Chapter 1: Paradise or Perdition?

My eyes opened only to shut again. The florescent lights above cut through my lids like a knife. It hurt. Everything hurt.

No. Hurt was the way someone might describe a few scrapes or bruises. Hurt was a paper cut or a stubbed toe. This... this was something else. I didn't know what, but definitely not hurt.

What had happened to me?

Was I drunk last night? No, I don't drink. Did I get in a fight? Had I been in an accident? Maybe I would have remembered if that bone saw had quit eating through my skull as I tried to get my bearings.

Fish. There had been fish. And water. Lots of water. And Captain Boucher. He had said, "Good luck, son. You had better watch yourself down there." For what? Had I been in danger? And I remembered going down deep... deeper than I should have gone with that little oxygen in my tank. Why would I do that? Because there was something in the sea...

Lights. Lights like back in Manhattan. Deep at the bottom of the ocean.

My eyes snapped open. Atlantis! I had found Atlantis!

Oh, my head ached, but I sat up. I was on a bed, the kind found at a hospital, in nothing but my underwear. We were hundreds of miles away from any land, how did I get here?

Atlantis... Atlantis had hospital beds that looked like they came from Hoboken Medical?

My head continued to throb. Maybe I had just dreamed the whole thing. Dreamed that I had found an underwater Utopia. Dreamed that I had started running completely out of air. Dreamed about the boat, the crew, all those missing vessels. Dreamed about—about everything?

Was I going completely insane?

"He's finally starting to stir, Davis. It's been two days," My ears pricked up at the human conversation coming from outside the closed door of my hospital room. A man was speaking, sounding agitated. "We have to do something now. You think we can just slip this under the rug?"

"It's just not right, Clark. It's like murder." A new, more authoritative voice answered the first.

"You don't know that."

"Have you been reading the same papers I have? Hanging, Clark. For contraband. Ryan will do anything to keep Rapture a secret. How do you think he'll react to a someone just stumbling onto this place?"

"It can't just be coincidence, Davis."

"And why not? You need to get out in that suit more often, Clark. We're not as hidden as we think we are. You never thought that eventually someone would find it?"

"Not by accident. Not by a roll of the dice. Look, you're getting too worked up about this. You don't even know who that guy lying on that bed is. He could be a CIA spook or... or even one of them frogmen."

"You think he's a Japanese spy?" the man gave a sarcastic voice of caution. "Call Roosevelt! Call Churchill! We've got a Nazi in there!"

"I'm serious, Davis. And if we get caught with him, we could be in the same boat. Even the doc said he wanted his identity kept anonymous. He's afraid he'll get his neck stretched just for helping this poor schmuck! I wish I could laugh at it, but he may very well be wise in the paranoia. We have to report to Ryan now."

The second man's voice became deathly serious. "I can't do that. There's no way I can just hand this guy over to be a sheep to the slaughter. If I were gonna do that, I would have just left him to suffocate in that suit."

Suffocate... I had been right! I had really been right. I wasn't going nuts, not losing my mind. I really had found Atlantis.

And it was looking like they were gonna kill me for it.

The first man spoke again, "If you won't do it, I will. This guy ain't worth dying over."

The words snapped through my ears to the depths of my brain, setting something off. I was in trouble. I was going to become some kind of prisoner if I didn't figure a way out of this. I scanned the room quickly. It was the size of an average hospital. The bed and nightstand beside it were the only furniture in the room. No windows, of course. Under the Atlantic, I couldn't possibly expect to climb out of here like Rapunzel. The only exit was the door that, no doubt, led to the two men arguing about my fate. I had no weapons. I was too weak to think I could win an attack using only my bare hands in the condition I was in.

Fine. Then I would at least go down trying. I was no man to just lay down and die. I'd be beaten down, and die with my boots on. Anything but give up. Anything but fall a coward.

I watched the knob start to turn.

"Wait, Clark," the second man's voice was pleading. "Let me just talk to him first, okay?"

There was a long pause, but finally the first one sighed sadly. "It's only going to make things harder."

They both sounded as though they were talking about putting down a dog. Was that was what I was now, deep down here? Just a common mutt? I shivered at the thought.

The door opened and the two men entered. I pegged the first voice as the shorter, older looking man with the scruffy red beard, and the second voice to the younger, taller man looking of deep concern.

