Notes From New Vegas 40
Apr. 22nd, 2012 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 40: There's No Place Like Home, There's No Place Like Home- DAMMIT SHOES COOPERATE ALREADY
When last we saw our heroine Janice had been kidnapped by floating brains in jars and informed that they'd removed several of her major organs and substituted technological replacements for them and then been asked if she would please go and retrieve a transmitter array and some kind of suit and special frequencies for a sound-shooting gun, partly because it would help her find her actual brain and partly because she, unlike they, had hands.
I can say it again but it won't make any more sense than that.
Well, Janice wasn't happy with the idea of doing anything the brains wanted, but she had to admit that they had more of a lead on what might have happened to her brain than she did. And regardless of her current functionality and the fact that the TESLA COILS STUFFED IN HER SKULL (no, really) supposedly would resist certain forms of damage and vulnerability that her original meat package was, er, vulnerable to, she kind of wanted it back. She was not in an issue of Battle Angel Alita, and this was not Tiphares. And, hell, even the Tiphareans freaked out when they found out about the brain thing-
ANYWAY. *ahem* Janice couldn't bring herself to attack the brains for some reason. No, literally, there was just this massively overwhelming feeling of mellowness that prevented her from reaching over her shoulder for her gun or even getting enough will together to attack them with her bare hands. So she figured, you know, maybe she'd better talk to the brains individually to find out a little more about her situation without the one she mentally called Dr. Thundervoice the First overriding them all.
The first brain she went to talk to had the voice of Thaddeus Venture. No, seriously, James Urbaniak did the voice acting; it was an insecure, unhappy robotics expert named Dr. O, who got all snippy and angry at the sight of Janice's Pip-Boy. Apparently he had major issues with RobCo as a company. Then again he had major issues with a lot of things. Including his name, which he said everyone got WRONG and couldn't they SEE and ARRRGH. Janice cut him off before he could get much farther, asking if that meant his name was actually 'Zero'. When it turned out it was, she suggested that if he really wanted to make sure people used Zero instead of O, he might want to consider putting a slash across the emblem, the way termlink protocol did on a computer screen. He was so thrilled with the idea that he immediately went into a tailspin of inadequacy over the fact he'd never thought of it himself.
Now, there is of course an ancient and long-standing tradition of talking machines and inhuman intelligences into destroying themselves, and I won't deny that Janice considered the possibility of pushing 0 the rest of the way over. On the other hand, she was outnumbered four to one and had no way of fighting back if the other brains overheard her or saw 0 blow up or something. And since she really didn't want to have any more involuntary surgery, she figured she'd be better off getting this particular bundle of neuroses on her side. She went into some blither about how even if he was a total zero, zero was at least a mighty number, considering what it did to anything else you multiplied it against. At the thought of being a Destroyer of Mathematics, Zero perked up and seemed to pull himself together. She probably could've asked him a fair deal more at that point, but it had just sunk in that she'd gone out of her way to give a disembodied brain with no qualms about experimenting on human subjects a shot of self esteem, so she made her goodbyes and hurried over to the next floating ball of ew.
This may have been a mistake. The next one was Dr. Dala, the female-voiced one, who claimed to have over three hundred doctorates in many different areas and a deep and abiding fascination with... biology. Anatomy, specifically. Even if it was thoroughly disgusting and unnecessary. Why, just look at Janice, all skin and hormones and blood and breathing and... and...
Janice took the opportunity at that point to yawn, and stretch, and veeeeery slowly scratch one arm. And to take some nice deep breaths, and cough. And then she developed a powerful urge to go take a shower somewhere, because Dala started making very interesting noises that one does not generally expect a disembodied brain to be able to make. She half expected Dala to ask for a cigarette when it was all done. Which she didn't do, thank God; on the other hand Dala admitted to absolutely loving surgery, both doing it and watching it, and told her about how the auto-doc that removed her brain had run into some problems due to an injury in exactly the right place to make it have to take extra long with the brain removal, and asked her if she would consider coming back every so often in her attempts to find the technologies just to, mmm... breathe...
