Once upon a time, there was a place called America. It was a bastion of freedom in a world that was slowly sliding into tyranny, a testament to the idea that a man or a woman could make their own decisions and steer the ship of their own life. But I never really lived there, not that America. When I was one year old, the first lockdown happened. I don't really remember it, but I remember the second wave. I was ten years old. It was strange seeing my parents, my friends' parents, my teachers, all so frightened about the New Plague being back... but also hearing everyone complaining about the masks and the travel bans and the business closures. I didn't really understand everything then, but even to me I could see that things weren't working. The second wave was the first time I was ever afraid, really afraid in my life. But it wasn't the last.

 

The thing is, one of the ideas that made America great was that if everyone got a fair shake, everyone could play the game, and they could win. Now, I learned in law school that this was more aspirational than historical, but once upon a time, we tried. But America was a place built on plenty, a place with the space and the resources and the stability for people to make plans and then focus on them. A place where you didn't have to worry about surviving day to day... at least in theory. The oil was already drying up when I was born, though. I remember wondering why the hand-me-down toys from my parents and my older siblings were plastic, but all the new ones were die-cast metal or wood. You could tell a new doll from an old one just by their weight. I remember when our television broke and that slim LED panel gave way to a heavy wooden cabinet with a cathode ray tube. 

 

But for me, safe and sound in central New England, and for my neighbors and friends? I don't think we ever really believed our way of life would end. The government told us that clean, sustainable fusion power would free us from oil, that the horror of the resource wars would never come to America's shores. We believed it. The government told us that industrial deregulation and repealing environmental laws would solve our unemployment problems and let our wages keep up with inflation. We believed it. The government told us that while the graphics might not be as pretty, while the boxes might be a little heavier, that our domestic electronics were reliable and long-lasting, and that we could live without the increasingly communist-controlled rare earth metals. We believed it. We lived our lives in our increasingly shrinking oases of middle class contentment, and we turned a blind eye to the shadows on the periphery.

 

 

Because elsewhere, things were falling apart. It started in Four States - protests against the lockdowns, food riots, highway closures, general strikes. The government always had the same answer: communist agitation, and the government always had the same solution: violence. I remember when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I was fifteen years old, watching TV between classes - we were back on remote learning after another flareup of the Plague - and I watched the Commonwealth Army drive tanks through the picket lines to let scabs into a factory. I knew the story there: they were replacing all their highest paid workers with robots, firing all the Asian-American employees on suspicion of communist sympathies, refusing to negotiate a contract with the union. And the last part stuck in my throat the most: the governor announced that no one arrested during the crackdown would be allowed to use public defenders. If they couldn't afford a lawyer, they could defend themselves in court. It was so wrong. 

 

 

It only got worse after the Chinese attacked us the next year. The communists weren't like fractious Euros or the decadent, perpetually impoverished Soviets. No, this was the only world power that still had meaningful oil reserves, guarded by the formidable People's Liberation Navy deep within the nine-dash line. This was the only world power with high capacity batteries, optical media, digital cameras, fiber optics, and high density semiconductors. We were undeniably the masters of fusion power, but it was our hulking atomic tanks against small and nimble Chinese weapon systems. And of course, both sides had robots and both sides programmed them to be absolutely merciless. There was no such thing as protecting civilians when your autonomous robots are don't understand the difference between a soldier and a civilian. 

 

I mentioned before how we believed that deregulation would fix the unemployment crisis. It didn't. But the war sure did. Between the draft, the hideous losses among both soldiers and civilians in the North West and later in Canada, and the final collapse of the public health regime and a resurgence of the New Plague on a level we'd never seen before, the population across all age groups rapidly shrunk. Those who weren't scooped up in the draft fled the cities if they could, and the cities themselves shrunk as the government tore down now-abandoned neighborhoods to reclaim their contents - precious plastics and rare earths - for the war effort. And of course, the government suddenly became very interested in the population growing. My hormone-drenched self of the time didn't mind one bit the sudden drive for natalism. Obscenity laws? Gone. Sexualized advertisements? Endorsed by consumer protection agencies. Healthcare for expectant mothers? Free and high quality. By the time I moved into my house in Sanctuary hills, it literally came pre-furnished with erotic art to help 'get us in the mood' for filling it with kids. 

 

 

Yeah, I liked this new cultural tone. This part of it at least. And I was old and wise enough by then to appreciate the irony of so-called family values conservatives complaining that big business' ads weren't pornographic enough. But other parts of this shift made me so angry. Anti-discrimination laws to protect the LGBT community? Repealed. Abortion? Flat-out illegal, with exceptions only to save the life or the future fertility of the mother. Birth control? Schedule 1 controlled substance, with the full weight of BADTFL enforcing the prohibition. Schools and churches promoting abstinence? Also illegal. OK, I didn't mind that last one, but I still understood how it was a fundamental violation of the constitution, and so it made me grind my teeth too. A summer internship with one of those rare law firms that both fought against unconstitutional laws and somehow managed to avoid being shut down by the Civil Defense Administration was enough to cement my decision: I was going to law school.

