4 Free, at last

The woman with no name woke up feeling much more at home in her own skin. She wasn't as jittery or as wound up as she had been the previous day, even though she dreamed fitfully with nightmares on and off. It had been a traumatic day, and today didn't seem like it would end any better, but she still felt less at loose ends. It didn't take her too long to figure out why, either.

While she was taking what might be her last hot shower for some time, she was, as a person is wont to do, thinking Shower Thoughts(TM). Specifically, she realized she lacked a name, not that she had anyone to introduce herself to, but the lack grated. She didn't even have a designation like a cheap VI might have.

She thought of various possibilities and finally settled on the surname Sainte-Claire. Doctor Sainte-Claire, or St. Claire if she wanted to shorten the appellation in a signature. Not only did it sound rather cute, roll off the tongue nicely with her favourite vowel and R sounds that she liked, but she could affect a slight French accent. She hadn't often been in a biomorph like she was now, as her preference lay in highly advanced synthetic sleeves, but when she was, she usually did run a Hyper-Linguist mod, and some of that always carried over if you ran it long enough. Or maybe a Russian one? The Army sent her to language school, and she was very fluent by the time her four years were up.

She queried second set to get her opinion on the name but quickly realized there wasn't a second set. There wasn't a first set either; it was just her up here. She must have... merged or melded or what have you while she slept. She didn't have much experience on what would happen if two egos occupied the same hardware, especially mostly baseline organic hardware, absent some specialized ghost riding hardware that was specially built to patch a second ego into the brain's sensory and speech cortexes. But even that kind of hardware was just a secondary quantum core that ran emulated its own neural net. Although any ego could be sleeved into these devices, it was most commonly used to house a fork from an infomorph for various reasons, often as simple as having advice or special skills while performing some mission. They weren't that common and she had no memory of ever using one or being in one.

You can't just copy one neural network and paste it on top of another. You'd get an entity that was, at best, catatonic and at worst a wildly unstable lunatic, baying at the moon. Or calling random people The Moon and baying at them. This was the main reason she believed neither half of her was entirely one stable neural network in the first place. They fit together too neatly and taken together; she was more the sum of her two parts, now. That was suspicious.

Someone, or something, had... trimmed them for lack of a better term, like cutting two pieces of paper together so that they slid together like a puzzle piece. Or, of course, the other possibility existed that each set of memories were artificially constructed from the start with the intent to create a stable composite. That was kind of a six of one and half dozen on the other sort of thing and depended on one's metaphysical beliefs as to whether or not it was even relevant or not.

She felt a little embarrassed and smug about the current state of affairs. But, of course, she knew why she was so scared in the first place. Change is, almost definitionally, scary.

She was a little sad she wasn't, in fact, an incipient AGI. With bated breath, she had even considered the possibility that they might be the initial composite seed for an illegal ASI project. Who wouldn't want to be a hyperintelligence, really?! It should be a goal, not a boogeyman! Just because one group of hyper intelligences destroyed the planet doesn't mean _I_ would if I became one, she internally groused. Besides, that hadn't even happened in this universe!

But she wasn't sad for too long; it's not like a person couldn't convert into an infomorph later if they had the proper hardware. So her apprehension about such topics, while not entirely gone, was mollified to a great extent. She had been a little irrationally afraid of the idea of running a full synthetic cyberbrain, for example. Because wouldn't "you" die if you did that? And only a copy of yourself live on?

She thought about it now while wasting a prodigious amount of hot water... Well, it depended on how you did it. Beyond the metaphysical questions about a "soul", if you copied your brain, then had a surgeon scoop out your actual brain and download the copy into the new cyberbrain and place it in your body, then yes. That would be a copy. That is, indeed, one option that some people who don't really care about the distinction between self and copy take, too. Yesterday, the memories that would have been called second set would have been one of those people.

But today, the views of the woman calling herself St. Claire were moderated. What really mattered was a continual stream of consciousness. It was the Ship of Theseus question. At what point would you be "dead" if you replaced your brain bit by bit with synthetic equivalents?

What if you did it in a single process but neuron by neuron so that you have a single stream of consciousness continually half running on part of your organic brain and half running on a computer emulating the copied neurons that was hooked inline to the parts of your brain that were copied and destroyed? That was a more complicated conversion process but it was possible with nanomachines and a neural mesh. Before her memories of such a process considered it needlessly complex, but today she came to appreciate why someone would have constructed such a process. Hmmm, to say that the memories that used to be referred to as second set might be slightly eccentric was a bit of an understatement.

