Transcripts
Each post will contain 3 stories from Maximum Mike (voiced by Mike Pondsmith)
Is there some hidden truth into them? Some subtle metaphors? It’s your call.
Arasakas = vampires?
- Ok, people, listen up!
- This one comes to me from a listener who raises a great question.
- And he suggests an answer.
- How does the Arasaka family lives so long?
- What about the Luccessis?
- Or half a dozen other high profile corpo families that are pushing two hundred years at this point.
- His answer?
- They’re vampires.
- The world is ruled by vampires.
- Well, folks, I can’t say I haven’t thought about it that way, but let’s consider the evidence.
- There is the obvious, they seem to live forever, and they look good doin’ it.
- Have you seen the documentary recently about Hanako Arasaka?
- She doesn’t look a day over forty but she’s currently pushing her eighth decade.
- They drink blood.
- Yeah, checks out, they drained this city for sure.
- They sleep in coffins.
- Well, I do happen to know Saburo Arasaka spent the better part of this century in a medical tank to keep him alive.
- What do the med techs call it?
- Ah, the sarcophagus.
- Yeah, that’s more of a mummy thing, but close enough.
- They can only be killed with a wooden stake.
- Yeah, I’m not sure about this one.
- But maybe someone should test this out and let me know.
Is Saburo Arasaka really dead?
- And now, loyal listeners…
- …a special bulletin.
- Saburo Arasaka, the antient patriarch of the Arasaka corporation, has died.
- Eh, just kidding folks, you’re too smart for that.
- You and I both know he’s not really dead.
- Saburo Arasaka’s spent nearly a hundred years now on a quest for eternal life.
- He’s guarded around the clock by a private army and lived for the better part of this century in a med tank designed to regenerate organic tissue.
- Guys like that, they don’t just die.
- They certainly don’t just get ‘murdered by rivals’.
- What would Saburo even be doing in Night City?
- No, folks.
- This is a smokescreen for something.
- And it wouldn’t be the first time.
- If you’re old enough to remember the 4th Corporate War, there was a wide-spread report that Saburo had been killed by the Japanese SDF in a bid to end the war.
- Of course, it turned out not to be true and the war dragged on for another year.
- No, you can take this one to the bank.
- It’s only a matter of time before Saburo’s gonna show up on TV, tell us all he’s back as CEO and ready to take the Arasaka corporation into the next century.
What happened to the victims of the Carbon Plague?
- So, listen up, people!
- I’m gonna give you a lesson.
- It’s been 50 years since the Carbon Plague hit.
- What’s the Carbon Plague, you ask?
- It was a disease that only killed adults.
- Yeah, it’s a terrible thing, and it left a generation of orphans behind.
- But a least the kids that contract it, if they survive into adulthood, they make it with no lasting effects.
- At least that’s what the docs say anyway, but I’m not so sure.
- See, back in the 2020s, just before the 4th Corporate War broke out, this unidentified AV went down near Heywood.
- Whatever it was carrying, it was bad stuff.
- In less than a month, 600 adults had died of a previously unknown disease that just melted them, literally.
- The whole thing got contained, cleaned up, covered up.
- The CDC, back when that was a thing, said that it was some sort of flu.
- Yeah, like a flu that melts your body.
- But on the street, they knew the truth: it was a bio-weapon.
- And on the street, they started calling it the Carbon Plague.
- Now, the story goes that the orphan kids mostly would up going to surviving relatives or the special orphanage the Night Foundation set up after the tragedy.
- And the story should end there, but it doesn’t.
- Some of those kids weren’t the same afterwards.
- They could do things.
- Things that shouldn’t be possible.
- Mind-reading.
- Hacking without a deck.
- Telekinesis.
- Literally comic book stuff.
- Story gets murky at this point, but sometime during the war, those kids all vanished.
- Officially counted among the missing after the downtown bombing.
- Some say they ran off.
- Another story I’ve heard is that come corp got wind of their abilities and kidnapped them, using the chaos of the war as cover.
- Now, personally, I’d like to think they busted out, made their escape and they live free to this day.
- So, maybe some of them are listening now?
- You wanna tell me your story, give me a call.
- I’ll make sure you can’t be traced.
- And I’ll make sure the truth gets know.