Richard Stone did not regret many things, but the few things he did regret were so great that they overshadowed his joys and accomplishments. Both of them marred his life like a carton of rotted eggs in the pantry, the stench overwhelming and tainting all it came in contact with.

His first regret had been his patriotic fervor in the closing year of the war. He was finally eighteen years old in the fall of 1944 and he had enlisted, although he could have easily gotten a legitimate pass to continue his work at his father's factory, aptly named Stone and Sons, where he had been training as a draftsman. Richard wanted to earn the respect of his peers and his elders, and simply helping to design the turrets and tank treads that ground the Nazis in red paste wasn't enough. Richard had looked so dashing in his drab olive uniform. His bright blue eyes sparkled gaily and his bright blonde hair rakishly ignored the reality that Richard could die. After all, he believed himself to be invincible; he was young and handsome and charming, the talented son of a wealthy industrialist. Surely death and suffering was for the dregs, for the unwashed masses, not for the well-bred scion of a proud pedigree.

Battle knows no barriers of class and wealth, and Richard took half a dozen bullets to his left hip and thigh from a German machine gunner near Dorsten during the Allie's final push to Berlin. He spent V-E day like he had spent the weeks leading up to it and the weeks afterwards-in an opiate haze and attended to by nurses. Efforts to save his leg were successful, although he had lost a considerable amount of muscle and flesh.

His wife, Dorothy, had married him the day before he shipped off. Her pretty face, with it's high cheekbones and coyly rounded mouth, had fallen when she saw that her dashing young husband was now grievously wounded with a morphine addiction. However, later that evening, when they retired to bed in their fashionable New York apartment, her face could not contain the horror when she beheld his naked wound. She had said that it looked like someone had taken an ice cream scoop and torn out chunks of his leg and hip.

Her words burned him, but he understood her revulsion for he felt it as well. His injuries were more than simply ugly. It affected nearly all aspects of his life-simply walking was a painful ordeal. Richard required a cane in order to hobble around the house sufficiently and he found it impossible to stand for longer than a few seconds. Injected morphine dulled the agony of rendered muscle enough for life to continue, but Richard quickly realized the stark fact that he was constantly requiring more and more painkillers just to be able to sit at his desk and work.

Lovemaking was, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Richard simply could not hold the position long enough without collapsing in agony and Dorothy refused to experiment with alternative methods, likening them to sodomy. Rejected by his wife and pitied by his friends, Richard threw himself into his work. He had nothing else to do with his time and the long hours of meticulous industrial drafting kept his mind off of the nearly constant pain, pain that oscillated between numb and fiery, depending on how badly Richard was determined to wean himself off of morphine that day. He sullenly lamented that he was designing weapons for a government that had stolen his youth and his health and alienated his wife and friends from him, but he kept his resentment silent for years, devoting himself to his work.

His second regret was coming to Rapture. His father, Franklin Stone, had been captivated by the promise of unending industry and of limitless potential. The elder Stone had grown weary of making weapons for Washington to use as toys in their squabble with the Reds, and had encouraged his sons to join him in the brave new world of free enterprise. Richard had been suspicious of the invitation from day one. Why would a perfect city need weapon manufacturers? But he had grown so disgusted with his life that he jumped at the opportunity to begin a new one. So in late 1949, at the age of twenty-three and having been handicapped for nearly five years, he made the choice to immigrate to Rapture with his wife, his parents, and one of his brothers, Rolland, who was still a bachelor.

Together they forged Stone and Sons into a successful business and churned out thousands of defensive turrets. As more and more people immigrated the demand for turrets skyrocketed. The state of having four solid walls constantly closing in on you made everyone nervous and paranoid, afraid that their neighbor would slice their throats in the middle of the night simply to grab whatever expensive little treats that had been exported from the surface at high prices. Their products were lauded as great technical achievements since they were able to recognize friend from foe. That accolade belonged to Rolland, who had used the sonic fingerprints emitted by known "friendly" people to be programmed into the sensors. But Richard had done his work as well, designing the turrets with masterful precision so that they would spring to life at a moment's notice and be accurate with its targeting.

