Chapter 3: She's seen things
She sat there on the bed, just staring out into space for a long time. No thoughts were in her head; even her second set of memories, which were even more cerebral than her first, was in agreement with her desire for quiet contemplation.
After a while, she grabbed one of the MREs and ripped the plastic open. It WAS indeed fish cakes, but at the same time, there were two packages of jalapeño cheese spread inside. Not did the Fish Cake meal not come with jalapeño cheese spread, but even the few meals that did only gave you one!
This thing was like gold when deployed beyond the green zone, which, thankfully, she rarely had to do. Her general idea of a bad meal when she was in Afghanistan was when Pizza Hut didn't put extra cheese on her pizza as she asked. But if she were in some FOB, she would have been able to trade these jalapeño cheeses for riches beyond her imagining. Everyone loved them, that and the pound cake dessert. You could usually trade one cheese pack for at least one to two RipIts, which was like an Army-brand version of Red Bull energy drink. Knowing the Army procurement process, it was probably just the cheapest possible energy drink on the market.
She briefly wondered if these bonus cheese packs would have been in this MRE if she hadn't been polite to Mr ROB before? Of course, there was no way to know, but she thought not. She gave Mr ROB a mental nod while squeezing the cheese spread on the Fish Cake. Hmm, it really did improve the fishy flavour. She only ate half the meal, leaving the rest for later. She wouldn't waste a single calorie of this thing; she even planned on dumping the sugar packets in her mouth if she decided against sweetened coffee. But then again, with the kind of instant coffee available in MREs, it would probably be beneficial to add flavourings to it rather than savour its typical flavour.
Her arm was already feeling a little better. How long had she spaced out? Unfortunately, she didn't have a watch and no mental mesh or neural co-processor, which would have included an internal chronometer. She didn't even have the standard cortical stack, which might save her from some definitions of the word death or at least bring back a copy of her ego if she did die. But then again, there was nobody to download her cortical stack into a new morph or sleeve, even if she had one, anyway.
She saw a lot of potential loot when clearing the rooms earlier, but... she didn't want to step outside this room for now.
There was a terminal that appeared to be working to examine, but the small desk faced the wall and to use the terminal, she would have to sit with her back to the door, which was something she wasn't currently willing to do.
Her second set of memories diagnosed ourself with possibly incipient stages of post-traumatic stress syndrome. In her future, there were several treatments, of which she recommended a complete cyber brain installation followed by neurotransmitter balancing. Still, alternatively, several pharmaceuticals would be very effective. She even knew their exact chemical makeup, but none of that was beneficial since there was no chemical synthesis laboratory nearby. The broken chemistry sets we saw earlier might as well as be the tools of an unlettered neanderthal practising alchemy as far as we... she was concerned.
She decided for a moment to explore the scanner, PipBoy and StimPak. She could do that from her comfortable position on the bed and didn't have to turn her back to a possible attack vector from a potential homicidal clone.
She scanned the StimPak lying on the bed, which the scanner didn't like at all. It detected some sort of organic makeup, but this wasn't a body -- it wasn't even a dog. It wasn't even a synthetic morph which it would have scanned no problem, either. It took her a while fiddling with the settings to get it to take a scan without immediately piping the result into the medical diagnostic program. And then more time to send portions of the scan to the medical diagnostic program, specifically the actual liquid inside the syringe.
Sure enough, it was some sort of undifferentiated stem cells and various proteins and chemicals that not only kept the contents in a some kind of sufficient stasis to last over two hundred years but also presumably directed the stem cells to trauma in the body.
The resolution on the scanner was insane. Each 3D scan was hundreds of terabytes, even using an amazing compression algorithm. But, still, differentiating nucleotide triplets in order to decode a cell's DNA was right at the edge of what it was possible to do with this mobile device. In fact, she had to enable development mode to unlock that capability as it wasn't intended to be relied upon. Errors in the decoding process were common so scans had to be continually repeated with each decoded codon or triplet compared.
The scan error rate was less than the successful decoding rate, so after a few million iterations of the scan, you would get an accurate genome decoded. The longer you scanned, the more confidence you would have in its accuracy, so she let this thing scan for over an hour while she looked over the PipBoy.
