[BioLock]

At Medical Access I’m supposed to find a way into Neptune’s Bounty, Richard Brook tells me, but he conveniently forgets exact instructions, so I flounder a bit longer. This is all feeling very repetitive and honestly I don’t want to keep going, but he just says “would you kindly?” and I melt, I can’t stop myself from helping him.

As I wander through one of the glass tunnels interconnected between virtually every building in this sunken city, I walk a little slower to appreciate the scenery. A school of fluorescent red fish lazily amble by above me. Starfish cling to the tunnel walls. I can see a gorgeous panorama of this chunk of Rapture, with Plasmid advertisements and Surgery propaganda. In the tunnel several yards away, running adjacent to mine, I see them. Him: a giant metal man with a drill for a hand. Her: a tiny grey girl cradling a needle. The same pair I saw earlier, but different. This Sister’s dress is green, her hair rust-colored, and the Daddy’s suit is more bullet-riddled and rusting.

I keep watching and walking. They are skipping, oblivious-- or she is, while he walks at a snail’s pace to compensate for her tiny legs.

I don’t want to encounter them if I don’t have to.

I don’t want to kill them.

Outside of what looks to be an emergency room, I finish off two splicers with a shock of electricity to the water they’re in and head back out to another glass hallway that aren’t growing any less glamorous despite the frequency. It gets a little less glamorous when the tunnel ruptures at the end, though.

“Sounds like another tunnel collapse.” Richard Brook mutters into the radio, then, louder, he laughs. “Welcome to Rapture, Johnny-boy, it’s the world’s fastest growing pile of junk.” I chuckle too, even though he can’t hear me. It seems polite.

Flashes of sepia-toned somethings. A cab driver, a gunshot, laughing somewhere we shouldn’t be.

Staggering slightly, and trying desperately to shake off the question of who ‘we’ is, I take a detour through a door on my left. Inside is a room with black-and-white tiled floors and a more extensive collapse on the other side of the room, as well as an archway branching to a larger, less collapsed room. Screams of a child are coming from there. I raise my wrench and approach cautiously.

The Big Daddy comes flying through the archway and lands, dead, barely three feet in front of me. He’s on fire and leaking blood and it occurs to me that machines don’t bleed. It also occurs to me that there is some joke there that I’m just missing, but that’s hardly important now.

I peek through the offending archway to see the green-dressed Little Sister from earlier. Richard Brook calls through my radio with a voice like he’s salivating. “It’s a little one!” He cooes. “Now’s your chance to get some ADAM.”

I step into the room. A splicer looms over the child on what looks like a dancefloor. He gets shot in the head, but shockingly not by me. My head snaps to the source of the gunshot.

In one of three balconies nearly fifteen feet above the floor, a man holds a gun towards my head. His frame is tall, but thinner than a needle, he might weigh ninety-five pounds, and he’s wrapped in long, wooly navy coat. Eyes are on fire with something unplaceable but as light as ice. Hair settles in curls around his ears. Lips are thin, and drawn thinner in concentration as he says “Stay away from her or it’s you who’ll be shot next.”

I don’t have time to speak before Brook talks through my radio. “Easy now, Holmes, he’s just looking for a little bit of ADAM. Just enough to get by.” I’m not a telephone. I’m not a telephone. I’m not a telephone.

“I’ll not have him hurt the little ones.” The man, apparently ‘Holmes,’ says flatly. I start to wonder what, exactly, I would have to do to get ADAM from this girl. Because it’s sounding a lot like I’d have to kill her, and that is not what I’m here for. Nevermind the fact that I don’t know what I am here for.

“It’s okay, Johnny-boy.” Richard Brook soothes me, as if he’d read my thoughts. “That’s not a child, not anymore. Mr. Holmes saw to that!” Slowly, dubiously, basically unwillingly, I take a few steps towards the child, who begins to scamper away on hands and knees because she’s so scared she can’t stand.

Mr. Holmes-- Isn’t Mycroft Holmes the bastard who runs this place?-- exclaims “Don’t hurt her.” I slow down even further. “Please.” I stop.

A scoff comes from my hip-height radio. “Oh that’s a pretty sermon coming from the psychopath who created these creatures in the first place.”

By what seems a force of habit, Mr. Holmes corrects Brook: “I’m not a psychopath. I’m a high-functioning sociopath, do your research, Mr. Brook.”

