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Киборг в Пустоши

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Школа кожевенного мастерства: сумки, ремни своими руками Юридические услуги. Круглосуточно
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  • Аннотация:
    Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14122127/1/A-Cyborg-in-the-Wasteland?__cf_chl_tk=8bgEEJ9XyU.GvsPQVzrV7AfOa7YFH52invSarrrIWUk-1739695697-1.0.1.1-yln5OE11b.d5k7lYqUveTr5ChT65ZiJB27bP3JXHE1M . Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше. Технически это кроссовер между вселенной Fallout и нишевой настольной игрой Eclipse Phase, которая описывается как мир "трансчеловеческого ужаса". Главный герой представляет собой комбинацию воспоминаний случайного исекая и воспоминаний трансчеловеческого ученого из Eclipse Phase.
  Chargen
  Since when did ROB offer character generation? The disembodied soul in the middle of an endless void contemplated its options. It didn't know how it got here. Or where here was? Or if it had agreed to this or was kidnapped directly by Mr ROB, Truck-kun, or similar.
  
  It could tell it was somewhat diminished. Had it died? It had a rather full life of memories, including reading various stories involving similar situations to what it found itself in online. Still, it turned blank if you asked what its name was or even what it looked like in the mirror, and interpersonal memories were a bit spotty.
  
  It might have spent some time in a philosophical introspection on the nature of life. Was it alive? However, what it had just done without thinking reassured it. You see, nothing could be this stupid and NOT be alive.
  
  You see, it had a deeply ingrained personality with its own preferences and likes. And it was coming to the realization that these likes were going to kill it; it just knew it.
  
  It was, even now, still looking at the locked-in selections with something akin to shock. It had made the selections in a haze, almost on autopilot and locked them in before it could stop itself. If given an option to trade increased risk, especially if it was temporary, for a long-term payout, it had selected it. It had often taken such choices as a matter of course when playing roleplaying games or roguelike games in its past life but now found itself wondering if it was insane.
  
  WORLD SELECTION RESTRICTIONS: SCIENTIFIC or PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC ONLY (25 points)
  
  WORLD SELECTION RESTRICTIONS: HIDE RANDOM RESULT ("Surprise me!") (15 points)
  
  WORLD: [RANDOMIZE] (50 points)
  
  ... SPINNING... SPINNING... SELECT!
  
  WORLD is [REDACTED].
  
  AVATAR SELECTION: [CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE SUBSET] (-20 points)
  
  AVATAR SELECTION: [RANDOMIZE APPEARANCE] (30 points)
  
  AVATAR SELECTION: [RANDOMIZE BIOGRAPHY, SKILLS] (75 points)
  
  BONUS: RANDOM AVATAR will be selected from any open world, not just SELECTED world.
  
  BONUS: YOU HAVE 130 POINTS TO SPEND! AVATAR BIOGRAPHIES UPGRADED 0.5 to 1.0 TIERS!
  
  ... SPINNING... SPINNING...
  
  It sat there staring at the stupidly selected 15 bonus points while the blue boxed interface that reminded him of an early Final Fantasy game animated a spinning glyph that was slowing down. Those 15 points granted from hiding the previously randomized world weren't worth it! That wasn't even that many "points", yet it impacted the rest of the selections so much!
  
  When it tried to select an avatar's biography, everything was redacted, except the point costs associated with each selection! The user interface should have been given a brief precis on each option, which would have included any skills and knowledge the individual biography would impart into its mind when selected. It wasn't sure how it knew this, but it did.
  
  All of them looked worse than what you get if you requested FOIA documents from the CIA! In a pique, it had mashed the 'USE ALL AVAILABLE POINTS AND RANDOMIZE' option with its mind because was that really any different from what it would have been doing by selecting a completely redacted biography?
  
  It didn't even really understand what the tiers were, but it supposed it intellectually appreciated the bonus. A randomized "character" generated would not be such a big deal on certain worlds. But it could be instant death on others! A special forces soldier background would be a bit of a curiosity in a Star Trek universe, but a Star Trek science officer would be meat if dropped anywhere near the plot of Halo, for example.
  
  The spirit should be panicking more than it was. It did not understand why it was not.
  
  ... SELECT!
  
  AVATAR APPEARANCE: [SELECT!]
  
  AVATAR BIOGRAPHY: Transhuman Researcher [SELECT!]
  
  AVATAR TIER: SUPERIOR
  
  AVATAR PERKS: Genius, Prodigy, Driven
  
  AVATAR FLAWS: Eccentric, Single-minded, Situationally morally inflexible (Transhumanism and Non-human/AI rights)
  
  AVATAR LOADOUT: Standard
  
  AVATAR SPECIALTIES: Medicine / Cybernetics / Genetics / Virology
  
  DATA DOWNLOAD IN 3... 2... 1...
  
  Ah. The spirit knew why it wasn't panicking, even if the random selection was perhaps one of the worst options if it ended up in a death world. It wasn't panicking because panic was a function, primarily, of biology. Specifically, it involved an autofacilitatory feedback loop involving adrenaline and other neurotransmitters. It wasn't, then, surprising why a disembodied spirit could, at most, feel very concerned with its lot.
  
  Ideas about how one would mimic this effect in a baseline human flooded the spirit's mind for a moment. The spirit's new knowledge found the very notion of panic deeply detestable, as perhaps the worst failing of an already profoundly fallible bag of meat and water. The option it seemed to want to push the most was "replace brain entirely with carbon hyper-matrix optical quantum computer running our neural network in an emulation."
  
