Hiding In The Green: A Fallout 4 Story

Chapter 1

Raina was carefully hand pollinating the cacao bushes with a slender paintbrush made out of her own hair when she heard her sister Victoria yelp, a crash of falling scaffolding, and then a wet thud like a melon dropped on concrete. "Vicky?" she called, and when there was no answer, she dropped the brush and dashed to the other end of the EnviroVault (Tropical Clime). "Vicky!"

Their last remaining Mr. Handy, Jonny-say-Quoi was already there, pulling away parts of the collapsed walkway. "Miss Victoria? Are you all right? Miss Victoria—. Miss Raina—oh, Miss Raina, I am so sorry."

Raina looked, and a burning bitterness rose in her throat, choking her, because her sister's head had hit the corner of a planter, shattering her skull. "No. No, Vicky. You can't. You can't do this. You can't leave me alone. You can't." How could her sister go from being a thinking, living person one moment to a rapidly cooling sack of meat the next? It was not possible. It was not comprehensible. But it was true.  

All the while, all around them, the agribots continued their work, tending to the plants, their dull and dim AI packages rendering them incapable of understanding or caring.

"Vicky..." Raina had seen death before. She killed chickens and rabbits on a regular basis, then cleaned and cooked them. However, she had never seen a person die before. It was like watching her own death, for so many reasons. Reaching out, she brushed the hair away from Vicky's face, recoiling as her fingers touched the mushy spot where her sister's head was caved in. Abruptly, she turned and vomited on the walkway. "Don't leave me. Don't," she choked out through her tears.

At the end of the day cycle, she and Jonny-say-Quoi buried Vicky in EnviroVault (Temperate Clime), in the bed they used for purely ornamental plants, among their foremother and sisters—Caroline, Regina, Isabella, Noor, Melisande, Catherine, Maria Theresa and the very first of them all, Theodosia.

"What was she like?" Raina asked Jonny-say-Quoi. (His name was a play on the French phrase 'Je ne se quoi', something which cannot be adequately or fully defined.) "Theodosia, not Vicky. I mean, I know we're all her, genetically speaking, but she was the only one who lived before the bomb, and being clones of her doesn't make us carbon copies. Vicky and I weren't the same in everything—nor were we that much like Joanna." She and her sisters all had names which were either the names of queens or names which meant 'Queen'. Joanna had been the sister before Vicky, and before her had been Maria Theresa. She could remember Jo, although she had been a child back then, but Maria Theresa was no more than a name to her.

"Hmm." The robot paused not so much for thought as for emphasis. "Sorrowful. She channeled her sadness into her work."

"Our work. All of ours," Raina looked around. "Except—I'm the last." The words rang bleakly in her head, though the vegetation absorbed the sound.

Doctor Theodosia Queen, the one and only survivor of their vault, was the keeper of the Concord Seed Repository, a massive collection of seeds from around the world, a bank far more valuable than any full of gold or jewels after the bombs fell.

For more than two hundred years, she and her cloned daughters had cared for the plants in the sprawling underground greenhouses, germinating seeds from the storage units, raising the plants, collecting their seeds, and then returning the new crop to storage, ensuring that the collection remained viable. After all, someday the radiation would die down enough for the world to be replanted. Then there would again be roses and chocolate, cherries and kohlrabi, maple trees and bananas, all that was beautiful, useful and nutritious. Of course there would also be nicotine, cocaine, and opium when that time came, but even Eden had its serpent.

In the meantime, besides preserving the flora of the world before the bombs, there was work to be done. People needed to eat, and in the experimental EnviroVault, the Queen women had developed razorgrain and mutfruit, super ginko trees and Sleeping Beauty roses, plants which would flourish in irradiated soil and provide for the hungry survivors. Raina's eyes went to the plaque on the plinth, the one with the names of the sisters who were not buried there. Margaret. Elizabeth. Juliana. Constancia. Matilda. Ulrike. Joanna.