BioShock: Rapture

by John Shirley

  “The what? Oh—basically, the kid, right? Prefetus?”

  Suchong bowed. “Mr. Fontaine has it exactly.”

  “We got someone to bear the kid?”

  Suchong blinked. “Who can bear kids? I cannot bear them. The kids, they—”

  “Suchong—I mean someone to have the baby, and turn it over to us!”

  “All is arranged!”

  “So Ryan’s bloodline, his, what do you call it—”

  “His DNA. Yes. When new vita chambers work, when security is DNA specific—Ryan’s DNA will protect your … subject.”

  “You think the project is doable in the short term, Suchong?” Fontaine pressed. “I mean, making it—what was it you called it?”

  “Accelerated development. Child growing faster. And then—the conditioning…”

  “That’s the important part. The conditioning. Brainwashing. Kid has to respond to cues, like you said. You can do that?”

  “Yes. I believe so. My experiments confirm it. Suchong use the reward system of brain, condition the organism, the human offspring—to do anything! Anything you desire of them!”

  “Anything? On cue? I mean—even something the guy’d never ever normally do? That’s what we need, see. I need to know I can use this kid against Ryan when the time comes.”

  “I believe so—yes!” Suchong’s eyes were shining. Conditioning, mind control—that was his meat. It was what he gloried in. “Especially if I have him very young.”

  “Okay, say you’ve got him as a kid—and let’s say he’s got a puppy. Kids love dogs. You could make him kill his own dog? I mean, a cute little puppy, one he really loved—could you make him kill it with his bare hands? That’d be the real test…”

  Suchong nodded, showing his teeth in a grin—very unusual for him. “Yes! Wonderful, is it not?”

  “Yeah, if it works.” Fontaine felt a giddiness himself. It was a real grifter’s ace—a primo con. Maybe the best bunko of all. One that would take years to unfold. But that was the beauty of it. The time lag would make it something Ryan would never expect. This way, if the Atlas project didn’t pan out … he had another way to get at Ryan.

  He already had wealth and control over a great deal of Rapture. But to have a conditioned little puppet, waiting to do his bidding—it was a thrilling thought. A con carried out by life itself …

  16

  Rapture Central Control

  August 1958

  “What’s wrong, Mary?” Jim asked, in that calm way of his. “You look like you’ve just heard some terrible news!”

  “Capital punishment in Rapture!” Mary replied, worriedly. “This isn’t what I signed up for!”

  Jim’s voice was almost jolly. “Now hold on there, pretty lady! The only people who face capital punishment in Rapture are smugglers, and that’s because they put everything we’ve worked for at risk. Imagine if the Soviets found out about our wonderful city, or even the U.S. government! Our secrecy is our shield!”

  “A little capital punishment is a small price to pay to protect all of our freedoms.”

  “Now you’re talking, Mary!”

  Andrew Ryan switched off the recording, leaned back in his desk chair, turned to look at Bill McDonagh, eyebrows raised. “What do you think? What’s the first thought in your mind, hearing that, eh?”

  “Well sir…”

  Bill no longer felt he could say what he really thought. Especially when his first thoughts were: I think you’re looking mighty old, Mr. Ryan. Old and tired. And you smell like you’ve been at the martinis again … And that bit of propaganda is depressing …

  He looked around at Ryan’s office—it seemed big, echoingly empty. He wished he had Wallace or Sullivan with him. Someone to back him up. It was getting harder to show enthusiasm for Ryan’s new direction.

  “Go on,” Ryan urged him. “Spit it out.”

  Bill shrugged. “We have the death penalty now, guv—I reckon people have to get used to it … Hard to ignore with people hanging from gallows. Council’s divided … Maybe it’s time to ease up on it…”

  Ryan had two tape recorders on his desk—the smaller one, purchased, ironically, from Fontaine’s company. He smiled coldly, reached for the small recorder, hit Record, and intoned, “The death penalty in Rapture! Council’s in an uproar. Riots in the streets, they say! But this is the time for leadership. Action must be taken against the smugglers. Any contact with the surface exposes Rapture to the very world we fled from. A few stretched necks are a small price to pay for our ideals…” He hit the button, switching off the tape recorder, and turned to Bill with satisfaction. “There you are, Bill. I summed up my feelings about it—and recorded it for posterity. Have you been using your recorder? Rapture will define the direction of civilization for all the world, in time—and history will want to know what happened here!”

