Notes From New Vegas 46
Jun. 10th, 2012 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 46: The Brain Behind The Curtain
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had sneaked around a lot in a big room and turned off a robo-scorpion the size of a 747 without being seen or dying horribly. This was an Accomplishment, given that the robo-scorpion had an ATOMIC LASER TAIL and ALL THE SPLASH DAMAGE, ALL OF IT. I mean, yeah, she probably could've fought the thing to the death and made it explode in a fantastical shower of sparks and righteous something or other, but this is Janice we're talking about. Janice can kill things pretty well, but she's not, y'know, Thor's baby sister or something. She's the chosen one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars. Deliberately flinging herself into combat against a foe umpty skajillion times her size? Not something that she particularly wants to do. She found the off switch, a computer program on a terminal she had to hack by leaning through an open window, and she used it, and she used it good.
So anyway, when the giant robo scorpion of atomic doom ceased active operations, she scrounged the good stuff from the area and headed for the last door she hadn't investigated yet. She stil had Dr. Mobius to deal with, after all.
The room on the other side was pretty familiar. Apparently the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME!!! was built on the same floor plan as the Think Tank's dome, only with green and yellow lighting instead of... I don't know, I seem to remember it being mostly reddish-pink lighting in the Think Tank. There were what looked like faded old scribbles all over the floor, too, which was odd because Janice didn't see any sign of whoever had scribbled them. Since none of them blatantly said 'I prepared Explosive Runes this morning', she ignored them and started searching the place for any sign of a brain in a jar. Didn't find one straight off, although she did find a Robobrain chassis and what looked like its brain-to-be off to one side. Neither was active, and she couldn't actually pick up or destroy the brain (it was a world decoration object, not an NPC), so she kept on going. She found a couple of rooms with file cabinets and research stuff in them, and then she found the ROOM FULL OF MENTATS. Seriously, there were something like forty-seven packages of Mentats in there, and two or three doses of Psycho. You could've built a respectable doll-sized Chateau d'If out of the packages of Mentats. It was kind of weird.
'Course, considering that when Janice stepped out of there she heard the voice of a disembodied brain singing "Electron's connected to the... neutron, the neutron's connected to the... meson!", weird was kinda relative. Okay, a lot relative. Okay, she shortly forgot about the weird of the mentats completely.
You would too, if the cackling insane mastermind who'd been controlling the robot scorpion fleet and issuing periodic mad threats over every PA in the Big Empty turned to you and blinked at you with his one good optic unit and said, in a cheerfully dotty voice, "Oh! Hello there. eh... you are there, aren't you? You're here for your brain, perhaps? It's just up there- a very nice brain, young, bright... Should look at getting my visual nerves re-attached. It's just that the right eye would see the wrong things. The flying tortoises were the worst! Would you care for a Mentat?"
She had met the man behind the curtain, and he'd been snorting the dust bunnies.
After some gaping and Mobius happily explaining that he'd had all kinds of ideas, to the point where he had to start using the dome floor and walls to inscribe his equations and lost track of where they started and ended, Janice finally managed to blurt out that he wasn't what she expected at all . This actually got his interest; he asked her what he was supposed to be like, on the grounds that it might well be worth a cognitive realignment if her theoretical Mobius was better than him. Being earnestly blinked at by one eye's worth of crazypants disembodied brain with a serious interest in what you have to say kind of threw her off, though; she sort of ran her hands over her face and muttered that she needed her brain back to deal with this. Mobius' reply?
"Do you? You seem fine without it. And does it want to go back with you? You might want to ask it. Tell you what- I'll leave it up to your brain. If it wants to go, then fine. If not, then you should respect its wishes."
Bzuh. Bzuh.
Well, at that point Janice figured she had nothing to lose; she rather cautiously asked Mobius if she could ask him a few questions. "Oh, curiosity!" the brain answered. "I experience that less now that I know everything. Or maybe it was that I found out some unpleasant answers? Mmhmm."
(Yes, this is his actual dialog. I did my best to transcribe anything he said. After the bloodthirsty psychosis of everything in Big Mountain up to this point, a simple case of apparently good-natured pants-on-globe crazy deserves a little extra screen time.)
