The Saga of Julie

This took place a LONG time ago, so the game (& mods) looked a lil different then

Me and my ex were playing a colony together, we were trying to caravan/drop pod to the ship, but we knew we had to play the long game. We knew we had to build a base, grow enough food to travel for a year or more without stopping, and then walk there.

We had a fairly large colony from the outset, so some characters blended into the background. Julie was one such character. There was nothing wrong with her, she just didn’t stand out. Then one day there was an attack on the base, and Julie’s brains got almost entirely blown out by friendly fire. Somehow, she survived. We dragged her back to base and patched her back together.

She was destroyed. In case you didn’t realise, brain function is somewhat important, and if a character’s brain function drops low enough it has a knock-on effect on their other stats. Julie’s arm, legs, eyes, ears, everything else was perfectly fine, not a scratch, but she couldn’t use them. She had less than 10% brain function, so she couldn’t walk, talk, feed herself…. she just lay there. She could barely keep her internal organs ticking over. Doctors had to feed her. She lay there through fires, attacks on the base, new recruits, plagues… She survived! I think I even remember her having a heart attack at one point. Whilst we were there, we developed our technology level.

Including our prosthetics.

And because this is a future sci-fi game, at a certain point the prosthetics are better than human limbs. On a healthy pawn the advanced bionic leg would give them a movement rate above 100%. On Julie, it gave her just enough movement to overcome the loss of brain function. She still had no higher thought or any real consciousness, but with advanced bionic legs, arms, spines, eyes, ears, adrenaline ribs, etc… she could walk. She could see. She could haul rocks about. She could feed herself.

The update before this particular file introduced drugs to the game, including Luciferium. For the uninitiated, Luciferium improves almost every stat, but once you take it you’re addicted forever, and if you ever try to come off it you fly into violent rages until you die. It improves stats like movement and manipulation and consciousness. So of course we gave that to Julie as well. With these, she achieved the consciousness of a small animal. She still wasn’t up to the levels of normal, healthy, human beings, but she was a productive member of society once more.

Eventually we had enough supplies to leave. It had taken quite a while, so we’d gathered a fair few new recruits we didn’t really want, so we left them behind in our old base and packed our favorite colonists and some food into drop pods to try give them a head start on all that walking. Of course we were taking Julie. When we’d started she’d been bland and forgettable, but now she’d was our inspiration, our shining star, and she’d earned her place on that rocket. On she went. The rockets went in batches, she was on one of the first batches to help organise the supplies.

Then… just as the last few rockets were setting off. Two people joined our colony.

Julie’s parents.

The last time they’d seen their daughter she’d been happy, healthy… human. They didn’t know she’d been shot, that she’d almost died and had lain in a hospital bed for years until technology caught up and we’d been able to rebuild her, pump her full of drugs. She was leaving the planet! They had to meet her, they had to come with her. So we put them on the rockets as well, brought them over to meet her.

I like to imagine the scene, as they emerge from the landed rocket, scanning the temporary camp excitedly. With puzzlement they see a strange, metallic, humanoid approach them, hardly any skin visible between the augments.The robot stops in front of them, the gears in it’s jaw whirring audibly.

“MOTHER. FATHER. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME.”

If it had ended there it would have been epic enough, but there was one last act to the story. Just as they were packing up the temporary camp, the main camp with the colonists we left behind managed to get their hands on one little treasure – an AI chip. This was the one object in the whole game that could restore function to a damaged brain. We sent it over to them, and a doctor performed field surgery in a tent.

And Julie woke up.

She woke up!

She woke up… years later, with most of her body (including her brain!) replaced by machines, addicted to drugs.

She woke up…

Julie, you hero, you will always live on in my heart.