Date: 8.16.2224
Location: Vault 288 — Sub-Level F
Terminal: Medical Research Archive
User: Mike Marcel
Condition: Stable / Memory improving
I went down to Sub-Level F today.
Not because anybody told me to.
That would have been easier.
I went because I had spent the better part of yesterday staring at records that didn't make sense, and eventually I reached the point where staring at them wasn't going to make them explain themselves.
So I went looking.
Samson's holotape is still in my pocket.
I'll check that out later.
Right now, I have another trail to follow.
One thing at a time.
The lower levels of Vault 288 feel different.
I don't know if that's because the lights are dimmer or because fewer people come down here, but the further I traveled, the less the Vault felt like a home and the more it felt like a place somebody had decided to forget.
The upper levels have voices.
Children.
People working.
Food.
Music.
Arguments.
Life.
Down here, the walls seem to remember when there wasn't supposed to be any.
I followed the signs toward the old medical research section.
Most of the rooms were empty.
Some had been stripped.
Others had been sealed.
There were old examination tables, storage cabinets, broken terminals, equipment that I couldn't identify, and shelves containing medical supplies that looked as though nobody had touched them in decades.
It wasn't the sinister underground laboratory I had imagined.
That almost disappointed me.
No army of scientists.
No rows of glowing tanks.
No Vault-Tec executive waiting behind a curtain to explain that my entire life had been part of some grand experiment.
Just old rooms.
Old equipment.
Old paperwork.
And dust.
A lot of dust.
There were records, though.
That's what mattered.
The research surrounding my cryogenic condition was spread across several decades. Some of it was technical. Some of it was medical. Some of it was little more than notes from people checking on a man who was still asleep.
Me.
I was becoming a recurring appointment for people who hadn't even been alive when I went to sleep.
Then I heard somebody behind me.
"You're not supposed to be down here."
I turned.
Lydia Carter.
The medic.
One of the first people I saw when I woke up.
She was leaning against the doorway with the kind of smile that told me she wasn't actually angry.
She was dressed like she had walked straight out of a medical shift and decided halfway through that professional dignity was optional.
There was something unmistakably feminine about her.
Not delicate.
Not timid.
She carried herself with the confidence of somebody who knew exactly what impression she was making and had no intention of apologizing for it.
She smiled at me.
"Although," she added, "I suppose I'm not supposed to be down here either."
I looked at her.
"You're the medic."
"Among other things."
That answer sounded deliberately vague.
I looked back at the terminal.
"I found your father's records."
Her smile changed.
Not disappeared.
Just changed.
"Ah."
I turned toward her.
"That's all you have to say?"
"What would you like me to say?"
"I found out your father spent decades researching me."
"That's true."
"I found out he was monitoring my condition long after the Great War."
"Also true."
"I found out somebody kept a treatment plan for me."
"Very true."
"And then I found your personnel record."
She raised an eyebrow.
"And?"
I looked at her.
"This is where it gets strange."
She crossed her arms.
"I was beginning to wonder when we'd get there."
I pulled up the records.
"Is Lee Carter male or female?"
She stared at me.
I continued before she could answer.
"And are you male?"
That got a laugh.
Not a nervous laugh.
A genuine one.
I wasn't trying to be funny.
"The photographs of your father show a woman," I said. "Then the personnel files say male. Your own profile says male. But you—"
I stopped.
She waited.
I decided I might as well finish.
"You present as a woman."
Lydia tilted her head.
"That's what you noticed?"
"It's difficult not to."
She smiled.
"Fair."
I pointed at the screen.
"I thought that was strange."
She walked over and looked at the photograph.
For a moment, she didn't say anything.
Then she sighed.
"Records."
She said the word like it was an old disease.
"Records are wonderful things, Mr. Marcel. They can tell you exactly what somebody entered into a box thirty years ago."
She looked at me.
"They're less useful when you want to know who the person actually was."
I leaned against the desk.
"So?"
"So what?"
"Your father."
She smiled.
"My father was male."
I looked at the photograph.
"That photograph looks like a woman."
"Yes."
"That's what I'm trying to understand."
"And you're doing wonderfully."
I gave her a look.
She laughed.
"Sorry."
She wasn't sorry.
I could tell.
"Your father transitioned?"
She nodded.
"Eventually."
"While he was married to your mother?"
"Yes."
"And your mother stayed with him?"
"Yes."
I looked back at the photograph.
"That's... complicated."
"Most families are."
She said it casually.
Then she looked at me.
"For a while, it was like having two moms."
I didn't say anything.
She continued.
"My father was born male. He transitioned while he was with my mother. My mother stayed. They worked it out between themselves."
She shrugged.
"People did that before the bombs too."
"Apparently."
She looked at me.
"You sound surprised."
"I woke up 148 years later, Lydia. Everything surprises me."
That made her laugh again.
Then she pointed toward herself.
"As for me?"
I waited.
She smiled.
"I was born male."
There was no hesitation in it.
"But my parents raised me as a young lady."
I looked at her.
"Why?"
"Because they didn't want me falling into some of the Vault positions most males were pushed toward."
