The holotape disappeared in the slot with a ka-thunk. Ryuji watched the neons on the frame of the jukebox light up, and a satisfied grunt came out of its speaker: "Damn! It's good to be back online." The machine's voice was raspy and had an odd cadence to it. It sounded like an old jazz musician, but Ryuji wasn't familiar with the genre, so he didn't connect the dots. "And who's the new cat on the block?"
"I'm Ryuji," he introduced himself. "I'm living in the Sink for now, and I found your backup tape."
"Pleased to meet ya, daddy-o," the jukebox replied. "Folks call me Blind Diode Jefferson."
"With introductions out of the way," CIU spoke up, "the documentation suggests that you are capable of improving the sonic emitter's damage dealing capabilities by way of recalibrating with more potent samples. Is that correct?"
"Yep," Jefferson replied. A panel on the front of the Jukebox opened, revealing a Sonic-Emitter-shaped indent and a few holotape slots on the side. "Put yo' noise blaster here, and stick the samples in, we'll spin some grooves."
Ryuji did as ordered, putting the weapon inside and uploading the Opera Singer and Tarantula samples. "Right on," the jukebox proclaimed, as the panel slid closed. "For now you've got the Revelation sample installed. It's the factory option, not much oomph to it, if you catch my drift."
"I've noticed," Ryuji remarked, bitterly. "Are the new samples any better?"
"Yeah, though different tunes bring different vibes," Jefferson explained. "Both new samples hit twice as hard as Rev, Spider a bit more than Opera. The Spider also uses three times as much juice as the Opera or the Rev do. Eight shots per reload and not twenty-four. They also differ in the special sauce department."
"Special sauce?" Ryuji repeated.
"Ya see, sometimes Lady Luck smiles upon you," Jefferson went on. "Sometimes, you fire a weapon at the right time, from the right angle, hit the right spot, and all the moving parts that make up our fine world click together and give you a break. And when that happens, Opera breaks the target's limbs, and Spider sets 'em on fire. Pick your poison."
After thinking it over for a moment, Ryuji went "I've got enough spare ammo. Give me the firestarter."
"Lemme spin the ol' turntables…" Jefferson remarked, with satisfaction in his voice. After a moment, the panel opened again, revealing the Sonic Emitter. "Knock 'em dead, kid."
Ryuji picked it up and inspected it. The only visual change to the device was the color of the oscilloscope in the back; it was now purple. "Thanks, Jeff," he said, holstering it.
"Should sir desire or require an additional bit of damage per shot," the CIU piped up, "when cataloging the resources available in the network, I have located a paper about hand-tuning standard energy cells for superior efficiency. I could prepare an abridged simplified version of it, adapted for sir's needs."
"Right on, Jeeves!" Jefferson cheered on.
"Why simplify it?" Ryuji asked, slightly frustrated. "You calling me stupid, C?"
"I would not dare," the CIU replied. "I simply assume sir has limited experience with energy weaponry and wanted to keep things approachable. And frankly – sir should keep in mind I proclaim it – the vocabulary of said paper is needlessly complex. Certain types of scientists overuse multisyllabic or seldom-used words in their research, to appear more sophisticated or intelligent, and to conceal that the meritum can be boiled down to two standard A4 pages. Three, if diagrams are included."
Three sheets of paper came out of the CIU printer. Ryuji picked them up and glanced at their contents. The procedure seemed clean and quick enough, and he could've made a bunch of optimized cells before leaving, but there was another thought blooming in the back of his skull. "You said you can make me, like, small items and such?"
"That is true," the CIU agreed.
"Could you make me, like, a radio headset or something?"
"For what purpose, sir?"
"You know stuff I don't," Ryuji explained. "And I…" He paused. "I'm not from here. So I don't even know what stuff I don't know. I could ask you questions if I spot something in the wild. You'd be on mission control or something."
"I understand. If sir gives me a few minutes, I shall fabricate a combination of a speaker and a microphone." After a pause, the CIU added, "I promise to not offer unprompted comments, so as to not exacerbate sir's insecurities."
"Yeah, that'd be neat."
With a brand new one-ear headset and pockets filled with optimized ammunition, Ryuji departed the dome again. "Testing testing," he said to the microphone. "Can you hear me, C?"
"Loud and clear, sir. What is sir's current plan?"
"I'm gonna head to that internment camp. See what the old guy left behind."
