BioShock Rapture

“What is the greatest lie ever created?” said Ryan over the public address, in his deepest intonation. There was a treacherous intimacy in that voice, like a quietly angry father. “What is the most vicious obscenity ever perpetrated on mankind? Slavery? Dictatorship? No! It’s the tool with which all that wickedness is built. Altruism.”

Bill sighed to himself. He was no great believer in charity. But if people wanted to extend a helping hand, that was their business. Ryan’s fierce rejection of altruism had been there all along. Lately, with a whole class in Rapture suffering, it was starting to grate …

“Whenever anyone wants others to do their work,” Ryan went on, “they call upon their altruism. ‘Never mind your own needs,’ they say. ‘Think of the needs of…’ of—whomever! Of the state. Of the poor. Of the army. Of the king. Of God. The list goes on and on.”

“Right,” Bill muttered. “And so do you, Mr. Ryan. Go on and on, that is…” He glanced over at Pablo Navarro, working across the room with a clipboard. Might be a mistake, saying that kind of thing out loud. But Pablo seemed focused on writing down heat readings.

From the speakers near the ceiling, almost from the very air, Ryan went inexorably on: “My journey to Rapture was my second exodus. In 1919 I fled a country that had traded despotism for insanity. The Marxist revolution simply traded one lie for another. And so, I came to America, where a man could own his own work—where a man could benefit from the brilliance of his own mind, the strength of his own muscles, the might of his own will.”

Now that view, Bill thought, using a tiny screwdriver to adjust the filter, was something he could appreciate. It was a view that had helped bind him to Andrew Ryan: a man being judged on what he’d achieved, what he could do—not on class, religion, race. Sure they were going through a rough time in Rapture, but he still had faith that Ryan’s grand vision would see them through …

Quiet rage simmered in Andrew Ryan’s voice as he went on, “I thought I’d left the parasites of Moscow behind me. I had thought I had left the Marxist altruists to their collective farms and their five-year plans. But, as the German fools threw themselves on Hitler’s sword for the good of the Reich, the Americans drank deeper and deeper of the Bolshevik poison, spoon-fed to them by Roosevelt and his New Dealers. And so, I asked myself, in what country was there a place for men like me? Men who refused to say yes to the parasites and the doubters. Men who believed that work was sacred and property rights inviolate. And then one day the happy answer came to me, my friends: there was NO country for people like me. And THAT was the moment I decided … to build one. Rapture!” Ryan finished his speech, and the music came back on. Cheerful boogie-woogie played.

“Yeah, he decided to build Rapture,” Navarro said wryly as he came over to write down readings on the meters near Bill. “He built it, and he gave us the come hither, acting like it’d belong to us too. But it’s all his, really, Bill. You ever notice that?”

Bill shrugged, glancing nervously at the door. This was pretty seditious talk, the way things were lately. “Mr. Ryan did use his own money to build Rapture,” he said, wiping grease from his hands with a rag. “My way of thinkin’, we’re all leasin’ space from ’im here, Pablo. Some have bought space. But Mr. Ryan still owns most of Rapture, mate—he has a right to think like Rapture belongs to him…”