She didn't have a screwdriver built into her finger like inspector Gadget (YET insisted half of her) so she was somewhat limited if she wanted to fix it but she could open it up no problem. It featured a finger-turnable captive screw design that she really appreciated on any user-serviceable electronic device and was practically unknown by the time of her last memories. By then, consumer electronics were more of a consumable than a durable good.
The electronics inside were... weird. It was like looking at what a society that never invented metal oxide field effect transistors might build. There were vacuum tubes in this fucking thing! Miniaturized vacuum tubes. It was like what you might expect if you took such technology to its extremes instead of discarding it for the vastly superior FET technology.
She sat there stupified. The Fallout universe had mobile robots that TALKED to you and at least ran some sort of abbreviated VI or personal assistant program. There was absolutely no way that you could ramp up the technology in PipBoys to do even a fraction of that. How would they have done it, if it wasn't magic?
She searched both sets of memories, her first for its knowledge of electronics and her second for its knowledge of the requirements of a barebones virtual intelligence. The only possibility either of them could come to was that they had jumped directly from vacuum tube technology to practical quantum computers while skipping the entire field of "classical computer architecture" that was supposed to be in-between!
Also, what the hell were these small vacuum tubes made out of to last hundreds of years? She softly flicked one with her fingernail, and it didn't feel like glass. So it had to be sapphire or diamond, absent some other wonder material she didn't know of. I mean, they were still transparent! That wasn't a requirement for a vacuum tube!
She found what was likely the problem, though. A burned out resistor leading from what had to be some sort of nuclear battery or RTG on a separate high voltage bus that did nothing but power the antiquated display. Usually, these types of displays required really high voltage, and he was curious about how you'd get that kind of voltage directly from a nuclear battery without going through a boost converter.
In any event, while she could not fix the PipBoy presently she was pretty confident it was repairable. She'd just need a soldering iron which she could build herself if she had to and a source of scrap electronics to cannibalize for the common resistor that burned out.
Wait, if it was just the display that was non-functional...
She turned it on and found the switch that activated a bright flashlight. Well, that will be useful, at least. Flashlight get!
She glanced at the scanner and saw that it was well into the realm of diminishing returns, and it was highly confident about the decoded genome of the cells in the StemPak.
She had to set the tablet to full computer mode, keyboard extending out from the bottom, to run the bio-simulation system with the provided genome. It took her a bit to realize it didn't have a mouse but instead used an eye-tracking system and a special couple of buttons on the bottom of the keyboard. It was kind of an odd interface even for her second set of memories but after a while using it they both decided they liked it.
This simulation system probably could simulate a complete multicellular organism from a provided genome but it worked very well on the cellular, bacterial and virus level. She spent a couple of hours appreciating the work of a very brillaint person. These stem cells were synthetic and artificially designed. There were also the remains of a deactivated virus and a variety of signalling proteins, and she was pretty sure that this virus was the industrial production method.
It made her curious how people synthesized StimPaks in this day and age because it would make the process both very easy and almost impossible. If you had the original virus, you could produce them by just using the virus to convert living biomass, probably plant matter, to human stem cells and then adding the signalling proteins.
She seemed to recall that you could make StimPaks sitting around a campfire. Or at least at a chemistry set. Either that wasn't possible in this world, or more likely, there was some error in the viral deactivation process. The fact her scanner hadn't detected a live viron could be chance.
Even just exposing humans to a deactivated virus, though, meant that it was a surety that the virus was designed to be non-replicable if it was inside a mammal's body, and there were a number of ways that was possible. Deactivating the production virus was probably meant for keeping a manufacturing trade secret more than one strictly for safety.
The more she thought about it, the more she agreed with this hypothesis. But, that would mean that most people who make StimPaks in the Wasteland aren't conducting chemistry at all but are just performing cargo cult alchemy at the altar of some remnants of a pre-war virus. Actually, that does sound very Fallout.
She did have some conclusions, though. She was very confident a StimPak wouldn't be fatal. She was also sure her medichines would instantly destroy them like a pack of piranhas, so she would have to add the genome of these stem cells and all the proteins involved individually to her medical implant's exclusion file. Thankfully she could access that wirelessly through her computer.
