Sorry about the delay dear readers. As we get closer to the end of this story I have to actually pay attention to what order the chapters go in!

So we wonder through the whole game just why the Institute replaces people with synths. And then we get to the Institute and… don't really find out. I mean, McDonough, that makes sense, Danse, that makes a lot more sense than him randomly being a synth and forgetting about it, but your nameless settlers? It seems like pure underpants gnome logic to me! (step 1:replace random settlers with synths. Step 2:? Step 3:Profit!) Is the Institute hoping to replace the entire surface population? Do they just enjoy causing terror? Do they even know they're causing terror? It's both annoying and delightful because now I get to decide which way to slant it in the story.

Begin Recording

The List

Recording by Scribe Ellison

I woke up in the early afternoon, famished. When I'd washed up and come outside Dogmeat greeted me with his tail wagging. Nick was helping in the garden and I heard Jimmy say, "You're really bad at this."

"That's why I gave up farming to be a detective."

Our Tom had last night's baked bloatfly and tatos on ice for me, both foods that are better as leftovers. My prewar self took a long time to come around on eating bugs—it's a texture thing, even baked perfectly it's kind of jellyish and awful inside. Poor Tom was just about vibrating with questions as he handed over my food but my brain stuttered and I shook my head.

I was going to get the questions from everyone. What's the Institute like, why do they attack us, why do they replace people, what do they want, do they hate us?

And,

My sister disappeared, my brother started acting strangely, my friends rejected me because they thought I'd changed, am I a synth, am I dangerous, how can I know, why did the Institute ruin my life?

I didn't know most of the answers. I could get them, maybe, but only if the scientists at the Institute didn't realize how deplorable I found some of the things they did. And in the meantime I had to figure out how to tell what I did know.

The Institute is full of kind, friendly people who don't even think about how they're hurting all of you. That was worse than being hated, I think.

Deacon sat down next to me and momentarily raised his sunglasses to show his eyes looked like he'd been up all night just like mine did. "How's the morning after treating you?"

I groaned as an answer. "I don't know what to do next."

"A whole lot of people are about to tell you what you should do next."

"Including you?"

"Of course!" Deacon smiled cheerfully, then sobered. "That tape you sent back had a list on it. There are some names you should see."

The tasty leftovers turned to cement in my stomach. "People I know?"

"A few."

"Let's see it." I took a last bite and handed the plate back to Tom to give to whoever was on dish washing duty. Probably I'd missed my turn. I was careful to do all the same chores as everyone else no matter how much General-ing I had to do. "Who's seen what's on that holotape?"

"Sturges, your friend Garvey, and me. Nobody's read the whole thing. Most of it is science, some of it's encrypted, and a lot is things like lists of how much toilet paper each division uses per month. Spy books say any knowledge of the enemy is useful but I'm not sure about that."

"I suppose it could tell us how many people really live in the Institute." I offered, "Hey, mind if bring Nick in to read this list? He knows a lot of people in Diamond City, Goodneighbor and Bunker Hill. If we're going to be—something—some of their citizens it might be good to have him on board to do diplomacy."

"Not sure what the boss would think, but I'm for it."

I have a sudden curiosity, "Did the Railroad ever reach out to Nick? He is a synth."

"Valentine's kind of a unique case, everybody knows he's a synth but nobody's breaking out the pitchforks and torches. I guess Valentine's got the life we'd like all synths to have… but I've only ever heard good things about him so sure, invite him."

So I waved and called, "Nick!" and he happily handed off the hoe and came over.

"How are you holding up?"

I managed a wry smile, "Thinking about all the terrible things we still have to handle is taking my mind off all the terrible things that already happened."

I'd had to get out of my house because there was a danger I'd stand at the door to Shaun's room and look at the clothes I'd bought him neatly folded on the bed and never move again.