By 1951 Stone and Sons had expanded into their own building and began to experiment with both hovering technologies and the sonic fingerprinting that Rolland had pioneered. The mechanics and practically of a flying defensive security turret meant that Richard saw even less of Dorothy, and what he did see of her he no longer even recognized. She had received plastic surgery to "fix" her nose, although Richard had seen nothing wrong with it to begin with. But he recognized the fad that the bored women were indulging in and sought to guide her in another direction, perhaps down a path where they could reconcile.

"There's much more you could do," Richard said one evening while they sat near the fire. It was almost always cold in Rapture, and the chill only served to aggravate his wounds. "You could learn something, or-"

"Most women have children to occupy their time," Dorothy had replied curtly. Her bitterness over their shared misfortune was a continual source of tension.

Richard bit his tongue. He wanted to harshly repute her with his own bitterness and anger, but he wanted to avoid confrontation with Dorothy. It was so tiring to fight with her all the time. Most of the time he bit back his angry comments

Dorothy lit a cigarette. "Marlene?" she called after a few moments.

Richard wondered why anyone would come to Rapture to work as a domestic. A ticket to Rapture was one-way, and why anyone would come to a watery tomb for a job they could have on the surface was baffling to him. He supposed that, like him, Marlene and her fellow low level workers had been trying to escape something in their lives. But just as he had been

conditioned to do on the surface, Richard's thoughts did not dwell too long on the less fortunate.

Marlene appeared from the dimly lit recesses of the apartment. She had worked for them since they had moved in. Like all people in Rapture her skin was pallid and lackluster. The absence of the sun had more than just cosmetic effects, however, and Richard was beginning to feel smothered emotionally by the fathoms that sequestered the city.

"Ma'am?" she asked, her voice flat with an unmentionable weariness.

"Prepare me a bath," Dorothy ordered without even glancing at Marlene. "Not too hot this time, I felt like a boiled lobster last night."

"Yes," Marlene replied slowly, then lumbered off towards the bathroom.

Dorothy sat in silence for a while, smoking several cigarettes in succession while Richard stared listlessly into the fire.

"I would like it if you reconsidered my advice," Richard said, trying hard to keep the frustration he harbored towards his wife's attitude under control. "You need to find something to do other than listen to the radio and chat with your friends."

"Don't you tell me what to do with my life," she snapped at him. "Isn't it enough that you dragged me down here? Do you want to manage everything I do?"

"I did not drag you down here," Richard firmly said, his frustration getting the better of him. "I gave you an option, an out. I thought you wanted the chance to leave me, and I gave you the dignified choice of coming with me or staying behind as opposed to a divorce. And you chose me, my dear, although if you chose me or my wealth is really the question, isn't it?"

Dorothy shot daggers at him. "How dare you?" she sharply shot at him. "I never-"

Richard stood up, wincing at the sudden rush of pain in his hip and leg. "This conversation is over, Dorothy. I tried to get through to you, yet you treat me like some kind of stupid and sick old man. You either begin to treat me like your husband or you can learn what life in the Sinclair Deluxe is like."

"You wouldn't really, would you?" she gasped at him.

He sighed and grabbed his cane, which was made of ebony and had a copper handle embellished with engravings. Richard was planning on stealing the bath that Marlene was preparing for his wife; heat was the only thing other than opium which could ease his pain. Maneuvering into the bathtub was a feat in and of itself though. "I do not want to spend the rest of my life with someone who will not engage with me in any way," he said and shifted his weight to his cane.

"Neither do I," Dorothy rebuffed.

