BioShock Rapture

Bill recognized some of the big, wheeled machines crowded into the room: routers as big as small cars, mining drills, scoops and cranes, many of them still dripping water; some, adapted for deep-sea use, looked strange to him. One machine was about twenty feet long, with enormous pincers at the ends of the jointed arms, like the ones on the submarine.

“What’s that thing do?” Bill asked, pointing to it.

“The mechanical gripper?” Greavy said. “That’s one of our basic workhorses. Remote controlled. It’s a concept that came out of weapons development in the war.”

“Right—like the teletanks the Russians use. Didn’t work out so well, them things.”

“Our remote control is reliable—like the bathysphere you came in. Remote-controlled machines speed up construction. Very difficult to set up the foundations of Rapture in this deep cold water otherwise. We have a good deal of the Hephaestus level set up already—and indeed geological energy is already flowing into the finished units…”

Greavy glanced at Ryan for approval before continuing. Ryan nodded, and Greavy went on: “It’s heat-driven electrical energy drawn from volcanic sources under the sea floor—hot springs and fumaroles, sulfur chimneys, and the like. ‘Geothermal’ some call it. A virtually endless source of power. Wonderful, isn’t it? No coal needed, no oil!” Greavy said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Once the supply line is set up, the energy flow goes on as long as the earth retains its heat!”

“We have twelve domes like this one arrayed around the site,” Ryan added proudly. “We sank them, pumped them out. Pipe in clean air. The domes are all connected by tunnels we’ve built right on top of the seabed.”

“Not sure I believe it, guv,” Bill said, staring at the big gripper, “and here I am looking at it!”

Ryan chuckled. “Then you shall see it up close! Greavy—ask Wallace to take us in for a closer look!”

*   *   *

Roland Wallace was a bearded, dour man of about forty with deep-set eyes and a furrowed brow. Ryan introduced him. “This is a man you can count on to get things done in tough conditions.”

Wallace led them to a large steel door, one of three placed symmetrically around the dome. He checked a couple of dials on a panel beside the door, nodded to himself, and spun the wheel. He grunted as it swung open into a tunnel made of some amalgam pocked by vents and ribbed in metal. “Now if you gentlemen will wait to the side here…”

They pressed against the wall to the right, Ryan with an expression of proprietary pride. After a minute, the battery-powered gripper drove slowly through the doorway, whirring to itself. Affixed to its rear was a small cockpit, where Wallace drove, the gripper’s jointed, black-metal arms retracted; behind him came a little radio-slaved tram, reminding Bill of a small funicular without the cable. It seemed to be driving itself—and it stopped in front of Ryan and Bill when the gripper stopped.

“Step in,” Ryan said, and they climbed into the leather-mesh seats of the shuttle, side by side. The gripper moved off, and the little shuttle followed.

They passed under the electric lights of the tunnel for what seemed a quarter mile when suddenly a killer whale flashed overhead, its toothy mouth agape. Bill recoiled. “Oi!”

Ryan laughed dryly. “Look closer!”

Bill leaned out of the tram and saw that the walls here were transparent—they were a heavy, polished glass of some kind banded with metal. Light shone upward from electric lamps on the seabed outside the transparent section. He could see the tunnel, mostly cement, occasionally glass, wending out across the seabed toward the framework of Rapture. The foundations of Rapture stood out in shades of dark green and indigo.

“It’s hard to reckon where the water stops and the glass starts—it’s like we’re in the water with ’em!” Bill muttered. A diffuse shimmer from the surface far above answered the glow from the seabed lamps. Schools of fish emerged from billowing forests of green kelp and purple sea fans: tuna, cod, and fish he couldn’t identify, gleaming with iridescence, threading in and out of light and shadow. A squid pulsed by and then another great black-and-white orca swept by. Bill was awestruck. “Look at that bloody thing! Fast as a swallow but big enough to swallow a man! It’s flyin’ right over us!”

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Ryan mused, gazing through the curving, transparent pane as they rolled along. “Fairly obvious, looking out at a glorious prospect like this one, why I’m calling the city Rapture! Of course, I’ve always had a fascination with the deep sea. It’s another world—a free world! For years I read of giant squid netted from the depths, the adventures of explorers in diving bells and bathyspheres, strange things sighted by submariners. The thrilling potential of it all! I detest the warmongering of the ‘Great Powers’—but world wars did generate workable submarines…”

“Nothing but glass, holding out all that water?” Bill marveled. “We’re down fair deep! All that bloody great pressure…!”