August 16th, 1958

Audio Transcript – 'Rest'

[So, he's found his way back to Rapture. When Songbird destroyed the Siphon, I brought us here. For me, it was a long time ago. For Rapture, it hasn't happened yet. We keep coming back to these same places. The great serpent eats its own tail and destruction begets creation, I suppose, going around and around in circles. Perhaps, just as energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so too does time and destiny have a tendency of recurring, never created anew, but simply existent in a new form. The Luteces tell me that here is where I will find the final iteration of Comstock, and I desperately want to believe them. I want to rest. It's time to break the circle.]

Elizabeth, dressed in a black skirt and button-down shirt, her brooch pinned to a red necktie, wandered through the empty department store. Beyond the windows, the ocean was impossibly black. Shadows flickered along the walls as luminescent fish flashed through the murk. Dawn seemed a long way away –– not that anyone in Rapture would ever see the sunlight. It was a small wonder, Elizabeth thought, that the whole city hadn't gone completely insane.

As she moved past the haberdashery and the jewelry store, the security cameras and turrets became more numerous. Elizabeth kept to the corridor peripheries, staying just outside the searchlights of the automated security. Elizabeth had considered opening a new Tear to another part of Rapture, away from Fontaine's Department Store –– simply materialize through spacetime like the Luteces. But she couldn't risk entering a world without Comstock. There was a debt to be repaid, and Elizabeth was prepared to take the long way around to collect.

Unlike the rest of the department store, the Rapture Metro station in the pavilion was not completely deserted. Elizabeth froze in the entryway. Two women –– at least, Elizabeth assumed they were women –– milled around one of the anchored bathyspheres. They hammered on the hull of the spherical submersible with basin wrenches and pipes. Their appearances were grotesque. Black hair fell out in matted clumps. Their eyes glowed yellow, and their faces were pockmarked with blisters. The skin on their knuckles had been scraped clean, exposing the necrotic flesh and sinew underneath. They wore ragged scraps of clothing held together by clothespins. In some places, Elizabeth noted queasily, the pins went straight through their skirts and were buried in their legs, right down to the bone.

… there have been side effects: blindness, insanity, death…

Elizabeth took a step backwards, towards a ventilation duct set into the wall. She heard the man's breath in her ear before she saw him, standing right behind her…

"Cat lick your heart," he rasped.

Elizabeth screamed.

The misshapen lump of his face leered, pulsing with weeping sores. He gnashed his black and broken teeth. Elizabeth staggered towards the center of the pavilion. The two women looked up from the bathysphere, and their pupils narrowed to slits.

"Painted whore!" they shrieked. Their lips split and blood dripped down their chins.

Elizabeth searched for a weapon, but the department store floor was spotless. The displays were locked behind thick panes of glass. As Elizabeth skirted the edges of the pavilion, the disfigured creatures barred down on her, hefting their wrenches and gutting knives and icepicks. Elizabeth looked back towards the department store complex. When the man circled around her to join his companions, Elizabeth bolted for the Prêt-à-Porter boutique.

"Pretend you're not interested!" the creatures snarled. "They like that!"

As Elizabeth drew closer to the shop, she saw the security turret's spotlight darken from green to red. The stocky machine swiveled, aiming its double-barreled gun straight at Elizabeth. She dove behind a rack of clothing, and the turret fired several rounds into the assailants, daubing the far wall in scarlet. The man died instantly, a bullet burying into his exposed brain cavity. Several more sliced through the women's throats. They fell to their knees, grasping at their necks, gurgling in agony as blood pooled on the glossy hardwood floors.

"What the fuck…"

Elizabeth struggled out from under the clothes. Behind the service desk, a bald man in a turtleneck looked around in horror. He held a toolbox in one hand and his gun in the other. He wasn't pointing his pistol at Elizabeth; instead, he had it trained at the three corpses on his floor, as though he was afraid they would lurch to their feet and stagger towards him. When the man turned to Elizabeth, his expression was creased with concern.

"Christ, lady, you okay?"

Elizabeth nodded, ashen-faced. "I am now."

"Shit, it's a good thing I was in early to repair the turrets. Fontaine, he calls me down, and he says to me, he says, 'Herschel,' he says, 'you gotta get the security devices seen to otherwise them splicers are gonna tear the place a new asshole.'"

"Splicers…" Elizabeth stared at the corpses. Their bodies looked as though they had been stapled together by someone with only a diminutive understanding of human physiology. Their skin was shingled and enflamed. Even riddled with bullets, the two women twitched. They hardly seemed like people anymore.

"Too much gene splicing, that is. They're a fucking menace, and Ryan… Ryan, that son of a bitch, he thought the whole ADAM fiasco was just going bounce off him. Well, he ain't made of rubber. If he don't start doing something soon…"

… ADAM acts like benign cancer, destroying native cells and replacing them with unstable stem versions… causes the cosmetic and mental damage… you need more and more ADAM just to keep back the tide…

"I have to go…" Elizabeth brushed off her dress. She tried to keep her hands from shaking.

"Hey, there may be more of those bastards running bat-shit crazy out there. You don't want to go out alone."

"I appreciate your help, Herschel. It was serendipitous, and it likely saved my life, but I am needed elsewhere."

"Oh, okay," Herschel Weiss nodded, "I get it. Night staff, are you? Figured you'd bum a ciggy on your break? Look, lady, you really ought to be careful around here at night."

Elizabeth nodded. "I will be certain to bear that in mind. Good morning."

"Good morning, miss. Be careful, yeah?"

