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Notes From New Vegas 44
Notes From New Vegas 44: I Hate My Species
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had bolted out of the X-8 testing facility like her tail was on fire, partly because the place was a monument to prewar science's inhumanity and one man's utter insanity, but mostly because said madman (now a disembodied brain in a levitating jar of glowing biogel) had for no good reason installed an atomic core in his dog. His ex-dog, at that point, since Janice ran out of there during the countdown that led to Gabe's core's explosion. Whatever. Doesn't much matter- the point is, dog + atomic core = so much of a bad idea even the other disembodied brains in levitating jars were calling the guy out on it.
Anyway, Janice just wanted to get back to the Sink at that point, as she had the sound recording she'd gone into X-8 to retrieve in the first place and she wanted it slapped into her sonic emitter gun while she hid under the bed and whimpered. Unfortunately, you can't actually hide under the bed and whimper in this game. There doesn't appear to be an 'under' for that bed, in fact. It goes straight down to the floor. So all Janice could do was get the gun upgraded and have the autodoc patch her up, and then... well, pretty much go back out. She'd found the X-2 antenna and the frequency for the gun, and since she'd grabbed the stealth suit parts back in X-13, she might as well head that way to run the stupid thing through the tests and get it to work properly for her.
Now, I don't remember the last time I mentioned perks and traits in this series, so I'm gonna give you a quick rundown on them before I proceed further. At character creation, you get to choose your base attributes. These are used to calculate your base skills. Other points can be allocated to skills each time you level up. You also get to choose as few as zero and as many as two Traits, which affect your character's gameplay overall and are generally part positive, part negative. That's all you get in the way of Traits, unless you find an in-game way to change them- you can change them with the Sink's Autodoc by telling it you need a psychiatric evaluation, but you can only do this once. Perks, on the other hand, you get to choose one of at every other level. They can be things like Black Widow/Lady Killer, which give you 10% damage in combat against the opposite sex and seduction-type dialogue possibilities with certain npcs. (The same-sex versions are Cherchez la Femme and Confirmed Bachelor; at least one whiny forum person once complained about getting 'too much gay stuff' in his game, only to get the smackdown from a game developer who pointed out that you don't actually hear any of the gay-related dialogue unless you deliberately take the perk to get it.) They can be things like Bloody Mess, which gives you extra damage with all weapons and guarantees you the most splattery death animation possible for your enemies. They can be things that improve your combat abilities, or some of your social dialogue, or give you the option to eat certain corpses- all kinds of things.
I bring this up because I remembered that the X-13 facility was eyeball deep in Nightstalkers, and so when Janice leveled up around this time, I took the Animal Friend perk. Anything classified as an Animal and not an Insect or an Abomination will not attack you if you have this perk. Given that nightstalkers are a successful cross between coyotes and rattlesnakes you'd think they were abominations, but no, they're animals. Bizarre, but what can you do. I'm not about to complain, since in practical terms it meant that Janice was able to walk out into the Big Empty without being chased down by frothing angry rattledogs. She didn't know why not and she didn't care. As long as one less thing was trying to rip her to shreds.
She didn't know about the trait at first, though, which is why she decided to try a different route to X-13. Maybe she'd be able to avoid the rattledogs. She swung around northward instead, figuring she might be able to come in from downwind or something. And then she stopped figuring anything of the kind, because she'd just caught sight of an area ringed with high chicken-wire fences topped with barbed wire. There were shacks inside, big ones, about what you'd expect a field barracks or mess hall to look like, and as she got closer she started finding sentrybots that'd been blasted to pieces. And there was a guard tower, too, of a design that looked okay as a ranger station back in Zion National Park but here just looked awfully like something out of Escape From Sobibor.
I do not use that comparison lightly. Janice had just stumbled upon Little Yangtze.
