Fallout - Chapter 145: Real and False Futures (Patreon)

The top floor of the Institute, the Director’s private quarters.

A medical life-support pod stood motionless in the center of the room. The three-meter-long, oval-shaped metal pod was entirely milky white, with dense rows of indicator lights arranged along both sides of its walls. Pale green and light blue lights flickered alternately, slowly glowing in the dimly lit room.

The upper half consisted of a single piece of curved bulletproof glass. Through the transparent canopy, one could clearly see the Institute’s supreme leader, Shaun, lying inside.

More than a dozen medical tubes of varying thicknesses were inserted into his body: some ran deep into the veins of his arms, others were attached to his chest to monitor his heartbeat, and still others extended through his nasal passages and throat into his body, rising and falling gently in time with the ventilator. The cool, white light from above fell evenly, casting a faint halo on the glass canopy and illuminating Shaun’s aged, gaunt features with striking clarity.

His chest rose and fell slightly; each breath carried a distinct sense of labor, as if something inside his body were gradually blocking the passage of life.

Nate stood in front of the chamber.

To get there as quickly as possible, he decisively opted not to wear his T-51 Power Armor because the hoverbike couldn’t handle the weight.

Instead, he donned this lightweight and agile Type 92 suit, racing through the underground tunnels on his hoverbike. Alarm sirens blared one after another along the way, and red warning lights strung together behind him formed a broken, flickering trail of light.

Within half an hour, he had breached at least seven layers of defenses, including hydraulic gates, sentry turrets, and patrolling Synth squads. He plowed through with near-brutal force, fighting his way to the restricted zone on the very top floor of the Institute.

The room was so quiet it was almost suffocating.

Only the life-support pod’s monitors emitted a constant low hum, while the ventilator’s air pump repeatedly compressed and released air. The air was thick with the pungent smell of disinfectant, carrying a certain unsettling, synthetic quality.

Through the glass, Nate silently watched Shaun inside the pod.

His blurred reflection appeared on the glass, overlapping with the face of the elderly man inside, creating a strange and eerie superimposition.

The dying old man before him still carried himself with dignity; even bedridden, he exuded the dignity of someone who had held high office for decades.

He was only in his early sixties, yet his hair and beard were already entirely white. Beneath the Wasteland, there were no changing seasons, only ceaseless scheming and decision-making, which had aged him faster than anyone on the surface. His face was covered in deep wrinkles; each furrow resembled a decision buried deep in his heart, never spoken aloud, layered upon layer until it was finally etched into his skin.

His eye sockets were sunken, his cheekbones prominent; illness had stripped away most of the flesh from his face, yet those eyes alone remained alive, so clear they didn’t belong to a man whose life was about to fade, his gaze piercing through the glass to rest firmly on Nate.

In the depths of his gaze lay scrutiny, hatred, and a faint glimmer, like the sudden flicker of a candle as it died. That was desire, hidden at the very bottom of all his defenses.

Shaun’s voice came through the life support pod, weak and hoarse, each word requiring immense effort.

“Hope cannot grow on the Wasteland, just as flowers cannot bloom from ashes.”

The words struck Nate’s ears with the weight of a piece of fire-hardened iron.

He had seen the settlements in the Wasteland, ordinary people growing crops amid radioactive dust and building walls to fend off Super Mutant attacks.

They had neither the Institute’s science and technology nor bunkers to protect themselves, yet they lived, day by day and shovelful by shovelful, carving out a niche for survival on the scorched earth.

But in Shaun’s eyes, all that struggle was meaningless, nothing more than the futile proliferation of inferior genes.

Nate fell silent for a moment.

The words Jace had spoken to him in the cellar at Sanctuary Hills flashed through his mind:

“You’d better be prepared to strangle Shaun with your own hands.”

Those words were like a thorn, lodged deep in the recesses of Nate’s mind, impossible to pull out. He knew Jace was right, and he knew that on his bloody path here, the blood on his hands had long since become too much to count.

But when he actually stood before this dying body, the emotions churning in his chest were far more complex than he’d anticipated.

Nate raised his hand and removed his helmet.

The cold, white light fell on his dust-covered face. There was still a streak of blood that hadn’t quite dried at the corner of his forehead, a mark left by a stray bullet as he breached the second-to-last line of defense.

The heaviest weight, however, lay in his eyes: the farewells of 2077, the cryogenic slumber in the Vault, every inch of scorched earth he’d trod upon in the Wasteland, and all the words left unsaid. All of it now sank into that gaze, pressing down on the glass pane before him.

Outside the door, Nora’s fingertips pressed against the doorknob; her knuckles were white, yet she held the door firmly in place, refusing to push it open.

