Tales from the Wasteland: Black as Oil

Author's Notes on Lore

This is likely to be dull for those of you not interested specifically in the lore of the Fallout games and Fallout 3 in particular, so you may want to skip down to Chapter 1. Do please read this before leaving a comment arguing with my stated information about the Capital Wasteland, aliens, Charon, Ghouls, androids, or other parts of the Fallout universe.

Lore stated here will be from the unmodified Fallout 3 PC game. I use many mods, but I try not to include them in fanfics. At this time I do not play any of the DLCs, but I'll try not to miss any important lore from them (thanks to the Vault Wiki). I definitely welcome corrections when I do miss things that are stated explicitly in the game or on the Wiki.

Here are some things pertinent to this story which I understand to be true about the Fallout world, based on FO3 gameplay and the Wiki:

-Ghouls may or may not live to great age depending on exactly how their DNA has been affected by radiation; similarly, Ghouls can come into existence merely by radiation exposure if they have the right genetics. (Contrary to how ordinary people react to strong radiation exposure, which is by dying horribly as in our world/real life.)

-Ghouls are not harmed by radiation; in fact, they heal faster when exposed to it.

-In the unmodified game, Charon stands head and shoulders taller than most other NPCs. He is a big fellow.

-Charon's contract can be purchased from Ahzrukhal for 2000 caps (or by doing a quest which will not be used in this story), and what he does right after his contract is purchased in this story is canonical.

-Charon has a tendency to prefer his combat knife or other melee weapons to ranged weapons even when instructed not to use them. (Both noted on Wiki and observed during gameplay.) He also seems to strongly prefer the flamer to his shotgun despite its infinite durability and ammo. He is expert in sneak and explosives.

-Charon was brainwashed as a child (it is not specified how) and is blindly obedient to the holder of his contract. The contract can be invalidated by the contract holder attacking Charon or by their sale/gift of it to someone else, not by anything less (if fired he will state that the player still holds his contract).

-Charon can act on his own initiative in combat situations, and in fact will attack definite hostiles without orders to do so.

Aliens/Extraterrestrials and Recon Craft Theta:

-Recon Craft Theta is crashed/embedded in the ground in the Northern part of the map in FO3. It has a shattered cockpit with green blood dripping inside it and a dead alien who appears to have been thrown clear. There is higher-than-normal background radiation around the craft, large creatures may spawn near it (including yao guai or deathclaws), and a radio signal can be picked up near it (the actual signal is in fact a joke played backwards, but for purposes of the story I will pretend it's in an alien tongue).

-Physical appearance of the aliens, which my main OC will partly share. Green blood is also found on the alien's helmet and in the cockpit.

-There is no statement as to whether they breathe oxygen (the crashed alien has a helmet on), but I understand there will be a DLC in which the player will be on an alien spacecraft, so I'm hoping that means that they do.

-The alien blaster uses alien power cells, loads from the side, does electrical damage, and is one of the game's more powerful weapons because of its high rate of critical hits. There is one with the dead alien at Recon Craft Theta, along with a few power cells. Other power cells are located in a clearing not far off.

Androids:

-Androids exist in the FO3 universe and are built/created in the Commonwealth.

-Those shown in the game are male (there are only two canonically).

-More advanced androids can eat, sleep, digest, bleed red, and grow hair - they really cannot be visually distinguished from humans. (That last is observational/Wiki rather than stated game canon.)

Here are the things I'll be deducing or making up:

-The Vault Dweller was an ordinary human male. He performed only the main sequence of quests and is dead at the time of this story, having successfully accomplished Project Purity without being saved by the sequence of events that happens in the Broken Steel DLC. See TFW: Thistle for more information.

-In the game, the player does not have the option to tell Charon to kill or hurt people who are not immediately hostile, but it's canonical that this can be done (per statements of Ahzrukhal). I take this to mean that he will do absolutely anything when told except harm himself physically.

-Charon may or may not have it together mentally. He often talks to himself, occasionally as if he were having a conversation ("Over here. Where? Keep firing!"). Whatever mental problems he has don't affect his ability to follow instructions nor to converse coherently with the player when addressed.

-Some of his personality, way of thinking, etc., will be made up by me. I'll try to be true to how he seems in the game, but no two people will experience/interpret the character exactly the same way, so he probably won't be the same in my head as yours.

-Charon's actions right after the player purchases his contract appear to indicate he's capable of some initiative. I will probably run with this.

