A/N: And we're back! Bit of a longer chapter here, people - covering a lot of ground and bringing into a new period of pain and suffering for someone who truly deserves it :)
We're in the home stretch, people, and to commemorate the occasion, I'm going to try something new and interesting - perhaps a Mr Sardonicus-style ending to Braun's story? Perhaps a choice between two equally horrific fates?
Either way, it's showtime! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Fallout is not mine. Again.
It took over ninety-two hours to fully reboot and repair the simulation, and Braun spent every single minute of it simmering with rage.
Rebooting was bad enough in no small part because it forced him to temporarily turn the simulation off, leaving him with no choice but to face the real world until the work was finally done. Thanks to his executive failsafes, he couldn't leave his Tranquillity Lounger even if he'd wanted to commit suicide, so there was no danger of him being exposed to the elements, nor any pain to speak of. There was only the dusty canopy of the Lounger, and what little Braun could see through it – in this case, a wall.
Though he had no means of seeing his real body, he could already tell that his physical self was in very poor condition: he couldn't turn his head, he couldn't move his limbs, most of his body was completely numb on the outside, and after two hundred years of neglect, his eyes were barely functioning. True, it wasn't as if he'd ever get to use his sense of depth perception or colour anytime soon, but it only made his surroundings even more boring; by itself, the wall was dull enough, but when tinted grey, shrouded in mist, and with no way of telling how far away it was, the whole thing became excruciatingly stultifying.
For hour after hour, Braun stared at the wall, doing everything he could to keep himself from screaming. In the end, he gave up on maintaining a dignified silence, only to find that his vocal cords had desiccated to the point that he could no longer produce anything other than a dry, rattling groan; worse still, the muscles inside his face had been petrified by the specially treated atmosphere inside the Lounger, leaving his mouth effectively frozen shut and reducing his groans to near-inaudible gurgling.
In the end, all he could do to pass the time was focus on the minute sensations produced by his life support – the only thing he could physically feel: the intravenous additions of fluids into his withered circulatory system, the moist ooze of nutrient-rich paste being pumped directly into his stomach, the deep rumble of self-cleaning tubes pumping away waste and funnelling it away to be recycled into fertilizer, and above all else, the thud of his own augmented heart still plodding along even after two centuries. It was the augmenting systems that were the most disturbing: lifetimes ago, he'd anticipated that his body might gradually cease to function even while preserved by the Lounger, and several dozen mechanisms had been programmed to enter, enhance, and even replace certain elements of his body as the centuries dragged on; and he could feel all of them working away beneath the surface, as subtle as dialysis or as blatant as the mechanisms squeezing his lungs like a pair of bellows.
It didn't hurt… but it was definitely uncomfortable. And yet, it was the only thing that could keep his brain from shutting down out of sheer boredom.
When the simulation finally came back online a day later, Braun returned to it with the frenzied relief of a drowning sailor abruptly washing up on dry land. He embraced the work of re-establishing the simulation, seeing the familiar scenario blossoming back into existence, checking it for any lingering bugs that Matty's sabotage might have left in its wake, and finally allowing it to run uninterrupted for the first time in what felt like eons.
And yet, the joy he felt was short-lived: the dry land he'd returned to was a lonely island in the middle of a vast ocean, wondrously lush but without company of any kind. Oh, he could easily conjure up as many NPCs as he could imagine, program them with all the necessary personality traits to make for brief distraction, but he couldn't give any of them the subtleties that could make them worthy prey. All he had were ephemera, paltry substitutes for the real entertainment that Matty had stolen from him, and none of it was worth a minute of his time as long as there were real human beings out there that he could induct into the Loungers.
But Braun could be patient.
He could wait as long as necessary for the day when Vault 112 would finally see new residents; before he'd ushered in his first generation of playthings, he'd waited for years within the simulation without torturing a single living soul. He could wait even longer this time around; this time, though, he would have more to keep him occupied than synthetic daydreams: he would need to make the Vault ready, to find a means of luring in unsuspecting civilians into his home, and he needed to upgrade his defences so that there would be no further errors in his games.
He'd already begun the process by resetting the entire system, completely overhauling every last aspect of the simulation from the ground up. Laborious recoding and progressive system purges had finally eradicated the Chinese Invasion failsafe, autobackup function and all; now, when the time came, none of his residents would ever find sanctuary in death. For years, the lengths that Braun had needed to go to just to remove the unwanted failsafe had discouraged him from taking the necessary steps; now he had no choice.
Soon, his robobrains would be headed for the Vault entrance to undo Matty's sabotage; it would take weeks for them to rewire the gate controls, and even longer to get the smaller doors open again; getting the trapdoor open would probably take days of welding given that none of the robobrains had been built for serious heavy lifting and that the staircase could only accommodate one of them at a time.
But it could be done. Nothing was beyond his intellect, least of all the simple act of preparing the way for his newest playthings; he would make sure of it…
Of course, it wasn't as if his days were spent entirely on work and nothing else. When he wasn't overseeing the robobrains, remodelling the simulation, or doing any one of the many chores he'd neglected over the decades, Braun still had a healthy dose of nostalgia and the promise of the future to keep him going: his automated recorder had been running for nearly two hundred years, and all that footage was just waiting to be edited for future viewing. And if that didn't suffice, he still had a semi-functioning radio, just waiting to bring him news, music, and distractions aplenty.
As it turned out, there was rather a lot of news to keep him interested once the robobrains had finished making the necessary upgrades to the aging receiver.
It seemed Washington – now formally known as the Capital Wasteland – was alight with word of Matty's activities across the ruins: the few deeds that he'd shared with Braun and Tessa had been little more than a sampling of the bewildering feats of derring-do that the so-called Lone Wanderer had been getting up to – and continued getting up to as he escorted James across the wastes. There were clashes with slaver caravans, ambushes by super mutants, battle royales with mercenary gangs out for the price on Matty's head, and dozens of other violent encounters reported by fawning bystanders and trumpeted on high by Three Dog, the most annoying radio host that Braun had ever had the misfortune of hearing.
Still, at least the music was nice.
