S.P.E.C.I.A.L.: Strength 6, Perception 5, Endurance 8, Charisma 3, Intelligence 9, Agility 4, Luck 5
So someone had to go in there and die of radiation poisoning to stop an explosion.
Well, shit.
Desperate schemes flashed through my mind. Find a robot and send it in there—no, it'd take hours to find an appropriate one and longer to program it. Get a really long pole and poke the keyboard—no, that would take too long and a wrong entry didn't bear thinking about. I stood there frozen, ideas flashing through my head but none standing up to scrutiny. No, I couldn't shoot the controls…
"It has to be activated now!" Dr. Li screamed over the intercom.
I looked at Sarah Lyons, and was ready to tell her I'd go…but hesitated. At first, the utility function sprang to mind: my superior skills and talents would probably be far more useful to the Capital Wasteland in the long run, but Lyons had far more people who deeply cared about her, who needed her, than I did, and I didn't know if any of it would work anyway...and utility ethics had some flaws. So I opened my mouth to tell her I'd go in…and stopped again. Memories were flashing before me.
"Keep up the great research, super assistant!" I glowed for the rest of the day, although that might have been radiation…
"Feeling a little under the weather? Or a bit over the Geiger counter?" I'd forgiven that, I remembered, since it wasn't her specialty, but told her it was a Geiger-Mueller detector, everyone always forgot poor old Mueller, and we had a nice long talk about that…
And then…
"But if you're clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic. Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone's trying to put it back together like it was, but it'll never come together in the same way."
I had never met anyone, in the Vault, in the Wasteland, in fiction, who had said something so close to what I'd always believed, who understood why a person tinkered and altered and dreamed of something better…I had stood there, agreed, then told her something Stanley had mentioned once to me when we were rewriting some Pip-Boy code:
"Progress begins with someone saying: there has to be a better way to do this."
She told me that was beautiful, and I knew what she meant, even though Lucas Simms was in the store at the time and seemed to be wondering whether he ran a town or a nuthouse.
And I snapped back to the present, and Lyons, and the purifier, and the overload…
"I can't," I told her, unable to look at her. "I'm…I'm sorry, I…there…there's too much left to do. You go."
"Why, you, damn it, fine!" she shouted. "Cycle the airlock for me."
I nodded. "I'll make sure the Wasteland never forgets this!" I yelled over the noise as I cycled the lock, it was so corny and stupid and inadequate but I had to do something. "I'll make them canonize you in Rivet City! I'll—"
The answer hit me like a bolt of lightning (although, come to think of it, what was a bolt of lightning?). I slammed the button again, ripping off my Tesla helmet. The inner door slammed again, and the outer one opened. Sarah turned to me, confused and angry.
"STOP!" I screamed at Sarah. "Listen, go through the whole process, but don't press the last button!" She tried to say something. "I have a plan, neither of us has to die, just do what I said!" I mashed down the airlock button, the outer door closed, the inner one opened, Sarah stepped through, press the button again, then release the Tesla armor—
In my underwear, I dropped the Tesla armor in the path of the outer door, so it couldn't close. A frantic search for the sensor on that door ensued, the groaning of the overload was getting worse, found it! I rushed back to the airlock button and pushed it yet again. The outer door tried to close, but ran into the Tesla armor and jammed. If it had been leather armor or even combat armor, the door might have plowed right through, but Tesla armor was the toughest stuff in the Capital Wasteland, and with a horrible screeching groan, the door and the armor locked into an impasse, leaving a gap wide enough to squeeze through. I found the sensor again, and pushed it. Now the inner door believed the outer one had closed, and began to open, letting the leader of Lyons' Pride hear me.
"Take off your power armor and put it in the path of the door!" I shouted. She looked confused, but responded, accepting that I had a plan. The moment her armor blocked the door, I released the sensor. The inner door tried to close, but hit the power armor and became firmly jammed. Neither door could close.
