The lights of Rapture showed that life flourished amongst the crags and rocks of the sea floor, gave testament to the 'great chain' that Andrew Ryan so earnestly believed in. That a man could do anything if he set his mind to it, and had no one to censer him, to hold him back.
But even if its halls flooded, its lights dimmed and all it was that Ryan worked so hard and spent so much for died, life wouldn't leave the undersea metropolis. One only had to look up to see that the sea was already filled with more life than could ever be supported by Ryan's city. Fish would swarm the spires of Rapture's buildings. Dolphins would play amongst its air locked cosways, bobbing and weaving between the tubes. Sharks would hunt amongst the trash and detritus of the great valleys between the cities districts. Crabs, lobsters, eels, and rays would turn the streets and homes of the city into a new undersea paradise, unfit for people.
All of these things were lost on the Big Daddy as it sent rivet after rivet into the warped steel and iron before it. A bulkhead had become loose, and with its Little Sister back at the facility the Big Daddy was sent out to fix the outer shell of Rapture's main non-airlock passageway from Apollo Square leading to Hestia and the major entrance to the lower reaches of Rapture.
That isn't to say that the Big Daddy was stupid. It was far smarter than the citizens of Rapture believed, or the men and women of Ryan's labs had given it credit for. It simply became…. Confused, if it tried to remember certain things.
This particular Big Daddy, if it concentrated as hard as it could, and didn't have to do anything for about an hour, could remember the smiling face of a little girl named Mavis. She'd had a pretty smile, it'd remember. The more it tried to remember the less distinct the face became.
Unknown to the Big Daddy, the conditioning placed upon them to link them to their Little Sister's latched on to memories of loved ones and twisted them into thoughts of the little sisters they would protect. This same conditioning would make it harder and harder for the subjects to remember things from before the conditioning had taken place.
Now that the Big Daddy thought about it, it should return to the facility, surely its Little Sister was ready to go back out and about.
Previous incarnations, the first batches of Alpha Series Units to try and be bonded with little sisters had attempted to kill the children, or beat themselves to death. The doctors had attempted to try and find why, but to no luck. In truth, the subjects found it difficult to deal with the loss of these things that fundamentally made them who and what they were. As the conditioning improved, fewer and fewer subjects died but even now the survival rate of subjects was still only two out of three. Ryan was pushing his scientists for better and better results. The Big Daddies, he reasoned, could be a powerful force against Atlas and his parasites.
These things didn't concern the Big Daddy either, though it had begun to wonder about one of the side effects of its surgeries and conditioning. Subjects would begin to lose any concept of time. This wasn't much of a reason for anyone to worry, given the menial jobs Big Daddies did most of the time. But an idea of how many hours it worked would have allowed it to understand the images it saw through the glass.
A man stumbled past the glass, a bottle in his hand. He collapsed against the glass and stared at the Big Daddy. Later it'd seen the same man with a woman, shorter than him, with short brown hair. They laughed and the Big Daddy was reminded of Mavis. It saw another woman, older with black hair, and then later she and the man were together, kissing.
Now the woman was returning, but she wasn't nearly as on top of things as she was the first time. She clutched at her head and nearly fell over twice in the few steps that the Big Daddy watched. It would follow the woman until she stepped into an airlock; through the door it watched the girl drop something. The woman passed by again, from the same direction she had come before. But this time she wasn't wearing the white and black and red as before. It was a dress, and she glared at the ground and the red on the glass.
In a faint corner in the Big Daddy's mind it wondered if these people knew how damaged the metal and glass was in this area. They wouldn't keep walking through if they had.
The man came again. It was strange to see him alone, after all the times seeing him with the woman before.
The Big Daddy wondered if it should head back and pick up Mavis. The Little Sister must be worried by now.
The Big Daddy had seen other people too. It remembered a bald man leading groups of people through the street. They all had these things… guns. They all had guns, and they yelled and cheered and shoved the weapons into the air and into the hands of anyone that joined them. The Big Daddy was sure it'd seen the man before. A long time ago… before the… before he…
Women had walked by as well, pushing carriages and holding books.
Three other women walked by as well. The black haired woman was with them.
