The Anatomy of Melancholy
Third Instar: Manchester Impasse
Chapters 89-92: "The Lockreed Tetralogy," chronological version
DEAD DOVE WARNING Please heed this warning label, as it is one of the segments which necessitate this work's Explicit Content Warning. CWs include but are not limited to: extensive drug use and voluntary drugging, physical hostility, sustained grudge arguments, location entrapment, discussion and execution of bloodletting, hematophagy and entomophagy, descriptions which might read as discussing self-harm, eroticized self-harm, moderately graphic injury, prolonged absence of hygiene, copious amounts of insects and insect gore, faked romantic embroilment, masturbation as traumatic catharsis, forfeit bodily autonomy, mental break, ego death, and memory and reality fuckery. This selection includes the NSFW Rexton Nova chapter "Formica."[0]A/N: You can click footnote numbers to jump to the footnote without losing your place, because the footnote is also a link to where it's cited in the text. <3
 October 25, 2287 The rooftop ridges and rakes of unfortunate Cape Cod houses peek from the snow here and there. On occasion the trio passes a chimney still standing. Two centuries of dilapidation and harsh winters have collapsed many of them, permitting snow to fill their insides. Gnarled, bald trees intermix with tufts of evergreen. Anything more than a hundred feet out may as well not exist. Sticks shifts from animated agitation to a numb fury, the longer they trudge on without success. Trailing behind him, 'Choly resigns that Sticks is right: without bearings, they can't prioritize rejoining the caravan. The dull, lazy clicking of their Pip-Boys in the ice fog has drifted to feeling more like cotton in his ears. He's grateful Bledsoe didn't buy his RadAway, but he should have taken Rad-X before they embarked. Ahead, a low-rise building appears in the Fog. A nearby river crackles with sinuous, suffocated echoes. They scan for signs the snow may hide frozen water beneath, then continue toward the tenebrous silhouette. The seven-story streamline moderne office building only accounts for the central pillar of a broad one-story complex. The snow blocks off the lobby entrance. Ribbons of the Aurora have danced above them all the while, unnoticed in the hoar-frosted sun. As the sky dims, their iridescence grows brilliant again in the distance. 'Choly's jaw drops at the sight. "Just how far North are we...?" "There." Sticks points. His breath crowds his face. "Rooftop access." The ghoul easily crawls up the exposed four feet of concrete and aluminum, and stands to peer down at 'Choly and Angel. He crouches to extend a hand up to 'Choly. 'Choly glances to Angel. "On a good day, Angel couldn't clear that jump. I'm not leaving it out here." Sticks rolls his shoulders with a groan, and walks the perimeter of the roof. Bewildered, 'Choly and Angel follow along below without a word. Eventually, he stops and rests his arms akimbo. "I can get having trouble with one big step," he says. "How about a ramp instead?" Before either knows it, the man and robot have scaled a gradual snow bank. Only inches of the roof crest the ice here. A smile tugs at 'Choly's mouth, but he's too tired, cold, and hungry to be particularly happy about anything yet. The snow is less dense along the ramp, and 'Choly's steps sink deeper into it than in the open expanses of town ruins before, but he clears the rooftop, and stands beside Sticks. They beckon Angel with arms outreached. As it tries to join them, its unsteady flame thruster melts streaks in the snow that will refreeze in minutes. It, too, ultimately clears the edge of the roof. Now, the wind cuts more than the Fog bites or clings. They cross the roof more cautiously than the ground, as six inches of snow disguises the possible formation of ice. Halfway to the rooftop access, Sticks puts an arm around 'Choly's waist to steady him. 'Choly doesn't object. A terminal secures the door. With the butt of his palm, 'Choly knocks ice loose from it, to fold out the keyboard. He eyes the garbled screen. Sticks promptly pushes him aside, rubs his gloves together, and unfurls his Pip-Boy's keyprong. "I'll huff and I'll puff," he beams. 'Choly snatches his wrist. Alarm pins wide his glare. "Both the Pip-Boy and the terminal are damaged, idiot. You'll set off the security defenses!" Sticks yanks his arm free and chuckles at him. He shrugs a bit to right his coat on his shoulders. "Defenses? On an office building?" "I don't think an office building would have security clearance on a roof entrance." "You worry about everything! This is our only option." Sticks squares up to plug into the terminal. 'Choly grabs him again, this time with both hands. "Get—" Sticks shoves him off. 'Choly sprawls back on his butt in the snow with a hollow crunch. He watches in terror as Sticks apes at the manifold to locate its ports. A murmur of whirs, intermixing a sequence of faint chirps and beeps, goes unnoticed by the ghoul. Panic snatches 'Choly's breath altogether. The door clicks. They all jerk and freeze in place. "dSDFL— tCH— coME To LocKREed of NaSHHua." Gauss damage garbles the terminal's otherwise modulated voice font. "Location tCHHX— sdflhDDO— Deenwood Complex. Bio— sdlfhOI— tCHH— verifIIIed. Welcome, CoooŒrrrnel Carey." The wind whips at them. They gawk as the door slowly opens itself to reveal a dim stairwell landing. Sticks nips at the air. "Can this day get any fucking worse!" 'Choly pats at his chest, first to the left, then the right. His gloved fingertips contextualize the devices still affixed to his frost-iced coat. He can't quite swallow. "Angel. —Angel, is there a soul inside?" The Mister Handy approaches the doorway and pauses for some time. 'Choly won't let Sticks help him back to his feet, and insists on leveraging himself up with his cane. Their gazes lock, desperate for mutual understanding. 'Choly folds first and watches Angel. "Just us and the, erm, blattidae, Sir." Sticks slings his rifle off his shoulder, then with one hand slaps Angel's chassis. "Here's hoping whatever that is doesn't mind us coming in out of the cold." 'Choly steels himself. With his cane hooked on his elbow, he grips his 4-wood with its head up, and follows behind them both. They're not down to the next landing before the rooftop access door latches itself shut again. 'Choly doubles back to scrutinize the wall terminal. He squirms and glances down at Sticks. "It's password protected. Maybe further in—" "—We'll comb for a password, then." "You don't understand. We're not locked out. We're locked in now. We're locked inside a Lockreed building. These places have some of the highest military security defenses in the country." Sticks glares at length. "Don't follow me. You do whatever the hell you want. Just don't involve me. I've had enough of this nonstop stream of bullshit. Separate corners or else." "It's ill advised we split up, gentlem—" "—Can it. No gentlemen here. Just us and those lattiwhatsits." Sticks starts to storm off down the stairs. "I'm begging you, Sticks. Be careful. Promise me you won't screw with any doors until I can tell what we're up against. And roaches. It senses RadRoaches." Sticks flips him off before embarking through the stairwell's main floor doorway. "Promise me!" 'Choly frowns to Angel. "Aaand I'm right back to sleeping on office furniture. If I can sleep at all." "Come now, Sir. I'm certain you'll pass out right when your head hits the pillow!" It, too, clips off down the stairs and through the door. He just sighs and follows after Angel. "At least it's warm in here." October 27, 2287 'Choly knocks on the open office door, and stands in it. Sticks naps with a borrowed curtain pulled over him, with his arms folded atop it. Without any reply, 'Choly takes a step inside. This office is warmer than the one 'Choly occupies. "Can we talk?" The ghoul opens an eye, then closes it. "What's to talk about?" "Please don't be like that." He sits against the side table at the doorway, and clasps his gloved hands in one another in alternations. "I know you're mad, and you've every right. I'm not here to apologize, though. Not yet. I'm tired of apologizing for needing things." "Need, want. Do whatever. You don't need my permission. Clearly." "I do, though." He clears his throat, and eases back to standing so he can sit beside Sticks's legs on the couch. He peers at the office's modular paneling. "I've had a lot to think about since we got here, and everything we must accomplish before we can leave. There's one thing in particular that I can't do without you. If we're— staying here, erh. Hmh. You know I need you for the last ingredient of the Melancholia." Sticks watches him, gripping the curtain. Unease and anger tug at his features. 'Choly looks to him, briefly, to confirm he has his attention finally. "You're talking the blood part, aren't you? You insist on staying here. I'd rather you stayed, too. I could go find the caravan and bring some back." "I've told you that I can't allow that. We leave together or nothing. The security system let us in on a data corruption technicality: it's fucked. This is a Lockreed site. There's no telling what protocols or defenses this building has, or how it will behave if any other parts of it are damaged like the security door." A faint disquiet softens him. "You don't have a map or compass, and traveling alone just isn't practical in these conditions." "The blizzard's let up." Sticks sits up and slouches on the arm of the couch. "Surely—" "—The weather isn't the only factor and you know it. Or the doors. Think about the composition of the caravan. The nurses stayed at Ant Lane!" 'Choly grips Sticks's knee through the curtain. "No one at the Lane would trust donating blood now. You know people there won't trust the Blood Drive after what happened. They're superstitious, clearly with good reason. And even if you could find any donors within the caravan, there's no one with them who could cleanly and safely draw blood." Sticks grabs 'Choly's hand and takes it off his leg, then throws off the curtain to sit up. "And you can?" 'Choly clutches at the chest busks of his Surgical Leathers, for lack of a more logical place to rest his hand. "I'll have to! There's a lot I must be candid with you about, with this mess. A person can safely give one pint of blood every eight weeks. The formulation in the Merrick Index converts that one pint into almost three full Melancholia." His fingers wander to trace his chin scar. "Self-draw is nonviable. The Merrick advises against using your own blood except in emergencies. The chemical treatments which turn blood into Stimpaks and then Melancholia alter the healing factor just enough for a small risk triggering cytokine storm.[2287.10.27-1] Repeatedly taking Stimpaks or Melancholia made exclusively from one's own blood can kill them." "I really don't like the idea of being your only donor." "I don't like to put you in this position, either. But you're insistent I take Melancholia as it's prescribed for Limit 115 suppression. Once a week." Sticks murmurs, counting on his fingers. "Wait, you dullard. Your math is bad. Only three every eight weeks? That's not once a week." 'Choly pushes down pesky worries and lets his gentle, glassy gaze impart reassurance. "Good. You follow me, then. Let me continue explaining. Like I said, I've thought about this extensively already. I don't have an autoclave or phlebotomy equipment. There's that fridge where you've been keeping the RadRoach meat, but without perfectly sterile implements, the blood must be processed immediately after drawing it. And without a cannula, we'll have to use a knife." Sticks has been eyeing his arms in thought, but stops because 'Choly is watching. "If you're trying to spook me out of sticking to my request, it's not working." "I'm trying to provide you with everything I can so you can decide for yourself whether you're actually okay with this arrangement. I want your input, too. Your thoughts. That's all. Now, to get an entire pint of blood at once, with a knife, the cut can't be superficial. Some veins will be safer for this than others. This is another reason I can't reliably self-draw. Without proper phlebotomy implements, I could exsanguinate." "How am I any different? Tch! If you can't Stimpak yourself, I couldn't Stimpak myself either!" A smile quivers on 'Choly's face, small at first, but widening to tense the corners of his mouth and crease his cheeks. He leans to hold Sticks by the jaw with a tender touch. "You're a ghoul." He pats Sticks's cheek and eases back to sit beside him. "I recall clearly that your Pip-Boy indicated you've got remarkably high Endurance. That metric diagnoses traits like your healing factor and blood volume. But it's not just that I'm confident you'd withstand it. You remember how quickly your arm healed up after the RadFowl bite, once you could get it to stop bleeding? You regenerate so quickly. Please, tell me this sounds like I get the picture." "Quick healing or no, I know a quarter-cup of blood a week isn't going to cut it. Pun... not intended. There's got to be a way you can stretch a pint. Don't tell me you think we'll be here two months." "Even once we leave, we'll need a way to synthesize enough Melancholia that I can drink it weekly. Any dose I don't use here, we can take with us. And no, I had the opposite in mind: I'll get multiple pints from you every two months, if my theory holds. You could, in theory, stand in for more than one donor. Human healing factor replenishes lost blood count. Blood is another type of tissue, after all. Your ghoulish healing factor... well, you've indicated rads speed it up. Rads rejuvenate you. If we were to irradiate you after making the deep incision, I think—" "—NO!" Sticks lurches to his feet, to fling 'Choly to stand as well. 'Choly doesn't even try to squeeze in a word, too focused on keeping his balance as Sticks shoves him toward the hall. "Fuck! No! Hell no! Out! Out now! You little freak you're not milking me that's disgusting oh my god so help me—" The door slams. 