Bones
The American Southwest is, was, and will forever be a land of bones. Whether it is the Morrison Formation, the titanic graveyard spanning much of North America, great Jurassic claw raking the belly of the Sonoran Desert and as old as stone itself; whether it is the bones of the Pueblo or Jornada Mogollon two-thousand years ago; whether it is the bones of the Apache at Camp Grant in Arizona, one-hundred and thirty-six women and children; whether or not it actually is bones; it is a land of bones. It is bones in the bleached-white dead trees, in the chalk and the sand. It is bones in Utah, where the lone and level salt flats stretch far away. It is bones in New Mexico, where calcium slowly oozes off underground ceilings.
White Sands, New Mexico, was bones. It was adjacent to White Sands Missile Range. White Sands Missile Range was an important target for the Chinese, as the base was a conspicuous laser research center. It was also a sort of fuck-you to the whole idea of atomic bombs, one final nuclear explosion on the Trinity test site, to perhaps put a pin on the whole idea for good. Among the leading scientists and scholars of 2077 it was seen as likely that any future civilization, were there to be any civilization at all after the Nuclear Apocalypse, would be incapable of doing something so horrible as to create more atomic bombs. There wouldn't be enough resources, the scholars and scientists conjectured. In private they prayed that where the resources were available, the know-how surely wouldn't be. So, it was not odd that the Trinity test site was bombed, as it made sense as a symbolic gesture. If nothing else, it got rid of the plaque commemorating man's biggest step towards his own obliteration. It was unclear, though, why White Sands National Monument was also targeted.
There was no strategic advantage to targeting the area. Technically, it was included in the area set aside for the Missile Range, but the only building for miles around was a ranger station and visitor center. The reason, simply, was a small error in the missile's trajectory. It was targeted at the nearby air-force base, but it fell short by a few hundred miles, instead blasting White Sands' white sand into towering, glittering gems that glowed in the dark. The superheated gypsum became radioactive selinite, beautiful crystals that, near the center of the explosion, reached as high as two-hundred feet. The crystals were highly prized for their light and their beauty, but there was only one tribe with the means to harvest them.
Before the war they were the employees of Big Buck's Friendly Drilling and Wells, a subsidiary of New Mexico Standard Oil, a subsidiary of Petró-Chico, a subsidiary of Poseidon Oil, a subsidiary of Poseidon Energy. They were drillers and welders and riggers who worked in the fields and lived nomadic lives, traveling with all their equipment to new pre-fab houses in different parts of the southwest and Mexico to set up automated oil well after automated oil well, anywhere there was even the slightest hint of petroleum. They were out in the field when the bombs fell, starting another twelve-hour shift. They didn't even know the world ended. They knew when the black rain fell. Thankfully, they had top-of-the-line safety gear, which they were no longer being billed by New Mexico Standard Oil for use of. After tromping through radioactive sludge they were running out of supplies and hope, but then luckily one of them found the entrance to Vault 35. The door was closed, but that didn't matter much to the employees of Big Buck's Friendly Drilling and Wells, most of whom were wielders. Their thermic lances cut through the vault door like butter, and for the final locking mechanism they blew it open with thermite.
Vault 35 was designed to test human behavior in an extremely isolated environment. To that end, as soon as the door slammed shut all five hundred residents were sealed into individual living quarters. By the time the Big Buck's field workers found them, the residents of Vault 35 had gone nearly six months without any human contact. Supposedly, the terminals in their rooms were to provide a way for limited inter-vault communication, but they never worked.
Some of the vaulters had already killed themselves. More were insane and inconsolable. They were from a broad base of different backgrounds, although nearly a quarter of the population were supposed to be of Scandinavian extraction, based on a racist and pseudo-scientific belief that Scandinavians had self-selected genetic traits that made them uniquely equipped to withstand extended periods of isolation over centuries of cold, lonely winters and long, lonely boat trips. Then Vault-Tec plunked the vault directly in New Mexico, America's 36th ranked state for Norwegian residents.
It wasn't an oversight, but a concerted effort by the vault's designer to limit the number of Latin-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans in what turned out to be the most gruesome and harmful torture performed in any of Vault-Tecs horrible vaults, therefore theoretically limiting the number of Latin-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans who would survive the Nuclear extinction that befell much of America in 2077, and thus inherit the future. After all, the Norwegian population in Albuquerque was just over 1,200, well more than the 125 required by the Vault's plan. And any one of those lucky 125 would be de-facto denying a spot to one of Albuquerque's 40,000 Native Americans. In a victory for bald-faced racism, the pseudo-science reason to trap these 'Norwegians' in Vault 35 never had a chance to be tested, as most of the self-reported Norwegians in Albuquerque might have Norwegian names, but in fact had diverse European heritages. Most of which were actually more Polish than Scandinavian. But that was still white as far as Vault-Tec was concerned, so the true intent was fulfilled. In the end, though, even with the deck stacked, the ratio of "whites" to "non-whites" in the vault still evened out to 1:1, especially once the roughnecks (who by the time they made it through the black rain were one-hundred percent "not white") arrived and killed off all the men.
