And there's something quite peculiar
Something shimmering and white
Leads you here despite your destination
Under the milky way tonight
-The Church
Like the rest of the world, I am on lockdown uncertain of my future. It is May, everyone is fearful of dying from Covid. My boyfriend and I watch the news every day and we look out at the empty barren streets and closed businesses. Even if it wasn't real, the fear is. We are all afraid of the unknown. We all know we are going to die someday; we can fall down a flight of stairs or get hit by a bus. This fear was different. It wasn't irrational, science has progressed enough to know that microorganisms can kill. Not dying from covid seemed easy enough, avoid spreading it and avoid catching it by staying away from people. Even if you know the person, they could still have it.
My boyfriend Shane and I are some of the lucky ones. The one's who can work from home. He is an accountant. He doesn't have to go into an office for that in this age of technology. I am a project manager for a software company. I was able to do my reporting from home and conduct meetings with upper management and the team I managed through Zoom calls.
I road my bike to the park one afternoon. There were few others sitting on park benches, jogging and exercising. A lot of them were wearing facemasks. I wasn't sure whether I should be wearing one or not, being outside on a bike and in a park. It was easy to avoid people. I hung a mask on the handlebars, I did not want to be the one who people gave negative looks to for not wearing one and if for some reason, someone would approach me I had one handy. The playground equipment had police tape around them so kids couldn't play on it. Everyone was avoiding one another except if they were there with a partner or their child.
On the ground there were chalk drawings and messages.
Keep smiling.
We are all in this together.
You are not alone.
I hope to hug you in a better world.
Tears began to fill my eyes. These little messages were simple, yet they summed up how everyone felt. A last message brought a smile to my face. Corona Virus Sucks. No matter whether you believed it would kill you or not, that message was true whichever side you were on.
When I got back to the apartment Shane made me wipe down my bike with disinfectant wipes then take all of my clothes off and get into the shower. It might have been a bit overboard, but his fear wasn't irrational. Little is known about this disease.
There is nothing much else to do, except maybe binge watch a show on Netflix or Hulu. Sometimes we go into our separate rooms and lose ourselves in a book or a video game. We know one thing; the virus is real and not a hoax. My neighbor was taken away in an ambulance. He had the virus and died three days later from it. He was not too much older than me. I am in my mid-twenties. He was a jogger in his thirties. He wasn't old, overweight and he did not have a preexisting condition. Shane and I were scared that it might be transferred to us, because we lived in the same building as him. Much is unknown about how it is spread. We began ordering everything on Amazon, including toothpaste and toilet paper. We ordered take out from our favorite restaurants that were still open and would deliver it to our door. We even had our groceries delivered. It seemed overnight a new industry of delivery people sprung up. We wiped down every package we received with disinfectant wipes. Again, probably an unnecessary precaution, but one could be too careful.
I ordered a VR headset. I did the research and was anxious to play the new Half-life game Alyx on it. VR wasn't new to me. I have used it at work. They had Vive Pro's there used for software development. It came down between the Vive Cosmos Elite and the Valve Index. Both had similar specs and came with a free copy of Alyx which was a $60 game. What sold me on Index was the controllers and they were able to ship it to me within a two weeks. The Cosmos was out of stock.
The day it arrived felt it Christmas I carefully opened the sleek black box it came in making sure I wouldn't destroy any of the documentation that came with it. After the hour it took to set the lightboxes up and configure the software for room boundaries I downloaded Alyx. It was probably one of the most amazing games I had ever played. There was a drawback, when I beat the game I had no reason to play it again. I knew how to solve all of the puzzles and the game was linear. There was no reason to go in for a different ending and I could not world build. There were no special quests for a better weapon on armor.
I began to search the Steam library for other games. VR Chat was fun. I was able to interact with people from all over the world, finding the right group of people was difficult, but we were all there for the same reason. To escape the world of Covid and to get the social interaction that the disease took from us.
I played other games like Rick And Morty's VR game Beat Saber, Job and Vacation Simulator. I downloaded Skyrim and Fallout 4, both games that I have played many times outside of VR. Even though the review were mixed for the VR version of the games, I had to play them. I was a fan of the Fallout games. I have replayed all of the games several times. Each time I chose a different faction to side and went out of my way to collect weapons, bobbleheads, magazines and snow globes in the games. Bethesda made games that you could interact with items that had a backstory. Even the fictional companies in the game like Vault Tec Poseidon Energy and Nuka Cola had a story to it. I have played Fallout 76 since the launch and played through the bugs to look at the world the designers made. The placement of corpses, toys and furniture all told a story or had some obscure real-world reference.
