Maximus

Might I offer tea before we begin? Nobody ever accepts, sir; I keep the kettle filed under optimism.

In 2296 the television record follows three roads into what remains of California; this dossier is the third. Maximus, an aspirant of the Brotherhood of Steel's western chapters, was orphaned young and raised in the order's barracks — schooled by its clerics, bruised on its training floors, and taught to want one thing: a knight's T-60, and the standing bolted to it.

The Brotherhood itself is filed elsewhere, two centuries of steel and scripture. This record is smaller and heavier: the doctrine, poured into one boy, with the lid closed.

He was a child of Shady Sands, capital of the New California Republic, a city whose ending will not sit still. A bomb fell; the survivors' chalkboard says 2277, other records strain that arithmetic, and this archive files the date as contested. What is attested is the boy: he hid in a refrigerator while his city ended, and crawled out to a knight in T-60 standing over him like a saint of steel. The order took him in. That is the record's verb. Took.

The raising is shown plainly: aspirants beaten by aspirants, the officers arriving only when it was done; worth measured in willingness to die; armor preached as sainthood. When his friend Dane won a squire's post, a razor in a boot maimed Dane's foot, and every eye turned to Maximus, who had wanted the post enough to be plausible. He denied the act, confessed the wanting, and offered the order his life; the tribunal — pleased, I suspect, by that arithmetic — handed him the post: squire to Knight Titus. Who held the razor is answered late in this file, and it is no one the tribunal thought to ask.

Knight Titus proved a small man in a large suit — bored, cruel, contemptuous of his own scripture. When a yao guai pulled him down and his courage went before his blood did, he demanded the stimpak in his squire's keeping. Maximus held it, and held it, and told him he did not deserve the armor. Then the armor was empty. Then it was not.

There followed an education in wearing a dead man's name. A new squire, Thaddeus, arrived to serve "Knight Titus," and Maximus, handed a boy to command, repeated Titus gesture for gesture — the doctrine transmits through the armor whoever is inside. Then Maximus confessed the lie himself — and when Thaddeus would not swear to a cover story, he turned the armor on the boy. Thaddeus shut the suit down, pulled the fusion core, and left him entombed in his own sainthood. Lucy MacLean let him out.

With her, briefly, the file brightens. In Vault 4, a shelter for surface survivors — his scattered Shady Sands among them — he tasted comfort, returned a stolen fusion core because she asked, confessed his true name and worst act, and was invited to a life in Vault 33 regardless. At a radio relay in the hills they caught his fled squire; Maximus sent the boy running, gave Lucy the true head, and lifted a ruined fake from a corpse nearby. They parted there with a kiss and a counterfeit head. It is the only stretch of this record where nobody is teaching him anything.

The counterfeit bought him a pistol at his temple; he bargained his life against the artifact's location. Dane stepped forward and confessed: the maiming had been their own hand, done from dread of the wasteland, never meaning the blame for a friend. Dane's punishment was the battle. Maximus's pardon was to guide it.

At Griffith Observatory the Brotherhood took its prize. His squad was fed to the Ghoul. The boy from Shady Sands stood before the man who erased it — Hank MacLean, Lucy's father — and was knocked flat in one blow. He woke to Moldaver dying beside her machine as cold fusion lit Los Angeles, and to her last request: when the Brotherhood misuses this, try to stop them. She did not sound certain he could.

Dane found him beside her body, drew the wrong conclusion, and his denial went under the chant: Knight Maximus. Hailed a knight for a kill not his, in an order he had just been asked to defy, on standing built — like the tribunal's mercy, like Titus's name — upon a lie. He does not look glad. There the reel ends, sir; what follows is beyond this coverage, and the archive prefers a gap to a guess.