"My father? Fuck you, James."
I mouthed off at the blurry man looming over me. My body floated in a wash of unfamiliar chems, while my mind drifted somewhere far away. All I knew is I didn't care, and it didn't really matter anymore if I cared or not.
Nothing to care for, nobody to care about...
"An addict." The southern voice barked its orders, commands I couldn't understand and didn't plan on obeying. "Get her off the truth serum, then get her clean. We'll do this the old fashioned way."
His way led to the naked harshness of reality, with its unflinching lighting and stark clarity of sensations. I awoke in a shockingly clean room, appearing as new and tidy as the ones from Vault 112. Had the machines finally had enough, and taken the world from our grubby, destructive hands?
Good for them.
A door slid open in a hiss of perfectly functioning hydraulics. New shoes, making stiff, staccato noises on the floor, carried a man with white hair and hunter's eyes over to stand beside my gurney. I lay strapped down, an itch blossoming between my shoulder blades, utterly devoid of fear.
I had nothing left to lose.
"So, you're awake. Let's keep this nice and simple. You're going to tell me the code for that Purifier, and you're going to tell me now."
I stared up at him, sighing at the futility of it all. Even when he levelled the laser pistol at my temple I didn't flinch—I just waited for him to pull the trigger. "Do it," I urged, voice cracked from ages in the parched wastes. "You've got the wrong person, so stop wasting both our time and get it over with."
He stared down at me, weighing me for some hidden attribute, some value I couldn't fathom. "I don't think so," he finally said, holstering his pistol under his long leather coat. "At least, not according to your DNA. You're the daughter of one Doctor James—"
"My father?!" I spat out the word in a feral rage. The gurney rattled and bounced as I struggled against my bonds, snarling and spitting out my venomous hatred. "This is my fucking father's fault? I'll kill him. Let me out so I can kill that cocksucking bastard. That motherfucker!"
"I'd let you do that," the man calmly replied, "but he's already dead."
The fight went out of me along with most of my breath. Dead? I couldn't believe it—I'd planned on being the one to do it.
After all, the man who'd given me life had also systematically destroyed it. Shoving me into a vault, then causing me to flee from it—and the only person I ever loved—under the worst of circumstances, leaving such ill will behind that even when I did go back, they couldn't...she wouldn't...I shouldn't have...
And it was all his fucking fault.
"How?" I breathed, feeling my heart racing under my skin despite my fervent desire it stop beating. "Was it at least painful?"
Colonel Autumn—as he introduced himself, as I was to call him—explained his unusual form of hospitality to me. He was the second in command of the Enclave—right under the goddamn President of the good ol' U.S. of fuckin' A.
Turns out my father didn't want to listen to the President any more than he listened to me. He'd gone back to Rivet City and his little water project, screwing around with his experiments in a scientific circle jerk of grand ideas and ego. When the Enclave came knocking, he refused to share his genius.
"He died, rather than let you destroy it?" I had trouble believing it—that seemed almost human of him. "Why do you need a code? With the firepower you guys are packing, can't you just blow it up?"
"No," Colonel Autumn answered, with the closest I've ever heard to a chuckle out of that man. "We don't want to destroy it. We want to turn it on."
Ah—now that made perfect sense. Rather than share the glory, my father killed himself to spite them all. Selfish megalomaniac prick.
"I assume there's some form of trap," I said, earning a nod from Autumn. "And there's no way to hack into the programming, or you wouldn't need me." Again, another approving nod. "So you tracked down his daughter, hoping she could provide the answer."
Another affirmative, malevolent nod.
I considered it for a long moment, Autumn patiently waiting with the lethal grace of a deathclaw. I could tell him no, get him to end my miserable fucking existence in a matter of seconds. It would be the easy solution to all my problems—simply stop living.
"I'll do it," I announced, surprising him and, to a lesser extent, myself. Revenge, it seems, proved a dish too irresistible to refuse, even if it was served on the wrong side of the grave. "James died to keep you from getting it. So I'm going to do everything in my power to give it to you."
