JUNE 6, 1959 — 1:11 AM
For a great many hours after the argument with his father, Jack did not dare to leave the relative safety of his apartment. He sat behind locked doors with his pistol at his side, waiting for the inevitable moment when the scientists or another assortment of Ryan's men would come to dispose of him.
But that moment never came. Perhaps he had underestimated his father's patience; perhaps he had overestimated his father's willingness to destroy him.
The latter of these didn't seem as likely in his mind, not least of all because of how convinced he remained of his father's involvement in the death of Jasmine Jolene.
It was just too convenient. Sure, Jack didn't doubt that there were plenty of people in this city possessing the ability and wherewithal to have killed her in such a brutal way, but he could think of no motive likelier than Andrew Ryan's.
Andrew Ryan's motive for denying it, however, was less clear. Knowing how easily he could silence Jack for having discovered the truth, it wasn't clear at all. The only reason that came to Jack's mind was that he truly did have nothing to do with it—but no, he wasn't ready to believe that just yet. He wouldn't be ready to believe that at all, he was certain, until he could find some concrete proof that Ryan was not involved.
But how would he find that?
He could ask Sullivan—but no, that would be useless. His father had the entire security force at his beck and call, particularly Sullivan. Even if they told him they suspected the involvement of another party, Jack had no way of truly taking them at their word.
He could investigate for himself, he supposed. But there was the same problem with the security: how could he be certain that they hadn't removed any evidence from the scene? How could he know that they hadn't scrubbed the place clean of any sign Ryan had ever been there a single day in his life?
He couldn't possibly know for sure, could he? Unless his father finally admitted it himself, unless he had some way of knowing exactly what went on in that room that night, knowing exactly what went through his mother's mind in her final moments...
Jack rubbed his hands over his face, head sinking to his knees where he sat on the edge of his bed, and rubbed and rubbed until he felt the skin might peel from his bones. How frightened could she have been when she knew she was going to die? How scared and confused and pained could those last moments have been, knowing her own death was imminent and yet not knowing why?
Those questions weren't ones he wanted to consider now, not when there was nothing he could do about them. But still they swirled about in the chaos of his thoughts, her imagined screams echoing and multiplying against the walls of his mind.
His head throbbed. He found himself gripping the edge of his bureau, having somehow paced the full length of his room without being consciously aware of it. Perhaps that should have alarmed him, but he didn't care.
How frightened must she have been . . .
A loud cry, frustrated and broken, summoned itself up from his throat as he cleared the bureau's surface with one mighty sweep of his arm, sending its scattered contents crashing to the floor. He didn't want to think about it, but he was powerless to stop.
He was powerless to stop now, just as he'd been powerless to stop anything from happening to her—just as he'd been powerless to affect anything of worth in this entire damn city, in his whole damn life.
His head sank to the bureau's edge, just as his eyes shut tight against the barrage of doubt that assailed him. When he finally dared to open them again, a red glow sat in the corner of his eye.
He turned to see the plasmid Atlas had given him, knocked free from its case and lying bare on the floor. He still hadn't taken it; its side effects still warded him off.
Its side effects...
But then people start goin' mad, and then they start seein' ghosts . . .
A jolt of realization shuddered down Jack's spine, enough to make him bolt upright. Ghosts: hallucinations of another life in moments previous, memories borne and shared by ADAM as it flowed from one set of veins to the next...
No—no, that would never work, would it? Atlas had given him this plasmid some days ago, while Jolene's body had only been discovered the morning previous. It was impossible for this flask to carry any memories of hers. Even beyond this flask in particular, it couldn't be possible for her to have been...no, there wasn't enough time.
But he knew how quickly the gatherers did their work, how much ADAM had to be harvested and recycled and repackaged on a daily basis just to meet Rapture's growing demand from day to day to day. Perhaps it was impossible for her genetic material to be borne in this flask, but that didn't negate the possibility of its circulation throughout this city even now.
It was a slim chance, an incredibly slim chance. But the fact that there was a chance at all left Jack with little choice but to take it.
JUNE 7, 1959 — 5:26 AM
"Give me the freshest juice you got."
"Yes sir, comin' right up. Got this batch fresh off the production line..."
There was no way of knowing the shopkeep's claim to be true or not. But Jack had no choice but to take the man at his word.
Jack kept his scarf wound tightly about his face as he slid the money across the counter and slipped the hypo of EVE into his pocket. After everything else that had happened, the last thing he needed was word getting back to his father about his dabbling with plasmids.
Not that he'd actually taken it yet. The plasmid was tucked away into the inner pocket of his coat, nestled against his heart and away from pilfering hands. He needed to be certain he was ready before taking the plunge.
Fort Frolic was, for the most part, still. The hour was early enough that the doors to the shops were shuttered, and the only traffic in the corridors belonged to the evening's last stragglers emerging from Sir Prize and Pharaoh's Fortune. Jack might have fit in perfectly among them if not for the fact he was headed in the opposite direction, down the glass-tunneled path to Poseidon Plaza and in the direction of Eve's Garden.
His father's old command still echoed somewhere in the back of his mind, quickening the pulse of his heart as the club's brightly lit sign came into view. But it wasn't enough to slow his steps now.
