Diary.10: Yi Suchong - The Genius Scientist Without Ethics

In the 1950s, the Art Deco underwater city of Rapture was constructed in the cold, heavy depths of the North Atlantic Ocean. The utopia of “Objectivism” and “Rational Egoism” championed by Andrew Ryan was a massive experimental ground designed to liberate humanity from all shackles, such as state censorship and divine morality. However, the entity in which this philosophy culminated in its purest and most grotesque form was not the founder Ryan himself, but a single ruthless scientist who fundamentally reshaped the ecosystem and fate of Rapture.

This report is a top-secret, in-depth investigative record concerning Dr. Yi Suchong, one of the most important figures in the history of Rapture, and the genius scientist who created the city’s defense system (Big Daddy and Little Sister) as well as the ultimate assassin (Jack) who led the city to its ruin. His trajectory embodies the runaway escalation of “Behaviorism (mind control)” and “Eugenics” that emerged under the Cold War structure of the 1950s, demonstrating the ultimate dystopia reached when science loses its anchor of ethics.

This article elucidates the causal relationships of the specified themes based on evidentiary data such as audio diaries, environmental visuals, and the ultimate fates of characters left within the game. By strictly distinguishing between “recorded facts” and “considerations of ideological and psychological depths” inferred from historical context and circumstantial evidence, we will thoroughly dissect the madness and philosophy of Suchong, a genius without ethics.

1. A Muddy Upbringing and Survival Strategy: The Origins of Yi Suchong

Many of Rapture’s residents were elites who descended to the ocean floor to escape the constraints of the surface world and freely let their talents blossom. However, Suchong’s motivation for reaching the underwater city was decisively different from their “noble ideals.” At his core lay a thorough “thirst for survival” and “opportunism” cultivated under extreme circumstances.

1.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

Suchong was born as the son of a low-status servant in rural Korea. His birthday is recorded as December 16, but his exact year of birth is unknown. During World War II, in Korea under Japanese occupation, he smuggled high-quality opium to the Japanese military to earn his research funds and simultaneously prolong his own life.

In his audio diary “Protecting Little Ones,” Suchong recalls the situation at the time with extreme coldness. Stating, “The Japanese killed all the men in my town, but Suchong was spared. Because Suchong had very good opium,” he remains emotionally unmoved even in the face of the tragedy of mass slaughter. Furthermore, in the same recording, he states, “War is a terrible thing, but not for Suchong. Everyone is afraid, everyone wants ADAM. (…) The good news is, war makes a lot of corpses. Suchong knows how to recycle ADAM from corpses,” viewing human death merely as a supply of resources.

Later, in December 1946, to escape pursuit by the Chinese government as a collaborator with the enemy (a collaborator with Japan), he faked his own disappearance and fled to Rapture, an underwater city beyond the reach of the law.

1.2 Considerations of Ideological and Psychological Depths

At the core of Suchong’s identity lies a complete indifference to “great causes” such as the state, morality, and ideology. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, it is considered a virtue for individuals to reject self-sacrifice for others and to pursue their own happiness and reason. However, Suchong’s behavioral principle is not that of the “proud producer” idealized by Ryan, but nothing other than the ecology of the “ultimate Parasite” that fattens itself by feeding off environmental tragedies.

Amidst the ideological conflicts on the eve of the Cold War, he used opium as a bargaining chip for his own survival, consuming even massacres as a stage setting to prove his usefulness. There is no evidence whatsoever that he resonated with the philosophy of Rapture; he merely utilized the underwater city as a “safe zone where no laws existed to punish his unethical experiments.” This absolute lack of ethics and materialistic thinking that views others only as resources would later become a fatal poison that devoured Rapture’s society itself.

2. Hypocritical Philanthropy and Spatial Duality: The Free Clinic in Apollo Square

Suchong’s base of operations in Rapture was a space that seemingly embodied his very mentality. He established the “Suchong Institute” and conducted top-secret research under Ryan Industries, Sinclair Solutions, and later Frank Fontaine. Its most symbolic facility is his clinic located in Apollo Square.

