please enjoy the first chapter of this new story, and I hope you enjoy my take on the Vigors. Read, review and above all enjoy!
Disclaimer: The Bioshock series doesn't belong to me in any universe. Eagle-eyed readers, keep an eye out for hidden crossovers!
Why am I writing this?
It's been six years since Columbia – at least, I'm reasonably certain it's been six years: time is hard to measure when you've spread it out over as many worlds and time periods as I have, but the Luteces assure me that it has indeed been six years since the four of us wiped Comstock's floating Eden from reality. Six long, complicated years of hardship, adjustment, recovery, and a trail of hard-won victories.
True, I still have nightmares of the nightmare Columbia might have been, I still don't really know what I am or what will become of me, and I don't think I'll ever be sure of my purpose in life… but in spite of all my fears, regrets and doubt, I think I'm almost content with my life as it is.
After all, I have so many people to share it with and so many different ways to appreciate it: with the Luteces, I can study the possibility space and all its infinite wonders; with Booker and Anna, I can enjoy a relatively normal life as Anna's "brainy big sister"; with Jack, Eleanor, Brigid, Charles, and the Little Sisters they rescued from Rapture, I partake of their friendship as a fellow freak and survivor of a utopia gone horribly wrong… and by myself, I can use my powers to help others across the multiverse.
So I ask myself again, why the hell am I writing this?
I should be content that Columbia is dead, gone before it could conquer the worlds of the possibility space. Why should I want to prolong the legend of that godforsaken city? Why can't I just leave it as it is, a cloud of defunct memories adrift in the backwaters of space and time?
Well, as strange is it may seem, I don't want it to remain forgotten. The more I think about it, the more I want to see that people can learn something – anything – from the nightmare of Columbia. And after all, there are so many untold stories, so many triumphs and tragedies, intrigues and atrocities, marvels and monsters left unexplored in Columbia's memory: in the all the iterations of our journey across the city, Booker and I only had a chance to glimpse a handful of these stories in passing, but now that I can explore the memories of the city I erased, I have it within my power to ensure that these tales aren't lost to the maelstroms of time and space. I want someone to remember all those people. I want someone to remember Booker as he was… and I want someone to remember me as I was.
Oddly enough, I don't think I'm alone in this respect: Jack and Eleanor have already published their accounts of Rapture, and some of the Splicers Brigid was able to cure have been writing their own vast testimony of the construct and fall of Andrew Ryan's paradise.
Then again, it's not as if I've been quiet about any of this up until today: God only knows I've told the tale of Columbia enough times for the Little Sisters to learn it off by heart. So, maybe it's time for me to commit Columbia and all its many stories to paper. Of course, considering all the variations of Columbia I've visited and catalogued, either firsthand or via the memory cloud, it might take some time… but, for once in my life, I'm in no hurry.
And perhaps it's appropriate that I begin with one of the more obscure stories: the tale of Jeremiah Fink's Great Folly.
Whenever I tell the story of Columbia, I'm invariably told that it sounds like something out of a fairy tale – and with good reason: a flying city, a princess in a tower, a dragon patrolling the skies, a vengeful ghost leading armies of the dead, gateways to other worlds, potions that grant impossible powers… my life sounds like something out of legend, even to those who've participated in a few legends of their own. Even Eleanor has trouble believing it.
So, I suppose there's only one way I can begin this story: once upon a time…
Once upon a time, there was a thief, and his name was Jeremiah Fink.
Before Columbia took to the skies, he was a petty businessman, a middling factory owner, a dabbler in industrial engineering and a part-time con artist: more often than not, he was the shill of more powerful industrialists, persuading workers, engineers, debtors and even fellow businessmen to sign on the dotted line in return for a bonus from the robber barons that were his masters.
Unsurprisingly, he longed to be one of them, but their monopolies were airtight and the doors of management were forever barred to Johnny-come-latelies like him, leaving the young Jeremiah Fink seemingly condemned to a lifetime of entrepreneurial mediocrity.
