Alexis peeps out the front door to Tranquility Lane and her stomach drops. Black-clad soldiers rush into the neighborhood with foreign shouts. Their precise formation and heavy weaponry are as out of place in this pre-war simulation as she is. House by house, the assault force kick down the door and storm inside; occasionally there is a burst of gunfire.
For a good ten seconds, she can only clutch the door frame with her child's hands and try to breathe. This is the violence she's inflicted on the residents. And she still doesn't know where Dad is.
Please be okay, Dad.
She hunches down with a gasp as the squad passes the abandoned house, intent on the residents who are fleeing through a nearby backyard. In the middle of the street, Betty stands rigid, eyes wide and fists clenched at her sides, aghast at the sight. Alexis doubts the girl's distress comes from the scene of violence. Sinking into a half-crouch, Alexis circles around the formation, but they're too preoccupied to notice her. She tries not to hear the thump as a body hits the green grass.
Behind Betty is a white door that was not there before.
Alexis' nerves are tight as she bounds towards it, but the soldiers scour the neighborhood without ever once looking at the park. In the garden, Betty drops her watering can with a hollow clang.
"You've ruined everything!" No longer a girl's voice, but the gruff snarl of a man.
A nearby burst of gunfire causes Alexis to cringe, adrenaline spiking on her tongue, searching for the source: a trio of Chinese soldiers gunning down Old Lady Dithers.
I'm sorry—
The dog barks, drawing her attention back to see Betty lunging at her throat with a trowel. Alexis springs back, hand going to her hip for a holster that isn't there, and trips over a watering can that conveniently finds itself underfoot—
With a snarl, Doc rushes past her to sink his teeth into Betty's white wrist. She howls in pain, her grip loosening on the trowel. But then there's a flurry of movement and the dog goes flying. He hits the dirt and tumbles to a halt with a whimper.
Alexis darts to Doc's side and the dog snuffles, his tail thumping against the ground. After a reassuring pat, she rounds on Betty with a right hook that would do Butch proud. Maybe Alexis has the body of a kid, but between Butch pushing her around and surviving the Wasteland, she has the advantage over a scientist in a scrawny girl's body.
Pinning Betty to the ground, Alexis has to shout to be heard above the latest hail of gunfire. "Where's my dad? What have you done with him?!"
Betty laughs with that unnerving man's voice. "He was here the entire time and you were too dense to figure it out. The dog, you fool!"
Alexis looks up at Doc and the dog stares back with intelligent brown eyes. There's nothing, no hint or clue from the tips of his pricked ears to the soles of his paws that betray his humanity. As his daughter, she should know, dammit. "Dad?"
He cocks his head under her scrutiny and whines low in his throat. His tail wags, though.
Huh. Makes sense. She's seen no other living creature aside from the residents.
The neighborhood is quiet now. Alexis glances around the street, this time keeping half her attention on Betty, and sees the soldiers milling about. Their programming fulfilled, they have no further purpose in the simulation. The door is across the park, next to the swings. With a final punch to disorient Betty, Alexis scoops up Doc—Dad—in her arms and rushes for the door.
"We're going!"
She can feel Dad's heart pounding in his too-small chest as she bolts for the door. Her legs are too short and her arms are too small to properly carry Dad, but she ignores the annoyingly realistic burn in her legs because she needs to go faster. The door springs open of its own accord, revealing a depthless gray beyond the threshold—
White-hot pain bites into her back. Dad barks in alarm, scrambling in her arms, claws digging into her skin, as they tumble across the threshold.
Behind her, Braun laughs.
White.
A hiss around her, faint and distant. Every nerve is alight with fire, surging outward from her chest to her limbs, followed by a wave of cold from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.
Something touches her jaw, turning her head to find the pulse point in her neck. A thumb peels back one of her eyelids, and she hisses at the influx of unwelcome, burning light. Her vision resolves on the figure leaning over her. Graying hair, a now-unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, a straight nose and familiar eyes. Worried eyes.
"Honey? Can you hear me?"
"Yeah." Alexis cracks open her other eye and can only stare. After all these weeks of uncertainty, her dad is right here. He's also lost the tail, which must be a relief for him.
She shifts in the recliner and makes to sit up.
Dad presses a hand to her shoulder, halting her movement. "Give it a moment. Your exit from the simulation wasn't nearly as smooth as mine. Are you in any pain?"
Ah, the doctor voice. Maybe she can argue with his dad voice, but not his doctor voice. Alexis curls her fingers and toes, feeling a wash of pins and needles. "I'm okay. It felt like some kind of nervous overload."
