When Megan inexplicably found herself flying high above the desert, with the sand, scrub, and cliffs a distant pattern far below, she didn't question it. She simply enjoyed the ride, banking this way and that like a leaf carried along by the hot, dry wind. Soon, she left the open waste behind and crossed briefly over the sprawling ruins of the city she had not yet seen up close, her imagination filling in the gaps of her knowledge with equal parts squalor and gawdy splendor.
Rising high above the rubble, Vegas' most striking landmark stood out like the world's biggest chess piece, the gleaming tower a queen – or a pawn – alone on the board, but even that seemed uninteresting and irrelevant as she soared further and further west. The terrain was rougher out here, the elevation more extreme, and the settlements more sparse. Sharp peaks on the horizon had trapped a dark cloud above them, and her line of sight became hazy and dim as a polluted miasma obscured the view of the ground below. She found herself sinking into this cloud, losing elevation at an alarming rate.
She had no control over where she went, but she still fought to turn aside or pull up again. All to no avail. She was compelled to descend into an enormous valley, an immense cracked bowl belching smoke and fire into a blasted sky. Now at ground level, she saw that what she had assumed at a height to be rocks and building rubble was actually human bones of every shape and size, some twisted and blackened, some shattered to sharp fragments, and some whole, skulls grinning, gleaming in the weird, reddish light.
There the wind dropped her and she was bound to the earth once again. She was barefoot, her bruised body wearing only a thin cotton shirt. Broken rib bones cut her feet as she tried to walk through them and an unstable pile of skeletal remains shifting under her weight almost sent her sliding. Up a hill and to the left a rocky hillside loomed, stamped by an immense, gear-shaped disk of metal. The vault door, she thought, although she could not recall having ever seen anything like it before. Her heart leapt at the sight, and she made it her destination, rejoicing in the expectation of what she would find within. Picking her way along the treacherous path, she approached the door boldly but found it sealed shut, with no visible intercom or mechanism for opening it. Pounding on the unyielding surface, marked only by the number six, she only succeeded in bloodying her fist. She tried to call out, but the words were swept away by the wind.
"It won't open," said a curiously mechanical voice behind her. Turning wildly - there had been no one there a second ago, she knew - she came face-to-face a metal-skinned humanoid monster with black sockets instead of eyes. No, not a monster - that was just a helmet, with a built-in gas mask and voice modulator. Power armor, some forgotten memory whispered again.
"Why not?" She felt no fear for the expressionless guard, only impatience at finding the way forward impassable. She knew that answers to who she was and where she was from lay behind that door. If only it would open.
"This is the Courier's vault. You wouldn't want to go in anyway. Only the dead live there. They're terrible company for a little mouse like you."
She was indignant at this brush-off. "But I'm the courier. If that's my vault, then they're my dead. I need to see them. I need to know."
"No, you're just a courier, with a lower-case 'c.' Someday, maybe, you could be more, but not yet and probably never. In any case, everyone here is 'your dead' and that is your fault." She (for some reason, Megan was sure it was a woman behind the mask) made a sweeping gesture that took in the entire desolate field. "Claim them and know them all, if you dare. The way to your vault lies through them."
Megan felt cold and afraid. The figure who stood in her way betrayed neither pity nor contempt, but their matter-of-fact words settled into her heart like a block of ice. "Wh-what do you mean, my fault? I didn't kill anybody. I wouldn't."
"You wouldn't, I know. You couldn't. Someone took your teeth and claws and rage and threw them away. All that's left is a lame kitten, a broken plaything for smarter, stronger people to tinker with and train for their own ends. The doctor's one, for all that he means well, and there will be others. They'll try to block you from a past that only stands in the way of your usefulness. But if you want to be the vault-dweller you were, you also have to be the killer again."
Megan swallowed. "I want to know who I was, whoever I was. I don't believe that I am a killer at all, but I'll accept the guilt if I deserve it. I won't let anybody keep me in the dark."
"You accept? That makes this easier than." The filtered voice dropped and became almost kind. "It seems cruel to punish you for crimes you can't remember, but I didn't make the rules. Goodbye, little courier." The figure picked up a long, complicated-looking weapon - a device with coils of copper wire and rings of magnets all down its length. It made a whining sound as it charged, emitting its own blue light. "Any last words?"
