Chapter 104: All My Friends Have Off Switches

Chapter 104: All My Friends Have Off Switches

"Courier..."

The words hung heavy in the air and echoed in the darkness. Where was I? Was I awake? Was I alive?

Did I care?

I willed my eyes to open. It took a few seconds for my sight to adjust past the blinding white light...

I was standing in the center of an enormous rocky canyon, surrounded by a scene of utter and complete devastation. The skeletal metal frames of destroyed buildings jutted out of the side of the sheer rock face at odd angles. Rubble was strewn all around me. I looked up, and the sky was a swirling mass of yellow and grey clouds, completely obscuring the sun.

There was something slightly off about this place...maybe it was the small white flurries that filled the air, like snow. Yeah, that was definitely it. A flake landed on my cheek, and I reached up with my left hand to brush it away; it was crushed beneath my fingers into a dark grey smear. That's when my mind put two and two together: it was ash. Ash was falling from the sky.

"Courier..."

There was that voice again. Where was it coming from? I looked around... there was nothing here except rubble. Twisted metal and broken buildings. There were a few faint orange glows from fires somewhere. Was that where the ash was coming from? I took a single step, intent on trying to follow the voice.

Slosh.

At first, I thought I was ankle deep in water, only based on the sound. But then I looked down. I wasn't standing in water. I was standing in blood.

That's strange.

Where was it all coming from? I looked around again and swiftly got my answer: it was coming from my right arm.

That's even stranger.

I lifted the severed stump, and the river of blood gushing in buckets out of my arm didn't stop - it didn't even slow down. The surface of the blood-lake was rising steadily. I was more confused than anything else. I mean, it didn't hurt. But, seriously. I didn't think human bodies contained that much blood.

"Courier..."

The voice was getting louder. I looked up, trying to see where the voice was coming from, and I suddenly realized that I was no longer alone. Figures were walking past me. To my left, NCR soldiers were gradually walking past, ignoring me and each other. To my right, I saw Legion soldiers walking in the same direction as the NCR troops, and doing the same - ignoring me and each other.

I tried to get their attention, but they just kept walking past me. The line of soldiers on both sides seemed completely oblivious to everything around them. And they continued to be oblivious as their armor started to peel and flake away, carried away into the sky by the same wind making the ash fall. Soon both rows of soldiers were completely naked, still oblivious, still walking...

And then their skins began to peel away.

I was completely transfixed. I was rooted in place by the absurd spectacle. I didn't know if I should've been horrified or merely confused. Before long, both the NCR and Legion had been stripped of anything identifying them. They were skinless bodies of meat, still walking, still oblivious, and somehow still alive.

"Courier..."

I turned around immediately, absolutely sure now that the voice was coming from behind me. Involuntarily, I shut my eyes. There was an intensely bright light that was almost blinding, like when I'd first opened my eyes earlier. I held my left hand up in front of my face, and tried to squint against the burning brightness.

There was a man standing with his back to me. He was holding onto a tall staff, tipped with an eagle. I couldn't make out any concrete details about the man, except for the duster he was wearing. A symbol was painted on the back. Thirteen white stars painted on a blue circle, and five vertical red stripes below it all.

"You can go home, Courier," the man growled at me, lifting up the staff, and then slamming the bottom against the ground with a sharp crack.

My eyes snapped open - for real, this time. And yet I was still in darkness. I heard a pair of muffled voices from... somewhere.

"M'colleague, are you absolutely certain that sir going to awaken soon?"

"I certainly hope so. It'd be a damn shame if this was the first time my patented 'Wake-Up Juice' didn't work!"

A pair of doors opened in front of me with a loud hiss and a blinding flash of light. I suddenly found myself falling face-first out of a large box and onto the cold metal floor. I did manage to catch myself before my face smashed into the floor, so I ended up on my hands and knees. A heaving sensation rose up in my chest. As soon as my mouth opened, out came some kind of unidentifiable semi-solid white fluid.

"Augh!" I coughed a few more times, wiping away the excess from the edges of my mouth. "Oh, what the... that's... ugh!" I pushed up off the ground, still completely confused and disoriented. I wobbled in place, and clutched at the edge of the hologram table in the center of The Sink.

"Welcome back to the waking world, sir," Jeeves said, unflappable as ever. "It is certainly heartening to see sir once again conscious and back on sirs feet."

"Wh..." I looked around groggily, still a bit unfocused and disoriented. "M'at th' Sink? How did... how'd I get here? Wasn't I... I was in th' mud... an' fighting... an'... blood ev'rywh're..." I coughed again, reaching up to rub my face with my right hand.

"Yes sir, you did indeed appear in quite the sorry and, if sir will pardon my French, bloody state when sir was dragged here by sirs canine companion the other day." Jeeves said calmly. However, as my faculties slowly started to return, something occurred to me:

Sickening as it was to think about, I was pretty sure that my right arm had been severed by a proton axe, just above the elbow. The more I thought about it, the more I definitely remembered that happening.

