BioShock: Rapture

by John Shirley

  “You know where Fontaine gets the money for that charity?” asked Greavy with rhetorical pompousness. “From selling ADAM! And why are a lot of the poor impoverished? Because they’re addicted to ADAM! They’re spending all their money on it! The irony is naturally lost on the hoi polloi…”

  They walked to the nearest wall, not far from the entrance to an apartment complex—and almost immediately Bill felt cold water dripping on his head.

  He looked up, saw the discoloration high on the wall where it met the big, heavily framed windows arching over the room, several stories up. He admired the Wales brothers’ vision, building big public spaces like this one. The high glass ceiling eased the sense of confinement, gave people access to something like sky. Infused by light filtering green-blue from the surface, the sea was directly overhead. The windows curved down to meet the walls, and through the glass near the ceiling was a rippling vista of other Rapture buildings, light streaming up their towering façades, neon signs blinking.

  Another drop of water fell from the ceiling and splashed his shoulder. “Pressure crack,” Bill guessed. “From the look of the puddle it’s been here awhile. Wish I could climb walls like those spider-splicer bastards, get a closer look. Well, I think we’ll have a team go out in the diving suits, apply some sealant, then we’ll see if—” He broke off, staring, as a wrench floated up from his tool kit, as if weightless, and bobbed in the air in front of him. “What the bloody hell is that?”

  The floating wrench suddenly darted at his head, and only good reflexes and a quick duck saved Bill from being struck down. The tool flashed by him, and he turned to see it spinning along, stopping in midair, turning to swish viciously at him again.

  “What the blue blazes!” Bill grabbed the wrench with his left hand, bruising his palm. It seemed to jump about in his hand like a live but rigid metal fish before it simply stopped. “Who’s chucking tools at me?”

  “There’s your tool chucker,” Greavy said, grimly amused, pointing at a woman about ten yards away, standing by the doorway into Artemis Suites. She was a petite, smirking, waiflike woman in black pedal pushers and a ragged, blood-spattered blouse, the left sleeve ripped entirely away, her left arm scratched and bloody. She wore kohl smeared around her eyes, so they looked like a panda’s, and her bleached hair was teased up over her head, almost writhing around like Medusa’s snakes. Bill supposed a side effect of the telekinetic plasmid she was using was affecting her hair. One side of her face was striped with red welts. Her eyes had the demented glimmer of the hard-core plasmid user. She was crazily stoned.

  She raised a grimy hand and pointed it at his tool kit—which jerked from his hand and spun away from him, scattering its contents across the room. People dodged out of the way of flying tools, now under the control of her telekinetic powers.

  “Hey you, stop throwing your tools!” shouted a glaring, bald-headed constable in a checked suit, stalking toward Bill. A star-shaped badge was pinned on his chest.

  “Isn’t me!” he yelled back. “It’s ’er, Constable, the splicer over at Artemis!”

  The constable turned to look, reaching into his coat pocket for a gun. But as soon as he did his badge tore itself off his coat, spun around his head, and then buried itself between his eyes.

  The constable screamed in agony and fell to his knees, clutching at his blood-spurting forehead.

  “That’ll show you pricks!” the little female splicer screeched, pointing a finger at Bill and Greavy. “I saw you, poking around here, you official types! Ryan’s little puppets! Well, we don’t want you ’round Artemis! Or your bald-headed cops neither!”

  She made a sudden gesture, and his tools, scattered across the intervening floor, leapt into the air and came spinning at him. Bill threw himself flat as they flashed over him. Greavy shrieked, and Bill turned to see a screwdriver driven through Greavy’s chest—the screwdriver blade dripping crimson. Greavy wobbled …

  “Jay-sus, Greavy!”

  Bill got to his feet just in time to catch Greavy as he fell, lowering the man’s quivering body to the floor. Greavy was sputtering, dribbling blood, his eyes glazing. Dying.

  Maybe if they could get some ADAM to him in time they could heal him …

  But there was no time. In moments, Greavy was dead.

  Bill looked in shock over at Artemis Suites—but the telekinetic splicer was gone. He heard someone cackling from the shadowy corners of the ceiling.

