Author's note: Been working on this for a few months; the Luteces are brilliant characters, and writing them was so much fun! Hope you enjoy the fic, and as ever, comments, criticism and reviews are warmly received.

Warnings for: Mild references to blood, violence and death, and spoilers for Bioshock Infinite.

Disclaimer: Bioshock and all related concepts do not belong to me – so would you kindly not sue?

CHAPTER ONE – SET IN MOTION

As a child, I had a recurring dream in which I was in a room, staring at another girl who both was and was not myself. I never thought, however, that I would end up meeting her. Or, for that matter, that she would prove to be male. Needless to say, my view of the universe has widened considerably within the last few days. My counterpart seems bemused with the whole situation. We do share a lot of similarities in that regard.
- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 12th of January 1891

Rosalind Lutece was not having a good day.

It wasn't the incompetence of her numerous lab assistants that was bothering her. Nor was it the near-constant malfunctions in her lab equipment, making it nearly impossible to get any real work done. It wasn't even the unending telephone messages from her employer, ordering her to hurry the progress of science just to meet his confused goals. Although, certainly, none of that was helping her mood.

No, the reason that Rosalind Lutece was having a bad day was a lot simpler than that. She was incredibly bored.

Somehow, when she had entered the field of physics, Rosalind had imagined that it would be a lot more interesting than this. Every day she would turn up at the lab with a vague notion that, that day, she would finally get to do something truly earth-shattering. Oh, sure, there was the day she had discovered the basics upon which she was building a floating city. That had been mildly interesting the week she had first discovered it. But the novelty had worn off quickly enough as she realised that was about it on the mind-blowing discoveries front. The Lutece Field was simply failing to hold her interest any more – the daily rituals of carefully measuring atoms had become a chore, especially when that was all she had spent the last few months doing.

All things considered, she needed a break. So as she marched into the lab on that blustery January morning, Rosalind was not expecting much in the way of intellectual stimulation. Her fears were confirmed when she was greeted at the door by one of her lab assistants, holding a broken gizmo and wearing a sheepish expression. She swept him aside with a look of scorn, storming past him into the room and giving its occupants her best death glare. By the terrified looks on their faces, they got the hint and scuttled off to at least pretend to be doing something productive. Sighing, Rosalind cursed the day she was lumbered with such a hopeless batch of lab assistants.

Her lab wasn't even a particularly interesting location to begin with. Essentially, it was just a set of large rooms, with any actual lab equipment strewn haphazardly across them wherever it would fit. Experiments were conducted when and where she decided they would be, and any assistant foolish enough to question her judgement would pay the price. Such was the price of not having enough money to fund a better-organised space. Her sole source of funding was her employer, a young man whose self-styled prophet act had convinced a couple of rich, influential and (in Rosalind's opinion) completely gullible people to give him the money to fund his dream of a flying city. She'd call it preposterous but for the fact that the city was rapidly on its way to becoming a reality, something that probably should have felt like more of a triumph than it did.

Having an eccentric employer came with more drawbacks than perks, and the most evident to her was the lack of any sort of proper space in her lab. Not that she really minded, equipment was equipment no matter where they threw it, but the assistants were often prone to complaining about it. That, and the lack of any sort of decoration. Apparently, the drab grey walls and concrete floors did not lend themselves to a happy workforce, which she repeatedly ignored because she didn't see the point. (Apart from the fact that it made the lab extremely cold in the winter. Perhaps she should look into getting some sort of carpeting in the future, then.)

She did have an office of sorts, which was more realistically just a smaller room that happened to contain a desk and her vitally important notes. Said notes were currently either in a pile on the floor next to the desk or scattered across it chaotically. I really need a better filing system, she mused to herself as she thumbed through yesterday's findings, which were scrawled onto a yellowing page in blotchy blue ink.

"Well, at least nothing's changed," she said aloud, scowling at the page in front of her. The readings were exactly the same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Not that she had expected anything else, of course. "It might have just made today somewhat interesting."

Closing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair slightly, blankly assessing her situation. If this tedium continued for any longer, she decided, she would have to go insane in protest. The life of a mad scientist did sound rather attractive, even at the cost of a permanent decrease to the credulity of any discoveries she might make. And a marked increase in the chance that something would explode, but if she was insane that probably wouldn't be as irritating.

With another exasperated sigh, Rosalind opened her eyes. There was no point in delaying the inevitability that she would have to get some work done at some point.

Outside of the office, her lab assistants were busying themselves by procrastinating as efficiently as they could. The four young men seemed to be permanently intimidated by her, a fact that only served to endlessly amuse her. The oldest, a small, thin boy named Walter Francis who looked as though he had never experienced the sun in his life, was the only one who dared approach her, a clipboard clutched in one hand.

"G-good morning, Madame Lutece. How was-" he began to stutter. Rosalind silenced him with a look.

"Francis, if you honestly cared for my thoughts you would have asked me that when I first arrived. As such, you betray your attempt to make up for overpowering the generator yesterday. Get me a cup of tea, will you?" she snapped, a humourless smile creeping onto her lips.

