BioShock: Rapture

“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