CHAPTER 1: Before the Fire Fell
Palo Alto, California – October 22, 2077
Interior – Vault-Tec R&D Annex, Northern California Institute of Technology
The glow of the ceiling lights felt sterile, too bright for this late at night. Somewhere, a vent hummed with recycled air. A clock ticked softly. But Juno Arendal was too deep into his project to notice any of it. hunched over his workstation, eyes fixed on a glowing panel as it streamed live diagnostics. Tangled wires, sensor nodes, and a humming capacitor core spilled across the worktable in organized chaos.
Juno leaned in, tweaking the voltage alignment with a careful twist of a microtool. The display blinked amber, then green. His eyes lit up.
"Live feedback's holding," he muttered, more to himself than anything. "Ninety-eight percent stability across all sublines…"
He sat back slightly, just enough to stretch the tension out of his shoulders. For the first time in weeks, he allowed himself a breath of relief.
It was working.
What he had built—what he had pushed to build—was called an autonomic failsafe relay. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't some high-concept AI or advanced military system. But it mattered. It was designed to reroute power and internal diagnostics during catastrophic failures, keeping vital systems alive when everything else went dark.
To Juno, that meant something. Something human.
It could save lives.
This project was supposed to be the crowning achievement of his final year at NCalTech. He'd worked with professors, written the whitepapers, aced the simulations.
Then Vault-Tec showed up.
They didn't ask. They offered full funding, instant internships, and a private R&D annex off-campus. It sounded like an honor. A few select students—Juno among them—were chosen to be part of "The Horizon Initiative." Vault-Tec's future.
The future of humanity, they said.
Most of the others bought in quickly. Lena. Malik. Rourke. All brilliant in their own right. But Vault-Tec knew how to sell a dream.
Juno wasn't so convinced.
The more time he spent in the annex, the more things stopped making sense.
The equipment they had access to was decades ahead of anything he'd seen. Military-grade cryo modules, massive power isolation fields, entire data wings under biometric lock. Some of it didn't even seem like it belonged in this timeline.
And then there were the files—buried under layers of access code.
Juno had always been good at finding backdoors.
What he found didn't sit right.
Project directives referencing population behavior studies. Internal memos debating "acceptable thresholds for survival response." He once stumbled on cryonic test logs cross-referenced with civic profiles.
He didn't tell anyone. Not yet. He couldn't prove anything.
But something about Vault-Tec's mission was changing.
And it wasn't just about saving lives.
A soft knock at the glass pulled him from his thoughts.
My friend Lena stood there with a pair of steaming mugs.she looked as tired as he felt.
"You're going to fuse your spine to that chair if you don't move," she said, stepping in.
Juno gave a small smile and took one of the mugs.
"Thanks."
"It's the last of the powdered mix. Tastes like burnt cardboard."
"Luxury."
She hovered beside the workbench, watching the steady pulse of the relay core.
"Still holding?"
"Ninety-eight percent. Might be able to push to full protocol tomorrow."
Lena nodded, quiet for a moment. Then:
"They moved the Director's inspection again."
He looked up.
"Again?"
"They're redeploying some of the vault teams. And... a lot of our data just got cloned and pulled off the internal servers. Doesn't that seem weird to you?"
"Everything's weird lately," Juno said.
There was something hollow behind his voice.
Something tired.
"You ever feel like..." Lena hesitated. "Like this isn't just research? Like they've already decided what happens next, and we're just playing along?"
He looked at her, more surprised by how much he agreed than anything else.
"Every day."
Later that night, the message came.
Two Vault-Tec officials arrived after hours, dressed clean, pressed, with smiles too practiced to feel real.
They pulled Juno aside.
Said he'd been selected for a controlled environment test. Just a short evaluation of his relay system—installed in a prototype pod.
"Routine diagnostic conditions," they assured.
"No danger. Just twenty minutes inside. You'll be monitored the entire time."
"Why me?" Juno asked, cautious.
One of them leaned forward, speaking softly.
"Because you're brilliant. And you're ready."
The words hit like a warm knife.
Juno had grown up wanting to matter. To build something that made a difference.
And here it was—recognition. Trust.
It was just a test.
He followed them into a cold, metal room deep under the annex.
The pod sat in the center, quiet and open, lined with cables. Diagnostic displays pulsed on nearby terminals. A tech gave him a nod. Everything seemed above board.
He stepped inside.
The metal felt colder than it should've.
The interior smelled like disinfectant and ozone.
"Just lie back," one of them said. "It'll be over before you know it."
Juno did as he was told. He felt the soft pinch of a sensor latch against his neck.
The lid began to close.
"Wait—"
But they were already walking away.
A hiss of pressurized gas filled the chamber.
The lid locked.
Juno's heart began to race.
He reached for the side panel, but his fingers felt heavy.
"Hey—wait, something's wrong—!"
Too late.
Darkness fell like a curtain.
His last thought: This wasn't the plan.
Outside the pod, a Vault-Tec terminal blinked quietly.
SUBJECT: AR-DELTA1
ASSIGNMENT: CRYO-STASIS
PROTOCOL: CORPORATE OVERRIDE 77B4
STATUS: PERMANENT HOLD
CONSENT: N/A
No alarms. No announcements.
The lab lights dimmed automatically as the system idled.
And far above, beyond the sealed floors and reinforced concrete—
—sirens began to scream.
The world was ending.
And Juno Arendal was asleep.