"Y-yes ma'am," Francis stammered, before darting out of the way. She rolled her eyes briefly at his retreating form, before striding down the corridor and stepping into the grandly-titled Observation Room.

The Observation Room was really just the room where they had set up the first working Lutece Field and left it running for further surveillance. All it contained was the equipment they used to generate the Lutece Field, which consisted of a couple of large, grey machines at the far end of the room, and a few desks that had been dragged in to aid them in recording their observations of the single atom that the Field manipulated. The atom in question had responded by failing to do anything at all for a significantly annoying number of months.

It was tedious enough for Rosalind to consider deactivating the entire thing and progressing with the next stage of the research, but for the fact that they needed to test if the Lutece Field's effects ever wore off. Discovering that after building a floating city and sending it off into the sky would have some disastrous consequences.

Absently sweeping a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Rosalind picked a clipboard from a nearby desk and made her way over to the equipment, where a lone lab assistant in an oil-stained shirt and threadbare brown waistcoat was frowning at a screen, rubbing his jaw in the most thoughtful pose he seemed to be able to muster.

"Mornin', Madame Lutece," he said as she approached, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Wouldja have a look at this? Somethin' weird goin' on here..."

"What is it, Wright?"

The young man ran a hand through his dark hair. "Well, the atom seems to be...pulsin'. Or somethin' like that, anyway. There's no pattern to it, I've been watchin' for a while now."

"Hmm." Rosalind's brow furrowed as she moved the assistant out of the way, taking his place at the computers. "Let me take a look..."

With a spark of surprise, she peered at the atom displayed before her. Surely enough, it was blinking at her, pulsating and flashing to a mysterious rhythm. If there was some sort of pattern to it, it was extremely complex and completely unfathomable to the human mind. This was highly unusual. She had never seen the atom behave this irregularly before – and it seemed to have started too suddenly to be a complete accident. Wright filled her in as she watched, carefully noting down the exact pattern of pulsing that the atom was displaying.

Apparently, he had come into the lab the previous evening with everything as normal, but twenty minutes ago the atom that they were observing had begun acting erratically. He had no idea what to make of it, and was in fact about to go and find her to see what she thought when she saved him the trouble by walking in.

Rosalind's eyes narrowed. "Curious," she muttered, looking down at her notes. In her haste, she had transcribed the pattern as a series of dashes, long and short depending on how long the pulsing lasted. But now that she was looking at them properly, they didn't really look how she had thought they would. The pattern seemed random, but there was some repetition to it after a while. Not to mention that the ordering of dashes almost seemed familiar to her. In fact, they almost looked like…

"Morse code!" It was as though a switch had turned on suddenly in her brain. Still holding the paper, she ran back to her office, throwing open one of the desk drawers. At the bottom was a long-forgotten, dusty book on Morse Code, which she grabbed before heading back to the Observation Room, her mind reeling.

If it was Morse Code, it meant that somebody was trying to contact her by manipulating an atom. Which was, on the whole, an extremely odd way to try and get into contact with somebody, not to mention inefficient. Her head buzzed with the possibilities. Clearly, this was the work of somebody who was both exceptionally clever and questionably insane. That sounded like the sort of person that Rosalind would want to meet. Silencing a bemused Wright with a glare, Rosalind threw herself down at a nearby desk, Morse Code book open in front of her and, muttering to herself, began to decode.

"Dot dot dash, dash, dash, four dots, dot…"

After a couple of minutes, she found herself staring down at the translated message, her mind filling with more questions than answers.

I am Robert Lutece. Is there anyone out there?

The first thing that jumped out at her was the name. Robert Lutece. Rosalind wasn't sure, but she had a hunch that 'Lutece' was not exactly a common name – at least, she had never met another Lutece that wasn't related to her before. There was almost no way that could be a coincidence. But if it wasn't a coincidence, then what was it?

Then there was the actual message. 'Is there anyone out there?' That was ominous. That implied that the mysterious Mister Lutece was in fact somewhere unconventional, perhaps not even on this world. She was beginning to suspect that the nature of this other person was also rather unorthodox, but she couldn't prove it. Not without more evidence.

"It's a message," she said aloud, startling Wright, whose eyes were beginning to droop. "From one Robert Lutece. He wants to know if there's anyone 'out there', whatever that entails. Do you think we can reply?"

Wright scratched his head. "Well, we'd need to know how the hell he's manipulatin' that thing to start with-"

Rosalind smirked. "That is simple," she remarked, turning to face the Lutece Field Generator behind her. "I assume that Mister Lutece has something similar to our own Lutece field wherever he is. He must be turning it on and off to generate this effect." With a grin, she indicated the switches on the side of their own device. "Rather time-consuming, although admittedly the only way to contact somebody on this scale."

"On this scale?" Wright's face was contorted into a grimace of confusion as he stared over her shoulder at the decoded message. Rosalind pursed her lips in wry amusement. Perhaps she was expecting a little much for one of her useless lab assistants to actually understand anything she said.

"Yes, Wright. I believe that Mister Lutece is not exactly on the same plane of existence as you and I."

"What?!" Wright boggled at her, his deep brown eyes wide as saucers.