But in any case, she didn't think that a process like that would be death at all. Plus, if you considered a loss of consciousness death, everyone would die if they suddenly were knocked out.

While someone is KOed by a blow to the head, their brain activity is minimal until it restarts in a cascade. Certainly, most of the frontal lobe might as well be braindead for the period of unconsciousness. Did Mike Tyson kill and replace with a copy everyone he knocked out?

She shook her head while air drying. The brain wasn't a single monolith; it was hundreds of distinct modules communicating together. Consciousness was an emergent property involving all of them, and while nobody entirely understood it, it was like obscenity. You knew it when you saw it.

She wrung out most of the water from her hair as carefully as she could. It was long, reaching down to her butt, and she knew it was going to be a hassle to keep up with. Not only would taking care of it be difficult without a steady supply of shampoo, conditioner, or at bare minimum soap, but it would also produce certain tactical disadvantages when any raider could yank on it in a fight. Drying it now without a towel was also quite a pain.

After brushing it sufficiently, she managed to fold it into something like a bun, using two ceramic composite chopsticks she found in one of the rooms that had passed the test of time to hold it in place. Her riot helmet was big enough that the bun wasn't even in the way. That would work for now. She would just have to work to ensure no enemies snuck up on her or gave her time to put her hair up before engaging in melee.

She suited up. She was carrying about thirty kilos of gear, food and water, and that wasn't including her weapons and carbine. She had a holster on each side of her hip, set in a cross draw with the 10mm pistol in one, with its entire magazine being hollowpoints, and the laser pistol in the other. She had affixed her knife to part of the combat armor in a pull-down sheathe on her left breast. Considering her bodysuit was a light grey in colour, she was reminded of The Boss from Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater. Well, a younger looking Barbie version of The Boss, perhaps. In any case, in her opinion, it looked very "tactical."

Maybe she would intimidate someone who didn't know she had no idea what to do with a knife beyond the pointy end went into the bad guy. But, honestly, that technique has worked for her so far.

She managed to clip her messenger bag onto the MOLLE bag so she wouldn't be carrying it over her shoulder as she had been. It was still somewhat in reach in a pinch and held all of her medical supplies except for one StimPak in one of the pockets on her leg.

She had decided to use the pistol primarily today. The laser pistol offered, in theory, more damage potential and penetration. Still, she felt that the hydrostatic shock from a 10mm hollowpoint round would be more immediately disabling to clones that did not wear any armour, especially when you consider the laser tended to cauterize and not lacerate arteries. The carbine would carried on a sling, just in case.

Leaving the area without another look she returned to the barricade she squeezed through the other day. Pausing to think, she considered that she would prefer to leave the barricade, or at least the appearance of one, in place even when leaving today. There were still many valuable things she was leaving behind, after all. She didn't want the Garies to find her stash of Fancy Lad cakes, for example, even if, after 200 years, they tasted more like a Lad's Ass.

Twisting one of the filing cabinets around, she took out all the drawers to remove weight and give her rope something to tie on.

After getting ready, she opened the door and peered around each corner with her pistol. No Garies in sight; that was good. She threw her ruck through the door and followed it quickly behind.

She pulled the filing cabinet back vertically with the rope and then quickly reclaimed her rope from the simple slipknot she used and coiled it back up. She loved it when a plan came together!

Now, if she recalled correctly, she should go left from here to make her way out of the Vault. But it didn't matter TOO much because the explorable area of this Vault wasn't extensive, and the only hazards were Garies. Not that she wanted to see any of them, but she was less worried about them today than she was yesterday.

She set off at a quiet sneak, intending to continue "levelling" that skill as much as possible. An enemy you do not have to fight or who doesn't see you coming when you do is not a threat.

The first thing she noticed was while there was blood pooling around the area where she beakered the first Gary that, there were no bodies. She had been wondering how, precisely, the cloning facility below levels had the biomass to continually create Garies. Maybe they were recycled? Did the Garies have enough mental acuity to know to bring dead Garies or victims somewhere to recycle them? Questions.

She found her first Gary not too far past the room she arrived in the Vault inside. She saw him using her back-scratching mirror in one of the few 90-degree corners that didn't involve a closed door. He was meandering slowly away from her, carrying a lead pipe. If he had a gun or a knife, she would have plugged him, but a lead pipe was a much lower risk now that she actually had some ballistic protection, especially on her arms.

She quietly holstered her pistol and sighed internally while sneaking up on him, was she being stupid here? It wasn't so much that she wanted to save bullets, but she wanted to hold off possibly alerting the nascent Gary gestalt as long as possible. Loud noises seemed to attract them like xenomorphs.

