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Chapter 38

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Haley, Capital Wasteland

Present Day

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Artificial adrenaline was still coursing through my veins, causing my ears to ring and my heart to hammer, when I finished hog-tying the two zombies and the Brytish lord, along with his cat. With him thoroughly searched for any further tricks and the others secured in such a way that they couldn’t get at each other’s bindings, I sat and tried to ignore the tiny shapeshifter running around my feet keeping up a frantic stream of commentary.

“So what are we going to do? I’m so glad you came along I really thought I wouldn’t find anyone! Do you think the pills will cure all of them? He got them from a place called a Vault do you think we should go there? They might have more! Are you going to be okay? They shot you an awful lot out there, that was crazy! What are we going to do? ” The hyper little mouse-parakeet-ferret-cat scampered around like it hadn’t tasted freedom in days, which, to be fair, it probably hadn’t. But it was wearing on my patience and making it hard to think.

Finally as it ran across my shoulders I snapped, “ I DON’T KNOW!” and immediately felt terrible as the little daemon recoiled and ran to a corner. “I don’t know, Telantes. There’s too much going on and too much at stake.” None of this felt right- I just couldn’t get into it, there was something missing in my mind and I couldn’t help but prod at it like a sore tooth. I considered my unconscious charges. This would be so much easier if I didn’t care about two of the three of them. Lord Asriel I could take or leave, but even a child-murdering sociopath might prove useful. “I can’t leave his operations here undisturbed, but there’s an invasion going on in my world- two invasions, I guess. And I need to get back there, back where my magic works. This world so clearly wants me to shoot my way out. I refuse.”

I turned back to the zombies, who were gradually coming to. They didn’t moan or try to bite- they weren’t physically infectious, and I imagined whatever version of the meme had gripped them mostly made them extremely receptive to instruction by Asriel. They simply sat in the back, completely ignoring their injuries and staring at me with a blue-eyed intensity that unsettled me. I sighed, and looked at the case we’d pulled from Asriel’s coat. “Mentats” it said, in big friendly letters, “Courtesy Vault 101. Praise the Overseer!” Whatever that meant. “I guess we’ll try one of these. Roy, you’re the most responsible for getting our people captured. You’re my guinea pig.” He didn’t resist or bite at me when I approached- just kept staring, wriggling slightly behind his back at the bonds. He’d wear through his arms before he wore through the nylon rope, and I realized as I thought it that that was a legitimate concern- I didn’t think he’d stop once he began to bleed. Whatever- I forced his jaw open with one hand and crammed a tab of the stuff down his throat, then massaged until he swallowed on reflex. Giving all those pills to mom’s old dog when I was young finally comes in handy.

It took very little time before it took effect. His eyes didn’t clear but the glow muted, a little. He shook his head and his eyes began to scan again, show signs of interest in things other than my immediate death. “Ugh- I have the world’s worst hangover. Haley?” He looked blearily at me. “I think… you were right. This… clearly isn’t our world.”

I smiled weakly, happy just to see him come back. They can be saved! I honestly wasn’t sure if my magic would do it, I’m glad there’s an alternative. “Can you describe what you’re feeling?”

He shook his head. “I can but I don’t know if you want to hear it. It’s like my brain’s full of big, blue spiders. It’s all that half of me can focus on. Before, it was all of me. But it’s like… these pills expanded my mind somehow, and it’s a space the spiders can’t occupy. I’ve got room to think, to resist. But I can still feel them in there, trying to manipulate me.”

My grin vanished as quickly as it had come. “That sounds... “ I checked the tin in my inventory screen. 5 intelligence, 5 perception, 2 hours. “Extremely temporary.” He looked crestfallen and I tried to cheer him up. “Listen, once I’ve had a 2 hour rest out in the real world, I’ll have my spells back and I can get an angel to throw a Heal on you. There are other options.” And I really hope they work. This thing spreads via in-universe memes, I have suspicions about permanent cures. But we’ll see. “In the meantime… I think we need to visit this Vault.”

Telantes piped up. “Yeah! It’s like his home base now, we’ve got to shut it down.” I untied Roy, cautiously, until I was sure he wasn’t going to leap at us. The pills in that case would keep him functional for a day or so if he consumed them all. Hopefully, the Vault would have a substantially larger supply- as the one thing that I knew worked, I wanted as much of it on hand as possible for future situations.

