Part 30: Loose Ends
Update 30: Loose Ends
Although it was tempting to rush off, we weren't going to catch flying vehicles in a Highwayman, especially when they'd left days earlier. They wanted my tribesmen for a reason, so they weren't likely to kill them out of hand. In the meantime, we were right next to the Toxic Caves.
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I had enough time to repair the generator while Marcus was stumping through the glowing puddles that lined the floor. Somehow, I don't think the radiation bothered him very much.
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The new electronic lockpick let me through the door to the elevator, although it was a bit trickier than I thought. There was also something that looked almost like an electrical trap in the doorway, but it didn't go off so it wasn't exactly a problem.
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The rocket to everyone's collective face from the still functioning security robot was, however, a problem. That thing had been waiting in the dark for someone or something to come down for decades. Unfortunately for it, the first living creatures to come down the elevator were heavily armed enough to tear it apart in a few seconds.
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Inside there was a stock of ammunition, energy cells, and some improved combat armor along with another Bozar. We didn't really have much user for another one, but it was sure to be valuable so it came along.
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Our next stop was in the New Reno area. Angela was a bit upset with me for some reason. Somebody had cleared out the bodies from our last visit, but left all of the weapons and equipment in some kind of bizarre memorial.
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Seeing her reminded me of safes, since that was where she'd kept her jet supply. It stood to reason that her dad had one as well and I hadn't went back up to crack it after I was done killing him.
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Now that we could get into the backup elevator there was a lot more to explore in the Sierra Army Depot, without having to pull out somebody's goo covered eye every time I wanted to use an elevator.
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The real shocker was finding out that the computer system on the lower levels was not only working, but intelligent enough to have a conversation.
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Given that it was supposed to protect the Depot from invaders, I was just happy that it didn't order all the guard robots we'd passed to open fire as soon as it realized it didn't know who I was.
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Or it could have just been being subtle about it. There were raised plates in the middle of the corridor that were almost certainly linked to something nasty.
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There was also yet another preserved eyeball in a storage locker inside an office at the end of the corridor. They really had a thing about eyeballs in this base, but there were also a number of textbooks so I couldn't complain too much.
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When we reached the central computer it was a giant system that looked exactly like the one I'd seen in Vault 13. Skynet wanted me to put together a robotic body so that it could leave the Depot and explore the world. There was a body it could use here on Level 3, but it needed a brain from Level 4.
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That was the end of the 3rd floor, so we hustled down to the 4th. It was somehow more dingy and dilapidated than the rest of the building, although that might have just been that the lights were all down. A skeleton with a gigantic head was curled up on the floor next to a science book, and I really had to wonder what the hell they'd been doing here.
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An operating table covered with rust brown stains stood off in one of the rooms, with a cluster of automated tools above it. The fact was, the Sierra Army Depot wasn't a fortress. It was a lab.
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And they'd been up to some crazy things. The computer revealed that the operating table was actually an organ extraction machine, and had settings for a number of different species as well as room to add more. The only remotely safe use it seemed to have was removing an appendix, and even then I wasn't too sure about what route it would take reach a person's appendix.
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The next room had a computer that controlled access to a vast storehouse of viruses, organs, and cadavers. I was only here for a brain, but I didn't see a reason not to pull out a body while I was at it.
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Dobbs had been injured on the front lines of the Great War and plopped into a vat of biomedical gel as an experimental treatment to regenerate his body. As soon as he explained that, Dobbs ran off to rejoin his unit. We didn't even have time to tell him that the war had been over for more than a century and that nobody had won.
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Not that it mattered, since it turns out there was a reason the regeneration process was experimental. He got about 20 steps down the hallway before melting into a pile of goo.
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On the plus side, for some reason he had Limited Edition Red Ryder BB gun on him. Somebody was sure to want it as a collector's item, if nothing else.
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As I turned back to the console and brought up the brain retrieval interface, something went wrong I had to rush to enter a system correction, even though I only had the faintest idea of what the system interface should even look like.
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It didn't go as well as it might have.
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There wasn't a chance to pick more than one, due to a really unfortunate malfunction, so I went with the obvious choice and took the human brain. I didn't really want to ask any questions about who it had belonged to.
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When we went back to Skynet for further instructions there was some kind of a glitch, so we had to figure out the rest the hard way.
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Luckily the computer hooked up to the robot body had a checklist. We had the brain and there was some biomed gel conveniently located in the same room as the body.
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Without any reference as to where the spare motivators were kept, we went with the caveman solution of just destroying every robot we could find until we found one with a compatible motivator.
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It wasn't that hard, since Skynet had chosen a fairly common body type. The little brain bots were packing combat shotguns, which irritated Cassidy since he didn't see why a robot should have a weapon as nice as his.
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After that, it was just a matter of plugging everything in and hooking up the connections before flipping the big lever.
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