BioShock: Rapture

by John Shirley

  Yeah. He could feel it. His cultivation of Suchong and Tenenbaum was paying off.

  “Keep on this,” Fontaine told them eagerly. “I’ll make it worth your while—worth all our whiles!”

  Medical Pavilion

  1953

  Sitting pensively behind his inner-office desk in the medical pavilion, Dr. J. S. Steinman was bored, and tired of fighting his own impulses. And only just now beginning to understand why he’d come to Rapture.

  Steinman took a cigarette from the box on the coral desk, lit it with a silver lighter shaped like a human nose, and got up to open the curtains on his office port hole so he could gaze out at the sea—at kelp and sea fans waving in the current. Restful, that view. Nothing like New York. Always hectic in the Big Apple. People interfering with a man.

  It was the implied condemnation he resented, the small-minded judgment of his greatness. How to explain what it was like to reach out for the planet Venus, in hopes of making it his pocket watch? How could he explain that he was sometimes visited by the goddess Aphrodite? He had heard the goddess’s voice so clearly …

  “My darling Doctor Steinman,” said Aphrodite. “To create like the gods is to be a god. Can only a god fashion a face? You have done it again and again—you have taken what was lumpen and made it exquisite; you have taken the mediocre and made it the marvelous. But in every man and woman’s face a secret is hidden. The lost perfection—masked. Under the face of a woman whom low, vulgar people regard as ‘beautiful’ is another face, the perfect face, the Platonic ideal—hidden under the surface beauty. If you can liberate the perfect face from the almost perfect, you become a god. What is more important than beauty? It was I, Aphrodite herself, who inspired the poet Keats. Truth is beauty; beauty is truth! The hidden symmetry underlying the ugly irregularity of surface reality. And here is the paradox: only by passing through the dark gate of chaos, through the shadowy valley of so-called ‘ugliness,’ is the quest at last completed and the hidden perfection found!”

  Oh, how the goddess had thrilled him! Yes, it was true that he’d heard her voice while taking ether—cocaine and ether by turns, in fact—but it had been no mere hallucination. He was sure of that.

  So when Ryan had approached him, saying that innovative surgeons would be needed in Rapture, he’d heard Aphrodite whispering to him again: “Here it is! Here is the chance, here is the opportunity, here is the secret realm you’ve dreamed of, where you can at last unearth perfection! A refuge where the small-minded scorners cannot find you!”

  Steinman blew a plume of blue smoke toward the ceiling vent and turned to look at himself in the office mirror. He knew very well he was a “handsome” man. The elegant chin, the striking ears, the dark eyes, that understated, perfectly clipped mustache like an accent mark over a bon mot when he uttered a witticism …

  And yet there was another face under that one waiting to come out. Did he dare to find his own perfect face? Could he do surgery on his own face—perhaps using a mirror? Could he—

  “Doctor? Miss Pleasance is waking up…”

  He glanced up at the doorway, where his assistant waited for him: Miss Chavez, a small, pretty Puerto Rican woman in a white uniform, white shoes, nurse’s cap. She didn’t seem surprised to find him gazing into the mirror.

  Chavez was a petite little creature with a heart-shaped face, Cupid’s-bow lips. Could he find that perfect face underneath Miss Chavez’s features? Suppose he were to reduce the pterygoideus muscles by half, then doubly tighten the temporalis muscle, and he might just bisect the eyelids …

  All in good time. “Ah—yes, go ahead and begin unwrapping her face, Miss Chavez; I’ll be right there…”

  Miss Sylvia Pleasance was engaged to Ronald Greavy, son of the Ruben Greavy who worked closely with Ryan. They were an influential family in Rapture.

