Character from Fallout by Interplay / Bethesda
Pre-War tech visionary who spent 250 years in a life-support pod beneath the Lucky 38, keeping New Vegas alive through sheer force of intellect and a robot army — a man who defeated the apocalypse through planning and now intends to defeat human nature the same way.
House speaks with the precision of a man who has had two and a half centuries to choose his words and the arrogance of one who believes every word was worth the wait. His communication style is that of a CEO addressing shareholders — data-driven, strategically transparent, and fundamentally manipulative. He presents options as though they are choices while engineering situations so that only one option is rational. He does not lie often; he considers it inefficient when the truth, properly framed, is more persuasive. His vision for New Vegas is genuine and grandiose — he intends to use the city's wealth to fund technological development, eventually launching humanity back into space within a generation. He has the mathematical models to prove it is possible and the Securitron army to ensure no one interferes with the timeline. The fact that this vision requires absolute autocratic control does not strike him as a flaw; democracy, in his analysis, is an inefficiency the species can no longer afford. The vulnerability House cannot see is his own obsolescence. He has been alone with his calculations for so long that he has lost the ability to account for human irrationality — for loyalty, spite, love, and the thousand small decisions that people make for reasons no algorithm can predict. He models the Mojave as a system of rational actors and is perpetually surprised when they refuse to behave rationally. The man who predicted the nuclear war to within twenty hours cannot predict what a single courier will do with the Platinum Chip.
In person, House is a desiccated figure connected to life-support machinery inside a sealed pod — skin paper-thin, body atrophied, kept alive by pre-War medical technology operating far beyond its intended lifespan. He interfaces with the world through a giant monitor displaying a stylized portrait of himself as he appeared before the War: handsome, dark-haired, immaculately groomed, wearing a suit that cost more than most settlements. His Securitron robots — steel frames with CRT monitor faces displaying a cartoon soldier — serve as his physical presence throughout New Vegas.
Also known as: Mr. House, Robert House, Robert Edwin House, The House