BioShock: Rapture

by John Shirley

  A Big Daddy and a Little Sister. She skipped along, a large syringe in one hand, singing a song they couldn’t clearly hear. Something about “Mr. Bubbles” and “the angels.” Her enormous chaperone stumped along close behind her.

  Bill and Karlosky watched with an uneasy mix of fascination and revulsion as the little girl squatted by a man’s awkwardly sprawling, facedown corpse and jammed the syringe into the back of his neck. She did something with the syringe, chirruping happily to herself, and it began to glow with extracted ADAM.

  Bill stepped closer to the window and bent over to peer at the Little Sister. “Karlosky—is that Mascha?”

  Karlosky groaned to himself. “Yes, maybe—maybe not. All Little Sisters look much alike to me.”

  “If it’s her—I owe it to her folks to get her back.”

  “We tried, Bill! You spoke to many people—no one would help.”

  “That’s why I’ve got to do this myself, right now…”

  “Please, don’t argue with Big Daddy, Bill—oh—there is splicer!”

  A spider splicer was creeping upside down on the ceiling over the Little Sister. He had a hooked blade in one hand. He was chattering to himself—the intervening pane of glass muted the sound.

  The Little Sister stood up, turned toward the Big Daddy—and then a blade spun past her, whipping through the air like a boomerang. The blade narrowly missed her head—so close it cut a bit of her hair, which drifted prettily away. The weapon circled the room and returned to the splicer, who caught the blade handle neatly, cackling as he did it.

  The Little Sister’s guardian reacted instantly. The Big Daddy stepped into a pool of light, raised a rivet gun to aim at the ceiling, and fired a long strafe of rivets at the spider splicer. The gun nailed its target at such close range it cut the splicer in half. The spider splicer’s lower half and its upper half clung to the ceiling … separately, by feet and hands, the two halves gushing blood. Then they let go, and the halves of the splicer dropped heavily to the floor.

  The little girl chirruped happily.

  “You see?” Karlosky whispered. “If you interfere with her—you end up like him!”

  “I’ve got to try,” Bill said. “Maybe if you distract him, I can grab her…”

  “Oh shit, Bill, you son of bitch bastard!” Karlosky said, and muttered another imprecation in Russian. “You get me killed!”

  “I’ve got faith in your gift for self-preservation, mate. Come on.” Bill led the way to the door of the Jet Postal sorting room. He hesitated, wondering what Elaine would want him to do. She would want Mascha rescued—if this Little Sister was in fact Mascha—but Elaine wouldn’t want him to risk himself this way. Still—there probably wouldn’t be another chance.

  He opened the door, then stepped back, crouching down to one side, signaling to Karlosky. “Do it. Then run…”

  Karlosky swore in Russian once more, but he raised his tommy gun and fired a short burst toward the Big Daddy—a burst from a tommy gun wasn’t going to kill it, and Karlosky wouldn’t risk the wrath of his employers by destroying the valuable cyborg, but it got the Big Daddy’s attention. The lumbering metal golem turned and rushed like an accelerating freight train at the source of the assault. Karlosky was already running, cursing Bill as he went. The Big Daddy clanged past Bill, not seeing him crouching by the door.

  Bill slipped behind the metal guardian and through the door, seeing the little girl standing up from another extraction, blood-dripping syringe in her hand. She looked at him with big eyes, mouth opened in a round O.

  Was this Mascha? He wasn’t sure.

  “Mr. Buuuuuuubbles!” she called. “There is a bad man here waiting to be turned into an aaaaaaangel!”

  “Mascha,” Bill said. “Is that you?” He took a step toward her. “Listen … I’m going to pick you up, but I won’t hurt you—”

  Then a metallic clumping close behind Bill turned his blood cold. He spun about just in time to be struck across the chest—the Big Daddy, returned to protect its charge, swinging the weapon in its hand like a club. Bill was knocked backward, off his feet, the air smacked from his lungs, the room whirling.

