A Rebellious Child

How did Nora not know about this area of the Institute? Shaun had hidden it from his ever-curious and nosy mother too well—to the point that Nora hoped it came at some very large cost to him to have to do so. (It wasn't a surprise that upon becoming conscious, Nora was feeling very hostile.)

She did not know how long she had been unconscious, but as she came out of her half-dead sleep, she found herself in an entire laboratory that she'd never seen before. By the look of it—because Doctor Volkert who was wearing scrubs and a surgical mask, standing a short distance away as he faced some large computer, and was spurting orders to someone rushing around—the lab was made for the specific purpose of researching and ultimately turning a human into a machine.

Why hadn't Nora seen that Doctor Volkert was merely a mad scientist waiting on the sidelines for his chance to use her as a guinea pig?

Some of the equipment looked familiar, even through the crazy static-speckled daze Nora was in. She felt as she always did right after being relayed, but the dizzy feeling wasn't wearing off as it did when she relayed. The disorientation and white static in her eyes was constant and straining. Nora wished that blacking out would have been it—she would be dead. Not come back as a robot; and especially not be awoken to witness becoming one. But somehow, they had pulled her out of the near-death state she was in.

She came-to with a needle in her chest where her heart was, practically naked except for institute issued undergarments, and she was entirely restrained to a chair that was extremely uncomfortable; because it wasn't so much a chair as it was a stool with a large machine propping her up and holding her firmly in place with multiple robotic arms. It reminded her of the machine she watched for hours in awe as it created synths from scratch—with its multiple arms that worked in a circle.

Nora eventually noticed her son Shaun sitting next to her in a desk chair. The machine worked and moved around him as if he wasn't even there. Nora could only tilt her head a little to the right to see him, and she couldn't see the whole of him. She could sense him though, probably because her whole body wanted to reach out and strangle him once she noticed him.

"Are you awake, Mother?" he asked when she tried moving to look at him. Something twisted inside her gut when he did. His tone was desperate and almost childlike. After all that he was—deceitful and just as twisted as she had become—Nora still felt the pang of being a mother wanting to take care of her son.

"I thought I was dead," Nora whispered. "The thought of dying made me happy." It was true. That final betrayal before she blacked-out had broken her. She had not wanted to return to it, yet here she was.

Shaun shifted in his seat. "I need you alive," he replied firmly. He then sadly breathed out, "You're all I have. I cannot trust anyone else to carry out what must be done."

"Patient is successfully revived," the bustling individual moving around the lab told Doctor Volkert. Was that Brendan Volkert's voice?

"I suppose you'll get what you want by just programming it into me," Nora said with no feeling. She had no emotion left to care what becoming a synth would do to her.

"You think so little of me," her son sounded genuinely disappointed.

Nora was quiet, watching the multiple arms of the machine move. What was it doing as she sat there restrained in its clutches?

Then she answered Shaun with, "No, I do not. We're more alike than I realized. You're only older and settled in your ways. Back then, I thought I would have a chance to settle, but I lost it all and was forced to adapt to completely new way of living. My motivation for continuing was finding you, Shaun; even when it became more of a daydream than a goal. And when the daydream came true, I still could not settle. My heart was still broken."

Shaun seemed to be listening more so than he had ever listened to her before. Maybe he had the same pang of wanting a connection to his mother as she did to her son.

"You'll be getting a new one." It sounded like there was a smile in his voice.

Nora actually laughed, which made her dizzy. Then she sighed before expressing, "There is something you said earlier that I don't understand. In your office, you asked me what right I had to care about the synths when I was not one. That I should be more concerned with my fellow human beings. Yet here I am... becoming a synth. Because that's what you chose for me. Who am I supposed to care about now? The synths or... humans?"

"I can't make that choice for you," her son ominously spoke. "But you must choose soon. You see, war is coming. War with the Brotherhood of Steel. And war never changes, Mother. There will be blood on everyone's hands."