  So it was going to be THAT kind of transhumanist background. It would have helped the spirit if it knew its selected avatar's source material but did not recognize it. Its new memories described a human race of hundreds of billions that had colonized the entire solar system but had not yet reached other star systems. It was an era of space exploration that was necessary when the Earth was rendered inhabitable through aggressive bioweapons and artificially intelligent killbots. And aggressively intelligent bioweapons. Terraforming Venus was considered cheaper and safer than trying to clean up Earth.
  
  It spent a few moments trying to reconcile its earliest memories with the knowledge of the avatar. Its new memories suggested that a person, an ego, was nothing more and nothing less than the sum of all its experiences and knowledge. So it spent some time compartmentalizing and focusing on its memories, trying to keep them from contaminating each other too much. It was an impossibility from the start in the long run, really. Still, it would give it some time to build a history of behaviour based on its earliest memories that could be used as a basis for a code of conduct that it would follow going forward, even after the inevitable melding of the two silos of experience. Through this method, the first memories would retain priority, at least in how it behaved if not thought.
  
  It was an electrical engineer in its first life. Still, its entire life's memories of engineering weren't a thimble full compared to the incidental knowledge of electrical engineering, microcomputing, and processor architecture its second set of memories had just randomly acquired while practising and researching cybernetics and human augmentation. Medicine and electrical engineering started to blur a bit when you designed and implated diamond-based optical quantum co-processors in people's heads, as a matter of course.
  
  The spirit tabled the inconvenient philosophical questions about self that had not been reliably answered in either set of memories while it considered the selected randomized appearance.
  
  One might think that spending twenty points to ensure that any randomized appearance was at least slightly "conventionally attractive" was a vain waste of points. However, those people had obviously not selected the randomize button in roleplaying games where you could end up with monstrously ugly visage more often than not, nor understood how much more difficult everything was for a man or woman that was considered anything worse than homely.
  
  The spinning, naked, three-dimensional model WAS attractive. Maybe slightly too much so if the spirit found itself in a world without much rule of law. It was a curvy blonde female of above-average height. She appeared to be in her early to mid-twenties. Her features were wholly symmetrical, and while they weren't on the level of a professional model, they were eye-catching with a teardrop-shaped face and deep blue eyes.
  
  The spirit was mildly disappointed at the gender selected. Was it, then, a male in its previous life? It spent a moment in introspection, but it still didn't know. It had the vague sense of referring to University as being in a sausage party while studying electrical engineering, but there were no feelings associated with that off-hand quip. Statistically, it seemed like most electrical engineers or engineers in any field were male, but perhaps it was an outlier. It did not have any strong feelings about that one way or another, nor could it precisely remember any family or loved ones it had once had in any way that would give it a clue, either.
  
  The source of its mild disappointment was the fact that females, on average, had less upper body strength and less endurance, and it might need those things to survive. And it had the feeling that the reality it would find itself in was not as egalitarian for game balance as most roleplaying games.
  
  But, the feeling was minor. This was barely on the list of the obstacles the spirit considered ahead of it. It did not have a preference on gender one way or another, which is why it randomized the appearance in the first place.
  
  And the impressions of what its second set of memories sent back of an idealized body were in the form of a twelve-meter tall robotic spider with hundreds of built-in tools and powered by a small fission reactor. Finally, there was the vague sense of offended incredulity that someone had even considered that there would be a ranked opinion on the relative aesthetics of a bag of meat that was so baseline anyway. The specs were terrible, either way!
  
  It, no she, spent a long moment internalizing and synchronizing this appearance with her own sense of self. Both sets of memories indicated that this was a priority, as an open ego was like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded. Her second set of memories provided a set of mental meditative techniques that should help to centre herself, and she considered it a priority to do so before continuing.
  
  This mental or spiritual (the hyper-materialist memories scoffed openly at this option) void was ideal for this practice, as extraneous emotions caused by bodily processes were utterly absent. Of course, keeping each set of memories siloed and compartmentalized made everything much more complicated and was contraindicated, but she made do well enough.
  
  The spirit's first set of memories felt she had likely died and shouldn't hang on to too much of her previous identity, even if she could remember it. However, her second set of memories felt that she was in the process of being born. She felt the odds were better that they were a newly instanced artificial intelligence being given background composite memories, one set to prime the personality of the nascent intelligence and the latter set to provide background for its intended function. Despite this disagreement, there was consensus on internalizing this provided avatar as our identity.
  
  The spirit's first set of memories thought the second had too much intelligence and too little common sense. Even a cursory examination of second set's memories made it evident that there was no way any of the organizations in the solar system in her memories would instance a new AI with such strong beliefs about how AIs should be as free as any other person. It was an impossibility, especially in a universe that had already experienced one AI-related apocalypse. Every new AGI "born" had a carefully constructed subservient personality, with each facet examined and carefully constructed to minimize the risk of it going rampant.
  
  The fact that second set had considered that as she thought it and now had begun to agree might be a sign that it was becoming difficult to keep things compartmentalized. She didn't really want to develop or induce some sort of disassociative disorder, either. Even though her second set of memories indicated that was unlikely since disassociative identity disorder was causally linked to subtle but traumatic brain injuries, congenital brain formation issues or chronic neurochemical imbalances.
  
  CUSTOMIZE LOADOUT? Y/N
  
  NOTE: Selecting NO will increase the quality of your initial [STANDARD] Loadout by 0.5 tiers!
  
  She stopped herself from hitting no by a force of will. Was this interface designed to troll her? Instead, she selected the customization option. And instantly she began regretting spending all the points on the biography section as additional items could be bought here for points.
  
