Hop in a bathysphere,
take in the atmosphere,
it's like New York, but with more fish
take in the atmosphere,
it's like New York, but with more fish
—The Bioshock Song, Brentalfloss
To build a city at the bottom of the sea! Insanity. But where else could we be free from the clutching hand of the Parasites? Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society that they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.
—Andrew Ryan, Bioshock
When all was made ready, the Beta-Station Turbines were switched on - and they had sat humming away ever since, the crown jewels of His Majesty's Corps of Aquatic Engineers, constantly sucking in the ocean water that surrounds the Station, and churning it out as pure freshwater - which, once pumped inside, was channeled into a series of interlocking canals and sluices that form the "roadways" of Sub-Marine Station Beta, by which its residents traveled from docking station to docking station as they went about their business.
And thusly was implanted, four miles below the ocean's surface, a thriving city of some five and seventy thousand souls. Here were the living laboratories, were teams of hydro-zoologists worked to perfect new techniques of marine animal domestication and control; here were munitions experts and shipwrights, designing more effective vessels and armaments to wage war against the sea-bests; and here, for those having the means, was a place to live and work and be diverted by numerous undersea pleasure gardens and aquatic exhibition halls. All in the total safety provided by a fortress in the very heart, as it were, of the enemy camp.
An entire economic powerhouse existed beneath the oceans of the world. Seaweed harvesting, undersea hotels, pearl gleaning, treasure hunts, the mining of manganese nodules, fish farms that spanned entire continental shelves. Salt water was ruinous to robots; nor did cybernetic humans work in the depths of Inner Space. Only these gillmen—superbly adapted by genetic engineering to their fluid environment, ready to come to the aid of their cousins above the waves. Atomic submarines! Submersible cruisers! Transphibious planes! Trained Navy dolphins! Giant squids with serious territorial issues!