"It isn't a Bethesda game if it doesn't have bugs," Shane joked to me as I was getting frustrated with Skyrim VR's lack of Index controller support.
"I don't think it's Bethesda's fault here," I said. "I think it's Steam VR, I just need to bind them to the game."
After many hours of researching and finally downloaded a mod I was able to play it.
I waited for Shane to go to sleep to play Fallout 4 VR. He did not understand why I liked the Fallout universe. He had gotten me tee-shirts, posters and game merchandise from GameStop as gifts. But we also had Pokémon Minecraft and other video game merchandise decorating our apartment.
I cried when I watched George Floyd die. I wanted to go to the protests that were taking place in downtown Philadelphia afterwards. It wasn't just because of the black people police were killing. Something needed to be done about absolute immunity. Even before George Floyd's death, people of all races are killed or injured by the police during arrests or traffic stops.
"The talk" was given to my brother and me by my father telling us what to do if we were ever pulled over.
"Don't argue with them," he said. "Just answer all of their questions and give them what they want. Don't make any sudden moves and even if they don't deserve the respect, always use yes sir and yes ma'am when talking to them."
"You can say yes sir," my brother said. "But in your head you can be thinking fuck you."
No one should be held unaccountable at their job. Police seem to have the right to kill just because they are the police. Even the military when they are in warzones have rules to follow. Soldiers cannot just go up indiscriminately and kill someone just because they thought they were the enemy. There were always consequences for their actions.
"I don't see why you play that depressing game," he said to me one day as I was fighting a boss battle in Fallout 76.
"It's because I know it's not real," I said. "And the community is awesome."
The community was awesome as far as MMORPGs go, You got the occasional person who was an asshole, but the majority of the players would stab a stimpacks in you if you were about to die and give away ammo and junk if you just asked.
"Still," Shane said. "You are escaping one dystopian apocalypse to go into another."
"We aren't living in an apocalypse," I argued. "It might be a bit dystopian, but it's not an apocalypse."
"Still don't think we are living in an apocalypse," he asked when the wildfires on the West Coast were turning the skies orange.
"I just don't understand why he doesn't do anything about it," I said watching a news conference with the president of the United States.
"About what," Shane asked.
"About everything," I said. "He argues it is too hard or it costs too much money, these are people's lives. He is the fucking president. I never heard a president say something is too hard. If Roosevelt said it was too hard or would cost too much money to enter WWII we all would be speaking German or Japanese now."
"You probably wouldn't have been born," he said to me. "Being half Jewish and everything."
We aren't political people we don't consider ourselves affiliated with any political party. We vote based on which candidate holds the same values as we do. The president doesn't seem to hold any values. He does not lead, he thinks politics is a popularity contest, who gets the best ratings on TV wins.
I ordered a haptic suit to become more immersed while in VR. I decided that Fallout would one of the best games to use it with. I suited up and I fidgeted a bit with the settings when I loaded Fallout 4 VR. I downloaded a few mods that improved the game's graphics. The game was now 5 years old; the graphics were no longer state of the art. Better engines were out now, but it wasn't the graphics I wanted, it was the story. If they made a VR version of Fallout New Vegas I would play it. Even though the interface and the graphics weren't on par with today's games, the story was epic.
The usual Please Stand By load screen came up when I loaded it.
"War, war never changes..." I got goosebumps when I watched the opening video.
The war with China, the Virus that was caused by a bat in Fallout 76, natural resources, being depleted civil unrest, all were happening in the real world. Is art imitating life or life imitating art?
I click new game on the menu.
I was in the bathroom of the Lustron Home. Nate was staring at me. I have played male characters before, this one I wanted to play as close to me as possible. I the female Nora character. I adjusted the hair and eye color to match mine. I had red hair and hazel eyes. I struggle between the ponytail and rough night hairdo. I finally chose the ponytail.
When that was finished, I went into the living area of the house. I noticed the kitchen counter looked small; I wasn't that tall in real life. I went into the settings of the game and scaled down my size, so everything looked about right from what I was used to. I am 5'1 in real life.
The world looked crisp and clean. I went in the kitchen and played with the pots and pans, I opened the fridge to see the bottles of milk and Nuka Cola in it. Over at the counter Nate was reading a newspaper, I noticed the Grognak the Barbarian comic on the counter. I wished that I could read it, like the books in Skyrim. That sort of detail Bethesda left out in the Fallout Series. It was left up to the players imagination to what was in magazines and books in the game in Fallout.
