[b]Port Newark, Newark[/b]

	With a gloved hand, Clifford Smith carefully reached for the control panel of Generator #4. He turned a knob slowly to the left, its dial ticking down as it went down the percentages marked along its circumference. Generator #4’s whining quieted and the glow from inside dimmed. The bank of eight whirring fusion core generators were nestled side-by-side in a dimly lit concrete room underneath the old port administration building on the south side of Newark. There were once ten generators, each supplying power to the largest American prewar port on the East Coast. #3 and #8 were lost to time and disrepair, but the others could still produce a power output for the community that lived there.

	Port Newark was an early settlement in the New York City metropolitan area after the war. It provided several benefits to wayward refugees: the military had hardened and secured the port against possible sabotage during the old world’s war with China, which offered protection from raiders and looters after the bombs fell. Indeed, a half dozen sentry bots bearing the faded orange and blue striped service mark of the US Coast Guard still patrolled outside the perimeter. Settlers broke open the mountains of shipping containers inside for their old world goods, hoping to find food and technology to survive.

	The resulting settlement of mid-rise dwellings cut into shipping containers and ringed with scaffolding, balconies, and walkways, resembled something like a building under construction. But a fully functional community became fiercely independent and isolationist while the rest of the city burned in post-atomic chaos. The settlers of Port Newark fought with the city government for years, including skirmishing with the mighty General James Hastings. Eventually, however, after Hastings’s capture of Newark Airport and the encirclement of Port Newark by the SecDiv, the community acquiesced and was annexed. Their supply needs were alleviated, except for power.

	Nuclear energy supplied by fusion reactors was common before the war. Every office or industrial park had a fusion generator or two, much like the ones Cliff was tweaking in the port administration building. These were great answers to saving money on electrical bills, as generating your own power was always preferable to paying the grid. But they simply were not able to provide energy robustly across an entire settlement. Port Newark was a slight exception, with its massive industrial power generation needs translated to the lesser concerns of domestic heat and lighting for its denizens in makeshift container homes. Despite this, they suffered frequent blackouts for over a hundred years prior to their annexation.

	Cliff finished his work, stepping into the generator room’s antechamber to strip off his gloves and lab coat before washing his hands in a sink and returning to the control room. His assistant, Anna Pawlowski, sat at a computer desk with the green monitor illuminating her face. “The reactivity has gone down to appropriate levels,” she assessed calmly. “We should be good for the night.”

	Cliff stepped over to her, passing shelves and bins littered with tools and spare parts and drained fusion cores. It was a messy co-use space, often occupied by technicians trying to repair old world pieces to keep the ragged generators running. From over her shoulder, Cliff saw the data streams on the RobCo terminal’s ghastly screen. All according to plan. Every day, they had to manually tweak the reactors to provide as much electricity as the settlement needed. No more, no less. Running the fusion cores at a hundred percent efficiency all the time would drain them faster than turning down the reactivity at night when less power was needed.

	Cliff nodded at Anna: “Alright. You good from here?” he asked. His tone of voice was professional, like a teacher to a student.

	“It should be,” she replied as she tapped the screen. “According to our data, 59% fusion rate should suffice for the night. It’s not quite winter, the heating in most units won’t kick on tonight.”

	“Good work, then,” said her mentor. Cliff smiled. She was learning quickly. He had been letting her make the calls on night shift reactor decisions: he still manually changed the settings on the generators for now, but planned on disconnecting one from the Port Newark grid and giving her a class later.

	“Yep. You enjoy your night, Cliff,” said Anna. Keeping an eye on the computer, she leaned over to her briefcase and unlocked it to withdraw a book she had been reading. The [i]Big Book of Science[/i]: a classic textbook. It looked new, lacking the yellowed paper and peeling covers of prewar books. Cliff knew the Wasteland Aid Society had just come to town with their portable printing press to deliver some books to the school.

	He bid her a good night and headed for the exit. Dimly illuminated by an emergency sign that had long since been relevant, Cliff dressed himself in an overcoat and fedora. It was getting cooler out there and Cliff had never liked the cold. The man pushed open the door to the building and stepped outside. The streets of Port Newark were lit only sparsely: partially because of the power restrictions and partially because the streetlamps had long since been broken. He made his walk towards the stacks of shipping containers where he now lived. Following a winding path through “streets” and “avenues”, Cliff reached the stairs up to his residence. His container was stacked on top of four others and was quite the workout to walk to.

	Cliff reached his place, swinging the wooden door open to the same container that he came back to every day. It was a “double-wide”; two containers with a wall cut out between them and supports added in. The interior was almost entirely plywood, with “rooms” made from partitions and the exterior walls stuffed with improvised insulation held behind the simple boards. A window had been cut out to the walkway to let in light. A meager kitchen space, bathroom with improvised plumbing, and bedroom were all he had. Humming a tune, Cliff turned on his radio next to the window and reached into his refrigerator to find something to cook. Squirrel stew it was. Cliff went to bed early that night.

	He awoke to a knock on the door earlier than his alarm. The man grumbled, rolling over on his twin-sized mattress to check the clock hung crookedly on his wall. 7:12 AM? He usually woke up at eight to get ready for work. Grumbling to himself, Cliff put on some decent clothes and walked his way towards the entrance to his home. He opened the door and felt his heart sink to his stomach. Standing there in the dawn’s light was a man he had not seen in five years: a former colleague named Arthur Morales.

	“Can I come in, Cliff?” asked Arthur plainly. Cliff couldn’t answer the question, staring in confusion at the man who had come all the way from Manhattan to visit him.

	“Arthur?” he asked, shocked. “What? I? It’s been years.”

	“I know, I know,” said Arthur with a hint of solemn regret. “And I apologize. We’ve done you dirty. But I hope you know I never wanted it to be that way.”

