BioShock Rapture

“I’m not ready to share all my secrets with you yet, Bill, but that is in fact a perfect merging of glass—and metal. Something new called submolecular bonding. Astonishingly pressure resistant. Expensive, but worth every cent.”

The two vehicles paused under the curving transparent pane of the tunnel, and Bill gazed into the shaded blue distances of the sea. He glimpsed great shadowy shapes swimming along out there, murk-veiled outlines not quite definable—appearing and vanishing. An object on the seabed about five hundred yards away gave off a faint red glow.

“What’s that—glowing, over there?”

“That’s our geothermal energy valve,” said Ryan. “We lost three men setting it up,” he added casually. “But now it seems quite secure…”

“Three men lost?” Bill looked at him, suddenly feeling what a deep, cold place this was. “How many have died working out here?”

“Oh, not so many. Why, when they built the Panama Canal, Bill—how many do you think died there?”

Bill thought back to his reading as he watched the silhouette of a bathysphere drifting by overhead. “If I recall, the French lost about fifteen thousand men. When the Americans finished the job, another five thousand died.”

Ryan nodded briskly. “Risk, Bill—nothing is built without risk. Build an ordinary house and lay the foundations a few inches wrong, the whole thing might collapse on you. Men died for the canal. Men died in the building of great bridges, died attempting to scale the highest mountains. Pioneers died crossing deserts. But we don’t take pointless risks. We are observing safety precautions—we don’t wish to lose skilled workers. Ah”—Ryan pointed— “look there.”

Bill saw something like a giant lobster flying over, fifty feet long. Then it passed from a patch of dimness into the glow around the edges of Rapture, and he saw it was one of the smaller, specialized submarines he’d glimpsed earlier. Beams of light projected from headlights like shining eyes; its jointed, pincered mechanical arms were extended to grasp a big ornate segment of metal wall lowering on a cable.

Bill watched a gripper move up opposite it, mechanical arms poised to help ease the big metal section into place on a wall. The wall sections appeared to be sculpted, prefabricated metal pieces. Bill thought of the way the Statue of Liberty had been constructed, with the separate pieces made in Europe, then shipped to America and fitted precisely together to form the gargantuan figure.

He noticed there was no one in the small cockpit at the rear of the gripper—he could just make out the connective control cable trailing behind it.

“How does anyone see enough to control it?” he asked. “The controller watches through a window?”

Ryan smiled. “He’s watching on a screen. We use a television camera on that one.”

“Television! Me second cousin in the Bronx had one. Got a headache, me, when I tried to watch one of those boxes, not a week ago. Fellas caperin’ about in dresses, dancing packs of cigarettes…”

“The technology can be used for more than entertainment,” Ryan said. He pointed across the site. “One of our supply submarines…”

Bill saw it gliding along on the far side of Rapture’s foundations: a larger submarine, without mechanical arms, that could almost have belonged to the British Navy—except that it was pulling a massive oblong shape behind it on a doubled chain. “It’s towing freight in some kind of container,” he remarked.

“There is a little air in the cargo bag, for buoyancy,” Wallace said. “Mostly it contains some dry goods and medical supplies. All netted together.”

“Costly process,” Ryan said. “Off we go, Wallace…”

Wallace returned to the gripper, and they drove on, through tunnel after tunnel, passing through domes crowded with tool racks, machinery, tables. Here and there a lighted window looked out into the deep. Just outside a dome window a crowd of translucent pink jellyfish billowed, trailing long, delicate-looking stingers. A strong smell of sweat and old laundry was a physical presence in the domes; some were partly screened off, and Bill glimpsed men sleeping in cots back there.

“The construction goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” Ryan said. “The men work in shifts, ten hours on, fourteen off. We have a recreation dome where beer is sold, music is played, movies are shown. They showed the latest Cagney film there last week…”

“Fan of ’opalong Cassidy meself,” Bill murmured, as they passed into another covered tunnel. A transparent panel gave a glimpse of workers in deep-sea diving suits wrestling a culvert-sized copper pipe into place.

“We’ll be sure to get you some Hopalong Cassidy films to watch when you’re down here,” Ryan said.

“Will I be working down here a great deal, then?”

“You’ll be with me in New York much of the time. And in Reykjavík. I need the perspective of someone I can trust. But we’ll be down here too—I intend to supervise the next stage closely. Rapture will be my legacy. I fully expect to spend the rest of my life down here, once the city is built.”