The Replicated Man

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The door opens onto ruin and rust, buildings blown apart and left for time and sun and God alone knows what else to work them over. Ellen wrinkles her nose as she holds the door open. "Sorry about the smell," she says, "but nobody lives here except ghouls and a couple of bandit types. We'll be heading west to get you that armor and stop at Big Town; the doctor there gave me one of those holotapes."

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[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Fortunately, even in the Wasteland there can be quiet quarter-miles. Apart from the distant barking of feral dogs, there's no sign of trouble in the blasted, cracked emptiness. As they head down the bleached grey rubble that used to be a road and pick their way around the remains of an ancient, huge car that once gleamed with chrome, the smell of blood filters through on the wind. "Over there," Ellen says, pointing to where three bodies in black armor lie. "The one in the middle. He was about your size and he only took a shotgun blast to the face, so his armor's still in good shape."

[replicant-cop.livejournal.com]

Deckard is doubtful at first, but then he remembers what world he's stepped into. If this is the most extreme thing he ends up doing here, he'll probably be lucky.

So he grits his teeth and tries not to breathe in as he recovers the armor and slips it on. At least it's not covered in blood. Much.

And Ellen is right. It's almost a perfect fit. He takes another couple of minutes to adjust straps and snaps to make it a little more snug, and then turns to her with a slight shrug.

"How do I look?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Better than I did the first time I put on combat armor," Ellen answers frankly. "You've worn this kind of thing before, haven't you?" She glances down at the corpses. "Come to think of it, this might be for the best... if people see you traveling with me in that, they'll assume I'm your prisoner, and they'll stop trying to hunt me down so much."

[replicant-cop.livejournal.com]

"Something like it," Deckard admits quietly, but doesn't seem to want to talk about it. Not good memories, apparently.

He nods at her suggestion. "Good idea."


"So where do we start?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods towards a rusty red rocket in the distance. "See that? That's just outside of Big Town. We'll start with the doctor there. Her name's Red. She's not much older than I am, but she had some contact with people who interacted with the android."

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Deckard surveys the horizon. "How exposed are we out here?"

He's starting to wonder if they're going to need to duck from one cover to another.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Not as badly as you'd think," Ellen says. She nods towards the dog padding alongside them. "He keeps an ear out for trouble, and anything that might be on the wind. And my armor's got a distant early warning system built in. If anything was within gunshot range, we'd know."

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Deckard is surprised to find himself feeling a little better after hearing that. But he still double-checks his gun, before pulling his coat over the armor. It's a snug fit, but the coat is just roomy enough, and it makes him stand out a little less than the black of the armor did.

Then with a sigh, he gestures to Ellen. "After you."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods and sets off down the remains of the road. It's not as far to Big Town as it might have been; there are no mutants out on the prowl today, and the only yao guai to be seen anywhere are so far downwind that they don't even notice the humans. One squatty little creature with big teeth and big skin pokes its head up by the roadside at one point, but when Dogmeat growls it turns and flees. "Mole rat," Ellen says. "Ugly, and jumpy, but they probably won't bother us."

And they don't. Up ahead a huddle of buildings, the spaces between them patched together by wire and corrugated metal, mark the place where the people who once refueled at that red rocket monument used to live. "Big Town," Ellen murmurs, and raises a hand. "Dusty? Dusty, it's just me, Ellen."

The guard at the bridge- a twitchy, tired-looking fellow in his early twenties- blinks a few times. "A- ah- okay," he says doubtfully. "Who's this? I thought you were going on your way...."

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"Deckard," is the answer Dusty gets, with the tone of someone who's said all he should have to say. He's been a cop long enough to make that work every time back home. Might as well try it here.

Looks like Dusty is overdue for a break from that post. By about three years.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It works perfectly. Dusty eyes the stranger, then nods. "All right," he says. "Come on in. Just watch out for Flash- you know how he gets."

There's a small wooden bridge over a trench of water best left unexamined. As they cross into Big Town, Ellen murmurs, "These people've only just recently learned how to defend themselves properly. The town's been under all kinds of assault for a long time. Red's still so shocked to be alive that she'll probably answer any questions you have without thinking twice- that's her clinic over there, the house next to the junkyard."

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"That's a clinic?" Deckard asks, then instantly regrets it. The town is probably lucky to have it.

Even if Ellen hadn't mentioned the assaults, he couldn't have missed the signs. Deep holes in the ground, heavy impact craters in just about every wall he can see. He wonders what would happen if he had an old style Geiger counter right now.

The people have that beaten down look he knows from the worst neighborhoods in what remained of South Central. People who can hardly believe they've made it, and others who aren't sure they really have. They might be survivors, but most of them don't look like they're too confident about staying that way.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"It's pretty typical for anywhere that isn't Rivet City or Vault 101," Ellen says. "We don't have a lot of infrastructure in the Wasteland, and this place has less than most."

She waves a greeting to a tall, skinny black-skinned woman dressed in bodged-together leather armor. "That's Kimba," she says. "She's the closest thing they have to a mayor around here. Mostly because she's the oldest- this town was founded by people who got run out of a community of children and orphans when they turned sixteen, which might explain some things."