That caught my attention.
"What positions?"
She shrugged.
"Security. Enforcement. Heavy maintenance. Lower-deck labor. Certain administrative tracks."
"Because you were male?"
"Because the Vault had expectations."
She leaned against the desk.
"My parents didn't like those expectations."
"So they raised you as a girl."
"Among other things."
Again.
That phrase.
I was starting to notice it.
"You keep saying things like that."
"Do I?"
"Yes."
She smiled.
"Maybe I'm a complicated woman."
I stared at her.
She smiled wider.
"Or maybe I'm a complicated man."
I laughed despite myself.
She had a talent for making a serious conversation feel like I had somehow walked into a joke I didn't understand.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"Doing what?"
"Making me more confused."
"Mr. Marcel, you've been awake for eight days. I don't think I have to work very hard."
I couldn't argue with that.
She walked past me and pulled another chair toward the terminal.
"Sit down."
I sat.
She pulled up the Carter files.
And for the first time, she stopped joking.
"My father was obsessed with cryogenics."
She brought up an old research document.
"Not because of you specifically at first."
That was important.
"What do you mean?"
"Your case became important because you survived something that most people wouldn't have."
She scrolled through the files.
"Your body had been placed into cryogenic stasis under circumstances that weren't supposed to happen. Then the war happened. The Vault sealed. Whatever procedures existed before the bombs became emergency procedures after them."
"So my father found me."
"Not exactly."
She opened another document.
"People knew you were here."
I stared at the screen.
"How many?"
"That's difficult to answer."
"Try."
She glanced at me.
"Enough."
I didn't like that answer.
"Enough isn't a number."
"No."
She continued scrolling.
"But it is sometimes the most accurate answer."
I waited.
Lydia finally explained.
"My father wasn't the first person to monitor you."
That stopped me.
"Who was?"
"We don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Some of the earliest records are incomplete. Some names were lost. Some systems were replaced. Some records were transferred between databases and corrupted."
She pointed at the screen.
"But there are enough surviving records to establish something."
"What?"
"You were not forgotten."
That landed harder than I expected.
I looked at her.
She continued.
"Somebody checked your condition. Somebody made sure your pod remained viable. Somebody monitored your biological status. Somebody kept the equipment functional."
"Why?"
She shrugged.
"That's the question."
I stared at the records.
"Did Vault-Tec order it?"
"Maybe."
"Did the Vault administration?"
"Maybe."
"Did somebody just decide that since you were already alive, they should keep you alive?"
"Maybe."
"Did my father?"
"Eventually."
"Then why did he?"
Lydia looked at the photograph of her father.
"Because he believed you were worth bringing back."
That answer was simpler than I expected.
"What did he know about me?"
"Probably less than you think."
She smiled faintly.
"That's the funny thing about scientists. They can spend forty years studying something and still know very little about the person inside the experiment."
I looked at her.
"Was I an experiment?"
"No."
She answered that one immediately.
"You were a patient."
"There's a difference."
"A very big one."
She turned toward me.
"My father wanted to understand what happened to you because if we could understand you, we could understand cryogenic injury. Maybe we could improve recovery. Maybe we could help somebody else."
"Maybe?"
"Science is full of maybes."
She tapped the terminal.
"Your body was a question nobody had answered."
I sat quietly.
That explanation made sense.
Maybe too much sense.
"What about the monitoring?"
She looked at me.
"People cared."
I frowned.
"That's it?"
"That's not a small thing."
She turned back toward the terminal.
"Look at the dates."
I did.
Then later entries.
Then more.
Different names.
Different handwriting.
Different generations of medical personnel.
All connected to the same patient.
Me.
I looked at the screen for a long time.
"They kept checking."
"Yes."
"Even when my father wasn't here."
"Yes."
"Even after he died."
"Yes."
I leaned back.
That was the part I hadn't expected.
I had been thinking about a conspiracy.
A secret.
A reason.
Something hidden beneath Sub-Level F.
Instead, what I found was something considerably harder to explain.
People cared.
Maybe they were curious.
Maybe they were scientists.
Maybe they were following orders.
Maybe they believed preserving me was the right thing to do.
Maybe all of those things were true at the same time.
But somebody kept checking.
For 147 years.
I looked around the room.
There wasn't much here.
No grand laboratory.
No monument.
No evidence that I had been some important secret.
Just old machines.
Old records.
Old people whose names I would never know.
People who had spent portions of their lives making sure that a man they had never met could someday wake up.
I looked at Lydia.
"So why were you there?"
She smiled.
"At your revival?"
"Yes."
She leaned back.
"My father."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
"Lydia."
She laughed.
"Fine."
She looked at the terminal.
"I grew up hearing about you."
That made me sit forward.
"About me?"
"Not you exactly."
She thought about it.
"Your case."
"That's different."
"Not when you're a kid."
She smiled.
"My father would talk about cryogenic recovery. Post-stasis neurological damage. Tissue degradation. Memory loss. He talked about you like you were a problem he desperately wanted to solve."
"That sounds comforting."
"It wasn't always."
