BioShock Infinite: The End of the Multiverse (closed for lassardlost & slut_in_white)

[LassardLost]

BioShock Infinite: The End of the Multiverse (closed for lassardlost & slut_in_white)

“What do you think they’ll think?”

“Does it matter?”

“What?”

“Does it matter?”

“Is matter a verb or a noun?”

“Both.”

“Well if it’s both then yes, though you used the verb incorrectly in the sentence.”

“I’m so difficult to talk to sometimes, Lutece.”

“Well that is something we can both agree on.”

_+_+_+_+_+_

Grey Kendall awoke with a throbbing headache. Grey was not the kind to have headaches. The last time he had suffered from one was his intern year in during residency, but that was a simple tension headache. This time, the left side of his head throbbed so painfully that he wished he had never woken up. He opened his eyes, the vision of a bleak white ceiling before him, and sat up. A groan. He felt dizzy. He kept his eyes closed until the dizziness went away, taking stock of what he thought had happened.

He had been walking home after his shift. He worked in the Emergency Department in a tertiary care center in San Francisco, and he was only a few blocks away from his apartment. He took the usual alleyway shortcut. Just before he reached the end of the alleyway, he heard an unusual sound –some kind of whiz-pop like he had never heard before, accompanied by a distinct if not quite disgusting smell; a combination of black licorice and burnt human hair. He turned, to see a slender man in a brown suit standing before him, his head cocked to one side, with a quizzical look on his face. His suit was not the standard modern fare however. it appeared, if his throbbing head served him correctly – to seem… old. Like he belonged in the forties. In his hand was some kind of silver device – it looked like a remote control, at least, it didn’t look like any kind of weapon. There had been nobody in the alleyway when he had walked into it, and there was still some light outside as the sun was just setting, so he would have seen someone in the alley if he had been there before. Grey’s wondering at where the fashionably-out-of-place man with the remote control had come from was quickly curtailed by the man’s sudden movement: his hand shot up and the last sensations Grey remembered after that was the sight of electricity arching, shimmering through the air before him, coupled with an instantaneous and severe pain in his head – incapacitating from the sheer pain of it. Grey remembered falling backwards. But the last thing he remembered, the most disturbing part of the entire thing, was that he did not remember passing out. He did not remember hitting the floor. He remembered, and quite distinctly so, never hitting the ground. He fell, and fell and fell, and the same whiz-pop sound and disgusting smell permeated his quickly diminishing senses, until… he woke up in this bed.

Now he sat, and as his headache subsided enough for him to open his eyes and take in his surroundings, the first thing he noticed, was that he was in some kind of cell. The walls were a dull white, with water stains coming up the side from the floor and the ceiling. Peeling paint on all the walls – except on one where there was a large, horizontal, rectangular mirror that took up almost the entire wall. Directly opposite that mirror-wall was a door with a small opening in it, bars running down its length. A commode. A sink. And that was it. The entire space could not have been more than seven by seven feet.

Grey felt cold. Fear had already taken hold, but as he looked down at himself and realized that he was completely nude, the fear transcended to horror. Whoever that man was, and wherever he was now, they had nothing good in store for him. Nothing good at all.

 

[slut_in_white]

Isobel del Rasa had been spending the past hour or so trying not to cry. Her pale grey eyes never left the one-way mirror that spanned one of the walls of her cell. She was certain someone was on the other side, and she was quite adamant that she wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of seeing her tears.

She was sitting on the small cot that marked the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn't built into the wall - the only other items were a sink and a toilet. She'd pulled herself into the tiniest ball she could manage which, honestly, was quite small. She was just shy of 5'3" and slim enough that she'd been the target of plenty of snide comments about how she needed to eat more. As it was, she was curled up in part to comfort herself and hold her fear at bay, and it part in an attempt to hide as much of her body as she could behind her legs. She could only imagine the leering eyes that were on the other side of the mirror, searching for some glimpse of her naked chest. She wasn't going to give them that satisfaction either. She pulled irritably on her long, dark hair, bringing it in front of her shoulders to hang down over the carmel-coloured skin of her breasts, in the hopes of putting another layer between them and the eyes. With a shuddering sigh, she pulled her knees up closer to her chest, and continued to stare back at the mirror, her expression some combination of rebellion and terror.

------

It only seemed like an hour before that Isobel had been walking home from work. She'd gotten a job in a biology lab at the University of Toronto, writing the highly specific programs required by the researchers there. It had been her dream job when she graduated university only a few months before, and she'd only been working there for a month or so when she'd encountered the strange woman with the silver remote.

