BioShock Rapture

YES, SOMEONE CARES! ATLAS KNOWS IT FEELS AS IF NO ONE IN RAPTURE CARES! FIGHT FOR ATLAS! FIGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE WORKINGMAN …

Diane smiled, imagining Andrew Ryan’s reaction to seeing the leaflet. She crumpled it up and threw it away. But the words loitered in her mind.

Yes, someone cares …

Apollo Square

1958

“I wish Ryan would take down that fucking gallows,” Bill McDonagh said as he and Wallace walked by, grimacing at the reek of the dangling corpses. Four bloated, purple-faced bodies, turning slowly in four nooses. Looked like new ones, since last time. It was bloody depressing.

Bill was going to be glad to get his meeting with Sullivan over and hurry home to Elaine and Sophie tonight. A man didn’t feel much like taking a turn in Rapture with this kind of bleakness setting the black dog to snapping at his heels.

“What I can’t figure is,” said Roland Wallace, as he and Bill walked across the trash-strewn floor of Apollo Square, “how Fontaine got all those splicers there to wait for the constables? They’re too loony to recruit—aren’t they?”

Bill chuckled grimly. “You forget, mate, those buggers’ll do anything for ADAM.”

Wallace grunted. “You have a point. So Fontaine bribed them with ADAM. Show up there, take on whoever comes—and the survivors get plenty more…”

“That’s ’ow I figure it, right enough … Here, what’s all this then?”

A big crowd was gathered in front of Artemis Suites—where a man stood on the steps, addressing them.

“Must be that fellow calls himself Atlas,” Wallace said, his voice hushed.

“Oh right—I’ve seen the pamphlets.”

“Started with pirate-radio messages, got people all worked up. Followers leaving graffiti about…” Curious, Bill and Wallace paused on the outskirts of the crowd to listen to Atlas.

At least seventy-five people—most of them seeming to be still human, ostensibly, or not yet far into ADAM—were gathered around this Atlas. He wore maintenance workers’ coveralls. Just one of the people. The man sounded vaguely familiar—but looking closer, Bill decided he didn’t know him. Couldn’t have forgotten a bloke like that, almost movie-star handsome with his lush golden-brown hair and cleft chin.

“Now back home in Dublin we had a saying,” bellowed Atlas, in something like an Irish brogue. “May the cat eat you, and may the devil eat the cat! Isn’t that what’s happened to us, here? You bet it is, boyo! We’ve been eaten alive, twice! First by Rapture and then by Ryan! There’s no craik here, no fun for the workingman, for that is reserved for the swells and their spoiled bettys up in Olympus Heights! Come and start life anew in Rapture, he said! But that was the cat talking to the mouse and the devil talking through the cat!”

Hoots of agreement from the crowd.

“Aye!” Atlas went on, his voice carrying over all Apollo Square. “We have been lied to, and lied to again! They told us it was all free market here—but what happens? Ryan takes over Fontaine Futuristics! Takes it by force, he does! He starts in with curfews and blockades—turns the place into a police state!”

An approving roar at that. Ryan’s hypocrisy hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“We were lured here!” Atlas bellowed. “Lured from a slum in Queens or Dublin or Shanghai or London—to a smaller slum under frigid water! Moving up, we are, right? Moving from living four in a room to living twenty in a room! It’s theft—theft of our future, boyo! Theft of our hope! But there is another way—a way to real hope! A share-the-wealth program! Why should them hypocrites be allowed to accumulate a hundred times, two hundred times, what a workingman earns—when they get it ’cause of our hard work! We work while they sit up there in their penthouses drinking champagne and puffing cigars—imported cigars we ain’t allowed to have! Why shouldn’t every family be given a basic allowance—a thousand, two thousand Rapture dollars, to live on!” Roars of approval at that. His voice rose, and rose again, with every word. “Why should the wealth of Rapture belong only to a greedy few? Now tell me THAT!”

Fists popped up—but they were shaking in agreement. Someone started chanting. “Atlas, Atlas!”

And all the crowd took it up. “Atlas, Atlas, Atlas!”

Atlas had to thunder the words out to be heard over the rising chant. “And if it’s got to come to a fight—armed with ADAM and armed with guns—then so be it!”

“Atlas, Atlas, Atlas, Atlas!”

“Like he’s been taking notes from Sofia Lamb,” Bill said in a low aside to Roland Wallace. “But he’s got his own style. More the workingman’s daddy…”

“Why—he’s Huey P. Long!” Wallace said.

“What, that bloke from Louisiana?”