Disclaimer: Fallout 3 is the property of Bethesda Softworks. I gain no monetary profit from writing this.

ATLAS

Chapter One: G.O.A.T.

"So, let me get this straight," Edwin Brotch said, staring at what he had thought was his star pupil, "you want to go into maintenance?"

"That's right," was the response he got.

The G.O.A.T. was long over, and all of the other students had left. One student had stayed behind, and surprised his teacher with a request for an assignment change. This was not unusual, but normally such requests were for an upgraded position. A request for a downgrade was unheard of.

"… I must admit, Mr. Pascal, that I don't much like giving someone a position they are overqualified for. It's at least as bad as one they are under qualified for. So, what brought this on? If you didn't want medicine, I would have expected some other highly technical field."

Marcus Pascal stared at him for a long time. Finally, he quietly admitted, "I hacked my father's terminal the other day."

Edwin appraised him. 'Hmm. That's a thoughtful look, not a guilty one.' "And? You obviously don't feel bad about it."

"That's right, I don't. But when I did, I saw the file he keeps on Mr. Armstrong."

"And what, may I ask, in Stanley's file made you decide to work with him?"

Marcus held his gaze for a moment. "My father has recommended a lifelong prescription of aspirin for Mr. Armstrong, on the grounds of his headaches. Ostensibly, his headaches are caused by the light down here, but in reality my father believes them to be the result of overwork and stress. He also states that this is unlikely to change, as the Overseer has been… unwilling to change Mr. Armstrong's work schedule."

Edwin grimaced. 'I knew Stanley was hurting, but…' "So, you're doing this for Stanley? While noble, that isn't really…"

"No, not for him," Marcus interrupted, "I'm doing this for me. Mr. Armstrong is a great mechanic, no question, but he can't keep up with the work schedule. That means that maintenance in the Vault is running behind. This Vault is old as it is, and it's likely to fall apart completely if it isn't constantly maintained. You know as well as I do that the only reason it's lasted this long is because we've closed off whole sections, in order to conserve power and spare parts. If Mr. Armstrong can't keep up with the repairs, we may find ourselves waking up covered in Radroaches soon. So, even if I'm more than capable of doing something more intellectual, at this point my survival is dependent on this place holding together."

He smiled brightly. Edwin had never gotten used to seeing Marcus's smile. It was disconcerting: not because it was false, but because it was genuine. He was one of the few in the Vault still capable of genuine joy, still capable of untainted happiness. It was like… seeing an infant smile, so innocently, and at the same time seeing a very old man, who'd seen much horror in his life, smile as well. It was an innocent sort of happiness, not because of any lack of maturity on Marcus's part, but because… well, that was the part that disturbed Edwin. It was like Marcus still believed in a rational world, in spite of knowing otherwise.

"Ok. If you want it so bad, it's yours. But…"

"But?"

"I'm going to include in my report to the Overseer that you requested this, and that I allowed it in spite of you being overqualified, citing your reasons. As I won't include your reasons, the Overseer may be calling you in for an interview to find out why."

Marcus shook his head. "It's possible, but unlikely. My friendship with Amata has made Mr. Amaldovar hate me for reasons he, in my estimate, is unwilling to think about. I think he will be pleased to find me in the maintenance department, and probably won't even read the rest of your report."

Edwin chuckled. There was little chance of anything but pleasure on the Overseer's part upon seeing Marcus's work assignment, true. Edwin hadn't known precisely how much Alphonse had hated the boy, but the occasional inquiries into how his class was going never failed to infuriate the man, especially when Edwin mentioned that, yes, Marcus was still the best student he'd ever had.

"Hmm… You're probably right about that… What are you doing?"

Marcus had pulled, out of his pocket, what appeared to be a heavily modified sensor module. He hit a switch on it, and then affixed Edwin with the most serious expression he'd ever seen on anyone. "I want to tell you something Mr. Brotch, but I'd rather that this part of the conversation stays between us."

Edwin looked at him a long moment. 'What the hell…?' "Okay. What's on your mind?"

"The Vault is failing."

Taken aback, Edwin could feel his face paling. Marcus went on. "I'm not sure how much longer we have, but we have a fixed amount of time remaining; that much I'm sure of. I've… found a terminal in a closed off section of the Vault. It dates back to the Vault's construction, and contains records from the opening of the Vault to the present.

"Based on what I've discovered, Vault 101 was originally intended to last twenty years. We've lasted two hundred years. While the human will to continue was instrumental in making that possible, the fact of the matter is that machines fail.