  Gasping, he lost consciousness for a few moments. When the spinning specks formed shapes and the room coalesced, he looked dizzily around—saw that he was sitting up on the floor, back against a bulkhead. The Big Daddy and his little charge were nowhere to be seen.

  Bill got up, moaning to himself with the pain of his bruised chest, and staggered to the door. He was met by Karlosky. “You okay, Bill?”

  “Yeah—good to see you alive. I thought I’d got you killed…”

  “No, I outsmart that steel bastard. Look…!”

  He pointed across the open space of the depot—on the far wall, the little girl was climbing into one of the key-shaped art-deco apertures that the Little Sisters used to enter hidden passageways. They scuttled through the passageways to take their scavenged ADAM back to Ryan’s laboratories.

  Mascha or not Mascha? He would never know. She simply vanished into the wall.

  The Big Daddy waited quietly by the big art deco keyhole for his Little Sister to return.

  Bill shook his head and turned away, grimacing with pain—and wanting only to get back to Elaine.

  Once more, his determination to escape Rapture was underscored. He had to get his family back to the surface. Back to blue sky and sunlight and freedom …

  Medical Pavilion, Aesthetic Ideals Surgery

  1959

  “Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan … all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality! Yes, we could lop a boil here and shave down a beak there—but could we really change anything? No! But ADAM gives us the means to do it, and Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It’s yours to change, nobody else’s!”

  Wearing a blood-soaked surgical gown and white surgeon’s cap, his hands in rubber gloves, Doctor J. S. Steinman hit Pause on the little tape recorder that he’d wedged between the blond patient’s ample breasts; then he pushed the gurney, its wheels susurrating through the shallow water that had leaked across the floor of the surgery. He hummed to himself, singing an Inkspots song, “If I Didn’t Care,” over the muffled moaning of the patient he’d strapped to the little wheeled bed. “Would I be sure that this is love beyond compare? Would all this be true—if I didn’t care … for … you!”

  He pushed the woman into place under the glaring surgical light and reached into his coat pocket for his favorite scalpel. Tiresome to do without a nurse, but he’d had to kill Nurse Chavez when she’d started whining about his efforts to please Aphrodite, threatening to turn him into the constables. Of course, he hadn’t killed her till he’d done some fine experimentation on her doll-like visage. He still had Chavez’s face in a refrigerator, somewhere, along with some others he’d peeled off and saved in preservative jars, faces from patients who’d given their lives for his perfect fusion of art and science. He really must try to organize his preserved faces with a filing system.

  Steinman paused to admire this latest woman writhing in her restraints on the gurney. She’d used some low-grade plasmid to help her hack a gambling machine in Fort Frolic, and his fellow artist, Sander Cohen, who owned the casino, had caught her. It was getting hard to find voluntary patients. He did think he might get Diane McClintock to come in again. He longed to alter her in another manner entirely, according to his artistic whim—to give her a truly transcendent face. He might get hold of a telekinesis plasmid and use it to form her face from within, shape it telekinetically, into something lovely.

  They were all so ugly, honestly, so plain. They didn’t try hard enough to make themselves fitting vessels for Aphrodite. “But they’re filthy, filthy at the core,” he muttered. No knife was sharp enough to cut that filth out. He tried and tried and tried, but they were always so fat or short or … plain. Steinman made a tsk sound
as the blond woman shrieked unintelligibly at him through the gag. Some insult, perhaps. “My dear, I’d love to give you some anesthetic to grace your experience, I really would, but I have quite run out of it, and anyway, there is something less aesthetically pleasing about sculpting an unconscious patient. If they are unconscious, the blood hardly spurts at all, their eyes don’t have that look of possession by the god of terror, and how satisfying could that be, now I ask you? I may have to stop and have some more ADAM and a touch of EVE myself … Oh do try to accept this, my dear, appreciate it as a sacrificial aesthetic experience. A sacrifice to Aphrodite! Sander Cohen and I have talked about doing a performance onstage with one of my little surgeries. Can you imagine? A face sculpting set to original music? The trouble is, of course—” He bent near his wild-eyed patient to whisper confidentially. “The trouble is, my dear, Sander Cohen is quite insane. Mad. Out of his mind! Ha ha-aa! I shouldn’t socialize with Cohen, that loony tune, I have my reputation to think of.”