The door to the clinic slides open, revealing a reasonably well-lit interior that's as clean as a frontier doctor without much in the way of antiseptic can make it. "Red?" Ellen calls. "Red, it's me...."

"Oh, hey, you're back!" The dark-skinned woman who emerges from the next room is dressed in, perhaps appropriately, an old red jumpsuit and red head-wrap. As she adjusts her glasses, she says, "I hope you don't need my services again so soon, do you?"

"No, no," Ellen answers. "But I wanted you to meet somebody. This is Deckard."

"Well," says Red, holding out a hand for the shaking, "okay, I can do that. Are you all right, sir? Usually people don't come looking for me unless they need medical assistance."

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"I'm fine," Deckard replies. "...Thanks," almost as an after-thought.

"We'd like to ask you some questions....," he starts, slipping easily into cop mode, but this time to back up Ellen when she actually asks those questions.

It never hurts to play bad cop, even with somebody who's probably willing to talk, just so long as you don't get too heavy with them too fast.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"It's about that tape you gave me," Ellen says. "The one from-"

"Oh, right," Red says. "The one from the man who claimed to be an android? Yeah, I remember. What did you want to know about it?"

"Well," Ellen says, "I got to listen to it a while ago. The tape mentioned looking for a doctor to perform facial reconstruction. Do you know anything about that?"

"Not really," says Red, a little doubtfully. "I mean... not unless you mean the kind where you sew up someone's ear after it gets torn, or something."

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"Sometimes that can be the same thing, depending on the tech," Deckard replies.

The new Nexus-5 models, just starting to appear back on his world, are startlingly lifelike, and there are rumors of even more amazing breakthroughs on the way.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Red nods. "Either way, it doesn't matter all that much," she says. "I haven't operated on anybody's face since getting the tape."

"All right," Ellen says doubtfully. "What about the other part, though?"

"Which other part?"

"The voice on the tape says he wants his memories altered. How would someone go about doing that, do you know?"

Red shakes her head. "Sorry," she says. "We used to have a couple of guard robots here that we bought off a trader with all our pooled money, but that was before you came here. The guy who used to take care of them's... he's in Paradise Falls, now."

Ellen winces. To Deckard she murmurs, in a voice too low for Red to hear, "Paradise Falls is where the slavers operate."

[replicant-cop.livejournal.com]

Deckard frowns at that, but then turns back to Red.

"What about the guard robots? Are they still here?"

He's no tech, but if they haven't broken down too much since the guy left, maybe he and Ellen can get something out of them.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Sure, they're back in the scrapyard," Red says. "Deactivated, but there should be a spare battery for them. You're welcome to them both, after everything you've done."

"Thank you, Red," Ellen says. "We'd better go have a look at these robots, then."

[replicant-cop.livejournal.com]

Deckard nods thanks at Red, and then nods again at Ellen in assent.

'Robots.' Replicants were supposed to be 'More Human Than Human.' At least that's what Tyrell Corporation said, and they kept an army of marketers around to make that point 24/7. By now hearing somebody say 'robot' couldn't help but sound wrong to his ears. Deckard wondered if the robots on this world would be as primitive in his eyes as the word made them sound.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Bluntly put? Yes. Oh, yes.

Ellen kneels next to the deactivated bipedal one anyway. "This is a Protectron," she says. "They're not very bright, but they're capable of basic tasks without interfering with the humans around them, and they're okay on area defense. I've only ever seen the other one in a simulation, though. If the real thing is like the ones in the sim, it's got a Gatling laser built into one arm and a missile launcher in the other. That one would've been most of the town's defenses, I think."

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Deckard stops and blinks for a second.

"Industrial design. You see models like this on the big construction projects. And the Outworld Colonies that haven't been terraformed yet. Don't usually run into them myself."

He walks up to take a closer look. "Gatling laser, huh? Missile launcher.... Sounds like they'd come in handy."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods. "I've been to the factory where the Protectrons were made before the War," she says. "There were several old ones still on display. They had a lot of uses, mostly for basic security and low-ranking army work. We had two guarding the storeroom in Vault 101, where I grew up, and there's one at the gates of Megaton, where I live now."

She considers the sentry bot a moment, then fumbles around with its torso.

"There's got to be a powerplant in here or something. Maybe we can get it active long enough to tell us where it came from..."

(Or maybe there might be a name etched on the Protectron, if someone who's not too distracted by fooling around with an unfamiliar robot's innards might happen to be looking.)

[replicant-cop.livejournal.com]

Which is why Deckard is the one who notices something on one of the robots:

"The name 'Wollinski' mean anything to you?"

He taps the plate on which the name is etched.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Hm?" Ellen glances up. "Actually, yeah... Scott Wollinski's a robot technician, out in Canterbury Commons. He likes his robots so much he kind of went off his rocker for a while when one of them got destroyed. I think he's one of two people in the whole Wasteland who specializes in just working with robots..."