Last night. Body in the room. She was an opponent, seemingly. As I lie on the matress it is about 7 o clock, the sun is streaming through the window. There are bodies downstairs too. They are looking unseemly.
I have never really written before. It isn't something I've particularly needed before, either recreational or as an outlet. Writing, to me, always seemed inferior to speaking. I can recall even hating the writing of cards and letters. But that world is out of view. Even the pedantic, the superfluous things, the things you don't give a moment's thought, now are gone.
The past for me is another nation, another planet, in fact. I don't feel drawn to it quite. I have a need to think of the future. Considering how it was I came to live in this year, 2287, that may seem strange.
It strikes me that I don't know who this is for. When you are uncertain of even being alive tomorrow, why bother? A million different people wrote a million different diaries before 'the war' as everyone now must call it. How many are still surviving? How many have been found and read? How many were appreciated? The number gets successively smaller for each of those propositions. And those people may have lived under the nuclear threat, but one can only spend so long paralysed in terror. And of course, the human is more than likely to be wishful in thought and a diary must be a place for those thoughts to live in. This is a thought I have entertained more and more recently.
I spent some of my past years in the army. I remember little of it, but a few details stand out: The routine. The day to day, it was rigid, and I can remember being amazed at its tedium. Another is the fighting. When you are in a gunfight, you are thinking about very little in real thought. Your body and mind instead take on a strange symbiosis. And it is very much chaotic and unpleasant. You spend every moment of actual conflict wishing it would end, so you could return to safety. But in safety, your view changes and again you feel the passive stickiness of tedium.
I suppose, if I take account of what it is I do now, dodging bands of raiders, mutants and grafters, all intent on dealing death without difference, I must be better off for having been a soldier. I still have my fatigues, which I wear for their ease of access. They are made with the need for magazines, guns and parts etc anyway. But I do not miss it, nor do I relish the reminders I get of it today.
War brutalises people and mashes them into new types. They start thinking in terms of survival and selfishness becomes a mandatory thought. Not all succumb to violence or the wreaking of havoc, but enough people do that one is forced to be on their guard, and to distrust even their friends.
In that sense, I am unsurprised by the war and horror and death found in the Commonwealth, a place name so ludicrous that its only relevance is in its shortcomings. It's a name that highlights not the worst, but the pointless. The wish, but lack, of respectability and harmony and common good. The tatty clothes and unblinking eyes, the knowledge, which I haven't quite faced yet, that life is likely to be shorter. The belief that things will get better while realising they haven't. Somewhere above nihilism, but beneath true hopefulness. And yet, titles like that must be bandied about as the way things are. The word 'Commonwealth' both in actual and assumed terms, is a word that does not even suggest the world it is emblazoned above.
Besides the general anarchism expressed by the aforementioned gun wielding types, I am surprised among settlers, of how insular things are. I could write a note from Anchorage as an enlisted man and have a reply by second subsequent afternoon. Yet here, there is no postal service. Nor is there any press (with one exception, which I will write of later.) There are also no hospitals, no real running factories, or stores. There are vendors and salesman and individual doctors. Institutions have been reduced to individuals. People don't go 'out' or try to explore the world. Outside of those who are too ill or vulnerable to travel, there seems to be an incessant and puzzling lack of curiosity by most settled people to go anywhere, even for short times.
Of course, there are the mutants, but also the little things, like mole rats. But if I can survive and live essentially among them, being a strange sort of newborn adult in this austere and rickety world, why don't the locals see more of it?
Perhaps I am simply too limited in outlook. I have only lived in this age some few months, but in it I have seen much. I spent my first few days with Codsworth. Then after encountering the militiamen I went south. I took many stops on the way and got into more than a few fights, but nothing that had me out for good.
It may be hypocritical of me to criticise the settled because I don't remember feeling anything like ease or newness or promise until I found Diamond City and, the intellectual jewel in its crown, Piper.
I was happy to find there were people with lives here. Conversations could be had and though people were interested in selling something, they had homes of sorts and a 'place' to call their own.
