Chapter 2: Detachment
It was 1900. A young lady was washing dishes in her kitchenette when a loud pounding was heard at her door. She whipped her strawberry blond hair around in surprise as she heard her name being called out from behind the door, "Ariel!" She knew the voice. She got excited, grabbed a dish towel, and dried her hands as she walked to the door. "I'm coming!" she called out, but the pounding continued. She tossed the towel on the footlocker on the end of her bed and opened her door to find Rep standing there. "Lee!" Being slightly shorter than him, she jumped up and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down to hug him, "God, Lee, I haven't seen you in months!"
"Ariel," Rep pulled himself free, "we have to talk about something inside," he looked to either end of the hall, "now!" She looked at him and saw he was very panicked. From as far back as she knew him, Rep was never the type to let machinery make him nervous. She stepped aside as he stepped in. The door slid up and closed with a clunk.
"'As the Overseer of your respective Vaults, you will perform experiments as part of the Societal Preservation Program,'" Ariel was reading the second document Rep had printed from the Overseer's files, "'As part of the program each Vault will consist of select individuals and their families from varying backgrounds - where applicable - to be subjected to various stimuli in hopes to eventually bring them to their breaking point; testing the limits of sheer human will amongst various types of personalities.' This can't be for real!"
Rep had been pacing the room as Ariel sat on her bed reading the paper. The young woman was almost feeling his tension when she asked, but Rep still heard a twinge of confusion and disbelief in her voice. On his return heel-turn, he instructed her to keep reading. When she tried to protest, he repeated himself effectively cutting her off and causing her to sigh a very stressed sigh.
She continued, "'As Overseer, it is your responsibility to perform these experiments to their conclusion where it will be deemed a success.'" She looked up at Rep shrugging only for him to point at the document and have her finish, "'Failure is not a valuable discourse to the program, so take charge and eliminate any variable that may harm the experiment…'" there was a pause as she took in the weight of what was next to be said, '"...that may harm the experiment BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY'? Lee?" the fear had finally sunk in, "What does it mean for one of these, 'experiments,' to succeed?"
It was a hard question; a hard question with an answer he himself couldn't bear to say aloud. He knew Ariel was a smart kid, so he put it as easy - but direct - as he could, "Well, what they deem a failure is where everyone... lives."
She jumped up, dropped the printout, and started backing herself into the wall with her hand over her mouth. She had looked away, tears of terror filling her eyes. Rep looked over as she jumped, realizing that was still too blunt of an answer, "Ari, I'm sorry…"
"You liar," she whispered.
"Never!" She looked at the engineer. She saw that calling him that hurt him, but she defended her statmentment, "Yes you are! You have to be! You're only saying this because I'm marrying Mitch!" Rep closed his eyes in pain as he lowered his head. She continued, "You make up this wild story that Vault-Tec is killing us? Why tell me this insane lie?"
Rep bellowed out, "I'm the variable!" Ariel snapped back from her denial from the man's words. He lifted his head up, a single tear streaking down his face, a tremble in his voice that made his voice break told her he was telling the truth as he spoke, "They're going to kill me, Ari," he picked up the papers from the floor and went to the list of Vaults. He forcefully handed her the papers; she read the list handed to her. Another look of shock grazed her face as he took another document out and handed it to her. Her eyes of terror softened to that of sadness.
She looked to him with tears still streaming down her cheeks. She shook her head in disbelief, "No! No!" She gently wrapped her arms around his midsection. Her red-blond hair being all he could see of her as she whimpered.
Ariel and Rep had grown up together along with the Overseer's son, Mitch, when Ariel was very young. She was found wandering around the hallways of the Vault by herself, always claiming to be playing hide and seek with her imaginary friend Buttons. One particular day she ended up somewhere in the engineering section - again by herself - when a steam pipe from the boiler system broke in a blind hallway trapping her in the corner. Rep - being 8 at the time - was with his father in the engineering section when the chaos erupted and Ariel was trapped.
The pipe was breaking loose and was inching closer to the frightened 6 year old faster than the Vault Engineers could get to her. Rep was the son of the Senior Vault Maintenance Engineer so he knew every section of the Vault from every bulkhead to every screw. Rep knew there was a set of vents from the fabrication room that led to the end of the hall. With his father's help, Rep crawled through the vent, grabbed the girl, and put her in the vent just as the rest of the pipe broke away. Although the steam was slightly radioactive which affected his eyesight permanently, he was deemed a hero.
Just before he was to take the G.O.A.T. at 16, Rep had learned Ariel lost her parents in a diner fire; 10 years to the day Rep lost his mother. Although the fire suppression system worked properly, the ventilation system cut out, and the fire door wouldn't unlock. Ariel watched through the glass of the diner as her father clawed at the window suffocating in the small smoke-filled room. It wasn't long before Rep and his father heard what was going on and rushed to the common area to try and unlock the doors, but it was too late.
