The Return West

Might I present the newest reel in the collection — the television record, Season One, handled with the white gloves.

Vault 33 sits beneath the ruin of Los Angeles, two hundred and nineteen years after the bombs: clean corridors, a wedding under paper streamers. The bride is Lucy MacLean, a dweller of excellent temperament and better aim. The groom arrives with raiders behind his smile, and by morning the vault is burned and the Overseer — Hank MacLean, Lucy's father — is marched off by a woman called Moldaver.

Lucy goes up, into a wasteland two centuries deep, alongside a Brotherhood squire and a ghoul bounty hunter with older business. She went up to find her father. The record is about what else she found.

The raiders did not force the door. They came through Vault 32 — a sister vault whose dwellers were dead — carrying the Pip-Boy of Rose MacLean, Lucy's mother, gone from the vault years before.

Follow the numbers down to Vault 31, which holds no community at all — only Vault-Tec's own management, frozen as the world ended and thawed one at a time to serve as overseers of 32 and 33. Shepherds, planted in the flock. The program's steward is Bud Askins, a junior executive continuing as a brain on a rover, still managing after two centuries. Hank MacLean is one of his. When Rose fled upstairs with her children and found a living city — Shady Sands, capital of the New California Republic — it was Hank who fetched the children home, and Hank whose hand the record places on the bomb that ended it.

One caution, faithfully filed: a chalkboard in Vault 4's refugee classroom dates the Fall of Shady Sands to 2277; the Mojave record shows the Republic fielding an army at Hoover Dam in 2281. The chronology is CONTESTED. The archive prefers a gap to a guess.

Before the wasteland feared him, Cooper Howard was Hollywood's cowboy, then Vault-Tec's — the thumbs-up in the advertisements is his. His wife, Barb, was a Vault-Tec executive. Lee Moldaver was the scientist whose cold fusion promised energy without end, until her company was bought and shelved; she handed Cooper a listening device and asked what his wife did all day.

What he heard was a boardroom: Vault-Tec gathering its rivals — RobCo, West Tek, Big MT among them — to parcel out the vaults as private experiments, and weighing the business advantage of dropping the first bomb itself. Here I must be exact. The recording ends before any vote. No record I hold establishes what that room decided. I have filed that sentence once before, about a Saturday morning in October.

He outlived the morning. Radiation unmade his face and unspooled his years; a drug, dearly bought in vials, is all that keeps a ghoul so old from going feral. Two centuries he has hunted bounties to pay for it. What he is truly hunting is anyone left from that room.

The season's prize is Moldaver's miracle, finished at last: cold fusion, carried out of the Enclave in the head of a defector named Wilzig. Every road bends toward it.

They meet at Griffith Observatory, where Moldaver keeps the remnant of the New California Republic — veterans of Shady Sands under the two-headed bear. The Brotherhood of Steel comes down in force. In the smoke, Lucy learns what her father is; Moldaver, dying, lights the device, and Los Angeles glows for the first time since the bombs. How she crossed the two centuries between, the reel declines to say, and I decline to guess.

Hank MacLean walks east, toward a city of lights on the horizon. The record closes on that skyline, on survivors setting out after him. Reel Two lies beyond this coverage, listed as in processing. What the city is called, the reel never says — so neither, dear patron, shall I.