  And then an announcement echoed from the public-address system—Diane McClintock’s recorded voice: “Remember that here in Rapture, we’re all individuals—but we’re also a part of the Great Chain! Welded together by the free market, we are becoming one happy family…”

  Andrew Ryan’s Office

  1955

  “Mr. Ryan? Something I’ve got to ask about…”

  Bill McDonagh was nervous, demanding an explanation from Andrew Ryan. He had countless other things to do, but he was too troubled to work until he cleared this up. Worry, burning like an acid stomach, had been building up in him.

  “Yes, Bill?” Ryan said, looking up from a small box of audio tapes, seeming only vaguely curious about Bill’s errand. He was at his desk, sorting through labeled recordings of his speeches and debates. An Acu-Vox recorder was set up beside the box.

  Ryan was wearing a caramel-colored, double-breasted suit and a blue tie. Bill wondered how he could function in a buttoned-up suit all day long. “Mr. Ryan—I’ve got to keep the heat evenly circulating in Rapture; I’ve got to keep the pipes from freezing; I’ve got to be able to control water pressure. Part of the engineering of this place. I can’t do it when there’s a big drain, a sudden drop in heat and pressure—and it comes unpredictable-like and no one’ll let me inspect the source of it—”

  Ryan set the box aside. “Come to the point. What does this enigmatic monologue refer to?”

  “There’s a whole section of Rapture I’m not even allowed in now! Sinclair’s got his own people running it. Place he is calling Persephone. I knew they were building something, but I thought it was a hotel. Only it’s too secretive for that. I can’t be responsible for hydraulic engineering when a whole section of the city is sealed off from me! Seems like it’s been functional for a long time. More than a year … And it’s no hotel.”

  Ryan made a small growl of grim amusement in his throat. “Depends on what you mean by hotel! Persephone. Yes … I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that…” Ryan leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling as if something were written up there. “Bill … have you heard my debates with Sofia Lamb?”

  “Only caught a minute or two. Kind of surprised me, when you debated ’er…”

  Ryan smiled ruefully at him. “I took a risk, elevating that malcontent in that way. My instinct was simply to have her arrested as a … a social saboteur. But—I advocate freedom; I don’t wish to be a hypocrite—and I didn’t wish to make her a martyr. So I thought I’d let the people hear the sort of nonsense she spouts when I’m there to refute it! Listen…” He pressed a button on the tape recorder.

  Bill heard Ryan’s voice: “Religious rights, Doctor? You are free to kneel before whatever tribal fetish you favor in the comfort of your own home. But in Rapture, liberty is our only law. A man’s only duty is to himself. To imply otherwise, therefore, is criminal.”

  Lamb replied, “Ask yourself, Andrew—what is your ‘Great Chain of progress’ but a faith? The chain is a symbol for an irrational force, guiding us toward ascension—no less mystic than the crucifixes you seize and burn…”

  Bill nodded. It bothered him too, when Ryan seized religious artifacts. He wasn’t religious. But a man ought to be able to believe in whatever he liked …

  Ryan hit Fast Forward and then Play. Lamb’s voice again: “… Dream, delusion, or the pain of a phantom limb—to one man, they are as real as rain. Reality is consensus, and the people are losing faith. Take a walk, Andrew. It is raining in Rapture, and you have simply chosen to not notice…”
/>   Ryan stopped the tape and snorted. “Quite the little extemporaneous speaker, isn’t she? If you parse it, it makes no sense. But its real message can be decoded, Bill—‘reality is consensus … the people are losing faith.’ What is that but a Marxist notion? And this business of claiming I ignore the suffering in Rapture…” He shook his head grimly. “I don’t ignore it—but I must accept it as part of the long, weary march of evolution! The surface world is still with us here—to die to the habit of parasitism comes hard, Bill. And some fall by the wayside in that long, lonely march. I know that full well! But what does she do? She makes me sound like Louis the Fourteenth! Next she’ll imply Diane is Marie Antoinette, and she’ll call for the guillotine! Do you expect me to stand by while that happens?”

  “What’s all that got to do with this Persephone, guv?” Bill asked. He suspected he knew—he’d heard rumors—but he wanted it spelled out.