"Get clear!" I shouted, and pulled my dart gun from its pouch in the Tesla armor. The one weapon I had never expected to use for this operation…I struggled with the tip of the dart for a second before jamming it between Sarah's armor and the door, the tip snapped leaving the dart blunt, load it into the gun, get to the inner door, and now to make the shot of my life on the Enter key…
I tried to activate VATS, but it didn't recognize a target and wouldn't engage. Time seemed to slow anyway as adrenaline surged through my body. I'll spare you the detailed description of my emotional state, and just say that I pulled the release, and the dart, by some miracle, hit its target. The sequence began. I dropped the dart gun, squeezed through the gap between outer door and wall, and yelled for Sarah to hit the airlock switch. When she did, the outer door…didn't stop trying to close. Shit!
I ripped the last of the Ultrajet from the armor pocket, and drove it into my veins; I'd taken Buffout already. Sarah had seen the problem and was at my side.
"On three!" she shouted, as the Pip-Boy's radiation counts started sounding less like footsteps and more like a distant machine gun. We gripped the Tesla armor firmly. "One, two, three!" Blood full of stimulants, I had entered a haze, and remembered only giving it the hardest haul of my life, faint pain in my arms and back, then a screech and a grind and a groaning thud and the glare became blinding but the frantic ticking had stopped and it was a good thing I was on Med-X because I was fairly sure some of my muscles were no longer connected the way they should be.
I dimly registered Sarah doing something to my arm, then jamming two stimpaks into it. A few minutes later, everything had sorted itself out. The regenerative mutation I'd inherited from my father, had saved me a lot of caps the last few months, and probably my life.
I pulled off my helmet, staring at nothing. The vents engaged, I registered dimly, and the scientists ran about, checking readings and throwing switches and ordinarily I would be incredibly curious and excited about everything they were doing and making a nuisance of myself with questions and maybe even actually help after a few minutes, but right now I was realizing that I'd nearly sacrificed a woman's life for something I couldn't even be sure was possible—
"Uh, can I leave?" someone asked. I looked up to see the Enclave trooper standing there, plasma rifle thrown aside. For a moment I wanted to blow his head off, but resisted the impulse; instead, I dropped my own weapon.
"Right, I can get that back faster than you can shoot me, so don't try anything foolish," I told him. "You can do what you want, but frankly, I wouldn't go back to the Enclave, whatever's left of them, if I were you. They're not America."
The man took off his helmet, and I realized he was practically a kid, not even my age. "You're lying," he said. "You're destroying everything we're trying to rebuild." But his heart wasn't in it.
I tried to think how to explain it. Then it came to me. "America's like a broken piece of glass," I said. "You can't put it back together. But you can make a mosaic out of it." He didn't seem to know what that was, and I sighed. Ignorance was the most frustrating thing I had ever encountered, and that included trying to get out of Tranquility Lane with a conscience and no musical ear.
"Well, let's take another approach," I said. "They don't obey the Constitution. If there were still a Congress, your President would have been impeached and convicted long ago."
"Impeached?" he asked, confused.
"I tell you what," I said. "Don't go back right away, if you're going to. You can tell them we took you prisoner and describe in great detail your daring and glorious escape. Just give me a favor first: go to Rivet City—I'll give you directions in a moment—and go to the museum there, right? Find the guy who runs the place and tell him I sent you. Then ask him to explain the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He should have both of those now. Honestly, I'm not coming up with much the Enclave hasn't violated."
Sarah Lyons looked at me with an expression I'd gotten used to throughout my life, a "how the hell does he know that?" sort of expression.
"You're as annoying as hell, you know that?" she said as I showed him where to find Rivet City.
"So I've been told," I responded, donning my helmet.
"Where are you going, if you don't mind my asking?" came his voice from the speaker.
"That's something I'd rather not have the Enclave knowing," I told him. "Let's just say I've got some things to see and people to do."
He left. I turned to Sarah. "Sarah, I'm sorry, I have to go. Now that my father's work is nearly done, there's something I have to do, that I should've done a long time ago." I hurried out of the room before she could answer. I couldn't face her right now.
I was outside the Jefferson Memorial before realizing what I'd said to the Enclave soldier. Talk about a Freudian slip.
The bridge was covered in burning wreckage, bodies, and Enclave equipment. Liberty Prime was standing by it doing nothing, and I stayed well away from him—friendly/hostile identification was a tricky bit of programming and one that was all too prone to bugs. And I did have a Chinese assault rifle.
I made it across the bridge without further incident, and set off for Megaton. I was trying very hard not to think; I knew if I tried to process everything that had happened in the last few hours, I'd go insane.