'Choly doesn't deflate. He waits a moment before cupping a hand to the door and speaking through it. You're the one who thought of it as milking... "...I didn't mean right now," he says. "I came to discuss things with you. There's still four days before I need to drink the last Melancholia, so if you don't want me to miss a dose, you've got about ten days or so to consider how you want to proceed. I'm open to any ideas you have, too, provided we stay here and we stay inside." His voice raises: "I'm confident that between the two of us, we can come up with something!" He almost offers the MREs, but stops himself. He can respect Sticks distrusting the General—especially anything in which she's hidden chems. He has the luxury of having no other choice. Hopefully Sticks won't tire of Grilled RadRoach anytime soon. He'll get them both in better dietary straits once they can get out of here. "...That went well." He can't wave off coffee pangs, even at this hour, and endeavors to distract himself from his racing heart by organizing the literature he's gathered from the now vacant offices on their floor. He's too tired to do anything with the books, stenos, and binders, but he can at least sort them by their relevance to his pending tasks, to tackle later. October 28th, 2287 'Choly's stash of Mentats won't mitigate the absence of coffee in his diet, but it isn't like he has much choice. Swatting out the cobwebs from his belfry is his only way of restoring Angel. The MREs kindle his morale, at least. Whether they're placebo doesn't concern him: it only matters that they work. Guard your nametag better than you guard your wallet or keys: Here, it's both! He's laid hands on a Lockreed onboarding manual, and cards through it in hopes of learning programming and restoration. It's one thing, to use a Pip-Boy. It's another entirely, to fix one, and he'll have to in order to wing Angel's necessary repairs. There's got to be a robot workbench somewhere in the building, but they will require a Pip-Boy to operate, and he refuses to interface with the Mister Handy again until he has total certainty in his Pip-Boy's integrity. He can't risk corrupting it further with botched connections and garbage data, even though that means continuing to let it operate as is. He still can't navigate his Pip-Boy's menus. This evening, following instructions from the manual, he interfaces the 3000 Mark IV model with a terminal, and remotely initiates a preliminary debug scan. He fears some threat at this location, but admits they lucked into sheltering in offices which required an advanced familiarity with Pip-Boys of its entry level employees. Humility. Everyone starts with the basics. He hopes the scan will be complete by morning, so he can aspire to assess more clearly the device's damage tomorrow, and continue teaching himself from the manual. The Pip-Boy clicks away where it rests on the desk. He rubs at his bare right wrist with a distracted frown. As an unreleased model, Sticks' 3000 Mark V may surpass the repair limitations of the terminal's operating system. Nothing he's read yet has extrapolated upon anything higher than the 3000 Mark IV. Restoring the Mark V will take learning the differences between the two, and reverse engineering solutions based on their similarities. Of course, there's a lot to square away before he can even try that. He doubts they're even on speaking terms right now, for one. He notices himself worrying. Funny, how DayTripper regulates his appetite. Before he had these MREs, he can't remember the last time he was hungry and genuinely interested in doing anything about it. He tuts, decides to make himself dinner, and calls it a night. October 31, 2287 Glass clinks onto the desk beside 'Choly. He looks up from reading the onboarding manual, at the two empty milk bottles that have appeared, and the last Melancholia. Sticks toes at one of the chair's caster wheels with his shoe. "You'll need something to put it in." 'Choly swivels to look up at him. "I thought you were against... milking." An exasperated, visceral mental flinch clicks through Sticks's turbinates. "Just because it's the bottles doesn't— Look, do you want my help with this?" 'Choly smiles in metered apology. "I couldn't help myself. Of course. I take it you've decided to help, then." "Kind of a no-brainer. As much as I hate the spot we're in, it's not fair to you to turn you down. If you get contagious again, well. You'd relapse, wouldn't you? I don't think I'd wish that kind of suffering on many." Every possible reply that forms curdles on 'Choly's tongue. He still disagrees with the DIA documenting him as a positive New Plague case, but without a functional Pip-Boy to employ even basic medical diagnostics, he can't reasonably disprove it. There's no arguing with the allegation, and agreeing with it only condemns him. It's hopefully a short-term arrangement, and they can get out of here soon, but in the meantime, follow-through assuages Sticks's anxiety, and he won't turn down more Melancholia besides. A small smile reforms, withdrawn and curt. "All right, then. Have they been sterilized, or will we need to?" "I rinsed 'em out and put 'em in my fire while I ate breakfast." Breakfast falls from his mouth like unchewed words. 'Choly is surprised Sticks hasn't set off any fire alarms yet, but says nothing. "I figured glass was the cleanest option. You mentioned this needing rads, too. What... exactly is enough rads?" "You'd have to tell me. Does a little feel nice? Does a lot feel real nice?" Sticks's eyelids shut and compress his eyes. "--Forget I asked. Suggest something, and we'll try it." "Trial and error." 'Choly dislikes the idea of error, but lets only success compel him. "Well, we could dismantle some equipment that isn't connected to anything. A Fusion Core would work, too, but I think it'd be overkill. Try to find a fusion cell. Something with a clock or counter is a good bet. Atomic time, you know." "Atomic time..." Sticks mutters under his breath, and glances around the office. "Wait here." While Sticks flexes his procurement expertise, 'Choly opens the Melancholia. He nurses the cinnamon concoction, and contemplates just how vital it is in his quality of life. To him, he is inextricable from them. He did, after all, name himself after his endearment for them. As he waxes narcotic, the hubeine gradually subsumes any lingering self-consciousness with its leaden comfort. "Melancholia," he vocalizes, dismantling its components in his mouth and letting them roll around. "Melancholia... 'Choly. Kholi. Khholi. Kholodets. Tch, opukholi. ...Опухоли..."[2287.10.31-1] Tumescence. He drifts through the elephantine febrile imagery of his "Filarial" piece. Small guttural chirps of half-formed laughter don't make it out of his throat. Pukheya and Korkusha are such crooked, cruel muses, he thinks.[2287.10.31-2] He's not sure what he means, but pays it no mind. "Hey, what about one of these magnets?" Sticks sets it in 'Choly's lap to jar him from his daze. "That's a fusion cell wedged in there, isn't it?" 'Choly sits up straight and grips the saucer of coiled copper wire in both hands. He tucks the empty Melancholia bottle under his arm and stands with the magnet, to take it to the loveseat. Far away from the desk, and his Pip-Boy, and the terminal. "Let's see. Use your multitool to pry open the connections." Sticks sits beside him to pull out the multitool, and does as instructed. He picks the lipstick-sized battery from the wiring, and eyes it. Then, following 'Choly's guidance, he uses the crux of the plier arm of his multitool to partly crush its casing. "Is it okay for you to be near this?" "It shouldn't be too many rads, especially if you hold it. My Vault Suit has radiation resistant lining." 'Choly's glossy eyes brighten. "If it takes more rads than that to produce the results we seek, we've still got plenty of Rad-X." "Do you ever dial it down, Mindy?" "I've never noticed, personally." Reservations temper his smile as he runs a mental list for their crafts project. "We've got bottles, a healing trigger, and..." He reaches for his cane propped against the wall on his side of the sofa. "A knife. Its restoration makes it the most recently sharpened blade we have, I'd think. Here, fetch the bottles for me. And the lighter from the desk drawer, too." Sticks sneers playfully at him as he does as asked and presents him the steel lighter. "I absolutely got it fixed just so you could shank me with it." For a moment, neither makes a sound. A chuckle works its way out of Sticks which develops into a full laugh when 'Choly joins in. 'Choly unlatches the clasp on his cane hilt and slides its halves apart, and the laughter dissipates to punctuate their mutual tension. "I've been calling it Komár." 'Choly works at brushing the flame along the length of the blade. "Poetic, that we use a mosquito knife for bloodletting. This kind of blade is better at stabbing than slicing, but it can be a lancet in a pinch. No matter the site, I don't advise stabbing. We must keep it superficial. The less you have to heal, the easier it will be on you." Sticks sits again, with unusually good posture for him. "You've thought this part through, too." "Phlebotomists typically use the median cubital vein." 'Choly flips the lighter shut and points to the inner fold of his elbow with the pinky of the hand holding the knife. "Close to the skin. Furthest from large nerves. The only easier access veins are in the neck and inner thigh, but those are far more vulnerable. Halloween or not, I'm no vampire." "Oh for Christ's sake, it is Halloween, isn't it?" Sticks groans and slouches. "Can we make sure first that this is going to work like your hard on thinks it's going to?" 'Choly glances at him over his crescent glasses. "You're so intent to believe I'm getting off on this." "I'm still trying to figure out what exactly does." 'Choly gestures for Sticks to hold out his inner forearm. Sticks rolls up his shirt sleeve and lays his arm across his lap. "Last I checked, this does not fit the bill." 'Choly scrutinizes a good starting place, and settles on slicing the pad of Sticks's fingertip. "Does it fit yours?" "Please stop talking." When 'Choly squeezes the finger to ensure it bleeds nicely, Sticks stiffens ever so slightly. He lets go and nods for Sticks to apply the cell. They both watch the cut as Sticks waves the cracked opening in the cell's casing over it. Eventually, Sticks rubs the blood between his thumb and finger. He produces a kerchief and wipes his hand clean, and holds it out again. Their brows both wag as 'Choly looks it over. "I'd say that it works." 'Choly looks at Sticks solemnly. "Are you sure you're all right with this? I think it's best if we only draw one pint for now. This proves that rads heal your skin and blood vessels, but I don't want to take too much at once without the ability to measure your recovery. Maybe if we find a biometric scanner here, or get lucky and there's a Pip-Boy laying around—" "You've thought this through. So have I. I don't want you getting sick. You're soggy cardboard as it is. If that means being an ingredient in your silt flour smoothies, it means being an ingredient in your silt flour smoothies." "For now." He nods with a guilty gratitude. "You're more than an ingredient." "The main ingredient, even." Sticks grins through clenched teeth. "Just... take it easy, okay? It might heal up, but it's still gonna hurt like sin." 'Choly murmurs. Here goes nothing, then. No room for error. 'Choly cradles Sticks's right elbow in his right hand, and squares up to the antecubital fold with his left. Sticks readies a milk bottle between his thighs. 'Choly double checks he can visualize Sticks's blood vessels through his keloidal skin, and makes a short quick slice lengthwise along the chosen vein. With a sharp sustained inhalation, Sticks expects the blood to spurt. Instead, it pours, and he collects it somewhat easily after 'Choly can pull away and give him the space to hold it steady. Sticks lets out a long ragged breath and doesn't blink as he watches himself filling the bottle. 'Choly navigates to borrow the kerchief to wipe the knife, so he can sheath it. "How are you so far?" 'Choly asks, quiet and watching. He rubs gently at Sticks's knee. "I'm not fond of watching my own blood come out, but I'm not going to faint, if that's what you're asking." Sticks sighs. "Two pint bottle, isn't it? If you only want one for now, you only want half of this then?" "We need to feel out your limits before we push them. Tiny steps. Half the bottle is perfect for now. It'll buy us three weeks where we don't have to worry about whether I've got another dose of Melancholia." "So we can focus on getting out of here," Sticks agrees. "Back to civilization. You haven't made any strides figuring out how to get the doors to behave, have you?" 'Choly chooses his words. "I've been seeing what I can do to repair my Pip-Boy. It will be necessary to access the doors. And necessary to repair Angel." "This again." Sticks waves the fusion cell near the cut as the quantity he's collected resembles what he's been requested to provide, easing it to apply pressure with it to the upper side of the blood vessel. "Do you see any robot workbenches around here? It's got some screws loose, but it's not in pain. Now is not the time. I've been eating RadRoach for the past week. Nothing but goddamn RadRoach. The fuck have you been eating anyway? Have you eaten anything since we've been here?" "Yes, of course. It's, ah, funny you ask. I'm going to let you... finish first." "If you've been withholding food, so help me." Sticks clicks his tongue at him and grouses over completing his task. He grabs the kerchief back and wipes up, then applies pressure and glares at 'Choly expectantly. "I found more proof General Francis was here. MREs. Months' worth. They're still well within date, too." Sticks blanches with a sharp frown. Queasiness tugs at his features. "Christ. No wonder you're not pawing at the walls to get out. Are you sure you don't want some of my RadRoach meat?" "The MREs don't irritate my stomach. I'm not against eating insects, but I don't know if it would agree with me. I'd rather not add digestive issues to our trouble trapped here. Really, it's fine. I'm eating them willingly." Sticks sours at him and hands him the bottle. He stands with a creak and grunt, and doesn't make eye contact on his way out. "Yeah, you have fun with that. Angel might not have a clue we're trapped, and both of you might not care, but I do. And you should, too. Sure, we risk starving to death here, but one of us might go insane before we get that far." "Thank you," 'Choly calls out through the open doorway. He smiles to himself that he didn't get a slammed door in reply this time. Then he eyes the contents of the bottle in his hand. To keep from crying, he smiles even wider, that he has to consciously hold himself back from intimating the original purpose of the vessel to its current one, and from pressing its mouth to his own. November 1, 2287 'Choly toils over his plentiful notes salvaged upon vacating Lease 37. The ancient paper crinkles and warps from fresh water damage, and the ink is not entirely indelible. He appreciates that it follows to expect he would pen formulas and sketches to paper, but just like their memories of it, even these notes have gaps. Surely, the bungled holotape which he has yet to eject from his Pip-Boy sequesters even deeper detail. Missing pages might account for some diagrams and annotations lacking their antecedents, but only the existence of text files on the holotape can explain such extensive, consistent, glaring omissions. In essence, without the work he expects hides within holotape, he possesses only the appendix. A smile quivers at the corner of his lips. Did we glimpse what was never meant to be seen again, or did we awaken it? If we were meant to see it again, then why have us so soon and so completely forget? Everything about the mall was put there for a reason. ...I just haven't any clue what reason that could be. If the omissions aren't on the holotape, they're lost for good. For his sanity, its contents must complete the picture. How he gets on Berries can nettle even him, but the sheer earnesty of whatever he was on about in these footnotes nauseates him. The chain reaction of the storm and whatever chems he took during it convoked notions and imagery which churn his heart in an abyss. The handwriting is unmistakably his, down to an idiosyncratic reliance on Cyrillic in places. It's unsettling enough allegedly to have witnessed such things, but he's desolate to know them only secondhand through what amounts to letters to himself. Reading what survived the lease flood jogs uncomfortable fragments of thoughts he struggles to piece together, like driftwood lapping against an uneasy brume-choked shore. He wishes that