Wildstar Medic/Resonator Heacanon
[EDIT: I forgot one of the neater ones! Added!] So I’ve been mulling on this for a while, and I think it’s worth sharing! I’m really into figuring out reasons why things work in fantasy/sci-fi settings, and recently while RPing my medic I started thinking about the mechanics of the resonators. Here’s what I’ve decided makes sense:
The resonators have eight programmable presets.
The resonators use their own specific programming language, which is taught in medical school. My tentative name for it is AESC because I’m a dork.
More advanced or educated doctors and medics will know more advanced code and applications for this programming language. It is not a user-friendly or easily picked-up programming language by design.
The eight presets are there for ease of use in emergencies. New functions may be programmed in on the fly, but it takes time (just like in-game it takes time for you to pop up the UI and switch things out on your LAS). Obviously, medical personnel will get faster at programming in the things they use the most often.
There is a set of serviceable, but not fancy, resonators tucked into the tops of all of those round med-kits just in case someone who can use them needs them. They are pre-programmed with three or four of the most basic healing functions. The bottoms contain more traditional medical supplies such as gauze, needles, sutures, a weak laser scalpel, antibac/pain relief medisprays, and healing medisprays for minor cuts, scrapes and punctures.
The resonators were developed out of an ancient, single-use technology. Crafty medical personnel were already attempting to create multi-use, handheld devices to incorporate many of the new technologies being developed. These were successful, but the iconic design of those ancient and easily-recognized “defib paddles” was an easy choice for merging function and familiarity into a new standard medical tool.
The advanced programmability came much later, when the resonator technology was picked up by military scientists. AESC was still used for healing purposes only at this point.
Shortly thereafter, an ethically-grey and very curious military researcher realized that if the devices were capable of healing, that meant that at their most fundamental level, they were capable of rapidly altering biological matter, period. Testing for resonators as weaponry began, still using AESC.
Harmful usages of AESC are an ethical quandary for some medical personnel. Many medical schools forbid knowledge of those usages of the code. Some personnel take pride in never having learned anything to do with the harmful side of AESC.
Neurological/psychiatric uses for AESC have been tinkered with since a few decades after its widespread adoption, but only in the last several decades has any real research been done into it. Experimentation with the neurological/psychiatric potential of the programming language is generally done by the elite few who know it inside and out.
Only one or two reliably predictable functions — reliable enough to be taught widely, anyway — have been discovered in that time. An example of one is Calm.
That’s what I have so far! If you have any other sweet medic headcanons, let’s talk about ‘em. I love medics I love tech I love ethical quandaries I love this game
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