Voices, half heard amongst a swirling cloud of mist, filtered into her ears as if they had floated down along a distant, watery tunnel. Struggling she tried to remember something, anything at all of who she was, but nothing came. There was only the voices.
"I thought you said you could make the machine work, Rothchild. We all know what it can do; yet this is the fifth test this week, and still" - the voice faded out, as if the person was walking away, before returning as strong as ever - "You know how important this is for the war effort! We can't afford for this not to work! Sarah is running out of..."
And then the voice was lost into the fog, as the sounds and anima of reality sank back into a sullen nothingness. Dimly, she was aware of other voices: of talks about a 'Project Purity', of a fight against an 'Enclave', the words breaking and melding back together as the sentences merged with a multitude of voices that were not her own. And still she could not think, could not gather anything of herself save for one thing, and one thing only.
'I am the Lone Wanderer.'
It was Elder Lyons' voice that she had heard when she was unconscious, as she later realised when he explained what had been happening in her fortnight-long coma. Much of the inside of her head was still a blur; a jumbled collection of shapes and memories, and at first she hadn't recognised him. She still couldn't, truth be told. Only the hint of the memories had remained, not the memories themselves, in that she could remember that she had met him but not actually meeting him.
What he told her seemed much the same. Apparently the Enclave (a blank, but one that was later filled in) had been forced from Project Purity (she could remember it in ruins, but never rebuilt) by her and Sarah Lyons.
Sarah Lyons. She could remember her. The fellow Valkyrie standing battered but never broken next to the burning corpse of a behemoth. And now she was lying unconscious on a Brotherhood table, still dressed in battle armour; still trapped by the same coma from whose clutches she'd only just escaped. And she'd seen the look of jealousy and hunger in Elder Lyons' face; the unspoken question of 'why are you awake when she's still asleep?' She had told him that time would heal all wounds and he had said he knew, but his eyes had showed that he didn't really believe it. And so she'd left the two of them to pursue the Enclave: to help the Brotherhood fight one last war alongside a giant robot whose inner workings were still unknown and whose support was still unreliable.
"You betrayed us!" the Enclave officer screamed, two Hellfire and Tesla troopers hastily covering his retreat from the crumbling, pre-war building; their frantic footsteps throwing up clouds of dust into the beams of light pouring down from the patchwork ceiling.
Whilst her mind was still wondering what on earth he was talking about, she took advantage of the distraction to break from cover, her hand arcing up with the Alien blaster. The liquid bolt of blue snapped the head from off another Hellfire trooper, his corpse thudding onto the floor as she completed the spin and whammed into the side of an upturned table. Painful, but it left her well hidden from the plasma bursts winging their way towards her.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she'd called back, readying a grenade in her left hand and feeling her sweat stick to the metal, waiting for his response to betray their position before she'd risk throwing it.
"You know what I mean! Raven Rock and the deal you made with President Eden. We let you take the purifier, and you led the Brotherhood and that robotic monstrosity right to us. He trusted you, and - ah!"
The grenade had left her palm before she could stop it, the explosion instantly killing the remaining Enclave soldier. She walked round the now charred table and over to where the Enclave officer was slumped against the wall. He was still breathing, but the stuttering rise and fall of his chest suggested it'd soon stop. If he'd been wearing power armour the explosion would have just winded him, but his uniform had only stopped the blast from tearing him to pieces. Blood was dripping out from some hidden wound underneath him, the red liquid mixing with the dust and crumpled newspapers on the floor.
"I don't remember Eden, or Raven Rock," she said, more to herself than the officer, and shot him in the head.
Adams Airforce Base burned before her, the fires dancing in her eyes; tattered remains of the crawler thudding down from the sky like metal rain. And she had done it alone: she had finished the job when the Brotherhood and Liberty Prime had proved they couldn't. The Enclave lay dead at her hands; a hundred soldiers killed to quench her drive for a revenge she could barely remember. Everything about her life from before the coma seemed blurry, as if she was remembering it from a video reel or picture album. What little medical knowledge she had picked up from her father told her that was to be expected, but expecting it was not the same as living it. Her memories felt hollow, and they were not the only thing that was wrong.
What had the Brotherhood done to her?
Or 'what had the purifier done to her?', she later amended, trudging back down through the Presidential Metro and towards the waiting train. The amount of radiation she'd absorbed would surely have changed her. She knew that now. It was stupid to have thought the Brotherhood was behind any of the changes since she had woken up: differences between how she was now and what she could remember being like. Not that she had changed that much on the outside; the same face still looked back at her from the mirror; she still fought with the same deadly efficiency. But she was still changed.
All of her old abilities were gone: she no longer felt the twinge of skin re-knitting itself in the sun or the sudden clarity of the night's air. As if the radiation had undone all that radiation had ever given her. But this rewrite came with something else, something more shocking. She had taken at least fifty bullets when storming the Air Base, and yet not a single one of them had hindered her. All that had happened was that she'd bled for a few moments before healing rapidly. It was as if she was invulnerable, unstoppable; a juggernaut formed by the unholy levels of radiation released from the Purifier. And that wasn't all: her horizons had expanded, her abilities no longer constraining her in the same way they'd done before. She could learn more skills, think better thoughts; improve herself in a myriad of ways.
