Geneticist

This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

The Geneticist makes his home in the Medical Wing, north of Medbay, but East of Robotics. As a Geneticist, your primary job is to keep essential staff from dying permanently through the use of wacky clone science, while also researching genetic defects and mutations in your spare time. When all the Medical Doctors are dead or incompetent and the Roboticists are too busy putting butts on everyone's heads, it's often the Geneticists that come through with a previous killed crewmate who is able to out the traitor and start a lynch mob. The Genetics lab is frequently an early target of Operatives.

The Lab

Med-Sci has a DNA analyzer and cloner, a DNA manipulator, and a small storage area. The storage area has a couple of tools, 4 monkeys, and 2 morgue slabs to get failed experiments off the floor.

The Cloner

This is 90% of the usefulness Genetics offers in any given round. To clone someone, you require a scan of their DNA. This can be collected while they are living, or shortly after they have died. Rotted corpses, skeletons, and husks left by Changeling meals do not have any DNA within them. If you get a body like this, send it to Robotics. In some cases they can help, in other cases they can't.

To get a DNA scan, grab the subject and then click on the DNA scanner to load them in. Click on the Cloning Console with an empty hand, then Scan them. If there is DNA to salvage and the player is still logged in, you will get the scan information. If there is no DNA (rotted body, husk), the computer will tell you so. If the player is not logged in anymore, the computer will give a cryptic error about the mind interface failing.

Now, click View Records and find the person you want to clone. Click on their record, and click clone to start the process. If the player is not logged in, the computer will tell you it is unable to start the cloning cycle.

If someone comes in to get scanned of their own accord, they can climb in and jump out of the DNA Scanner themselves. This allows a helpful AI to control this process if you have a mind to let it to. If someone has the initiative to come in and get scanned on their own, it is polite to attempt to clone them every 10-15 minutes. The one time it works you can be assured they were dead in Maintenance somewhere.

Once the cloning process starts, it takes about 2 minutes for it to complete. When a clone stumbles out, they are naked, and usually have some combination of toxin damage and brain damage. Anti-Toxins and Alkysine, respectively, will fix these problems. Give them a speech on how you are god, get them some new equipment, either from their old body or the locker in your lab, and kick them out.

The Manipulator

There is also a DNA manipulator in the south part of the lab, which is where Geneticists conduct the involved work of unlocking the genetic code, hoping for super-powers. The process is absurdly elaborate, technical, and time-consuming. For a more complete discussion of this, see the Guide to Genetics.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. As a geneticist, you can expect to see the following:

End the round with at least 5 people scanned
You need to get people into the DNA scanner. Most rounds, you won't get 5 people in the scanner period, let alone 5 people who won't be cloned, so if you really want to do this you might need to try accosting people in medbay so you can scan them.

Save a buffer containing at least one superpower to disk and ensure it reaches CentCom
After you've isolated a block with a superpower and set the block high enough to activate it, save the buffer to a data disk. As long as that disk leaves on the escape shuttle, this will be completed.

Syndicate Geneticist

A Geneticist's biggest asset when acting as a traitor is the fact that they have near total control over who gets revived, and how. If an assassination target gets pulled up to your doorstep, tell the person that you'll get to the corpse in a second, then conveniently forget about them until they've rotted. The Manipulator is also a fantastic way to kill people that walk into your lab if you are able to score a flash off the Roboticist. If someone barges in, flash them, take off their headset, then shove them into the Manipulator and let them eat a ton of radiation. Eccentricity and wandering is also expected from a Geneticist. Hunting for superpowers is extremely boring, so many Geneticists wander off to do something else. Nobody will question why you're dragging a dead body if you're heading back to your lab.

The Geneticist's biggest challenge is access. Geneticists are one of the few people on the station who don't start with Maintenance access, which is a huge problem. Fortunately, it's not unusual to request it from the HoP, so if you dash out to Customs the second a round starts to ask for access, you can usually get it.

Supplementary Video

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