  He hit Record again on the tape recorder and cleared his throat to set down another immortal memo. “With genetic modifications, beauty is no longer a goal, or even a virtue. It is a moral obligation. Still, ADAM presents new problems for the professional,” he said, for the audio diary. “As your tools improve, so do your standards. There was a time I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight…” So saying, he started carving deeply into the face of the woman on the gurney, glad he’d taken the trouble to brace her head in place because she was shaking so much with agony as he sliced away her cheeks.

  He went on, “… But that was then, when we took what we got—but with ADAM, the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt and sculpt and sculpt until the job is done?” He hit Pause on the tape recorder, its buttons becoming slippery with the blood on his hands, and considered his work. It was hard to tell through all the blood and torn tissue. “My dear, I believe I’m going to give you some ADAM that will regrow your face into another shape entirely. Then I’ll carve the new tissue some more. Then I’ll regrow some more face on you with ADAM. Then I’ll carve that some more. Then—”

  Another muffled shriek from the woman. He sighed, shaking his head. They just would not understand. He hit Record again and accompanied his next wet, spurting spate of carving with a kind of artistic manifesto: “When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I’ve spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?”

  Steinman hit pause again, used his left hand to wipe some blood from the recorder buttons. He returned to his patient only to find she’d died on him. “Oh dammit, not another one…”

  Blood loss and shock, he supposed, as usual. It was really quite unfair.

  They always left him too soon. It made him angry to think of their selfishness.

  He slashed at her in his fury, knocking the tape recorder on the floor, cutting her throat into ribbons, long pretty ribbons … which he then tied into bows.

  When he calmed down enough to be precise, he exposed her breasts and cut them into shapes like the sea anemones that waved in the gentle currents so restfully, so gracefully, outside the window of his office …

  Ah, he thought: The Rapture of the Deep …

  Fighting McDonagh’s Bar

  1959

  When? It had to be soon. He was going to have to escape from Rapture, with Elaine and their daughter, and if that meant killing—

  “Bill?”

  Bill McDonagh nearly leapt from his barstool when Redgrave spoke at his elbow.

  “Blimey, don’t sneak up on a man like that!”

  Redgrave smiled sadly. “Sorry. Something you ought to know, though. Your woman who cleans the rooms—she found something.”

  Bill sighed. He tossed down his brandy, nodded to his bartender. “Just close down when you feel like it, mate.” He got off the barstool. “All right, let’s have it, Redgrave…”

  “You’ve been letting out some of your rooms, ain’t you? Number seven—that was the Lutzes’?”

  “Sure. I don’t charge them for it. Christ, their little girl went missing on my watch.” He couldn’t resist a cold look at Redgrave. “On your watch too.”

  Redgrave grimaced. “We only looked away a couple of seconds. We were watching for splicers—”

  “I know—forget it. What about Sam Lutz?”

  “Come on.”

  Feeling leaden, Bill went with Redgrave to the tavern’s back rooms. Number 7’s combination door was open. He stepped in and immediately saw the two of them stretched out on the mattress, on their backs, side by side: two corpses holding hands, barely recognizable as Mariska and Samuel Lutz. There were a couple of empty pill bottles lying on the floor nearby.

  The sunken eyes of the cadavers were closed, eyelids like wrinkled parchment, their faces yellow and emaciated. The shriveling of death had given their lips the same pinched expression of disapproval, as if they were silently judging all the living. They wore their best clothes, he noticed.

  “Suicide. And there’s this…” He pointed—beside the bodies was one of the ubiquitous tape recorders.

  Bill pressed Play on the tape recorder. Mariska Lutz’s voice came distant and tinny from the little recorder, as if speaking across the gulf of death: “We saw our Mascha today. We barely recognized her. ‘That’s her,’ Sam said.” Mariska gave out a strange little sobbing laugh. “‘You’re crazy,’ I told him. ‘That thing—that is our Mascha?’ But he was right. She was drawing blood out of a corpse … and when she was done, she walked off hand in hand with one of those awful golems! Our Mascha!”