Her breathing was barely audible; she had almost held her breath.

The cold, white light from the hallway poured down from above, stretching her shadow thin and long, casting it onto the metal door panel where it wavered slightly.

Little Shaun in her arms was unusually quiet, his tiny hand clutching her collar, his knuckles white. She could feel the boy’s heartbeat against her chest, rapid and muffled, thudding against her ribs with every beat.

The situation was too chaotic. She didn’t know how much longer she could hide, but she wanted even more to know what the two most important men in her life, her husband and her son, were actually saying on the other side of the door.

Nate’s emotions were incredibly complex.

The first feeling to well up was a loathing that ran deep to his very bones.

He had seen too many disasters wrought by the Institute: settlements razed by Synths, ordinary people silently vanishing after being replaced.

The children’s toys dug from the ruins of those villages, the charred stuffed animals, the scattered family photos. Each one was a silent indictment.

All the suffering, ruin, and despair on the Commonwealth’s surface traced their roots back to this hospital room, to the dying old man before him. It was he who had ordered the Synths to infiltrate the surface, and it was he who had marked all dissidents as defective units to be eliminated.

The matter of the cloned Nora, in particular, left him utterly disheartened.

Nate recalled the look in the synthetic Nora’s eyes in the photograph. Those eyes were exactly like the Nora he remembered: gentle, with a touch of stubbornness, and holding a hint of a smile. Yet he knew that beneath that outer shell lay a creation encoded by the Institute.

That sense of dissonance churned in his stomach.

Nate knew full well that whether it was little Shaun or the synthetic Nora, they were both, at their core, creations of the Institute.

If Shaun were so inclined, a single authorization command could easily erase their consciousness.

He couldn’t possibly sacrifice the future of the entire Commonwealth for two Synths who could vanish at any moment.

Yet deep down, a thread of indescribable regret and empathy lingered.

He knew just how tragic Shaun’s life had been.

Forced away from his parents as an infant, he grew up in a cold underground bunker, deprived of family, devoid of warmth, surrounded only by endless experiments, scheming, and factional strife.

No one ever read him bedtime stories; no one stayed by his side when he was sick; no one taught him what tenderness or kindness meant. His childhood was nothing more than a data tag, a set of experiment codes, or a checked-off entry in a growth log.

Extreme loneliness bred extreme paranoia and indifference.

Nate had often wondered: If that abduction hadn’t happened back then, if Shaun had grown up in the sunshine, what would he have been like?

Maybe he’d play soccer, scrape his knees and run home crying, fall in love with an ordinary girl, or sit on the porch one summer night drinking beer and shooting the breeze.

Nate looked at Shaun, who was clinging to life inside the pod. His voice was low and hoarse, his Adam’s apple bobbing slightly, and his fingertips trembled ever so slightly along the edge of his leg armor.

“Back then, when you were snatched from Nora’s arms, I couldn’t stop it. I was useless.”

Nate recalled that day, when Nora was shot right in front of him, a dark red pool of blood spreading across her chest, and the child in her arms was snatched away.

He lay in the hibernation pod, one hand reaching out into the empty space ahead, his palm grasping nothing but air, powerless to do anything.

“I wasn’t a good husband, and I certainly wasn’t a good father.”

As he spoke those words, guilt, anger, pain, and resentment all welled up inside his chest, pressing down so hard that every breath brought a dull ache.

Then he looked up, fixing his gaze intently on Shaun, his voice rising slightly,

“But none of this has anything to do with your mother. You shouldn’t have disturbed her, and you certainly shouldn’t have turned her into your tool.”

The ventilator’s pump rose and fell rhythmically as Shaun watched him silently.

“I cloned my mother back then simply because I didn’t want my younger, naive, and helpless self to repeat a lifetime of loneliness, coldness, and distortion.”

His gaze shifted slightly, as if piercing through time to look at a place far, far away.

“I grew up without parents, living amidst scheming and cold data. No one loved me, no one looked after me, and no one cared about my feelings. So I created the Institute’s only child Synth, little Shaun.

I just wanted to give that lonely child a warm mother and a stable, complete childhood, so he wouldn’t have to lie awake at night having nightmares like I did.”

Those words were like an ice pick driven into Nate’s chest, slowly twisting as it burrowed deeper. He opened his mouth to speak, but found he couldn’t form a coherent sound.

Outside the door, Nora stiffened, and her fingers slowly slipped off the doorknob.

Her back pressed against the cold wall of the hallway; her legs felt weak, and she slid down an inch before regaining her footing.

