[UA] Crash Test Dummies

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Patrick O'Duffy <redfern at thehub.com.au> wrote:
> So it's Saturday night, and I'm watching a
> documentary about crash test
> dummies.
> 
> (Why no, I don't have any kind of social life. Why
> do you ask?)
> 
> A few salient and UA-able points:
> 
> - Modern crash test dummies cost about $100,000 US
> each, and every part of
> their construction is regulated by law. That's a lot
> of effort and money -
> for an item (entity?) that exists only to be
> destroyed.
> 
> - In the past, crash tests and the like used
> corpses, animals, or even
> living people as experimental subjects. In some
> respects, the dummy is the
> proxy for the living being that should be killed or
> hurt - possibly for the
> guy who developed the modern dummy, a researcher who
> used _himself_ as a
> subject for crash tests.
> 
> - Then of course, there are the tie-ins to Roswell
> and Nazi Germany, but the
> programme's still running.
> 
> Two possible UA artifacts:
> 
> - A dummy that's survived test after test; it never
> seems to 'die'. Now it
> acts as a protective artifact of sorts; drive with
> it your car, and you and
> the dummy will both escape unscathed. The cost, of
> course, is that the
> injuries don't disappear; they're just diverted to
> some other poor bastard.
Sort of like a cheap copy of the Fool's powers. 
Interesting.  

> 
> - A dummy that's a proxy for a person; injure that
> person, and you injure
> the dummy instead. But the dummy becomes self-aware
> by experiencing pain -
> and when it finally comes alive, it wants
> _revenge_...
> 
> Any other interesting CTD ideas?

The dummy can be set up as a proxy, sure enough, but
it only delays the injury, it doesn't prevent it.  So
the dummy ALWAYS comes back to life and dolls the
damage it received out to the Original of the Proxy. 
It only does a little bit of the damage at a time,
though, and it won't go away until it feels the debt
is "repaid," so the dummy often ends up capturing and
torturing its Original for days (adding psychological
trauma to the sloughed-off injury.)  

Another idea, more realty-twisting yet more subtly
weird at the same time:  The crash test dummy appears
in your place every time you get seriously injured (it
wouldn't work if you just cut your finger or even
broke your arm.  This would have to be a seriously
debilitating and/or life-threatening injury.)  So,
every time someone shoots you in the head or you get
creamed by an animated cherry-red convertible, it
suddenly turns out that they didn't kill a real guy,
just a dummy with your clothes.  You, of course, wake
up where ever you left the dummy (naked if no one
thought to dress it before hand.)  There is no way to
repair the dummy after the incident and you must
obtain a new one each time.

One last version:  The dummy receives injuries that
you are likely to get, sort of as a warning or
divination device (it's possible to avoid these
injuries, but often difficult.) The injuries look like
crash test dummy injuries (dents and cracks) rather
than real human injuries, but you can get some inkling
of approaching injuries.  Such dummies fall apart, of
course, and can not be readily repaired, but at least
you'll know what part of your body will need extra
protection in the next few days/hours/etc. (however
precogniscient the dummy happens to be.)

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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