Vacate 53
Dan Shannon
Chapter 1: Discovery
Some people in this life, they don't have it easy. On this day in January, a man known as Leroy Robert Teehan was about to learn something that would forever change his life.
Leroy - known to friends as Lee, but mostly known to the populus of Vault 53 as "Rep" - was the Senior Vault Maintenance Engineer. Rep was short for, "Repairman," a nickname fitting for a man of his talent. Rep liked to get his hands dirty and do his work. He was an upstanding citizen, and just about the kindest soul the Vault has known. That is, unless he or someone he loves is crossed. Otherwise, he had a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. profile that was oddly high for someone in this particular Vault.
Rep didn't exactly have the best life, but he was a happy man when he was tinkering with machines, or repairing things in ways no one could otherwise understand or conceive. He wished he had some of the other things in life others in some regards took for granted - even wishing his talents for repairing things worked for his circumstances in life.
Life has a strange way of making people stumble upon the reality of the situation. Whether you realize it when you actually see it depends on your will to fight, or just accept fate. Rep was about to learn of such a situation…
It was morning. You couldn't tell it from the never-changing steel walls and soft glow of the Simu-Sun lighting systems, but the clocks read, "0800" throughout the Vault. The main door that led to the General Atomics-built Reactor Control Room opened, everyone in the room jolted when the door clunked loudly. Rep - A tall husky man in a Vault Utility suit wearing thick-rimmed glasses - followed by a much older man in a normal Vault Citizen suit walked into the control room. The three operators before the control panels nervously looked behind them as the two men talked, "How are the new efficiency tests coming along?"
"I got the kids here taking care of the Xenon-135 problem" Rep responded, "The extruders had a hell of a time synthesizing the barium-graphite plates; come to find out the damn thing's molecular composition processor was burned out again."
The older man cocked an eyebrow, "I'm trusting you fixed it?"
"Yeah," Rep said, pulling up on his Vault suit's belt, "but this time it ain't ever gonna break again." The old man's eyes opened wide, "How did you manage that?"
"Found we had a bad run of the damn things in spare parts storage. The processor's main bus has a point in it where the gauge drops in size; a little too much power, the narrow point in the bus heats up and burns out. Bye-bye processor, hello sixteen hours work and over nine-hundred ticked off Vault Citizens. So, I just ran a bus bypass on the main socket, and voila!" The old man had a concerned look on his face as though Rep's news was dangerous or bad in some way, "Uh... Is there something wrong, sir?"
"Huh? Oh! No, son!" the man placed a hand on Rep's shoulder, "No, that's fine work you did there, son." For some reason Rep still had the feeling he did something he wasn't supposed to do. For the longest time, almost seven generations going on eight, all the machines in the Vault broke. Constantly. Rep would have figured finding the flaw with at least one machine would excite someone, especially the Vault's Overseer.
He had seen this face on the Overseer before; when he repaired the malfunctioning Auto-Doc in the medlab that killed little Denny Foster; all the doors throughout the Vault that severed several feet and legs; when he announced the solution to the Reactor's power fall off; before his father's...
"Well," the old man broke Rep's concentration, "I have a birthday to attend."
"Of course, sir." Rep said before he turned to look over the shoulder of one of the operators. The Overseer was about to walk out of the room when he stopped and turned back, "Oh, before I forget," the old man said, "Ariel talked to Mitch and told me to tell you that you're back on the guest list."
"Did you convince your son not to stomp on my intestines when he sees me at the reception?" Rep asked with snark.
"Oh, of course I did," Rep looked back, "I'm the Overseer, after all."
"And not because you and my dad raised hell as kids," a small smile crept from the corner of the engineer's mouth.
The Overseer walked back to him, a somewhat saddened smile appearing on his face in turn, "You are one hell of an engineer, just like your dad. I consider you my son no different than Mitch."
"Yeah, two sons who hate each other," Rep reverted his eyes, "I guess that's what happens when brothers disagree."
"There's someone for everyone, son."
Rep shook his head, "Naw. There's only so many people in this Vault. I feel like this is the end of my line, man."
"Listen to yourself," Rep looked up at the man before him, "You're young yet, you'll find someone here, you just need to talk. You know, communicate with confidence like you have confidence with machines," The man patted him on the arm, "Okay?" With a chuckle, the Overseer walked out of the Reactor Control Room door, sliding shut behind him.
Looking after where the old man had gone for a moment, Rep put his hands on his hips and scoffed at the idea. "You know, sir," one of the operators spoke up, "he has a point."
"Hey, you wanna do garbage detail for the next month?" Rep's words made the young operator's eyes go wide then made him quickly turn back to his control panel.