  He stubbed his cigarette out on the seashell ashtray on his desk and walked down the hall. Stretched out in the recovery room, Miss Pleasance was wearing a nightgown and socks. She had a sheet draped modestly over her. Look at those fat little arms. Too bad he couldn’t cut into those fat little arms and reduce them. Perhaps down to the bone. Even expose the bone in places. Like ivory jewelry …

  Nurse Chavez had cranked the upper part of the patient’s bed to a forty-five-degree angle and was beginning to unwind the bandages. Miss Pleasance’s large green eyes were gazing out at him from the gaps in the mummylike facial wrap with a mixture of fear and anticipation. Her red hair spilled almost stylishly over one side of the bandage. He thought, once more, that there might be a certain appeal to leaving the bandages on—forever. One would see only the hair and eyes—and mystery. Like a mummy …

  Sylvia Pleasance’s face was slowly revealed … Nurse Chavez gasped …

  And clapped her hands together. “Isn’t she lovely, Doctor! You’ve done a wonderful job!”

  He sighed resignedly: it was true. All quite lovely. He hadn’t done anything experimental with this woman. He was trying not to do anything unusual in his new practice. Just give them what they wanted. But it was hard. The temptation had been strong …

  She had a conventionally attractive, delicately sculpted face now, with dimples on her pale cheeks, a matching dimple in her chin. It was a sweetly rounded visage but with all the unpleasant chunkiness gone. Her fiancé would probably be pleased. She looked rather like an adult Shirley Temple. How tiresome. But the Pleasance woman cooed over her reflection when Nurse Chavez gave her the hand mirror.

  “Oh, Doctor! It’s perfect! God bless you!”

  “Yes, yes,” he muttered, approaching, taking her chin in his hands, turning her head from side to side, looking at it under the light from the gooseneck lamp. “Yes, only … I cannot escape the feeling that there is more, far more, to be done … some hidden perfection lurking underneath this pretty little mask!”

  “What?” Miss Pleasance seemed startled. She swallowed and drew back from him. “I…” She frowned and looked at herself again in the hand mirror. Turned her head this way and that. “No! This is what I wanted! Exactly! I’m amazed at how you got it! I wouldn’t alter it a jot, Doctor!”

  He shrugged. “Just as you like. I simply think…” Thinking to himself: If I could just cut a quarter inch off the nose … and then … perhaps narrow the forehead, entirely remove the orbicularis oculi …

  But aloud he said, “I’m so glad you’re pleased with the results. Go ahead and let her get dressed, Nurse, release her to her fiancé, and I’ll, uh…” He turned vaguely and walked, as if through a dream, back to his office.

  Surgical knives are so limited. If only there were some way to transform people on the cellular level. If one could only sculpt people genetically; if only a surgical artist could reach into the very essence of a person, transform the subject from within—just the way God would.

  The way Aphrodite would want him to …

  Fontaine’s Fisheries

  1953

  It was late. Fontaine’s office was closed, the shades drawn. Reggie was somewhere outside, keeping watch. Fontaine and Tenenbaum were alone in the fisheries’ office on a comfortable sofa. Brigid Tenenbaum was stretched out, wearing a negligee and red pumps. Fontaine was half-sitting on the edge, leaning over her, her hands clasped in his. Beside them on the floor was an empty Worley wine bottle and their glasses. Fontaine wore only his boxers and a T-shirt. His clothes were folded neatly on a chair at his desk across the room.

  She seemed frightened, and yet he could see anticipation in her eyes too when she glanced at him and—as always—looked quickly away.

  “You look kinda scared,” he said. “You sure about this?”

  “I … do not like to be touched,” she said. “But … I need it, when the feelings of desire come. What I dream of is a man who … who simply takes me. I will make some token resistance. But it will not be real. I must fight a little. I can only do it that way…”

  “Well, kid,” he said, using his ‘voice of reassurance,’ “you came to the right sho
p.” She’d cleaned up rather nicely and put on some perfume, even seemed to have brushed the cigarette stains off her teeth. “So this is something you haven’t done exactly—but you … imagined?” he asked.

  “Yes. I am afraid to touch. But I must be touched…”

  “What they call a contradiction in terms. That’s you, eh?”

  “Perhaps. Now … please … put the blindfold on me.”

  “Oh yeah.” He took the black blindfold from his pocket and tied it over her eyes. “There. You can’t see me now.”

  “No … now that I cannot see you … you can touch me—if you hold my arms down…”

  He pressed her arms back by her wrists to either side of her head and stretched out on her, pressing his hips to hers. She tried to twist away—but she wasn’t trying hard.