The first thing she asked- mostly to make sure she got some honest answers- was if she could assist in fixing, or at least tuning, his visual inputs. Mobius was really happy about that. Especially since she indicated that the flying tortoises hadn't been there in the first place and were probably just a mechanical malfunction of some kind. Once she got his remaining optic tuned up properly and he was suitably grateful, she got up the nerve to ask why he'd stolen her brain.
"Oh, a variety of raisins. You're something of a homily. Er, anomaly? You're something quite special- you're the most successful brain extraction experiment ever performed here in Big Mountain. If you were to go back, your brain could be popped back in. Can't have brains walking around of their own volition..."
Okaaaaaay, so, why was that a problem? Given, you know, they were already bobbling around of their own volition in spheres and things. And her own brain had been moving around of its own volition in the first place, just tucked into her body and all. "Not sure, but there's a very good raisin for it. I have very good raisins for everything I do, even if I forget them occasionally."
Right. Fine. Whatever. Maybe another topic would be better- she figured she'd ask him what the deal was about the robo-scorpions. "Well," he said, "every scientist needs an army. Mine came to me after these rather large scorpions came in from the dessert! Like poisonous frosting- they'd survived when nothing else had? Then I thought what if they shot energy bolts and acted as walking eyes and data drained computers and acted as bullhorns? Then I made them bigger. Then I thought about custard..."
Bridge-of-nose pinching time, there.
Anyway. He didn't seem aggressive, Janice said, so why did he broadcast all those threats? "Oh, I was probably tripping hard on Psycho when I sent that. Had to work myself up to it, not usually violent, except when I am. So many chems, such varieties! As for the Psycho, sometimes I get the chems in the wrong tube. Still, served its purpose."
Purpose... Wait, did you do this to keep the think tank occupied? "Did I? Maybe. Can't have them leaving. Some reason for it. Ethics, or... con-science? You and your brain are quite alike. I'm sure it knows the raisins better than I do."
That was either evasion, or extra dottiness. Janice squinted at Mobius and said that everything he'd told her didn't add up- even his name, Mobius, didn't seem right. "Dr. Mobius? Rather catchy, isn't it? It's my name. My new name. Overwrote the old one. It's real as you or I, although your brain expressed similar incredulity. "Someone's been watching too many Old World science fiction movies," it said... I must admit, I have a vulnerability for holotape fantasies of domes and planets and all things forbidden... Like the Think Tank, we were all reprogrammed to forget our names, take on new names. It enforces the recursion loop in our perception programming."
Wait. Wait. What? That sounded like actual useful information. Go back to that part. You reprogrammed their names as part of a recursion loop? What, to trap their processors? "Now, 'trap' is a rather harsh word. Like 'excrement'. Not an inappropriate word... but yes, I did take some liberties with their programming. It's all right, they don't remember. I certainly didn't."
A recursion loop, Janice said, was meant to prevent info flow. So... "The Radar Fence wasn't really enough. They'd have found a way to disarm it. So I had to do something else to keep them occupied here. I prever to have several plan Bs in case the As fail. I suspect I have plan C's in place, but I may have coded myself to forget them, just in case. They're probably very dangerous. Possibly even lethal."
Things were starting to come clear. Janice wasn't entirely sure about it, so she had to keep him talking, and seized on the first thing she was able to suss out. Namely, the names- Klein, Mobius, 0 was a circle, 8 was an infinity symbol, Dala was short for mandala, they were all loops, weren't they? "You figured it out! They've all forgotten themselves, the world, sense of time, and history. All that is left is what's here. I reprogrammed their chronometers, geometers and cartography programs. Big MT is now their world. It was a merciful lobotomy, thinking back. They were my friends, but... sometimes they would take things too far. And the world isn't ready for that kind of too-far-thing-taking. That's my professional opinion anyway, and I am told I was once quite professional."
He actually sounded remorseful when he said that. Not Dr. Borous' "I feel a weird emotion and I DON'T LIKE IT AT ALL" kind of remorse, but... he really sounded as if he regretted what he'd done. Or the necessity for what he'd done. Janice wasn't entirely sure. She didn't know if she liked the idea that somebody here actually had some kind of sense of responsibility, either- it meant that she couldn't just write all of them off as too horrific to be allowed to continue to live. There might be something in there worth saving, maybe.
