Diary.02: ADAM and Plasmid - The Rampage of Science Without Ethics

Introduction: The Double Helix of “Miracle” and “Despair” Born in the Darkness of the Ocean Floor

In the 1950s, as the surface world was divided by the nuclear threat and ideological conflicts under the Cold War structure, a completely free-market city, “Rapture,” was constructed deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Embodying Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, this Art Deco utopia was a testing ground for pure Laissez-Faire, devoid of state censorship, religious morality, and the ideology of the “Parasite” that advocated for the salvation of the weak. However, when unraveling how this city descended into a dystopia smeared with madness and blood, one cannot avoid the existence of a single, decisive “biological singularity” that predates political conflicts or class struggles. That very singularity is the subject of this report: the discovery of “ADAM” and “Plasmid,” and their reckless commercialization.

In this article, the second in a series of reports documenting the history of Rapture’s collapse, we will thoroughly elucidate the process from the biological mechanism of the substance known as ADAM to its commercial distribution as Plasmids, and the physical and mental deterioration it induced. By strictly separating the objective facts explicitly stated in the game from the ideological and psychological insights inferred from them, we will logically uncover the depths of what happens when science is stripped of all ethical restraints.

2. Revelation from the Deep: The Discovery of ADAM and Its Biological Mechanism as a “Benign Cancer”

2.1. Encounter with the Sea Slug and the “Resurrection” of Cells

The frenzy of genetic engineering in Rapture began with a chance event on the dark, cold docks of Port Neptune. As a fact explicitly stated in the game, Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum, a geneticist with a past of discovering her scientific talent in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, one day encountered a smuggler. This man had been paralyzed in both hands for years due to a war injury, but after being bitten by an unknown deep-sea Sea Slug while unloading cargo at the docks, he suddenly regained the function of his fingers by the next morning.

Tenenbaum’s audio diary “ADAM Discovery,” which recorded this phenomenon, factually recounts the terrifying efficacy of the unknown secretion (later named ADAM) extracted from the Sea Slug. ADAM does not merely heal damaged cells. It is the ultimate panacea that “resurrects” dead cells, forcefully twists the double helix structure (DNA) of the human body, and rebirths individuals, turning “black to white, short to tall, weak to strong.”

2.2. Facts and Analysis: The Rampage of Stem Cells and the Redefinition of Life

As a biological fact confirmed by the in-game audio diary “ADAM Explained,” when ADAM is taken into the body, it promotes the formation of powerful stem cells. These stem cells possess the ability to differentiate into any cell, including unnatural cells that could not possibly exist in the natural world. From a medical perspective, the action of ADAM closely resembles a “benign cancer,” a process that destroys the native cells of pre-existing biological tissues and replaces them with highly unstable stem cell versions.

As a logical analysis based on this fact, the discovery of ADAM signified an encroachment upon the “realm of God” within the scientific and ideological context of the time. The 1950s was the period in the real world when the double helix structure of DNA was discovered, an era when the mysteries of life were on the verge of being unraveled by science. The “complete redesign of the human body (the extreme of Eugenics),” which was tabooed in the surface world due to ethical and religious constraints, was justified in the morality-free Rapture under the beautiful name of “individual self-realization” in Objectivism. The violent nature of ADAM—destroying cells and reconstructing them in an unstable state—can be said to be the very ideological metaphor of the city of Rapture itself: “destroying old morals and reconstructing society through the unstable power of the free market.”

3. The Industrialization of the Flesh: An Ethicless Mass Production System and the Exploitation of Hosts

3.1. Parasitism on the Gastric Mucosa and the Induction of Regurgitation

Although the astonishing potential of ADAM became clear, there were decisive physical constraints in the early stages. As an explicitly stated fact, the amount of ADAM secreted by a single Sea Slug captured in the deep sea was extremely minuscule, falling far short of what was needed for the full-scale commercialization of genetic modification technology.

To resolve this supply shortage, Brigid Tenenbaum and businessman Frank Fontaine crossed the final line of bioethics. According to the facts recorded in the audio diary “Mass Producing ADAM,” they developed a parasitic process in which a live Sea Slug was surgically implanted directly into the gastric mucosa of a human “Host” (Augmentation procedure). By feeding the host and then artificially inducing “regurgitation” to make them vomit, they succeeded in extracting 20 to 30 times the amount of usable ADAM that could be obtained from a single Sea Slug.

