BioShock Rapture

It was true. Blinken was wriggling in the sarcophagus of ice. A little melted water, mixed with bloody foam, slipped about his face, his cries were muffled; one wild eye was bleeding, the other rolling under its blackened, swollen lid …

Martin marveled that he felt so little, that he was so distanced from what was happening this close in front of him. But the rolling hotness, the transporting sweetness of the plasmid high was still upon him, dominating him, and nothing else was truly real.

“Please, Mister, don’t do that!” the woman shrieked. “No no noooo!”

Martin turned to see Cohen flicking the lighter under her ragged clothing, her hair. Setting “Winken” on fire.

“We’re almost ready, Martin!” Cohen crowed as she writhed, shrieking in a growing plume of flame. “You must capture her in ice when she’s in just the right posture for the composition! We’re making a glorious tableau, a lovely triptych of tragedy: the human condition! I shall entitle it, Three Souls Revealed! If only Steinman could see this glorious transfiguration!”

Martin could barely hear him over the woman’s shrieking. Most of her hair was gone now …

What was this movie he was in again? What was the title? Martin couldn’t remember …

“There!” Cohen shouted, leaping with excitement. “As she arches her back and howls and spreads her fingers! Now! Freeze her! Just point at her and freeze her right there!”

Martin stretched out his arm and willed the plasmid to emanate from his fingers—he felt the chill of it passing out of him, saw ice crystals shimmering in the air in front of his hand. Suddenly, the fire around the dying woman was snuffed out.

She was instantly frozen solid, her eyeless sockets—the flame had melted her eyes—filling with pockets of crushed ice. Her mouth agape around a chunk of ice, her singed-away hair replaced by icicles …

Martin felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He was starting to see that this was real. These people were real …

Cohen vanished, teleporting—then reappearing near Blinken. Who was just starting to crack out of his ice cocoon.

“As soon as he breaks out, when he opens his mouth to shout at us—freeze him!” Cohen ordered. “Freeze him solid!”

At least that would end the man’s terror, Martin thought. The thought making him feel sick in itself. This is real …

He emanated the entropic power of Winter Blast—and the plasmid quickly froze the man through and through. And Martin shuddered, as if he was frozen himself.

“Ha haaaaa!” Cohen cackled just before he vanished—reappearing close to the groaning young man hanging slack in his bonds. “Only one panel of the triptych remains! Come, come and play with Nod, Martin!”

Martin found he was drawn to Nod, that his hands went easily to him. He was a very pretty young man, after all. Cohen took out an elegant little straight razor …

Medical Pavilion, Aesthetic Ideals Surgery

1956

J. S. Steinman was bemused and distracted. Admiring the eyeless, limp face he had so deftly removed from the woman’s skull, holding it up to the sea light from the windows so that he could see the deep blue of the North Atlantic through her empty eye sockets, Steinman thought: Aphrodite, your light is entering my eyes …

And then the visitor buzzer razzed intrusively at him.

“Damn them, why won’t they leave genius to be genius!” Steinman muttered, hanging the detached face—complete with her nose and eyebrows—over the lamp beside the operating table. The electric yellow lamplight came prettily through the sockets, but the blood emitted an awful stench in contact with the hot lamp.

The buzzer buzzed again.

“Wait here, my dear,” he sighed to the faceless woman lying on the operating table. Of course, speaking to her was pure whimsy: she couldn’t hear him. She was dead. She’d been a rogue splicer he had bought from a constable, who’d shot her in the head when she’d tried to decapitate someone with a fish knife. The bullet had left her alive—anyway, she’d lived until a few minutes ago—but paralyzed. So Steinman hadn’t needed anesthetic or restraints to keep her quiet during the carving …

He left the operating theater, climbed the stairs, and went through the operating suite’s door, locking it behind him. Absently toying with a scalpel, he crossed the small lobby and opened the outer door.

Steinman realized he should have cleaned up a bit before answering the door. Frank Fontaine and his bodyguards were standing outside the Medical Pavilion, staring aghast at his blood-splattered surgical coat and the bloody scalpel in his hand. The booster plasmid he’d been using was starting to make him a bit abrupt, careless perhaps. He had gone three nights without sleep.

“We didn’t realize you were, um, busy, doctor,” Fontaine said, rolling his eyes at his bodyguards: a thuggish sort in a tatty suit and a grubby long-haired man who looked like a dirty Jesus.