Edit 8/7/14

Rather than feeling as if the autodoc was inside her, which was most certainly the case, it rather felt as if Callie was inside the autodoc. The sensation of its metal appendages penetrating her skull and scraping away at her tissues was absent. Rather, if felt like a metal womb that surrounded her, protected her from harm and social responsibilities. She felt curled up along side of it, smelling like iron. Too much blood.

In an abstract way she knew she wasn't really conscious, but only with the certainty of a skeptical dreamer noticing little things out of place rather than rejecting the fantasy outright. Still, she felt warm and safe and protected. Either it was the autodoc swallowing her whole or Benny had meant it when he said he would be waiting for her on the other side. As she'd drifted away he had held her hand between both of his.

They had sex a little before she went under, right after she had finished programming the autodoc and double checking each setting. He told her that she was his girl, even if she wouldn't marry him. Cruelly, she had laughed in his face; the whole thing had become absurd. It was his blind persistence she had been laughing at. They were so fucked up.

Then he whispered that she could be his man too, if that would make her happier. He wasn't going to be that picky about it.

That wasn't an invitation she was going to deny. She slid her fingers past his lips and he sucked, smirking around them the whole time, darting his tongue in the spaces between the digits. As she rode him, he dug his fingers into her hips and she conceded she'd always be bruised there, so long as they stuck together. Purple welts showed off the pattern of his fingertips. She came like that, on top of him and two fingers in his mouth, his tongue dancing around them, biting only slightly when she clenched around him. In moments like this she could almost believe that this was okay and that she would have ended up here despite everything else. Maybe he didn't have to shoot her in the head. Maybe the world didn't have to die and her ancestors have been lucky while his had been poor and abandoned. After all, they had both made it to this point. Accidents of birth hadn't managed to kill either of them. They hadn't managed to kill each other either. Maybe that was the way the script was supposed to go and this was the perversion of it.

Even though she had little idea what she was doing, she pulled her lips around his cock. She could taste herself there, slightly sour and slightly sweet. She tasted just like other girls. Not so special there, utterly regular.

Without another woman's memories to guide her, her mind stopped, only to restart again when he mewled so sweetly above her. Panting little breaths informed her that she wasn't entirely terrible, but that didn't really mean she was entirely okay either, but the muscles in his thighs twitched all the same and both of his hands gripped into her hair, not directing her, just holding, like she might slip through his fingers. She splayed her right hand against his thigh, holding him in place. His tattoos stopped just above her hand, dark lines set off against the flush of his skin.

She wasn't entirely lost, she had seen those vids too, ones of blowjobs, only she had liked them less. Anyway they didn't adequately provide diagrams about what she was supposed to do with her tongue. The feminine blondes with their enhanced features would bob their head up and down, make their lips tight, but what to do with her tongue? They would roll their eyes up and look at the camera, placed just askew from where the man's line of vision would actually be.

With her fingers she had a little more confidence, sliding one past the tight ring of muscle and curling it as if he were her girl. He hitched at that, hitting the back of her throat and causing a little cough. But at the thought of what she was doing, the vulnerable position that he had placed himself in, if only to bring her a little fun, she was thrilled. It was as arousing a thought as she could conjure up. The physical enactment was less important than the idea of it, the idea of fucking him in the way he could fuck her, making him submit to her. The pleasure of it went to both her deteriorating brain and to her groin.

The second finger wouldn't fit, he was so fucking tight, and she wanted to tell him that. She wanted to speak in the lewd tones of men play acting their lust. Only she had been worried about breaking the spell that sat between them. Even though she couldn't see his face, she could imagine it, with his eyes closed and his mouth open, letting those pants and gasps that she could hear escape. He was strangely beautiful in this moment.

Like this his cock wasn't so unpalatable any more. It felt slick and hard against her lips and less overwhelming in her mouth. She wasn't servicing him, she was controlling him. His orgasm hit him so hard and fast that she didn't have time to pull off as he came down her throat. His cum was bitter and his voice sweet as he regained composure.

