FO1 short story

[BlueFlames]

This is a bit of a short story that I had been meaning to write for a while. I had some spare time a few nights back, so I finally took the outline and wrote it up. The ending looks a bit rushed in retrospect, but it was late, and I just wanted to finish up, so that's what I get.

Obligatory spoiler warning: If you've not played Fallout 1, but intend to, this may give away some small plot elements relating to your goal of recovering a water chip. Of course, if you haven't played Fallout 1 and intend too, you're really not trying too hard, are you?

Nonobligatory formatting note: Normally, my formating is a single hard return with a tab for new paragraphs and a double hard return for either a shift in perspective or a jump through time. Web browsers don't parse tabs though, so I altered the formatting to double hard returns for new paragraphs and horizontal dividers for shifts in perspective and/or time. I like being a little more subtle than a horizontal divider, but the internet sucks.

"Chronicle of Vault 12"

Bakersfield, at one point, was a small town in the state of Utah. That was long, long ago though... Even those that survived the war were born after it had become a bustling metropolis. That was why the vault was installed, not knowing that that would only compound the problem of Bakersfield's size. All the propaganda that the United States government and media could put out was not enough to hide the tensions between the United States (including recently-annexed Canada), Europe, and China. That made living in a city with a vault a major perk.

Construction of the vault began in secret, as was true of most vaults. Four months prior to completion, word of what the "sewer expansion project" really was leaked. Each month thereafter, the population of Bakersfield doubled. When there were no houses, apartments, or hotel rooms left, people who were once living economically healthy lives in other regions became vagrants in Bakersfield's streets. The city did everything it could to keep pace with the population explosion, but there was nothing to be done to stop the magnetism of having a vault to flee to in the likely event of war.

As we all know now, war did come, and Bakersfield's population boom had moved it up the Chinese target list. It was allocated one of the missiles in the first barrage, meaning that the sirens did not sound until a scant ten minutes before impact. The city had not had time to drill the population on how to evacuate to the vault, should the sirens sound. All there had been time for was to give out meaningless safety and preparedness awards for the propagandists to show off. When the sirens did go off, people simply flocked to the sewers. Once underground, it was chaos. Nobody could agree on which direction go to search for the vault, so everyone chose their own direction and ran.

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To this day, I don't know who to consider the lucky ones. Though it was so long ago, and I was just a school child, I still remember the day. My mother and I were in the lobby of our apartment building at the time, coming home from the elementary school, when the alarm claxons began wailing. Just as with everyone else, we knew the vault was our only hope and it was in the sewer. With adrenaline surging through her, my mother hefted me off my feet, something she hadn't done for a few years at that point, and made a run for the nearest manhole, just like everyone else.

A crowd had already begun to form, but it was still small, for a moment at least. As soon as she set me down again, I understood that climbing down was my most immediate priority. The last I heard from my mother, she was shouting at me to run and not wait once I got down, so run I did. My childhood size let me squeeze between and squirm past the adults, though I was sharply aware that I could also not be seen by people running the other way. Fortunately, the further along I got, the more people were taking the same course.

What they could see and I could not was the vault's massive outer door. I only caught a glimpse of it, once I breached the front of the mob. At the time, it was a glistening, polished silver. Even in the dim, dank atmosphere of the sewers, it seemed to gleam. Had the situation not been so urgent, I would have been tempted to play with the door control panel. If anything, I knew I would be trampled if I paused, so I continued my rush for the vault. Two police officers were at the enterance, trying to stem the tide of people and count heads as they funneled into the airlock. They weren't about to deny a child enterance, so they took no action when I squeezed between them.

Once inside, I was directed to the elevator that was shuttling people to the living quarters on the second level. Everyone was visably relieved. In theory, they had made it to safety and had the rest of their lives to live, whereas moments before, they thought they were moments away from being vaporized in a sewer. In retrospect, it would have been a less-than-desirable place to die, but for some reason, that was not the foremost thought on my mind at the time. I was mostly interested in finding a bed.

I'm not sure how long I was running, but I was tired after the fact, and just wanted a nap. Vault personel (you could tell they were vault officials because they already had the blue jumpsuits with giant, yellow twelves sewn onto the backs) were directing people once they reached the second level. They were apparently not worrying about reuniting families at that point, just making sure everyone got their space. I was sent to a room at the far end of the level.

All the children wandering in seemed to be getting directed to this room. There were two supervisors, one watching the door, and the other trying to take names to help find parents later. The older children, who had a better grasp on what was going on, were cooperative, while the younger ones, myself included, still followed the mantra, "Don't talk to strangers," to the letter.