Enclave Radio provided a few interesting titbits of information, though mainly via association: for some years, he'd been wondering about what had become of the president following his disappearance; he'd wondered about those secret government Vaults in which the crème de la crème of American society had been preserved without fear of experimentation, and whether or not they had survived the war or the centuries that followed. Now it seemed that the Enclave was the only answer he needed. He'd heard rumours of an organization by that name prior to the war, and he known that there'd been covert groups within both the government and Vault-Tec's uppermost echelons vying for control of the country, but he'd never imagined that the rags would have gotten the name right. Furthermore, it seemed that their methods had only grown less subtle in the centuries since the collapse of the United States: "President" John Henry Eden (obviously an alias) liked to style himself as the harbinger of America's rebirth but competing radio broadcasts by knowledgeable Wastelanders, had already mentioned some of the Enclave's less salubrious exploits.
For a time, Braun considered reaching out to them, offering them his technical expertise in exchange for playthings, but eventually decided against it: there was no way of knowing if the Enclave was in any fit state to do business with him, if they'd even survived that fabled last battle at the Oil Rig. For all Braun knew, Eden's broadcasts were being made by some desperate loyalist with a transmitter and too much time on his hand, or even by an automated system mindlessly replaying pre-recorded speeches by some long-dead Enclave actor.
And if they did exist at full strength… well, he had never been one of them. True, he'd been valuable enough to be given wealth, prestige, infinite resource and even a place in one of their true Vaults (not that he'd accepted it), but never enough to be welcomed into those shelters containing the Enclave's leadership, never enough to be given a seat at the table. Being a naturalized foreigner had been part of it, no doubt, but they'd no doubt known that Braun was different in other ways, and perhaps they had considered him a potential threat because of his nature as a liberated hedonist. And if they'd considered him dangerous before, what might they think of him after two hundred years of intervening time? Would they cut a deal with him… or would they just strip-mine his Vault for parts?
In the end, he thought better of it, and went back to trying to assuage his boredom the old-fashioned way.
A few days later, while trawling the airwaves for something other than music or sycophantic opinion pieces, Braun was surprised to stumble upon what appeared to be a secret radio channel based at a location identified only as "Project Purity." Normally only accessible by Pip-Boys, the Vault's receiver was powerful enough to eavesdrop on otherwise secret communiques, allowing Braun to discover that the channel was being maintained by a small team of scientists lead by none other than James, the broadcasts themselves sent out for the benefit of Matty – the team's resident gofer.
From what he could gather over the radio, the first of his uninvited guests was making bold strides in his attempts to purify the water of the Potomac, but he still needed to complete his fair share of errands before it was ready: they needed provisions, spare parts, mechanical assistants, and more importantly, they needed someone to watch their backs just in case the project base came under attack. Matty, servile by nature and unimpeded by dignity, was always needed to fetch, carry, hunt, and kill on behalf of his father's impotent friends, and radio conversations between the father and son were infuriatingly common.
Braun could have lived with it if these little chats had been restricted to instructions and requests for more gear, but the two just had to make the whole thing so tiresomely personal, flooding the secret airwaves with one tooth-rotting exchange of sentimentality after another. Over the course of such discussions, Braun became intimately familiar with Matty's life story, especially with the fact that James had spent a good deal of his son's life lying to him about the circumstances of his birth: far from being born in Vault 101, it turned out that his parents were Wastelanders who'd conceived the brat while working on Project Purity, and after the diseased Wasteland whore had died spitting the detestable runt into existence, James had brought his infant son to the only surviving Vault to be raised in safety. As such, there were a great many questions, a hurricane of "why did you do this, father, why did you lie to me" and a great many "son, I always loved you and I'm so proud of you achievements across the Wasteland," and so on and so forth, ad nauseum ad infinitum.
The only reason why he kept listening was because the two men would occasionally discuss what they planned to do once they had obtained a GECK and gotten Project Purity up and running. James was nothing if not predictable, insisting on managing the purifier so that its couldn't be exploited or sabotaged by more commercially minded bandits. By contrast, Matty wanted to continue exploring the Wastelands, to do his best to help others in far-away lands and put his skills as an adventurer to the best possible use; he also wanted to one day returning to Vault 101 and opening it to the outside world, even resuming his old life as a Vault-Dweller once he'd had his fun. However, there'd been one small proviso.
"Once Project Purity is working," Matty whispered over the radio late one evening, "I want to go back to Vault 112. I need to give the residents a decent burial; they suffered for so long, they deserve some kind of monument. Maybe I can have Three Dog read out some kind of tribute to them…"
"But that's not all, is it?"
"No: I'm also going back there to deal with the one other loose end we left. I need make sure that Braun's wings are clipped once and for all."
"Matty, he's already trapped in a hell of his own making. What more could you possibly do to him?"
"He still has his robobrains. As long as they're still active, he's a danger to everyone in the Capital Wasteland; I don't know if they'd be up to capturing travellers or luring them in from the road, but I don't want to see this nightmare repeat. More importantly, I don't want the old bastard enjoying the luxury of a virtual reality kingdom while the rest of the human race is still struggling just to find food."
"This is starting to sound worryingly like a quest for vengeance, son."
"It's not: it's justice, pure and simple."
"How is killing him justice?"
"I'm not going to kill him, Dad. I'm going to destroy the robobrains down to the last unit and make sure they're beyond repair; then I'm going to sabotage the computer, destroy the simulation down to the last detail. I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that he lives a long and uncomfortable life in the real world – a prison sentence if you like. That is justice. That is what he deserves."
Had it been anyone else, Braun would have scoffed and ignored the boasts… but he'd learned that Matty was not to be underestimated. Within minutes of hearing the radio exchange, he'd sent every last robobrain in the Vault down to the armoury to have their weapons upgraded to the highest possible intensity he could manage; then, he reprogrammed them with a shoot-to-kill order on Matty. It should have been enough to keep the facility secure, but that didn't stop him from shivering in his Lounger whenever he heard Matty repledging himself to this quest again and again over the course of the days that followed.
Once or twice, he felt his heart jolt in his chest as he heard Matty making plans to acquire designs for the Thank Machine 3600r, knowing that it would make all the easier for him to disable the simulation without harming Braun himself. Of course, such things would only be found in the archives of the Pentagon or Vault-Tec HQ, as James himself mentioned, but once again, Braun knew better than to underestimate the boy. If they still existed anywhere in the world, Matty would find those schematics.
But as it turned out, he'd never need them.