2.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

Suchong opened “Dr. Suchong’s Free Clinic” on the second floor of Artemis Suites in Apollo Square. This functioned as a “charitable medical facility” for the working class who could not afford the exorbitant medical fees of the Medical Pavilion. However, like other charitable organizations run by Frank Fontaine, this clinic was not a pure philanthropic endeavor, but a front to consume the poor patients who came as test subjects for his human experiments.

The clinic has a dual structure: a public face and a massive secret research facility hidden behind it.

Deep within this clinic, he repeatedly conducted experiments devoid of ethical regulations, sacrificing countless citizens.

2.2 Considerations of Ideological and Psychological Depths

The spatial design of this free clinic is environmental storytelling that brilliantly represents the duality of Suchong as a person and the class contradictions of Rapture in the 1950s. The lower-class citizens who fell through the cracks of Ryan’s free-market economy had no choice but to cling to the “false philanthropy” provided by Fontaine in order to survive. Suchong exploited the despair of these socially vulnerable people as an “inexhaustible supply of cheap experimental materials.”

What is important here is that Suchong did not view the human body as something sacred at all. He considered himself an “artist who reconstructs the flesh” and treated his patients merely as canvases. This excessive desire for self-display and the psychopathy that objectifies others were sublimated into a maddening aesthetic sense, causing him no hesitation whatsoever in turning his facility into a blood-soaked slaughterhouse.

3. Commodification of the Flesh and the Art of Genetics: Madness in Plasmid Development

With the discovery of ADAM, the scientists of Rapture stepped into the realm of God by rewriting human genetics. While Brigid Tenenbaum established the foundational theory of ADAM, it was Suchong who popularized it as a practical product (Plasmid) and integrated it into the foundation of society.

3.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

While acknowledging the talent of his colleague Dr. Tenenbaum, Suchong looked down on her approach. In the audio diary “Plasmids Are The Paint,” he boasts as follows: “Tenenbaum… sometimes I pity that little freak. Such a poverty of imagination… she is satisfied just sitting in front of a tank of ADAM, tweaking and optimizing. I need to create. ADAM is a canvas of genetic modification… but Plasmids are the paint.”

His “creation” was achieved through extremely cruel human experiments.

On the other hand, Suchong highly evaluated Tenenbaum’s intuitive genetic analysis abilities, praising her in the audio diary “Mozart of Genetics,” stating, “She has no formal training, no experience, but sit her in front of a genetic sequence, and she becomes Mozart at the harpsichord.”

3.2 Considerations of Ideological and Psychological Depths

The process of Suchong’s Plasmid development is the extreme pole of Eugenics. While Tenenbaum held a pure (yet twisted) curiosity towards the mystery of life in a Nazi concentration camp, wondering “why some are smart and some are stupid,” Suchong’s interest was directed solely at an engineering utilitarianism: “how to efficiently and dramatically rewrite the human body and turn it into a product with market value.”

His description of ADAM as a “canvas” and Plasmids as “paint” is a complete denial of human dignity. Just as an artist mixes paint and slaps it onto a canvas, he chopped up and combined the genes of his test subjects. The reason he calmly continued recording even in the face of Roland Wallace’s screams was that, to him, the test subject was not a human being, but merely a “brush” or “pigment.” The pathology of the “commodification of human labor and desire” harbored by 1950s American capitalism achieved its ultimate evolution in Rapture at the hands of Suchong into the “commodification of genetics and the flesh itself.”

4. The Pinnacle of Behaviorism: The Creation of Jack and “Would you kindly”

Suchong’s most abominable and historic achievement was providing Frank Fontaine with the ultimate weapon in the power struggle for control of Rapture. That was the creation of Jack, a genetically engineered human completely stripped of human free will.

4.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

Suchong directed the project to rapidly age Jack, Ryan’s illegitimate son, and place him under complete mental control. In the audio diary “Baby Status / Lot 111,” Suchong records, “Baby is now one year old. Weighs fifty-eight pounds. Possesses the musculature of a healthy nineteen-year-old. The results are… disappointing, but within acceptable tolerances,” indicating that Jack was given the body of a young adult in just one year.

