I still don’t bleed like I’m supposed to.
My last chance was six weeks ago, Mandie can’t convince them to give it longer, there’s no place for me here anymore. They’ll ship me to another vault. A non-breeding one, where the raiders do well enough for that luxury.
My Special score isn’t that bad, I'm not completely useless, I'm perceptive, and on paper at least - I’m lucky. Sadly round here, there isn’t much use for that combination, not that I get a say in it anyway - what I do, where I end up. The overseer decides everything.
Tonight’s my final night in vault 69.
I thought it would be so much harder than this to say goodbye. Over the years, I’ve grown fond of these exposed metal walls, the jenky elevator shafts, the flickering lights down in water purification, on the lowest levels - where the power drops first.
I managed to hide it for the first few years, 1 man, 999 women - no one was suspicious that I hadn’t got pregnant, until Linda started tracking our fertility.
Unproductive.
That was what she wrote in the report, what she submitted to the overseer in vault 1 - telling me to be grateful she wasn’t evicting me herself. Vault 69 started as a social experiment, but it soon became something else - although may it always was.
Vault 69, the Primary Supply.
The most desirable death sentence a man could wish for, right? Wrong, ha, so very wrong, Linda took over vault management three years ago, she improved everything, swapping water purification for a nuka bottling plant, even getting us on nuclear power.
Her improvements to reproduction were even more hands on, or hands off as the whole thing ended up - it worked, our pregnancies rocketed. We provided vault 75 a steady supply of three year olds, doing our part in raising the next generation to survive - heroines of the commonwealth.That’s what Linda called us all, her heroines, but no matter how many kids we send they always want more. She implemented targets, tracked fertility, she’d no choice there - but those interviews to justify our existence to vault 1 were wrong.
Then those first three were evicted - menopausal, low skilled and turned out to the wastelands. I guess that's when I started seeing it differently, I know it was never your fault Cassidy, but you replaced an old friend, sent out there to die. It wasn’t always like this down here, but there is one thing that’s never changed. 75 need more.
This isn’t a life, we’re no different than cattle.
There was an error with air regulation last quarter, we had to connect into the vault mainframe to fix it - I saw other vaults!
Self governing, independent of vault 1, open to anyone - they’ve been lying to us.
I'm leaving while I can, when you lose hope here, know it’s waiting for you, out there.
Good luck.
Prompt image provided by @tristancarax from a mobile version of Fallout where the player looks after a vault operating independently of vault 1 and without any experimental factors.
The #31sentence contest run by @tristancarax is a really great regular contest, providing a word count for each of the 31 sentences. The prompts are always very unique and interesting, adding to the overall challenge - from things like fallout shelter to different breeds of dogs favoring different hands while playing poker. The sentence order this time was 8, 22, 6, 12, 19, 26, 4, 7, 13, 31, 29, 1, 27, 18, 10, 5, 11, 30, 23, 25, 20, 21, 15, 28, 16, 3, 9, 24, 14, 17, 2. You can check out the entries this round under the contest.
The Freewriters Community is pleased to support the 31 sentence contest
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You have garnered support from the @bananafish community. We appreciate your fine work and hope that you will continue to produce awesome content for us to feast our minds on.
It is so nice to have you back for a round, @letalis-laetitia. Per usual, your storytelling is superb.
On one hand, I get a kick out of the aspect of the game where you get all the women pregnant with one man if one chooses. On the other, I can't help but ask, "Was this game made by a chauvinist pig? Am I endangered of becoming one? (haha, yeah. Only in my dreams!!! Trust me. I'd love to be in Vault 69 right now.)
I don't like this idea of having women as slave-making-baby-machines, such as the Western culture has made a woman out to be. I wish women were respected more across the globe. Some balance needs to be struck because I'm also not for enslaving all men either.
That line right there reminds me of racing horses; once the horse's percieved worth is no more, they're killed (or used to be). So sad that humans treat humans and non-humans this way.
Hahaha! They don't really use vault 69 much, but there is a brilliant poster for it, and that poster almost seems like it's aimed at women as much as men - why advertise to men if there's only one position. I'd say, given the amount of experimental vaults full stop, nahhhh, we'll give them a pass. Although then again, looking through the female characters yesterday... then the men are equally buff eh, who I am to judge ;) I dunno how cannon this story would really be but I enjoyed building the connection with vault 75 and then to the shelter game.
Ladies aside, probably not a bad shout, it isn't a vault where they slowly leaked the radiation in or anything like that, and one of the few I don't think the fate has been revealed for... maybe it's a womb-topia lol
very well said, I think there's a lot to be said for giving people the benefit of the doubt, second chances, and thinking the best of them - even if sometimes we are let down. I really hope one day we can stop comparing our differences and categorizing each other by them. "Hi, i'm a flawed human trying to be the best I can to others" "hey guess what, me too, and that's fathoms of common ground" haha
It really is, all life has value. I equally end up feeling for people who have lived a life where they end up seeing others that way, human or otherwise, I feel likes it is uncommon for someone who has been truly, unconditionally loved and valued to see any kind of life as disposable like that. Damn Tris, deep stuff for first thing in the morning lol
I haven't seen your story!
Oh my! 999 women for one man! Oh my! But it's a little weird, if I do it with 5 a day it would have to be 200 days, assuming they're all the same age. But I don't think so, do you?
Fertile women did not use them to care for infants? No male children were born?
Are they a cult of some kind? Where do I sign? Shut up and take my money.
Hehehe XD
Sorry. I'm just kidding!
That's awful... How many women were there?
XD...
Great story, thanks for sharing.
hahaha oh my I hadn't done the maths, yep, could definitely get away with hiding not being able to get pregnant for a while there. That was my reasoning behind them switching to a "hands-off" approach to improve reproduction rates (was that too subtle a euphemism haha)
Nope, children are shipped off to keep vault 75 in steady supply. Vault 75 was about the refinement of the human genes, so I figured that could tie well into vault 69, if at 75 they put children through all these harsh tests without regard for their survival, they would lose a lot of kids, so would need a steady supply. If they waited for the first batch to turn 18 to breed from them, they would have a long period with no new children coming in, and then when those children did turn 18, the babies would need time to grow into at least toddlers. So vault 69 would have been able to steadily supply them with fresh babies, and some degree of genetic diversity. The idea of 75 needing more and more children kind of plays on the tests getting harsher and harsher and less children surviving to adulthood there. That's more my inference than cannon though ;)
Thank you very much for stopping by :) I had plenty of fun with this one, it was such a good concept, all the entries were really good!