BioShock: Rapture

by John Shirley

  It seemed to Bill that those three words summed it all up.

  Fort Frolic, Rapture

  1959

  “My daddy’s smarter than Einstein, stronger than Hercules, and lights a fire with a snap of his finger! Are you as good as my daddy, Mister? Not if you don’t visit the Gatherer’s Garden, you aren’t! Smart daddies get spliced at the garden!”

  The automated voice at the Gatherer’s Garden machine, near the entrance to the strip joint where Jasmine worked, seemed to be speaking directly to Andrew Ryan, as if teasing him, mocking him. He ignored it, as well as the startled man taking tickets at the door. He rushed into the strip club, disregarding the swaying woman on the stage.

  He beelined right to that backstage door he’d been so familiar with before he’d gotten Jasmine into her luxury apartment …

  He should have taken her in hand, forced it out of her—not gotten so caught up in other things.

  But too late. He kept hearing the tape over and over in his head. “That creepy Tenenbaum promised me it wasn’t gonna be a real pregnancy; they’d just take the egg out once Mr. Ryan and I had … I needed the money so bad. But I know Mr. Ryan’s gonna suss it out … gonna know I wasn’t being careful … gonna know I sold the…”

  Sold his child!

  He slammed into the back hallway, down the hall, into the bedroom where strippers did their “extra” shows for special customers, and there she was, barely dressed, yawning on the wrinkled bedclothes. Jasmine Jolene, looking sleepy. Pretending all was right with them when she saw him come in. Pretending that she was glad to see him.

  “I … I thought you’d forgotten about me…” she squeaked. Forgetting her elocution lessons in her fear. “But I’m so glad you didn’t.”

  “You sold my child! To Tenenbaum! To Fontaine!”

  She scrambled away from him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ryan. I didn’t know. I didn’t know Fontaine had something to do with it! I…”

  He couldn’t bear to hear the lies coming out of that pretty mouth. He lunged at her, closed his hands over her soft neck.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped. “No, no don’t! Please! I loved you—don’t, please, don’t! No, no!”

  She tried to say something else, but it was cut off, squeezed off by the inexorable pressure of his fingers tightening on her throat. Tighter, squeezing ever tighter, until her pretty eyes fairly popped out of her head …

  Farmer’s Market

  1959

  A security bot whirred by overhead, making that irritating whistling noise. Ryan and Bill, walking with their escort, glanced up at the bot as it whizzed by, Bill ducking.

  He looked over at Elaine and Sophie, browsing together on the other side of the open-stall market. The pale, frightened little man standing behind the hydroponic vegetables rack gave them a hesitant smile. Bill glanced up at another sound—the big security camera above a fruit booth, whirring in its red pool of light to take him in. He wore his ID flasher, so it decided not to tell one of the turrets or bots to kill him.

  This was no place to raise a child. Especially when they might come across a dead body at any moment. But Ryan insisted that life go on with as much normality as possible, and he’d pressured Bill to bring his family out on this walk today.

  “Come along, Bill…” Ryan had said.

  Bill had said, “Right, guv’nor, I’ll get the Mrs. and the squeaker…” But it had taken a lot of talking to get Elaine out of the house with Sophie.

  They had Redgrave and Karlosky in front of them, Linosky and Cavendish, each one of them with a machine gun in his hands. Andrew Ryan was the only one without a gun. Ryan carried that fancy walking stick now, what with him getting a bit long in the tooth. He still looked natty and confident—a bit grim, but not too worried.

  A lot of men had died in the past few days. Skirmishes were popping up all over Rapture. It was a guerilla war—but it was war.

  Bill had nearly left Ryan Industries after the takeover of Fontaine Futuristics—it had been a blow, Ryan nationalizing an industry. A putrid hypocrisy. And before that—Persephone. Then Sullivan telling him what Ryan had been up to, behind the scenes. Torture—and having Anna Culpepper killed. But the final, camel-busting straw was the disappearance of Mascha. He’d asked Ryan about it, and Cavendish. Ryan had said he could not be bothered with every petty crime around Rapture—and Cavendish had said, “You deal with the plumbing; we’ll deal with security—now fuck off.” And that was it—he’d decided right then, walking away from Cavendish’s office, he was getting his family out of Rapture. It was just a question of choosing his moment.

