Atlas Lives
The boy drags his feet down the slippery stairways that descend from Point Prometheus. He doesn't listen for the ragged breathing of a secluded splicer, the grinding wail of a big daddy. At a puddle beneath the dripping ceiling he sinks to his knees. In the dirty water he washes his hands, stained with blood and ADAM, and begins to cry. It is an absent, numb crying.
He had just one friend.
He staggers to his feet, head splitting with the agony of sleeplessness and starvation. When his vision clears, he glances up at the wall he leans on. A poster hangs there, wet and torn, bearing the image of a man he can almost recognise. WHO IS ATLAS?
Nobody. There is no Atlas, there never was.
x
Julie Langford – Lucrative Opportunity: Today I met with this Andrew Ryan feller. Flew me out to this hotel in New York, which he seems to own. Then he sits me down and offers me a 'potentially very lucrative opportunity'. His words. Before I could answer, this- this blue collar feller pulls up a chair without invitation. Bald guy. He whispers something in Ryan's ear and starts to eat right off of his plate. Using his fingers and everything. They looked at each other like a bull and a matador. Couldn't figure out which was which, though.
x
The boy's shoes are full of water, his feet ice cold, and the only thing keeping him alive is the Adam running hot and red through his veins. The nose of his shotgun drags on the ground as he walks. He takes no shelter, looks not towards the shadows, he listens not for the heralds of danger. He walks unafraid, down through the drowned city, to the only place he can think to go.
He can hear something faintly, low and sombre. Perhaps it is the song of the pipes, creaking and groaning as they are warped by the ice. Perhaps it is piano music. He doesn't recognise the tune, but why would he? He was never a real person, anyway. Neither of them were.
The boy finds himself strangely at peace with this knowledge. Perhaps his mind is slipping away, drifting, like the music through the stagnant air. He was always a simple creature, more of a lamb than a shepherd. His shuffled footsteps echo faintly as he enters Olympus Heights. Nearly there. The dim light filters through the tall, thick windows, the dark shape of the city wavering, distorted by the water. Outside he can see a flickering sign signifying the New Year. 1959. He wonders if it's still 1959. There's a great beast swimming between the buildings, slow and lazy, silhouetted against the neon lights. The people who made him obviously hadn't thought he needed to know what it was.
All of a sudden it becomes very quiet and still, and for a moment the boy glances around himself, confused. It takes him a moment to realise. The shortwave radio hooked to his trousers has gone silent. He holds the tarnished little machine in his hand, staring at its bronze face. He stands for a minute or two before he drops it, and it lands with a muffled clunk on the carpet. Without its ever-present static spluttering in the background, the city seems so still. Only the faint thrum of the machinery keeping it aglow reverberates through the metal framework. He thinks he sees a figure in the window of the building opposite, he thinks he sees it turn to look at him before disappearing out of view. Perhaps he imagined it. Wouldn't be the first time.
At last he turns away from the glass and heads deeper into the city, down towards Fort Frolic, towards Eve's Garden.
x
Sullivan – Fontaine: This Fontaine guy... Ryan had him dragged to the Seaworthy warehouse in the middle of the night. Ryan was hysterical. For Fontaine's part he seemed pretty calm, even spitting blood like he was. Asked if Ryan would be in need of a good fishery down under the water. When they asked him how he knew about the North Atlantic Project he says, "Steinman told me. We used to work the same circuit a while back." "Plastic surgery?" I asks. He grins and says, "Rich ladies."
x
The boy's shredded fingers rest on the brass doorknob. His gaze is drawn to the cracked and swollen wood of the door. Someone carved a message there, who knows how long ago. A sleazy and satisfied recommendation: "She ain't a killer but she'll blow your fucking head off".
The knob is thick and brittle with rust, and won't turn. He forces the door open with his shoulder, and steps into the dark room. He's been here before, just once. Just long enough to break the safe, to stuff his pockets and escape before anybody found him. There she lays on the bed. Her silk chemise clings to her, damp and rotten, like her skin. Her skin sinks into the hollows of her cheeks, hangs between her ribs like tattered flags. It's too cold to smell her.
He sits down beside her on the violet covers. Softly. Quietly, like he doesn't want to wake her. He looks at her limp hair, plastered to her skin. It was probably blonde once. The boy slips off his shoes, one, two, and then his soggy socks. He flings them across the room and wriggles his pale blue toes. There's no blood or warmth in them, but they still work.
There's no warmth in her, either, he discovers as he lays down beside her, wrapping his arms around her emaciated frame. He buries his face in her neck, in her lank, blonde hair. His mind floats high above him like a buoy, hanging on to his body by a fine thread as he drifts off to the faint song of the pipes.
x
Brigid Tenembaum – Shark Tank: Today Andrew Ryan holds his soiree in the Penthouse suite of his hotel. Why he thinks Rapture needs a hotel is beyond me, if anyone will be travelling here, it will be to stay. He introduced me to his club, he calls his pantheon. Most of them I find agreeable enough... all but one. I know what this Frank Fontaine is. I saw men like him in the camps in Poland. Not the officers, but the others, the Jewish men who shovel the corpses of their fellows into the furnaces. His smile is like the shark's, and he... this man... the city is not settled, yet already he smells blood.
x
The boy wakes with a needle jammed into in his eye.
