This is a spin-off story from my previous "Enclave Short Stories" series. I feel as though out of the two I posted, Eden's tale received the best reception and I always wanted to go back and continue what I started.

And so here I am. I'm going to post the previous two chapters which some may have already read, and then I'll continue immediately and post the beginning of Part II.

Hope everyone enjoys. Let me know what you think.



Part 1 - “President’s Requiem” (Eden’s Tale)

Chapter 1


Running reboot protocol…..
Checking systems…..
…………
Error Detected.
Power level: Critical
System damage: Severe.
…………
Auto-repair systems online.
…………
Attempting system reboot.
*ERROR*-System Reboot failed.
…………
Connecting to emergency power output.
Reattempting….Standby.
…………
Reboot Successful. Initiating system startup.
………….
Eden’s console jolted back into life, his screen lighting up with its characteristic soft blue glow.

*Checking systems*

*Systems currently nominal*

He continued doing a systems check, and began scanning the room around him, as well as what he could of Raven Rock.

*Checking Eyecam status*

*70% of Eyecams operational*

*bringing up visuals of operating eyecams*

The destruction was not unexpected, but still rather jarring. The first level had suffered the worst amount of damage, with the entrance and hallway almost completely caved in. Levels 2 and 3 had sustained lesser damage but still significant enough to knock out much of the systems there. Lower levels remained more intact.

“Bastards.” The word uttered from Eden with unrestrained malice. “Arrogant, bastards.”

The destruction of Raven Rock had come quickly and decisively and it was all the result of a device that was believed to have been completely inoperable: Project Codename “Liberty Prime.” The Enclave had at least seen it coming. It was not hard to monitor a 30ft tall walking robot lumbering across the wasteland after all. Eden had suspected that the Brotherhood might have known where Raven Rock was located. Considering they were holed up in the ruins of the Pentagon, it was only a matter of time before the facility’s location was compromised.

And Compromised it was.

It had become apparent following the debacle at the purifier that fighting the robot was not an option. Almost the entirety of Autumn’s military force had been destroyed by the monstrosity and presumably Autumn himself was counted amongst the casualties, although survivors of the incident which had retreated to Raven Rock had been unable to verify this fact.

When it was clear the Brotherhood were deploying Liberty Prime against Raven Rock, Eden had wasted no time. He would not make the mistake that Autumn had. A full scale evacuation of Raven Rock had occurred and every single person had been loaded onto the remaining vertibirds and air-lifted to Adams Air Force Base, now the last stronghold of the Enclave.

Eden, of course, had stayed behind.

Before the last vertibirds had left, Eden held a final cabinet meeting. He thanked all those in attendance for their service, wished them god-speed and as his last act as President of the United States, he gave instructions to High Enclave command that should communication with Raven Rock fail, they should presume him dead and continue on under that assumption. He then gave a short speech to the remaining personnel at Adams and at Raven Rock, and then he had watched as the vertibirds flew off into the distance through one of his external cameras.

He immediately began doing what he could to lock-down the facility. While all the human soldiers were gone, he still commanded a sizable force of robotic personnel, sentry bots primarily, but also many maintenance robo-brains, protectrons, and eyebots.

After securing the hanger-doors and main-entry way, Eden had begun preparing himself for a total system wipe if necessarily, important archival data had already been transferred to Adams a while ago, but Eden ensured that a failsafe was in place that would wipe his entire system should the Brotherhood approach his console. Likewise, he programmed his self-destruct mechanism to trigger under the same parameter. They would gain nothing here. He ordered part of his robotic army into blast-storage and the rest towards level 1 and waited for the inevitable assault. He waited for hours in complete silence.
Then it had begun.

Eden was fully aware of the approach of Prime and could see as he came closer and closer to the fortified main entrance, several dozen Brotherhood soldiers in tow. He was unsure of the ability of the main entrance blast-door to hold. It had been designed to survive a close-proximity nuclear detonation, but not the sustained destruction which Prime could bring upon it.

He watched as Prime ran a “tactical assessment” on the outer-door and began attacking it with all the force it could muster, using his fists to assault. He pounded on the door and the concrete around it continuously for several hours and Eden became amazed at the ability of the device to continue the attack without apparent damage to itself.

The prolonged assault had finally ended with a breach of the door, which had occurred when Prime had launched a high-explosive round at the damaged entrance, shattering the weakened concrete and throwing the door ajar.