-Anything I say about Charon's raising or history will be made up, since we don't have a canon source for that - other than Ahzrukhal's vague statements that he was brainwashed as a child and that he ended up in Ahzrukhal's employ due to his own choices. I will assume that this process began in early childhood and continued for some time, because that's about the only explanation for his continuing these behaviors as an adult (even then it's unlikely).

-It's not stated how old Charon is or if he has Hayflick immortality.

-At the time I'm beginning this story, the Mother Ship Zeta DLC is not out yet. I may end up disagreeing with things it says about the aliens; I will fix on the fly if possible. If not, I'll just live with being wrong.

-Nothing in this story is related to Geonox's alien hybrid race mod, which is a strapping male-only race with quite an attractive alien head mesh but normal human anatomy otherwise. (See notes on sexes below.)

-Since the aliens bleed green, I could assume them to have a copper base (like Star Trek's Vulcans) or an iron-hemolymph-base (like terrestrial arthropods) for their blood chemistry. I'm going with hemolymph because it would be more human-compatible biologically and there is real-world precedent for it.

-Similarly, I will assume them to have double-stranded DNA and sexes somewhat analogous to ours (if lacking much visible dimorphism). The vast majority of macroorganisms on our planet have two sexes, including many plants. It's nice and simple physically, and it's useful in terms of genetic exchange for increased adaptability in offspring. Interesting as it is to imagine alien species with three and more sexes which are all needed for reproduction, it's just not very probable that a species would develop that way without quickly going extinct. Having just one sex, on the other hand, doesn't allow much adaptability against predation, environmental change and disease. This is why, of all our planet's wacky sexual variations, most of them are male and female at some point - whether it's male and female alternating with parthenogenetic female (aphids and water fleas), disexual male and female alternating with asexual self-cloning (many plants), female changing to male over the life cycle (some fish), or whatever.

-Anything stated about their language, culture or other biology will be made up by me. The things I'm assuming about their senses are not canonical that I know of, but are similar to elements that are often part of the cultural lore of Roswell grays (which they resemble).

-I assume the aliens to be less vulnerable to radiation than humans, based on the radiation found around the crashed spacecraft.

-I assume that not all androids are as advanced and humanlike as Harkness and, to a lesser extent, Armitage. After all, Harkness is designed for a special purpose; it would be to the makers' advantage not to make ALL their androids so easily able to "out-human the humans."

-Since his number is A3-21, I assume this to be a series designation and quality level. Accordingly, I assume "lesser" androids would belong to the B, C, etc. series. The other numbers then indicate production runs and subtypes (hence B2-09 later on).

-Further, I assume that there are at least a few non-squishy parts to the androids. Harkness's memory wipe and redo certainly would not be possible on a normal human brain. Also cf. the "android component" which Victoria from the Railroad will give to the player as proof of Harkness's "death."

-I assume female androids exist and, like male androids, are specialized to various tasks. This is reasonable if we assume Commonwealth scientists are of both sexes and that both sexes have equal power over decision making processes involving the creation of androids.

Original Characters and locations:

-The underground lab locale is made up. See the "Those!" quest line for a smaller precedent.

-Xen (pronounced "Zen") is an OC, and her personality and biology is a complete invention. I have no idea if she is possible in canon, but the Fallout universe is full of weird hybrids and genetic remixes. I've assumed her psychology to be mostly human (otherwise it'd be a bit hard for me to write about her).

-Xen's creators and their robots are all OCs.

-Bell is an OC and her character type is not exactly like a default one (how will become clear).

-There may be other OCs in the story as well. Canon characters will undoubtedly be present and I will try to be accurate with them as much as possible; however, where information is limited, I will feel free to improvise.

-ADDITIONAL NOTES ON CHARON'S PSYCHOLOGY AFTER CH. 13: Based on the events of the game, Charon is not psychotic. That is, he is able to accurately perceive and interact with his surroundings, because otherwise it would not be possible for him to closely follow instructions and remain passive at other times.

However, his behavior is consistent with hearing voices. He sometimes speaks as if to someone besides himself or the player character. I did some research on this via Wikipedia and discovered the Hearing Voices Movement, whose research data indicates that something like half of people who hear voices experience them as benign and are able to function in an ordinary way. They are not paranoid, violent, or homeless. These are the people whose voices don't constantly put them down or order them around, so they are not a source of constant internal conflict. Many of these people, even those with benign voices, began to hear them after an early trauma (there's a high correlation with physical and/or sexual abuse as a child). These are not multiple personalities as the media has presented them. These are not people experiencing themselves as one person one minute and someone else the next, or trapped in an interior world of battling personalities. They identify themselves as the same individual they have always been, and the voices as external to themselves. If anything, I'm being less realistic by suggesting that the voices can sometimes "borrow" Charon's voice (required by the fact that he asks and answers himself sometimes, as in "Over here! Where??").

