The poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of the "willing suspension of disbelief" to justify the use of fantastic elements in literature. Everyone who has played the Fallout games has indulged in this exercise to their great satisfaction as the world of post-apocalyptic America has unfolded. To further the ends of fiction that is based upon these games I have taken some small liberties with the nature of the Capital Wasteland while trying to stay as faithful to the lore of the game as possible.

The most important assumptions that I've made in this story are first, that political power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Someone, eventually, will attempt an NCR-type unification of the Capital Wasteland. Second, the population of the wasteland must be significantly greater than that which we see in the game. There are perhaps 400 named characters in the game, including all the DLC. Even if the unnamed characters are added to the mix, any anthropologist would tell you is far too small to support any kind of society at all, much less one that includes several substantial settlements. So, don't be surprised, for example, if there are several hundred residents of Megaton. Third, there are some pretty basic technological innovations that should have reappeared by the third century post-war. For example, where the hell is the WHEEL? Things like basic carts, harnesses and collars for pack animals, etc. will be assumed to have been developed. The Brahmin should be happy.

Fourth, I've always thought that within the Fallout universe, most of the "villains" are far too one-dimensional, and among all the evil bastards out there in the Wasteland none are more heavy-handedly evil than the Raiders. Why are they such idiots? I mean they have their freedom, plenty of 23rd century drugs, the companionship of others of their kind with bodies made almost unbelievably attractive by the game developers as well as by the creators of the many body mods (Breeze, Rude, et al). So when I see some large-breasted, nearly naked woman who looks as though she just stepped out of the Martyn Maxey Hair Salon and screaming "Tear 'em apart.", I just scratch my head and chalk it up to the time and economic constraints of game design.

Before I forget, here's a disclaimer: I do not claim ownership of any part of the Fallout universe. I think that distinction goes to Bethesda, at least for Fallout 3, to Interplay, formerly Black Isle for the earlier games and to God knows who for the prospective MMOG. If you think that life in the Wasteland is contentious, just follow that legal drama.

Final note: this story takes a while to build. There are no early bloodletting. I take some, but what I hope is not an exorbitant amount of time to set the foundation for what, by necessity, will be a story that takes quite some time to tell. It all depends on you, the readers. I hope that a story of this sort finds an audience in the pages of FanFiction. We shall see what we shall see.

"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it," - George Santayana

"History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history" - Clarence Darrow

… from a certain perspective.

"I'm getting too old for this shit." Liam complained to no one in particular. He was sweating and breathing heavily as he shifted his pack to one side and crested the ridge. Aside from his books and electronics he only carried a blanket, a shelter half, some purified water, dried Brahmin meat, some cooking utensils, a first-aid kit, night-vision goggles and, of course, his weapons – a sniper rifle, a combat shotgun, a couple of grenades and a fully-automatic 45. His leather rebel armor was lightweight but provided a surprising amount of damage protection. The bulk of his load consisted of engineering manuals. They were priceless, irreplaceable, and as soon as he could find an apparatus to transcribe the books to holotape he was going to burn the lot of them. He had been half-mesmerized by the railroad tracks he had been following for the past few miles. His neck snapped up at the sound of a Brahmin lowing and he proceeded with a more wary step, fully alert.

This trip was not what I had in mind for my retirement, he thought. Yeah, that's about the best spin I can put on walking almost 250 miles of barren wilderness with near-impassable rivers, hostile locals and mind-numbing heat. You would've thought that at the least I'd get a little professional courtesy from the raiders, he grumbled under his breath. I have, after all, been taking down trading barges for most of the last 20 years. His crew worked the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Their knowledge of the currents and seasonal variations gave them an advantage over the traders who worked the entire length of the rivers. It also helped to have the fastest, most reliable craft afloat. This, he thought, was compliments of me, the best engineer from DC to the once-Great Lakes, if I do say so myself. Well, if I wasn't a damn good engineer Ashur - damned if I ever called him "Lord" Ashur - never would have recruited me to be the chief production engineer at the Pitt.

Long before Ashur, life on the river was sweet. The pirates, there was really no other way to describe them, took a "tariff" on any vessel they could interdict on the rivers. They crews seldom put up a fight. The barges were built for cargo while the pirates' craft were built for combat. They took only a portion of the cargo and never did any more damage than was absolutely necessary to force the other vessel to strike its colors. This was pragmatic rather than altruistic; a vessel once sunk would never pay a tariff again.

Then Owen fucking Lyons brought the Brotherhood to the Pitt and they crushed every local crew they could find. Thing is, they also sowed the seeds of its resurrection when they left Knight Ishmael Ashur behind for dead. Instead of dying, he survived to unite the scavengers and most of the local raiders into an organization that not only ruled most of western Pennsylvania, but also became a formidable trading and manufacturing center. That bastard was one of the hardest me that I've ever met, Liam mused. He had a good organizational mind and was charismatic in the bargain. On a practical note, his vision of a functional mill was impressive if somewhat limited. Ashur had sent agents to Paradise Falls for "workers" to meet the "labor" shortage caused by the Troglodyte Degeneration Contagion and before you could blink they were turning out steel. Steel!