  Bill nodded—without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been recording the odd comment, guv, like you suggested. Next one might have to be about this raid we’re planning on Fontaine Futuristics. What are we going to do with the bloody thing once we have it?”

  Ryan’s face went blank. “That’s for me to decide. In my own good time.”

  “I just think, ’ere—we can’t just take over another man’s business by force! We become bleedin’ hypocrites, guv’nor! That’s … like, what do they call it—nationalization! It’ll take Rapture in another direction—opposite where we set out to go.”

  Ryan looked at him frostily. “Bill. It’s true that I prize your … outspokenness. And I prize individuality. But I also prize loyalty. Whatever I decide—I hope I can count on your loyalty…”

  Bill looked at the floor. He thought about Elaine. And their daughter. “Yes sir. Of course—you can count on that. I’m all loyalty, me. That’s Bill McDonagh—straight through.”

  But as Ryan turned back to the tape recorder to play the service announcement once more, Bill wondered. Could he really stomach Ryan taking over Fontaine’s business? There were already curfews, ID cards. How much closer to fascism could they get before they had gone into a complete, mad reversal of everything Ryan claimed to believe in?

  “A little capital punishment is a small price to pay to protect all of our freedoms.”

  “Now you’re talking, Mary!”

  Ryan switched the tape recorder off and sat back, frowning thoughtfully. “I really have to make a decisive move against Fontaine. He’s going to new extremes—I’ve reason to believe he’s interfering in my private life. Jasmine! She was a real comfort to me, you know, Bill. We’re both grown men here. You understand. But she’s moved out of the snug little place I gave her. I know that Fontaine has his hands in this. Perhaps even putting listening devices in her apartment.”

  “Hmmm…” Bill tried to keep his face expressionless. Privately, he thought Ryan sounded like a paranoid, imagining things.

  “He continues his smuggling. We have secret Christian groups forming, a result of those blasted Bibles. Letters may be going out from Rapture. He’s selling weapons to Lamb’s bunch too! I thought I had an understanding with Fontaine—but he’s gone too far. While I was buying fish futures, he was cornering the market on genotypes and nucleotide sequences. He’s become too powerful—and that makes him too dangerous. For all of us. The Great Chain is pulling away from me, Bill. It’s time to give it a tug…”

  “Right,” Bill said, resigned to it. “When’s this great, glorious raid coming about anyway, guv’nor?”

  “Oh—two days. The twelfth, if all’s well. Sullivan and I have organized a large cadre to carry it out—heavily armed. But we’re not telling them where they’re going till we get there.”

  “Well maybe I can help, guv. What’s the strategy?”

  “I’m telling as few people as possible about that—no need for that hurt look, Bill; it’s not that I don’t trust you. But if Jasmine’s place was bugged—what else might be? You could be overheard talking about it to me, or Sullivan. We’re going to keep this under wraps. The fewer kn
ow about it, the better. We must try to be more … secure about it this time. And hope they’re not waiting for us when we get there…”

  Fontaine Futuristics, Lab 25

  1958

  “Quite astonishing, the rate at which the child is growing,” said Brigid Tenenbaum, staring at the toddler lying in the transparent bubbling incubator.

  “Yes,” muttered Dr. Suchong, as he pored over the biochemical extract results on the clipboard in his hands. “Mr. Fontaine will be quite pleased. Also—may have implications for all mankind. Children—so vile. This one … not child for long…”

  They were in a cramped laboratory space lit by a yellow bulb—the door doubly locked, the air stale, smelling heavily of chemicals and hormones and electrical discharge.

  The naked little boy floated on the lozenge-shaped incubator on a table between them, his sleeping face above the liquid. The child was in a kind of trance within the thick fluids.