She'd always known that it wasn't a good idea to cut through the empty, darkened parkade near her building on her way to the subway stop, but it cut her walk in half, so it was always tempting. She'd been hungry and anxious to get home for dinner. What harm could possibly come to her in the 30 seconds she'd be inside the building? Plenty, as it turns out. She had rounded a corner and nearly walked smack into the red-haired woman. She remembered apologizing, and the woman ignoring her. She'd frowned, thinking the woman rather rude, and stepped around her to continue on her way. Then, there had been a strange snapping sound, like the crack of a large static shock, and a blooming pain in the back of her head.

Then she remembered falling, falling forever. She didn't remember hitting the ground, or much of anything that made any sense. The falling stopped, abruptly, and she was simply sitting on the cot in her cell, without having made any impact at all.

Terror gripped her. She had no idea where she was, or what the woman wanted with her. And that assumed the woman was even at fault here. There hadn't been anyone else in the parkade at the time, but the woman, with her perfect coiffure and immaculate suit that looked a bit like something out of Mad Men, didn't exactly seem the type to kidnap random young women.

Of course, that's what they say, isn't it? It's always the ones you least expect.

 

[LassardLost]

Grey sat with his legs curled up against his body, attempting to hide his nakedness. He had not lived a dangerous life. He had no prior career that would have earned him enemies, nor had he a modicum of a criminal record. He was a straight-shooter. He had had a what he had always thought was a pretty standard middle class up-bringing, working through college to pay for bills. He had thousands upon thousands of dollars of loans which he had always paid on time after college, a masters and his medical school. He had had a few girlfriends along the way, none of whom he had angered considerably upon either his leaving them or their leaving him. He was known for his humor among his friends, his kindness among his family (with the occasional angry outburst when people pushed his buttons - but nothing more than usual). He was a quick thinker and he liked working with his hands which was why he was a recently graduated physician in an Emergency Department of a level 1 trauma center. The most unusual thing he had done in his life, if it could be regarded as such was that he had travelled only once out of the country and that too to Mexico with his medical student association for a mission, and there had been no issues at the border. Grey ran his self-perceived narratives through his mind again and again, as if by doing so the sheer banality of them would somehow free himself of this situation which was clearly not supposed to be part of any of those narratives. The only thing he could come up with was what he had heard on the radio the other day. There had been a show on which the current tax scheme was being debated. At one point, one of the left-wingers had uttered the standard line that "those who earn more should be taxed more," but then at some point had mentioned the "elites of the society," which the radioshow guest had thought were people like "wealthy politicians, investors, doctors..." and others. Whether Grey considered himself to be an "elite" now that he wore a long white coat (he certainly did not), or not was besides the point. It was at that moment that he realized that it didn't matter what he thought - others would seem him as such. And perhaps some group of those "others" had decided that now that he was an "elite" physician, he - or rather, his bank account - was ripe for the picking. This was the only possible explanation.

Yet the man that Grey saw just before he ended up in this cell hardly struck him as the type to conduct a robbery (but those are just details, he could very well have been), and the cell that he was in now didn't make any sense in light of that theory. Why not just hold him at gun point and take him to a local ATM? Perhaps they meant to torture him to be sure that he gave up all his assets? What bothered him the most, was not the idea of the loss of the little money he had recently acquired - but rather that he couldn't make sense out of any of this. That he was naked. His privacy and his right to exist in the way he chose to, completely and utterly violated in a way that was like nothing he had ever experienced. Fear, more than anything permeated him, but below the fear simmered anger. Neither of those however could get the best of him. As soon as whoever it was that was doing this to him revealed themselves, Grey would need to have his wits about him - naked or not. He was not going to let anyone take his life away from him.

A sound like the static-crackle of an old grammophone suddenly permeated the room.

"Specimen twenty-four, please be advised that you are now property of the Laboratory for Future Discovery." A male voice crackled through what Grey identified immediately as a small box-like speaker just above his head on the wall behind him. "Your life as you know it, has now come to an end. You will now reside within the confines of this laboratory, until further notice. Obedience will be rewarded. Disobedience will be punished." The tone was not malevolant. In fact it sounded quite non-chalant, almost bored, as if it was literally a scientist reading the "methods" section of a journal article. "The sooner you accpet this fact, the better it will be for you. Any attempt to escape or otherwise maintain non-compliance with our scientists' experiments will result in only furtherance of suffering." A pause, with the crackle continuing in the background. "Do you understand?"

Grey now had someone - at least a voice - with which to work with. "I understand... but-"

"Good. Now please stand and face the door, arms by your side, don't bother covering your genitalia." The voice interrupted. Grey stayed seated.

