Hephæstus

Your bathysphere emerges into a relatively undamaged metro station. Atlas orders you to head to Ryan's office and kill the son of a bitch!

The desk in the middle of the vast workshop between the entrance and the trophy room has a grenade launcher on it. It, and the grenade and rocket that drop from the pipe above, are gifts from a spider splicer hiding in the darkness above. Snare them with telekinesis; do not just walk up and take them, or the splicer will take you!

That is easier ordered than done, because the door to Ryan's office is clamped shut with two magnetic locks wired directly to the geothermal core. You will be in awe of the room in front of that door: Its centerpiece is a bust of Ryan around which are the impaled corpses of those who have tried to kill him. One of the would-be assassins is Bill McDonagh himself, fed up with Ryan's stubborn refusal to see reason.

You will hear a lot from Ryan through the radio, demonstrating this utter loss of reason that compares with the mindlessness of his aggressor slaves, despite no evidence that he spliced up himself. How about a sample?

door to the core

Another of Ryan's victims, Anya, was out to get Ryan for what he did to Rapture and to her daughter, now a Little Sister. She tried to sleep her way to the information she needed to get inside Ryan's office. You will follow in her steps as you find a way to foil the magnetic locks on his office door.

The door to Hephæstus Core is sealed. After you hear her tape, a gang of Ryan's splicers burn their way through the door. After they are finished with the door, and after you are finished with them, the heart of Hephæstus is open to you.

On the lowest level near the stairs is a Circus of Values. In case you did not hear the vengeful splicer rigging it, the vendor dispenses live grenades. Use them with your telekinesis if aggressors threaten nearby.

There appear to be three levels in Hephæstus Core. In fact the Core Room consists of a long spiral around the rotating Core. You enter the top just in time to see an aggressor try to take out a Big Daddy. The spiral has three main hatches: Heat Loss Monitoring, Workshops and Geothermal Control. Also along the spiral is a gatherers garden and, in front of it, a P2P vendor.

heat loss monitoring

You are directed to find the workshop of Pablo Navarro in Heat Loss Monitoring. As you make your way though Heat Loss you discover that some aggressors lay on the floor playing possum to ambush you. This will become a common occurence for the rest of the game.

One of the workshops is not only flooded but electrified. A hallucination reveals that Ryan enforced loyalty by assassination. Hack a control panel shown by the hallucination to turn the juice off.

The other workshop is Navarro's. Evidently the local splicers thought him too untrustworthy, or were tired of his nagging about their lack of professionalism. So there he is, dead on the floor. But you discover his tape: He sent Anya to his boss Kyburz' toolshop — after a suitable payment. So it's off to the workshops.

the workshops

Kyburz's office, at the bottom of a flight of stairs, is very heavily guarded with turrets and trap wires. You need to navigate all these to reach the P2P vendor and the intriguing switch that will give you access to the nitroglycerine in the glass cabinet (and give you a surprise turret).

A tape in a side room in front of the office reveals that Anya was handed over to Ryan's splicers by Kyburz himself. He feared Anya was a spy out to make him tip his hand.

Further down the winding passageway is a toolshop with what remains of Kyburz. On his body is a tape, in which he describes a dream that inspires him with an idea of how to break the magnetic locks on Ryan's office door. The fruit of that idea you find inside a crawlspace behind some bookshelves: An electro-magnetic pulse bomb. The casing is ready; you need to complete the bomb with the following components.

The nitro is in Kyburz's office, if you have not already picked it up. The ionic gel canisters are scattered throughout the level. The R-34's are the most difficult to acquire because they form part of the control circuitry of the Big Daddies, and you may have to take on at least one of them to get those.

geothermal control

Here you take an elevator, walk down a passage, and raise a platform lift to a shelf just under the Core. That is there the bomb goes. The problem is that passage is flooded. You need to turn a wheel to pour magma into the water to boil it away — but not before you set up a perimeter of mines, turrets and trap wires to keep the aggressors from interrupting you.

Once the bomb explodes (and after you waited out the security alert), return to the trophy room. Throw the circuit breaker on the magnetic locks, and the door to Ryan's office opens.

would you kindly?

Rapture Control is a hugh room, darkened from the Core explosion. But not for long: As you approach the great control edifice, Ryan quotes from what he calls the Book of Lies a passage from Ecclesiastes: A time to build — and a time to destroy! Ryan has set the Core to self-destruct, which would destroy the whole of Rapture. Atlas urges you to hurry up and kill Ryan.

The door to Ryan's office is locked, so you will have to climb a long flight of stairs up to a vent, through you will crawl into the foyer. Right in front of you is all the physical evidence of Jack's creation, over which is the words Would You Kindly written in blood. Surrounding Jack's smiling face are pictures of the people who had a hand in his creation. Below on the table are photos of Jack's fake memories, of the tanks where he spent most of his life, and of Jack himself in the Kashmir Restaurant and Medical Pavilion.

Through the unlocked door you wind your way to a hugh glass wall, on the other side of which is Ryan putting golf balls.

the death of ryan

The assassin has overcome my final defense, and now he's come to murder me, says Ryan when he notices you at last. As he expounds on the theme a man chooses; a slave obeys he reveals what the documents in the other room already made clear: Jack is Ryan's son, cooked up by Tennenbaum and Suchong into an assassin made perfectly pliant with the control phrase Would you kindly?, which Jack remembers Atlas using throughout his time in Rapture. Ryan drives that point by telling Jack Stop/sit/stand/run/stop/turn, would you kindly?

Atlas orders Jack to seize the genetic key off of Ryan's body and insert it into the self-destruct override. It is part of a massive machine that looks like old-style telephone relay panel, except that the panels are shaped like Rapture seascrapers.

atlas? what atlas?

With a sarcastic Nice work, boyo! and a long mocking laugh, you discover that there is no Atlas. The guy who had been guiding you all this time is Frank Fontaine, Ryan's supposedly dead enemy. As the machine finishes processing the key and shifts the screen from Ryan Industries to Fontaine Futuristics, Fontaine tells you to say hi to Ryan and sics security devices at you.

escape!

A Little Sister waits outside the door to the machine room. She guides you out of the office and to a vent, where other Little Sisters beckon you to enter. As you crawl inside, you fall down and loose consciousness.