The rest of the day was rather routine; a stop at the Armory to repair some plasma rifles; showing up to the common room to repair the lounge's Nuka Cola machine; repairing several lights in the main entrance corridor. It had been a full day. Looking over his clipboard, he found there was one repair left on the task list for the day; the Overseer's terminal. "That's strange," he commented to no one, "Why didn't he mention this earlier?" With a shrug of his shoulders, he proceeded to Administration on level two.
Toolbox in hand he walked to the Overseer's office and pressed the intercom button. "Yes?" a static-filled voice called from the device. "It's me, sir." The door made a metallic clunk as it unlocked and opened, the sound of pneumatic pistons hissing as they assessed the heavy door's movement. Rep stepped inside to find the Overseer at his terminal, his face beet red with anger. Approaching the man from behind, Rep saw that the whole monochrome screen was filled with lines of gibberish; the whole screen littered with nonsense characters and letters.
"What seems to be the issue?" Rep placed his toolbox on the desk as he watched the older man keep typing commands on his keyboard only to finally ball up his hands into fists and slam them down in fury on his desk, "I don't know!"
The man stood from his chair and started pacing in the room, "I came back from little Judy McIntyre's party, and found this... chunk of shit acting like... like... this!" The Overseer kicked the side of the desk as though he was kicking the side of the terminal. He quickly found that to be a mistake as he started hobbling around on his kicking foot in pain.
"How long ago did you put in the repair ticket?"
"An hour ago!" some of the pain subsided as he went back to pacing, "I was working on the Vital Vault Operation Statistics before I left to talk to you this morning; I thought I could salvage it myself. Two weeks of work – shot to shit!" The older man grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter on his desk and stormed out of the room, shouting as he walked out, "Fix that fucking thing!" The door shut behind him.
Rep was in awe. He had never seen that man so upset before, and over a device that has an issue at least two times a week almost everywhere in the Vault. Then again, this was the first time that he knew of where the Overseer's terminal actually malfunctioned. Nonetheless, he went to work. For him, it wasn't hard to figure out what had gone wrong. After gaining root command of the operating kernel, he found that, somehow, the master language file had been replaced with a file that changed the alphabet to absolute insanity. It looked as though the alphabet was inverted. He deleted the file and restored defaults the best he could, but he needed the Overseer's master access password.
Just as he was about to stand up from the Overseer's desk, he remembered how utterly ticked off the man was when he left. It did bother him; quite a bit. Even in the past when the man was mad, it meant great wrath. At his current level of anger, asking the man of anything would mean a great tongue lashing and maybe mucking the sewage system for the rest of his life.
Nestling himself back into the Overseer's chair, Rep looked at the screen, biting his lip as he looked at the RobCo UOS start screen. He reached for his toolbox and opened it up. He took a deep breath and lifted the top tool tray out to reveal a very old notebook underneath.
He opened the book and started flipping pages of handwritten notes until he found what he was looking for. After a few keyed commands, a screen with multiple words spread among random characters scrolled across the screen. After a few minutes he found the correct password lifted in the temporary memory.
He checked all the files to see if everything worked as it should. The most recent file – the Vault Statistics file the Overseer was so concerned about – opened with no problem. He was about to close the file when his name popped up in his visual scan.
"'It is with a heavy heart that – for the sake of the experiment – that the Senior Vault Maintenance Engineer not only be terminated from his position...'" Rep's eyes went wide as he read the next phrase, "'...but also of his life, just like his father, Robert.'"
He couldn't believe what he had just read. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. He couldn't believe such a thing was possible given the language that was spoken to him that very morning by the man who owned the terminal he sat before. Yet, there it was; black and green; clear as glass; a clearly written sentence that not only explained what happened to his father, but further explained what was to befall him.
"Jesus Fucking Christ!" Rep's mouth hung open in horror. Thoughts of all kinds ran through his mind as memories of his father's death and all that led up to passing before his mind's eye. At first Rep was terrified; then he got angry. His heart was starting to race as he felt his hands ball into fists.
"Why?" the engineer asked himself, "fucking, why did Pop die? And why did he…" That was when he spotted the word "Experiment," in the report. It stuck out, "for the sake of the experiment." He already had access - already in deep - he grabbed the dusty old notebook and flipped through the information he needed and started furiously typing into the terminal. After breaking another password he gained access to the Vault Overseer's protected files.
Inputting a word search for, "Experiment" garnered an exorbitant amount of results causing Rep to drop his jaw again in absolute terror. This experiment had been going on for several years; decades; centuries, even. He called up the earliest file he could find on the system to find a welcome file that was labeled, "TOP SECRET - For Vault-Tec Overseer Eyes Only!" He opened the file and started reading aloud.
