BioShock: Part 1B

Section B [Plasmid Abuse]

The door shut tightly, sealing Jack into a small chamber. The mechanical bubble shifted as it was forced downwards. Jack could only stare out the glass window watches the numbers outside count upwards as the machine took him further downwards. Then, it went black. The whole “room” of sorts, dimmed, and a projection shone on the glass.
“I am Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question: is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose ... Rapture.”
At that moment, the picture disappeared, and what lay in front of Jack was something far beyond he had ever imagined. The sight was amazing: a city underwater. The buildings looked exactly as they would have if they were above the water, except there was a slight change: between buildings that were close to each other, a glass pipe-like structure was erected, connecting the two. The pipe was clear, and you visibly see into it. At one point, the bubble passed directly underneath one of the larger pipes, but what Jack saw in it, was not something to marvel at. It looked like a giant man in a diving suit, and it was repairing what looked like a crack, but what was disturbing was the sheer image of this man, who had to have passed seven feet tall, and was large enough to knock Jack out in a single punch.
As the bubble flowed by the buildings, Andrew Ryan had continued. “A city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”
It had sounded like Andrew was finished “welcoming” Jack to a city he had just stumbled on, but another voice cracked through the radio as Jack witnessed a piece of the plane fall past his view, reminding him where he was, and how he had gotten there. “…but the lighthouse is all lit up like hellfire…looks like some kind of plane crash.” The voice had a slight Irish accent to it and was obviously talking to another man, who responded immediately. “But we’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, how could it-.”
“Dunno. You’d best get over there, and be quick about. The splicers are coming.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding. How do you know someone’s even coming?”
“’Cause we got a bathysphere on its way down, that means we’ve got company.”
“O-okay, just one more minute. The ‘sphere - the ‘sphere is coming up now-!”
“Johnny! Security’s banding off all over! Get a move on!”
The entire conversation over the radio seemed more like a foreign dialogue to Jack. As he was listening, the “bathysphere” had travelled into a small vertical tunnel, and began to move upwards, but Jack was attempting to figure out what the hell a “splicer” was. He didn’t have much time to think though, as the bathysphere had finally surfaced and he witnessed a man backing up towards him, with a dark shadow that had two pointed hooks attached or being held by the hands. “Please, lady…I didn’t mean no trespass. Just…just don’t hurt me. Please, let me go…you can keep my gun! You can-!” At the instant Johnny had pulled out his pistol to give to the lady, she gave out some shriek, like a wild battle call, and instantly used her hook to slice right through his neck. The body immediately went limp, and slumped on the floor. Without any sort of regard to it, the woman now turned her attention to Jack, who held his breathe for as long as he could. “Is it someone new?” The voice said, in an almost soothing tone, as if it were to give Jack a sense of safety. But the shriek it made had Jack tightening harder, hoping his life wasn’t about to end as quickly as Johnny’s had. But the woman made a lightning fast leap, and the bathysphere began rock.
Jack couldn’t help but shake as he heard the metal hooks rip and tear off the metal of the bathysphere. Wires began to fall out of the shell where the woman was breaking into. Then it was over. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Jack breathed a sigh of relief, but jumped almost two feet in the air when he heard the man’s voice over the radio. “Would you kindly pick up that shortwave radio?” Jack didn’t need to be asked nicely, he grabbed for it, and as soon as he unhooked it, the glass door gave a hiss of released air, and opened up wide. “I don’t know how you survived that plane crash, but I’ve never been one to question providence. I’m Atlas, and I aim to keep you alive. Now keep on moving, we’re gonna have to get you to higher ground. Take a deep breath and step out of the bathysphere. I won’t leave you twisting in the wind.” Atlas’ voice was calm and cool, as if he had done this before.