"It's nice to agree about something for once," Richard said dryly and made his way out of the room, pitching about on an uneven but effective gait. "If you want to remain with me, Dorothy, you will have to start sleeping in the same bed with me, at the very least." In the last year she had taken to her own bed because of her repulsion of his injuries, which were healed but still sickening to Dorothy. His bones, covered only by thin scar tissue, jutted out at odd angles and she could not even bring herself to touch him at all anymore.

He groaned in annoyance as the familiar pain sunk its teeth into him. "You're disgusted with me, but not disgusted enough to do us both a kindness and leave," he continued, his tirade against her picking up steam as the pain ground against him. "I am the one who has to live with this, not you, and you can go any time you like."

Dorothy followed him, much to Richard's surprise. "You aren't the same man I married, you're a depressed man addicted to painkillers. How can you demand from me what wasn't the deal to begin with?"

Richard continued his shambling lope to the bath. "You want an intact man, hmm? Well go and pick yourself a waiter at Kashmir or one of Cohen's little pets," he shot back, unhappy that she had made a valid point. He had been depressed before they had come to Rapture, and the lack of sunshine and fresh air and contact with the outside world had only made it worse. Back in New York he has enjoyed simple things that were now intangible fancies-bird song, the soft glow of a winter's sunset, and even driving rain and blizzards. The view from the window here was always the same, always the same muted blue, eerily luminous with steady lights from the city. He could almost feel his will to live ebbing away each day, suffocating under Ryan's callous propaganda and the eternal abyss of the sea.

"I will never be the same person I was before the war," he said, straightforward as usual. "You have to deal with that. When and if you do, I will be more than willing to-" he stopped abruptly as he reached the bathroom, his thoughts dying on his tongue.

"What?" Dorothy asked, then followed his gaze. "Damnit!" and then ran off, presumably to find help.

Richard leaned forward the best he could and grasped Marlene by the top of her dress. He tugged and with considerable effort on his part he was able to pull her out of the now overflowing bathtub, where she had laid herself headfirst into the water. He rolled her onto her back and pushed on her stomach and chest. A burble of water erupted from her lips, but her face was not reanimated and he gave up, tired by the effort, and sat down on the side of the tub. Richard was oblivious to the warm water trickling down the tile and now saturating his pants.

Someone should really do something about this, he thought sadly while gazing at the fresh corpse of Marlene. Suicide rates had skyrocketed in Rapture, particularly among those who had little hope of social mobility. Richard clenched his fists in an attempt to still the pain that arisen in him with his sudden activity. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply, his resolve against using morphine that night fading.

Would you kindly imagine a page break here?

Lupe pressed the lumpy pillow against her ears, desperately trying to get the rest that she sorely needed. The dormitory held forty-eight young women, all between the ages of eighteen and thirty, in a space that a quarter of that number would have felt cramped. Each night at least one young woman would be crying, another two or three would be fighting with each other, and at the very least another four would be up and chatting and gossiping.

As much as she sympathized with the evitable weeping woman and understood the urge to pick fights with the others, she didn't understand why they couldn't wait until daytime to do so. Of course, daytime was a relative term. Sunlight never reached their prison.

She tried to tune out the other women and sleep, but once she managed to tune out their sobs and squabbles and laughter Lupe turned within herself and could only hear her own anger. She had been tricked and she hated her deceiver only slightly more than she hated herself for falling for their lies.

Lupe had been born in Argentina to prosperous parents, but political turmoil had led her family to emigrate to America just before the war. They opened up a restaurant in Los Angeles and had made enough money to support Lupe's dream of being an artist. She had attended art school and upon graduation had moved to New York, eagerly trying to make her mark on the world with charcoal still lifes and landscapes.

Her style was not exciting to the art world, which craved more abstract and nebulous representations of reality. After two years of rejection she was ready to give up, move back home, and refit her dream to match the cruelly honest reality that the gallery owners and critics had presented to her. But one late afternoon she had been at her tiny apartment with her roommate, heartlessly sketching out the skyline, when there had been a knock at the door.