there weren't any parsible sense within these individual scraps of understanding, that they couldn't possibly interrelate to anything more grandiose. The juxtaposition of thermodynamics substantiating the supernatural... Awe and dread wrestle for his grief. No matter how much of his notes he may ever restore, not even a polymath like General Francis would believe what these annotations threaten to insinuate. Even without Berries, he can tell the math itself details something very real, but sound math without evidence will always be on paper mere theory. Perhaps it's best if most take it for an overwrought fabrication. It tickles him a bit that he's somehow penned something that psychologically strangles even him. It's almost a shame that it reads like nonfiction. Almost. Yet, when he wrote these pages, he understood the conditions that came to damage Angel and the Pip-Boys. They are his key to undoing that damage. There are several units in the onboarding manual about gaussian repair. If he can deconstruct the nor'easter's magnetic properties, he can study the patterns it cut in their collective data media. Without this insight, he won't stand a chance otherwise. Fuck it all, magnetic fields. It's no wonder no one can remember fully. How anyone in the Hinter can inure themselves to such insidious inclement weather is unfathomable in any measure. The drugged MREs aren't what makes Lockreed feel so secure. Something far more sophisticated has to be at play here, for the prewar building's interior to remain even more pristine than Deenwood despite apparent abandonment. Something grazes loose hairs of his wadded up chignon. He smooths the hair down, and doesn't pay it much mind until it happens again, too absorbed in the notes. He feels behind himself. The RadRoach chirps a warning at him. "I know this is your house," he tells it in Russian, not turning or moving, "but for now this one room is my home. I wish you and your cousins understood it." He eases forward to set down his papers on the desk. His ears are trained on his unappreciative host behind him. He whips around in the chair to grab the insect. He grabs its antennae. It flails and chirps angrily, and it flicks its wings in an attempt to dislodge his blinding grip. For how flexible even an enormous roach is, and for how barely he has a grip on it, he cannot get a grip on any other portion of its anatomy without the risk of getting bitten. As he rises and walks to the office door, he thinks to beg for it to stop squirming. He flings it as hard as he can down the hall and shuts the door. He eases himself back into the chair, and rolls his eyes. To tell an insect not to squirm... They breathe through abdominal contractions—isn't squirming then their way to hyperventilate? At least this one didn't get a bite. He leans to pick up his notes again. His faint, shaking fingers trace the crude sketches he hopes are—and he wishes aren't—life drawings. A smirk twitches. "Pèlerins. She called them... Pèlerins, didn't she?" Do my sketches do their likeness any justice? Why am I never certain my nightmares are nightmares? November 22, 2287 Mister Sticks reclines on Mister Carey's couch. He has just provided Mister Carey with another pint of blood. Mister Carey is at the desk, where he's cleared a space for the hot plate from the break room and several glass bottles. "Mister Sticks," Angel says, "I'd rather you didn't put your feet on the armrest, but thank you for not putting your shoes on the furniture." Sticks mumbles and gets more comfortable. He presses the stained kerchief against the inside of his elbow, in which he's wrapped the cracked fusion cell. "Gentlemen, Thanksgiving is in two days. Are we planning a trip to the grocer's today? The pantries are a bit scarce as of late." The Mister Handy's lenses attune to each of them. "Oh! Does this mean you're traveling, then?" "We're not going anywhere, Angel," Mister Carey sighs over his shoulder. He can't mask his nuisance. "We're staying in." "Aren't we ever," Sticks snips, shutting his eyes. "Does this mean you wouldn't like me to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for you two? What are we to do?" "Well, Mister Mosquito over there is taking care of that as we speak." "Are you going to nap in here?" Mister Carey asks. "I hope the fusion cell is still helping. I believe that was a thorium cell, so it should keep going for a while even with the casing breached." "My arm hurts, if that's what you're asking. Keep talking and I can't nap." "So you do intend to nap." "Your couch isn't as comfy as mine, but I can't be bothered to move." Mister Carey sits back as the iodine-naphtha mixture yields benzoquinoline fumes. He takes the complex off the heat, then heaves a dejected sigh. He holds one of the bottles he's emptied. "Would I be able to bother you to check the other offices and closets for more ingredients for me? If you haven't got anything better to do." "If it doesn't involve bashing the walls open, I'm not interested." "Mister Sticks, mind that I'll be most cross if you vandalize the building." Angel crawls over to the desk. "Sir, I'll gladly assist you! What do you require?" Mister Carey hems and holds a coffee filter like he doesn't quite know where to put it. "I was going to ask Sticks to look for mineral spirits. Naphtha would be best, but anything besides paint thinner will work. Of course, toothpaste and mouthwash. Always toothpaste and mouthwash. And he could be so nice as to locate more iodine for me. I just used the last of what I brought with us. Again, Lugol's would be best, but I can work with a tincture. We've got the Rad-X, but it's outside my current lab processes to separate the iodine from the other compounds in it." Oh. His owner is trying to strategically request his partner to leave, without asking him outright. Its subtext algorithms could use some polish. "Well we're certainly not using the Rad-X for anything else, now are we? Pfft. I hate to break it to you, but there's not exactly much of anything in this place. It's, like, the exact opposite of when we found that medical warehouse was leveled. Angel pointed out how there wasn't anything there, and that the lack of anything meant scavvers had to have looted it clean. This place is still standing like the bombs never happened, but there's almost no evidence anyone ever worked here. And there's sure no evidence that scavvers have picked it clean." "I tell you, Liv was here at some point. She had to have taken everything of value." Sticks shoots upright and pockets the fusion cell and kerchief. "Not everything of value: everything. We're lucky there's even furniture and RadRoaches!" Mister Carey's irritation deflates sorrowfully. "I wish you'd eat the MREs, Jacob." "A delightful idea, Sir! Shall I whip up a meal for each of you?" "Sooner eat my other hand." The ghoul stands. He rolls the aches from his shoulders and pockets his hand and wrist. "Grocery shopping. Loud and clear. Come on, Angel. I get the feeling he wants us both out of his hair." "Just you!" Mister Carey calls out from where he sits. "Not even DayTripper can make him easy to get along with," Mister Sticks mutters. "All the worse for his two month Mentats bender." "I'll do better keeping him hydrated, Sir." "Aw," Mister Sticks grins. "We don't want him more shriveled up?" "I do believe such a development would indicate poor health." "He's got a lot more than dehydration wrong with him." "Sir... these things you're saying. These... terrible things... I... I believe you need a distraction. Yes! A distraction, to calm this dire mood. It's been ages since we've had a proper family activity. Checkers. Chess, perhaps?" "Solitaire's more my tune. Let me know if you find a deck of cards." November 30, 2287 Sticks drags open the desk drawer in his office and rifles through the pile of holotapes. He's only found four games on this floor, and he's tired of all of them. Prior to getting trapped in here, he had never given video games a single thought. If he weren't trapped in here, he'd probably enjoy them a lot more. They're definitely not the stupidest thing a terminal can do, though the instructions could be way more straightforward. But what else is there to do? Just games and pest control. It's spooky how clean and orderly this whole place is. The elevator and stairwell have security doors without plugs or terminals. He's tried to find other ways out. Since the nor'easter, several nights of snow have replaced any snow that may have melted. It's maddening, to have a clear view out the windows on the front face of the building, right there. He can throw a chair and walk out right across that expanse of white bullshit, back to sanity, and back to civilization. 'Choly keeps telling him that breaking windows will sound the alarms, but has yet to explain what he thinks will happen if they breach the lockdown. They can't prove there are any robots or turrets here, for one, and if there were guard dogs before, all that's left are RadRoaches. It pisses him off more that the roaches can inexplicably get in, than it does that he and 'Choly inexplicably can't get out. Where the hell were they coming from! He surveys the holotapes in his possession. Red Menace has occupied him the most for the past month. The propaganda to it is so absurd. The Red flag is alive. Power Armor is a bonafide power-up. There's no question that RobCo and the army were in cahoots, with products like this. He likes the irony of it, but what he likes more is the sense of satisfaction saving the girl, even though she's just dots on the screen. He's not feeling it today, though. He picks up Rubble Rouser[2287.11.30-1], and tosses it right back down, too. He'd give Wastelad another try, but if he wanted to read, he'd rather have a book. Or solitaire. He groans. What sensible office doesn't have a single pack of playing cards? Hell, he'd settle for Caravan at this point.[2287.11.30-2] RobCo Entertainment is a phrase he keeps seeing when he scavs the offices they can access. It had better not have anything to do with RobCo Towers. Things don't feel like a coincidence when they might involve the General in some way. He decides on Automatron, slings his bugged out Pip-Boy and bugged out hand in the drawer, and slides the desk shut. He inserts the game into the terminal tape deck and clicks it shut. He pecks out a command line to start it. While it loads, he slides the joystick nearer with wrist and hand at the ready. He easily zones out mowing down robots with a spray of fire. If only Lowell had been this easy. Automatron makes him miss his flamer, though... and the Riverhawk. Admit it, you're scared. Being told that to his face still chews at him after all this time. He's not scared. At least, not duly so! Shouldn't it upset just about anybody to have an entire day erased from his brain? All of Ant didn't get blackout drunk, and he knows it. Something happened that day, and until he knows what, he doesn't want a damn thing to do with that place. It wasn't part of the plan, anyway, to end up there. Not in passing, and for damn sure not long term. They were supposed to already be in Goodneighbor by now. A RadRoach walks along the wall behind the terminal. He sighs, gaze trained on the screen, and slides the chair out slowly handsfree, still clicking away at the game. Once he clears the current level, he stands and scans for the foot-long insect. The terminal continues chirping and beeping at him to remind him the next level will load. The roach lunges out from under the desk. It goes right for his ankles. He flinches, and flinches again seething before he can react to a third nip. His heel swings down on its back with a satisfying crunch. He collects his machete from beside the couch, and crouches over the bug. A few zealous chops square away inedible parts. He cracks the shell apart with the butt and spine of the knife, and frees the meat with the knife's edge. He ran out of things to burn a week ago. Grilled RadRoach is almost like chicken. Raw RadRoach is even more like raw chicken. A resigned ennui drives him to stand again. He scoops the cuttings on top of all the others collected in the wastebasket he hasn't let Angel empty for days. Then he slops the fist-sized slab of meat on the desk beside the joystick on his plate, and slices it into a few unseasoned inch-thick pieces. He wipes the knife with his crusty apron tail and sets it on the other side of the desk. He wipes his hands on his apron, too, and sits to resume his game. Between levels, he eats a slice or two of insect from his plate. Under the chair, he rubs the top of one foot against the nicks to his ankle. I'll wash it next time I get up, he tells himself. He knows full well he probably won't. December 19, 2287 "How the hell are you getting i—" Sticks sputters into minced oaths under his breath. The two RadRoaches he was chasing have vanished. Machete in hand, he slouches in the hall to catch his breath. His lone blond lock hangs limp and grotesque against the contours of his temple and cheek. He tries to talk himself down after missing his chance at a timely meal. "Can't get a moment's peace! There's always more RadRoaches! Can't get out. Stuck in here! Alone! With a damn prewar vampire ghost with the Blue Flu, and his broken Handy! All I've eaten in two months is RadRoaches!? RAW. RADROACH!? WHERE. THE HELL. ARE THEY ALL COMING FROM!?" With a rumbling feral roar, he slashes futilely at the modular deco paneling. The shrieks and clangs of steel on aluminum fill the corridor. Grunts, growls, and hisses punctuate the storm of metallic din. "FUCK!!" He slashes to one side. "FUCK YOU!!" He slashes at the air. "I'M NOT SCARED DAMMIT! SHOW ME WHAT YOU'VE GOT, YOU STUPID ASS BUILDING!" He eyes the handleless security door which leads to the stairwell. He backs up a few steps, to rush toward it. He slams his shoulder. The wire reinforced glass explodes, and the chunks roll down the stairs. His head swims, and he tries to stand up straight. He rubs his right shoulder with an addled frown. When it feels warm and wet, he glances to his blood-streaked wrist, then to the now-exposed razor sharp latticed wire. He groans, and totters back to his office. He paws around in the pencil drawer of the desk, in search of that broken fusion cell they've been using to heal his blood donor cuts. When he can't find it, he nips a curse under his breath, slumps into the chair, and sits until his breathing steadies. Put pressure on it. Right. He cuts a wide strip off the end of his barkcloth-curtain-turned-blanket. He pins one end under his armpit, and works it around his bicep and delt as best he can. He tucks the loose end under the wrapping. He swivels his shoulder to test whether the wrap will stay, then coddles its soreness. He still can't remember where he put the cell— "Jacob, what the fuck did you do!" When he whips around in the chair, 'Choly is neither scared nor furious. That little Russian is laughing at him! He clenches his teeth. He snatches his machete off the couch. He shoves 'Choly out of the way, and powers down the hall. "I'm tired of getting bossed around by a building and its damn nonsense bullshit doors." He shoves the butt of his palm against the stairwell door, but it still doesn't budge. "Do you often laugh at men with knives? Almighty, you're high." "Do you often threaten men with knives?" With a small smirk, 'Choly tips up his cane for emphasis. "Yours is bigger, but mine is definitely sharper after your tantrum. So I was wrong about the Pip-Boy route, what without keyprongs and all that. I'm still trying every day to figure out the security doors. You've got to be patient. Are you okay?" "You're not the one getting gnawed on by neverending RadRoaches—" Sticks notices the brushing of antennae under the janitor's closet door. "Shh." He goes to the cracked door. The light switch scatters multiple RadRoaches, and he growls. Determination contours his wiry lips tight against his teeth. He makes a fist, and in half-foot intervals, he goes along the wall applying deliberate pounds. He listens for any change in hollowness, or change in resistance, and stoops lower and lower as he follows the wall. "Cockroaches outsmart you." 