Tympans of Temples Held

December 30th, 1958

Audio Transcript – 'Goodbye'

[There are times when I forget the warmth of the sun, the sound of birds, the indigo of a midnight sky peppered with starlight. In my dreams, I open Tears, just to remind myself of the worlds I've left behind. But the Doors have become mirrors; through every one, there is a city. There is a shadow growing unseen in the corners of the room, darker than the nightmare depths of the ocean. These universes have become infinity mirrors, reflecting the world back into the Doors, in recursion, creating smaller and smaller reflections that appear to recede into the infinite distance. When Lutece told me that this city housed the final iteration of my enemy, I wonder... did they mean Comstock? What if this is the final iteration for all of us, the last mirror in infinity. These echoes have become my epitaph, here at the end of all things.]

Elizabeth thought the tracks on Cohen's new album "Why Even Ask" were an insult to the inner ear, but the people of Rapture certainly seemed to like it. And so long as Cohen was busy posing and posturing on the Fleet Hall stage, Elizabeth was free to poke around the projection booth.

The door was locked with a Yale lock, a radial variation of the cylinder lock, one that used tubular pins. The original key would have had to have been circular in shape, with several half-cylinder indentations designed to align with the pins. The locks in Rapture had proven to be slightly more sophisticated than the locks in Columbia, but like Sinclair, Elizabeth had adapted. And after Cohen decided to lock her books in a safe beneath his office desk, Elizabeth had readily accepted the challenge. It hadn't taken her long to design her own lock pick.

She inserted her lash-up into the lock, turned it clockwise with only a slight bit of tension on the pins. As she pushed the pick further, the pins were forced down, binding the driver pins behind the shear line of the lock. As Elizabeth pushed the final pin down, the lock clicked, and the door swung open.

It never gets old, Elizabeth thought to herself, smiling.

The projection booth was a small, sparsely furnished room overlooking the center aisle of the Fleet Hall. The projector dominated the center of the room; several filing cabinets and a desk had been pushed unobtrusively in one corner. Elizabeth sat in Cohen's chair. He kept his accu-vox diaries in a bin on the floor. Elizabeth picked one up, dated the tenth of December. After a brief burst of static, the tape began to spin:

[I was a little leery when he shuttered Fontaine's business and sent that bald buck to a grave deep in the briny. But when Ryan buried all of Fontaine's pals in that department store, someone had to find a home for all those freshly minted orphans. And if I turned a dollar or two in the process, you can hardly blame me for doing well by doing good...]

Elizabeth placed the recorder back on the pile. She began to rifle through the receipts and invoices stored in the desk. Cohen may have had more than several screws loose, but he kept a meticulous record of his transactions. Most of his ledger detailed sales of the girls to the Optimized Eugenics laboratory at Point Prometheus, where Ryan had taken over as chief executive officer. However, several bills of sale corroborated Sinclair's allegations: some girls had been sent to other buyers, mostly shadowy characters in Rapture's less reputable neighborhoods. Elizabeth found an invoice from Daniel Wales, the owner of the Pink Pearl brothel in Siren Alley. Elizabeth knew what went on in the Pink Pearl, and she didn't like to think about it at great length. The word on the street was that Daniel Wales, the local governor, was spliced beyond recognition and had traded an architecture firm for more carnal métiers. Siren Alley was one of Rapture's unspoken horrors, left to fester in its depravity. The prospect of children in a place like that turned Elizabeth's stomach.