Then Columbia left the ground for the first time, and the great city found itself in need of factories – and those who could manage them. Hungry for the wealth and fame that awaited the first industrialists to invest in America's shining bride, he led the charge on Columbia's verdant industrial playground and fastened on every available opportunity like a lamprey: with no old boys club and no well-established competitors blocking his path, Fink's businesses flourished and prospered, thanks in no small part due to his lack of scruples and his ability to provide for Columbia's elite as the city grew and more isolated from the Sodom Below.
When Comstock finally declared himself an enemy of the United States, it was Fink who was able to solve Columbia's sudden shortage of "menials" by drawing upon connections other Founders were too "upright" to exploit; when the city's Irish population grew too offensive for the bigoted majority to tolerate, it was Fink who offered them a place at Finkton – out of sight and out of mind; and when Comstock needed a man knowledgeable enough to eliminate the Luteces and make it seem accidental, the job went straight to Fink.
But it was Fink's use of the Tears that gave his already-expansive empire a chance to rise to truly Olympian heights. Even as the richest man in Columbia, Fink was still a shameless thief at heart, and by the time he first encountered a random Tear, he was also a self-righteous intellectual leech without a single innovative thought in his head: more than half of his accolades and honours were acquired by taking credit for the achievements of his underlings, and the most prominent "inventions" of Fink MFG were no exception.
Peering out across the possibility space, the businessman glimpsed other worlds and discovered countless opportunities for profit: stealing or documenting a vast array of machines from the worlds of the multiverse, he reverse-engineered them in Columbia, often without bothering to modify the stolen invention beyond a few perfunctory cosmetic details.
Vending machines, advanced personal firearms, automaton transports and turrets, Motorized Patriots, the infamous Handymen and even the mighty Songbird were all introduced through Fink's intellectual pillaging, elevating a business empire to an irreplaceable component of Columbia's society.
In the end, however, Fink's excess was his own undoing: not only did his gluttonous exploitation of the downtrodden inspire them to revolt under Daisy Fitzroy's banner, but many of the inventions he so gleefully plagiarized ended up in the hands of his enemies – thanks, in part, to his unwillingness to alter the stolen blueprints more than he felt was necessary.
The vending machines, for example, were overdecorated copies of Rapture's automated armouries, right down to their habit of dispensing ammunition alongside soft drinks and confection – a practise that drew in additional funds from thousands of paranoid citizens and desperate police officers alike, but one that only ended up putting ammunition in the hands of the Vox Populi. Once the designs obtained from the wreck of the S.S. Madame Du Pompadour were properly implemented, the Motorized Patriots and other automata were roaring successes, but their lack of security failsafes ended up once again swelling the ranks of the Vox Populi – particularly once they began seizing control of the factories.
The Handyman autobodies, reverse-engineered from Omni-Consumer Products' discarded prototypes as they were, emerged as possibly the biggest failure on Fink MFG's record: while consumers were intrigued by the possibility of immortality through mechanical augmentation, the fact that the fully-converted Handymen were effectively condemned to perpetual agony dissuaded many potential customers – forcing Fink to stage industrial accidents in his own factories just so he'd have the organic material to produce his own army of security brutes; not only was this a needlessly costly approach to boosting sales, but in the end, more than half of his own mechanized army turned on him in a flurry of agonized revenge.
And as for Songbird… well, my beloved guardian did more to end the menace of Columbia than any of Fink's plagiarized inventions. The mental conditioning, the mechanical exoskeleton, the augmented strength – all of these traits were stolen from Rapture, and all of them gave Booker and I the power to wipe Columbia from the timeline and save the multiverse.
With all these ambitious mistakes in mind, I sometimes wonder if Fink ever realized that he'd effectively doomed himself in his reckless pursuit of profit, or if he remained blissfully oblivious to his imminent demise up until the very moment that Daisy Fitzroy put a gun to his head. I can't be entirely sure, for even with the echoes of Columbia's many iterations drifting through the endless either of the possibility space, I still can't read minds.