Dad makes her lie down for another minute, tapping her fingers against her thumbs to prove her fine motor skills haven't been damaged. So she takes the opportunity to get a closer look at the tranquility lounger. Besides the TV screen, there's medical equipment on either side of the chair; syringes on automated arms and IV lines snaking into the base of the chair. Now she understands why the weird robot insisted she don a Vault 112 suit. This one is thinner than her 101 jumpsuit, and features several ports for needles to slide freely under her skin. She's more than a little thankful the automated procedure must have cycled while she was still unconscious. Catheters are no fun whatsoever.
Shaking off the last of the pins and needles, Alexis sits up, gingerly, and presses a hand to the knot of pain in her spine. There isn't a trowel embedded in her back, at least, so that counts as a win. Dad steps back and offers a hand so she can lower her feet over the side of the lounger.
Instead of dropping his hand once she's steady on her feet, Alexis crushes him in a hug.
Her skin still prickles from the shock of exiting the simulation but she ignores it as his arms wrap around her, and for the first time since Amata jostled her awake, she can relax. Dad drops a kiss to the top of her head even though he has to stretch on his toes to reach. She can feel him deflate as he sighs, one hand running down her back.
"Dad," she croaks. "I missed you."
"I missed you too, sweetie. I was afraid I'd be trapped in there forever, but you saved me."
Alexis doesn't want to know how long he's been in the simulation. It took her weeks to pick up his trail. "Did you find what you needed on the G.E.C.K., at least?"
"Yes, before Braun grew impatient with—wait." He peers down at her. "How did you know about that?"
"Dr Li told me you'd gone to the Jefferson Memorial. I found your journal entries. That's how I knew to come here. I was always one step behind you."
Dad pulls back enough to place his hands on her shoulders, holding her at arm's length. The warmth leaves him, replaced by incredulity—and worry. "While it's good to see you, what are you doing outside the vault?"
Something in his tone gets her hackles up. "Isn't it obvious? What are you doing outside the vault?"
Dad sighs again, but there's an unfamiliar spark in his eyes. "If you've been to the memorial, you must know of Project Purity by now. Remember your mother's favorite Bible passage? It started as her dream: safe, clean water for everyone. She gave up so much for the project—we all did—and I have to see this through. Now that I have my answers on the G.E.C.K., there's no time to waste."
Instead of following Dad to the stairs, Alexis makes her way to the nearest monitoring station. The terminal shows its connected occupant status. Zero life signs. She checks the next terminal; same readout.
"Sweetie?"
"Dad?" And, oh, she hates how her voice trembles, lifting in that childish tone only he can draw from her. "Did I do the right thing?"
Silence but for soft footsteps, and then a gentle touch on her arm. Dad looks past her to the terminal and its flashing alert that immediate medical attention is required. "Braun would have tortured them for as long as they lived."
"That doesn't mean there wasn't some way to get them out of the simulation safely."
"Even if there were, these people are over two hundred years old. That the loungers kept them alive this long is frankly astounding. There's no telling if they'd even survive being released from the simulation, or what condition they'd be in afterward."
Hands poised over the keyboard, she closes her eyes. "I thought you swore the Hippocratic Oath?"
"It's… not as simple out here as it is in the vault, I'm afraid."
There's a world left unsaid in those words.
Alexis moves on to the next terminal, and pauses when it offers stable life signs. Her hopes are dashed when she reads the subject's name.
Overseer Stanislaus Braun.
Loathing breaks the surface of her grief, spurring her to race around his lounger, fumbling for her gun.
"Alexis, what are you doing?"
She points her sawed-off shotgun to the thick cables that provide power to the lounger's functions. Provide life. Her shotgun barks. The noise is like thunder in this cold cavern. Alerts flash across the terminal's screen, warning of power failure. Alexis reloads her shotgun and waits, but the lid doesn't lift, and the withered silhouette inside the glass remains still.
Forever, she hopes.
"Alexis!"
Ice water runs down her spine. She just killed a man in front of her father.
"Alexis. Look at me."
She turns around to face him, but looks at his left ear rather than risk eye contact.
Whatever he's going to say dies on his tongue. Taking her elbow, he guides her to the stairs.
They pass the strange robots on the way out of the vault, and again Alexis gawks at the brains suspended in tanks, wondering if they're human. The size would be about right. And then she wonders if she even wants to know. Both Alexis and her dad are eager to put Vault 112 behind them; she trots up the stairs despite him calling after her to take it easy after the recent shock to her body. It's good advice to heed, so she ignores it. Rebellion is an unfamiliar thrill, shooting through her stomach.