Three days after that fateful discussion, the secret radio station went dead; Galaxy News soon reported that Project Purity's base at the Jefferson Memorial had been attacked by the Enclave, and armed troops were moving in to seize control of the nascent water purifier. Before long, the broadcasts were claiming that James had been killed and Matty was running for his life with the rest of the project staff; alas, Braun had barely enough time to celebrate before events began spiralling out of control.
For the next few days, the brat was preoccupied with a new mission to retake the purifier, now with the help of the so-called Brotherhood of Steel – a group that Braun had only heard of once over the airways and already hated with every fibre of his being. What followed was an all-out war between the Brotherhood and the Enclave, with Matty once again serving as ace in the hole to his faction of choice, furthering their cause through a series of incidents that Braun only heard of via Three Dog or the less secure comm channels. By far the most infuriating of them included Matty not only getting his hands on a working GECK, but also blowing the Enclave base at Raven Rock to Kingdom Come.
The whole thing ended about a week or so later with a frontal assault on the Enclave-held purifier, led by – of all things – one of General Chase's masturbatory wonder weapons, the pompously-named Liberty Prime. The aftermath of the battle was quickly shrouded in confusion, but by the sounds of things, Matty had been cut off from the rest of his comrades and forced to enter a radiation-flooded control room just so he could finally get the purifier up and running. With news reports detailing Matty's unconscious body being carried back across the Wasteland towards the Pentagon ruins, Braun spent the next couple of days hoping that he was finally rid of the detestable little bastard once and for all… only to be once again frustrated when the Lone Wanderer prevailed against impossible odds for the second time, not only surviving exposure to fatal radiation levels but making a full recovery.
After that, the only thing that saved Braun from Matty's inevitable plans for retribution was the simple fact that the Hero of the Capital Wasteland just couldn't resist the call to yet another adventure, each one more bewildering than the last. And no matter how trivial it was, the Wastelanders just couldn't resist gossiping about it over the airwaves. First, Matty was tasked with eliminating the militant remainders of the Enclave, a task that resulted in the destruction of both Liberty Prime and the Enclave's last remaining base; then he'd run into a group of outcasts from the Brotherhood of Steel and supposedly had to venture into yet another simulation just so he could access a cache of weapons; then he'd been called to retrieve a cure for rare mutations from the ruins of Pittsburgh; then he'd decided to go on a riverboat cruise to Point Lookout State Park for some fucking reason, and the radio waves had brought back all manner of weird stories about him intervening in a decades-long vendetta between a ghoul secret agent and a preserved brain in a jar.
The last and most confusing report emerged perhaps five months after the confrontation on Tranquillity Lane: it featured Matty being swept into the sky by a beam of light, supposedly being drawn towards a ship gliding across the night sky. According to several radio-owning Wastelanders, Matty himself had sent out a few discreet broadcasts assuring them all that he was alive and would return just as soon as he and the other abductees got the ship under control. After that, nobody had heard anything.
Matthias, the Lone Wanderer and Last Best Hope of Humanity, was never seen again.
The triumph, unfortunately, was short-lived.
Even with Matty gone, Braun still couldn't afford to get his show on the road yet, not with the Washington chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel still sniffing around: as he'd learned, the self-styled paladins were always greedy for pre-war technology, and this particular branch liked to think themselves protectors of the innocent. Any attempt to lure in unsuspecting Wastelanders could only end in disaster, so for now, Braun was obliged to keep his head down.
It nearly drove him mad.
Going without victims was boring enough, but the hurricane of chores and annoyances he found himself confronted came dangerously close to making him chew his own fingers off out of sheer frustration.
First of all, he needed to retire from the airwaves for at least six months: the sheer number of tributes to the Lone Wanderer were nothing short of nauseating, as were the prayers for his just intervention. Countless folk, including Three Dog, seemed to believe that their lost saviour was entombed in some great vault in the stars, not dead but merely sleeping, preparing himself for some unspecified second apocalypse that would extinguish all human life. Upon that day, the Lone Wanderer would awaken, descend from his spaceborne crypt, and save them all – as if Matty was the Capital Wasteland's equivalent of Friedrich Barbarossa. If Braun had to hear another fucking word praising the irritating little spunk-bubble's virtue and strength in adversity, he would have physically vomited in his Lounger.
Then he needed to manage the repairs to the Vault; it wasn't enough just to give the damnable machines an order, because now he had to divide their efforts between rewiring the door controls, bringing up fresh machine parts, and continue their routine maintenance.
Then he needed to make something new from the simulation: he couldn't stay in Tranquillity Lane anymore, not after the humiliation he'd undergone there, and he didn't have any more scenarios to work with after two hundred years of frivolous deleting. So now he had to finally create a virtual world of his own; in the wake of two centuries of near-uninterrupted fun, the effort of slowly cobbling together a playground was agonizingly dull. For similar reasons, he also needed a new avatar – after all, he could hardly remain as Betty after having his nose broken and his ear chewed off – but he couldn't think of what new form to take; for once, his imagination seemed to have run dry.
And when he wasn't busying himself with this mind-rotting routine, he was trying to have fun – the operative word being "trying." With the radio out of the question until those stomach-churningly saccharine obituaries finally vanished, the only fun he could find was of the virtual kind. He still had an improbably vast media archive of books, radio programs, films, and television shows to keep himself occupied with, but nothing born of the imaginations of lesser mortals could hold a candle to the glorious hunts and games he'd enacted in the past, and he could only content himself with the most luridly graphic works in the archive – pure pulp, really. And while there was some satisfaction to be found in editing together the footage of his exploits, he frequently ended up getting too excited by the playback to concentrate on the actual effort; it was, as Bill Foster might have put it, "like trying to focus on hotwiring an ignition while Vera Keyes has her hand down the front of your pants."
More often than not, Braun finding brief entertainment in generating virtual victims in the half-finished fields of his new kingdom, slaughtering them in the most amusing ways he could imagine; it was nowhere near as satisfying as murdering real individuals, but it provided a few ephemeral morsels of amusement, enough to sustain his mind, just enough to keep him from going completely insane.
But at the end of the day, the one thing Braun did more than anything else was wait.
Three years went by.