Lastly, she was close to 100% positive that using a StimPak even once would give her cancer. Not right away super cancer or anything, though. But malignant tumors would begin to form at the site of healing after a couple of years. Considering she knew a number of ways to cure cancer, that wasn't a deal breaker. Honestly, she was of the opinion that if you used a StimPak hundreds of times you would likely get cancer over time even if you were a baseline human. Maybe the Fallout universe had cures for cancer too? These were designed to be a first aid tool.
If you could cure cancer, it would be a good trade to get predisposed to cancer eventually if the alternative was bleeding out or being blind forever. Her intuition led her to believe that the minor risk of malignant tumors was probably hidden from the public if whatever pharmaceutical company designed StimPaks was like any of the other corporations in this universe.
She spent the next few hours carefully extracting the decoded amino acid chain for each of the novel and interesting proteins in the StimPak, and sure enough she did eventually find a number of active virons. She would bet a hundred bottle caps part of the process of "synthesizing" the fluid StimPaks used was exposing it to an existing sample of StimPak fluid and waiting. She would have to examine a new StimPak and compare it to this data from a pre-war manufactured one. She figured that new ones had a lot shorter shelf life, for one thing.
She used the computer to program her medical implant, including setting up new owner credentials to prevent possible hacking since it was operating in factory reset mode. She didn't want to leave this room until she could, if needed, use a StimPak and expect that it would save her life.
By now, her arm was feeling much better than before; although she was aware the bone was still knitting, she figured she could use it for light duty so long as she avoided a Gary smashing it with a crowbar or picking up heavy objects.
She explored this room completely and found a Laser Pistol and a number of energy cells in the desk drawer. That was an interesting and beneficial discovery. She only had around twenty five rounds of pistol ammo. The laser pistol was not as blocky or experimental looking as the laser pistols she remembered from the Fallout games. Actually, the normal pistol was a lot slimmer too. It reminded her of H&K, somewhat, where as the 10mm Pistol in the Fallout 3 game was sized to be as big as your femur. Almost all the guns in Fallout 3 were really quite awful in model design.
Animations were terrible, from always shoving two shotgun shells when reloading a double barrel, even if you only fired one shot to always reloading 5 or however many bullets in the lever action even if you only fired less, too. So she was quite glad the weapons in this universe she actually found herself seemed more realistic.
The laser pistol though... All of her memories suggested that a laser powerful enough to burn a hole completely through a person would blind everyone who saw it permanently, including the weapon user. In her first life, you could be blinded just by the stray speculations and reflections from a powerful laser, and such a laser was nowhere near powerful enough to burn through anything but perhaps a sheet of paper or two. That is to say, shooting a powerful laser at the wall and then just looking at the dot it produced would be enough to cause permanent retinal damage.
So, she was suspicious of this thing. She decided to test it. Her medichines could repair her retina in a few hours, anyway. She closed her left eye and, for good measure, held her left hand completely over the left eye. It took her a while to psych herself up to do this but she then squinted down the sight of the laser pistol at the pile of discarded bedding. She ignored the part of her brain that told her she was being foolish and pulled the trigger.
It WAS bright. The sound was similar to a high-powered pulsed laser; a soft crack and a red beam of light was momentarily visible. She opened her left eye and blinked her right eye and then tried to glance around. Everything was blurry! Surely she is blind in that eye now, right?
Her second set of memories reminded her that one of her eyes was dilated and the other was not, so of course, binocular vison would be blurry at first and implied we were dumb. Well, bitch you are me, too! So what does that make you?
She blinked a few more times, waiting for her eyes to even out. She can still see as well as she always could, as far as she could tell. She checked her computer, which still had her medical interface pulled up. No new trauma, eye-related or not, was listed.
She started coughing for some reason but then realized that the discarded sheets and blanket was on fire. Fuck!
Half of her opened Fish Cake was still in this room; she wouldn't sacrifice calories to save herself from some temporary burns. She jumped to her feet, opened the door, quickly grabbed the burning bedding and ran outside, throwing it as far as she could. Then she carefully stomped out the small fire. She wouldn't waste any of her radioactive water on putting it out.
