#nick rant

Nick is the exact opposite. With all the burdens he carries, he still a bright, cheery guy who believes in doing good for the sake of good and wants to help everyone.

When things look bad for SS, he's the one cheering them up and telling them the darkness will pass. He's even willing to risk his own life by allowing you to use his brain to find your son, even if you've been a royal ass to him the whole time.

Of course, Eddie Winter would say something like, "You broke in here, but at least you're hot."

Hahaha. He is such a scumbag. Have you listened to his last tape to his girlfriend? He secured immortality for himself and left her to die. He couldn't even share the experiment with her.

One thing I REALLY love is the fact that Nick already helped me kill Kellogg (who killed my husband). So killing Eddie Winter (who kills his fiancee) with him is like returning the favor.

Every time I do this quest, I hope that there will be some dlc that expands on Nick Valentine. The original Nick, I mean, and what happened to him once the Institute got him. Maybe we’d finally learn that Nick IS the real Valentine (I think he is. I think his consciousness was transferred like Curie).

I think it would just be great if a dlc expanded on ALL the followers. We'd learn more about Preston, Hancock, Cait, Curie, Piper . . . everyone. Maybe there would be a quest where we have to learn more about them -- or they learn more about our past.

I would LOVE to have a dlc that allows me to build Nora's past even more. Compared to Nate, she was practically neglected.

Your companion/love interest would learn more about you, and their reaction would reveal more about them.

Like, Preston's reaction to the SS’s story is very telling. Once you learn that Pres was suicidal, him saying "Damn!" when you tell him the truth makes sense. No doubt in that moment he was realizing that other people have it a lot worse than him but are still pressing on. I think knowing your story and how much you had suffered and the fact that you just kept going gave him the strength to go on, basically.

Nick normally gains approval when you unlock terminals. But I discovered today that Nick "silently" gains approval just when you USE a terminal. I triggered his admiration speech just by looking at a random terminal. 

Curie's confusion about her feelings had *nothing* to do with G5 (who I kept confusing with C2) and everything to do with her evolving as a sapient being. So everything I said in my "nick rants" about two beings sharing one body can be tossed out the window.

I'm still very curious to see if the Institute was really trying to gain immortality through finding some way for human consciousness to inhabit a synth. And it still seem as Father was the only one to pull this off with synth Shaun. 

Would be interesting to have at least one dlc where the Institute is explored more thoroughly.

Then I listened to Nick's speech at the end of the quest again. He talks about how the last thing *he* remembers is getting sent to the Institute  for a shady procedure, then he wakes up in a dumpster with his family and friends and entire life gone.

I must've been too tired to have caught it before, the way he switches pronouns so often.

I'm starting to think that the real Nick Valentine *did* live on in a synth. Only that synth has his own personality and consciousness, so trying to separate himself from the human in his head is confusing.

It's kind of like when Curie takes a synth host. The synth host retains memories and feelings in its brain that Curie is actually able to feel as if they were her own. Two beings in one body.

I'm basically saying, the real Nick Valentine still exists inside a synth. When Nick speaks to Eddie, that's the *real* Nick speaking.

The real Nick had no idea what the true nature of the procedure was. I've been wondering ever since what happened to him once his brain was scanned and the copy put inside the synth Nick.

Was he murdered and disposed of after the procedure? Did he die during the procedure? Was his entire consciousness actually put inside Nick, so the synth Nick is actually the REAL Nick?

I've seen a theory thrown out that the Institute was trying to find some way to live forever. Once they had succeeded in taking over the surface with synths, they would control everything from underground -- for all time. And this could have been the reason behind the experiment on Kellogg that allowed him to live so long.

Father says in his terminal that the other scientists are jealous of Kellogg's immortality. I think it was their plan all along to live forever. In experimenting on Nick, they could have been attempting to find someway to preserve human consciousness in a synth host. But once it worked, they realized Nick was too good. He could never be someone like Kellogg: a minion who would do the evilest things for a few trifling bottlecaps. Nick had too good of a heart and could not be manipulated, so he was tossed out in the garbage. Their first attempt at a perfect, almost-human-but-not-quite synth specimen was out the window.

They tried again with Kellogg. And while Kellogg did live over a hundred years, he could not be controlled. As I said in my University Point theory, I think there was even a point where Kellogg tried to sabotage the Institute.

Then the Institute created coursers. Cold. Emotionless. Perfectly obedient.

But the problem of their mortality was still there. They could give a mercenary eternal life but could not cure the common cold. So the experiments on the bioengineered synths began. We actually see a scientist in the Institute (the one who says "we can't cure the common cold") doing experiments on a synth subject.

It seems they are trying to figure out how to combat disease, perhaps at Father's insistence because of his cancer, but also for the sake of honing the perfect synth host for their later use. If the scientists in the Institute were one day able to do what Curie did (and the real Nick did, to some extent) in possessing a synth host, then they would live forever.

It really challenges you to find that blurred line between sentience and artifical intelligence (that exists in fiction, anyway. In real life this stuff couldn't happen).

And it makes you feel really sorry for Nick. He's trying so hard to find some identity seperate from the real Nick and he finally does that with your help. Nick is a classic example of why creating machines with human emotions would be morally irresponsible.

This is something that the movie A.I. hit upon. David was programmed to love Monica and only Monica, but when Monica could not love him back, it broke his heart. And because he had been programmed to love her, he could not make the decision to simply move on with his life. He kept loving her for hundreds of years and lived with the terrible pain of her rejection.

Nick Valentine is going through something similar.

I think the Brotherhood is right in the sense that it's wrong to create these people. It IS wrong. It's essentially playing god to create sentient beings and subject them to human emotion with no way to process it. It's wrong to create them and then enslave them.

So the Brotherhood is half-right: it's wrong to create these beings in the first place. But now that they exist, it is also WRONG to deny them life, equality, and the basic decency all living creatures are afforded.

And I have to really applaud Bethesda for stepping up with their writing. I honestly feel as if I'm starting to love Bethesda (and CDProject to some extent) better than Bioware.

At least Bethesda never promises my choices will matter and then they don't. At least their games can be modded. At least their games can run pretty smoothly on my computer. The list goes ON.