I have just enough time to think a curse as hard as I can before the water surges forward and I'm carried away in the torrent. I'm battered and crushed by the surging waves, aware only of the seething foam that bubbles against my faceplate and the weight pressing in on me. Oh yes, the weight. The suit enables me to survive underwater, but it certainly doesn't ease the water pressure that hammers every inch of my person. When I finally stop hurtling head over heels, I feel as if I've been beaten to about an inch thick.
For a moment I just lie there, listening to the sound of my own hoarse breathing. A school of fish flickers above me, a smooth silver wall which ripples with the twitches of their tails. The water writhes with minute sea creatures, plankton or something, which sparkle with the distant rays of sunlight that fight their way down here. It's peaceful at the bottom of the sea, and it strikes me that it might not be such a bad place to spend eternity if I didn't have a kid to find and a certain lady to deal with.
However, I do, and I heave myself off the ocean floor. I give a prolonged groan at the pain which promptly ensues, a stream of bubbles escaping from my suit. Still moaning gently at the dull ache and the crushing sensation that always accompanies underwater jaunts*, I begin to walk in what I hope is the direction of the city, although to be quite honest I have no idea what with all the spinning. There's a lot of furniture floating in the water, but there's no way of knowing if I'm heading towards its source or away from it.
I'm startled by a sudden blast of static from my radio, and Tenenbaum's voice in my head. She seems happy to find I'm still alive- thinking, no doubt, that there was still hope for her mission for me, whatever it is- but I'm a little worried at the implication that she can see whatever I'm doing. Could she see me picking up that audio diary of hers?**
If she notices my anxiety, she doesn't comment, only tells me once again to meet her at the train station. I feel a pang for my lack of functional vocal apparatus, as now the radio has stopped transmitting and I still have no idea where to go. Shrugging it off, I continue my slog through the turquoise-tinted darkness, stopping every now and then to collect rivets or even the occasional ADAM slug. At one point, I come across one of Rapture's glass walled corridors, and I watch as another Big Daddy protects his charge from a splicer's attacks, throwing her onto his back while she shouts out encouragements. She spots me through the thick glass, and pauses in her yelling to give me a cheery wave. Soon the thing is defeated, and the girl and her guardian make their way down the darkened corridor, him trudging along with footfalls heavy enough to send dust billowing out of the carpet, her skipping in his wake.
I continue on my journey, negotiating a path through the rocks and even at one point ducking through the giant ribcage of some titanic ocean creature. It's a little while after that, after picking through a garden of luminous coral, that I come to a ledge, and see the city stretched out before me, Atlantis in ruins.
You'd never guess at the pandemonium that lay inside from here, with the veritable galaxy's worth of lights that shine from the windows and the statuesque shapes of the buildings. Sea life wends its way through the rooftops, squid threading their tentacles through the guttering and sharks swimming between the towers, but even this only serves to enhance the sheer otherworldliness of this place. The presence of this city beneath the waves seems to stand as testament to man's greatness, as doubtless its creator decided it should be- no matter what man saw, he conquered***.
I gingerly lower myself from my vantage point onto the marshy seabed below, next to a dark passageway formed from the heavy machinery that litters the surroundings. I manoeuvre myself through the tight aperture, and am finally confronted with the maintenance depot for the Atlantic Express. Huh. Would it have been so very hard to tell me it was here, Tenenbaum? Is three seconds such a very long time to spend giving a few directions? Grumbling to myself (or making grumbling noises, at any rate), I walk inside, and tug on the airlock control. The water drains out in a flurry of bubbles, and I'm treated to the first sounds I've heard in what seems like an age that aren't muffled by the ocean. True, it's only the thundering of water and the hiss of pneumatics, but I take what I can get.
"Ah, Herr Delta…"
I start at the sound of a human voice, but it's only Tenenbaum again, welcoming me to the station and asking me to come up to the ticket booth. The honorific that she's stuck at the beginning of my name rings oddly in my ears- mostly adults don't even bother with "Delta", preferring forms of address such as "freak" or "the subject", depending on whether they're a splicer or one of the doctors. Being treated as an equal by one is odd, but I feel like I could get used to it.
The door of the airlock makes its rusted, jerking way out of sight, revealing yet more of the art deco wreckage that I'm growing accustomed to seeing in place of the grandiose world I know. I rummage about in the rubble for a while, looking for anything I could use, but am eventually forced to concede that this particular area was picked clean by the genetic aberrations that constitute the population long ago.
Speaking of, I can hear a gaggle of wheezing voices up ahead, arguing about something (probably ADAM). I edge cautiously through a corridor and up two more flights of stairs. This time, they're stairs which were only used by the employees of the station as opposed to customers, and are consequently narrow and even harder to get up than the ones in the Adonis from before. Nonetheless, I make my way up without too many mishaps, but unfortunately my grunts of irritation when my feet slip off their precarious perches alert the splicers, so by the time I reach the top I'm confronted with a trio of the abominations who are sure I've got a Sister concealed somewhere about me, and aren't too choosy about the methods they use to get at her.
I deal with them accordingly. The first gets an elbow in the stomach, sending him spinning away to the other side of the room, while his friend who attacked a moment afterwards gets a drill to the face. The final member of the group lets out a cry of fury and plunges in before I've finished with his companion, hacking at my armour with what looks like a long kitchen knife. It's lucky he's not too bright- that thing looks sharp, and if he focused his attentions on the leather regions rather than on the brass and rivets of my helmet, he could do some serious damage. As it is, he only manages to scratch the surface of the metal before I slam him with the electrobolt and finish him off with a blow to the head. The first attacker was badly winded by my assault, and has spent the duration of the encounter panting in the corner, but a sudden crash alerts me to the fact that he's now taken the initiative to shut the heavy vault door that blocks off the passage, trapping me inside.