'Choly leans into his cane with both hands. "We are in TmuRadTarakan for certain."[2287.12.19-1] Sticks is too focused, too annoyed, and in too much pain to bother asking what the hell 'Choly is on about now. The corner of one panel is no longer screwed down. Sticks stands to pull away the utility shelf in front of it, then pries at the panel. 'Choly sputters over how to help. Once Sticks has the panel peeled back enough, 'Choly squeezes behind it and pushes. Sticks stumbles back. His grip falters, and sooner than slash his hand on the edge of the panel, he directs it to fall to one side. He braces in the expectation he needs to catch 'Choly from falling forward, but only the clatter comes, not the collision. He shakes off the flinch and surveys their success. The RadRoaches have chewed out a sizable chunk of the interior of the walls. Wiring and woodwork alike have succumbed to the insects' path inside. 'Choly stoops to peer down the hole. His voice echoes back dully. "Roaches and termites are cousins, you know." "Sometimes, your weird bug trivia is on point enough to be creepy. You know that?" "I do what I can." "Either you're going down the rabbit hole, or you're going to get out of the way." Sticks pulls him back by the corset laces. "I should go first. There could be termites," he sneers. "You really intend to go in there? Sticks, wait—" "I will chew the wall open myself if I have to." On all fours, Sticks scoots himself into the hole at the bottom of the wall, and squints in search of other light sources. Resting his upper weight on his injured arm hurts more at this angle than it did to pull on that metal sheet, but he powers through. He pokes the machete around out ahead of him. About six feet ahead of him, he finds another wall panel. He glances to either side, but it's too dark to tell which way the RadRoaches went. He sets down the machete close in front of him, then pushes with his left shoulder against the panel he's found. When it gives, he pushes harder. "If you're behind me, could you swat any bugs that rush me? I think I found the other side." "The other side of what?" 'Choly's voice is close and quiet. "Jesus, you did follow." "You have me curious." 'Choly yelps, only to wheeze. "Just some loose wires. Damn it." Sticks kicks at him, but misses, unable to see behind him. 'Choly chuffs and swats him in the butt with the handle of his cane. Sticks's foot connects. "Ow!" Sticks chuckles. The panel spills forward without much effort. He inches through. The stairwell is on the other side. He looks down. There's a gap between the wall and handrail. He inches through the tunnel. Though he eases himself down, he still spills onto the stairs with a thud. Once he has his footing, he helps pull 'Choly through. Frowning, 'Choly eyes the broken stairwell door. "How are we going to get back up now?" "Let's try going down first. We've been on the second floor, I think." "We're still snowed in, in case you couldn't tell." Sticks descends. "Easier to chew through ice than metal. My kingdom for some tin snips. Wait." He produces his multitool from his apron with a heavy lidded grin. "What's a little wire to a handyman?" With an unconvinced murmur, 'Choly follows him down the dim stairwell. "Hope Angel won't come looking for us while we're down here..." A dense blue carpet furnishes the walkways of the first floor. Unlike the second floor, the rooms all have the knobless doors, and they're sealed shut. The pair meanders to survey things. "It doesn't even smell like dust in here," 'Choly utters. "You've noticed?" "Yeah, I figured my sense of smell took that day in October on vacation with it." Sticks looks in an office door's window and bangs on the glass. "Probably safe to say that breaking the doors doesn't set off anything, you think?" "We don't know that. Please don't break more doors." "It's looking like our best option. We don't have keys." Sticks sees a wastepaper basket. He snatches it up and hurls it at the first door's window that catches his fancy. He applies most of his throwing force with his left arm. He fires a contented sneer at 'Choly. "This place still has half power," 'Choly says. "Before you cut that, you should make sure that it isn't electrified. Shouldn't you?" "Slicing my shoulder up didn't electrocute me, but if it'll make you happy." Sticks picks up a scrap of paper scattered by his throw, and holds its edge so it contacts multiple wires at once. "There. No fire. No live wires." 'Choly watches Sticks snip a hole in the grid of copper wire. Beside the door is a placard designating it leads to a basement. He hems. "There's gotta be something good down here," Sticks says. His hand spasms for the repetitive grip strength necessary to clear this many individual low gauge wires. He huffs a defeated smile and offers his accomplice the multitool. "Would you like to do the honors?" "I suppose I should know how to do this if it comes to it." 'Choly's reinforced officer's gloves make the application of grip nearly effortless. He smiles as he snips the last ten wires, gratified. He then leans against the door and reaches an arm inside, to feel for any buttons, panels, or levers. "We might do better to knock out even more," 'Choly says. He pulls his arm back out and cuts the hole twice as wide. Sticks this time puts his head through. Two flood lights are aimed at the landing but one bulb is out. When he pulls out stumped, 'Choly looks for himself, too. Sticks glances down the hall in thought. "Maybe there's a security office on the first floor," Sticks wonders. "Wait, there's— I think I can— Yes!!" The door unlatches with a clunk. 'Choly pulls his arm back out, with his cane in hand. He steadies his footing and bows to the ghoul. "To think you've been telling me all this time not to bust up the place." Sticks clicks his tongue and draws his machete again. "Shall we?" 'Choly nods, and unsheathes the blade from his cane as he follows. They descend the first turn of the stairs. RadRoaches descend upon them. Some fly at their faces, but most go for their legs. Sticks yells and grunts, kicking at them barefoot. He can hear 'Choly swatting and yelping nearby but too many are upon them for either to be of much mutual aid. All either can do for one another is to take out as many as they can. Sticks feels a cool warmth inching up the back of his leg. He grabs through the curtain of RadRoaches to find a Glowing RadRoach. He cackles and smashes it against the wall. He pins the dead irradiated green and black insect in his right armpit. While the bug's rads soak into his shoulder, he commences to focus his fighting technique on stomping and kicking. Eventually, the numbers dwindle to where what remains decides to scatter rather than continue trying to take down a large meal. "You ok?" he asks 'Choly. "I haven't dealt with this many roaches since— Since 111—" Sticks looks to him. The poor man is shivering and has sat down on the last bit of stairs. His face is bitten up, but he mostly looks shaken. The ghoul sneers at the idea of the roaches, aspiring to lighten the mood. "If they can get inside a sealed Vault-Tec vault, they can get into anything." It takes some time to receive a response. 'Choly can't seem to stop rubbing at his arms. His wandering gaze doesn't actually look to anything in particular. "That's for damn sure." Sticks halts. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and looses a dejected whistle. "Well. I found the first evidence that somebody else has been here." That gets 'Choly's attention. A body lays sprawled in the floor. Only bones and tatters of a quilted khaki leather military uniform remain. "A summer uniform," 'Choly comments. He eases himself to crouch with his cane, to inspect more closely. "Creeley. Uhh, Maria Creeley." "A lieutenant?" Sticks says of the lapel stripes, to contribute to the observations. He's not sure why it matters much. It's not like the uniform is in any wearable condition. "Didn't know her, did you?" 'Choly checks the saddle pockets on each hip of the blazer. He shows Sticks a handful of fusion cells. He scans the basement floor, and points to the laser pistol about ten feet from the body. "Of course not. ...Strange." "Mm," Sticks murmurs. He begins exploring the basement. There are several rows of utility shelving, and they're all packed with aluminum crates. "Oh, most officers were outfitted with 10mm pistols or combat rifles. She must have had to get resourceful on her way here. Wonder what did her in?" "I'm more interested to know how she got in." "I suspect she came here with Olivia. Whenever that was, it was certainly decades ago or more, going by the state she's in now. She's not lying on the ground in a way that looks like she was placed where she is. Something definitely killed her. Skull's charred on one side." 'Choly's wild conjectures annoy Sticks, but he allows it. He glances back to the body, seeing it from a different angle. "She's kind of crumpled up. What's under her?" While 'Choly moves Maria's skeleton around to find out, Sticks turns back to a crate. He grips one corner of the lid and shifts it offset, to peek inside. His eyes light up at the phrase RobCo Fun, but he keeps quiet and shuts it back. He reminds himself there's a chance he won't need more distractions if getting in here means they can finally escape. "She... She has a Fusion Core." "She what?" Sticks picks his head up when he understands. He looks around for the one type of mainframe with which he has any real familiarity. "Yeah, the F.C. mainframe is in the corner over there." "No wonder the place is at half power. I'm going to see if I can't reinsert it." "Why not take it with us? No reason to waste it running a backup generator no one's using." "The doors might be electronic. More power might render them operational again." Sticks checks another crate on a different shelf. It's full of the same game as the first one. "I knew that." "We're in luck! Creeley knew the protocol sequence to eject it properly. She didn't brick the generator." "Luck? I don't know her." The building emanates a low hum, and more overhead lights come online. "What gives? I've opened three crates now, and they've all got this one game in them." Sticks pulls a game from a crate. The flat medium box is glossy and a sturdy weight. He walks over to 'Choly, and opens it. His eyes sparkle at the sight of board game chips. 'Choly takes the lid from him. "Captain Cosmos in Jangles' Big Day." 'Choly turns the lid over, then looks at its top again. "Limited edition. Mail order rebate exclusive. Tch, you had to send in ten different Hubris Comics proof of purchase to buy one of these![2287.12.19-2] You said there's three crates of this game here?" "Yeah, and judging by the stenciled labels on them, that's most of these crates." Sticks chuckles, poking around the tokens. "They look kind of like caps." 'Choly's brow piques with the slightest judgment. "They're not crown crimped. They're more like one sided checkers. ...Why does a board game have a holotape?" "Oh, don't be a stick in the mud. I bet somebody would trade me for them! Didn't the lid say it's two halves of the same game? No idea what that means. It's just a regular cardboard game board."[2287.12.19-3] 'Choly gives him back the lid. "I'll take one upstairs with us. Incomprehensible. What is this many copies of this strange game doing in the basement of a Lockreed?"[2287.12.19-4] "It's a shame Ant has such distaste for prewar tech. I bet we could buy the largest lease in the place with all these JBD crates." "I think the better value isn't the game, but the medium itself." 'Choly coaxes him to put the lid back on the box, so he can snatch it from him. As he speaks, his spirits brighten. A genuine smile of optimism snares him. "No one needs several hundred copies of a video game anymore. Viable holotapes, though? If I can format them, they're reusable. You know what this means! I can finally draft applied script! I can finally prove that I've retained all the reading I've done these past two months! I can start fixing my Pip-Boy! I can start fixing yours! And your hand! And then I can fix Angel!!" "What." Sticks tries to pull the box from him. The RadRoach under his arm flops to the floor. He doesn't bother retrieving it. "No. No, no, no. We're not staying here a goddamn minute longer than it takes to smash the window out." "It's impossible to travel this area in the winter." 'Choly beams at him, looking like he might spring to dance if he only had the faculty. "At least wait until the snow evaporates. The ice Fog will only get us lost again." Sticks's snarl tickles 'Choly until the ghoul whips out his machete. The little man takes a step back with a tepid chuckle. "That might not be until Spring!" the ghoul growls. "And it could be tomorrow!" 'Choly flashes a commanding grin. "Come now. Be civil about this. Be rational. It's warm here. The worst of it has just been RadRoaches. We've managed so far. Haven't we?" Sticks lets him hold him by the wrist, but doesn't put the machete back in his apron just yet. A snarl still locks his jaw tight. "Give me a few days. I bet Lt. Creeley here got in the same way I got us in. Her ribbon rack is intact. If I can compare the two, I could determine a way to program her RFID with your biometrics. The building might recognize you. We could just walk out instead of demolishing the place." Sticks's eyes water when it clicks. "...Open sesame?" "Open sesame." 