Pip Boy

Written by Dan Pickens

Based upon the Fallout Series by Interplay

Chapter One. 2075.

Tinny music radiated from the television set as it played an advertisement for the latest brand of car from Chryslus. Janine leaned out from her work in the kitchen and looked at the TV. An advertisement came on for RobCo's latest innovation: the Mr. Handy robot. Only as much as the Chryslus car had been in the previous commercial! What a joke.

Janine went back to fiddling with the device on the counter in front of her. It was brand new, chromium-plated and frustratingly impossible to figure out. You had to hand it to RobCo, when they set out to make your life easier by adding technology it only made things worse. She was trying to pick up the local radio station on her brand new Pip Boy, but it was failing to work exactly as she had hoped.

The news came on the television, a report about U.S.-Controlled Canada. Janine peeked again to see Army men in hulking powered armor shooting a Canadian communist repeatedly in the head. The image cut away to an advertisement for war bonds, and then a map of Alaska demonstrating the invasion plans.

The Pip Boy in front of her beeped, and static emitted from its tiny speaker. Its screen displayed a graph with a bar vibrating minimally in the middle, and a frequency of 640.1. Janine looked at it, annoyance crossing her face. The TV went to commercial in the next room.

Carefully, Janine rotated the dial until the Pip Boy's readout said 648.08. The Vault-Tec news came on, as she had planned, and she smiled as her words came through the small speaker on the Pip Boy in the voice of Vault-Tec's handsome spokesperson, Troy Weathers. She picked up the Pip Boy and fitted it around her left wrist, and then switched the radio off.

She went into the living room and switched off the television set, and at that point noticed that she had neglected the mess that had been made when she had had company the previous evening. She had been pitching the idea of being an Overseer in one of the hundred Vault-Tec vaults to a nice young couple from Los Angeles who Vault-Tec had flown out to New York just for the visit. The couple seemed excited, and agreed, and they signed the paperwork for Vault 13 that night. The paperwork was still on the coffee table, along with two half-full mugs of coffee and a half-empty bottle of whiskey next to a shot glass.

She decided it was time to clean up the mess, but ended up sitting down on the sofa and pouring the shot glass full of whiskey. She looked at it for a moment, then toasted her employers silently before tossing it back.

Later that day, Janine was walking into Vault-Tec's corporate headquarters in Manhattan. She noted that several other of the big-leaguers in the company had the RobCo Pip Boy on their wrists, sunlight glinting off the chromium plating through the large glass windows of Corporate HQ. She felt proud, a major part of the company, to be included in the test of RobCo's new technology, no matter how infuriating it could be.

"Janine Smithers! How good it is to see you!" Leon Quinn, Vault-Tec's finance spokesman, crowed as Janine walked across the lobby.

"Mr. Quinn," remarked Janine, remaining icily professional. Quinn had a tendency to womanize, and Janine wanted no part of it. "Good morning."

"I missed you at the Christmas party last week," lied Quinn. He had been roaring drunk and, despite finding the company of two other women that night, he had been watching Janine like a hawk the entire evening. Even now Janine could see that his eyes were on her breasts instead of her face.

"That's odd," said Janine, not even stopping to hold the conversation with him. "I was there the entire time. And besides, you seem to have found Brittany Lyon fairly accommodating so why would you have wanted my company?"

"Brittany Lyon is hardly comparison for you, Janine," Quinn said, jogging to keep up with Janine's pace. "Why won't you go out with me?"

"Because I don't like you, Mr. Quinn," Janine said, and she rounded on him. A look of utter shock crossed his face. "And I don't like your constant quips about me, and I don't care if you've got an in with Roger Stanley because I just got the contract signed for Vault 13 last night, making me the best saleswoman in this damn place."

Quinn just stood there. It was true, he went golfing with the human resource consultant, Roger Stanley, and had used his relationship to get a couple of women fired in the past who had crossed him. At this point, he seemed too shocked to really say anything to Janine.

She turned and walked away, and she heard him mutter something like "bitch" under his breath. No doubt she would get a call from Roger Stanley later on, but she didn't care.

When she reached her cubicle, she shut the small glass door and turned on her computer. Three intra-net messages showed up, two of which were congratulatory messages for signing Vault 13 and the third an advertisement for Mr. Handy.

Right, she thought. I'll get one of those as soon as they give me one for free. As she was going to delete the message, a new message popped up on the screen, from her boss. She opened it.

"Miss Smithers,

Congratulations on the Vault 13 thing. We've got a bigger project for you, it's in DC. The Smithsonian wants to put a Vault-Tec exhibit in the Museum of Technology. You are to oversee the advertising division. All the paperwork will be in your box in twenty minutes, as well as the metro ticket you need to get there. If all goes well, Vault-Tec might find a new home in DC which would get us closer to the president and a full governmental endorsement. You're an integral cog, Smithers. Don't mess this up!

-Mister Crow"

So she was going to the nation's capital. No doubt it would be overrun with foreign dignitaries still trying to pick up the pieces of the United Nations, which had finally fallen through just a couple months previously. Plenty of good customers, people who actually believed they needed to be saved. If she could land Vault-Tec contracts in other nations, maybe she could get promoted to head of Advertising. It was a possibility, and it seemed a good time.

This could only be good fortune!