Bored as he was, Braun was once again beginning to lose grip on time, the numbers on his internal chronometer blurring together until it was impossible to distinguish the passing of a second from the passage of a month; alas, it didn't feel as if time was passing any faster for him. If anything, it felt like it was getting progressively slower, even as real time rocketed along in fit and starts.
Fortunately, by the time he looked up to find out that he'd been working on a single virtual floor tile for almost three months, he found that the radio was once again in listenable condition. Bit by bit, the loving tributes to the Lone Wanderer had petered out; he was still revered, yes, and many still hoped for his return, but by now, the grief over Matty's disappearance had been replaced by a fresh outpouring of terror.
The Brotherhood of Steel's efforts to maintain a peaceful status quo had gone awry, for though they still maintained a stranglehold on the now-active water purifier, raiders and slavers were making a comeback throughout the Capital Wasteland, and while attrition had gradually whittled away at the super mutant army scattered across Washington, the mutants themselves were no less dangerous. And wherever the chaos was thickest, the individual known only as the Mysterious Failure could be found, lending his aid to whatever side took his inexplicable fancy.
Elder Lyons, the sanctimonious leader of the Capital Wasteland's Brotherhood, was dead. His daughter, the self-righteous tin-can bitch and one-time comrade of the Lone Wanderer, was dead. The Brotherhood itself was currently cycling through a series of incompetent replacement Elders, most of whom had no idea how to deal with the problem. Groups like the Regulators were attempting to bolster the Brotherhood's forces, but their numbers and equipment simply weren't up to the task.
Also, for reasons that escaped him, a lot of Paladins seemed to be talking about some kid named Arthur.
But as public anxieties over the state of the Capital Wastelands increased, fascination with the lands beyond it were skyrocketing. Right now, every Wastelander with a working radio was talking about the West Coast: once again, the glorious New California Republic, with its wealthy ranchers and Old World-style devotion to law and order, was a hot topic among gossipmongers. News from the Mojave was even more extravagant, claiming that Las Vegas was somehow still active and operating, and that a whole host of weird and wonderful places could be found hidden in the surrounding deserts – everything from casinos shrouded in blood-red clouds to vast craters that swallowed up any explorers who tried to venture inside. And, as the months lurched onwards, the rumours began to claim that armies were amassing in the Mojave, seeking the power of the long-dormant Hoover Dam on behalf of the NCR or some post-apocalyptic warband known as Caesar's Legion.
By far the strangest story of all was the claim that that the war between the NCR and the Legion had been won by a man who'd returned from the dead, "crawlin' outta his premature grave to champion New Vegas wit' the power of ghosts and an army of wendigo at his back," or so some aging Wastelander crank had gibbered over the airwaves. It was most likely just a rumour, though given that this particular rumourmonger had been a gibbering pilgrim by the name of "No-Bark Noonan," Braun was led to suspect that neurosyphilis and paint-huffing were still prevalent on the West Coast.
In between his work on the gate and his work on the simulation, Braun considered modifying the radio so that it could pick up on signals from outside Washington, if only so he could learn the truth of what was happening out in the Mojave. True, he probably wouldn't be able to get a signal all the way over to the opposite coast of the country, but he'd at least be able to receive word from closer, more reliable sources. But by the time he'd gotten the necessary parts together, the local news reports had taken on a different tone altogether.
Once again, he'd lost another few years while he wasn't looking, and now the Capital Wasteland was taking another spectacular change.
Arthur, the boy he'd heard mentioned so frequently among the paladins, was now ascending to the highest ranks of the Brotherhood of Steel; now known as Elder Arthur Maxson, the faltering knights rallied to his side, apparently attracted to his ferocity and unyielding devotion. The remaining Regulators were absorbed into the ranks of the Brotherhood, while mercenary groups like Talon Company and Littlehorn & Associates were forcibly inducted; anyone who resisted was executed, their bodies left on display for good measure. Raiders and slavers were cautiously extended the same offer, though both tended to run rather than wait to be conscripted... and this was only the beginning of the changes the boy-king instituted.
Under Maxson's rule, order was restored in Washington, the chapter replenished its membership a thousand times over through inspired recruits and conscripts alike, their coffers of pre-war technology filled to bursting, and all who lived within their territory were afforded safety that most Wastelanders could only dream of.
This in itself was already annoying, given that Braun had no choice but to bunker down and wait even longer for a chance to lure in unsuspecting civilians. However, he soon found that there was much more to fear from Arthur Maxson's reign than the usual obsessions of the Brotherhood: Maxson was much more extreme than his predecessors and far less tolerant towards "aberrations of science", pursuing the annihilation of not only militant super mutants and feral ghouls, but any kind of nonhuman whatsoever.
Within a few months of his ascent, Maxson began exterminating ghouls all over the Capital Wastelands: those of them who lived in predominantly human communities were surrendered to the Brotherhood by their terrified neighbours, while those numerous enough to create settlements of their own were annihilated through brute force assaults; the most resilient of these towns, Underworld, only survived as long as it did because it was situated in a museum, a popular source of pre-war technology. As soon as Maxson figured out that there was nothing of value to be found in that wing of the building, he had the structure carpet-bombed so violently that Vault 112's seismographs actually detected the ensuing tremors.
Before long, this campaign of extermination was extended even to former allies and acquaintances of the Lone Wanderer: the super mutant known as Uncle Leo was the first to be killed, his pacifism doing nothing to spare him from Maxson's death squads; a family of vampires living in a subway put up a valiant fight, but were slaughtered to the last man; a ghoul by the name of Charon appeared to have slipped the net, but the Brotherhood vowed that they would hunt him down eventually; finally, another peaceful super mutant by the name of Fawkes was slain while helping the survivors of Underworld to flee Washington – though his death cost Maxson eight of his best paladins and bought sufficient time for the refugees to escape.
Needless to say, Galaxy News Radio did not remain silent for long. Three Dog, once an ardent supporter of the Brotherhood, was soon calling for an uprising against Maxson's regime, demanding justice for the hundreds of slaughtered ghouls and – in one impassioned broadcast – even calling for the Lone Wanderer to return and set things right. From what Braun was able to overhear, most of the senior members of the Washington chapter regarded the increasingly bitter diatribes with amusement, apparently believing that Three Dog didn't have the stomach or the ability to truly harness public opinion. Unfortunately, Maxson didn't feel the same way, especially once the DJ began attempting to rally the Wastelanders into a full-blown uprising.