A baby cried, Codsworth, the Mr. Handy robot said he would take care of it and floated down the hallway into a bedroom.
"I know we were nervous at first," Nate said. "But I am glad that we got Codsworth."
The doorbell rang. It was the Vault Tec salesman. As usual I went to configure my character's stats and skills in the game. Being in VR, I tried to walk around him and see what was on the clipboard he was carrying. I was able to pause the game and walk outside around the house, by walking around my room. I bumped into walls and stubbed my feet on furniture, I decided to get back to the game.
I listened to the salesman's pitch, I responded with the sarcastic responses. And chose perception, endurance intelligence and charisma as the skills I wanted for this playthrough. I divvied the 21 points out equally and gave the remaining point to agility.
The name, I thought a while. I could do something silly, but this character I wanted to name after my grandmother. My real-life hero. The woman who was always there for me and showed compassion and understanding to everyone one around her. I remember she offered a ride to an old black lady with bags of groceries waiting for the bus on a cold winter's day. I was around ten and was always told to be wary of strangers. My grandmother would have given that lady her jacket if she refused. The lady accepted the ride. She had grandchildren of her own. When we dropped her off at her brick rowhome, I helped here in with her groceries. Inside her house she had pictures of her family. Her husband was watching the Price is Right on television.
"Who the hell is that" he was referring to me.
"The granddaughter of a saint who gave me a ride home from the market," the woman said.
She offered me a cookie as I left. I took it, bit into it and I thanked her.
"The world needs more people like your grandmother," she said to me as I walked out the door.
Alice. I named her Alice after my grandmother.
After my character creation I looked around the room more.
Shaun cried again. Codsworth summoned me for my maternal loving affection. I walked into Shaun's room.
The script continued, I continued with the sarcastic responses.
Codsworth called us with a nervous voice into the living room.
We go over and watch the news.
"Confirmed reports of nuclear detonation in New York and Pennsylvania," the newsman said.
Sirens began to go off, vertibirds were flying over the house.
"We need to get to the vault," my character says.
"I've got Shaun," Nate rushes out the door. "Let's go."
I stop and talk to my neighbors in the game. Kids were running down the street. Being in VR made it more real, more intense. My real-life world feelings began flowing over to the game. Even though I was trying to escape my reality, I felt the danger and severity of what was happening. This was a life-or-death moment. I was one of the lucky ones who had the safety of a vault to live out the apocalypse in.
I paused the game and wiped the sweat and tears from my face. I knew what came next, but I continued to play telling myself it wasn't real.
I followed the marker on my screen to the vault. I heard the screams of people panicking. I tried to look at the beauty of the world, the Prepare for the Future Vault Tec billboard was colorful and lifelike. The trees and sky were beautiful.
"If you're in the program step forward," an army soldier yelled. "Otherwise return home."
He looks at this clipboard and waves us through the gate to and we led to the platform that was to carry us down to the fault. I looked at all of the NPC's reactions. They looked disturbed and frightened.
Then the flash of light, and explosion came from the south. I watched a mushroom cloud form in the sky. My haptic suit vibrated when as the shockwave from the blast rolled over us and the platform lowered into the vault.
In the vault I took my time examining everything. I talked to everyone.
The doctor urged us into the room where the cryochambers were.
"We just need you to change into the vault suit and we will decontaminate you," he said pointing to my machine. I knew what it did, but I went along to progress the game.
I clicked the controller to enter it.
The screen went white. Something was wrong. I felt cold in real life. My hands felt numb. I felt like I was traveling at the speed of light, particles were passing by me, I felt stretched like a piece of spaghetti being pressed by a rolling pin. I became whole again. I was shivering inside the cryochamber.
I looked outside the chamber, Kellogg and someone in a protective suit with rubber gloves on were demanding for Nate to hand Shaun over.
I did not belong here. I banged on the glass to be let out.
Kellogg shot my husband and took Shaun. He looked into my pod.
"We still have the backup," he said.
Then I was cold again. Just the white light this time.
I woke and dropped to the vault floor when the pod opened.
"This can't be real," I was shivering on the floor. I clawed at my face, trying to get my VR set off. I tried to wake myself from a dream by saying "This is a dream, this isn't real."
But it was real. I could smell the decayed body of Nate and the others who were in the pods. I vomited on the floor. I felt everything and was able to touch everything. Controllers no longer controlled my movement.
"How is this possible?" I yelled. "This is a fucking game. Something people programmed on a computer."
I began to hug my knees. I needed to think. I am in a computer game. I need to get out.
I am fucking Tron.
