» Sat May 28, 2011 1:49 am 23 OCTOBER 2077
63? 2' N, 29? 55' W
Fifty fathoms below the icy waves of the north Atlantic, Andrew Ryan sat alone in his office and drank to the end of the world.
He had known it was coming for months now, if not years. The radio masts atop the lighthouse brought him not only civilian news broadcasts but also military intercepts; though his people were unable to decode most of them, the sheer volume and increasing urgency of the traffic also carried meaning. Now the inevitable had happened: a little over an hour ago, those distant voices had started to go silent, replaced by emergency messages that repeated mindlessly until they too were cut off, or simply swallowed up by a rising tide of static. And just now, confirmation had come to him from another source: those who watched the seismographs for underwater tremors reported that the needles were jumping from hundreds if not thousands of disturbances, far too many (and too faint) to be ordinary earthquakes.
So they had finally done it: the parasites, careless with the Promethean fire given to them by greater men, like an idiot child playing with matches. In their greed and short-sightedness, squabbling over the final scraps, they had destroyed not only themselves but civilization... the hard work of centuries undone in hours. Art, industry, progress, all gone. But thanks to Ryan, and his vision, it would not be the end of mankind - the best of Man would live on here in Rapture, safe from the bombs and fallout, safe at last from discovery. Safe, and free.
Of the billions that must be dead or dying up there right now, Ryan mourned only a handful. Some of the great minds he had tried to entice to his city had been unwilling to give up their former lives and start over; a few, like Braun, had made arrangements of their own. Perhaps the hole the scientist had dug for himself would be deep enough to survive this holocaust. Ryan wished him well, and drank.
Aside from those few regrets, he was content. Neither the eagle nor the dragon would ever find him now. His greatest rival was dead, and the industry Fontaine had built was in Ryan's hands. Shortly he would announce to the people, his people, what had happened to the world they had left behind. Faced with the reality of the situation, they would fall in line behind him and the troubles would finally end. The smuggling trade would dry up, as would notions of revolution, once it became clear there was nowhere else to go. The sea would provide them with everything they needed to survive. The few who still refused to work to make the city strong and prosperous would be exposed as the parasites they truly were, and dealt with.
Perhaps someday, Ryan thought as he drained his glass, their descendants would re-colonize the land above the waves - founding a better kind of civilization on ground that had been swept clean, as if by another deluge. But that would be their choice, and it was a long way off in any case. Right now, he had a city to run.
(end)