In November of that year, Three Dog's regularly scheduled broadcasts came to an abrupt halt, promptly replaced by a non-stop stream of propaganda from a Brotherhood radio station, grudgingly interspersed with the occasional tune. Days later, Braun learned from horrified witnesses that Three Dog had been dragged out of his studio and hanged from the radio tower, his decomposing body being left to dangle over the GNR building as a warning to future rabble-rousers. From then on, Galaxy News Radio was firmly under the thumb of the Brotherhood of Steel.
And as the lush forests of Oasis burned in Maxson's efforts to ferret out Harold the mutant tree, Braun could only cower inside the Tranquillity Lounger, almost too afraid to listen any longer.
Vault 112 was already a potential target thanks to its bounty of pre-war machines, but if Maxson were to learn that Braun was still alive and active within the facility, he might consider him another "aberration of silence" and have him killed. With the Brotherhood at peak strength, he might very well be able to do it, too. So, with patrols becoming stricter and surveys of the ruins becoming all the more aggressive, Braun quickly decided that the safest thing to do was play dead.
So, for the second time, he deactivated the simulation, withdrew all his robobrains to maintenance work in the lowest bowels of the Vault, and deactivated as many noncritical systems as he could. Before long, the underground chambers were as cold and dark as any other gloomy subway in the Capital Wasteland, and with all but the most essential machines inactive and the rest hidden beneath several floors of reinforced concrete, Vault 112 was effectively invisible to any scanning methods that the Brotherhood might have rediscovered. In the meantime, the garage disguise would discourage anyone from investigating, thanks in part to Matty's efforts to hide and sabotage the trapdoor.
In the meantime, Braun could only hope that Matty hadn't told anyone outside his family about Braun, that his desire for vengeance would have prevented him from sharing the location of Vault 112 with the Brotherhood. If not… well, he'd have no way of knowing until it was too late to make the slightest bit of difference. Until then, all he could do was keep his head down, too scared to use the simulation, too bored to do anything other than stare at the wall and hope that nobody would find him.
Time passed - first in months, then in years; eventually, Braun began tentatively listening to the radio again, if only so he'd be able to know if any expeditions were being sent his way… only to discover that the Brotherhood was now occupied with something quite different.
Perhaps inspired by the eminently wasteful spirit of Constantine Chase, Maxson was overseeing the last stages of the single most ambitious engineering project the East Coast had seen since the end of the war: the construction of a colossal one-of-a-kind airship at Adam Air Force Base, no doubt intended as the official flagship of the Brotherhood of Steel. By the sounds of things, he'd been at work on it for nearly two years, keeping all the relevant data restricted to only the most guarded channels of communication, hence why Braun hadn't heard of it up until whispers of its construction had finally began to leak out into the airwaves. Furthermore, this monstrous aircraft wasn't just meant as the capstone to the twenty-year-old Elder's successful conquest of the Capital Wasteland, but as a means of extending his reign to the rest of America; as soon as it was airborne, Maxson was taking it on tour in a glorious display of the sheer force that the once-faltering Brotherhood could now exert in its quest to cleanse the Wastelands.
Quite a feat for someone who isn't old enough to legally drink in this state, Braun mused.
A few months later, the ship was finally launched with much pomp and circumstances, and even given a name befitting the pretentiousness of its creators: the Prydwen, so named for King Arthur's ship. Before long, everyone in the Capital was talking about it, radio broadcasters springing up by the hundreds just to talk about the monstrosity now dominating the skies… and though he knew it wasn't safe to allow his robobrains aboveground yet, Braun couldn't help but wish that he could see the giant ship passing overhead as it thundered off to parts unknown.
As bad luck would have it, the Prydwen didn't take every single member of the local chapter with them – Maxson wasn't that stupid. By then, his latest recruitment drive had provided a very generous stockpile of raw manpower, and those of them who hadn't had enough time to prove their worth in the field were left behind to be trained at the Citadel… and to continue the efforts to rebuild, as the long-neglected Pentagon was still recovering from the events that had led to the death of Sarah Lyons.
For the next few months, Braun had precious little to listen to other than the gossip of the newest initiates, most of whom were either revering the Lone Warrior as a martyred saint or shamelessly hero-worshipping Arthur Maxson. As nauseating as the whole thing was, it did manage to proffer up a few welcome slivers of real information: the Prydwen was headed for Boston, intent on cleansing the Commonwealth of scientific abominations and winning more glories for their cause. And according to the best-informed of the recruits, they'd already met with some success, even obtaining help from one of the locals – a strange and exceptional recruit that Maxson himself had earmarked for greatness.
Despite the advantage of their mighty airship, however, the Brotherhood still had a lot of work ahead of it: Boston was not only infested with ghouls and super mutants, but a whole host of synthetic humans dwelling in secret, supposedly with the backing of a tyrannical secret society known only as the Institute. For good measure, they also had to contend with two other factions vying for control of the Commonwealth: the Minutemen, another group of wannabe peacekeepers marked by their perverse obsession with heroes of the past, and the Railroad, an underground anti-slavery movement dedicated to freeing the synthetics from human bondage – the former regarding the Brotherhood with distrust and non-compliance, the latter resisting them wherever possible.
Though Maxson had insisted that the new recruits were to be put to use in maintaining law and order throughout the Capital Wastelands as soon as their training was complete, it didn't take long before he decided that the only way to break the impasse between him and the Institute was through numbers.
The call for reinforcements began resounding across the airwaves within a week: despite being warned by their instructors that they were not prepared for the dangers of the Commonwealth the Washington recruits began pouring out of the Citadel in their dozens, eager to win glory in battle. Before long, dispatches from Boston began requesting the instructors as well – and then the scribes, supposedly for yet another gloriously impractical engineering project… until at last, only a skeleton crew of initiates and veterans remained.
And then one day, the news from the Commonwealth abruptly ground to a halt. None of the initiates had any idea why this had happened, but the radio operators at the Citadel were all reporting silence from the Prydwen, kicking off an immediate stir of concern among the remaining populace. The more optimistic of them hoped that this was simply due to technical failure in the airship's radio.
"After all," they murmured to each other over their radios, "It's not as if anything could actually bring down the Prydwen, is it?"
