BioShock Rapture

“No—I mean, he’s borrowing from Long’s playbook. The Kingfish they called him, down there in Baton Rouge, king of the southern rabble-rousers. The Kingfish talked exactly like this. Except for the Irish accent. And Atlas tossed in a little Bolshevism…”

Bill shook his head, puzzling over it. “Strange I ’aven’t seen this bloke Atlas before. Been ’ere for years, thought I’d seen every wanker in this big leaky tank of a town.”

Wallace gave him a poke in the ribs with an elbow. “Bill—look up there!”

Bill looked at the ceiling, saw spider splicers creeping across it upside down, coming from three directions—converging right above him and Wallace.

He looked around the edges of the square and saw the telekinetic splicer who’d killed Greavy. She was watching from the wall near the entrance to Artemis Suites.

“They’re closing in on us, Bill.”

“Right; we’ll take the better part of valor and back off—fast. Come on, mate!”

They hurried back the way they’d come. They’d go the long way, through the checkpoint—they both had their ID cards—and then through the transparent passages between buildings to another bathysphere entrance to get where they were going. Or they wouldn’t get there at all.

The splicers didn’t seem intent on pursuing them out of Apollo Square. Which confirmed Bill’s suspicion that they were somehow working for Atlas. They were remaining as his bodyguards …

A word popped into Bill’s mind as they hurried through the passage, striding under a passing pod of dolphins. It was a simple, one-syllable word, summing up what he felt was coming from the inevitable confrontation between this new Kingfish and Andrew Ryan. War.

More killing. More war. More danger for Elaine and Sophie.

Something had to be done to stop it. Somehow it had to be defused …

A frightening notion came to him. He tried to dismiss it from his mind. But it lingered, whispering to him …

Ryan Industries / Fontaine Futuristics

1958

“I really must get around to taking that sign down,” Ryan said as he and Karlosky walked under the words Fontaine Futuristics. “It’s Ryan Plasmids now.”

They passed through the double doors and walked across the polished floors, past the sculpture of Atlas holding up the world.

He glanced at his watch. He was half an hour behind time—the lights would dim for evening soon. The message from Suchong had been urgent: a crisis in ADAM production …

Ryan ignored the lab workers hurrying past, clipboards in hand, and hurried up the stairs, Karlosky close beside him. He rarely worried about splicers or assassins with Karlosky around—the man had eyes in the back of his head. He wondered if plasmids could make that literally possible.

They went through the sterilization air locks to find Suchong and Tenenbaum in a steamy lab, working over a sea slug in a bubbling tank. Frowning in concentration, Tenenbaum was using a pipette to draw an orange fluid from the sea slug’s horny tail. Ryan noticed that her hair didn’t seem to have been washed in days and her lab coat was splashed with stains, her nails black. There were blue circles under her eyes.

Suchong glanced up as they entered and gave them each a short bow. Tenenbaum withdrew the pipette and released its contents into a test tube. Ryan stepped closer to inspect the sea slug—the creature quivered in its bath of seawater, but otherwise seemed almost lifeless.

Ryan pointed at the sea slug. “Surely that’s not the last one?”

Suchong sighed. “We have a few others in a suspension. But they are almost gone. The fighting of the raid, all the chaos—we lost them. Damage to the tanks. If only you’d warned us…”

“Couldn’t risk that. You haven’t exactly earned my trust, Suchong, working for Fontaine.”

Suchong inclined his head in something that passed for regret. “Ah. Suchong very sorry. Grave mistake to work for Fontaine. I should have known—the intelligent man work for men with more guns. Always the better policy. I will not make that mistake again. You have my loyalty, Mr. Ryan.”

“Do I? We’ll see. Well, you sent for me and I can see the problem for myself. No sea slugs, no ADAM. Any suggestions, Doctor? What are we to do for ADAM? We have all these lunatic ADAM addicts running about … a whole industry could collapse. I’ve taken over the plasmids business—built the Hall of the Future to extol them. But if we run out of them—it’s all for nothing.”

Tenenbaum looked up from the test tube. “There is a way, Mr. Ryan. Until we can learn to breed more slugs…”

“And that is?”

“Many men are dying and dead in Rapture. But before they die, there is a … how would you say it, a stage in their metabolism of plasmids … in which they create a refined ADAM inside them. It is deposited in the torso. And we believe…”

She looked at Suchong, who nodded at Ryan. “Yes. It can be harvested. From the dead.”

Karlosky grunted and shook his head. But said nothing. Ryan glanced at him. It was hard to startle Karlosky, but it seemed they’d done it.