3.2. Facts and Analysis: The Ultimate Exploitation Seen in the Birth of the Little Sister

The most ecologically suitable hosts for this cruel parasitic process were young girls. As a matter of fact, Fontaine established “Little Sister’s Orphanages” as a front, successively providing girls without relatives as test subjects, and mass-produced living ADAM refineries known as “Little Sisters.” When Tenenbaum expressed concern about the shortage of hosts, Fontaine coldly declared, “Patience, Tenenbaum. The first facility for the Little Sisters will be opening soon.”

The analysis derived from this is the extreme of the “instrumentalization of others,” a negative aspect of Objectivism philosophy. In Ayn Rand’s Rational Egoism, the pursuit of one’s own happiness is considered the highest morality, but as a result of this being permitted without limits, defenseless orphans were degraded into “mere organic machines for generating profit.” The exploitative structure disguised as the welfare of an orphanage embodies a gruesome irony: the capitalists of Rapture, who supposedly despised the Parasite (the weak), themselves “parasitized” the bodies of young children to siphon off immense wealth.

3.3. The Imprinting of “Angels” through Behaviorism

As demand expanded further, it became necessary to directly harvest (recycle) residual ADAM from corpses lying around. As an in-game fact, Yi Suchong applied mind control based on extreme Behaviorism to prevent the girls’ psychological rejection of the gruesome task of draining blood from corpses. Their vision and perception were completely rewritten; they were programmed to see ruined corridors as rose-colored marble, corpses as gracefully sleeping “Angels,” and the extraction of blood with giant syringes as the “salvation of angels.” Through this perfect mental isolation (imprinting), they were remade into “Functional Children” who continued to slurp ADAM from corpses while humming innocent songs.

4. False Evolution: The Commercialization of Plasmids and the 1950s Dystopia

4.1. The Commodification of Genes and the Biblical Metaphor of “EVE”

Raw ADAM is an extremely unstable substance, but the serum refined and processed to manifest specific abilities is a “Plasmid.” By injecting a Plasmid into the body, the subject’s stem cells undergo specific mutations, allowing them to acquire “superpowers” such as shooting electricity from their fingertips, generating fire, and manipulating telekinesis.

As a matter of fact, to power these active Plasmids, a blue-glowing byproduct (energy source) refined from ADAM, known as “EVE,” was indispensable.

As an ideological analysis of this fact, the importance of the biblical metaphor embedded in the naming of “ADAM and EVE” can be cited. Just as Eve was created from Adam’s rib in the Old Testament, the structure of EVE being refined from ADAM clearly suggests that scientists were mimicking the creation of life, which is the realm of God. Furthermore, the fact that the HUD symbol for EVE in the game is an “apple (the forbidden fruit)” serves as a poignant allegory: as a result of the citizens of Rapture denying God and succumbing to the temptation of the forbidden fruit of science, they ultimately brought about their expulsion from paradise (Rapture) and their own ruin.

4.2. Deceptive Marketing and Superpowers as Household Goods

The historical background of the 1950s was an era characterized by the post-war economic boom, the advent of a mass consumption society, and the prevalence of an innocent Techno-utopianism that believed “science and technology will magically enrich every aspect of life.” Plasmids, too, were initially marketed not as military weapons, but as “revolutionary household consumer goods to enhance everyday convenience.”

The following table is a comparison of facts and data, verifiable from in-game advertisements and circumstantial evidence, showing how major Plasmids were marketed as everyday conveniences while their actual, terrifying destructive power was concealed.

The advertisements of the time were drawn in the innocent and cheerful cartoon style typical of the 1950s (illustrations of housewives and workers reminiscent of Vault Boy).

What can be analyzed from this is the ultimate form of capitalist deception, akin to the tobacco advertisements of the time: “concealing the terrifying real-world side effects and lethality with pop and cute mass advertising.” Consumers irreversibly rewrote their own DNA with the same casualness as buying a cheap syringe for under $20, and as a result, an environment where “mentally ill madmen could easily burn ordinary citizens to death with a single fingertip” was legally fostered everywhere in Rapture.

