The hackette and the survivalist.

[Soveliss]

Year 2050. World tensions are raising as several rogue states are enjoying inexplicable success with nuclear programs, and the developed world has been spending more than ever into experimental technologies. You are a teen female, very good with hacking, and with salvaging junk and trash as well as overlooked and discarded items to build things with them, living on US soil. You have been hired by a well funded conspiracy nuts group on the Deep Web to investigate disappearances of homeless people in Detroit, as the conspiracy claim that vehicles of experimental tech giant Omnitech were always seen near their last known location, and Omnitech has to be involved somehow, and the data must be on their servers. You managed to infiltrate their servers and grab a heavily encrypted file. But before you could look for the encryption key, you were abducted by Omnitech and sent to a joint Omnitech-CIA blacksite. You had enough time to see hundreds of people, some of them you recognized as missing homeless from Detroit whose pictures you have been sent by the conspiracy nuts. Many seemed brain damaged to the point they were more beasts than humans. Others seemed to have regressed to a state of severe mental retardation. Others seemed to just be perpetually dopey and have no initiative. Others still seemed to be actively struggling against several musclebound thughs. You were brought to what looked like a sci-fi sleeping pod, and forcefully confined in it, naked, while every other non CIA were confined to others. Row upon rows of them. Then you felt a weird mix of cold and sleepy. You felt tired. You went to sleep.

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"Truly a fair deal Melissa. So there's this weapon cache by an organization called Omnitech, probably is the haul of a lifetime, locked by a gate impervious to all the blowtorches and explosives you have access to. You go there with three goons driving your cobbled together trucks so you can loot the place and retire with the profits... The place has good electronic security that you know how to bypass, no guards since they all died of carton homicide poisoning, because the ventilation system malfunctioned or something. So you want me to crawl into the ventilation system with a jury-rigged origin mask so I can breathe because, being under 1m50, I'm the only one small enough to do it. And all I get my pick of on weapon and ammo from the cache, as well as as many miscellaneous items as I can carry.
-You got it Liz. Now I could have gotten any random urchin to do it, but you are disciplined enough to give me the best odds of actually use the oxygen mask to open the gate, stealthy enough to avoid any security that may still operate on backup power, and skilled enough in guns to shoot anything giving you trouble. Go to the entrance, and open the gates. The button you have to push is marked by a padlock.
-Which is good for me, because I lost everything but the clothes on my back due to a Molotov lighting my backpack, which had dynamite in it, on fire. I lost everything throwing it at these mercs, and it also destroyed their gear when it exploded, but I'm still alive. And with the bounty the slavers have put on me, I am too busy escaping mercs of all stripes, so I literally can't deny your job offer.
-Smart girl. Let's go before the price on your head jeopardizes my mission."

It took a small drive to the place. Liz was handed a 9 mm handgun and 20 rounds. Explosives were set on the malfunctioning ventilation system. Liz was handed the origin mask, and crawled through the vents. She escaped them, and unlocked the entrance. Melissa was there, with her 22 LR rifle, and her three hired muscle were guarding the trucks with baseball bats. Melissa guided Liz to the control room.The control room overlooked may strange devices, some strange oval shapes with a glass window, each containing a human being inside.

"Freeze Liz, and drop the gun to the floor.
-You had to keep all the weapons to yourself?"

Melissa handcuffed Liz, and turned her around gently stroking her cheek.

"You don't get it Liz, do you? This is no mere weapons cache. When I learned about the Omnitech-CIA blacksite, I just had to get it. The technologies inside are legendary. Here was the first ever successful cryogenics program. Preserving people in cryosleep, where they don't age and can be unfrozen anytime... There could be an army in these pods, ready to wake up. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Neural conditioning. Enough to make anyone a mindlessly obedient servant and soldier. Combine the two, and you have an army just waiting for my orders, and the ways to grow it! The technology is still experimental mind you and neural conditioning resulted in lots of brain damage at first, and no on knew how well neural conditioning interacted with cryogenics, so they threw all their brainwashed test subject along with a control group in there, where they're ready to wake up! I will first use that tech on the three muscle head mercs. If it works, you're next Liz. Don't worry, you'll come to love serving your new Goddess with your cute body and weapons skills! And this is just..."

