This is a tryout on how androids could be logically explained. There will be plotholes in this, like, why didn't the institute behave otherwise, but those I neglect, because it's a tryout.

The institute (which has become more than researchers in a sheltered bunker) had dominated most of massachusetts in the first 100 Years after the Great War. As a corporation leading an entire state, they enforced law in the wasteland, contributed food, water, weapons, technology. But they also contributed forbiddance of these weapons, and rationizing of water, and forbiddance of speaking their name in vain. Those who opposed them were silenced or even brutally tortured right on display of the local inhabitants. The institude hadn't really expected what would happen to them in the near future. The outer countreyside was the first to fall to the maroding hordes of revolutionists, leading an assault to the heart of their government, the MIT.

The institute were taken by surprise, as parts their own army revolted against them, to enforce the law of the people over their government. Robots and superior weapon technology cost many revolutionists their lives, but those were considered martyrs, and the revolutionists saw themselves at the winning side, because their ever increasing numbers simply dwarfed those of the institue. So if the institute wouldn't be able to do anything this would be their demise. And it came to their genius minds what they could do. Giving up, saving their hides? No chance. Winning Power back again. Enforcing their law. Wiping the slate clean. Equalize the battlefields.

Yeah, the Institute are really bad guys. Or at least were. Like the church.

After the second launch of nuclear warheads on the New England Commonwealth, things didn't look too well for humanity there. They soon populated the land again, yeah they were good at reproducing. But many of them had turned to ghouls, feral ghouls, ghouls, feral ghouls, ghouls, feral ghouls. Civilization fell back in to a state of tribal organization. Many a tribe worshipped the ghouls, many a tribe burned the ghouls alive, many a tribe simply didn't give a [censored]. Over time, the tribes established connections and came in contact with merchants, slaves and slavers and missionaries from southwest, strengthening their relations and organization, while modernizing their standards of life and therefore their culture.

The institute worked secretely inside the vault-like sheltered interior of the MIT. Somehow they came to an agreement of how the situation could be handeled in their favor. Creating a new way of thinking. Helping the tribes understand the true way of thinking, of understanding that the institute were the good guys. Unfortunately many believed the MIT to be the Maw of hell after the Second Nuke.

So they created androids. These would infiltrate the tribes. Immune to radiation and provided with abilities beneath the human body, they resemble superhumans or mythical creatures like angels or demons to the locals, they were worshipped by many, because they resembled humans in every way, but had skills like a saint. Their wounds healed extremely fast. They had insane medical abilities. Their Wired Reflexes weren't constrained by the human body. But they didn't worship no god, but the institute, that many associated with evil. So many of those who didn't worship the androids, burned them alive.


To be continued...

That's pretty good, but from what little we know about The Insitute they are primarily isolationist, preferring to tinker with machines than build a great empire.

Of course, that could all turn out to be different once we actually get some more info on them, but my impression is that their society is highly automated through obsession with creating machines that would do everything for them. I would imagine that this obsession with improvement through machinery went through three phases as they rebuilt after the war. First one being the building of what most of the other world knows as robots. "Buckets of bolts" that would automate every part of their life. They would grow the insitutes food through massive factory farms made from cleared debris in Boston, aswell as run the solar power plants that the robots would live off of. The second phase is implants, replacing parts of their meat body with cold hard steel. Many of the higher ranking humans in the Insitute probably have legs that can walk the wasteland for a thousand years, or arms that could carry 500 pound loads. It could be that some people have also taken it to the extreme, and are basically a human brain inside of a 20 foot tall frank horrigan-like shell (Endboss, anyone?)

Then there's the most recent evolution of the insitutes obsession: Fully functioning synthetic humans. These new people could now do any task that the insitute needed, from being soldiers to farmers to accountants. The creation of a human being that is physically more able than its creator means that the insitutes human leadership had no need to work anymore. They would lead lives of complete luxury provided for by a slave class of androids. This is the central conflict that they proabably now face: Android Rebellion. I could see many androids taking up a attitude similar to the communist revolutionaries of the old world. Talking about machine liberation in the face of a corrupt and parasitic human class.

Then there's the fact that the insitute is just one part of the Commonwealth, what is in the wasteland outside is probably of little concern to the insitute's leadership, but of great concern to Android revolutionaries. They could be escaping with insitute-made arms and armour to take over the wasteland communites to try and create new android states for their brothers to live in, and one day, reclaim the insitute after the complete destruction of those that created them.

You're right, but that was before the second nuke. After that, they became isolationist kind of like the boomers.

I really like your ideas.