“A city where the artist would never fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small.”

Andrew Ryan’s dreams were, indeed, big. Growing up during the Russian Revolution and witnessing Bolsheviks rise to power, he relied on the belief that “everyone gets what they deserve” after what he had experienced. It was this notion that made him fled Russia to go to America where intelligence and determination were justly rewarded. There, the idea of “anyone who battens on others undeservingly is nothing more than a parasite” found a niche in his mind. Because of that, he did everything in his power to make fortune and fame. The devastating effects of the World War II prompted him to use his power and ideals to achieve the impossible, to create an utopia: A city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean only for the ones who deserved… Rapture.

In the year 1946, Andrew Ryan spent all his well-earned fortune and took the first step to bring Rapture into being somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, far beneath the surface of the ocean where even the sunlight didn’t reach. First, the resources and the workers were transported to the coordinates, where the city was to be built, by Ryan’s personal steamship Olympian. Later on, a huge platform was built and everything was taken down to the ocean floor, to their final construction place. The city, which was designed to be self-sustaining, was using the power of the underwater volcanoes for electricity, food production, water treatment and defense systems.

And later, the privileged people of Rapture started to take up residence in the city. Each and every one of them was “the world’s best and brightest” as described by Ryan. Artists, scientists, big names of the industry… All started to vanish from history without a trace one after the other. Although this incident, which was called “The Vanishing” by the media, played into the hands of the conspiracy theorists, those brilliant people were actually moving to Rapture to live a life of freedom as they were promised.

At that very moment, the first crack in the Ryan’s brilliant plan burst into sight: The workers, who built the city itself, were left jobless as there was no sustained labour for them after the completion of the magnificent construction. Some among them tried to adapt to their new jobs and lives, whereas most of them were assigned to the “temporary” houses which were damp, dirty, crammed and isolated from the rest of the city. Ryan and the Central Council generally chose to ignore the problems on this particular matter as they believed that the workers would find their ways to deserve their places in Rapture.

The second crack came from the upper class of Rapture. Even though they were enjoying their freedom to the full, it was pretty hard, even for the best representatives of the human race, to get used to living without sunlight. Sophia Lamb, a successful psychologist who studied at Oxford University, was brought to Rapture to solve this psychological problem that harshly contradicted with Andrew Ryan’s optimum ambience. Dr. Lamb’s selfless and idealist approach made her gain popularity among Rapture’s citizens in a short period of time. Her methods were in great conflict with that of Ryan’s, who believed that everyone had to strive to get what they deserved, as Dr. Lamb held public welfare in high esteem and tried to live up to her own utopia by enlightening the citizens of Rapture. She was already gathering followers because of her deeds, such as giving free therapy sessions to the poor and deliberately losing a lot of money in poker to those who were actually in need of cash.

Roughly around that time, another doctor, Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum, made a discovery that would change Rapture’s fate radically. While passing through the docks in Neptune’s Bounty, she saw a man, whose hands she knew had been crippled during the war, was recovered from his disorder. When he was questioned about the miraculous restoration of his hand, the man told the doctor that he had been bitten by a sea slug. Knowing that this would be an important discovery, she immediately started to look for sponsors. Although she was looked down on by the other scientists in Rapture, she was funded by Frank Fontaine -a businessman of Neptune’s Bounty who was known for his cruelty. But to get that funds, she had to transfer all the profit and claims that she would get from the project to him. Financing Dr. Tenenbaum with the fortune that he had made through smuggling, Fontaine put his signature under Rapture’s brightest but also the darkest discovery.

Tenenbaum’s studies showed that the substance that the sea slugs released from their bodies acted like stem cells and had the ability to manipulate human DNA. With this substance, the untreatable diseases would be cured and the human evolution would be taken to unimaginable phases. It was “the rebirth” of mankind and, thus, was named “ADAM”.

The discovery of ADAM was only the beginning of all the studies on the miraculous substance. When the other scientists, who had looked down on Tenenbaum at first, joined her research, new properties of ADAM were revealed. The most important one among them all was that when placed in the abdominal regions of young girls, a symbiotic bond with the slugs would enable the creatures to produce 20%-30% more ADAM than normal. And Fontaine needed too many girls in order to have enough production to hit the market the way he planned to. So he founded his “Little Sister’s Orphanage” and used the girls as hosts to double the production. In the meantime, he was encouraging the families of Rapture to send their young girls to the orphanage for better supervision and education. The girls, who went under physical and mental transformation due to the sea slugs producing ADAM in their bodies, were given the name “Little Sisters” in accordance with the name of the orphanage.