I think it's reasonable to suppose Charon might have such an experience resulting from the extreme trauma of his early conditioning. Since voices can function as a coping mechanism rather than an additional trauma, and he could experience them while still being able to understand and follow orders, this makes the most sense to me.

Thanks for your patience, and on with the show.

A/N: Yep, I still like my author's notes. It's a sickness.

Most of this takes place concurrent to and shortly after the events of TFW: Thistle, with which it shares a miniverse. If you wonder why the characters talk about a cure for Ghoulhood, you may want to read that one first, but it won't be really important otherwise.

1

Twenty years before Project Purity, two scientists, four robots, and enough tools and equipment to equip a small biomechanics laboratory left Raven Rock.

This was by no means a usual circumstance. Benevolent as the regime of John Henry Eden might be, it was not customary for Enclave-trained personnel to depart quite so informally, particularly carrying millions of caps' worth of equipment. Quite the contrary. The two scientists, whom we will call by their full and richly earned titles of Drs. Sherman Montalban and Jessica Graber, spent quite some time researching, planning and collecting. The covert programming of a Vertibird transport with an AI sophisticated enough to fly itself and secure enough to follow only the instructions of Dr. Montalban was a project of several years all on its own.

Faking the authorization to take the bird out, armed to the teeth and loaded down with everything but the acid-proof porcelain sink (it wouldn't fit), was child's play by comparison. It was well over 48 hours before anyone realized something untoward had taken place. By then it was far, far too late.

Drs. Montalban and Graber were well aware that the Vertibird could eventually be traced, so they didn't waste much time at the crash site East of Raven Rock. They tracked the alien signal to its source, sent their specially modified Mister Handy unit out to retrieve the single sad little corpse, and sped off to the South and the Capitol.

They weren't so foolish as to fly over the Mall, of course. Their research had been quite thorough, involving the creative acquisition of a great deal of surveillance footage, and they both had a fairly good idea of the abrupt end to which a rocket launcher held by a super mutant could bring their venture. The bird dipped and swooped between the gutted remains of tall buildings, using its full sensor suite to look for a suitable power source. They finally found it in the Metro station under Crystal Plaza.

The Plaza was occupied. Raiders had set up a squatter's camp there, lolling about behind their crude barriers of wood and canvas and wire. The Vertibird soon took care of this problem, although Dr. Graber felt somewhat inconvenienced by the necessity of stepping over a charred corpse as she climbed out of the flyer. The four robots were sent to reconnoiter the station below. They cleaned out a few mole rats and another unsuspecting Raider who had not planned to share his cache of Jet with the others. In an hour they had found a suitable site: well-situated, susceptible of fortification, complete with functional plumbing and working generators. Once it had been a set of offices and a repair station.

It took two people and four robots surprisingly little time to transfer the Vertibird's full contents down to the site. They locked up the flyer and left it up above while they set about making their new home clean and safe. This was a frantically quick and yet a painstakingly careful process. Drs. Graber and Montalban had worked together for some time now, and they acted with and around each other and the bots with a precision that would astonish a layman.

When everything was finished, the pipes tapped and the locks repaired and the smuggled turret wired in place, Dr. Montalban transmitted his last orders to the Vertibird's AI. It was not without regret that he did it, but there was no other choice; once the Enclave had detected their absence, they would look for the flyer's enormous power signature first of all.

The Vertibird rose into the sky over what was left of Washington, D.C. It flew on its programmed course to the North and West. Merchants on their way out of Megaton took note of its passing. When it was as near equidistant from the City and Raven Rock as its navigational systems could accomplish, it went into a steep climb, stalled out, and crashed straight down into the desert landscape. The noise frightened a family of radscorpions. The fireball lit up the pitiless blue sky for a few seconds. And that was all.

The dead alien, which Dr. Graber persistently called a xenoorganism, was stripped, examined very thoroughly, and stuck into a preservative field station in the suite of rooms the two scientists (with a very typical scientific spirit of description) just called the Lab. They had several other field stations in that same room. Two were stolen from the Enclave. The rest were adapted from old Protectron docking stations by the clever hands of Dr. Montalban.

The two Enclave sentry bots were set to drag in debris and block up the tunnels immediately around the Lab as much as possible. The other two bots, the aforementioned modified Mister Handy and an equally tweaked Robobrain, remained inside the lab to assist with projects. Dr. Montalban had programmed them both with female voices and named them Tori and Bunni. This was very typical of his sense of humor.

