[BioLock]

My radio buzzes fitfully to life. Brook’s sweet voice chimes through with the timbre of emotion making it smaller than before. “Listen -- I've got a family.” He says, breaking with helplessness I can hear even through the static. “I need to get them out of here. But the Splicers have cut me off from them. If you can reach them in Neptune's Bounty, then maybe, just maybe…” He gives me a weak, mirthless laugh. “I know you must feel like the unluckiest man in the world right now, but you're the only hope I'll ever see my brother and husband again.” A deep sigh, and then a more firm “Go to Neptune's Bounty-- find my family…” And just when I think this stranger has shown me the true depths of his emotion, he adds “Please.” Just under a whisper and I feel my heart leave me and go to him for comfort. I know now that I have to save this man and get him to safety.

So. Next stop: Neptune’s Bounty.

It’s just through the Medical Pavilion, isn’t it?

Why do I know where that is?

No. No. No more questions, they’re distracting and right now I’m a soldier on a mission to save civilians from a warzone.

Actually I’m not a soldier, I’m… Someone. Certainly I’m someone. Goddammit, I wish I knew who! Maybe I was a soldier before, maybe that’s why all this comes so naturally. The thrill of being chased, the adrenaline pumping through my veins, just me against the world.

I step out of the elevator to find a still very-well-outlined trail for me to follow, and of course there is a splicer waiting just around the corner.

I raise the wrench to dash in with no holds barred, but her shadow, her echo, catches my attention. She sings a low, dissonant tune and I can tell by the silhouette she’s bending over a stroller, singing to it.

“When you’re daddy’s in the ground, momma’s gonna sell you by the pound. When your mommy’s up and gone, you’re gonna be the lonely one. When you are the lonely one, no one will be there to sing this song.” Her shredded vocal chords make the morbid song even stranger and I can’t help but feel someone erratic enough to sing that to a child shouldn’t have charge of one in the first place. The song has stopped, but the echo continues as the shadow begins to twitch. “Hush now,” it soothes hoarsely, “Mommy’s gone… and daddy too…” whatever child this woman has custody of doesn’t need soothing, it hasn’t whined even a little, and if it did that is not the way to do it. But hey, what do I know? It’s not like I’ve ever had kids, probably. “Wait.” The mommy-splicer interrupts herself. “This is happening before and not… why aren’t you here? Why is it today and not when you were warm and sweet?” Now I am concerned, genuinely, because it is beginning to dawn on me that this woman is not talking to a baby. “Why can’t mommy just hold you and-- I’m bleeding. Mommy’s bleeding!” Now the shushing mother’s tone grows high-pitched and catatonic. “Where am I!? This is all wrong!” And she comes barreling around the corner, nose streaming blood and face all distorted by tumors and growths. All it takes to kill her is a single wrench-blow to the head before I can relieve her of some cash and a pep bar. Going to the stroller the woman had been standing at-- because I feel an intrinsic need to ensure that she was not actually talking to some poor child-- I find it empty of anything living. It’s occupant is a revolver. I pocket the weapon before continuing morosely through the corridor.

As if sensing my unease, Richard Brook comes back in through the radio, voice more composed than before. “Plasmids changed everything.” he explains solemnly. “They destroyed our bodies, our minds. We couldn’t handle it. Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs.” I wince inwardly at that, because I know somewhere up in my noggin that that is what happened to mommy-splicer. “The whole city went to hell.” Then the static punctuates his withdrawal back to his hidey-hole just outside of Neptune’s Bounty.

I walk in silence through the doorway just ahead. Beyond is what once was a hub of socialites but is now a disorienting mess of debris and bloodshed. The New Year’s poster marked for 1959 shows a man in a mask with chilling relation to my spliced up companions-- and I feel this was one party I’d have missed. The neon reading out with the same congratulatory message hangs awkward and lopsided and several meters lower than intended, probably used at one point or another as a climbing foothold for anyone leaping from the demolished balcony edge to the still-spinning Rapturian globe intimidating the dance floor below. The set of stairs that one is supposed to use for things like going downstairs has been left helplessly disused and thus in fairly good condition, if you’re okay with some wet feet. All the decor was once subtle and warm, but when setting up party decorations it’s rare to have them be so permanent, so the colors have turned to drab and dull, some dank and dust settled in at the corners.

Voices grind below, maybe they were high-pitched once, or maybe people going through constant drug overdoses are liable to have strained vocal chords. I don’t think so, but how should I know? I’m no doctor. Probably.

I’m probably not a soldier either, but I sure can move like one. I am silent down the stairs and I club the male splicer outside the door, just as he’s bitching about whoever is inside the locked door owing him ADAM. He falls like a downed glass of alcohol, which the female inside the door hears and uses as an excuse to emerge worriedly from her vaguely-safe-house.

“CHARLIE!” She squeals. This is the one with the streaky voice and I make no mistake in her quick dispatch.

Next up: exploring the vaguely-safe-house. It’s the carcass of a kitchen, and the only real materials found, other than the EVE hypo from the lady’s corpse, is five dollars and a first aid kit. Basically a waste of time, although God knows the only things that don’t feel like a waste of somehow-precious time right now is finding Neptune’s Bounty and reuniting Richard Brook with his family.

Back on the dancefloor, the flooded indent holding the globe now also holds two splicers, drunkenly stumbling.

“If you catch a splicer in the water, hit them with your electro-bolt, Johnny-boy.” Brook nearly sighs into the radio. He sounds so… lost, now that his only job is helping me get to him and waiting like a damsel in distress. I know I’d hate that bit.