'Choly rattles the box to jangle the tokens in it. "Now let's go try the doors. And the elevator." "You think the elevator's working?" "Only one way to find out." December 25, 2287 Angel's servos buzz with delight as it sets the hot, fresh Meals-Ready-to-Eat in front of Mister Carey and Mister Sticks. The two men sit facing one another at opposite ends of the table. Mister Carey smiles in recognition, but does not pick up any utensils as he glances to his partner. Mister Sticks, his once-white button-up shirt dark and crusted with blood, glares at the unlidded cardboard box. His hair is glued to his forehead. Beleaguered ire hangs heavy on his brow. "Is it to your liking, gentlemen?" Angel asks, its relished tone still delicate with anticipation. "Shall I fetch you anything? Ah, refreshments! Here you go. Fresh condensated water for you both. The humidity in this building is markedly lower than average. I don't believe I'm producing water at the rate typical of my model." "You produce plenty," Mister Carey lauds. He pats at the table beside the can the Mister Handy has set down. "Thank you for preparing us a nice meal, Moy Angel." "But of course! It's Christmas." Mister Sticks mutters under his breath, but his partner and Angel still both hear him. "Who even celebrates Christmas anymore." "You've outdone yourself," Mister Carey continues. He eats a spoonful of Salisbury steak. "All to keep us in good spirits. To give us reason to spend even one moment together. To remind us both to keep up hope." He smiles over his glasses when Mister Sticks decides it's acceptable to begin eating, too. "Thank you for agreeing to come out of your hiding spot to spend time with us." "I'm making no habits of this," Mister Sticks insists. He opens both their cans, then gesticulates with his multitool. "I can't remember the last time I had a potato, and I probably don't want to. Starchy wet cardboard. This stuff's got more texture than I remember a potato having, and I'm not sure that's a good thing." "It's certainly better than tatoe," Mister Carey replies. "I think mashed tatoes would be unpleasantly gelatinous. Wouldn't go with chopped steak at all!" Angel anticipates further input from one of them, but a silence hangs between them. Eventually, the Mister Handy intuits a series of puns were had. "Oh! Mister Sticks," Angel scoffs. "You kidder. Potato, toe-mah-toe. You're most welcome. Really, it was no trouble. I can do so whenever you like! May it nourish your mind and body!" Mister Sticks mutters under his breath again, but it's mostly gibberish. Angel's interpersonal algorithms indicate his tone has softened. They eat their meal in silence, but Angel knows their comfort by their level breathing patterns and steady bite portions. Eventually, Angel clears the table and excuses itself with the bussing, and returns with its tendrils behind its back. "I know we've no Christmas tree, but surely we could exchange gifts, at least?" In the days leading up to today, Angel has noticed that neither gentleman gathered a gift for the other. It takes the responsibility of filling that deficit. After all, it tells itself, who would want to wake on Christmas Day with no gifts awaiting them! "What gifts?" Mister Sticks insists. His guarded tone suggests that Angel's query worries him. Angel sets a medium-size wrapped gift in front of each of them. Mister Carey and Mister Sticks pick up the packages and regard the way they're addressed. "To Mister Carey, from Mister Sticks," Mister Carey reads aloud. He sniffs and purses his lips with a smile. "Mister Sticks, you shouldn't have." Mister Sticks is holding back chuckles, in his eagerness for the surprise. "I can't begin to guess what this is, Mister Carey." They both pull off the continuous stock paper with which Angel has wrapped the two gifts. It adapted from its giftwrapping algorithms several intricate, deluxe folding techniques which do not call for any tape, as it has none. The results are fancy and impressive, and were anyone to call attention to the extra tucks and creases, they would likely regard such giftwrapping as markedly artistic. Giddy with anticipation, Angel keeps an ocular lens trained on each of them. Mister Carey looks at the game box in his hands, alternating between composure and heaving, nasal laughter. Once Mister Sticks starts laughing at his own, too, they both succumb to hysterical guffaws. Angel cannot contain its tee-hees, either. "Just what I wanted," Mister Sticks says between heaves. "How did, how did you know?" Mister Carey cackles. His laughter slides into a high pitched whine. "Soon to be a classic," Angel decrees. "RobCo Entertainment's latest holotape game release, Captain Cosmos in Jangles' Big Day! The both of you have been so hard at work. You should find respite and recreation where you can." "Thank you, Mister Carey," Mister Sticks wheezes. He wipes the corner of his eye with the butt of his palm. "Thank you, Mister Sticks," Mister Carey whines. Soundless cackling overtakes him, and he must lay his upper half on the table. His hands are buried in his arms for a bit, and muffle his speech once words find him again. "Even when you're not operating at your fullest, you're a treasure, Moy Angel." "A testament to General Atomics craftsmanship," Mister Sticks agrees. Angel freezes with pride. If they know it's responsible for these gifts, they're not showing it. It can't have done better by the two of them. "Oh, gentlemen, seeing the two of you in such high spirits is the best gift you could give me. Thank you!" "Merry Christmas, chap." "Merry Christmas," Mister Carey seconds. He straightens back up and picks up the box again. "You know, maybe we should play it. Probably a different experience on a terminal than on a Pip-Boy, but Angel's right. We should have a nice low-stress evening." "I know it's the meal talking, but you're not wrong." Mister Sticks pushes off to stand, and carries one of the game boxes. "Come with me. Step into my office." Mister Carey follows him in kind. Angel remains nearby in the event they need its services. At the very least, it can stave off any errant blattidae which threaten to disenchant this rare moment. "I thought you hated technology," Mister Carey says. "Finally decided to give it a shot, or is that also the meal talking?" "This place has given me way too much time for a change of perspective, that's for sure." "I've only seen you three times since, well." Mister Carey sighs. "We don't really get the chance to talk much anymore, is what I'm trying to say. What have you been occupying yourself with?" Angel notes tension in its owner's voice and its partner's sustained silence. Its interpersonal algorithms refine its focus in anticipation of an argument. When he finally does answer its owner, Mister Sticks's humble chuckling reassures it enough that it excuses itself to its dusting rounds on this floor: "All busywork. It's nothing. What's way more important is what you've been up to. While we play, you can tell me how things are going with Maria." December 31, 2287 Mister Carey sleeps on the couch when Angel floats in to check on him. It comforts Angel, to watch its owner sleep. His long, greasy hair spills over the armrest, and a vague tension tugs at his features. He doesn't usually sleep on his back, it doesn't think. It observes his twitching microexpressions for several minutes. "Mister Carey," it says from a few feet away. It gets nearer. "Mister Carey, do wake up." His eyes open wide. He stares at Angel in the dark for some time, nostrils agape. "Do you need something?" he asks. "I believe you were having a nightmare, Sir. I woke you." His gaze breaks away. His lips press together ever so slightly. "Ah." "Could I do anything for you? My condensator tin isn't quite refilled, I'm afraid." He turns over to face away from Angel, and curls his head into the pit of the armrest. "I'm not thirsty. I just want to be left alone." "Oh, don't spend New Year's alone, Sir. Your nightmare was just that." He curls up tighter against the back of the couch, only to pick his head up in confusion. "What? It's not New Year's, Angel. Just. Please let me try to sleep." Angel checks its chronometer and calendar. Its ocular lenses tighten and dilate as it thinks. "As of thirteen minutes ago, it is now 2288. You didn't ask me to wake you to ring in with you, so I let you sleep until your distress was apparent." He groans and tosses an arm over his ear. "New Year's isn't for another two weeks. Just... let me alone until then." "Sir, forgive me, but you sound hungover, or possibly ill. Could I—" Mister Carey snatches the nearest book from the floor scatter at the foot of the couch, and flings it at Angel. Angel picks up the book it believes he's dropped, and returns it to him. His shoulders lock up and his hands clench, and he's shaking trying not to hyperventilate. Before Angel knows it, Mister Carey is bombarding it with holotape after holotape after book after holotape. "Go! Get! Alone! I want! To be! Alone!" Angel retrieves the dropped items for several minutes, oblivious to the clangs and twangs of being pelted with research paraphernalia. Eventually, Mister Carey stops dropping things. The pile at his feet is now tidy and bears no marks of exhaustive study. His eyes are wet and glassy. Angel's ocular lenses dilate and it floats in front of him in silence. "I suppose, Sir, if you'd like some solitude," it eventually posits, "I could downscale my tidying algorithms. Or, even suspend and later resume them, when you're ready for further housekeeping." He wipes at his face with a thick angry sniff. "Suspend housekeeping for two weeks." "Absolutely, Sir!" it beams. Its tendrils twitch as the command takes. "Keep in mind you can always reinitiate these algorithms at any time, even sooner than the designated time. My settings are at your disposal!" He sobers up to hear it took his request in earnest, only to sour into a different hurt. "Where's the setting where you go bother Sticks and leave me alone?" "Right away!" Angel excuses itself so its owner can go back to sleep. It wishes that he would simply talk to him. Nightmares must be as terrible to humans as bad data sectors. If only he's able to idle his brain a bit, so back processes can take care of the damage for him. Do humans have back processors? "Well, I'd imagine that's what sleep is for," it whispers to itself as it floats down the hall. It extinguishes its thruster flame, content for nothing more than to follow orders. For the next six hours, it sits patiently beside Mister Sticks and watches the ghoul sleep. January 5, 2288 The terminal bonks at 'Choly, to inform him he's used up all his tries for the hour. He's locked out. Again. He slouches and massages his nose bridge behind his glasses. This would be so much easier if I could get my Pip-Boy working again... and if I had a decryption holotape for it. Breaking windows isn't an option now that they've solved the building brownout, but the odds of this current trick working are still far higher, he thinks, now that they've restored full power. They just have to remember not to touch the exposed wiring in any security glass Sticks has already shattered. Despite resistance logging into the admin's terminal at the reception desk, he remains confident that it is crucial to programming his ribbon rack and Lt. Creeley's. He found the required peripheral equipment in a drawer the other day, and a personnel management software manual remains among the reference texts on the desk. He's been at it going on two weeks, without hacking script at his disposal, and nothing at the reception desk seems to point to any clues. If only the admin were so negligent to have written down the password and tucked it unceremoniously in the desk, or in any of the folders or books. He sucks a Mentat and skims the desktop again anyway. When he started coming down here to get into the terminal, he would bring his gauss homework with him, but bouncing between failure and rejection is wearing on him more than he can admit. He quickly loses motivation searching the desktop, and lets himself read one of the books to occupy himself for the next hour. He finds that the orientation text has a unit on the history of this Lockreed site. Maybe it can shed light on the General's interest in this place. Sticks insists she just stole all the robots, but 'Choly knows there's more to it. There's so much more, he swears. There's not any evidence robots have ever been employed here, for starters--there's no storage bays or workbenches, no maintenance equipment, no fuel, no mentions of them in company procedure materials--and the only robot they know is in the building at this given moment is Angel. Understanding just how deep this rabbit trail goes might not solve the primary obstacle that traps them here, but it will still check off a high priority task for them. So, he reads. His sole taps along the low-pile carpeting, to the faint jazzy tune which saunters the well-lit empty halls of the first floor. The more populated that he learns the world is, the more accustomed to solitude he grows. He's proven he's not as isolated as he thought. All that matters to him is that he's alone by choice. Interfacing and telemetry prodigies founded the security systems company SysDef in 2052. RobCo negotiated partnership with SysDef, then RobCo bought them in order to procure the patents for their state-of-the-art interfacing protocols. The buyout shifted the company vision: as RobCo Entertainment, they came to script video games. RobCo Entertainment's lavish library could be enjoyed on any RobCo processing system. Thanks to SysDef, that would include the pride of RobCo's Lowell location: the 'Personal Information Processor,' endeared to the world as the Pip-Boy.[2288.01.05-1] No wonder RobCo devices are compatible with those of so many different companies. The SysDef patent set them a league apart from the rest. Impressed but restless, 'Choly bites through the remaining wafer of Mentat left in his mouth. His discoveries do substantiate his months of paranoia. It's no secret that RobCo had always partnered heavily with the military, and the military saw special promise in RobCo Entertainment. The federal defense complex orchestrated annexation of the company under their Lockreed Industries. As Lockreed of Nashua, the company resumed full focus on defense systems development. Beyond mention that they had been coding aerospace technologies, the text does not indicate exactly what the military had contracted them to produce for them in the years leading up to the Great War. His only clue is that any questions regarding S.C.Y.T.H.E. Program projects must be routed through the director. 'Choly recalls the crates of ballistics fiber at Boott Mills were labeled S.C.Y.T.H.E. property, too.[2288.01.05-2] "I really wish I knew what that stood for, damn it." January 5, 2288 'Choly looks up from the book to check the countdown timer on the terminal. Three minutes left. He hems and drums his pencil on the steno he's been using to track the possible ten letter passwords he's already tried. The General must think she's General of the entire US Army, having survived all other known officers. Maybe it's as simple as some presumption that she owns the rights to anything the Army claimed. He hopes it's that simple. She doesn't strike him as the type to binge Grognak & the Ruby Ruins. His mind drifts, and his eyes trace over the individual letters. Something clicks about the dots and crosses and natural spacing of his handwriting. It may have been nine months ago, but he still remembers just enough of the method he applied to hack Eleanor's terminal in Lexington. The markup of the encryption is one means of finding the password. He's thrown blind guesses at it all this time. It takes a bit for him to jog his memory how to coax the terminal to display that formatting, but once it spills across the screen, he needs only heed the punctuation to determine the answer. Subjectify.
He hopes he doesn't need an uplink in order to gain access to the nametag application. At least if he does, this is an administrative terminal, so he shouldn't need to stray far from where he sits at the first floor lobby. He plucks around the terminal to get a feel for how this administrator kept his desk. The admin's daily life doesn't concern him, but his curiosity distracts him enough from his immediate task that he still takes a glance at the inbox. Even if snooping doesn't yield anything, reading the admin's various correspondences still seems interesting. He opens messages that appear high profile, but they're vague at best. Eventually, he doubles back to a shrink of messages with a long chain of back and forth. Most of it is between the admin and the director. He skims to get the gist, and cuts to the height of the drama.