Sturges was hard at work, copying a diagram from his terminal onto a piece of paper. "This is a gold mine! I think I can fix up a generator to power the whole settlement! One generator! There's a lot of what looks like chemistry on here too, I can't make heads or tails of it but I'm sure someone could. I've made copies of the original holotape, with the same data compression. Not many terminals will be able to access the data so we can send these to the other settlements for safekeeping in case something happens to ours. And I have an uncompressed tape of just the lists of names for you, and one of all the engineering in case you need a Christmas present for your friends from the Brotherhood of Steel."

Sturges was really happy.

And for a moment while I listened to him ramble and imagined how much fun it would be to give Danse a tape full of Institute tech and see his face, I realized that 'fun' was a thing that might still be possible in the world.

I didn't get to give it to him. Instead I used it for leverage to get everyone to talk peace.

We left Sturges to his fun and took the tape back to my house to read it, and it was a good thing I'd just seen something good because we were about to learn more terrible things. I ended up sitting at my terminal with Nick and Deacon hovering over my shoulders like anyone trying to read someone else's terminal.

And the Institute's files, in Deacon's words, dropped their pants and showed us everything they had.

The files went back fifty-nine years, and actually started with Unconscious surface agent, human interaction test. Failed. Unit destroyed on site. My eyebrows went up. "Is that the Broken Mask Incident?"

"The date matches. Not many words to describe a day that's still hanging over Diamond City."

"So 'unconscious agent' means he didn't know he was a synth, I guess. He was just programmed to talk to people. Not shoot everyone, at least according to this entry."

Nick said, "Nice to know, even if it doesn't really matter now. The time to tell everybody that was right after it happened."

Each entry was a separate file and each entry was about the same: date, synth designation, project name, authorizing division head, and project notes. That last section had all the interesting information and some of the entries had quite long notes. There were 'conscious agents' and 'unconscious agents,' 'escaped' and 'discarded.' some of the entries included the synth's last known location or mentioned, 'Railroad involvement suspected.' Some had the synth's human name, and some didn't.

I looked down the list of synth designations, none of which meant anything to me. "Nick, do you remember what that synth Jenny said her number was?"

"K1-98."

"There it is. Institute agent, assistant to Bioscience division. Escaped to the surface…"

"Escaped how?" Deacon asked from behind me.

And my brain put it all together. "She used the molecular relay. Which isn't guarded. Because Director Ayo is trying to hide how many synths are going missing. She can't get back without a courser chip, but she could just leave. I wonder how many do."

I opened a few files at random and found that synths teleporting themselves out of the Institute was rare. Most of the synths on the surface had been sent there to do specific jobs, or they'd had jobs and walked away from them, or they'd just been tossed out. I found Percy's file: "Observation of the Minutemen canceled as they are no longer a power in the Commonwealth. Asset discarded."

There were other discarded assets too, from different projects. One was a robotics project by the division head before Doctor Binet, he'd programmed several synths with brain scans from before the war and turned them loose. Doctor Binet added that his predecessor hadn't left behind any notes suggesting what the goal of the project had been. So those synths had just been forgotten. They were probably still around with no idea of what they were.

Then there were the 'unconscious agents' put into settlements to spy or gather resources of some kind. They'd obey their programming without realizing they were doing so, just forgetting what they'd done. Some of these entries included human names and locations, some of them familiar.

I found a name I knew, a woman who lived at the lighthouse was a synth. Lily's orders were to collect prewar books, which Lily had done anyway. I knew her more than some of the settlers since we both liked to read.

Later on we did restore her memories, and her story was… not so bad. It turned out the real Lily was sick—Doc Weathers diagnosed her but didn't tell her. He told the Institute. The real Lily was taken to be a test subject for medical treatments while the synth Lily would return to the surface and live, except now she was programmed to leave some of her books at a drop point every now and then, and not remember that she'd done it. She just noticed that her more sciency books got lost every now and then. We woke her up, she went berserk for about a minute and then just cried a lot, poor woman, and now she's doing all right. What Doctor Binet told me, about replacing people who were going to die anyway, it was partly true. Partly.