"I will, as soon as you give me some infor-" The door knob jiggled, and the door swung open, two men in white jumpsuits appeared, their hair combed and parted neatly, both of them burly, one of them carrying a black rod with what appeared to be a pulsating light at the end of it. Grey's heart jumped into his throat and instinctively put his hands up, moving away form the men. "Get away from meAAAAAH!" One of the burly, white-jump-suited men jabbed the black rod into Grey's thigh, sending electricity coursing through his body - pain wracked through him as his muscles spasmed and he fell to the ground - his vision blurred, his heart pounding, his entire body aching and screaming. "Ok! Ok! S-S-Stop! Stop it!" He was able to get out as his body twiched uncontrollably, curling into a fetal position on the floor. The two men stood silently over him, the one with the rod at the ready. The voice crackled again.

"You did not indicate understanding Specimen twenty-four. Do you understand? Obedience will be rewarded, disobedience will be punished." The crackling went silent, and the two ment left the room, locking it behind them.

Dr. Grey Kendall lay on a cold, tiled floor, freezing, in pain. He tried to fight the mounting confusion and abject fear. Whoever these people were, they were organized. They were cold and calculating. They were going to try and rob Grey of his hard-eanred life. The pain in his body made him believe for just a moment that they may succeed - but this was only a temporary set-back. Grey would need to go along with this as much as possible to earn their trust, to learn as much as he could about them. Only then would he be able to figure out how to get out of here.

 

[slut_in_white]

Isobel didn't know how long she'd been sitting there, curled up on the bed, but it had certainly been long enough that her legs were growing stiff and achy. Still, she didn't dare move or relax. Fear and no small measure of anger kept her tense and still.

She started, scrambling even further into the corner, when the door opened abruptly, admitting two women dressed in pristine white lab coats. A loudspeaker crackled to life.

"Specimen twenty-five, please be advised that you are now property of the Laboratory for Future Discovery. Your life as you know it, has now come to an end. You will now reside within the confines of this laboratory, until further notice. Obedience will be rewarded. Disobedience will be punished. The sooner you accpet this fact, the better it will be for you. Any attempt to escape or otherwise maintain non-compliance with our scientists' experiments will result in only furtherance of suffering. Do you understand?"

Isobel craned her head up to look at the speaker on the wall behind her. "No! No I don't understand!" She turned her gazer to the two women, both old enough to have graying hair, both bearing stern expressions. "Where am I? Why did you bring me here? I haven't done anything to deserve this!"

"Such questions will not be answered. Do you understand the directions given to you?"

Isobel, despite knowing that the two women were not the ones speaking, glowered at them in any case. They were the only living representations of whatever group was holding her, and so she directed her anger at them. "No! I don't understand anything!"

"Please specify what particular aspect of the directions you did not understand."

"Why am I here?!" Her voice was growing louder, nearly shouting, but she hadn't been given anything to drink in the hours since she'd arrived, so her voice was raw and cracking, robbing it of some of its usual power.

"That question is not directly related to your directions. Our information suggests an IQ high enough that such simple directions should be well within your capacity to understand. Responding with anything less than complete honesty when asked a question will result in punishment."

Isobel felt her heart drop like a stone at those words. Punishment? Just what the hell were they going to do to her? Some part of her wanted to give in, out of sheer terror at the idea of being punished at the hands of these people. The rest of her, still the larger part, was furious at how she was being treated.

The two women in lab coats crossed the room toward her and one of them produced a metal rod with a vicious looking set of prongs on the end.

"Stay the fuck awa-AH!" Isobel had started by trying to keep as far from the women as possible, but the room was small and there was nowhere for her to go. When the prongs made contact with her skin, an electrical shock raced through her system, setting all of her nerves on fire. It wasn't enough to be truly harmful - the tool was clearly designed to inflict the greatest possible amount of pain without doing any actual permanent damage. She curled up into a little ball on the cot, shuddering. Her face was wet with tears, but by the time she got enough feeling back to recognize them, she'd stopped crying.

"Specimen twenty-five. Stand up and follow the lab technicians," the loud speaker instructed.

Isobel looked up at the two women and the fear that gripped her over what they were going to do to her once she followed them was still greater than the fear of the pain she knew the rod could inflict. That, combined with her anger and the desire to refuse anything these people asked of her drove her to narrow her eyes and respond with a hoarse, "No." Then she shut her eyes and waited for the pain of the prongs again.

This happened several times. The loudspeaker would ask her to stand, Isobel would refuse, the women would shock her and then wait until she was capable of speaking before they asked her again. Isobel never really gave in - the pain simply became too much, and she stopped answering after a while. The lab-coated women gave her another shock, as if to be sure that her lack of response wasn't simply some new form of rebellion. When Isobel didn't respond again, they hauled her up, one at each of her arms, and practically dragged her out of the room.