BioShock Rapture

The cigarette was being smoked by a muscular man seated casually behind a battered gray-metal desk. On the desk was a tumbler and a gold cigarette box.

It was he. The man she’d seen outside the café. He wore white, rolled-up shirtsleeves, just like in the poster. A good face, she thought, that seemed to emanate trustworthiness.

Two shaggy bodyguards stood behind him, near a ganglion of valves. Both bodyguards wore coveralls and carried tommy guns. One of them had an unlit pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“I’d be Atlas,” said the man at the desk, with an Irish lilt, looking her over with an unsettling frankness. “And you’re one of Ryan’s birds?”

“I’m Diane McClintock. I work … I worked … for Mr. Ryan. I saw you helping people in Pauper’s Drop—and it touched me. I don’t feel good about the way things are going and … I just wanted to see if … to see if…” What was it she wanted, exactly?

He smiled impishly. “You don’t seem certain of what you’re wanting to see, Miss McClintock.”

She sighed and unconsciously brushed her hair into place with her hand. “I’m tired. Had a few drinks. But … I want to know more about you—I mean, you know, in a friendly way. I don’t work with the constables. I’ve seen things. Heard stories … I don’t know what to believe anymore … I just know—once I was passing by Apollo Square and I saw a woman come over the barricades and … one of the splicers working for Andrew…” She didn’t like to remember it. The woman hurrying along, full of life, one moment. The next, a splicer had sent a ball of fire into her—and she’d sizzled away into a blackened corpse, within steps of where Diane stood. “Well the splicer burned her. And the look on her face … like she was trying to tell me something. So tonight…” She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m just so tired right now…”

“Get the lady a chair, you great ejit,” Atlas growled at Philo.

Without a word, Philo brought a metal chair from a corner, and Diane sat down. Atlas pushed the gold box across the desk toward her.

“Cigarette?”

“I’d adore one.” She opened the box and took a cigarette, her hands trembling. Philo lit it for her, and she inhaled gratefully, then blew the silken smoke into the air. “This—this is a real cigarette! Virginia tobacco! And in a gold box! You do yourself well for a revolutionary…”

Atlas chuckled. “Oh, aye. But we took that from one of Ryan’s little storerooms under Rapture. Sure, he brought it in to sell in a little shop—a shop I used to sweep out, once upon a time. I was maintenance, a janitor in Rapture—come here when they sang me a pretty lie—a promise of working in me trade. Ended up a janitor. And later—couldn’t find work doing even that.”

“What was your trade, before?”

“Why, I was a metal worker.” He stubbed out his cigarette—his fingers looked pale and soft for a workingman. “As for what we took from that storeroom—we distributed most of it to the people. How do you think people eat round ’ere, with Ryan, the great son of Satan himself, cutting off supplies to Artemis, eh?”

She nodded. “He’s talked about an amnesty for people who give up the … what does he call it, the Bolshevik organizing.”

“Bolshevik organizing! So we’re Soviets now! Asking for a fair break is hardly that!”

She tapped the cigarette over an ashtray on the desk. “Any sort of ‘break’ is pinko stuff to Andrew.” She sniffed. “I’m fed up with him. But I’ve got no reason to love you people either. You can see what you did to me.” She touched the scars on her cheek.

He shook his head sadly. “You were hurt in the fight, were you? A bomb? You’re still a fine-looking woman, so you are. You were too strong to die there. Why, you’ve gotten character from it, that’s all that’s come about, Diane.”

He looked at her with that disarming frankness. And she wanted to believe in him.

“Why do you call yourself Atlas? It’s not your real name.”

“Figure that out on your own, did you?” He grinned. “Welllll … Atlas takes the world on his shoulders. He’s the broad back, ain’t he? And who’s the workingman? The workingman takes the world on his broad back too. Holds it up for the privileged—for the likes of you!”

He opened a drawer and, to her astonishment, took out a bottle of what looked like actual Irish whiskey. Jameson. “Care for hair of the dog, mebbe? Philo—find us some glasses…”

They drank and talked, of politics and fairness and organizing and reappropriation of goods for the working class. “And you think you’re the liberator of the working class, Atlas?”

“I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. That’s the only thing Ryan was right about. These people will liberate themselves! But they do need someone to tell them that it can be done.” He toyed with his glass. Then he said, “You know about the Little Sisters, do you? What they do to them poor little orphan waifs?”

“I’ve heard … Yes, it bothers me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”