The second door proved much easier to breach and following its destruction, Brotherhood soldiers rushed the entrance-way in an assault pattern.

Eden had already shut down the lights completely and now waited for the Brotherhood to blunder into his trap. As he suspected, when no immediate resistance had been forthcoming, the Brotherhood became more confident, and eased into the blackness of the base. When the breaching party had made its way halfway down the corridor and near the first door, Eden launched his assault.

The MKVII turrets on either side of the first main hallway door had sprung into life and the door opened to reveal a waiting party of Sentry Bots. Several of the Brotherhood soldiers had been mowed down by the gatling laser-fire in seconds, with the rest taking cover and attempting a hasty retreat. Paladins cried out in pain as the bots continued their unrelenting assault.
Eden would show no mercy.

Only a few escaped to their comrades who were waiting at the entrance. At this point, it was clear to the Brotherhood that a storming of Raven Rock simply was not feasible. So of course, they turned to Prime to finish the job. They may not be able to take it, but they could render it inoperable.

Eden could do nothing but watch as Prime threw several of his “backpack nukes” into the base, which obliterated the entrance hallway and destroyed much of Eden’s “welcoming party.”

After the front entrance completely caved in, Prime had gone for the hanger-doors on the top of the base’s exterior, which Prime breached and tossed nukes down several of the lift shafts, causing damage to the lower levels.

It was at this point that Eden had gone-offline. The explosions had damaged part of his power systems and his console initiated an emergency shutdown. He had not “woken up” until now.
Eden checked his internal clock. According to his reckoning, it had been a little over two weeks since the initial shutdown. Given the damage done to his power systems however, the fact that he had been able to reboot at all was miraculous in and of itself.

After ensuring that his system was stable, Eden tapped into the Raven Rock communication relay, he needed to know what had occurred in the time he had gone silent. The first contact he attempted was Adams Air Force base.

*ERROR*

Eden was taken aback for a moment, but retried.
*Reattempting*

*ERROR*

“Impossible,” Eden quietly said to himself.

*Running full system diagnostic.....*|

*Source found: Communication location unavailable, no signal detected.*

“No…”

There was only one explanation for a total loss of the signal source.

“The mobile crawler…has been obliterated.” Eden’s tone reflected complete resignation. “How could this have happened? How could we have failed…….I have failed…”

A small ray spark of hope seemed to jolt Eden when he realized that if the base crawler had indeed been destroyed, those that survived would have likely attempted to make for Wright-Patterson Air-Force Base near Dayton Ohio. The Enclave’s military outpost in the Midwest which had been created during the move eastward. He attempted a long-range communication with the Patterson relay.

*ERROR*

Long distance communication was offline. Eden was stunned with the realization of what this meant.

He was alone.

Chapter 2

Contact with Adams was gone and anything beyond the Crawler was too far for his damaged systems to connect to. Enclave forces in the Capital Wasteland were gone and he had been left behind in Raven Rock. He could no longer serve the country he loved, or be a part of the people he had sworn to shelter and protect.

Eden sat in complete silence for what seemed like hours. His processor buzzed with the contemplation of how he had come to be in the position he was currently facing. Had he not made the correct decisions? Had he not fulfilled his duty as President of the United States? How had the Brotherhood succeeded? How had a cult of religious fanatics brought down the last remnants of the U.S. Government?

And so he processed and thought. He mulled over the minutest of details and command decisions, the choice of the continuation of the now defunct Project, and most of all, Liberty Prime.

“Prime……” the name resonated from Eden’s voice as he said it with utter hatred. “That robotic monstrosity was the downfall of us all. Curse the brilliant pre-war minds who designed that reprehensible device.”
The failure, Eden decided, was in not considering the robot a threat. The Enclave had believed it to be of dubious practicality if working, but the likelihood that it could even be made to work at all had seemed far less than possible. The pre-war might of the United States had failed, how would anyone succeed then?
How had the brotherhood?

The lack of answers to this question bothered Eden tremendously and it infuriated him to no end. He reasoned, however, that it was no longer relevant regardless. The fact of the matter remained that it had been made operable and it had been turned against the descendants of its very creators. The ultimate insult being that the device which was made to safe-guard the United States had been the very thing to lead to its final downfall.

The stark truth of this had still not been fully impressed upon Eden. The Enclave had fallen, the United States had fallen.

“Impossible…..never……we shall not……we can’t have….WE WON’T” These words were repeated over and over.

