Chapter 93: Chapter 89

General Joe Becker sighed heavily as he considered the facts before him. With the Nexus taking up a sizable chunk of the Commonwealth and its robots purging the lands around it, it felt like the Minutemen were about to lose their jobs.

The areas not under Nexus control were desolately still after clouds of Sentinels had descended and exterminated every vermin, ghoul, raider and supermutant throughout the ruins of old Boston and the wasteland beyond it. The Minutemen patrols now only had to deal with occasional appearances of mole rats and radroaches, things that even common settlers could easily handle.

It hurt to admit it, but the rapid rise of Sev and his Nexus had tamed the dangerous lands in nearly a year, where the Minutemen had long struggled to maintain even a base minimum of security. He felt…useless and obsolete, and it was a sentiment shared amongst a growing number of men.

Having a peaceful Commonwealth should have at least made Joe feel content, but he could only feel uncomfortable at the fact that the peace had completely nothing to do with the Minutemen. And to twist the dagger, Sev still maintained respectful contact with the Minutemen as if they were his peers, and never once has supplies from the Nexus been disrupted in any way.

Sev remained a man of his words, and though his iron will was imposed within the Nexus Severalty, Joe couldn’t find any fault in him as a patron, a neighbour, or an ally. The goings-on in the notorious Blacksite Tleilax and the new Institute was sinister, but it was not that much crueller than the wasteland justice that a lot of settlements enforced, simply more clinical in its execution. After all, even the Minutemen used prison labor occasionally to clean out highly radioactive sites or fortify outposts, and sometimes executing the dangerous raiders after that.

So with times quickly changing, the general had to struggle with keeping the Minutemen relevant somehow, or finally calling it a day and disbanding the organization. The latter was unthinkable to him, but the former was a bitch to deal with. What could the Commonwealth Minutemen do that the Nexus’ more advanced forces couldn’t?

Sighing once more, Joe got up from his seat and dragged himself out of his office. He had a call to make, and hopefully Sev’s stalwart support of the Minutemen would not fail here.

*****

“Well, that’s all of them,” Deacon declared with brittle satisfaction. “In total, less than two hundred stable synths liberated.”

Dr. Carrington gave a heavy sigh. “Considering the obstacles we faced, it was a better result than zero.”

Desdemona hated it, but she had to agree. “That’s two hundred lives now free to live without the shackles of the old Institute’s programming. We could have done way worse.”

“Yeah, sad to see that Sev’s miracles only go so far, but…” Deacon shrugged and left his sentence hanging.

The air in the Depot’s meeting room was filled with bitter victory. Desdemona shook her head at the numbers before her. Despite their best efforts, and with generous assistance from the Nexus, only a small portion of the synths held in cold storage could be recovered and rehabilitated.

That was a less than ten percent success rate. Short of reactivating their programming to force subservience, the others had proven too damaged mentally to be safely let out, and after several failed experimental treatments, it was decided that the rehabilitation of the remaining synths were a lost cause.

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Selective mental wipes had proven ineffective as the damaged personalities refused to be erased. But complete mind wipes, ‘hard resets’ as Sev called them, left the synths without even a sense of identity, becoming little more than drooling, blankly staring creatures that didn’t know how to respond to stimuli.

It was a horrible thing, to determine the fates of the very people they wanted to rescue, but the options were bleak. Either reactivate the synths and keep the shackles of their programming on to have them live out the rest of their lives as slaves to the protocols seared into their very being, or put them out of their misery and allow them to at least die free.

The former was a fate some liberated synths had described as being worse than death, being trapped in their minds within the strict confines of their programming. But the latter would be a horrendous crime, a genocide. The heavy topic was discussed and debated to death, with rehabilitated synths providing their valuable input along with Sev, Nick Valentine, and a few others. The vote had to be unanimous, resulting in the whole ordeal being drawn out.

Today was the day that those of the Railroad had finally come to terms with their biggest failure after their biggest victory and witnessed the tragedy of their decision. To a man, they would travel to Blacksite Tleilax and witness the euthanizing of the remaining deactivated synths. Desdemona forced herself to watch from the observation room, forced herself to stare down at the massive room filled with synthetic sentients laid on the floor with Mr Handy robots moving between them.

She watched the robots wave some sort of device across the head of each synth, saw how the synths had twitched a little before finally becoming still. Another set of Mr Handies carried off the corpses. The whole thing lasted a brutal twenty minutes, and once the hall below was finally empty, Desdemona allowed herself to tear herself away from the window to quietly sob at her failure.

Sev, busy as he was, had offered the bodies to be placed in a massive mausoleum, to serve as a monument and reminder to the Institute’s atrocity. Nearly two thousand artificial humans would be entombed in the Nexus’ cemetery within a marble edifice quickly constructed by a swarm of Sentinels. Desdemona appreciated that the ruler of the Nexus would allocate his attention and resources even during the potential war brewing.

After watching everything the Railroad fought for come to an end, it was time to move on. Which begged the question: What do they do from here?

*****

Life within the new Institute wasn’t too bad for Brian Virgil. As one of the lead scientists, but not a head of department, he was spared from being disappeared into Blacksite Tleilax. The accommodations in the repurposed Institute was a far cry from the clean, serene environment of its past life, but still liveable. The lights were still electric, the air conditioning running flawlessly, all one needed was to ignore the slagged metal remains and austere, brutalist designs built from reinforced concrete.

As much as he hated being a prisoner in his desecrated home, he hated being dead far more, and knew things could have gone much worse. He and most of the other Institute scientists had learned to carry on and make do with what they had. They were prisoners of a crime the surface had deemed atrocious, but other than the minimal lifestyles they had to endure, nobody within the Nexus Correctional Institute was abused or poorly treated. The robot overseers were cold and absolute in meting out punishments for those who had initially tried to fight back or break free, but other than that, the metal monsters left everyone alone.

At least he got to go out to work at Ix. The wonders of the research center took Brian off his bleak imprisoned life and gave him a sense of purpose. It wasn’t just that he was hoping to work off his sentence, but the lines of research that the place was developing was mind-blowing and the scientist had become truly invested in them. It was also nice that the other people who passed through or worked in Ix had stopped giving him and the other Institute inmates dark looks.

So when Brian and his colleagues were not only there to witness the first batch of cows - not brahmin, but actual cows - grow from embryo to calf, but also credited as well for the breakthrough, it was safe to say that the former BioScience researcher was excited and overjoyed. That he found out later that five years had been docked out of his sentence was a pleasant bonus too.

Sure, things could be better, but for now, Brian Virgil would enjoy whatever moments he could.

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