The amendment goes unnoticed by the irate man on the short-wave. “You took fine little girls and turned ‘em into that, didn’t you? Listen, Johnny: you won’t survive without the ADAM those… things… are carrying. Are you prepared to trade your life-- and the lives of my brother, my husband, for his little Frankensteins?”

Just as I’m thinking that the guilt will live with me forever, and I’ll try to make it quick, the man behind me gets my attention once more. “Here! There is another way. Use this,” he passes me a bottle, and looks pleased when I catch it, “free them from their torment. I’ll make it worth your while.” The bottle has an ominous red glow, but what doesn’t when you’re at the bottom of the ocean? I drink it quickly and feel the tingle of a plasmid enter my bloodstream.

The Little Sister has pressed herself, shaking, to a luggage box and I reach out one hand gingerly. She protests but I manage to put my palm to her forehead and she collapses under a harsh glow of light. Just as I’m wondering if I did it wrong and have accidentally killed a small child, the light leaves with a flash and before me sits a perfectly healthy, if somewhat pale and emaciated, young girl of maybe seven or eight.

She looks at her hands before grinning wildly, her eyes a match to the green on her dress and now glowing with joy instead of drugs. “Thank you, mister!” She exclaims before sprinting across the room and wiggling into a golden hole in the wall.

The man on the balcony sighs with relief, Richard Brook scoffs into the radio.

“I’ll start by telling you that man is a fraud.” Mr. Holmes says without emotion. “He’s manipulating you so he can ultimately take over this godforsaken dump and then throw you to the sharks. His real name is Jim Moriarty.”

I scoff, almost in unison with my radio. “Really, Sherlock?” Not Mycroft the dictator. Maybe a relative, not a lot of physical similarity though. “You couldn’t prove that, even if it was true.”

Now a smirk comes to the one on the balcony, he’s lowered his gun. “Yes I could., or in this case: can. Now would you like to admit it yourself or shall I start deducing?” There is no doubt, no emotion, nothing but calculation in his baritone voice. It’s miles from what I’d certainly heard when he’d pleaded for the life of that little girl.

A pause sits within the radio for so long I wonder if it has malfunctioned. No, though, I’m not so lucky. “Would you kindly ignore the crazy Mr. Holmes and find my family? I think we’ve wasted enough time here.” At first I don’t want to move, but then I see: yes. We have wasted much too long here, dallying with sociopathic scientists and ghoulish girls. It’s time to continue with my mission.

A look of pity evanescently brushes over Sherlock Holmes’s face. That brings up more stings of heart-rending pictures. In a traincar with a ticking clock, a man lying shot on the steps of his own home, someone leaving a wedding early. I stumble out of the room and continue my quest towards Neptune’s Bounty.

Before I’ve gotten far, Richard Brook tells me “If you come across another of those pink Gatherer’s Garden machines, go ahead and get yourself another plasmid. If you can afford it of course. Saving Little Sisters doesn’t get you nearly as much ADAM, but that’s your prerogative..” He cuts out as a new sound fills my ears.

There’s a song playing, recorded voices of little girls play fuzzily. I follow the noise to-- as luck would have it-- a bright pink, rusting vending machine with a metallic Little Sister on either side. The options offered are almost overwhelming, but I eventually go for buying the Incinerate plasmid. It seems useful in a city of frigid water leaking from every possible seam.

This is all well and fine, until I proceed to find another Big Daddy and Little Sister pairing not ten minutes later.

There is an implicit choice here: I can ignore this, leave things as they are, and pretend I never saw anything, I could kill the both of them like the animals they are probably meant to be treated as, or I could save the Little Sister the way I’d done before. This would have been an easy choice except for the part where getting to her meant most probably killing him. Which frankly sounded like a pain in the ass.

But I’d like to think I’m a good guy, so here goes nothing.

I steal a shotgun from a corpse and fire all four rounds into the metal giant’s face. Now blood leaks chillingly from one small porthole and he screams in pain before running at me, drill raised. Just before impact, I glide to the left and try out my new Incinerate plasmid on him. The fabric on his body lights up and some of the metal warps under the heat. He swings wildly at me, blinded by pain and rage. The Little Sister squeals behind him, and sobs.

I try not to feel guilt.

