camwyn | (no subject)

I'm trying to justify the workings of Gordon's hazard suit. It's capable of detecting fractures and apparently compensating for them, and it can administer morphine. If it's charged, it can expend some of its own charge to take bullet damage instead of the wearer being hurt. It never seems to fall apart or lose integrity even under heavy damage, and if it's recharged it returns to full capability immediately. That's canon.

Implied in this is quite a lot of capability. Gordon's performance never flags while he has the suit on, despite having morphine in his system and incurring fractures. I can account for the fracture thing by assuming the suit has some kind of electrostim circuitry; there are devices that use small electrical pulses to encourage broken bones to heal faster. Amp that up a good distance and you have what the suit can do. The morphine is more problematic. I'm assuming that the suit's monitoring capacity allows it to judge the morphine dose *extremely* precisely. I'm also guessing that since you can take *radiation damage* and not come out too sick or too hurt to heal, it's got chelation agents that get released into the bloodstream in a hurry to swamp the worst of the radiation's effects. (An experimental drug of this nature just started human trials in the real world. I'm going to claim that Black Mesa had it back in '01. They have teleports, dangit, they can jolly well have CBLB502.)

The big problem is the fact that you can get shot multiple times, or chewed on, and you can come within a hair of dying and then heal right back up. While I can get away with claiming the suit has self-resealing nanotech capabilities, I'm not sure how to account for the human stuff. There are, however, locations in Xen where all you have to do is walk into a glowing blue pool and you heal right up- slowly, but still. I'm going to say that the green stuff in all the health dispensers on the walls is at least partially composed of the healing liquid from Xen, and that it's green because after the initial survey teams started getting collected themselves, Black Mesa had to stretch out their supply and added as much inert but possibly useful liquid as they dared. The medikits you find on the floor probably contain a number of high tech healing items like the foam the DoD's been testing recently- shoot the stuff into a wound and it forms such a strong barrier that an artery pumping hard enough to hit the ceiling from waist height stops so much as *leaking*. There's probably also morphine in there in the higher security areas. And every medikit- not the health dispensers, but the medikits- contains a couple of glucose packets in case of diabetic emergency. Which explains how Gordon can keep going without food for so long.

I'm not sure how he manages without sleep. I'm going to claim that the Xenian chemicals- whatever they are- titrate the fatigue toxins out of his system. They can't do jack for the mental state of 'when did I last sleep?' and 'when does the hurting stop?', but all the ick that accumulates in a muscle or nerve or brain that hasn't slept for a while gets compensated for by the stuff in the health dispensers. The medikits, on the other hand, might wind up going out the door with a light-fingered employee, so they don't contain anything from Xen.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Maybe it's not "morphine." Maybe there's a synthetic painkiller that is symptomatically similar to opiates, without actually being opium-derived. Rather than broadcasting the synthetic (and/or Xenian) nature, the pharmacological chemists were calling it "morphine-47" or "synthetic morphine" or "super morphine" or "Diet Morphine" or something, and the HEV was programmed with simply "morphine" to make the programming easier.

As for the fatigue poison issue, I like the idea. I can see the potential for Gordon to become psychologically addicted to the suit. I mean, it's not habit-forming, but he likes the increased productivity that comes from not having to sleep, right? Until the hallucinations kick in, of course.

Related Trivia: In the State of Texas, going without sleep for 72 hours constitutes "temporary insanity" for legal purposes.

I have a sudden image of him finally getting a look at the actual fluid packaging in his suit, and discovering that the drugs are subject to the same naming rules as things like Froot Loops and Cheez Whiz. "What the hell is 'mawrphynne'?" But, yes, the renamed synthetic painkiller is probably the most sensible way to account for that. Plus if he realizes somewhere around hour 7 or 8 of the Very Bad Day that whatever the suit is shooting into him, it isn't acting like morphine, it allows for a lovely stretch of absolute dread over whatever it is that they've put into his veins.

*eyes psiTunes* "Stayin' Alive". Very cute.

