BioShock Rapture

She chewed a lip, hesitated, started to say something, then shook her head. She looked around with a quiet desperation—then pointed at the corner of a window. “Um—those. Snail things or … whatever they are.”

He looked at the lower edge of the window. Some spiny crustacean was creeping across a corner of the glass outside. “You wish to have your window cleaned of those things? I’ll try and get a crew up here when you’re at work. You know how they like to stare in at you when you’re home.”

“You can’t tell where they’re looking in those big dark helmets. Scary ol’ big daddies, I call ’em.”

“Is there something else you wanted to tell me, Jasmine?”

She closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head. He could see she’d made up her mind not to tell him.

Ryan opened his arms to her—and she came to him. He enfolded her in a warm embrace, and they gazed out the window, where the light was fading, the shadows of the deep rising with the coming of night …

PART THREE

The Third Age of Rapture

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place”; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

—William Shakespeare,Henry the Fifth

15

Persephone, Infirmary

1957

“So … if I volunteer to be a test subject for these plasmid experiments,” said the man with the scars on his wrists, “I’ll be let out of here…” Carl Wing shrugged. “Sure, I got that part—but won’t I just end up locked up in some other place in Rapture?”

Sofia Lamb hesitated. She was sitting with a therapy subject in the small, overlit, metal-walled Persephone infirmary, and as the lank-haired, nervous little man in the prisoner’s jumpsuit looked trustingly at her, she suddenly wanted a cigarette. She’d given up smoking, but right now she would’ve paid a great many Rapture dollars for a single smoke. But he was looking at her with his sad green eyes, and she had to respond. “Um—ye-es, in a way,” she admitted, remembering to smile. “You’ll be in a … a research facility. But you’ll be able to help the cause, there, in time—it will give your life meaning. You did say, Carl, that you felt like your life was meaningless, that you had no identity here in Persephone. That…”

The words died on her lips. She just couldn’t go on. It all sounded so hollow. She was proposing to play Sinclair’s game and send this man to be an experimental subject. And she thought about Eleanor—her own child, the subject of experiments somewhere in Rapture …

I’ve lost my way, Sofia realized.

She’d been working with other prisoners in Persephone, partly to get the warden, Nigel Weir, to trust her—and partly to indoctrinate the “patients” with her philosophy. She was creating moles who would be activated when she sent them the prearranged signal, as part of her scheme to escape Persephone and overthrow Ryan …

The therapy sessions with Persephone prisoners under the auspices of working for the warden had seemed necessary. Part of the deal was prepping some of them for Sinclair’s experiments.

But abruptly—it had become unbearable. And as she realized that, another realization swept over her like water crashing through a collapsing seawall. The moment has come.

She cleared her throat and said, “Carl—we’re going to change course here, you and I. You won’t have to volunteer for … experiments. If you want to help our cause, then simply go to your cell and wait till the doors unlock and you hear the signal we talked about. ‘The butterfly is taking wing.’ Then … head for the guard’s tower. Overwhelm anyone who tries to stop you.”

He gaped at her. “The tower? Really? When did you decide—?”

She shrugged and smiled ruefully. “Just now! I felt the movement of the body—the True Body of Rapture! Truth is in the body, Carl! The body is speaking to me—speaking through me!—and it is declaring that the day has come. Now go—and don’t speak of this to anyone! Wait for the signal!”

He nodded eagerly, his eyes shining.

She went to the door, called for the guard, and had Carl escorted back to his cell. She didn’t need an escort herself—she had a pass that allowed her to move freely from one part of Persephone to another, so long as she didn’t try to leave the facility.

But today, she decided, as she strode down the corridor, she would become the one issuing passes—she would make the move for which she’d long prepared. She prepared for this day—but she hadn’t felt ready, till this moment. It wasn’t just Carl or the others like him. It was the thought of Eleanor—the painful fact of Sinclair and his scientists warping the girl’s powerful but innocent mind. She could bear it no longer.