The man had seen her portfolio, he said, and he was impressed with her skill. He was dressed in a well-tailored grey suit and his hat sat elegantly on his head. Lupe was taken with him, but resisted her innate desire to flirt with the stranger. She desperately wanted to be a professional artist, and she knew that she must behave as a professional. The man, Mr. Van De Graf, had a proposal for her, and that if she wanted to hear it she should meet him for lunch tomorrow.

Lupe wore her best silk stockings, used her very limited supply of cash to buy some make-up, and slipped into the best clothing that her and her roommate had combined. She hadn't had a meal at an upscale restaurant since she left Los Angeles, and the sudden heady feeling of sophistication gave her a confidence that filled her with hope.

Mr. Van De Graf's proposition had been interesting. Well, interesting wasn't really the word. Beyond belief was maybe a better way to say it. The world was dying, he said, and creative types like herself would be the first victims. Talent like hers would be trampled underfoot by a new world order that sought only to control. There was no difference, Mr. Van De Graf claimed, between the Soviets and the Americans. At their core they shared the same goal; total annihilation of the individual and enslavement of the masses. That was why she had not found any takers for her art; Lupe's work showed signs of rare skill, of an unlimited natural genius, and he could provide her with the environment in which she would flourish.

"You will bloom like a rose," he said and gestured to her. "You have it all. You are young, beautiful, charming, but above all, you've got a special gift that will only be tarnished by the parasites that wish to suck out your lifeblood for their own selfish existence."

Lupe liked to think that living on her own in New York had given her some degree of education in the way of the world, but looking back she was as naïve as a farmer's daughter. Mr. Van De Graf had breathed new life into her heart's desire. In her mind's eye she could see herself, her long straight brown hair, sparkling green eyes, and toffee-colored skin in a fashionable dress, surrounded by adoring fans.

And now, as she lay on her stomach on the mattress, she cursed herself for being such a fool. She had wagered everything on the bright future that Mr. Van De Graf had promised her. She disappeared, leaving her family behind her, who had probably assumed that she had died in New York in some anonymous and tragic way. She held back her own tears over that, refusing to compromise her dignity in front of the other women, but Lupe perpetually felt the sting of regret and of sorrow.

Her first week in Rapture had thrilled her. She had arrived in the closing days of 1949 and spent New Year's Eve spinning around the dance floor of the Mermaid Lounge, happily swapping dance partners with each song. All the young men claimed that once they had made the proper contacts and got a little bit of capital stored up they would be a captain of industry. They all had bright ideas, they insisted, and all their ideas needed was the money that their jobs at Atlantic Express or Jet Postal would earn them.

Lupe had shared her descent in the bathysphere with a fellow female artist, a wispy looking Pole named Helena. They had become fast friends and in their first few joyous days in their new "paradise'' they had paid visits to galleries and expositions together, playing off of each other in order to gain the owner's attention. Lupe pretended to be a haughty prima donna while Helena was an angst-filled artiste who had lost her entire family in the war. In reality Helena had grown up in an orphanage and had spent the war in relative safety in the remote countryside, conscripted into labor on a dairy farm.

Their act was fun but not productive. They were informed that there would be a fee for display of their art, and upon commiseration with the other women in the dormitory they discovered that all the women had been told this. The dormitory was owned by Mr. Van De Graf, and the charges for room and board were quickly depleting Lupe's resources. The gallery fees were too much for the women, so Mr. Van De Graf was more than happy to offer employment placement services for the women. Twenty-five percent of their paycheck, plus he could take another twenty-five percent for their room and board as they were obligated to live at his dormitory for the length of their contracted employment.

Lupe examined the contract for kitchen work that had been offered to the voluptuous young French woman that slept on the bunk below hers. She did the math and realized with a sudden burst of panic that if she would accept a similar contract it would take her three years to earn enough money for the gallery fee alone, and that was if she spent nothing other than the required kickbacks to Mr. Van De Graf. And everything was so expensive in Rapture. Clothing cost three to five times as much as it did on the surface and even simple things like fresh water tore a considerable chunk out of her budget.

