The Luteces are revealed over the course of Infinite 's story to be parallel universe versions of the same person, which is the basis of their in-sync interactions with each other and their ability to finish each other’s thoughts. In the main timeline of BioShock Infinite, Rosalind Lutece is a physicist who developed the technology that made the floating city of Columbia a reality. During one of her experiments she met Robert Lutece, a male version of herself from another universe, whom she refers to as her "brother". The discovery of a machine at Rosalind's boarded up residence that could produce 'tears", fissures in dimensional time and space that offer a route to an alternate universe which does not exist in the current world, reveal that the Luteces initially worked for Father Zachary Hale Comstock, the leader of Columbia. They devised a plan to secure a child as the future successor for Comstock, who had become sterile as a result of the machine's effects on him, but later turned against him when they realized Comstock's true nature. In retaliation, Comstock arranged for the deaths of the Luteces through a sabotage of the Lutece machine. The Luteces had survived the machine's malfunction, but find themselves in a quantum state of flux, where they are able to travel between universes freely and in turn cannot be affected by the phenomena of a given universe.