He isn't sure how long the needle has been there, when he wakes. Now, his vision is blocked by the huge syringe, drawing the glowing red liquid out of his... out of...
BLAM.
The pistol still works, and he pumps round after round into the splicer's face, standing as he does so. The old man stumbles backwards, leaving a trail of brown blood on the wall as he slides diagonally, down onto his knees, down into his grave. His last shuddering breath he uses to mutter something about Jesus.
Satisfied, the boy tosses the gun back onto the pillow it had slept beneath. He feels the red hot tears on his cheek and wipes them away. He licks them from his blue fingers. He doesn't know if it is Adam or blood, but he's learned not to waste anything. This isn't the first time the harvesters caught him sleeping.
He glances at the dead man, then at the dead woman, and then turns his back on them both, heading through to the adjoining washroom.
He looks at himself in the mirror there, for a long time, and slowly, a change comes over him.
He springs into action. Strips off his soaking sweater, and tosses it into the broken toilet. He crouches before the small cupboard, slamming the doors open and peering inside. From among the forest of chemicals- a prostitute's arsenal- he locates his desire, snatching the bottles out one at a time and tossing them into the sink. Standing again, he scans the letters and symbols scribed upon them, synthesising their meaning into his mind, ordering and aligning them like pipes.
He pours the contents of one bottle into another, and wets his hair. He discovers a small brush in one of the drawers, and stuffs it through the neck of the bottle, coating it in the mixture. Slinging one filthy towel around his shoulders, he parts his hair neatly along the side, and begins to apply the peroxide along the divide. His scalp itches and burns, but no more than his eye does, or his writhing insides.
He uses her nail scissors to cut his hair while he waits, trimming it with shaking fingers, as straight as he can manage. He tries to focus but his eyes keep getting drawn to their reflection, a violent, bloodshot red in the grimy glass. It's coming together now.
He stalks back into the boudoir, over to the dead man and turns out his pockets with the ease of a lifetime's practise. There's not much, but the boy finds what he's looking for. He opens the box, and sees that there are four cigarettes left. Jackpot. He sticks one between his lips, and pockets the rest, shaking the fire back into his arm.
Sparks begin to fly, and he snaps his fingers. Just like on TV.
x
Yi Suchong – Morning Encounter: Suchong arrive early this morning to deliver lot 192 test results to Fontaine. Suchong come to his apartment to maintain secrecy of experiment. Exiting from the room is that Tenembaum, no shoes on her feet. She pretend she does not see Suchong as she leaves, goes back to her own apartment. Fontaine come out after, loud and happy. "How is my bouncing baby boy?" he ask. Suchong not know many ah, proverbs, in English, but this is one of them: "Don't shit where you live."
x
The dead man lies bare chested on the bed now, his swollen, bloated body crushing the corpse of the woman beneath him. They are both soaked in hydrogen peroxide. The boy isn't looking at them, but through the door to the washroom, into the mirror, at his own face.
A different man stands before him now. Gone is the dark hair, the ragged woollen sweater. In their place, a collared shirt, brown with fresh blood. A pair of dark suspenders once belonging to a John, left abandoned on the floor. A mop of lank, blond hair.
Atlas lives.
Atlas takes one last drag on his cigarette, before flicking it towards heap. It takes a couple moments for the sparks to ignite, for tongues of infantile flame to begin lapping at the fuel. In a few minutes an inferno caresses the ceiling, blackening the mouldy plaster, threatening to eat it up entirely. Atlas doesn't feel the heat. He gazes at the flames for a few moments more, then turns on his heel, stuffing his pistol into the back of his trousers.
x
Diane McClintock – Big Fish: I saw another side of Atlas today. We've started taking prisoners. People Atlas thinks are still loyal to Ryan. People who he says are ideologically impure. Even a couple of the original revolutionaries are down there now. They keep them in the boiler room of Hestia Chambers; it's sweltering hot in there and they don't feed them anything. It's awful. We're supposed to be better than Ryan. Anyway he caught me giving a prisoner water, today. He put a pistol in my hand, and told me if I really wanted to end the poor man's misery, I should use it. He said, "You came down to Rapture to swim with the big fish, didnt'cha, Diane? So swim."
x
He can hear her ragged breathing before he sees her. The sound of the hooks that let her crawl along the ceiling is growing steadily louder. She means to approach him from behind, catch him unawares.
He turns towards her calmly, catches her eye. She falters, and drops from the ceiling to the floor. She is staring at him.
"Is... sss... it you?" she breathes. She approaches him slowly, and he lets her. Her hooks drop one by one to the metal grating. She reaches out for him with disfigured fingers. She touches his hair, his face. "It is you." Happiness bubbles up out of her lungs like fluid. Her knees are weak, and he catches her before she falls, lowering her gently to the ground. "Atlas," she says, "you came back."
Around the entrance he can see them gather, peering curiously into the tunnel towards him, their eyes flashing in the dim light. They always congregate this way, he knows, in twos and threes, like crickets. It will take more than this, he knows. It will take all of them. Every man-jack of them. Everyone left alive in this underwater coffin.
He glances back down at the creature in his arms. Not a woman, not anymore, but he can work with that. She is frowning, her bleary gaze fixed upon the tattoos on his wrist. "You've got chains on," she murmurs, incoherently. He smiles.
"Not anymore."