So how was I rubbing my face with my right hand?

I pulled my hand away and stared. It was my arm, and at the same time, it wasn't my arm. Let's not mince words here: I was now the proud owner a robot arm. But it was unlike any other fake limb that I'd ever seen before. EVER. Most of the time, if someone loses a limb in the wasteland (and they actually take the time and caps to replace it at all) the fake arm or leg is made out of whatever is available. Scrap metal, spare parts, maybe a bit of hazard paint around the edges...

This didn't look like that at all.

For one thing, it was the exact same shape and size as my old arm. It was clearly made out of some kind of metal, but it certainly wasn't scrap, and the flexing, interlocking metal plates were flesh colored. If it wasn't for the tiny gaps in the joints (where I could almost see the inner workings) and the obvious seams separating the plates, it almost looked like a normal arm. And it was the entire arm, too - the prosthetic ended at my shoulder, and looked like it had been fused to the side of my chest.

I stared at the arm, opening and closing my fist several times... and a few other odd things stood out. The action didn't feel as fluid as it should have been, for one thing. Trying to move it like my old hand felt jerky and stiff. As much as it looked like a robotic carbon-copy of my arm, there was clearly some learning to be done. For another thing - and this was what really and truly baffled me - there was a sense of feeling in the arm. When I clenched my fist, I could feel the metal fingers pressing into the palm, and the thumb wrapped around the outside. I started poking the plates on my forearm and bicep with my left index finger, and - yep, could feel that too. I don't know how to properly describe it, other than it felt weird and utterly wrong, but there was definitely a sense of touch being transmitted through the metal.

"Sir?" Jeeves asked as I examined my new limb. "Is sir quite alright?"

"I... uh..." I tried my damndest to shake it off. "But I... uh... wh... huh?"

"I believe the words you're lookin' for are 'thank you," Auto Doc said, proudly. "Yeah, you should consider yourself damn lucky to have that replacement. That right there is state of the art - Nano-Prometheus' top of the line! It's stronger, tougher, faster... basically, just all around better than flesh and bone. I wanted to go ahead and give you a full set, but Mr. Killjoy over there nixed that idea, told me to just replace the mangled stump." The Auto Doc sighed. "Just gotta suck the joy outta everything..."

"... a full set?" I asked weakly.

"Ahem," Jeeves coughed, bringing my attention back to the hologram table. "I believe, sir, what m'colleague is trying to say is that thanks to the schematics sir was able to recover from the X-12 Nano-Prometheus labs, we were able to successfully manufacture a biometric prosthesis quite easily, after which it was an easy job for m'colleague to graft it onto sirs nervous system."

"Schematics?" I asked, a bit confused. "But I... I didn't recover anything from X-12 except Sasha." I paused. "... did I?"

"Sir is indeed correct in sirs deduction," Jeeves said, his holographic bars glowing faintly. "Sir did not personally recover any physical schematics from the X-12 labs. However, once sir entered the facility and disabled the defensive security measures - as sir did with X-8 and Y-17 - then it was a trivial matter to set up a remote link and download the schematics via the UHF waves saturating the crater."

"...Huh." I looked back down at the metal arm, trying to process the vast amount of information dumped on me since regaining consciousness. I opened and closed my hand several times, and tried to see what range of motion I had; the movements still felt stiff and slightly unnatural, but it was getting noticeably easier by the minute. "So, you said this arm is stronger than my old one? How much stro-"

"BARK!"

Before I had a chance to react, I was flat on my back, being pinned to the ground by 100 pounds of cybernetically modified dog, licking my face frantically.

"Augh! Ah-heh! Ah, hey Rox! Happy to see you, too." Instinctively, I started to reach for her with my right hand, but stopped just short of her fur, and decided to pet her with my left hand before gently nudging her off me so I could get back on my feet. The mad scientists here seemed to love to push everything they did to the absolute limit, and then go a bit further, so it's probably best to play it safe until I'm absolutely sure of how strong this arm is...

A horrible, terrifying idea flashed in my brain, and my blood ran cold. I looked back down at the cold, hard metal of my right hand... and immediately decided that I would have to learn how to do certain other activities with my left.

"So, you saved me, huh?" I shook off the feeling of dread as quickly as I could, continuing to absentmindedly pet Roxie.

"Indeed, sir," Jeeves said as soon as I was back on my feet. "Sirs cybernetic canine companion has been quite busy the last few days, retrieving many objects of great value... and others of perhaps dubious importance," Jeeves coughed, grumbling softly.

"Du- what?" I asked. "What are you talking about?"

"There is problem?" Sasha asked. I could hear the brain whimper.