I paused as I reached the gates, looking at Micky. I recalled my previous conversations with him; the raiders had crippled his leg as he escaped the school, and Doc Church couldn't fix it, even after I paid him to try. At least his health seemed to be improving, and it would improve further once there was water for all.
"Water?" he asked, then noticed who it was. "Oh, it's you! What happened? I was hearing explosions to the south—"
I normally liked him, although I was disgusted both with his refusal to do any work—you didn't need a good leg for everything—and Megaton's refusal to let him in without doing work. But right now, I was tired and my emotional state was somewhere between a Super Mutant and a Vault 108 resident.
"We activated a giant robot, killed most of the Enclave soldiers in the Jefferson Memorial, I sent a woman to her death, and you shortly will no longer have to beg for water. Now leave me the fuck alone."
When a guy with power armor and a plasma rifle tells you to leave him the fuck alone, you do it.
I stomped through the gates into Megaton, feeling numb. The plan was to go back to my house and go straight to bed. If I couldn't sleep, well, I had some vodka left. I didn't enjoy poisoning myself with ethanol, but I'd gotten used to using it to give me the little boost necessary to haul another ten pounds of valuable loot. I crossed the central space, noticing Confessor Cromwell ranting in the bomb water as usual. Apparently Doc Church slipped RadX and Rad-Away into his food periodically; I'd suggested to the doc that he might want to consider letting natural selection take its course.
"Drink of the water!" Cromwell said, noticing me. Something snapped.
"I'm not drinking that water!" I snapped at him. "I will never drink that water, and anyone with sense will never drink that water, because we now can give you pure water. Clean water. And you're insane!" That sounded stupid even then, but I didn't care, stomping around the clinic and up the walkways.
I was almost home when I looked across the crater and spotted Craterside Supply. I took a few steps back, wanting to go there and see Moira and talk to her, but I stopped again, knowing I wasn't in any condition for that.
Wadsworth greeted me as I came in. I went to my weapons locker, threw everything inside, yanked off the power armor, threw that inside (well, on the growing heap of things around the base of the lockers), climbed the stairs, and dove straight at the bed.
7:55 AM. Moira was nothing if not punctual; the door to Craterside Supply was unlocked at 8:00 AM every day; the largest deviation I'd ever observed was 52 seconds. Jericho was also here, apparently waiting to buy something for his house.
I was leaning against the wall of the building, heart pounding and breath coming fast. I needed to talk with someone, get this all sorted out, but I didn't want to scare Moira away, I…well, I loved her. Well, I thought so—my naturally analytical mind promptly picked up on the fact that I didn't know exactly what that experience was supposed to be, since this had never happened to me before. I'd found Amata attractive, but not really interesting: she was bright, but not clever the way Moira and I were. None of the other Vault girls had held any attraction, and there certainly wasn't anyone else in the Wasteland I felt this way about. It sounded arrogant even as I thought it, but someone had to be the best…
Okay, so let's take as a working hypothesis that this is love, I decided, but be open to new evidence, both about my feelings for Moira and the phenomenon of eros love generally.
The problem, I realized, was that I had no idea of the applicable social conventions. The culturally appropriate procedure here, I only knew for Vault 101 and pre-War America. Neither was necessarily what currently prevailed.
Well, I decided, I would simply be logical about it, she was rational too, and we could figure it out. Right. Yeah. That would absolutely work.
The door clicked, and Moira opened it.
"Great to see you!" she said sincerely. "What's going on out in the Wasteland?"
I opened my mouth, then remembered Jericho and closed it again. "Moira, I suggest you deal with him," I said, trying to keep my voice level, "and then I need to—that is, I'll tell you what—I mean…Damn it! Just take care of Jericho."
She seemed to sense this was about much more than business, and didn't question me. I waited, leaning against the inside wall, while she haggled with Jericho over some ammunition he refused to explain why he needed. I nervously adjusted the pre-war businessman's suit I was wearing; I'd wanted to look nice, but maybe this was overdoing it. Oh, well, nothing for it now.
Jericho and Moira finally came to an agreement, and he walked out.
"What did you need?" she asked me.
