orthogeeks

You’re traveling through the wastes, and you come to a massive, rocky canyon that was once spanned by a great bridge, but now lies in ruins and fragments. Ahead of you is the face of the other side, and as you stumble down a dirty slope to the floor of the canyon, you catch a glimpse of greenery ahead.

As you’re searching for a path upwards, you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. But soon you find a small gulch running perpendicular to the canyon: looking left and right you see that it is a hidden road, starting hidden at the base of the canyon, and running up into what seems to be a jungle.

Making your way blearily up the path, what starts as a small tree here and there, becomes quickly the jungle you saw; and as the path bends off to your right, you see a wooden wall with a gate. Two men – a man and woman on closer inspection, guard the way in hoods and robes. The man motions for you to come forward.

“He knew you were coming. Welcome! Please, He would like to meet you.”

You figure this is probably all another one of those hallucinations – recalling both the tale told by the radioman and your experience in that half-destroyed subterranian vault. You haven’t been ‘experimenting’ with anything, but you never know.

You agree to come in: in dreams and other worlds of the mind it is usually best to just go along with things as much as you can.

Soon you find yourself in a wooded clearing with a pavilion, and the man who escorted you explains what you must do if you want to meet ‘Him’: there is a ritual involved. This will not have been the first (or last) time that you’ve had to ingest or be exposed to potentially harmful substances – but strangely, his reason for this ritual is so that you will not harm ‘Him’.

You consider asking if this ‘Him’ is some kind of god; as the reverence given to him is not unlike that preacher of Atom, but with less demands to explode the world and other unsavory things having to do with atomic bombs and radiation. You decide against it. You assent, wondering who it is who knew you were coming, and why they sent for you – maybe they are going to make a meal out of you? But in any case, that never worked out so well for the others, did it?

All of the members of this small community gather, and you take a drink (as directed) of some strange sap-like substance. As you are passing out (telling yourself isn’t this exactly how it always is) you hear the different people saying a variety of utterances – prayers for purification perhaps or just ravings? – including something about ‘judging the living and the dead.’ Then, whiteness.

When you awake, you’re alone in some kind of grove – a short inspection reveals it is a different clearing than the one you were previously in (ruling out the possibility of a Rip Van Winkle) but still uncertain as to whether this place is also a hallucination. As you are checking around the edge of the pool which lines the grove, you suddenly hear a voice behind you.

“So they made you do that ridiculous ritual too, did they?”

You turn to find yourself face to face with a great tree – with a face.

In short order you find out that this tree is in fact a man with a tree growing through him (perhaps?) and into the ground. His name: Harold. He called for you, why? He wants you to kill him. Very simple, he says – simply go underground and find his heart (near where the roots of the tree are) and destroy it, so he can rest.

To do this, though, you need to speak to the others, he says, who have locked up the path to the caves that go underneath the area. In the process you meet several people: including a child who likes to talk to Harold, and who tells you that he fears fire. That’d be one way to do it, right? Kind of horrific, though.

The others reveal to you that they are of two minds: The first wanting to protect the gift they have here and not spread it, and the second wanting to spread it throughout the world if possible. But what is this ‘gift’? Harold, they say, or the tree that grows through him anyway – once a year releases a bunch of seeds, from which all of the plants in the area had grown.

His ‘followers’ reveal a variety of reasons for being here – some don’t really believe that Harold is a god or has special powers, but like the community. Others believe that he is as close to a deity as you can touch. When you ask if he has asked to be killed before, the leader of the community (and his wife) both spiritualize it: it must be a hidden message, they say. Harold tells you: “They only listen to the most simple commands.”

Returning to Harold with the key, you explain to him that the others have asked you to do other things to his ‘heart’ – including covering it with various tinctures to make the tree produce more or less seeds. Harold is horrified only at the prospect of dying by fire – but doesn’t seem to happy about the idea of living, either.

Something nags you, though. How does a single tree produce seeds for many species? And how did he know you were coming? He only has an answer for the latter:

“Sometimes, I feel as though I can see and hear through every leaf in this forest.”

—

Since I’ve already expressed some brash and perhaps unenlightened opinions about the series, I want to use it is a jump-off point for the beginning of a very interesting topic. This is something I like to pay attention to whenever I’m exposed to a story of any kind – especially the most well-loved and classic ones.

The story I just related, ‘Oasis’ – one of the subplots in the Fallout 3 story – is an example of ambiguity in storytelling. It is not possible to tell whether the authors are genuinely anti-religious or not, and the story does not preach a particular moral or ideology. It presents several ambiguities which force the player to make a choice with incomplete information.

While there are disillusioning elements (that Harold is a man stuck in a tree, for instance) they are balanced off by mysterious elements (him being able to see through all of the leaves) which if not magic or supernatural by the traditional definition, are certainly ‘wondrous’ elements that make light of the stark existential choice set before you.

And this is what, I think, is important about this story and the way it is crafted: While certainly there is a moral choice of whether it is right to put a man out of his misery who is suffering, this choice is not even so clear: is he even merely a man at all?