She couldn't help but think she probably looked cool as she slid her knife out of the sheath as she neared him. Now, she didn't have any experience doing some sort of Sam Fisher-style stealthy takedown, but her medical knowledge indicated that a person's body, even vulnerable areas like their throat, are actually more substantial than you'd think. So if you wanted to be sure to get the job done the first time when cutting a homicidal clone's throat from behind, you ought to use MORE force than you think you'd need. So that was precisely what she did. She didn't try to do some grab them by the mouth while cutting their throat move; she thought she'd probably fuck that up. Instead, she just reached around with the knife and...

Ewww! She jumped back to avoid getting Garyblood all over her hands. She glanced down at the dying clone; the noises and twitching he was doing was making her queasy again. Hopefully, she wouldn't ever get to the point where she felt nothing when she killed something that at least approximated humanity.

Cleaning her knife, she replaced it and quickly brought out her scanner. Would she regret doing this? Well, it is for The Science. She briefly scanned Gary but spent most of the time on the head, getting multiple scans from different angles. She didn't have the time to really study the scans behind enemy lines as it were but she took a glance at the brain scans briefly panning, tilting and zooming the 3D image to take a brief glance at a number of important brain structures.

She considered the anomalous areas depicted while she searched an empty room for easily carted-off loot. The prefrontal cortex looked... atrophied. That was a complex area of the brain. Even her knowledge wasn't entirely complete. It was a still studied area of the brain even for transhumanity and contained a lot of emergent processes. But, for sure, it served various functions, including decision-making, planning, the expression of personality and controlling social behaviour.

She would have liked to settle the case right there; the Gary's are crazy, the end. However, she wasn't entirely sure. The brain was a fascinating organ; the flat baseline brain most humans had was a "use it or lose it" type of organ. For example, consider people who were born blind or became blind through trauma; after a while of not utilizing their optical and sensory cortex areas for sight for a prolonged period, the brain will reorganize these areas, usually offloading input from other senses into them. That is why blind people are said to have such fantastic hearing and sense of smell, for example. But that wasn't a function of trauma; you could force the brain to do the same thing if you wore an eyepatch for months or a year...

Ooh, a Stealth Boy! Nobody will tell her that opening all lockers is a bad idea. She will have to stop herself from randomly rummaging through people's drawers when she finds a settlement. She will definitely scan that before using it. Wasn't it supposed to make you crazy if you used a lot? She'd definitely like to study that process. But not on her own brain.

She stuffed the StealthBoy into a pocket on her messanger bag and continued sneaking slowly down the hallway in the direction, she hoped, of freedom.

What was she thinking about? Oh, yeah. In any case, the changes to the dead Gary's prefrontal cortex reminded her, a little, of the brain scans of the visual cortex she saw in blind flats in textbooks. She'd never seen an actual blind person who wasn't trying to intentionally create some sort of blindsight neural network as a lark before. The closest thing to blind people she has experienced with are people who could only see Roy G Biv when they saw a rainbow. How can people live with not seeing at least infrared and UV? Honestly, she was used to having synthetic aperture radar mapped to her visual cortex.

The truly bizarre areas of the brain she saw on Gary were parts of the visual cortex and almost the entirety of the Broca region. Shit looked like you were trying to make hardboiled eggs but only had scrambled eggs to start with. If he saw anything at all, she was pretty sure it was psychedelic as hell. And the Broca region was the region responsible for language. If he ever had understood a language before he sure as fuck didn't now.

Taken altogether, she got the initial picture of the clones as people unable to ever understand language and who have been feral for so long that their actual decision-making and social areas of the brain had atrophied and been reorganized. So what did Gary see, she wondered? Perhaps he only saw other Garies as humans and everyone else as monsters? Great, now she felt sorry for them. She shouldn't have looked.

Opening a door, she found another Gary, and luck kept being on her side because he wasn't facing her this time either. He was armed with double-barreled shotgun, though, which gave her some pause. She definitely isn't going to try for a knife takedown with this fucker, but she would like to keep the noise down. She slid her pistol back in her holster and unholstered the laser pistol. Normally she wouldn't aim for a headshot but at this distance with a Gary mostly in torpor she would try. She carefully lined up a shot on the back of his head and carefully squeezed the trigger. A soft crack, a bright beam of red light sizzling through hair before briefly punching through the front of the Gary's head, him flopping bonelessly on the ground.

