Chapter 21

I wake up in a comfy bed missing an arm and covered in wrinkles. The memories of my background life here start flooding back to me. The whole process is slightly easier than when I was remembering/learning about my life as a giant. I only briefly remember my childhood with my new parents, because they entered cryogenic storage when I was 6 the rest of my childhood was spent in the communal orphanage/ school. I was never well-liked I was bad with people and pretty ugly. (Whoops guess very bad Charisma did affect me) Despite my lack of popularity, I succeeded in other facets of life. I was top of my class and was quickly picked as an apprentice to the head engineer. In addition to adding his practical expertise to designing inventions, he was in charge of keeping the Vault running. I helped him with both keeping the vaults properly maintained and designing things. Like redesigning lab equipment for specific experiments or to work with substitute parts. I was also loaned out to occasionally work in the medical department. Mostly just first aid, but it did break up the monotony of repair. Despite all my professional success, my peers didn't like me and I often had to sneak around to avoid running into them. Not that things escalated into fights, well not after the first time when I won, but I thought it was best just to avoid the tensions.

My mentor was frozen when I was 15. He was replaced by one of his older apprentices Bill. Bill was the kind of guy everyone liked he got along with everyone. Including me, Bill was probably my best friend when he was chosen as overseer he picked me as lead engineer. When I was 26 Bill alerted me to a problem in the energy department. One of the apprentices broke a pipe valve on the nuclear reactor and he needed someone to go down and fix it. It wasn't anything serious so I decided to fix it myself. I went down to the reactor to fix the valve, however, what no one realized was that in addition to breaking the valve the apprentice had also set it closed. What he had closed was an intake pipe to the reactor feeding in coolant. As I went to fix it the reactor also went supercritical and needed direct intervention or else it would meltdown. With no one else around if I didn't act everyone in the vault would die. In order to vent the reactor, I had to perform a manual override physically opening a vent. Venting and opening the pipe allowing coolant in was enough to avert disaster. Unfortunately, I was exposed to lethal levels of gamma radiation. I remember nothing in between venting the reactor and waking up weeks later in the medical center.

I woke up missing my left arm and ghoulified. My left arm was cooked by the radiation and need to be amputated. The vault thought I was going to die so didn't perform any immediate medical procedures, but once it became clear I wasn't dying they amputated my arm and dosed me with radiation medication. The arm was a lost cause but had they treated me earlier I might not have been ghoulified. The self-sacrifice in the name of the vault and the guilt of not treating got me a lot of goodwill. So much in fact that 2 years later when Bill was stepping down I took his place as overseer. I don't think people were particularly happy, but I was going to be a short overseer only 2 years at most. Being overseer had some unforeseen pressures. There was just so much going on I started taking mentats to keep everything organized. Then I started to take them because Mentats are awesome. (I don't have a problem you have a problem)

That's how I find myself now in the bed next to the office of Overseer of Vault 14. The next thing I think is how much I want some mentats. I reach for my stash and take a couple and then think fuck this week waiting around checking stuff out. I'll do it once I don't crave a form of meth and when my body doesn't slightly burn all of the time. I pass the buck of choosing the next overseer to the head of resource management. He's only slightly younger than me 28 nearly 29. I'll let him choose I make the announcement to the vault and say that I will be entering cryosleep a week early. There's a small celebration for my years of service and for the next overseer. That night I take the vault elevator to the restricted subfloors where around floating octopus robot with medical tools for arms leads me to an empty pod. Where it then walks me through the freezing procedure and then when I'm ready freezes me.