You might remember Little Yangtze from a few entries back. Dr. 0 referred to it as 'our old human farm'. Now, let's be frank; when a mad scientist who is a disembodied brain floating in a levitating jar of luminescent biogel tells you through his mouth monitor that he and his colleagues used to have a human farm, if you are like me (and I know I am), you are going to think of the Matrix. Or a cloning facility. Or something involving bodies and body parts being grown en masse, probably in jars, under controlled yet highly disturbing conditions that probably involve pipes coming out of the ceiling. I really kind of wish this were the case, but it wasn't. We're talking camp here. And not internment camp, either. When Janice made it up into the guard tower and found a functioning computer terminal... well, the entries were from the 2070s. Judge for yourself:
"The government shipped in the first batch of dissidents today. Three whole train loads of Communist infiltrators. Half of them don't even speak English, so we had to show them where to go with our nightsticks. The docs are already talking about "research subjects". Guess that'll help advance the war effort."
"One of the prisoners who speaks a little English came to the commandant's office screaming about hungry ghosts snatching his people up in the night. The commandant told him to give up the ignorant superstitions of a bygone era and had him thrown in the cooler for three weeks. Me, I've seen some of the new robots they're developing here, and I gotta wonder where they get the brains from."
"Another escape attempt last night. We rounded them all up and processed the escapees, but these little bastards are determined. We've got triple shifts on the camp around the clock, and the extra hours are eating up morale. Commandant says he's put in a requisition to use the camp as a field test for the new 'total pacification collars' the scientists have been working on. Maybe then I can get some goddamn sleep."
Yyyyyyyyyeah.
And there were other terminal entries, too, much more recent ones, but they were from Father Elijah and basically amounted to ABLOO BLOO BLOO I'M A TOTAL BASTARD. Frankly, after realizing exactly what had gone on here, Elijah crowing over having gotten the explosive collars to work didn't really give Janice the wigginses any more. Why he'd bothered to leave this place and go to the Sierra Madre she didn't know. If anyone ever belonged here, it was him.
(Janice didn't know it, but this kind of shit is exactly why the Brotherhood of Steel was formed in the first place. their ancestors in the US Army flipped their lids when they found out about ongoing Forced Evolutionary Virus experiments on live, unwilling human prisoners, killed all the scientists, and declared themselves in full mutiny and rebellion from the United States government. Who ignored them because the war with China was about to go nuclear, but whatevs. Father Elijah and his desire to use this kind of thing to experiment further until he could reach the goals HE wanted? Would have gotten him summarily executed and dumped in an unmarked grave by the Brotherhood's founders.)
She wound up gathering some things from the guard tower, like a big laser gun that Elijah had probably used to slice up those robots and some programming material for the Sink, and climbed on down to have a look at the camp. There were still a couple of people shambling around inside- ghouls, with explosive collars on. Which... more or less meant those poor bastards had been trapped inside that fence living on whatever they could scavenge for the past two hundred years, because the alternative was passing the sensors and having their heads explode. Janice found out that that aspect of the system still worked when she opened the camp gate and one of the ghouls ran at her with an axe; she started running, and bee bee bee SPLORT. Simple and disgusting as that.
Fortunately she didn't have to go far to deal with that. There was a makeshift graveyard, markers and all, inside the camp gates. A little too little, a little too late, for the people whose skeletons she found stuck in the higher parts of the fence- they'd stacked up mattresses and tried to climb over the barbed wire, but no dice....
She turned around and left at high speed then, because there is only so much grim reality one can take. This was very definitely a LET US GO FIND SOMETHING WACKY AND SILLY NOW PLEASE OH GOD moment. At one point she thought there was something that might be easier to deal with up ahead, but it turned out to be three skeletons slumped over duffels containing nothing but a coffee mug each. THAT IS NOT THE SILLY SHE WANTED, THANK YOU, and so she walked into the radar fence again, because getting knocked unconscious and dumped back at the Sink was easier than thinkin'.
When she finally woke up in the Sink again, Janice figured the nightstalkers couldn't be any worse than finding out more awful truths about this hell hole of a place, and so she set off at a dead run for X-13. The sooner she got all of this done, the sooner she could figure out a way to get her brain back from the monsters who ran this place, because God only knew WHAT they'd do with it. She did, briefly, wander into another building near X-13, but it turned out to be the hologram research center- still being patrolled by holograms, in fact. Fortunately they weren't nearly as nasty as the holos at the Sierra Madre. Most of them just sort of looked at her and kept right on patrolling. A terminal entry in the building indicated that the Big Mountain researchers did not think the 'killer holo' idea was especially practical to begin with despite Sinclair's urging, so all Janice did was grab some stuff from the building and head on out again.