Arcade. I've left him behind again. She tried to bargain with one who had judged and sentenced her in a moment. "Please, let me go back and say goodbye to Arcade first," she begged. "He'll think I broke my promise. Abandoned him without so much as a word. You can kill me later."
"You sure about that? You want him to know what you did? Fine, we can do this another time. Mark my words, there will be another time," the guard said, lowering the weapon and letting it power down, and chuckled, as if remembering something. "While you're at it, ask him where he was when the oil rig went nova. Can you remember that? That'll make his day." The colossus in armor looked down at her then, and laughed unpleasantly. "Oh, never mind. Forget farewells, confessions, and messages from your subconscious. The radiation is already melting your skin off. Forgot that would happen out here. I'd guess you have about a minute left. Does it hurt?"
"No," she answered, amazed and bizarrely unafraid to see her own skeleton showing under sloughing skin and charred cloth, brilliant red flames coating her entire frame. And then it did hurt, horribly, especially when her charred legs snapped off at the knees and sent her rolling across the boneyard. She writhed and screamed, trying to find relief from the pain. Just like Rusty! she thought, wildly. Please, someone, help me!
The guard seemed to have repented of her earlier callousness, and was trying to pat the fires out, holding her still, saying, "Hey, it's okay, Megan. Wake up now. I've got you. Shhhh." With a jolt of realization, she stopped struggling and opened her eyes to find herself back in Primm, being shaken awake by a sleepy-looking Arcade clad only in a shirt and boxers. Ruby and Johnson Nash, also wearing pajamas, watched warily from the doorway.
"Ugh… I'm sorry, I'm so sorry you guys. Bad dream." She panted, heart racing wildly, her cheeks warm with embarrassment. "I thought… I was on fire, like that one Powder Ganger." Tears pricked her eyes and she rolled on her stomach, hiding her face with shame. She could still feel phantom flames stabbing into her bones, but the intense heat was gone.
"It's okay, I'll make sure she's alright. You two can go back to sleep." Arcade turned the lantern up and knelt closer, pulling her over to her left side. With one hand he touched her neck, with the other, he brushed her forehead. "That must have been a hell of a dream. You're strong when you're afraid. Do you want to talk about it?"
Squeezing her eyes shut against the images of her dream, she pushed his hands away, sat up and shivered, "No… just a drink of water, please. And no drugs, please. I don't want to sleep anymore tonight."
"One water, opiate-free, coming right up. That first dose should still be working, anyway. You've only been asleep for about four hours." He screwed the lid off and handed her the bottle, which she drained and handed back.
She just wanted a moment alone, away from his anxious looks. "Thanks. Uh, do they have a bathroom or a bucket or something around here?"
"Indoor plumbing, just one of the marvels of our modern age. Out that door and to your right." He helped her to her feet and she hobbled away, Pip-Boy bathing the hallway in greenish light. When she returned a few minutes later, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, flipping through a small hardback book. "Would you like me to read to you for a few minutes? You really should get some more rest, and I personally find poetry very calming."
She lay back on the mattress, feeling emotionally wrung-out and physically battered. Poetry actually wasn't really her thing, but listening to Arcade talk always made her feel more grounded. "Um, sure. That would be nice. Is that a new book?"
"Yes. It's a collection by a man named Ralph Waldo Emerson. Easy Pete, of all people, gave it to me as payment for an arthritic ointment yesterday. One poem in particular has been turning over in my head, and I'd like to read it to you. It's called "'The Past.'" He licked dry lips and read:
The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed,
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can reenter there, -
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.
Megan listened for more, but that was the end. Arcade seemed to be waiting for her reaction. She tried to coax her drowsy mind into engagement. It seemed the least she could do. "Um, so… he seems weirdly reassured by the idea that the past can't change. I find that depressing. And is it all set in stone, really? We've lost so much knowledge that no one really knows for sure what happened before. Also, even though there are some major events that we can pretty much all agree on, anybody can spin the narrative to suit their purposes… making history into the founding myth for whatever their group is into."
