A House Divided

**A House Divided** is a quest that can be obtained in the Commonwealth in *Fallout 4*.

## Synopsis

Not everyone is happy that the Sole Survivor has been deemed the next director overseeing the Institute, with some resorting to rather drastic measures in order to express their frustrations. Two Institute conservatives, Lawrence Higgs and Max Loken, have seized control of BioScience and cut off supply of foodstuffs to the rest of the institute, in order to force the Director to change their decision and appoint someone more worthy of the title or for the Survivor to resign. To Higgs, the Survivor represents an unacceptable threat to the Institute: An unproven outsider incapable of providing experienced and competent leadership, jeopardizing decades of Institute research and progress. By holding a gun to everyone in the Institute and protected by a small army of hacked gen-2 synths, Loken and Higgs intend to wait out the rest of the Institute until their demands are met.

## Walkthrough

* Upon completing *Mankind - Redefined*, the Sole Survivor will return to the Institute to learn of unrest between the scientists, with both Lawrence Higgs and Max Loken having taken control of a moderate group of generation 2 synths, and holing themselves up in the BioScience laboratories until the Sole Survivor has stepped down as the next director, once Father dies.
* Oberly will give the Sole Survivor a holotape, which is revealed to be the bioscience systems access holotape needed in order to enter the nearby door, allowing partial access to where the two rogue scientists are holding out.

### Rogue scientists

* After dealing with the hijacked turrets and synths in this area, Higgs will speak to the player in the control booth. Higgs can then be talked down through a Persuasion check and asking for a chance to prove themselves. If successful, Higgs will confer with Loken and agree that a leap of faith might be in order, then the two of them will confine themselves to quarters waiting for the player's decisions and reverting their synth override.
* If Persuasion fails, the player can kill them or hack the console to force the door into BioScience open. Once the scientists' hijacked guards are gone, the two scientists will then proceed to give up.
	+ The player can also access a console in the next room, which will allow for them to use the holotape to disable the hijacked turrets and release the synth gorillas, in which the two of them will proceed to massacre everything in the room. The synth gorillas can then be killed and/or looted in order to obtain the finite gorilla meat, in which two portions can ever be obtained legitimately.
* Should the scientists live through this incident, the Sole Survivor will be given a several of choices in how to deal with them when talking to Oberly outside Bioscience. These include:
	+ sparing them and meting out no punishment,
	+ confining them to house arrest,
	+ executing them for their betrayal of the Director. In this case, two headstones will be erected in the concourse in their memory.
* Regardless of the scientists' fate, Oberly will award the Sole Survivor with chems, in return for their efforts.

## Behind the scenes

The title of the quest is a cultural reference to Abraham Lincoln's famous quote "A house divided against itself cannot stand". The analogy being made between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America at the time of the American Civil War and the Institute.