Chapter 1: System Boot
Marcus Cole looked up just long enough to understand. Concrete dust rained into his eyes. Someone screamed his name. He shoved the woman beside him toward the door, both hands on her back, hard enough to send her stumbling into the stairwell. She made it. He didn't.
Twenty-eight years old. FEMA Region II, Emergency Management Specialist. Three years of coordinating disaster response across the Eastern Seaboard. He'd walked through flooded neighborhoods, talked down panicked crowds, slept on cots in high school gymnasiums while hurricanes raged outside. He knew how buildings sounded before they died. The low moan of stressed steel. The pop of fracturing support columns.
He'd heard all of it, ten seconds too late.
The slab hit his shoulders first. His knees buckled. Then something massive drove him flat against the floor and the world became pressure and heat and the wet snap of things inside him breaking. He tried to breathe. His lungs wouldn't expand. Tried to scream. His mouth filled with dust and copper.
"Mom. I'm sorry, Mom."
Darkness. Total. The kind without edges.
Then—light. Not light. Letters. Green text burning against black, floating in nothing.
[SOVEREIGN SYSTEM: COMPATIBLE HOST DETECTED.]
[INITIATING BINDING PROTOCOL.]
[SOUL TRANSFER IN PROGRESS — STANDBY.]
He couldn't feel his body. Couldn't feel anything. Just the text, pulsing in rhythm with something that used to be his heartbeat. The letters dissolved. Reformed. Dissolved again.
[TRANSFER COMPLETE.]
[BINDING INITIATED: 3%.]
[WARNING: HOST VITALS CRITICAL. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.]
Heat. Blinding, suffocating heat, like opening an oven door with his whole body. Sand in his mouth—not concrete dust, sand—fine and gritty and tasting of metal. His eyes burned. His skin burned. Everything burned.
Marcus gasped and choked and rolled onto his side. The sky above him was a washed-out blue, no clouds, a sun that hammered down like a physical weight. Desert stretched in every direction. Cracked earth. Scrub brush. The rusted skeleton of a car, half-buried twenty yards away.
His hands. He stared at them. Wrong hands. Bigger than his, rougher, the knuckles scarred. A leather jacket hung loose on his shoulders—cracked, sun-bleached. Worn jeans. Boots that didn't fit right, a half-size too large.
"This isn't my body."
He patted his pockets. No wallet. No phone. No ID. Nothing that said who this body had been before Marcus Cole's dying consciousness slammed into it like a fist through wet paper.
The green text flickered at the edge of his vision, translucent, barely readable in the sunlight:
[BINDING IN PROGRESS: 8%.]
[HOST VITALS: CRITICAL.]
[DEHYDRATION: SEVERE. RADIATION EXPOSURE: MILD. CORE TEMPERATURE: ELEVATED.]
[SEEK SHELTER.]
"Radiation?"
He pushed himself to his knees. The world tilted. His stomach heaved—nothing came up. Empty. When had this body last eaten? He swayed, caught himself on one hand, and squinted at the horizon.
A road. Not much of one—cracked asphalt, faded lines, chunks missing like something had torn bites from it. And beyond the road, a sign. Rusted through in places, leaning at an angle.
GOODSPRINGS — 3 MI.
His blood went cold despite the heat. He'd seen that name before. Not in person. On a screen. A loading screen. A character creation menu. A game he'd played six hundred hours of during college, arguing with his roommate about which faction was the least evil.
"Fallout. I'm in Fallout."
His legs buckled. He sat down hard in the dirt, staring at the sign, and the green text pulsed again:
[BINDING: 12%.]
[SOVEREIGN SYSTEM — FACTION LEADER PROTOCOL.]
[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE. SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: BUILD.]
[FULL INTERFACE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL BINDING EXCEEDS 30%.]
The words meant nothing yet. His brain wouldn't process them. The System—whatever it was—presented information the way a computer screen would, floating text overlaid on reality like the world's worst heads-up display. Each notification arrived with a faint vibration behind his eyes, a pressure at the base of his skull.
He needed water. He needed shade. He needed to stop sitting in the open desert staring at a road sign like a man waiting for a bus that would never come.
Marcus stood. His knees protested. His head pounded. He picked a direction—toward the sign, toward the promise of something other than sand—and started walking.
---
The gas station had been dead for two hundred years, give or take.
The roof sagged inward. The pumps were rust sculptures. A Nuka-Cola machine stood against the far wall, its glass front shattered, bottles long looted. But the overhang still cast shade, and the walls still blocked wind, and that was enough.
Marcus stumbled through the doorway and collapsed against the counter. His breathing came in short, ragged bursts. The walk had been less than a mile. It had taken forty minutes. Every step had cost him.
He found the water bottle wedged beneath a shelf—plastic, cloudy, half-full of something that was technically water if you were generous about the definition. Sediment swirled at the bottom. A faint greenish tint.
He drank it anyway. The grit scraped his throat. His stomach clenched, threatening rebellion, then accepted it. Warmth spread outward from his gut. Not comfort—survival.
[BINDING: 18%.]
[RADIATION DETECTED: LOW-LEVEL AMBIENT EXPOSURE.]
[HYDRATION STATUS: POOR. CONTAMINATED WATER SOURCE INGESTED.]
[RECOMMENDATION: LOCATE PURIFIED WATER WITHIN 12 HOURS.]
He set the bottle down and stared at the green text until it faded. The System—he didn't have another word for it—communicated through direct neural overlay. No sound. No physical screen. Just text that appeared in his field of vision, semi-transparent, easily ignored if he focused past it. Like subtitles for reality.
"Why me?"
The question bounced around his skull without an answer. He'd been nobody special. A competent bureaucrat with a talent for staying calm during floods and keeping spreadsheets accurate during power outages. He'd never fired a gun outside a range. Never been in a real fight. Never done anything remotely heroic except show up to work during hurricanes when everyone else called in sick.
And now he was sitting in a ruined gas station in a nuclear wasteland, wearing a dead man's clothes, with an alien intelligence binding itself to his soul at a glacial eighteen percent.
His hands trembled. He pressed them flat against the concrete floor. They kept trembling.
He tried to remember his mother's face. Brown eyes, laugh lines, the way she hummed while cooking. The image came, but blurred. Like looking through dirty glass. His apartment—the one in Newark, third floor, the radiator that clanked at 2 AM. That was fading too. His coworkers' names. His phone number. His own middle name.
"James. Marcus James Cole. Born March 14th, 1996. Newark, New Jersey."
He repeated it like a prayer. The words felt hollow. Real, but hollow. Like reading someone else's biography.
The sun tracked across the broken windows, casting long shadows that moved like slow hands across the floor. His stomach cramped. Hunger, deep and nauseating. He had nothing. No food, no clean water, no tools, no weapons, no map, no plan.
Three miles to Goodsprings. In the game, that meant a friendly saloon, a doctor, quest givers happy to point a fresh-faced vault dweller in the right direction.
This wasn't a game.
The light faded. Orange, then red, then purple, then gone. The temperature dropped fast—desert nights were brutal, he knew that from training exercises in Nevada, back when Nevada existed as something other than an irradiated graveyard.
He curled against the wall, leather jacket pulled tight, and tried to sleep. The binding pulsed behind his eyes—a heartbeat that wasn't his own.
Three miles to Goodsprings. He'd move at dawn.
If he woke up.
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