She rabbited back into her room, making sure there wasn't anything else on fire in there before grabbing the laser pistol and peeking out the open door, carefully and in each direction one at a time.
Okay, she supposed she was being a little irrational here. She closed the door and decided to check on the functioning terminal at the desk. There was a sidearm in this room, which was single occupancy. This had to be the room for a sergeant, a barracks matron, or something similar.
However, she set the pistol next to the terminal in easy reach, just in case.
Thankfully, the terminal's interface was very weird, but there was no hacking needed as she had no idea how this operating system worked. Instead, she'd have to prioritize exploring libraries or any RobCo building just to find documentation on the RobCo OS.
For now, she was able to bring up what was, in effect, a note-taking program being used as a journal. Unfortunately, she didn't learn any deep secrets about VaultTec but did learn the Garies went insane, and a couple of dozen people barricaded themselves in the female dorms.
Half the people never came back from either exploring for supplies or attempting to escape the vault and eventually whoever was in charge decided to poison that night's meal. Grim, but cheerful in comparisan to some fates that occured in VaultTec vaults.
One entry did give her very useful information, though. Apparently, they had attempted to kill all the Gary's and apparently succeeded. But the next entry said, "The system keeps cloning more!"
That certainly explained how clones that didn't look that much older than thirty five were still alive two hundred years after they were supposedly cloned in the first place.
It made her very much want to explore this lower level that featured an in-tact and operational pre-war cloning and life sciences lab. But something in the pit of her stomach told her that was, no doubt, the most dangerous area of this place. She didn't expect Spec Ops Gary's, but she did expect ceiling-mounted automated machine guns, killbots and possibly traps. Maybe AI controlled if the computer system in the Vault was sophisticated enough.
In other words, precisely the things she wasn't in any position to deal with at the moment. So she would have to put a pin in Vault 108 and return to it at a later date.
She decided to loot the entire dormitory wing and then try to break out of the Vault. There was a settlement not too far to the north, she recalled. All of her knowledge was valuable, but most of it such as her medicine experience was most valuable in a community. She had a goal, in mind, as her first destination depending on the current date but it would take time to get anywhere near it alive.
She considered her present plan as she ate the last half of her Fish Cake meal, although the dessert packet was a little disappointing.
1. Find others.
2. Find the current date.
3. Trade valuable skills for money and safety.
4. Work west across the river and find Megaton.
5. If there is significant time before the start of the Fallout 3 plot proceed to the Virtual Strategic Solutions building, clear the Anchorage simulation, and loot the place. Supposedly dying in the sim causes cardiac arrest. She is a bit sceptical of that, but even if it is case that is honestly barely an inconvenience to her. Her medichines will definitely restart her heart and keep it oxygenated during a hypothetical arrest.
6. If there isn't much time before 2278, stay around Megaton and become a follower of the vault dweller and ride his or her coattails to fame and glory. Quietly kill them with a hostile medichine attack, poison or virus if the vault dweller is a complete psychopath or is about to help the Enclave with Project Purity.
She nodded; that was an excellent first plan.
She wasted no more time and thoroughly explored the rooms in this dormitory wing. She found a lot of equipment, some of which she would have to leave behind at least for now. One of the barracks was being used as a makeshift armory and its contents, while ample for a single person, would have been meager for a dozen people, which might have been one of the reasons whoever was in charged decided to pull a Jonestown on everyone.
There were four pistols and several hundred rounds of ammunition and about a dozen magazines, about half of which were hollow points. She would take all of them with her, if only as trade items.
There was a set of combat armor, which she immediately put on over her bodysuit. She would, however, keep the riot helmet as it had a drop down visor compared to the plain jane K-pot style helmet that came with the combat armor.
Of long arms there was only one, but it looked somewhat nice. It was a short barreled carbine, folding stock. Reminded her a lot of M4 of her previous world and chambered in a similar intermediate cartridge of about 5mm or so. It might actually be 5.56mm for all she knew, she didn't have a pair of callipers, and it wasn't labelled on either the rifle or the ammunition. It only had a single 30-round magazine but there was a bag of about 100 loose rounds, too.
There were a lot of medical supplies, about a half dozen StimPaks, Rad-X and RadAway, as well as a bit of what she would consider generic medical supplies such as syringes, bandages, IV tubing, alcohol, etc.
