BioShock Rapture

Ryan tossed the pencil on the desk, tented his fingers, and scowled broodingly. “Fontaine is shaping up to be my great rival here. He can only sharpen me. It is like fuel for the fire of my talent. But I cannot let him come to fully dominate the marketplace in Rapture. No. I may have to take action. We may have to get tough with Mr. Fontaine…”

Maintenance Station 17

Early 1955

It was right depressing, visiting the old maintenance workers’ colony. Bill McDonagh didn’t like coming here. It made him feel obscurely guilty as he walked along from the Metro passage to the back of the pawnshop at the corner, picking his way past moraines of trash. Bill felt responsible for Rapture—he sure hadn’t planned on any slums.

Someone had written “Welcome to Pauper’s Drop” in red across one wall in dripping paint. Below it, a long, tatty row of sullen indigents squatted against the metal bulkhead, shivering, some of them in carapaces of cardboard. The heating duct for this area was blocked, and the few merchants down here were reluctant to pay the Ryan Industries service fee for getting them unblocked. Bill had come down to do it in his spare time. Not that he would tell Ryan that. If Ryan knew he was doing charity work …

Bill had gotten Roland Wallace to help—each swearing the other to secrecy—and Wallace promised he’d bring an electrician along. But neither Wallace nor his wire jockey was here now.

Bill was beginning to feel nervous about being here alone. The surly unemployed along the wall watched his every step. He heard them muttering as he went along. One of them said, “She’s watching him too…”

He was relieved to see Roland Wallace at the corner. With Wallace was a bearded man in overalls, carrying a toolbox—a tall, gaunt man with an aquiline profile.

“Oi!” Bill called, his breath steaming in the chill. “Wallace!” Wallace saw him and waved. Bill hurried to him. “I’m bloody well glad to see you, mate,” Bill said, keeping his voice low. “These ragamuffins over ’ere’ve been giving me the gimlet eye. Half-expecting a knock in the head.”

Wallace nodded, looking past him at the ill-kempt men and women along the wall, many with bottles in hand. “Drinking too, a lot of them. No rules against making your own in Rapture—someone’s been selling cheap absinthe to this bunch, I hear. Three people died from bad hooch, and two went blind.” He cleared his throat. “Well, come on—the best way into the duct is in the back of the pawnshop. Glad to get the heat working here—it’s damn cold…”

The electrician said nothing, though it seemed to Bill that the man was muttering to himself under his breath, his hawkish, deep-set eyes darting this way and that. Bill noticed thick red blotches on the man’s forehead.

They stepped over small piles of trash and went around a quite large one to get to the back of the pawnshop. “There’s no trash pickup here either?” Bill asked.

“We can’t afford it.”

“You live down here too?”

“Why you think I’m doing this job free?” the electrician said, clipping the words. His tone dripped venom. “Need the heat. Can’t get into the ducts without you Ryan Industries types along. Not if I don’t want the constables after me.”

Bill nodded and thumped on the back door of the pawnshop.

“Who is it?” called a gruff voice from inside.

“Bill McDonagh! Looking for Arno Deukmajian! You got my Jet Postal?”

“Yeah, yeah, come on in.” The man who opened the brass-sheathed door looked as gruff as his voice sounded. He was a squat-faced man in a rumpled suit with a scar through his lower lip. His arms were too long for his suit jacket. His hair was bristly short. “Yeah, I’m Arno Deukmajian. This here’s my shop. Come in, come in … if you have to.”

The three men entered the dusty, dimly lit back room where there was barely room to move about. Piled floor to ceiling were appliances, radios, lady’s shoes, gowns, boxes of guns, boxes of watches, silver picture frames, anything that could be hocked. “I’ve cleared off the trapdoor,” Deukmajian said. “This place was built right over it.”

Building over the trapdoor might’ve been a violation of some building regulation up on the surface, Bill figured, but in Rapture there were almost no building regulations.

Wallace had the key. He knelt on the metal floor and opened the trapdoor, as the electrician held an electric torch for him. The light slanted down to reveal a grimy iron shaft and a rusty ladder.