Hi, I'm Gary (Fallout 3 SI) (Patreon)

My brain felt crowded, like there was too much shoved in a too-small container. The sensation wasn't exactly comfortable, but in a… you're sitting on a park bench and you end up sitting next to someone you don't know and you're forced to touch each other just a little bit kind of way. I could feel the other guy in my head, forced to touch, and where we did weird sensations washed over me.

"How do you feel, Subject Two?" A man I recognized asked me. Or the other guy? Dr. Patterson. A middle age man with wrinkles gathered around his eyes and mouth while white hair gathered at his temples. I was lying on a table, strapped to it and my arms lunged up only to be stop cold.

The sensations were driving me mad.

Because I was currently in my cell. White walls with a lone mirror that acted as a two-way mirror. I stood before it, looking at my own reflection, seeing my face twist in a way I hardly recognized. "Gary?"

"Gary!" I screamed as I lurched on the table. The fear bled through our connection where we were forced to touch. Fear, anger, and a complete lack of understanding. It was as if a newborn suddenly gained awareness, and it couldn't make any sense of what it was seeing. It was completely and utterly overwhelming, and that fear bled into me. The anger too -- why was I being restrained? Why was this being done to me?

What the fuck was going on?!

"Subject Prime is displaying volatile behavior patterns. Administrating sleeping gas," I heard through… through Subject 2's ears. As I looked at my reflection, bearing a fist against it hard enough that blood smeared on the unyielding surface, gas began to flood the room. Subject 2's head wrecked to the side to get a look at someone else in the room -- she was wearing a lab coat, her blonde hair was cut in a bob and she sat before a terminal. Through the window she sat before, I caught a glimpse of… of myself.

How I was coughing even as I beat my fist against the glass, each thump getting weaker and weaker. I could feel the connection dimming as I was knocked out, but that just left me feeling more like the guy strapped to the table. Pure undiluted panic flooded my veins as I tried to rip my arms free, uncaring of the pain as the leather strap bit into my skin. All the while, Dr. Patterson looked down at me with an indifferent expression, simply tweaking a few things on his… his… was that a Pip-boy?

"Subject Two shows heightened aggression. More so than his predecessor. Do a work up and compare the results to Subject One," he instructed as I continued to thrash in the chair. I grit my teeth, tasting blood on my tongue, and tried to get away when the woman approached me with a syringe.

"G-Gary!" Get the fuck away from me, you crazy bitch! "Gary! Gary! GARY!" I felt a pinch and everything went black.

…

My brain was getting more crowded, and the sensation had gone from mild discomfort to overwhelming. Fifteen sets of eyes. Fifteen sets of ears. Fifteen mouths. Fifteen bodies that were all experiencing different things all at once. While in some bodies, I was sitting in the corner of a room, trying to not move a muscle to prevent adding to the overflow of information, in others I was strapped to a table with doctors around me. Some were undergoing medical tests. Others were getting surgery done.

They were all me. They were me in fifteen different bodies

I hated this place. I hated these people. I hated the mind numbing boredom of looking at gray walls. I hated the experiments they were running on me.

I hated that I knew exactly where I was.

"There's clearly an issue with the cloning process," Dr. Peterson said, standing over one of my bodies as I was strapped to a chair with my head locked in place. I couldn't feel anything above my shoulders, but I had heard drilling behind me. "Biologically speaking, they're perfectly healthy. At first, we thought the pituitary gland was overproducing testosterone, but it's within normal parameters. There isn't a medical reason why we're seeing this behavior. Not to mention prior clones are showing signs of neurological decline."

"Could it be a problem with the source material?" A man's voice asked. I couldn't see his face, but it was low and gruff.

Dr. Peterson answered quickly, "Unlikely."

In one of my rooms, I grit my teeth. In another, I clenched my hands into fists so tight that they trembled. They were talking about me like I wasn't there. Like my head wasn't cracked open and they were poking around it. My own helplessness was galling. Especially when I knew what they wanted.