Now it's not too difficult to create steel from scrap metal – the Enclave must be doing it somewhere in order to manufacture their power armor. But the Enclave doesn't do any mining, so they can't produce steel in any great quantities. They can't make enough to sell and what they do produce goes to high-end product like their power armor. But production in quantity requires mining and mining is labor-intensive. Can't you imagine those assholes in Hellfire armor swinging a pick or humpin' a wheelbarrow full of ore?

Steel production on a large scale requires iron ore, coke and limestone for the iron and chromium if you want to make stainless. There's plenty of ore in Pennsylvania as well as in Maryland, along the Chesapeake. Some of the Maryland ore is rich in chromium, which is something of a bonus. You find coke just about anywhere coal has been mined – can you say Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Coke? No problem.

When Ashur asked me where to find chromium I told him that the earliest worked deposits in North America were those found in the serpentine of the Bare Hills near the old city of Baltimore. For a guy as jaded as I am, that was a pretty stupid thing to say. It took my team six months to locate, survey and sample the deposits, but we were never short of chromium after that. Now that the Pitt is being run by the former "workers", production will almost certainly plummet. Who's going to mine that shit without a gun to his head, or endure the heat in the mill? Then, when the equipment starts falling apart, production will stop all together. Good luck with the Bessemer converter, Wernher – he, he, he.

……………..

"This looks like the place" he thought out loud, peering along the line of railroad cars as they bent into the maw of the complex known as Evergreen Mills – probably the only other place within a 500-mile radius where you also had the still-intact furnaces necessary for steel production. He noticed that a caravan had set up where the tracks turned into a canyon.

"Is this a regular stop for your caravan?" he asked the man who seemed to be in charge..

"Sure is. Raider caps look the same as any other. You got a problem with that?"

"No, it's just that raiders and traders don't mix much where I used to live. Fact is, I'm glad to see a businessman with a pragmatic bent."

"I'm Lucky, that's my name, not my destiny. Lucky Harith. I guess my folks hoped the name would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, not that it's seemed to work out that way."

"I'm Liam, Lucky. What's your inventory like?"

"Weapons my friend. Sale and repair. Anything from combat knives to assault rifles." I found he was eying my armor. "I've never seen gear quite like yours before. Where did you come across it, if I might ask."

"I got if from a supervisor at the Pitt, name of Everett." Lucky's eyebrows rose at the name of the infamous mill facility. "It used to belong to a priest who swore it was bulletproof."

"What happened to the priest?" Lucky asked.

"It seems he had been misinformed." Noticing the stacks of crates, Liam pressed "What's in those containers?"

"Water, pure and clean."

"That must have set you back some" Liam said.

"The water is free, friend. It's the transportation that's costly. See the sign?"

Liam read: "Free water" and shook his head. "How can pure water be free?" he asked. "Nobody gives pure water away."

"Where are you from again?" asked Lucky, smiling acerbically. "Haven't you heard about Project Purity?"

"Project what?" Liam asked, incredulously. "What are you talking about?"

So, Lucky ran down the story of the scientists who conceived and developed a plan to provide clean, pure water to the DC Tidal Basin. How they failed at first due to the untimely death in childbirth of one of them, but how her husband came back 20 years later to at last succeed with the help of their son. How the father lost his life at the hands of the Enclave and how the son and the remaining members of the team joined with the Brotherhood of Steel to wrest control of the facility from the Enclave and complete the project in triumph. Finally, Liam learned that the upshot of all this was that the Brotherhood was now giving water away for free. Finally, the trader described how the Rivet City security forces were helping the Brotherhood with distribution throughout the Capital Wasteland and the caravans were bringing pure water to the people in barrels and crates of bottles.

"And none of this" Lucky concluded "would have been possible if not for the Brotherhood of Steel and the Lone Wanderer."

"WHAT?" Liam exclaimed! "The fucking Lone Wanderer? Again? First this clown wrecks the only steel production facility on the East coast, if not on the continent of North America, and now he's destroying the economy of the entire DC region by giving away a major resource below cost and driving any number honest merchants out of business. What an asshole!" Liam's face was turning an angry shade of red. Lucky didn't know whether to be alarmed for Liam's sake or his own.

"Well, not everybody sees it in quite that light …." Lucky began. But Liam was in full rant by this time.

"And don't even get me started on those sanctimonious, overbearing, self-righteous pigs from the Brotherhood of STEAL. Two hundred years of pillaging, scavenging and bullying technology from people and they still can't make anything for themselves. I mean I'm a thief, a killer and a slaver, but I NEVER claimed to be something I wasn't. I don't like those Nazi bastards from the Enclave either, but at least their scientists make their own armor and weapons! The Botherhood is still using armor from before the fuckin' war, and they'll steal it from anyone, anywhere, anytime."

Lucky was slowly backing away as he shrugged his shoulders. "Sure mister, I, uh, know how you feel, I guess."

Liam noticed the look on Lucky's face and dialed his emotions down, at least to the point where he ceased his raving.

How far is the camp?"

"Just follow the tracks for a quarter mile or so. Can't miss it."

………………………..

…. Gee, that was easy, just like Hemmingway said it would be – just sit in front of a typewriter and bleed. What do you think?