BioShock Rapture

He pressed her arms back by her wrists to either side of her head and stretched out on her, pressing his hips to hers. She tried to twist away—but she wasn’t trying hard.

“Just remember,” Fontaine said as he did his duty, enjoying it more than he’d thought he would, “you want it done your way—you do your work my way. You work exclusively for me…”

Ryan Amusements

1953

Bill McDonagh felt a bit foolish taking the Journey to the Surface ride alone. It was made for Rapture’s children, really, to “satisfy their curiosity” about the surface world. Supposedly. In a few years his child would want to go on a ride in Rapture’s only amusement park. Bill wanted to know, in advance, if what he’d heard about the ride was true. If it was, the ride would probably upset Elaine …

He’d been here before to do some maintenance work, but he hadn’t taken the tour. He’d bought a ticket and everything.

Now he climbed into the ride car—shaped like an open bathysphere—and settled back. It lurched into motion and then creaked along its track into the tunnel.

The car rumbled slowly past an animatronic mannequin of Andrew Ryan sitting at his desk, looking almost fatherly. The mannequin moved and gestured, in a herky-jerky way, and “talked”: “Why, hello there. My name is Andrew Ryan, and I built the city of Rapture for children just like you, because the world above’s become unfit for us. But here, beneath the ocean, it is natural to wonder if the danger has passed…”

“Crikey,” Bill muttered. The Ryan robot gave him the willies.

Then the car moved on to the mechanical tableau that warned about taxation on the surface world. Up on his left was a farmhouse, where a farmer tilled his field and his happy wife and child stood behind him … but then a giant hand—truly gigantic—moved clutchingly into the tableau, reaching down from above. It had suit sleeves on it—like the suit worn by a bureaucrat. It grabbed the roof of the house and tore it off … The tax man taking away all that the man had worked for … The animatronic farmer slumped in despair …

“On the surface,” said the deep voice of Andrew Ryan booming from hidden speakers, “the farmer tills the soil, trading the strength of his arm for a land of his own. But the parasites say, ‘No! What is yours is ours! We are the state; we are God; we demand our share!’”

“Oh lord,” Bill said, staring at the hand. It was terrifying, that giant hand … And the hand—as if from some cruel bureaucratic jehovah—came inexorably down in other tableaus as the ride trundled slowly onward. An animatronic scientist made a glorious discovery in his laboratory, rose up on a pedestal in triumph—and then was crushed back down by that giant hand from above. “On the surface, the scientist invests the power of his mind in a single miraculous idea and naturally begins to rise above his fellows. But the parasites say, ‘No! Discovery must be regulated! It must be controlled and finally surrendered.’”

That one ought to make Suchong and his like happy, Bill supposed.

The next tableau showed an artist painting away in rapturous inspiration—before a giant hand came down and suppressed his freedom again …

The final tableau was the most frightening of all. A child was happily watching TV with his family. Then Ryan’s God-like voice warned, “On the surface, your parents sought a private life; using their great talents to provide for you, they learned to twist the lies of church and government, believing themselves masters of the system, but the parasites say, ‘No! The child has a duty! He’ll go to war and die for the nation.’”

And the giant hand came down, pushed through the wall—and dragged the child away—into the darkness … into death.

Bill shook his head. This was all about scaring children it seemed to him. He’d heard that Sofia Lamb, when she’d first come, had given Ryan the idea—an “amusement ride” that was a kind of aversion therapy, a way of imprinting children with a revulsion for the surface world—and a consequent commitment to the only alternative: Rapture …