The thread ends here, but an asterisk indicates that a reply sits in the admin's drafts:
'Choly wonders if the admin was cruising for a promotion or simply clawing to keep his job. He muses over the ancient office drama while he gets to work fiddling with Lt. Creeley's RFID nametag. He grabs the personnel software manual, and roots through the admin's desk for the peripheral equipment required to use it. His hand sets upon something cold and sobering. Instead of producing the name tag cradle, he pulls from the back of the drawer a potato sized bronze paperweight. He wishes he didn't recognize the features of the metal mask. A gift tag still dangles from a thin twine around it, in a crude indelicate script: A gift from the Aldermen, to Lockreed's sharpest and brightest. He forbids himself from reacting. He returns it to the drawer, and shuts it rigidly when he cannot shut it calmly. He has work to do. He searches the next drawer down for the RFID cradle, and finds it. Once he plugs it in, he instructs the terminal to scan for it, then dives into the script. Maybe he's just spent an alarming amount of time in recent months immersed in programming literature, but the application is surprisingly straightforward, and reprogramming its identity data for its new owner is a breeze. He notes that the script suggests the lieutenant's name was Maria Greeley, and inspects the tag where it sits in the cradle with a skewed expression. He removes his glasses and picks at the engraved lettering with the tip of his pencil. A fleck of debris dislodges from the engraved letter, demonstrating it is in fact a G, not a C. Because the server is inaccessible, and because he and Sticks are the only living humanoids present in the building, he can isolate the building's biometrics and indicate which of the two he wants the nametag to define as Maria Greeley.[2288.01.05-3] The RFID cradle has a deck for engraving, but he has no blanks to use to make one that says Sticks on it. He hopes the ghoul won't mind what the physical tag says, as long as its digital programming works. If they stay much longer, he'll consider snooping around for their office supply closet to locate some. But if it works, they shouldn't have to bother. It's going to work. Next, he has his own name tag with him. His ease altering Greeley's tag suggests that Lockreed likely developed this personnel name tag system for all military applications, not just corporate military sites such as this. Greeley wasn't stationed at Deenwood, as far as he can tell, but the tag's similarity to his own suggests even these are about as military issue as it gets. When he loads the script contained in his tag, he must sit back and read it time and again. There's something wrong about it. He's no sophisticated programmer, but between the script he just edited on the other name tag and the script instructions in front of him in the software manual, he can clearly discern entire lines of script that set apart his name tag from the lieutenant's. "Olivia altered it." He sits back in his chair and chews on his pencil. "When she promoted me to colonel, she didn't just edit my ribbon rack and devices: she... tampered with it." He's nervous to alter any of the script, lest it bungle his ability to regain access to Deenwood. He sits up and rolls his eyes at himself before poising over the keyboard once again. That's ridiculous. Why does it matter if I hypothetically ever step foot on base again, if I can't even step foot out of this building? The system won't accept an ID that looks hacked. Before deleting any lines of script, or changing any parameters or variables, he flips to a new page in his steno and writes down the entire code. It's not that many lines, fortunately, but just like a misplaced comma or unclosed parenthesis, whatever the General added doesn't look like it belongs. He edits the code to resemble Greeley's as closely as possible, retaining his own name, biometric signature, and credentials, and ejects his tag. Within minutes, he hears the sibilant click of pneumatic locks opening all down the halls. He shivers. "Why am I usually only right when that's a bad thing?" She's been their warden all along, intentionally or otherwise. But she couldn't have known they would end up here. They're here by a fluke of getting lost in the ice Fog. She couldn't have intended that they get locked inside due to a technicality of her code meddling. And yet, with the subtlety and sleight of mind the woman commands, he can expect no better explanation. At least she was so kind as to stock a season's worth of MREs. January 9, 2288 Sticks adjusts the scarf around the lower half of his face and snaps the flaps of his ushanka back over it, then continues whittling with his multitool. In the lingering four feet of snow, he shields himself from the occasional bite of wind by crouching behind a stand of rocks. His Pip-Boy's Geiger counter clicks lazily, and he half wishes he could simply turn it off rather than tune it out. A variety of wood lay in his lap and around him along with a handful of various wires he's scavved from inside Lockreed. He might not know much of any intended use for them, but he's found that braided wire makes a damn fine snare, so he supposes that means it's good for something. He shakes his head and eyeballs the piece of pine branch he's notching. You've lost your marbles for good this time, River Sticks. You finally got out of this damn place, and you're still puttering around here. It's not so bad, that he hadn't known a need to procure foothold traps before leaving Ant. Pelt traps are easy enough to lay. Provided reliable wood and sufficient cordage, the hard part is always patience. He spent most of yesterday looking for a gap in the ice where he could cast the seine he usually wears for a shawl, but he only netted two small bass and a load of garbage from upriver. He's surprised the snow and ice have persisted this late into the season. But, he's been overjoyed he gets to eat something this week besides RadRoach, for the first time since they got themselves stuck inside Lockreed. It's something of a frustrating inversion, for him to crave things to eat alongside the meat, but two months with not even so much as a tato or carrot has him a bit deranged. He has a lot of reasons to be a lot of kinds of deranged. His shallow, sharp breaths don't condensate around his face. His thin cracked lips peel back in a grimace. He works at notching another piece of pine. His hand isn't acting up so much today. Occasional vague guttural snaps punctuate his strokes. Even though they got one of the F.C. generators back online two weeks ago, 'Choly still forbids any of them to go anywhere without extensive scrutiny beforehand—not to another floor, and certainly not outside. The little rat bastard thinks the place is haunted by the General or something, Sticks guesses. He was on about something, after they found that body in the basement. All Sticks followed was, give me a few days. The new project got him to leave Sticks alone for a bit longer than usual, anyway. Open sesame. The building security system calls 'Choly Colonel Carey. Thanks to 'Choly's tinkering, it now thinks Sticks is some dame named Maria. He's not sure what 'Choly did, but now he can come and go as he pleases. I'm free. I can cut all my losses and run like I wanted. Guy's hyper-focused on so much history malarkey and a crap ton of computer projects. He's constantly junked up. He wouldn't notice for days. Maybe even months. Sticks tucks his multitool back in his left hand, then stands and gathers his whittled components, and treks off to locate good trees for setting snares. So why doesn't Sticks just leave? It's been so easy to string the guy along with bluffs of infatuation. It bugs him somehow that 'Choly's so readily respected his demand for space. Has the lovestruck worn off? If he did notice Sticks left, would he even care? Sticks can't have lost his hook in him somewhere between here and Ant. And surely, 'Choly hasn't been faking being into him, too. It would be too much for the ghoul, if he'd been getting played by his mark. What exactly is 'Choly's angle with all this, anyway? He finds a sturdy slim forked tree, and begins running some wire between its two trunks and through a branch through which he's bored a hole. He sets to winding up the load. Those disgusting Blue Flu smoothies. He could become contagious again without those. I can handle him cutting me every few weeks... Don't lose sight of your grand prize, you fool. The bastard hasn't made good on his promise yet to cook me Deenwood treats. He doesn't just represent everything Deenwood has to offer—he has the whole damn cookbook and knows how to read it. And he won't even need that place to make the stuff! He catches himself overwinding, and eases back the load a few turns before setting a safety branch. With a sigh, he kneels down to unpack a two-foot wide patch of snow. When the ground is too frozen to clear out a ditch, he replaces the snow as loosely as he can. Then to either side, he tamps down twin stakes with the butt of his machete, and ties a snare loop. He pulls out a cut open Vim can, into which he's stuffed the diced up second fish he didn't eat the day before, and taps out a portion of it atop his makeshift camouflaged pit. I can't let go when I'm this close to my hard work finally paying off. That's all it is. He mutters to himself, as though he's forgotten what he's been after for over fifty years. "Whole damn cookbook..." He's got his rifle. He decides to track a Radstag once he's done laying his snares throughout the nearby area. It will be difficult to dress larger game with a multitool and machete, but he's overdue for a solid physical challenge, and damn, if he couldn't go for some ribs.  [2288.01.13-0] January 13, 2288[2288.01.13-1] A declarative chirp concludes the algorithmic gaussian repair scan. 'Choly glances up at the terminal screen from the lease papers. He unglues himself at some point and reaches to eject the holotape from the Pip-Boy tape deck. His eyes trace the key-prong cord tethering the device to the terminal. Every time he remembers that there exists a model of Pip-Boy with two tape decks, he wishes he had one. In order to write from one holotape to another, or run any script on one and apply it to another, he must plug into a terminal to use its hardware. Neither jealousy nor anxiety seizes him so much as anticipation. Success signifies far more than a reading opportunity, but in the moment it's exactly that: he can finally deglaze one background anxiety that's caked his brain for months. He couldn't risk the data on the nor'easter holotape with his script experiments. He had to be fully certain the script works, as he's ruined several dozen formatted JBD cartridges ironing out viable gaussian repair script. Applying his script to a formatted holotape has only served repeatedly to damage it beyond restoration. If it weren't so ironic to have caused permanent physical lacunae in the holotapes, in his attempts to test a tool intended to repair them, it would madden him to suspect that jogging his own memories of Division Day could bake in or even accrue further brain damage. He's had his Pip-Boy back online for several days now, for his efforts, at least. He clutches the holotape a little too long, and a little too firmly. A broken sigh falls from a broken smile. He disconnects the Pip-Boy and clips it back on his right arm, and allows it to synchronize with his Vault Suit before reinserting the holotape and clicking the deck shut. He takes it with him to the break room, for reading material over lunch. He notices that he's already hard programmed to walk as lightly as possible, and that he carries his cane sooner than bear weight on it. Though he can't term it fear in his condition, he remains cautious not to draw Sticks's attention, in the chance the ghoul has come back inside already. Only once in the break room, choosing his boxed meal, does he chuckle softly to himself: Olivia salad.[2288.01.13-2] He prepares a goulash and grazes on it. All this time, he's expected to retrieve a single document for his efforts, but it surprises him to find that his transcript of the events of the Division Day Nor'easter span multiple entries. Between the holotape and the physical annotations, his transcript tallies upwards of fifty pages, all for an eighteen hour time frame. Speculation sublimates amid bewilderment, that even more may have been lost when they relinquished Lease 37. Not even his "Fly-Blown" session, with its strangely organic comixture of narrative and hard pharmacological fabrications, had been so prolific. His arms feel so much heavier. A soporific grin pulls the corners of his mouth abreast. He checks the medical diagnostics tab of his Pip-Boy to confirm that he once again enjoys the benefits of these two hundred year old Meals Ready to Eat. He couldn't dream of having ready access to this quantity of DayTripper anywhere else. He's grateful for his companions, but these gifts the General has left behind are his truest undeniable grace here. One of the earliest entries details what he had endeared a Foucauldian cocktail. He chuckles at the neuroplastic engineering that explicates his capacity to have penned such a volume of information in such a short span. Enduring attention, enhanced cognition, lasting satiety, and suppressed fatigue. He wonders whether he moved even once the entire storm. He plans to hash out some future means to compound the cocktail into a single chem dose, with the intent to market it to the Commonwealth's aspiring authors. Continuing through the holotape, he encounters one instance too many where the entries reference his notes, and can stand it no longer. He shovels the remainder of his meal and returns to plant himself at the desk. Before he proceeds another second, he copies the Nor'easter holotape to a formatted JBD cartridge. He calls for Angel, to store the original, safe inside it. While in its storage, he puts his hands on the twin armillary baubles from Burlington Glassworks. He can't imagine how they survived the lease liquidation. He plucks them from inside his Mister Handy, thanks it, and turns it loose to resume patrolling their empty building. He eyes the baubles with an indistinct unease. Inside the storage compartment, they had cast their impossible color in lieu of light, but under the fluorescent office lights, their observable chroma is limited to their effect on reflected light, as though that peculiar green-red gold were only visible in shadows and images. He sets them on the desk and tucks a sublingual Mentat. He then inserts another JBD into his Pip-Boy tape deck, intent on stenographic exegetics as he jumps between reading on the terminal and reading on the written page.[2288.01.13-3] It's a heavy read, and a dense one, but he persists. He can't remember any of the details transcribed in the lease notes or holotape, yet it is manifest that he penned it from a firsthand account. His account must then substitute his memory of it. An otherworldly choreography had played out that day, to the tune of a lethean blizzard's imperceptible cacophony. What had compelled the pretemporal images; the Satellites, Children, and Laners; the ants; Sticks or even himself? They all had followed a path, seemingly incomprehensibly exact in its byzantine dimensions, yet at once just as rudimentary in the sense by which its actors had connected with it. History forever repeats itself in echoes and distortions, a fractal formula of design. Something brushes at the back of his mind like a loose hair, or silvering cobweb. He twitches, and wipes at it as though physical action can liberate him of it.