"I need…I want…fuck, Moira, I'm…I need to talk to someone, OK? I've been through a hell of a time. I can't have this getting out, who and what I am, I mean, what with the whole 'Lone Wanderer' legend and all, it's no good. I'm not speaking very coherently, am I?"
"No, but I can understand you," she said. She walked over to the main door (God, that ass!) and locked it. She then headed up the stairs, leaving me standing there lost in thought. "Come on, silly, come upstairs and sit down!" I quickly followed.
With a Nuka-Cola in front of each of us, the whole story started spilling out of my mouth and wouldn't stop. Three Dog. The museums. Super Mutants. Tranquility Lane. Underworld. Little Lamplight. More super mutants. She knew some of it already, of course but I couldn't quite remember which bits, I hadn't told her everything; I hadn't wanted to worry her. She listened, but I caught her scribbling down notes now and then, questions to ask later, I supposed—couldn't really blame her for that. The Brotherhood. Elder Lyons. Liberty Prime. Democracy is non-negotiable. Project Purity.
Everything just kept spilling out. "So there it was, for a moment, I thought it had to be me or Lyons and there was no way around it, and I told her to go in, that I wouldn't. I…well, I couldn't live without you—I mean, I didn't want you to live without me—I mean…shit, why am I fucking everything up?"
Her usual perkiness had faded as I'd gone on, but she was smiling, now.
"You've been silly, haven't you?" she asked. What?
"Didn't you ever think I felt the same? When you came back from the Mirelurk tunnels all slashed up, I thought you were so brave, and looked so tough, and I knew you were hurting and pushing through—and then you wrote half the section on Mirelurks a few hours later! You're tough, brave, smarter than I am—no, you are, I took a SPECIAL assessment when I was a girl and my Intelligence was only seven."
"Those tests are terribly designed!" I exclaimed. "The correlation coefficient between the Intel score and one's middle school grade point average was less than 0.4, according to Andrews' paper—"
"Yes, but if you look at mean income, like Clarke did—"
"Clarke? Is this Arlington archives? Anyway, that's meaningless, a few high earners could yank the averages up significantly, and given America's Gini ratio in the 2050s they probably did—"
"The medians correlate well too!"
"What was the r value? Because I'd be very surprised if it was more than point six, and then there's the problem that utility to society was mapped to income rather badly—"
"The free market, by definition, does that perfectly! What you're saying was why the Resource Wars happened. The central planners couldn't respond to market forces—"
"What is it about the phrase 'negative externality' that's so hard for you to—!"
I broke off as she burst out laughing. After a moment, I did too.
We had spent as much time arguing about things like this as doing actual writing during the Survival Guide sessions. The cause of the Resource Wars had, clearly, been the damage done to renewable resources increasing pressure on nonrenewable ones: by the mid-21st century fish stocks had been depleted, waterways poisoned, the ice caps melting, and the ozone layer failing, all at an enormous cost and requiring yet more oil and uranium to factory-farm, purify water, etc., creating a vicious cycle that led to the War. This was a direct result of the failure of world governments to intervene to protect and conserve common pool resources. Moira, however, continued to insist that the only problem was the fossil fuel subsidies distorting the market, and that the free market would have led to alternatives being developed much sooner if not for said distortion. While that had made matters worse, it was not even close to the whole story. She also said that the Chinese had only been so desperate for resources because of the inherent inefficiency of command economies, which in my mind was also only part of the problem.
It was a strange bit of her psychology: she was the sweetest person in the world, except when it came to business.
So, yes, here we were arguing about the politics of two centuries ago when I'd just had an emotional meltdown and we'd (sort of?) confessed our feelings for each other.
"Right," I said, while she was still giggling. Is this how you do this? Well, whatever. "Dinner. My house, nineteen hundred, I'll cook some brahmin steaks, I think there's a bottle of wine somewhere in all the crap I was hauling around, Wadsworth can give us some aqua pura—huh, that would be a good name for the Brotherhood's water."
"Deal!" she beamed.
Someone pounded on the door leading into the shop.
"Moira! Are you all right in there?!" Lucas yelled.
"Yes, I'm great!" she called.
"OK, well, the doc wants more stimpaks!"
"I'd better get down there," she told me. "Nineteen hundred, then."
A sort of electric shiver shot through my body as she kissed my cheek. Her lips were thin, but so soft…
I walked out of Craterside Supply, leaving Moira dealing with Lucas, and trying to control my erection. (I was doing that, not Moira. As much as I might prefer the latter.)