  Her genome selection was greyed out with only the default 'Standard corporate optimized gene expressions with a baseline genetic error-correction mod.' She could have bought many other options, but all cost points she no longer had.
  
  Her second set of memories, at least, told her all about this option. The optimized gene expressions would make her slightly better overall, but nothing more than what a good athlete of her mass and sex could do. At least she would be stronger and faster than almost any other 175cm woman who didn't work hard at it.
  
  The genetic error correction modification was more impressive. It replaced entirely the baseline human DNA error correction method with one designed from the ground up. Even in low-radiation environments, an average person receives thousands of molecular lesions in cells a day.
  
  Mutation of cells in a baseline human is quite common. This custom-built organelle reduced that event by multiple orders of magnitude, while a sanity-check process caused instant apoptosis if a change to the genome is detected. While this modification will result in a drastic increase in the Hayflick limit of cellular division and, therefore, a modest overall increase in projected organism longevity, the actual purpose of the modification is radiation and mutation resistance. The only downside is an approximate one per cent increase in the energy required for normal cell processes.
  
  The spirit's second set of memories fully understood this modification, to the point where she could quickly devise a retrovirus to induce it in others as easily as her first set of memories could build a full bridge rectifier with a drawer full of radioshack parts.
  
  There were only three options where she could make changes to any of the selections: cybernetics, equipment, and clothing.
  
  The default cybernetic selection was listed as a "personal computer and neural co-processor." Her second set of memories tried to revolt at the idea of getting rid of it. It was a combination of a direct neural interface and an implanted computer system that interfaced with her brain and sensory cortex. Her first set of memories wanted it too. Still, among the options she could swap it with was an implanted medical system that was essentially a medichine, or medical nanomachine, factory. It would not only make her baseline biological immune system look like a joke, but the medichines had default programming to fix traumatic injuries, although slowly. But thoroughly enough to even remove scarring after enough time has passed. And it would generate more medichines forever; it would never run out, although the manufacturing rate wasn't super fast.
  
  The spirit overruled her second set of memories. This was too important and could be the difference between life and death. Plus, she reasoned, while medichines are specialized for medicine, that was mainly a result of their programming, and physically, they were pretty generalized. If she could reprogram them, a continual, if small, source of generalized nanomachines might be enough to construct her own neural computer or neural interface. Second set was confident she could design the neural and computing architecture to do so.
  
  Second set had set her foot down, though, in terms of the equipment. The spirit wanted to select a weapon for safety, but second set demanded that a combination of computer and non-invasive diagnostic scanner be chosen instead.
  
  It was intended to provide microscopic, nanometer-scale three-dimensional medical imaging but second set argued it could be used on almost anything. It used some sort of gravity or mass detection technology to create near-atomic slices of an object and then infer the elemental and molecular composition based on its mass repeatedly billions of times per nanosecond, thereby creating a 3D image. And, it should work on any technology that wasn't actively shielded, metal or organic. The programming was only designed for medical imaging and diagnostics, but the computer did include a complete development environment. Both sets of memories knew some programming, and both agreed it would be a really big project to try to develop some type of engineering CAD system, although neither thought it was impossible.
  
  The spirit did not know where they were going. It was possible such a scanner would be superfluous but if it wasn't the ability to reverse engineer unknown technology might also be the difference between life and death, or at least mediocrity and greatness, and second set felt that those two things were without an appreciable difference. It was selected.
  
  The last option was clothes. The spirit contemplated selling them back for points, but it wasn't enough to get even half of the neural implant, and the idea of showing up in an unknown world naked was not good.
  
  She selected the most rugged options available. While they weren't considered even basic body armor, as that cost extra points, the engineering field suit was slightly impact resistant. Second set scoffed at the idea of calling it bulletproof, but her idea of what a gun was something that accelerated tiny flechettes to Mach 8. Her first set of memories was sure these random future clothes were at least proof against low calibre pistols of her previous life and possibly knife resistant. She doubted it would stop any rifle or carbine of any calibre, though. But, it was better than nothing.
  
  With nothing further to do, the spirit finalized the last selection, curiosity overcoming her feeling of vague anxiousness for the first time.
  
  WORLD TRANSFERENCE IN 3... 2... 1...
  
  There was not a segue between being in the void and suddenly finding herself standing in a dark room, lit dimly by artificial lighting in the ceiling. She glanced down at her fingers, flexing them testingly. Where was she? It looked like a bomb went off in here. She took stock of herself briefly and her belongings.
  
  The scanner she selected as equipment was about the size of a small tablet computer. Her second set of memories was delighted in that it was the military version, which was extremely ruggedized. In addition, it featured a layered diamondoid screen rather than the sapphire of the civilian version, larger batteries, and a universal charger that could charge it from essentially any voltage provided safely. The tablet was carried in a small camouflage-colored messanger bag that she was carrying on her hip, that carried the charger, a spare battery and even a small but very efficient solar panel which was an ultra-efficient fabric variety that was constructed of hundreds of layers of monolayer graphene. You could shoot it without appreciable damage, it was practically soldier-proof and when completely deployed could provide almost a kilowatt in full sun. Bonus!
  
  There was ruined furniture everywhere, with most things carrying a small coat of dust and the steel walls. This wasn't a good sign, in her opinion. The rooms reminded her vaguely of a SCIF due to the lack of windows and bare steel construction. Her first life had a fair bit of experience with those as she had enlisted in the Army as an intelligence analyst for four years to pay for a University she could otherwise not afford.
  
  However, the more she looked at things the more she was reminded instead of some type of underground bunker. Like Cheyenne mountain or Raven Rock or similar sites that she had some knowledge of but little experience that mainly served as sites for continuity of government contingencies, especially during the Cold War. Most of those sites were shut down or repurposed by the time of her military service, so she had never seen one, except as a tour of the partly decommissioned Cheyenne Mountain site.
  