Even though Vault 35 was the cruelest psychological nightmare ever inflicted on that large a group of human beings in history, an act so vile and horrifying that it would give history's greatest monsters pause, the roughnecks didn't have much sympathy for them. As far as the boys of Big Buck's knew, they'd had it way worse than these soft vaulters with their ready-made meals and soft beds. There was never a reason given for killing off all the men, but it was easy enough to infer.
With the vault door blasted off and more than half the doors in the vault unable to close, some of the survivors decided they might as well try and make it outside in the wasteland. The survivors of Big Buck's Friendly Drilling and Wells and Vault 35 divided. Those that left took their thermic lances with them, for protection and to perhaps plunder another vault should they happen to find one. Fortunately for the residents of the next two closest vaults, what they found instead was towering crystals of glowing selinite in what was once known as White Sands National Monument but which quickly came to be known as the Crystal Forest, the Crystal Field, the Forest of Light, and the Tower of Light, depending on which tribe you asked. Although the monument to man's great reckoning was visible for miles around (especially at night), the men and women that left Vault 35 were uniquely equipped to profit from it. Those men and women came to be known as the Big Bucks, and although they lived closest to the selinite, they did not have a poetic or grandiose name for it like the other tribes. The selenite was a part of them, as integral to their life and their living as any part of their body. They called it Bones.
The Big Bucks quickly became a powerful tribe. The selinite proved to be a reliable light source, highly prized across the wasteland. The arts and tools of metalworking and welding and drilling were passed down from generation to generation, all in service of harvesting the Bones. They made armor out of the crystals, and jewelry, and they pierced their skin with the stones, in elaborate and beautiful patterns that no other people could ever hope to replicate. Perhaps most importantly, though, was how successfully they translated their skills at drilling wells for oil derricks into drilling wells that pumped clean water.
Of course, that was the men of the Big Bucks. Women weren't allowed to drill or weld or cut stones. It had been that way before the war, and the men saw no reason to change that. Even though they outnumbered the men five-to-one, the women accepted it as the way of things, too. They wouldn't have accepted polygamy, though. Not if they had their own means of survival. The men controlled the drills and the lances and the saws (and most importantly, the knowledge), though, so they got to say who married who. Since none of the women were present when the roughnecks murdered all the men, some women were married to their husband's or brother's or father's or son's murderer, and never knew. Many of them left the vault because they assumed it was Vault-Tec's fault.
For the next hundred-plus years the descendants of those men and women lived comfortable lives, for the New Mexico wasteland, at least. Very rarely did they have to resort to cannibalism, and never did they cannibalize their own. The more they got to know other tribes through trade, the luckier they felt about that.
Like most tribes their health wasn't terrific, but any man that survived to their mid-twenties survived to their seventies or eighties. Women only very rarely survived past their forties, almost exclusively because they reached menopause. In the Big Bucks, if a woman could get pregnant, she would get pregnant, and the chances of surviving any given pregnancy started bad and only got worse with age. The same was true of the Twisted Hairs. The same was true of most tribes.
Butterfly's mother didn't survive her birth. Butterfly barely survived her birth. Even though he had four more wives, her father was still grief-stricken. He had loved Butterfly's mother dearly. She was a gentle woman, who had a lot of love to give. Even though she was only sixteen, she was matronly. She would've been a good mother to Butterfly. She would've been a good mother to anyone.
Butterfly's other mothers didn't care for her. They said she was ugly, and they refused to care for her, so her father beat them. Butterfly didn't know that, but she knew that even though they took care of her, her mothers did not like her.
Her father liked her, though. Even with six other wives he somehow never managed to produce a male heir, and so to bide his time he treated his eldest like she was his son. He taught her numbers and letters, how to track, how to identify plants, how to haggle. He didn't go so far as to teach her the skilled trades that had profited the Big Bucks for so long, but he taught her how to be self-reliant, and to think for herself, which was more than most girls or even boys were taught in the tribe.
He taught her unthinkingly, idly, as he waited patiently for a son. Whenever one of his wives entered her third trimester his attention shifted away from Butterfly to his prospective male heir, but with every miscarriage, complication, and baby girl he'd return to teach her something new, mostly to hide from his own grief. He gave Butterfly an education, and showered her with affection and attention, but it was never about her. It was always about him.
Naturally, when she became marrying age, he thought nothing of marrying her off to an older man in trade. That's what daughters were for among the Big Bucks. They were property, and all the time he'd spent with Butterfly did nothing to change that. The fact that Butterfly didn't want to be married did nothing to change that.