  Little “Jack” seemed older than he was—and that was as per schedule. The accelerated-growth program was really remarkable. Perhaps Suchong was right—it could lead, someday, to entirely sidestepping the need for a childhood in future children. They could be grown with fantastic acceleration and taught with conditioning—as this child was being taught. Flickering lights, recorded voices, electrodes sparking his brain imbued him with the basics of learning—the ability to walk, memories of imaginary parents—that would have taken years to accumulate normally. He was a tabula rasa—anything they wished to imprint on him could be pressed into the yielding tissues of his young brain … just as Frank Fontaine had requested. She had heard Fontaine refer to young Jack here as “the ultimate con.” The backdoor entrance into the well-protected fortress that was Ryan. Jack had been, after all, taken from Jasmine Jolene’s uterus, extracted as a tiny embryo that was just twelve days past being a mere zygote …

  “I must complete the W-Y-K conditioning,” Suchong muttered, setting the clipboard on the table. “The child must be set in bathysphere soon, sent to the surface … Mr. Fontaine has a boat waiting already…”

  She frowned. “What is this W-Y-K?”

  Suchong glanced over at her in rank suspicion. “You test me? You know I am not to tell you everything about conditioning!”

  “Oh yes—I forgot. Scientific curiosity is strong in me, Suchong.”

  “Hmph, woman’s curiosity, that is more to the point…” Suchong tinkered with a valve, increasing the flow of a hormone into the incubator. The child twitched in response … its legs kicked …

  What, she wondered, were they doing to this child?

  And then she wondered: Why are such thoughts troubling me?

  But they’d troubled her increasingly. Their work with the little girls; this work with this child. It was beginning to stir memories in her. Her childhood. Her parents. Kind faces …

  Moments of love …

  It was as if all the exposure to children called to some child locked within her own breast. A child who wanted to be set free.

  Set us all free, whispered the child.

  She shook her head. No. Sympathy, caring for laboratory subjects—that was a scientific hell she would not enter.

  Unless, perhaps—she was already there …

  Neptune’s Bounty

  1958

  “Crikey, how many men d’we have here?” Bill asked, a bit awed by the numbers of heavily armed men massing in front of the broad, steel-walled corridor outside Neptune’s Bounty.

  Bill was carrying a tommy gun; Sullivan had a pistol in his right hand, a hand radio in his left. Cavendish had a shotgun in one hand and the Rapture version of a search warrant in the other. “Lot of buggers for a raid, Chief, innit?” Bill asked. “We really need all these blokes?”

  Sullivan muttered, “Yeah. We do. And there’s a lot more moving in on Fontaine Futuristics.”

  “Fontaine Futuristics—what, at the same moment?”

  “Same time. Boss’s orders.” He shook his head, his unhappiness as clear as his wide scowl. “Let’s face it, these aren’t exactly bloodthirsty desperadoes we’re talking about. Rapture’s full of poets, artists, and tennis players, not hired gorillas. But Fontaine … he seems to have a whole segment of Rapture in his pocket.”

  “So where’s Fontaine? We want this raid to work, we’d better take him down personally.”

  “That’s the plan: word is he’s here today, somewhere in the fisheries—maybe on the wharf, up to something in their supply boat. Anyway, it’s not just a raid,” Sullivan confided, in a low voice, as Cavendish opened the doors and they followed the double column of men down the wooden corridor toward the wharf. “It’s an all-out assault … a military assault on Frank Fontaine and everyone around him.”

  “How planned is it, Chief? Remember what happened last time. Maybe we should’ve spent more time setting the bloody thing up?”

  “It’s planned, all right. We’ve got two waves of men going in here, two more waves ready at Fontaine Futuristics. But Ryan wanted to keep it under wraps as much as we could. Trouble is, you tell more than two people about something, maybe even just one, and ten always seem to find out about it. And Fontaine’s got all kinds of splicers on his pay, cuts them free plasmids in return for info. So I’m not sure if…” He shook his head. “I’m—just not sure.”

  A crackle on the little portable shortwave Sullivan held in his left hand. “In position,” came the voice over the radio.

  Sullivan spoke into the radio. “Right. Move ahead when I give the designation ‘Now.’” He changed frequencies and spoke to another team. “This is the chief. You ready up there?”