Elizabeth left Prêt-à-Porter. When she reentered the pavilion, faint rays of light rippled down from the surface. The ocean glowed a deep green. In the department store, Elizabeth heard the sounds of metal grates being pulled back and doors unlocked, prerecorded advertisements playing over the intercoms. Rapture was waking up.

Elizabeth realized she had a problem during the shift change, when the night staff went home for the day and the first shoppers drifted through the pavilion. People began to line up for the bathyspheres, and every single person held a ticket stub in their hand. Those without tickets were turned away or forced to fork over several crumbled dollar bills, each one with a dark, angular man with intense eyes glaring back at them from the center fold. Elizabeth patted at the pockets of her new shirt and skirt; while Carol Lynn had been complacent enough to leave her purchases laying around Cupid's Arrow, her carelessness hadn't extended to leaving her purse in her pocket. More was the pity, thought Elizabeth.

She walked up to the last person standing in line: a young woman with premature age lines marring the corners of her mouth. A nametag on her breast pocket identified her as Samantha Kemp, an employee of the Old Man Winter test drive.

… just a long, final dive into the abyss… and a little hope… and when a person's got nothing, hope's about the kindest thing you can give her. Or the cruelest… he reminds me of someone… somethin' about him smells stink to me…

"Excuse me," Elizabeth tapped Samantha Kemp on the shoulder.

"What do you want?" The question didn't sound rude so much as exhausted.

"I was wondering… what is the fare for the Metro?"

"Depends on where you're going, hun. It's a dollar on all stops between here and Fort Frolic because it's on the mainline, but if you're heading to Minerva's Den or somewhere far off it's going to cost you a little extra."

"And this applies to all forms of transportation within Rapture?" Elizabeth was beginning to miss the skylines.

Miss Kemp laughed. "Where the hell've you been, hun? Course it does. This is Andrew Ryan's city." She looked ruefully at the ticket stub in her hand. "Got to pay to damn well breathe down here, don't you?"

… the air you breathe is sponged from my account…

"I… I don't get out much."

"Squatter in Arcadia?"

"Something like that."

"Won't last, you know. There's already talk of that Langford woman charging a fee. All on Andrew Ryan's say-so, of course."

"Of course."

Samantha Kemp blew a strand of hair out of her face. "Look, hun, I've had a long night, I got a kid waiting for me up in Artemis Suites and this'll be the last bathysphere until lunch."

"I'm sorry. I won't keep you."

Elizabeth began to walk away. Samantha Kemp watched her for a moment, and then called out:

"Hey, miss?"

"Yes?"

"You don't got a ticket, do you? How you expect to get around Rapture without a Metro pass? Or cash?"

Elizabeth didn't have an answer. She had considered pit pocketing the shoppers milling around the pavilion, but there were cameras and security bots everywhere. There was a constant prickle on the back of her neck as computerized eyes tracked her through the department store. In Columbia, at least, picking up the stray silver eagle could be done discreetly.

"No," she said honestly, "I don't have any money."

Samantha Kemp nodded sympathetically. "Don't be embarrassed. I get it, I do. It's the economy, isn't it? One day you're working the graveyard shift at the Atlantic Express Depot and the next thing you know, that Kinkaide fella's gone and replaced the trains with bathyspheres and you're suddenly out of a job. How do they expect us to pull ourselves up by our damn bootstraps if there ain't any boots going around?"

"You're working now," Elizabeth noted, gesturing to Samantha Kemp's nametag.

"But for how long, hun? Ryan and Fontaine keep trading blows but it's us who get caught in the thick of it. Most of us work for Industries or Futuristics, but when each of the two of 'em are trying to come up on top, us poor folk are the ones going home hungry."

"So whom do you work for? Ryan or Fontaine?"

"Fontaine's Test Drive's what's keeping my kid fed and housed in Artemis, for now. We all thought Frank Fontaine was going to be different, you know? While Ryan was banging supermodels up in Fort Frolic and doing gin slings with Sander fucking Cohen, Fontaine was always talking about how he was going to lift Rapture right out of the old man's wallet, no fuss, no muss. Turns out he's just as crooked. Least Ryan's a little more honest about it."

"Either of them hiring now?"

Samantha snorted. "You got a better chance getting a record deal with that loony bin in Fort Frolic than working for Andrew Ryan. But," she considered for a moment, "Fontaine's guys are always looking for more hands down at the fisheries. You might have some luck there."

Security Chief Sullivan had mentioned something about Fontaine Fisheries. It didn't sound like an exceptionally pleasant place. Through some of the Doors, Elizabeth heard gunshots; saw blood swirling around the pylons of an old pier. Smelled the gutted fish and the sulfur. "Where can I find Frank Fontaine?"

Samantha pointed straight up. "He'll be in his office, round the back of the Manta Ray Lounge. Just tell Reggie you're looking for work."

"Thank you, Samantha."

"Don't thank me yet, hun. This is Frank Fontaine we're talking about. You mess with Andrew Ryan, you end up in Persephone. You mess with Frank Fontaine, you get put out an airlock and told to walk on home… so I've heard. At least with Ryan, you get some air to curse his name with."

Elizabeth blinked, and the Doors opened onto the endless dark, the crushing blackness trapped under the weight of the ocean. Screams bubbling and floating towards the surface…

"I see your point." Elizabeth rubbed her thimble and sighed. For a moment, Samantha thought she looked very old. "But I can look after myself."

"Yeah," Samantha said quietly, "you can, can't you? All the same, good luck to you, hun."

The line for the bathysphere was down to two people. Samantha hurried to catch the front of the queue.

"Samantha? I have one more question."

"What?"

Elizabeth's blue eyes looked almost black in the dark metro station. "Do you know a man named Zachary Hale Comstock?"

"Nope." Samantha shook her head. "Never heard of him."