Case nodded his head. The courier's brain was snarky and rude as fuck, while his brain, was… how to say it? More retreated, more calmer, and way way more blues. Heck, Case got the feeling that the brain would rather be destroyed than anything else.
"Then came the Legion. The chains. The weight of the collar. I still feel the hands on us, Case. The endless nights of being used, the sodomy... the systematic stripping of everything we were."
The brain seemed to shrink further within its glass prison, the gray folds twitching in the green light.
"The human brain is funny," it whispered, the voice dripping with a bitter, clinical detachment. "It has ways to stop a human from fearing, to stop them from feeling, by cutting off the painful memories like gangrenous limbs. But now, with a consciousness of my own—me, the brain—I have all of it flowing back. If not for the heavy hormones Mobius pumps into this tank, you would hear me sobbing in this… glass retreat."
Case felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. "You're this hurt, brain?"
"OF COURSE I'M HURT!" The brain's telepathic shout was like a physical blow, causing the liquid in the jar to churn violently. "What? You think being used by dozens of legionnaires won't leave you scarred for life? You have forgotten it, all of it! And thanks to whom? Thanks to me! I took the weight so you could keep walking!"
Case stood silent for a long moment, the hum of the laboratory suddenly feeling deafening. "I'm… sorry."
"Not your fault, Will. Or Case. Hmph. Who am I even talking to?" the brain sighed, its anger dissolving back into a flat, depressed exhaustion. "William Mayer, M.D., or simply... Case."
Case's eyes widened behind his visor. The name hit him like a freight train. "So my past life was William? With an M.D.? Who am I?"
"An Internist, Case. An Internist," the brain replied, its voice buzzing with a haunting, professional pride that felt like a ghost in the machine. "Unlike you, I don't have a body to produce the hormones that obstruct the truth. Without those chemical filters, everything is too clear. There is no memory blocking here. And with no memory blocking? Fuck living. I see the pills you swallowed to end it all. I see the slave pens. I see the Legionnaires... the blood... the violations. Don't you get it? I was a prisoner in your body, helpless to stop the input. Out here, I'm finally separate."
Case felt a cold knot tighten in his chest. "Do you have any happy memories?"
"Hell if I know," the brain answered with a mental sneer. "Maybe a moment or two from our old life, but I don't think we ever lived a happy life, Case. Not really. In fact, your recent memories from the last two years are the only light in this jar—the warmth, the feeling of falling in love with the girl in the riot gear."
Case's heart hammered against his ribs. He stole a quick glance toward Milla. "I'm not—"
"Oh, please," the brain interrupted. "Who else do you bring on every single mission? Or rather, she brought you, and you accepted it without hesitation, even when it meant crossing the Colorado into the lion's den. You didn't do that for the Rangers. You did it for her."
"SHHH, brain, be quiet," Case hissed, his face burning under his helmet. "I don't need you spreading rumors left and right."
"Right, so… what did you do to yourself?" Case asked, his medical intuition as an Internist flickering to life despite his own shock. He looked at the dials and the pulsing electrodes attached to the jar. "You can think. You're articulate. That shouldn't be possible with your level of PTSD—not without a total psychological collapse."
"Hormone adjustment," the brain replied, a bit of that old Dr. Mayer smugness creeping into the gloom. "Funny things, hormones. I simply adjust everything I need here in the tank. I can dial in the precise amount of serotonin to keep calm, the adrenaline to feel angry, the cortisol to feel sad. I am my own chemist now."
The liquid in the jar bubbled as the brain pulsed with a faint blue light.
"Of course, you wouldn't feel it," it continued. "The Tesla coils they shoved into your skull when they took me out... they won't react to me anymore. I'm my own consciousness."
Case looked at his reflection in the glass—the armored man who had survived the Legion, the horrors of Big Mountain, and the unforgiving Mojave—while the "old him" stayed behind in a jar, drugging himself into a state of artificial stability.
What was there to say, really? He didn't have a medical textbook for this. He just had the weight of the rifle on his back and the mission ahead.
"So, brain, what do you say?" Case asked, his voice low and firm. "Ready to confront the Think Tank? Flush yourself back to the Think Tank. Let me have those aggressive thoughts—the ones you've been holding back. We'll use them to intimidate Klein and the others, take over this whole place with the Rangers as our personnel, and actually make some real changes."
The brain was silent for a moment, the nutrient fluid swirling as it processed the shift in the plan. The idea of control—real, tangible control over the very place that had dissected them—seemed to spark a different kind of electrical pulse in the jar.
"Oh, like the Courier?" the brain mused, its tone shifting from depressed to a dark, calculating curiosity. "Delightful. I've always wanted to see Big Mountain with all this tech actually doing something useful instead of being a mere… shadow in the background."
"That's what I wanted to hear," Case said.
"Let me flush my way there," the brain said.
The brain-jar closed with a final, pressurized hiss. As the fluid began to drain, Case felt a strange, phantom tingling at the base of his skull—the brain was already beginning its high-speed transit through the facility's pneumatic tubes.
Milla stepped away from the terminal, holding a holodisk she had just finished copying. "Case, look at this. I found the source."
She pulled up the data on her Pip-Boy for the team to see. It was an entry titled Plan 13 - Subject: Old World Blues. The code was a masterpiece of neurological sabotage; it was a deep-layer script designed to truncate the Think Tank's short-term memory banks every few hours.
