User blog comment:Pawn of Atlas/Important Discussion for Rapture Storyline page/@comment-189.143.46.245-20140329144427

I like to think that when Ryan's men took Fontaine and his men in that fight and put the surviving ones in the Department Store, Suchong went to hiding, as he worked for Fontaine and that would be pretty bad recieved by the public if he survived and stayed in Rapture proper, helping out the man who tried to kill or vanish him in the first place. Maybe he locked himself up un Artemis Suites, just using the secret hallway we see in BaS 2 to exit the building to avoid public detection. He was dead for the people of Rapture. And maybe, as he couldn't really get to populated places easily, Alexander assumed that he was killed during the siege against Ryan's forces, therefore he started working on the Alpha Series program since October 1958, (BaS' given date of Fontaine's "death") at Fontaine Futuristics, not knowing that Suchong was also working on it in his clinic, but differently and with another method. That way, Suchong's believed death by Gil would be explained, Alpha Series would be around by New Year's Eve, and the Protection Bond perfected by Elizabeth would become the main Bond for later Big Daddies in the series, replacing the Alphas' Pair Bond once Sullivan made the discoveries of Suchong's body during the Civil War, perhaps giving the research on the Daddies to someone superior, like Gil or Ryan. There, my two cents, my own head canon, but it makes a lot of things more understandable in my mind, and I'm going to go with it. :P