  He had a half-formed plan. Roland Wallace wanted out too. They’d talked it over: Wallace was authorized to pass through an external-access air lock. There was a minisub in bay 2. Wallace could pretend to be doing repairs on it, then slip out with it through the air lock to the open sea.

  Wallace would get the little sub to one of the old sentry launches, still tied up behind the lighthouse, and bring the launch around to its entrance. Bill could get his family out through the lighthouse, which had a single cable for its cameras and turrets. He could unhook that cable. If the camera were out, the security bots wouldn’t be activated when he approached the lighthouse shaft. No one but Ryan was genetically authorized to be up there—the bots would attack anyone else.

  The water was rough, over Rapture. They’d have to wait on the escape; wait for better weather, in late spring. Fewer ice floes. Then they’d escape, take the launch to the sea routes, ride the currents, and flag down a passing ship.

  If they could get through to the lighthouse at all—not only was Ryan’s security in the way, there were rebels and rogue splicers. Atlas now controlled about forty percent of Rapture, including Apollo Square, Artemis Suites, and Neptune’s Bounty, his strongholds. Lamb was mostly tied up around Persephone and Dionysus Park. They’d all have to be skirted. Bill thought about trying to make some kind of deal, on the sly, with Atlas, but he knew he couldn’t be trusted …

  As if reading his thoughts, the PA system hissed with static, whined with feedback, and then a woman’s voice announced: “Atlas is a friend of the parasite! Don’t be a friend of Atlas! Ignore the lies of Atlas and his parasites! Rapture is on the rise!”

  Another hiss of static became: “We all have bills to pay, and the temptation to break curfew to make a little extra ADAM is forgivable. Breaking the curfew is not! Stay on the level, and stay out of trouble!” A whine of feedback, and then: “Wanting an item from the surface is forgivable! Buying or smuggling one into Rapture is not! Attention: a new curfew will be enacted on Thursday! Citizens found in violation will be relocated! The parasite has his eye on Rapture—keep your eye on the parasite!”

  Bill pretended an interest in the grain-based “meat” at the farmer’s market “butcher’s stall.” But his mind was full of questions. Could he and his family really escape from Rapture? Was it possible while this war was going on? Probably too dangerous to try.

  There was one other possibility. Having a couple too many glasses of Worley’s brandy, he’d even recorded that possibility on an audio diary: “I don’t know if killing Mr. Ryan will stop the war, but I know it won’t stop while that man breathes. I love Mr. Ryan—but I love Rapture. If I have to kill one to save the other, so be it.”

  He had to erase that tape immediately. He’d be a dead man if someone found it.

  “Seen Diane lately?” Ryan asked, too casually, as he picked up a rather withered apple from a stand. He smelled it, made a face, and put it back.

  “Diane McClintock? No, guv, not in person, like. Last I heard she was … ah, that Doctor Steinman did some work on ’er.”

  “He was working on her in more ways than one, Bill. Your delicacy is appreciated. Yes, I was actually quite bored with her, and she became very narcissistically tiresome after the New Year’s Eve attack. Whining about her scars. Went gadding about with Steinman—but he’s thrown her over, I understand. Last I knew she was spending a lot of time
gambling in Fort Frolic…”

  The security bot flew past again—it was on watchful patrol status in order to protect Ryan—and Bill noticed little Sophie watching it with big eyes. Frightened of the thing that was supposed to be protecting her.

  Sophie saw him looking at her and came running to him, throwing her little arms around his waist. Elaine followed, with a strained smile, nodding to Ryan.

  Ryan looked down at Sophie and smiled, patting her on the head—she shrank away from him. Ryan looked startled at that.

  Then came a sad, low-pitched groaning noise and an ominous vibration of heavy footsteps—and they turned to see the hulking, plodding, clanking form of a Big Daddy. There were at present two models of Big Daddy, the Rosies and the Bouncers. This one, a Bouncer, made a drawn-out moaning sound as it came, almost as if in mourning. They all did that, of course. They all smelled rancid. Like dead things.

