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Link:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-house-always-wins-a-fallout-new-vegas-quest.879525/
("You see that you and I are of a different stripe, don't you? We don't have to dream that we're important. We are.")
Turn 0 - 3:32 AM, October 23, 2077
You are Robert Edwin House, arguably one of the most intelligent men alive in 2077 and inarguably one of the most successful. Born on June 25, 2020 to a wealthy Nevada tool magnate, you were orphaned at an early age when both of your parents were killed in a freak storm while testing a new model of gyrocopter. To add to the misery of the situation, your step brother Anthony cheated you out of both your parent's money and their company, H&H Tools, leaving you destitute, young, and alone. Despite that, your raw intellect and what scraps of wealth your brother saw fit to leave behind allowed you to attend the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, the most prestigious school for engineers and scientists in the United States.
Despite the difficulties you faced, you graduated as Valedictorian at the age of twenty, going on to found your company RobCo at the age of twenty two in 2044. In three short years, you built yourself an empire of steel and gears, creating an industrial titan that would go on to supply the United States with the robotic and technological might it desperately needed to fight back the threat of communism and maintain its place as the penultimate power on the world stage. In 2051, business boomed yet again as the United States launched an invasion of the United Mexican States, occupying the nation and syphoning its oil reserves north to fuel the continued might of the Union, your robots playing a vital role in subborning attempts to resist American rule.
The reasons for the invasion quickly become clear in 2052 as most of the world is wracked by an energy crisis, kickstarting a race for new and more innovative sources of energy to replace oil. As the world grew increasingly unstable, resource wars breaking out across the continent, you found yourself significantly more embedded with the government, your robots serving to defend American interests across North America, the jingoistic stance of the current administration only being reinforced by the dissolution of the United Nations later that year. In the next several years, a brutal pandemic and limited nuclear conflict in the Middle East prompted the initiation of Project Safehouse, financing the creation of nuclear shelters referred to as 'Vaults' to shelter the American population if the worst was to occur.
As the world grew increasingly unstable, RobCo's profits skyrocketed, your company benefiting greatly from the massive governmental contracts and elimination of restrictive regulations. A staunch pragmatist by nature, you would regularly design and run mathematical projections based on global political and socioeconomic conditions in an effort to predict future events. By 2065, your projections showed something frightening, if not particularly shocking: within the next fifteen years, the world would be subsumed in a nuclear holocaust. Worse, at least in your eyes, your contacts in the military were able to inform you that the People's Republic of China, the main rival of the United States, currently had seventy seven nuclear warheads aimed at your beloved city of Las Vegas. Of course, you could not allow this to stand: given the failures of the current government, you were clearly the only individual capable of resolving this crisis.
Over the next twelve years, you rallied your assets, contacts, and intellect to construct the defenses that Vegas will need to survive the coming storm. You put in place measures that would disable the majority of the missiles in flight, eliminating the threat they would pose to the city. To further secure the safety of the city, you installed an array of high powered laser cannons on top of the Lucky 38 Hotel and Casino, the heart of your Empire and the place you call home. To ensure that you could live on to see the city that you had saved, you redesigned the Lucky 38 to serve as a bastion capable of preserving you through the coming storm, at the heart of which you placed an extremely sophisticated life support device referred to as a hibernation chamber. While you would have to be attached to it permanently, you don't truly mind: you didn't get out much anyways.
The only missing piece was your Platinum Chip, a sophisticated, high-density data storage device holding an array of software upgrades that would overhaul both your robotic Securitrons and the Lucky 38 itself, ensuring that you would be able to weather the storm that the apocalypse brought with ease. As it stands, the Chip is set to arrive twenty hours from now, ensuring that your plans would be secured three years before the deadline.
Of course, this was not to be.
3:32 AM, October 23, 2077
An angry beeping pierces through the fog of your sleep like a hot knife, sending you stumbling face first into the unwelcoming land of the waking. You rouse yourself from your position on your workbench with an angry grunt, casting off the funk that had gathered around you over the last few days: waiting for the arrival of the Chip had been… straining, to say the least, even excluding other current events. Casting an eye over the half assembled Securitron on the workbench, you take a moment to consider the problems that have confronted you most recently. The news about the Automation Riots in Appalachia had been unsettling, especially given the direct involvement of RobCo: the primary cause behind the protests was the role your robots had in replacing local workers. Beyond that, there was the entire mess surrounding the Archetype Project: you could understand making use of… individuals such as death row inmates and prisoners of war, even if it was rather questionable. The recent use of normal American citizens was much more… unsettling, something that you weren't quite used to. You didn't particularly enjoy it. There was also that invitation from General Chase: you don't know why he wants you to visit some old Posideon oil rig, though you assume it must be rather important, given the urgency he placed on it.