In some dead timelines, I've seen him fight back – one of my other selves has a rather vivid memory of him seizing control of an articulated cargo lifter and trying desperately to crush the crowd of revolutionaries under the giant automaton's bulk – and in others, he merely cowered and begged for mercy, but the reasoning behind his actions remains, more often than not, unknowable.
The Luteces have discussed the topic with me on the rare occasions when I can steer the conversation away from multiversal physics, and neither of them spare much thought for Fink's intellect – not much of a surprise, considering that he murdered them. As Robert often puts it, anyone who honestly believed that a perfectly functional manufacturing district would be improved by a fifty-foot golden statue of themselves probably didn't have the humility to imagine their own demise.
And, as Rosalind often jokes, a well-documented cocaine addiction and a case of untreated neurosyphilis probably didn't help much either; having listened to the man's public service announcements and read his diaries at length, I'm tempted to add a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder to the list, but that might be beyond my purview.
In the end, I can only conclude that Jeremiah Fink spent his last days as he spent the rest of his glory days in Columbia, still conducting extravagant parties at the Good Time Club, still dreaming up new ways to exploit his workforce, still building his mythical animal kingdom of workers – with Fink the Lion as the King of Beasts. He died as he lived – a man too entranced by the ripe stench of money and ego to ever think the end would dare come for him.
However, out of all the mistakes on his expansive record, one that sticks in the memory more than any other is the creation of the Vigors – in part for the role I played in their development.
Out of all the stories of Columbia I have told over the years, the story of the Vigors has received the least attention.
To the Little Sisters, they're just magic potions that give the drinker unimaginable power, but Jack and Eleanor always want to know more. Of course, once I discovered what the Vigors really were, I wasn't exactly in a hurry to talk about them: the truth was frankly embarrassing and more than a little bit disgusting.
But as uncomfortable as the topic makes me, now that I've set out to record all of Columbia's untold stories, I've obliged to include the stories of the Vigors. So, we return to the magical city in the clouds to uncover the truth of its enchanted potions:
In an unusual departure from Fink's usual modus operandi, the Vigors were not actually plagiarized.
True, Fink had observed similar implanted superpowers throughout the multiverse, most prominently in the form of Rapture's plasmids, the Outsider's Mark, the Melange of Arrakis, and the Escafil device – all of which he attempted to acquire.
However, despite his best efforts, he had never been able to obtain working samples through the Tears: sometimes the Tear was too unstable to retrieve physical samples, at other times the technology was simply impossible to reverse-engineer. Even after retrieving the body of a splicer from the ruins of Pauper's Drop, ADAM could not be replicated with Columbian technology, and by the time a gateway to Rapture's laboratories stabilized, Fink had already found a much cheaper alternative.
No, the Vigors were actually the creation of Rosalind and Robert Lutece, one of many patents that Fink was awarded by Comstock for his help in assassinating the troublesome scientists. For years prior to their "death," the idea of the Vigor had been explored in detail but never implemented outside a laboratory, the Luteces considering it a minor facet of the great vistas of space-time exploration and control they studied on a daily basis. Needless to say, neither Rosalind nor Robert were truly interested in making their invention a commercial success, having only patented it in an idle attempt to boost their annual research budget; it took Fink's aggressive eye for exploitation to transform their modest discovery into a citywide enterprise.
And the source of this discovery?
Me.
After I was incarcerated at Monument Island and the Siphon was installed under the tower, the Luteces soon discovered that the machine they had designed to limit my powers had a rather unexpected side-benefit. Originally, the energy the Siphon leeched from me was only meant to power its own machinery, ensuring that my abilities would remain suppressed even if the generators went offline; however, as it descended from my quarters through the base of the tower, the dimensional energies began radiating from the conduits into neighbouring systems, including the plumbing.
Water began to behave very oddly around the tower: pipes were blocked by sprouting crystals, taps dispensed molten lava, and bathrooms became infested by metallic fungal growths. But it wasn't until a lab assistant began sprouting talons and feathers shortly after washing his hands that Rosiland and Robert recognized the problem: thanks to exposure to the undiluted energies of the time-space continuum, minute Tears were being "earthed" in the water, resulting in a liquid that could effectively bridge the gulf between realities.