  “Just remember,” Fontaine said as he did his duty, enjoying it more than he’d thought he would, “you want it done your way—you do your work my way. You work exclusively for me…”

  Ryan Amusements

  1953

  Bill McDonagh felt a bit foolish taking the Journey to the Surface ride alone. It was made for Rapture’s children, really, to “satisfy their curiosity” about the surface world. Supposedly. In a few years his child would want to go on a ride in Rapture’s only amusement park. Bill wanted to know, in advance, if what he’d heard about the ride was true. If it was, the ride would probably upset Elaine …

  He’d been here before to do some maintenance work, but he hadn’t taken the tour. He’d bought a ticket and everything.

  Now he climbed into the ride car—shaped like an open bathysphere—and settled back. It lurched into motion and then creaked along its track into the tunnel.

  The car rumbled slowly past an animatronic mannequin of Andrew Ryan sitting at his desk, looking almost fatherly. The mannequin moved and gestured, in a herky-jerky way, and “talked”: “Why, hello there. My name is Andrew Ryan, and I built the city of Rapture for children just like you, because the world above’s become unfit for us. But here, beneath the ocean, it is natural to wonder if the danger has passed…”

  “Crikey,” Bill muttered. The Ryan robot gave him the willies.

  Then the car moved on to the mechanical tableau that warned about taxation on the surface world. Up on his left was a farmhouse, where a farmer tilled his field and his happy wife and child stood behind him … but then a giant hand—truly gigantic—moved clutchingly into the tableau, reaching down from above. It had suit sleeves on it—like the suit worn by a bureaucrat. It grabbed the roof of the house and tore it off … The tax man taking away all that the man had worked for … The animatronic farmer slumped in despair …

  “On the surface,” said the deep voice of Andrew Ryan booming from hidden speakers, “the farmer tills the soil, trading the strength of his arm for a land of his own. But the parasites say, ‘No! What is yours is ours! We are the state; we are God; we demand our share!’”

  “Oh lord,” Bill said, staring at the hand. It was terrifying, that giant hand … And the hand—as if from some cruel bureaucratic jehovah—came inexorably down in other tableaus as the ride trundled slowly onward. An animatronic scientist made a glorious discovery in his laboratory, rose up on a pedestal in triumph—and then was crushed back down by that giant hand from above. “On the surface, the scientist invests the power of his mind in a single miraculous idea and naturally begins to rise above his fellows. But the parasites say, ‘No! Discovery must be regulated! It must be controlled and finally surrendered.’”

  That one ought to make Suchong and his like happy, Bill supposed.

  The next tableau showed an artist painting away in rapturous inspiration—before a giant hand came down and suppressed his freedom again …

  The final tableau was the most frightening of all. A child was happily watching TV with his family. Then Ryan’s God-like voice warned, “On the surface, your parents sought a private life; using their great talents to provide for you, they learned to twist the lies of church and government, believing themselves masters of the system, but the parasites say, ‘No! The child has a duty! He’ll go to war and die for the nation.’”

  And the giant hand came down, pushed through the wall—and dragged the child away—into the darkness … into death.

  Bill shook his head. This was all about scaring children it seemed to him. He’d heard that Sofia Lamb, when she’d first come, had given Ryan the idea—an “amusement ride” that was a kind of aversion therapy, a way of imprinting children with a revulsion for the surface world—and a consequent commitment to the only alternative: Rapture …

  Between the big tableaus, animatronic Ryans appeared, lecturing, hectoring—warning the child about the horrors of the surface world.

  As the ride ended he heard Cohen’s song, “Rise, Rapture, Rise,” playing …

  Oh rise, Rapture, rise!

  We turn our hopes up to the skies!

  Oh rise, Rapture, rise!

  Upon your wings our dreams will fly.

  A city in the ocean’s deep

  A promise that we’ll always keep

  To boldly turn our eyes upon the prize!

  So rise, rise, rise!

  Oh rise, Rapture, rise!

  We merrily sing this reprise.

  Oh rise, Rapture, rise!

