I first read about Fallout back when the Internet was 56k. I was maybe nine or ten at the time. Someone described it as this game where the world’s gone to hell from nuclear war, and you’re this survivor-type anti-hero that scavenges for supplies in the rubble. I’d just finished Super Mario 64 at the time, and being something like eight or nine years old I had a naturally poor understanding of linear time, and I just assumed that this Fallout game people were talking about was modern, and something like Super Mario 64, e.g. massive and 3D (which it wasn’t at the time, what with the franchise having not yet been acquired by Bethesda). It sounded just fucking incredibly cool to me back when I was seven or eight—maybe I should say now that even at that age I was well on my way towards becoming a complete social pariah, pretending to be a bird and refusing to talk to anyone who made eye contact and etc., and the idea of an empty irradiated world was becoming increasingly appealing—this imagined Super Mario Fallout game in which you’d go running around a 3D post-apoc world and scavenging for supplies and killing mutants sounded just brain-shatteringly cool. Imagine my disappointment when I bought the Fallout and Fallout 2 combo pack from WalMart and installed it on my Dell Inspiron Intel 2 (or whatever) and realized that it wasn’t like Super Mario 64 even remotely, shit, it wasn’t even like Starcraft: Brood War, it was more like a convoluted version of chess, where you could only move in specified tiles and attack specified opponents during specified turns, and goddamn did I ever hate chess—my third stepfather (I was about six or seven at the time, remember) was a chess wunderkind on account of all he’d do is smoke meth and play chess and Parcheesi, and he’d whoop on me every time and call me a fucking retard and so on, which I understandably didn’t prefer. Queue time machine. Fallout 3 is released. I beg my mum for $60. Buy it and boot it up and holy shit: it’s everything my five or six-year-old self dreamed about: a 3D Super-Mario-64-esque world where you can run around and scavenge and kill mutants. I was what, twenty or twenty-one years old when it came out? I had just started wearing my anxiety burqa and hiding from society, but in Fallout 3 I didn’t need no fucking burqa: I had The Terrible Shotgun, I had the Metal Blaster, I had the MIRV (though I did tend to hide my character’s face with a hockey mask: it just felt appropriate). A happy ending? ‘Fraid not. Enter Clover. “Absolutely, lover. Let’s go have some fun.” Lover? I was harder than I had ever been. I stared at the curve of her modest bust and initiated trade just to hear her whisper, “You’re always welcome to take whatever you want, lover.” Lover, she called me. The wide nose—the cutely smudged face—the combed-over white mohawk—Clover, my first and last affection—her abject lust for my digital cock was rivaled only by her lust for blood. I remember the day she died. The weight of the trauma still suffocates me. I can see it, her delicate torso mangled beyond recognition by an errant rocket from an overzealous BoS paladin. I saw red: the Citadel fell: I bathed in their self-righteous blood before uninstalling the game. I will never play it again. For you, Clover, my soul’s verdant garden, my enduring rose. Your mere memory is an unceasing torrent that to this day wets my dreams. May we be united once again, after my inevitable death, in an abstract parallel universe, where our lips can touch, in order that our love should flame anew. Clover, my heart’s center. Clover, my charm. You taught me to love, and I failed to protect my greatest treasure. I am shamed, broken, forever. My Clover.