January 31 2135
"Where the fuck is it?" Dench practically screams inside. I've been MIA for the past half hour, hiding on the roof. I'm sitting next to the vent, so I can hear snippets of conversation from all over the Embassy building; but I don't think I'd even need to be next to the vent to hear Dench's shrieks. Half of Europe can probably hear him with how loud he's being.
I know the longer I stay up here, the madder he'll be when he finds me. I don't really care about that right now - that's a problem for future me. I just needed to get away from him, from being called broken and defective over and over again, from him trying his damndest to convince me that I'm not allowed to be my own person. I find myself missing the HomoTech facility more often than not. They didn't know how the hell to deal with me, but at least they let me be my own person. Dench is determined to make me behave like all of the other Variants, just a mindless husk of a person.
"Sir, we've swept the entire facility," I hear someone say, presumably to Dench. "We don't know where he went."
"You don't have to refer to that thing as a human when it's not around, Mr. Williams." I recognize Dench's voice. "Have we checked the area around the facility yet?"
"N-no, sir, I'll let everyone else know to do that."
"That thing is important!" Dench yells. "We didn't invest billions in this science project to lose one of the fucking clones!"
"Let's check the roof." I hear one person say, closer to me than Dench was. Shit. I look around frantically for anywhere to hide, before remembering that there are people going out onto the grounds, as well. I resign to defeat, since they're gonna find me, either way. I move out of sight of the door and draw my legs up to my chest and rest my head on my knees. Might as well have a few moments of peace before the shitstorm. I can hear four sets of footsteps coming up the stairs now, followed by the door swinging open. I put on a stopwatch to see how long it takes them to find me.
"Alright, fan out. He has to be somewhere." One of them says to the others. All four sets of footsteps seem to be moving away from me. 15 seconds. One of the sets of footsteps starts to make its way closer to me. 36 seconds. It takes another 20 seconds before the person declares "I found him!" and grabs my arm. I don't fight back - it'll just be worse if I do. The person, a short woman wearing thin-rimmed glasses and a light blue suit, pulls me to my feet and continues to hold onto my arm for the 3 minutes it takes to get back to Dench. He looks fucking pissed, hazel eyes full of rage.
"How defective are you?" He yells at me, clearly trying to keep himself from either grabbing me or punching me.
"I'm not defective, I can just think for myself." I hiss at him. "And I think that you're an ass that I shouldn't have to listen to."
He's practically fuming now, hands shaking violently. He turns and storms off, yelling behind him to order the girl holding onto my arm to bring me back to my room, which is admittedly nicer than my room back at the HomoTech facility. It's a few square meters bigger, and I have a desk and chair to sit at. They didn't give me anything else, but since I have the Cortex I don't really need anything else. I have the entire internet at my disposal- books, TV and movies, games, music - I'll probably spend the rest of today zoned out playing Fallout 4, unless Dench decides to come in and start yelling at me. I settle into my chair, a big, cushioned swivel seat, and boot up the game. The familiar menu music begins to play after just a moment, and the scene of the workshop and power armor greets me. I load up my save and wait a few moments for it to load. Finally, Diamond City loads in.
Playing like this is better than ever playing on a screen, since it plays more like VR than anything else. It feels kind of like I'm really here - I have surround sound and full visuals of the entire environment, and the movement controls are basically just the same as how it would be to just walk normally. I installed a fuck ton of mods that let me do things like climb, and I did a little bit of editing to make the scenery even more realistic. It's a lot more immersive, and I'm fairly certain I've worked out all of the bugs in my copy, and it's a nice little bit of nostalgia from Matt's life. It was old by the time he was in middle school, and it was really hard to find a copy, let alone a console to play it on, but he did, and he was pretty into it in seventh grade. He liked to analyze all of the different outlooks of each of the factions, and he liked to spend a lot of time in Goodneighbor. It's nice to find there are still some similarities between him and I - I've spent hours in Goodneighbor, sitting in the Third Rail listening to music, talking to all of the townspeople, or just sitting on top of the courthouse, looking across the Commonwealth. One of the mods I installed adds plants and foliage growing over all of the buildings. It gives the game a The Last of Us 2 vibe, another favorite of mine but not a very replayable one.
I also love Diamond City, if for nothing else just for Takahashi and Nick Valentine. It feels nice to see communities built up from the rubble of a nuclear wasteland. While all of the nuclear warfare in real life didn't cause the crazy mutated creatures that are the ghouls and supermutants, it did level cities and leave hundreds of millions of people homeless. Seeing images of 2070s Chicago and Dallas reminds me of the Commonwealth, with towns inside of stadiums and criminal gangs roaming the streets, terrorizing anyone who isn't safe inside of the heavily armed mini-cities. Slowly, cities got rebuilt, governments were reinstated, and order was slowly brought back. Sometimes I wish Matt could have seen the people rebuild themselves after all of that devastation - instead, he was left with a cliffhanger ending, unsure of what would become of humanity after he died.
I'm not interrupted for three hours, until someone knocks on my door to bring me food. It's a short woman, maybe 19, with jet black hair and a sleeve of tattoos on her left arm. She hands me a paper bag, I mutter a 'thank you' and she scurries off down the hall. Everyone's so fucking jumpy around me. It's started to sting a little- no one talks to me, other than to let me know if I'm needed somewhere. I was hoping that there would be some people that would want to talk to me; maybe Dench told them not to talk to me - maybe that's wishful thinking. I just… need to find someone to talk to.
I suddenly get an idea; it's a bad idea, it probably won't even work, but I think it's the best bet I have right now. I need to do a little bit of digging.