  Ryan looked Bill in the eye—the look was almost one of defiance, though Ryan was boss here. “That’s where Sofia Lamb was taken, not long ago, Bill! And incarcerated.”

  “Incarcerated!”

  “Yes. You must have noticed her absence from the scene. That glib, sanctimonious woman can make all the speeches she likes to the walls of her cell.”

  “But—won’t that make her a martyr?”

  “As far as her followers know, she’s simply disappeared. Deserted them!”

  Bill shook his head sadly. “Ought to be another way, Mr. Ryan…”

  “I cannot allow this social sabotage to go on!” Ryan aimed an index finger at Bill. “Do you know who planted that charming little confetti bomb, with its warnings? Oh, I found out, Bill.” He slapped the top of his desk. “It was done by an agent of Sofia Lamb! Stanley Poole’s infiltrated her little circle. He’s heard that it was one of our own people who planted the thing … quite likely, Simon Wales!”

  “Wales!”

  “Oh yes! At Lamb’s behest.”

  “Well—why not prosecute her for that? A bomb’s a bomb. It was vandalism at least! But this just disappearing people…”

  “Her public prosecution would become a cause célèbre! Anyway, we haven’t got solid proof. Just hearsay. But think about it—how like a psychiatrist to create a bomb that blows nothing up … except our sense of security! Not long after she got here, she started her little game, pulling the pins out from under us one by one. Do you know what she did with the bonus money I paid her? She took that—and a great many ‘donations’ from her followers—and built that smarmy Dionysus Park. Named in some bizarre effort at mockery…”

  “Dionysus Park?” Bill scratched his head. He’d only been there once, to check the drainage. “Thought it was some kind of ‘retreat.’ Therapeutic art, something like that.”

  “Oh yes.” Ryan’s voice dripped with cynicism as he went on. “A retreat—her sheeplike followers closeted with Sofia Lamb in her precious garden and her own cinema. Just the setting for Marxist propaganda disguised as therapy and art! Rapture is a powder keg, Bill—I knew that when Ruben Greavy died. Plasmids made Rapture unstable. We can’t remove plasmids, not now—but we can remove some of the instability. Lamb, people like her—they have to be stopped.”

  Bill wondered exactly what happened to the “incarcerated” in Persephone. Wasn’t Persephone a name from a myth—about hell?

  Ryan went on, gesturing at the Acu-Vox, “I recorded a note to you about all this—but I may as well talk it straight out with you instead. You remember when you spoke of a ‘marketplace of ideas’? That was you. I liked the phrase. So—I let Lamb enter the marketplace, tried to defang her in debates. But she is too dangerous to be allowed to roam freely … You know the place they’re calling Pauper’s Drop—you’ve been to the Limbo Room?”

  “Not me. Too much a ’ole in the wall.”

  “Good. Because Grace Holloway was singing protest songs there—perfectly harmless colored lady was Grace, till Lamb got hold of her! And between their protest screeches, these … these Oblomovs hand out Lamb’s manifesto! Lamb adorns every wall there! Saint Lamb! You made her, McDonagh—”

  “Me!”

  “You with your marketplace-of-ideas talk! You persuaded me to allow her sort! Now—I want you to talk to the council about this. They must accept that people like this are to be silenced…”

  “I can’t do that, Mr. Ryan, it’s not my place…”

  “I need to know how you really feel, Bill. That’ll show me where you stand.”

  “But—incarceration? This place Persephone … What exactly is it?”

  Ryan sighed. “I should have let you in on it. Quite a while back I did a deal with Augustus Sinclair to build it—it’s out on the edge of Rapture. Right over that … big crevice—just in case. It’s … a facility for isolation and interrogation. Something between a mental hospital and a penal institution. For political enemies of Rapture.” He was busying himself with the tapes—seeming embarrassed. “Some of this woman’s followers are free—and some aren’t. We’ll find them, in time, and they’ll have their own little cells. There are various shades of malcontents in Persephone…” He seemed to realize he was fussing mindlessly with the tapes and put the box aside. “As for water-pressure issues—I’ll have Sinclair speak to you, give you reports on all that. He has a maintenance crew to deal with any … internal problems of that kind.”