  “Ready to hit Futuristics…”

  “Goddamnit, don’t say that name on the radio, just—never mind. Just count to thirty—and take the initiative, hit ’em. We’re moving ahead, here.”

  Sullivan glanced at his watch, nodded to himself, looked around, made a hand signal to the others—and then they stalked up to the Securis door. He nodded to Cavendish, who swung it open, held the heavy door for the two lines of grim-faced men at ready—and shouted, “Now!”

  And with a shared howl the men rushed through the door. Behind the rushing ranks—shouting in excitement, guns raised—came Sullivan, Head Constable Cavendish, Constable Redgrave, and Bill, all of them storming down onto the water-flanked wooden peninsula of the wharf toward the small tugboatlike vessel tied up there.

  And suddenly the splicers were everywhere.

  Some of them were literally dripping from the ceiling—spider splicers dropping down, slicing with their curved fish-gutting knives as they came, so that five men in Ryan’s attack force fell within seconds, spouting scarlet blood from their slashed-through necks, headless bodies stumbling over their own heads rolling about underfoot. Bill had to step sharp to keep from stomping a man’s still-twitching face. A splicer turned from its victim and slashed at Bill but he had the tommy gun ready and squeezed off a quick up-angled burst, blowing the top of the splicer’s head off.

  Someone nearby stopped running—and turned into a statue, coated with ice. A lobbed grenade blew up the splicer that had done the freezing—but more were coming.

  Like demons out of the Bible, they are, Bill thought.

  “Yippee ti-yi-yo!” howled a splicer, somewhere above. “Gene Autry’s riding to the rescue!”

  A prolonged rattle of machine-gun fire, and a spider splicer screamed and fell from the ceiling. A ball of fire roared from a figure dimly seen in the shadows near the far corners of the wharf, the splicer up to his waist in water. Bill winced from the heat as the ball of fire burned meteorically past, striking a man behind him in the face, scream burbling as his face boiled away. Bill fired his tommy gun at the silhouette near the wall as another fireball raced toward him, streaming black smoke. He saw the spider splicer jerk and fall with machine-gun bullets, blood splashing against the wall as a fireball went into a spiral, seeming to lose control of its direction when the spider splicer died. It veered crazily above him and th
en down again and hissed itself out in the water.

  A thudding rattling banging booming of gunshots—shotguns thundering, machine guns clattering, pistols snapping off shots—as rising gunsmoke clouded the scene, making it all the more like hell. The blue smoke reflected red muzzle flashes and bomb blasts, explosives chucked from ceilings, from behind pylons, from under the wharfs, blowing Ryan’s men into flinders, the splicers shrieking nonsense and mockery—

  Lots of them. And they’d been waiting, expecting them. They’d been done over—Bill was sure of that.

  A man in front of Bill went rigid and jerked about like a marionette dangled by a palsied hand, electrocuted by a lightning-throwing plasmid. As he fell, Bill fired a burst past him at the splicer: a black-haired, dark-eyed woman in shorts. She was half-hidden behind a stub of pylon, aiming her electrically sparking hand at Bill. But the tommy gun split her chest and face asunder, and she fell backward into the water, which was clouding up with crimson billows—the blood of fallen men and women; human and rogue splicer.

  God, Bill thought. Ryan’s got me killing women! Oh lord, forgive me. What would Elaine think of me now?

  But a woman spider splicer on the ceiling fired a pistol at him, the bullet grazing his ribs, and he returned fire without hesitating—because he had to. The woman leapt from view.

  On the deck of the little boat tied up near the wharf was a wild-eyed, patchy-haired woman pushing a baby carriage with one hand. She reached into the carriage, snatching out a hand grenade of some kind, tossing it in the air. Cavendish rushed her …

  The bomb stopped in midair, then came arcing telekinetically toward him—and he threw himself down behind a stack of fish-reeking wooden crates. The crates caught most of the explosion, sending splinters rocketing like javelins—and someone behind him wailed in pain.

  Bill got to his knees and peered through the smoke in time to see the woman’s head vanish in a cloud of pink and gray in the near-point-blank double-barrel shotgun blast fired by Cavendish. The woman sagged—