That was disturbing. Both to Janice and to me. I'm almost certain there's some kind of feminist commentary to be made about the fact that the brain with the overtly sexual interest in anatomy and horrible procedures is the female one. On the other hand, the brains at Big Mountain are all parodies to greater or lesser degree of Fifties scifi movie tropes, and you couldn't throw a rock in a Fifties scifi movie without running into the idea of women as the embodiments of terrifying sexuality, so I suppose it makes a certain degree of sense given the context. Having one of the guy brains be the sex monster would be more unnerving for me, to be honest. Mostly because what makes Dala so deeply disquieting is the Dr. Mengele element. Having one of the male brains get all panting and aroused over the idea of slicing up its victims- for science, of course- would turn that brain into every skeevy tomomaniac serial killer out there, and border on something out of The Human Movie I Didn't Want To Know Existed, and then I'd have to deal with that brain on an ongoing basis... look, ultimately it's pretty goddamn disturbing no matter which of the brains involved is the sex maniac, honestly. NEW SUBJECT.
Dr. 8 was next. 8 was the brain who spoke only in static bursts. He actually seemed kind of nice, although that may have been because it's hard to say anything overtly creepy when your vocalizations sound like white noise and your subtitles are mostly composed of @ symbols and brackets. Janice eventually managed to coax a little sense out of him when she realized it sounded like the kind of noise computer terminals running RobCo termlink protocol made during a hack attempt, and he calmed down a bit. She never did entirely understand what he was saying, but he seemed to appreciate her taking the time to talk to him, and he gave her some magazines and what sounded (to someone who can understand static) like an invitation to come back and talk to him again sometime.
Too bad the next brain wasn't nearly as congenial. That would be Dr. Thundervoice the Second, more properly known as DOCTOR BOROUS, who had this massively pathological need to talk like Don "Movie Trailer Guy" La Fontaine. About Communists. And animals. And his army of cyberdogs, including 'a scamp' called Gabe. And his mastery of DNA manipulation. And how he had created the nightstalkers (aka rattledogs, aka fully functional coyote-rattlesnake hybrids). And how he had created the industrious cazadores. And how he had kept them all sterile and safely controlled inside Big Mountain. And how he could demonstrate his surgical castration techniques on the COMMIE ANIMAL LOBOTOMITE in front of him if she didn't quit telling him things about his creations he didn't want to know. And how he was HEAD OF HIS BIOLOGY CLASS at American High School, no thanks to idiot jocks like RICHIE MARCUS. And- yeah, um, Janice kind of got the feeling that while Dala was immensely disturbing, and 0 was neurotic as hell, Borous was simply flat out insane, or at least living on more of his own little world than any of the others. She got some info out of him about Mobius and his roboscorpions- something about their stings devouring intelligence, and nobody being willing to test whether that was true- and then fled the scene, because after those four she did not want to talk to Thundervoice the First (Dr. Klein). She just wanted to go somewhere and shiver for a while.
So, not really having any other place to go, she turned and went back to the rooms she'd investigated earlier. Along with the sound gun, the brains had given her some kind of personality chip to install in the central computer in those rooms; as soon as she did the device switched itself on and asked her, in a very deferential British voice, how it could help sir today. It apologised greatly for its inability to address sir properly based on sir's gender, but its programming hadn't been designed with the possibility of female visitors in mind; Dr. Mobius had assumed he would be the only resident present and programmed all the systems accordingly. Oh, yes, there were other systems present, such as the biological research station and the sink and the auto-doc, and if sir wished any of them to function the appropriate coding tapes had been scattered about Big Mountain sometime in the past and had only to be retrieved and installed. Janice thanked the system and asked it if it were an AI; it said no, it was only a bit of personality overlaid on some basic background functions, as Dr. Mobius was fond of studying human-machine interaction. odd, Janice thought, but she didn't feel like arguing. The system told her that it would be happy to open its stores and allow her to purchase supplies should she so desire, and that it accepted bottlecaps as currency, as Dr. Mobius had once speculated on the possible economic structures to arise in a post-apocalyptic environment. It could also repair most of her gear should she so wish.
This was fine by Janice, since she was going to be out there a while. The brains had been very insistent on having her hurry, hurry, hurry to find all the technologies, and she wanted to inconvenience them as much as possible- besides, what guarantee did she have that the beings who sliced her up had any reason to be truthful with her about where her brain was? She'd better investigate everything she could find, just in case. Like, for example, the door next to the bedroom door, which had been locked before she activated the central computers for the room.
Oh, dear. That might not have been the best move she could have made. Nothing ever really prepares you for seeing your own spine and heart floating in big glowing jars of biogel. Or the empty jar of biogel between them, where your brain was supposed to be. YOUR OWN BODY PARTS. IN JARS. NEXT TO YOUR-
YOUR-
Wait, wait, your heart and your brain and your spine, which is to say your nerve. Good Lord, Janice was in a production of The Wizard of Oz Goes To Hell. And no amount of clicking her heels was going to fix that.