He stopped me as I went back to the driver’s seat. “Listen, I… remember. I remember you risking your life and everything you did to save us. I remember shooting you. I’m sorry I doubted you before. You- you could have killed us, easily. I can’t even say you’d have been wrong to do so.”

It was good to hear the words, but the weight on my heart didn’t ease much. I shook my head at him. “Never easily. In the end it was good we came in here- we learned of a threat that might have taken us by surprise otherwise. We... lost Maria, out there, because we weren’t working together. Let’s get back without losing the others.” He bobbed his head in agreement and went about policing the weapons.

As he worked, he said “Just promise me one thing. If I start to turn back, if these pills start wearing off- kill me, please. Don’t let me spend the rest of my life like that. Alive and conscious and not able to think of anything except that idea. It’s a nightmare.”

I stared out the front window and struck the armored carrier into gear. I really hoped we had enough fuel to truck out to wherever this vault turned out to be. We’d brought extra, on this trip, but we’d already driven for five or six hours. “I promise I’ll do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. But I’m not going to kill you, Roy. I’m not killing anyone. Telantes, tell me everything you can about the vault. In particular, tell me where I need to start driving.”

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Where it was located, as it turned out, was almost directly south of us through an overnight drive. Telantes relayed the story of the last few days as I carefully navigated the bombed-out cityscape of the capital wasteland, ignoring about a hundred calls to adventure carefully staged in my path. The game world clearly wanted me to engage, so very badly, but I was determined to head straight towards what was sounding more and more like the very final boss.

Asriel had settled into the wasteland several days ago and his first move had been to expose the Concept to the recently opened Vault 101. More of an underground village designed for long-term civilization than a proper fallout shelter, it had apparently not had any sort of defenses against surface attack- it had fallen within hours, and he’d sent search parties out to subdue surface worlders and return with interesting technology samples. The Fallout universe was pretty uniformly lethal and most of them didn’t make it back- not that Asriel cared overmuch. Unfortunately one of the parties that did return had encountered the Brotherhood of Steel, some sort of technology-fetishizing holdover from the nuclear war that devastated this world, and recovered several examples of their extremely advanced power armored suits. He’d wanted to gather more but the Brotherhood were smart enough that they began countering the standard Concept tactics of bum-rush and memetic spam pretty quickly. He would have won a war of attrition but he had some kind of schedule to keep, so he’d made his way out into the devastation to find un - zombified help, and had run into me, instead. I looked to him for confirmation of any of this- I couldn’t risk ungagging him for fear of any further orders to the remaining zombie, who was still working himself bloody on the ropes. He glared back without any indication what he was thinking.

It sounded a lot like my challenge was going to be to find a way to assault or infiltrate an entire subterranean city populated by memetically hazardous zombies, some of whom were wearing fusion-powered armored suits. This felt distinctly like the world of Fallout thumbing its nose at me and my notions of pacifism. I’m not giving up yet, damn it. I put my mind to work on the problem as I drove.

We passed burnt-out office buildings and a caravan of wasteland salespeople. We drove over a rotten, ancient concrete bridge and I was astonished when it didn’t crack and plunge us into the irradiated water. We ignored open caverns and animal dens and on one occasion, parked between two rocks to hide from an overhead patrol by some kind of twin-engined VTOL craft that I assumed was related to the stirred-up Brotherhood. Nothing I wanted to pit the armor of my APC against, that was for sure. We drove through the night and into early dawn and eventually we arrived- Telantes indicated to me that the hill we were looking at was just a few miles from the hiding place of Vault 101, and I parked us far enough away that we wouldn’t immediately alert the guards that I assumed were posted at the entrance. Asriel very helpfully glared at me some more when I asked.

I climbed off the driver’s seat and went back to sit next to him. Time for a confrontation I should have had earlier. “Asriel- I’m not going to call you Lord anything, if I can help it- I’d like to be totally honest with you. I have about two dozen competing incentives to kill you right here, and very little that is keeping you alive aside from an acute case of conscience. I have a feeling that, story and setting-wise, the second I turn my back on you you’re going to get out of here, probably hurt or kill Roy to establish motivation for me, and you’re going to try to ambush me or otherwise try to kill me while I’m going about my business and I’ve had just about enough of pompous assholes who think they can come down on me hard enough to change my course.” He seemed a little nonplussed by this, but otherwise didn’t react. His leopard was growling at me, low and menacing.