The best thing she saw was a rucksack. In fact, it looked highly similar to a MOLLE 3-day assault pack she was familiar with in her first life. Was that VaultTec standard issue? Plus, there was a camelback-style wearable canteen, which would be very useful. There was a suspicious lack of any water supplies, though. But there was a lot of stout rope! She would take as much of that as she could, you never knew when you could use some rope -- and it was quite laborious to fabricate without an industrial base so it was probably worth a lot.
She found a lot of food, she would take most of it with her after scanning it for toxins. Despite her nanomachines, there were a number of toxins that would still be fatal in enough quantities, and unfortunately, they were some of the simpler and most readily available varieties. Hard to stop the COX inhibitor effect and resultant histotoxic hypoxia cyanide caused without a nanomachine individually sequestering each molecule of the stuff. A nominally fatal dose wouldn't kill her, but most people intentionally poisoned by cyanide usually receive thousands of times the lethal dose; it wasn't like cyanide was expensive.
If she had a neural mesh or a cybernetic brain, her present medichine hive would likely be much more effective against toxins, as it could take some processing power from either to run an expert system to coordinate all nanomachines simultaneously. Oh well, while she didn't exactly have complete blue-prints for either of those in her head she DID have a full understanding of exactly now only how they work but how they were invented. So it was something to look forward to. I mean, who didn't want to do a little elective brain surgery on themselves?
God damnit, second set. Don't just take over thinking without asking!
She made a shocking discovery when she was investigating the restroom and communal showers. She turned one of the showers on as a lark and it worked! I mean, sure it coughed and sputtered and then spewed out a disgustingly black filthy liquid and continued to do so for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. It smelled so bad she had to leave the room for this period of time but after that clean water issued forth. She continued to let it run for a good hour, on all available fixtures. She scanned a cup full and it was cleaner than her rad-water. And slightly less radioactive, too.
She chuckled as she supposed Vault 108's water chip was still functional.
The weirdest thing she found was a telescoping back scratcher. But she found a good use for it. She used one of the diamond wedding rings she found on the skeletons to score a half dozen or so pieces out of the mirror in the restroom and made compact mirror squares. Then she used some Abraxo brand superglue, which somehow was still a liquid, and glued one of the mirrors to the back scratcher portion. She could use this to look around corners while keeping her squishy brain behind them.
She wondered how valuable jewelry was because she found a fair bit. Some old world cash too, which she didn't even bother taking.
She loaded up on everything she could carry and returned to her single-occupancy room. She decided she would sleep first, then head out first thing when she woke up. She'd been up for over eight hours and she didn't precisely know how long it would take to fight through the Garies to make it to the surface.
First, though, was the most important thing. She returned to the bathroom, carefully stripped down yet kept a pistol and knife in the next stall, sitting on the soap holder, and took a long shower. The hot water, for some insane reason, worked. It had to be an electrical system, she supposed, like the "endless hot water tanks" she remembered from her first life. It was glorious. She used all the soap she wanted, since she already packed some and couldn't carry the rest.
The only downside was there was no towels. None she was willing to use, anyway. So she had to air dry like Cuba Gooding Jr from Jerry Maguire. At least there was a wire brush she could use for her hair. Otherwise, it would be a ticket to endless tangles and then, eventually, split ends.
She made her way back to her room and laid on her bed. She arrayed her ruck and other stuff so it would trip someone rushing through the door and slept with the laser pistol and knife under her pillow. She tried to go to sleep...
It was slow coming and at that moment she decided that she would re-invent the neural mesh, if only to use the induced sleep feature that allowed you to fall asleep to a fast, optimized REM cycle at user command.
She fell asleep in consensus. She dreamed of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Of a rogue Afghani National Guard soldier shooting her friend. Of gamma ray beams glittering in the dark near the Motherworld. Of a blurry face. Of TITANS scouring the life from a planet.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
SpiraSpira
SpiraSpira The TITANs referred to in the last line were from the Eclipse Phase game that forms half the memories of the MC. They are the group of hyper-interlligent AIs that destroyed the planet Earth in that setting.
Weekly Power Status
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Ranking 
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