Though they were able to shield the conduits and prevent further infections of the tower's plumbing, the Luteces continued to study the side-effects under more controlled circumstances: eventually, they found a means of directing the Tears in the afflicted water to specific destinations in the possibility space, negating the more unpredictable side-effects and allowing those who drank the tainted water to manifest powers from other worlds.
The effects of these concoctions were temporary, usually requiring further ingestion in order to sustain the acquired traits for longer than an hour – hence the refillable bottles and tanks the Vigors were made available in; however, as Booker later discovered, those who'd already been exposed to major tear activity were able to maintain their powers on a permanent or near-permanent basis.
By December 1908, the Luteces had already isolated the Tears that would create most of the eventual product line, as well as those that would create the magnetic shield they would later give to Booker during his journey across Columbia. Following their deaths in 1909, Fink took over their labs and expanded the simple laboratory-based process into a massive assembly line: redirecting the conduits of the Siphon into one of his many pumping stations, he directed the energies leeched from me into gallon after gallon of water, then set to work on directing the Tears in the infected fluid, eventually creating what he officially titled "Vigors."
As it happens, I didn't discover the truth behind the Vigors until well after the Siphon was destroyed, a fact I'm very thankful for: being leered at from behind two-mirrors and photographed in the shower by hidden cameras was disgusting enough even before the technicians started taking the snapshots home with them, but having the same voyeurs turning my powers – a part of my being – into a drinkable product would probably have driven me to a nervous breakdown.
In hindsight, I probably wouldn't have found the whole thing so revolting if Fink hadn't decided to call the Siphon "a milking machine."
I'm not even going to mention what he called me.
In the beginning, the Vigors were restricted to Columbia's military elite: the Firemen, the Zealots of the Lady, the Mariners, the Centurions, the Preachers of the Way, and the Cherubim – all carried a flask or tank of Vigor. However, Fink wanted more than a pittance from Comstock: he wanted customers throughout the city, having been inspired by the vast popularity of Plasmids in Rapture.
Unfortunately, he failed to account for the circumstances that made Plasmids such a roaring success in the first place: a code of moral relativism, an atmosphere of scientific optimism and a downtrodden populace in desperate need of compensatory power. When Fink finally made the Vigors available on the open market, his chosen customers were Columbia's upper/middle classes, god-fearing men and women with little trust in science and little interest in home defence.
For all the years Vigors were in production, less than five percent of Columbia's civilian populace used them: the Tear-induced visions suffered by first-time drinkers often discouraged future customers, and the flickering deformities that regular users periodically manifested only soured first impressions further; on a deeper level, many of the highly-conservative Founders were disquieted by the notion of miracles being mass-produced, and some of the more old-fashioned of them wondered aloud if there was something Satanic at the heart of Finkton – the product "Devil's Kiss" not helping much.
And when the negative side-effects of Vigors became apparent in the more habitual users – most prominently in the Zealots and Firemen – Fink MFG's client base plummeted: the effects of dimensional merging were disastrous enough if only inflicted on the human mind; when infected on the body, the results were often beyond description – to the point that many iterations of Columbia featured Josiah Saltonstall himself petitioning Comstock for an end to the civilian use of Vigors.
Like all of Fink's products, the Vigors only ended up fuelling the Vox Populi: the fact that even the Black and Irish members of the population could avail themselves to the "Divine Gift" of the Vigor did much to discredit Comstock's racist dogma. And when enough of the product was obtained by Daisy's army, they used it to wreak havoc upon the factories of Fink MFG.
In countless iterations of Columbia's dying days, Daisy's final charge on Fink's office was accompanied by an honour guard of Vigor-junkies, men and women encrusted with the crystalline growths of Shock Jockey and writhing with the tentacles of Undertow; and while they slaughtered the industrialist's bodyguards, Daisy cornered Fink in the ruins of his failing empire and put a bullet squarely between his piggy little eyes.
Thus ends the tale of Jeremiah Fink, beginning with fortune and ending in folly.
A/N: Coming up next - Possession!