Liz simply headbutted Melissa in the middle of her monologue. She may not have had an education in sciences and thus didn't understand much aside from Melissa wanting to wake up a sleeping army she assumed was brainwashed and came with the way to order it around, and brainwash the wastelands to rule as an wannabe goddess, but she was smart enough to know that when you manage to get your enemy monologuing, there as only one proper way to stop them from monologuing: a decisive attack at the moment they expect least. The impact knocked the mask off Melissa. Melissa recovered quickly, grabbed her gun, took aim, and Liz dove on the ground, hoping to avoid one shot. The shot missed her, and a red light activated.

"Gunfire detected in command room. This blacksite is going in lockdown until manual override is confirmed."

A heavy door shut off the command room. Melissa stood up, walked to Liz, and put her booted foot on Liz's chest. She took careful aim at Liz's head. Liz closed her eyes. The pressure on her chest vanished. So this was how it felt to be dead? This couldn't be it. She still felt the gas tank against her back, and still heard blaring warnings. She opened her eyes. Melisa lay unmoving next to her, the rifle out of her grip. OF COURSE! The air was poisonous here. Talk about a close call. Crawling to Melissa, Liz managed to grab the key to the handcuffs and free herself. She couldn't open the door by force, so she had to override it, whatever that meant. Liz observed the room. The bulletproof glass showed that big doors to the big room were also closed. They likely closed all over the place. There was a computer flashing a yellow triangle in the command room. Liz grabbed the rifle and handgun, and all she could from Melissa. It included the origin mask and tank, the rifle and 12 .22 LR rounds, two MREs and a strange key with the same logo as the one in the building in it. With Melissa dead, the muscle may turn on Liz. If she could get at least one of the people there to go first, she would know where the muscle stood regarding her with their employer dead. But she had no idea how to do that. She touched the screen. text and numbers appeared. This was the time she regretted most not knowing how to read. It was usually annoying enough trying to figure out how to eat an MRE with just the pictures or having to open any box/can of liquid she found to know what was inside (and she often got it wrong, not that she ever tried to eat something other than an MRE or something from a tin can), but now her life was at stake if she couldn't make sense of these letters. Next to the screen were a square of yellow and black lines, and a keyhole, both with a yellow triangle above them. The keyhole matched the key she grabbed from Melissa. She inserted the key, and turned it. the square of black and yellow lines retreated, and there was a red button. She pressed it.

"The self destruct sequence has been activated. All personnel must evacuate immediately. All doors are now unlocked and all bulkheads are open. Cryopods are being  disabled as well. All experiment and security data being transmitted to the Omnitech satellite network. Error. Satellite network not detected. To abort the self-destruction sequence, type in an authorized code in one of the emergency consoles."

So the "army" was woking up. Liz wondered how the base would destroy itself, but guessed it was probably explosives all over. She hurried to try to find a stair to go to the floor with the strange oval things. They all opened as she arrived. Some humans looked confused and indecisive, others were catatonic or acting like they took too many blows to the head. She held the origin mast and tank.

"Anyone, put the mask on and listen to me if you wanna live."

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You woke, up somewhat confused. You felt like you had slept for a long while but were still sleepy, even though warning klaxons were blazing. It was giving you a headache. You saw a young adult woman holding what looked like a breathing mask connected to a gas tank, telling you to put it on if you wanted to live. She was holding a rifle, so she was probably part of the experimentation. But what did you have to lose anyways? She could always just shoot you if you didn't comply fast enough. Very soon, you would learn the world has long ended in a nuclear inferno, Omnitech just a few weeks from a tangible solution to take over the world following a nuclear war when the bombs hit, and that you have no idea how to survive in a post nuclear world. But maybe the young adult who gave you the breathing mask and tank could take you in?

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PS: Liz never had a formal education, she's smart in her survivalist way, but she never went to anything resembling school, so she... Doesn't quite get what we consider elementary chemistry/physics like oxygen (origin) or carbon monoxide poisoning. If you see butchered academic concepts in my posts, it's Liz defaulting to the "closest sounding word she knows" when hearing words she doesn't understand.

So, anyone wants to play a hackette who has no idea how the wasteland works but has a knack for making up small tech out of whatever can be salvaged being mentored by a slightly older (5 years tops) survivalist lacking even basic schooling in anything that's not hunting, foraging, sneaking, shooting, and physical conditioning? Both having a lot to offer the other.