Ever since waking up at the Institute, Nora had had a vague sense that something was off. She looked far too young, her skin smooth and firm, without a single sign of childbirth; the stretch marks left from her previous pregnancy had completely vanished.

She had always assumed it was a benevolent gift from the Father, or a special privilege granted by the Institute’s technology, and had never delved into the underlying reasons.

She had even secretly rejoiced, feeling that fate had given her a second chance to stand before Nate once more in her prime.

It wasn’t until she heard the broadcast about the Synths’ uprising and saw her fellow Synths, numbered, memory-erased, and ruthlessly manipulated, that she finally understood everything: she was no exception; she was merely a meticulously crafted, deliberately orchestrated synthetic prop.

Her memories were implanted; her emotions were preprogrammed; her very existence was a coded function.

That pre-War wedding, that sunny afternoon, the look in Nate’s eyes as he held her hand and said, “I do,” were those real?

Or were they merely templates implanted by the Institute to make her more like Nora?

Her fingernails dug into the palm of her hand; the pain shot up, yet it felt utterly unreal.

Before she could process this cruel truth, Nate’s voice rang out again from inside the room, steady yet carrying the weight of a thousand pounds with every word.

“Then why don’t you just cure your mother?”

Outside the door, Nora’s heart clenched suddenly, and her breath caught in her throat.

Cure her? Was the real Nora still alive?

She instinctively clutched little Shaun tighter, so tightly that the boy wiggled slightly to break free. Her gaze was fixed on the door, as if she wanted to pierce through the metal panel with her eyes, trying to see inside the room, to see Nate’s face, to see Shaun’s eyes, hoping to find the answer in their expressions.

But the door remained motionless, cold and silent, like an insurmountable barrier.

A crack instantly appeared in Shaun’s gaze, his eyes filled with sudden confusion and bewilderment.

It was an extremely rare lapse in composure. For decades, he had been accustomed to controlling everything, to receiving every piece of information in advance, and to having every possibility thoroughly simulated.

But at that moment, his expression went blank for an instant, like a machine suddenly encountering unrecognizable data, with all its computational logic freezing simultaneously.

“What? Mother is still alive?”

Nate’s flat tone shattered Shaun’s understanding.

“Nora was only shot in the chest back then; the fatal injuries were blood loss and asphyxiation. The hibernation pods in Vault 111 are life-suspension systems; the low-temperature environment, combined with medication, can reduce the human metabolic rate to 0.3 percent of normal levels. With oxygen absorbed through the skin and a constant-pressure oxygen supply, blood circulation stops and the lungs cease to function, but the person doesn’t actually die.”

He stared at Shaun’s blank face and asked softly:

“You’ve never gone back to see for yourself, have you?”

Shaun remained silent for a long time. The waveforms on the monitor fluctuated slightly as he was silent; each heartbeat dragged on, as if reluctant to take the next step. His lips moved, opening and closing several times, before he finally spoke. His voice was dry and hoarse, with a clumsiness bordering on the absurd.

“I’ve never set foot outside the Institute since I was a child.”

Nate looked at him and suddenly realized something heartbreaking. His son had never truly seen the sky for as long as he could remember:

He didn’t know what the wind tasted like, didn’t know what it felt like to have rain hit his face, didn’t know the warmth of sunlight on his skin.

All his knowledge of the Wasteland came from sensor data streams, footage relayed by Synths, and flickering charts on terminal screens.

Sitting in a room with constant temperature and humidity, separated by two hundred years and a layer of concrete, he had sentenced the entire world to death.

A faint sense of regret welled up in Nate’s heart.

If Shaun could have stepped out of his 200-meter-deep underground prison, set foot on the Commonwealth’s soil, and seen the ordinary people clearing land, tending crops, repairing settlements, and struggling to survive amidst the ruins, if he could have witnessed the unbroken vitality and hope that still thrived on the Wasteland, perhaps he wouldn’t have become so obsessed.

But he had spent his entire life in a climate-controlled laboratory, immersed in data and calculations, judging life and death on the surface through a screen, and ultimately concluding, as a matter of course, that the Wasteland had long since died.

“Never mind. It’s too late to say anything now.”

Nate snapped out of his reverie and suppressed the complex emotions churning within him. He couldn’t let them get the better of him. Whether it was the confessions or justifications of a dying man, none of it could bring back a single life erased by the Institute.

Shaun must die.

Shaun’s breathing grew fainter and fainter; the monitor’s waveform flattened; his vital signs were fading away bit by bit.

The light cast ever-deeper shadows across his face, and his once-clear eyes began to cloud over with a thin film of opacity.

Summoning his last ounce of strength, he looked at Nate, his voice carrying a final plea. Stripped of all defenses, all scheming, all air of superiority, he was simply an old man on the brink of death, making one last request of the only blood relative left in the world.