You allow yourself to ignore the beeping from the console at the back of your workshop for a moment longer, taking a swig from your beloved mug of coffee, your face twisting as the bitter room temperature liquid coats your mouth. The mug is set aside with a disgusted grimace and a mumbled promise to fill it with something more satisfying as you stride across the workshop, directing your ire towards the cause of your awakening. If this was simply some company matter that one of your subordinates felt urgent enough to wake you for… you'd probably take it out on them in the morning, all things considered: you weren't feeling awake enough to provide them the reprimand that they deserved for disturbing you at an hour like this. Your blurry eyes scan across the screen, taking in the text present there and taking a moment to truly ponder the implications. Then you do it again. And again.
The exhaustion is gone.
In its place is fear.
Raising a shaky hand to your head to wipe away the sudden perspiration, you can't help but feel as though the cramped workshop is now stiflingly hot. Ignoring the momentary discomfort, you read the report again, taking the time to absorb the details before you.
"Damnation."
Before you truly consider what you're doing, you move, pushing yourself away from the terminal and rushing out the door into the Presidential Suite of the Lucky 38, ignoring the greetings of your robots as you finally go through with the plans and protocols you put in place all those years ago.
It was finally happening. More importantly, it was happening twenty hours too early, twenty hours before the Platinum Chip arrived. Twenty hours before you could save Vegas. With a sinking heart, one thing becomes clear: despite all of your preparation, you are not ready. The work you'd put in, the money you'd spent, it wouldn't be enough to save your city. Without the Platinum Chip…
No.
You are Robert Edwin House. Twelve years ago, you swore that you would save this city and that is what you intend to do. Despite lacking the Platinum Chip, you still have the baseline RobCo operating system, as well as your prototype Golden Chip. Neither was perfect of course, but there wasn't time for perfect: what you needed was good enough. Logging into the Central Terminal is surprisingly difficult, the shaking of your hands making typing far more difficult than it should be. Once the login process is complete, it's a mad dash to retrieve the necessary files from the arcane depths of the mainframe, giving you plenty of time to curse yourself for the intentionally difficult to navigate organizational structure of your files. You can't help but glance at the clock as the minutes tick by, the weight of the task before you seeming almost suffocating: you had three hours before everything ended.
The procedure needed to place yourself within the hibernation chamber would take two hours, the installation of your chosen operating system two and a half. More than enough time for your purposes, even if you expected to have far more. With a final and decisive motion, you begin the installation process, turning moments later and striding towards the central chamber of the suite.
There is no time to lose.
[Standard Operating System] The standard operating system used by most RobCo products, this option is the safest… but also more limited. The hard work put into this ensures that there is practically no chance of a catastrophic failure, though the actual functionality was limited. Beyond that, it would mean limiting Securitrons to their more… legal secondary weaponry, rather than their much more potent primary weapons. Beyond that, you hadn't managed to get the self repair system working yet… but it would have to do.
[No chance of critical failure, Civilian Weapon Suites, +10 to rolls involving robots and your OS.]
[Prototype Gold Chip System] Your original attempt to create a new operating system for your beloved robots, the Gold Chip was a success… of sorts. Serving as a work of passion, built over countless long nights of slightly tipsy labor, the Gold Chip serves as a testament to your personal genius. Despite the artistry of its design, it lacks the advantage of being reviewed by a full team of bug testers, meaning that it is still riddled with minor errors. Capable of achieving a level of efficiency four times that of the standard model, showing greater potential for monumental successes, and having access to the full weapons suites, the Gold Chip would be a superior option in every way if it didn't fail catastrophically one out of ten times. It did have some of the more interesting predictive algorithms however, allowing it to estimate impacts of defense prioritization decisions within a two hundred year prediction range.
[Critical Failure on 1-10, Critical Success on 95-100, Semi-Functional Military Weapon Suites, +40 to rolls involving robots and your OS.]
[Platinum Chip Operating system] Error 404