I switched on the radio, tuning in GNR.
"…and repeating, the Brotherhood of Steel is missing one Lone Wanderer! He seems to have just up and wandered away! If you see him, please tell him the Brotherhood needs him…but, for your own sake, do it politely. That's all from Three Dog! Wooo-oowww!"
I swore. I might be able to get down to the Memorial and then back in time for dinner with Moira, but it would be a close-run thing even if there were no trouble en route.
I wished I had a way to let them know where I was, but concluded there was no practical way to do that. If we had a powerful transmitter, or a shortwave, here in Megaton…now that was an interesting idea. Radio Free Megaton? What would we broadcast?
It'd be something to talk about at dinner, anyway.
I rummaged through the fridge, finding some sugar bombs I'd forgotten to take to that ghoul making Ultra-Jet, a dubiously edible mutfruit, and finally a couple of brahmin steaks. They were raw, and I swore; I'd been eating them that way this entire time, since the combination of the Pip-Boy's immune support system and my rapid-healing mutation could handle the worst bacteria the Wasteland could throw at me. But Moira had neither of those, and I didn't imagine she'd like raw meat.
I thought for a few moments, then the flamer occurred to me. I had that and a fair amount of fuel. My impulse was to just try it, but I realized as I fitted the tanks into the flamer that it burned too hot and too fast: the outsides would be charred and the insides still raw.
What followed was about three hours of scrounging and tinkering. Eventually I managed to modify the fuel pump to slow the burn. I had Wadsworth slice up some scrap metal to make a stand for the flamer nozzle, and welded together some old barbed wire from outside Springvale (collected as a potential weapon part, then tossed into a junk heap when I couldn't find a way to make that work) into a lattice. With the improvised grill welded onto the outside of my house's wall above the flamer nozzle (using a mixture of my laser pistol and plasma rifle), I flicked the flamer switch. Fire came forth, but a campfire's worth, not the design-condition murderous inferno. Brilliant! I shut it off.
Thirsty and hungry, I went inside and drank a Nuka-Cola and ate the sugar bombs, figuring that I had better things to do than haul them all the way over there for 40 caps. The mutfruit could be used to season the brahmin steaks, what was the word, marinate? Right. How?
At this point, I realized I didn't really know what I was doing. I could probably work it out, I thought, but there was a nontrivial probability of bad cooking on my part disrupting proceedings.
Down I went to the Brass Lantern.
"Jenny?"
"What can I do for you?" she asked.
"Can you advise me on how to cook brahmin steaks?"
"I don't think I should reveal my recipes."
I felt a strong impulse to bang my head on something. "I'm not going to open a rival restaurant! I just want to…I need to know how to cook them for Moira." Should not have said that.
"You're having dinner with Moira?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Now are you going to help me, or not? I'd like to note, before you answer, that had I not stopped Burke, your atoms would now be radioactive and spread over several hundred square miles."
"Oh, all right, I'll show you," she conceded. "Come inside."
It took another hour for me to be walked through the whole process and have all my questions resolved. I was starting to understand the logic behind all the prepackaged pre-War food; cooking was evidently a very time-consuming and tedious process compared to its benefits.
"So yes, that's about it," she said. "I'm glad someone's after Moira. I've thought she must be lonely."
"Maybe a little," I answered after a moment. There was more to say, but I didn't know how to say it in a way Jenny would understand. I thanked her and left.
It was near noon; the sun glared down from high in the south. I checked my radio again, but GNR was playing music and the Enclave frequency didn't seem to be transmitting. Either we'd got the last of them or they didn't want to give anything away. Given our luck, probably the latter.
Right, seven hours. Shame I didn't get the Love Machine theme, but then, Science should be just as effective at putting her in the, ah, mood, if not more so. How's cleanliness? Was there anything Wadsworth wasn't dealing with?
I hurried in and looked around. Everything downstairs looked spick and span; the workbench was messy, but it was always that way and trying to clean it up would make it harder to use. Besides, Moira's was worse. I hurried upstairs and abruptly stopped. The bed was absolutely filthy. More than once, I'd just come up here and crashed into bed with my armor still on, utterly exhausted, and the mattress was covered in dirt, blood, what looked like pieces of a radroach, and some unidentifiable slime that set my GM detector clicking away. Oh, and a few white crusty patches (don't act like you didn't do that every now and then).
