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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 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."