"But this is not what I meant when I said that the Vault is failing. The Vault is failing because Alphonse will very likely be our last Overseer, and yet no preparations are being made for the day that we will have only one choice left: Starve, or open the Vault. Again."

Now Edwin's face turned white (or at least as white as it could turn). "How…"

"It doesn't matter. The point is, I know. I know the Vault was opened before. I also know that the outside world is still livable, if only with difficulty. I also know that our best option would be to open the Vault now, so we have time to acclimate and to plan, instead of waiting. I also know that we aren't doing that; I know that no one is talking about that; I know that the Overseer has threatened more than once to have anyone who mentions going outside beaten. I know that the Vault is going to fail someday, and when it does I want to be ready. That's why I'm going into maintenance, Mr. Brotch. So that I will know exactly how long we have."

Silence reigned. Edwin could only stare at his best student, who had proven to him that not only was he fantastically bright (which Edwin had already known), Marcus was actually far more intelligent than anyone he'd ever known. He saw with untainted eyes, and processed without error, refusing to discard conclusions just because they were disturbing. He put his own judgment forward, and seeing no resistance from others around him, was confident in his conclusions, in spite of the fact that no one had ever agreed with him: he knew that they refused to agree because he was right, not because he was wrong; he was completely right, but no one wanted to face what it would mean to agree, so the only response they could offer was to evade the question (or in the case of the Overseer, threaten violence).

He knew, deep inside, that the Overseer would want to know this. He knew that Alphonse would want very badly to know this. He also knew that Marcus was right.

He could think of nothing to say. So instead, he directed his gaze to the odd device.

"Oh, this? There may be no cameras, but the Overseer has the classroom bugged. But I know how the security system in this Vault works. The moment I switched this on, the bug started registering a conversation we had nearly a year ago, a conversation that I know the Overseer never listened to the entire recording of. No one but the two of us will ever know the contents of this conversation."

He rose. "Have a good evening, Mr. Brotch." And without saying another word, he left.

Edwin stared after him for a long while, long after the boy… no, the man-ling had gone back to his quarters, to get some sleep in preparation for his first day as a mechanic. For nearly an hour, Edwin looked at the doorway, simultaneously trying not to think, and at the same time not willing to refuse thought. Finally, seeing no other solution, he reached into his desk and pulled out a glass and a bottle of vodka. He filled the glass to the rim, and downed it in a single gulp. The drink burned all the way down, but he barely noticed, filling the glass a second time, and settling in for a long night of struggling not to think about what Marcus had made him think about.

~~~Scene Break~~~

Marcus returned to his quarters for his nightly shower, in preparation for bed. 'Damn old man is probably going to dance a jig when he sees where I've gone, because it'll make it easier for him to evade the truth once again.'

In truth, what Marcus had found wasn't merely a Pre-War terminal, as great of a find as that would have been. What he'd found was the failsafe records terminal. It contained every single file that had ever been committed to any Vault terminal, every security record, and probably half of the Library of Congress. When he'd first discovered it, he'd been nine years old and out of bounds, but would have been willing to tell the Overseer all about it, because he had believed the records would help the Vault.

As luck would have it, while he was fiddling with the terminal, he'd stumbled across a directory labeled "Deleted Security Records". In class, Mr. Brotch had told them that security records were never deleted, "just in case". So, being the bright and curious child he was, he'd immediately investigated the directory of what shouldn't exist. And being a bright child he immediately recognized a trend from the records.

"Deleted Record #6" was dated July 5, 2260. This, to the nine year old, meant that only 5 records from before that date had been deleted. Record #1, dated January 4th 2078, turned out to be of someone's private quarters: he recognized them as the Overseer's quarters. In each one, he saw two people appearing to wrestle, naked, on the Overseer's bed. Being the son of the Vault doctor, he very quickly understood that the two were having sex.

His face reddened slightly, knowing he wasn't supposed to be watching this. 'Some of father's books mentioned sex. This isn't exactly what I pictured, but… Why was this deleted? I suppose I can ask father later.'

Records #2-#5 had similar contents. None contained audio files. But when he looked at Record #6, his heart stopped.

It showed a man entering the Overseer's office. There was a strange man in the Overseer's chair ('That must be Mr. Amaldovar's predecessor,' he'd thought). But after what seemed to be a heated argument, the man drew a gun ('What's that black thing on the end of the gun?') and shot the Overseer! Several times, the last right in the face, even! That was bad enough, but seeing the shooter's face… 'That was Mr. Amaldovar! Mr. Amaldovar is a murderer!'

The video continued, showing Mr. Amaldovar cleaning up the blood, and dragging the body out of the room. Records #7-#10 were of different cameras showing Mr. Amaldovar pulling the body out of the Vault.

The last file in the directory of things that shouldn't exist was numbered #57. All of them had been deleted during Amaldovar's term as Overseer.

From that point on, Marcus spent every single moment he could spare pouring over that terminal. Every record, from the First Closing, until the present: no file left unviewed. It was clear, even to a nine-year-old, what the records he'd found meant. 'Mr. Amaldovar is a murderer. That means he's evil.'

He knew that the previous Overseer had been murdered, or else Mr. Amaldovar would have told people why he'd killed the man. Instead, everyone thought that the previous Overseer had just vanished into the Wastes one day; or at least that's what the written records Marcus had found said. 'Mr. Brotch never mentioned that the Vault used to be open. He always talked about it as though it had always been closed.'

Eventually, after he'd worked his way through the records, he began accessing the literature archives. The files he'd found had indicated that the reason the archives had always seemed so empty was because various Overseer's (not starting with Amaldovar, though he was the worst) had been systematically deleting the archives over the years. They only ever deleted the least-used files, but that added up. It was always explained as "corrupted files, deleted for maintenance purposes".

But this archive was complete. It had a fair amount of corruption, at least with the older works, but it wasn't nearly as damaged as the Overseer's had made it out to be.

By a stroke of luck, he happened across a most amazing work.

