Diary.00: Synopsis

BioShock (2007)

In 1960, Jack, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean, descends via a bathysphere from an isolated lighthouse into the ruined underwater city of Rapture. Rapture was built as a laissez-faire utopia by the ruthless magnate Andrew Ryan, who sought to escape the moral and political constraints of governments and religions to create a haven for society’s elite. However, the discovery of ADAM—a stem-cell substance granting superhuman abilities—ignited widespread madness. The city’s residents, driven to extreme addiction, mutated into monstrous “Splicers,” and a devastating civil war ultimately brought the society to ruin.

Guided over the radio by a charismatic resistance leader named Atlas, Jack sets out to escape the nightmare. Roaming the shattered corridors of Rapture are “Little Sisters”—young girls engineered to harvest ADAM from corpses—and “Big Daddies,” heavily armored cybernetic guardians bound to protect them. As Jack injects himself with ADAM to acquire superhuman powers, he is forced into brutal moral dilemmas: whether to “Harvest” the Little Sisters for their ADAM, killing them, or “Rescue” them, curing their corruption and restoring their humanity.

After fighting past Ryan’s desperate defenses and reaching his central command center, Jack is confronted with a staggering truth: he is actually Ryan’s biological child, bought as an embryo by the underworld mastermind Frank Fontaine, genetically modified for rapid growth, and mentally conditioned to be a sleeper assassin. The psychological trigger commanding his every action was Atlas’s seemingly polite habit phrase: “Would you kindly?” The plane crash and Jack’s absolute obedience were entirely engineered; every decision he believed he was making of his own free will was merely a scripted path. Proving Jack’s complete lack of autonomy, Ryan utters his famous doctrine—“A man chooses, a slave obeys”—and commands Jack to beat him to death with a golf club.

Immediately after Ryan’s murder, Atlas reveals his true identity as Fontaine and turns on Jack. However, saved by Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum and the Little Sisters, Jack breaks free from his mental conditioning and finally reclaims his true free will. Jack confronts Fontaine, who has mutated into a towering threat after injecting himself with massive quantities of ADAM. Jack’s ultimate fate after defeating Fontaine depends on the moral choices the player made throughout the journey:

If Jack rescued the Little Sisters, he brings them back to the surface world. He watches over them as they grow up, regain their humanity, and build happy lives, before passing away peacefully in his old age surrounded by their loving families. Conversely, if Jack harvested the Little Sisters, he usurps the throne as Rapture’s new tyrant. He ambushes a rescue submarine sent by the Navy, seizes its nuclear weapons, and plunges the world into an era of terror and chaos.