"It's a lobotomy of the mind, not the body," Milla explained, her voice tight with disgust. "It keeps them trapped in a perpetual loop of 'now.' They remember the 21st century perfectly, but they can't remember what they did five minutes ago. That's why they never leave—they literally forget they even wanted to."
"And somehow, our arrival alleviated the programming a bit," Case noted, his mind already beginning to bridge the gap between his Ranger instincts and his medical past.
"Possibly," Milla agreed, looking at the scrolling code. "The sheer chaos of a full-scale Ranger incursion probably created enough new stimuli to bypass their routine. For a few minutes, they were actually forced to pay attention to the present."
Jacob let out a low whistle, leaning his weight against his heavy machine gun. "So they're geniuses who can't remember where they put their car keys. No wonder this place has been a stagnant loop for two centuries. They aren't just crazy; they're stalled."
"Alright, that's that," Case said, his voice dropping into a tone of command. "We uninstall Mobius's loop, break the recursion, and bring the Think Tank under our management. They used to work for the government—in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure they remember the definition of 'submission' once the right pressure is applied."
"There's more," Jacob interrupted, his radio crackling as he pulled up a fresh report from the scouts. "The underground team just reported a massive discovery. There's a secondary complex—a factory tier—running directly underneath the whole Big Mountain. Think of it as the 'Second Level' of Big Mountain. It's the real deal, the industrial spine that actually connects one facility to the other."
Case froze. "HUH?" He racked his memory, searching for any mention of a subterranean layer in the archives and his general experience about the New Vegas that he'd studied. "You're telling me this facility has a second layer? A hidden foundation?"
"Yeah," Jacob nodded, pointing toward the structural schematics appearing on his HUD. "It's a massive transit and manufacturing hub connecting every dome in the crater. Most of the entrances were locked behind high-level encryption or buried under cave-ins, but our construction protectrons just unearthed a few new access points. It's like the Big Mountain we see on the surface is just the tip of the iceberg."
"That's a surprise..." Case muttered, a sense of awe—and tactical greed—washing over him. "Any catch?"
Jacob shifted the weight of his machine gun, his face grim behind the visor. "Well, there's a catch. Want to hear?"
"Yeah," Case nodded, his mind already racing through the logistical possibilities of a subterranean industrial layer.
"The Central Intelligence Unit—Harry, as you call him—isn't just an A.I.," Jacob added, his voice dropping into a low, serious rumble. "He's actually the primary interface for a massive ZAX Supercomputer housed in the sub-strata. And this ZAX... it's integrated with a brain as a processing unit."
"WHAT?" Case shouted, his voice echoing off the metallic walls of the Forbidden Zone. "There's a Brain Core in the underground of Big Mountain? You're shitting me, right? A ZAX with a biological processor?"
Case took a moment to process the scale of it. A ZAX-Brain hybrid was a level of computing power that rivaled—or exceeded—anything that the Think Tank could come up with. Biology has its limits, machines were not. It explained how the facility had stayed powered and somehow maintained for two hundred years despite the scientists' insanity.
"No joke," Jacob replied. "The scouts found the cooling towers. It's a massive, multi-story pillar of wetware and circuitry. It seems the Think Tank wasn't the 'highest' authority here. There was a silent partner sitting in the basement, managing the actual physics of the mountain while the scientists played in their labs."
"No shit… who's this ZAX? Don't tell me it has a name," Case asked, his voice crackling with a mix of exhaustion and genuine excitement.
"Stone," Jacob replied, checking the data stream on his HUD, connected to his pip-boy. "She prefers to be called simply Professor Stone."
"Huh… that's odd. So what is going on here?" Case blinked, his head spinning. He turned in a slow circle, looking at the chalk-covered walls of Mobius's lab as if the room itself might start changing. He was trying to wrap his mind around this god-level plot twist. An underground facility was already a massive deviation from everything he knew about the Big Empty, but a ZAX supercomputer?
"Really, what in the actual fuck?" Case muttered. "The Think Tank thinks they run the show. Mobius thinks he runs the show. But there's Professor Stone in the basement actually keeping the lights on?"
It was a twist he never could have anticipated: leave the eccentric, ego-driven geniuses upstairs to indulge in "big thinking" while a cold, calculated intelligence handled the grim realities of resource management and structural integrity in the dark.
But as Case stared at the floor, imagining the miles of circuitry beneath his boots, a chilling question took root. Was "Professor Stone" truly artificial? Or was she something far more complex—a Super Intelligence born from the seamless integration of a human brain core and a ZAX mainframe?
If she was a hybrid, she wasn't just processing data—she was thinking, feeling, and perhaps even seething with resentment toward the floating jars in the dome above. A pure machine follows logic, but a human brain brings ego, ambition, and the haunting memory of what it's like to have a body.
This was officially above everyone's pay grade.
Case had felt confident against the Think Tank because he knew their scripts; he knew their quirks from New Vegas. But a ZAX supercomputer integrated with a legitimate brain—a true Super Intelligence—was an unknown variable. He looked at his hands, wondering if he was just another piece being moved across a grander chessboard. Had she lured him here? Was the entire Ranger incursion just a play to help her clear out the "dead wood" upstairs?
Case muttered and grumbled, his mind a storm of tactical anxiety and medical curiosity.
"I say we face Professor Stone. What do you say?" Jacob's voice, filtered through his power armor's external speakers, snapped Case out of his spiral. The heavy thud of a metal gauntlet on his shoulder grounded him.
"Yeah... yeah, let's go," Case replied, snapping out of his rumination.