So, anyway, to distract herself from thinking about that she asked him why he terrorized the Think Tank if he'd lobotomized them. "Well, despite their failings, they're rather bright. I didn't change that. Without something to distract them, make them afraid, they'd simply deduce what had happened. Then you came along, the final variable solved. They saw their world was larger than they perceived. Bacteria, finally able to see its host."
... oh, crap.
"There've been other visitors, but you were the one who really set them off. You were irrefutable proof there was a world outside, and then there was the whole 'brain' fiasco. Your brain had a special kind of wrinkle they'd never thought to try in all their escape attempts."
Janice murmured something about the cranial injury from Benny shooting her in the head. "Yes!" said Mobius. "I should have Mentats ingest you instead of the other way around. Anyway, you showed up, and because you had a cranial injury in just the right place, bullets in the head are much more fatal and yours was a light case of bullet-head-itis. It was enough for the Auto-Doc in the Sink to change its programming to fix the problem, and the brain extraction technology worked for once. That gave the Think Tank the knowledge it shouldn't possess. With that knowledge, the procedure can be reversed. If they obtain that data, they can use it to modify their cranial selves into hosts to slip past the radar fence..."
The idea of the other brains stuffing themselves into unsuspecting lobotomite bodies made Janice kinda sick to her stomach, but she had to be sure of something. If she didn't get her brain back into her body, she asked, she couldn't ever leave, right? "Oh no," said Mobius, " your brain already knows the trick of it. If you become friends or exist in an uneasy truce with weapons aimed at each other, it would unlock the fence for you. Once the Think Tank was dealt with, of course. Your brain's a responsible sort. Doesn't want mad scientists running around everywhere."
Well. That was good to know. Sort of. More or less. God, Janice wanted a drink. All the drinks.
She put that aside and noted that Klein said the Think Tank had the idea to get the three technologies after Mobius' broadcast- was that a coincidence? Mobius snorted, insofar as a disembodied brain with a vocalizer and no nose is capable of snorting, and answered, "I consider 'coincidence' to be profanity, along with the words 'astrology', 'herbal tea' and 'luck', so watch it, potty-mouth. My broadcast was designed to instill, or install, fear and prompt them to focus on retrieving the technologies and bring them to attack me. And, coincidentally, pardon my language, all those technologies are needed to put a brain back into its skull properly."
Well, she had to ask what the specific purpose was there, just in case she understood them wrong. "The X-2 antenna can be used to focus your alpha wave frequency thought patterns. The sneaky suit houses a cardiac regulator. And the soundwave projecto-emitter was never intended as a weapon. It was a medicinal vertebrae pulse desensitizer. Brains, heart, courage- a spine. I think there was a story where a band of murderous thugs sought these things. They had them all the time in the story. Didn't stop them from murdering to get them... and it won't stop the Think Tank, either."
A-yup. The Wizard Of Oz Goes To Hell.
Anyway, just in case there was some other horrible surprise waiting out there, Janice asked if Mobius had tucked any extra info into the broadcast he had been using to mess with the Think Tank. "Yes, it was designed to keep reinforcing 'forget' ,'fear', 'rinse', 'repeat'. Oh, and 'get me the things to castrate your only possible escape attempt'. But I couldn't delete you or your arrival any more than I could the other visitors. Only so much Science can do when you started talking to them. You're really quite difficult to ignore. You're rather intriguing, if you'll forgive an old brain for saying so."
Compliments are nice, but, um, considering the source- well, it didn't matter so much. Janice had to point out that if the technologies she had in her possession were the things the Think Tank needed to escape, they'd managed to download the schematics each time she recovered one. They might not have the physical objects, but they could rebuild them with the right supplies. Mobius was silent a moment, and then said, "Oh. That means my plan is a total failure. That is unfortunate. Oh, well, at least I tried..."
Yeah. Um. yeah. Janice didn't... she didn't really know what to say at that point, so she murmured something about having to go talk to her brain now. Mobius got cheerful again and asked her to mind the equations on the floor, and then wandered off to go work on some console or other. Janice just rubbed at her face and wished, once again, for all the liquor in the world.
