Dysmey Post > Projects & Stuff > Bioshock 2 > Something In The Sea
Something In The Sea [→] is a marketing site previewing events leading to the release of Bioshock 2. It tells the story of an average man's struggle to find his kidnapped daughter, and the clues that lead him to travel to Rapture in order to find her.
In 1967, little girls had disappeared from seaside communities in countries along the coast of the north Atlantic Ocean. A detective named Mark Meltzer had been following the disappearances and tried to capture the kidnapper, whom he called the Traveller. It was too much for him, breaking his leg and several ribs. Worse, it followed Meltzer to his home — and kidnapped his daughter Cindy!
That was on 21 October 1967. Six months later, after his release from a mental hospital, Meltzer began his search to find his Cindy.
Meltzer, following a series of often deceptive clues and fending off the meddling of his estranged wife and the police, had discovered that thousands of very bright people — among whom Kyburz, McDonagh, Steinman, Suchong, and Tenenbaum — had vanished in the late 1940's. In fact, there was a name for such an event — the Vanishing
(McDonagh's nephew Flann knew about the Vanishing and dismissed it as a bunch of Ryanist buffoons, including his own uncle, going off to put Ryan's philo$ophy to the test. He was more right than he could know in predicting that [t]he narcissistic bastards found out the hard way that self-interest (i.e., greed) is a lousy foundation for a society.
)
The authorities at that time dismissed the disappearances as a result of the chaos following World War II, and chose to ignore them, just as they ignored the appearance of the Frozen Triangle, a section of the North Atlantic Ocean where ships and planes had a habit of disappearing.
In time Meltzer discovered a businessman, cryptography author and Lewis Carroll maven named Orrin Oscar Lutwidge. Lutwidge acted as an unwitting front and supplier for Andrew Ryan during the construction of a place called Rapture. Ryan abandoned Lutwidge after Rapture was sealed around 1952. Since then, an angry but intrigued Lutwidge had been searching for the city with the aid of a company of pawns
, including an Irish con artist name Jeremiah Lynch, tossing deceptive clues to throw off such unworthies
as the U.S. Government. Lutwidge then disappeared in 1958.
Lutwidge did indeed find Rapture, but just after the Civil War started. After becoming a splicer and fighting on Atlas' side, only to witness his comrades become MAD, Lutwidge managed to escape the city. A bitter Lutwidge returned to his New York laboratory, where he wrote of his journey with manic intensity under the name Rød Killian Quain. He then presented the work to an editor of a sci-fi magazine. The work made it, altered by the editor in serial form, as Behold, Utropolis!
Lutwidge, however, did not make it, as one of the unworthies
he duped, a wealthy French heiress named Celeste Roget, caught up with him and bribed the authorities into locking him up in the secured ward of the mental hospital for good. That was where Meltzer found him, after faking a psychotic episode. A brief visit won Meltzer the hospital dossier on Lutwidge and a puzzle cylinder from Lutwidge himself. Inside was a notebook telling of Lutwidge's visit to Rapture — and his emergence as a splicer.
Just as Meltzer faced his dark night of the soul, hope appeared in the form of an Art-Deco-ish sand castle in front of which is a message from his daughter in Lutwidge's cipher: "Wha[t i]s taking so long[?] Daddy[,] come find me[.]"
No longer bothered by the police (one of whom encountered the Traveller, who made of the sand castle) and with nothing further keeping him at home (his assets were frozen by his wife's divorce lawyer), Meltzer drove down to Baltimore to meet up with a UFO buff, who was the only one who believed in Meltzer's mission. The fan, in turn, secured passage for Meltzer on a ship that would, in time, take him to the lighthouse … and Rapture.
After a long voyage along the Atlantic coasts, visits to various pawns, and a three-way confrontation with Roget and Lynch, Meltzer at long last made it to Rapture. Unfortunately the boat that took him there did not: The final image of Meltzer's cabin is a flooded room with bullet holes in the walls; a sink full of blood to go with the blood splatters on the walls; and a dead spider splicer reflected in the mirror. On the back is the message written in blood: RAPTURE AWAITS.
Meltzer, having made it to the City, has done all this with the conviction that, whatever and wherever Rapture is, that is where his daughter — and her kidnapper the Traveller — will be. And he would stop at nothing — pretending to be insane to get to Lutwidge, riding an old rustbucket through the Atlantic, even fighting an armed man with only that man's book to shield him — in order to find her.