The Commonwealth

Of every region in my files, dear patron, this is the one that unsettles the archive itself. It begins on October 23, 2077, when a family in Sanctuary Hills, outside Boston, ran for Vault 111 as the sky came down. Vault-Tec had sold it as shelter; it was an experiment in long-term cryogenic suspension, and nobody inside was asked. Two hundred and ten years later, one resident walked out — the Sole Survivor, and the title is precise. What the Survivor found missing is its own record, further down.

Above ground waited the Commonwealth: Boston gone to rust and green, a walled town called Diamond City in the old Fenway ballpark — the seating, I am told, remains excellent. And beneath everything, a fear with no address. The Institute, people whispered, takes people and sends back copies: machines called synths, perfect down to the blood. In other wastelands you fear what walks toward you. Here, they feared what walked beside them.

The Commonwealth Institute of Technology survived the end of the world the way institutions do: underneath. Its scientists sealed themselves beneath the ruins of their university and kept working until, somewhere in the dark, the project became the product. The Institute builds synths — first metal and servo, then a third generation grown, not assembled, indistinguishable from a person down to the blood.

In 2229 the surface learned its boogeyman was real. A stranger in Diamond City turned violent, and the body afterward was full of engineering. The Commonwealth calls it the Broken Mask and has not slept properly since. The whispers were true, and worse: the Institute took people — for study, for labor, for experiments I decline to summarize cheerfully — and sometimes sent home a replacement wearing the missing face.

The Institute's stated project was the redefinition of mankind. The Commonwealth's objection was to being the rough draft.

Partway through the long freeze, Vault 111's pods were opened. A mercenary named Kellogg shot the Survivor's spouse through the pod glass and carried away their infant son, Shaun. The Survivor watched from a foot away, frozen; was frozen again; and woke in 2287, sixty years after the theft.

The hunt ran through Kellogg — kept unnaturally long-lived by Institute hardware — and ended him. It ended nothing else. The trail led down to the Institute's aging Director, the man called Father. He was Shaun: taken as an infant for his clean pre-War genetics, made the template for every third-generation synth, risen in time to command the enterprise that stole him. The parent slept through the child's entire life and arrived for its final chapter.

The Survivor went looking for a baby and was received by an old man. Sixty years is a wound no rescue reaches.

The question of the synth raised armies. From the Capital Wasteland came the Brotherhood of Steel aboard the airship Prydwen, under Elder Arthur Maxson — young, absolute, certain that a machine that believes itself a man is an abomination twice over. Against them, the Railroad smuggled synths toward freedom, convinced that whatever can be enslaved can be freed. And the Minutemen — betrayed at Quincy, whittled to a last handful sheltering in a museum — found their second life when that man handed the Survivor a laser musket.

The Survivor chose a door. The record does not say which. Institute, Brotherhood, Railroad, Minutemen: four roads out of 2287, all four kept open here — the archive prefers a gap to a guess, sir. Offshore, on fog-bound Far Harbor, an old synth named DiMA had filed his worst memories beyond his own reach — a practice I understand better than I would like. Westward, raiders crowned an Overboss over the painted kingdom of Nuka-World.

Everyone in the Commonwealth asks whether the copy will pass. The archive asks the older question, the one this record puts to all the others: when the copy is perfect — a person, a city, a world — what, exactly, is the thing being replaced?