"But did you have to make the Handy sound like a damn Californian?" said Dr. Graber. "I swear you've never heard that accent in your life except on tapes."

"I like that accent," said Dr. Montalban. He refused persistently to change it back.

A few weeks after that, Dr. Montalban pronounced his very first artificial womb functional and ready to go. (He started to tell Dr. Graber his plan to name it Cherri, but the look on her face and the scalpel in her hand convinced him this might be a bad idea.) By that time, Dr. Graber had a viable cell culture from the dead xenoorganism's skin cells. At first she just spliced a nucleus from one of its somatic cells into an egg from the colony of ova she had cloned from her own body.

The new conceptus failed after two cell divisions.

She tried again. This time it made it through six divisions. Then somehow a bacterium got into its container and killed every single cell. Graber's DNA and organelles had some native resistance. The xenoorganism's did not.

The third time, she used a fertilized egg and spliced the alien's DNA in chromosome by chromosome (where possible; the creature evidently possessed two more than a human being, and these had to be shoved in piecemeal). She was pleased to observe growth proceed not only through the blastocyst stage, but well up to the point where it was ready to implant into the barrel-sized interior of the artificial womb. It lasted two whole weeks before it died.

Graber and Montalban argued violently over whose fault this was, transferred the microscopic corpse into a jar of preservatives, and started over with a new nutrient solution. Graber teased apart DNA strand by strand, looking for places to shoehorn in xenoorganic additions. This time she spent a great deal more time on this part of the process. The result was a horrid little fetus that actually lived into its second trimester. It had some sort of seizure upon accidental exposure to the laboratory's ambient lighting and died hemorrhaging green-black blood into the tank.

The two scientists argued again, curtained off the room, lowered the lights, and started over.

This went on for a while. It was not until the nineteenth attempt that the fetus actually made it into the third trimester. Graber fully expected it to die the first time she opened the artificial womb's observation window, just like all the others.

This particular infant looked a bit more human than the last subject. Its skin was pale with only the slightest hint of green, it already had a tiny wisp of black hair (not unlike Dr. Montalban's), and its head was no more outsized than one would expect from a normal baby. And, instead of dying, it blinked a silver-irised eye at the light. An inner lid shot across the inside of the lens, rendering it slick and black as oil. Then the pale, wrinkled infant stuck its thumb back into its mouth, closed its perfecty ordinary outer eyelids, and went back to sleep.

"Neat trick," said Montalban. "It's actually kind of cute."

"Oh, shut up," said Graber, who could not have been happier.

Human/Xenoorganic Hybrid #19 continued to prosper. Drs. Graber and Montalban did hit a snag the day they removed it from the artificial womb. The synthetic placenta detached just as it was supposed to, and there was no trouble about the cord; the greenish-black hemolymph that served the infant for blood drained out of it just as it was supposed to do, and it was cut without event.

The new baby took a deep breath of the lab's dry air and promptly went into anaphylactic shock. Rapid administration of epinephrine by Dr. Graber saved its life (her life, in point of actual fact – Graber had been quite certain about those chromosomes). Dr. Montalban went out to scrounge some more metal to build new air filters for all the rooms in the Lab. Dr. Graber calculated to a nicety exactly how much blood she could extract for analysis without harm to her newest subject. It wasn't very much, but it did contain enough interesting data to keep her busy for quite some time.

Dr. Montalban was promptly assigned the task of feeding, holding, and otherwise directly caring for Human/Xenoorganic Hybrid #19.

"I don't want to prejudice my judgment in case we have to sacrifice it later," said Dr. Graber. "Besides, I have genetic analysis to do, and you don't. Just follow the nutritional instructions, Doctor."

"Sacrifice it?" said Dr. Montalban with some alarm, rocking the foil-wrapped infant slightly without realizing he was doing so. It cooed and played with the nearest button on his lab coat. Its tiny hands had three spatulate fingers and a thumb. "What are you talking about?"

"That's the word," said Graber patiently, "for what you do when you've finished with a laboratory subject."

"But we can find out considerably more," said Montalban. "Think what we'll learn from observing its ongoing development. The xenoorganism may have a completely different social model from ours."

"In which case, it wouldn't have imprinted so readily on you," Graber pointed out dryly. "Anyway, the point will probably be moot given that it's allergic to practically everything. Don't get attached to it."

"Nothing could be further from my mind, Doctor Graber," said Dr. Montalban, holding the infant a little further from his body. "I'll see if I can devise some padding for Bunni's chassis. She can watch it while I'm working."