Begin Recording
Little Stranger
Recording by Scribe Ellison
After letting me out of the autodoc the polite synth had shown me to a small apartment he said was mine. Once alone I sat down against the wall, curled myself into a ball and just… dealt with things, for a while. Told myself that Shaun was never coming home. Searched for a reason to ever stand up again. It took some time. Since I crawled out of my pod in the vault my whole reason for standing up was that Shaun was out there and he needed me, and now that was lost… and now I had to fight through that to realize I'd had other reasons for a while. I had other people waiting for me. For them I needed to get home, and I needed to learn everything I could about the Institute, and to do that I needed to talk to people and look normal so I had to not be mourning right now.
After realizing that, standing up took another while. I made my way to the bathroom to wash my face and straighten my hair, and I made a wonderful discovery. Toothpaste! The Institute had toothpaste! That gave me a new goal: to figure out how to get more toothpaste for everybody. I brushed my teeth with my wonderful discovery, combed my hair and put it up in a fresh bun, and promised myself I could collapse again later as long as I didn't collapse now.
The whole time there was… I was probably suffering from what Doc Jenna would call serious mental trauma, I may or may not have been doped to the gills by an autodoc trying to treat that mental trauma, I was trying to act and think normally because I needed to, and the Institute truly is incredibly peaceful.
I walked out into the round space that was the heart of the Institute, gawking like a tourist. In my vault suit I couldn't pass for a local so there seemed no reason not to turn around with my head tipped back to look up at the balconies hanging above me from what must have been apartments, and the elevator column patterned with the spiral helix of dna. On my level water cascaded endlessly down glass-sided stepped pools and trees grew from islands in them. Trees like I hadn't seen since before the war, tall and bright green with health. The room spelled fresh and outdoors, but in a… clean way. No compost heap small, nothing left behind by a dog or brahmin.
There were a few people around, adults dressed in white trousers and tunics or lab coats. They politely ignored me, sending smiles my way but not interrupting my staring. I wondered what Father had told them about me.
This place was amazing, and I kept thinking of the room I'd made for my son and how pathetic it was compared to this place he had made.
I was surprised to see the boy synth sitting on a bench by the water, frowning at some bit of machinery in his hands. He looked up, met my eyes and smiled shyly so I felt safe to walk over. "Hey, sorry I scared you before. I didn't mean to—I was confused."
The boy said, "It's all right. I'm not really scared of outsiders, I even used to live outside. I don't remember what you said though. Father must've used one of my codes." His lip curls in distaste for a moment before he smiles, "Father said you're our friend, so it's nice to meet you. My name is Shaun."
"Mine is Em."
He laughed. "Your name can't just be one letter!"
I smiled too. "My whole first name is Emily but my friends at school started calling me just Em and now it's stuck."
I'd been ready to just apologize and escape the conversation, but he was looking at me with curiosity. Of course I looked pretty different from everybody else. I'd left my armor pieces in the room the polite synth said was mine but I hadn't been able to leave behind my gun harness even in a place as peaceful as this one. Of course that was what the boy noticed.
"Are those real guns? Can I see them?"
"Yes, so no. I don't want anyone to get hurt."
"Do you shoot people with them?"
"Only people who try to shoot me first. Mostly I shoot molerats, then I cook them and eat them."
"I know about molerats! Some came up under the stands in Diamond City and Kellogg, who was looking after me, went to shoot them and get paid. Have you been to Diamond City?"
"Lots of times, some of my friends live there. Did you like living there? Do you miss Power Noodles now that you live down here?"
"Yes! I want to eat noodles and buy scrap, Kellogg let me buy as many parts as I wanted for building things."
I cringed a little, because I did not want to think of Kellogg with any child but also sort of wanted to ask if Kellogg had treated him well. This wasn't my son, but he was still a child. "What were you trying to build today?"
"I fixed a scanner and I was trying to power it up in my desk but I overloaded the energy cell and it made a big pop and everyone jumped and the teacher said just because you're Father's favorite doesn't mean you can disrupt the class and that was my last energy cell."
My heart twisted. He reminded me of Nate. Not the fixing things but the accidentally disrupting class, and the way he told it. It sounded like Nate regaling me with the plot of the latest Grognak—a story I didn't fully appreciate until there weren't any more romance novels to read instead.
"Well..." I patted the ammo pouches on my harness and pulled out a handful of energy cells. "All yours. Have fun, just maybe not in class."
He smiled like sunshine and I flinched back because I knew I shouldn't be this happy to make this synth happy. "Hey Shaun, can I ask you something? Do you know what you are?"
"Yes. I'm a prototype personal synth. It's a pain and I have to take lots of tests."
At least Father hadn't lied to him, not about that anyway. "Tests?"
"Logic tests and story tests and strange tests like what would you do if molerats were going after people and you could push a fat man in front of them to stop them and save the people. Do you know the right answer to that one?"
The words reordered in my head and memory of college came back to me. "Um. That's called the trolley problem. There is no right answer. It's supposed to help you understand why you think what you think."
"I think people shouldn't invent questions with no answers!" The boy grumbled, and I laughed.
"Hey, Father wants me to meet all the important people in the Institute and I don't know what any of them look like. Want to show me around?"
"Sure!" The boy said immediately. Happy to spend time with a stranger. Maybe the dna we shared somehow subconsciously made him want to trust me, or maybe he was just very bored, or very lonely.
It was… it should've been… but I wasn't repulsed by him. Maybe I felt sorry for him after seeing Father shut him down with a code. Certainly I was curious to know him, to know what my son had created.
And there were thoughts I wasn't letting myself have, thoughts that started with, Shaun runs the Institute, and the Institute… and then I'd have to think about everything I saw with the Railroad, and the fear in Diamond City, and the word bait and if I let myself get that far I'd curl up in a room and never move again. But if my son treated this boy well, then those thoughts might not be true.
