Buried III: Oh Father Mine
AN: My thanks to Aegon Blacksteel, Little Caesar's and WastelandScribe for their reviews, support and critiques.
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James can feel the sea air on his face. Gunfire echoes in the distance and seagull caw overhead.
He knows he's dreaming.
Then he turns around and recognizes where he is. The columns, the walkways. The whole building is half a ruin even when it is not the real thing: two decades in the Vault have stripped him of the wishful thinking and embellishment of his youth and crunched any vein of imagination. Only unadulterated memory and single-minded obsession remain.
The price of Safety went beyond his physical Liberty, but he noticed too late.
That single, lucid thought tells him it's worse than a dream, that he'll remember it all on waking up and that he definitely hasn't had enough to drink.
He proceeds anyway: the faster he'll get through it, the quicker it'll be over. And yet his pace settles in a lackadaisical gait, where outside the dreamscape even the briefest walk outside meant risking being shot at. His eyes take their time to roam over the empty corridors and the silent halls. Steps echo where jury-rigged machinery beeped and broke down routinely; dust and waste have covered the footprints of fervent minds blossoming with ideas, of duty and drive and hope.
In the Rotunda, the heart has stopped beating, but if James focuses, or maybe it's the dream's own will speaking, he can still hear it. Under his feet, the sweetest ambrosia pouring into his ears. Thomas Jefferson looks down at him, immortalized in stone and writing. Dead eyes accuse from their tomb of polluted water and abandoned resolution.
"I know," James whispers, then glares up, a spark of the old flame dancing behind his eyes. "Hypocrite."
He knows just then he's not alone.
"You kept your promise, love," she says, and still, after so long, James heart aches with longing. Their time together was too brief. Ripped apart by a will not their own. By betrayal.
"He had Safety. He still has. You've given your son a life he would have never enjoyed out here."
"He wasn't worth this!" he snaps, but the hand waving around is tired with repetition. How many times has it played out, the same, pointless script? Why does he still bother? The answer is easy: to hear her voice one more time. "He wasn't worth all our work, all our sacrifices. All the lives lost so that more would prosper."
"He wasn't worth us," she finishes his thoughts, and James nods numbly. Of all the people that populate his dreams, of all the projections greyed by years of misery, hers has never faded. Flickered, maybe, but the cinders always rekindled.
Her hand rests on his shoulder, snakes under his coat, through his shirt. Her fingertips are scorching against his bare flesh and for a single, delirious moment the Rotunda wavers, a mirror of water disturbed by the ripples of precious memory, one of the feeble barriers still erected between him and the barrel of a gun.
Thump-thump.
The Rotunda shakes, and he with it.
"She was selfish," she says.
Thump-thump.
It reverberates from his chest, up through her fingers, and the ceiling cracks, but no lances of sunlight penetrate.
"She had no right."
Thump-thump.
Water pours down in gallons, raucous and shattering as if filling a new sea once the partition have crumbled away, or returning to replenish a drying bed.
"She betrayed us all."
James walks into the water and drinks from it until all he can breathe is its purity.
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The beeping came first, then the cold. Hard metal against his flattened cheek. His fingers began to tingle as he shifted his head from his arm, eyes still shut.
The beeping, again. He should go see. Why was that so important?
'Alphonse wanted something. About Hogarth and some… ants.'
The curved outline of a computer blurred into clarity, the keys half covered by his own arm spread over them and across the desk. The metal desk he was sleeping on.
'Passed out on," he corrected himself. "A scientist must be precise.'
His mouth was stuffy, almost anesthetized as he tried to chow away the awful, familiar taste of lingering puke. The small, constrictive world swam and spun around him tauntingly in rhythm with the buzzing between his ears. The hangover wouldn't rear its ugly head until later, and it wasn't like he had no experience working with ethanol giving him a little boost, but he already knew Jonas would bitch about it.
'No reason to slack-off, Dr. M. Stop drinking so much, Dr. M. Is that a water chip you're stealing, Dr. M.?'
James propped himself up awkwardly, leaning on one side only to stop when he felt the chair threatening to slip away from under him. He blinked, taking in the polished steel of the Clinic walls and a Ms. Nanny floating silently in and out of an operation room, mechanical arms picking and plucking at surgery tools covered in crusted blood.
Green blood. Green blood belonging to ants. Animals from the Outside that almost killed Hogarth.
He could almost feel the Ms. Nanny's three ocular-lenses narrow at him judgmentent, but it was so easy to ignore he almost didn't even have to try anymore.
He straightened up and sluggishly pulled at his coat where it got caught behind his leg, then shuffled to the drawn curtains around the operatory table. The beeping insisted, but he had to see. That it wasn't just some alcohol-induced hallucination. That there still existed a world outside, beyond the Vault's walls. That he hadn't imagine the first thirty-two years of his life.