Rep's father Robert made a bee-line to one of the doors and started tearing the panel off to get the door open. As he did Ariel's father took out a marker and started writing a message on the glass. As he did he kept bumping the bill of his pre-war baseball cap against the glass, a sign he was losing consciousness. The smoke was still filling the room as her father dropped the marker and put his hand on the glass as he looked to his daughter.
Ariel approached the window and placed her hand on top of his. A single tear streaked down his face as the smoke finally engulfed him and his hand streaked down the glass until it finally released at the bottom of the frame. When the smoke filled the room, her father's message became clear:
I'll always love you.
I'm sorry.
Ariel started backing away from the glass, the eyes of the crowd around her glared at her as she felt panic creep up. She backed into Rep and turned to look up at him before burying her head into his chest and crying uncontrollably. He cradled her in his arms doing the best to console her.
There was yelling at the diner door as two members of Vault Security had Robert by the arms, "You gotta let me open it, or they're gonna die!"
A much younger Overseer stood before the engineer and tried to calm him down, "You can't do that! You open that door, you let out a backdraft, and everyone on this level will be hurt!"
Robert tore himself loose and squared his shoulders, "I told you two weeks ago the ventilation system in the diner was stopped up with grease and needed maintenance," the man was growling at the Overseer, "I asked for clearance then and you denied it! What's your answer now? Does it look like a priority now?!" He lunged at the Overseer pinning him against the diner door, security again grabbing him and restraining him.
Rep sat in Ariel's terminal desk chair as she sat on her bed, cheeks flushed red from the heavy crying. She had calmed down quite a bit, but now had more worry to manage, "What are you gonna do? You can't just lay down and let them kill you."
"They'll have another accident just waiting for me like they did Pop." Rep sounded rather grim. For so long, what he thought was just another horrible accident was, in fact, an engineered failure; one especially designed for his father. He felt light-headed, "It just makes me so damn sick knowing now what I know," he shuddered at the thought, "I wonder if they did the same to my mom." A look of thought came across his face replacing the grimace he had not but a moment ago, "Mom?"
The inquisitive tone of his voice caused Ariel to look up at him again, "What's the matter?"
"I just remembered a conversation I had with Pop," his eyes darted back and forth as he recalled something, "It was right after your parents' funeral…"
"Poor kid," Robert came into the living quarters followed by Rep, the both of them wearing black bands on their left arms over the sleeves of their Vault Suits, "I wanted to punch the Overseer so bad; fucking puke." Rep's father had a temper on him. Very often when another person was hurt or killed due to a malfunction in the Vault he rightly became upset over it, but in this case he was actively upset at the Overseer for stopping him from preventing not only the fire, but the people in the diner from dying of suffocation.
Robert walked to the workbench on the one side of the room, placed his hands upon it palms down, and leaned on the table top letting out a sigh as he did. It was none too easy for a young Rep who's friend had just had a loss and he knew her parents better than Robert did, but there was something else bothering him, "Hey, Pop? Can I ask you something?"
Backing off the bench a moment, he asked his 16 year old son back, "What's on your mind, kiddo?"
"Pop… At the wake, I finally noticed something I never noticed before; Why are you so much older than the other fathers of kids my age?" Rep heard a groan as his father's head tilted forward. "Son," he said, "sit down."
The 16 year old sat on the couch as his father sat in his chair across from him in the small space. Rep saw his father was distressed about what was to be said; it was all over the man's body language, "Leroy, what if I told you that there was a time when I couldn't get the time of day from a girl?" This confused the young Rep, the expression clear on his face. His father continued, "It was as though all the girls in my age group heard something nasty about me and kept away from me like the New Plague. They treated me like I was gross; diseased. I once even heard that I supposedly bathed in the sewage traps before the water recycling system for… sexual reasons."
Rep was appalled, "What? That's disgusting! Who the hell was spreading these rumors about you?" "I never found out. I found one of the rumors on printed terminal paper, it seemed like it was spread around using printouts so the handwriting could never be IDed. Anyway, years after I finished my Post-G.O.A.T., all the women my age ignored me and I spent damn near all of my 30's by myself. All my friends including Tommy - you know, the Overseer - got married and had kids. It wasn't until one of the Post-G.O.A.T.s came down when I met Stella; when I met your mother.
"She came from a family that was slightly younger than your grandparents, so the generational gap was large enough that she never learned or heard of those… vile rumors about me. It wasn't long, however, when she started getting strange anonymous emails with the same rumors on her terminal, but it didn't sway her. Six months later we were married; nine months after that, you came along."
"Why were people saying these things about you?" Rep asked.
"Not sure," Robert looked off to the side, his eyebrows inward showing both annoyance, and again trying to find an answer, "It was almost as though someone didn't want me to fall in love. Hell," he said with a chuckle, "they might have been trying to stop you."
"Me?"