"Good, you're awake" the younger one said. "I, uh, guess we should get formalities out of the way. My name's Eddie Davis."

I nodded without a word. Davis gestured to the shorter one, "This is Dennis Clark."

Clark stared at me, discomfort plain in his face. I opened my mouth to speak, but Clark raised a hand, "No. We don't need to know your name."

"Clark!" Davis was appalled.

"You want to lie to him? You want to put on a happy face and tell him it'll be okay when we both know it won't be? Whether or not it's fair, he's here, and there's no other way around it. He's got to be turned over to Ryan now, before we all get pulled in too deep to climb out."

Davis looked speechless, confliction written all over his face. Clark, on the other hand, had a look that seemed almost sad. Sad to know the truth. He looked to me and said, "Why did you come here, son?"

I didn't say anything for a short moment. Finally, I said, "I'm an undersea explorer. I find and study physical remains found in the ocean. My team has been combing around Iceland recently, and we found some abnormalities in this area. I was sent down to assess a small idea of what was down here; if it would be a dead end search or not from a little bit of looking around. A lay of the land, I guess you could call it." I smiled halfheartedly. "I saw this place from higher up, and stopped considering everything. My team, my air... I just needed to know what this place was."

It was such a simple story. Such an innocent tale. They would sympathize with it, I knew. Just a man trying to understand that much more about the world he lived in.

They both just looked all the more desolate. Davis ran his hand down his face. "This place, it's not the way you think."

"I think it's Atlantis."

Clark gave a bitter chuckle. "Not Atlantis, son. Rapture."

"Rapture?"

Davis said, "That's what we call this place. See, Rapture is... well, it's freedom. We came to get away from big government and crippling societies and overbearing laws. It's the American dream, I guess, but the way it was originally supposed to be. And it's our secret from the world."

"Freedom, huh? You talk about this Ryan as though he were a baby Stalin, though."

Davis's face flushed. "Things aren't going well right now. Why's not really important; the gist is that we just can't risk anything while this is going on. We can't allow ourselves to be discovered. It would ruin everything we've ever worked for. Andrew Ryan, our leader, knows that more than anybody."

"So you figure I'm a liability to your amazing secret?" I was blunt and plain, hiding all of the fear that was making my heart beat faster by the minute. "So the only way to fix it is to kill me, right? I mean, that's the most obvious solution Mr. Ryan is going to go with, you think. Quick and dirty." I snapped my fingers, an action that made Davis wince. "Gone. Just like that."

Davis turned away and swore, slamming his fist to the wall. "There's got to be some other way!"

Clark went to his friend and placed a hand on his shoulder. "There isn't, Eddie."

Davis shook his head. "If we turn him in, we'll never hear from him or about him again. That's the problem. He's too freaking anonymous..." Davis raised his head. "Wait a minute..."

Clark's eyes widened. "Davis?"

"He's too anonymous! That's the key! That's it!"

"What's it?" I asked, rising from the bed. I swayed from the dizziness, but gritted my teeth and stood tall.

"We'll turn you into Ryan, sure we will!" he looked at me with a grin that stretched from ear to ear. "After we make you a Rapture celebrity!"

"Wait, slow down," Clark looked beside himself. "What do you mean 'Rapture celebrity'?"

"This has never happened before, a guy just finding Rapture, Clark. All on his own! The public will eat it up."

"You want... to publicize this guy?"

"Yes! He'll be city-famous in no time! Ryan can't make a guy like that just fade away like he never existed."

Clark regarded his friend as though he were going insane, then thought about the proposal. He looked at me, then at Davis, then me again. "It could work..." Clark began to laugh at the cleverness of it all. "It could actually work, you slimy little hoodlum." Clark slapped Davis on the back, who looked as joyful as a child at Christmas.

"How are you feeling, guy?" Davis came over to me. "The doc said you would make a full recovery, but not before getting a vicious migraine. But do you think you could feel alright enough to a little bit of a clean up?"

"Clean up?" I was dizzy from the pain and full of confusion.

"You have to be able to look good for the pictures. And we gotta get you back into that suit. Without the helmet, though, I think. People should see that you're just a man, beyond anything else."

"Sure," I nodded like an idiot. At that moment I would have agreed to dressing up like Shirley Temple. "Sure, whatever you say."

As long as I was a free man.