She laughed.
"But he cared."
She looked at the photograph again.
"I wanted to finish what he started."
There it was.
The answer I'd been looking for.
Not a secret order.
Not a Vault-Tec prophecy.
Not some grand plan.
Inheritance.
Her father left her research.
She picked it up.
He spent decades trying to understand how to bring me back.
She learned how to finish the work.
And when the time came, she was there.
"Then why didn't anybody wake me sooner?"
Lydia's expression became serious.
"Because nobody knew whether you could survive it."
I looked at the records.
"All those years."
"Your body was stable."
"But you didn't know."
"We didn't know."
"So what changed?"
She looked at me.
"Medical technology."
Then she smiled.
"And probably your luck."
I laughed.
"After 148 years, we're calling this luck?"
"Would you prefer divine intervention?"
I looked at her.
She grinned.
"Don't answer that."
The thawing process was apparently more thorough than I had understood.
I asked Lydia what exactly she had to examine while I was being brought out of cryogenic stasis.
She gave me a look.
"Mr. Marcel."
"What?"
"You really want me to answer that?"
"Yes."
She smiled.
"Everything."
I stared at her.
"Everything?"
"Everything."
There was something entirely too amused about the way she said it.
I looked back toward the terminal.
"So you examined my entire body."
"That is generally how a medical examination works."
"Right."
She leaned against the counter.
"Don't look so embarrassed. I've seen people in much worse condition."
"I'm not embarrassed."
"You're absolutely embarrassed."
"I'm trying to understand what happened to me."
"Your memory is improving. Your pride apparently isn't."
I looked at her.
She smiled.
Then her eyes traveled over me in a way that made the next few seconds unnecessarily uncomfortable.
"Although," she said, "I will say this."
I waited.
"Whatever the cryostat was doing to you, it certainly didn't take everything out of you."
I stared at her.
"Lydia."
"What?"
"You're a medical professional."
"Yes."
"Act like one."
"I am."
She smiled again.
"Professional observation."
I shook my head.
She wasn't finished.
"Besides, you were surprisingly..."
She paused.
I knew immediately that whatever came next wasn't going to improve my afternoon.
"Surprisingly what?"
"Well preserved."
I gave her a look.
She laughed.
"Rock hard, Mr. Marcel."
I nearly choked.
"Excuse me?"
"Your muscles."
She said it with the straightest face imaginable.
"Obviously."
"Obviously."
"That's what I meant."
"Of course it is."
She turned back toward the terminal, still smiling.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she said:
"Still, I wouldn't mind having a Rocket-Pop."
I stared at the back of her head.
"Lydia."
She started laughing.
"Don't look at me like that."
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to."
I shook my head.
“You're trouble.”
She smiled.
“And you're alive.”
That shut me up.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then she returned to the records like she hadn't just completely derailed the conversation.
Some questions are better left unanswered.
Especially when the person answering them is smiling like that.
I expected Sub-Level F to give me answers.
Instead, it gave me something else.
Perspective.
There wasn't much down here.
Not anymore.
Most of the equipment is gone.
Some of the rooms are sealed.
Some of the records are damaged.
Whatever this place once was, time has taken most of it.
But the research remained.
And so did the names.
That's what I think I'll remember.
Not the machines.
Not the lights.
Not the old Vault-Tec equipment.
The names.
Lee Carter.
The people who came after him.
The people who checked the monitors.
The people who maintained the cryostat.
The people who wrote down what I was supposed to eat.
The people who made sure the plan survived even when the people who wrote it didn't.
I came down here looking for the reason I was kept alive.
I thought maybe I would find something terrible.
Instead, I found evidence that people cared.
Maybe they cared for different reasons.
Maybe some were curious.
Maybe some were obligated.
Maybe some were following an old order they didn't understand anymore.
But some of them probably cared simply because there was a human being asleep behind a piece of glass.
That's enough for me.
For today.
I still have questions.
Plenty.
I don't know exactly why my monitoring continued.
I don't know how my father's research became so important.
I don't know why certain records contradict what I see with my own eyes.
And I still don't understand everything about Lydia.
But maybe I don't need to.
Not yet.
I've spent the last week trying to force this world to explain itself to me.
Maybe that's the wrong approach.
Maybe I need to let some things remain uncertain until the evidence catches up.
That's what I've been doing since I woke up.
Watching.
Listening.
Following the thread.
One piece at a time.
Lydia walked me back toward the elevator.
Before we left, I looked back at Sub-Level F.
It wasn't frightening anymore.
Just old.
And strangely human.
I thought about all those people who had come down here while I slept.
Doctors.
Technicians.
Researchers.
Vault workers.
People whose names I'll probably never know.
They had lives.
Families.
Problems.
Arguments.
Meals.
Birthdays.
Deaths.
They lived entire lifetimes while I remained asleep.
And somewhere in all of those years, somebody still checked my monitor.
That means something.
I don't know exactly what yet.
But it means something.
A mistake put me in the pod.
People kept me alive.
Those are two different stories.
And now I know both of them.
— Big Chief Mike Marcel
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