"Fuck, Girlie, fuck." He had brought both his hands to cover his face as he started to control his breathing.

Callie smiled, satisfied with herself. She may have not trusted her ability to understand his motives, but she could understand this.

The memory was quite close to her in the autodoc, as it should have been. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes ago. That was, if she could trust her sense of time. She had programed the bot with the aid of the medical textbook Swank had found, the binding did say 'Followers of the Apocalypse,' scrawled in blue pen, but she didn't ask anything more about it. Before she went under Benny had wanted one last go, she supposed. Always the chance she wouldn't come back up. Then he'd have to bury her a second time.

I buried her myself.

The double use of Benny's statement hadn't hit her quite so hard before. When Mint died he buried her body, so certain in her death. That certainty prevented him from ever believing she was Mint. Even when she had woken up thinking it was her name and her past, Benny had never believed. But he had buried her too, in that shallow grave above Goodsprings, and she had come back, baring memories of the girl he had loved in his childhood. He had buried her himself as well. That had been the burial of a stranger, without feeling or guilt. Benny had probably put dozens like her straight into the ground, if they even got that courtesy. Most were probably left to rot where they fell. Dr. Mitchell's body was still decomposing in his bed, if he hadn't been found yet.

He had wanted one more go and she had gotten up and kissed him with semen still in her mouth. She washed her hands and rinsed her mouth in the bathroom sink. He had come up behind her, gripping her at the waist and told her he loved her. A nod was all she could manage. Even now she couldn't. She was so close, but she couldn't.

No, Callie, be more assertive.

She couldn't understand why she cared for Benny.

Try again. It wasn't as if he could see into her mind, even if it was exposed in pieces in front of him.

She loved Benny. Full stop. Don't think of the conditions.

If she woke up, she might even try to tell him. No, she knew she wouldn't.

Because everything was the rhetoric of the Overseer. The Overseer was dead but even now she couldn't bring herself to concede he could have been right. She couldn't remember his face but she could remember his ideology.

In a very literal way memories were coming back to her. As the final remnants of Mint were manually peeled away, Callie peeked out from underneath, a strange little girl in a systematic vault with pretty mother and an absent father.

She was twelve-years-old and in the Overseer's office. His voice was loud, commanding, he only ever spoke with authority. At first his words were kind, he was speaking to a child after all, and even though she was in trouble, he wanted her to see things his way. Fiona Darby had told on her, that Callie Washington had kissed her, in the innocent sort of way children with a first crush do. But to Callie it seemed like the whole world was in Fiona's big blue eyes and the claustrophobia of the vault didn't matter anymore. This hadn't been the first incident to cause concern, the Overseer stated. Didn't Callie like the boys? Particularly Marco James? Although at sixteen, he wasn't such a boy anymore.

"No," she had said defiantly, she liked Fiona Darby with her wheat-blonde hair and blue eyes and dimple on the left side but not the right. She looked like a doll and spoke very little.

"Well, maybe when you're older you'll like Marco James, he's a very good match for you. I heard a secret, do you want to hear it?"

"No." Her protests were empty because the Overseer didn't care.

"I heard Marco James likes you very much."

But Marco James was short and heavy-set, even though they all got the same rations every morning, noon, and night. He smelled like the liquor his father drank and was four years older than her. She liked Fiona Darby.

The Overseer pat her on the head and told her to think a little more about Marco James. He would protect her. From what, he didn't say. There wasn't anything in the vault that Callie had ever seen that she couldn't protect herself from.

By sixteen she had moved on from Fiona Darby. She looked too much like a doll and spoke too little. Besides, she had gotten engaged and never kissed Callie back. Instead, Callie occupied herself with illicit vids on her Pip-boy she had gotten from Kyle Perkins. All the boys had shared the vids right about the age of fifteen. Their fathers passed them down as if they were the great secret of the vault. Never tell your mother, never tell your girlfriends or wives.

