We Tell Ourselves Stories

I don’t know how I survived the crash over Rapture’s waters. No one else did. I wonder now if there were any others to begin with. I had read the note given to me before takeoff, reminiscing about something my parents apparently told me while I was growing up—that I was special, I would do special things—and then everything was in flames. The water saved me, providing a protective envelope from the heat, and submerged the fire danced and the world shimmered in some sort of hallucination. I didn’t see what the sky looked like that night. I didn’t see any bodies in the water around me. I pulled myself panting from the cold and the wet and went further into its depths, where its embrace became throttling, became everything.

I rode into the city proper inside a personal submersible, and through Andrew Ryan’s zealous appeals I could feel the silence pressing in, forbidding. Whales glided mute in the corridors between buildings, large as the shadows of clouds, their lack of detail echoing the hard angles and malevolence of the architecture. Schools of fish flitted by my window; it seemed only the very big or the very small survived here. I was greeted by a man who pleaded for his life with money before he was killed, his body a strangled silhouette against the dim blue of the water, and then slumping, and I stood helpless behind glass.

I wandered the city hunting for the breath of other life. I ran from the deathly quiet of empty rooms and hallways into the bray of gunfights. Contact with other, sane, human beings seemed always limited by glass or radio; so I came to accept the junkies and the deranged as company enough. I stopped flinching as their bladed bodies hurtled towards me, and dispatched them quickly, sometimes with care. Our fights became intimate. Their rabid mutterings and anguished howls reverberated inside the decaying corpse of the city, and my soul listened.

This, more than what seemed to be any other argument against Ayn Rand’s philosophy, this loneliness is what damns her Objectivism. For a year after I read Atlas Shrugged I was impassioned with the might of the individual, and I was a monster. I became arrogant, holding friends to a set of values even I could not live up to, alienating both them and myself. And as I walked and killed in the empty hulk of Rapture I lived these values, and this individualism, and I too became empty.