No teleportation doodads, active or otherwise, were available near Little Yangtze, which meant he'd have to take a walk to the internment camp on his own two feet. After double-checking the map, he marched west, to go around the dome before heading north.
The sidewalk led him past some old ventilation ducts on one side and a pile of rubble on the other towards a single-story building with a sign by it, reading 'X-12'. Near that sign, the path split into two roads. The one going west led down some metal stairs, towards what could be best described as a massive cluster of hexagonal concrete pillars serving no practical purpose. In the distance, you could spot a massive satellite dish pointed upwards, with the mark of the X-13 facility. That one was somewhere on Ryuji's to-do list as well, since it apparently housed one of the MacGuffins he was told to fetch.
But for now, he turned north. The path went alongside another large-diameter pipe towards some radio towers surrounded with a square chain link fence. And there was a red humanoid thing in the distance, heading towards him. Ryuji immediately leapt above the pipe and ducked behind one of the rusted tanks by the side. The primer flashed back in his head:
The Y-17 Trauma Override Harnesses are robotic full-body suits originally designed to transport wounded combatants to their home bases, capable of autonomous motion. Regrettably, the models around the facility do not have a designated home base, leading them to wander aimlessly, and their identify-friend-or-foe systems were of substandard quality and deteriorated to the point where a harness will shoot at anything in its immediate vicinity.
The harness moved closer towards Ryuji's hiding spot. From the outside, it was a well-worn red latex suit with yellow details on it, silver moon boots, a fishbowl-y helmet, and what seemed to be an air tank of some sort on the back. It quietly rattled with every move, the poor sod inside long dead and rotten, until only the bones remained. In what remained of its hand, it held something off-white and pistol-shaped. It didn't seem to notice Ryuji, and walked past the tank undisturbed. He knew how to be quiet, despite all the smack-talking from the others. And it's not like holding meetings in a frickin' Shibuya passageway was his idea…
Ryuji quietly unholstered his Sonic Emitter and scanned his surroundings, expecting some hitherto unseen assailant to jump out of nowhere and mess things up for him. Alas, nothing of the sort happened, and so he took aim at the helmet of the harness, whispered 'Bang.' under his breath, and pulled the trigger. The weapon shook in his hand for a moment, and then released a shockwave that shattered the harness' helmet, blasted the skull into the distance, and set what remained in one piece on fire.
It wasn't enough, so Ryuji dived behind the tank to avoid laser fire, and fired a few clean shots from behind cover.
When the harness finally collapsed, Ryuji scanned his surroundings one last time before getting out of cover and approaching the remains, interested in one thing and one thing only.
"Is everything in order, sir?" CIU's quiet voice came from the headset. "I registered discharges of energy weapons."
"It's fine. One of those skeleton robots attacked me," Ryuji said, picking up the harness' weapon. "By the way, the thing dropped a laser pistol of some sort. Can you tell me how it compares to my sound gun?"
"Is the salvaged weapon shaped like a rectangular cuboid with a handle?"
"It's shaped like a gun," Ryuji replied, spinning it in his hands. "It's light gray and has a trigger guard as long as the whole grip, and two LEDs for 'safe' and 'fire' on the side."
"I see. I believe sir is now in possession of a Wattz 1000 laser pistol," CIU exposited. "It should be able to fire twelve shots from a standard energy cell and deal comparable damage to sir's Sonic Emitter."
Ryuji fired a few shots at the sky, just to play with his new toy a bit. It seemed to have some recoil – somehow – but was accurate, fired quickly enough, but most importantly, fired when the trigger was pulled, making it an instant upgrade to his current gun. "[Great, something for enemies that don't take turns,]" he muttered under his breath.
"I beg sir's pardon?" went the CIU. "Whatever language that was, I do not speak it."
"It's nothing," Ryuji waved him off, giving his surroundings one last check. "Just a madman mumbling to himself." Laser pistol in hand, he marched onward, towards Little Yangtze.
After an incident with a pack of coyote-snake hybrids that we'll omit for brevity, Ryuji found himself approaching the camp.
The first thing that poked out from behind a hill was a guard tower, made out of wood, with a little booth at the top of it, its windows boarded up with scraps of wood and sheet metal for some reason. As Ryuji went up the hill, the camp itself came into view – a fence made of rusty metal frames of barbed wire, with a few more spirals on the top. An enormous marquee tent in the corner was blocking his view of the rest of the camp.
