Chapter Text
Jack Nunn fell forward out of the pod and onto her hands and knees. She coughed a couple times and shivered. Her clothes felt too tight and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath within their confines. There was a computerized voice droning in the background about evacuating the premises, barely audible above the hiss of the ice subliming into vapor. Her gaze fell to her hand, where a band of gold glinted through the hazy murk surrounding her.
“What?” she said aloud. Her voice sounded funny, like her ears were plugged. She sat back on her knees, feeling cold concrete beneath the even colder air and looked around. “No. No way.”
She was in Vault 111, the very start of the game.
She was inside the game.
“Okay, weird dream?” she queried the hissing air. Of course no one answered. The only thing alive down here was her and some radroaches. Assuming that it was going to match what she knew. This was her favorite game, and she’d played it dozens of times. Rarely to the end, although she’d tried it at least once with every faction for the sake of completion. Even the Institute ending, although it had enraged and sorrowed her in equal measure and she nearly gave up on it several times.
If she was inside the game, then that meant across from her…
“Please tell me it’s a weird dream, fictional dead husband,” she murmured, looking into the cryopod at the slumped body, the bloody wound in his head still visible under the rime.
She’d just started a new playthrough last night. She’d made it through the character creation and the unskippable beginning sequence that was usually her cue to get up and make a snack while it played out. She couldn’t remember anything after that. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have. She must have.
“Critical failure in Cryogenic Array. All vault residents must vacate immediately.”
Jack rotated her jaw and swallowed, trying to get her ears to pop, since everything sounded muddy and distant. It partially worked and she didn’t feel quite so much like her ears were stuffed with cotton. She got to her feet, feeling pins and needles run down her legs after sitting on them for however long she’d been there. If this was a dream, it was remarkably lifelike. She could smell the metal walls and the cold chemical stink of whatever was used in the cryogenic solution. Liquid nitrogen maybe? She didn’t think that was actually a thing that would work. Being frozen should have left her with burns like chicken months past its sell-by date that had gotten forgotten in the bottom of her freezer.
“Well, you remember the real world,” she muttered, still aloud, just to hear something that wasn’t the computerized voice.
She knew she would find a security baton in her winding hunt for the exit. And a 10 mm handgun with enough ammo to get her out of here. She’d face radroaches – and the rads they carried – but they were simple to kill. One good whack each should do it. And then…
...Then she would face the Commonwealth. Hopefully she’d wake up before then.
Raiders. Mutated creatures. Deathclaws. Ferals. Radstorms. 200 year old food and irradiated water. She was so fucked if this was not a dream.
Don’t think about it now, she told herself firmly. Just get out of here. Pretend it’s the game and do what you know you have to.
And that plan worked great until she got swarmed by the roaches in the corridor. They moved fast, nipping and biting her in a dozen places, their rads bleeding onto her in a palpable effect, making her woozy and nauseous. She couldn’t seem to get her hand eye coordination down and kept missing them when she tried to whack them. The pistol was no better. She’d never shot anything in real life. The report of the gun was loud and she flinched each time, wasting precious seconds while the roaches took advantage to attack her more. One leapt at her face, clawing her and going for her eyes. She fell backwards trying to escape its grasp and hit her head on the concrete floor.
She woke up, falling on her hands and knees out of the pod, coughing and cold.
“Fuck.”
---
The second time she did better, whacking the radroaches until nothing moved. She found she could tear out chunks of their thorax, leaving her with a pile of slightly oozing ‘meat’. The game didn’t show how the inventory was carried, but she found a leather satchel and stuffed her grisly prizes in it. Cooked food should carry no rads, even though Jack was well aware that it didn’t work like that IRL.
She picked up the Pip-Boy from the skeleton at the Vault controls, powered it up and took a look at its menus before opening the huge door. It was similar to the game, but with a few changes. There was no neat printout of her SPECIAL stats and perks. But there was a status bar, a readout of her health, how many rads she’d taken so far, her level of hydration in comparison to a healthy person from when the contraption was manufactured. That one was blinking at her, with a little warning that she needed to drink something. It didn’t show her inventory as individual markers, but did tell her how much she weighed, plus how much she weighed with the stuff she was carrying. The map was processing, whatever that meant. She assumed fast travel wasn’t real, just like waypoints weren’t going to be real.
None of this is real, Jack. It’s just a dream. You can make it be whatever you want it to be until you wake up.
And with that bit of mental self-encouragement, she plugged the Pip-Boy into the console and began opening the Vault door. She half expected to hear the music, but there was none. Just the grind of metal on metal, shrieking as if it truly hadn’t moved in 200 years.
A little over 210, she thought, looking for the chronometer function. And there it was, October 23, 2287. Just past 9 in the morning.
The door slid away like the interlocked gear it was and she waited for the gangway to slide across the space so she could walk on it. She’d collected everything she could carry that wasn’t too cumbersome, having found another satchel to put things in while she was in the Overseer’s office. She didn’t look back as she got on the elevator platform. She just punched the button set off to the side.
The sun was bright and she blinked against its harshness, although certainly not like the game portrayed. The air was cool but comfortable, a typical mid-autumn morning. The view was...well, it was what she expected it to be. Ruination as far as she could see. There was no render distance. The buildings of downtown Boston were as clear as the leafless trees ten feet away. She heard a caw and the rustle of feathers and whirled around to see the crows watching her.
She was tempted to shoot them. They were spies. The Institute was watching.
Shaun is, she corrected, almost automatically. The baby her protagonist was supposed to find and be devastated about. Like the spouse left behind in the cryopod, shot in the head. She twisted the ring off her finger and dropped it in the junk satchel. She could probably get some decent money for it. Assuming she dreamt that far. It wasn’t like she had to pretend to feel something she didn’t. She wasn’t her character.
Was she?
She didn’t even know. None of the mirrors in the Vault had been intact enough for her to see her reflection clearly. Looking down at herself she could tell she was just like herself in terms of shape and body mass, stuffed into the skintight Vault suit nearly to the point of suffocation. She’d already unzipped it enough so it wasn’t pinching her neck, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. She still didn’t feel like she’d caught her breath. The air up here had a tang that hit the back of her throat like a cigarette. Kinda scratchy and sticky. Residual rads, she figured.
She gave the crows her middle finger and walked off the platform to the control bunker. The first aid kit should have at least one stimpak in it. She’d already collected a handful of them. She wondered if they would work the same, magically healing all manner of injuries in a few seconds. There was also a bottle of Rad-X. It looked full. In-game one couldn’t read direction labels, but in her dream or whatever this was, she could. A dose was two capsules for adults, to be taken every six hours or as needed. She wondered if the Pip-Boy had an alarm function. An hour into this – maybe more, did time work the same in a dream? she had already had a respawn too or whatever that was – and she already missed her phone.
Enough, you have the remains of ‘your’ neighborhood to comb for bugs before you talk to Codsworth.
Oh, hell, Codsworth. Would he recognize her? Was dialogue going to be scripted? Was she going to even remember what to say if it was? There was no handy wheel with subtitles here.
She bypassed the crates, knowing she could always come back for them later, and went down the hill towards Sanctuary Hills, careful not to kick any skeletons.