Persephone



"Technically, Utopia shouldn't have much use for a detention facility... but if you do business as long as I have... well, you learn to pick a brand name from the writin' on the wall."

- Augustus Sinclair

Persephone Penal Colony is host to the Persephone Correctional Facility. It is the gulag of Rapture, a prison constructed by Augustus Sinclair as a favor to Andrew Ryan. It spans over two levels in BioShock 2, Outer Persephone and Inner Persephone. The prison is suspended over a deep trench on the outskirts of the city, built in a cavernous area under Fontaine Futuristics.

History
In the early days of Rapture's construction, when the original Sinker platform was moored in the ocean floor, the men working on the foundation discovered an enormous cavern in the bedrock. Sinclair saw the possibilities in such a discovery and purchased the rights to the space, which no one else wanted. He then paid off the few people who knew about it to forget that the cave had ever been found. Through further exploration Sinclair discovered that the cave system extended out into a cliff at the edge of an oceanic trench. Eventually, Persephone was expanded to lie just beneath Fontaine Futuristics, a convenient location close to Sinclair Solutions' largest client.

Even before the Rapture Civil War, the Persephone facility hosted many unruly people that Ryan found unfit for his society. One such dissenter, the noted social psychiatrist Sofia Lamb, was imprisoned in Persephone when her altruistic philosophies began gaining too much influence among the rich and poor populations of Rapture. Augustus Sinclair, ever the opportunist, took advantage of Lamb's psychiatric expertise and began employing her as a therapist of the other inmates, hoping to make them more docile. This plan would eventually backfire on him, as Lamb used this extra freedom to gain considerable influence with the inmate population.

After the birth of the Plasmid industry, Augustus Sinclair began renting out the inmates as test subjects in the experiments conducted by Fontaine Futuristics, and later by Ryan Industries. Many prisoners were subjected to these experiments, most unwillingly. One notable inmate (who would later be known only by the serial designation, "Subject Delta") was both a product tester at the "Plasmid Theater" in Fontaine Futuristics' headquarters as well as the first successful Alpha Series candidate in the Big Daddy program. Sofia Lamb objected to this treatment of her supporters, but she was powerless to stop it, and was eventually forced to choose sacrifices from among her own people to keep the rest alive.

This situation underwent a drastic change some time soon before the events of the 1958 New Year's Eve Riots that sparked the open Civil War in the rest of Rapture. Sofia Lamb's followers among the inmate population managed to overthrow their captors, gaining complete control of the facility and ousting Augustus Sinclair in the process. The remaining guards and prison employees, such as Warden Nigel Weir, were faced with the choice to either join Lamb's supporters or face the same fate as Sinclair. After this, Sofia Lamb was free to come and go from the prison as she pleased, and it became her base of operations as she waited for the chaos of the Rapture Civil War to end, and afterward as the Rapture Family took control of the remains of the city.

Eventually, Sofia Lamb converted several wings of the prison into housing and caretaking for a new batch of Little Sisters kidnapped from the surface. Dr. Edward Grimes and other staff (who had previously been employees of the prison) were commissioned to care for the girls and perform the needed operations on them. Lamb also brought her daughter Eleanor to stay in Persephone after her condition as a Little Sister was cured. Eleanor was soon confined within the prison as her mother began using her in the experiment to create a "perfect Utopian." For this purpose Eleanor was eventually confined in a comfortably arranged quarantine chamber in the upper level of Persephone. It is here that Subject Delta found her during the events of BioShock 2.

Operation of the Facility
Augustus Sinclair ran Persephone like many of his other business endeavors, trying to extract as much profit from it as he could. The largest way Sinclair Solutions profited was by renting out inmates as test subjects to other firms. However, Sinclair also turned a profit in other ways. Inmates were given the option to purchase special treatment or more comfortable accommodations. Advertisements for comfier beds and other products of "Fail-Safe Industries" were plastered on the prison walls, enticing inmates to purchase "premium accommodations available from your Sinclair Solutions Catalog."

Employees of Persephone seemed at least partially concerned with "rehabilitation" of the inmates. However, this interest was mostly inspired by the desire to make them more docile. An entire ward of the prison was devoted to inmate therapy. There, Dr. Grimes and other staff supervised patients in simple activities like creating paintings. Other forms of "therapy" included electroshock treatments and a special room designed to condition patients against feeling carnal urges.

Known Employees

 * Augustus Sinclair (Owner)
 * Dr. Edward Grimes (Physician/Therapist)
 * Nigel Weir (Warden)

Known Inmates

 * Charles Milton Porter
 * Connor
 * Dodge
 * Harold Darby
 * Harold Parson
 * Johnny Topside
 * Knuckles
 * Louie McGraff
 * Mattson
 * Murphy
 * Parson
 * Sofia Lamb
 * Thomas
 * Wilson

Trivia

 * Persephone was named after the daughter of Demeter, Greek goddess of the corn, who was kidnapped by Hades, lord of the underworld, to be his queen. To prevent Demeter's search for her daughter from driving humanity to starvation, Hades agreed to let Persephone visit with her mother six months out of the year, in spring and summer, while ruling with him the rest of the year, in fall and winter. Similarly, Sofia Lamb took Eleanor from Subject Delta, and he rescued her to prevent Rapture from ultimately collapsing.


 * If the player looks down through any window in either Inner or Outer Persephone, an enormous glowing orb can be seen, bigger than Persephone itself. It can also be (partially) seen radiating light around the Fontaine Futuristics level. The light seen in the Futuristics is reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights. No explanation is given in any part of the game for what exactly it is, but one of the game's developers, Steve Gaynor, revealed what it was meant to be. It is a "luminescent biomass, which is what originally mutated the sea slugs to produce ADAM."


 * In one of the Little Sisters' songs, Persephone is called "the House of Upside Down".