BioShock Rapture

Bill chuckled, tucking her hand under his arm. “That happens when a place is settled with people, love. They bring the worst and best with ’em wherever they go. People’ve got to have some place to let their ’air … their hair down. Got to have their Fort Frolic.”

They went down the stairs to the lower atrium, past Robertson’s Tobaccoria, and she sighed as they passed Eve’s Garden. She looked at it askance. “A strip club was necessary, was it?”

Bill shrugged. “Especially necessary, some would say—with all the men we’ve got here. Men building, working maintenance. Now me, I don’t need any such diversion. I’ve got the best-looking bird in Rapture to admire.”

“Well, don’t expect a strip show.” She batted her eyes at him like a flapper in a movie. “Until we get home I mean.”

“That’s my girl!”

She laughed. “Oh I don’t mean to sound like a bluenose—Let’s get some wine in Sinclair Spirits … or maybe something in the Ryan Club. You’d probably rather have ale…”

“It’s wine for milady! But we’ve got tickets for the show at Fleet Hall, love. Thought we’d have our drinks after.”

“Oh, Fleet Hall! I’ve been wanting to see it. That Footlight Theater place is kind of cramped.”

“Fleet’s big. Mr. Ryan planned for big all through Rapture.”

She glanced quizzically up at him. “You really admire Mr. Ryan, don’t you, Bill?”

“What, me? You know I do! Gave me everything I’ve got, he has. I was installing toilets, love—and he made me a builder of a new world!”

They passed the liquor and drug emporium Le Marquis D’Epoque—which was quite thronged, mostly with young men. He saw someone he knew inside, the rat-faced Stanley Poole, shifting from foot to foot, nervously buying a vial of some narcotic. Bill hurried on, not wanting to talk about the place with his wife—and not wanting to make small talk with the execrable Poole.

The piped music had become Fats Waller jazzily banging out the Jitterbug Waltz. Happy voices echoed from the high spaces of the atrium. People looked a bit ghostly in the reflected light from the neon, but they were happy ghosts, smiling, teasing one another. A young red-haired woman squealed as a young man pinched her. She remembered to slap him, but not very hard.

Bill saw one of Sullivan’s constables, big Pat Cavendish, looking like a hotel dick in his cheap suit and badge, swaggering about, hands in his pockets and gun on his hip, leering at a parcel of young girls.

Elaine brightened when they came to the Sophia Salon, and Bill resigned himself to standing about with his hands in his pockets as Elaine poked through the finery in the “high fashion” boutique. He bought her a nightgown and a new coat to be delivered to their flat, and then it was time to go back upstairs to Fleet Hall.

They hurried out of the boutique and up the stairs, where Bill spotted the architect Daniel Wales talking to Augustus Sinclair. But the younger Wales was in close conversation with the mercurial businessman and didn’t even look up.

Bill peered up at the ceiling, thinking about watertight integrity, and was pleased to see no sign of leakage. Some parts of Rapture were more scrupulously maintained than others. This one was pampered like a baby’s bottom.

It seemed to Bill that Rapture was thriving: the Atlantic Express rumbled efficiently from one building to another. Shops bustled with business. Rapture’s galleries and atriums glowed with light; its art deco fixtures gleamed with gold leaf. Crews of workmen kept the carpets clean, picked up trash, and repaired cracks in bulkheads. Looking down at the lower atrium, the increasing crowd, and the shining signs, Rapture seemed fully alive, thrumming with economic brio. And just maybe Mr. Ryan, the Wales brothers, Greavy—just maybe they couldn’t have done it without Bill McDonagh.

Bill and Elaine reached Fleet Hall, pausing to admire the grand blue-and-white sign. The archway was tricked out with radiant lines of white neon. A buzz of mingled conversations came from inside. Bill pressed Elaine’s arm to him and bent and kissed her cheek, and they went in.

The big, ornate concert hall was thronged, and they had seats in the orchestra section. The lights went down, the band struck up, and the musical Patrick and Moira commenced. It was a Sander Cohen production, thankfully without Cohen in it, and Elaine was enthralled. Bill found it all rather sentimental and a tad morbid—the play was about a ghostly couple who found each other in the afterlife—but he was happy to be there with Elaine, pleased she was having a good time. She seemed lost here on occasion. Now—he felt like they’d really found their place in the world … deep under the sea.

Heat Loss Monitoring, Hephaestus

1950