And in the safety of his Tranquillity Lounger, Braun couldn't help but snicker, waiting patiently for the day when the awful news finally arrived.
When a badly-damaged vertibird finally crash-landed outside the Citadel with a dying messenger from the Commonwealth aboard, the worst fears of the skeleton crew were finally realized – and Braun's most gleeful suspicions confirmed.
The Prydwen had been destroyed, reduced to blazing wreckage in the ruins of Boston Airport.
Brotherhood forces across the Commonwealth had been devastated, reduced to a paltry handful of broken survivors fleeing in all directions with whatever they could carry.
On the upside, the engineering project they'd been working on – the reactivation of Liberty Prime – had been successful, after a fashion: it had been used to blast the Prydwen out of the sky, and the destruction of the airship had taken Liberty Prime with it.
Last but not least, Elder Arthur Maxson had been killed; days after the carnage of the final battle had subsided, his horribly mangled corpse was found dangling from a streetlight, though none of the survivors had been able to tell if he'd died in battle and been strung up post-mortem, or if someone had captured him alive and slowly tortured him to death.
And most galling of all to the Brotherhood was the fact that all this damage had been done over the course of a single battle… and with the Minutemen surrendered, the Railroad exterminated to the last man, and the population effectively cowed, the Institute now claimed victory in the war for control of the Commonwealth.
The news proved a fatal blow to Brotherhood morale in the Capital Wasteland. By now, it was apparent that the late Elder Maxson had bitten off more than he could chew, for not only had he committed too much of the Brotherhood's forces to the failed campaign, but the construction and fielding of the Prydwen had beggared their technological resources, and the attempted reactivation of Liberty Prime had only made things a thousand times worse. Those who survived simply didn't have the personnel or the weaponry to keep the Capital Wasteland under control, and most of them no longer had the faith in themselves to try.
"We had every advantage," Brotherhood radio operators whispered to each other. "We had the greatest ship in all the Wastelands. We had Arthur Maxson. If we couldn't win a victory with such blessings, how can we hope to succeed now?"
Worse still, Brotherhood chapters in other cities were now grappling with the loss of the Prydwen as well and couldn't afford to send reinforcements to Washington: the destruction of the organization's greatest asset had taken their reputations with them, and many factions that might have thought twice before tangling with the Brotherhood of Steel were now smelling blood in the water, resulting in a wave of violence throughout Brotherhood territory. And alas, the Capital Wasteland chapter was no exception: the execution of Three Dog and the mass-pillaging of resources for the Prydwen's constructions had won them a lot of enemies, and now those enemies were rioting against anyone stupid enough to try to police their settlements. And though Maxson had been successful in cleansing Washington of ghouls, super mutants, and even the occasional vampire tribe, the raiders had merely been driven into the shadows: for nearly ten years, they'd rebuilding their numbers from the rejects and misfits that the Capital settlements inevitably spawned in preparation for the day they could finally have their revenge – and now that day had arrived.
Less than a week after the news had reached them, the surviving members of the Washington chapter finally broke under the strain. Though the Citadel would have been able to shelter them, morale had dropped too low for any of them to even try to maintain the defences, and they fled on masse in the desperate hope of reaching safety before the raiders caught up with them. Most of them were captured alive and brought back to the newly-occupied Citadel, where their grisly deaths were broadcast live to the horror-stricken airwaves amidst a nightmarish orgy of torture and cannibalism. Before long, the Pentagon had become a banqueting hall for the raiders, the site of a month-long festival as they celebrated the destruction of their hated enemy and – though none of them knew this – the beginning of a new dark age for the Capital Wasteland.
Of course, raider supremacy didn't last.
Without a common enemy to unite them, the raider tribes disbanded and reverted to their usual infighting; in the months that followed, the settlements that had prospered under Brotherhood control fell into disarray as the new wave of barbarism swept across Washington – until only the heavily-fortified Megaton and Vault 101 remained at their usual standard of living. The rest were either conquered or became so fixated on individual defence that they simply couldn't maintain cohesion: "every man for himself" became the abiding tenet of the Capital Wasteland, and entire communities began to fracture as individual settlers jealously horded resources that would have normally been shared among an entire settlement.
Eventually, most towns were simply abandoned altogether, often disassembled down to the last section of wall. In their place, fortified homesteads began springing up all over DC, protected by automated defence turrets and offering everything from clean water to crops; often, these scrap metal fortresses were populated by lone Wastelanders, but as they grew more established, it became common for them to collect spouses and produce squalling broods of children who would know no life outside the corrugated walls. Of course, families required more resources and protection than a hermit, so it wasn't much of a surprise when frenzied homesteaders began laying claim to any tech that could be found in a single patch of ruin.
Eventually, a new technological gold rush began. Regardless of whether they were raiders or settlers, everyone wanted the best toys in the nursery, either so they could pillage more than their fellows or keep themselves a little more secure than their neighbours. A few raiders had been able to collect power armour and energy weapons from the bodies of the slain chapter, but most of the Brotherhood's greatest technological resources remained hidden deep beneath the Citadel, sealed within impregnable concrete storerooms with locks too complicated for most post-war hackers to even dream of cracking.
With the Brotherhood having picked the Capital Wastelands clean over the last few years, there were precious few other sources of pre-war tech to be found anywhere in Washington, and so most of the treasure-hunters resorted to stealing from each other just to maintain an edge. However, the Citadel was the Holy Grail of this new generation of Wastelanders, and sooner or later, radio conversations invariably crept right back to how to get into the Pentagon armoury; indeed, many of them began jealously hoarding books on chemistry in the dim hope that they might be able to improvise a bomb powerful enough to hammer their way to the grand prize.
Unknown to them all, Braun got there first.
As soon as he'd been certain that the Brotherhood wasn't likely to see reinforcements, he'd reinitialized the Vault's usual processes, continued his work on the simulation permitted his robobrains to finish unblocking the exits. Then once the path to the outside world was clear, he'd outfitted three of the robobrains with a remote link camera and radio link back to the Vault, before sending them trundling off to the Citadel under cover of darkness. With most of the Wasteland's population preoccupied with war or lesser hunts, nobody noticed the trio creeping through the darkness towards the Pentagon ruins – and if they did, well, it wasn't as if rogue robots were an unusual sight in the Capital Wasteland. Certainly, no observers would ever suspect that these three robobrains were being commanded by the only man in Washington with the knowledge and experience to open the doors to the Pentagon armoury.