It didn't matter if was the middle of the night and his conversation partner was half-asleep. Arcade loved to talk. "There's something to that line of reasoning, although you could take the abnegation of truth-seeking too far. Even if past events are ultimately unknowable and a factual account of history is a unattainable ideal, we can still observe the consequences of the past in the ruins of the present day. It's not a work of fiction to make educated and unbiased hypotheses about the causes behind effects on the level of a civilization. As someone somewhere once said, 'Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' We could throw up our hands and abandon the effort because it's hard to nail down or makes us feel bad or can be manipulated, but that would be doing the future a disservice. If and when it ascends again, humanity needs to know what has already happened. Our species can't survive flirting with our own destruction again."
It didn't take much for her friend to warm to a topic and converse at length, and Megan usually tried to respond intelligently, but this seemed unlikely just now, with her brain foggy from narcotics and exhaustion. She yawned and said sleepily, "Sure Arcade, you've convinced me. History good, collective ignorance bad. Mutually-assured destruction very bad." She pulled the blanket up to her chin and finally relaxed, feeling safely removed from that nightmare valley. "So, I know you Followers are secular humanists and all… but sometimes you sound kind of religious. No offense," she added hastily.
He laughed. "Yes, I know what you mean. Back at the beginning of my training, I heard sermons about preventing a future nuclear armament that could make a grown man weep. I guess we indoctrinate our young as much as any cult would. I hope we're better than the average group of crazies, though." He lapsed into thought for a moment, then looked down to notice that her eyes were closed and her breathing was slow and even. He reached to turn the light off, when he heard her mumbling something.
"What?" he whispered, not wanting to wake her if it was just sleep-talk.
"I said, 'what's an oil rig?'"
Her face was peaceful and her dreamy voice didn't hint that she knew she was asking anything significant, but he felt his mouth go dry with shock. Voice cracking, he tried to answer casually, "It's a piece of pre-war technology used for mining petroleum from the ocean floor. Turns out you need some fossil fuels even with nuclear fusion. Why… why do you want to know?"
"The guard in power armor told me to ask you 'Where were you when the oil rig went nova?' Didn't say why… oh, never mind, Arcade, that was a dumb question and it was just a dream anyway. I'll try not to wake you again. 'Night."
Having lobbed this unwitting bombshell at his sanity, she slept peacefully until morning. Arcade did not. He lay awake for hours, fighting the crazy urge to flee the Mojave and never look back until he was far, far away from his father's old friends and this blundering, oddly perceptive creature, who observed and asked about things she had no business knowing. In two decades of failed romantic connections - fellow students back in Los Angeles, the chief of medicine at his first posting (that one had lasted three years and left him cynical about love), the occasional soldier on leave in Vegas, and an on-again-off-again thing with Ignacio Rivas - not one of these men had learned or guessed as much as she had in only a month.
They all asked, of course, the ones that cared - honestly, the good ones cared enough to stop asking, but his inability to give good answers and unwillingness to weave complex falsehoods had cast a pall over every relationship in the end. It was inevitable. No matter how good the sex was, after a while there had to be a more personal give-and-take, and scraps of Latin, literary trivia, and philosophical discussion could only get you so far. He had almost confided in his first boyfriend, a dark-haired poet a year below him in medical school, but his mother's dying warning had stopped him in the end. Their relationship hadn't survived the summer harvest break.
Miriam Gannon's health had been poor for years, but it was cancer that killed her in the end, like so many others. Then a student at the start of his education, Arcade spent all of his free time those final weeks lingering in the palliative care ward, a depressing institution meagerly supported by the donations of the wealthy. One night he was sitting next to her bed, attempting to memorize the finger bones for an anatomy test in the morning, and pretending that everything was going to be alright.
He was trying not to look at her too closely, the woman who'd given birth to him and kept him safe all these years, who was now subsisting entirely on IV saline, glucose, and morphine. He was afraid that she would die in between metacarpals and he didn't want to see that last exhale. She surprised him then by plucking at his sleeve and opening parched lips to speak, for the first time in days. He'd leaned in to hear her breathless whisper, with long pauses in between words as she struggled to fill her lungs. "Arcade… there won't ever be a safe time to be your father's son. Not in the NCR. They'll arrest you, execute you just for the association. We brought so much fear here that they won't risk pardoning you. You can't… tell… anybody. Promise me."