Some of the replacements had it a lot worse. Waking someone up—the poor synth just knows they got tied up by strangers and then suddenly their head is full of awful stuff that wasn't there before and for a lot of them the trauma of it sets off the destructive impulse in the synth chip and then they really lose it. It's an ugly thing. I was there for every one from the settlements. Their friends and family couldn't be there but their General could be.

And there was someone who… who I cared about, who will never look at me the same way again because now he knows he's a synth, because of me.

But that was what happened later, over the next few years. The Railroad did it all, really. Finding the synths, making sure they really needed to be woken up. Runaways like Jenny aren't going to freak out, they know it all already. But an unconscious agent whose first memory is seeing his original grab a gun off a courser and end himself because he knows the alternative is being an FEV experiment… no, I'm not going to tell you who that was. If he'd started to suspect he was a synth he would've been terribly dangerous.

That was later. I didn't even see that file until later. But the next thing we had to do that day was figure out what the hell to do about McDonough. A still-sleepy Piper turned up for the discussion and I read McDonough's file out loud. I don't remember the details—it was a long file, McDonough was replaced more than ten years ago. He knew he was a synth, but he also had the real McDonough's memories in his head along with an implant that could just shut him down if his human ethics started taking over. So there he was, he had to be mayor and he had to follow orders from the Institute. If he didn't follow orders the Institute would kill him. And if the people of Diamond City ever found out, they'd kill him.

That explained a lot.

"He's been following their orders the whole time! He should be outed in the press!"

Nick was sitting with his chin in his hand, thinking. "You already outed him in the press." he said finally, apologetically.

Piper began, "Valentine..." and then started to see the problem too. She reached up to squash her hat down onto her own head, grumbling underneath it, "All right all right, 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' I know. We don't even have proof do we? Not the kind anyone else could believe!"

"Even if we did have proof… I'd feel fine seeing McDonough removed from office but not so fine seeing him lynched. And who knows where it would go after that? Blood in the streets. I've—the first Nick—has seen that."

Without thinking I said, "There was a war protest in January that-" and I suddenly realized the human Nick might have been there downtown while I watched the protest-turned-riot on television. I shuddered. Nick looked at me with the same spooked expression like he might have been trying to remember if he'd ever seen me before he was himself. Eager to move on from this feeling of someone walking over my grave I said, "I don't like the idea of the Institute being the power behind Diamond City but it might be best to leave McDonough alone for now. I'm working with the Institute. Maybe I can find a way to make the orders stop coming so McDonough could be mayor under his own power—or fall apart and resign, but without violence. Maybe without violence."

Piper really did not like that. "But the people of Diamond City are already in danger! Just because people aren't listening, does that make it right to just not tell them? How do we know the Institute won't just order him to poison the water or something?"

None of us had a good answer for her. Nick offered, "They haven't yet. Makes my skin crawl too, but we need a plan to get him out of Diamond City safely."

Piper's eyes narrowed and I could just see plans hatching in her mind.

"Piper..." I said.

"Fine..." she smiled. "I'm not a loose cannon, Blue. Really! Now that it's not just me and the paper against the world… I can work with people."

Nick said, "Good to know, Piper. I wish Diamond City had a little more standing for it than an old private eye and a plucky girl reporter, but I suppose we're better than nothing. We'll try to find evidence that can get McDonough out of office. Maybe we can even find something that won't out him to the Institute and get him killed. For how long though?"

I said, "I don't know. A while. We've got the Brotherhood looming over us, the Railroad about to start shaking things up and Shaun—the Institute has some kind of plan and I don't know what it is yet. This doesn't seem like the time to risk destabilizing Diamond City." I was trying to sound confidant but my voice trembled.

Then Deacon said, "Congratulations, the fate of the Commonwealth is in your hands." His voice was kind, he was just kidding, but I sobbed and Piper gave him a look that could peel paint. When I got hold of myself again Deacon offered, "At least you know people who are used to dealing with synths. As long as you can handle the humans."

That was the day after I came back from the Institute and the second time someone mentioned us—me—being responsible for the Commonwealth.