  The Bouncer was carrying an oversized drill built into its right arm; on its back was a heavy power pack. To Bill the Big Daddies almost looked like pictures of robots he’d seen on the covers of pulp science fiction magazines. But he knew there was most of a human being inside that Big Daddy suit—some poor blighter who’d been caught breaking a rule, sometimes a criminal, sometimes a Lamb follower, sometimes just a hungry man who’d stolen an apple. The constables tranquilized “candidates” for Big Daddies and took them to Prometheus Point, where their flesh was fused with metal, their brains altered and conditioned to focus on protecting the Little Sisters and on killing anything they perceived as a threat. When the Big Daddies were damaged, repair parts were scavenged, on the sly, from the Eternal Flame Crematorium. Who was going to miss a leg or an arm when the rest had been cremated?

  All over the massive Big Daddy’s great round metal head were circular, glowing sensors; its huge metal-encased legs clunked along relentlessly—but careful never to injure the barefoot, grubby little tyke of a girl who scampered along beside it. Gatherers, some called the girls. This one was tiny and fragile compared with the Big Daddy, but she dominated it completely. The Little Sister wore a dirty pink smock; her face seemed faintly greenish, her eyes sunken. There was a distance in those eyes, like something Bill had seen in Brigid Tenenbaum’s—as if her peculiar aloofness had been installed in her creation.

  “Come on, Mr. Bubbles!” the Little Sister fluted, calling to the Big Daddy. “Come on, or we’ll miss the angels!” The towering mock of a deep-sea diver lumbered after her, moaning …

  “Oh Christ,” Bill muttered.

  A dark-haired Little Sister skipped past them.

  “Mascha!” Sophie called out.

  The Gatherer stopped, blinking, mouth open in an O, to look at Sophie for a long, puzzled moment. Then she said, “What is that one? That’s not a Gatherer; and she’s not an angel yet! We can’t play with her until she’s an angel!”

  Then the little girl danced away. The Big Daddy gave out its long, mournful groan and clumped after her. The floor shook with the creature’s going.

  “Oh God, Bill,” Elaine said, hugging Sophie to her. “Was that—?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I’m sure it wasn’t her.” He doubted she believed the lie.

  Bill was just grateful that Sophie hadn’t seen what was left of her friend Mascha sticking a syringe in a dead body, drawing out the pulsing red effluvium of living ADAM. A sickening sight. It seemed to belong to Rapture the way giant pink elephants belonged to hallucinating drunks.

  The public address chose that moment to inform them, “The Little Sisters Orphanage: in troubled times, give your little girl the life she deserves! Boarding and education free of charge! After all, children are the future of Rapture!”

  And Bill noticed that Ryan was staring down at Sophie …

  Olympus Heights

  1959

  Feeling weary, deeply weary, yet restless too, Andrew Ryan poured himself a martini from the silver shaker and settled back in his easy chair at the picture window, gazing out over the shimmering skyline of the submerged city.

  I’m getting old, he thought. The city should still be young. Yet it seems to be aging right along with me.

  A couple of squid rippled by, outlined against the glow—and then were gone. The neon signs for Rapture businesses were flickering, threatening to go out. Some of the lights supposed to shine up from the bases of the buildings were dark. But most of the lights still worked. The city of Rapture continued to glow.

  The city itself was showing signs of new life. There were the new Circus of Values machines, expected to raise a great deal of revenue. There were the Gatherer’s Gardens too. Scientists were working on machines that could raise man from the dead, if he hadn’t been dead long, and restore him to life. Sure, the population of Rapture was depleted, but when he completed his control of ADAM and the splicers, and rid the city of the rebels, he could build Rapture up anew.

  He sipped the martini, put it on the end table beside the tape recorder, and then pressed Record for his audio diary. History must have its due.