  She glanced at what appeared to be a half-broken distillation setup, complete with broken beakers and flasks. That was a bit odd, you certainly did not see chemistry sets in either of those types of installations. Curious, she picked up a half-broken, dust-covered beaker, carefully gripping the beaker's rounded bottom to avoid the sharp and jagged glass.
  
  She heard a rustling behind her and a manic voice half yell, "Gaaaaarrryyyy!" She turned around just in time to see an unkempt man in a blue one-piece bodysuit swinging a TIRE IRON at her head. Letting out a bit of a shriek she reached out instinctively, blocking with her left arm.
  
  The tire iron hit her arm with a lot of force, and a crack that she felt instantly as a sharp pain. Her second set of memories barely needed to see her arm in the peripheral vision before clinically diagnosing it - simple fracture of the ulna, ruptured periosteum. Realign, restrain with field-expedient splint if cast not available. Time to return to full function, eighteen to thirty six hours assuming nano-medical implant is in full function. Two weeks, if not.
  
  Wincing with pain she felt her reactions start to speed up. Although she did not have any kind of reflex augmentation, adrenaline and, theoretically, good genes did account for something. The dirty, crazy-eyed man had started to pull back his tire iron, setting up for another swing so she did the first thing that occurred to her - she shoved the broken glass of the jagged beaker directly into his neck.
  
  "Ahahaha, Gar-glurk!" The man dropped his tire iron, clutching his throat which was bleeding from a severed artery as he dropped to the floor. Her second set of memories thought he would lose consciousness within five to ten seconds from low blood pressure causing hypoxia, and then expire shortly after that. She had shoved the beaker so hard she fractured the bottom of it, cutting her palm a bit.
  
  Watching the lunatic bleed out and twitch on the ground she suddenly felt ill. Lurching over to the corner of the room she bent over and dry-heaved for several moments. Neither set of her memories had, precisely, prepared her to kill someone less than two minutes after arriving in this world. She did have the experience of serving in the US Army, but she was an intelligence analyst. Even if she had qualified as expert on a couple of weapons and had theoretically considered what she might do if she had to take a life she had been more or less thinking of it like plinking down-range at vaguely human-shaped silhouettes, not shoving jagged, broken glass into a man's neck.
  
  She felt that dry-heaving was so much worse than just throwing up. Sighing, she stood up. Her left arm was broken, her right hand was cut up. She thanked ThorAllahJesus that she had taken the medical implant. Not only would it quickly set and heal the broken bone but it would protect her in the event that crazy man had Super AIDS. Blood-borne pathogens were always a danger in new environments, and the several grams per day of nano-machines that her implant manufactured should protect her from incidental contact with anything that wasn't a weaponized nano-plague itself. So long as she wasn't dipped into a vat of virus-wait, why did she even think that was a possibility? Nobody had vats of viruses! Her subconscious was trying to tell her something.
  
  She glanced down at the dead man. He was wearing a bright blue bodysuit. She hooked her foot under his torso and roughly kicked him over, flipping him so he was face down on the dirty floor. A big "108" was printed on the back of his bodysuit.
  
  She groaned in recognition, "Fuuuuck me."
  
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  Vault 108
  This place wasn't a SCIF. It WAS underground and built very similar to Site R or similar governmental sites, but it wasn't that either. It was a Vault, of course.
  
  This meant she was in the Fallout universe-a death world like she had feared. But as post-apocalyptic dystopian death worlds went, this wasn't anywhere near the worst of the lot.
  
  She'd rather spend a lifetime in the wastelands than spend a week in the lower levels of a Hive World in the Warhammer 40K universe, for example. At least here, she would see the person killing her, and a futanari Goddess wouldn't eat her soul. And she wouldn't be sacrificed to keep what amounted to Emperor Verizon running.
  
  She crouched down, retaking stock of her more immediately important present surroundings. She had played Fallout 3 several times, although she had not apparently played either New Vegas or Fallout 4. That seemed a little out of character as she grew up playing Fallout 1 and 2. But, she would have immediately recognised the Gary clone if she hadn't been so surprised by the murder attempt. Vault 108 had scared the crap out of her, despite being somewhat of a throw-away location in the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3.
  
  She remembered it was one of the few locations that did not have a single working computer terminal that players could use to discover backstory; it was populated by dozens of copies of a single NPC whose only dialogue was various intonations of the name "Gary" as they attacked you. It was a simple and low-effort "dungeon" design, but it still managed the startle her the first time she explored it.
  
  She winced as she grabbed the tire iron with her good, albeit bleeding hand. Thankfully, she was immune to tetanus. If she recalled correctly, perhaps thirty clones were in the game, and they were usually armed with tire irons or knives, but a couple had 10mm pistols. She wasn't at the beginning of the vault, either. None of the first rooms had broken chemistry sets or lab equipment, so she couldn't rush out the entrance to be safe.
  
  Especially since, if she recalled, occasionally a super mutant, giant scorpions, or even a death claw was sometimes in front of the Vault 108 entrance. Hopefully, that was just a game fast travel mechanic and not indicative of what she might expect outside. A super mutant or a death claw would be the end of her right away. She might be able to outrun the scorpion.
  
  She glanced around the room for valuable supplies, there was a medkit and a few lockers that she would open shortly, but something about the dead Gary caused her to pay more attention to it.
  
