Chapter 76: Chapter 73

With things stabilizing administratively after the massive expansion of the Nexus, it felt like the time was ripe to finally move beyond just a few farms for the surface. The growing legion of Sentinels were sent to scour the rivers in our lands clean of junk and rusted debris, clear out or fill up tunnels, and dismantle condemned ruins to their foundations.

Having such a massive automated workforce meant I could just plan things out with my admin team, marking out the sites for new buildings that would serve as depots, shelters and the start of factories. Then the Sentinels would go to work, using the resources salvaged from within our lands or imported from Diamond City. Delegation and automation was nice; it was damned enjoyable not having to rely on console spawning for stuff like this.

Within days we had ourselves a proper network of roads and depots, and the skyline slowly crept upwards with silhouettes of factories, placeholder structures and Sentinel hangars, a testament to the Nexus’ development on the Commonwealth’s mainland.

Designated farmlands and residential areas were fenced off for future expansion, leaving swathes of neatly empty lands that at times looked like the world suddenly stopped rendering the terrain. Based on conservative estimates, the Nexus Severalty can sustain a cool three hundred thousand people within our lands, if all the farmlands we’ve held could keep a passable decent output. That’s excluding being supplied by Caladan. If food production was better than passable, we could probably host up to a million folks without them starving for even a day.

Of course, the diet would be almost completely vegan for now, since I didn’t trust wasteland meat and cleaning the meat with de-radiating rays would be a waste of energy in the long term. Which led to my next project: Watching the robots and a few select Institute scientists (heheh…Institute scientists…) work on some brahmin specimens.

The work with feral dogs, particularly the unborn fetuses, was a complete success, allowing for healthy, furry puppers to make an appearance in the Commonwealth. But the brahmins were a different problem.

Apparently de-radiating the fetus and doing minor gene coding wasn’t enough, so this little group of scientists and robots were backtracking through the progress of the fetus in hopes that something might work.

It was like watching paint dry on an unstable bomb that’s being disarmed: completely uneventful on the surface, but there’s an anxiety of whether something will happen or not.

I had no idea what the scientists were actually doing as they looked through microscopes, wielded syringes and scalpels, and conversed in medical jargon. But I still stood by the observation window, because I was aware that my presence in Tleilax made everyone else realise the importance of what was going on here.

This was a rare thing from the blacksite, to share a research project to the public. And while some of the wastelanders don’t see the point in getting a proper moo cow, I really, really wanted to enjoy a good steak that wasn’t spawned freshly cooked from the console or tasted of metal and impending cancer.

It’d be nice to cook my own rare cut. Maybe we can raise the cattle to provide higher grades of meat. Hm… ‘Nexus A1’ series of beef.

Fuck, I’m getting hungry thinking about that.

I watched for a while more before leaving after watching another round of shaking heads and negative noises. Looks like beef will have to wait for a while longer.

Still, it’s not all bad news down at the blacksite. Nick Valentine had came for a meeting on behalf of his clients, and after quickly agreeing to help sort the bodies, I also offered to upgrade or at least restore his frame. Which led to the synth detective being interred in a small room as a few Mr Handy research bots were carefully rebuilding and reinforcing every inch of Nick’s hardware.

The whole process would take a painstaking six days to ensure his second-gen frame would last far longer than the initial shelf life due to the Insitute’s limited resources. Nick would probably be the last synth, regardless of generation, to have resources allocated to. He’d be a relic of the old Institute, as well as good advertising for the Nexus once his body’s refurbished.

Before leaving Blacksite Tleilax, I made a quick stop at the Niche Room, locking down my sanity stats in the console before passing through the heavy security doors, the miniature Obelisks of Lights and the white laser defense network that guarded the entrance.

I swear, if not for using the console to suppress my stats, a good chunk of the advancements made in the Nexus would never have been made. Ethics and common decency and all that.

The Niche Room was basically a circular room, close to a hundred yards across, and five high. Three rows of niches built into the walls at regular intervals, only the doorway interrupting the pattern. Each niche would house a limbless body, basically a torso with a cut open head. Neutral interfaces pincushioned the brain while tubes and electric spikes were embedded at various parts of the body.

While the initial idea of using synth chips to control human minds was mostly not practical due to various concerns, here the chips were used to delve into minds and explore the limitations of what can and cannot be coded into a human brain. Eva had picked up where Curie had left off on this side project, and the AI assistant was far less worried about adhering to medical principles as the luxuries of humanity were absent from this room.

Specialised Sentinels and Mr Handy researchers constantly worked to ensure that each occupant was as healthy as they could for their state as experiments were carried out almost non-stop to create the ultimate mind control chip.

