BioShock: Rapture

Steinman took a cigarette from the box on the coral desk, lit it with a silver lighter shaped like a human nose, and got up to open the curtains on his office port hole so he could gaze out at the sea—at kelp and sea fans waving in the current. Restful, that view. Nothing like New York. Always hectic in the Big Apple. People interfering with a man.

It was the implied condemnation he resented, the small-minded judgment of his greatness. How to explain what it was like to reach out for the planet Venus, in hopes of making it his pocket watch? How could he explain that he was sometimes visited by the goddess Aphrodite? He had heard the goddess’s voice so clearly…

“My darling Doctor Steinman,” said Aphrodite. “To create like the gods is to be a god. Can only a god fashion a face? You have done it again and again—you have taken what was lumpen and made it exquisite; you have taken the mediocre and made it the marvelous. But in every man and woman’s face a secret is hidden. The lost perfection—masked. Under the face of a woman whom low, vulgar people regard as ‘beautiful’ is another face, the perfect face, the Platonic ideal—hidden under the surface beauty. If you can liberate the perfect face from the almost perfect, you become a god. What is more important than beauty? It was I, Aphrodite herself, who inspired the poet Keats. Truth is beauty; beauty is truth! The hidden symmetry underlying the ugly irregularity of surface reality. And here is the paradox: only by passing through the dark gate of chaos, through the shadowy valley of so-called ‘ugliness,’ is the quest at last completed and the hidden perfection found!”

Oh, how the goddess had thrilled him! Yes, it was true that he’d heard her voice while taking ether—cocaine and ether by turns, in fact—but it had been no mere hallucination. He was sure of that.

So when Ryan had approached him, saying that innovative surgeons would be needed in Rapture, he’d heard Aphrodite whispering to him again: “Here it is! Here is the chance, here is the opportunity, here is the secret realm you’ve dreamed of, where you can at last unearth perfection! A refuge where the small-minded scorners cannot find you!”

Steinman blew a plume of blue smoke toward the ceiling vent and turned to look at himself in the office mirror. He knew very well he was a “handsome” man. The elegant chin, the striking ears, the dark eyes, that understated, perfectly clipped mustache like an accent mark over a bon mot when he uttered a witticism…

And yet there was another face under that one waiting to come out. Did he dare to find his own perfect face? Could he do surgery on his own face—perhaps using a mirror? Could he—

“Doctor? Miss Pleasance is waking up…”

He glanced up at the doorway, where his assistant waited for him: Miss Chavez, a small, pretty Puerto Rican woman in a white uniform, white shoes, nurse’s cap. She didn’t seem surprised to find him gazing into the mirror.

Chavez was a petite little creature with a heart-shaped face, Cupid’s-bow lips. Could he find that perfect face underneath Miss Chavez’s features? Suppose he were to reduce the pterygoideus muscles by half, then doubly tighten the temporalis muscle, and he might just bisect the eyelids…

All in good time. “Ah—yes, go ahead and begin unwrapping her face, Miss Chavez; I’ll be right there…”

Miss Sylvia Pleasance was engaged to Ronald Greavy, son of the Ruben Greavy who worked closely with Ryan. They were an influential family in Rapture.