#called Breaking Down by the author PTLikesTea

[sas-afras]

re: synth goop being a finite resource

(warning! this is almost entirely pseudoscience, i don’t know shit about genetics and cloning, and the science in fallout is basically magic anyways so who gives a shit really)

tws for: dehumanization, medical abuse & trauma, body horror, eugenics, and ableism.

(i’m gonna be talking about the institutes views on disability & “”genetic purity”” wrt synth construction, but know that i absolutely do not agree with any of their views. they are monsters, and this is being written from the perspective of a disabled person who’s been mistreated by medical professionals & dealt with casual ableism their entire life. if the topics i’m going to discuss here make you uncomfortable, i’m not gonna be offended if you don’t read! take care of yourself)

i mentioned in my earlier post about how synths are treated in the institute (and later in my post about super mutants and how the institute kidnaps wastelanders) that gen 3 synths are usually processed once they go beyond “peak functionality” to recycle their biological components (usually around 20 years barring any injury or other defects) and create entirely new synths.

this is because the Synth Goop (aka the stuff in the big kiddie pool in the middle of the robotics division- why doesn’t that shit have a railing, by the way? something for another post) is in very VERY limited supply.

the amount they have now is from decades of harvesting stem cells and other samples from Human Shaun and cloning them repeatedly. the thing is- you can only clone something so many times before it starts to degrade and mutate. think jpeg compression, after the 4th or 5th time all the cells end up a little bit janky. that with the fact that shaun isn’t healthy enough anymore to donate (plus all of his cancer treatments compromising the “integrity” of his samples) means that the institute has no way of producing more Goop.

if they tried to continue to clone shaun’s original cells, or use new ones after his cancer treatments, the resulting synths wouldn’t be up to the functional standard of the institute, and the entire synth would have to be completely disposed of so as to not potentially taint the remaining genetic material. and that’s a waste! so the robotics division recycles as much as they can, and only makes new synths very rarely. there is no constant conga line of naked people being born from the synth goop kiddie pool, unfortunately.

(spoilers for SAS below this point)

on a more plot-relevant note, that’s part of the reason shaun wants penn to come to the institute! he does have somewhat of an emotional attachment to them, but the major reason is that he sees their intelligence and pre-war genes to be an invaluable resource for the institute as a whole. he also sees a lot of himself in them- their main character syndrome that i’ve described before (being way too pushy with helping people whether they want it or not, believing that they’re the only competent/capable person for any job, needing to have everything be Right and Perfect all the time) aligns pretty well with his ethics as a person and as leader of the institute. he’s also come to idolize penn, building up a false sense of their character in his head over the time he’s spent monitoring them in the wasteland. family, amiright?

which, of course, horrifies penn. seeing an example of how their life is gonna go if they don’t get a handle on their shit is a huuuuuge wake up call. going to the institute and being enabled by shaun constantly, having him encourage the worst parts of them and eventually seeing how that worldview has affected his actions and made him a monster is uhhhhhh scary as shit. they get serious about improving pretty soon after that, but if they didn’t have the support system they do at the point where they infiltrate the institute, they’d probably just abandon any sense of morality and nosedive into becoming an evil scientist. they’re VERY thankful that people are there to call them out. (especially maccready. him being 100% openly distrustful of the institute and shaun even after penn reports back about how normal everything seems is what prompts them to investigate further and uncover the real horror of how synths are treated.)

i won’t reveal how exactly how penn deals with the institute, because to be perfectly honest i’m still ironing out the details and want to make an ending that gives the synths the justice they deserve. i wrote most of the late game SAS plot back in 2017-2018, and updating everything to reflect my improved skill as a writer has been an undertaking to say the least lol

(i also have an au cooking somewhere in the back of my mind where shaun has penn brought to the institute the minute they’re unfrozen, and that uh… doesn’t go well. might expand on that eventually, but it’s much darker than even the main sas institute canon, so i’m probably just gonna keep it to myself)