“Father, I beg you, take little Shaun away. Take that child away.”

His voice was broken and halting, each breath accompanied by a hissing sound.

“I’ve programmed a set of one-time memory-erasure commands for him. Once triggered, he’ll forget everything about the Institute, the lab, the growth chamber, and me. He’ll come to believe, without a doubt, that you are his biological father, and he’ll have a completely new, clean life.”

Shaun’s fingers trembled slightly against the chamber wall.

“I took it upon myself to give him a stable childhood. The rest of his life is in your hands. I beg you to take him away from here and give him the future I never had.”

He gasped for breath as he finished his final plea. Every word drained his remaining vitality, as if squeezing the last glimmer of light from an oil lamp about to burn out.

“Please, take good care of him.”

Outside the door, Nora instinctively looked down at little Shaun in her arms.

The boy didn’t speak, but his ear was pressed tightly against the door crack, hearing every word of the conversation clearly. His tiny body tensed instantly; his hands clamped tightly around Nora’s neck as he buried his face deep into the crook of her shoulder, too afraid to look up.

Nora could feel his fingernails digging into her shoulder through the fabric; she could feel that tiny body trembling, a faint, steady shudder, like a baby bird soaked to the bone by a downpour.

A brief, deathly silence enveloped the room; only the ventilator continued its mechanical cycle, cold and relentless, refusing to stop. The waveform on the monitor had become a faint, nearly flat line, flickering only occasionally, like a lamp struggling in the wind as it was about to go out.

Shaun’s voice was almost inaudible; every syllable was drawn out, long and soft, as if it might be swallowed up by the hum of the machines at any moment.

“As for that Synth Nora… the damage caused by Kellogg’s shot is severe. Stimpaks likely won’t be enough to repair Mother’s physical injuries… We need a compatible organ donor, and she happens to be just the one.”

Nora, standing outside the door, froze.

At that very moment, a heavy, rapid metallic clatter of footsteps echoed from the far end of the hallway.

It was the roar of a suit of power armor sprinting at full speed. From far to near, it closed in rapidly. The floor of the entire corridor was vibrating, and the fluorescent tubes on the walls trembled slightly, flickering on and off.

Immediately afterward, Kyle’s shout pierced the corridor and came clearly through the crack in the door into the room:

“Ms. Nora! We’re on your side! Nate sent us to rescue you! Look, here’s a photo he gave us!”

Kyle lifted his visor, breathing heavily and rapidly. He held up the old, yellowed, and worn photograph.

Four T-51 Power Armor suits screeched to a halt at the corner of the hallway; the bloodstains on their armor had been washed clean, and the silver-gray armor plates gleamed starkly under the cold, white lights.

Nora looked at the old photo of herself as a young woman. Her heart sank, and without a moment’s hesitation, she clutched little Shaun tightly and turned to run.

Although she knew that even if she could evade the power armor, there was absolutely no way she could escape Nate’s pursuit.

But she had to try, for herself and for this child.

Holding the child, she sprinted with all her might toward the bend at the end of the corridor. Little Shaun bounced up and down in her arms, but he bit his lip tightly, making no sound, as tears streamed silently down his face, soaking the fabric on her shoulder. In a flash, she vanished completely from view.

Inside the room.

Nate heard the commotion outside. He spun around abruptly and strode out of the room.

The heavy metal door was flung open, slamming against the wall and rebounding with a thud, sending a dull rumble through the room.

But by the time he burst into the hallway, all he could see was Nora’s retreating figure.

“Nora! Wait! Let me explain!”

Nate’s shout echoed through the empty hallway, sending a string of reverberations that bounced off the metal walls and back again, yet failed to catch up to that figure. His fist clenched and then relaxed.

Kyle pulled up behind him with four T-51 suits; the team members exchanged glances, and the atmosphere grew exceptionally awkward. The heavy armor emitted faint creaks of metal fatigue in the quiet hallway, as if even the suits themselves were feeling just as at a loss as their wearers.

One of the Knights lowered his voice and spoke with resignation:

“Captain, it looks like… we’ve been misunderstood again.”

Kyle looked down at the photo he was still holding. In it, Nora wore her pre-War clothes as she stood in the sunlight, creating a stark contrast with this cold, alarm-lit Institute corridor.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Then he turned to look at Nate.

“Sir, what exactly… did you say to the lady?”

Nate stood where he was, gazing down the empty hallway, his shoulders slumping slightly. The metal joints of his Type 92 suit emitted an extremely faint, sigh-like grinding sound.

“…I didn’t get a chance to say anything.”