Disclaimer – I own no legal rights to Bioshock or related etc.
Shadowelf144 –Thanks for continuing to read.
A/N – Another two months snuck by without my updating, and again I want to apologize for that. Just haven't found the right time to sit down and write the next chapter until now. We're almost finished, and I just hope I haven't taken so long to get this chapter out that you've given up on me and that some of you are still reading.
Dr. Yi Suchong was poring over his papers, trying to figure out where exactly his brilliant plan had gone wrong.
He hit record on the Accu-Vox.
"The Protector Trials are almost complete," he said. "Subject Alpha through Gamma have failed to imprint on Little Sisters. Have been sent to harvest ADAM with little girls, but regard them as nothing, as we might a common houseplant."
"Papa Suchong?"
The tiny voice came from somewhere behind him. A quick glance over his shoulder and Suchong recognized the little waif as Eleanor Lamb, daughter of the renowned psychologist Dr. Sophia Lamb. Sophia was one of Andrew Ryan's greatest political enemies, almost as hated as Atlas himself, and when she was brought to him as a test subject for one of the first Little Sisters to be paired with her own personal Big Daddy, Suchong had been inclined not to question it. The same way he had been inclined not to question how willing the test subjects for the Daddies themselves, all convicts from Persephone, had been as volunteers.
"Not now!" Suchong said, turning back to his papers. He spoke into the Accu-Vox again. "Have experimented with genetic modifications to form a pairbond between Daddy and Sister, mental conditioning to be totally dependent on one another. But still have yet to see results . . ."
"Papa Suchong," Eleanor repeated again, more loudly this time. "Papa Suchong, I'm scared. Will you read me a story?"
No, creepy little bitch, Suchong thought.
"No. Go away. Papa is busy right now."
"Please, Papa? Please?"
She was right beside him now, tugging at the sleeve of his lab coat. She was unclean, smelly, her dark hair full of seaweed, her hands and face covered in scales.
"I said no," Suchong yelled. "Go away."
"But Papa . . ."
Suchong wrenched his sleeve free from her grasp and swung a hand hard across her face.
She threw her head back and began to cry. Now she was really giving him a headache.
And then he heard the thundering footsteps and the low, not-quite-human moan.
Alpha Delta, Eleanor's assigned protector, was standing in the doorway, the light behind his diving mask glowing bright red. He raised his arm and the drill began spinning.
Suchong smiled. He hadn't made a mistake. His experiment was a wild success. The first bond between a Little Sister and a Big Daddy had been created. Something had threated Eleanor, made her cry out in terror, and Delta was going to see that her attacker was punished.
As he smiled, and the drill came closer to his face, Suchong just prayed it would kill him quickly.
The last moments of his life were a drawn-out agony worse than anything he could have imagined.
The little girl in the soiled dress was smiling and skipping, singing a happy little song, unbothered by the stench around here. Jack, on the other hand, was trying his best not to breathe in, choking on the stale air of the Olympus Heights sewer as he waded through its filth. His stomach was threatening to rebel with every step.
"Faster, mister," the Little Sister was calling from ahead of him. "You're almost there."
When Jack took another step, the ground began to shake. He heard the heavy footsteps, splashing through the water, and the bloodcurdling moan that went with them.
"Uh-oh," Jack heard his Little Sister say. When he looked towards her, her feet were disappearing through a porthole in the wall.
Ripples ran through the water and splashed up against Jack's legs as the Big Daddy rounded the corner, its Little Sister giggling madly and holding on for dear life. The portholes were already gleaming red, and Jack remembered Twitch's words on the Atlantic Express, "It can't be the same one, can it?"
As if in answer, another whale call sounded behind Jack. He looked over his shoulder and saw another Big Daddy, the Little Sister on its shoulder pointing at him and laughing.
Jack reached for the pistol tucked into his trousers, but as he reached for it he slipped on something foul. He managed to stop himself from falling face first into the filthy sewer water, but the gun hit the ground and went off, the bullet just missing the second Big Daddy, who growled furiously.
Jack plunged his arm into the water and took hold of the gun as the second Big Daddy charged towards him. He fired three shots at the approaching Daddy. The bullets ricocheted off the diving suit, as harmless and as irritating as a swarm of gnats.
The flailing arm of the Big Daddy caught Jack in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and launching him into the sewer wall.
"Get him, Mr. B!" one of the Little Sisters screamed. "He's a real nasty man!"
As Jack tried to pick himself up, the first Big Daddy stampeded towards him. The drill was spinning at full speed. Jack managed to wrench himself out of the way just in time for the drill to thrust over his shoulder and into the wall, pieces of debris flying off and hitting Jack's face as the drill continued spinning.
As the first Big Daddy worked on pulling the drill back out, the second Big Daddy was firing rivets across the wall, Jack managing to run fast enough to stay just one step ahead each time a rivet became embedded in the wall.
Now the other Big Daddy was swinging its drill arm like a saber. As Jack tried to step backwards, keeping an eye on the end of the drill while trying to put distance between himself and the Daddy, he slipped and fell into the water. He coughed as he pulled himself back into the air, choking on the discolored water he had almost swallowed.
Jack caught a beam of wood, something that must have detached from the support beams of the sewer's ceiling, floating in the water. He braced himself and swung the board with all of his might against the Daddy's back. The board broke in half, but the Daddy just roared, swinging its huge fist into Jack's chest and sending him flying again.
