dp.4.5
MEGAZONE 23
"The second step to becoming a mad scientist is having a
doctorate. After all, no one is going to tremble in fear at
the name of the Mad Mister Rainbow."
--The Mad Scientist Primer
"Where the hell did the Animated Quartet go?" thought
ReRob. It was a, well, UNIQUE day. He had just experienced
the Wedge War. He saw the Wedge do things it has never done
before. He saw anatomical organs he had never seen before.
In fact, he had just finished washing some of them off this
person. And now, Ben, Zoner, Kei and Yuri had gone piff on
him.
ReRob was on, shall we say, a mighty adrenaline rush.
And he is not the type of person to inflict gratuitous
violence on innocent people. Innocent inanimate objects,
however, would be another thing entirely. "I think I'll take
this one to the road," he thought.
He walked downstairs and found his OmniSchwinn. That
just wasn't enough. "I need some wheels," he thought. He
caught himself. "I need some vehicleage."
Too late. Michael Wheeler walked in, retrieved one of
his cassettes, and walked out. ReRob never noticed this
because of a rather interesting thought entering his mind.
It could be done, and the research was the hardest part.
"Hey, Mark, can I borrow the REF Field Guide?"
"Sure, ReRob."
ReRob then proceeded to grab the Invid Invasion tape and
MegaZone's VCR.
Mark walked downstairs and witnessed ReRob leaving with
all this hardware and literature. "What the hell is that
for?"
"Kinemasochistics. You wouldn't believe the project
we've got."
ReRob locked himself into the HoloDECStation (HDS) and
kludged up a window with a video input port. He plugged the
VCR in, started playing the Robotech cassettes, and fed the
Field Guide into a vidinput window.
When the computer was done digesting up the data, ReRob
called up cluless and rezzed up a VR-052 Cyclone and a suit
of CVR-3 body armor. Cluless sent back a "no prob" on the
CVR-3, but stopped short on the actual Cyclone. The error
message was:
protoculture: yaright?
ReRob told the computer to fuck the protoculture and
give him a Cyclone sans power unit. There are better power
units than protoculture anyways. Especially when one had a
VCR.
Within an hour, he had fed itsnotmygoddamnplanetmonkey-
boy all three Back to the Future movies. He then rezzed up
the DeLorean. Cluless yaright?ed on the flux capacitor, but
that was okay. He didn't want a DeLorean. He removed Mr.
Fusion, and installed it in the gas tank of the Cyclone.
Like, have some power.
Within five minutes, ReRob learned that walking through
the basement of Fuller Labs wearing futuristic body armor and
pushing a variable-geometry motorcycle raises eyebrows.
Telling students that this is the true power of UNIX didn't
help.
After a field trip to the Atwater Kent dumpster for
fusion material, ReRob dropped some leftover SPAM into the
gas tank, kick-started the fusion reactor, and sped off into
the sunset. He only dropped the machine three times on the
way off campus.
All in all, it was a simple learning procedure. Mr.
Fusion is many things, but it does not use a physical
transmission. In other words, it's an automatic motorcycle.
ReRob had ridden bicycles before, so it was just the concept
of turning at higher speeds and with more weight under him.
Thus, he was just about getting the hang of it and cruising
down I-290 when the cops took an interest in him.
The Cyclone is a rather amusing and powerful mecha unit,
but it was never designed for twentieth century street use.
To be sure, it carries headlights and all the normal safety
features. The only problem is that there is literally
nowhere to place a license plate. The only obvious spot, on
the tail of the machine, is the perfect place to fry the poor
aluminum off while jetting around in battloid mode.
Fortunately, ReRob was wearing his CVR-3. This
completely obscured his features. Besides which, he looked
incredibly cool. Unfortunately, this didn't stop the main
problem, that being black and whites behind him with sirens
wailing.
"But," ReRob thought, "Let's get real. A motorcycle on
an interstate with a top speed of over two hundred miles per
hour versus Ford mega-sedans. Null perspiration." And with
that, he experienced the joy and dangers involved with
removing the front wheel from the tar. He eased off on the
throttle, reminded himself that he was wielding a fusion
powered road machine, and figured that while high rates of
velocity were necessary, large values for higher derivatives
of position were right out.
The cops were no problem in about fifteen seconds
(that's one combat round for you Palladium gamers), but a new
difficulty arose. Even in Massachusetts, driving around at
one hundred fifty miles an hour creates interesting problems
in traffic avoidance, meeting other vehicles at relative
velocities of over seventy miles an hour. ReRob slipped into
a game of Pole Position in his mind, and survived for the
next minute or so. Then he ran across a strip of traffic
flying formation; there was no way around. A voice from the
old Gauntlet game intruded upon his thoughts: "Wedge Rat is
about to die." He checked and realized that he was fresh out
of quarters. This was his last game. Flub this, and it was
all over.
There was only one way out. It was untested, and would
probably remove several parts of his anatomy along with his
all-important ugly baritone singing voice. "Oh well," he
thought, "Not like I'm going to have a use for it if I end up
in this guy's hatchback."
He pushed a lever from the down to the up position.
The bike proceeded to behave in several ways that bikes
never normally react. First thing it did was microjet up to
leap over the line of traffic in question. That was the
simple part.
Then the front faring started acting up. It split in
two and attached itself to ReRob's chest armor. The engine,
it seemed, was not an internal combustion engine at all, but
just a latex item that looked like one. It rapidly deflated
itself. The skid plate moved up and became a chest piece.
By almost sheer coincidence, it linked perfectly with the
armor codpiece: ReRob was still a baritone.
The entire back of the motorcycle, tail through fuel
tank/Mr. Fusion, slid behind ReRob, folded up, and attached
to his back. The wheels swung around in a rather unbalancing
position and deployed jets. ReRob was now a quasi-cyborg,
over three hundred fifty pounds of flesh, metal, plastic, and
ceramic, and was now hovering over the northbound lane of I-
290, thinking "Neat!"
He hovered over to the southbound lane, waved to the
cops as they passed, and landed on the grassy strip next to
the breakdown lane. He began the sequence which would allow
him to extricate himself from his bike and ride it again.
But only one thought took up his frontal lobes: "Shouldn't I
be thinking something profound here?"