They were only really illicit when they were in her possession. Kyle was alright, she supposed. He didn't try to stick his hand down the front of her vault suit. Luckily, she knew better than the boys how to hide the file folders.

She and Kyle watched them together at first. Kyle liked the one with the thin, plain looking woman with tits that looked bolted on and the much larger man with big muscles. The man pinned the woman down and fucked her from behind. Callie knew which one of the pair Kyle was looking at, and that didn't bother her at all.

Callie liked the vid was a pretty girl, with breasts like pillows, soft and natural, twirling a baton in a short cheerleader uniform, it rode up and exposed her ass when she jumped. The flat plane of her abdomen was always exposed. Later in the video she inserted the end of the baton into herself. Callie liked that part less, but even in the monochrome format of the Pip-boy, she could tell that the girl's face was flushed, and she could hear the noises she made as she came. Callie liked that part, so she would focus on the girl's face as she fucked herself.

She and Kyle Perkins would watch their favorite vids together, side by side on their Pip-boys, they would touch themselves but not each other.

She had been called in to see the Overseer again, but not about the vids. He didn't know about that. She was here because she had punched Marco James in the face when he tried to rape her. They didn't teach that word in the vault. But she knew it just the same. She had punched him seven times straight in the nose before he blacked out. The blows were sharp and in quick succession. The next morning he had run straight to the Overseer, pride be damned.

He had pinned her to the ground of her single room after coming through the unlocked door. The room had been assigned to her after her mother had died. It would have been cramped for anyone else, but Callie spent most of her time working on the robots around the vault. She was hardly ever here and it was sparsely furnished. Marco James pulled up her skirt and down her blouse. His knee had struck her hard between her legs and his breath smelled like vodka. He told her that she had been promised to him and she was a little cunt for not delivering. Sixteen already and he hadn't gotten to fuck her. None of this mattered, what mattered was that she had punched him seven times in the face.

Couldn't Callie see that Marco James liked her? He had always liked her, it was destiny. He might have even loved her, and his love could make her very happy. Yes, really he must have loved her since she was a girl, just on the cusp of womanhood. And now that she was sixteen, well, wasn't she just so beautiful?

Callie didn't know how any of that could be true because they hadn't even spent an hour speaking to each other over the sixteen years of her life. She told the Overseer as much.

But she wasn't a little girl anymore, she was a young woman. The Overseer resolved to speak to her as an adult as she was now too young for childish coddling.

"I've paired you with Marco. It's important to the future of the vault. You will love him, marry him, have children with him."

"Give him someone else. I'm not interested. I don't like him."

"Callie, you've had biology, yes?"

"Yes." She had been good in some of her subjects. She was absolute shit in literature and English, but she was good in math and science. Biology a little less than physics, but she was okay.

"It is very good for the biology of the vault that you love Marco. Yes, he could love another girl, and you might love another boy, but it is important that you have children together."

"I don't see what this has to do with biology…"

"You're very special to us, Callie."

"You're still talking to me like a child." Certainly, this memory was flawed. Her encounter with the Overseer at sixteen hadn't gone this way, not at all. This was a fabrication she had concocted to avoid the truth of what happened. He hadn't been calm or level headed. He had simply screamed in her face that she would marry Marco, that he would keep her pregnant as often as possible, that he had invested so many resources in them already that this plan would pay off.

Callie had been terrified of him. He hadn't spoken to her in calm measured tones. He had snatched her by the front of her jumpsuit and smashed her back against the wall, calling her a pain in his ass but one he couldn't get rid of. He said if he wasn't a better man than that, he'd fuck her himself. But that hadn't been in the long term plan.

It ashamed Callie to remember she had been scared of him. While she had easily shown Marco she wouldn't give in to him, that she would fight back like a vicious animal, she had been petrified of the Overseer.