"Wadsworth!" I shouted.
"Good afternoon sir. What can I do for you?"
"Clean this bed."
"Certainly sir!" He came jetting into the room. I sighed and went over to my lab set to pick up the new compound, whatever it might be. As I was tinkering with the lab, I began to smell smoke. At first I thought it was the lab, and began rapidly searching through the containers for the problem. The smell got stronger; I looked up and the bed was on fire.
"WADSWORTH! PUT THAT OUT!" I bellowed.
"Certainly sir!"
I realized I should not have given such an ambiguous command. Wadsworth tore the top of the burning mattress off, seized it between his arms, and shoved it out one of the ventilation grilles. This was shortly followed by screaming on one of the walkways below.
I ran across the upper story, jumped down to the lower floor of my house, grabbed several stimpaks from the locker, and sped out the door.
The fabric had fallen onto one of the Megaton settlers I didn't know very well, who was hurt but not seriously, and Lucas and the doc were already hurrying over. I decided there wasn't anything useful I could do down there, and started to head back inside, when I remembered the original problem with the mattress. Which was now destroyed.
Trying to stay calm, I started for Jericho's house, but then realized I didn't even want to imagine the state his mattress would be in. I turned around and headed for Lucy West's place. She was in, and I knocked.
"Lucy?"
"Yes?"
"Is your mattress clean?"
"More or less…"
"I'll give you five hundred caps for it."
She opened the door. "OK, done."
We hauled her mattress all the way up to my house (I didn't trust Wadsworth with mattresses any more) and I got it on the bed.
"Well," she said in a strange tone. "Is there anything…else you…want?" She bit her lip.
"Ah, no, that should be adequate," I told her, fixing the mattress.
"Oh. All right. Well, don't be a stranger." She left.
A few minutes later, I realized what she'd meant, and was left wondering half-seriously how the Capital Wasteland in general and Moira in particular felt about polygamy.
18:52. Moira would be here right on the dot; she was always right on time.
Everything was in place. The steaks had been placed on the grill, lathered with mutfruit juice and some herbs. I didn't know how Moira liked hers cooked, so this way they would be rare just as she arrived and I could ask. I'd bought a candle, some more mutfruit, and some Dandy Boy Apples (the least disgusting pre-War food, for dessert) from the Stahls. The candle's flame was now waving and flickering, hopefully romantically. I'd cleared all the laboratory equipment off one of the tables and hauled it into position in the middle of the floor, with my two chairs around it. I'd even given Wadsworth a polish, then put the fancy suit back on.
With nothing to do for a few minutes, I started wondering whether people in the Wasteland ever had sex with robots, then whether, given her mechanical proclivities, Moira would enjoy penetration by a robot. I was starting to half-seriously worry that I might get upstaged by my own robot and that I shouldn't have polished him, or it, or whatever, when the knock came.
Even the way she knocked on doors was cute.
"Wadsworth, kindly show the lady in," I said, giving everything a final glance.
The door opened. She walked in like an angel, if angels had huge foreheads and wore grimy RobCo jumpsuits.
"Miss Brown, would you care to join me?" I asked, pulling out a chair at the table. Maybe I was overdoing it a little, but I figured she'd get a laugh out of it. She did, in fact, giggle.
"I would indeed," she said, and sat. "This is great!"
"How do you like your steak cooked?" I asked. "They're on the grill now, I wanted to know how you wanted yours done."
"I don't understand."
"What? Oh…that's been lost? That system?"
"What system? This sounds interesting!"
"The degree to which…that is, how thoroughly meat is cooked. Rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well done. It was a little irrelevant in the Vault, since we hadn't had meat in years. There'd been pigs and chickens when people first entered the Vault, but the pigs all caught a disease and died thirty years ago, and the keeper made a mistake and let the two roosters kill each other twenty years before that. Protein was beans, spinach, and some replicated stuff."
"How did that meat system work? We just call it raw, pink, brown...black."
