BioShock Rapture

“Bill!” Elaine squeaked, snapping her legs shut and pressing the gown down over her crotch.

“Right! See any problems, you two?” Bill said.

“Hm?” Suchong looked at him in puzzlement. “Ah! No, no, she will do very well. It would be interesting to probe a bit—”

“Won’t be necessary, Doc! We’re off.” Bill helped Elaine down from the table. “Come on, love. Back in here, there’s your clothes, time to get dressed.”

He heard Andrew Ryan’s voice from the lab next door. “There you are, Dr. Suchong—is all well?”

Suchong said, “Yes, yes, nothing abnormal. I am glad you are here, Mr. Ryan—please to look at experiment thirty-seven…”

Bill stepped to the door of the lab, with half a mind to tell Ryan how coarsely Elaine had been treated. But he stopped, staring.

Andrew Ryan, Suchong, Gil Alexander—a researcher who worked for Ryan most of the time—and Brigid Tenenbaum were gathered around a big motley figure in a sort of glass coffin filled with water; the case was hooked up to a tangle of translucent tubes. Bill had only met Gil Alexander a few times—a serious-eyed man with a thick mustache. He was quite professorial and intelligent, but, it seemed to Bill, cold-blooded.

Stretched out in the glass coffin was a man whose body seemed a patchwork of flesh and, in some places, steel. Corpse-pale, the man lay motionless in the bubbling water—Bill thought it could have been a drowning victim.

Gil Alexander was adjusting a tube sinking into the supine man’s left leg. “A little inflammation. Not bad. We have good induction…”

Bill found himself staring at the exposed left leg—it looked as if flesh and metal were fused at the thigh. It was all puckered, and Bill thought he saw the skin quiver, as if reacting to a perfusion of bubbles. He wanted to speak up or leave, but there was something that held him, something weirdly fascinating in the scene …

“You see, Mr. Ryan,” Tenenbaum said, “fusion is incomplete, but I feel if we were to perhaps try viral gene transfer, we make body more capable of unifying with…”

“Bah!” Suchong said, glancing at her in annoyance. “You always think genes the way. Viral transfer of genes is entirely theoretical! Not needed! Body can be conditioned so that cells bond with metal! We have no way to control genes without breeding program!”

“Ach—forgive me, Doctor,” she said, her voice faintly contemptuous, as she needlessly straightened tools on a nearby table, “but you are mistaken. The way will reveal itself to us. When we consider Gregor Mendel…”

Alexander seemed amused by the simmering between Suchong and Tenenbaum. He smiled, Bill noticed, but said nothing.

Ryan made a dismissive gesture as he frowned over the figure in the transparent, liquid-filled coffin. “I’m more interested in the practical uses—I need a process that makes our men capable of longer hours out there—”

“Cor!” Bill burst out—as the legs of the supine man contracted, an armored knee striking the top of the glass case, cracking it. Water spurted up through the crack …

Ryan and Suchong turned to stare at Bill—Tenenbaum and Alexander seemed more caught up in changing the flow of a chemical through the tubes that communicated with the glass coffin.

“Bill,” Ryan said softly, coming over to him. “I thought you’d gone.”

“Just leaving,” Bill said. “That fellow in there all right?”

“Him? Oh he’s a volunteer—helping us with an experiment.” Ryan took his arm. “Come—let’s leave them to it, shall we? How’s Elaine…?”

And he escorted Bill from the lab.

Fort Frolic

1949

Bing Crosby crooned “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” from flower-shaped speakers, and Bill hummed along as he escorted Elaine along the upper atrium. There was just time for a stroll before the musical at Fleet Hall. Bill had brought Elaine for a Christmas-season outing. Their friend Mariska Lutz was looking after the baby.

“It’s funny about this place,” Elaine murmured, as she and Bill strolled along the balcony walk of Poseidon Plaza, in the neon-bright upper atrium of Fort Frolic. Elaine wore a shiny pink satin dress and Bill wore a white linen suit. Other couples hurried by, dressed up, hair coiffed, faces glowing with laughter. Almost like New York, Bill thought.

“What’s funny about it, love?” he asked. They were passing the entrance to the Sir Prize Games of Chance Casino, with its big knight’s helmet projecting between Sir and Prize. The neon signs seemed to radiate sheer insistence in an enclosed space. There was no sky to put them in perspective.

“Well, I mean—I thought it’d be really different from the surface world. It is, of course, in some ways—but—” She glanced through the windows at the people working the slot machines. “The idea was to bring just the best of the world down with us—but maybe we brought some of the worst too.”