Hiding In The Green: A Fallout 4 Story

Greygarden

Paladin Danse was willing to keep his side of the bargain, but he wasn't ready to start out immediately the next day. He wanted the deep range transmitter installed, tested, and to successfully communicate with Command before he accompanied them to the Galleria, which would have been fine except that it didn't work right the first time, or the second, or the third. Raina would have offered to help, but the antenna array was on the roof and her fear of heights would have kicked in.

After whiling away the morning waiting, with Rhys making nasty remarks while Danse and Haylen worked on the antenna, Raina and Nick's eyes met.

"Greygarden?" Raina asked. Nick nodded. Soon they were on their way to the robot-run homestead.

"This looks familiar," the agroecologist said as they mounted the hill to the farm.

"Well, we did pass by just yesterday," the detective pointed out.

"More familiar than that," she said, and Nick Valentine stole a glance at her face.

"You look like you're working out a chess move in your head or something," he observed, seeing her creased brow and noncommittal mouth.

Her face cleared. "You're the last person from whom I need to keep this a secret. Or keep any secrets from, at all. I—never explained why I'm like bread starter."

"You mean when you told me I'm a grafted tree? No, you didn't," he said.

"Well, now I'm telling why. Yeast used to be available in every grocery story, in cakes or dry granules, but now if you want raised bread, you have to have a crock of bread starter, a yeast culture, just like people did for thousands of years. Yeast is a living thing, so you have to keep bread starter alive by feeding it flour and water, storing it somewhere that's not too hot or too cold, and so on. When you go to make bread, you put the starter into the dough, let it sit and rise, punch it back down, let it rise again-but before you shape it into loaves and bake it, you take out a big lump of dough and put it back in the crock, for next time. Then it's renewed, but it's still the same bread starter. There's always some of the original culture in the starter, no matter how many loaves you make."

She paused and went on, "Another name for that kind of bread starter is a 'mother'. There's something of Theodosia left in me—and of Margaret, Constancia, Melisande, Catherine and Ulrike. Memory can be transmitted genetically, but only if the genes are not recombined during conception. That's our theory, anyway. Theodosia was here, and she was here more than once. I can tell. I think she knew Dr. Grey."

"You inherited memories?" he asked, a little stunned. "Geez, no wonder you understand what it is to be...to be me."

"It isn't equivalent," she said, staunchly. "For one thing, it was and is our choice. Mostly inherited memory applies to things my predecessors did a lot, so I was born knowing how to speak and read and write, knowing how to get around our vault—routine things. Learned memories. Personal memories are slippery, like trying to catch minnows in a stream with your bare hands. Which I have done, by the way, in the pond and stream environment chambers."

"Geez," he repeated. "I wonder if that's how the Institute makes Gen 3s with functioning memories straight out of the box. It obviously doesn't bother you much, if at all. How do you handle it?"

"For me it's perfectly normal," she shrugged as they continued their climb up the hill. "I am me, not Theodosia or any of those who came between her and me. It helps that we have a commonality of purpose—the Vault. But we do alternate donors so there's variation between sisters. If I could start up a younger sister in vitro, I wouldn't use my cells, I'd use Jo's and then Vicky's."