Well. Time to get out there and start kicking Winkie and Winged Monkey ass.
When last we saw our heroine Janice had been kidnapped by floating brains in jars and informed that they'd removed several of her major organs and substituted technological replacements for them and then been asked if she would please go and retrieve a transmitter array and some kind of suit and special frequencies for a sound-shooting gun, partly because it would help her find her actual brain and partly because she, unlike they, had hands.
I can say it again but it won't make any more sense than that.
Well, Janice wasn't happy with the idea of doing anything the brains wanted, but she had to admit that they had more of a lead on what might have happened to her brain than she did. And regardless of her current functionality and the fact that the TESLA COILS STUFFED IN HER SKULL (no, really) supposedly would resist certain forms of damage and vulnerability that her original meat package was, er, vulnerable to, she kind of wanted it back. She was not in an issue of Battle Angel Alita, and this was not Tiphares. And, hell, even the Tiphareans freaked out when they found out about the brain thing-
ANYWAY. *ahem* Janice couldn't bring herself to attack the brains for some reason. No, literally, there was just this massively overwhelming feeling of mellowness that prevented her from reaching over her shoulder for her gun or even getting enough will together to attack them with her bare hands. So she figured, you know, maybe she'd better talk to the brains individually to find out a little more about her situation without the one she mentally called Dr. Thundervoice the First overriding them all.
The first brain she went to talk to had the voice of Thaddeus Venture. No, seriously, James Urbaniak did the voice acting; it was an insecure, unhappy robotics expert named Dr. O, who got all snippy and angry at the sight of Janice's Pip-Boy. Apparently he had major issues with RobCo as a company. Then again he had major issues with a lot of things. Including his name, which he said everyone got WRONG and couldn't they SEE and ARRRGH. Janice cut him off before he could get much farther, asking if that meant his name was actually 'Zero'. When it turned out it was, she suggested that if he really wanted to make sure people used Zero instead of O, he might want to consider putting a slash across the emblem, the way termlink protocol did on a computer screen. He was so thrilled with the idea that he immediately went into a tailspin of inadequacy over the fact he'd never thought of it himself.
Now, there is of course an ancient and long-standing tradition of talking machines and inhuman intelligences into destroying themselves, and I won't deny that Janice considered the possibility of pushing 0 the rest of the way over. On the other hand, she was outnumbered four to one and had no way of fighting back if the other brains overheard her or saw 0 blow up or something. And since she really didn't want to have any more involuntary surgery, she figured she'd be better off getting this particular bundle of neuroses on her side. She went into some blither about how even if he was a total zero, zero was at least a mighty number, considering what it did to anything else you multiplied it against. At the thought of being a Destroyer of Mathematics, Zero perked up and seemed to pull himself together. She probably could've asked him a fair deal more at that point, but it had just sunk in that she'd gone out of her way to give a disembodied brain with no qualms about experimenting on human subjects a shot of self esteem, so she made her goodbyes and hurried over to the next floating ball of ew.
This may have been a mistake. The next one was Dr. Dala, the female-voiced one, who claimed to have over three hundred doctorates in many different areas and a deep and abiding fascination with... biology. Anatomy, specifically. Even if it was thoroughly disgusting and unnecessary. Why, just look at Janice, all skin and hormones and blood and breathing and... and...
Janice took the opportunity at that point to yawn, and stretch, and veeeeery slowly scratch one arm. And to take some nice deep breaths, and cough. And then she developed a powerful urge to go take a shower somewhere, because Dala started making very interesting noises that one does not generally expect a disembodied brain to be able to make. She half expected Dala to ask for a cigarette when it was all done. Which she didn't do, thank God; on the other hand Dala admitted to absolutely loving surgery, both doing it and watching it, and told her about how the auto-doc that removed her brain had run into some problems due to an injury in exactly the right place to make it have to take extra long with the brain removal, and asked her if she would consider coming back every so often in her attempts to find the technologies just to, mmm... breathe...
That was disturbing. Both to Janice and to me. I'm almost certain there's some kind of feminist commentary to be made about the fact that the brain with the overtly sexual interest in anatomy and horrible procedures is the female one. On the other hand, the brains at Big Mountain are all parodies to greater or lesser degree of Fifties scifi movie tropes, and you couldn't throw a rock in a Fifties scifi movie without running into the idea of women as the embodiments of terrifying sexuality, so I suppose it makes a certain degree of sense given the context. Having one of the guy brains be the sex monster would be more unnerving for me, to be honest. Mostly because what makes Dala so deeply disquieting is the Dr. Mengele element. Having one of the male brains get all panting and aroused over the idea of slicing up its victims- for science, of course- would turn that brain into every skeevy tomomaniac serial killer out there, and border on something out of The Human Movie I Didn't Want To Know Existed, and then I'd have to deal with that brain on an ongoing basis... look, ultimately it's pretty goddamn disturbing no matter which of the brains involved is the sex maniac, honestly. NEW SUBJECT.