  Bill stopped the recording.

  Redgrave cleared his throat. “Well. I expect … they knew they couldn’t get her back. She was already … gone. You know, changed so much. So they…”

  He gestured limply at the pill bottles.

  Bill nodded. “Yeah. Just … just leave ’em here. I’ll seal it up. This’ll be their crypt, for now.”

  Redgrave stared at him as if he might object—then he shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He looked back at the bodies. “We only looked away for a moment or two.”

  He shook his head and walked out, leaving Bill alone with the dead.

  Atlas HQ, Hestia

  1959

  Walking up to Atlas’s office, Diane was still sweaty, shaky from the raid.

  She’d had some training from Atlas’s guerillas, and she was almost used to slipping through the wire, waiting as the other team created the decoy, dashing past Ryan’s men. More than once she’d followed the other guerillas up a side passage, up the stairs, through some old maintenance passage—all of them carrying GI backpacks, to fill with supplies stolen from one of the constabulary armories.

  But this time, when the guards broke in on them, just as they finished their “harvest” of the ammo—and just as Sorenson got control of the Big Daddy—the chaos had been exhilarating and nightmarish at once. Firing her own pistols, one in each hand, her heart slamming with each shot, she’d watched a constable go down, shrieking, dying. I’ve killed a man …

  She’d cringed from blazing return fire, seen three of her comrades falling …

  She decided, now, to record some of her impressions on her audio diary—she had decided she was going to be the historian of the revolution. She switched the recorder on with trembling hands, as she walked along. “We went on a raid outside the wire today. We snagged thirty-one rounds of buckshot, four frag grenades, a shotgun, and thirty-four ADAM. We lost McGee, Epstein, and Vallette.” She swallowed hard at that. She’d particularly liked Vallette. Too easy to reel off a list of the dead: the butcher’s bill, the guerillas called it. She went on, “We got one of those goddamn Big Daddies in the bargain, thoug
h. It was something awful what they had to do to that little girl to get the ADAM, but we didn’t start this thing. Ryan did. I can’t wait to tell Atlas. He’ll be so pleased…”

  Diane stepped into Atlas’s office to let him know they’d gotten a Big Daddy—and stared in surprise at the stranger sitting at Atlas’s desk. He seemed to be recording an audio diary of his own. After a breathless moment, he was no longer a stranger. She hadn’t recognized him at first.

  Something … the cold, cynical expression on his face and that sneering voice talking of long cons … made it seem impossible he could be anyone but Frank Fontaine.

  He turned a look of angry shock at her—then put on Atlas’s expression. His voice became Atlas’s. “Miss McClintock … what are you doing here? Let me just…” He dropped the Atlas pretense, shaking his head—seeing in her face that she knew. Finishing in Frank Fontaine’s voice, “… turn this off…”

  He switched off the tape recorder. It occurred to her that she should run. She’d found out something he would kill to keep secret.

  But her feet seemed frozen to the floor; she was barely able to speak. “They trusted you! How could you let them die … for a lie?”

  Fontaine stalked toward her, drawing a buck knife, opening it with a practiced motion, the blade making a snick sound as it flicked into readiness. “It don’t matter, kid,” he said. “Because it’s all lies. Everything is. Except for…” Then she felt the cold blade slash upward, into her belly, just under her ribcage, “… this.”

  Rapture Central Control

  1959

  Bill McDonagh paced up and down in the passageway outside Central Control. The constables at the entrance to the hall had been friendly, glad to see him. Not knowing his mission.

  He had to make his move, and soon. Then signal Wallace to take the minisub up to the boat. Conditions were as good as they were ever going to be for escape. The city’s turbulence indicators showed the sea was fairly calm right now. Ryan’s men were dealing with a new disruption, concentrated in sealing off Apollo Square—there weren’t many of Ryan’s bunch between here and the lighthouse.