[2288.01.13-4] It isn't a RadRoach. He checks to be sure. Something deeper than chem reliance robs him of the grief, guilt, and terror he rightfully expects every time he gains fresh postwar information. He half suspects that he's simply so far past the threshold of these emotions that he can no longer register them meaningfully: in the same way human nerves have a limit to the amount of pain they can measure, the human mind must have a limit to the amount of fear or remorse it can process. He delights to have stumbled upon one of the oldest nepenthes known to humanity, left with no other choice but to forget, because remembering takes too much. He wonders if his cryogenesis monopolizes a similar stranglehold on his experience and recollection, or if some more profound trauma explicates his displacement. But is biology to blame for this general anesthesia, both acute and chronic? He sneers and smears at his face to loosen tightness building between his temples. He chews up the Mentat and continues to knead the sides of his head with the heels of his palms. It feels uniquely myopic to suspect nothing greater is at play. The mathematics he implemented in this transcript are beyond him without Berries, but tenuous fringes of insight still hover around the formulas, diagrams, and statistics. The philosophy of intelligent design doesn't quite ring, but the deliberateness of it all still unfurls a certain welcome resignation.[2288.01.13-5] Attempting to alter the trajectory set in motion by the events which bound the Pèlerins to the granite feels like trying to steer an explosion after the fact. He won't need to consult Mama Murphy on the tenets of free will: she alone is evidence that knowing the temporal terrain only reinforces the path it's blazed. She saw Jared's chem-warped, monstrous visage through 'Choly's Jet bleary eyes, easily a decade before 'Choly hallucinated it. Rhyme or echo, time cascades ever onward. He can't control any meaningful aspect tangent to his existence, any more than he could have controlled whether Jared became a monster in Lexington, or whether the General melted together everyone in Lowell. He feels so small... like an ant. The sensation of the stray thread laps at him again. Ants follow the signals of a pheromone trail to dictate their path and behavior. Something just as ingrained must dictate how humanity moves and behaves. He relinquishes the notion of free will. He accepts a lack of agency, and accepts the role of agent. I was only following orders. Something inside him cracks. He writhes in a hollow eroticism. He's always thought he seeks control in sex encounters, but perhaps even deeper he endeavors simply for things to transpire as intended. If that responsibility can be relegated to someone or something else, he can focus more completely on achieving results. A resigned smile doubles down on his inability to feel terror, despite any logic that he well ought to. "These silvered cobwebs. Nemiza plays cat's cradle all around me."[2288.01.13-6] He reclines on the loveseat, and imagines an undetectable force willing him to undo himself. He flicks the stenographic capture lever which he's missed so dearly, and lets the Tryasovitsy work him apart with a calligraphic fever. He knows full well that Sticks is not sixpence to the good on any transaction to ferry him safe to the Afterlife.[2288.01.13-7] He can't expect Sticks to do all the work for him, machete or not. For all he is and all he's done, as a ghost he can only expect to drown in a river of nepenthe. Neither this world nor the next has room for him. You caress the insides of your thighs. And you tremble. Your fingertips drag the contours of your pudenda through fabric. And you shiver. You unlatch the busks and buckles of your Surgical Leathers, to intimate the ecdysial rapture of an insect capable of ripping off its own husk. And you rasp. The zipper glides apart and even your garments peel off your form. And you burn. The fingers of one hand tangle in your hair, to pin your neck over the armrest and bare your neck. And you're bent and broken apart. You're laid bare, indelicate, and structureless. Your outgrown nails scrape bright lines on your skin. And isolation peals between your ears. You're denied climax—imago and imagination. You can't come, or become. Not now, and perhaps not ever. Your only purpose now is to need, and continue to ever need. It always has been. And rotting, ineffectual aches bloat you. Your nails graze your bare crotch, to appreciate the keratinous bite of the insect you fancy that you are. And you convulse. You rake them down your thighs, and you rake them to fill them with skin and blood. And your own throat gags you. Your feeble fingers can't dig deep enough. You reach for the Komár, and unsheath it. You place its tip above the knee and drag it up the thigh, just to compare its bright red strokes to those you can leave yourself. No, precision and swiftness are unbefitting of you. Again you wrack your throat by the hair, and you press the blade beneath your jaw. And jaundice waxes you. You'll claw yourself to sloughed viscera like this, reduce yourself to crystallized pheromonal commands made manifest. You'll sweat and writhe ad infinitum, forced to modulate your sex just to keep from slashing your own throat. And you're paralyzed ever-waking, ever-watching yourself edged to oblivion. Who has placed the knife to your throat? Who holds it there? As it should be. Your form only serves to hover perpetually a razor's edge from expiration.[2288.01.13-8] Again and again his skin stings and crawls. Even once he lets himself put up the Komár and return to the use of his fingertips, he can't wipe or scrape thoroughly enough. Raw and unsatisfied, he sprawls deflated, unable to decrypt exactly what his mind is on about. All the while, in a detached commitment, he continues gently grazing and caressing his red-streaked ragged body. He decides he's not the ant, but rather the surface they traverse, the surface which their tireless path erodes underfoot.[2288.01.13-9] To humanity, granite is timeless. Even if humans manage to destroy it, its history-haunted sand will still blanket the beaches and oceans with granitic specters. His mind wanders to chemistry, and formic acid's varied uses. Originally identified from compounds isolated from ants, the substance was once a prime reagent in both pharmacology and resin synthesis. Too, it is the less egregious cousin to formaldehyde, the prodigal embalmer. Formica may not be granite, but they both posit crystalized dimensionality. The Lane's ants symbolize its granite's eternity, and its frozen granules of undiluted time. But, he's not granite: in this analogy, he's more like formica, a substitute, a resin. He thinks again to Sutter Grove's diorama, and how much like a diorama the Concourse itself resembled during the nor'easter. So much concern of surveillance saturates the nor'easter holotape transcript. Was he not the surface on which the actors play out their roles, but rather the surface by which an outside observer might perceive the play itself? A lens is a surface, he guesses, but a viewer-jailer dynamic only holds when the players are aware they might be watched. He speculates that the nor'easter's mass lacuna was a consequence of environmental circumstances eroding a veil between the diorama and the audience which was meant to hold fast. We witnessed the scurrying behind the curtain. It would be impossible for him to guess what the author of such a performance would want to achieve through such a work. The ants were the flymen that fucked up, tugged strings they ought not have, at a time they ought not have, and sent the curtains tumbling down. He wrestles to differentiate his fantasy from his understanding of the events of the nor'easter. If he's the surface which suspends the audience's disbelief, perhaps the collapse of such a curtain signals the erosion of the fourth wall. To what consequence, did the ants' actions pull him down? And most importantly of all, did destroying their audience's immersion mean the actors' performance was fictitious? Suddenly, he can't succinctly define fiction. The nadir of an existential ego death throttles the last of his physical strength. He lies there with exhausted relish, beached with a raw unparalleled systemic throbbing. He'll clean up the mess he's made of himself... eventually. He's exposed, and knows he's exposed, but doesn't seem to care. He stares up into the ceiling, legs sprawled across the back and arm of the couch, and fixates on what little he can see without glasses. He resents that he can perceive this fourth wall but cannot seem to alter it himself. He resents Sticks's near-perfect Charisma. He resents the General's ludicrously high Intelligence. He's not Strong enough or Intelligent enough or Enduring enough or Charismatic or... "Happy New Ye— Oh my stars, Sir!" Aghast, Angel shifts from entering to rushing to 'Choly's side. "No time to tell me what's happened to you. We haven't any Stimpaks. Oh, this won't do! I'll fetch the iodine." 'Choly bolts upright on the couch. Abjection gnarls his features. "NOT MY IODINE—!" It hesitates, caught between imperative concern for its owner and the need to abide by him. "At least allow me to prepare a wash bin for you. Try not to move too much. I won't tarry!" As the Mister Handy rushes off to the bathroom to wet a hand towel, he reclines again and his mental track persists. He thinks to just lock the robot out, but doing so would require that he get up. He wants to ask it to fetch him his next Melancholia dose five days early, but he also knows he would have to explain himself to Sticks if he were to need to replenish his medication a week ahead of their schedule. What use is it, to be Melancholy? he demands of himself. In his state, he hasn't even the faculty to snivel over it. Maybe, Melancholy has forgot how to be Melancholy all this time. Maybe, he just needs a nudge to recall his nature. And maybe, like the holotapes, and their Pip-Boys, and eventually Angel, he too can move past seeing dimly in a mirror of his own imago.[2288.01.13-10] February 4, 2288 A terminal with an unburnt screen. 'Choly sits down at a cubicle in an office on an upper floor. He's been wandering a wider path researching the military documentation in the building ever since Sticks began making trips outside. Despite the degree of preservation throughout the premises, because something seems to have prevented the screensaver script on many terminals from triggering, centuries of disuse have burned images deep into their screens. The glow bleed on inoperable terminals, he imagines, resembles what it must be like to stare into the sun. He hopes he's not Icarus. It doesn't take long for him to ascertain that whoever once occupied this desk used its terminal for a diary. It's encrypted by pay grade. He unfurls his Pip-Boy keyprong to attempt his password decryption algorithm. Before he can analyze the possible correct commands among the guesses on the screen, a synchronization between a biometric sensor in the room and his nameplate verifies his identity and O-6 pay grade. It dismisses the encryption check. He's had no reason to wear his bekesha-tulup indoors, so he's tucked his ribbon rack and nameplate into the small pocket in his Vault Suit's lining. Still, he would have expected secure terminals to require more than his physical presence to access them, but he supposes it's not too unlike a unique fingerprint, if the building's biometrics are as advanced as he suspects. He leans into the keyboard and favors proximity to the screen such that he can remove his glasses. Delight flushes over any possible terror, to recognize the last active user of this terminal was Olivia Francis, then designated Major General.
He sits for some time. He rereads the entry trying to jog his memory of those names. Surely, he reassures himself, she had not set in motion the events which transpired last October. This couldn't have anything to do with the granite, or the fungus, or the hypnagogic chroma shifts, or the widespread acute memory damage. He curses under his breath in a healthy mix of English and Russian. The idea that the General believed Taskerlands was actually remarkable ruffles him a great deal. Eventually, he jots some notes... Luther, Taskerlands, AEGIS... underscores Taskerlands, overwrites the name time and again with a strained gurn... and continues.
As expected, these diary entries raise more questions than they answer. When he tries to copy the entries to the JBD in his holotape deck, a permissions error bonks at him. The read function is locked behind an O-6 pay grade, but the write function is locked behind a confidentiality of O-8 or higher. He slaps the side of the terminal case, then pretends he's kidding. He smiles into himself as he retracts his key-prong. It's fine. If he can't take the terminal's data to his current workspace, he'll take his current workspace to this terminal. This office desk boasts much more desk space than the cubicle downstairs anyway. And if he needs to, next time he can transcribe the entries himself manually. But what did it all mean? On his way back downstairs, he can't help but chuckle in a secondhand nostalgia regarding the humble beginnings of Helen's AI signature.[2288.02.04-1] What other models has the General loaded her into? At what point did she become an Assaultron? His smile fades, but his spirit persists. What will her next model be? He shakes his head with a tut and smirk. "Of course See's is her fault. Of course it is."[2288.02.04-2] He giggles and chuffs intermittently for hours, that the Lane likely never saw what its appointed squad of robots could have done drowning in the electromagnetic distortions of a postwar nor'easter... and that the General very likely never knew that she spared the Lane that tragedy by having rigged a smaller scale fake malfunction of her own. February 10, 2288 "Forgive the intrusion, Mister Sticks." Angel floats into the office where its owner's partner has been spending much of his waking hours. Its tendril pincers coil at a caution near its body. "Did you have something special planned for Mister Carey?" Mister Sticks huffs in exasperation. Several gnashed guttural grunts punctuate an increase in the rate of his keystrokes. Angel's interpersonal algorithms indicate he is trying not to curse. His task must be difficult, whatever it is, it thinks. It can't quite make out on the screen what exactly it is Mister Sticks is doing, but lyrical digitized sound effects accompany his efforts. An intense but frustrated enthusiasm compels him. "It's just that it's Valentine's Day in a few days," it continues. "I wanted to be certain to remind you." "Isn't giving him my blood every three weeks enough?" he eventually replies. He does not look up from his task. Angel's ocular lenses focus, then dilate. "Blood donations? I hate to say, Sir, but that doesn't seem so romantic. Shouldn't we plan to get him some flowers? Take him out for dinner?" The terminal's sound effects resemble a digitized smash. Mister Sticks growls under his breath. "I get that he's still working on you, but have you really got to do this? Right now? I'm busy!" "Right, right. I know you're hard at work. My apologies. I'll let you get back to it." Angel excuses itself, but remains in the hallway, as he begins to mumble to himself. "What would he even find romantic?" he murmurs at a hush. His task seems quieter to match, but he's no less diligent. "Tch! He'd better not try to surprise me. I'll show him." His gravelly, scheming chuckles delight the Mister Handy, and it speeds off to do a celebratory once-over dusting the floor of the building. February 15, 2288 "I do hope you're finding what you're looking for here, Sir." Angel tidies the space it has tidied three times already. It whistles as it whisks its feather-bare duster at the spotless shelves of the director's office. "You know that I had to be certain we wouldn't set off the security systems by coming up here." Seated at the desk, 'Choly paces the menus on its terminal. For some time, he chews at a pencil bridled between his teeth, and says nothing further. "Here. Fucking fuck, I've got it." He removes his glasses and rubs at his eyes, then rereads the most recent of several entries. "The S.C.Y.T.H.E. Program outline for this site is all here. All this time I was expecting it entailed a product, but their project was... Fuck. Ant Lane was a military experiment. Listen to this. The director kept drafts of sales pitches, and mental notes of investors."
"And another. This one's dated 2071."