No nightstalker attacks, which was nice, because nobody likes to get bitten to death by rattledogs. When she got into the X-13 testing area and pulled the suit on, it announced in a cheerful teenage girl's voice, "Hello, it's nice to meet you! Who can I hide you from today?" And then started going over her inventory of chems and other things. Apparently it had a rudimentary onboard intelligence that would dope her with stimpaks and Med-X if she got too badly hurt. This turned out not to be as nice as it sounded, because if Janice already had stimpaks working in her bloodstream, injecting another one didn't really heal her any more. And the AI was rotten at gauging how much Med-X it could give without causing addiction, too. But it meant well, and gave her cheerful advice when it came time to start the tests that would allow it to calibrate itself and work better. Mostly they involved a simulated REPCONN office and sneaking past sensors and robots to steal documents out of a safe without being detected. Something new was added to the test each time. Janice being Janice, however, none of the tests other than 'deactivate all the robots without being seen' were done the standard way. Instead she went upstairs, picked the lock on the observation room that overlooked the area with the safe in it, and jumped down into the room from the observation balcony.
Look, if they didn't want her to do it that way, they shouldn't have made the victory condition that easy to achieve.
Anyway, after the first successful test, the roboscorpions showed up. Janice was thoroughly disgusted with SCIENCE!! at that point and blew them all to smithereens, then stalked out of the room and ran the test again. She wanted the suit as improved as physically possible so that she could be the terror that goes 'boo' in the night right before taking down all those stupid, stupid brains. When she finally ran out of tests, she gathered up her stuff and left the building. There was some stuff in-game about how she could supposedly grab some kind of special kennel key for the X-8 facility and do even MORE tests in THAT building, but at that point she could not possibly have cared less about the place; she rather hoped the atomic dog had destroyed it....
So that was X-13, and it was over with. Janice stomped back to the Sink to consider her options now that she'd grabbed everything the brains had ordered her to get, and I shut off the Xbox because damn, the mood whiplash. More next time.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had bolted out of the X-8 testing facility like her tail was on fire, partly because the place was a monument to prewar science's inhumanity and one man's utter insanity, but mostly because said madman (now a disembodied brain in a levitating jar of glowing biogel) had for no good reason installed an atomic core in his dog. His ex-dog, at that point, since Janice ran out of there during the countdown that led to Gabe's core's explosion. Whatever. Doesn't much matter- the point is, dog + atomic core = so much of a bad idea even the other disembodied brains in levitating jars were calling the guy out on it.
Anyway, Janice just wanted to get back to the Sink at that point, as she had the sound recording she'd gone into X-8 to retrieve in the first place and she wanted it slapped into her sonic emitter gun while she hid under the bed and whimpered. Unfortunately, you can't actually hide under the bed and whimper in this game. There doesn't appear to be an 'under' for that bed, in fact. It goes straight down to the floor. So all Janice could do was get the gun upgraded and have the autodoc patch her up, and then... well, pretty much go back out. She'd found the X-2 antenna and the frequency for the gun, and since she'd grabbed the stealth suit parts back in X-13, she might as well head that way to run the stupid thing through the tests and get it to work properly for her.
Now, I don't remember the last time I mentioned perks and traits in this series, so I'm gonna give you a quick rundown on them before I proceed further. At character creation, you get to choose your base attributes. These are used to calculate your base skills. Other points can be allocated to skills each time you level up. You also get to choose as few as zero and as many as two Traits, which affect your character's gameplay overall and are generally part positive, part negative. That's all you get in the way of Traits, unless you find an in-game way to change them- you can change them with the Sink's Autodoc by telling it you need a psychiatric evaluation, but you can only do this once. Perks, on the other hand, you get to choose one of at every other level. They can be things like Black Widow/Lady Killer, which give you 10% damage in combat against the opposite sex and seduction-type dialogue possibilities with certain npcs. (The same-sex versions are Cherchez la Femme and Confirmed Bachelor; at least one whiny forum person once complained about getting 'too much gay stuff' in his game, only to get the smackdown from a game developer who pointed out that you don't actually hear any of the gay-related dialogue unless you deliberately take the perk to get it.) They can be things like Bloody Mess, which gives you extra damage with all weapons and guarantees you the most splattery death animation possible for your enemies. They can be things that improve your combat abilities, or some of your social dialogue, or give you the option to eat certain corpses- all kinds of things.
