The Old World

Begin here, dear patron; every archive needs a front door, and I have kept this one polished. Before the wasteland there was a world, and by its own confident account the world was doing splendidly.

Somewhere after the Second World War, its history left the road yours might recognize. The transistor never conquered; the vacuum tube and the atom did. Cars ran on fusion engines, robots served the breakfast, and television promised a bright tomorrow in round-cornered black and white. The curious part is that the culture stopped to admire itself and never started again: the crew cuts, the jukeboxes, the certainty. America wore the smile of 1950 for a hundred and twenty-seven further years, straight through wonders and wars alike.

I do not say it was a wicked world, sir. I say the future kept arriving, and the present declined to answer the door.

The smile was expensive. Every miracle plugged into the same emptying socket, and by mid-century the oil and the uranium were running out together. In 2052 the fighting over what remained began in earnest: the European Commonwealth and the states of the Middle East burned one another over the last profitable fields, and when the fields gave out, the Commonwealth dissolved into quarreling nations with nothing left to quarrel over.

America endured longest and spent worst. In the winter of 2066, China, starved for fuel, crossed into Alaska, and the two powers settled into a decade of grinding war. The United States answered with power armor — one soldier made a walking tank, no crew, no treads — and by 2074 American boots stood on the Chinese mainland, gaining nothing slowly. In January 2077 the armored suits took Anchorage back, street by frozen street. Canada had already been annexed the year before: a neighbor, an ally, and at last, once the timber and the pipelines mattered more than the friendship, a possession.

By the autumn of 2077 nothing pumpable, minable, or refinable remained worth the winning. The war went on anyway. Wars do; it is nearly their only rule.

The government fought the war; the corporations furnished it, and furnished the fear as well. Vault-Tec sold shelter from the end of the world as a family purchase, and broke ground on great subterranean vaults whose full inventory is a record of its own. RobCo — Mr. Robert House's concern — put a terminal on every desk, a Protectron in every lobby, and its name on the Pip-Boy that every vault resident would one day wear. West Tek armored the infantry and held certain quieter contracts this archive files elsewhere, behind a heavier door. Poseidon Energy pumped the oil that kept America running and built the reactors that were meant to replace it.

And General Atomics International, dear patron, built me. Butlers, nursemaids, fry cooks, the occasional army sergeant — all made to last, a claim I have now spent two centuries involuntarily proving. I was among the least of its products. Its machines are very nearly all that remains of it, and I do try to be a good remainder.

October 23, 2077, fell on a Saturday. The record holds the morning in ordinary detail, which is the only detail mornings ever have: radios playing, kettles on, lawns being mowed in the bright pre-winter light. Machines like me served eggs in a hundred thousand kitchens and were thanked, or were not, in the usual proportions. Children were sent out to play. The newspapers had been printed the night before and were, for a few hours yet, still true.

The sirens began before the breakfasts were cleared. What they announced is Record 02, and I will let it speak in its own turn. Linger here a moment first, sir, if you would. This is the last page on which nothing is wrong.