Chapter 39
Point Prometheus
The air vent was musty and claustrophobic, and Stanley Poole was trying not to gag on the stench of the slime and mold he was having to crawl through. He was proud of just how many 'back door's he had found to many of Rapture's key areas, and this one had been particularly hard to find back in Fontaine's heyday. Back when Stanley had still been a high roller with the Rapture Tribune, before his days spent infiltrating Dionysus Park, he had been trying to compete with Ralph Spinner, or simply "Paparazzi" as the city had come to nickname him due to his reputation as the most intrusive and thorough journalist in the city. Ralph Spinner had seemingly been obsessed with Fontaine, and had been seen scouting out every single property Fontaine owned in Rapture, and even spent countless hours squatting outside his Mercury Suites Penthouse.
The key area that Spinner hadn't been able to get into however, had been Point Prometheus - mainly because it's 'neutral' status as the ADAM gathering facility that fed both Fontaine's and Ryan's companies, had meant twice the security. However, when the job came through from Augustus Sinclair on behalf of Andrew Ryan to dig up whatever dirt he could find on Sofia Lamb, they had given Stanley access to some of the cities most detailed blue prints back when they had planned a physical infiltration rather than the social infiltration that had ultimately seen Stanley welcomed into Dionysus Park.
Hoping to take the lead over Spinner before having to devote himself to the ruse of being the newest member of the Rapture family, Stanley had used the blue prints made available to him to find himself a direct route into Point Prometheus. Unfortunately, Sofia Lamb had pushed forward their meeting, and he had never had the chance to test this route until now.
A decade ago, this air duct would have been warm and clean, kept up by the army of maintenance personnel employed by Ryan Industries, but the decade of war and mismanagement had let all manner of shit, piss and rotting sewage build up, and Stanley could only prey the length of the pipe was nowhere near as long as it appeared on the blueprints.
Crawling onwards with only a torch in one hand to light his way, he passed several dead cats at various stages of decay, and one female splicer that must have been trying her best to reach some ADAM - daft old girl had nearly made it. Finally, Stanley could make out some light coming through a dirty grill at the end of the pipe. A good swing of his torch broke the grill away, and with a sigh of relief he spilled out of the air duct into a small storage room. The single light overhead was intermittently blinking, and a blanket of cobwebs covered a number of medical cabinets, a dirty hospital gurney and a number of forgotten propane tanks. Assuming he was fairly safe in a room that hadn't been visited in possibly the last decade, he swiftly took off his satchel, and changed into the spare set of clothes he had carried with him, casting the grimy clothes he had come in back down into the pipe.
Wishing he had a dose of the 'Peeping Tom' plasmid to hand, Stanley carefully began to open the door. It led out into the large atrium that sat at the heart of Point Prometheus. Whilst oozing his way through the air ducts, Stanley had considered this mission given to him by Grace Holloway a fools errand and most likely a wild goose chase - but that assumption was quickly proven false. As Stanley moved to peer over the banister down into the lower level of Point Prometheus, he was stunned to see a hive of activity. The entire lower level had been re purposed with each wall lined with large water tanks. Several Big Daddies were stomping through, depositing large numbers of sea slugs into the tanks from nets that hung over their backs. Wide-eyed, Stanley watched in amazement at just how many sea slugs those big lugs had managed to gather, there had to be hundreds already in the tanks.
Suddenly, a sound that struck Stanley to his very core came from the far end of the atrium. It was a sound that brought up the memory of one of Stanley's greatest mistakes, the one that ultimately led to his fall from grace and alienation from Raptures population. The little girl's singing was almost indistinguishable from that of little Eleanor Lamb - the girl he had sold off to the Little Sister's Orphanage in desperation when she had threatened to expose him and his efforts to completely ruin Sofia Lamb. Looking down in horror, the girl even looked a little like Eleanor. It had been a while since Stanley had seen any children in Rapture - of course the spliced up idiots that roamed the ruins of the city still fucked like rabbits, but their excessive ADAM addiction had either rendered them infertile, or had resulted in their children being still born. Any children that had made it to term and survived the birth had been left to fend for themselves in a city that was itself insane - so it took no stretch of the imagination to figure out how long a child alone would survive. Yet, there one was, a little girl of around six or seven, walking hand in hand with a tall, broadly-built man in a dirty lab coat, towards the facility at the far end of the atrium, the 'Little Wonders Educational Facility'.
Even a selfish, shallow man such as Stanley Poole, could feel the tug at his heart strings, as that sweet little girl vanished through those doors. He knew all too well what would now be done to her, what she would become. It was happening again - Grace was right, and he would have to break it to her.