I bring this up because I remembered that the X-13 facility was eyeball deep in Nightstalkers, and so when Janice leveled up around this time, I took the Animal Friend perk. Anything classified as an Animal and not an Insect or an Abomination will not attack you if you have this perk. Given that nightstalkers are a successful cross between coyotes and rattlesnakes you'd think they were abominations, but no, they're animals. Bizarre, but what can you do. I'm not about to complain, since in practical terms it meant that Janice was able to walk out into the Big Empty without being chased down by frothing angry rattledogs. She didn't know why not and she didn't care. As long as one less thing was trying to rip her to shreds.
She didn't know about the trait at first, though, which is why she decided to try a different route to X-13. Maybe she'd be able to avoid the rattledogs. She swung around northward instead, figuring she might be able to come in from downwind or something. And then she stopped figuring anything of the kind, because she'd just caught sight of an area ringed with high chicken-wire fences topped with barbed wire. There were shacks inside, big ones, about what you'd expect a field barracks or mess hall to look like, and as she got closer she started finding sentrybots that'd been blasted to pieces. And there was a guard tower, too, of a design that looked okay as a ranger station back in Zion National Park but here just looked awfully like something out of Escape From Sobibor.
I do not use that comparison lightly. Janice had just stumbled upon Little Yangtze.
You might remember Little Yangtze from a few entries back. Dr. 0 referred to it as 'our old human farm'. Now, let's be frank; when a mad scientist who is a disembodied brain floating in a levitating jar of luminescent biogel tells you through his mouth monitor that he and his colleagues used to have a human farm, if you are like me (and I know I am), you are going to think of the Matrix. Or a cloning facility. Or something involving bodies and body parts being grown en masse, probably in jars, under controlled yet highly disturbing conditions that probably involve pipes coming out of the ceiling. I really kind of wish this were the case, but it wasn't. We're talking camp here. And not internment camp, either. When Janice made it up into the guard tower and found a functioning computer terminal... well, the entries were from the 2070s. Judge for yourself:
"The government shipped in the first batch of dissidents today. Three whole train loads of Communist infiltrators. Half of them don't even speak English, so we had to show them where to go with our nightsticks. The docs are already talking about "research subjects". Guess that'll help advance the war effort."
"One of the prisoners who speaks a little English came to the commandant's office screaming about hungry ghosts snatching his people up in the night. The commandant told him to give up the ignorant superstitions of a bygone era and had him thrown in the cooler for three weeks. Me, I've seen some of the new robots they're developing here, and I gotta wonder where they get the brains from."
"Another escape attempt last night. We rounded them all up and processed the escapees, but these little bastards are determined. We've got triple shifts on the camp around the clock, and the extra hours are eating up morale. Commandant says he's put in a requisition to use the camp as a field test for the new 'total pacification collars' the scientists have been working on. Maybe then I can get some goddamn sleep."
Yyyyyyyyyeah.
And there were other terminal entries, too, much more recent ones, but they were from Father Elijah and basically amounted to ABLOO BLOO BLOO I'M A TOTAL BASTARD. Frankly, after realizing exactly what had gone on here, Elijah crowing over having gotten the explosive collars to work didn't really give Janice the wigginses any more. Why he'd bothered to leave this place and go to the Sierra Madre she didn't know. If anyone ever belonged here, it was him.
(Janice didn't know it, but this kind of shit is exactly why the Brotherhood of Steel was formed in the first place. their ancestors in the US Army flipped their lids when they found out about ongoing Forced Evolutionary Virus experiments on live, unwilling human prisoners, killed all the scientists, and declared themselves in full mutiny and rebellion from the United States government. Who ignored them because the war with China was about to go nuclear, but whatevs. Father Elijah and his desire to use this kind of thing to experiment further until he could reach the goals HE wanted? Would have gotten him summarily executed and dumped in an unmarked grave by the Brotherhood's founders.)
