BioShock Rapture

Then a metallic clumping close behind Bill turned his blood cold. He spun about just in time to be struck across the chest—the Big Daddy, returned to protect its charge, swinging the weapon in its hand like a club. Bill was knocked backward, off his feet, the air smacked from his lungs, the room whirling.

Gasping, he lost consciousness for a few moments. When the spinning specks formed shapes and the room coalesced, he looked dizzily around—saw that he was sitting up on the floor, back against a bulkhead. The Big Daddy and his little charge were nowhere to be seen.

Bill got up, moaning to himself with the pain of his bruised chest, and staggered to the door. He was met by Karlosky. “You okay, Bill?”

“Yeah—good to see you alive. I thought I’d got you killed…”

“No, I outsmart that steel bastard. Look…!”

He pointed across the open space of the depot—on the far wall, the little girl was climbing into one of the key-shaped art-deco apertures that the Little Sisters used to enter hidden passageways. They scuttled through the passageways to take their scavenged ADAM back to Ryan’s laboratories.

Mascha or not Mascha? He would never know. She simply vanished into the wall.

The Big Daddy waited quietly by the big art deco keyhole for his Little Sister to return.

Bill shook his head and turned away, grimacing with pain—and wanting only to get back to Elaine.

Once more, his determination to escape Rapture was underscored. He had to get his family back to the surface. Back to blue sky and sunlight and freedom …

Medical Pavilion, Aesthetic Ideals Surgery

1959

“Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan … all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality! Yes, we could lop a boil here and shave down a beak there—but could we really change anything? No! But ADAM gives us the means to do it, and Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It’s yours to change, nobody else’s!”

Wearing a blood-soaked surgical gown and white surgeon’s cap, his hands in rubber gloves, Doctor J. S. Steinman hit Pause on the little tape recorder that he’d wedged between the blond patient’s ample breasts; then he pushed the gurney, its wheels susurrating through the shallow water that had leaked across the floor of the surgery. He hummed to himself, singing an Inkspots song, “If I Didn’t Care,” over the muffled moaning of the patient he’d strapped to the little wheeled bed. “Would I be sure that this is love beyond compare? Would all this be true—if I didn’t care … for … you!”

He pushed the woman into place under the glaring surgical light and reached into his coat pocket for his favorite scalpel. Tiresome to do without a nurse, but he’d had to kill Nurse Chavez when she’d started whining about his efforts to please Aphrodite, threatening to turn him into the constables. Of course, he hadn’t killed her till he’d done some fine experimentation on her doll-like visage. He still had Chavez’s face in a refrigerator, somewhere, along with some others he’d peeled off and saved in preservative jars, faces from patients who’d given their lives for his perfect fusion of art and science. He really must try to organize his preserved faces with a filing system.

Steinman paused to admire this latest woman writhing in her restraints on the gurney. She’d used some low-grade plasmid to help her hack a gambling machine in Fort Frolic, and his fellow artist, Sander Cohen, who owned the casino, had caught her. It was getting hard to find voluntary patients. He did think he might get Diane McClintock to come in again. He longed to alter her in another manner entirely, according to his artistic whim—to give her a truly transcendent face. He might get hold of a telekinesis plasmid and use it to form her face from within, shape it telekinetically, into something lovely.