I got a question about McCready, and the answer is sadly that he, Cait, Curie and Hancock probably won't get a lot of screen time. I'm trying to keep this story from making too many promises that I may not be able to keep. But! This story is already twice as long as I thought it would be, and I have no idea how many chapters are still to come or what may happen in them! Sorry for the non-answer, but now you know as much as I do about my own story. ^^;

Begin Recording

Nuclear Family

Recording by Scribe Ellison

The story I've just heard from the General is tragic and has so many parts I don't know what to ask about first. My fellow scribes would probably like to know more about the institute, but the thing I can't look past, the thing I can't believe… "Shaun is..."

"Mmhm."

"And Shiloh?"

"My children are synths." Em says, with a little smile like she might be enjoying my dismay if she was less basically decent.

I'm having a terrible time reconciling this. I know Shaun and Shiloh, they're normal kids! They could be squires in a few years! I can see them now, walking past with one of Shaun's creations and a box of soap for some escapade. But I've just learned they aren't even human beings. "...why?"

"Father made Shaun as… I'm not sure he even knew. As a gift for me? Bait to bring me to search for the Institute so we could meet? A chance to give 'himself' the childhood he didn't have? All of those, maybe. It wasn't a gift I would have asked for and I… almost hated Father for the way he did it, but that wasn't Shaun's fault."

"And Shiloh?"

The General cranes around to see what the children are up to by the river, but we not sitting in a place with a good view.

"Father never meant to make another child synth but Doctor Bene worked on a lot of the programming for Shaun and he wanted to see what he could build with the data from the prototype, fine-tuning the balance between implanted memories and learning protocols. God, I'm talking like him. Every other synth starts out adult and he wanted to see what you'd get starting a synth as a child."

Shiloh herself passes just then, hauling a load of laundry. "I'm the beta!" she says proudly, "I'm very advanced!"

"Shiloh's the beta, which doesn't cause sibling rivalry at alllllll. She was made from the female half of Father's genes, which makes her almost my genetic duplicate. Doctor Bene planned to just tinker with her brain forever without waking her up. Father wouldn't have allowed it. But I couldn't just let her be an experiment, even if she wouldn't have known about it. She deserved the chance to be a person. Doctor Bene liked the idea of an experiment integrating synth children in a 'typical wasteland family structure.' I'm sure he made that phrase up on the spot because 'single mother with several male friends who are quite fatherly, two teenagers who call her mom when they feel like it, and several settlements full of volunteer babysitters plus pets and livestock' was too long to fit on the page. So I gave her the name Nate and I picked for our baby if she'd been a girl, and brought her home.

"And that's my family. Preston is kind of the childrens' father but he isn't my husband. Mama Murphy is kind of their grandmother but she isn't related to any of us. Jimmy and Kaynah remember their own mothers so I'm not really their mother. Paladin Danse just seems to like us so he's around a lot, but he's not my partner. Piper's happy to be the cool big sister to this lot, and they're long distance friends with Nat in Diamond City.

"It's not the family I thought I was going to have but… oh lord, they're going to bury the whole settlement in bubbles… but here we are."