It remembered the men coming back, there wasn't nearly as many as had gone through the first time, the bald man wasn't with them. Some of them shot some bullets at it, but the glass merely cracked. It was far too thick for such small thing as bullets to break it. The Big Daddy wondered if these people wanted to die. More and more people did that. The kicked at the glass, some of the stranger ones would throw fire at him, or lightning. It never remembered anyone doing such things when it walked around with its Little Sister. If they had it would have nailed them to a wall.
It watched as another group of men went by, carrying guns, and following another man. He looked familiar to the Big Daddy, but it didn't know how. It had never seen him before.
A man who was once known as Ronald Gartlet might have recognized the man, but not likely. There weren't many people who'd known the man before he came to Rapture but Ron 'Garter' Gartlet was one of them. He'd followed 'Frank Fontaine' down to Rapture. He'd started up the fishery with the man. One day he'd been caught with a crate of Bibles, delivering them to that father down in the slums. The Police had said something about 'the dick being right' the next few weeks he'd seen no one, and had metal walls for company.
That was until the men in white coats came and took him away. In those times he'd wished he'd been back in his little cell. He's told them what he knew. About Fontaine's operation, about the smuggling. About the girls he'd taken. And the little smile he'd see in his sleep. The doctor had only grinned at him.
'Who do you think Suchong works for, Mistah Garter?'
For some time, he'd walked with his Mavis. It had followed her wherever she went, following angels. Then she had to go back to the school, so he worked on the city.
It saw another Big Daddy with a Little Sister walk by, and it thought of Mavis. It wondered if it missed her smile. In a little part of its mind it was sure it did.
The Big Daddy looked up at the fish and whales and dolphins and jelly fish that swarmed the city's buildings. A bathysphere floated past a few dozen feet above. A normal person might have been filled with awe at the raw nature around them, the thought that the pressure of the water could kill them in fractions of a second.
Or they might have looked at the world and seen it as something to be conquered, something to be tamed, its will bent and broken, its riches plundered.
The Big Daddy looked at the world of water that surrounded it, and the vision of it all washed through it, like water through a sieve. Nothing left behind and nothing altered.
It punched another rivet into the metal and watched the man as he came closer. He looked at the blood on the glass, and then at the Big Daddy itself. The man looked more the worse for wear. Worse than the Big Daddy had ever seen him even when he held the bottle. The man knocked on the glass and smirked.
It had certainly been a strange day.
At least that's what the Big Daddy would have thought if it had a concept of an inner monologue anymore. Now it was just another thing slowly peeled down and beaten into a corner of its mind.
The man-without-the-bottle's smile ran away and he turned away from the glass. He walked slowly to the airlock, still open after the woman walked through it twice before. He was following the red drops and smears along the floor and glass and walls. Inside the tube he picked up what the woman had dropped the first time. He stopped there for a while before turning around again.
The Big Daddy didn't understand things like holidays. All it knew was that there weren't many people out right now. It would have liked to know that it was Christmas, if it could remember such a thing. There was no one to throw things at it.
The man came back through the tube, the thing in his hand, that the woman had dropped, was blood blackened. That was a color the Big Daddy knew. It had defended Mavis a number of times from men and women that tried to take her. The man shoved the thing into a trouser pocket and sat at the bench by the glass, his head in his hands. It seemed to the Big Daddy that he was looking for something, and hadn't found it.
Next to the man was a bundle of papers. Month ago the Big Daddy would have known it was a news paper. It also would have known exactly what the headline meant. 'Kashmir Star Loses Mind' and the sub header 'Blazes through the streets' the man grabbed the bundle and read through it. After a moment it threw the papers away.
It was clearly not a good holiday for the man.
All these things happened over the span of minutes, to the big Daddy, but seemed to take hours for it all to happen. It would have liked to think more about these things, but the more it tried, the more its head hurt. Or at least it thought it hurt. Pain was another thing that seemed to have gone away. IT got confused and looked back at the rivets. Rust covered the metal plates, the Big Daddy put its gun against the metal and rammed a rivet home.
The little people were lucky it was here. Rapture would be falling apart if it wasn't for its rivets.