The vault is quiet but for her father's wheezing breaths behind her; she ignores that, too. It isn't just the tranquility loungers, now coffins, that spur her forward.
Past the great gear that once sealed the vault, they trudge up the final set of stairs that spits them out in the tin garage. The temperature changes in the span of a heartbeat; one moment, cool and damp. The next, sweltering heat. Circling the counter, Alexis halts at the roller doors.
"Okay," she says. All right, maybe she huffed it; Dad isn't the only one puffed from the climb. "It's getting late. We have cover here, so we should make camp and move on tomorrow." She scuffs one boot on the floor and surveys the view through the open garage. She isn't avoiding looking at Dad, no sir. That would be petty. And if rational, dutiful Alexis has never been one thing, it's petty.
He disagrees. "We have a few hours of light left. The more ground we can cover now, the better."
She raises an eyebrow. "You don't even want to take a few minutes? You were the one who spent the past however many days trapped in a dog's body."
"No, no. There will be time to rest when my work is complete. This is far too important. I need to get back to Rivet City right away."
Hefting her backpack to sit more comfortably on her shoulders, Alexis steps out of the garage. It isn't nearly as hard this time to adjust to the surface's brightness as it had been when she left Vault 101. In the yard, cars are stacked and rusted together. Beyond the chain-link fence that marks the boundaries of the yard, there are rolling barren hills and a cluster of dead trees. Alexis checks the map on her pip-boy, and when she looks up, she notices Dad doing the same. Despite herself, her lips twitch in a smile.
They set off without further fanfare, Dad in the lead, dogged by whatever force that has driven him for twenty years. Alexis follows more slowly, picking her way along the remains of the road. Chunks of asphalt, sunken into the ground, threaten to catch her toes on their uneven edges.
Dad glances over his shoulder, a frown tugging his eyebrows together, and she entertains a half-moment's notion of deliberately slowing down before she picks up the pace like a dutiful daughter.
Now striding beside him, she asks, "So tell me more about this Project Purity. How is it going to work?"
"It's a purifier, but unlike the one in the vault, this one is gigantic. Capable of purifying millions of galleons at once."
Suddenly the choice of locale makes sense. "You want to purify the whole basin. But if it worked on small scale—like the vault's purifier—and not on large scale, why not redefine your goals to something more easily achievable?"
Dad's gray eyes glimmer with excitement like two silver coins in the dirt. "Because it is possible on large scale, as Braun's work confirms. A smaller purifier, or even a series of purifiers, could be conquered by anyone who wanted to take advantage. With our work, we wanted to provide clean water for everyone."
She's encountered enough raiders who would hoard something so important for themselves, not to mention certain sleazy wasters who would charge for access to a water purifier. "If the whole basin is full of clean water, no one can have a monopoly on the resource."
"Precisely."
Talking shop is safe, so Alexis continues to quiz him on the details. "And this G.E.C.K., it can do so much more than purify water? It could terraform the entire wasteland? Shouldn't we be using all of the G.E.C.K., not just its water module?"
"Now who's jumping to large scale?" he teases. "Braun himself admitted the technology is unstable, so I wonder how successful it would be. Still, there's no harm in looking."
"After Project Purity is finished, you won't know what you do with yourself," she throws back. "Consider it a retirement project."
He chuckles. "I was thinking of taking up fishing, actually."
She can't fight the giggle that builds in her chest. Dad catches her gaze and something eases between them. It can't entirely heal the resentment that bruises the tender spaces of her heart, but for now it's enough.
They pass a shallow cave that offers some protection from the elements, but Dad refuses to stop. "Now that I know what we need, I want to get back to work as soon as possible."
Moira taught Alexis to establish cap before it gets dark. If she's learned this, her dad, who evidently grew up on the surface—and that's an alien thought to consider—should know better. "Dad, there's no guarantee we'll find a decent place to sleep an hour from now when it's too dark to travel safely."
Despite spending days trapped in the simulation, fresh determination has renewed his stamina, or at least his willpower. Seeing that curdles something bitter in her chest, and the strength of it surprises her. Project Purity is so important he won't stop at anything for it, not even when it comes to leaving his own daughter behind.
When she'd imagined their reunion, Alexis had figured she could wait at least a day before hitting him with the hard questions. But she hadn't counted on this sudden surge of anger. "And you had to keep this science project a secret from me?"
He seems to resign himself to this fight. "Oh, my love," he sighs, "it's so much more than a simple science project. This is my life's work—and your mother's. She gave everything to Project Purity. I couldn't allow her legacy to remain unfinished. You're an adult now." Under that damned calm is a hint of regret. "You've grown into an independent young woman who hardly needs her old man anymore. It was time to return to Project Purity."