Suddenly, Brendan Volkert—also wearing scrubs and a surgical mask—stepped up beside her and worriedly said, "Doctor, the patient is talking to herself."

"It's expected that she'll be delirious, Brendan. Her brain is functioning at a higher capacity than normal for a human, and her physical senses cannot keep up. We're also poking around her brain while she's conscious but under an anesthetic."

Nora tried turning to see Shaun again, but he wasn't there. What was happening? She was delirious? But Shaun. . . Had he even really been there speaking to her just now?

"Brendan," she called to him before he ran off. "Brendan!"

The man hesitated but then answered, "It's best to just go with the flow, Nora. We're under a lot of pressure to get this done before—"

"Where is my son?" was all she wanted. "Where is Shaun?"

Brendan looked from Nora to his father. "Doctor?"

"What does she want?" Doctor Volkert stopped what he was analyzing to ask.

"She wants to know what happened to Shaun. I mean... the Director."

Doctor Volkert grimly nodded, walked over to Nora's side, and leaned down. As sympathetic as he'd ever been, he relayed, "Nora, Shaun passed away shortly after you went unconscious in the relay room."

Nora closed her eyes. "Why did you wake me up, Doctor? Couldn't you have kept me unconscious through all your work?"

"Trust me, you don't want the answer to that question, Nora. It's better that you just let me continue my work without further delay. This is a very delicate process. Any number of things could go wrong." He didn't even give Nora time to reply. He strode back to his computer and continued whatever "work" he was doing.

"I didn't even have a chance to tell my son to go to hell," Nora mused with Brendan next to her. She looked up at him with a hellish smirk. "Or maybe that's where I'm being sent." The man's eyes showed that he was both scared and saddened by the comment.

"It's time for more anesthetic," Doctor Volkert called out.

Brendan jumped away from Nora before the machine produced a robotic arm with a new needle. But before it injected her with "more anesthetic", there was an interruption:

Several Gen 2 synths voiced out to Doctor Volkert a warning that the lab door had been forced open. Nora could then hear shouting from what sounded like a very annoyed Doctor Justin Ayo. He was demanding to be let in or, "I'll have my coursers force their way in!"

"Ayo!" Doctor Volkert yelled back. "I told you I couldn't have you in here. This is a very delicate operation. "You and your Courser's will be in our way! Do you want to endanger our new Director's chances of living through the procedure?!"

"My presence is for the Director's safety!" Ayo growled back.

There was several zap! noises, a clattering on the floor, and then a, "Dear God, Ayo," from Doctor Volkert. "You're putting all of this at risk of failing!"

There was a pause before Ayo said, "What is that machine doing to her brain?" in a very dreaded—and very unlike Ayo—voice and manner.

"Don't—don't get near it," a flustered Brendan said. "You may contaminate the most vital piece to Doctor Volkert's work."

"Are you lobotomizing, Nora?! Taking her brain apart so you can scan it?!"

Why does Ayo sound so surprised, Nora thought. Why does he even care? It wasn't surprising at all, now that Nora realized, that the machine working around her was digging into her brain. Her brain was probably out in the open for everyone to see.

An angry but resolved Doctor Volkert replied, "X6-88, please escort Doctor Ayo out of my lab. He is putting our Director at risk of death before we can completely capture her brain waves and transfer them over to her new body."

X8 didn't reply to Volkert, but he did appear next to Nora, leaned down, and said, "When next you wake up, you will not be human. Nor will you be a synth. Do you understand?"

"I will not be human, nor a synth," Nora repeated. What was X8 trying to tell her? Of course she wouldn't be human. And she would be a synth if she wasn't human, right? Why had X8 felt it was important to break into the lab with Ayo to say something so silly?

"Who we are is not based on what we are. Do you understand?"

Something struck Nora's mind, and a single tear formed in her eye before rolling down her cheek. The computer where Volkert stood went haywire for a moment. The Doctor got excited and started turning nobs on the computer's console.

"Memories can be falsified for a synth," Nora thought out loud, shutting her eyes. "Or even forgotten by a human. What if I forget Nate? What if I forget everything?