That she wasn't just a product of his failing mind.
There was one of the drones on the slab of metal. The pits in its torso, arranged in orderly lines, revealed only formless mush underneath. The organs bobbed in jars filled with greenish biomed gel, giving the whole Clinic an impression of evil mastermind's lair. A complete array, though the brain he had to remove in loco in the Old Levels, from the only carcass whose head hadn't been damaged beyond salvage.
'Gomez always taught him well. Too well for his own good.'
James reached out, fingertips brushing the sleek exoskeleton. The chitin had been washed of the dirt and blood caking it while still in the Old Levels, by order of Alphonse. He didn't want anyone to come in contact with potential biohazards, so much that only one had been carried to the Clinic for the exams, and both the halls and the carriers had or were undergoing a complete rad scrub.
He'd be treated with one of his own, and so would Jonas. Hogarth? Probably, at least to avoid contagions in the general population. Any bacteria or pathogen that could survive in the Wasteland would prove dangerous for the molerats of Vault 101. The other bodies had already been disposed of at the incinerator.
Then the hole to the ant's nest would be sealed, and he would be still stuck underground. Just like another molerat.
Beep-beep-beep.
James padded to the bio-analyzer, watching dully as the black screen lit up with scrolling green text, filing out notions and numbers he already knew by heart.
Flesh and blood were radioactive, unfit for consumption. Cellular markers were altered from the stored information on the pre-War species, but still recognizable. Tumorous growth within all major organs, but James knew first hand none of them would impair the things from ripping of a wastelander's leg at a moment's notice.
Hogarth had been quite lucky.
The results kept scrolling until James switched the terminal to low-power mode. He swiveled lightly on the stool he'd perched himself upon, eliciting soft creaks from the seat.
The familiar pang of disappointment that accompanied every thought of Catherine's son had been dulled recently – for how long, he didn't know. Days and weeks tended to blur together. Yet now, it burned brightly, making James' fingers itch for the bottle.
He swiveled around and rose gingerly to his feet, only to witness the Ms. Nanny grab the half-filled bottle on his desk by the neck and pour it down the sink. James' face scrunched into a scowl.
"Unit #16, enter hibernation," James hissed. "Authorization: Dr. James Mitchell, ID 0002… 90A6," he finished after a pause to push down the bile.
"Votre autorisation est refusée, docteur Mitchell," the French spewing can of bolts had the cheek to reply. One of its ocu-lenses whirred on him while she slotted the empty bottle into her storage unit for recycling at the earliest convenience.
James had half a mind to process the robot for recycling.
The door to the patients ward hissed open before he could translate intent into action. Jonas was reading off a clipboard as he walked in, spectacles heavy on his nose. Seemingly satisfied, he scribbled something at the bottom and only then noticed James staring, or rather glaring at him.
"You overrode my authorization?" he asked, pointing at the Ms. Nanny. Jonas' lips pressed together, then he shook his head.
"I didn't. Chief Hannon did." For a few long moments, the only sound was that of the Ms. Nanny busying itself around the dissected ant, then Jonas spoke.
"Dr. M, Hogarth is on a fever. I had to give him some Buffout for the time being and I extracted the broken needle, but he needs surgery remove the piece of… jaw, I guess, stuck into his tibia."
James shook his head. "Even if we put him on the table, not even Super Stimpacks aren't enough for bone regeneration. But Alphonse will never concede on the Auto-Doc."
Jonas took a couple of steps forward, surprising James. He had met his mother Anne once before, when he still lived up top: a bold, blunt woman. She was the leader of Overseer Leninger's scouts, no matter how much Almodovar changed the history books and imposed silence to fulfill his little fantasies.
From the first day he was saddled with him as assistant, James always thought she'd be ashamed of what a sycophant her only son turned out to be.
So it was with surprise that James found himself grasping the clipboard – Hogarth's medical register, he realized – as Jonas shoved it into his chest.
"Then go to the Overseer and make him relent. There's your son in there." Jonas' voice was a leashed rumble, dripping with clashing emotions. "Act like a father for once. It's bad enough what he has to go through every day, now you'd let him become a cripple too?"
They held each other's gaze for another long moment, then Jonas sighed and made his way out of the room.
"At least go and see him, if you can be bothered." Then the Clinic's main door hissed shut behind him and James caught a last glimpse of him passing by the Security guard on duty.
"What are you looking at?" James barked at the Ms. Nanny. Its ocu-lenses narrowed and he thought he heard it huff, but it dutifully resumed its work and pushed the table outside of the operatory room and through to the hatch dropping directly into the incinerator for a quick disposal.