Personally, I have the feeling it's going to be a long time before anyone can actually talk him out of the suit after the Very Bad Day. It kept him alive in the face of a universe turned suddenly hateful. If he takes it off, what's going to protect him from whatever unspeakable things might sneak up on him in the meantime? And, yes, I don't think he's going to be willing to sleep for ages. That would involve letting down his guard- and look what happens when you do that. If the suit's chemistry can keep the fatigue poisons at bay, that's another reason for refusing to take it off. They're going to have to knock him out while he's raving if he's to get any actual sleep at all.

Yeah, that's going to go well. Because the Powers That Be will want to analyze that suit first thing.

Here's a thought: How are Gordon's circadian rhythms going to react when he does take the suit off?

Shot completely to hell. One by one the various systems are going to shut down at inconvenient times; he's going to sleep pretty much wherever he first achieves horizontal status, assuming he doesn't conk out sitting down, and when he wakes up he's going to be absolutely ravenous, because his stomach won't care any more whether it's day, night, or anywhere else. It wants food NOW. He's going to be a while getting it back in order.

In canon, he goes directly (from his point of view) from in the suit at the end of the Very Bad Day, to wearing ordinary clothes on a train twenty years in the future. But he picks up the new version of the suit less than an hour later...

Edited 2008-05-02 22:31 (UTC)

Yeah. Whereas the one I'm playing at Milliways is going to walk out of the Star Tram and into the Bar, which is why taking the suit off even comes into the picture. He's going to be stuck at the Bar until I've played through HL 2 and at least Episode 1. I need to give him that time to approach something vaguely like a reasonable mental state, because people in HL 2 don't react to him like they would to someone on the edge of a nervous breakdown, from what I understand.

The G-man's going to teleport him out of his room at Milliways straight onto the City 17 train, for great WTFery.

I have the feeling it's going to be a long time before anyone can actually talk him out of the suit after the Very Bad Day.

heh Wouldn't be surprising, no. I wasn't able to find a reference offhand, but I seem to recall that in "The Fall of Reach" (the first Halo novel), there's a mention of a similar thing, where while the SPARTANs can go without their armor, they don't like it so much. Besides the raw protection factor, MJOLNIR's hydrostatic gel layer, neurally-linked power assisted movement, and other such design features apparently also make it exceedingly comfortable. Perfectly controlled temperature, fully supportive, and instantly responsive. HEV's probably not quite that good, just as it's not that mightily protective, but it's probably got some of that.

Now I'm wondering if one of the more psychically capable Milliways patrons is going to have to reach into his brain and go "SLEEP DAMMIT" at some point.

A couple of years back I remember hearing that someone, possibly DARPA, had (or has) a drug entering human trials that basically blocked fatigue. It went into the brain and said no, you're not tired, everything is fine. It wasn't a stim. It didn't lead to shaky hands or jittery tempers, or anything like that, it just switched that part of you off. It lasted quite some time and did not involve a caffiene-style crash afterwards because it's not a stim. I think it was some kind of neuro-chemical blocker. The implications were that troops on the battlefield could go for days without sleep and suffer none of the effects of sleep deprivation. Suggested civillian uses included giving them to truckers to prevent accidents, or using them as a performance enhancing drug to eliminate that inconvenient period of sleep that your corporate masters would rather not have to let you go home for.

I saw it on several different outlets for bleeding-edge tech news online and then poof. It was gone. I havn't seen any mention of it since. Which makes me wonder if maybe it wasn't supposed to be public knowledge in the first place.

I think health dispensers would make a lovely repository for your suit to refill on this stuff.

And then, there's always this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodiola_rosea

Combats depression, fatigue, boosts mental and physical performance, even stops altitude-sickness. Sounds about right, yeah? Okay so take extracts from that and mix it with the glowing Xen life-goo, which they were already using (you're right, s'got to be what's in those medpacks) and, well, yeah. A couple pints of that mixed in with your blood and you'd probably be superman too. Assuming the Xen-goo undoes the massive kidney and liver damage that fistfuls of any drug in your system would cause. I'm inclined to believe it does.

Side note: I'd never heard of an adaptogen before. It just sounds like it should be some kind of superpower pill, doesn't it?

That would be Provigal...and its still out there. It doesn't block fatigue, it just removes the sleepies and headnodding. Generally prescribed for Narcolepsy and the like.

(deleted comment)

*does some digging*

O-ho. Got it.