"Because who an individual is, is not only founded on where one came from, but also where one goes."

"Choice," Nora put it into one word.

"Choice," X6-88 agreed. "Will you choose to be Nora when you wake up, even if that means relearning who Nora was? Or will you choose to be someone else? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. What's important is that you do not let what you are decide for you."

"I think I understand." Nora smiled, opening her eyes to look at the synth. X6 was not wearing his sunglasses, which was astonishing to her. More significantly, his eyes were conveying hope, which she found even more amazing. "Thank you, X6," she softly spoke. Could she trust the man after all? Had his betrayal been misunderstood?

Nora also got a glimpse of Ayo standing not too close to where the machine had her. He looked more afraid than she'd ever seen him, which was unbecoming for the head of the SRB. His posture, too, was different. Had he put on some weight? She felt as if she was seeing someone else in Ayo's place, but she couldn't place who, and it may have been a hallucination, just like Shaun had been.

X6 calmly got up and went over to Ayo, firmly putting his hand on the man's shoulder. "We have to leave Doctor Volkert to his work. Our new Director is fine and will make it out of this alive."

Ayo didn't look convinced and kept staring at what Nora assumed was the machine probing into her brain. The machine finally injected Nora with more anesthetic, and a fist clenched at Ayo's side as he watched. "I can't—"

"We won't lose her," X6 reiterated to him in a harsh tone. Something was definitely wrong with this picture. X6-88 was practically telling Justin Ayo, his boss, what to do.

"Doctor Ayo," it was Brendan to speak up. "Is something wrong?"

That seemed to snap Ayo out of whatever thoughts he was in, and his face became his own again. "For security's sake I'm leaving one Courser at the door, Doctor Volkert."

"Fine, fine," Doctor Volkert didn't seem to care now. He was much too involved in whatever readings he was getting out of his computer.

"I—uh... Director Nora, I look forward to speaking with you when you're... Better... " Ayo stuttered.

"You're acting strange," Nora all but laughed at the man. The anesthetic was kicking in, making her feel lighthearted and silly—less hostile for the moment. "Who replaced the real Ayo with a nice robot version?"

He nervously laughed before saying, "You assume too much, Assumè."

"Ooooooooh," she expressed, before giggling uncontrollably. Now it made sense. Or she really was hallucinating. "You'll have to. . . ," she was starting to feel herself slip into numbness, "explain it to me when I wake. . . up."

Everything went fuzzy and Nora fell into half-asleep stupor, occasionally feeling dull pricks in different parts of her body. Voices and noises were nothing more than a distant humming. She felt alone and as if she was drifting on a river of bright white light.

Suddenly, Nora found her 18 year-old-self sitting in the house she grew up in. . .

"Darling, you need to stop this rebellious phase you're in," Nora's mother said in that disapproving tone she'd heard so many times in the last year. It was the calm tone, before her mother made the leap into a screaming fit. "Your father has been so stressed out each time you come home late that it's starting to effect his work. He said a few of his co-workers saw you flaunting yourself like a she-devil somewhere downtown."

Nora sat on the couch in the living room wearing what her mother called "the clothes of Jezebel". It was a red tube top and a pair of mini short jeans—not even a mini-skirt as she had worn the other night. Her black greaser jacket lay next to her, but Nora kept a hand on it, in case her mother decided to take it away and burn it in one of her fits. Someone special had given it to her.

"Remind me why I care about Father's work and what his co-workers said they saw?" Nora facetiously asked her mother. She honestly didn't care if her behavior was stressing her father out. The man was barely ever at home himself these days. He spent most of his time in Boston with his colleagues.

Nora couldn't even remember who he officially worked for, because it was one of those companies that worked with a bunch of other companies in "security". What she really knew was that her father's company was full of crooks. They were paid crooks. Crooks that were paid to break into other companies to find cracks in their security; but it didn't stop them from also selling any secrets they found to the highest bidder.