There was also a barely audible sound. Ryuji followed it past the watchtower and alongside the fence, and found a pair of speaker horns hanging above one of the rusted gates, pointed downwards for some reason. Even as he got right up to the horns, he couldn't make out anything coherent – it sounded like a bunch of voices interlaced with white noise, a radio that nobody bothered to tune properly.
Ryuji stared at the horns, hesitant. The gate below them was rusted shut, probably untouched over the past who-knows-how-many years. He'd come back to this, right, of course, but he would check out the watchtower first. He turned around and trotted up the stairs, then marched around the balcony. There were a few ham radios, still active for some reason, that he did not dare touch, a few ammo boxes, and what looked like some sort of energy rifle resting against the wall; he'd pick it up when leaving.
He put the hand on the knob of the door leading to the watchtower booth, then turned it and pushed it open. He then saw what was inside, registered the smell, then turned around and vomited over the railing.
The microphone picked up the retches and the wet splat of the contents of his stomach hitting the ground below. "Sir, is everything in order?" CIU asked.
"Sh-shitai…" Ryuji muttered.
"English, sir."
"There's a corpse inside!" he screamed. "In the watchtower! I-I don't know how long it's been there, it's… jeez, it's rotting…"
"I believe the Auto-Doc offers trauma counseling if the need arises," the CIU informed him. "Unfortunately, since it is highly unlikely that the cadaver in the Little Yangtze watchtower was the lobotomites' doing, it must have been left behind by the previous prisoner. And sir set out to investigate what he had left behind, did sir not?"
"Ugh…" Ryuji gathered his resolve. Inside that building could've been a key to getting out of this madhouse, or at the very least something to make surviving it easier. He gripped the railing and straightened himself back up, then, keeping the door open, he marched inside the watchtower.
The holes in the roof and the gaps in the window barricades let in enough light to let Ryuji scan the area. A desk with a small computer terminal on top next to some scattered papers, a corpse on the floor surrounded by surgical tools, an unfolded bedroll in the corner next to a poster of some pretty woman advertising Sierra Madre, whatever that was, a dead body in a jumpsuit and some kind of collar, with a few other collars surrounding him, some shelves and cupboards storing assorted odds and ends and a dead freaking body that no matter how hard Ryuji tried, he couldn't push out of his head. The flicker of the terminal screen attracted him and he grabbed a discarded chair and gently nudged the body away so he could sit in front of the screen. The computer didn't have a mouse, but after some fiddling and a few suggestions from the CIU, Ryuji managed to figure out how to navigate it.
It was a glorified typewriter, storing a bunch of logs from the previous users. Ryuji scrolled to the very top and opened the first log.
The first batch of Chinese spies came today. I dunno how theyre going to fit four trainloads in the few tents we have here, but I aint the smart guy here, Im the guy with a whackin stick. And I had to whack some of them to move along cause some of them habla non ingles.
Ryuji felt a chill going down whatever served as his spine at the moment. He moved on to another note:
The camps overloaded. A few people escape every day, and we cant catch all of them, even with 24hour shifts. Commandant filed a requisition form for 'pacification collars'. You slap them on prisoners, they step outside the wire, everything above their neck goes kablooie. Should be enough to stop the bastards.
After a moment of being appalled at the cruelty of it all, Ryuji realized something. He glanced to the side, at the collars lying next to him. He then spun the terminal around, moved his chair to the other side of the desk, and continued reading from there.
They keep escaping. I dunno how, but they do. One of the guys that speak English came up and said people get kidnapped by ghosts. Dumbass. I cant even call em what they are cause the eggheads complain about my language. Bleedin heart liberals, hope they got proper background checks so the army didnt hire pinkos…
"[Yeah, right,]" Ryuji muttered under his breath, frustrated at the long-dead guard. "[The 'bleeding heart liberals' are the problem. Stupid jerk…]" He pressed the buttons just a bit too hard to move the cursor to another note and slammed Enter.
They cut off their brains.
I wandered off outta curiosity adn saw the robots with fucking brains in their domes on the top. Eggheads todl me its for the war effort so we beat the commies. But if we fall ti their level to win, is it worth winning?...
I asked for reassingment., I cant do tjis anymore. God forgive me.