She wound up gathering some things from the guard tower, like a big laser gun that Elijah had probably used to slice up those robots and some programming material for the Sink, and climbed on down to have a look at the camp. There were still a couple of people shambling around inside- ghouls, with explosive collars on. Which... more or less meant those poor bastards had been trapped inside that fence living on whatever they could scavenge for the past two hundred years, because the alternative was passing the sensors and having their heads explode. Janice found out that that aspect of the system still worked when she opened the camp gate and one of the ghouls ran at her with an axe; she started running, and bee bee bee SPLORT. Simple and disgusting as that.
Fortunately she didn't have to go far to deal with that. There was a makeshift graveyard, markers and all, inside the camp gates. A little too little, a little too late, for the people whose skeletons she found stuck in the higher parts of the fence- they'd stacked up mattresses and tried to climb over the barbed wire, but no dice....
She turned around and left at high speed then, because there is only so much grim reality one can take. This was very definitely a LET US GO FIND SOMETHING WACKY AND SILLY NOW PLEASE OH GOD moment. At one point she thought there was something that might be easier to deal with up ahead, but it turned out to be three skeletons slumped over duffels containing nothing but a coffee mug each. THAT IS NOT THE SILLY SHE WANTED, THANK YOU, and so she walked into the radar fence again, because getting knocked unconscious and dumped back at the Sink was easier than thinkin'.
When she finally woke up in the Sink again, Janice figured the nightstalkers couldn't be any worse than finding out more awful truths about this hell hole of a place, and so she set off at a dead run for X-13. The sooner she got all of this done, the sooner she could figure out a way to get her brain back from the monsters who ran this place, because God only knew WHAT they'd do with it. She did, briefly, wander into another building near X-13, but it turned out to be the hologram research center- still being patrolled by holograms, in fact. Fortunately they weren't nearly as nasty as the holos at the Sierra Madre. Most of them just sort of looked at her and kept right on patrolling. A terminal entry in the building indicated that the Big Mountain researchers did not think the 'killer holo' idea was especially practical to begin with despite Sinclair's urging, so all Janice did was grab some stuff from the building and head on out again.
No nightstalker attacks, which was nice, because nobody likes to get bitten to death by rattledogs. When she got into the X-13 testing area and pulled the suit on, it announced in a cheerful teenage girl's voice, "Hello, it's nice to meet you! Who can I hide you from today?" And then started going over her inventory of chems and other things. Apparently it had a rudimentary onboard intelligence that would dope her with stimpaks and Med-X if she got too badly hurt. This turned out not to be as nice as it sounded, because if Janice already had stimpaks working in her bloodstream, injecting another one didn't really heal her any more. And the AI was rotten at gauging how much Med-X it could give without causing addiction, too. But it meant well, and gave her cheerful advice when it came time to start the tests that would allow it to calibrate itself and work better. Mostly they involved a simulated REPCONN office and sneaking past sensors and robots to steal documents out of a safe without being detected. Something new was added to the test each time. Janice being Janice, however, none of the tests other than 'deactivate all the robots without being seen' were done the standard way. Instead she went upstairs, picked the lock on the observation room that overlooked the area with the safe in it, and jumped down into the room from the observation balcony.
Look, if they didn't want her to do it that way, they shouldn't have made the victory condition that easy to achieve.
Anyway, after the first successful test, the roboscorpions showed up. Janice was thoroughly disgusted with SCIENCE!! at that point and blew them all to smithereens, then stalked out of the room and ran the test again. She wanted the suit as improved as physically possible so that she could be the terror that goes 'boo' in the night right before taking down all those stupid, stupid brains. When she finally ran out of tests, she gathered up her stuff and left the building. There was some stuff in-game about how she could supposedly grab some kind of special kennel key for the X-8 facility and do even MORE tests in THAT building, but at that point she could not possibly have cared less about the place; she rather hoped the atomic dog had destroyed it....
So that was X-13, and it was over with. Janice stomped back to the Sink to consider her options now that she'd grabbed everything the brains had ordered her to get, and I shut off the Xbox because damn, the mood whiplash. More next time.