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Civil Affairs: Superheroes

WetRats

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Of course it’s a crazy-ass plan, Deacon and Isabel cooked it up.

Save a lot of lives if it works.

Gonna have to completely re-arm and reprogram the big guy, though. My stance against the use of nukes, mini OR maxi, is firm, even against the Gunners. Besides, Deacon estimates they have upwards of two thousand slaves at Watervliet.

The scariest part for me is taking any of Binet’s team into the field. They’ll have to go through a crash course in basic wasteland survival beforehand. Guess I’ll put them in Ronnie’s loving hands.

And I wish it didn’t involve putting Isabel in harm’s way. She’s… she’s still pretty fragile.

Wait.

I never told you that story?

Oh right. I was gonna tell you at the Dugout the night you sprung Nick on me. Put it right out of my mind. By the time we were talking again, there was a lot of other stuff going on.

So a couple of weeks after your first batch of articles, an eyebot showed up at Northbridge, with a message from somebody calling themselves The Mechanist.

Yep. Another wannabe superhero. Poor Kent. I still can’t believe Deacon played along with his stupid fantasy.

Yes. I know. Like I said, crazy-ass plan.

So this Mechanist wanted to know how he and the robot army he was building could help me save the Commonwealth. “He” was little Isabel with a voice modulator, but I didn’t learn that for a while.

Hell yes, I was skeptical, but I was still pretty freshly-thawed at the time, and was being surprised on a nearly daily basis by the sheer weirdness going on around here.

Anyway, I sent a polite reply back with the eyebot, and asked for more details on what she meant by an army.

Turned out she wasn’t exaggerating. Somehow, she had not only found, but taken over a secret RobCo production facility. She really was BUILDING a robot army.

Yeah. You know how I felt about robots back then. The Constitution was enough of a pain in my ass already, I did NOT want hundreds of cobbled-together, over-gunned, semi-autonomous machines clomping around shooting at whatever they determined was a threat.

Good thing, too, because when I let her attack Libertalia as a demonstration, I discovered she was using fucking Robobrains as squad leaders.

I didn’t know much about Robobrains, they were supposed to be top secret, but they were such a catastrophically bad idea that stories were out there. Terrifying stories.

Have I mentioned that the people running this country at the end were fucking insane?

The Robobrain project would have been horrible enough already, but these psychopaths made it monumentally worse by using the brains of criminally insane people. Murderers. MASS-murderers seemed to be their preference. Stupid, stupid, stupid motherfuckers.

My observation team and I had to intervene to keep them from slaughtering the folks at Nordhagen. They decided the civilians would be safest from harm by being dead. Jesus.

After that, I insisted on a face-to-face meeting.

That’s when I learned that The Mechanist was just a scared kid with an absolute genius for building and programming robots, and no goddamn sense at all about how people worked. Let alone criminally goddamn insane people who had been stuck in robot bodies for over two hundred years.

I don’t think they misunderstood her instructions. I think they manipulated her into letting them out of the facility so they could indulge themselves in all the mayhem they’d been missing out on until she showed up. I think they let her take over the facility when she stumbled upon it, and I think they were putting all sorts of dangerous ideas into her head. She wasn’t programming them, they were programming her.

Thank God she found your articles and got in touch with me. I hate to imagine how much mayhem there would have been if she had unleashed her army to “save” the Commonwealth.

So I convinced her to keep building her army to be my ace-in-the-hole, and sent Sturges to help her for a while.

Of course that was my plan. Sturges is the most level-headed person I’ve ever known. Have you ever even heard him raise his voice? He was a really good influence on her even before he figured out how to shut down the Robobrains.

Meanwhile, I did deploy one part of her army.

Did you notice how many more eyebots there were for a while, blaring out the recruitment message for Cambridge Polymer Labs?

Yep. Those were mine. I got a whole lot of intel from them while they wandered around, hiding in plain sight.

So anyway, that’s Isabel’s story. I’ve been slowly, gently socializing her for a few years now, steering her genius in useful directions. Her assaultron-killers have been really effective for instance. I like not having to be completely reliant on Madison for all my little projects.

I’m not sure how Deacon found out about her, but you know Deacon, that's what he does. He’s been visiting her for a while now, even before he decided to play dress-up and get Kent killed. Important rule: Never Let Deacon Get Bored Again.

So yeah, The Mechanist and the Silver Freaking Shroud have teamed up and come up with a plan to use Liberty Prime and Mac’s Rough Riders as a distraction while they sneak into the Gunners’ stronghold, reprogram the robots to turn on their masters, and free a couple thousand slaves in the process.

Think I could get Strong to wear a Grognak wig?

Then they’d be Unstoppable.
 
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I'm not sure if or where Jackson's Caravan will come into play, but they're still alive.
 
I like alluding to untold stories. Particularly since everyone reading this has played the game and can guess what they're talking about.

I did this a few chapters back:

"NV: I need one more thing. Did your people ever make any sense out of what they found on the robobrain project?

JC: Jesus. What a nightmare. Madison put someone on her shit list on it. Why?

NV: Personal project. I’d appreciate a copy of the report. You can send it back with the Mariner.

JC: Roger that. The Mariner? That’s your sick friend? She’s not another wannabe comic book hero is she?"
 
Assigning side quests to other characters is fun as well.

I'll probably not ever make it explicit, but Nick totally had a fade to black interlude with Gilda the Robobrain in Vault 118.
 
I really do enjoy reading your alternative take on the Fallout 4 world. As you say, most if not all of us are all too familiar with the in-game versions, having probably run through them many, many times. It makes it all the more engaging to read these what-if versions, without you having too spend many words setting them up in our minds. Does also provide a bit of a reminder of the often slightly disappointingly two dimensional nature of computer game quests.
 
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