James found himself alone in the too pristine, too orderly ambient. It and the Clinic as a whole had nothing of him: the robotic aides ensured the utter cleanliness of every surface, the sterilization of every tool and the perfect, mechanical arrangement of every element. The air smelled of disinfectant for the routine practices, but it lacked the unending motion and exciting air he'd breathed elsewhere during his training.
Compared to the years of his education back West, the hardships of self-teaching and the dire conditions the Followers operated under most of the time, the whole set-up in Vault 101 never felt like a dream come true it should have. It was a sterile cage, almost surreal in its unchanging perfection and suffocating control. It refused him as he refused it.
'If we had had this kind of resources at the Project, none of this would have happened.'
Again, his throat itched for a drink, to cloud the recent lucid dream. At the same time, annoyance swelled into his chest, fueled by frustration and the alcohol still flowing in his body. The cursed tin can had to throw away his vodka, didn't it?
James turned to the door leading into the patients ward and took a couple of quick steps forward.
The terminal chimed.
James grunted, stopping himself from pushing the door commands. He brought up his Pip-Boy and frowned at the screen. Was the damn thing failing him too? He'd updated the software forwarding all notifications and communications from the terminal directly to his wrist only a month before.
Turning awkwardly on his heel, James slumped at his desk and highlighted the message, narrowing his eyes when he failed to recognize the sender. Then the breath caught in his throat and he goggled for a moment, his head jerking around to see if anyone had just snuck up on him to look.
'Someone is always looking in Vault 101.'
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done to spend the next two minutes typing away, ignoring the message as it beckoned him, always at the corner of his eye. When he was finished, his hand lingered on the switch, eyes taking in the header and the first lines of the message to assure that no, he wasn't still in a dream. He was tempted to pinch himself though, a stronger temptation than he would have imagined.
The he deleted it and powered down the terminal.
The Pip-Boy buzzed in acknowledgment of the forwarded message and James got up from his desk, picking up Hogarth's medical clipboard. Almodovar could remotely access every terminal in the Vault from the Overseer's console, but his Pip-Boy was fairly safe thanks to the softwares he'd… appropriated from Hogarth's Pip-Boy six months before. The boy never realized he always had a back door in there, ever since his tenth birthday.
The only good thing Almodovar could teach him in twenty years, after all, was paranoia.
He couldn't well keep the trepidation out of his gait, not completely, as he passed into the ward. A small corridor was lined with half a dozen beds partitioned by curtains, plus an isolated room at the back. There remained the Vault's only remaining Auto-Doc, activated sparingly and only with Almodovar's authorization.
Hogarth was on the third bed. Gone were the blood soaked rags of his jumpsuit, replaced by an hospital gown. An IV was plunged into his arm, the bag of blood half-empty, and on the nightstand Jonas had left the Buffout, just out of reach of the patient's reach or flail.
The wounded legs rested on a cushion, wrapped in medical gauze helping to keep the inflammation at bay. James had no idea on how to synthetize an antivenom against whatever toxin the ants secreted, but either the Ms. Nanny or Jonas would.
James gave him a once over, then he fished out the clipboard and pretended to go over the data while confronting it on his Pip-Boy. For a moment, the longest moment in twenty years, he thought he'd imagined it all, that the alcohol was finally taking its toll to his sense.
Then the message was there. James' eyes stopped on the header.
Project Purity
He had never told anyone in the Vault about it. About his past, and his greatest failure. Almodovar only wanted a physician after the Exodus left the Clinic unmanned, and James was qualified for the job. No questions asked, only a bunch of exams and nineteen years of reciprocal disdain.
This couldn't be a trap of his to justify his demotion from Vault Physician. James read, though the words were already engraved into his mind.
To Doctor James Mitchell,
My employer and I are great admirers of your work at the Jefferson Memorial. We'd wish to help you see your work to completion. To that end, a first step has already been taken to extract you, and whoever you would deem noteworthy, from Vault 101. Other associates are already on the move to clean the Memorial from the creatures squatting inside.
With your cooperation, we can have you and a team of scientists transferred there in about ten days.
No signature, but definitely someone from the outside. For a moment, James felt delirious, felt like guzzling down an entire bottle and break into laughter. It was almost too good to be true. Someone from the Outside, after all those years.
He shook his head, as if to clear it. No, not the Outside. The Capital Wasteland.
But when something seemed too good to be true, it usually was.
What's in for you and your employer? He typed back. Who are you?
He didn't have to wait for longer than a minute before a new message pinged on his Pip-Boy screen. A whole minute he spent fighting the urge to look over his shoulders as the ghost steps of Security paced on the other side of the door.
Our talons reach far, Dr. Mitchell. We wants the same thing you do: a better future for this Wasteland, and to fulfill our ambitions. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made so that the status quo can be broken. You've sacrificed twenty years of your life already.
You can call me Mr. Burke. I'm sure our partnership will be fruitful.
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AN: Shit's about to get real in the next chapter.