Fortunately for her, by the time she was of marrying age, the Big Bucks had been converted to Hecate worship. A harpy by the name of Avaela came to the tribe a few years prior. The Big Bucks by the Crystal Forest were a priority for Hecate. The trade network that traversed the southwest made their home a major hub, and Avaela was given near-unlimited resources to make sure that the Big Bucks fell under the goddess's sway. She arrived with a whole caravan's worth of resources, brahmins with heavy saddles and chests, each one carrying a rarer and more beautiful treasure than the last. Avaela was given the tribe's blessing to preach, and her caravans headed straight back to Ouroboros, now loaded with whatever could be plundered from what was left of White Sands Missile Range, treasures far rarer and more valuable than whatever garbage they'd brought to appease the Big Bucks.
Hecate worship spread quick, directly correlated to the precipitous decline in the infant mortality rate. The success of Dark Mother's cult was so quick that it scared the men. The old boys club of the Big Bucks was a hair's breath away from exiling Avaela and banning Hecate worship, when something unheard of happened. For the first time in the tribe's history, the women of the Big Bucks used their voice. Never before, even though for the entire history of the tribe women had outnumbered men by a more than three to one ratio, had they ever decided the future course of the Big Bucks. From the first time the tribe left the vault, to who they trusted in the wasteland, to who they ate or when they ate them, did the women of the Big Bucks ever decide. That changed after Hecate's messenger arrived. Avaela was a smart, charismatic woman, and although the women of the Big Bucks didn't know the kind of power they wielded, she did. She mobilized that power for Hecate. Worship of the goddess was not banned. In fact, the whole tribe converted.
Butterfly didn't know what, but she knew something momentous had happened, something that was unprecedented. A subtle shifting of the balance of power within the tribe, not too great, but which changed everything forever. She knew Avaela was at the center of it.
Even with her unconventional upbringing, Butterfly knew that there was a marked disparity between men and women, young and old. Traditions older than the tribe dictated her place within it, no matter how good she was at tracking and reading and whatever else. The Daughter of Hecate, though, was different. She was not beholden to tradition, to the rules and roles that had defined life in the Big Bucks, and New Mexico before them. Since the beginning the Big Bucks were ruled by old men. Suddenly there was Avaela, a young woman, who took over the tribe with a deft hand. She was wild, untamed, and free. Butterfly looked up to her, and when the time came for her to be married, she turned to the Daughter.
It never occurred to Butterfly's father as he taught her to be self-reliant, she might someday want to rise above her position in the tribe. He never considered the attention he lavished upon her to be special, merely a distraction to waste time. She was shocked and appalled to be married off, treated like property, like every other young woman of the tribe.
Avaela took pity on her, and smuggled her away to Ouroboros. At the sight of Hecate's Grand Temple, with robots and women bustling back and forth between the surrounding buildings, Butterfly fell to her knees in rapture. If she hadn't been a believer before, she certainly became one then. She began training as a Harpy, but early in her education a new program was established in Ouroboros, an elite corps of cybernetically modified women who would engage in clandestine and far-reaching operations on behalf of the goddess. Although in time the selection process would become narrower, at first all it took to be a Maenad was passing "the ritual," a test designed to ensure that only the goddess's best and brightest would join Ouroboros' elites. It was an exciting time in Hecate's city. Many young women tried to pass the ritual, but few succeeded. Butterfly was one of those few.
She was surprised she made it. It hadn't been her idea to make the attempt, a friend dared her to. At the time it was popular among the Daughters to challenge each other to the ritual. Many of the first Maenads only became so because of the fad. To Butterfly, it was a dream come true. Her success earned her the respect she'd always secretly longed for.
The cybernetic technology was new and exciting, with seemingly limitless opportunity for body modification. Every woman who passed the ritual was given a suite of standard upgrades, including the Y-3 implant, a Hypertrophy Accelerator, a reinforced spine, and a Logic Co-Processor. There was no limit to the number of optional implants a woman could have, so long as the Maenad's body could handle them. Butterfly could handle a lot of cybernetics.
One upgrade in particular caught her eye. Like all Big Bucks, her skin was implanted with selenite crystals all over her arms and legs. It made sub-dermal plating difficult to implant, and somewhat redundant, but among the options provided by the auto-doc, there was one that truly felt like not just an upgrade to her tribal markings but also in keeping with the spirit of them. Even among the cutting-edge cybernetics the Maenads had access to, the procedure was advanced. It required the removal of her selenite, replacing it and augmenting her entire epidermis with diamond-weave nanites, making her skin as tough as a deathclaw's hide. It was not a popular body-mod among the Maenads, as not only was it a difficult and dangerous surgery, but it made her sparkle in the wasteland sun. Butterfly would never again be able to travel through the southwest without drawing attention, which was fine with her. Whatever was out there, she wanted it to see her coming. She wanted it to be afraid.