The world of Rapture is filled with power players, scientists, and those who simply know how to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. And no opportunity was bigger than the one following the Fall of Rapture. Ryan’s demise created a void atop the Rapture food chain as big as the city itself. Here are a few of the folks rushing in to fill it.
Andrew Ryan
The wealthy industrialist who founded the City of Rapture. Ryan envisioned the underwater city as a place where the finest minds of the surface world would gather to pursue their callings without government interference. As every citizen worked in his or her own self-interest, unhindered on moral, social, or legal grounds, Rapture society as a whole would become the greatest society on Earth.
But as the realities of a society without moral boundaries bore down on Rapture and the city spiraled into chaos, Ryan flailed desperately to bring it back under his control. Dissidents like Sofia Lamb simply ‘disappeared’. Eventually, Ryan became the very thing that he built Rapture to escape—a dictator, ruling Rapture with an iron fist.
When Frank Fontaine began threatening Ryan’s position of power, Ryan seized his businesses, instituted strict city-wide curfews, and even began executing dissidents in Apollo Square. In 1960, a daring assassination plot ended in the death of Andrew Ryan. It had seemed that that utopian dream of Rapture died with him… until now.
Brigid Tenenbaum
The brilliant scientist who discovered the miraculous substance known as “ADAM” inside a sea-slug, and developed the process of implanting it into young girls to produce the Little Sisters.
Brigid Tenenbaum is a survivor: once icy and emotionless, she escaped the Holocaust by assisting her captors in their inhuman experiments on her own fellow prison camp inmates. She prospered in Rapture by corrupting a generation of innocent girls, sentencing them to be Little Sisters—and by extension, creating the ADAM addiction that destroyed the city.
But as Rapture fell, Tenenbaum had a change of heart, and experienced remorse for the first time. Since then, she has sought redemption. Long ago she developed a Plasmid to cure the Little Sisters, and worked to return them to humanity in order to rescue them all from Rapture.
Now she is trying to stop whoever is responsible for the creation of the new ones wandering the city.
Sofia Lamb
Sofia Lamb is both an Oxford-educated psychiatrist and philosophical idealist. She was brought to Rapture to counsel the populace. Her worldviews were shaped by her experiences aiding the survivors of the nuclear blast at Hiroshima. She was very near the blast, but miraculously survived—only to find that everyone she had met for the past several years was dead.
The US justification for the bombing—the ‘greater good’—was a perversion of her own beliefs. She believes that genetic biases toward the self have doomed the surface world, and so she sought refuge in the underwater city of Rapture.
Her intent in joining Ryan’s great experiment was to transform the closed society into an enlightened one through psychiatry—ultimately to abolish human suffering amongst the Utopians. Her daughter, Eleanor, was raised in isolation from other children, intended as a genius-level intellect trained to promote Lamb’s philosophy. An underground religion began to form around her, born out of the city’s disenfranchised, and Lamb took full advantage of it.
But Lamb’s collectivist ideals conflicted directly with those of Andrew Ryan, and she mysteriously vanished during the Fall of Rapture. Later, she crossed paths with Subject Delta, murdering Eleanor’s beloved bodyguard in order to retrieve her from his care.
Now that Ryan and Fontaine are gone, Lamb has returned—and it seems she has a new plan for Rapture…
Eleanor Lamb
Born in Rapture to Sofia Lamb, Eleanor’s early childhood lacked a father or any other adult influence. Her genius was carefully cultivated in order to build the perfect vessel for Lamb’s own altruistic philosophy. Eleanor was isolated from other children for years, but was headstrong and rebellious, teaching herself to disable Lamb’s sophisticated security measures and explore the city on her own. Her true aim was to see the surface world her mother abandoned—a place about which she has only read.
When the elder Lamb was incarcerated by Andrew Ryan, a series of events led to Eleanor becoming a Little Sister—a ghoulish, ADAM-carrying hybrid. Ultimately she was bonded to Subject Delta as his personal ward, and was psychologically conditioned to love him as her father.
After her mother murdered Subject Delta to reclaim Eleanor, she spent many years in Lamb’s ‘care’. But taking control of Rapture had changed Lamb. She managed to rehabilitate Eleanor psychologically—but regards the girl’s physical condition as a blessing in disguise, subjecting Eleanor to many experiments involving ADAM.
Eleanor has been trying to escape ever since, and considers Subject Delta both father and ally in this plan.
Augustus Sinclair
An entrepreneur who puts profit above all else—ethics, honesty, and even the lives of others. Sinclair likes to keep a low profile and will happily exploit anyone and everyone in order to make a buck. In Rapture’s heyday, Sinclair founded a number of money-making institutions through a firm called Sinclair Solutions, including the low-rent housing in Pauper’s Drop and home testing of experimental Plasmids on desperate addicts.
As Rapture started to fall down around him, he saw a business opportunity: to gather up all the amazing scientific advancements discovered by the great minds of the city, bring them back to the surface, and sell them off to the highest bidder.
He needs you to secure his escape from Rapture, so that he can return to the surface and complete his plan. Unlike Andrew Ryan, he doesn’t believe that altruism is evil, but simply unprofitable. He’s helping you to help himself.
Grace Holloway
An alluring torchlight singer at the Limbo Room jazz club in her more youthful days, Grace joined Sofia Lamb’s cult-like organization during the Fall of Rapture. All her life she longed to be a mother, and was overjoyed when she was able to adopt Eleanor Lamb when Lamb was detained by Ryan’s agents.
But one night, Grace took Eleanor to a clandestine gathering of Lamb’s followers in her absence and Eleanor disappeared. Grace still pines after the missing girl, who was subsequently turned into a Little Sister after being abducted.
She harbors a deep resentment for anyone involved… including Subject Delta.
Stanley Poole
A self-described “ace newsman” who once worked for the Rapture Tribune, Stanley was employed by Andrew Ryan to infiltrate the Rapture Family—Lamb’s organization. His charge was to find proof of Lamb’s collectivist ideas beneath the veneer of private religion, and to sabotage her in any way he could along the way. Over time, he became involved in far more aggressive tactics against dissidents in Rapture.
But when Ryan was killed, Stanley found himself imprisoned within that lie, and has worked for Lamb ever since. Now, he seeks to hide the evidence of his crimes against her, and has enlisted Subject Delta to help him ensure that his past stays buried.
Gil Alexander
Gil was an ambitious young researcher in the early days of Fontaine Futuristics, specializing in mechanical and robotic engineering. At the height of his career, he designed much of Rapture’s automated security system, including the ubiquitous security bots. He constructed the mechanism which implanted ADAM slugs into Little Sisters, and ultimately, even assisted with the creation of the bond which links Subject Delta to Eleanor Lamb.
After the deaths of Fontaine, Ryan, and several of the city’s key players, Alexander relished the opportunity to grab the title of the corporation’s head scientist, taking over from Dr. Yi Suchong. But since the fall of Rapture, he came to see his own role in a new light and wished to make amends. Before long, he fell in love with Sofia Lamb, who used his guilt to manipulate him into volunteering for an experiment of her own.