To engrave absolute obedience into this body, Suchong conducted brutal conditioning. The audio diary “Mind Control Test” records that decisive moment.

Suchong: Is that your puppy? Very pretty… Young Jack: Thank you, Papa Suchong. Suchong: Break his neck for me. Young Jack: What? Suchong: Break that pretty puppy’s neck. Young Jack: No… please… Suchong: Break that puppy’s neck. ——Would you kindly… Young Jack: No… no… (puppy whimpering) Snap (sound of bone breaking) Suchong: Very good.

Furthermore, in addition to the command trigger phrase “Would you kindly,” Suchong had also embedded a fail-safe called “Code Yellow” into Jack’s brain, which would forcibly stop his heartbeat.

He summarizes his achievement in the audio diary “Fontaine’s Human Jukebox” as follows: “For years we thought we were making progress with Skinner boxes and electroshocks… what a waste of time. Until ADAM, taming a child was like taming a boa constrictor. Fontaine hands Suchong a profile he wants imprinted on the kid’s head. Kid not a person, he jukebox, ready to play whatever tune Fontaine wants to hear.”

4.2 Considerations of Ideological and Psychological Depths

These facts demonstrate the extreme pole of “thorough Behaviorism,” such as Project MKUltra (the CIA’s brainwashing experiments) in the 1950s, Ivan Pavlov’s conditioned reflexes, and B.F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning. By using the unknown substance ADAM, Suchong elevated the uncertain method of psychological conditioning into an “absolute physical law” at the genetic and neurological level.

In Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, “human free will” and the “ability to choose based on one’s own reason” are considered the very conditions of humanity and its highest dignity. Andrew Ryan’s famous line at the climax of the story, “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” is the very thesis of this Objectivism.

However, Jack, created by Suchong, was the worst antithesis to this philosophy. Suchong downgraded a “human being with free will” into a “machine (jukebox)” that flawlessly executes a specified action (tune) when a coin (trigger phrase) is inserted. The experiment of having the puppy’s neck broken was a cold-hearted demonstration to prove that the subject’s emotions, affection, and moral resistance were completely powerless in the face of scientific conditioning. The act of Jack killing the puppy with his own hands while crying and screaming signifies the ultimate destruction of human dignity, where the autonomy of the mind and the actions of the body are completely severed.

5. Forced Affection and Grotesque Symbiosis: The Construction of the Protector Program

To mass-produce ADAM, an entity (Little Sister) was needed to recover ADAM from corpses and refine it within their bodies. However, it was impossible to send young girls with no combat capabilities out into the streets of Rapture, where madness-filled Splicers roamed. Therefore, Suchong devised the “Protector Program,” which involved accompanying the girls with an absolute guardian, the “Big Daddy.”

5.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

First, Suchong was pressed with the need to remove the psychological barriers on the Little Sister’s side. In the audio diary “Little Sisters and Corpses,” he views the girls’ disgust at the sight and smell of corpses as a problem, deducing, “We need to program them to perceive corpses as something appealing, like kittens or chocolate bars, some silly thing children enjoy.” This is the origin of the mental conditioning (cognitive conversion) that causes Little Sisters to call blood-soaked corpses “Angels” and believe their syringes are “syringe-shaped toys.”

Next was the conditioning on the Big Daddy’s side. Suchong directed the development of the “Protection Bond (Lot 255),” a mental imprinting designed to make the Big Daddy instinctively protect the Little Sister. He records in the audio diary “Protector Smell,” while mentioning the terrible stink emitted by the Big Daddy, “Little Sisters seem to like odor… Now must find new recruits,” attempting to utilize a chemical bond using pheromones.

However, this program entailed immense costs and difficulties. Suchong reveals the manufacturing process of the protector suits in the audio diary “Cheap Son of a Bitch.” “Fontaine is a scary son of a bitch, but Ryan is a cheap son of a bitch. The protector suits are not reusable. You have to take a man, graft his skin and organs directly into the suit, otherwise the suit doesn’t work. Ryan says Big Daddies are too expensive. Ryan can go suck egg,” he says, bitterly criticizing Ryan for being stingy with the budget.