As the train took her back she worried that she was becoming some kind of super-mutant through unsuspected FEV exposure, or maybe even a ghoul. She checked her reflection in the window, pulling her dark hair out to check if any of it was falling out. But it wasn't: it was the exact same length it had always been. Something about that bothered her, but she brushed it aside for the relief coursing through her body. She wasn't changing, or at least not changing yet. If there was one thought she feared most of all - above any kind of death the wasteland could offer her, -it was the idea of becoming something other than she was: a non-human. Even though she respected them, helped them even, she could never stop the disgust she felt inside. They weren't human; they were less than human. Freaks caused by the war and allowed to linger on. A living reminder of mankind's folly.
Lyons would know if something had changed. He'd been watching over her the entire fortnight, more than enough time to have called in some medical professionals to look her over. Perhaps he hadn't told her so that she wouldn't be distracted. That seemed likely. He'd know if something was wrong with her, she was sure of it.
"What's happened to me?" she'd asked him, Elder Lyons still waiting by Sarah's bedside for his daughter to wake up. And he'd turned, and she'd walked in closing the door behind her to give them some privacy.
And he'd replied, eyes for the first time betraying the age of his body, "That's what I want to know."
She paused then, because this was not the way this conversation should go, not the way any conversation should go. It was wrong.
And he'd continued: "What happened with you? What worked on you that won't work on Sarah. What happened to you?"
He turned back to Sarah, a hand brushing aside a few of her golden locks of hair, looking every inch the wizened old man.
"I don't understand, Lyons. I need you to tell me what happened at the purifier. What changed; what's different? I don't feel normal; I don't feel right..." She trailed off, unable to ask the question 'am I a ghoul?' for fear of the answer.
"What happened at the purifier?" Lyons had looked up at her, a slow, dark realisation creeping across his face. "You know, don't you. You've figured it out."
Maybe if she pretended she had, she could figure out what had happened: the state he was in gave no promise that he'd explain it if she said no. And so she nodded.
"You died." He stroked Sarah's head sadly. "And we rebuilt you."
She could only feel shock. Dead? They could cure that? Rebuild her like some kind of Lazarus... what?
"Of course, we were lucky enough to have the data on your pip-boy." What data? She'd never done anything on death... unless they'd cloned her from one of Vault-tec's experiments...
"We visited Pinkerton first of all, of course, and then we picked up Harkness. And we were lucky enough that you'd been to vault 112, so that we could retrieve your memories from the simulation. We had to fill a few of them in with just your pip-boy memories... We had nothing from after the simulation, of course, and it took some work from Rothchild's scribes and a full facial and sex change by Pinkerton before..."
She couldn't hide the shock anymore, and he'd seen it. And now there was only pity in his eyes. Pity and pain.
"You lied, didn't you? You never knew." He'd paused, and she could feel her heart thumping away and the air catching in her throat. But not her heart and not her throat, just simulations; simulations...
"You're an Android," he said quietly, and the world shattered around him, falling like a cascade of stars around his still speaking form.
"You have to understand, we were at war and you were dead. We'd lost the Lone Wanderer when we needed her most, and you're worth as a symbol, or even just as a soldier, far, far outweighed the cost. It wasn't even hard: it had all been done before, and Pinkerton and Rothchild were more than happy to help."
And then the old man turned back to his daughter, and the pain in his eyes was filled with a feral love.
"And we lost Sarah, too; lost the leader of Lyons' Pride. We couldn't cope with both of you gone, and so we remade you. The other Android to remake Sarah was easy to catch; Rothchild figured it out of course. Victoria Watts. You probably never realised. And we had a set of memories from when Sarah tried to access that Anchorage simulation, and we got it, even if it meant crushing the Outcasts and all the casualties that caused."
And now the love turned again to pain.
"But she won't wake. We've tried everything that worked with you: everything, but nothing works. And we can't devote any more resources towards it... Rothchild only allowed me to bring her back because he knew what she meant to me; knew that even bringing you back was just an excuse so that I could see her again..."
And he looked up, his eyes filled with tears as the world still fell around him. An old man crying for his dead daughter amongst a waterfall of twisted light and half-reflected shadows.
"But it won't work, it just won't work as it has for you. So tell me, Wanderer: why has it worked for you? Why do you walk whilst she still sleeps? What happened to you?"
The silence dragged out as everything changed, as the broken world tried to remake itself and fell apart each time, because the cornerstone was never there. She was not herself. She was dead. And it all made terrible, horrible sense.
"Say something, please. Tell me why," he begged, as if he expected a reply; as if she could still remember how to speak.
"Frankenstein," her voice said, and moments later she remembered thinking it, remembered that it was what she had meant to say before her thoughts collapsed into pieces again.
Elder Lyons paused, as if her voice had surprised him too, before nodding.
"I could understand why you'd think that, but we didn't bring something back from the dead. We brought you back from the dead, you! You're not a monster."
And she'd almost laughed, laughed at how he could be so old and yet so stupid: to spend so much time clinging to the past and yet never, never understanding it.
"Within the Outcast's there was a soldier. Her name was Anne-Marie Morgan, and if she'd heard that she'd tell you that whilst Frankenstein was a monster, he was not the monster you're talking about."
And she knew what she had to do.
"Frankenstein was the name of the scientist who made him: who brought him into life. And everyone remembers that he was a monster, but then they always forget that he never was one. Just a man who dreamt of being a god."
In hindsight, he should never have left her armed.
Her hands flicked up and the Alien blaster was in them and the jet was already streaking out to Sarah's limp form. It hit her, and the Android-that-looked-like-Sarah's eyes and mouth flew open, and not a sound came out as she crumbled into dust.
Elder Lyons had barely enough time to scream out "What are you doing?" before the second shot hit her in the head, forever destroying the Android that housed the last remnant of the Lone Wanderer.