We'll deal with the actual brain in the next post. Any scene where the player character gets to have an extended angry conversation with her own brain should get its own screen time.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had sneaked around a lot in a big room and turned off a robo-scorpion the size of a 747 without being seen or dying horribly. This was an Accomplishment, given that the robo-scorpion had an ATOMIC LASER TAIL and ALL THE SPLASH DAMAGE, ALL OF IT. I mean, yeah, she probably could've fought the thing to the death and made it explode in a fantastical shower of sparks and righteous something or other, but this is Janice we're talking about. Janice can kill things pretty well, but she's not, y'know, Thor's baby sister or something. She's the chosen one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars. Deliberately flinging herself into combat against a foe umpty skajillion times her size? Not something that she particularly wants to do. She found the off switch, a computer program on a terminal she had to hack by leaning through an open window, and she used it, and she used it good.
So anyway, when the giant robo scorpion of atomic doom ceased active operations, she scrounged the good stuff from the area and headed for the last door she hadn't investigated yet. She stil had Dr. Mobius to deal with, after all.
The room on the other side was pretty familiar. Apparently the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME!!! was built on the same floor plan as the Think Tank's dome, only with green and yellow lighting instead of... I don't know, I seem to remember it being mostly reddish-pink lighting in the Think Tank. There were what looked like faded old scribbles all over the floor, too, which was odd because Janice didn't see any sign of whoever had scribbled them. Since none of them blatantly said 'I prepared Explosive Runes this morning', she ignored them and started searching the place for any sign of a brain in a jar. Didn't find one straight off, although she did find a Robobrain chassis and what looked like its brain-to-be off to one side. Neither was active, and she couldn't actually pick up or destroy the brain (it was a world decoration object, not an NPC), so she kept on going. She found a couple of rooms with file cabinets and research stuff in them, and then she found the ROOM FULL OF MENTATS. Seriously, there were something like forty-seven packages of Mentats in there, and two or three doses of Psycho. You could've built a respectable doll-sized Chateau d'If out of the packages of Mentats. It was kind of weird.
'Course, considering that when Janice stepped out of there she heard the voice of a disembodied brain singing "Electron's connected to the... neutron, the neutron's connected to the... meson!", weird was kinda relative. Okay, a lot relative. Okay, she shortly forgot about the weird of the mentats completely.
You would too, if the cackling insane mastermind who'd been controlling the robot scorpion fleet and issuing periodic mad threats over every PA in the Big Empty turned to you and blinked at you with his one good optic unit and said, in a cheerfully dotty voice, "Oh! Hello there. eh... you are there, aren't you? You're here for your brain, perhaps? It's just up there- a very nice brain, young, bright... Should look at getting my visual nerves re-attached. It's just that the right eye would see the wrong things. The flying tortoises were the worst! Would you care for a Mentat?"
She had met the man behind the curtain, and he'd been snorting the dust bunnies.
After some gaping and Mobius happily explaining that he'd had all kinds of ideas, to the point where he had to start using the dome floor and walls to inscribe his equations and lost track of where they started and ended, Janice finally managed to blurt out that he wasn't what she expected at all . This actually got his interest; he asked her what he was supposed to be like, on the grounds that it might well be worth a cognitive realignment if her theoretical Mobius was better than him. Being earnestly blinked at by one eye's worth of crazypants disembodied brain with a serious interest in what you have to say kind of threw her off, though; she sort of ran her hands over her face and muttered that she needed her brain back to deal with this. Mobius' reply?
"Do you? You seem fine without it. And does it want to go back with you? You might want to ask it. Tell you what- I'll leave it up to your brain. If it wants to go, then fine. If not, then you should respect its wishes."
Bzuh. Bzuh.
Well, at that point Janice figured she had nothing to lose; she rather cautiously asked Mobius if she could ask him a few questions. "Oh, curiosity!" the brain answered. "I experience that less now that I know everything. Or maybe it was that I found out some unpleasant answers? Mmhmm."
(Yes, this is his actual dialog. I did my best to transcribe anything he said. After the bloodthirsty psychosis of everything in Big Mountain up to this point, a simple case of apparently good-natured pants-on-globe crazy deserves a little extra screen time.)