They wanted to take over my bodies. They hadn’t made a secret about it. It was pretty revealing what people would talk about when they thought you couldn’t understand them. They were racing against a clock, and I was their only hope of survival. This vault was a testing vault, and I was the sick twisted experiment that was being run -- immortality via cloning. I hadn’t seen it yet, but they had something called a Visiontron which would let them essentially copy and paste their consciousness into a new body.

My body.

Because, the kicker was, they couldn’t make clones of themselves. They had to copy and paste themselves into me. And their absolute willingness to overcame any resemblance of sympathy I felt for them. I understood -- if it was you or the other guy, I wouldn’t ever hold it against anyone for picking themselves. Unfortunately for the vault dwellers, I was also picking myself. I wouldn’t just let myself die to save them.

"The project is behind schedule, Doctor. Very behind. We were meant to be in our first gen bodies according to the timeline," the man said, his tone sharp enough to cut. There was an air of desperation around him. The doctors… they wanted this, but he needed it.

"I understand, Overseer Jones. We're doing the best that we can, but-" Dr. Peterson began to reply.

"Do better then," Overseer Jones snapped before he seemed to catch himself. I heard him swallow a sigh behind me. "I apologize, Dr. Peterson. Things… time is the one thing that I don't have."

There was a small beat of silence between the two men. Eventually, Dr. Peterson said, "I'll ramp up clone production. With enough bodies, and if the continued mental degrading holds, then we'll find the culprit. From there, we can isolate it and we can fix it."

Overseer Jones let out the sigh he swallowed, "Thank you." He replied quietly. Gently. Then I heard him walk around me, wearing a blue and yellow jumpsuit with a pipboy on his wrist. He didn't so much as glance my way as he headed to the bulkhead door. On his back was a number -- 108

"Gary," I cursed the man in one of my rooms. I hated him most of all. He was the Overseer…

And this was a vault.

It took a depressing amount of time to understand that. Though, in my defense, I was constantly having to put up with new roommates in my head. I knew that this was Vault 108, in the Capital Wasteland. I knew that the Vault had something to do with cloning because by the time the Lone Wanderer arrived, it was populated by a good dozen clones that could only say their own name. I knew the information because I had a memory of stumbling across the Vault and getting jumpscared by a clone bad enough that I got caught staying up late to play video games.

And, in complete honesty, it was that memory that stopped me from going mad.

I saw what the end result was. Murdered like a common enemy by some murderhobo in search of loot and a bobblehead. If I went insane, then that was my fate.

"Gary," One of my bodies sighed. Fear of death was a lot more intense than fear of the unknown. Only the unknown wasn't unknown anymore. I had answers. I don't think the original Gary did. He had just been a blank slate, and all he knew was Vault-Tec doctors experimenting on him and the lack of self couldn't have helped with the overcrowding feeling each new me made worse. The increased violence and hostility to non-clones wasn't due to clone instability, but because non-clones were assholes and Gary learned to fear them.

Because these idiots hadn't realized that they had made a hive mind.

That was going to be their downfall.

…

"Subject Fifty-Six," Dr. Peterson began in a procedure I was every bit as familiar with as he was. "Can you tell me your name?" He asked me, already going to mark my answer. I was laying on the same table as I always was when they created an additional me. In the same room.

Dr. Peterson looked older. A lot older. He seemed to be the kind of guy that would age with grace, and that had been the case for a while. Then, like a string snapping, everything just seemed to fall apart at once. His hair was stark white, but only around the rim of his bald head. His wrinkles were pronounced and I saw a liverspot forming on his neck and cheek. I had no way of telling how long we had been doing this song and dance, but it had to be years by this point.

Decades, even.

"Gary," I answered as I shifted my hand. In the end, my aggression had worked against me. They reinforced the straps when they noticed any wear and tear. What they didn't do, however, was replace the weakening attachment point. They never thought to look for it. Even all these years later, they didn't know what I was. That every time they created another me, they gave me an opportunity to advance my escape plan.

"Of course," he sighed. I hadn't seen the lab technician in awhile. And I knew for a fact that Overseer Jones was dead -- cancer, based on the small talk I heard around me. "How do you feel?" Dr. Peterson asked me in a tired tone.

