by John Shirley
Ryan made notes, nodded to himself. Then he looked up at Bill, smiling. “I get so caught up in the day-to-day business—I forget to really take a good look at the people around me. You look a bit careworn, Bill. That’s natural. How’s Elaine?”
Bill smiled, relaxing a little. He liked to see this side of Ryan. “Grand, Mr. Ryan. Knows how to make a man happy, that one.”
“Good, good. I too will settle down when the time comes. I dream of having a son one day, you know. Someone to take what I’ve built in his hands and keep it thriving—build on it! An investment in the future. What a wonderful place to grow up, Rapture is, too. A wonderland for kids, I should think…”
Bill wasn’t so sure of that. Not at all. But he only smiled musingly and nodded.
Sullivan came bustling in. He nodded to Bill and stood beside the desk with the tense air of a man who was fitting this stop into a tight schedule. “You called me, sir?”
“Ah—Chief. There you are! Yes…” He pushed the folder toward Sullivan. “I need you to jump with both feet into this. Have you heard something about a … a new development called plasmids?”
“Plasmids? No sir. What the blazes are they?”
“Some kind of product. Look at this…” He reached into a desk drawer, drew out a folded copy of The Rapture Tribune, and laid it out on the desk for Bill and Sullivan to see. It was opened to the back page, on which an advertisement proclaimed,
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO BE
YOU CAN BE
WITH PLASMIDS! THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
FROM FONTAINE FUTURISTICS
Free Samples of HairGro
BrainBoost
SportBoost
Electro Bolt
BruteMore Muscle Enhancer
And watch for Incinerate!
Ryan shrugged. “Fontaine is putting them out. Grows new hair, new teeth, makes you prettier, stronger, younger, even faster. Already selling big to the maintenance workers. A genetic breakthrough, according to Poole. Our restless young rival is at it again. I want you to find out what you can about these ‘plasmids,’ Sullivan, and everything about Fontaine Futuristics. Apparently he’s hired Dr. Suchong and Brigid Tenenbaum to develop these products. That woman seemed unstable to me—but she’s a whiz.”
Bill looked at the advertisement and shook his head. “Too good to be true, innit? I mean—got to be side effects. They test these things first?”
Ryan waved a hand dismissively. “I’m not really concerned with weighing down progress with a lot of testing. People want to try it, they can take their chances. Well Sullivan—can you take this on? Poole’s got his hands full watching that Lamb woman…”
Sullivan rubbed his jaw. “Working on that smuggling thing pretty hard right now, sir. Fontaine’s changed his MO.”
“We’ll take care of their smuggling later. Unless you have solid proof it’s Fontaine?”
“No sir. Not arresting proof. Of course, the constables would probably arrest anybody you told them to…”
Ryan leaned back in his desk chair, seemed to consider it. Then he shook his head. “No. If I did that, we’d be no better than the Reds. No, we’ll get evidence. But first I want to know what this plasmid thing is all about. My instinct tells me it’s something that could change Rapture’s marketplace.”
Sullivan nodded, ran a hand through his hair, licking his lips as if he were thinking of bringing up another issue. Then he shrugged. “I’m on it, sir.”
He headed out the door, a man on a mission.
“How are those leakage problems I’ve been hearing about, Bill?” Ryan asked, though the glazed look in his eyes suggested his thoughts were roving elsewhere.
“Constant maintenance, guv. The bloody sea doesn’t just sit quiet out there—we push it out of our way, and it pushes right back. Always throwin’ its weight around—sheer water pressure, currents, changing temperature, ice formation, sea creatures a-scrapin’ and squeezin’. Barnacles and starfish and seaworms. Had to send scraping crews out twice the last month.”
“Yes. Some of the men spend so much time in deep-sea diving suits they’re beginning to feel like part of them.” Ryan smiled to himself.
Bill remembered the experimental subject he’d seen in the labs. Not something he wanted to think about.
