The Law of the Wasteland

by fuzzyBEANZ117

The Courier is a good man, but doesn't see himself as such. He's just a washed up soldier. But after two life threatening injuries occur within two months, he starts rethinking his attitude. Now following the last words of his father, and his own moral guidelines, the Courier sets off to find the man who shot him. Instead he changes the future of the Mojave.

1. Prologue

Prologue

The Greeks called her Gaia, the Romans; Terra. Three hundred years ago, we left her for the first time, looking down on her from the Moon. We call her Earth, or the Big Irradiated Dirt Ball. For four and half billion years, she's been going around the sun. Four and a half billion years, and look at what we did to her in two hours.

Long before the war, scientists had estimated that life on Earth had begun about 4 billion years ago, give or take a few hundred million. 250,000 years ago, modern humans evolved, eventually leading to the development of agriculture, language, and civilization. And war. The Earth had seen violence before, but not on the scale that we waged it. The first tools became the first weapons, and the first weapons lead to the first armies. For the entirety of our existence, we've waged war. It's part of what humans are, and it's vital to our evolution and development of technology. After every war, technology leapt forward. Agriculture, medicine, construction, transportation, power, industry; all of it was fueled by war. And with some of these technologies came great weapons as well. The weapons that we used to burn the world, to undo everything we had achieved.

Still, despite the nuclear hellfire we unleashed on ourselves, we were not destroyed. Why? The same reason we fought each other. It's because we're human. Throughout billions of years of biological evolution, no species has adapted and survived as thoroughly as humans. This ability to adapt so quickly and efficiently triggered our development of tools, leading us to where we are now, putting that ability to the test every moment.

Now we're on the brink of war again, and while the reasons and sides appear complicated, beneath it all it's simple, really. It's our nature to fight, to want better for our families, to want what isn't ours. Long before the world burned some one said, "War never changes". And they're right. It hasn't changes in 250,000 years, and it'll never change. Sure the apparent reasons will change, but the real reason will remain the same until the last human dies. Malice, brutality, and evil all sprout from war, but so do courage, mercy, and kindness. Everything a human can be, feel, or experience is present in war. That's the real reason.

War never changes because we're human.