The Book Chute, or Library Processing Unit 232.7[1], is an automated personality in the Big MT in 2281.
Background
The Book Chute is a mechanical device located in The Sink. Like all the other systems there, it was disabled shortly after Doctor Mobius left The Think Tank for the Forbidden Zone. When his personality back-up is recovered from Doctor Klein's house (House 101 in Higgs Village), he speaks like a dystopian authority, promising to protect citizens from "seditious material"; namely, pre-War books.
According to his dialogue, he was also supposed to come equipped with an indoctrination module, but it was stripped to suit the R&D budget. He instead instructs the player in how to perform a form of self-indoctrination, involving a small cage and a sack of mole rats. The Book Chute also dislikes communism, and anything related to it, often commenting on it when the player is nearby.
Interactions with the player character
Interactions overview
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Quests
- All My Friends Have Off Switches: Book Chute is one of the appliances the Courier must upgrade.
Other interactions
The Book Chute converts old books into blank books at a one for one exchange. The books that it will accept are as follows:
These blank books can, in turn, be used at a workbench to create one skill book of each type. The player will need to acquire the recipe holotape (which are single-use items) for the skill book they wish to assemble, as well as 25 blank books and two bottles of wonderglue.
The mulching upgrade allows the Book Chute to breakdown any type of clipboard into 1 duct tape and 1 scrap metal. It can also breakdown pencils into 5 lead and 1 scrap metal for each turned in. The four clipboards types it accepts include:
Inventory
Notable quotes
Appearances
The Book Chute appears only in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues.
Behind the scenes
- The character is an amalgam of several concepts from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The book chute concept is reminiscent of the "memory holes" present within the "Ministry of Truth" where material that contradicts the current government line are placed never to be located again. The character also makes reference to a form of torture used in later parts of the novel ("a cage that fits over your head and a bag full of mole rats."). Another reference is that the personality matrix for the Chute is recovered from House # 101 in Higg's Village. Room 101 is an infamous room in 1984, in which the main character undergoes torture similar to what the chute describes with such vigor. It also references using the blank books to keep a journal, something the main character of Nineteen Eighty-Four does.
- In The Venture Bros. episode "Eeney, Meeney, Miney... Magic," Dean Venture declares that penguins have a gland above their eyes that converts salt water to fresh water. The Book Chute paraphrases this, confusing penguins for communists. This is itself a reference to the Supraorbital gland which does not directly produce fresh water but removes excess salt from the bird's bloodstream.