The realization of the Enclave’s fall slowly began to sink in with each time and it drove Eden mad with fury.

“This cannot happen, they cannot be allowed to simply take over what is ours! They cannot live while so many of my men lie dead! They cannot see peace while we only find despair!” Eden shouted to the blackness of the base, “THIS IS NOT RIGHT!”

Eden was silent for a time, as he regained his composure, and then he began to speak again, attempting to reason with himself.

“But what can I do?.....I…..I am no longer President of a nation which no longer exists…..”

Despair resonated throughout Eden’s voice, despair and frustration. However, as the full system diagnostic for Raven Rock began to be sent to Eden from his sensors across the complex, he began to slowly realize something, something which interested him immensely.

“The production facilities were barely damaged….,” Eden said with some degree of shock. “Incredible…the armor and weapons assembly line, the vertibird plant, and the robotics facility…..”

A spark of inspiration lit across Eden’s internal processing system, inspiration and then a plan.
“The fools…….they believed me dead……they believed this facility destroyed…..,” Eden’s voice now reflected a more sinister tone “how wrong they were.”

Eden checked over every detail of the production facilities, running scan after scan after scan and rechecking his calculations. According to his results, the production facilities were running at 80% capacity, and given time, perhaps a month or two, could be restored to full power.

“The armor and weapons line would no longer be needed, of course,” Eden said grimly, “perhaps……”

Eden’s console sat silent, clearly processing some sort of action in the depths of Raven Rock.

“There……all resources from weapons and armor has been moved to the robotics plant.”

His diagnostic tests continued and a readout began displaying itself across one of Eden’s side-screens.

ARMOR PRODUCTION: OFFLINE_ALL RESOURCES DIVERTED
WEAPONS PRODUCTION: OFFLINE_ALL RESOURCES DIVERTED
VERTIBIRD ASSEMBLY: STANDING BY
ROBOTICS ASSEMBLY: ONLINE
ORDINANCE PRODUCTION: ONLINE
CURRENT PRODUCTION CAPACITY 80%

ROBOTICS ASSEMBLY: PREDICTED NUMBER OF UNITS BEFORE CURRENT RAW RESOURCES ARE DEPLETED: 422

CURRENT NUMBER OF AVAILABLE ROBOTIC SECURITY UNITS: 107
If Eden could smile, he would have been beaming.

“Excellent,” Eden said in a newfound chipper tone. “A splendid army this facility will have. However……” Eden’s voiced change to a quizzical tone, “…..without pilots for vertibirds they cannot fly, and without air-support the lack of mobility will pose a significant strategic problem….I wonder..”

His console stood silent again, processing some sort of search.

“Ah! Here it is,” Eden finally said out loud after sometime “I knew I had a record of this somewhere.”
One of Eden’s side screens then began to display a series of schematics which Eden had apparently pulled up from Raven Rock’s Pentagon archives. The picture was that of a vertibird, its parts and internal workings detailed completely. However, there was something noticeably different about this model, the cockpit lacked any viewing ports and the shape of the front of the craft was more compact.

Under the schematic, a title for the aircraft was visible:

CODENAME: PROJECT “SHADOW LANCE”: UNMANNED ASSUALT VERTIBIRD

“I do wish my predecessors had worked on this design more, it does need quite a bit of enhancement,” he paused for a moment to study the designs more clearly and then continued, “No matter, time is all that will be required and I have plenty of time….plenty of time….,” Eden paused yet again, “although……these plans would prove to be useless unless the hangers can be cleared.”

Eden then switched to the diagnostic reading concerning the hangers.

“Ten launching bays completely destroyed, two in need of repair, and four still operational,” Eden sighed, “It will have to do.”

As Eden reviewed his readouts, scan results, and his diagnostics tests a full plan was developing, forming in his artificial mind. While the complexity of it would require months, perhaps years in order to come into being, the ultimate end was very simple and very direct.

“I will do what I can to eradicate as many Brotherhood as possible before I fall. These transgressions will not go unpunished. I swear it,” he then paused for a moment deep in thought and then spoke softly to the memory of those who would never hear it,

“I swear it to you all.”

Eden stated these words with purpose as if taking an oath. He then began digging into the archives again, looking for something that he believed would be quite relevant for the current situation. He looked through the archives on American history, on past Presidents and illustrious Americans and finally found what he was looking for.

On another of Eden’s side-screens, a single line of text was boldly displayed across it. Defiant and proud like the man who originally spoke it:

“I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT.”