The first thing she asked- mostly to make sure she got some honest answers- was if she could assist in fixing, or at least tuning, his visual inputs. Mobius was really happy about that. Especially since she indicated that the flying tortoises hadn't been there in the first place and were probably just a mechanical malfunction of some kind. Once she got his remaining optic tuned up properly and he was suitably grateful, she got up the nerve to ask why he'd stolen her brain.
"Oh, a variety of raisins. You're something of a homily. Er, anomaly? You're something quite special- you're the most successful brain extraction experiment ever performed here in Big Mountain. If you were to go back, your brain could be popped back in. Can't have brains walking around of their own volition..."
Okaaaaaay, so, why was that a problem? Given, you know, they were already bobbling around of their own volition in spheres and things. And her own brain had been moving around of its own volition in the first place, just tucked into her body and all. "Not sure, but there's a very good raisin for it. I have very good raisins for everything I do, even if I forget them occasionally."
Right. Fine. Whatever. Maybe another topic would be better- she figured she'd ask him what the deal was about the robo-scorpions. "Well," he said, "every scientist needs an army. Mine came to me after these rather large scorpions came in from the dessert! Like poisonous frosting- they'd survived when nothing else had? Then I thought what if they shot energy bolts and acted as walking eyes and data drained computers and acted as bullhorns? Then I made them bigger. Then I thought about custard..."
Bridge-of-nose pinching time, there.
Anyway. He didn't seem aggressive, Janice said, so why did he broadcast all those threats? "Oh, I was probably tripping hard on Psycho when I sent that. Had to work myself up to it, not usually violent, except when I am. So many chems, such varieties! As for the Psycho, sometimes I get the chems in the wrong tube. Still, served its purpose."
Purpose... Wait, did you do this to keep the think tank occupied? "Did I? Maybe. Can't have them leaving. Some reason for it. Ethics, or... con-science? You and your brain are quite alike. I'm sure it knows the raisins better than I do."
That was either evasion, or extra dottiness. Janice squinted at Mobius and said that everything he'd told her didn't add up- even his name, Mobius, didn't seem right. "Dr. Mobius? Rather catchy, isn't it? It's my name. My new name. Overwrote the old one. It's real as you or I, although your brain expressed similar incredulity. "Someone's been watching too many Old World science fiction movies," it said... I must admit, I have a vulnerability for holotape fantasies of domes and planets and all things forbidden... Like the Think Tank, we were all reprogrammed to forget our names, take on new names. It enforces the recursion loop in our perception programming."
Wait. Wait. What? That sounded like actual useful information. Go back to that part. You reprogrammed their names as part of a recursion loop? What, to trap their processors? "Now, 'trap' is a rather harsh word. Like 'excrement'. Not an inappropriate word... but yes, I did take some liberties with their programming. It's all right, they don't remember. I certainly didn't."
A recursion loop, Janice said, was meant to prevent info flow. So... "The Radar Fence wasn't really enough. They'd have found a way to disarm it. So I had to do something else to keep them occupied here. I prever to have several plan Bs in case the As fail. I suspect I have plan C's in place, but I may have coded myself to forget them, just in case. They're probably very dangerous. Possibly even lethal."
Things were starting to come clear. Janice wasn't entirely sure about it, so she had to keep him talking, and seized on the first thing she was able to suss out. Namely, the names- Klein, Mobius, 0 was a circle, 8 was an infinity symbol, Dala was short for mandala, they were all loops, weren't they? "You figured it out! They've all forgotten themselves, the world, sense of time, and history. All that is left is what's here. I reprogrammed their chronometers, geometers and cartography programs. Big MT is now their world. It was a merciful lobotomy, thinking back. They were my friends, but... sometimes they would take things too far. And the world isn't ready for that kind of too-far-thing-taking. That's my professional opinion anyway, and I am told I was once quite professional."
He actually sounded remorseful when he said that. Not Dr. Borous' "I feel a weird emotion and I DON'T LIKE IT AT ALL" kind of remorse, but... he really sounded as if he regretted what he'd done. Or the necessity for what he'd done. Janice wasn't entirely sure. She didn't know if she liked the idea that somebody here actually had some kind of sense of responsibility, either- it meant that she couldn't just write all of them off as too horrific to be allowed to continue to live. There might be something in there worth saving, maybe.