The anthropomorphic monsters in the knee-deep puddle fry to death. Very easy. I make a note to use that more often.
Unfortunately, I’m not in Rapture for dancing, and there’s nowhere to go from downstairs. I head back up the stairs and head for the bathrooms instead. Some conditioned principle of modesty forces me into the room labeled “Gents” and away from the one labeled “Ladies”.

The inside is exactly as well-kept as one would expect in a drug-addicted hell-hole. Half the sinks and two toilets are entirely gone. Mirrors smashed. The handicapped stall has been entirely demolished in the hopes of making a convenient spot to enter the next room. Maybe not convenient for one trying to run a successful dance floor and restaurant, but very convenient for one trying to leave said dance floor and restaurant.

My luck turns up when there is only one set path ahead of me, but flips when Brook’s voice comes in with new, fear-filled intensity through the speaker of my radio. “Would you kindly lower that weapon?” He requests politely.

And I think: Oh, of course, what was I doing, waving it around like that, in the first place?

I step onto the catwalk over the theater below me and see a little girl, a child, kneeling next to a corpse. I can’t tell whether it’s scarier that there is a child among the monsters here or that the tiny thing is sticking a bloated dead body with a syringe.

“You think that’s a child down there?” Brook cuts in abruptly, he sounds disgusted. “Don’t be fooled; she’s a Little Sister now.” He spits, and I can hear the contempt in his voice, it might not be aimed at the girl-- the thing-- below  me, now drinking from the graduated end of the syringe through a special bottle-top. Brook’s tone goes south, into bitter sadness. “Somebody” and I guessed that he meant a very particular somebody, “went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster. Whatever you thought about right and wrong on the surface, well that just doesn’t count for much here in Rapture.” A pause, then he went to a more didactic tone, and I had to shake my head to clear the protest from it. “Those Little Sisters, they carry ADAM, that’s the genetic material that keeps the wheels of Rapture turning. Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it.” I feel the dilapidated carpet of Rapture’s theme under my feet again and hurry down the stairs that are immediately before me.

There’s a window at the bottom of the landing, likely where one would watch a play from, and I can see a man enter through the curtains. I feel my stomach drop-- exactly like it would if this was a play and not some demented man coming to kill some demented child. It’s only when I get close enough to try and warn the kid when I see what she looks like: grey skin, glowing yellow eyes, a frankly disgustingly blood-and-grit-covered frock, and a ponytail more in shambles than my apparent logical reasoning capabilities. She looked familiar, but there was no real way for that to be possible.

I want to scream for this girl, but she spots the assailant and beats me to the punch. Almost immediately a big pile of mildewy metal with a porthole barrels out from behind the curtain and the man is down before he can raise his gun. I’d sigh in relief if it was any relief to have one threat replaced by another.

Except the Little Sister takes his hand in hers (which is a hyperbole, really, her whole hand can barely wrap around his finger) and skips away with a smile. Unperturbed.

“That’s the Big Daddy.” Brook chimes in, still with a somberly informative tone. “She gathers ADAM, he keeps her safe.”

Well at least one of us is safe.

I break the lock on a gate to my left, and follow some of Rapture’s more direct and window-laden paths through a ragtag gathering of splicers and one unfortunate Big Daddy corpse to a sign reading Neptune’s Bounty $48 and two pep bars richer. A chain-linked gate shuts in my face and I barely dodge a flamethrower to the solarplexus. And, of course, a dozen splicers suddenly want to be my suicide buddy and they all come flying down a set of stairs waving guns and crowbars.

The soothing voice of Richard Brook comes to me filled with static and background information I wish I’d known earlier while I fight.

“It’s Mycroft! Goddamned Mycroft Holmes! He found us, or you at least. Shit! He’s cut off access to Neptune-- wait, there’s another way! Head to Medical, go! What are you waiting for? Hurry!”

I follow instructions, because for any fighting prowess I did or did not possess I was hopelessly outmatched.

I catch a break in the access to the Medical Pavilion being open and across the hall. But who cares for anything being easy? The bulkhead door shuts before my very eyes and, while Brook promises to try and override it from his position, the screen in the corner fuzzes from black to a black-and-white of one Mycroft Holmes, with hands still untouched by more than a bureaucratic papercut and suit still pressed. The picture was, of course, taken before the pandemonium.

“So tell me, friend, which one of those mongrels sent you?” He spits through the loudspeaker. “The KGB wolf? The CIA jackal? Hm? Well, let me clear the waters: Rapture isn’t some sunken ship for you to plunder. And Mycroft Holmes is no giddy socialite, I won’t be slapped around by government muscle. And with that: farewell, or dasvidaniya. Whichever you prefer.” His screen snaps out of existence and the white noise now consists of the spliced-up screams of maniacs attacking the separating glass between me and them. Oh, and Brook telling me “I got it! Get out of there!” and when the glass cracks and I rush towards the bulkhead he nearly screams “Get out now!”

I open the bulkhead post-haste, without a splicer able to make it with me, thankfully.

When the bulkhead opens to the Medical Pavilion without a flood warning, Brook comes back in, bitterly, on my radio. “Now you’ve met Mycroft Holmes, the bloody king of Rapture.” He scoffs before telling me “Get to Emergency Access”

So I do, following the angular halls of Rapture and attempting to ignore the patronizing advertisements telling me of Dr. Jeff Hope’s spectacular medical prowess and saying that splicer issues were under control. All of it, so backwards.

It takes a long while-- who knows how long days really are?-- and six splicers before I reach Medical Access.