He let her go after that. In hindsight, he had been confident that he managed to break her. But six weeks later he was dead. He hadn't been particularly old or particularly frail. He was just a normal man who was now heading for the incinerator. Callie imagined that his death had been painful, she wanted him to suffer badly. He'd been found face first in his bowl of Sugar Bombs.

Marco James married Sarah Drass later that year. Their mothers were sisters.

Callie was six and her mother was beautiful. She had straight hair and pale skin and freckles and blue eyes. Callie had none of those things, her freckles would come later, after she had been in the Mojave sun for weeks, but at six she was clear-faced. She looked at her mother and looked at herself and didn't understand. Her mother had never taught her to have fear of anything and so Callie asked her, why they didn't look alike.

"But we do, baby, come here." Her mother pulled her up onto her lap in front of the mirror. "Look here," she poked her little girl in the center of her forehead and Callie contorted her face, scrunching it up in annoyance. "You've seen me do that too, right?"

Callie nodded, her mother always made that face when the Overseer came by to check on them.

"And see," Her mother pulled her straight hair back into a ponytail. She then undid the ties around Callie's poofy, curly pigtails and tugged her hair straight back into a ponytail as well. Callie's mother lowered her head so it was in line with her daughter's smaller one. "Our faces have the same shape, don't they?"

"Yes, ma." They really did, with high cheeks and small chins. Their noses were different, and their eyes different colors, but their faces did look alike.

"You look like me, but you also look like your papa. Like the best of both of us." Her smile was a little sad. She rearranged Callie's hair so it was back into two pigtails. It would never stay in the ponytail for long. Her hair was too thick and heavy.

"Where did papa go?"

Her mother set her back on the floor. She was six, after all. She wasn't a little baby anymore and she was getting too big for her mother to coddle like this. Callie was going to school and learning math. She loved math.

When Callie was eighteen, almost nineteen, the decision was made to open the vault. The instructions and reasons given were vague, but Callie knew the real reason. Eight months ago she had hacked into the records kept by the last Overseer. So many things had haunted her since sixteen, from when he beat her in his office and she had last shown weakness, since she had yielded even though her mother never taught her how to be afraid.

The Overseer's notes had been jumbled, cramped, even as they were uniformly typed. They were like the confessions of a madman. There had been years worth of scratchings to pour through and most of them hadn't meant anything. She wrote a script that scraped the files for any mention of her name, her mother's name, her family name.

They weren't opening the vault now because they needed parts for the water purification system. That was what the new Overseer said, but she knew better. Had she been asked, she could have cobbled together a filter with a little work. It wouldn't have been perfect, but it would have kept the vault sealed. But Callie said nothing about the excuses used.

No, the vault was being opened because they had an inbreeding problem with the residents. They were getting slower, dimmer, more susceptible to disease. The last Overseer had tried to correct the problem by arranging marriages between the most distantly related residents. In the months leading up to her parent's marriage, three newborns had died or been killed, it wasn't clear from the looping illogic of the notes left behind. Only thing that was clear was the babies had been born "wrong." Two-hundred years shouldn't have been enough generations for the level of problems they were seeing. But Clara Hill with her soft, snowy skin and Gilbert Washington who had seemed impossibly tall, dark, and handsome, even at fifteen, certainly would produce a child without deformities.

All of the notes were stored in her Pip-boy now, carefully concealed in one of many hidden folders. She was an expert at hiding things. Sometimes, she would read passages from the folder out-loud to deactivated bots while she worked on them. It was as close as she would come to telling anyone else what she knew. It was a strategy to keep herself from going crazy.

She had been an ill-conceived science project, right from the beginning. Experimentation hadn't begun when Doctors Henry and Mitchell started poking around in her skull, trying to fix the problems Benny had created. Entering the Wasteland hadn't been her first brush with unfulfilled expectations either. But the new Overseer had seen the futility of placing the vault's future in a bi-racial assumed lesbian's uterus. That was never fucking working, so instead, the vault gave up on Callie. The vault was going to open, and they were going outside.