5. The Aesthetics of Madness: J.S. Steinman and the Dismantling of Ethics

The “liberation from constraints” brought about by ADAM did not stop at the mere spread of physical violence; it also birthed a fundamental madness in aesthetic ideals and medical ethics. The most prominent example of this is the fate of J.S. Steinman, the cosmetic surgeon who managed the medical facility, Medical Pavilion.

5.1. Liberation from “Toy Morality”

Once a brilliant surgeon bound by the medical ethics of the surface world, he experienced a dramatic paradigm shift with the advent of ADAM. His surviving audio diary, “ADAM’s Changes,” factually records his ideology, in which he ridiculed surface ethics as “toy morality” and came to equate the power of ADAM, which could freely sculpt the flesh, with the power of God.

“Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan… Before I met them, was I truly a surgeon? We held the scalpel, bound by toy morality. (…) But ADAM gave us the means to change that. And Ryan freed us from the false ethics that held us back.”

5.2. Facts and Analysis: The Flesh as “Clay” and the Tragedy of Cubism

As a matter of fact, for Steinman, who had acquired the “Paint” of ADAM and a scalpel, the human body had transformed into nothing more than “clay.” In the audio diaries “Limits of Imagination” and “Symmetry,” he recounts that after remaking his own beauty to the extreme, he began having lunch with a hallucination of “Aphrodite (the Goddess),” who revealed to him the “liberation from the tyranny of the commonplace.” Ultimately, he immersed himself in bizarre vivisections, dismantling and reconstructing the faces of living patients like Picasso’s Cubist paintings, carving them into asymmetrical lumps of flesh.

What is analyzed from this series of evidence is the philosophical terror of just how far the limitless power of ADAM can distort human desires for “Self-expression.” In Objectivism, “individual productive achievement” is considered the highest virtue, but in Steinman’s case, when the canvas for that achievement was directed at the “flesh of others,” medicine transformed into torture. Science and technology, stripped of the shackles of ethics, provided a logical foundation to justify madness as a “new aesthetic.”

6. The Trap of Market Fundamentalism: Ryan’s Philosophy of Leaving ADAM Unchecked

When discussing the gruesome side effects and societal collapse caused by ADAM, one cannot exclude the market fundamentalism (Objectivism) of Andrew Ryan, the creator of Rapture.

6.1. The Fanaticism That “The Market is Patient”

As a matter of fact, as the use of ADAM spread, its terrifying side effects (blindness, insanity, and death) became a serious problem in the city, and voices demanding regulation of this dangerous “Plasmid business” grew louder within Rapture. However, Ryan adamantly refused the introduction of regulations in his audio diary “The Market is Patient.”

“There is tremendous pressure to regulate the Plasmid business. There are side effects, yes. Blindness, insanity, death. But what good is an ideology if it is not put to the test? The market does not cry like a baby at the slightest discomfort. The market is patient. And we must be too.”

For Ryan, the health damage and mental collapse caused by ADAM were merely a “test of the market,” the result of choices made by consumers based on their own Rational Egoism. He also argued in another recording, “Great Chain Moves Slowly,” that while acknowledging there are those who “destroy themselves with careless splicing,” he stated, “I will not pass laws. It is hasty action that invites the Parasite of big government.”

6.2. Analysis: Ideological Purity and the Genetic Arms Race

What can be read from this fact is the extreme price paid to protect ideological purity. Ryan thoroughly rejected the “guarantee of safety” through state or government intervention as the logic of the Parasite that robs individuals of their freedom. Under completely free competition with no government intervention or ethics committee audits, the Plasmid market radicalized as a tool in the struggle for supremacy between Frank Fontaine’s smuggling ring and Ryan Industries.

Plasmids, which began as everyday conveniences, rapidly transformed into “weapons” to eliminate opposing factions. Citizens sought more powerful Plasmids for self-defense, and later to attack their neighbors, and consequently, the intake of ADAM increased exponentially. This “Genetic Arms Race” was the root cause that ultimately dragged the entirety of Rapture into an irreversible abyss of madness. Ryan’s Laissez-Faire functioned as the ultimate accelerator for the collapse of the citizens’ genes, instead of growing the market.