Ryan tossed the pencil on the desk, tented his fingers, and scowled broodingly. “Fontaine is shaping up to be my great rival here. He can only sharpen me. It is like fuel for the fire of my talent. But I cannot let him come to fully dominate the marketplace in Rapture. No. I may have to take action. We may have to get tough with Mr. Fontaine…”
Maintenance Station 17
Early 1955
It was right depressing, visiting the old maintenance workers’ colony. Bill McDonagh didn’t like coming here. It made him feel obscurely guilty as he walked along from the Metro passage to the back of the pawnshop at the corner, picking his way past moraines of trash. Bill felt responsible for Rapture—he sure hadn’t planned on any slums.
Someone had written “Welcome to Pauper’s Drop” in red across one wall in dripping paint. Below it, a long, tatty row of sullen indigents squatted against the metal bulkhead, shivering, some of them in carapaces of cardboard. The heating duct for this area was blocked, and the few merchants down here were reluctant to pay the Ryan Industries service fee for getting them unblocked. Bill had come down to do it in his spare time. Not that he would tell Ryan that. If Ryan knew he was doing charity work …
Bill had gotten Roland Wallace to help—each swearing the other to secrecy—and Wallace promised he’d bring an electrician along. But neither Wallace nor his wire jockey was here now.
Bill was beginning to feel nervous about being here alone. The surly unemployed along the wall watched his every step. He heard them muttering as he went along. One of them said, “She’s watching him too…”
He was relieved to see Roland Wallace at the corner. With Wallace was a bearded man in overalls, carrying a toolbox—a tall, gaunt man with an aquiline profile.
“Oi!” Bill called, his breath steaming in the chill. “Wallace!” Wallace saw him and waved. Bill hurried to him. “I’m bloody well glad to see you, mate,” Bill said, keeping his voice low. “These ragamuffins over ’ere’ve been giving me the gimlet eye. Half-expecting a knock in the head.”
Wallace nodded, looking past him at the ill-kempt men and women along the wall, many with bottles in hand. “Drinking too, a lot of them. No rules against making your own in Rapture—someone’s been selling cheap absinthe to this bunch, I hear. Three people died from bad hooch, and two went blind.” He cleared his throat. “Well, come on—the best way into the duct is in the back of the pawnshop. Glad to get the heat working here—it’s damn cold…”
The electrician said nothing, though it seemed to Bill that the man was muttering to himself under his breath, his hawkish, deep-set eyes darting this way and that. Bill noticed thick red blotches on the man’s forehead.
They stepped over small piles of trash and went around a quite large one to get to the back of the pawnshop. “There’s no trash pickup here either?” Bill asked.
“We can’t afford it.”
“You live down here too?”
“Why you think I’m doing this job free?” the electrician said, clipping the words. His tone dripped venom. “Need the heat. Can’t get into the ducts without you Ryan Industries types along. Not if I don’t want the constables after me.”
Bill nodded and thumped on the back door of the pawnshop.
“Who is it?” called a gruff voice from inside.
“Bill McDonagh! Looking for Arno Deukmajian! You got my Jet Postal?”
“Yeah, yeah, come on in.” The man who opened the brass-sheathed door looked as gruff as his voice sounded. He was a squat-faced man in a rumpled suit with a scar through his lower lip. His arms were too long for his suit jacket. His hair was bristly short. “Yeah, I’m Arno Deukmajian. This here’s my shop. Come in, come in … if you have to.�
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The three men entered the dusty, dimly lit back room where there was barely room to move about. Piled floor to ceiling were appliances, radios, lady’s shoes, gowns, boxes of guns, boxes of watches, silver picture frames, anything that could be hocked. “I’ve cleared off the trapdoor,” Deukmajian said. “This place was built right over it.”
Building over the trapdoor might’ve been a violation of some building regulation up on the surface, Bill figured, but in Rapture there were almost no building regulations.
Wallace had the key. He knelt on the metal floor and opened the trapdoor, as the electrician held an electric torch for him. The light slanted down to reveal a grimy iron shaft and a rusty ladder.