Hours later, the three robobrains returned with a newly-activated army of robots at their back, most of them also carrying a wide selection of the armoury's contents in their metallic arms. While the trio were prepared for another night-time visit to the Citadel, the first wave of salvaged robots were surveyed for usefulness and applied accordingly: those who were in poor repair or had too many faults in their programming were recycled into spare parts and mods for the robobrains, while those of them who were still in good working order were stationed around the Vault and the garage as defenders.
Braun was under no illusions: even with the Brotherhood gone, the outside world was still overflowing with potential threats to him, and with the hunger for pre-war machines stronger than ever, he doubted that his future playthings would be as cooperative as James. So, just in case the newest toys were to arrive in force, he would ensure that his person and his Vault received the best possible protection. Thus, over the course of eight consecutive trips, he gained a substantial private army.
By the end of the month, Vault 112 had no less than fifty-five defenders, not counting the horde of robobrains that were already on duty: twenty-two automated turrets, fifteen protectrons, ten Mr Gutsys, five assaultrons, and three sentry bots. Also, one eyebot.
For good measure, he also had the brawnier members of his army rearrange the aging car wrecks around the garage so that the guard posts could remain hidden from a distance, hauling in a few more from across the area for good measure. Inside each rusting carcass, the bulk of the turrets sat just out of sight, their gun barrels pointing squarely out the windows. Behind them, a small force of protectrons and Mr Gutsys squatted in low-power mode, looking for all the world like piles of scrap metal unless you were close enough to recognize those shapes on the other side of the barrier; just in case of emergencies, two assaultrons also hid among them. For good measured, he'd also clustered the exterior of the building with surveillance cameras, just so he could handle the situation directly as possible.
Inside the garage, the sentry bots waited for Braun's command: in the event of an emergency, two would be ordered to stand guard by the trapdoor, while the other would head out through the roller doors to confront any attackers. If all else failed, the remaining forces had been arranged underground at various points on the approach to the Vault; as much as Braun would have liked to have had a sentry bot on duty right outside the gate, it wouldn't have been able to fit down the staircase without first being dismantled, and Braun didn't know if any of his current workforce were dextrous enough to rebuild such a complex beast. As such, it fell to the remaining assaultrons to serve as his trump cards inside the Vault itself; for good measure, he'd also modified the ventilation ducts with a few ready-to-use cannisters of sedative gas – just to make capturing potential guests a little easier.
Not that any of them would ever get that far, of course. With such an army defending him aboveground, how could anyone hope to prevail?
So, with his forces concealed and prepared, Braun synthesized an audio recording of a human voice and prepared the radio for its first broadcast in two hundred years: a short-wave message from a treasure hunter calling to his partner, telling him all about an incredible stockpile of tech located under Smith Casey's garage. With the garage on the outskirts of homesteader territory and far, far away from the raider fortresses, the only people who'd be hearing this little whisper would be the most isolated Wastelanders: travellers, outsiders, and misfits. It didn't matter – everyone was greedy for tech these days, and the opportunity to cash in one someone's claim would be too much to resist.
He'd baited the hook: now it was time to see who would bite.
So, he settled in and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
After three weeks of patient waiting, Braun was forced to admit that nobody in the immediate area was alive or interested enough to take the bait. Annoyed, he amplified the signal strength and tried again, hoping that someone at a longer range might be listening.
Three months went by, during which Braun successfully managed to get his newest simulation environment to his satisfaction, created an exciting new avatar, planned out a number of potential games he could play with his new toys, and even drew up a rota of acceptable survival/death rates… but alas, not one Wastelander responded to the bait. As far as he could tell, nobody had even gotten within sight of the building: no passers-by, no thrillseekers, no rubberneckers, no hunters, no foragers, nobody at all.
He reviewed the airwaves, and to his utter disbelief, people had heard the message – a few of them were talking about it in discreet exchanges between friendly homesteads – but none of them had thought it was worthwhile.
"It's just a garage," they would say. "There's nothing there but rusting Covegas and a ton of ghost stories."
"Besides, there's more interesting things going on a few miles to the west of here: someone's building a great big transmission tower, they say."
"And I hear there's one-wheeled robots with screens out there, too. Never seen nor heard of anything like 'em before."
"What about those silver skeletons from the north?"
"That's exactly what I'm talkin' about: who cares about this garage? It's old news, been old news ever since the first scavenger got near the place. If anyone has time for treasure-hunting, we should be heading for the Citadel or the tower, not some greasy old shitstain in the middle of nowhere."
There was no word in any dialect of German or English that could properly convey his frustration at this newest annoyance: all those years ago, he'd intended the garage to be the ideal camouflage to prevent uninvited guests from spoiling his fun… but now it was spoiling his fun anyway, simply because the disguise worked too well! In the end, Braun was so infuriated that not even butchering synthetic personalities in the simulator could smother his rage, so he resorted to inventing new swearwords just so he could fully enunciate the depths of anger he felt.
"Fuggeruntitwatitch" seemed to be the most therapeutic word he could think of under the circumstances.
His eventual solution to the matter of finding new playthings was radical, but by then, Braun was willing to try anything if it meant finally being able to relieve the growing sense of boredom welling up in the back of his mind. He needed entertainment; he needed victims; he needed play. And more importantly, he needed a sales pitch that could entice Wastelanders into taking the journey to the garage.
It took a month to work out the necessary script and audio, but eventually, a new broadcast was sent out across the Capital Wasteland. By now, he didn't care who heard his call: he wanted everyone in Washington to get wind of this, even if it meant having to subdue and capture an army, as long as it meant having someone to play with. As such, he'd made his pitch as inviting as possible, presenting in the style of a good old-fashioned advertisement, delivered in the most blandly enticing female voice he could synthesize.