A wooden security barricade still blocked the entrance on the ground floor—no great obstacle for him to move past, but not one he felt like risking, even with the relative peace and quiet of the surrounding area. If any officers came back to find it disturbed...no, that wouldn't do. He went up the stairs, down the hall to check the upper entrance: locked, but not barricaded. This, he could deal with.
Much of the time before his public debut—the time when he was still a test subject under development in Ryan's, or perhaps Fontaine's laboratories—had since been obscured by his conscious memory, and on most days, he was glad for that. But sometimes flashes of recollection leached through the barriers of his mind, spurred by some distant recognition of whatever was at hand—something like deja vu, perhaps, but he knew it was something more than just a trick of the mind. This time it was the lock at the door, its peculiarly Rapturian construction coming apart easily in his dexterous hands. He could not consciously remember hacking any sort of lock, much less having any reason to have ever done so, yet he knew that he had done this before; he knew without question that this was something he unquestionably knew how to do.
It was the same sort of feeling that nagged in his mind whenever he felt the weight of his pistol in his hand: failing to remember any instance in which he had fired it, yet knowing that he knew how. It was something he tried desperately not to dwell upon.
The door slid open with a loud rattle, sending a clattering echo down the length of the hall. Jack froze, feeling every part of him suddenly tense...but nothing came of it. It was too early yet for anyone to be looking in the direction of the strip club, after all.
Jack took a cautious step inside, and made sure that the door slid shut again before he stepped any further. The last time he'd been here, though he'd only caught a glimpse of it all before being ejected from the premises, the whole club had been in full swing: girls dancing on the stage below, carousing with patrons at the surrounding tables, all while drinks flowed freely at the bar to the side. A haze of cigarette smoke had hung in the air, and one remained even now, though it looked far more eerie in the dim light and quiet emptiness of the place.
He took wary, quiet steps down the creaky stairs that wound behind the bar. There was no sign yet of anyone here, none that he could see at least, but he could never afford to be too careful.
His eyes had to strain in the dark before he found the back door, the one which led to the fabled back room. When he found it, his steps were heavy, but deliberate. He couldn't slow down now.
No matter what awaited him in that room—the room where his life began, where hers was cut short—he could not back down now.
His hand trembled at the door handle. In that moment, the ADAM at his breast and the EVE in his pocket felt heavier than the weight of the world upon his back, to say nothing of the ocean upon his shoulders. But he could not stand down now.
He opened the door.
The room was larger than he might have expected, though in truth, he didn't know what he expected at all. The bed sat atop a dais towards the back, where it was surrounded by four pillars bedecked with billowing red curtains. The only light in the room came filtering through a great arched window directly above the bed itself, softened and distorted and colored with blues and greens by the water beyond the glass and the neon signs even further beyond that, but it was plenty enough light to see the portrait that hung against the far wall—Andrew Ryan's Favorite Gal. It was plenty enough light to see the telltale dark stains on the bedspread and the surrounding floor.
Jack didn't know if he was ready for this. He had hoped he would be, yet doubt still plagued him even now. But he was already long past the point of no return.
He reached into his coat, drew out the hypo full of glowing, pulsing ADAM, carefully removed the cap from its long, thick needle, and just as carefully rolled up one of his sleeves.
It was now or never.
Finding a vein in the broad muscle of his forearm wasn't quite as difficult as he'd anticipated, and the pinching pain as he slipped the needle in wasn't quite so unbearable as he'd feared. The weight of the syringe and the resistance of the plunger beneath his thumb felt almost natural. But what immediately followed was none of the above.
A sudden swarm of pain gathered at the site where he'd injected himself, swirling into a storm before flooding through the rest of him, bursting along each and every one of his nerves as jolts of electricity rocketed through his veins. His field of vision swam with tinges of red as the world pulsed and swayed and toppled before him, crashing down until he realized he was the one crashing down instead, crashing to the floor where his hands uselessly clawed and scrabbled for purchase. For all the ringing in his ears, it was only by the hoarseness of his throat that he might have realized he was screaming, but he took no notice. His body was tearing itself apart, he was certain, all the way down to the cellular level, and it was all he could do to hang on as desperately as he could manage.
It seemed as though an eternity had passed in that room before the pain began to abate, and it was only then that he could finally remember—EVE. He wasn't finished yet. Now that he had ADAM coursing through his veins—pulsing throughout every part of him, sending up sparks behind his eyes, tearing at his raw and bloodied nerves with each pass—he had to take the next step.
His newly horizontal position on the floor made his reach uncomfortably difficult, but he managed to fumble the glowing blue hypo out of his coat pocket. He flinched more sharply this time when the needle broke his skin, shuddered at the sensation of the plunger under his thumb, and when the EVE flooded into him, his senses were overtaken even more greatly than before. It swept over every nerve just as the ADAM had done earlier, filling him with an indescribable sensation that nearly lifted him to his feet—but no, it was too much, far too much, he was overfull, ready to burst from the inside out...