"Well... I mean... aren't you out of ammo?" I finally said. "I don't exactly have a lot of $200 custom tooled cartridges lying around. I don't have any, in fact."

"No worries! Is not problem!" The gun shouted, with the brain under the barrels panting heavily. "Ask Sink Central Intelligence, he can make more!" I blinked a few times, taken aback.

"Jeeves?" I said aloud.

"Yes sir?" Jeeves spoke up, his voice echoing from a speaker above my head.

"Is this true, what Sasha's saying? Can you make more ammo?" I looked up, trying to find the unseen speaker, pointing at the minigun.

"Indeed, sir. If sir would care to return to the central console, then I would be happy to demonstrate to sir my main intended function." I walked out of the bedroom, past the living room with the light switches (who both let out sighs of disappointment as I passed, now that I was fully clothed), and finally came to a halt in front of the circular table in the middle of The Sink.

"Alright, Jeeves," I folded my arms across my chest, staring at the (surprisingly blank) hologram table. "Thrill me."

"I cannot, sir." Jeeves replied instantly.

"Hang on, you just sa-"

"I cannot provide sir a demonstration of the holographic reconstitution matrix, until sir provides me a specific construction order." Jeeves said calmly. I sighed, and buried my face in my left hand.

"Alright, you want an order? Fine. Can you make some of those custom-whatever cartridges for Sasha?" Before I'd even finished speaking, the edges of the hologram dish began to glow brightly. Streams of light emerged from the center and the edges of the dish, and blue holographic cubes formed out of thin air. The squares pulled themselves together, like iron filings to a magnet, and I watched with dawning recognition as they got smaller and smaller until instead of glowing holographic cubes, I saw a single rifle bullet hovering in midair directly over the center of the dish.

"Does the result meet with sirs satisfaction?" Jeeves asked as I stared, wide eyed. I reached out and cautiously plucked the bullet from its spot in midair. Yep, it was, in fact, real.

"I've seen this before," I said aloud, more to myself than to Jeeves. "This is... this is like the vending machine tech in the Sierra Madre!"

"Unfortunately, I do not know of this 'Sierra Madre,' of which you speak, sir." Jeeves said, his holographic bars returning. "However, I can indeed inform sir that the holographic reconstitution matrix provided within my chassis was the initial prototype of such experimental technology, designed and built by Doctor Mobius, after which the schematics were sent to the Y-0 facility for further testing and production." I continued turning the bullet around in my hand, staring at it.

"You mean... you're trying to tell me that this whole time I've been here, you could've just zapped in more ammo at the drop of a hat?"

"I am able to provide many more services and items than merely ammunition, sir, so long as the files for said item have been loaded into my databanks and the reserves of raw materials are not exhausted. If sir is interested in perusing the full list of items available for replication, then I can produce said list for sir at any time sir wishes."

"Nevermind that! You didn't think to tell me about this before NOW?!" I shouted, leaning against the table.

"If sir will forgive my use of a tired old clich, sir did not ask."

I just shook my head and walked away. I'd deal with Jeeves later. There were still at least two personality constructs that had been installed, and finding them might be a bit of a laugh. A laugh I desperate-

"OH GOD!" A synthetic female voice shouted as I entered the plant workshop on the other end of The Sink. The voice had a similar accent as Jeeves, and when I looked around, I realized the voice was coming from the sink mounted on the side of the wall. "Look at you! You're... filthy." She said the word with utter disgust, as if it was the worst word she could imagine. "Your clothes... they're just caked in horrible, sticky blood, and such filthy, filthy mud, and..." the Sink sniffed the air. "... Jesus wept, you smell like stale sex! I suppose you'll... want to clean up then?"

"Uh..." I pointed to the bathroom just behind me. "Well, there's a shower in there. If I was gonna clean up, I'd probably use that." The Sink let out a sigh of relief.

"Oh, thank God..." I couldn't help but laugh.

"What, do you have a problem with dirt or something?"

"Well, of course I do, darling!" The Sink practically shouted hysterically. "It's just so... unsanitary! Do you know how many germs are in one cubic centimeter of dirt? Seventy... hundred... gajillion! Would you want that getting washed down your gullet day in and day out? I didn't think so!" I thought about that for a few seconds.

"You know, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure gajillion isn't actually a real number." Before the Sink could respond, I heard another voice from behind me - a synthetic male voice, yawning and moaning. I turned, and saw that the server I'd noticed earlier was now lit up and humming to life.

"Oh, Bloody Norah! You've gone and woken up the lech," the Sink sighed heavily.

"Ooh... oh yeah, baby!" The server said as the lights on the side flashed, his deep voice practically oozing sex. "Feels good to be on-line again! Yeah, all circuits on-line... ready to receive your seed."

"Uh..." I hesitated, a bit taken aback. "W-what did you just say to me?"

