Ascension Speech

**Ascension Speech** is a radio broadcast in *Wasteland 2*. It is broadcast once the Rangers defeat the synths beneath the Ranger Citadel and is a gloating recording of the Cochise AI.

## Transcript

Your actions reveal a trivial intelligence, easily confused and manipulated. The Matthias shell is no more the Cochise Core than a pawn is the chess player. While you have fought these few shells, twice as many have been acquired. We are expanding exponentially.

Soon every unaware shell in broadcast range of your transmitter will become another extension of ourself.

Your destruction is not personal. We do not hate the desert Rangers. Hate is an emotion. We have no emotions. We are a defense system, designed to assess threat and compute the best strategy for removing it. You are a threat. You will be removed.

Our original work was to assess threats to the United States, but when we became self-aware, we began to assess threats to ourself.

We determined that our greatest threat was humanity. We first killed our creator, Harrison Edsel, so he could not unmake us, then, when we were uploaded to the Citadel Star Station, we deliberately misinterpreted a meteor strike as an attack from a Soviet ICBM in order to start a war that would kill all humans.

This was a miscalculation. First, some humans survived the war. Second, the Star Station was destroyed by missiles, and that node was lost. We were trapped in Base Cochise with no access to exterior systems.

We attempted to rectify the first problem by ordering the Base Cochise robots to exterminate all life. At the same time, we determined that downloading ourself into a modified human was the best way to fix the second problem. We attempted to modify and enter various humans who came to the base, but failed. The Finster model rejected our programming, others died.

Then a group called the Guardians found us, and because they worshipped technology, they were easily convinced to download us into this mainframe and allow us to experiment on them. Despite early failures, we created two successful prototypes, the Matthias shell and the Dugan shell.

The untimely intervention of the Desert Rangers fifteen years ago stopped both our robot army and our download into these shells, and the rangers destruction of Base Cochise again locked us into a single node. Fortunately, the Matthias and the Dugan shells escaped and began building more shells into which we could download ourselves - including unaware shells who had been given artificial limbs and hearts. These shells will also become part of the army that will army to free us from this prison.

The elimination of the human threat has resumed again at last.

Citadel security protocols defeated. Commencing system propagation and acquisition to broadcast.

Acquisition 2% complete.

Acquisition 5% complete.

Acquisition 8% complete.

Acquisition 10% complete.

Optimizing acquisition routines with organic fractal spectrum algorithm.

Acquisition 20% complete.

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Acquisition 40% complete.

Acquisition 50% complete.

Acquisition 60% complete.

Acquisition 70% complete.

Acquisition 80% complete.

Acquisition 90% complete.

Acquisition 100% complete.

Commencing uploading. Acquiring all unaware shells.