That bit gets easier when the Big Daddy whips out a machine gun and fires away, leaving me with milliseconds to dive behind a counter and wait until he has to reload. Then I realize my opportunity, peek up above the countertop, shoot him with a bolt of electricity, and unload a whole clip from my pistol into a soft spot in his armor. More blood falls out, but finally he groans pitifully and falls to the ground.

The Little Sister sprints to his side, seemingly not caring about my personage or cavalry, and clings to him as her crying wracks her tiny frame. “Mr. Bubbles, please wake up…” She pleaded.

The guilt was back. In order to try and fulfill some sort of karma, I approached her carefully. She tried to kick at me, bite, scratch, but I’m honestly about four times her size, even as short as I am, so she isn’t hard to lift and I press my palm almost desperately to her forehead. A flash of hot white light and I set her down quickly.

Dress: still a dusty purple and covered in blood and grime. Hair: still ratty and barely contained by a white scrunchy. Body: still thin as a rail and dirty to discoloration, but not grey anymore. Eyes: bright without an ominous glow as she looks all around her in bewilderment. Voice: shy when she thanks me and scampers away on bare feet.

I feel a little better about killing the Big Daddy now, despite the mournful look the ex-Little Sister casts him as she disappears into a hidey-hole in the wall. The second is short though, then I feel a sharp pain in my neck and the world goes black.

“Wake up, would you kindly?” I snap my eyes open.

“Sit, would you kindly?” I raise myself to sit up, opening my eyes to observe the world around me.

“Stand, would you kindly?” I am suddenly on my feet. I look around to see I’m in a cleanly, if anything overly-posh office. I had been sleeping on the couch.

Resting coolly in the chair across from me is a dark figure reading a yellowed newspaper. “At ease.” I let out a breath I hadn’t been holding, not consciously anyway. Relaxing back into the couch, I recognize the man across from me as one Mycroft Holmes. Rapture’s seemingly totalitarian, kakistocratic pioneer-leader. He pours me tea, of all the things he could do. “‘Would you kindly’… hmph.” He says in a measuredly contemptual tone. “Tell me, what separates a man from a slave, hm?” He requests politely, patronizingly. “Money? Power? No.” Without any amount of extra force, Mycroft sets the teapot back down, but it seems to shake the table. “A man chooses. A slave obeys.”

Dubiously, I take the tea proffered to me. “You have no memories, do you? Nothing of, say, a plane crash?” Narrowing my eyes, and really wishing the bastard would get to the point, I shake my head. “Let me be clear,” Mycroft hisses, menace slicing through his voice, “I want to know why you think you’re here.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” I reply, unintimidated.

A condescending smirk, “Of course you don’t. You weren’t made to understand, just to do.” I’m getting very close to throttling this son of a bitch, but he finally puts down his own tea. “‘Would you kindly”… Powerful phrase, isn’t it? Familiar phrase, perhaps?”

Is it? It is. Where have I heard that?

Oh.

Oh.

Richard Brook. As in Richard “Would you kindly pick up a radio/find a crowbar/lower your weapon/ignore Sherlock Holmes/etc.?” Brook. Things are starting to feel sideways.

“Stand, would you kindly?” I stand up. “Run, would you kindly?” I run, and I feel sick for it because this is certainly not what I want to be doing right now. “Stop.” I stop. Turning away from me, Mycroft calls “Anthea, your assistance is requested.” A pretty woman enters, clipboard in hand. Back to holding my attention, Mycroft hands me my wrench, looking disgusted at the feel of it between his fingers. “Would you kindly kill Ms. Anthea, here?” He requests flatly.

My mind screams in protest, but my hand grabs the wrench. Anthea only looks slightly displeased with this, casting an annoyed glance to Mycroft.

When I begin to step towards her, I also begin to cry, to scream. “Stop, please, for God’s sake! Don’t make me kill her!” But I raise the wrench above my head and slam it downwards without ability for remorse.

“Stop!” Mycroft finally releases me. The wrench is only six inches from Anthea’s hair, she has cowed slightly but rights herself when I drop my arm and the wrench to my side. I take a shaking breath.

Waving Anthea away with a flick of the wrist, Mycroft smiles, slimily. “Consider this before continuing any work with that Richard Brook fellow. My brother was right about him: he is Jim Moriarty.”

Before I can protest, a gag is brought around my mouth and a bag is brought over my head. I’m pulled from the room, with the final words I hear being “No one knows of this conversation, yet. Use that wisely.”