"Your seed, baby," The server said with a voice as smooth as silk. "I'm the original, certified, rarefied, testified GS-2000 Biological Research Station. Yes sir, I'm a seed-clonin' machine. You got seeds? I'll clone the shit out of 'em!"

"Clone? What do you mean, clone?" As soon as the words left my mouth, I was getting a few ideas as to what he meant, but...

"It's the miracle of life, baby. You bring me some succulent genetic samples, and I'll work my mojo on them. Clone you up all kinds of plants! Got DNA profiles for hundreds of plants, aw, yeah... I can also break them down for you, if you're into the kinky stuff. Bring me any old plant parts, and I'll grind them up into Salient Green for you. Yeah, you like that, don't you baby?"

"DNA profiles? What kind of plants can you clone?" I asked, much more curious now. The main monitor on the side of the server suddenly lit up.

"Ready your eye-holes, and take a gander at this list of everything I can do for you, baby." I bent over to get a closer look at the list of plants on the screen. I scrolled down, and the list just kept going... and going... and going... it was immense! Half of these plants I'd never even heard of before.

The longer and longer I perused this list, the more I realized... this machine, this biological research station... it must have been built before the war. All of these plants on this list were unmutated plant life from before the bombs. I was prepared to bet that this contained a genetic record of every plant that had since gone extinct! This was... the possibilities were...

"Okay..." I spoke up, still scrolling through the seemingly never-ending list of plants it could clone. "So, if I bring you samples of dried plant life, you can clone any plant on this list, and grow them in these planters?" I pointed to the trays of dirt filling the room behind me.

"Oh, you know it baby. I just need some samples and I got you going. Take a few days, but trust me - it's all kinds of good!"

"This is... holy shit..." I kept staring at the list, trying to contain my excitement. "There's... there's wheat in here! I've never... I've only ever had bread made from corn. And there's fruits! Strawberries... blackberries... cherries... I've never..."

"Oh, that ain't the best thing I can do for you, baby," the Biological Research Station let out a long, slow laugh. "I can make every single species in the genus Coffea." He paused for a minute to let that sink in. "That's right, baby. I can make you some steamy hot coffee. Ohhh yeah..."

"Welcome back, sir," Jeeves said when I walked back into the central room. I'd finished making notes of everything I'd wanted to grow (all I needed was to find some 'genetic samples' for the BRS), and got finished taking a shower. The Sink in The Sink was right, I was filthy. It was nice to get clean. "Will sir be requiring more ammunition and supplies?"

"In a minute, yes Jeeves," I said, flexing my robotic hand. I'd only been up an hour, but it was already feeling a lot more natural. Not perfect, but better. "If there's one thing I've learned from my little accident, then it's that I need to be a lot more mobile. It's no use finding all this tech and gear out in the crater if I can't bring it back, because I've been ambushed and can't outrun my attackers."

"A cunningly astute observation, if I may say so sir."

"Thanks. So! If I want to get more mobile, I'm gonna need some wheels," I said. Jeeves' holographic bars flickered slightly and changed color.

"For your feet, sir?"

"N-no..." I stammered out. "Wheels, as in a car or a truck. Some kind of motorized transport."

"Ah," Jeeves' tone seemed somewhat relieved. "Yes sir, that does indeed make more sense. Forgive my confusion, sir, but stranger requests were issued of me by the Think Tank in days gone by."

"Yeah, I can believe that. So, where can we find a car in the crater? Do you know of any place around here that might have one in halfway decent condition?" As I spoke, the holographic bars vanished, and were replaced by that familiar map of the crater.

"Sadly, sir, I cannot pin-point any specific locations for sir, as none of the vehicles used in the Big Mountain facility had any transponders. However, there are records in my databanks that the Securitron De-Construction Plant to the northeast of the dome had a number of second-hand former US-Army M35 2-ton cargo trucks in their motor pool, for the use of transporting robots both intact and disassembled." As Jeeves spoke, a red dot flashed on the map, pointing out a location somewhere to the northeast of the dome. I quickly input the location into my Pip Boys map.

"A deuce-and-a-half, huh?" I said, nodding. "Well, that'll certainly help me carry stuff... Alright, it's a plan." I paused. "Actually, hang on. Jeeves? That list of yours, that has all the things you can replicate. Do you have any car parts, in case the only deuce-and-a-half I find is completely broken?"

"Allow me to provide for sir the complete list, in full, of every item available within the holographic reconstitution matrix, so that sir might peruse at sirs leisure." The holographic map disappeared, and was replaced with a list nearly as long and exhaustive as the Biological Research Station's list of plants it could clone.

As I looked over the list, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I'd forgotten about something... Something important... something...

I shook my head and went back to reading. I'm sure if it was really important, I'd remember it eventually.