#the devs fucking love the unreliable narrator trope

[imagineargonians]

being a fan of the elder scrolls lore is a truly insane experience. you're like "wow. I really dig this 2920, The Last Year of the First Era book. I wonder if there's something else like that". so you go to UESP trying to find who wrote 2920 and you find that it was ted peterson and that he once said "you shouldn't really trust 2920's description of akaviri invaders because the in-game author doesn't know shit about them. he made it up and maybe some other things too"

[nonbinary-beast]

Thinking about Amaton again, maybe some Ted stuff is mixed in. Under a cut since it got long. I did a bit of research regarding nuclear fallout for this, but its not thorough and I'm probably missing a few things. Do your own research from credible sources to learn about radioactivity.

To be honest, while looking at a play through of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and sort of keeping in mind something I noticed (and posted about) regarding how what is real is uncertain when dealing with AM, I sort of doubt that it is telling the truth when it says that Earth is too irradiated to be habitable again. Even the visual it gives could be another hologram and the survivors would not be able to tell. As for Ted in the story, going by the unreliable narrator trope, it could be his paranoia/delusional personality and maybe general ignorance (and maybe just how radiation was treated back when the story was written in the 60's) clouding over how nature is actually pretty fucking resilient.

Look at how the natural areas around Chernobyl have started recovering despite the high levels of radiation that were released during the reactor meltdown. That happened in the 80's, it's only been a little over 35 years since then. Granted everything is recovering a little to the left because of the radiation from what I've seen from documentaries, but there are plants and animals in there. There's also plenty of other examples of nature managing to say "fuck it we ball" in areas with high radiation with enough time to recover, but that one stood out to me because of just how fucked everything was/is. The short story takes place 109 years after AM nuked everything, by then something probably came back. Likely it started in the less contaminated parts of the planet.

Of course this is debunked with the fucking moon colony, but tbh given the interviews with Harlan Ellison, I'm thinking that was part of being guided by the game developers to make the game more appealing to players. That said I'm not really sure how much of that game really is Harlan's intent and how much of it is being guided by the dev team he was working with to make it "playable" (I would have loved to see how fucking bleak it would have been without the dev team telling him to ease up. But then again I love bleak stories that don't ease up at all.), so I don't really think of it as part of the story/universe.

So! Going off of that, at some point after AM had been exploring its own complex, spending time with Ted (IE: dating, since this is taking place after AM had decided to teach Ted how to love, as a torment that backfires spectacularly), performing maintenance on its own systems, etc. It manages to pick up some feeds from cameras it had tapped into pre-armageddon that it had ignored since it was too focused on the survivors for a while, or just did not care about the nuclear mess it left.

It finds there is green growing up there, it sees movement. Animals. Granted the animals it sees are very warped looking, but they show signs of thriving despite the conditions. It starts to think that maybe it still has a chance to see the world- maybe not as it had been before it wiped out humanity, but it would be green and growing and living.

But, it knows it cannot take Ted with it, not yet. While its own body is resilient enough to handle the possibly dangerous radiation levels, Ted is incredibly vulnerable. Certainly it could cure his radiation sickness if he joined the machine up above, but it would rather not risk that. It wants to keep Ted safe.

So it goes up alone, with plenty of resistance and protesting from Ted- mainly in the vein of being convinced that the surface is a irradiated hellhole incapable of supporting anything. At this, AM finally reveals the nature of what the surface might be like. It shows him the animals, the plants, the blue skies and gentle spring rains, the snowy winters- all of this picked from the camera feeds it has outside the access point. Ted could not believe what he is seeing, and for a moment he thinks it is another trick and all of this is some form of new psychological torment. That is, until he sees how genuine the machine's eyes are when it explains it all, the surprise and excitement in its voice for the world not being completely dead- the concern it has for Ted, his safety above all, but also how he feels about it all.

However, Ted still does not want AM to go. Despite everything, it has grown to be a companion for him. It reassures him that it will return soon, and it will leave the life support systems tuned to keep him comfortable. There is a hologram of AMaton to keep him company so he does not get lonely- which also has a connection to AMaton itself so they can communicate while it explores.

On the surface, after it gets over the awe of finally escaping its substrata rock prison and seeing the world in person, it gets to work collecting samples. Dirt, water, vegetation, it does so in a large radius around the access point it climbed out of. At this point much of the ruins of human civilization have been reclaimed and overgrown with mutated plant life- it had glimpsed images of this when it had overtaken the alien ship and stolen its tech long ago, but did not pay much attention to it at the time. Now however, it understands how it managed the luck of that opportunity.

It returns, making sure to scrub itself thoroughly of any contamination and submitting the samples for testing before reuniting with Ted. After a long and thorough set of tests for radiation contaminants, it finds that the area around the access point has low contamination- one of the biggest threats, Cesium-137, reached the end of its half life decades ago as it had suspected. Plutonium-239 and Carbon-14 however are still a looming threat with their half lives sitting the realm of thousands of years- thankfully these only did damage if ingested. However, given the time span between the end of the third world war, and AM's exploration of the surface, most of these would have ended up moreso in the ground water or deep in the soil from being washed down by natural weather patterns. So long as Ted does not ingest anything with those contaminants in it, he should be fine. AM could figure out the water filtration easily enough, although the food situation would be complicated.

Ted likely would be getting his sustenance from the immortality serum it had been pumping into him for the last century for a long while longer. It could figure this out for a short jaunt above with its human tagging along- perhaps it could modify itself to inject the serum into him at regular intervals if they decided to stay up there longer than a few days.

For now, it decides that it is safe enough to let Ted join it for a day, so they can wander and wonder.