camwyn | Minor Milliways brainstorming part 2: The peoplesicles

The thawing out of humans on board the alien ship is of incredible importance to the Brotherhood of Steel. Their original mission in the Capital Wasteland was to find local prewar tech and secure it; the Brotherhood's overall mission is to find and recover prewar tech wherever possible. While there are lots of Brothers who don't really like the Lyons Doctrine that puts them in a position of risking their lives for ungrateful primitive dirt farmers very much, I strongly suspect that they would feel differently about the peoplesicles. They might not be pre-war tech, but if any of them are scientists or scholars, they actually know the stuff the Brotherhood is trying to uncover. Making contact with the alien ship, even more than making the attempt at radio contact with Lost Hills, earned Lyons and his people immense credit in the eyes of Casdin and his Outcasts. Accommodating these prewar folks and adapting them to the Wasteland three and four at a time became something of a priority for the more conservative Brothers who stayed with Lyons.

Casdin... well, Casdin and the Outcasts aren't coming back officially, because it's kind of hard to forgive insubordination, treason, and theft of materiel. But the shooting war between them and Lyons' people stopped when the RobCo factory came online and Second Diana went functional. Arrangements, I think, were made. The Outcasts would have been very interested to hear about the peoplesicle community, but I doubt any of them would've been allowed near it. It's kind of a delicate situation.

Here's the problem: with the possible exception of people who were kidnapped from exceptionally harsh environments, for the vast majority of the peoplesicles, their situation is basically Rip Van Winkle Goes To Hell. Let's take the example of Doctor Morrison Rand. He was a professor of anthropological archaeology at Banfield College in Humboldt, Oregon. In August of 2041 he was kidnapped by the aliens on his way from work to his car; he's one of the recorded voices you can find on the alien ship. 2041 was a little before the Resource Wars started, so Professor Rand was probably living a pretty good life in a pretty good place. Mister Handy robots had been in use for several years at the time as construction and maintenance 'bots; cars still ran on gasoline; life was pretty good. Maybe he was an expert in the Clovis culture or something like that. Maybe he spent a lot of his time in the field fiddling with potsherds and looking forward to coming home to a nice thirteen-inch black and white TV and spaghetti and meatball dinners that didn't have to be freeze dried to be hauled out to the dig site. The worst he's had to deal with for most of his life has probably been dust storms and bureaucrats, with maybe the occasional interference from wild animals and/or chem dealers. He's a very knowledgable man overall; he earned his place at Banfield.

And then the aliens grabbed him and he wound up with a lot of patchy memories of little green faces and a lot of patchy scars he doesn't like to think about.

And then one day he goes from seeing the canister close over his face (they do it every time they start an experiment- wake up one or two of the more obstreperous prisoners and make them watch) to unconsciousness, and then to consciousness again, and this time it's a human face to greet him. Only now it's been two hundred years. The world went to hell a few decades after he last left his office, apparently; the oil dried up and the coal followed and China invaded Alaska and America conquered Canada and Tel Aviv got blown off the map and Europe gave up on union and went to war with itself and the United Nations was replaced by a department store, and and and. But that doesn't matter any more because it went from ordinary hell straight to the Malebolge shortly after all that. He doesn't even have enough time to let how bad things got sink in before he finds out about the nukes. The planet's been scorched, and the government he knew and (mostly) trusted was partly responsible. His last dig site is somewhere you can't go without a Geiger counter. His offices... might exist, theoretically- there were places worse off than Oregon- but if they do, they're a load-bearing wall or two and a particularly stout filing cabinet surrounded by rubble and mutant plant things. His private library probably burned. Everything he ever knew isn't changed, it's lost.

Oh, there's civilization of a sort in California, they tell him, but the people who took the ship away from the aliens can't make contact with them. The best they can offer him is a place in a relatively secure farming community- if you can call it 'farming'; the cows have two heads and the scorpions are as long as he is tall, and the water supply arrives once a week. He's got supplies he can start off with, they got those from the alien ship, but he's got to manage on his own with the help of people he's never met before, who might or might not be from anything like his own time and place, who might or might not know how to take care of themselves.

Every day.

For the rest of his life.

At least he doesn't have to regularly defend himself. There's a military to do that. They check on him regularly and talk to him regularly and respect him as an academic, but... every last one of them was born literally hundreds of years after everyone he ever knew died; they barely share a common frame of reference with him at all. The whole place feels like a psychotic episode, only it's one he can't ever snap out of or wake up from. The only way out of this future is to live out what's left of his life and try not to wish they'd left him frozen.

Okay, now take Professor Rand's story and multiply that by thirty or forty, because that's at least how many people there'll be by now who had been kidnapped before the Great War. There's probably people from after the bomb, too, who may be the major reason the little community sticks together- they've seen fresher hell than the Capital Wastes and can reassure the beforetimers that this is better than the alternative- but good lord, man, there's going to be a lot of utterly horrified people trying to make it through the day every day without going to pieces no matter how nice the Brothers on-site are.

I think I may have Ellen get told "hey, look, we know your home is in Megaton and you're the primary liaison to the reprinting project, but you're being reassigned for at least a few weeks- the garrison commander out by Canterbury is in over his head and requested somebody who can do counseling, and you're the one wearing the chaplain's pin, and didn't you also get kidnapped the same way as- look, you're being reassigned and we'll see you again in a few weeks to a few months, pack up some of your Brahmin and get moving". It seems like it might be called for.