"Gary," I replied. His lack of attention meant my hand went unnoticed. I could feel it weakening. The metal joint could only endure so much before give out, and I knew it was on the cusp.

Then Dr. Peterson stepped forward, as he always did. And I did what I always did.

I lunged for him. For fifty five times, he had been safe. The restraints held. It was a routine at this point. He didn't even flinch as he tested my response to his presence.

Which is precisely why he failed to react when the arm suddenly gave out and I swung at his temple. A few years ago, he might have been able to dodge that. Or even take it on the chin. However, Dr. Peterson was an old man at this point and he crumpled like a paper bag, falling to the side with a bleeding cut over his eyebrow. I wasted no time in reaching over to undo the strap on my other arm.

I had envisioned this moment a thousand and one times. I knew exactly what I had to do. But, I always imagined that I would be more afraid. Nervous. It was my one shot, after all. If this escape attempt failed… I imagine they wouldn't be making more clones of me. I imagine that they'd kill me -- all of me. And that fear gave me a razor sharp focus as I got out of the chair and walked to the terminal, stepping over the groaning Dr. Peterson.

Fallout terminals were old-school analog computers -- a pixilated, eye seering green with lighter green marking the text. They had never bothered with any precautions like a password, simply because I was meant to be a freshly created clone. How could I possibly know how to navigate a computer? It took a little getting used to, but with the arrow keys, I managed to find the options that I wanted.

The doors released.

One by one, I opened the doors to my cell. It would take me a minute to manually open them all, and while I did that, my bodies sprung into action. I fled the cells, sprinting towards the stairway that would take me up to the living area for the scientists. Dozens of me sprinted up the stairs as the bulkhead doors opened, another door at the top of the stairs starting to, telling me someone was on their way down. As soon at the door cleared, I dove forward, tackling whoever it was to the ground.

They cried out in pain while my hands went for their throat. Meanwhile, I continued forward, spilling into the main hallway. Down the hall was a guard -- an older one, and he was fumbling for the nine millimeter at his hip as a primal hate-filled scream ripped itself from my throat, "Gaarrryyy!" I roared, taking a bullet in the chest but even as that body fell to the ground, I pressed onward.

With a jumping tackle, I latched onto the man, feeling pain blossom in my back with a loud bang echoing on the hallway. Gritting my teeth to it, I grabbed hold of his gun, wrenching it up to the ceiling above us while the others tackled him. I threw him to the ground and with snarling hate, we started to stomp on him. He cried out in pain, but I didn't care.

These people had locked me up and tortured me. They could go right to hell for all I cared.

The alarm went out as I picked up the gun as another body handed me the spare ammo. I looked down at the body that had ripped the gun out of the Vault-Dweller's grasp. I could feel the body dying. Each breath was wet and more difficult than the last. Red stained the jumpsuit, spilling out on the metallic floor. He was dying. I was dying. I could feel the fear. The uncertainty. The despair and even the anger…

Then I simply felt the connection to the body vanish.

Even after all this time, I still wasnt sure how the hivemind worked exactly. Every me was… well, me. Yet it wasn't like I was divided up into each body. Every one of them had feelings and needs. Just no… thoughts. No personality beyond the one that we all shared.

Yet it never got any easier feeling myself die. And I had felt it more than a dozen times over the years -- back when the desperation had set in, when they weren't just going through the motions of figuring out why the cloning process didn't work.

"Help! Help me!" One of the Vault-Dwellers shouted out as I stormed the dormitories, both male and female. The security was practically non existent, leaving me free to bludgeon the older people into submission with my bare hands. But, I knew that there was a security office and guns were one hell of an equalizer. My bodies split up, searching for the Overseer's office and the armory. In the dormitories, an older man with whispy hair held up his hands in surrender. "Please, don't hurt us!"

"Gary!" I roared at him, picking up a chair and waving it at him menacingly. I didn't recognize him. "Gary! Gary!?"

"I… I don't… I don't understand?!" The old man tried, cowering with the others as we gathered them up in a corner. They were all old, I noticed. And the number didn't at all match the number of rooms that I had been running by. There should be hundreds of people in the Vault, and I was seeing dozens at most. When a body armed with a gun arrived in the room, I debated shooting them.