She clenches her jaw. "You couldn't even say goodbye in person? What was I supposed to do?"
"I never wanted this life for you, in this forsaken warzone. Raiders, super mutants and all other manner of dangers prowl the surface. Not to mention the radiation that poisons all it touches." He frowns. "You were supposed to stay in the vault and make a life for yourself where it's safe."
"Safe?" Alexis repeats, dumbfounded. But of course he doesn't know anything of what happened in the vault after he left. "Dad, they killed Jonas. After you opened the vault, the Overseer— he— it's like someone flipped a switch. He sicced security on me and even had Amata tortured to find my whereabouts. I had to get out of the vault."
He stops mid-step. Shock blanks his expression. It's quickly chased away by the ravages of dawning horror. "Jonas is dead?" He looks away, to the horizon. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought if the Overseer could blame it all on me, you would be safe. And Jonas…"
The usual platitude is that the recently departed look peaceful. That hadn't been the case with Jonas.
Alexis doesn't want to remember him like that, not when he used to race her in wheelchairs they'd liberated from the infirmary's storeroom, or when he showed her how to win at Zeta Invaders so she could beat Butch's highest score.
"I'm sorry too. I wish there had been something I could have done for him." She swallows. "Why does the Overseer hate the surface so much? That's— that's why he never liked us, isn't it?" And now that she's walking through her thought process, something else occurs to her. "I wasn't even born in the vault, was I?"
"No, you weren't. You were born in the Jefferson Memorial."
Yet another thing he never told her. Her shoulders slump. "When Moriarty told me he'd seen me as a baby, I didn't believe him, you know? I thought he was lying to squeeze more caps out of me. But it wasn't a lie. Dad, why didn't you ever tell me? Why did I have to learn that from some skeevy con man?"
"One term of entry into Vault 101 was not to advertise that we had come from the surface. As the years passed, it became forbidden to even speak of the vault opening. Also, I… felt it would be best not to give anyone reason to ostracize you. Butch would have found some fresh way to torment you, I'm sure."
He isn't wrong on that count. Alexis folds her arms. "We all grew up thinking the vault had never been opened, but there's a store in Megaton that had a 101 jumpsuit. Our whole lives, the Overseer lied to us."
Not just him. Every adult in the vault. Everyone old enough to remember her dad's entrance, or the surface foray before that.
"I know, and I'm sorry."
There are no more words to be had between them. They make camp when it gets dark. Unlike the area they passed earlier, they have to make do with a sandy ditch that offers measly protection from the elements courtesy of nearby boulders. Despite Alexis' best efforts scouring with her pip-boy's torch, there is no wood to be found for a fire. At least they can pool their supplies for an almost decent meal of Cram and split a snack cake for dessert. Maybe the food in the vault was mostly bland, but at least it wasn't riddled with rads like surface food is.
It doesn't feel right to toss the tin away after she's finished; it can be recycled, and to do anything less is wasting a finite resource. But it isn't like she can knock of Vault 101's door with a bag full of cans. With a sigh, Alexis pitches the tin as far as she can.
"How do you find it on the surface?" Despite describing the surface as a 'forsaken warzone', Dad's tone his curious.
Alexis makes a noncommittal grunt.
Dad raises an eyebrow at that. "You don't sound impressed."
She shifts on the dirt. "It doesn't feel right without a roof over my head."
"Ah yes, the knowledge of several hundred tonnes of rock above our heads kept at bay only by a centuries-old ceiling."
"You're mocking me," she accuses.
Dad keeps a straight face. "I would never." He then leans back to watch the sky, and something in his expression shifts, just slightly. She doesn't recognize it. "The surface has its dangers, but I missed the stars."
Alexis follows his gaze skyward. As always, her chest tightens for a brief moment, her mind screaming this isn't right and where's the ceiling and too much space. The green-tinged sky of daylight hours is nothing to write home about, but when the sun had set on her first day out of the vault and the stars had revealed themselves—she'd lost her breath. Milky curtains ripple across the sky like vast nets, trawling for millions of tiny pinpoints of light.
She'd never imagined anything like this could be possible.
"I know I've been a brat about this," she says, slowly, "but from what I've seen up here… Project Purity is important."
He sighs, only it isn't from weariness but from relief. "I want you to be there when we finally open the floodgates."
"I will be." And she means it. "I want to help."
"That's my girl!" Dad stretches the distance between them to wrap an arm around her shoulders and presses a kiss to her temple. As she leans against his side, he hums thoughtfully. "While this isn't what I had in mind, I'm glad you're with me."