Chapter 156: Chapter 151

Considering what I knew, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Vault 108 was giving out strong metanatural readings. The insanity brewing within carried a metaphysical weight that was amplified by the clones who shared the same psychopathic emotions. One freak accident could’ve easily created a ritual to channel the madness, or concentrate it into something far more real.

 

On the bright side, by the time we reached the Vault in force, no such event had happened, and the eldritch radiation was still within safe, approachable levels.

 

The bad news was, the first person we encountered by the Vault’s entrance was not a psychopathic Gary clone as I had expected. It was a male wastelander, crouched over seven decaying corpses in Vault 108 jumpsuits. I couldn’t make out their faces, but console stats told me that the bodies were almost entirely identical. 

 

As the troopers from 1st Company cautiously approached the wastelander, he finally deigned to notice us and stood up. There was an obvious wound on his right side, the torn leather armor revealing dirty skin with caked blood. Probably a grazing cut, judging from the machete lying on the floor.

 

The man’s eyes were closed and he wore a blank expression as he stood perfectly still. His console lines told me that he wasn’t a clone, though some of his lines were…

 

“Hey Mister,” Philip ventured.

 

Our stranger’s eyes snapped open, and the troopers reeled back in surprise at the sudden spike in eldritch radiation. I got surprised by the sheer rage in his eyes instead. Then the wounded man lunged towards us, his voice a hoarse croak as he screamed out a single word.

 

“GAAARY!”

 

We subdued the man in no time at all, and though Tiberium leeched off the exotic energies off him, his mind remained compromised as he screamed the name over and over. I frowned at the ‘Gary.Disease=1’ and ‘Gary.Convert=52’ lines stuck on the man. So, there was another eldritch infection to look forward to? 

 

Just great.

 

A couple of troopers were needed to guard the weak yet frothing madman as I led the others down into the vault. There we finally met the clones, whose warcry of ‘Gary!’ quickly became annoying rather than unsettling. My experienced troopers dispatched each Gary efficiently, breaking arms and legs to keep them alive as helpless prisoners. I also used remote pickup on bits of cloth I found throughout the vault to shove into their mouth and gag them.

 

More than just to give our ears a break, the muffling aborted the buildup of eldritch energies. Whatever it is affecting our prisoners, it was capable of transmission.

 

They all had the same lines found on the wastelander, except their convert line was set to a hundred. Also, their base physical stats were higher than an average person’s. Not super mutant high, but enough so that the clones could almost count as super-soldier material.

 

For better or worse, the rest of the vault had little worth salvaging, except for the cloning research notes. So once the place was fully cleared out and de-eldritched, I left the more thorough combing over to the bots.

 

I was about to make a beeline straight to the time-dilation chamber for figuring out the Gary lines, but Sarah pinged me on the comms as soon as she got a look at the wastelander who was enroute to Tleilax.

 

“I know him,” Lyons said with shock. “It’s Abe... He helped us with Project Purity months before you came. His father…his father was James Neason, the head of the project.”

 

The information gave me pause, and I stared into space as I processed the words.

 

First off, what the fuck? The protag of Fallout 3 got ganked in Vault 108? Seriously?

 

Secondly…

 

“That’s his name? Abe Neason?”

 

I could hear the shrug in Sarah’s voice. “Abe, Abraham…it depends on how much of a friend he sees you as.”

 

“But regardless, that’s his full name?”

 

“That I know of. Why?”

 

I let out a long sigh as a headache began to form. How do I explain that his console names all read ‘GaryWasteland_1’?

 

We visited Vault 101 after that, and it took some questioning to confirm that no, Abraham Neason had no middle name or nickname with ‘Gary’ in it. I even double checked with Madison back in Ix for info about his parents, just on the off chance that either of them wanted to name him Gary. The agents I had Desdemona sent out also confirmed that those who met him only knew him as Abe or Abraham, if not as the Lone Wanderer.

 

So that only meant that the Garys…turned the protag into one of them?

 

That sounded horrific.

 

As the rest of Washington DC was being secured, I locked myself in the Blacksite Tleilax with some Garys and test subjects. It only took me a full day to discover a new metaphysical phenomena, which Madison helpfully labeled ‘Concentrated Identity Resonance’. CIR was apparently what happens when you put too many sapient exact copies together for too long. The saturation of similar identities actually warps metanatural reality, ‘infecting’ other sapients similar enough to them.

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Only six Garys were required to start becoming a localized infohazard that could only infect human males within a yard of the clones. The clones stopped acting hostile towards the test subject at about fifty minutes - the moment they gained the disease and convert lines, and their name IDs switched to Gary-something. The raiders still retained most of their identity at that point, but there were subtle changes in their voices, and a growing disorientation that eventually led to a coma as the ‘Gary.Convert’ stat climbed and most of their stats adjusted to match the clones’.

