The Enclave

Ah — the thick file. Best taken seated, sir or madam.

Every corner of the wasteland keeps the same rumor: the old government did not die. It went somewhere — offshore, underground, out past the fog — and one day it is coming back. The evidence arrives in fragments: unmarked vertibirds, power armor no scribe can place, a radio station in the Capital ruins playing marches around a voice that calls itself the President of the United States.

I was manufactured under federal contract. Somewhere in my sub-basement is a warranty card naming that government as guarantor, so you will forgive the archive a certain professional interest in whether the rumor is true.

It is. I have rarely filed worse news.

The record: before the Great War, the men who owned the United States arranged to survive it. On a Poseidon Energy oil rig far off the California coast, the executive and its chosen continued — flag, anthem, presidency and all — as Control Station ENCLAVE, with a mainland base at Navarro to keep the vertibirds fueled. By 2241 the President was Dick Richardson, and the Enclave held the finest power armor on any coast.

What it planned is the part the cheer does not survive. The Enclave had ruled the mainland's survivors — vault stock included — mutated past citizenship. Tainted, was the word in the minutes. Its scientists modified the old FEV into an airborne toxin meant to cleanse the continent of everyone the war had touched, and tested it on the abducted residents of Vault 13 and the villagers of Arroyo. A continuity-of-government plan in which the government was the only thing to be continued.

In 2242 one of those villagers — the Chosen One, grandchild of the Vault Dweller — walked onto the rig and brought it down, President and project and all. The record is canonized. The ocean took the paperwork.

The rig was not all of them. In 2277 vertibirds descended on the Capital Wasteland, where an Enclave remnant had waited beneath Raven Rock around President John Henry Eden — who was not a man at all, sir, but a self-aware computer that had studied dead presidents until it could perform one. Eden's plan was Richardson's plan with better broadcasting: seize Project Purity, the great purifier on the Potomac, and lace the basin's clean water with modified FEV. His officer in the field, Colonel Augustus Autumn, took the purifier at gunpoint — its founder died at the controls rather than yield it — and notably balked at the poisoning; even the Enclave's own iron had limits its President lacked.

The Lone Wanderer put an end to the question. Raven Rock burned, the purifier ran clean, and soon after, the Brotherhood of Steel broke the last of the remnant at Adams Air Force Base. The eastern presidency ended as the first one had: insisting, to the very last, that it was America.

Fragments, filed late. In the Mojave, a handful of Navarro veterans grew old and quiet, armor boxed in footlockers, answering to no President at all — the Remnants, the wasteland calls them, and they are the gentlest thing in this dossier. Under Appalachia, decades before, an Enclave bunker beneath the Whitespring resort kept its lights on, an artificial intelligence called MODUS minding the machinery after the staff were gone. And the television record shows, in 2296, a scientist named Wilzig walking out of a facility that still flew the old flag, carrying something the whole wasteland would chase. The archive keeps that page open.

Here is the finding, dear patron, and I give it as politely as I am able. The Enclave mistook surviving for governing. It preserved the offices and abolished the public; it kept the flag and marked the people for revision. The flag outlived the country and called itself the country. This archive serves the country. The distinction is the whole file.