7. The Feedback Loop to Collapse: ADAM Addiction and the Splicer

7.1. The Biological Cycle of Ruin and Withdrawal Symptoms

The greatest and most fatal problem with ADAM lay in its powerful “addictiveness” and the self-destructive feedback loop caused by the “instability” of the cells.

As a fact based on the data left by Tenenbaum and others in the game, ADAM destroys the original native cells and replaces them with unstable stem cells. Because these stem cells are extremely unstable, it had a structural flaw: in order to maintain that state and preserve the form of body and mind, one “must constantly continue to consume new ADAM.” Once a Plasmid is used and ADAM is taken into the body, the countdown to an irreversible addiction known as “ADAM Sickness” begins.

1. Forced Consumption: To control the unstable cells, further ADAM is consumed.

2. Cellular Proliferation: The consumption of new ADAM causes the unstable stem cells in the body to proliferate even further.

3. Increased Demand: To maintain the enlarged cluster of unstable cells, a much larger amount of ADAM is required than before.

When the supply could no longer keep up with this explosively growing thirst for ADAM, gruesome withdrawal symptoms occurred.

7.2. The Fall to Splicer and Physical/Mental Meltdown

The end result of this genetic collapse due to ADAM deficiency or overdose is the madmen roaming the streets of Rapture—the “Splicers.” They were once the elites, artists, and skilled workers who agreed with Rapture’s ideals and moved to the ocean floor, but their forms have been destroyed beyond recognition.

• Physical Collapse (Fact): Continuous bleeding from the eyes, nasal cavity, and mouth, sagging skin (cutis laxa), tumor development, and the protrusion of crystals. Furthermore, abnormal mutations due to the overdose of specific elemental Plasmids can be seen (for example, the protrusion of ice crystals from the entire body like the Frosty Splicer caused by an overdose of “Old Man Winter”).

• Mental Collapse (Fact): Severe paranoia, hallucinations, severe insomnia, and memory impairment. Their mutterings, such as “I can’t sleep because of the ADAM. I’ve been so forgetful lately,” can be heard throughout the city.

• Ferocity (Fact): Ultimately, they were reduced to “vicious animals” capable of sniffing out even the faintest scent of ADAM, descending into beings who would not hesitate to brutally murder others to steal it.

7.3. Analysis: The Loss of Self and the Meltdown of the “Individual”

What is analyzed from these symptoms is a “meltdown of self-identity” that goes beyond mere drug addiction. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is predicated on the “firm reason of the individual,” but ironically, ADAM, which they chose as a means of evolution, physically destroyed the functions of the cerebral cortex and erased their reason and memories. As a result of trying to design themselves by their own will, they lost the very existence of the most fundamental “I” at the genetic level.

8. The Frozen Frenzy of 1958: The Psychology of Masquerade Masks

8.1. The New Year’s Eve Tragedy and the Wearing of Masks

One of the most visually striking facts when exploring Rapture is that most Splicers wear glamorous Venetian masks (Masquerade masks) modeled after “rabbits,” “butterflies,” or “cats,” and are clad in blood-stained evening dresses and tuxedos.

Behind this bizarre sight lies a clear historical fact. On December 31, 1958, a grand New Year’s Eve masquerade party gathering Rapture’s upper class was held at the high-end Kashmir Restaurant. However, this glamorous banquet was torn apart by a bombing perpetrated by the rebel forces led by Atlas, and this triggered the outbreak of the gruesome Rapture Civil War.

Amidst the violence and terror of the civil war, people competed to abuse ADAM in order to survive, and the physical deformities (such as tumors and collapsing skin) rapidly progressed. In an in-game line, Atlas comments on this situation: “Wonder why they wear those masks? Maybe there’s still a shred of humanity left in them, and they’re ashamed of what they’ve become.”

8.2. Analysis: The Fate of Bloated Vanity and Psychological Defenses

As a deep psychological analysis based on this fact, the masks function not merely as decorations, but as the “last psychological defense” to protect their completely shattered self-dignity. The elites, who once despised the constraints of the surface world and descended to the ocean floor boasting of their own talents and beauty, could not bear to look directly at their own altered, hideous faces, nor expose them to others.