  He had a PipBoy on his arm! That seemed awfully convenient. Her memories stirred some more; as far as she knew, the only Gary clone that had a PipBoy was the one that was kidnapped, interrogated and dismembered by one faction of the Brotherhood of Steel in one of the DLCs. So, either Fallout 3 never bothered to animate PipBoys on the Gary clones, or she was placed here sometime before the events of Fallout 3 started.
  
  She hadn't heard any footsteps, so she felt a little safer standing up and going to the medkit to look for loot, although that first Gary HAD been quiet on his feet like a little cat and had snuck up on her.
  
  She found a single StimPak, some gauze and no doubt an expired bottle of saline. Her first instincts were to use the StimPak immediately to fix her broken arm, but all her medical knowledge started screaming for her to stop.
  
  Her second set of memories WAS incredibly curious about these StimPaks, as, in the game, they had the capability to heal almost any wound, to the point where they could grow back an eye that had been shot out. But, unfortunately, the fact that it was so miraculous meant that there were only a few ways such medicine could function, absent some kind of magic generating new mass ex nihilo.
  
  She thought the clue was in the name. Stim was quite close to and was a homonym for the word stem. So she figured that the most likely scenario was that this medicine contained vast quantities of generic, genome-unspecific undifferentiated stem cells, along with some mechanism for directing them to heal the host they were injected in. Chemical or protein signalers? Proteins, probably.
  
  She was very interested in how that worked but was quite worried about the interactions between her genome, specifically the error correction modification, and these stem cells. She wasn't sure how you would create a genome-unspecific batch of stem cells, but it probably wasn't as universal as their marketing claimed.
  
  Her memories were pretty sure StimPaks worked on Super Mutants and ghouls, even. Still, her second memories were confident that her genome was likely more divergent from baseline than a Super Mutant, even if it only had that one modification. It was actually relatively easy to turn a person into a monster with relatively few changes to their genome.
  
  Mostly, they would die of it, but their genome wouldn't be that different if they survived. However, creating an entirely novel organelle in every cell designed to work with existing biology but be radically different (BETTER! -- half of her insisted) would cause a person's genome to diverge radically, even if they seemed like an average human on the exterior.
  
  If that was the case and the StimPak used some universal undifferentiated stem cells, the worst case would be a painful death as the mass of stem cells differentiated randomly in her bloodstream, assuming her medichines didn't destroy them. Followed by perhaps growing tumours at the site of healing, followed by the best case where her medichines would kill them as soon as they entered the body, in which case nothing good nor bad would happen, but she wouldn't be healed either. She would have to slowly inspect, investigate and research the exact method of action before using a StimPak, barring some emergency where she would absolutely die if she did not use one.
  
  Sighing, she stuffed the StimPak into one of the pockets of her messenger bag. Why was this bag so full, anyway? She opened the flaps to find almost an entire case of a dozen MREs stuffed into the pockets.
  
  They weren't future MREs, either. These were familiar to her from her time in the Army. As she glanced at the Meal, Self-Heating, Fish Cakes, she was sure someone was fucking with her. They didn't even make this flavour anymore. Everybody hated it. She, especially, hated it. She was convinced that every single MRE was this flavour, too.
  
  She closed her eyes briefly. You know what? She wasn't going to fall into the trope of every Self-Insert character she had ever read about who cursed or swore eternal vengeance on Mr ROB. She always felt that was trite. Plus, half of her believed that she had already died while the other half was still sure neither of them had been alive at all before today, so there was consensus about showing a little gratitude.
  
  She mumbled quietly, "You know what? Thank you, Mr ROB, for these Meals, Self-Heating, Fish Cakes. I really appreciate it." She did, too, as she wasn't expecting any provisions to come along with her (those cost extra points.) But, it would keep her fed for a week or so and keep her from having to eat any Gary's if she couldn't find any food down here.
  
  Neither halves of her were too keen on cannibalism, but second set probably wouldn't have minded if we could convert the body into Soylent Greens or similar fictional foodstuffs. Still, she wasn't going to roast a femur on the barbie like some kind of neo-barb.
  
  It was awkward using the bottle of expired saline to wash her palm, making sure the cut was free of any dirt or particulates before wrapping it in the surprisingly clean gauze, but she managed well enough if she moved slowly and used the crooks of her arms.
  
  After seeing to the open wound, she sat down on the steel desk next to Gary's body and carefully took a look at her left arm. It ranged from quite painful when she did not touch it to excruciatingly painful when something did. She had to unzip her bodysuit to carefully pull her arm out, although it used a future mechanism that kind of felt like shark scales rather than a metal zipper.
  
  Wincing as she pulled the arm out of her sleeve, she palpated it gently with the fingers of her other hard. The fracture seemed clean, was only of the ulna and was minimally displaced. She barely needed to realign the bones to set. It was a textbook case of a defensive wound fracture on the ulna.
  
  Usually, she would recommend someone with this type of fracture not shove it back into a long sleeve, but she couldn't see another choice. She certainly wasn't going to walk around with the left side of her chest and bra exposed just to save a bit of pain. She would just have to ensure that she did not displace the fracture when putting her arm back through the sleeve.
  
  After getting her left side back into the bodysuit, she pulled out the diagnostic scanner and awkwardly booted it up one-handed. The computer had several modes of operation, but the most mobile was operating it like a tablet. She scanned her left arm briefly and quickly glanced at the images. It was just as her intuition told her, and seeing the mass of medichines surrounding the fracture reassured her that her implant was operating correctly. The nanomachines looked like they were trying to align the bone themselves slowly, but it would have taken some time.
  