He'd promised, she'd died that night without saying another word, and he'd barely passed the make-up test a week later. He finished his education, embraced the Followers ideology, and told nobody about his family or the training he'd received as a teenager. There was one symbol he held onto openly: his father's plasma defender, recovered from his body by the pilot who'd flown him on his last mission. While a doctor carrying a weapon openly in the Boneyard was unusual in this relatively civilized age, in Freeside it was almost mandatory; nevertheless, this weapon in particular raised a lot of eyebrows in the Fort. It wasn't enough to get him in trouble, but probably contributed to his reputation as an odd duck… though not as a war criminal. No one had come close to guessing. Until now. He finally dropped into an uneasy slumber just before sunrise, his mind still turning over the one important question: What (and how) does she know?
When he awoke some hours later, it was from his own troubling dream of a sky dark with vertibirds and a column of storm-troopers in Tesla armor burning Vegas to the ground. Megan was gone, but most of her stuff (including her rifle) was still there, so he knew she hadn't gone far. Pulling on some pants and shoes, he walked down the hallway to the front to find Ruby Nash doing some calculations on an adding machine at the desk.
"You're finally awake! Your girl's been up for hours, messing with that old hover-bot. My husband's out there with her. It's closer to lunch than breakfast now, but would you like me to make you a cazador-egg omelet?"
"Ah… no thank you. I don't usually eat breakfast. I appreciate the offer, though." Something in what she had said rang a warning bell. "Hover-bot?"
"Sure, you know, one of those little flying robots with antennae stuck everywhere. Or maybe you don't know - I haven't actually seen one working since I lived in California, and that was forty years ago. One of our couriers left a broken one here last year, and it's been collecting dust ever since. We offered it to Megan as a thank-you for saving the town, though she deserves a lot more."
Arcade didn't trust himself to respond to these details without gibbering like a madman, but only nodded and gave her a strained smile as he reluctantly headed outside. Behind him, Ruby called out, "Come back in an hour and I'll have some radscorpion casserole for y'all. Make sure those other two don't forget to eat either."
Johnson and Megan had set up a card table in the shade of the casino's awning and their heads were bent over the carcass of an honest-to-goodness Eyebot, with random electronic detritus and tools scattered all around. She looked up when he approached and flashed him a bright smile, eyes dancing under sweat-soaked bangs. "Arcade! Check this out. We've almost got it ready to turn on. Can you hand me that soldering iron, please?"
He located and handed her the item wordlessly, standing back and looking on blankly as she used a tiny bead of copper solder to join the wires Johnson was patiently holding together. They did this three more times, connecting a refurbished circuit board, a fission battery, and a pint-sized vacuum tube to the innards of the damned thing. "Right, well, the lasers and tasers aren't engaged yet… but, you know, let's make sure it doesn't want to kill us before we give it weapons." She eased everything inside the shell and carefully snapped it shut. "Okay, everybody hold your breath."
He did hold his breath and prayed it would stay dead, but the courier apparently knew what she was doing. The bot rose slowly to head-height, and beeped twice, LEDs flashing as it ran a diagnostics check. Chest bursting with anxiety, Arcade seriously indulged the idea of melting it into a pool of plasma on the spot (I'll plead temporary insanity and I won't be lying, he thought in a rush), but one look at Megan's obvious pride and happiness stopped him short.
She beckoned him over. "Arcade, meet ED-E, our newest companion. I'm just going to call him ED." She pronounced this "ee-dee." Some of his misery must have showed on his face, because she scrutinized him closer and frowned. "Are you okay? Sorry, but you look awful. Did you have trouble going back to sleep after I woke you up? I really feel bad about that."
He had to say something. "No… and yes, but it's not your fault. Listen, can we talk? Alone?"
She looked apprehensive, but didn't hesitate. "Sure, just let me take ED inside and clean up this mess."
He helped her and the old man carry the equipment inside, each making several trips. When ordered to wait, the Eyebot hovered obediently in the corner, scanning the room at regular intervals with its tiny radar dish. Arcade knew he was being paranoid, but he imagined it was watching him the closest. As they walked toward a bench outside of the (hopefully enemy-free) hotel, he broke the silence, "You're moving around well today."
"Yeah…" she looked sheepish. "I know you're saving those last three stimpaks for a severed limb or something, but I took some healing powder from your pack this morning. I would have asked, but you were asleep."