"Right, let me see if I can remember…rare is interior dark pink, outside light pink; medium rare, interior pink, outside gray; medium, interior light pink, pink right in the center; medium well, a little pink right in the center; well done, grey—or black—all the way through. More or less. You're sure Jenny never mentioned—yeah, you are. Damn, it's a good thing we and the Brotherhood have the Arlington archive now, so this stuff won't fade away into history. Is it on your terminal?"
"Yes, but only some of the entries are there. The rest is just a list of the others. There isn't enough memory!" she pouted.
"Yes, the memory limitations are very frustrating when you're trying to program, if only there were a way to make the circuits smaller…oh well."
A pause. Then I remembered the steaks, and said so.
"Well, the 'medium' sounds like the way I like meat!" she told me.
I checked my Pip-Boy. "Right, then we'd better wait a few more minutes. Purified water?"
"Please!"
I watched, desire swelling, as she took a long drink, then licked a drop off the edge of her mouth.
"So I wanted to ask you about the social conventions here for this…procedure," I asked.
"Procedure?"
"The, uh, I'm not sure how to articulate—the process by which, ah, unions are achieved in the Capitol Wasteland's culture. Have I erred?"
"Honestly, from the little I know, it's all kinds of things," she told me, with that analytic gleam in her eyes. "There was a period after the War when nearly all the people not in Vaults had lost all their technology and gone back to being tribal. All the tribes had different customs, and they roamed around and intermixed, basically at random. So there isn't any widespread agreement!"
"That might be contributing to the low birthrate!" I exclaimed. "Humanity seems to be struggling along, barely making replacement—at least in this region, that's true—and I've been curious why, since rapid reproduction has historically been associated with both poverty and a high child mortality rate."
"Part of it," Moira pointed out, "is that the soil in most places around here is not very fertile. Food comes from brahmin, hunting, gathering, and scavenging, in about that order. What you said is true for farming, to have more, well, field hands, but kids for the last three of those aren't very, well...useful."
"I see your point. And then of course there's the radiation blasting everyone's sperm and eggs to bits. But I'm saying another factor could be the lack of agreement about the culturally appropriate way to…couple up. It would be a major stumbling block, if one partner always thinks the other…"
"Is being too formal, or mean, or just weird!"
"That's the idea. What to do about it though? This isn't like an engineering convention—we can't just write a guidebook to this. There are deeply held beliefs involved. Which brings me back to the question of what yours are."
"I honestly don't know," she said. "I never really thought about it." She paused, and I could swear I saw her blushing, which I had never seen her do. "I've never met anyone like you before."
"Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of people in the Wasteland who are annoying and talk too much," I answered, reflexively snarking. To my relief, she laughed.
"I annoy some people too," she said more seriously after a moment. "I just never get why! I always try to be nice to everybody. Is it because I charge too much for parts?" she asked anxiously. "I mean, that's business, it's different…"
"That might contribute, but…" I struggled for words. "You can't change what…what grates on some people…without changing who you are, what you are. And I like you just the way you are now."
"What am I?"
"You're…you're Wade and Garris and Hagen, you're Richard Feynman, you're Albert Einstein—"
"Oh stop!"
"Lavoisier, Pasteur, Faraday, Maxwell, Newton, Louis Montgolfier, whatever caveman realized you could bang rocks together to make sparks and what that implied. I'm not joking—the difference is in opportunity and education. Most of them had the opportunity to learn what they needed to learn to do what they did, one way or another. You…you've had scraps, you can't stand on the shoulders of giants because the bombs laid them low, and yet you've put together a very useful book, a shop, somehow cobbled together the tools making up the workbenches…and you've only just gotten started."
She grabbed my hand.
"We've only just gotten started. I couldn't have written the Guide without you. You're amazing!"
And it was corny but it was real and my heart was pounding like I'd only heard it do after I'd been shot far too many times, and I stared into that deep green of Moira's eyes and there was no guile there, no deception, and maybe that was what I really loved about her, this bastion of truth and decency and the best of what humanity could be, a safe harbor after I'd been plunged into this surface, this maelstrom of deceit and violence and horror...and I needed to go check on the steaks.
"Oh, the steaks!" I exclaimed. Damn it, she even had me talking like her; that was going too far…
"OK! Hurry back!"
As it worked out, the steaks were now ready. I picked up the plates, loaded them on, and carefully carried them in. Hopefully the mutfruit flavor would work.