"Is reality a disappointment to you? Do you toil endlessly in the dim hope of a reward that never arrives? Do you suffer from radiation sickness, venereal disease, scurvy, or old age? Have you lost all hope of a better life, even in heaven? Do you long for the kinds of things you can only achieve in your dreams? Well, ladies and gentlemen, salvation is at hand: Vault 112 is now opening its doors to you! Our trained specialists are trained and ready to ease your sorrows, whatever they may be: our state-of-the-art virtual reality simulators can provide you with anything you can possibly desire, and our executive class life-support facilities can heal and sustain you in perfect comfort until you are well enough to face reality. Don't delay, don't doubt, and don't think you don't deserve the wonders we can provide: the world of your dreams is waiting! You can find us beneath Smith Casey's Garage at [coordinates enclosed]. Come to Vault 112 and experience true bliss!"
Admittedly, Braun was cribbing notes from the radio invites to the Sierra Madre, but by then, he was desperate: he needed to have someone real to play with or he was going to lose his mind. So, as soon as he was certain that the message sounded suitably beguiling, he sent it out as a long-range communication across the entire Capital Wasteland. He didn't care who heard anymore; he needed someone to listen, to take the bait, or he'd be forced to start battering down doors and snatching people out of their beds.
For days on end, he waited as the called rippled out across Washington, almost ready to contact someone directly and scream for their attention. But just as he was beginning to give up hope, one of his external cameras caught a brief glimpse of a rag-shrouded scavenger making his way across the horizon: the man, whoever he was, paused just long enough to study the garage through his binoculars, muttered a few words into an old radio handset, and scurried off.
A fortnight later, five people were hunched on the very edge of the perimeter, casing the property for any signs of traps or past visitors. Braun had his defenders running on their lowest possible mode, making them appear like miscellaneous heaps of scrap metal to all but the most sophisticated of sensors; as long as they didn't try anything aggressive, the visitors wouldn't be fired upon. However, they didn't move within twenty yards of the building; instead, they remained crouched behind the ruins of old fences and barriers, presumably trying to work out if the place was worth their time.
The next day, they crept closer, getting within spitting distance of the front door before losing their nerve and retreating to their encampment on the edge of the perimeter. As far as Braun could tell, there was nothing special about them: just another gang of lice-infested losers in ragged coats and scrap-metal armour, probably close siblings if the cloistered nature of local Wastelanders held true. They'd be good enough for his purposes, though… if they would just work up the nerve to step inside the garage, to get at least as far as the Vault atrium. Then Braun could switch on the gas, and for anyone who could hold their breath, a horde of robobrains armed with stun guns and mesmetrons were lying in wait to make sure that every last fatherless whoreson reeled in by the message ended up in the Loungers.
A day later, a raider gang arrived and fought the scavengers tooth and nail for the chance to get at the garage, but the scavengers were too well-equipped and too dug-in to be dislodged, and given that the common strategy of raiders was to attack head-on with no regard for tactics, it didn't take much effort for the team's sniper to pick off the new arrivals one by one.
But still, the scavengers took their time: they had one of their number skirt the property on hands and knees, just to make sure that no other competitors had arrived on the scene. While this was going on, they had the youngest of them take the first tentative steps inside the garage, promising him all manner of rare treats in exchange for scouting out the threshold. The runt obliged and, after bracing himself for what he no doubt felt was a horrible death, swung open the front door and tiptoed into the building.
It took him a grand total of thirty seconds to notice the open trapdoor, and below it, the long flight of stairs heading straight down into the tech-rich bowels of the Capital Wasteland. In a flurry of excitement, he hurried outside to give everyone the good news.
But still they waited. Already, their other scout had returned with whispers of other raider gangs creeping in, and they didn't know if there was enough loot beneath the garage to justify the risk of doing battle with two or even three warbands at once. Eventually, their leader – either the mother or eldest sister – decided that they'd head in tomorrow morning, just as soon as they were sure that the defenders back at their own fort were secure.
Braun spent the entire evening pacing back and forth across the simulation, unable to focus, unable to force himself into simulated sleep, unable to think of anything else but how close he was to finally being relieved of his burden.
He'd waited ten long torturous years for this – or was it eleven, going on twelve? He couldn't tell, anymore: the internal chronometer no longer made sense to him and trying to remeasure the time only made him want to rip someone's throat out. One way or the other, he'd waited for more than a decade for the chance to feel true satisfaction, and he would not be denied the reward for his patience now: if these weak-chinned, cross-eyed streaks of inbred piss hesitated one more time, he would send an army after them, drag them kicking and screaming into the dream. One way or the other, they would be his.
And then, at 4:00 AM the next day, the scavengers heard an incoming message over their portable radios… and then ran for their lives. For a moment, Braun contented himself with the knowledge that whatever raider army had driven them off would probably take their place within the hour.
But as his cameras swept the landscape, he realized that the surrounding Wastelands appeared to be conspicuously empty. Braun sent out his eyebot to investigate… and to his confusion, he found numerous tracks where there'd supposedly been raider warbands, but no actual raiders; perhaps a mile from the garage, the eyebot reported an abandoned campsite replete with all the usual signs of raider habitation that Braun had learned over the radiowaves in the past few years: chems, badly-maintained weapons, the corpses of previous victims, and roasted haunches of human meat… all abandoned, as if their owners had been forced to leave in a hurry.
Among the things they'd abandoned was a portable radio, still whispering garbled alerts from a new and anonymous broadcaster. A quick check of Braun's own radio revealed that, after nearly a year of disuse, someone was operating the Galaxy News Radio transmitter again – but not to declare the dawn of some new government or assure the people that all would be well, or even to play some suitably retro music. Instead, this nameless broadcaster was only there to issue a warning:
"To anyone in the area near Evergreen Mills: get out of there, now! There's an army coming from the northwest, and they're not letting anyone get in their way; I don't know who they are or what they want, but they're not taking prisoners! I don't care what fairy stories about Vault 112 you heard – it won't mean a damn thing to you if they get between you and escape. To anyone near Evergreen Mills or Smith Casey's Garage: if you can get out, GET OUT NOW!"
After a few seconds of dead air, the message repeated – presumably having been left on a loop.
Suddenly nervous, Braun checked his long-range sensors, and realized with horror that there was something glittering on the horizon: dozens upon dozens of armoured bodies marching in lockstep across the Wastelands, their metallic shells glistening in the early morning light, their weapons registering the energy signatures of laser weapons…
…and all of them were moving slowly but surely towards Vault 112.
A/N: Who commands the army? What does it represent? What does it want from Vault 112?
Tune in next chapter - and feel free to supply me with your theories in the meantime!