Fallout
The Unchanging
Disclaimer
Based on the games by Bethesda Game Studios. This is a not-for profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web.
Author's Notes
Just a little something that came to mind after watching a compilation of the introduction films from the various games. This isn't really a story but it isn't really prose either. It's more of an attempt to bring all the elements of the various introductions together.
It helps, by the way, to try to read this using Ron Pearlman's voice.
Censor: PG – For discussing the darker truths of the human condition
War...
War never changes...
Only the people do but not the paths they choose to walk.
Since before the earliest dawn of history, from the moment our distant ancestors learned the killing power of rock and bone, man has ceaselessly shed the blood of man for every conceivable reason from god to justice or just simply psychotic rage.
The Romans waged war to conquer lands and obtain the slaves that were the lifeblood of their national economy. The Spaniards waged war due to their lust for the gold of the New World. Hitler forged one of the mightiest military machines in history for the sake of hate and nationalistic pride.
In the 21st Century, the spoils of war also became its tools: Titanium, petroleum, uranium and a host of other rare materials. To secure these, China would invade Alaska, the United States would annex Canada and the European Union would dissolve into dozens of squabbling factions, each seeking exclusive control over these dwindling resources.
In the year 2077, after millennia of ceaseless conflict, the destructive nature of mankind finally reached its logical and inevitable conclusion.
The end of the world, when it came, was pretty much as we had always predicted it would be: There were too many people and too little space and too few resources to sustain them. The voices of those who preached love, co-operation, peace, tolerance and the sharing of ever scarcer natural resources for mutual benefit were drowned out by the seductive calls of tribalism, greed, paranoia and deadly, nihilistic selfishness.
When the final conflict began, the cause was trivial, the details pointless and, ultimately, irrelevant. The reasons were, as always, purely human.
Some men just seem to want to watch the world burn.
A great nuclear cleansing, an atomic maelstrom, sparked by human hand but grown beyond any control. Nuclear spears rained from the skies, consuming the land in an endless fire. Whole continents burned and sank beneath the waves of the boiling oceans. Humanity was almost extinguished, the spirits of the billions of dead mingling with the lethal radiation that blanketed the land. Earth was all but stripped of life and a long, cold, silent darkness fell upon all that remained, one that would last many decades.
War...
War never changes...
Only the people do but not the paths they choose to walk.
This time, mankind had no choice but to walk the path to its end.
Yet although mankind had succeeded in destroying the world... he had not yet destroyed himself. Not yet.
A few had been wise enough... or perhaps fearful enough... to see the inevitable as it loomed over them. They did not believe the leaders who optimistically... or perhaps self-deludingly... claimed that the coming conflict was winnable and survivable. Instead, they created shelters in the deepest mines around the world, known as 'Vaults'. The Vaults were meant to preserve the rich, the powerful and the influential as well as those deemed necessary for their survival. They would hold the resources and technology needed to rebuild the world after the fires of the apocalypse had finally died away. However, in the end, as the tides of anarchy burst over the last fading lights of civilization, any who could lend their strength and their minds to the cause of survival were welcomed in before the mighty doors of the Vaults rolled shut and the final, terrible false dawn of atomic light rose above the horizons of a doomed world.
There, protected by lead, steel and millions of tons of rock, thousands of survivors waited for the day to come when the radiation would fade, the skies would clear and the world could be made anew.
It is here, in Vault 7 that your family, your great-grandparents, found shelter in those terrible last days. It is here that you were born, one of the most recent of three generations that have no conception of 'outside'.
The time will soon come for the Vaults to open and for the survivors to return to the barren wastes that are all that remain of the world. For man to try to return life to the scorched soil, the poisoned air and the befouled waters and to try to make a lasting home and future amidst the ruins of the past.
But war...
War never changes... Only the people do but not the paths they choose to walk.
Inside our shelters, the same violence festers unchanged within the human heart and the same dark impulses wait to be released. As the day for the door to 'outside' to open grows ever closer, only time will tell if the grim lesson of the past will be learnt... Whether the inhabitants of the various Vaults can pool their resources and talents to remake the world...
Whether, at last, mankind will learn to change their paths they choose to walk...
Or whether there are still men who only want to watch the world burn.