Fallout: New Vegas, released by Obsidian Entertainment in 2010, drops you into a three-way fight over the Mojave and declines to tell you who deserves to win. One of the options is a man sealed in a casino tower who hasn't had a working body in two centuries. He wants New Vegas run as private property with no elections and no appeals, and his pitch holds up better than it has any right to.
Robert Edwin House is the villain of a few endings and the most reasonable person in the game in most of the others. His case rests on arithmetic rather than scripture or campaign slogans, which already separates him from everyone else on the map. The uncomfortable part is checking his work and finding it holds.
He Did the Math in 2065
House ran the numbers on the end of the world and drew the only conclusion that he could. His own account is blunt about it, claiming that by 2065 he had deemed it a mathematical certainty that atomic war would devastate the Earth within fifteen years. The Great War arrived twelve years later, in 2077.
What he did with that conclusion is the part that matters. He put his fortune into satellite-linked mainframes built to disable incoming missiles, plus laser cannons mounted on the Lucky 38 and on Hoover Dam. He wasn't digging a private bunker. He was building a system to shoot warheads out of the sky over a city he intended to keep.
It nearly worked. The platinum chip carrying the final software upgrade was due to arrive on October 23, 2077, and the bombs fell roughly twenty hours ahead of the delivery. Running without it, his network stopped 68 of the 77 warheads aimed at the area. The nine that landed crashed his systems and left him comatose until 2138. He woke up fifty years late to a disaster he'd correctly predicted and failed by a margin of hours to stop.
What He Wants With Vegas
The chip does eventually arrive. You're the courier carrying it, two hundred and four years behind schedule, which is the joke the whole plot is built on. Two hundred years later he's still in the tower, and his ambition hasn't shrunk to match his circumstances. Asked what he'd do with control of the region, House talks about having people in orbit within fifty years and colony ships heading for the stars within a hundred. No other faction in the game is thinking past the next harvest, and most of them are arguing about a hydroelectric dam.
He has a track record to point at. New Vegas is the one place in the setting that looks like a functioning city, with the lights on and water in the pipes while the rest of the Mojave scavenges for scrap. That's his doing. He woke up in 2138 and struck a deal with the tribes that became the Three Families, and the Strip was running again before the NCR knew the place existed.
The cost is spelled out plainly and he doesn't soften it. There's no vote in his Vegas and no mechanism for removing him, because he treats both as a waste of the limited time civilization has left to rebuild. You're being asked to trade self-government for a working power grid and a shot at space, enforced by an army of robots that answer to one man in a box.
The Alternatives on the Table
The New California Republic arrives as the democratic option and behaves like an empire with a bureaucracy problem. House dismisses it as a society of customers run by scheming politicians, which is unkind and hard to argue with once you've watched its supply lines fail and its officers cut deals.
Caesar's Legion is the other serious army in the Mojave and it runs on slavery. House objects on grounds that have nothing to do with strategy. He's recorded expressing horror at the idea of that becoming the shape of human society. The game gives the Legion a coherent philosophy and then shows you the crucified bodies along the road.
The fourth path hands the Mojave to no one in particular and wishes it luck. It's the choice that feels best in the moment and comes with the thinnest plan attached, which is roughly how House would describe every popular movement he's outlived.