A sickening smell rose up from the shaft. “Must be something dead down there,” Bill said. He climbed down as the electrician held the light. It got a little colder each step he descended. The other two joined him at the bottom, and they ducked to enter a tunnel, the electrician going first to light the way. The reek of death was growing stronger. They had to move along hunched over—the tunnel was about eight inches too low to stand up in. “If they’re going to make it big enough for a short man, why can’t they make it big enough for a tall man,” the electrician grumbled. “It ain’t that much more.”
Just thirty echoing steps in, where the tunnel narrowed to a large pipe, they found the source of the smell—and the cause of the obstruction. A body was jammed in the heating duct. It appeared to be the partly mummified body of a boy—perhaps twelve or thirteen—lying facedown in the vent pipe. He wore ragged clothing, and his black hair was matted with old dried blood. A large fan blade, pitted with rust, had sliced partway through his neck …
“Oh Jesus fookin’ Christ,” Bill muttered. “Poor little blighter.”
Wallace was gagging. It took him a few moments to get his composure. Bill had seen enough death in the war—and in the building of Rapture—and he was almost inured to it. Almost. Still, he felt a deep queasiness looking at the shriveled hands of the child, clutching at the tunnel wall—as if frozen in a last attempt at reaching out to life.
“I reckon,” Bill said, his voice a bit hoarse, “the kid was exploring … and the fan’s not on all the time. It was off, and he tried to crawl past—and that’s when it came on.”
The electrician nodded. “Yeah. But he wasn’t exploring. Didn’t have any place to live. One of the orphans. Nobody took him in, so … he came down into the tunnels to sleep, where he’d be safe. Maybe got lost.”
“The orphans?” Bill asked. “Quite a few, are there?”
“There’s some, hereabout. People come here, work, then they finish a project and the bosses lay ’em off. No more work. But they’re not allowed to leave Rapture either. So they start to fighting over food and such—kill one another. And now with these plasmids … some people don’t know how to handle ’em. Got to know how. Surely do. If you don’t—you might get a little carried away. Leaves some orphans…”
“There ought to be an orphanage,” Wallace said.
The electrician chuckled grimly. “Think Ryan can figure out how to run one for profit?”
“Someone’ll start one, we get enough orphans,” Bill said. “Well, let’s move him and see if we can get this thing started…”
Glad to leave the impromptu metal tomb, Wallace volunteered to get the necessary items. He hurried back to the ladder, returning a few minutes later with a large burlap sack and extra gloves. “Kid’s kinda shriveled; I suppose we can get him in this…”
Grimacing, they worked the child’s body free of the jam, carefully blocking the blades with a hammer from the toolbox in case they should decide to start running.
But after they’d gotten the dried-out husk of a child removed and stuffed the desiccated body into the burlap sack and removed the hammer, the vent blades were still motionless.
The electrician opened a panel near the fan and made some adjustments inside with a tool. He squirted lubricant in and used a small device to test for current. “It’s live over there but … I’m going to have to give it a jolt to get it going. Some parts sat too long—rusted inside. Stand back…”
He stretched his left hand out toward the panel—seemed to concentrate for a moment—his eyes glowed faintly—and a small lightning bolt shot blue-white from his hand and crackled into the open panel.
Startled, Bill straightened suddenly—and banged his head on the ceiling. “Bloody buggerin’ hell!”
“Electro Bolt plasmid,” Wallace muttered.
“Holy…” Bill said, rubbing his head. “They just fookin’…” Then he realized that the fan was whirring, blowing warm air into his face.
“That’ll do it,” the electrician said. “When this one stopped, the other ones stopped too. Should all be working now…”
He turned and glared at Bill—and there was still a bit of glow in his eyes, so that he looked like a feral animal in the tunnel dimness.
“You just got to know how to handle ’em, see?” he said. “The plasmids.” Then he picked up his tools and started back to the ladder.
11
Maintenance Station 17, Sinclair Deluxe Hotel and Apartments
1955
“You don’t mean you spent it all, Rupert?” demanded Rupert Mudge’s wife—just as he’d figured she would—with that disgusted look on her face that he was getting so very sick of seeing.
