Whispers Beneath the Surface

2050s. A boardroom that doesn't exist on any official record. Men in expensive suits. Women with sharper minds than their smiles suggest. Representatives from Vault-Tec, RobCo, Poseidon Energy, and CIT sit across from one another, not as rivals, but as players in a game only they understand.

They call it the Great Game.

The rules are simple: Survive the inevitable. Control what comes after. Win.

They assembled a team. The best scientists, researchers, and minds they could trust. Representatives from each corporation, working together on something that would change everything.

They called this team the Directorate.

The Directorate didn't start after the bombs fell. It started decades before, in conference rooms and classified memos, in handshake deals between corporations that already had more power than most governments.

Vault-Tec. RobCo. Poseidon Energy. Hubris Comics. The Commonwealth Institute of Technology—before it became the Institute. These weren't just companies. They were architects of the future. And they knew the future was going to burn.

So they made plans.

Project Aeon was one of those plans. A life-extension serum. Not for everyone, of course. Just for the people who mattered. The people sitting around that table. And the representatives they'd chosen to make it happen.

On the surface, they were Helix Horizons Biotech; it looked like legitimate research. Botanical biotechnology. Pharmaceutical advancement. "Sustainable medicine through botanical innovation," the marketing materials promised.

Underneath? Experiments with plants, radiation, and things that shouldn't have been combined. The refinement of a serum that could extend human life indefinitely.

The Directorate coordinated it all—a network of research facilities across the country. Each one contributed to the larger vision.

And each one required test subjects.

The Great Betrayal

When the bombs fell on October 23, 2077, the Directorate retreated to their secure facilities. Survived. And waited for contact from their parent corporations.

It never came.

They'd been written off. Assumed dead. Abandoned by the very people they'd served.

So they said fuck it.

If their corporate masters had moved on, fine. The Directorate would survive. They would outlive those who'd abandoned them. And they would win the Great Game on their own terms.

They bought their time. Kept working. Kept perfecting the serum.

And they needed test subjects.

The Great Deception

First, they used their own. The employees already inside the facilities—safe from the bombs, with clean blood, conveniently located within their protected walls.

They told staff the surface was still lethally irradiated. Issued regular "radiation reports" showing dangerous conditions. Told stories of failed expeditions, brave volunteers who never returned.

The Directorate became humanity's last hope, they said. Preserving civilization until it was safe to emerge.

Some believed it. Some were too comfortable to question it. Some had nowhere else to go.

And when people tried to leave? When they questioned the isolation?

They were "transferred to other facilities," or "promoted to special projects."

In reality, they became test subjects.

The Evolution

Then they realized something. The people who'd survived outside? The ones exposed to radiation? Using those people as new subjects actually helped the research. Their bodies had adapted. Changed.

So the Directorate started hunting.

They sent teams to the surface. Nabbed survivors. Brought them back to the labs.

The experiments continued. The serum evolved. It extended life, yes. But it came with side effects. Ghoulification. Cognitive degeneration. A dependency on the serum to prevent slipping into ferality.

The Directorate didn't see this as failure. They saw it as progress.

And when their test subjects became inconvenient?

The Directorate buried them.

Sometimes literally.

The ones who survived

Not everyone stayed buried.

Some of those test subjects found each other. Slowly. Carefully. They built something in the shadows, beneath the Commonwealth, where the Directorate's eyes couldn't easily reach.

They call themselves the Underground.

They're survivors. Witnesses. People who know what the Directorate did, what they're still doing, and what they'll do next if no one stops them.

The Directorate thought the Great Game was theirs to win.

The Underground is about to prove them wrong.

What lies beneath

The Commonwealth has secrets. Facilities hidden in plain sight. Research that didn't stop when the world ended.

And underneath it all, there are people who've been watching. Waiting. Planning.

Some of them want to help you.

Some of them want to bury you, too.

Shadows of the Old World: Beneath the Surface
Coming soon.