	“It took you five years to apologize?” Cliff asked, his shock turning to frustration. His hand clenched around the door handle.

	“Listen, Cliff, let me in,” pleaded Arthur. “I can explain.”

	“You better,” said Cliff through gritted teeth. He stepped away from the door, motioning for Arthur to come in and sit on his ancient and stained sofa. The man, dressed in a grey suit, obliged and sat wordlessly while Arthur came over with a porcelain cup of coffee from his counter. He didn’t offer any to the visitor.

	“NucDiv sent me with a job offer,” Arthur explained.

	Cliff cocked his head, gripping the coffee mug in his hand. NucDiv had fired him so many years ago. They fired him with, as the manager said, “extreme prejudice.” They never would have wanted him back in a hundred years.

	“What the fuck, Arthur?”

	“I… Well, we… We know it wasn’t your fault,” said Arthur as he wringed his hands together.

	“Then why did you do that to me?”

	Cliff had worked for NucDiv before. He hadn’t always been in Port Newark. A long time ago, he had been born in the Bronx and was brought up through the Wasteland Aid Society’s schools for technology and science in the borough. Clearly talented, NucDiv hired him on as a nuclear engineer for a variety of projects. Cliff ran reactors for NucDiv in the Bronx until a fateful day when a radiation storm had overwhelmed the cooling units on a fusion reactor. There was an explosion. An entire building was leveled. The manager told him people had died. He was brought before the NucDiv supervisors, berated for his role, and fired. Cliff was suddenly left homeless and jobless. He lost everything.

	“I tried to tell them. It was the radstorm, not you. But they didn’t listen,” explained Arthur. He frowned. “The Council wanted blood.”

	“I blew up a building, Arthur!” exclaimed Cliff. “And I killed Honda. They said he turned into a ghoul in the core.”

	“Well… no.”

	Cliff’s eyes widened. “What?”

	“Honda was evacuated and saved a week later. We pumped pretty much our entire stock of Rad-X and RadAway into him, but he lived. His hair all fell out and he can’t run marathons like he used to, but he’s alive. NucDiv thought he was dead at the time… not sure why. He was in Bellevue the entire time getting worked on by the Society.”

	“So… then…” Cliff sat the cup down angrily. “This was all for [i]nothing[/i]?”

	Arthur shook his head. “The Council wouldn’t let us out of their microscope. You must understand. We were shut down in the Bronx, we had to use fission reactors for fuck’s sake. And I set you up here! I knew a position was open in Port Newark and I got someone to hire you. It sucks, yeah, but you were starving on the street.”

	Cliff narrowed his eyes at Arthur. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t push you off my balcony. Make it look like you tripped.”

	“Caps,” sighed Arthur. “Lots of them.”

	He reached carefully for his brown leather briefcase and unclasped it. With a deliberate motion, he turned it around and set it down on Cliff’s coffee table. Inside, Cliff couldn’t even count the number of blue Quantum caps inside. Each cap, popped from a Nuka Cola Quantum, was officially recognized as worth one hundred regular caps. An entire system of denominations had developed in New York City as the financial system made reforms to deal with the increasing amount of economic activity. It was easily a small fortune staring him in right in the face. All courtesy of the division that had scorned him so many years ago.

	Cliff’s mood changed from anger to confusion again. “What do you want me to do? I don’t get it.”

	Arthur left the briefcase on the table and clasped his hands back in his lap. “The Economist made a publication the other day. It was sent straight from the Council to NucDiv. They want us to go reactivate Indian Point.”

	Indian Point, as many in the city knew, used to power New York. Featuring an advanced, high-output fusion reactor, it was the pinnacle of American nuclear engineering. At the center, a system of “toroidal containment cells” – tokomaks renamed by the government because the sounded “too Communist for domestic use” – provided unimaginable amounts of energy to the entire region. Indian Point had been secured by SecDiv, but nobody had entered the facility since the war. It was dormant, ready to go, and waiting for someone to turn it back on.

	It was no secret that New York had an energy problem. Port Newark was no exception to what many boroughs and neighborhoods faced. An assortment of small generators both fusion and fission simply couldn’t join together in an ad hoc electrical grid with enough energy to power the city’s ambitions. As the Council mulled expansion northward and eastward on the Long Island Sound, it became clear that resources were going to be the limitation on this growth. Indian Point was key to unlocking the full potential of the city’s systems. It was even hypothesized that The Economist could use this to fully interface with the computer networks and automated functions that prewar New York thrived from.

	“Why me?” said Cliff simply.

	“We know you’re the best. You ran that plant well. You run this plant well. We know you’ve studied toroidal containment cells. And most importantly, we know it was you who stopped the Bronx disaster from wiping out an entire borough.”

	Arthur stood up from the couch and smoothed out his suit jacket. He left the briefcase on the table. “I know there’s a lot going through your head right now,” he said reassuringly. “NucDiv is sending a courier next week to take your answer back to the office. It’s a simple yes or no. But if it’s a yes, you’ll need to sort out your affairs. Find someone else to run Port Newark while you’re gone. Goodbye for now, Cliff.”

	Arthur walked towards the door while Cliff stared wordlessly. Arthur nodded at his former colleague and excused himself to the balcony. Cliff waited for the door to close and the figure of the NucDiv man to descend the stairs in front of his home before turning his eyes to the briefcase full of caps. The Quantum caps glowed a faint blue in the dimness of his sitting space, as if to lure him further in. Cliff shook his head and closed his eyes, cursing the universe that had ruined his life for the last half decade before suddenly deciding to give him a second chance.

	He made up his mind as he sat wordlessly eating a small breakfast. Anna would need to get trained on Port Newark’s fusion generators. The crash course would have to begin that day.