"That's what it's for. As long as you mix it with water and avoid taking it on an empty stomach, it can't really do any harm." He spoke mechanically, dreading the conversation ahead.
"Yeah," she laughed nervously, "Gritty water and cazador omelets, all part of a balanced breakfast. It's actually not as bad as it sounds. Hey," she said suddenly, grabbing his arm and facing him. Her face was earnest and apologetic, and the words tumbled out in a rush. "I know you're mad about yesterday. I don't remember much from last night, but if I didn't say it then I'll say it now: I'm sorry for making you worry and for asking you about things you're uncomfortable talking about. I won't do it anymore. Please keep travelling with me. I like you."
"You did say that already. I forgive you on both counts, and I'm not planning to leave. This is about…something else." He sat beside her on the bench and looked out onto the courtyard, wondering how to begin. He took a deep breath. "Does the word 'Enclave' mean anything at all to you?"
Megan looked thoughtful. "It's funny… that's one of those things I feel like I should know, which probably means I did know before..." she mimed a pistol shot to the temple, and chuckled ruefully, "It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't place it. What is it?"
"The Enclave was a powerful organization that gave the NCR and other groups a lot of trouble several decades ago. They considered themselves an extension of the U.S. government as it existed before the war, and had a lot of very high-tech weaponry at their disposal, including aircraft, high-end power armor, and… robots."
A light dawned in her eyes. "Robots like ED. So he was one of theirs." She frowned, "But he's pretty small and the weapons on him really aren't that powerful. What were they used for?"
"Propaganda. Reconnaissance. They weren't meant to do much damage by themselves, but where they went, death and destruction followed shortly after. They were the eyes and ears of the Enclave. They called them Eyebots."
She snickered. "Catchy. So…you're worried that ED will attract unwanted attention from the NCR and other people who remember the Enclave? Or that he's somehow still reporting to whatever's left of the faction?"
"More the former than the latter. The Enclave in the west fell - explosively - when a lucky tribal and his companions blew up the oil rig that had served as their base for over a century. That was almost forty years ago. Fighting continued for a long time afterward, with the NCR and the Brotherhood of Steel actually working together toward the common goal of eradicating the survivors." His face darkened unconsciously. "As much as the Enclave deserved to be destroyed, their pursuers' methods of extermination were… extreme, sometimes. Especially at the end, when the NCR forced them to make their last stand at Navarro, in northern California. By then, the risk they posed was minimal, but there were innocents there who got the same treatment as the soldiers: imprisonment and execution. Almost no one escaped Navarro."
Arcade realized with horror that his eyes were filling with tears, and he tried to conceal this by cleaning his glasses. He continued as blandly as possible, looking anywhere but at the girl beside him, "A lot of the high-ranking survivors took off immediately with the remaining vertibirds for the east after the oil rig was destroyed, but no one's heard from them since. They may have established themselves there, but without a reliable line of communication to that coast there's no way to tell."
She had been silent throughout this narrative and stared at him now, as if seeing him for the first time. He looked down at his hands and sniffed, wishing he was back in his stuffy research tent in Freeside, doing anything except this. He waited for the questions to begin. She took his hand in her own unburned right hand and squeezed it gently before releasing it. Then she spoke, calmly and decidedly. "What I'm hearing you say, Arcade, is that you're uncomfortable travelling with ED, and would prefer not to have it come with us. That's fine. I'll switch it off and stash it somewhere safe in the hotel before we leave. Or see if the Nashes want it for a guard dog."
He choked on an actual sob that slipped out, but tried to cover it with a cough. "You would do that? Just because I don't like it?"
"Of course. Your opinion means a lot to me, and I'd rather have you with me than some old robot any day. Seriously, it can't even talk, let alone manage sarcastic quips." She added quickly, "I'm not saying I won't come back and get ED when you and I have parted ways. I desperately need something to help me with terminals - those code words are impossible to line up when I can't read. But until then I've got your… ah, perfectly adequate hacking skills." She cleared her throat and stood up. "If that's all you wanted to say, I'm going to go inside to see if Ruby needs help with lunch. You should join us in a few minutes and we'll see what radscorpion casserole tastes like."
He watched her walk away, overcome with relief, realizing that he finally had someone in his life who knew the beginning of his secret - and didn't seem to care. Sorry mother, he said silently, but I think I'll be okay with this one.