5.2 Considerations

The development process of the Protector Program vividly demonstrates that Suchong perceived “human emotions and bonds” merely as chemical and neurological reactions. He reduced the fundamental love (agape) of humanity—where a parent protects a child and a child adores a parent—into physical and chemical elements such as “pheromones (terrible stink),” “visual hallucinations (the program to view corpses as angels),” and “brain imprinting,” and artificially synthesized it.

Here lies a grotesque parody of the nuclear family and patriarchy of the 1950s. The role of the “strong father (Daddy)” protecting the girl from the dangers of the outside world is forcibly played by citizens who have been transformed into hideous monsters, their organs grafted into diving suits and their free will stripped away. And the “innocent daughter (Sister)” is trapped in a hallucination that mistakes corpses for angels, turned into a blood-sucking machine. Suchong degraded even the concepts of love and protection into “functions” programmable by ADAM.

Furthermore, it is also important that he viewed Ryan and Fontaine, two ideological arch-enemies, merely as “financial backers (patrons).” He had no interest in Ryan’s Objectivism or Fontaine’s selfish ambitions. For him, the absolute standard of value was solely “how much funding (resources) they would provide for his unethical experiments,” and he would calmly switch employers regardless of who they were. In the audio diary “Changing Employers,” upon learning of Fontaine’s (faked) death, he openly expresses his joy: “Bad for Fontaine, but good for Suchong. (…) Tenenbaum is gone, Fontaine is gone. Suchong is the only one who knows everything about the Little Sisters. This is very good for Suchong.” His loyalty was always dedicated solely to his own experiments and profits.

6. Greed Transcending Dimensions: Communication with Columbia and Intellectual Exploitation

Suchong’s insatiable scientific curiosity and opportunism allowed him to cross even the barriers of space and dimensions. Records from “BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 2” reveal the fact that he was communicating with Jeremiah Fink, a capitalist and inventor from the alternate-dimension floating city of Columbia, through tears in space-time.

6.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

When Elizabeth visits Rapture, it is revealed that Suchong was using tears (rifts in space-time) to share research data with Jeremiah Fink of Columbia, engaging in joint technological development (or mutual imitation).

The drinkable superpower drugs “Vigors” manufactured by Fink were an imitation and application of Suchong’s “Plasmid” technology. On the other hand, the design philosophy of the giant mechanical bird “Songbird” developed by Fink (an absolute defensive instinct towards a target girl) greatly influenced the “Protection Bond” of the Big Daddy that Suchong was developing, and both parties advanced their own projects while stealing glances at each other’s research.

As the key to completing the Big Daddy’s imprinting, Suchong demanded that Fink provide him with “Elizabeth’s hair.” However, Fink ultimately broke off the partnership and refused this.

6.2 Considerations

The relationship between Suchong and Fink is truly that of “mirrored Parasites separated by dimensions.” One toyed with the human body using biology (ADAM and genetics) in an underwater dystopia, while the other exploited workers using physics (the Lutece quantum levitation technology) in a fanatical city in the sky. What the two have in common is a complete lack of ethics and a capitalistic greed that unhesitatingly plagiarizes and alters the intellectual property of others, turning it into their own profit.

What is noteworthy is that even when Suchong witnessed the phenomenon of tears transcending physical laws—that is, “windows to another dimension”—he never once believed in the existence of God or felt awe at the mysteries of the universe. To him, the dimensional rifts were merely a “convenient means of communication” and a “smuggling route for new technology.” This overwhelmingly materialistic thinking and utilitarianism are the very rock-solid foundation that supports Suchong’s madness. Any paranormal phenomenon, in his hands, is instantly converted into an “available resource.”

7. The Consequence of Karma: The Tragedy in Apollo Square and Environmental Storytelling

The final moments of the genius scientist who ignored all ethics and continued to consume others as test subjects and jukeboxes are presented to the player through masterful “environmental storytelling” that will go down in gaming history. The very scientific achievements he pursued ended up taking his life.