"Most of the people are now like this. Splicers."
No, really, Tenenbaum? I thought these mutants were a breed of ostrich. From what I can deduce, the lady wants to help the new Sisters who are being created, and I'm grateful to her for that, but how stupid does she think I am? Shaking my head, I go inside an office beside the door to try and find a way of opening it. My search proves successful: not only do I find some more food supplies, but I also discover a hack tool to use on the door control system outside. It's the work of a moment to bend the machine to my will, and soon enough the vault clanks its way open. I give a satisfied grin beneath my visor and saunter through, stuffing the tool into yet another belt and thinking of the days when you'd have to manipulate a finicky hydraulics system if your Sister detected an ADAM-rich corpse in a sealed-off part of the city. That wasn't fun at all in these gloves, let me tell you.
On the other side of the doorway, I recover a disabled security bot, sparking and smoking on the ground. From my experience, the little robots are pretty useful to have on your side, so I spend a few seconds hacking this one. With the thing whirring happily by my shoulder, I make my way along the passageway and find myself in a large chamber with a train suspended within it- though it crashes into a pool of water a moment after we enter. The reason behind its destruction surfaces a moment later- a pair of splicers, doubtless friends of the group from before, one brandishing a pipe and shrieking in a nasal voice, the other considerably more bass and armed with a wrench. Wearily, I strike at the woman with the drill a few times, sending her tumbling head-over-heels down a set of steps, whilst the male is riddled with bullets by my new propeller-powered associate. While I search the corpses, Lamb's voice once again fills the air, this time talking about the death of Ryan. I'm not altogether sure who Ryan is, aside from the fact that he was probably involved in Ryan Industries, but from Lamb's speech I can infer that he was Moustache Man from before**. Whoever he was, he apparently lives on in us all, so maybe he was a bacterium or something. A tyrant, too, according to the end of her little monologue, which doubtless gives hope to germs everywhere. You can be anything you want to be, pathogens! Look at Ryan- a humble infection in the gut at first, but ruler of an entire city in the end! Today the intestine lining, but tomorrow the world!
And here's a diary from the man- or microbe- himself, talking about his recruitment of a certain psychiatrist by the name of "Lamb". He sounds annoyed at having to welcome her into the watery depths of the place, so maybe I do have something in common with the guy after all. I discard the tape on a table and venture onwards.
Eventually, I come to a room drenched in red light and dripping sparks, with several screens showing security feeds branching off the walls. Well, some of them show security feeds, at least; others have simply given up the ghost and show nothing but steely grey. A quick glance around reveals a rusty lever that, according to its label, controls the gates. I crack my knuckles, and give it a yank-
-which is when everything is plunged into black.
For a moment I simply stare into the solid darkness, wondering what on earth went wrong. Then I hear a crisp click in my right ear. Spinning on my heel, I see one of the screens spring to life, showing a clip of film from the platform. Another click comes from out of the shadows, and another, and another, until all the screens are flickering white and grey with colourless images of the lifeless station or messages to "PLEASE STAND BY". I back away from them, just as their pictures are replaced with a woman's face and a voice resounds through the tiny room. A woman's face and voice which I know very well.
"I know you," Lamb says, in those frosted tones that have so often reverberated through layers of static in the announcements I've heard. "You're a dead man, Subject Delta. It's been ten years since I watched you ensure it was so."
As much as I appreciate the information on the time- and really, ten years? This town went so far downhill in that short a time?- the rest of her words grate on my nerves like a serrated knife down slate. Whose fault is that little incident you mentioned, lady? It sure wasn't yours truly's. She continues on, oblivious to my chagrin- or perhaps not, given how little empathy she's displayed so far.
"Don't feel too bad, Subject Delta. Your pain gave birth to Paradise."
Is this what you're referring to as "Paradise", lady? 'Cause if it is, you should get out in the fresh air more****.
She continues, noting with a glimmer of irritation that she has no idea how I survived, and that- hang on. She's speaking again. What men? What do you mean, they'll "ease my"-
My thoughts are broken off as I'm caught in a rain of fire.
Footnotes:
* Our primary purpose may have been to protect the Sisters, but we were given construction equipment to fight with for a reason apart from the fact that it's fairly effective at killing people. At least it gave us something to do after we left our charges in their pipes for the night, and had to wait out the dark hours alone.
** It may seem curious that I know what Ryan Industries is but don't know for certain who the man himself was, but my memories have always been a bit piecemeal. Apart from those which catalogue the events which ended in me waking up in the Adonis and what happened afterwards, it's all a blurry patchwork: a smile from Eleanor here, a violent death there, and all obscured by a boiling fog. Since a lot of my past was involved with Ryan Industries, it features quite a bit in the messy tapestry, whereas since Moustache Man's announcements never mattered much to me, most of what he said has subsided into the mist.
*** And women too, I suppose, but for some reason the messages on the flickering screens never brought them up from what I can remember. It was always "man" this and "man" that. There again, since I vaguely remember one talking about how we were all entitled to brow-sweat, maybe they decided to just not get involved. Good on them.
**** There again, given what the city of Rapture has become, so should we all.
Author's note:
Finally, Delta meets his arch-nemesis in person- for a given value of "in person", at least. I've rewritten her and Tenenbaum's speeches so I'm not copying-and-pasting from the dialogue in the game, so if you notice the discrepancies between the game's elegant prose and what I've written you now know why. If you don't- play the game again, it's awesome. Again, please review, and many thanks to my reviewer from the last chapter.