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Begin Recording

Doctors

Recording by Scribe Ellison

The General curses as Doc Jenna sews up a gash on her calf. "Damnit, the number of bullets I've dodged and I get whacked by a shovel. My own shovel."

The doctor ties off the thread and applies a stimpack to prevent tetanus. "Take the rest of the day off General, you can peel mutfruit or something."

Em groans but trades her gardening tools for a knife and a wooden cutting board and a pile of mutfruit. The tato crop is good this year, so we're eating tatos every dinner and the root cellar is full. The General's shovel mishap happened while digging another one. Everything else still needs to be cut up or otherwise rendered into the shape it needs to be for preserving or cooking for dinner. That's usually the childrens' job and Shiloh and Kaynah are doing it now. Shaun is sitting up against the metal support holding up the roof and fiddling with some gun parts, occasionally calling questions to Sturges who's working at the workbench behind him.

The garage of Sturges' house is the unofficial gathering place for people with something to work on, probably because Sturges is usually working out here and he's always happy to help people figure things out. So anyone wanting to learn to build anything hangs out here and everyone else just sort of gathers.

Jimmy is writing a story about Grognak the Barbarian with a charcoal stick down one wall of the house. Shiloh has scooted around so she can read it and offer commentary on the plot. The two children from Crater House sit watching, they have ears of corn to be stripping but they're still shellshocked enough that nobody's worrying whether or not they actually do the work. As I watch, Shiloh finishes her current job and starts shucking the corn and scraping the kernels off with a knife. "Like this. The husks are good for wrapping things and we dry the grains and make them into bread."

The newcomers don't talk much except for some shy attempts to spread the Good Word but they have at least stopped talking about returning to Crater house and given their names. The girl's name is Jill, and she was born in Diamond City before her father became irradiated in some kind of accident and decided to join the cult. The boy was born into the cult so his name is Born For the Glory of Atom, but decided 'Adam' would be an acceptable nickname 'since it's short enough to actually say' as Shiloh put it.

This is an ordinary day, most of the settlement working on digging the new root cellar or weeding and checking on the crops. Sturges has one of the generators in pieces on his workbench and is grumbling as he digs through the guts of it. Tom the bartender limps by with his crutch, with one of the settlement dogs trailing him worriedly. Dogmeat rolls happily in the dust.

The General asks, "Hey Scribe, what do you have for medical in Megaton?"

I say, "There's a doctor, Doc Church. He's very old now and rules his apprentices with an iron fist but he's teaching enough new doctors that some of them have started traveling to the other settlements around the Capital Wasteland."

"Think he'd send an apprentice down here if we sent one of ours up there? If I could get someone to volunteer."

Jonah, one of Doc Jenna's nurses, calls, "I'd go!" from the chemistry station.

I have a question. "Does the Institute have amazing medical technology?"

"Yes." Em says, and tosses a bit of peel into her scrap bucket. "But they can't or won't share most of it. The BioScience division could have grown Adam a couple of new kidneys if he'd turned out to need it, but they wouldn't have. The Institute has some amazing technology, but not enough to provide miracles to anyone on the surface right now. They do have something I can tell you about though, they have a working autodoc."

"No way." I say. I have heard that there was something called an autodoc perfected in a lab in California right before the war, it's supposed to be able to heal anything. I had assumed, as most scribes do, that the story is just a legend. "Those are real?"

"One is real, the Institute has it but it takes a lot of very specialized chemicals and a lot of power so it can't be used very often. I did not know this when a polite synth grabbed me and said I should 'Disrobe and step in here, please. It will make sure you are healthy and not carrying any pathogens from the Wasteland.' I had only just entered the Institute, seen it for the first time, and met someone who… well, I wasn't at my best. I felt a lot like when I woke up in the vault, so probably actual shock. I didn't even flash back to getting into a 'decontamination' pod at the vault, which I should have remembered. But I had also just realized I could trust the Institute, shock or not."

"So the only thing my brain noticed was the 'disrobe' part. It did make sense that I could bring germs in and that would be bad, so all right, but I was carrying two guns, a knife, chems, a bag of caps, and all my armor. So I said that to the synth, 'This stuff keeps me alive. You can disinfect it, but I need it back. All of it.' The synth assured me that my possessions would be returned in working order and waited for me to hand over my stuff. So I took off my harness and guns and my boots, and then had to say, 'Um, could you turn your back please?' Yeah, it's a synth not a man but it had a male voice and that was enough to count! It looked really confused but it turned away." Em laughs.

"So I stepped into this tube thing, a robot arm came at me with an injector and then I woke up two days later with the polite synth telling me the machine had cut a precancerous growth from my liver, filtered my blood, and strengthened the tendons in the shoulder I keep busting trying to fight in power armor. Happily I was not infected with anything contagious. The polite synth who'd probably been waiting there the whole time returned my clothes and armor and told me that everybody was looking forward to meeting me now that they were sure it was safe."

"So that was that experience. I'd rather get sewed up by the Doc where at least I can see what she's doing. The Institute does have a human doctor too, who does all the medical care since the autodoc has to be saved for life threatening emergencies."

Shaun says, "Mom's a life threatening emergency!" and his mother laughs.

"Well if I had something that nobody down there had been immunized against, I would've been! I want them to program twenty synth doctors, we've been going round and round, synth doctors would help get rid of the paranoia about the Institute but how many people would trust a synth doctor? Are synth doctors the best use of the Institute's resources? They mostly don't accept resources from the surface so we can't help. I just got Robotics to promise three synth doctors, so we'll see how those work. So that's my story. Who else wants to say something so my brain doesn't melt from boredom?"

Shiloh says, "Jimmy, what does Grognak do when he gets hurt?"

"He uses jungle herbs. Too bad those only exist in books!"

Here begins two hours of half the population of Sanctuary discussing comic books, which I believe my fellows in the Arlington Library would not consider a good use of holotape space. I'm more of a Silver Shroud fan anyway.