She was a hip-heavy, short-legged bottle blonde with permanent frown lines in the corners of her mouth that made her face look like a wooden puppet. She wore a tattered red-and-yellow flower-print dress and the work boots she used in her housecleaning job.
I’m outgrowing that woman, Mudge thought as he ran a hand through his luxuriant hair. He’d gone from partly bald to this glorious brown mane thanks to Fontaine’s plasmids. He shook his head—harder than he needed to, so he could make all that hair fly about—and then he reached for his new ADAM. He already had a good charge of EVE going to activate it.
“You take that plasmid stuff back to Fontaine’s!” Sally grated between grinding teeth. “I worked hard for that money!”
“Oh Christ, Sally,” said Mudge, injecting the plasmid, “a man’s gotta put on a good appearance out there in the world. I need…” His teeth started chattering as the stimulant effect of SportBoost hit him. The room was swirling slowly around him, pulsing with energy. It was like he was the center of the universe. It scared him and exhilarated him both. It almost made the shabby little studio apartment they rented in the so-called Sinclair Deluxe seem like something worth living in—if it weren’t for the cracks in the walls, the naked lightbulb, the leaks in the corners, the smell of rotting fish. “Sal … Sal … Sally … I need … I needa … needa … needa show people I’m fast and strong, I’m gonna get one that makes you smart…”
“Ha! I wish you’d taken the smart one first! Then you’d’ve been smart enough not to blow our little stash of moolah on any of this! You don’t need that fancy hair; you don’t need those muscles—”
“These muscles are gonna get me a new job on the Atlantic Express! They’re gonna put up a new line!”
“What I heard, more people are taking the trams and the bathyspheres—the Express might be, what you call it, obsolete. They aren’t gonna rehire you nohow after you went flippy on the foreman!”
“Aww, that big lug flew off the handle for nothin’!”
“You were on one of those crazy plasmid things, and you went nutso on him! You threw a wrench at his head!”
“Plasmids—you gotta get used to ’em, is all! I wasn’t used to it yet! All the fellas are usin’ ’em!”
“Sure—and most of ’em are going broke from it! They sit around jabbering, high on the damn things! Not a single one as doesn’t have side effects! What’s them marks on your face, there?”
“What, you never got a pimple?”
“That ain’t no pimple; it’s like skin growing where there oughtn’t to be any!”
“Woman—shut your trap and bring m
e some dinner!”
“Shut my trap! I’ve been working all day scrubbing floors in Olympus Heights for the high muckety-mucks, and I gotta come back to a dump and hear ‘bring me some dinner’! Why don’tcha try earning your dinner! How about them apples—the apples we ain’t got! How’m I going to pay for the food if you spent all the money on plasmids! You know Ryan doesn’t allow no soup lines around here!”
“I heard that Fontaine’s starting up some kinda soup kitchen…”
“I wouldn’t go near that man, if I was you. Mazy says he’s a crook!”
“Aw, what does that loopy bimbo know? Fontaine’s okay. I thought maybe I could get some work over there … I’m strong now! Look at that!” He flexed his bicep—and his shirt ripped with the expanding muscle. “That’s from BruteMore! Plasmids are the future, see!”
She sat down on the sagging sofabed across from him. “That’s what worries me—the future.” Her voice was soft now. And that had a way of upsetting him even more than when she yelled. “I wish we could afford a place with a window. Not that there’s much to see but fish. A person gets sick of looking at fish.”
His knee bouncing with nervous energy, Mudge looked around the small, dingy apartment for something to sell at the pawnshop. He wanted another SportBoost. Just to make sure. He didn’t like to run short on plasmids. All he had was another BruteMore in the icebox. The radio maybe—could he sell that? She kind of prized that radio. Only luxury they had left …
“Funny, Mr. Sinclair calling this flophouse ‘deluxe,’” Sally said. “Must be his sense of humor. But we won’t have even this if you don’t get off your tuckus and work. What I make can’t keep us in a home—’specially with you jabbing yourself with those crazy goddamn potions!”