BioShock Rapture

Pistols holstered under their coats, Andrew Ryan, Bill McDonagh, Kinkaide, and Sullivan stood together just inside the opening of a passageway that led out into Apollo Square. Karlosky was behind them, down the corridor, watching the back way; Head Constable Cavendish and Constable Redgrave were standing a few paces to the right and left, both carrying tommy guns. Rising up the brass-trimmed art-deco ornamented walls to either side of the doorway were the sleek sculptures that had once reminded Bill of hood ornaments: elongated, silver figures of muscular men reaching for the sky with rocketlike verticality, and holding up the ceiling in the process. To the left yellow lettering on a scarlet banner read:

THE GREAT CHAIN IS GUIDED BY YOUR HANDS

But it was the hanged men, across from them, that captivated their attention …

Ryan was making his monthly inspection of Rapture. “We’ve had repair crews in ’ere, working on leaks,” Bill said, “and the constables did a good job of protecting them. Nicking mad splicers, bunging ’em in the Dingley Dell. But it’s getting right crowded in there. And in the morgue. I mean, just take a butcher’s at that, hard to…” He chuckled to himself. He’d almost used the Cockney “rhyming slang,” “hard to Adam and Eve,” meaning “hard to believe,” but that would be a pretty confusing expression in Rapture. “Hard to believe it’s come to this.”

Standing in an open space, just inside the farther doors, was a crude wooden platform and on it a T-shaped gallows made of planks pulled up from around Rapture. Bill had seen the gaping holes where the planks had been the day before. From each arm of the T, a man’s body hung.

Apollo Square stank too. It stank of dead bodies. There were five of them Bill could see, four men and a woman, the corpses scattered widely about the big room, sprawled awkwardly in brown puddles of dried blood. And there were the two hanged men, slowly turning on the ropes at the far side of the big room.

The tram tracks were intact; there was no train at the moment. As far as Bill knew, the trains were still running. At Artemis Suites, faces peered out at them from the darkened recesses of the doorway. Trash lay about the square, some of it stirring in the ventilator breeze. Music played from somewhere, so distorted Bill couldn’t make out what it was at first—then he recognized Bessie Smith. She seemed to be asking to be sent to the electric chair.

Laughter cackled mockingly from the ceiling. Bill looked up to see a spider splicer creeping across, upside down beside the big windows.

“Maybe you can bring him down, Cavendish,” Sullivan said, glowering up at the splicer. “I don’t know how good that tommy gun is at this range, but…”

“No!” Ryan said suddenly. “It is not against the law to use ADAM. It is not against the Rapture law to walk on walls or ceilings so long as you don’t damage them. If he breaks a serious law—shoot him down. But we’re not going to shoot them like rabid dogs out of hand. Some of them are employable, eh Kinkaide?”

Kinkaide sighed and shook his head doubtfully. “Employable? Only sometimes, Mr. Ryan. Offer ’em ADAM, they can be persuaded to use the Telekinesis, move the bigger Metro parts about for us. But they get distracted and fight too much. Couple of them were supposed to be moving pipes into place, ended up throwing them at each other like spears. One of them impaled, right through. Took a long time to get the pipe clean afterward.”

Ryan shrugged. “ADAM will be controlled, in time.” He paused thoughtfully, then went on: “As for the rogue splicers, we will only kill those we have to kill. We’re going to control them, and we’re going to have some strict rules. We will end the vigilantism; we will end the vandalistic graffiti; we will stop people from getting into lunatic fights with one another. We won’t tolerate these oafs blasting out flames without thinking—disruptive fires starting. Burned up one of my splendid new curtains at the Metro station!”

“How do we get rogue splicers under control, guv?” Bill asked.

He took a deep breath, his face hardening with determination: “For starts—we are going to enforce a curfew. We’ll require identification cards at checkpoints. We will increase the presence of security turrets and security bots at key points … Ah, speak of the mechanical devil … daemon ex machina…” He smiled wryly.

Two security bots whirred around the edges of the voluminous room, flying side by side, miniature self-guiding helicopters, each about the size of a fire hydrant but blockier, with built-in guns. They made Bill nervous—he never trusted the bots not to shoot him, since they were mere machines, even though he and the others here wore identification “flashers” that told the bots they were friends.