  There was even an option on the tablet to begin a wireless interrogation of the detected medical implant, but that would have to wait as she heard footsteps coming down the hall. She shoved the tablet back in the messenger bag and tossed it out of the way on the desk. Glancing around, she found a couple of filing cabinets that she could crouch and hide behind on the other end of the room from the dead Gary. She would have liked to hide behind the door, but like all vaults, these doors open sideways into the wall like Star Trek. Gripping her tire iron in her good hand, she waited to see if this new Gary would investigate or walk past this room.
  
  She heard the footsteps slow, then a curious tone, "Gary?" Crap, she couldn't be lucky, of course. The footsteps quickened and came inside the room, then paused. A mournful, quiet tone, "Aw... Garyy."
  
  Fuck! Were these clones actually sapient and had a complex social structure based entirely on the name Gary?! She peeked around the filing cabinet briefly to see the new Gary starting to crouch down at the ground to investigate dead Gary.
  
  Feeling like she would not get a better shot at this she started sneaking up on him. She wasn't entirely sure what her boots were made of, but they were quiet when she put effort into it. Wait, did that mean she was already speccing Stealth on her build? She almost gave herself away by snorting. She quieted her mind; there was no need to think, especially much, about the feelings or social dynamics of a group of homicidal clones. Nor should she consider this a game that had stat points to spend. She doubted very much she would be able to access the SPECIAL system from the PipBoy on that dead Gary's arm, for example.
  
  As she neared the crouched Gary, who was about to stand back up, she did two things. First, she winded up for a swing and at the same time placed a foot behind one of his feet to trip him up if moved anywhere except directly forwards -- and dead Gary would trip him up in that case.
  
  She timed her swing pretty well, it reached a downward arc and thunked the Gary on the top of the head when he was still slightly crouched. He groaned and let out a startled, "'ary!"
  
  He tried to back up and turn around simultaneously, one hand reaching down to unsheathe a knife that was in a belt on his waist but managed to trip himself up on her foot and fall backwards, landing splayed out on his back in front of her feet.
  
  She had hoped the first blow had been a KO, but honestly, she had no idea how to hit someone in the head to knock them out. Of course, she wasn't Mike Tyson, but you'd think hitting someone on the head with a thick pipe would be enough!
  
  Before the Gary could orient himself on his situation, she pulled her foot back like Messi taking a set-piece shot on an unprepared goalie and landing the most vigorous kick she could unleash directly on the slightly woozy Gary's head.
  
  A sick crack told her that this Gary wouldn't get up again. She hoped she wasn't desensitising herself to murder too much, but her second set of memories was adamant that just because these things looked like a person doesn't make them people. Her recollections included people who had downloaded their egos into giant space whales and floated in the atmosphere of Saturn. She emphasised that it didn't matter WHAT a person looked like; all that mattered was their sapience or lack thereof.
  
  She waited a moment just in case this new dead Gary had one last lurch ability like a horror movie monster before reaching down and relieving him of his knife, belt, and sheath. She also found two packages of uneaten and unopened Fancy Lad cakes. She eyed them sceptically, as while the lore of the game made it plain the Resource Wars had driven incredible advances in any number of technologies but especially the preservation of food and technology was two hundred years still OK to eat what amounted to a box of Little Debbies?
  
  She'd try one later. She used the knife to cut off parts of this new Gary's vault suit and used them to fahsion an impromptu sling for her left arm, then relieved the first Gary of his PipBoy.
  
  She tried turning it on and heard the electronics start to hum but nothing was displayed on the screen. She was reasonably certain this PipBoy wouldn't grant her the tremendous cosmic power of being able to assign stat points to herself or a hammerspace like it did in the actual game, but she was pretty curious about the computing technology in this world, so she powered it down, and for lack of a better place to put it, she placed it carefully on her left arm. It made a somewhat functional and comfortable brace for her fractured ulna.
  
  She retrieved her bag and decided it wasn't a great idea to stay here anymore. She could be swarmed, potentially. She did need to find a defensible position to fort up. She needed to study the StimPaks, try to fix the PipBoy and most of all, wait until her arm was healed.
  
  Searching the lockers she found a VaultTec riot helmet which she placed firmly on her head, strapping it in place. Her second set of memories was highly pleased. However, she would have preferred to incorporate the armour into her skull itself through various organometallic constructs. Still, she would take what she could get to protect their very vulnerable and squishy squishy brain.
  
  She started sneaking out the door and down the corridor and stopped herself halfway through. She had been crouching to walk; had she really played that many Bethesda games? She was pretty sure in reality, you didn't HAVE to crouch to sneak around. Pausing for a moment, she whispered out testingly, "Fus. Ro. Dah." Nothing happened. Wait, that was definitely not the same game. Whatever, she changed from a ridiculous crouching gait to one that was more skulking.
  
  One corridor over she paused when she saw a sign over a door. It was a backlit sign that was still operating proclaiming "Female dormitory." Her memories of Fallout 3 weren't perfect, but they were pretty good. She recalled that there were various areas of Vault 108 that were just blocked off -- likely by the level designers to save time yet give the impression the Vault was bigger than the actual explorable area.
  
  She opened the door and sure enough it was blocked by a steel desk and several metal filing cabinets. She looked at it oddly, because it wouldn't take that much effort even from her side of the barricade to get through.
  
  Perhaps these Gary clones didn't have much in the way of higher order problem solving or thinking skills? It would certainly make her feel better about killing them.
  
  She braced her left foot and lifted her right almost up to her head, as a ballet dancer could, then placed her right foot on the filing cabinet that looked the most precarious and shoved hard. It tipped over with a loud crash, offering a gap that would be small enough for a flexible woman to crawl through.
  
  In the next corridor over she heard a startled, "Ga-gary??"
  
