Editing Setting:Nutopia/Locations (section)

===The Neumann Vault===
Take a trip through the Old Midwest, past the Cloning Farms still running, endlessly producing steadily more devolved subhumans as their genetic patterns degrade, beyond the Archives, the vast multi-kilometre data warehouses once full of the sum of human knowledge and now just meaningless ones and zeros, and beyond the Red Zone where the radiation from the Goldmarck Neumann Wars is still strong enough to kill an unshielded man in hours. Keep going, into the vast fields of GM wheat, effectively unkillable and unstoppable, that turns even the flesh-melting nanite clouds into another energy source. Keep going, through the vast craters of the Megabombs, GM wheat only broken by the scarce few ruins still stable enough to stand, and pools full of every kind of pseudolegal chems mixed by decades of leakage and sunlight into brews so utterly toxic not even the wheat can grow in it. Tread lightly past the Sentinels, unimaginably lethal 'bots designed to be able to hold off entire armies alone, still defending the ruins of their homes. There, go into the Deep Crater, and you can see it; the Neumann Vault.

It is an unassuming structure, a block of some fancy darkened supermetal, five hundred metres long and wide, and a hundred tall. Look for the door, fifty metres by fifty, every centimetre of space taken up by warnings etched into the metal. Behind that door lies the reason for the Neumann Corps' existence, the reason for their destruction, and the reason hundreds of Delvers die each year trying to open it.

A relative latecomer to the Corporations, Neumann was a small company built by a bored megarich executive around this facility, an empty space occupied only by at-the-time advanced nanonic assemblers with one task; to copy itself, and to improve itself every time. One day, the Vault would be opened, and whatever was inside would be The novelty of the offering amused many of the idle megarich, and money flowed in, soon powering it to the status of a moderate Corp. They built other divisions and started work, and soon forgot the assemblers in the vault over newer, more advanced models. They ran into money trouble, and were prepared to open the Vault to see what they had cooked up in desperation, and this so worried the Goldmarck Corp, another high-level corp mostly specializing in nanonic assemblers, that they declared a Private War, at first subtle, then more and more overt. By the end of it, just four weeks after it had begun, both corps were utterly destroyed, and the Vault soon forgotten as the Fall of the Corporations came a bare month later, befor the radiation had cooled enough to send in even hardened 'bots.

Decades later, the Vault still lies unopened, its work going on far longer than even the Neumann Corp had planned. Anything could be in there now, a mist of dead nanites self-coded into deactivation, assemblers capable of rearranging the universe on the subatomic level, a vast array of pretty and meaningless junk, built to please the eye of a nanite swarm gone Smart, or nothing, the assemblers improving themselves beyond the constraints of the universe.

All I know is what the Vault told me. Seven hundred metre crater walls mean that this vault had the Corporations so worried that, even as their world collapsed around them, they spared the time to launch no less than twenty-eight Megabombs at this place, and that the Neumann guys were so worried it could get out they built a facility that could survive that sort of punishment unharmed.

I came to unlock riches, me and the twenty others of our Delve. Only three of us survived to reach the Vault, and the other two had died by the time I found the Key. I could have opened it, but never brought myself to. I gave away my chance for new-Megarichdom at the doors of this vault, and ran back to my Enclave with everything I had destroyed, because I couldn't help but fear what could come out of those doors.

I'm giving you the key, because I'm a dead man. Even shielded, that place was so hot it cooked my DNA like like a frozen dinner, and I won't last the month. The key's gene-locked, and can't be lost, sold, or destroyed, only given away. You seem better than the sort of bastard might take the key off my body, and I'd rather whatever was in that Vault went to you instead of some fuckhead Raider.

Just remember. There are some doors in the world that, once opened, can never be shut again.

[[Category:Homebrew Settings]]
[[Category:Nutopia]]