  He doesn’t want me to go there, Bill realized. He doesn’t want me to see what it’s like …

  Something else occurred to Bill, then. There was a chance, after all, he could see the inside of Persephone—as a prisoner. It could happen if he said the wrong thing. That’s what it was coming to, in Rapture. And he couldn’t risk getting put away—not with Elaine and his little girl needing him …

  Bill let out a long, slow breath to calm himself. When things cooled down, maybe he could persuade Ryan to close Persephone.

  “Okay, Mr. Ryan,” he said, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “I reckon you know best.”

  Persephone Penal Colony

  1955

  Simon Wales felt a powerful mingling of superstitious awe and pride as the guard let him into Sofia Lamb’s cell.

  She was waiting for him on her neatly made bunk, sitting up straight, hands folded in her lap, her blond hair back in a bun. She looked thin, hollow-eyed. But the transcendent spark was there.

  “So you did come,” she said softly. “How’d you arrange it?”

  Wales had to take a breath to calm himself before he replied. He viewed this woman as a sending from the Locus of Universal Love. It was like being with the radiant Joan of Arc as she waited for the stake. “I … I have some terms of friendship with Sinclair, since Daniel and I were the chief architects of Rapture. I convinced him to let me inspect the structure here, to see if it was putting strain on the rest of Rapture—all a blind, of course. He allowed it—and then it was simply a matter of bribing the guards…”

  “Good. You must see to it that the guards will let you in whenever you come—pay them whatever you must. They fear Sullivan and Ryan—they cannot be induced to simply let me go. But they can be persuaded to let me talk freely with the other inmates.” She frowned. He could see emotional pain flicker across her face, quickly suppressed. “What about … Eleanor? Any word?”

  “They have her in some kind of … conditioning.”

  She grimaced. “Well. They will think she is one thing … but I have buried her true mission deeply inside her. Eleanor will survive! And she will surprise them. She will surprise everyone here. I have faith in that.” She glanced at the door. “I’m developing a therapeutic relationship with Nigel Weir…”

  Wales looked at her in surprise. “Weir? The warden of Persephone? He let you…”

  She smiled. “He’s a sad, disturbed little man. Under pretense of interrogating me—he asked me about himself. Indirectly, you see. I turned the interrogation back on him—we even looked at his files together. I think I’ve persuaded him to let me do some experimenting—and thera
py on the prisoners in Persephone. He’ll convince Sinclair it’s all for the benefit of Ryan’s little fiefdom. But in time, I plan to organize a rebellion here. One which they will never expect. They’re foolish, putting so many political prisoners in one facility—it plays into our hands…”

  Gazing at her, Wales felt dizzy. He suddenly—uncontrollably—went to his knees. “Ma’am … oh, Sofia! How is it that I was ever loyal to Andrew Ryan? That I let him blind me?”

  She smiled. “It’s all right, Simon. The ego is powerful. The will to love is weak, at first. It must be strengthened with sacrifice to the collective. It takes time! But you were one of the first to see the light. You are beloved to me, Simon Wales … And in good time, Ryan will fall. And I … we … will be waiting to take his place. Rapture will be ours. Tell them—tell everyone—I will be watching! I will know who is a slave to ego—and who ascends to the body with the blessed…”

  “Yes, Sofia! I’ll see that your flock knows!”

  Sofia Lamb put a hand on his head, in benediction. Wales felt an orgasmic shudder go through him at her touch, and he lowered his head and wept with joy …

  13

  Rapture Detention

  1956

  Sullivan was worried about Head Constable Harker. The HC was breathing through his mouth like a man who’d just finished a two-mile run, but Sullivan knew damn well he’d been sitting at that desk at least half an hour. One of Harker’s cigars, still smoking, was just a butt in the seashell ashtray. Harker sat there, panting, staring into space, drumming his freckled fingers on the desk. The head constable was a short, thick, jowly man with receding red hair, a shabby black suit. Looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

  “You asked me to come over, Harker, remember?” Sullivan said, sitting across from him. “You okay? You look kinda worse for wear.”

  “Sure, I’m … I’m okay.” Harker reached up, unconsciously fingering the constable’s badge on his lapel. “I just sometimes wonder”—he glanced at the door to make sure it was closed—“if I made a mistake coming to Rapture.”