"It is only a hypothesis at this point," she admitted with a casual wave of her hand. "But given that we both have the ability to influence this same atom, and we are the only ones in this room with the necessary equipment set up, I would say that it is a rather likely one, wouldn't you?"

He continued to stare at her as though she had spontaneously metamorphosed into a large octopus right there in front of him. "...right," he said, finally. "And what, exactly, are we gonna say to him?"

She was already back at the desk, translating her response into Morse. "Well, I had thought that 'hello' would suffice. Unless you have something more suitable in mind?"

"Uh-"

"I didn't think so. Come on. I need your assistance."

On the screen, the atom had stabilised, returning to its dormant state. This other Lutece appeared to have stopped transmitting. It was time to send out a message of her own, then. Motioning for Wright to man one of the many banks of switches, Rosalind made her way over to the side of one of the machines, where a large lever labelled 'ON/OFF' was attached to the cold metal. Working together, the pair turned the machine on and off in sequence, making the atom on the screen glow and pulse to itself. Somewhere, she hoped, a man named Robert was watching on a similar screen, translating her message back to plain English with a little book similar to hers.

I am Rosalind Lutece. Who exactly are you?

Panting with exertion, Wright wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Rosalind rolled her eyes at him. Her assistant was proving to be quite the drama queen. Turning the Field off and on wasn't that exhausting.

"We only sendin' it once, Madame Lutece?" he asked, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. She shook her head, returning to her observing the screen.

"That shan't be necessary. He should be watching for a response – and if he isn't, then sending it multiple times shall only serve to tire you more."

Wright cringed and mumbled an apology, but Rosalind's attention was already diverted back to the screen. The readings were going erratic again; it seemed as though their contact was indeed paying attention.

Lutece also? Interesting. Why are you observing my particle?

She frowned as she finished deciphering the message. That wasn't the question that she was expecting, and to be perfectly honest she had no idea how to go about answering it. How much was this stranger expecting her to tell him? He might not be a particularly trustworthy individual, although Rosalind had a hunch that she could predict his actions just as well as she could predict her own. After a moment's thought, she and Wright transmitted their reply.

I was observing it first.

That doesn't answer my question.

The answer was almost instantaneous, which made her smirk. Apparently, Mister Lutece tolerated fools about as well as she did. She bit her lip, staring at her Morse book. What could she say that didn't reveal too much about herself?

I suspect for the same reason that you are, Mr Lutece.

Curious. Where exactly are you?

That made her pause. If her suspicions were correct, then this Robert should have come to the same conclusion that she had – suggesting that, in fact, she was wrong about him and how they were communicating. But that couldn't be possible. For one, she was never wrong. But more importantly, there was no possible way that he could be manipulating her atom without her noticing.

The thought that he was being deliberately vague crossed her mind. Yes, perhaps he was testing her, to see if she was up to par intellectually.

Haven't you suspected?

I want you to confirm it.

I am in my laboratory.

Don't be sarcastic.

As entertaining as their banter was, it wasn't getting them anywhere. With a thoughtful frown, Rosalind attempted to move the conversation onwards.

You share my suspicion though, don't you?

That we are speaking across realities.

She grinned. So she was right. Of course. There was no way that she could have been wrong, really, but there is always a margin for doubt in any experiment. She straightened her blazer before manning the switch again, musing as she did so that this was proving to be just the distraction that she had been looking for.

Indeed. Unless you are a long lost cousin.

If that were the case I think a telephone might be an easier way to communicate.

She rolled her eyes derisively, chuckling as she did. It seemed that they shared a sense of humour, at least.

Now you're being sarcastic.

Maybe. Here, then, my exact coordinates.

The stream of numbers that followed was exactly the same as her own coordinates. Rosalind was grinning as she encrypted her next transmission. It was true. This Robert Lutece was not only remarkably similar to her; if her suspicions were correct, they were the one and same person, just in different realities.

"This is astounding," she muttered, more for her own benefit than Wright's. "You realise, we are communicating with a different, but parallel universe? Right at this very moment, we are speaking to someone in a place that nobody in our entire universe has ever communicated with before!"

Bemused by the lack of a response, she turned to see that Wright had fallen asleep against the bank of machines. She tutted. Typical. What did he expect her to do, send these vitally important messages herself? Some people were just so inconsiderate. Turning back, she began to operate the power switch again.

Our suspicions are confirmed, then.

I have yet to see any evidence.

I can hardly give you my coordinates back. They are the same.

I'll take your word for it.

She rolled her eyes. Perhaps that meant that her counterpart was not prepared to be as trusting as she was. That was fair enough. She did have solid evidence for their theory; he did not, and she couldn't think of any way to prove it to him at that exact moment. However, he appeared to have reached the same conclusions as her, even with that lack of evidence. She had to admit, it was impressive.

In any case, it's a pleasure to meet you, Mr Lutece. In a manner of speaking.

The pleasure is all mine, Madame Lutece. It's not every day that one meets oneself.

Standing back from the Lutece Field, Rosalind smirked. Yes, this did look as though it was going to be an interesting enough diversion for the time being.