The other Daddy pulled the trigger on the enormous gun it was carrying over its shoulder, and something shot from the end with a loud thwonk.
Jack saw the flashing red light on the object the Big Daddy had fired and he heard a bell chiming. Too late, he realized what it might be. He started to run, but the force of the explosion threw him off his feet and tossed him into the opposite wall.
As he struggled to regain his balance, the Big Daddy lifted him off the ground and hurled him through the air like a pigskin.
Jack collided with a crumbling wall, smashing his way through it.
Then, on the other side of the wall, forcing himself to get to his feet despite every part of him being in unimaginable pain, Jack heard something.
It was singing. A small, tinny voice, distorted, was singing somewhere nearby.
"In the garden things are growing, many changes will be flowing . . ."
Jack followed the sound through the tunnel he found himself in.
"If you want to be amazin', see the flowers, rearrange 'em."
As Jack stepped into another compartment at the end of the hallway, he saw some sort of vending machine. There was a huge hole in the ceiling above it, splintered and broken floorboard gaping indicating the spot the machine had fallen through.
The pink machine had an automaton on either side of it, each resembling a little girl in a pink dress. The autonomous jaws were clinking open and shut in time with the tinny recording.
"My daddy is smarter than Einstein, stronger than Hercules, and can light a fire with the snap of his finger," the machine was saying. "Are you better than my daddy? Not if you don't visit the Gatherer's Garden, you aren't!"
The floor was littered with bottles that had dropped from the busted machine, just like the bottle of Electro Bolt that Jack had found at Steinman's.
Without thinking, Jack began grabbing the hypos attached to the bottles and injecting the plasmids into his arms. He barely took the time to read the names on the bottles. Incinerate, Telekinesis, Winter Blast, Sonic Boom, Insect Swarm . . .
The pain of the plasmids flowing through his blood stream almost felt good after the aching from being tossed around by the Big Daddies. He grabbed at the hypos of EVE, the feeling of injecting them into his veins the most exhilarating sensation he'd felt since he'd had Evelyn straddling his lap.
Jack gritted his teeth and followed the tunnel back out to the sewer.
As he stepped out of the dark tunnels, the Big Daddies were standing at opposite ends of the sewer, distracted by their Little Sisters, one trying to skip stones across the surface of the sewer water while the other was using a chunk of the debris to scratch a picture of her Daddy into the sewer wall.
Both Daddies turned their attention back to Jack when his foot splashed into the water.
The Big Daddy with the grenade launcher pulled the trigger again, three times in rapid succession. With a thwonk, thwonk, thwonk, three of the blinking projectiles spat out. Jack didn't flinch as they flew towards him.
Instead, he held one hand in front of his face and arched his fingers as he had seen Touch do. The mines hovered in the air inches from Jack's nose, the cans they had been made from spiraling in mid air.
A quick flick of Jack's wrists and the mines flew back towards the monster in the diving suit, latching onto the portholes of the diving helmet.
The Big Daddy brought its shoulder forward and began to charge. The other Big Daddy was charging as well. They were heading straight towards each other, like medieval jousters.
Jack threw himself back, aiming his gun as he did so. He landed out of the water, on the damp surface by the wall.
"Fuck you, Mr. Bubbles."
And he fired at one of the mines. The explosion was intense enough, and the Big Daddies were close enough, that both of their helmets melted and they collapsed in flames, the water extinguishing most of the fire when the bodies hit the surface.
"Nooooo!" the little girl skipping stone screamed, running to the fallen Big Daddy's side.
The little girl drawing on the wall already had tears in her eyes as she approached.
"Daddy? Daddy, get up."
One little girl was kicking at the Daddy's melted helmet. The other was furiously shaking the other Daddy's shoulder.
"Please get up, Daddy. I can't do it without you."
"Daddy, you can't sleep now. The monsters will get me. Daddy, wake up before the monsters get me."
Their little shoulders were heaving, their backs turned to Jack. And as Jack tiptoed up behind them, he thought about how great the plasmids inside him were making him feel. And he thought about all of the ADAM those Little Sisters must be carrying inside of them.
They weren't human. Not anymore. Not really. Killing them would be considered inhuman, monstrous, on the surface. But Jack wasn't on the surface anymore. He was in Rapture.
He could see no right or wrong. The only rule of Rapture was every man for himself. If Jack was going to get his revenge on the man who had made him a puppet, he needed to show no mercy. He needed to take every advantage he could. Because Fontaine would.
As Jack came right up behind the Little Sisters, he thought of the crying child at the used car dealership, another lifetime ago, and how much he just wanted to stop her screaming. And he thought of Peach Wilkins, ready to break a Little Sister's neck, reach down her throat, and pull that slug filled with delicious ADAM right out of her.
What was right or wrong on the surface didn't amount to much down here. This was Rapture.
The Little Sister screamed as Jack put a hand around her neck.
A/N – I haven't really decided if it's "canon" that Delta is the Big Daddy that killed Suchong. I know it's hard to tell exactly where it fits in with the chronology leading up to the events of Bioshock, and I know it definitely doesn't fit the timeline of Shirley's novel. But I couldn't resist giving Delta and Eleanor cameos.
Hopefully I can get the next (and final) chapter up soon!