I stood up and smiled sweetly at him. “I need to shut down your operation here and it’s going to be a risky mission. So I can’t leave you behind me. Do you understand? This world wants me to kill you, and I am very capable of it.” I reached down to the cat, and she began to kick and thrash. I brushed the area where she was still missing an ear and they both shuddered. “But I don’t want to,” I said, contemplative. “I’ve killed before but… it was an unthinking mistake. I had so much power that it became as easy as swatting a fly, and- I’m stronger now, in some ways. I have to correct for it. I like to think that I’m the kind of person who does that, who can change even when it’s impossible to repent. I don’t want to be a killer when it’s convenient.” I considered him for a long moment, and then deftly undid the knot on the ties holding his cat. She sprang away to his side, hissing angrily at me. He looked at me in surprise. “So I’m not going to be. I have the right to make that judgement.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

He shook his head at me even as I pulled out his gag. “What are you doing, you fool woman? You’ve seen it- I’m not in full control of myself, I could become a danger at any time.”

Roy, who was watching all this out of the corner of his eye from the other side of the passenger compartment, chimed in. “Yeah, I mean- I don’t want us shooting him either, but- you can’t know he’s going to escape.”

I glanced between both of them. “I’m the only one here who seems to fully grasp the reality that we’re operating on now. Story-wise, he is guaranteed to become an issue here, because the story wants us in conflict. So I’m making it a moment of character growth. Subverting the narrative.” I turned back to focus on Asriel exclusively. “You are in full control of yourself. Telantes is in full control of him self, and he has even closer ties to your narrator.” He grimaced at that, trying to deny the point. “No- don’t look away. What you’re doing, you’re doing out of fear. Fear of what, I’m not sure. Reading your stories, I never took you for a coward-” that got his attention, “But you clearly have the ability to resist the direction of her story. Whether you choose to use it or not- well.”

I went to the side hatch and opened it. “Get out, start walking. In the opposite direction of the vault. If she overrides you, resist. If she breaks your story anyway- well, I’ve adopted a character from another story before, I can do it again. It’s time for you to be better than this, Asriel. If I see you in that vault now, it’s because you’ve failed a moral test, and even if I don’t kill you, by narrative law you’re more-or-less doomed. You understand that?”

He stood, hands still tied behind him. “You’re absolutely mad.” But he saw the look in my eyes and realized I was serious. For the first time since I’d met him, he really looked me. “But I’ve known some madwomen in my day, and they were always the most effective sort.” Under his breath, he muttered “Emrys was right to fear you, ‘Dragon Wife.’” People kept calling me that- was it a reference to our original story? Did he know my original story?

He straightened his back, as much as any of us could in this cramped space, and gave me what I wanted- “You and I want the same thing, I think- to be rid of this story.” He jerked and shuddered, clearly feeling a pull not to finish his statement. “ No - I will say what I mean to say. I will leave this wasteland, and not oppose you further here. I can’t promise we will never be enemies. But if you can remove the Concept from their minds-” he jerked again, and whatever was pulling on him gripped him so tautly that I felt it, even within my own narrative.

Come on, you bastard, fight it, I thought, watching his struggle. You built an army to overthrow heaven. You threw Metatron into the abyss, once. You can weather this. He didn’t say much more, but he didn’t fall into that blank-faced trance he had taken before, either. I think she’s not ready to drop the one trump she has- you have more leeway to resist her than you thought. He said only one word. “Silvertongue.” His daughter? Or a compliment? He nodded, once, and then left. His cat lingered in the door for a moment and then spoke to me for the first time I could recall. “Free us, please.” Then she disappeared into the wasteland evening. Roy blew out a long breath. “I really hope you know what you’re doing because that looked an awful lot like giving them warning that you’re on the way.”