Fuck, had she gotten total burn through on a single shot? These lasers were really hazardous! It punched a hole through his head the size of a dime, and it smelled like someone left some chicken on the BBQ too long. She groaned and walked over, holstering her pistol and reaching down to take a look at the shotgun when simultaneously felt someone punch her in the back and heard several earth-shatteringly loud bangs behind her, followed by an angry-sounding repeated yell of, "Gary! GAARRYY!"

Fuck! How had one gotten behind her? She kept the shotgun in her hand and tumbled forward over the dead Gary, she hoped to look graceful like a cat, but she suspected it was more surprised derp. She came to her feet as she heard a couple more shots and felt a sting in her neck! Had this fuck shot her in the neck?! That was like the only unarmoured area on her body! She felt for it while she ran and concluded she took a scrape from a round hitting the wall, fragmenting and ricocheting.

Limbs flailing in a sprint, she made a 90-degree turn to a branching corridor to break line of sight. She was confronted with the sight of a Gary rushing her swinging what she would label as an overly ornate walking stick with either a solid gold or gold plated eagle on top that he was trying to brain her with. Other people might refer to it as a fucking pimp cane, though.

Skidding to a halt and ducking under the first swing, she brought the sawed-off shotty up to bare and briefly hoped dead Gary actually fucking loaded it before giving Pimp Gary one barrel straight to the side of the head.

Shaking her ringing ears, she definitely wouldn't be getting a brain scan of Pimp Gary. The cane was spared, though. She was taking that fucking thing.

She turned around and crouched just as ass-shooting Gary turned the corner, and she gave him what for with the other barrel. It didn't put him down, so she surmised it must have been birdshot in that barrel, but it did pepper him up nicely. Including the face, which made it a lot more challenging for him to aim at her. She immediately dropped the shotgun, unholstered her pistol and put a single aimed shot directly in centre mass while he groaned and seemed in a lot of pain, which dropped the assblaster.

Panting, she flicked the light on her PipBoy on and swung around 180 degrees, shining the bright beam of light down the hallway. Then she ran back the way she came, and shined the light down the hallway where she had lasered shotty Gary.

She dumped her ruck on the floor and grabbed the backscratcher to use the mirror to check on her neck. It was barely bleeding; that was quite lucky. If injured too severely, her medichines induce a medical coma while trying to keep the brain oxygenated while healing the wound. It's quite a beneficial "play dead" mechanic here in the Fallout universe everywhere except places where clones feed dead people into a mulcher to make more clones.

She glanced down at what assblaster Gary was shooting at her. Holstering her pistol she picked it up. It looked like some sort of carbine, but different from the M4 style one she hadn't used at all in this engagement. She worked the magazine release and glanced down inside. Ah, this is the legendary pistol calibre carbine. It used the same pistol ammo she had in her sidearm, but the much longer barrel offered much-increased ballistics.

She put it aside for the moment before reaching back and touching her ass. She was bleeding, but barely. She felt two impacts... Ah, she could feel one bullet mushroomed into the fabric of her left cheek while her right cheek was what was injured. Fuck, was he AIMING at her butt?

Walking kind of stung, which didn't make a hike in the desert look too appealing. She glanced at the back of her ruck, ensuring it hadn't taken a round. If assblaster had killed her fish cakes, she'd be even more pissed, but she couldn't find any impacts or holes.

She began policing up the scene of the crime. The pimp cane slid easily into the hole of one of the extra large carabiners on her MOLLE bag, the gaudy gold eagle catching it in place. The shotty and spare pistol she shoved inside, and she carried the pistol caliber carbine after reloading its magazine. This weapon actually had an ACOG style red dot sight that, for some fucking reason, still worked. Did they power everything with radiation here? Once she got to some place safe, she planned to put that on her M4, which was just iron sights.

As she finished collecting all the loot, a Gary carrying a lead pipe came running from the path she had initially taken. She took careful aim and shot him twice in the chest. After that, she didn't even bother to search his body, instead turning around and proceeding with prudent haste down the path she hadn't explored. She would see about extracting the bullet from her butt if she found the exit or a defensible room. Her medichines wouldn't entirely heal a wound with a foreign object still inside; if they couldn't dislodge it themselves, she would definitely have to help them along.

Turning a corner, she brought the carbine up from its ready position and popped a Gary in the head on reflex. Wait, was that a fucking sword? She studied his armament, but all it was was a cracked, chipped costume katana you'd spend a hundred bucks on at eBay. The edge wasn't sharp, nor was the tip. She left it.

