BioShock Rapture

Sander Cohen went out the door, and Martin was somehow swept along behind him, carried by some powerful inner current. He was unable to walk slowly, unable to think slowly. He was a living dynamo of energy.

No wonder people get addicted to this.

That thought came, and he pushed it rudely aside. No raining on the parade! And the parade drum thumped frantically, pacing him down the hall to the rehearsal room at the rear of the backstage area. Cohen had already teleported ahead.

Martin felt like he was waterskiing, pulled along in a bracingly cold medium by a powerful engine. He burst through the door into the rehearsal room and found Sander Cohen stalking back and forth in front of three people, their arms spread in restraints. They were bound to three interlinked metal frames bolted to the small rehearsal stage …

It was all seen through a glass darkly, for Martin—a filter like mental sunglasses that made some bits shine out and muted others. It seemed unreal, almost two-dimensional, like it was all happening to someone else. Like a movie …

“Please!” said a busty, frowzy woman with flapper-style brown hair. She was pinioned on the left side of the practice stage. “Let me go!” Her eyes kept fluttering, perhaps because one of them was losing its false eyelashes. She wore a ripped black shift and one red pump, the other foot bare.

In the center framework, a middle-aged man with a tonsure of white hair shook in his bonds in rage and fear. His suit was torn and bloody, his nose was swelling and leaking blood, his left eye swollen shut. Cohen’s third “guest” was a young man in a T-shirt, with tousled blond hair and a little red-blond beard that, along with his green trousers, made Martin think of Robin Hood. He looked like he was drugged or drunk; he just sort of hung there in his restraints, murmuring inaudibly, eyes slitted, lifting his head now and then.

“We shall call these three Winken, Blinken, and Nod!” declared Cohen, parading around them, clapping his hands.

I was right; it’s a movie, Martin thought. It’s not real, none of it. He was in the audience and in the movie at the same time. It felt good to watch it and to be the hero of it.

“Please, Mr. Cohen!” the woman wailed. “I wasn’t holding out on the tips! The other girls all keep the same amount!”

“The constables Hector and Cavendish caught these three for me, Martin,” Cohen said, taking a cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his smoking jacket. He tapped a button on the case so that a cigarette popped out of a little hole; he lipped it up to the lighter, puffed, and blew smoke in Blinken’s face.

“Cavendish!” Blinken snarled. “That crook! Supposed to be the law! You bought him off!”

“And isn’t that always the case with the best policemen?” Cohen said, putting the cigarette case away. “That Sullivan is such a square. Won’t take a bribe. But Cavendish likes my little gifts … doesn’t he, Blinken?”

“That’s not my goddamn name!” the older man shouted. His remaining eye blinked furiously as he struggled with the tight leather restraints around his wrists and ankles. He went angrily on, “You know damn well who I am! I worked for you a good six years, Cohen! I did a hell of a job in that crappy little casino of yours!”

“Oh, but you were skimming the winnings, old Blinken,” Cohen said, his voice oily. He toyed with the cigarette lighter.

“Ask anybody in Fort Frolic; I was completely on the level!” Blinken snarled. “I was totally—”

He interrupted himself with a long, pealing scream as Sander Cohen put his cigarette out in Blinken’s remaining eye.

Cohen made a face at the man’s shrieking—and then came that sucking sound, the thump, the sparkling, and Cohen had vanished.

… Only to reappear close beside “Nod.” Cohen reached out and stroked the young man’s blond hair. “The problem is an artistic one, a compositional question,” Cohen said, raising his voice to be heard over Blinken’s cries. “Shut that one up for now, will you?”

“Sure.” Martin was glad to do it. Blinken’s screams were distracting him from the movie. He strode over to him, took him by the throat—but instead of squeezing, something else came from his fingers. Not quite intentionally.

Ice. It spread out from his fingers onto the man’s neck, his head, and clickingly up over his chin. It covered his face like a helmet. In another second it had coated his shoulders, his torso—the man was caught in a carapace of ice.

“Stop!” Cohen barked.

Martin stepped back, unsure as to what had happened at first—then realized that he’d used the plasmid. The power of the specialized ADAM he’d been given had sent a current of entropy from his fingers, slowing molecules, drawing water vapor from the air—coating Blinken in ice.

“If I hadn’t stopped you,” Cohen said, playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off, “you’d have frozen him right through in another second. This way he’s in a pretty cocoon of ice, for now…”