7.1 Reconstruction of Events Based on Recorded Facts

On January 14, 1959 (estimated date), Suchong met his end in the secret test chamber inside the free clinic in Apollo Square.

The audio diary “Protection Bond” vividly records the moment of his death. Suchong was terribly frustrated by the failure of the imprinting, as the Big Daddy was not reacting to the Little Sister. In the midst of this, one of the Little Sisters (Leta) clings to him, repeatedly calling out, “Papa Suchong!” Enraged, Suchong shouts, “Get away, you filthy little shit!” and strikes Leta. Immediately after Leta begins to cry, the tremendous roar of a Bouncer-type Big Daddy echoes from behind. Along with Suchong’s death cry, “What are you doing? Get back… get back!! Aaaargh!”, the spinning sound of a massive drill reverberates, and the recording cuts off.

About a year later, in 1960, when Jack visits the clinic in Apollo Square, Suchong’s corpse is gruesomely rotting, left impaled by a massive drill and screwed to the desk in his own office. Sullivan, the head of security, also testifies that he found him nailed to the desk, but the leader, Ryan, “just didn’t care” about this situation.

7.2 Considerations

Suchong’s death perfectly embodies “hamartia (ruin caused by a fatal flaw)” in Greek tragedy.

First, his “complete lack of empathy for others (psychopathy),” which led him to violently strike a defenseless girl out of frustration, became the direct trigger that took his life. He had fatally underestimated the natural human emotions that a child will cry when subjected to violence, and that a guardian nearby will become angry.

Second, with extreme irony, the actions of the Big Daddy that killed him were proof that the “Protection Bond (Lot 255)“—which Suchong himself had so desperately desired to complete, designed to “absolutely protect a harmed Little Sister”—had functioned perfectly. In “Burial at Sea - Episode 2,” it is depicted that Elizabeth, who came from another dimension, had indirectly completed this bond (the emotional connection between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister), but Suchong, unaware of its success, became the first victim of the “system that forces love” which he himself had created.

Third, the “environmental storytelling” of his corpse rotting away, skewered by a drill in the back of a blood-soaked operating room without being recovered by anyone, highlights the cold-hearted nature of Rapture’s society. Even Andrew Ryan, who had heavily favored him and relied on the Big Daddies and Plasmids he produced, ignored his death without a second glance and left him there. Suchong had consumed countless human beings as “disposable tools,” but in the end, he himself was nothing more than a “disposable cog” in the massive experimental ground of Rapture. His corpse is the most cruel monument demonstrating how a human being who has lost their usefulness is treated in an Objectivist society.

Conclusion: The Blood-Soaked Legacy Left by the Science of Madness

Dr. Yi Suchong is not an entity that fits into the mere cliché of a “mad scientist.” He is the incarnation of pure evil that emerges when “moral responsibility” and “human dignity” are completely stripped away from the “pursuit of self-interest” championed by Objectivism.

He possesses neither a “philosophical great cause” like Andrew Ryan, nor a “perverted art-for-art’s-sake” like Sander Cohen. Furthermore, he possessed absolutely none of the “pangs of conscience” or “awakening to motherhood” that Brigid Tenenbaum later harbored. What he did have was an obsession cultivated in an extreme struggle for survival, a “violent inquisitiveness” in the name of science, and an “emotional vacuum” that could only perceive others as matter.

• Stripping away the dignity of a human being with free will and remaking them into a “jukebox.”

• Reducing human sorrow and affection to the “effects of chemical substances” and forcing a grotesque symbiotic relationship (Big Daddy and Little Sister).

• Sending the innocent poor to the dissection table under the guise of philanthropy.

The Plasmids, brainwashing technology, and Protector Program left behind by Suchong continued to operate even after he died impaled by a drill, ultimately leading the deep-sea utopia of Rapture to complete ruin. His corpse rotted away in the darkness of Apollo Square, but the “runaway escalation of science without ethics” that he unleashed carved the deepest and most horrifying scars into the history of Rapture. What awaited at the end of humanity denying God and continuing to alter flesh and mind according to their own desires was the inevitable ruin of being slaughtered by the living machines that humanity had created with its own hands.