But she had no other options. Finding employment on her own was an even worse option. Most businesses used agencies to find employees, so anyone looking for work had to severely undercut the price of the agency to the point where they ended up earning half of what an agented employee would earn. And out of that half pay, rent still had to be paid, and even rat holes came at a premium in an air bubble at the bottom of the ocean. She worked a cigar store for a while, which was not so terrible, provided she could brush off the sexual advances of the clientele with good grace and aplomb.

Most nights the women were too tired to do anything except wax about what their big break was going to be like and show each other their portfolios. Creating art required more energy than anyone who worked seemed to have, and those who were between contracts did not have the money for supplies. Lupe browsed through her compatriot's portfolios and made the heartbreaking discovery that none of them were that good. With this awful fact in mind she flipped frantically through her own portfolio, trying to reassure herself that this tepid charcoal portrait was truly special or that that uninspired landscape showed true talent.

One night after a twelve hour shift at work her and Helena were exchanging foot rubs; standing (sitting was strictly forbidden at work) in high heels twelve hours a day made Lupe wish that the whole damn place would just catch on fire, improbable as that was. Helena had a job in the Medical Pavilion as a hospitality attendant to wealthy patients.

"I miss the cows," Helena said and groaned with pleasure and Lupe mashed her sore feet between her fingers. They sat on Lupe's bed as she was lucky enough to have a top bunk. "At least the cows did not treat me like garbage." Day in and day out Helena was forced to paint on a smile for the endless streams of rich ladies who came in to get cut up and sewn back together.

Lupe wasn't really listening. She was too distracted by her recent epiphany that just because she liked drawing that didn't make her an artist. Rapture was full of artists who had been celebrated on the surface and who already had a following. Lupe didn't like her odds so much anymore. "What did Mr. Van De Graf tell you when we asked you to come here?"

Helena frowned. "A bunch of lies. He told me that since Poland was under the heel of the Reds I would be persecuted for my little doodles of birds and lizards. Just a lot of nonsense. I don't see what problem anyone would have with drawings of birds, do you? I did nothing political or religious or philosophical, just sketches of the little animals I found in the woods near the farm. I wouldn't have a problem making little communist birds, if that's what they paid me to do."

"We got tricked," Lupe said, voicing her deduction aloud for the first time. "Mr Van De Graf knew no one would come down here to scrub toilets and wait tables and change bandages on snobby bitches, so he filled our heads with promises and used our unrealistic hopes to lure us down here. Then he trapped us in this dorm and pimps us out so he doesn't have to do any real work."

"Yes," Helena concurred. "There was a reason we got rejected back home, wasn't there? But here it's worse. We can't just go 'oh well' and try something else, we have to do what our 'patron' tells us because we haven't got anywhere else to go."

Lupe glanced around the dormitory. It was constantly cluttered, with suitcases and shoeboxes and clothes lying helter-skelter. It stunk of sweat and cheap perfume since the women were allowed a shower only once a week. "There has to be something we can do to get out," Lupe said and tried to believe her own words.

Helena seemed lost in thought for a moment. "There are always options," she slowly replied.

One week later Helena disappeared from the dormitory. Lupe was beyond herself with worry, frightened that something had happened to her newfound best friend. Mr. Van De Graf quickly filled her spot at the Medical Pavilion, but raged openly against Helena's defection. "You've all signed contracts!" he hollered at the women at five in the morning, rousing them from sorely needed sleep. "In Rapture we respect business, and without proper respect shown towards Rapture, the city will turn on you!"

Much to her relief though, Helena stopped by the cigar store a few days after she left the dormitory. Lupe had hugged her, risking a reprimand from her boss for slacking off on work for a few minutes, and let her know how worried she had been. Helena had smiled and told her to meet her at the Fort Frolic metro station tomorrow after work. Helena had a plan to escape, she told Lupe, and wanted to escape together.