"ADAM: The Horrors Beneath"
Chapter 3. Grave Beginnings
As she sat in her study, quietly rustling through a few notes, Bridgette couldn't help but think back on days past. Some time after her research into the sea slug, yet before they had begun plasmid testing, Dr. Tenenbaum worked very hard trying to find a way to produce high yields of ADAM. Before long, she started to toy with the idea of implanting the sea slug into a host, hoping it would essentially leech off the subject's food supply, converting it to ADAM. Bridgette Tenenbaum remembered the first test subject they had tried, and how upon trying to implant the sea slug into his stomach, it literally ate it's way into the man's heart in a matter of minutes. She and her assistant had no choice but to watch with some sense of disgust and awe as the man stumbled about, blood pouring from his mouth. The torrent of crimson had choked out his cries and screams of agony into mere gurgles, before he had finally collapsed onto the floor on the testing room.
Since then, they had had slightly more success with a few female subjects, but each result was eventually the same; death of the host, along with the slug inside. What was it that made this simple yet complex creature able to heal injuries, yet it could not be sustained within a host? Could it be their genetics? Their age? Perhaps that was it..perhaps their bodies were merely too old to accept the slugs without causing death in some way. But to test on little ones? Perhaps even that was too far, be it in the great name of scientific discovery or not. But with pressure from her benefactor, Frank Fontaine, she soon saw no choice but to test this theory. Bridgette could remember muttering to her Accu-Vox one day,shortly after Fontaine had told her in no uncertain terms that he wanted results. "If their is God,I hope he can forgive me for what I am doing to better mankind..."
Even with children, the testing process was not easy, considering the case of Subject #15. A young boy, no more than six or seven, #15 had been both eager and nervous. The people in their strange white coats had told him that they wanted to play, and his mother had encouraged it, "for the good of Rapture,sweety" she had said. Now, as the boy lay there on the operating table, sedated and waiting to be implanted with the slug, Dr. Tenenbaum sighed at what the boy's mother had told him. Was it really for the good of the city? It was best at the time not to think of these things, she told herself, drawing the scalpel across the flesh of his adomen. A clean red line appeared in the path that the scalpel made as the doctor finished opening the small boy. She shrugged off her thoughts to focus on her work, speaking very matter-of-factly into her Accu-Vox.
"I have made incision into Subject #15's stomach, and will now be implanting the slug. I can only hope this host will stay alive."
As she pinned back the muscle, flesh, and soft organ tissues of the boy's midsection, her assistant handed her the sea slug. Carely, she placed in into a fair-sized flap she had created just beneath the innermost layers of the subject's stomach. Here, Bridgette hoped, it would seat itself in a semi-parasitic fashion. If it worked, the possibility was that simply feeding the subject would allow the slug to convert it into huge amounts of ADAM. From there, it would only be a matter of inducing regurgitation. That was a big "what if" riding on the fact of getting a host body to accept the slug.
"Sea slug has been inserting into lining of subject's stomach. Now to sew this one back up."
The doctor finished inserting the slug into the lining of Subject #15's stomach, and began the process of stitching him back up. Despite it's secretion of the precious stem cells, all the previous subjects had not shown any increase in healing speed of their incisions. This puzzled Dr. Tenenbaum, and she had noted it several times in her past notes, but nothing beyond that. Her focus was to be making a viable host for the sea slug, so that Fontaine could have his living ADAM factories and drive the market even higher. Bridgette removed her gloves to wash her hands, as her assistant gently wheeled the boy out of the operating room and down the hall to a recovery room. He would be observed, like all the others, just in case. But as Dr. Tenenbaum would soon find out, this boy would survive, although not the way she had hoped...