So, anyway, to distract herself from thinking about that she asked him why he terrorized the Think Tank if he'd lobotomized them. "Well, despite their failings, they're rather bright. I didn't change that. Without something to distract them, make them afraid, they'd simply deduce what had happened. Then you came along, the final variable solved. They saw their world was larger than they perceived. Bacteria, finally able to see its host."
... oh, crap.
"There've been other visitors, but you were the one who really set them off. You were irrefutable proof there was a world outside, and then there was the whole 'brain' fiasco. Your brain had a special kind of wrinkle they'd never thought to try in all their escape attempts."
Janice murmured something about the cranial injury from Benny shooting her in the head. "Yes!" said Mobius. "I should have Mentats ingest you instead of the other way around. Anyway, you showed up, and because you had a cranial injury in just the right place, bullets in the head are much more fatal and yours was a light case of bullet-head-itis. It was enough for the Auto-Doc in the Sink to change its programming to fix the problem, and the brain extraction technology worked for once. That gave the Think Tank the knowledge it shouldn't possess. With that knowledge, the procedure can be reversed. If they obtain that data, they can use it to modify their cranial selves into hosts to slip past the radar fence..."
The idea of the other brains stuffing themselves into unsuspecting lobotomite bodies made Janice kinda sick to her stomach, but she had to be sure of something. If she didn't get her brain back into her body, she asked, she couldn't ever leave, right? "Oh no," said Mobius, " your brain already knows the trick of it. If you become friends or exist in an uneasy truce with weapons aimed at each other, it would unlock the fence for you. Once the Think Tank was dealt with, of course. Your brain's a responsible sort. Doesn't want mad scientists running around everywhere."
Well. That was good to know. Sort of. More or less. God, Janice wanted a drink. All the drinks.
She put that aside and noted that Klein said the Think Tank had the idea to get the three technologies after Mobius' broadcast- was that a coincidence? Mobius snorted, insofar as a disembodied brain with a vocalizer and no nose is capable of snorting, and answered, "I consider 'coincidence' to be profanity, along with the words 'astrology', 'herbal tea' and 'luck', so watch it, potty-mouth. My broadcast was designed to instill, or install, fear and prompt them to focus on retrieving the technologies and bring them to attack me. And, coincidentally, pardon my language, all those technologies are needed to put a brain back into its skull properly."
Well, she had to ask what the specific purpose was there, just in case she understood them wrong. "The X-2 antenna can be used to focus your alpha wave frequency thought patterns. The sneaky suit houses a cardiac regulator. And the soundwave projecto-emitter was never intended as a weapon. It was a medicinal vertebrae pulse desensitizer. Brains, heart, courage- a spine. I think there was a story where a band of murderous thugs sought these things. They had them all the time in the story. Didn't stop them from murdering to get them... and it won't stop the Think Tank, either."
A-yup. The Wizard Of Oz Goes To Hell.
Anyway, just in case there was some other horrible surprise waiting out there, Janice asked if Mobius had tucked any extra info into the broadcast he had been using to mess with the Think Tank. "Yes, it was designed to keep reinforcing 'forget' ,'fear', 'rinse', 'repeat'. Oh, and 'get me the things to castrate your only possible escape attempt'. But I couldn't delete you or your arrival any more than I could the other visitors. Only so much Science can do when you started talking to them. You're really quite difficult to ignore. You're rather intriguing, if you'll forgive an old brain for saying so."
Compliments are nice, but, um, considering the source- well, it didn't matter so much. Janice had to point out that if the technologies she had in her possession were the things the Think Tank needed to escape, they'd managed to download the schematics each time she recovered one. They might not have the physical objects, but they could rebuild them with the right supplies. Mobius was silent a moment, and then said, "Oh. That means my plan is a total failure. That is unfortunate. Oh, well, at least I tried..."
Yeah. Um. yeah. Janice didn't... she didn't really know what to say at that point, so she murmured something about having to go talk to her brain now. Mobius got cheerful again and asked her to mind the equations on the floor, and then wandered off to go work on some console or other. Janice just rubbed at her face and wished, once again, for all the liquor in the world.
We'll deal with the actual brain in the next post. Any scene where the player character gets to have an extended angry conversation with her own brain should get its own screen time.
