Sea of Nightmares - Little Sister Retcons

Ah Little Sisters, the BioShock series' greatest symbol right after Big Daddies. The basic concept of the Gatherers have gone through many incarnations over the development of the first game; originally it was nonexistent at all and the player were to simply collect the ADAM-producing sea slugs themselves. Later this idea was favored over by a concept of implanting the slugs inside other creatures, ranging from frogs and crabs to chipmunks and a dog in a wheelchair, until they came up with the disturbing idea of the Little Sisters we know today.

We, with the creation of the Sea of Nightmares, are in to close this circle. In canon, to transform a human into a Gatherer, one first needs to implant the sea slug inside the girl's stomach, which will somehow increase the efficiency of producing the ADAM tenfold. When harvesting a Little Sister, one has to rip the sea slug out of her stomach and presumably eat it, instantly gaining all of the ADAM it had, but the host is killed.
But then there's the part where all of this information is crossed with the fact the Little Sister has to be a little girl for any of this to work. This was most likely done only because of the creators' decision to excuse multiple things, ranging from the reasonable need to have only one model for the Gatherer to explaining why the Little Sisters are unable to protect themselves (and thus need Big Daddies). The developers actually wanted to present "Little Brothers" at several points but all were ultimately cancelled. It is referenced both in the book BioShock: Rapture, when Tenenbaum and Suchong mention a failed experiment to create a Little Brother, and in an Audio Diary where Tenenbaum is wondering why Little Sisters have to be female.

Ironically, there aren't any references to why they have to be children, and in the aforementioned diary Tenenbaum claims to know why that's the case, but at least in our opinion, having Gatherers be exclusively female makes more sense than being exclusively children - the former can be easily brushed off by placing the sea slug inside their uterus rather than the stomach, which in a game that's already 18+ is acceptable. Explaining why the host has to be a small child is trickier, and can probably be traced down to the fact the child's body is not fully developed and as such easier to genetically engineer.

And that brings me to the original point of this post. ADAM is more than just an economic powerhouse; it holds the power to overwrite the DNA of every cell in one's body. BioShock gives us badass arranges of spells we could use with this ability, from firing electricity from the tip of our fingers to creating an illusory copy of ourselves to fool enemies, but every real world geneticist would tell you the easiest method of genetic engineering is to implant the genes of one organism in another. And once the folks over Rapture map the genome of the sea slug, geniuses like Suchong could easily locate the one that makes them make the ADAM.

We the creators of the Sea of Nightmares, much like our other creations, did not originally mean to present the story as an AU that goes against canon lore, but it has eventually become apparent that some of the truths of the world were better retconned. If anything, call it constants and variables (not to mention several mechanics have been canonically changed between different installments of the franchise).

As the outcome, in the Sea of Nightmares, no symbiotic transplant is required to create a Little Sister. Instead, a serum known as LOT 215 is used on a young female child and overrides the function of a gland that in a regular adult female is responsible for producing enzymes that would provide fetuses with energy they need to develop, and causes it to constantly produce massive amounts of ADAM instead, which must be done before the gland becomes functional in order to properly work. This, however, also renders the subject incapable of bearing children, as her blastocysts would die out at an early age (a problem that can be fixed later via other ADAM-related procedures). In order to "Harvest" this version of a Little Sister, all one needs to do is use ordinary syringes to drain all of the ADAM in her body at once, which results in her death. It is also possible to revert the Little Sister back into a human girl by injecting her with a secondary serum known as LOT 260, allowing to safely extract some of the ADAM in her body, though the Gatherer still keeps most of it.

But arousing this topic allowed us to cross it with another fun subject into an opportunity we couldn't miss. Namely, how would LOT 215 affect an adult, or a male? The answer for that will be revealed in the future. In the meantime, let's just say: BioShock introduced a Little Sister and a Big Daddy. BioShock 2 added the Big Sister as the new strongest enemy. To come full circle, what needs to appear next?