BioShock: Rapture

They were all so ugly, honestly, so plain. They didn’t try hard enough to make themselves fitting vessels for Aphrodite. “But they’re filthy, filthy at the core,” he muttered. No knife was sharp enough to cut that filth out. He tried and tried and tried, but they were always so fat or short or… plain. Steinman made a tsk sound as the blond woman shrieked unintelligibly at him through the gag. Some insult, perhaps. “My dear, I’d love to give you some anesthetic to grace your experience, I really would, but I have quite run out of it, and anyway, there is something less aesthetically pleasing about sculpting an unconscious patient. If they are unconscious, the blood hardly spurts at all, their eyes don’t have that look of possession by the god of terror, and how satisfying could that be, now I ask you? I may have to stop and have some more ADAM and a touch of EVE myself… Oh do try to accept this, my dear, appreciate it as a sacrificial aesthetic experience. A sacrifice to Aphrodite! Sander Cohen and I have talked about doing a performance onstage with one of my little surgeries. Can you imagine? A face sculpting set to original music? The trouble is, of course—” He bent near his wild-eyed patient to whisper confidentially. “The trouble is, my dear, Sander Cohen is quite insane. Mad. Out of his mind! Ha ha-aa! I shouldn’t socialize with Cohen, that loony tune, I have my reputation to think of.”

He hit Record again on the tape recorder and cleared his throat to set down another immortal memo. “With genetic modifications, beauty is no longer a goal, or even a virtue. It is a moral obligation. Still, ADAM presents new problems for the professional,” he said, for the audio diary. “As your tools improve, so do your standards. There was a time I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight…” So saying, he started carving deeply into the face of the woman on the gurney, glad he’d taken the trouble to brace her head in place because she was shaking so much with agony as he sliced away her cheeks.

He went on, “…But that was then, when we took what we got—but with ADAM, the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt and sculpt and sculpt until the job is done?” He hit Pause on the tape recorder, its buttons becoming slippery with the blood on his hands, and considered his work. It was hard to tell through all the blood and torn tissue. “My dear, I believe I’m going to give you some ADAM that will regrow your face into another shape entirely. Then I’ll carve the new tissue some more. Then I’ll regrow some more face on you with ADAM. Then I’ll carve that some more. Then—”

Another muffled shriek from the woman. He sighed, shaking his head. They just would not understand. He hit Record again and accompanied his next wet, spurting spate of carving with a kind of artistic manifesto: “When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I’ve spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?”

Steinman hit pause again, used his left hand to wipe some blood from the recorder buttons. He returned to his patient only to find she’d died on him. “Oh dammit, not another one…”

Blood loss and shock, he supposed, as usual. It was really quite unfair.

They always left him too soon. It made him angry to think of their selfishness.

He slashed at her in his fury, knocking the tape recorder on the floor, cutting her throat into ribbons, long pretty ribbons… which he then tied into bows.

When he calmed down enough to be precise, he exposed her breasts and cut them into shapes like the sea anemones that waved in the gentle currents so restfully, so gracefully, outside the window of his office…

Ah, he thought: The Rapture of the Deep…

Fighting McDonagh’s Bar 1959

When? It had to be soon. He was going to have to escape from Rapture, with Elaine and their daughter, and if that meant killing—

“Bill?”

Bill McDonagh nearly leapt from his barstool when Redgrave spoke at his elbow.

“Blimey, don’t sneak up on a man like that!”

Redgrave smiled sadly. “Sorry. Something you ought to know, though. Your woman who cleans the rooms—she found something.”

Bill sighed. He tossed down his brandy, nodded to his bartender. “Just close down when you feel like it, mate.” He got off the barstool. “All right, let’s have it, Redgrave…”

“You’ve been letting out some of your rooms, ain’t you? Number seven—that was the Lutzes’?”

“Sure. I don’t charge them for it. Christ, their little girl went missing on my watch.” He couldn’t resist a cold look at Redgrave. “On your watch too.”

Redgrave grimaced. “We only looked away a couple of seconds. We were watching for splicers—”