The emptied hypo fell from his shaking hands as he pressed them to his face. If he pressed any harder, he felt, then perhaps he could reach right into his skull, pull out his brain and wring it dry. This was a mistake. No part of his body felt like it was under his control any longer. Bile rose in his throat; he could hardly breathe without feeling like he was going to explode. He'd made a terrible mistake. His father had been right to warn him away from this stuff. His father had been right, he'd been right about everything and Jack, oh, he'd been so wrong, so terribly wrong about everything—
"Who are you?"
The voice was echoing and accusatory. Jack was frightened to lower his hands from his face, to see who had discovered him like this. It was over, everything was all over from here.
"What are you... Oh, god, no!"
The voice echoed again. This time Jack managed to realize the voice echoed not from behind him, but rather from his front—but then again, was it really in front of him, or was it coming from his own mind?
Pain—another burst of pain suddenly ghosted throughout his body, just as he heard a woman's scream. Jack tore his hands away from his face to see the shape of a man—indistinct, but doubtlessly a man—hunched over the bed, wielding something heavy in his hand. A woman lay beneath him, attempting in vain to shield herself against his blows.
"No—" Jack's voice was little more than a croak, and the effort to speak nearly made him retch, but he couldn't stop himself. "No..."
"No, no, please, god, no, don't—"
Every movement was agony, but Jack could not remain still. He pushed himself to his feet, staggered forward, and reached for the shape of his mother's murderer.
"Sorry, doll, it's nothin' personal."
The assailant's voice was cold, callous, and punctuated by her screams.
"I just got some loose ends that need tyin' up."
"Stop—"
Just as Jack launched himself forward at the attacker, the ghostly visions disappeared from his sight, leaving him face to face with nothing but the sight of his mother's blood-stained sheets.
His hands gripped the edge of the bed so tightly he thought he might tear it in two. There was nothing he could have done. He could never have stopped this. He could never have kept his mother from being killed by...
Who was that?
The realization was cold as it sank into him: the voice of the man who had murdered his mother was not the voice of his father.
That didn't remove the possibility of his father hiring someone else to do his dirty work for him, of course. But this new fact coupled with his denial of the act made it seem to Jack as though the truth was slipping further and further away from his grasp.
In that moment, as Jack attempted to make any sense of what shape the situation had now taken in his mind, the lights in the room suddenly flared to life, blinding him and sending more bursts of pain shuddering throughout every part of his body.
"Who the fuck are you?"
The voice did not echo, not from anywhere to his front or inside his mind. A pang of fear rippled throughout him as Jack turned to see its source: a man stood in the doorway, a man of living flesh and blood, bearing a heavy-looking club in his hand.
"Please—" It was all Jack could do to stagger forward, hands aloft to show he meant no harm; he didn't know what he was asking the man to do, but it was the only word that would come to him. "Please..."
"What the fuck do you think you're—" The man started to advance, but his words and steps stopped short once he noticed the empty hypos on the floor. "ADAM... You've got ADAM?"
Jack was now close enough, his mind was now clear enough to see the twisted growths along the man's jaw. He'd made a terrible mistake.
"No— No, I..."
His eyes fell across the club in the man's hand, across the dark stains along its blunt end, and recognition took hold of him—but no, no. This man's voice was not the same he had just heard. It wasn't even close.
"Give it to me!"
In the brief moment of Jack's confusion, the man had found an opportunity to heft his club aloft and swing it. Jack barely brought up his arms in time to shield his head from the blow, but the strike was still more than enough to send him reeling back with a pained cry. He stumbled to the ground, pain and confusion and fear clouding all of his senses, leaving his mind panicked and unable to coordinate any manner of self-defense, until a burst of adrenaline cleared his vision well enough to see the man moving in for a second hit.
It felt automatic: his arm snaking out in the man's direction, shooting a bright blue bolt of lightning out from his fingertips to electrocute the man where he stood.
His loud cry and shuddering, seizing movements were all it took to stir the rest of Jack's mind into clarity, to propel him into action. This was a fight for his life. He could not afford to make a mistake. He pushed himself off the ground and launched himself at his attacker, tackling him to the floor, pinning him down with all his weight and punching him in the face to keep him out of commission. He could not afford to leave any threat standing. His hands wrapped around the man's neck, his thumbs slotted against either side of his windpipe, and he pushed down with all his might. It was so easy. He had never done this before, never, yet it felt so natural. Even with the man's gnarled and knobby hands clawing at his face, even with the flickering glow and look of hate in his bulging eyes, it was so, so easy to crush his throat.
It wasn't until some moments after the man's clawing hands fell away that Jack finally released him. It wasn't until another moment later that Jack fully realized what he'd just done.
He pushed himself off and scrambled backwards on hands and feet, as far away from the corpse as he could manage until his back hit the rise of the dais behind him. Panic flooded him all over again as his insides threatened to turn themselves out, sending more bile up his throat and into his mouth.
What had he done?
It was purely self-defense, he might have reasoned, but there was no room for reason in his screaming mind, no room for anything at all but panic and the instinctive urge to flee. He didn't know where he could possibly flee to, who or what or where could possibly provide him refuge at a moment like this, but running from the scene was all he could manage, and running was all he did.