The mutfruit flavoring was excellent. The steaks were dry on the outside and quite rare in the center, but everything in between was amazing. Even though I didn't strictly need my meat cooked, the human instinct to prefer it that way still had its grip. We didn't speak for almost a minute, in food rapture, chewing and swallowing as slowly as we could make ourselves.
"This is amazing!" she enthused. She leaned across the table, pulled me in, and kissed me hard on the lips.
Wow. Steak and Moira mingled, and the rest of the universe faded as there was only her, and lips, and tongue...and the odd bit of drool slipping out the corners of our mouths onto the table. It was only the second kiss of my life (the first being an experiment with Amata at 13 that had gone poorly), but it felt so natural and easy. We were both slow and uncertain, tongues edging forward and then withdrawing, only to cautiously entwine again.
Finally my head started to spin from lack of oxygen, and I let go. We both slumped back into our seats, hauling in the stale, gritty Megaton air like it was that of Oasis. I was already stiff, and discreetly adjusted my pants before looking up at her again. I opened my mouth, but nothing coherent came out. "That...I...wow. Did you...what..."
"That was fun!" she enthused, breath fully caught. "Why don't we finish dinner, super assistant," she winked, "and then we can go upstairs and have sex!"
I had picked up my fork, and dropped it on the floor, staring at her, then started laughing uncontrollably. She asked several times what I was laughing about, increasingly insistently, which only made me laugh harder. Tears began to run from my eyes, and I wasn't certain why; there were certainly plenty of reasons for that: my family was all dead, I had fought a massive battle and nearly sacrificed a comrade's life yesterday...yet I felt better than I had in weeks, months even. I stopped laughing as I suddenly realized that for the first time since I had left 101, I didn't want to wake up back in my bed there, with this surface world the fading memory of a nightmare, and head off to Stanley's shop to continue my latest bit of programming.
"I want to be here," I said aloud. "I want this to be real."
Eight years later, aboard the James (formerly Mothership Zeta)
"Attention, all personnel," I announced through the intercom. "Stand by for hyperspeed."
This was it. Years of translating, analyzing, building, rebuilding, repairing, trial and error…all had led to this moment. It actually felt almost anticlimactic.
With the new radio dish, we'd been able to beam our broadcast all over the world. Thousands or millions of people, across the planet, were listening with bated breath at this moment, which really made you a little nervous, as we'd patched the audio from the bridge through. Representatives from the west coast, of something called the NCR and a Mr. Robert House, had already turned up wanting our technical data, which both had been given. Also something called the Institute up in Boston? Even with the total loss of the James, another one could now be built within a few decades.
I checked the restraints on my captain's seat, one last time. "OK, Bryan," I said, "heat her up."
Bryan Wilks pressed a button. A hum of power began, then rose, louder and louder.
"Moira, how's it look?" I asked my long-suffering wife over the radio.
"We're stable!" she enthused. "The negative matter generation is working!"
The black sphere of the sky was starting to warp and skew. Stars seemed to slide and split, twisting dizzyingly. I averted my vision as it became worse…
Then the power reached its peak, and the distortion settled into a pattern—
Stars began to slip past us, as our little bubble of space ripped through the speed of light, tearing away from Earth and Sol orders of magnitude faster than any human had ever traveled…
"Collapsing field!" Bryan announced a scant few seconds later. The distortion flickered, and then suddenly space was hard and sharp again.
I didn't have to ask whether it had worked. A red-orange sphere, with white smears at the poles, loomed before us. Mars, reached in a matter of seconds, where only robots had gone before.
"Helm!" I shouted, "Set course for Proxima Centauri!"
"Uh, erm…"
"Oh, yeah, sorry, just got a little overexcited, ahead of myself. Moira, everything all right down there?" That was going to sound just great in the history books. Oh well.
"We're great!"
I closed the link, staring out at the stars, as logs were pulled and data compiled and systems checked all around me. The noise of the hustle and bustle faded as I stared at the millions of points of light.
We—humanity—didn't have to live on Earth any more. There were trillions of stars out there, untold trillions more planets, and surely it wouldn't take too long to find a better one, one with breathable air and pure water and edible plants, not full of radiation and mutants and deathclaws…
And my adventures—our adventures—had only just begun.