"'Welcome to Vault-Tec Overseership! Your Vault-Tec facility - much like a great ship in our Country's great Navy - needs a dedicated and worthy Captain, even if it calls for tough decisions and unpopular ideas. You are that Captain - Steering your ship and it's crew toward the future!'" Rep knew there was something big. He paged down and was greeted with a list of numbers and descriptors for each number, "The fuck is this?" He looked at the list:
"Vault 12: Door Malfunction - Radiation Contamination"
"Vault 95: Populated By Chem Addicts - Cure Addiction and Re-Introduce Chems on Populous After 3 Year Period"
"Vault 29: No One Over Age 15 To Enter Vault"
That was when Rep noticed a familiar number:
"Vault 53: Consistent Mechanical Failure"
Right there was when Rep realized what Vault-Tec meant by experiment. He couldn't keep this to himself, knowing he was going to be killed, and that the Overseer - the man that was his father's best friend - who was like a second father to him - had not only killed his father, but was going to do the same to him.
Rep looked at the clock and realized the Overseer was due to come back any minute. He activated the printer and sent a copy of the report and this… bizzare master list of Vaults to the device. Seconds felt like minutes as the device wrote out the documents line by line, loud rapid clacking emanating from the device's cradle. He ran his hands across his short hair as the device finished the first document. As he tore the paper at the perforated line in the printer's cradle the engineer took a look outside of the office window which overlooked the Common Area of the Vault. The Overseer was still downstairs with others smoking, but his cigarette was short. Knowing the layout of the Vault as well as the Overseer's tendency to take the elevator, he had three and a half minutes from the butt-drop to office.
The printer started the new document. Tension filled the man as he rested his elbows atop his knees watching the device scroll data across the paper with near-constant clacking, hands folded before his lips as a silent prayer was told for the device's speed to increase. He was clearly starting to sweat as the printer continued at it's pace. He once again looked out the window and saw the older man missing. The clock was running. In his mind he had approximately three minutes accounting for error and lag time between when the Overseer was done with his smoke and the next time Rep looked out the window, which wasn't long.
The list was long. Too damn long. At least there aren't 500 Vaults, he thought to himself. It looked as though the second document was halfway done when he looked at the clock again. That was when the printer stopped, distracting Rep from his time calculation. His heart skipped a beat or two as he looked to the terminal and found that the rest of the document was being loaded into the printer's memory, "Oh, fuck," he said under his breath.
Then out the window, he saw the Overseer, and he was taking the stairs!
"Oh, fuck!" the engineer said louder, a look of panic washing over his face.
He had to think fast. Now that he knew what was going on inside the Vault, he had to use it to his advantage. After the document loaded into the printer, Rep cleared out of that program and navigated his way into the Vault's safety and security control systems via the Overseer's terminal. Knowing the Overseer has to personally respond to safety emergencies the heavy-set man sent a signal to the Vault's Reactor core.
The lights in the Vault dimmed as the ground shook. An alarm sounded throughout the underground shelter as a voice rang over the P.A., "Reactor SCRAM has been activated. All Citizens - Report to the Common Area. All Engineers and Technicians - Report to Reactor Level." The message repeated as Rep looked out the window to find the Overseer turning around and heading back down the stairs to the Common Area of the Vault.
Sitting back down Rep turned back to the notebook and looked for another entry to copy. After locating and inputting the info he had gained access to the monitor logs of the reactor's Mainframe. He frantically started changing the logs to reflect it was a malfunction that SCRAM'd the reactor and not a voluntary command from the Overseer's terminal, covering his tracks the best he could.
Finished! He closed out of everything as he noticed the Overseer scrambling back up the stairs. Eyes wide behind glasses Rep quickly shoved his notebook and the first document into his tool box and was about to close it when he almost forgot, "Shit, the other paper!" He reached for the printer and tore the document out just as the office door opened. Rep quickly rolled the paper into a wad and shoved it on top of the inner tray of the tool box.
The Overseer stepped in just as Rep tried to close the box. He froze thinking he was busted. "I need to print the updated Vault manifest," the older man stated as he pointed to the terminal, "Is it fixed?" "Uh… Uh…" It took Rep a moment to come back to reality, "Yeah, it's good." "Then move it!" The Overseer said with vigor in his voice, "I gotta take head count!" Rep realized the older man was far more distracted with his Vault duties to even think the engineer was doing something suspicious.
That was until the Overseer noticed, "Why are you sweating so much?" Rep looked up in surprise as he slowly closed the tool box lid, "I-I was trying to get this done fast so I can get to the Reactor Level. I didn't wanna leave a job unfinished."
"Fine, fine," the older man made his way around the desk, "Get down to the reactor." Rep stood from the chair, grabbed the tool box, and started walking with a heightened pace out of the office door. Once the door shut behind the man, he took a deep breath and looked down to the tool box, "Fuck! I gotta tell someone!" With that Rep ran down the hallway to the elevator.
The Overseer opened his terminal to find everything where he left it. As he loaded the Vault Manifest he reached to turn on the printer to find it was already on, "Wait, didn't I shut this thing off?" He looked out the window to find Rep running down the hall faster than he'd ever seen the man run before - even for a routine SCRAM.