BioShock Rapture

“Sure, we got the letters. Mr. Ryan’s read ’em.” Sullivan looked the trawler over. “You got anything left to drink on this boat, besides water?”

Fontaine took out the flask, passed it over. “Help yourself…”

Sullivan opened the flask, drank deeply. He passed it back empty.

“Listen,” Fontaine said. “I’ll do what I have to—anything it takes to make my way … in Rapture.”

Sullivan pursed his lips. “You know—once you go where Mr. Ryan is, you ain’t coming back. You live there; you work there. Maybe you do real good there. But you don’t leave there. There ain’t a whole lot of rules. But that’s one of them. And that takes commitment, Fontaine. You ready for that?”

Fontaine looked out to sea, as if he were thinking, puzzling out some great truth. Then he nodded to himself. There’d been a kid at the orphanage—whenever the nuns asked him if he wanted to please God, the kid had looked at them, all mistylike. The kid had ended up a priest. Fontaine put that simple, misty-eyed belief on his own face. And he said, “All the way, Chief.”

Sullivan gave him a long, close look—and then grunted. “Well—Mr. Ryan liked your letters. And he’s inclined to offer you a place in Rapture. Says you’ve earned it, sticking at your vigil out here. I guess we’re taking a chance on you. Same offer goes for your men.”

“So—when do we go? Down to Rapture, I mean…”

Sullivan chuckled and turned to look at the sea, then nodded to himself. “Right now.”

And at exactly that moment, the crew of the trawler gasped and pointed—seeing a submarine suddenly rise to the surface in a roaring wash of froth just forty yards off the port bow.

7

Sinclair Solutions, Rapture

1948

“So what’s your problem with this Tenenbaum woman?” Chief Sullivan asked. He shifted in the stiff little straight-backed chair across from Sinclair’s desk. Glaringly visible through the big round window behind the desk, a SINCLAIR SOLUTIONS sign glowed in red-gold neon outside, against the indigo backdrop of the sea.

Augustus Sinclair rubbed his clean-shaven chin at that, as if he wasn’t sure of the answer himself. The pharmaceuticals investor was a trim, darkly handsome half-Panamanian in his thirties, with a faint line of mustache. You had to look close to see the mustache wasn’t just penciled in. “Well—she’s been working for us, development, see. Me, I don’t understand exactly what she’s working on—something to do with heredity I gather—but I’m a big booster of science. That’s one reason Andrew asked me down here, I guess. That’s where the money is—new inventions, new drugs. Why, if a man can…”

“We were talking about Brigid Tenenbaum,” Sullivan reminded him. Sinclair had a tendency to rattle on. And it was almost five o’clock. Ryan’s security chief was looking forward to a half bottle of what passed for Scotch in Rapture, which he had stashed in his apartment.

“This Tenenbaum,” Sinclair said, running a finger along the negligible line of his mustache, “she’s a damn peculiar woman and … I just want to make sure that if she’s working for us, she’s not breaking any rules around here. She had her own lab, for a while, financed by a couple of interests around Rapture, and those guys dropped her like a hot potato. See, word got out she used to do experiments on people for this doctor of Hitler’s. Vivisections and—I don’t even want to think about it. Now, we do some human experiments at Sinclair—you got to—but we don’t kill people off. We don’t force ’em. We pay ’em good. If a man’s hair turns orange and he starts acting like a monkey for a week or two, why it doesn’t do him no harm in the long run…”

Sullivan started to laugh—then realized that Sinclair wasn’t joking.

“But Tenenbaum,” Sinclair went on, “she’s taking blood from people by the bucket—and more’n one of them collapsed.”

“You afraid you’re doing something … unethical?” This was a word that didn’t get too much use in Rapture.

Sinclair blinked. “Hm? Unethical? Hell, Chief, I’ve been on the same page as Andrew about altruism, all that stuff, for years. Why do you think I was brought in so early? Worrying about ethics—I don’t do it. I came here to strike it rich; you won’t catch me blowing my last bubble for any other personage—” He jabbed a finger at Sullivan to emphasize the words: “ —plural or singular. I read every issue of Popular Science and Mechanics front to back—I’m a hard charger behind the Rapture science philosophy. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, there’s some rules here, ain’t there? I just feel like people might get up in arms if we go too far. I’m not sure this Tenenbaum isn’t likely to do that. Or that other fellow, Suchong…”