November 13, 2287 – As Nick and I headed to the lower level of the Memory Den, where Dr. Amari set people up in egg-shaped pods where they could live out parts of other people’s lives, I asked him a question I had been wondering about for quite a while, especially in light of my conversation with Hancock. With so many in the Commonwealth openly hostile toward the Institute, and synths in general, how was it that he was on such good terms with so many people? He said it hadn’t always been this way. He had never hidden who he was, and in a time when the real terror of synths came from them inhabiting friends and family, he had always just been Nick. That transparency – which was mostly forced by his facial appearance – had been vital in getting people to trust him. That led me to another obvious question – if the Institute had patterned human-looking synths on real people, was there a real Nick somewhere? And if so, what happened to him? Turns out, the “real” Nick Valentine was a cop, and if I had spent more time in the city back in my day, […]
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