 

Worryingly, it seemed that the more copies there were, the stronger the infection became. Put any male within a yard of eleven Garys, their physique and identities begin infection after twenty minutes.

 

Thirty Garys would start subverting any human, regardless of sex or age if they remained within a four yards for a few minutes. I had to waste the few female raiders Tleilax held to confirm that fact.

 

I don’t know how many it would take to affect ghouls and super mutants (or whether it was possible at all), simply because I didn’t have that many Garys with me, and I couldn’t copy and paste over the console stats required to create clones of my own.

 

Still, what’s discovered is bad enough to be classified as highly censored information, but ultimately I’ll have to create more Garys if I ever decide to further study CIR. For now, one Vault Gary, ‘GaryV108_9’, was kept in cryostasis, while the others were incinerated after being thoroughly studied.

 

As for Abe (it’d be disrespectful to call him Abe Gary), I had him sedated for further studying by the occultists, in hopes of figuring out how to un-Gary him. Madison was trying to figure out the metaphysical rules of CIR to hopefully find an approach to work with.

 

Unlike the Faceless infohazard, the ‘Gary.Convert’ could not be deleted once it stuck on you, and Tiberium and console tweaks could only stop the value from climbing any further. Thankfully ‘Gary.Disease’ could be removed, which removed Abe from being counted as a Gary to trigger CIR.

 

For now, I let Sarah and Madison worry over their acquaintance, and we all agreed to keep the news of his condition to a need-to-know basis. Amata had enough on her plate as a new overseer as it was, though hopefully we alleviated some of it with the renovations we did to the place. Vault 101 would be treated like any Nexus-aligned settlement, and within a couple of days it’d be fully linked up to our infrastructure network.

 

Whether the Vaulters decided to stay in their vault or leave to explore the outside world is fully up to them.

 

“Now then,” I sighed at my inner council, “New eldritch bullshit is over with, what’s next on the urgent to-do list?”

 

Glances were shared between my girls, Sarah, Gwen, Desdemona, Deacon, Madison and Edward. Gwen finally spoke up as she referred to her file.

 

“There’s Megaton.”

 

Ah yes, the virtually ruined city. After the Church of Atom went rabid, supposedly they tried to detonate the bomb somehow. According to reports, they almost succeeded, and it was only through the resident’s sheer grit that the followers were stopped and purged. Megaton suffered a lot of collateral damage, and it became a ghost town as most of the survivors abandoned the irradiated place.

 

Most, but not all. 4th Company made initial contacts with the remaining residents who eagerly accepted Nexus rule. It would be a normal integration, if not for the remaining Church of Atom cultists.

 

Well, technically they’re the offshoot ‘heretic’ branch, the Apostles of the Eternal Light. Their beliefs had apparently been divergent enough that they didn’t go nuts when Atom got smacked, and they had actually fought against the Atom cultists trying to nuke the place. Their deeds were all well and good, but their affiliation to the Atom was problematic, especially after they heard the news that I killed their god.

 

Now Megaton was divided between the residents who refused to budge from their homes and were eager to be part of the Nexus, and the Apostles who also refused to budge from their new temple and wanted any and all things related to the Nexus out of the deteriorating town. Sure, we could simply swoop in and process the cultists, but that might leave a black mark in our future dealings with wastelanders. Plus I’d have to probably listen to Nora again.

 

“The cultists are impotent?” I checked with Madison, who nodded.

 

“Their metanatural emissions are only slightly higher than average, and the energies are not at all the same as those emitted by any Atom cultists we’ve recorded so far. If anything, it might warrant further study.”

 

So, more interesting developments on the metaphysics of faith. Great.

 

“Any way to get them to compromise?”

 

“We’re still working on it,” Deacon answered with a shake of his head. “Their Mother is a stubborn ol’ lady, and the ghouls with her are very short tempered. It’d take very little to make them snap.”

 

“Then what about getting the non-cultists to leave?” Piper asked.

 

“They seem adamant about it,” Desdemona replied. “They fought hard for their homes before, and would fight for it again if push comes to shove.”

 

I let out another loud sigh. “Meh… Set up a meeting with them. I’ll go see if I can persuade either party.”

 

Gwen gave a curt nod, then looked at her notes. “I’ll get Kelly to find the right schedule. Next item of note: the Family. Cannibals who call themselves…vampires?”

 

I tried not to groan and kept my attention to the meeting as we worked our way down the priority list. Cannibals/vampires, raiders, merc companies… I forgot how infested the Capital Wasteland was with minor factions.

 

Plus I also had to remember to check on the Deathclaws after this. Supposedly gorging on too many raiders gave them some of them digestion problems. Note to self: Set up a zoological department.

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