 

I hated law school. By now you already know I was growing disillusioned, but my days at the Suffolk County School of Law opened my eyes to just how much we'd lost. I felt so powerless, I felt like a prisoner in my own country. And now I understood that the bars had been slowly put in over years - decades - starting long before the Plague or the war with China. They'd built it so quietly and carefully that I hadn't even realized I was in a cage. With every lesson, I learned about our rights as citizens, about the legal options to defend them, and about why those options were futile. I was about ready to drop out, but then I met Nate.

 

Nate was... something special. He was on TDY from the war, attending a training course at Fort Strong, and we met up by chance at the mall adjoining the Prudential Center. It turns out we both needed something to read, and our tastes in books guided us the same aisle at Barnes, Noble, and Bezos. In my opinion, BN&B was the best place in Boston to get real science fiction (read: not thinly disguised romance novels) and Nate... well, Nate had simpler tastes. He was just there for the new Grognak omnibus. But he was cute, I was restless, and it turned out we had pretty good chemistry. The affair was fast, intense, and so fulfilling. And then Nate was off to the Pacific Front and I was back to law school. We kept in touch though, and his letters managed to stave off my malaise to get me through to graduation.

 

 

Fast forward a few years to 2077. Nate was back, and in one piece. I could tell the war was living on in his mind, but the VA had gotten him a good therapist to help him work through his PTSD and he'd made a lot of friends at the Veteran's Hall. The Army had given him four years off to heal the scars of the war and, they emphasized, to have some kids. After that he'd be liable to be called back up, but that seemed like an eternity away. I didn't just have my law degree, I had a great job at a big law firm in Worchester and an advance of a full year's salary - despite the soaring unemployment rates, jobs that a robot couldn't do were in high demand, and the free labor market was alive and well. We got married in April, right as spring started to roll in, and reserved a space in a new gated community that was going up near Concord. 

 

Even though I knew the news wasn't reporting the big problems in the interior Commonwealths or even the food shortages in Boston and points north, the future felt bright. I'd worked through the funk that law school had put me into, and I was excited to make a difference with my new firm. The war wasn't going to completely release its grip on Nate for a while, but I think he was still happy and he seemed really excited about the volunteer work he was doing for the Hall. And of course, we had our first child on the way. Yep, we didn't need those randy prints the house came furnished with. I was well into my second trimester by the time we moved in. Four months later, I brough Shaun home from Medford Memorial, healthy and happy as could be. 

 

 

And then, a week before Halloween, it was all over. I don't think we'll ever know what really happened in those final hours - but I've seen some evidence that leads me to believe the Chinese launched a first strike from stealth submarines off both coasts. Unfortunately for them and the rest of the world, their first strike failed and we counterattacked. And it didn't stop there. We hammered the communists and they hammered us until there was nothing left. I'm told that somewhere in there, the Euros and the Soviets decided to settle old scores and joined the rest of the human race in collective suicide. 

 

The fairy tale was over.

 

 

But my story didn't end there. I mean, that's obvious since I'm telling you this now, but I was one of those lucky sixty thousand or so who found a place in the vaults. I say 'lucky' with air quotes because Vault 111 wasn't a control vault. It was one of the many sadistic experimental facilities Vault-Tek had established, and experimented on me they did. Officially, 111 was there to test cryogenic suspension systems, and they certainly did freeze me. Froze us all. But they didn't keep us frozen - to this day I don't like to talk about what happened during the other, unofficial experiments, but it left a mark on me. Inside and out. Suffice it to say that when I emerged from that vault, two hundred and ten years later, Nate was dead and Shaun was missing - kidnapped. All my hopes and dreams, erased and forgotten.

 

My name is Charlotte Ellison. Charley. This is the story of how I survived, and of how my friends and I pulled the Commonwealth back from the brink of extinction. 

 

 

 

Behind The Scenes

As I touched on in my recent programming note, it's hard for me to work on my Skyrim blogs because of the problems with site latency and upload time and reliability. I was thinking of alternate things I could do and one thing that came to mind was my Fallout 4 build. I finished it off a long time ago (though I'm sure if I went back to it I would find a lot of opportunities for improvement based on my ongoing modding skill development) and Sim Settlements 2:2 recently came out. I figured I'll give that a spin and blog it in a more high level, less "blow-by-blow" format where I don't have to interrupt my gameplay as frequently to upload images or jump back and forth to live blog adventure details.

 

At the time I'm writing this, I am unable to successfully upload any images, so I'll have to loop back later and add in the pictures. For now I've included screenshot links to imgur as a stopgap.