I looked around the room. There was a computer terminal. I went over to it. That had to get me out of here. A computer got me into this computer-generated world, I should be able to get my way out. I have a degree in computer science, I should be able program my way out of this world.
I looked into the amber text on the screen. The program looked like it was programmed in basic, like it was written on an old Commodore 64 my father had in the basement. It had Unix qualities to it, like the computer lab I went to in college that still had a few huge computers and terminals from the 70's and 80's. I learned a Unix when taking my Cisco Certification class. The computer did not respond to any commands. I tried the Break key. I tried clt + alt + del to reboot it. Nothing but menus to control the cryochamber, there and there was no power button.
I dropped to the ground and began to cry. I am stuck here, in this world of chaos, deathclaws and super mutants. I needed to think, think of another way out. There must be a way to get out of here. Why would I want to get out of here, this vault? That world out there is dangerous and unpredictable. I had a plan; I would go and find food and bring it back here and live out my days with the radroaches.
Jesus, are there fucking radroaches?
I couldn't stay here. I needed another plan, I needed to play the game. Finishing the game was probably my only chance to get home. If I ended the game, maybe I would be sent back to the real world. I can do this. I know how to play the game; I have done it many times. I'll just complete it and go home. It was the only logical choice.
I wasn't convincing myself. I was still terrified of the world out there. It wasn't just a virus that wanted to kill me, there were people, animals, and radiation. It was easy to sit in front of screen and play the game, but I am physically in it. I felt everything; I smelled everything. I looked over at the vomit I had left on the floor.
Grow some balls, I told myself.
"If you don't like the way your life is change it." My grandmother once told me. The context was completely different than this one, but meaning was still held its ground. Nothing was going to change by me just sitting here. I needed to try.
I was the only person alive in that vault.
I walked through the doors toward the living area. There was another computer in the kitchen common area. I walked over to it. Grognak the Barbarian was loaded on the screen. I found a way to eject the holotape. It came up with blinking cursor. I wouldn't even begin to know how to program myself out of this world. I tried the ~ key to bring up a console command to enter cheats into.
My attempt was fruitless.
Then there was a squeak. It was an animal squeak. I could smell something, not human and not animal. It smelled like the sewer and decay. I turned and saw it. A roach the size of a dog. It was looking at me. I froze.
'Please go away," I said to it. "Just craw away."
It began to inch closer to me. Its legs clicked on the vault floor.
I looked around for a weapon, anything to kill it with. There was a skeleton that sat on one of the metal picnic bench table with a security club in its hand. I slowly walked over to grab it. The roaches head followed me as I grabbed, the skeleton crumbled to the floor. The roach ran towards me.
I began to swing the club at it. I hit it in its head and flung backwards. It got up and I hit it again, this time the head came off and flew across the room, its body was still moving and walking aimlessly. I grabbed a chair and threw it on it to crush it. It stopped. I needed to get out of here. I did not want to spend the rest of my life living with the radroaches. I needed to get out of this vault.
I walked into the sleeping quarters and rummaged through the turned over lockers. Skeletons littered the floor and the beds, I tried carefully not to disturb them. In one of the lockers, I found a handgun with a box of 10mm rounds next to it.
I never held a gun in real life before. I did not know how to load it or to use it. I picked it up and examined the gun. It can't be that hard. Was the gun empty? I aimed it the wall and pulled the trigger. It just clicked. I need to load it. I fiddled around with getting the chamber to slide back and getting the clip loose. The empty clip dropped to the floor. I loaded rounds into the clip until no more could fit into it and slipped it back into the gun. I slid the chamber and heard a click. Was it loaded? I aimed the gun at the wall again and pulled the trigger. I screamed as it fired, and it jolted my arm a little. The bullet hit the wall and it bore a hole in it. I fired a few more rounds with both hands aiming for the first hole. I emptied the clip and filled it with more rounds. I shot the wall until I felt comfortable with the gun and was confident I could shoot a radroach with it.
Come get me now you filthy beasts.
I made my way towards the vault entrances. Two more radroaches were in the hallway. I shot them with the gun, missing at first then hit them, their bodies exploded into pieces. I felt the need to vomit again.
I made my way towards the vault entrance and the overseers office. Another skeleton with a handgun in its hands and a hole in the skull was laying on the floor. It looked like he committed suicide. I grabbed the handgun and looked around for something to put it in. A Vault Tec backpack sat next to the desk. I emptied it, to see if there was anything useful in it and put the gun and extra box 10mm rounds into it. There were 3 stimpacks on the desk, I added them to the backpack and a I put it over my shoulder.
I walked through one last door that lead to vault door.