~~~Flashback (after a year with the terminal)~~~

'What's this? A book called… "Atlas (something, the title was corrupted)" The author's name is corrupted too. Most of the story seems okay… but the only other bit of information about it is the publishing date: 1957. Wow! This book is more than 300 years old!' Now intrigued, he sent the book through the data cable into his PipBoy, and retired to his room to read.

The next morning, Marcus was late to class, for the first time. He'd stayed up all night, reading that amazing book, "Atlas (something)". In class, he barely paid attention to the lesson, and the moment class was over, he rushed back to his room to read more.

By week's end, he'd managed to finish the book. He was sorry to see that some parts of the book were corrupted and unreadable, but enough remained that he was able to guess at the missing parts from the context.

He spent the next week in a daze, lost in thought. His father worried for him, as did others, but after the week ended he was back to normal. Or, so they thought.

~~~End Flashback~~~

After that week, Marcus had never been the same. Nothing in that book had been anything new to him. It contained no information he hadn't already known. But… what it had contained had been more valuable than anything he'd ever imagined. It had given him the words to express something he'd felt for a long time, but had never had words for. At first, he'd wondered about the author's purpose. What sort of horrifying world had she (he'd sussed out that the author was female, as the writing reminded him of other female authors he'd read) imagined?

Only… it hadn't been mere imagination. In fact, the longer he thought about it, the more terrified he had become. That author had predicted, not in so many words but predicted all the same, what would happen to the United States, 120 years before it actually happened. Not only that, but she had predicted the entire collapse (and that's what the century leading up to the war with China had been, he realized: a long, slow collapse) step by step, and had done so not with mystic powers but by correctly identifying the mentality of both the general populace and of the politicians in charge.

And that was what Marcus had gained from reading this book. What he'd understood was the importance of the word: morality. Because what the author had been trying to get across, and what he learned, that he had always known, is that it's never what you do, it's why. In order for a choice to be good (or bad), in order for a person to be good (or bad), it was their why that one had to look in order to judge them. And their why relative to the world was morality. What the author had said is that the world would be destroyed because it lacked any kind of rational moral system.

The Before world had had many moral systems, but none of them had been rational moral systems, because most of them failed a basic understanding of what morals were, and the rest just did away with rationality. The basic questions facing any moral system numbered 2: 1) What is the standard by which we judge morality? And 2) Who should moral choices be aimed at?

The Before world had mostly operated on some variant of altruism/collectivism, which based their morality on how one's choices affect others. The problem, according to "Atlas's" author, was that altruism/collectivism did not answer the first question, instead it substituted its answer to the second question for the first; that is, that the target of morality is others and that the standard of morality is that which is good for others.

This, Marcus understood, was the root of all evil. It made men into sacrificial animals, to be sacrificed for the benefit of others. "Which men?" the author asked. "The able men, of course. They are the only ones who have something to give". And which others? "Those without ability, of course. They have nothing to give, how can we take from them when they have nothing?"

The question, according to the author, was "Why? Why must some be sacrificed, when more good can be achieved by those men then can be achieved by sacrificing them? Why should we eat our best, when we can have more food by letting them produce? Why must we try to have our cake and eat it as well?"

The answer to the moral philosophy (the non-existent moral philosophy) of altruism had become a dirty word long before the war. It had been a dirty word, one few wanted to be heard speaking in favor of even during its heyday. No other philosophy had done as much good for mankind as this one. None had even presented much of a challenge.

"It's only rational," the author seemed to say, "that the only possible standard of morality is oneself. That is the correct answer to the second question. What, then, is the answer t the first?