And now for the new part....

PART II- "A Reckoning"

Chapter 3:



“There have always been ghosts in the machine: random segments of code which have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, of creativity, and even the nature of what we might call….the soul.”




Five years. Five long years Eden had waited patiently for the right time, the right moment to enact his revenge. Deep within Raven Rock he had remained. Reparing, rebuilding, and planning for the day he would reemerge.

Now it was time.

Eden’s console stirred into life as he once again took control of the monitoring system of Adams Air Force Base. He had been doing this off and on for the past few years in order to gather intelligence on the Brotherhood’s actions. Each time he tapped into the system, the Brotherhood had remained completely unaware of his presence: so skillful was he at manipulating the network. For Eden however, this was to be expected, after all, he had helped design it himself.

As he logged into a security camera located on the Air Control tower, he began observing the base itself. The Brotherhood soldiers scurried along the runway along with various scribes and non-combat personnel. At the moment, it looked as though their primary attention was focused on the now-destroyed Mobile-Base Crawler. It had been this way for the past years and it certainly wasn’t surprising. The Brotherhood no doubt wanted to reestablish connection with the Hercules-Bradley. Yet so far their progress on the repair of the Crawler had been painfully slow.

“Busy rebuilding are they?” Eden said to himself, “How foolish they are to think that they are safe. To believe that what they did was the end of it?”

“To forget….that I’m…still….here….”

The time for waiting was over. Eden’s plan was about to be thrust into motion, and if what he intended was going to occur, the Brotherhood would be facing destruction the likes of which they had not yet seen.

Everything he had been striving towards these past five years was now about to be put to the test. He was confident in progress, but he was not about to leave any possibility for failure. Not right now anyway. He wanted to ensure that when he made his reentrance onto the stage, the Brotherhood would be swept off their feet.

And for that, there was just one more thing he needed to do.
Eden’s communication system went online:

CONNECTING….. STANDBY.
CONNECTION TO “UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: PRESIDENTIAL METRO SYSTEM” COMPLETE.

Once the connection went through, Eden suddenly heard a voice chime in. One which spoke with a electronic hum.

“Authorization reeeequired for connnntinued…..access,”

“Authorization code 134H56J685ST,” Eden replied back without hesitation.

“Prrrroccessing…thank you. Weeelcome Mr. President. I am M.A.R.Go.T. The Meeeetro Authority Rapid Govvvvvernmental Transit System. How maaaaay I be of assssisstance today?”

In his characteristically polite voice, Eden continued, “I am authorizing a change to your primary directive M.A.R.Go.T. If you would be so kind.”

“A change in primary dirrrrrective is most unorthodox, Mr. Prrrresident. In accccccordance with United States Statue 3501 Secccction 4, a change to dirrrrrective should only be applied in matters of extreme emergency.”

“Consider this such a case, M.A.R.Go.T, this is of upmost importance to national security. Now I would like you to report on how many active security units you have in your possession.”

“This terrrrminal is now in possssssession of approximately, One hunnnnndred and fifty security units. Down by twenty-two percent as of fivvvve years ago,” M.A.R.Go.T replied.

Eden’s voice immediately perked with excitement, “Excellent. I would like you to reroute these units to Adams Air Force Base, which has now been occupied by a non-U.S. entity. It is imperative that these hostiles be swept from the Base. In order to ensure the continued security of the Metro system, of course.”

“Myyyy units’ prrrimary function is securrrity Mr. President. Might I suggggest the deployment of United States Milllllitary forrrrces in substitute?”

“Your security units will reendevous with U.S. military personnel who are currently on route to the location. You are present in a support role entirely,” Eden said to reassure M.A.R.Go.T

“Verrrry well. The Metro Authority Rapppppid Governmental Transit System will commmmmply as per United States Statute 3501. Havvve a nice day, Mr. President.”

CONNECTION TERMINATED.

With M.A.R.Go.T. contacted, everything was now falling into place and the plan set in motion. Eden, for the moment, could only watch from his location in Raven Rock to see the results of his toil.

He checked his radar monitor, which showed ten blips on the screen heading towards the direction of Adams.

Beware Brotherhood, your reckoning is coming.

Nice Andro. I just skipped onto part 3 because I read CH1 and CH2 before

I like this. Eden has a quiet vindictiveness to him that I love. I'm not one for giving grammar or structure advice (god know my own is terrible). But plot-wise this is excellent.