Chapter 50: Fixing the World Through Science!
Timothy couldn't help but look at his lab partner, she really was a seriously intimidating presence, standing about eight feet tall and built like a brick shithouse, as he let his eyes roam over her broad and incredibly well-muscled back, her shoulder tops were bigger than his thighs let alone her arms.
Honestly, she kinda reminded him of a picture of a female Orc that he'd seen in a comic that one of the scout teams had recovered from a trip into the city once, she was completely solid with not a single ounce of fat on her anywhere that he could see which given that she seemed to be wearing an oversized lab coat that the odd spider centaur boy Malakai had made for her.
But what he could see was as solid as bunched steel, she had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows showing off her massive forearms and hands as she worked on dismantling the helmet that she had, he also couldn't help but be impressed by the nimbleness and dexterity of her large fingers as she worked.
She seemed to sense him looking at her and she turned to look at him shooting him a surprisingly shy smile as she did while also brushing a long bang of her long black hair over her ear.
Another shock came to him in just how handsome her face was, despite being a super mutant she was a very handsome woman, her features were feminine and attractive and that both shocked and scared him.
He'd been taught since the day he was born into the Brotherhood that he should hate super mutants and in fact, anyone who is different from humans, this attitude had indeed eased somewhat towards Ghouls the hatred still prevailed in its entirety towards the super mutants and to be fair it was with good reason, it was kinda hard to be understanding or to go easy on creatures that would happily kill you and desecrate your body by eating you.
For as long as he had been alive Super mutants had been a threat to humanity where ever they chose to tread, killing villages and towns, attacking caravans and killing simple people who were doing nothing more than trying to scratch a life for themselves in this awful world.
But now with the emergence of these smart super mutant groups, the water got muddier because it brought in a moral and ethical question to the equation, whereas before it was easy you see super mutants you kill them, simple.
Now though if there were intelligent did they have a right to simply exterminate them for nothing more than existing?
Especially if they were non-violent like Shauna here seemed to be, now according to Seven, the group that Shauna had come from that called themselves the Amazons had been exterminated by Seven's group freeing others like Shauna.
Then there was the other group that Seven had mentioned calling themselves the Greasers who were made up entirely of male super mutants and oh boy did that feel odd to say, now most people made the mistake of thinking that all super mutants were boys when infact they were genderless, it simply didn't matter what gender you were going into the vat coming out you were one of them plain and simple, but now apparently with this new variant in play you go in and come out the same but different, same person, different body.
So this left the question, did anybody simply have the right to simply just exterminate these poor people?
Yes, they were super mutants but no they weren't like their genderless cousins, Shauna and Raymond who he had met only briefly when he had delivered some equipment to the lab along with Visa and Ven.
Oh boy, now there was a whole new eye-opening world in themselves, sentient Deathclaws that talked and felt the same as any human and hell any other sentient race and the fact that they could love and even mate with humans or indeed other races.
The thought genuinely shocked and scared Timothy but it also made him kinda curious, what exactly did a claw see in a human and visa versa, but apparently they were very happy with each other both Visa and Seven did seem to genuinely love one another as did Ven and Gregory which was even more surprising in that a male claw loved a male human.
In fact, the whole group was a living breathing testament to what humans and non-humans could achieve together and not just in-between the sheets, from what Seven had said this group was responsible for removing the threat of Paradise falls to the region which was no lightweight feat.
That group had held so much power that even the Brotherhood had seen them as a threat to their operations and safety, but given the sheer amount of fighting that had been doing with the super mutants they simply hadn't had the people or the ordinance to deal with them but these guys as small as they were in number had simply walked in there and taken the whole place out in one fell swoop proving they were not people you would want to mess about with, not that messing about with death claws was generally advisable in the first place.
But somehow contrary to what not only what he would have believed to begin with but what he had been taught with the Brotherhood, this group had already achieved incredible things and now here he was being offered a chance to be a part of.
That brought him back to Shauna and the smile she was shooting at him, he couldn't believe that in any way shape or form that he could find anyone other than another human attractive, not that he'd exactly had a lot of experience with the opposite sex, one or two of the paladins had made a couple of advances towards him but he'd always rebuffed them due to his nervousness and his lack of confidence and indeed self-worth which had evoked a mixture of reactions from them ranging from pity to outright anger, he also discovered that the paladins and soldiers whispered worse than a sewing circle and he had been the subject of the giggling-behind-hands brigade more than once which had done sweet fuck all for his confidence.
But in all honesty, while he could see attractive qualities within his own race now being presented with an attractive member of another race his entire world had been shocked to its very core, but he simply could not deny what his eyes were telling him, Shauna truly was a beautiful woman and an incredibly smart one too.
He smiled back at her shyly feeling exactly the same as he did every time one of the paladins or soldiers had given him the same smile, "So have you seen anything like this before?" Shauna asked snapping Tim out of his daydream state and he shook his head to clear it.
"No but I've been hearing the stories about them," he said stepping forwards up to the workbench and looking at the disassembled helmet that had been taken from the head of one of the enslaved deathclaws the Enclave had been using.
"I gotta give them this it's an incredible piece of kit, I'm no engineer I'm a biologist and virologist so I can at least figure out how it's manipulating the brain of the claws if you can figure out what each part is doing," Shauna said and Tim nodded lifting one of the parts and turning it over in his hands.
It took them hours and a whole lot of coffee that the pair were grabbing in pots from the mess of the safehouse/bunker that they were in but eventually, they began to make progress as Tim began to identify each part one by one until they began to see how they worked in conjunction together, but finally after many hours of work they had a eureka moment.
"I've got it!! I know how they are fucking doing it!!" Shauna yelled suddenly making Tim nearly jump out of his skin and dropping the charge coil onto the bench from where he had been studying the coil.
He spun around and saw Shauna standing at the whiteboard that she had been doing equations on writing them around a picture of a claw skull and brain they'd drawn in the centre of it, "What have you got?" he asked walking over to her.
"Look here, this component you identified is changing the claw's neuroelectric field yes?" she said holding up the circular component that Tim had plucked out of a receiver that sat between the two tesla like coils and what he had figured out was a radio wave receiver.
"Yeah so?" he said.
'THey've mapped the muscle response of the claws! Think about it, its the only way this could possibly work, what they must have done is subject captured claws to invasive scans and bioelectrical probing to map what signals are sent to what muscles and how, so what this thing does is act like an interrupt, the only ones that get through are the ones that control the claw's organs like it's heart, lungs et cetera, but the ones to its legs and arms and everything else are being interrupted by this little thing and then are being replaced by the signals being sent from the controller to the receiver which is then sent to the claw's muscles and boom radio control claw" Shauna said.