"Boy is key," A voice in my head said. It was the voice of a scorched from Fallout 76. There on the floor there was another skeleton with a pipboy on it's broken off left arm.
I reached down to put it on my arm.
It easily slipped on and powered up. It tightened on my arm like a machine that takes your blood pressure. A sharp pain hit my arm underneath the pipboy. I tried to pull it off. It did not budge. It got sharper as if metal were cutting into my arm. I screamed in agony as I saw blood trickling out from under the pipboy on to my fist.
"Stop, it hurts," I yelled still trying to get it off my arm.
There was no way to pry it loose. It was on me; it was a part of my arm.
I looked at the display. It had my name, blood type, weight, height, blood pressure heart rate and age. How did it know all of that? I didn't question the technology involved. On another screen there was picture of the vault boy with a sad face and the left arm was flashing saying that it was injured.
"No, duh," I said referring to the pipboy. "You are the one who injured it."
I went into the backpack and pulled out a stimpack. There weren't any instructions on it, it resembled an EpiPen. I need to stop the bleeding and stop infection, I just stabbed it into my arm above the pipboy.
I felt the medicine going into my arm, then then pain stopped. The arm on the screen stopped flashing and the vault boy now had a smiling face.
I still needed to wash the blood of my hand. I walked back to the overseer's office and went into his quarters. I walked into the bathroom and turned on the sink. Water came out, I put my pipboy close to the water, to see if it was radioactive. I listened for clicks from the built in Geiger counter. It appeared to be clean.
I washed my arm off. The water did not short out the computer that was attached to my arm, it was waterproof. Ripped pieces of the vault suit washed out from underneath the device. I needed another one. I went through the locker in the overseers' quarters and found a vault suit sealed in plastic. The words One size Fits was all printed on the plastic.
I opened it up and a small vault suit made of soft stretchy material was inside of it. I pulled at it, it felt like cotton, but it stretched like spandex. It was a material not known to me.
I unzipped my vault suit and it easily slid off over the pipboy.
I looked down at the body that wasn't my own. I walked over to a mirror and looked into it. It resembled me, with my hair and eyes but it wasn't me. I was someone else.
I pulled the clean vault suit over me and headed back towards the vault door.
There were instructions on how to open it. I had to plug a wire that came from my pipboy into a panel that had a big red button and a keypad on it. After following the instructions, I pressed the button.
Enter Passcode, a computerized woman's voice came over an intercom.
What passcode I thought? I never needed a passcode.
I looked at the Data screen of my pipboy.
Passcode is Overseer's birthday was flashing on the screen.
I headed back to the overseer's office and went through his computer and filing cabinets.
The files in the cabinet were of vault tech personnel living inside the vault and vault residents.
There was a photo of Nate and one of me, the me in the mirror.
Alice Citroni was my name. I was born 28 years before the bombs dropped. I had a law degree from Harvard University. It showed where I went elementary and secondary school in Texas, where I was raised and met Nate and fell in love with him. He was an army veteran.
I finally found the birthdate of the overseer in his file that was in another cabinet all together.
Before I went to the vault door, I went back to the cryo chamber and got the wedding ring off of Nate. I took my ring off and put the both of them in a pocket in my backpack. If there were people outside, the rings should be good for trading.
I made it back towards the door. Time to get out of here.
I went through the steps to open the door.
Enter Passcode.
I plugged in 12-2-21. That was in the overseer's file.
Access denied, the voice said.
I plugged in 2-12-21 thinking that maybe it wanted the date before the month.
Access denied, it said again.
"What do you mean access denied?" I yelled. "It's the fucking overseer's birthday.
I thought for a while. I am the only one alive in this vault. Am I considered the overseer?
I plugged in the birthdate of Alice Citroni the one that was in her file.
"Access Granted." the voice said.
A strobe light flashed.
"Stay clear of the vault door until it opens." The voice echoed.
It was an amazing site. A huge robotic arm dropped from the ceiling and inserted itself into a large gear that turned a bunch of other gears that opened a huge door. A gush of air came in through the door as if the vault had been pressurized. On the other side of the door there was the platform with the numbers 111 in the center of it that brought me down here in the game.
On the wall were the faded lettering of instructions on how to use the lift.
Stand on the Middle of Platform and Do not lean against wall were the only two I could make out.
I got stepped onto the 111 painted on the middle of platform.
"Please confirm you want to exit the vault by saying "I want to exit the vault". The female voice said.
"Yes," I said. "I want to exit the fucking vault."
"Thank you for choosing Vault Tec," the voice said. The platform began to rise into darkness.