BioShock: Rapture

“You know what they’re starting to call this parta Rapture under the train station? Pauper’s Drop! Can you beat that? Pauper’s Drop, Rupert! That’s where you’ve taken me! I shoulda listened to my old man. He warned me about you. What’re you doing over there? Look at you! You look like you’re getting all swollen up… it ain’t natural!”

He spun to face her—and look at the expression on her face! Sally knew she should’ve kept her mouth shut. Her scrambling away like that—that was a clue. She was trying to get to the door.

“Should’ve kept your mouth shut, woman!” he roared. The metal walls seemed to vibrate with the sound. “Your old man warned you, did he? I’ll show you somethin’ that old fool never thought of!”

She was tugging at the door handle. Rupert Mudge turned, seized the icebox, lifted it up, spun around— and threw it at her.

Funny how light it seemed in his hands…

And funny too, how fragile she turned out to be. She had seemed like a real terror, sometimes. A little ball of fury. But now, just a big wet red splash all over the rusty metal door. And the wall. And the floor. And the ceiling. And a head all by itself, facing into the corner…

Uh-oh. Sally was paying the bills around here. And now she was dead.

He’d better get out of here. Get over to Fontaine.

Mudge stormed out the door, headed for the passage to the Metro. Yeah—Fontaine’s. Find work there. Any work at all. No matter what they asked him to do. Because he had needs. That’s what Sally hadn’t understood. He had powerful needs—and a need to be powerful.

Arcadia, Rapture 1955

“You know what’s missing, here?” Elaine said, looking around at the enclosed parkland. “The sounds of birds. There’re no birds in Rapture.” A soft, golden, artificial light suffused the air. Pushed by hidden fan blades Bill himself had installed, the breeze blew the perfume of daffodils and roses to them.

Bill and Elaine were sitting on a bench holding hands. They’d decided to spend most of his day off together. They’d had lunch and then gone for a long walk. It was getting near dinnertime, but it was a delight being in the park. Smelling flowers, looking at the greenery. Hearing a stream chuckling and murmuring. He found himself wishing they’d brought their little girl, Sophie.

Not quite four years old, Sophie liked to scamper to the miniature wooden bridge and toss blades of grass into the creek of filtered water, watch them float downstream to vanish into the walls. She would play happily among the ferns, the artfully random boulders, the small trees.

Still, he reckoned Sophie was having a good time back in the flat, playing that Sea Treasure board game with Mascha, the little daughter of Mariska Lutz. Mariska was an Eastern European woman Elaine had hired out of Artemis Suites as a part-time nanny. Funny to think Sophie and Mascha had never known a world beyond Rapture. Ryan suppressed most images of the surface world in Rapture’s classrooms. That troubled Bill as much as The Journey to the Surface. But there were things that troubled him more. Like Mr. Gravenstein putting a gun to his head in front of his ruined grocery store. The memory still haunted Bill.

“No birds here, love, that’s right enough,” Bill said at last. “But there are bees. From the Silverwing Apiary. There goes one of the little buggers now…”

They watched the bee zip by: pretty much the only wildlife inside Rapture, unless you counted certain people. The bees were necessary to pollinate the plants, and the plants created oxygen for Rapture.

“Ah, there’s your pal Julie,” Elaine said. Her lips compressed as she watched Julie Langford walk up.

Bill glanced at Elaine. Did she really think he had some kind of hanky-panky going on with Julie Langford?

The ecological scientist was a compact woman of about forty, her pragmatic haircut held by barrettes. She wore transparent-framed glasses and olive-colored coveralls for her work in the tree farm and the other green zones of Rapture. Bill liked talking to her—liked her quickness, her independent way of thinking.

Julie Langford had worked for the Allies devising a defoliant in the Pacific, he knew, exposing Japanese jungle bases. He’d also heard that when Andrew Ryan talked her into coming to Rapture, the U.S. government had gotten peeved after she’d abandoned her federal job. She’d vanished, in fact, from North America. They’d been combing the world looking for her ever since.

“Hello, Bill, Elaine,” Julie said distractedly, glancing around at the plants. “Still not quite enough natural light getting through down here. Need to add more sunlight mirrors in the lighthouses. Those junipers are going brown around the edges.” She put her hands on her hips and turned politely to Elaine. “How’s your darling little girl?”

Elaine smiled distantly. “Oh Sophie’s good, she’s just learning to—”

“Good, good.” Julie turned impatiently back to Bill. “Bill, I’m glad I ran into you. I need to talk to you about the boss—just for a minute. Alone, if you don’t mind.”

Bill turned to his wife, wondering how she’d feel about it. “You mind, Elaine?”

“Go on, I’m fine. Do as you like.”

“Back in a mo’, love.” Clearly she wasn’t fine with him strolling off with Julie, but Elaine was a cheerful girl most of the time. It wouldn’t do her any harm to feel a little jealousy now and then, keep her from taking him for granted. He kissed Elaine on the cheek and walked off toward the little bridge with Julie, hands in his pockets, trying to look as unromantic as possible.

“Don’t mean to drag you away from the little lady,” Julie said in a way Bill thought was a bit condescending toward Elaine. “But I need an ally, and I know you love this park.”

“Right. What’s afoot, Julie?”

“I tell you, Bill—here I am, a batty plant woman working for years to expose the Japs in the jungle, melting away plant life, and now I’m down here trying to do the complete opposite. ‘We’ll create a second Eden down there,’ Ryan says. All that, and now he wants to turn this place into a paying tourist attraction—for residents of Rapture, I mean.”

“What? But I thought this was a public park.”

“So it was to be. But he doesn’t really believe in public ownership of anything. And he’s trying to keep up with Fontaine. So he’s raising capital. Which means charging for everything you can imagine. Hires me to build a forest at the bottom of the ocean—then turns a walk in the woods into a luxury. Something you have to pay for! You know how he is. ‘Should a farmer not be able to sell his food? Is a potter not entitled to a profit from his pots?’ But what am I going to do? He’s my boss, but he listens to you, Bill. Maybe you can talk him out of this. We need some kind of free public space in Rapture. A commons. People just need it—they need the breathing room.”

Bill nodded, glancing at his wife, pleased to see Anya Anyersdotter had stopped to talk to her. Elaine was smiling. She liked Anya, a smartly dressed little woman in a pageboy haircut, prone to freethinking. Anya designed shoes and clothes and had her own boutique—one of Rapture’s success stories.

Bill turned back to Julie. “But here, what am I to do, Julie? You know about his own private forest fire?”

“What? No!”

“Oh yeah. Tells me: ‘I once bought a forest. Then they,’ says he, ‘claimed the land belonged to God— demanded I establish a public park there. A public park, where the rabble can stand about gawping, pretending they’ve earned that natural beauty! Land that I owned! Congress under that bastard FDR tried to nationalize my forest—so I burnt it to the ground.’”

“Not truly…”

“Oh yes. Truly. You think he could be talked into making anything into public property?”

She made a soft little grunting sound and shook her head. “Maybe not.” She gestured at the gemlike parkland around them. “Once he told me, ‘God did not plant the seeds in Arcadia. I did.’ But I designed all this— with a little help from Daniel Wales…”