I began to prepare, but acknowledged that he wasn’t wrong. “We’re all making it up as we go along. It was that or shoot him, here and now, and if the only two options are trusting that someone can make a choice to be better, or killing them in cold blood- I’ll at least try the first option, every time. And it’ll still take him an hour to get there, from here.”

I armed myself as well as I could. Lucky for me there was no crafting mechanic in this game, which gave me a lot of leeway to just make things up as I went along, not being constrained to what I found laying around in two hundred year old dumpsters. I dumped quite a few points into Science, which governed hacking but also told me enough about the weird bizarro-world technology of Fallout that I was able to craft a crude EMP with the remaining taser batteries and some odds and ends lying about the cabin. Enough to begin the rudimentary plan that was forming in the back of my mind. “Alright. Roy, please keep a lookout and take care of our teammate here. Leave the emergency radio on and tuned to our frequency. It’s time go do something really stupid.”

I left the APC in a crouch, keeping my “Stealth” activated. When I finally rounded the corner of the hill and came on the cave that held the vault as guided by Telantes, still in my pocket, I saw to my dismay that the zombies weren’t quite as disorganized as I’d hoped. There were two suits of truly intimidating looking powered armor standing in front of the giant mechanical cog that formed the vault door, both with some variant of a giant sci-fi laser rifle that I wasn’t about to tangle with. Their eyes glowed blue in the depths of their burnished-steel stormtrooper helmets. “One I can deal with,” I muttered, “but two? I’m going to need a distraction.”

Telantes sprang out of his hiding place. “Oh! I can do that, one second.” Before I could grab for him he was gone, off among the rocks. Soon enough I heard him calling out in his all-too-human voice, from some hiding place on the far side. “Oi you! You great big metal tools! Yeah, I’m talking to you! Come do your guard thing at me!” It was effective, at least- both of the armored zombies began to lumber out of their positions and toward the source of the noise. I could only assume he’d be fine- he was so small and capable of changing into almost anything, they’d never find him before I was done with them.

I got behind the rearmost one. If there was one stupid trick I knew about Fallout and these open-world RPG’s in general, it was the one I was going to try now. Come on game, let me see- Aha! The ability to “Pickpocket” seemed to flash into place in my mind- I could transfer items between his inventory and mine. Unfortunately I couldn’t take his worn items, so no stealing the suit off his back, but I armed the EMP grenade and slipped it into his… uh, where exactly had I put that? No matter, it wasn’t in my hands anymore. I slipped back several feet and waited. Within seconds there was a crackling pulse and the zombie’s armor seized, before toppling over. One down, I thought.

Now that he was prone and helpless, I could get at his worn inventory. It was nice not to have to physically strip the armor off of his unconscious body because I had no idea how I’d have done that. Instead I just nicked it out of some conceptual space and it disappeared from him, and onto me. It seemed to reboot on its own, which was also extremely convenient. I could get used to getting dressed in video games. It also elevated my strength slightly, which helped me to drag the unconscious man behind a nearby outcropping to conceal the body. I didn’t really care about the protection it afforded me in the physical sense- I was more concerned about the camouflage. The zombie ahead finally gave up his search for Telantes, who I really hoped would get back out to the APC, and turned back towards me. I stood stock-still, now dressed in the suit of his fellow zombie- crap, I forgot the gun, will he notice?

He didn’t. Whatever instructions they were operating on, “Watch for outsiders” was clearly number one. Asriel wasn’t conversant with video games so I was really hoping that idiot shenanigans like crouching to turn nearly invisible and wearing a full-body suit to appear friendly had not occurred to him. We returned to “Our” guard posts, and I noticed in the crook of rock just inside the cave that there was already a body. Poor bastard. I glanced at the other guard while I worked the radio inside the suit. He still hadn’t moved and no longer seemed to be paying any attention to me. “Roy, can you hear me? I’ve got one of these tank-suits on. This thing is ridiculous. Over.” I could hear him trying to respond but it was a crackling mess, I got maybe one word in three. Either the radio wasn’t compatible or it didn’t penetrate the mountain, or something was going on with the airwaves.