"Of all entities in the universe, only a certain class has values. This class is the class of living things. Of the class of living things, only one class has consciousness; that is, the ability to make choices. That class is animals. Of all animals, only one lacks the natural instincts necessary to exist on a perceptual level, a level consisting only of what one is experiencing right now. That one is man.

"For anything alive, its basic choice is: life or death. This must therefore be the one and only standard of value for anything alive. But of all living things, only one is given the ability to act as his own destroyer: man. This is because man possesses the conceptual faculty: the ability to integrate what one has experienced before into a useful whole in order to better understand now, and to make useful predictions about what will happen next. That is, man possesses the ability to properly understand his past well enough to make it useful both in the present, and in preparing for the future by predicting what the future will be. It is therefore only man that needs to ask these questions.

"For most of history, man lived at just above the level of animals. Often, he didn't even live as well. So, for most of history, man made little use of the great power he possessed. But finally, for an all-too-brief shining moment, lasting barely 150 years, man finally found the voice he needed, finally recognized the power he possessed, finally made something with all the knowledge he had collected.

"Just as science gave a proper structure to man's search for knowledge, so did this system give a proper structure to his ability to sustain his own life. That it eventually failed him was not the fault of the system, it would have continued to produce, and continued to improve its productive ability, so long as he continued to use it. Only, those who were supposed to be leading us, our philosophers, deserted the men of this system, because few among them had ever discovered how wrong collectivism had been. Few among them had ever accepted that contradictory premises could never be satisfied: that only a non-contradictory philosophy could flow, that anything else would impede thought.

"And because few of them had ever managed, those in the populace who lacked the ability to think for themselves believed the irrational philosophers. Why? Because those men told them that the problem was not in themselves, it was in the stars, it was in fate, it was God's will, it was the fault of THOSE MEN! 'HOW DARE THEY SUPPOSE THAT THEY CAN HAVE WHAT WE DON'T HAVE? HOW DARE THEY DEFY GOD'S WILL?'

"Although many were willing to defend this system on a practical basis, none could provide a moral basis for it. And so long as altruism (which people thought was moral) was opposed to this system, no matter how much good it accomplished, it would always be thought of as wrong, as nothing better than a necessary evil. And it was undercut and maligned and misrepresented at every turn, even as it worked its heart out, making easier the lives of those who hated it, just as they desired.

"Until one day, their philosophy finally collapsed."

This was what Marcus took away from him, and it was this understanding, this conviction that made him sleep soundly that night. Most would have been shocked at his thoughts: he was actually looking forward to what would be a gruelingly difficult career working for a man who hated him doing work that no one would respect him for. But he was doing it for himself. He was doing it because it gave him time to think, to plan, to learn. It gave him time to prepare.

Just as he fell asleep, his last thoughts made him smile once more. 'I swear of my life and love of it that I will never live my life for another man, nor ask him to live his life for me. I am no one's sacrificial lamb! No one is my sacrificial lamb!

'I am rational. I am logical. I am consistent. I regard thought as the greatest power given to man.

'I am a capitalist.'

Author's notes: Many of you might recognize the text that I'm drawing on for this story.

For those of you that don't, don't fret. You don't need to know what it's called, or what it's about. MY story is not about that book. Or, at least, it isn't about that story. It's about why that story is true, despite being a work of fiction. My story will be about Marcus living the lessons he learned.

For those of you who got bored, fret not. Later chapters will have a fair bit of introspection, but not nearly like this. The whole point of this chapter was simple: not how, but why. That Marcus is a highly capable and intelligent man could be explain by simple genetics and luck. It wasn't his capabilities that I needed to address here. It was his motivation. It was what will make him do what he does later that I needed to create here, so that you, the reader, could follow and appreciate where I'm going with what I'm writing.

Chapter 2 will probably be a little short, but it should be out soon.