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[first_of_steel]

That Mindy girl's alien burgers had turned out pretty good last night, and Roger will remember them in future, but right now his mind was on something else she told him about. She'd mentioned the Sensoriums could simulate just about any environment he could think of, and since he'd found a map to their location on his omnicomm this morning, he figured he'd put that to the test. He'd seen virtual reality training pods before, although as an MP he never really rated using one, so he wasn't sure what to expect.

... the desert north of the Lost Hills bunker where they'd been taking the younger Initiates for training, apparently. An absolutely perfect replica thereof, even down to the scorpions the size of Corvegas.

Huh.

Well, no sense wasting a perfectly good blighted hellscape. They'd pulled him here to fight a war, hadn't they? Might as well start practicing for it.

He pulls his helmet over his head, flips the neck latches shut, and reaches over his shoulder for the supersledge he carries. He'll break out the laserguns later. Right now, for all that he's taken his situation pretty well so far, he really, really wants to hit something.

Comments

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi smiled a little, but shook his head, walking across the sand toward Roger to examine the dead arachnid. "I'm afraid I can't take the credit. All Synthetic Humans of my generation possess increased strength."

He motioned to the dead creature. "Seems a little bigger than your average desert dweller. Are these common where you came from?"

[first_of_steel]

"Synthetic- huh."

The guy looks normal enough, at least compared to the contents of Mariposa. Must be an android or something, with a term like that hanging over him. Well, he seemed safe enough for now.

"Unfortunately, yeah, they are. They weren't this big twenty years ago." He shakes his head, glancing up at the remarkably well-faked sun. "All the fallout from the Great War must've mutated them. They're too normal-looking to be the result of somebody's experiments."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Hmm. He wondered if he hadn't given Roger the wrong idea about himself.

"The Great War? ...You mean the first World War?" It was difficult, sometimes, to negotiate the different timelines represented on the ship. Maybe Roger hadn't even come from Earth.

[first_of_steel]

"No, no-" Roger waved a hand. "Planet-wide atomic war, twenty years ago. United States versus Red China, with everybody else kicking in along the way. Lasted about two hours. Not much left standing after that."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

"Ah. That never happened in my timeline. ...You wouldn't happen to know a Veronica, would you?" Roger was the second person today to mention radiation and atomic war.

'Red China'. Hmm. So this man was probably from the 20th or 21st centuries. Much like the rest of the ship. "My condolences. It doesn't sound like a very pleasant place to live."

[first_of_steel]

"Met her not long after I found my gear," Roger confirms. "She's from about two hundred years after my time. I take it you've met her as well?"

He glances briefly over his shoulder, then back to his companion. "It's not," he says. "We're working on it. But it's going to be a very long haul."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. I usually make the rounds at pod releases, see if there are any questions I can answer. I don't get to everyone, obviously. But from what she told me, I'd guess you were right. So what was it that set off the war?"

[first_of_steel]

Roger heaves a sigh, holds up one armored finger. If he's going to talk about this, he wants his helmet off. Not like they're going to have any radscorpions sneak up on them.

Once his head's free and his helmet tucked under his arm, he says, "The Resource Wars went south, basically. I don't know how much Scribe Santangelo would've told you, but the world's oil supplies started running out when I was still in grade school. Same thing happened with other energy resources along the way. China invaded Alaska about three years after I joined the Army, mostly to get at the oil. We finally ran them out of North America in January of '77. Still had forces on the ground in a lot of places, though. Somebody, I don't know who, decided to take the final step in October of that year."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

It was strange, listening to Roger's explanation, hearing how things could have been but weren't. On his Earth, anyway. "I recall there being recorded shortages of fossil fuels in the 20th century. And mutually ensured weapon via nuclear weapons was certainly a concern. But it's hard to imagine things getting to the point where someone would actually have instigated that kind of disaster. Especially knowing the stakes involved."

Not impossible to imagine, of course. Especially considering what had happened in the 31st century.

[first_of_steel]

"This wasn't just shortage. This was complete and total ending of fossil fuel supplies," Roger says. "Everywhere. The last oil field in Texas ran completely dry in 2052. Half the wars in the Middle East died out by 2060 because there wasn't anything left to fight over except the holy sites. About all we had left to work with was nuclear power, and experimental solar energy generation out West in a couple of places."

"Between running out of energy, trying to keep everyone in the world fed, and diseases like the New Plague out there, I wish I could say I was surprised when those bastards finally let the A-bombs fly."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

"No one planned ahead for this?" Zouichi was a little surprised; humanity in general wasn't good at looking ahead to the far future, but when things started looking dire, they usually kicked it into high gear as far as research and development was concerned.

"...and what do you mean, the New Plague?"

[first_of_steel]

"The United States started doing everything in its power to convert to atomic energy pretty early on," Roger says. "The rest of the world... they weren't so good at it. Not to mention that even if they all had managed to move off coal and oil for energy, the sheer amount of plastics and advanced polymers in use was just draining the oil supply as fast as anything Chryslus Motors could've put on the road. We had our atomic cars, we had Hoover Dam, we moved our robots onto fission batteries and we invented the microfusion cell, but in the end it just wasn't enough."

He grimaces. "That was an epidemic that broke out in Colorado when I was eight," he says. "New Plague. Think influenza, the 1918 strain. Add in fevers, hemorrhaging, and swellings that make the worst case of the mumps you've ever seen look like a prickly heat rash. Spreads fast, spreads hard, tends to kill within a week or so of the onset of symptoms. It killed two hundred thousand people in Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs alone before the government brought down the boom and imposed a national quarantine."

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi looked grim. He supposed some things didn't really change from one Earth to the next. "Naturally caused? Or engineered?" For some reason, this seemed to be an important detail for him.

"You survived... were you not in the area at the time? Or did you recover from the illness? What was its efficacy?"

That was right. Back then, the nation-states were still all strongly divided by physical borders. Eventually, time had eroded those somewhat, allowing rapid global deployment of personnel and equipment. But apparently, it had happened too late for Roger's world.

[first_of_steel]

"Chinese bioweapon," Roger said, equally grimly. "Rumor had it the zero point was a couple of Chinese agents captured in the act of seeding the virus in Denver. Engineered, to the best of my knowledge, not domesticated."

Most of what he knew about the New Plague's origins was what he had been fed by the scientists at West-Tek and Mariposa. Given what they'd been working on in supposed response to the disease, he didn't particularly trust them, but it was all the information he had. Probably all the information anyone had, now.

"I was still a kid then. I grew up in Wisconsin," he said. "Understand, the damn disease started turning up nationwide before they could really stop it. But I wasn't anywhere near the hot zone at its height."