The first time Callie saw the sky the sun was just coming up over the Mojave. It made the sand look as if it was on fire, that brilliant orange-red setting alight the dull beige of the packed sand and dirt. She resolved then and there that she wasn't going back into the vault. When she breathed in the dust of the outside world she coughed violently. It was utterly glorious.

A year was reduced to a second and she was meeting Arcade. He was tall and handsome and stumbled over his words just a little bit when he spoke. Other times he was very fluent, speaking so fast she could barely keep up and not dropping a beat along his way. There were secrets she knew he was keeping but for the first time since Kyle Perkins she looked at a man and wasn't disgusted. Arcade didn't try to put his hand down the front of her pants either.

Still, he laughed at her jokes even though she didn't think she was very funny. No one had ever told her she was funny before. People hadn't told her much of anything. One night, while they were out gathering plants, they had to come up with dinner on their own. She shot at geckos with her laser pistol and he scowled every time she vaporized them. Callie just shrugged it off. She hadn't known scarcity. There were more geckos just over the ridge. It's not like they had a standard pistol with them, anyway.

They cooked and ate and Arcade played with her Pip-boy while she leaned against him. Arcade didn't like any of her holovids. He said they were vulgar. Callie just shrugged him off. Her stomach was full and she was happy. To think that people found the Wasteland to be terrifying.

She didn't stay with the Followers long. One day she just left. She didn't owe any particular allegiance to anyone, even Arcade. He only liked men, and she was supposed to only like women. But that wasn't why she left, not really. It was just that there was only so little time and so many different people she wanted to be. She had thought she would be traveling a lot more with the Followers, but they were putting down foundations, not pushing ahead into the unexplored. There was a whole world in front of her and no one to tell her what she could and could not do.

Once, after she left the Followers, she spent a whole day shooting birds straight out of the sky. They seemed endless.

There was one last vision for her to see, as she swam back towards consciousness. It was the last tiny flare of the girl who had died before her. Years and years ago. How old was Benny? The Tribal girl who could speak to animals and who Benny had loved for her own sake, even though she had been special and forbidden. She was petite and pretty and even though her skin was the same color as Callie's her eyes were a magnificent blue. She wore that purple dress, no one had ever seen a purple dress before they had made it to the Tops. The purple and the blue and her dark hair falling in waves made Mint look like the whole ocean.

Callie stood outside the scene, as a spectator, rather than a participant. But she had to have been both. Mint hadn't existed outside of her for years. A long stretch of being a brain in a jar to flickering back to life for a few weeks through a perverse set of circumstances.

The first night at the Tops, Mint fell asleep on the carpeted floor instead of the bed. There had been a celebration in honor of their newly occupied home. Together, they would be safe here. But there were no dogs or birds for her to speak to inside the walls of the casino. Benny was still downstairs, cautiously celebrating with the other men of the tribe. Only they weren't to think of themselves as tribe anymore, just a family of the Strip. They were respectable now, Benny would see to that.

Mint lay on the floor of Benny's suite, smelling the dust in the carpet until well past two in the morning. He came upstairs and found her lying there, waking her gently as he gathered her into his arms and moved her to the bed they would now share, out in the open. Everyone knew now and they didn't give a damn. They couldn't give a damn. Benny was in charge and she was still a witch that spoke to the spirits of animals. He would never be able to break the Tribal out of her. Not fully.

Mint loved Benny so much that is felt like her heart would break, like her love would become a living thing and crawl straight out of her chest to be with him. She had loved him since they were children starving in the Mojave in between times of feast. He had stopped her when her rage seemed uncontainable and didn't recoil when she used her powers. When the other tribesmen had wanted to kill her and be done with it, he made some of them see the error of their ways and killed the rest of them.

"Benny," her voice was more musical than Callie's. She spoke like songs rather than like a mechanic.

"You never have to sleep in the ground again."

"It's so quiet."

"I know, love. It's going to be quiet from now on. You can rest."

Callie woke up alone gasping for air and the autodoc still penetrating her.