Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume Two

John felt like he was going to get swallowed up by Bridget’s big eyes as she stared at the baby and looked away. The baby’s biological mother was being kept alive by life-support equipment and was laid on a bed beside the pod, still connected to the baby by an artificial umbilical cord, but he was already falling into the delusion that Bridget was the baby’s real mother.

“This child will be the bridge that connects us all,” Bridget told him. This baby, the prototype BB who would not only help rebuild America but might even save humanity one day, reacted to her voice and let out a tiny cry. Bridget caressed the pod and whispered, “It’s okay. You’re a special child.”

He was already special to John. But John had only realized that a long time after the child had been removed from his mother’s womb and the BB experiments had begun.

“You’ll be out of there in no time.” John heard a voice as he walked down the hallway. “And the second all this is over, I’m gonna take you wherever you wanna go.”

Before John even had time to try to remember who the voice belonged to, his attention was snatched away by the open doors to the laboratory—which was dressed up to look like a hospital room from the outside. Someone had been sloppy. You had to pass through multiple layers of security to access this floor! Only a few people would have been able to enter the room, but if anything had happened to the BB, John would never be able to face Bridget again.

John held his breath and snuck over to the open doorway to check it out. He could see someone’s back as they leaned over the pod. Even though his body was obscured by a shirt, John could tell the man was made of muscle.

“Look, BB. Brought you an astronaut.”

Without warning, and without a sound, the man leaning over the pod turned around. Astonished by such a clearly drilled action, John couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. The man had the same reaction.

“Can I help you?” the man asked. The man’s smile instantly jogged John’s memory. Whenever John had escaped the jaws of death, that smile was always there to greet him.

“Holy shit, John, is that you?!”

“Captain?” John exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

The two men embraced each other. Die-Hardman, the man who made it back from any situation, and Cliff, the man who always made it back from the verge of death, had met once again.

“My wife’s checked in,” Cliff explained, indicating toward the hospital bed by the wall. A woman appeared to be sleeping there surrounded by life-support equipment. She, herself, was brain-dead, and was “dreaming” of her unborn baby. John had no idea that she was Cliff’s wife. He had no idea that the BB was Cliff’s son. How much did the captain know?

“They don’t want a repeat of last year.” Cliff looked away from his wife and back toward John.

“Last year? The voidout in Manhattan?” John asked, careful to feign surprise. Cliff’s wife and baby certainly seemed to fit the bill for the mother and child from Manhattan. This time they had managed to create a special child, a Bridge Baby, without causing another accident. But to think that this was Cliff’s kid… Now the BB had a special meaning for John, too.

But the question of who the baby really belonged to began to spin around John’s head. Did it belong to Cliff? Or did it belong to Bridget and America? It was Bridget and the American government who had saved the child from its mother’s womb. He was expected to become the savior of America. He was supposed to become a child that belonged to all mankind, to be sacrificed. Just like Jesus who died on the cross atop the hill of Golgotha. Who had been Jesus’ real father?

“This isn’t what we agreed on. You said you’d do everything in your power to save BB.”

Cliff hounded Bridget. It had been a few visits since Cliff and John had first reunited.

“We are. But we cannot release your son just yet,” Bridget answered coolly. There was no hesitation in her cold voice. “Believe me when I tell you—it’s for the best.”

“Says some woman in a mask who’s done nothing but lie to me,” Cliff snapped back.

What Cliff was saying was right, but John couldn’t take his side right now. It made him feel so frustrated and pathetic that he couldn’t help his friend.

One discovery John had made in the time since he first saw Cliff again was that Cliff knew nothing about the Bridge Babies. All Cliff had been told was that his wife was brain-dead and the premature fetus had been rescued and moved to the NICU. His wife’s corpse would have to be suitably disposed of due to similarities with the Manhattan case, but with the passage of time, they might be able to save the baby. To Cliff, the BB wasn’t a Bridge Baby at all, but his actual child.

“I have a duty to protect our country. Lies are an unfortunate necessity.” Bridget left the room, ignoring Cliff, who was about to say something back.

All John was able to do was scurry silently after her. He couldn’t bear Cliff’s stare.

“The president gave me the highest-level access privileges. I’ve used them to manipulate the security system,” John looked up from the terminal and explained to Cliff a few days after the president brushed him off.

“We have five minutes before it resets, sir. Five minutes to talk… off the record.”

After that day when John walked in on Cliff, Bridget had made a complaint about the defective autolock feature on the door. As a result, John’s authorization had been upgraded to the highest level.

“They’re moving your son to a new facility tomorrow. You’ll never see him again. He’ll serve as the foundation of a new communications network—a sacrifice for a nation that no longer exists,” John hurriedly explained.

Cliff’s face clouded over. It wasn’t surprising. This was the first he’d heard about it.

“This child’s special. Your baby is going to become a Bridge Baby for all of America.”

John began to divulge all he knew about the BB experiments.

“It was a few months after the initial Death Stranding explosions. Some private hospital was doing a C-section. It was an unusual case. At seven months along the kid’s mother had become brain-dead. They put her on life support for the baby’s sake, but her blood pressure began to drop and the kid showed signs of bradycardia, so they had to perform an emergency Cesarean. The procedure went well and the plan was for the baby to be cared for in the NICU for a while. It was during the final stages of the operation when the voidout hit. The records show one of the doctors screaming ‘I can see them!’ At the time, medical procedures were broadcast on closed networks for medical interns. When the footage was analyzed, we realized the doctor shouted that at the exact moment he touched the umbilical cord to separate mother and child. That’s when the voidout hit and the hospital became a crater. We didn’t understand what it meant at the beginning, but as we researched the Death Stranding, we began to believe that the ‘they’ the doctor was referring to was the BTs. We began to think that maybe if we could find another mother and child, and use the umbilical cord that connected them to try to recreate the same conditions, we might be able to sense BTs and that might help us to finally understand the whole Death Stranding phenomenon. The president at the time went ahead with the project and experiments and testing commenced.