"You know perfectly well how important your Father's work is, Nora!" her mother started screaming.

Nora wasn't going to take it today—she was all but done living with her parents. She was merely waiting for the right opportunity before immediately packing and leaving to live with someone she had met on one of her late nights out. She stood up and put on her jacket. It smelled good to her. It reminded her the man she was falling for. "Actually I don't care how important Father's work is. He makes money off of stealing." She started for the front door.

"How dare you! Your father puts this roof over your head, and you're going to mock his efforts!"

Nora actually felt sorry for her mother. The woman was addicted to the newest drug out there to hit Boston, called "Mentats". And it was all thanks to her husband, Nora's father, who had a steady supply of the candy-like drug from his crook friends in Med-tek. Yes, the drug helped Nora's mother focus on her dressmaking work, but it was also addictive. Her mother's irritability was mostly caused from withdrawals when she wasn't on Mentats.

"And where are you going now? Wearing that?!" Her mother blocked the door. Nora knew her mother took it as a personal offense that she wouldn't wear proper dresses, like the ones her mother made. Her mother worked diligently to sell her dresses to neighbors at parties, but recently was also selling them at a clothes boutique in Boston-her mother was an honest worker; her father was not. Nora didn't wear the dresses her mother made for her, because they weren't suitable for Nora's work, which required a lot of sneaking around.

"I'm meeting someone," Nora plainly told her. "It was never a good idea to start yelling or screaming back at her mother when she went into a fit. Nora found it easier to just use patience, letting her mother wear herself out.

"Have you been sleeping around, Nora Reed?! Is that what these late night goings are about?"

"Mother," Nora started. "Haven't you noticed how distant Father's become? We used to have family outings every weekend. We'd all go to the park together. Play disc-golf. Take the car out for a spin and stop by the soda shop on the way home."

Her mother looked dazed thinking about it for a moment, and Nora went on. She could only try to reason with her mother. "We haven't done that since I was a sophomore. And now I've graduated. Dad didn't even attend my graduation. He showed up to the graduation party with an envelope of money, handed it to me, and went to bed."

"He's been working hard, Nora," her mother replied softly. "The security business is competitive. He hasn't had as many contracts come in as he used to. Why do you think I've been trying to help by selling more of my dresses?"

"The economy is changing," Nora addressed it differently than her mother probably expected. "People are starting to notice how corrupt our economy has become, and how fast our resources are depleting if we don't stop. I'm not one to stand by and watch the corruption continue. I plan on going to college, Mother. I've decided to get a law degree. I'm going to help crack down on crooks and thugs. And maybe one day go after the bigger thugs-the companies that have been corrupting our country under our very noses."

Her mother looked horrified. "Please don't tell me you've been attending some kind of secret Communist meeting, Nora-darling? If. . . someone in the government found out. . . you could end up dead!"

Nora pushed passed her mother. Before she opened the front door she said, "No, I'm not a communist, Mother. Communism is just a red herring used to cover up everyone else's corrupt secrets. I won't let the government define who or what I am."

"Such a rebellious child," she heard her mother cry as she closed the front door behind her.

AN: So it's been years of me not writing this fanfic. It's actually been years since I've written anything at all. Life kicked me to the gutter for a bit; it happens. But this is a story I think about often, because I still play Fallout 4 when I'm bored. I still love sci-fi at my core, and I often think about how I abandoned this sci-fi story when my real life went topsy-turvy. I had big plans for this story.

Now I'm not promising I'll make frequent updates. But here's an update. I apologize if the writing style is different and breaks the flow of previous chapters. I'm rusty, and I've changed. Maybe I'll never write the same. Maybe I'll get my groove back. Welcome back, or hello if you're new.

So I chose to make Nora's maiden name Reed. There's actually a Reed mentioned on a computer terminal at Natick Police Department in Fallout 4. Yes, the connection I want to make is that Nora's father was a crook.

Yes, I took the quote "Communism is just a red herring" from the 1985 movie Clue. Love that movie.