But I was struck by some things that blighted the picture my mind had commissioned of the place. The most interesting is the revulsion of 'synths'. In the army and indeed in certain commercial settings, I remember seeing robobrains and securitrons. They were machines that could think, yes, but only in the direct. You could not really 'talk' to it, but it had commands and instructions that you could say with reasonable flexibility. I did not know, and perhaps was not supposed to know, about 'synths'. People, when they can be induced to mention them, say they were a new phenomenon. Synths did not apparently exist in a real way in the pre-war era (a phrase I use with great reluctance).
They have been so made as to resemble, mimic and indeed live as normal humans. While I think there are some minor telling ways to discriminate a synth from a natural born person, I cant say what it would be. People go out of their way to malign, distrust and, if they think they can, expose synths. While the prevailing feeling for them is one of fear, I think there is another, more latent effect their existence poses.
There are people in every place with a large-ish population who say in some way that they are 'real people' who 'want to get rid of all synths' and whose views border on the paranoid. To me this is no good sign. Its that odd, in brackets way people speak about them. That woman in Diamond City who sells scrap, I think of her when I think of synths. Not in how she might be one (but of course, who is to claim she is not?) but in how she thinks of them. It sounds, in its tone and pace, in its lack of grace and overarching formality, like the kind of racism towards the Chinese I can remember hearing and reading in the army, but also in my civilian life.
The 'Institute', an organisation that apparently creates synths, something I guess can be believed without much risk, is what I believe the people truly fear. They exercise a great deal of latent power and seem, in their just being, to only care about itself and its 'research'. I'm prepared to say very little about the Institute. They are talked of and spoken about like some modern, real continuation of Orwells 'Ministry of Love'.
It is true that people must hate as well as fear them, but it comes out as a hatred for synths who, by walking and talking as they do, are at least in some way real and accessible, which The Institute most certainly isn't.
Though I still know frightfully little about them, or their construction, I am very untrustworthy of this cult of hatred. I cannot, in my deepest feelings, feel the paranoia, the insular choking grasp of their very existence. All I feel is curiosity and interest. And though as far as I know I've never met or conversed with a synth, I am inclined to defend them, or at least, refuse them my condemnation, in part because I think there is someone or something that benefits from this xenophobia. And I do not like the way some communities and people I meet look at me when you mention any scepticism of the idea. You suddenly seem small and yet dangerous to them, even through the patrolman's sunglasses I've taken to wearing.
I know this must seem prolonged, and isn't generally what one starts a diary with. But I wish to avoid the tedium of diary entries as I've come to understand them. This will probably not turn out as a day to day, minute to minute recounting of every single thing I did. No, it is more likely going to be an account of things as I see them, with reference to events as they come and a set of principles I generally stick by.
It was Pipers influence that made me consider it. She is always noting down something or other, but only when I am speaking to someone, or busy with crafting things. She says she does not write of me and wouldn't anyway unless I gave her permission, something I respect.
I asked her how she would feel about me writing and mentioning her. She said whatever helps me get through the day, as long as I promise never to tell her what it is I write. A powerful thing for a journalist to say, as by their nature, Pipers too, they are usually curious and extrospective.
Though I've been promised companionship by others in my travels, I am perfectly happy with Piper. She is more than able to defend herself (with perhaps one or two close calls she might have avoided) and I like her mind and how she thinks about things. She is generally quiet and understands I am as well and will go out of her way to help, usually helping me carry the mass of objects I collect. She is very inquisitive when she does speak, and expresses interest in how I feel about things. I am honestly happy she doesn't ask much about my past life, as I call it. She will joke about it, though.
I wrote these thoughts down and set them out with a mind for sleep. Piper is currently snoozing on the chair in front of me. She looks quite beautiful and the sun is on her back. Sleep of any sort is not easily got, as you always have in mind the knife at your back, the loaded gun you fear may be loaded for you. There is no real remedy or cure besides common sense actions like sleeping indoors, preferably with a barricade or a locked door. I wish I could just leave her there to rest a little more, but I can't. Time to get up and get on with it. I have things to do in Goodneighbor and no doubt some other event or quest will take the time to come to my attention. If I get a moment, I really should look east.
So here starts the diary, with all the trappings and limitations a risky, wayfaring life brings. The gun wielding, the life taking, the bartering and constant fear of radiation sickness, rotten food and scarce water to drink.
From the world of carnage and of anarchy and fear, to the future I say: Hello.