I hated them. All of them.

But hate could be reasoned with. And, like it or not, I did need them to teach me how to maintain the Vault. How to use the cloning vat. I would learn what they had to teach, and the helpful ones… they'd get to die of old age. The unhelpful ones…

As the thought trailed off, I reached the Overseer's office just as an alarm started to blare. The sound bounced off of the halls as emergency lights flashed red. The doors refused to budge when I arrived, unyielding to my kicking and punching. A half dozen of me pounded away at the door, trying to get it to open, but had no such luck.

That was, until, I dragged the people I had cornered in the dormitories in front of the door. And, more important, the security camera that was pointed right at us. The body armed with the gun pointed it at one of the weeping old people and snarled up at the camera, "Gary! GARY!" I jabbed them in the head with the pistol, making them sob loudly.

The doors only budged when I curled my finger around the trigger.

As it opened, I saw a woman. The lab technician. She became the Overseer? She had aged with more grace than Dr. Peterson had, at least. Late fifties to early sixties, a head of white hair, and wrinkles tugging at her eyes and lips. She held her hands up, looming at me with an expression that can only be described as bewilderment. "You… there's more going on in your head than we realized. How could you have orchestrated this?" She asked as I kept my gun on her while another body rounded her semi circle desk to her terminal. "We took precautions-"

"Gary," I spat at her, pushing her into a corner of the room.

"Oh. Is that really all you can-" she began, only to be cut off with a gunshot that struck near her head.

"Gary!" I thundered at her, my anger washing over the others and she watched as my expressions twisted. I could see her putting the pieces together, but it was too little too late. As she was finally figuring out what she had done to me, I was going through the Overseer's terminal. The first thing I did was unlock the armory, letting my other bodies arm themselves.

The second thing I did was look at the date.

November 12, 2112. If memory served, the bombs dropped on October 23, 2077. Meaning that it had been about forty years since the world had ended. The nukes that had completely devastated the world and brought about a nuclear apocalypse that the world wouldn't recover from even two hundred years after. That's what I was stuck with -- a nuclear hellhole even if I escaped the Vault.

Honestly, it sounded a lot more preferable to hide out in the Vault for another two or three hundred years until the world unfucked itself.

"You're all connected," the Overseer realized far too late. The wind had been knocked out of her lungs and she openly gaped at me as I spread out through the vault, armed and dangerous. The Vault-Dwellers within rolled over with little difficulty. There weren't many. Less than a hundred in a vault that could house closer to five. Even with the losses that I took, our numbers were comparable.

I did it. I was free.

That feeling resonated in my brain, connecting to all the others. Nearly fifty of them and with fifty voices, I spoke.

"I! AM! GARY!"

And the world would know my name.

...

To preface this, I'm not entirely sure what this one is. I rediscovered Shoddycast and I've been sick with a fever, so this may or may not have been a fever dream. So, at the moment, it's still up in the air where this story could go, but I think the basic premise is pretty fun to play around with.

A little background information for those who haven't played Fallout 3 seeing as it is a... fifteen-year-old game. Vault 108 is one of the experimental vaults in Fallout, and its one of the few that we really don't know what the deal with was. All we really know is that it involved cloning, and the clones are only capable of saying 'Gary', which might not even be their name. That, and the clones are apparently immortal seeing as the vault collapsed around fifty years after the bombs fell, but Gary 1 was still kicking around 200 years later.

So, the premise is that the SI possesses Gary and in doing so, he becomes the Gary hivemind. He is all Garys and all Garys are him.

As for the story itself, I'm of a few minds about it. Settlement building could be fun -- doing a settlement that's populated by dozens of Garys, while the general population is none the wiser. Do a bit of exploring of reclaiming parts of the wasteland necessary for rebuilding the world. Could also explore Gary infiltrating the other factions of the wasteland -- do a series of 'tales' of Gary 1 leading a settlement, Gary 33 leading a band of raiders, Gary 69 getting sold as a slave to Pitt,  etc.

In short, I think it would depend on what people would want to see. So, let me know.