In space, no one can hear you scream or complain about the working conditions. In the case of the universe in which Dead Space is set, you definitely want to read the fine print on your contract before signing up for an interstellar work shift.
When Isaac Clarke arrives at the dilapidated USG Ishimura, there’s a lot going on and plenty of monsters to contend with. One particular piece of nightmare fuel is the baby necromorphs, or Lurkers as they’re more commonly known. For many, it’s a jarring encounter and an unexpected addition to the creature roster, but why are they canonically here?
To answer that, we’ll need to dig a little deeper into the Ishimura and its less-than-ethical work practices. Because once you get that into context, the whole picture makes gruesome and grim sense. So here’s why there are babies on the USG Ishimura.
The USG Ishimura And Workplace Safety
First, let's take a look at the USG Ishimura itself. A vast starship in the Planet-Cracker category, it's been in operation for over 60 years without incident. It is run by the Concordance Extraction Corporation (C.E.C), a public company that primarily operates and trades in deep space mining and solar extraction. The ship operates through the company as part of the United Spacefaring Guild and is capable of rendering an entire world into floating chunks of debris and detritus. A doomsday device in the wrong hands, it's primarily used for mining dead and barren planets.
The Ishimura soldiers on through the depths of space with its crew that numbers in the thousands. Vast swathes of the ship are dedicated to grinding down millennia-old geography. So living conditions are cramped. But when employment opportunities are scarce in the future, you can't exactly be picky. Still, what's there offers a modicum of comfort, iron-encased crew rooms, med bays, cafeterias, and Zero-G Basketball for entertainment. All the modern luxuries of space travel.
Mining planets for their ores on such a vast scale isn't exactly going to go smoothly. Your average Health and Safety Manager would have a heart attack if they saw inside a few of the Ishimura's accident logs. It's commonplace for people to die, lose a limb, or get critically injured whilst on the job. Long hours are mandatory, the pay is low, and with so much heavy machinery and large rocks rotating around in zero gravity, something is bound to go wrong eventually.
A glance at some of the signage on the ship, or a scan of the logs, shows just how callous the Concordance Extraction Corporation can be when it comes to their workforce getting killed on the job. But with such a high mortality and injury rate being so commonplace, and space being so vast, the USG Ishimura can't exactly send people home or hire in a new shift. So people get patched up as best they can be, and they're pushed back out onto the work floor. This may sound fairly bad, but it gets worse when you learn how they do it.
So Why Are There Babies On The Ishimura?
In other sci-fi universes that include a starship in deep space, babies are common. Relationships can spring up between crewmates, and it spirals from there. But in the case of the USG Ishimura and other Planet Crackers, they have babies in abundance. To put it bluntly, these bundles of joy are nothing more than spare parts.
Vat-grown en masse and supposedly all cloned, each starship of a particular size is home to a coterie of high-tech cradles. Encased within are living, harvestable donors for everything from missing limbs to damaged organs and more. It's a practice that's not instantly stated outright in the game as no character sits Isaac Clarke down for a heart-to-heart on the matter.
But if you take a look at the surroundings, and some of the patient logs when in the Medical Deck around Intensive Care or in Mercer's Labs, you'll learn about the harvesting procedures and also literally see floating babies in jars.
Baby Labor Was A Bad Idea
Having a massive bank of readily available spare parts may seem like an efficient if brutal, approach to keeping the workforce mobile. In the case of the USG Ishimira, and subsequent locations in later games, bringing along spare babies continues to backfire quite spectacularly. Because from the point of view of the Necromorphs, they're handed a sizeable amount of fresh troops on a silver platter.
Though the mutation isn't as complex as other combat forms, when infected an infant undergoes a quite radical and grisly transformation into a Lurker. Their backs rupture open as three large tentacle appendages burst forth, barbed ends flying off with a whipped flick, only to be replaced by more as they scuttle forth.
And Everyone's Okay With This?
The beating-heart question at the core of this dilemma of using the baby backup system is if everyone is fine with this practice. They seem to be. There's no report of protests, no mention of it by other characters, nothing. One of the text logs you pick up mentions how certain people who make generous donations to the company can get preferential treatment when it comes to their spot on the prosthetic limb wait line. But insofar as everyone else in the main cast is concerned, it's just how things are done. As grim as it may seem, it does fit with the setting.
Space is vast, planets are plentiful, and life is cheap in this industrialized future.