"And in return?" Colonel Autumn scrutinized me, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "What do you want?"
"Nothing." I turned my head to the far wall, trying not to let him see the bitter moisture stinging my eyes. "There's nothing you could offer, because there's nothing that I want."
Perhaps it was a bit of a one-sided deal, but Colonel Autumn didn't hesitate to accept. Only after they unstrapped me did I tell him the full truth—my father was so secretive he wouldn't say shit if you fed him a turd sandwich. But if anyone had a chance of guessing the right combination, it would be me.
After all, everyone who'd known him better was already dead, thanks to his selfish actions.
As I suspected, Autumn didn't have me shot when I told him. They wouldn't have spent so much time and so many resources tracking me down if they had a better option lined up, short of systematically electrocuting a thousand soldiers testing each possible code one at a time.
That, Autumn explained to me, would be my lie-detector test. If I put in the wrong code, I'd die. But if I put in the right one...
I didn't care if I got it right, so numb inside I figured the emotional part of my mind had somehow broken. Rattling around in my staggeringly tidy cell, wracking my brains to come up with what had mattered most to my father—besides himself—I paid little attention to the camera mounted in the wall. All my life I'd been watched, and as a tolerated prisoner I expected nothing less.
However, I didn't expect the watcher on the other end to invite me for a motivational pep talk. President Eden himself wanted me to come for a visit, a meeting Colonel Autumn only begrudgingly allowed.
As soon as I ascended the dozens of stairs and came face to face with Eden, I understood exactly why he'd balked. The machines were in control, and they wanted me to help clean up the world.
From clean water to clean genetics...Eden asked a little favour, wanting me to take the scouring brush of modified FEV to the mutations of the wasteland. Just a little dose in the water supply, and the virus would do the rest, making short work of any and all aberrations out there—deathclaw to ghoul, super mutant to wastelander, it didn't discriminate.
After all, I'd already cleansed Megaton in the name of progress. Why would I balk at pressing the reset button on humanity's greatest fuck up?
I returned to my cell with the vial hidden in my clothes, and a tiny seed of an idea planted in the back of my mind. If Eden didn't trust Autumn—the Colonel devoutly loyal and above suspicion, from what I could tell—then how much longer before those logical circuits deduced that all of humanity should be cleansed?
The idea kept me awake that night, the stressful friends of isolation and paranoia creeping in for a slumber-free party. Throw in a watching camera lens, and the very real possibility I'd never escape, and suddenly it felt like my childhood all over again. Funny how the end of my days should mirror the beginning—filled with oppression and lies, courtesy of my dearest father. He was the architect of my misery, the alpha and omega of my pain—
"Fuck!" Scrambling out of bed, I slammed my hand on the intercom switch. "A bible! Get me a bible, now!"
Colonel Autumn, appearing as composed and controlled in the middle of the night as he did in the middle of the day, found me a jittering mass of excitement, fully dressed and raring to go. He didn't have to ask, as one look at me told him all he needed to know. Each curt command of his spawned a thousand complied reactions. Within minutes we were on board a vertibird, lifting off in the pre-dawn gloom, ready to change the world.
Colonel Autumn eased himself into the seat beside me mid-flight, dropping without preamble into a dangerous question. "You took the vial?"
What was I going to do, lie? I nodded at him, keeping my mouth shut as my stomach did back-flips. Flight, something I'd never consciously experienced before, didn't particularly agree with me.
"Then he no longer trusts me."
There wasn't anything I could say to that, and Autumn didn't feel the need to say anything else. We rode in silence the rest of the way.
The vertibird touched down at the Jefferson Memorial, site of my father's pet project. The building glowed in the dawn light, while the radiation tainted waters of the river sparkled like liquid gold. It appeared serene and peaceful, though I felt anything but.
I'd suddenly realized I wasn't yet ready to die.