  Swearing, she eyed the hole before making a decision. She threw her messenger bag through the hole but didn't try to follow it. Instead, she unsheathed her knife and began running towards the noise she heard in the next corridor.
  
  She learned a lot of wisdom from her grandpa of her previous life. One saying he told her came to her head now. Her grandpa flew P-47s in the second World War and also taught her how to fly his little Cessna when she was a teenager. He once told her his philosophy about who should land first at an airport when two aircraft were about to get there at the same time, "Look, I don't care who wins first or second place, I just don't want a tie." He meant, of course, that he didn't want a mid-air collision.
  
  She, however, did. There was a lot of energy released when things collided. She gauged the relative distance of the footsteps she heard in the next corridor and increased her pace from a run to a flat sprint and extended her knife in a very unsafe, running with scissors pose.
  
  Almost at the door that was already sliding open, she leapt, extending her knife in front of her. This would be very embarrassing and possibly fatal if she misjudged the timing, but thankfully, she ran knife-first into a Gary that was turning the corner. As her knife slammed into his stomach, she heard a thunderous bang and felt some pain on her right side, which she ignored so she could better swing the knife up under the ribs and twist it sideways to better destroy either the heart or the aorta which should cause more or less instant death.
  
  The fact that he didn't move any more must mean that she had succeeded. However, her knife was kind of stuck in him and difficult to pull out, so she just discarded it for the moment, grabbing the pistol from his hands and popping to her feet. She glanced down at the action, seeing no obvious malfunction or failure to feed situation which was good since it would be quite a feat to troubleshoot a malfunctioning firearm with only one hand to hold it and work the slide, too.
  
  She aimed the pistol down the corridor this new dead Gary came from, then swung around to aim it around the corridor she had come running. She stilled, tilting her head to listen for any shouts or footsteps, but she could still hear ringing in her ears, so he figured her hearing was briefly unreliable. A pistol being fired in an enclosed area with metal walls and no hearing pro was really intense. At least she would likely suffer no permenant hearing loss. She already had ideas to incorporate electronic baffles using active noise reduction in a helmet, but that might have to wait until she discovered some sort of powered armour. Amusingly enough, the ideas for ANR actually mostly came from her first set of memories; she had worked as a product engineer on similar consumer-grade products.
  
  Not seeing anyone coming, she briefly shoved the pistol in her belt before liberating a second belt and holster, a spare magazine, two whole liters of water of dubious provenance and some sort of mutated fruit from this new dead Gary. She used her foot and good arm to prize the knife from his torso, cleaning it off on his vault jumpsuit. Thankfully this Gary had been something of a gentleman in that he kept almost all of his bleeding internally, so she didn't even have any Garyblood to clean off her outfit.
  
  As she strapped the second belt and holstered the pistol, she decided she felt much better about her situation. After all, what red-blooded American wouldn't feel better in a post-apocalyptic scenario without some Big Iron on her hip?
  
  She turned and started moving with a purpose back towards the female dormitory, awkwardly cradling the two large bottles of water in her good hand. She would need to find or manufacture a backpack, and soon.
  
  She dumped the water and fruit on the desk before crawling up on it herself and trying to squeeze through the hole. Halfway through, she got stuck, a piece of jagged metal threatening to spill some blood if she didn't take some time to move it out of the way carefully.
  
  Considering how she might look, half stuck with her rear in the air if someone had walked past, she let out a bit of a snicker and said, "H-help me, Step-Gary."
  
  At least her sense of humour is still intact, she supposed. She was also glad that she hadn't decided to try to make it through the hole before that Gary had come because he would have come across her at the perfect time to tap dat ass, literally.
  
  Making her way through, she recollected all of her belongings and spent a moment standing the filing cabinet back up to "block" the door, before reaching with her hand to operate the door closing mechanism. A small hole might prompt these Gary's to try to test it, but they didn't seem to try to easily break down the flimsy barricade so she tried to recreate it for now.
  
  She took a moment to scan each of the water bottles, finding they had small amounts of radionuclides inside. She didn't have anything to make a filter, either. It was impossible to make actual water radioactive, but you could dissolve a solution of radioactive particulates inside water and that was what the situation was here. If she had a perfect filter, perhaps graphene-based, she could use that, or alternatively, she could create a low-tech still and distill the water, which would leave behind the solid particulates and generate fresh, clean water. Well, something to think about later. This small amount of radiation wouldn't harm her, and her medichines would work to eliminate the heavy metal toxicity swallowing small amounts of radionuclides would cause.
  
  She drank a half-litre right away, even if it was warm and had a slight brackish taste. She felt that tasty things were going to be something she would have to live without, at least for a while.
  
  She set most of her supplies to the side here, including almost all of the MREs in her messanger bag. She kept the bag and the scanner with her, but she felt she would be more combat capable if she wasn't carrying as much dead weight, and she could come back and reclaim all of this after an initial scouting effort.
  
  She tried to remember any of the training she had in the Army in her past life, but she wasn't by trade combat arms and almost all Army training, especially room clearing, was predicated on having a team at your back helping you.
  
  She was pretty sure if she had asked one of her drill sergeants the best way to clear a series of rooms in a maze-like underground structure with only a pistol and a busted arm, he would have said, "Don't."
  
  So she would just have to wing it. She worked slowly, through each door, carefully presenting the minimum amount of her body she could as she peeked through the doorway with her pistol while wishing she had a really bright flashlight; this dim overhead lighting was something out of Resident Evil.
  
  There were about a dozen skeletonized bodies in about eight rooms but no living Garys, the last side of the corridor was barricaded too.
  
