Hiding In The Green: A Fallout 4 Story

Can't See The Forest For The Trees

There was the holotape, still intact even after two hundred odd years....and it had the message on it. Raina slipped it into her pocket and went back to Nick. His guard had nodded off thanks to the medications he was on, which was fine with her, as she found him intensely unlikable. Since she didn't want to rouse the man, she beckoned for Nick to join her on the back stairs, where they sat down. King curled up on her feet, as usual.

"Didya find it?" he asked.

"Got it," She patted the pocket. "Nick, I—." Ever since he had told her how he came to be, the memories of a pre-war cop loaded into an electronic brain housed in a synthetic body, a Frankensteinian combination if ever there was one, she had been trying to come up with a way to explain him to himself.

"What's up?" Yellow eyes, brighter than a cat's, regarded her.

"I may get this wrong. I probably will, because I've never said anything like this to anyone, but..."

She paused a moment before she plunged in. "Fruit trees in the wild, that is, truly in the wild, not trees someone planted a long time ago—they're mostly awful. Their fruit is small, hard, sour, and almost inedible. Cultivated trees like pears, bananas, and apricots—they are what they are because a hybridizer took pollen from a tree with slightly bigger fruit and put it on the flowers of a tree with slightly sweeter fruit, and so on. It took thousands of years to turn a wild banana with more seeds than flesh, a banana that had to be cooked before you could bite into it, into a soft, sweet fruit that was easy to peel."

"Uh—you say things like that all the time," Nick pointed out.

"True," she said. "But there's more. A really good fruit tree is practically a miracle, so when a hybridizer breeds one, then they propagate it by cutting—that is, they cut off branches and root them so they'll grow into trees with fruit exactly like the parent tree. Except that it doesn't always work right, because maybe the original tree only flourishes in a certain kind of soil, or it's prone to root rot, so they take a tougher variety and graft the cutting onto the rootstock of that tree. The rootstock is tough and vigorous, the cutting bears fruit that's better and more abundant, and together they make a better tree than either would be on its own. Nobody can say that tree isn't really a tree, or that its fruit isn't really its fruit.

"And that's you, Nick. You're like a grafted tree. This synth body is the rootstock, and the original Nick Valentine's memory is the cutting. If not for the synth part of you, all of him would be gone and lost, or just so many ones and zeros in a database. If not for his memories, you'd be just...well, whatever a synth becomes when the Institute sees them as things and not people. I have no point of comparison, there.

"You aren't him any more than the grafted tree is the parent tree, but the things that were good about him live on in you. And those things are as rare and worth keeping alive as...the Moorpark apricot. It's probably the best apricot tree ever bred. Anyway, that was what I wanted to say."

He looked at her, and his eye-lights flickered a lot. For a long moment he was silent, then, "Damn ...For somebody who says they never say things like that, you sure hit it out of the ballpark."

"That wasn't what I was going for. I just wanted to try and help you find understanding."

"Well, I can tell you that right now, I wouldn't want to be anyone else, anywhere else," he said, and smiled. "You make me glad I am what I am."

His smile made her feel warm. None of her sisters had had a father or a brother, of course: they had to go all the way back to Theodosia herself for that, and Theodosia's personal memories were difficult to pin down. Nick was someone who was there when you needed him, someone who gave you good advice and had your back and worried about your health and wellbeing. Like a father or a brother, at least as she imagined they might be.