I began shuffling forward and when the other guard made no move to stop me, turned it into a more normal walk. This damn thing was awkward. It was going to be impossible to sneak while wearing it, but… hopefully they’d just ignore me? That didn’t seem like it would work forever. The body had identification and a jump suit from inside the vault- it said “Steve Armstrong” which meant nothing to me. Poor bastard, I guess you tried to escape when you saw what was going down. He also had an item on him called a Stealth Boy which sounded like just about the most useful thing ever if you asked me. I took that and turned back. Still no reaction from the other guard. I nodded at him awkwardly and strolled onwards, into the vault.

It was a poor name, I thought, for what spread out before me. Corridor after corridor, brightly lit and trimmed with all the furnishings of home. It felt more like the world’s most advanced dormitory, aside from the truly interesting areas like the indoor parks and fake-outdoor restaurants. Someone had gone to great lengths to build this whole place up into some kind of semi-coherent recreation of the retro-future living conditions of suburban America before the bombs fell. Unfortunately for me, underground suburbia was entirely overrun with zombies, and they were busy.

The shops and restaurants were empty aside from a couple of communal feeding troughs, clearly built to provide whatever slop they might shovel into themselves to keep their bodies running for another day. The smell was pretty indescribable and I wondered what the lifespan of these people would be once disease took hold. Flickering screens were stationed on every wall, and crowds of vault-dwellers queued up to take instructions from them- those that weren’t already working in the makeshift sweat-shops, in any case. When I realized what the images on the screens were, I quickly ducked my head down and didn’t raise it above floor-level. The damn meme was everywhere and I had no idea which versions would be infectious to me- probably all of them. I was clearly running on the same operating system, right now.

They seemed to be building something, or several somethings, but I couldn’t say what. One section of the facility was clearly dedicated to de construction- items of valuable technology came in, and a disassembly line was set up to pick them apart and extract useful components. Intriguingly, there were zombies stationed over many of the more useful items drafting something that looked a lot like blueprints- for possible industrial assembly later? For now, most of the parts were being taken further into the facility.

I didn’t see any other armored suits, but after glancing at me the “Civilian” zombies seemed to recognize what I was wearing as friendly and didn’t think about it any further. I wandered through the facility, trying to observe what I could without looking at any flickering screens, and I had several near misses. I got pretty lucky.

Until, eventually, I didn’t. I heard it before I saw it- a kind of metallic screeching, like static or infomorph speech but higher pitched and much more information-dense. Hearing it made my ears ring and my head begin to swim, even echoing at a long distance. I realized that it had to be an aural version of the meme and set my helmet’s filters to block external sound, immediately feeling better. Until I saw what was making it. It was a flying octopus made of metal- it had a spherical central body balanced on a ludicrous exhaust thruster, and three armored tentacles ending in what looked an awful lot like a blowtorch, a circular saw, and a bullhorn. One jointed robotic eye swiveled from the top of the thing as it blared static in all directions. It was, in short, a horrific 1960’s sci-fi robot come to life, and- apparently- now infected by the meme. As it approached packs of zombies it blasted that horrible noise at them, and they turned and- oh no. They were answering back with clicks and pops. This was some kind of internal security check and I couldn’t know the code- to know it would be mind-destroying. Asriel, this feels like something you’d set up. I began to back away, but the robot noticed and trailed after me. I tried to find an empty area for a confrontation instead- the best I could do was a nearby supply closet, recently emptied of everything but a few boxes of “Washo Detergent.” I closed the door and waited.

It caught up to me, and I sprang into action as soon as the door began to move. I yanked it inside and tried to slam it against the concrete wall. It screeched in mechanical alarm before spinning away from me, astonishingly agile on that single rocket motor, and flailed back with its tentacle limbs. The circular saw did nothing, but the blowtorch left a series of scorches across my armor and set some warning signs flashing within. I had a pistol, packed along from the APC, but I wasn’t about to fire in here and risk alerting the whole station. So I bum-rushed it. I pinned it to the wall with the bulk of my armored suit, and simply clubbed it to death with metal fists. It was… unsettling. It screeched and flailed like a living thing, and scored a couple of decent hits as it slowly crumpled under the assault. But it stopped moving eventually, and I fell back, exhausted. This damn suit was heavy.

After a while I realized I still couldn’t hear anything from outside, and re-engaged my external audio. That was when I got my second nasty shock. Asriel’s voice was ringing over the vault intercom.