BioShock Rapture

His stomach lurched. But he followed Suchong one step, just one, into the room. “We try to mix some genes from sea creatures with human,” Suchong was saying. “Give man powers of certain animals. But…” The musty, ill-lit rectangular chamber was about thirty-five feet by thirty, but it seemed smaller because of the shifting heap of the thing that dominated it. Clinging to the walls opposite Fontaine was something that might’ve once been human. It was as if someone had taken human flesh and made it as malleable as clay—bones and flesh made pliable—and plastered it onto the wall. Beaded with sweat, the mass of human flesh seemed to simply cling there, spread over two walls and a corner. A bloated face muttered to itself, at the center of the creature, near the ceiling; several human organs were exposed, including a heart and kidneys, damp and quivering, dangling like meat in a butchery from crust-edged gaps in its body, the creature’s big limbs …

“What the hell!” Fontaine blurted.

The thing’s beak clicked and muttered in response.

Fontaine turned and dashed from the room. He went five paces down the hall and, feeling dizzy, gagging, came to a stumbling stop, leaning against Rapture’s cold metal bulkhead.

He felt a surge of relief when he heard the door of the Special Studies room clang shut. Tenenbaum and Suchong strolled up beside him, Suchong with his hands casually in his coat pockets, looking faintly amused. Tenenbaum seemed almost humanly concerned for him.

“So…” Fontaine swallowed bile. “You got this process under control or not?”

“We do now,” Tenenbaum said, looking thoughtfully at the yellow overhead light. “Yes. We will not be producing more of … those.”

“Then—I want you to do something for me. Kill that thing in there. Incinerate it. No traces left—I want no bad publicity. I want more plasmids like the one that makes lightning. But more variety. More controllable … easy to package … Stuff that makes a man smarter, stronger. The stuff that makes us money. You understand? Money!”

Ryan Amusements, Rapture Memorial Museum

1954

Stanley Poole stood at the outer edge of the small crowd waiting for Dr. Lamb to begin. Discreetly passed-out flyers in maintenance station 17 and Apollo Square advertised “A Free Public Lecture by the Eminent Psychiatrist, Dr. Sofia Lamb, on a New Hope for the Working Man.”

The lanky, swan-necked blonde in the modish horn-rims stepped up in front of the museum’s Rapture Grows tableau, with its stylized images of Rapture’s founding workers. She gazed at the little crowd like a prophetess, her benevolent expression condescending but motherly, her smile infinitely knowing. She pressed the button to start the museum tableau’s recording. A friendly male voice intoned, “After the platform is secured, work progresses at an astounding rate. Designed to be the foundation of Rapture, workers toil around the clock to create the metropolis you see today.”

“Do you hear that?” She clasped her hands behind her back and chuckled ironically, making eye contact with the small crowd—mostly low-level workers, all listening raptly, though Poole realized that Simon Wales was there too. “That recording,” Sofia Lamb went on, “is a compact little insight into Rapture! ‘Workers toil around the clock to create the metropolis’! And in the Laying the Foundation exhibit, right over there—what does the recording say?” Her voice was mockingly arch as she recited: “‘Engineers work to overcome obstacles, such as diamond-hard rock, obstinate sea life and unexpected casualties!’ Think about it, my friends—how much needless suffering have we taken for granted?” She shook her head sadly. “Unexpected casualties? Oh, Andrew Ryan fully expected them! He just didn’t care! A great many lives were lost in building Rapture—those lives were sacrifices to the ‘god’ that is the human ego! Ryan’s ego! The common man and woman in Rapture is overworked and underpaid; they’re left exhausted. They toiled around the clock to create this city—but how much of what they created do they really share in? What did Andrew Ryan really offer—but paper? A little something called Rapture dollars … mere documents, paper money! Paper for paupers! And precious little of that! Who, I ask you, really owns Rapture? The people who built it? or the plutocrats who control it? The many—or the few? You know the answer!”

A good many in the crowd were nodding. Some frowned, unsure—but most seemed convinced. They’d been thinking something of the sort themselves, Poole supposed. Here was someone who said it right out loud … Dr. Sofia Lamb. A psychiatrist—using her psychology on the common man.