Jack took his step out on solid ground, into a hallway that looked like a sort of metro station, but it was almost completely destroyed. Most of the pillars had fallen over, and stacks of suitcases were piled near the bathysphere platforms. There was an olden feel to the room, as if Jack had stepped several years in the past, almost into the thirties. The biggest sight to see in the entire room was the vast windows across from his platform. They looked out into the city, which was mostly made of a large number of buildings that had bright signs attached to them, telling him what the place was: “McDonough’s Tavern” or “Fleet Hall”, but his favorite was “Eve’s Apple”, which almost every other American and him knew what it meant. Heading down past the windows, Jack followed the red carpet up a small set of stairs into another area that resembled a lobby of a metro station, complete with a time chart listing all the arrivals and departures, but they all said the same thing: “Cancelled”. It looked like Jack wasn’t going to be leaving this place anytime soon. The voice of Atlas cracked back on when Jack started to climb over a fallen pillar that was blocking him: “We’re gonna need to draw her out of hiding. But you're gonna have to trust me.” Jack didn’t have a chance to decide whether or not to trust Atlas, because his voice had alerted the woman of his location. “I’ll wrap you in a sheet.” The line was accompanied by the clank of metal to stone, but it came from above.
Jack looked up to find bright red hooks coming down from the ceiling, but the sound of beeping drew his attention away momentarily. A security camera had been aimed at the other side of the room, right where the woman had fallen from, but the security camera began to beep at her presence. There was a flurry of motion and sounds as something mechanical flew right past Jack and began firing rounds into the woman, who immediately made a leap for a wall and crawled up it. “How do you like that, sister?” Atlas called out through the short-wave radio. What the hell is going on here? How can she climb a wall? What is that machine? Jack was confused at what was going on. It had seemed this city, being cut off from the surface, had developed an advanced security measure of sort, and developed machines that acted and recognized hostiles.
When the noise had subsided, Atlas made another request, “Now, would you kindly find a crowbar or something? Bloody splicers sealed Johnny in before they…goddamn splicers!” Jack made a grab for the radio to respond, but there was no buttons on the radio. It was a bronze color that just had a set of holes for hearing, but no buttons. Returning the radio back to his belt, Jack put his eyes on the floor and spotted a toolbox lying on the floor, and luck had it, a wrench! He quickly grabbed it, and headed forward in through a doorway, the camera had been focused on before the, as Jack attempted to guess at was, splicer came into view. The doorway had a set of staircase leading upwards into a large room with only one door. The door was large and metallic, with the words “Securis” stamped into the front. There were large glass windows looking out into the city, which had those same buildings looming above him. This whole place was beginning to feel larger than it seemed.
Jack made a 180, and looked behind him to find a large balcony over the door he had come through. Since there seemed to be no way of opening up the Securis door, he had to find another way up. The stairs led upward, but to Jack’s dismay, the balcony was a dead end, with what seemed to be a large vending machine situated in the center. “Gatherer’s Gardens” was lit above the machine in bright red. The machine looked like any other vending machine, except instead of bottles of soda displayed on the right, there were large glass vials, filled with bright red fluid, to match the bright red signage. This vending machine in particular was missing several vials though, since there were three holes, and only on hole had a vial of the red liquid. As soon as Jack stepped up to the machine, it hummed loudly, and a child’s voice rang out from the machine: “My daddy is smarter than Einstein! Stronger than Hercules! Is your daddy better than mine mister? Not if he goes to the Gather’s Garden’s, he isn’t! Daddy’s get spliced at the Gather’s Garden’s!” Hmph. Some ad for a vending machine. Why not just say they could cure any disease, or regenerate limbs. The sheer thought of a liquid empowering someone with those abilities was absurd, but why question it? Everything else in this damn city had gone mad as well.
Jack reached out and grabbed the vial of red liquid and pulled down the wrapping to reveal a large needle attached. Here’s to nothing… With that thought, he thrusted the needed into a vein on his wrist and loaded the liquid up. With the needle pulled out of his skin, he had suddenly felt light-headed, as if the feeling in his head were gone, but replaced with the pain in his arms now. Looking down, he saw his arms had lightning moving on top of them, and thousands of volts were coursing through him. The pain was unbearable, and Jack had to scream out in agony, barely hearing the words of Atlas: “Steady now! Your genetic code is being rewritten! Just hold on and everything will be fine!” Jack could barely keep from standing, with all the pain. He leaned left, fell right, and grasped onto a railing near the balcony. But what seemed like years of no use had deteriorated the metal, for the railing gave way to his weight, and Jack went tumbling down twelve feet, before all the pain caused him to black out.