BioShock: Rapture

“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 me 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!”

“Oh, stop running your yapper…” Maybe he’d take his last hit of BruteMore—see how it did with the SportBoost real fresh in his system. He wondered if he could get Sally to take some BreastGro…

He got up, went to the icebox—he’d hidden the BruteMore behind an open, half-empty can of beans.

He injected it standing right there, with his back to Sally. A glowing red energy suffused him. He could feel it move through his body—it was like individual cells growing from inside.

Sally kept rattling on. “This area wasn’t supposed to be no permanent place to live! Supposed to be temporary housing for train maintenance! Not much better than one of those shacktowns we had in the Depression, when I was a kid, out in Chicago!