Ryuji wasn't shocked by that revelation – appalled, yes, but it was the exact type of evil nonsense he had expected from the Big MT at that point. Still, he pondered the note for a moment. On one hand, he thought it was better to have a realization on your own rather than double down on your mistakes until the bitter end, cough Detective Prick cough, but it all felt… insignificant? Pointless? The camp still stood after the guard had left, many others got chopped to bits – Ryuji himself included – and his change of heart didn't change anything else. Then again, what else could he possibly do against the world that had gone mad…
Finally, Ryuji came to a conclusion of 'the guy has been dead for two centuries, no point in overthinking that'. This was not the last entry in the terminal and he was curious what else was written in it. The buttons clicked satisfyingly underneath his fingers as he opened another note:
There was a terminal left behind by the guards. Still working, still running, just needed to bypass the password. RobCo knew how to make them.
There was a visible difference in the writing style and Ryuji's interest piqued.
The place was a concentration camp before the bombs fell. The watchtower should be a decent hiding spot for now. Found some prototype electric rifle, should pick off whatever robots the Dome brains send after me – or the ones Mobius sent after them. There were also explosive collars, left by the pre-War guards. Could be useful if I knew how they worked.
Ryuji pinched his nose in frustration; another madman was the last thing he needed. He moved on to another note:
The dreadlocked courier stays out of my way, so I stay out of his. He talks too much for my tastes, and seems allergic to calling the NCR and the Legion by their names, but he said one interesting thing. A casino, near the Grand Canyon, used by the researchers to test experimental technology before the bombs fell. "Sierra Madre". Could try to get there. Even if half the things he said about its dangers are true, it could be a safer spot for my research than the Big Empty is.
"[Sounds like a place to avoid,]" Ryuji muttered to himself, glancing at the discarded poster on the ground.
Hit a wall with the collar frequencies – deconstructing them takes time, circuit architecture is messy. Keep thinking about how to leave this place. Snuck out at night to investigate the teleportation beacons scattered around here. It's simple in comparison. Could probably reverse-engineer them to get me out of the crater, but it would be risky. They use some odd coordinate system and I can't really guarantee it sends me where I want. Will call that Plan D.
Gears, probably not literal, started turning in Ryuji's head. He glanced at the scattered papers on the desk. Some of them had sketches of the teleportation beacons scattered around the area, with their internals exposed. Barely readable, and requiring more technical knowledge than Ryuji possessed at the time, but still readable. One of them had a blueprint of sorts of some device, small enough to be held in one hand if the measurements on the side were accurate, labeled 'Portable Transportal Teleporter'.
"C, can you hear me?" he said to the microphone.
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Tell me… was I teleported to this place?"
"I do believe sir was brought to the facility via one of our crashed satellites, in which case transportalpondation was involved."
"Right." A thought popped up in his mind. "If I… were to teleport back to that satellite, would it break whatever's in place of my brain right now?"
"Definitely not," the CIU reassured him. "The design of the Tesla coil in sir's head incorporates many redundancies and excessive caching, and it is remarkably durable. Even if sir were to never return to the facility, sir's biological body would cease to operate before any of the organ replacements would."
A sliver of hope in the distance. Ryuji took a breath to calm himself down. Don't get too excited, this isn't over yet. "The old guy left behind some sketches and blueprints of teleport stuff," he went on. "Including one for a handheld one. Could you try to assemble it for me, and maybe program the coordinates of that satellite?"
"I make no promises," the CIU replied. "I wasn't explicitly designed to process schematics drawn on paper. However, should sir be able to bring the documents sir had acquired, I could try and improvise or extrapolate a pipeline for such a task."
"Great," Ryuji said, gathering the papers in a neat pile. "Great, fantastic, splendid." He didn't have to spend any more time in the bloody watchtower with a stiff and that alone gave him a little spring in his step. He grabbed the papers with his off-hand, then got up from his chair, out the watchtower, down the staircase…
…and into the sightline of three lobotomites.
Three humans in dirty white jumpsuits, their heads shaven and scarred, were wandering near the base of the watchtower stairs. They were holding their weapons at the ready – a hatchet, a sledgehammer, and a double-barrel shotgun. Ryuji noticed them just as they noticed him, and one of them gestured in his direction and snarled something threatening.
"[Oh bo-]"
Ryuji was shot in the face.
Wattz 1000 Laser Pistol (aka the Laser Pistol from the first two Fallouts) from Classic Fallout Weapons Remastered.