Dr. 8 was next. 8 was the brain who spoke only in static bursts. He actually seemed kind of nice, although that may have been because it's hard to say anything overtly creepy when your vocalizations sound like white noise and your subtitles are mostly composed of @ symbols and brackets. Janice eventually managed to coax a little sense out of him when she realized it sounded like the kind of noise computer terminals running RobCo termlink protocol made during a hack attempt, and he calmed down a bit. She never did entirely understand what he was saying, but he seemed to appreciate her taking the time to talk to him, and he gave her some magazines and what sounded (to someone who can understand static) like an invitation to come back and talk to him again sometime.
Too bad the next brain wasn't nearly as congenial. That would be Dr. Thundervoice the Second, more properly known as DOCTOR BOROUS, who had this massively pathological need to talk like Don "Movie Trailer Guy" La Fontaine. About Communists. And animals. And his army of cyberdogs, including 'a scamp' called Gabe. And his mastery of DNA manipulation. And how he had created the nightstalkers (aka rattledogs, aka fully functional coyote-rattlesnake hybrids). And how he had created the industrious cazadores. And how he had kept them all sterile and safely controlled inside Big Mountain. And how he could demonstrate his surgical castration techniques on the COMMIE ANIMAL LOBOTOMITE in front of him if she didn't quit telling him things about his creations he didn't want to know. And how he was HEAD OF HIS BIOLOGY CLASS at American High School, no thanks to idiot jocks like RICHIE MARCUS. And- yeah, um, Janice kind of got the feeling that while Dala was immensely disturbing, and 0 was neurotic as hell, Borous was simply flat out insane, or at least living on more of his own little world than any of the others. She got some info out of him about Mobius and his roboscorpions- something about their stings devouring intelligence, and nobody being willing to test whether that was true- and then fled the scene, because after those four she did not want to talk to Thundervoice the First (Dr. Klein). She just wanted to go somewhere and shiver for a while.
So, not really having any other place to go, she turned and went back to the rooms she'd investigated earlier. Along with the sound gun, the brains had given her some kind of personality chip to install in the central computer in those rooms; as soon as she did the device switched itself on and asked her, in a very deferential British voice, how it could help sir today. It apologised greatly for its inability to address sir properly based on sir's gender, but its programming hadn't been designed with the possibility of female visitors in mind; Dr. Mobius had assumed he would be the only resident present and programmed all the systems accordingly. Oh, yes, there were other systems present, such as the biological research station and the sink and the auto-doc, and if sir wished any of them to function the appropriate coding tapes had been scattered about Big Mountain sometime in the past and had only to be retrieved and installed. Janice thanked the system and asked it if it were an AI; it said no, it was only a bit of personality overlaid on some basic background functions, as Dr. Mobius was fond of studying human-machine interaction. odd, Janice thought, but she didn't feel like arguing. The system told her that it would be happy to open its stores and allow her to purchase supplies should she so desire, and that it accepted bottlecaps as currency, as Dr. Mobius had once speculated on the possible economic structures to arise in a post-apocalyptic environment. It could also repair most of her gear should she so wish.
This was fine by Janice, since she was going to be out there a while. The brains had been very insistent on having her hurry, hurry, hurry to find all the technologies, and she wanted to inconvenience them as much as possible- besides, what guarantee did she have that the beings who sliced her up had any reason to be truthful with her about where her brain was? She'd better investigate everything she could find, just in case. Like, for example, the door next to the bedroom door, which had been locked before she activated the central computers for the room.
Oh, dear. That might not have been the best move she could have made. Nothing ever really prepares you for seeing your own spine and heart floating in big glowing jars of biogel. Or the empty jar of biogel between them, where your brain was supposed to be. YOUR OWN BODY PARTS. IN JARS. NEXT TO YOUR-
YOUR-
Wait, wait, your heart and your brain and your spine, which is to say your nerve. Good Lord, Janice was in a production of The Wizard of Oz Goes To Hell. And no amount of clicking her heels was going to fix that.
Well. Time to get out there and start kicking Winkie and Winged Monkey ass.