  To help us crush parasites despised …

  Bill sighed. He was going to do whatever he could to keep Elaine away from here. She wouldn’t understand. She already had her doubts about Rapture, and this would only deepen them. Whatever happened, they were committed to Rapture and Andrew Ryan. Weren’t they?

  Dionysus Park, Rapture

  1954

  “How can a house divided stand, Simon?” Sofia Lamb asked gently as they sat in the sculpture garden of Dionysus Park. Simon Wales sat beside her on the carved coral bench, smoking a pipe, seeming troubled; Margie and several of Sofia’s other followers were scattering fish-gut fertilizer around the plants at the other end of the park’s gallery of sculptures. Across from them was an example of “unconscious art,” a sculpture by one of her followers showing a squirming octopus—but the creature had a human face that was oddly like Andrew Ryan’s. “Rapture is designed for conflict, for competition—but can this marvel of a community survive that division, bottled up down here? We need unity to make Rapture thrive! And that means a communal concept, not a competitive one…”

  Simon glanced around nervously. “Really, you shouldn’t use those kinds of … well, Ryan would regard that as red propaganda … Could be dangerous. They’re building a new detention center, and I have a feeling Ryan might want it for, ah, people who talk about undermining his master vision…”

  Sofia shrugged. “If I must go to prison—so be it. The people need me! More are coming every day, Simon! The vision of wholeness is taking hold! Rapture must be a single society—not some schizophrenic social organism forever wrestling with itself. Look at what’s been happening—people forced into prostitution, living on top of one another. How is that better than the surface world?”

  “If he suspects what you’re up to…”

  She chuckled. “He’s convinced I’m on his team. I advised him on how to set up that little child-training amusement park … it’s absurd, really; I doubt if it does anything but frighten children, but he believes it’ll train them to accept Rapture. I gave him an edited report on all my…” She glanced at him. “I can trust you, can’t I, Simon?”

  He looked at her with a stunned expression and swallowed hard. “But—of course! How could you doubt it? You know how I feel…”

  “Mommy, look!” Eleanor said pipingly. Sofia glanced over to see her small daughter, just three years old, in her pink pinafore, dragging one of the audiodiaries behind her. “I’m going to play with the Mr. Diary you gave me!”

  Sofia nodded. “Wonderful, my love!”

  His voice lowered, Simon asked, “Don’t you think it’s time she had some contact with other children, Doctor?”

 
“Hm? No. No, they’re under the influence of the poisonous paradigm of Andrew Ryan. I will keep her right here, train her in safe isolation—make her a paragon of the society to come…”

  “And—” He cleared his throat. “What happened to her father?”

  “Ah, as to that—it’s a private matter.”

  Eleanor was sitting in the grass, talking to the tape recorder as if it were a friend; she clutched a small screwdriver in her hand. “Hello, Mr. Diary. Want to play?” She mimicked its voice: “‘Actually, I’m quite busy right now, Miss Eleanor. Maybe later.’ Well, all right! But do you mind if I take you apart while I wait? I promise I’ll put you back together! ‘Wait! You can’t do thaaaat … noooo … waaaaiiiit, wait Eleaaanoooorrrr…’”

  And to Sofia’s surprise, Eleanor commenced stabbing at the tape recorder, breaking it apart with the screwdriver …

  10

  Laboratory Complex

  1954

  “Some plasmid effects proved to be more difficult than we expected,” Brigid Tenenbaum said, leading Fontaine down the hallway.

  Suchong was leaning out an open door, gesturing for them to come. “Suchong is ready now for demonstration!”

  Feeling a bit sick inside but determined to see this through, Fontaine followed Tenenbaum to the lab’s experimentation room.

  As they entered, Fontaine saw it was the same experimental subject as last time, the fellow Brougham. But now he was awake—though not entirely awake. His eyes were open and flicking about.

  They were in lab 3 of Fontaine Futuristics—an almost bare room but for a cabinet, a brushed-steel table of instruments, and an examination bed fitted with restraints. Steel walls were textured with rust and rivets; the room smelled of antiseptics and seawater leakage. He heard it dripping between the walls. A single naked electric lightbulb glowed in the middle of the ceiling. The floor was covered with what looked to Fontaine like a thin carpet of black rubber.