Bioshock Rapture's Final Days

June? 1975?

10:50AM

It's been getting hard to breath lately. Since the gardens in Arcadia were burnt to a crisp by those god damn Houdini splicers. How many days ago was that? 80? 110? The air lasted much longer than I thought it was going too.

How many people are still alive? A few hundred? Less than that? My estimate would be 122 with more dying every day. I think we all only have a week left to live before the air runs out completely and it's amazing that we even lasted this long. Food was getting scarce 4 years ago and it was already hard enough to live then.

I remember back when I first came to Rapture in 1948 I was only 12 years old at the time. I thought it was so cool that we were going to be living in a city under the sea like the legendary Atlantis. I remember in those days life was hard, really hard. Mom worked 2 jobs and dad worked 3 and we could barely afford the food on our table. We lived like that for 2 years and I didn't really mind. I just loved to stare out of different windows and look at the fish swim by. Then in 1950 I came home from school that my parents could barely afford for me to find that mom was on the ground. She was bleeding out of her head which looked really deformed. My dad told me we needed to go right away. I didn't know where we were going, it was everything I could do to not cry over mom's death. I didn't know it at the time but my dad had been taking a lot of sportsboost and other gene tonics to increase his physical abilities.

We spent most of the afternoon hiding in a crate by Fontaine Fisheries until I fell asleep. I woke up alone with him nowhere to be found. I was scared and ended up walking home. There was a constable outside my house who refused to let me in. I sat there for a few hours until I gave up. I became a thief after that and I got really good at it too.

For the next month I stood around and watched the routines of merchants selling food until I found the weak spots and started stealing their goods. It took this one fish place a whole week for them to discover I was taking their stuff. I moved to another place after that. Fort Frolic was my new hotspot but it didn't pan out very well for me. I ended up wondering into Eves Garden to fulfill my male curiosity and I ended up seeing my father there watching a girl dance on the pole. When I got his attention he told the bouncers I was too young to be here and got kicked out. I waited outside that place for 4 hours until he left. I walked up to him and told him I've been looking for him for a long time. I will never forget his words.

"Kid, life in Rapture is always about looking out for number 1. That's why your mom died. Don't ever look for me again." I never saw him again.

So I was on my own. I returned to my thief ways and survived that way for a long time. In that time joined a group of boys around my age that had the same struggle and we teamed up to find enough food to survive. We staked out places for weeks on end until we found the perfect opportunity to steal their goods. Some of us got caught and their spots were replaced with other boys looking to survive. We called ourselves Raptures Rats, at least that's what the people called us.

I remember one day we hit the jackpot. A guy who was selling plasmids and gene tonics illegally. We didn't waste time on staking this one out, we just followed him to his supplies and we killed him. Our thoughts were, if we kill him and get the plasmids, and then we can do a better job at stealing and surviving. He was hording all sorts of plasmids I never even heard of. At this point it was every Rapture Rat for himself. Survival of the fittest as Andrew Ryan says. I was only able to grab a sportboost and armor shell gene tonic. Thankfully it's all I've needed to survive in this hellish world.

I remember when the side effects hit me I almost killed my fell Rapture Rat Tom. I never had the chance to because he started a fight with a constable and got killed. We fell apart quickly after taking the plasmids and tonics. I think I'm the only person in Rapture who's still sane.

I remember in 1959 when life started to get kind of crazy in Rapture. Splicers going mad for ADAM and Andrew Ryan doing everything to maintain order which only caused more chaos. I remember finding my own little place to hole up in at Fontaine Fisheries unknown to anybody except this one guy who came to read a smut magazine a few times a week. I stayed there and ate the fish his guys brought in and kept to myself. It got even nicer when the guy suddenly stopped coming. I was forced out when a battle broke out all around. Ryan's men verses Atlases followers. At least I assume I didn't see most of it. I booked it as fast as I could only to learn that it was already 1960. Life all around me had gotten even more crazy than before. So many places were destroyed and broken down. The path to the Bathysphere I first came in was cut off by a flooded tunnel. Rapture always had leaks but never this bad before.

I had no idea what I should do next. It was then that I saw one of those big Brut splicers who were so full of physical tonics that their bodies were enormous. He had a big daddy and a little sister behind him as well. He had a nice grin on his face and charged me. I only had a pistol for defense and I would need to hit him in the head with all 6 of my shots to kill him. I had a better chance of killing the big daddy. I fled as fast as I could running down a path that took me to Fort Frolic. The gate was closed off though and I was cornered. The Brut splicer was right behind me and about to charge me into the wall. I jumped out of the way at the last second and guy ended up busting the bars enough to draw blood. His arm got stuck so I took this chance to fire at him in the head 6 times. There was absolutely nothing he could do. I ran past the guy through the destroyed bars. Behind me I saw the little sister harvesting ADAM from him. Horrifying.

Fort Frolic was one fucked up place when I entered it. People permanently stuck as statues and ugly displays of "art" as defined by that psychopath Sander Cohen. My top priority was getting the hell out of there and to the Farmers Market. I walked past a few splicers who didn't seem to care I was there. Maybe they were hallucinating something while I walked by?

Either way I found a new hiding place connected to a vent behind a desk. Finding food was simple and easy since it was all around me and if I needed to I could go to Arcadia and find some food there. This marks the 16 years of peaceful living period of my life. I lived in solitude away from the fighting and madness. Andrew Ryan was killed by his own son, Sofia Lamb took over with this idea of a family unit and was killed by an old Alpha series, and many of the little sisters disappeared and suddenly reappeared only to disappear again. In all the time I spent surviving I was forced to kill 29 people. I'm usually really good at avoiding splicers but sometimes its unavoidable.

Things were especially nice after Sofia lamb died and took the detention center with her. Those people were seriously crazy, worse than Fontaine's or Ryan's men. Most of the people in Rapture died after that leaving maybe 1000, that's my best guess.

These splicers go more insane when they don't have ADAM. They kill each other over the most idiotic things. I've seen 5 of them die in the room next to me for no apparent reason. Somehow I've not suffered much from taking gene tonics. Maybe it's only because I only took 2 tonics and no plasmids. Once in a while I feel the addictive urge to find ADAM out there but it's not too difficult to resist. Maybe I'm just better at it than everyone else.

During the last days before Arcadia was burnt down I was able to go on a walk through Rapture. With the lack of people it was much safer to do such a thing. Not that it was worth doing. Many places such as the Medical Pavilion, Neptune's Bounty, Olympus heights, Ryan Amusements and Paupers drop were all sunk. I saw bodies literally everywhere I went and a so much trash everywhere. Well Ryan, all I have to ask is what do you think of your precious Rapture now? I wanted so much to see his body, but I had no way to make it to him. Hephaestus still had splicers covering the main entrance. Not that it mattered to me.

My life has been one miserable struggle to survive and now it's over. Nobody has any idea we are here still. If they did I'm sure they would of torn this place down already.

I wonder where my dad is? I'm sure the bastard is dead but I wonder how he died? I like to think it was painful. I know now it was him who killed my mother and I wish I could get revenge on him for her death. At least before I died.

It's even harder to breath now. I'm sure the end is near. Before I die though I want to put this one entry diary in a safe waterproof lockbox with several audio diaries I found from Tennenbaum, Yi Suchong, Frank Fontaine and Andrew Ryan in addition to several books and documents I've found about Rapture and what happened here. They tell the story better than I did.

Me? I prefer to be a nameless casualty in Ryan's Great Chain.