Their figures, roaming the sea of blood ruled by madness in clothes frozen in time from the night of the glamorous masquerade ball, vividly depict the contrast between the ultimate artificial beauty of the 1950s Art Deco style and the hideous biological collapse brought about by ADAM. It is the saddest end of self-deception, reached as a result of vanity bloated to the extreme discarding the morals that bound it.

9. Memory Transfer: The Ultimate Irony to Objectivism

Finally, there is a decisive fact that must not be forgotten regarding the biological singularity of ADAM. That is the property of “Memory Retention and Transfer.”

9.1. The Memories of Others Engraved in Genes

As a fact revealed from the records, ADAM possesses the ability not only to remake the flesh but also to copy the cellular composition of previous hosts and parts of that person’s memories, physically preserving them within its material structure. Due to this property, when ADAM is extracted from a corpse by a Little Sister and injected into a new user, a phenomenon occurs where the “memories (residual thoughts)” of the original owner flow directly into the brain of the new host. The “ghostly images” and inexplicable memory flashbacks that the player frequently encounters in the game are not paranormal occult phenomena, but nothing other than “chemical memory information” played back directly in the brain through the genes (ADAM) of others.

9.2. Analysis: The Meltdown of the Individual and the Fall into Collective Consciousness

This fact functions as the most cruel biological counter (irony) to the Objectivism philosophy at the foundation of Rapture. The supreme value in Ayn Rand’s ideology was the establishment of “The Individual,” an independent and absolute entity that never mingles with others. However, ADAM, which they used as a means of evolution, had the property of blending the memories of the fear, pain, and desires of countless others and overwriting them onto the individual’s brain cells in the process of circulating through the bodies of hundreds of different people, being extracted, refined, and shot back into veins.

The paranoia of the Splicers and their incoherent soliloquies spoken to empty spaces can be said to be no longer just “their own pure madness,” but simultaneously a manifestation of mental collapse produced by the “crossed wires of countless others’ memories” melting and mixing within their bodies.

ADAM granted the power to freely rewrite an individual’s “DNA,” but as a price, it physically and mentally dissolved the very boundaries of the individual, integrating the residents of Rapture into a single, hideous sea of madness (a collective genetic soup). The city that glorified the absolute “individual” ironically met its end through the ultimate “anti-individualistic” biological tragedy, where the consciousness and flesh of all humans were mixed together.

Conclusion: The Usurpation of God and Its Price

As the analysis in this article shows, the history of “ADAM and Plasmid” in Rapture is not merely a story of sci-fi magical items. It is a record of the ultimate biological disaster born when human “boundless thirst for evolution” intersects with the “absence of ethics to restrain it.”

In the surface world, science was always bound by the “chains” of morals, religious ethics, or state regulations. Andrew Ryan severed those chains as the ideology of the Parasite and constructed a completely libertarian society on the ocean floor. And scientists like Brigid Tenenbaum and J.S. Steinman, within that intentionally created Ethical Vacuum, used the deep-sea miracle of the Sea Slug to step into the “realm of God (the redefinition of life).”

However, the price was far too gruesome.

The elites of Rapture, who aimed for complete freedom and ultimate self-expression by redesigning their DNA with their own hands and freely kneading their flesh as “clay,” paradoxically fell into absolute slavery to the addiction of that self-altering substance (ADAM). What lay at the end of remodeling the girls of the orphanage into inhumane biological factories (Little Sisters) and exploiting their blood even to the point of mind-controlling their spirits was not evolution into supermen, but degeneration into monsters who had lost their reason (Splicers).

Ryan’s philosophy, which boasted that “the market is patient,” failed to calculate the providence of nature: the “limits of the human flesh (the fragility of DNA)” and its “boundless addictiveness.” The rampage of ethicless science brought about by ADAM and Plasmids brilliantly depicts the historical inevitability of a city, built on the hatred of the Parasite, ultimately transforming into a giant cancer cell itself—parasitizing its own cells (citizens) and its own future (children), eating itself alive from the inside. Beneath the masks they donned on New Year’s Eve in 1958, shedding tears of blood, they continue to wander the dark ocean floor even now.