  “On my walk today I had an encounter with a pair of them … he, a lumbering palooka in a foul-smelling diving suit, and she, an unwashed moppet in a filthy pink smock. Her pallor was off, green and morbid, and there was a rather unpleasant aspect to her demeanor, as if she were in an altogether different place than the rest of us. I understand the need for such creatures; I just wish I could make them more presentable.” He chuckled to himself at that, took a sip of his martini, and made another diary entry: “Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me.” On one of the buildings outside, a light flickered and went out. He sighed. “But the city … it is collapsing before my…” He hesitated. Not able to finish the thought. It was unbearable. “Have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me—to question is to surrender. I will not surrender.”

  A letter arrived in the pneumatic tube: Ryan heard the distinctive swish of its arrival. He got wearily up, fetched the message back to his easy chair.

  Grunting as he sat, he fumbled it open. He was losing some dexterity in his fingers.

  He unfolded the letter—and recognized Diane McClintock’s handwriting:

  Dear Andrei:

  Andrei Rianofski, Andrew Ryan, Mr. Ryan; the lover, the Tycoon, the Tyrant: just three of the many sides of you. I saw only the cold side recently—first you didn’t show up for New Year’s Eve, and I had to face rogue splicers without you. Then you didn’t show up when I was recovering from the surgery. You stood me up again in Fort Frolic. You had “a meeting”! So I decided to go home. Tried to go the short route. Apollo Square was blocked off, taken over by the rebels. But I was a bit drunk, and angry, and I wanted to confront them for the damage they’d done me. Maybe I wanted them to kill me and just get it over with. A woman tried to escape—to get past Ryan’s guards keeping the rebels in Apollo Square, and one of your pet splicers pointed his finger at her and she burst into flames! I had heard about Atlas. But it occurred to me I only had your side of it. So I thought they were either going to kill me—or explain themselves to me. And I bribed a guard at the gate into letting me through.

  Conditions are terrible in Apollo Square, and Artemis. The crowding, the squalor. They say it was almost as bad before the revolution. They say it was your doing—your neglect! Graffiti is painted on the walls: “Atlas Lives!” What do I really know about Atlas? And at last someone took me to meet him. They know I’m your mistress, or was, but they have learned to trust me. Atlas was surprisingly humble. I asked him if he would lead the people in some kind of uprising against you. He said, “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. These people will liberate themselves.” Isn’t that strange—it’s almost like something you would say! But when he said it—I understood. It meant something.
It went right to the heart of me, Andrei! I thought you were a great man. I was wrong. Atlas is a great man. And I will serve him; I will struggle beside him, fighting all you represent! I’m going on a raid tomorrow to get weapons and food. I will learn to fight, Andrei. You abandoned me—now I have left you. I have left you for Atlas—and the revolution!

  Diane

  Ryan folded the paper up and tore it into small bits. He let the shreds of paper flutter to the floor, picked up his martini—and suddenly lost control of himself, throwing the glass so that it smashed on the big picture window, fragments of wet, broken glass sliding down over the glowing spires of the city …

  20

  Drafting Room, Atlantic Express Depot

  1959

  “There was meant to be a maintenance team here instead of me,” Bill groused as he bent to examine the cracks in the curved metal wall of the maintenance runoff tunnel. “They had some git of a splicer, was going to creep up the walls and fix the leaks they couldn’t reach. Don’t know what became of the buggers…”

  Karlosky grunted. “I think I see your maintenance team.”

  Bill stood up, walked over to Karlofsky—together they looked through a window into the mailroom of Jet Postal. The shadowy, indirectly lit room was scattered with undelivered mail. And with bodies—several bodies, men in maintenance coveralls lying about on the floor, motionless, pasted to the deck with their own blood. They seemed to have been hacked up by some sharp blade.

  Bill sighed, stomach contracting at the sight. “Yeah. I don’t see that splicer. Maybe…”

  Karlosky nodded, musingly patting the breach of his tommy gun. “Not good workers, those splicers,” he said dryly. “They go crazy; they kill. A man does not get job done when busy being crazy and killing.” After a moment, he shrugged and added, “Unless killing is the job.”

  “Well, I’m going to make a list of cracks and leaks and get a team in here with a constable escort,” Bill said. “We can’t risk…” He broke off, staring at a small figure in a pinafore, a child, moving through the shadows of the Jet Postal sorting room. Steel boots clanked; a great metal shape loomed up behind her.