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The only exception to this was the cluster of niches which housed Shaun and his advisors. Interface wires disappeared into their eye sockets and ears, and their heads were even more of a forest of wires than the usual occupant. They were living in a simulation, and if I remember correctly of the current digital environment, they were allowed to believe that they were in a lab, working together on various projects.

That was the carrot. If any one of them decided to be uncooperative, the simulation would end for all of them, they would be brought back to consciousness to have a remote camera’s view of their current desecrated state. Then the various brain interfaces would trigger an intense storm of pain for a while before sending them back to the simulation with their memories mostly scrubbed, save for the lingering, haunting trauma that would keep them behaving.

That stick was only used once, and I personally watched the torsos squirm in agony with an indifferent detachment enforced by my console. They were very good workers after that though, and have aided the Nexus greatly; they were responsible for cracking the key research for realizing the de-radiating emitters, and have provided significant contribution to our soon-to-be implemented agricultural projects on the surface.

A part of me wondered how Nora would react to this room. Curie came to see the place once. She took grim satisfaction at the sight, but also puked a lot once we got back to Caladan. It was warning enough for Piper and Cait to avoid entering even if they had the clearance to, and supposedly rumors about that place became associated with my bogeyman aspect.

“Don’t do so and so, or Sev’s robots will take you to the Niche.” Or something like that. I guess being feared can be useful…

A shame that there’s no one to drop that hammer on and watch them piss themselves in fear.

*****

The news coming from the east was troubling, and kept getting more so. At first, the Brotherhood of Steel had worried about the reach of the shadowy Institute with their synth infiltrators and who knows what other sinister tech they might have conjured up. The rumors of that organization had been consistent at least, mostly about impostors and depopulated farms.

And then something new came in: a man or a boy, depending on who you asked, had appeared, rescuing slaves in a working tank before carving up his own territory. Then things got really, really weird.

This Sev, he built a town overnight somehow. He subjugated, annexed or just charmed some vaulters into joining him. He was bulletproof and laserproof. He had an army of robots that was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, metal demons that tore a man to shreds while keeping him alive, of annihilating every trace of him with powerful energy weapons.

And those were the more believable stories, stories that were consistent in their key points. The idea of some discovered old tech providing what felt like magical or divine immunity, or at least giving off that impression, was feasible according to the fragments in the Brotherhood’s records. Whether or not Sev had a harem or had any number of cocks or could shrivel a man’s dick with just a glance was irrelevant and too unsubstantiated to confirm anyway.

Clearly an expedition had to be sent up to Boston, but their current state in the Capital Wasteland was still tenuous, dealing with the remnants of the Enclave forces still rallying in from across the continent.

Then news came months later that Sev slaughtered a great raider army that numbered anywhere from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Not fought, no. Never was it implied that Sev’s forces of robots and child soldiers and demons ‘battled’ against the raiders. It was always a one-sided massacre.

Sev became known as the ruler of the Nexus Severalty after that, raising a lot of eyebrows amongst the Brotherhood leadership.

And then weeks after that, the Institute was gone, an immediate and overwhelming response from Sev when they failed to assassinate him. Again, the traders and travellers were consistent in this: the Institute wasn’t defeated, wasn’t broken, wasn’t scattered. Sev had found the rotten core of the Institute and nuked it, before repurposing the blasted husk as the Nexus’ Correctional Institute. Those who used to live within that hole in the ground were all captured and either imprisoned or ‘vanished’ to the nightmare that was the Nexus’ Blacksite Tleilax. That was all common knowledge in the Commonwealth.

Hearing how some of the Enclave survivors could be fleeing to the Nexus, the Brotherhood couldn’t not send a reconnaissance team after that. With their limited manpower and resources, and the need to maintain their holdings in the Capital Wasteland, the newly promoted elder Sarah Lyons, barely weeks after mourning the passing of her father, had decided to join in the recon team.

It was uncommon and almost certainly unprecedented, but the fact that diplomacy would be required for this made the proactive new elder personally lead the mission. She left with a reinforced recon team of three paladins, twelve knights and four scribes.

No more than a month later, traders passing through the Citadel brought back the remains of the team, found amongst a pile of super mutants. Not enough body parts were found to make whole, recognizable bodies, but enough of the bloody and crumpled armor pieces salvaged from the site gave account to every member of the team. Elder Lyon’s chest piece was found warped and twisted, likely from direct blows from a super sledge, her power armor frame equally abused and drenched in gore.

None within the chapter dared to imagine the fate of her missing body, but soon after the promotion of Elder Darrick to take her place, the Brotherhood of the Capital Wasteland vented their wrath on any super mutant camps they came across.

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