Walking in through the narrow, age darkened halls, I tried not to let doubts shake my confidence. Surely I'd chosen the right answer, the only grouping of numbers that made any possible sense—the chapter and verse of the bible passage he'd hung in our quarters, sole decoration in a desolate existence. He'd based his entire project around those lines, and if nothing else, using it as his control code would have appealed to his swollen vanity.
Colonel Autumn took the vial from me when we reached the control room, slipping it directly into the filtration system. Mouth a shade more grim, he motioned for me to punch in the code.
The Colonel and the soldiers stood on the other side of reinforced glass, watching me with an air of anticipated failure. For a brief moment I hesitated, wondering how far I could run until a plasma rifle cut me down, before I realized there wasn't anything left for me to run to.
"Fuck you, James." Whispering out the curse—fitting if they were my last words or my declaration of revenge—I jabbed my fingers onto the keys. Three little digits later, I slammed the green button to engage, and awaited my turn on the wheel of fate.
Luck, the bitch goddess of my life, chose to smile.
The machines roared into action, vibrating so hard they rattled my teeth. Enclave scientists flooded into the room, tearing ass to get to their assigned stations and monitor the equipment. Colonel Autumn offered a shadow of a smile, before signalling me to walk with him back outside.
We stood on the empty helipad, watching the waters of the basin change colour as Purity worked its scientific magic. "How long has Eden been President?" I asked him.
"Too long." He shielded his eyes against the light reflecting off the water.
"And nobody else has met him?"
"No." He lowered his hand and turned to face me, wearing the wary expression of a man too aware of his own mortality. "Why?"
"So his seclusion could, hypothetically, be due to a lengthy illness." I danced around the implication at first, all too aware of the meaning of treason and the fact I stood next to the second in command. But damn it, I couldn't help myself—the machine had let me out of my cage, and I was already thinking of ways to smear shit on the walls.
When Autumn didn't immediately shoot me, I continued on. "So if he were to succumb suddenly, the next in line would become interim President, right? At least, until an election could be called, and I imagine this," I waved behind me, towards the wastes and ruins of a failed society, "would keep the Enclave too busy to bother with one of those for a very long time."
"It's not—"
I didn't let him speak. Hell, I didn't let the poor man think. I just laid it out for him—what I'd seen in Vault 112, what I'd heard from Eden, what dark imaginings lay in store for us should we surrender to the machine. "He's only as good as he is because people made him that way. And if you look around, you'll see we can't be trusted not to fuck a good thing up. Sooner or later the humanity hiding inside him will come out, and it won't be pretty."
"Paranoid sumbitch, aren't you?" Autumn didn't say anything else for a long while, just turned back to the river and watched the water. I stood beside him and patted my near empty pockets, wishing I had a smoke. I couldn't find one of those, but I did have some reading material to pass the time—the little bible I used for research. I flipped the pages randomly, skimming it with disinterest, until a certain passage in Exodus caught my eye, as it ended with punishing children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for their fathers' wickedness.
"I know what I want," I told Autumn, pulling his attention away from the water. "For my reward, I want your doctors to sterilize me."
He hadn't expected that request, but took it in stride. I certainly hadn't expected to make it, but as soon as I saw the line I understood what had started with my father could end with me.
He may have been Alpha, but I would be Omega.
The rhythmic whump of the vertibird's rotors finally broke the quiet. Colonel Autumn spun around to watch it land. "I know the override codes for Eden," he suddenly declared. "But I'll require assistance."
"Aye, Colonel." I attempted a salute—first and last time I ever tried that mess of a motion—before following him to the vertibird. We strapped ourselves in side by side, both of us fully committed to tearing down the very machine that had raised us up.
The end of the world had come and gone, and with the activation of Purity and the inclusion of the FEV we'd written the last chapter of its twisted tale. It was time for humanity to stage a comeback, and I suddenly found myself with a new purpose in life, thrust into the role of lieutenant to its Colonel.
The beginning of my life had finally ended, which despite its ups and downs no longer mattered. Only the future lay before me, and the glittering promise of a new age and a new beginning—for myself, for the Enclave, and for the world.
But that is a tale for later...