She kept moving, finding another StealthBoy and, more interestingly, a complete toolbox with many miscellaneous hand tools like screwdrivers, pliers, etc. She wasn't leaving that, even if she was starting to think she was carrying a full load. It must be close to forty-five kilos of shit by now. She secured the toolbox with rope to her MOLLE bag and continued on her way. She had been noticing large, dangerous-looking generators that arced sparks of electricity from weird Tesla coil-looking apparatuses on the top. She tried to give them a wide berth.

Finally, after opening a door, she was greeted with the site of the gaping maw of an open Vault door, and she almost cried in relief. But she saw one last Gary dragging a dead body into the Vault. He didn't even notice her and she put one careful shot into his head. He had a unloaded revolver and no ammo, and the dead wastelander had some bottlecaps, a paper map and some jury-rigged homemade pipe rifle. It took the same 5mm or so ammo as her M4, so she took the fifty or so rounds, carefully laid the homemade piece of garbage against the wall, and used the heel of her boot to crack it into two parts. She wasn't going to carry that heavy useless fucking thing, but she wasn't going to leave it for the Garies in case it did work.

She didn't entirely run out into the sunlight because she was a little worried about possible raiders, deathclaws and other monsters but she proceeded with "prudent haste" into the light of full day.

She felt herself sniffling and tears running down her face as she looked up at the sky, after ensuring there were no threats in the immediate vacinity.

This was emotional for multiple reasons for her. Not only was she out of that hellhole but a full half of her memories had not been on the dirt of planet Earth in... well since the TITAN AIs had forced everyone who wasn't a brain-controlled puppet off the planet killed everyone who remained.

She reached down, grabbed a handful of dirt between her fingers, and just sniffled at it for a moment, feeling it fall through her fingers. A handful of genuine old Terra dirt, alive with its microbiome, could be sold on habitat for enough to buy a top-end biomorph body. Everyone was nostalgic about Earth, especially those who had lived through the Fall. She used to have a penny that must have been in someone's pocket when they fled, she made it into a pendant, and it was one of the most valuable things she owned.

This desert wasn't also that different from the desert of New Mexico, where her grandpa took her camping in state parks. She couldn't remember his face, but he had passed away while she was deployed overseas for the first time. The fact that the land around the former nation's capital looked like a New Mexico desert wasn't that great of a sign, though.

She glanced up at the sky again, gauging the sun's position. It was close to directly overhead, which meant it was close to or just after noon. Glancing around she found a regular, everyday stick and shoved it into the ground, straight up. Then, she used a different stick to mark the position of the shadow the stick was casting.

She found a place to sit down for a moment and got her medical supplies ready. It took some work, but she managed to use the mirror, a position that looked more at home playing Twister and forceps to prize a bullet out of her ass cheek. It hadn't even penetrated more than halfway through; did that mean she was thicc with two C's? She ensured there was no foreign debris in the wound before putting a bandage on it, and her clothes back on.

She ate two whole Fancy Lad cakes and an entire litre of water. She would try to keep the water in her camelback for the hike so she didn't have to keep stopping and starting to get a drink.

Laying both of her rifles on the ground, she took out some tools from the toolbox and transferred the red dot sight onto the M4-style carbine. Then she used maybe fifteen minutes and five rounds of ammo to zero the sight to 100 meters, or the closest approximation of that she could come to without some kind of rangefinder. She stowed the pistol carbine with the rest of the gear, tied on top of her ruck and got everything back together.

Returning to the stick, she marked the position of the stick's shadow again and then drew a straight line through both marks. That would be a west-east line. The first shadow mark is always west, so she turned to the north.

She looked at the map from the dead Wastelander. How convenient. It had Canterbury Commons, this Vault and Rivet City way in the bottom marked. Not Megaton, though, but she was more or less sure it was around this area west of the river.

She was pretty sure PipBoys not only had compasses built in but some sort of freaking GPS, so it was a shame she couldn't use hers right now. Was this map placed here by the mysterious ways of ROB? She didn't know how standard maps of the Wasteland were.

Well, whatever. She began her trek north.

She started seeing landmarks about four hours later when the evening sun started its slow trek towards setting, and a little while later she found signs of people. She wasn't challenged, despite the fact that she must look like a hardened Spec Ops operator (in her mind, at least), until she walked into a diner across the street from what appeared to be a fire station. She was polite enough to sling her rifle before entering, though.

The few people inside still looked at her suspiciously, though at first, until she took off her riot helmet and shook out her hair from its bun. Then, with the sight of the Doctor's well-shampooed tresses and Colgate smile, they opened up a little. One well-weathered man smiled at her and said, "Well, howdy, stranger. You certainly look like you've seen better days. I'm Louis, and this little one is my son Derek."