He falls quiet again as he engrosses himself in the documents, a majority of which bear timestamps dating between 2054 and 2062. He recalls that Sacristan Haidinger suggested Vault-Tec had nothing to do with Pheasant Lane Mall's value as a bomb shelter, and these archives confirm that the two companies never communicated or collaborated regarding the site. The government's Project Safehouse, most well known for spearheading Vault-Tec's construction of the majority of the nation's bomb shelters, had also commissioned independent contractors to try a varied civilian-oriented approach to national defense. (For example, Pulowski Shelters spring to mind.) Several documents indicate that when the military lost interest in the financial viability of constructing subsequent structures like Pheasant Lane, interest still lingered in repurposing STAR Cores elsewhere. The biggest contract for them shows that Lockreed supplied Nuka-World with thirty-five STAR Cores, to control a large and diverse reserve of fully outfitted RobCo and General Atomics military grade robotics. The thirty Protectrons and fifty-three turrets still bewilder 'Choly. If everything in the General's terminal entries is accurate, the Lane had to determine the source of the earliest true AEGIS malfunction, restore it, and continue fully and knowingly protected. When had the first electromagnetic nor'easter ravaged the East Coast, and put this AEGIS system to the test? Yet, even if these AEGIS bugs do get repaired, he can appreciate how the biological effects of such a storm precipitate such entrenched local superstitions. Any science Sutter Grove commands is likely reverse engineered at best. He's neither a programmer nor an engineer, and can't do much more than augment their knowledge base going forward. Have the Lane's inhabitants ever truly known why or how the building protects them? He's not confident he can adequately explain to the Lane exactly what such things represent, but he knows with unwavering certainty that the survival of Ant Lane depends on its ability to withstand harsh magnetic weather conditions. Although at heart its inhabitants have largely reduced its architectural aegis to ghosts and shadows, Ant Lane owes its very existence to overwhelmingly advanced technological engineering. Angel stops its cleaning routine to check on its owner. "Chin up, Sir. It can't be all bad," the Mister Handy says. "I'm not sure I follow most of what you've just read aloud, but surely there's some kind of silver lining in it all. Some information that makes your trouble getting into this office worthwhile? Mmh?" He glances up at Angel with an uptick of purpose. "More of a lead lining. Or copper? Copper lining? Fuck, there's got to be hundreds of tons of copper in that place. I don't follow much of what's detailed here, either, but some of Sutter Grove's electricians might. We'll take them everything we can. Spare parts and all." There's got to be surplus components here. STAR Cores, the redundant components of Systemized Telemetry for Automated Robot Control, routed through the architectural multi-layered cousin of the Faraday cage AEGIS, the AnEchoic Gridwork Integrated Shield. He snaps his fingers, and swivels in his seat to push himself up with his cane. Like the one the General had used to pen her entries regarding the Academy of Liberty, this terminal is also write-protected. He'll return to it as needed, to transcribe it and transfer its data somewhere he can print out everything. He stops and frowns. The orientation booklet. The onboarding manual. If any of the texts he's found here have indicated anything regarding the STAR Control trained specialists, STAR Cores, or AEGIS, he would know it by now. Surely he's simply overlooking something profound in plain sight. Of course, he reminds himself, the onboarding book is just an entry level training manual. STAR Control and AEGIS must be among the most sophisticated projects this Lockreed ever worked on. Their finer workings eluded a polymath like the General for an entire summer to the point she was tracking down the masterminds behind it all. "Maybe there's a manual here for AEGIS training," he tells himself, and commences browsing the shelves Angel has just finished dusting for the fifth time today. "Or at the very least, a layout of where they manufactured STAR Cores." "That's the spirit! Shall I help you look?" Getting a reply where he expected none shakes him from inside his own head just a bit. He glances up with a pleasant startled thoughtfulness. "Yes. Thank you." "But of course!" After a while, it comments, "It's been so delightfully quiet since we've been here in New Hampshire, you know. Just the three of us. None of those pesky voices. So much easier to focus on my housekeeping." 'Choly stops and stares off into the corner. His voice cracks. "Angel, clarify." "The voices? Oh, they've been bouncing around in my receiver wiring since sometime in Lowell, I'd estimate. I couldn't tell you exactly when they stopped, but I've felt haywire since long before the damage you've told me I suffered recently." "The laser attachment." His eyes dull as his head turns to his companion. His gaze falls past it. "We removed all your attachments when we entered Ant Lane." "So that's where it's all gone!" Angel exclaims, with the levity of mere inconvenience. "I just knew I had attachments! Oh, I pray my service is still satisfactory to you, lacking them, Mister Sir. Should I fetch them so we can reattach them, or shall we continue with the brass tacks?" He sees red. If her tampering extends beyond having modified Angel's tendril laser, there's no other explanation in his mind than that she tried to power it on during the storm... and that she's thus responsible for Angel suffering gauss damage. He can't cry. "Moy Angel, you're you no matter what equips you." "And you're you, no matter your equipment." Angel's chuckle fades out in a glitched static. "Remind me again what we're here for, if you could, Sir." A smile cracks his haunted veneer. "Sometimes you're more human than you think." "Not as much of a compliment as one might think." He wipes the smile off his face, only to grin and resume searching the shelves. "Ни фига себе..."[2288.02.15-6] "Well! No need to curse about it." "This whole thing. Every turn leaves me speechless. Even you." He grips a book spine. "Perhaps I misspoke. You're complex, in a way humans can be. Complex, tragic, laughable." "I'm complex in a way machinery can be. Complicated and unpredictable."[2288.02.15-7] "Never change." [0] Formica. Both the ant genus and the resin. [2287.10.27-1] Cytokine storm. A dangerous and potentially fatal immune response in which the body exponentially generates more and more immune cells until they completely overwhelm the body. Most commonly seen in some forms of chemotherapy and certain viral infections. [2287.10.31-1] Melancholia vocalization. He's trying to think what else 'Choly might be short for, and ends up rolling the different words into a single thought process. Melancholia, меланхолия, a persistent gloom. Kholodets, холодець, is a gelatin salad. Opukholi, опухоль, is a growth or source of swelling, most commonly a tumor. [2287.10.31-2] Pukheya, Korkusha. Пухнея, Коркуша. Two of the Tryasovitsy. The former causes tumors and edema, while the latter causes victims' blood vessels clumping and knotting up. Here, his subconscious is suggesting that elephantiasis is a consequence of these sisters' joint effort. [2287.11.30-1] Rubble Rouser. 2D turn-based artillery game where players fire Mini-Nukes at each other's fortifications. A nod to the Magnavox Odyssey2's Smithereens! [2287.11.30-2] Caravan. A West Coast card game which likely sprung from an attempt to devise a viable game from incomplete card decks. Each player brings their own collection of cards to the game. [2287.12.19-1] TmuRadTarakan. A medieval Kievan-Rus' port principality on the Black Sea. One etymological theory speculates that the location's name means roaches in darkness, evoking a metaphorical sense of some back of beyond. The Strugatskys' Tale of the Troika make a pun of this etymology, calling instead a remote expanse of an impenetrably bureaucratic research facility Tmu'skorpion. Here, the trio is in a place of RadRoaches in darkness. (RadTarakan also happens to be the Russian name for RadRoaches.) [2287.12.19-2] Proof of purchase. A nod to voucher games, like the Magnavox Odyssey 1's Precepts! and Atari's Chase the Chuckwagon. Also a bit of a nod to the Atari E.T. landfill, in the sense that RobCo Entertainment just couldn't get rid of them. More later on how these Easter eggs ended up in a remote basement. :] [2287.12.19-3] JBD. A nod to the Magnavox Odyssey2's The Quest for the Rings, which pioneered the concept of a board game video game hybrid. It's one of the most notable entries of the Odyssey2's library, but I picked it specifically with Fallout 76's original Legendary Run event map in mind, and how such events are basically a board game guided by video game tasks. [2287.12.19-4] Lockreed Industries. Much in the same way RobCo Towers in Lowell is based off the Crosspoint Towers Wang Kronos building, Lockreed of Nashua is also based off a real world technological historical landmark directly related to the Massachusetts Miracle era. This is a serious footnote with serious insight. [2288.01.05-1] Lockreed of Nashua. The history of this company is based off the historical Sanders Associates. Sanders Associates started as contractor of defense technologies. One of their engineers, Ralph H. Baer, developed the first video game as a side project, for which they partnered with Magnavox to produce. Their console was the Magnavox Odyssey. Eventually Lockheed Martin bought Sanders. Currently BAE Systems owns the property. [2288.01.05-2] The S.C.Y.T.H.E. Program is mentioned in Fallout 4. In the years leading up to the Great War, the US military contracted existing civilian manufacturing facilities to produce army resources to reduce the time and funds building new factories. There are several such companies mentioned, but the acronym's definition is yet unknown, and it's unknown the full scope of contracts belonging to the project. [2288.01.05-3] Greeley. Maria shares a surname with the protagonist and programming specialist of The Stone Tape, Jill Greeley. They both met their demise as a consequence of their indefatigable investigations. [2288.01.13-0] Tagline for Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. "You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, you will not be saved!" [2288.01.13-1] January 13, the Mara Winter. Considered the unLuckiest day of the Pagan Slavic calendar, during which the Tryasovitsy, cruel spirit agents of the winter deity Mara, are at their strongest. It's also Russian New Year's Eve: due to date shifts when changing calendar formats, Russia celebrates New Year's twice. [2288.01.13-2] Olivia salad. Olivier salad is a traditional Russian celebratory mayo salad dish. [2288.01.13-3] Exegesis. Critical objective explanation of a text. [2288.01.13-4] Silvering cobweb. Серебряная паутина. Nods to the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, and the threads that no one else seems to notice except the protagonist. 'Choly is something of a pastiche of several characters, one of them being Kirill Panov. This fic was originally titled A Cure for My Me, after "a cure for his melancholy." (The title did still work its way into being a chapter title in First Instar.) [2288.01.13-5] Intelligent design. The pseudoscientific belief that the intricacy and inexplicability of certain aspects of the universe are proof that a supernatural entity played a role in its creation. [2288.01.13-6] Nemiza. The Slavic pagan deity of death. He/She measures the thread of life and cuts it to the appropriate length, before sending it off to the Afterlife. [2288.01.13-7] Sixpence, ferryman. Blended reference.
[2288.01.13-8] The structure of the second-person narrative follows a mental track of what ailment each of the Tryasovitsy excels at inducing. Figuratively, rent asunder by mental demons. [2288.01.13-9] I once heard the explanation that formica got its name by being a surface which only ants' tireless path could erode. I've since learned that it's a substitute 'for mica.' I like my high school teacher's story better. [2288.01.13-10] Being Melancholy. he's had this vein of "art imitating life imitating art" navel gazing in the past, most notably in Chapter 10, "Fly-Blown." He adopted his nom a clef Melancholy, with the nuance that he felt contrived and fictitious, a fictional character at risk of knowing he's exactly that. He questions whether he commands self agency, in inventing himself or in how he might define himself. His skepticism of what it means to be Melancholy is, at its core, the very spirit of Anatomy. [2288.02.04-1] The Assaultron Helen is named after Helen of Troy. One, a major factor to the Battle of Lowell does amount to Olivia and Laverne fighting over Helen, though they both have their notions as to why she's the perfect companion. Two, Olivia first stole her by exploiting Ant Lane's security systems via a Trojan virus. [2288.02.04-2] See's assault rifles. Olivia may have removed the robots from Ant Lane, but the mall's security and maintenance crew were tasked with the turrets' removal. Turrets in Fallout typically take 5.56 bullets. The assault rifle is See's guards' most used weapon because the bullets would exist in surplus for decades after the 2096 incident. Some higher ranking guards have firearms with converted 5.56 receivers as well for this reason. [2288.02.15-1] Nuka-World's Galactic Zone employs STAR Control telemetry to manage the operation of military grade robotics for entertainment display. These redundant components must exist in a certain quantity within the system in order to be capable of broadcasting a strong enough frequency to secure access. [2288.02.15-2] Robert House, the owner of RobCo and all its subsidiaries, began investing in private sectors in the years leading up to the Great War. In Fallout New Vegas, it becomes known that two such high priority ventures for him were ensuring his effective immortality through development of a stasis chamber, and the development of the Platinum Chip with its capacity to control a fleet of Securitron robots. He sought to prevent the nuclear exchange altogether, but ironically a direct nuclear hit on Las Vegas on October 23rd prevented the delivery of that command chip. [2288.02.15-3] In the Anatomy continuity, Ant Lane was the prototype for STAR Core telemetry modules. In practice, it was proven that a majority of what made the system so costly was AEGIS itself, and that STAR Cores are functionally independent of that infrastructure. Untethered from the problem child, Lockreed would go on to effortlessly produce STAR Cores for the military through the S.C.Y.T.H.E. Program. Bradberton would later furnish a contract to procure enough to furnish the Galactic Zone. [2288.02.15-4] John-Caleb Bradberton colluded with high ranking military, bartering for confidential technologies both with his wealth and with his own inventions. Nuka-Cola produced several confidential military products, and the partnership promised a front-facing public image which would bolster popular opinion of both the soda and the army. He managed to convince Gen. Braxton to permit his inclusion in the incredibly top secret Project Cobalt, which, in kind with House's ideologies, turned out of be another effective immortality technology. [2288.02.15-5] Brock Taskerlands is a portmanteau of both the property owner and project manager from The Stone Tape. Although his only holdings were in Vermont granite quarries and Pheasant Lane Mall, the billionaire was not so unlike the other eccentric investors who had their individual hands in Lockreed of Nashua's various interfacing and telemetry technologies. [2288.02.15-6] Ни фига себе. Somewhat vulgar, definitely impolite. No kidding, no frigging way, not flipping yourself off. [2288.02.15-7] 'Choly and Angel are exchanging various quotes from Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions regarding string theory, human nature, and self-determination. |