It was about the time that they asked my name that the floor jolted beneath me, and everyone heard a very muffled blast. Just a few seconds afterward, there were two more jolts and corrisponding blasts. The vault itself seemed to show no sign of weakness, but the vault officer taking attendance got up and darted out of the room. I suppose it was a matter of procedure, to either make sure that the vault's airlock had been sealed or to check in that there were no ruptures in the vault's walls.

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The next few days were quite tumultuous for everyone in the vault. First priority was reuniting families and orienting people to the lifestyle and procedures of the vault. Most of the children had at least one parent or older sibling make it to the relative safety of the vault. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. My mother never checked in, meaning she never made it to the vault, and my father was at work, miles outside of Bakersfield before the alarms sounded, so he did not have a chance of making it to the vault. That left me alone.

I was assigned an adoptive family, but as children thrust into foster families often do, I rejected them, on the basis of them not being my 'real' family. They were kind to me, but I was eight, and felt a strong loyalty to my biological family, even if I suspected that they were dead. Often, I wandered the vault, just to get away from them, but Vault Tec vaults don't offer much room to wander, so I was always found and caught in rather short order.

Getting used to the structure of vault life was somewhat difficult as well. For one thing, the illusion of democracy that still existed in the United States disappeared in the vaults. There was an overseer, and his word was final, not that he delivered too many words. For another, the vault was mostly automated, meaning that there was very, very little work to be done. For adults, all there was in terms of a job was medical training, and for children, there were learning computers in the library. Had things gone according to plan, our time-killing resources would have been exhausted in a matter of a few months.

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Despite plans, we did not have a few months. The vaults were meant to be closed for fifty years. Vault Twelve was closed for three weeks. At the time, we were unsure why, but the inner and outer airlock doors flung themselves open, and the background radiation began pouring into the vault. There was a futile effort to distribute anti-radiation medicine to everyone, but that was a short-term solution at best. Our food and water supplies could not be treated, and the medicine would run out well before we could even begin to guide ourselves to safer territory.

Many succumbed to the radiation. They seemed to literally melt as they absorbed more and more rads after the medication supplies ran out. Enormous, yellow lesions would boil up and pop, releasing a putrid-smelling pus. It was hard to tell when they died because days before death, they would stop moving, in a futile attempt to minimize their pain. It was a terrible tragedy to witness, and the memory pains me to this day.

Some of us did not fold under the pressure of the radiation though. Well, not entirely anyway. We felt the same pain, and our flesh too bubbled and burst, but we had some kind of natural resilience that saved our lives to a certain extent. Of course, we did not know at the time that we were going to be spared in this twisted way, so we were treated just as everyone else was.

At least, we were treated, until the medical staff died, just as everyone else was dying around them. It was two days after my final doctor died, when I finally acclimated to the pain enough to try to get up. Half-disentigrated muscle tissue made getting up hard enough, but that was coupled with the fact that most of my cartiledge had liquified, making for the worst case of arthritis imaginable. Though it was a whole new set of pains to get used to, it was nothing compared to the initial burn of the radiation.

I was not the only survivor. There were many more in the infirmary, and there were some that wandered in from the sewers after a while. We decided rather unanimously on a list of objectives.

First, we would investigate the cause of the vault's early opening. The answer turned up after a rather simple inspection of the vault's computer logs. Instead of the door being closed with the normal program, it was closed in an extended testing mode, designed to run three weeks, then return the vault to standby status. In that respect, it did exactly what it was supposed to, but the initial burst of radiation that blasted the computer systems when both of the vault's airlock doors opened prevented anybody from reclosing the door on a more permanent basis.

Our second and third objectives were to find any more people who managed to survive outside of the vault, and begin reestablishing Bakersfield. That is our ongoing goal, and we suspect that it will continue at least until the other vaults open in another twenty years.

[max]

hey i did play Fallout, and I actually tried to skip your introduction but that is exactly the mood I got from it. then i reread what you had to say, oh, it's actually about that game? then it's perfect. i think borrowed interest can be wonderful when people make it their own. i agree that the ending feels a bit rushed, but 50% writing is revision and the more you do it the better it gets. it's just how it works. you kept my attention.

[BlueFlames]

it's actually about that game?

Yeah... If you remember, in the Hub, you can get a data disk from the librarian that talks about three vaults. Thirteen is the one your character is from in the game; fifteen is the one you go to and find totally wrecked, and twelve is where you find the functional chip.

The problem for me was that Vault 12 only got that short mention in the data disk. Vault 13 obviously has a lot of flavor, because it's open for the player to explore. Vault 15 had a couple of former residents living in Shady Sands, and in Fallout 2, it gets used for a relatively major quest. I felt Vault 12 needed a little love, so the story is a bit of its history from the perspective of a resident.

I'll probably go back and rewrite the ending at some point. I've never been as good finishing written works (anything from essays to a sci-fi novella I'm finishing up) as starting them. This ending disappoints me more each time I reread it though.

Glad you enjoyed it.