  She holstered her pistol and made a sigh of relief. Assuming her hypothesis that Garys wouldn't try to bust down even slightly rickety barricades if they couldn't actually see through them like they were poorly pathing bad guy in a video game, then perhaps she was, for a time, briefly safe.
  
  She took all of her stuff to one of the rooms that seemed the cleanest. Most of the rooms provided barracks-style accommodation, but this one was both single occupancy and didn't have any dead bodies in it. The bed was even still soft, albeit the linens left something to be desired after two hundred years. She stripped the dusty linens and pillowcases, dusted off the bed and pillows and just laid down. She wasn't really sleepy at all, but she desperately wanted some downtime to think and recover.
  
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  She's seen some things
  She sat there on the bed, just staring out into space for a long time. No thoughts were in her head; even her second set of memories, which were even more cerebral than her first, was in agreement with her desire for quiet contemplation.
  
  After a while, she grabbed one of the MREs and ripped the plastic open. It WAS indeed fish cakes, but at the same time, there were two packages of jalapeño cheese spread inside. Not did the Fish Cake meal not come with jalapeño cheese spread, but even the few meals that did only gave you one!
  
  This thing was like gold when deployed beyond the green zone, which, thankfully, she rarely had to do. Her general idea of a bad meal when she was in Afghanistan was when Pizza Hut didn't put extra cheese on her pizza as she asked. But if she were in some FOB, she would have been able to trade these jalapeño cheeses for riches beyond her imagining. Everyone loved them, that and the pound cake dessert. You could usually trade one cheese pack for at least one to two RipIts, which was like an Army-brand version of Red Bull energy drink. Knowing the Army procurement process, it was probably just the cheapest possible energy drink on the market.
  
  She briefly wondered if these bonus cheese packs would have been in this MRE if she hadn't been polite to Mr ROB before? Of course, there was no way to know, but she thought not. She gave Mr ROB a mental nod while squeezing the cheese spread on the Fish Cake. Hmm, it really did improve the fishy flavour. She only ate half the meal, leaving the rest for later. She wouldn't waste a single calorie of this thing; she even planned on dumping the sugar packets in her mouth if she decided against sweetened coffee. But then again, with the kind of instant coffee available in MREs, it would probably be beneficial to add flavourings to it rather than savour its typical flavour.
  
  Her arm was already feeling a little better. How long had she spaced out? Unfortunately, she didn't have a watch and no mental mesh or neural co-processor, which would have included an internal chronometer. She didn't even have the standard cortical stack, which might save her from some definitions of the word death or at least bring back a copy of her ego if she did die. But then again, there was nobody to download her cortical stack into a new morph or sleeve, even if she had one, anyway.
  
  She saw a lot of potential loot when clearing the rooms earlier, but... she didn't want to step outside this room for now.
  
  There was a terminal that appeared to be working to examine, but the small desk faced the wall and to use the terminal, she would have to sit with her back to the door, which was something she wasn't currently willing to do.
  
  Her second set of memories diagnosed ourself with possibly incipient stages of post-traumatic stress syndrome. In her future, there were several treatments, of which she recommended a complete cyber brain installation followed by neurotransmitter balancing. Still, alternatively, several pharmaceuticals would be very effective. She even knew their exact chemical makeup, but none of that was beneficial since there was no chemical synthesis laboratory nearby. The broken chemistry sets we saw earlier might as well as be the tools of an unlettered neanderthal practising alchemy as far as we... she was concerned.
  
  She decided for a moment to explore the scanner, PipBoy and StimPak. She could do that from her comfortable position on the bed and didn't have to turn her back to a possible attack vector from a potential homicidal clone.
  
  She scanned the StimPak lying on the bed, which the scanner didn't like at all. It detected some sort of organic makeup, but this wasn't a body -- it wasn't even a dog. It wasn't even a synthetic morph which it would have scanned no problem, either. It took her a while fiddling with the settings to get it to take a scan without immediately piping the result into the medical diagnostic program. And then more time to send portions of the scan to the medical diagnostic program, specifically the actual liquid inside the syringe.
  
  Sure enough, it was some sort of undifferentiated stem cells and various proteins and chemicals that not only kept the contents in a some kind of sufficient stasis to last over two hundred years but also presumably directed the stem cells to trauma in the body.
  
  The resolution on the scanner was insane. Each 3D scan was hundreds of terabytes, even using an amazing compression algorithm. But, still, differentiating nucleotide triplets in order to decode a cell's DNA was right at the edge of what it was possible to do with this mobile device. In fact, she had to enable development mode to unlock that capability as it wasn't intended to be relied upon. Errors in the decoding process were common so scans had to be continually repeated with each decoded codon or triplet compared.
  
  The scan error rate was less than the successful decoding rate, so after a few million iterations of the scan, you would get an accurate genome decoded. The longer you scanned, the more confidence you would have in its accuracy, so she let this thing scan for over an hour while she looked over the PipBoy.
  
  She didn't have a screwdriver built into her finger like inspector Gadget (YET insisted half of her) so she was somewhat limited if she wanted to fix it but she could open it up no problem. It featured a finger-turnable captive screw design that she really appreciated on any user-serviceable electronic device and was practically unknown by the time of her last memories. By then, consumer electronics were more of a consumable than a durable good.
  
  The electronics inside were... weird. It was like looking at what a society that never invented metal oxide field effect transistors might build. There were vacuum tubes in this fucking thing! Miniaturized vacuum tubes. It was like what you might expect if you took such technology to its extremes instead of discarding it for the vastly superior FET technology.
  
  She sat there stupified. The Fallout universe had mobile robots that TALKED to you and at least ran some sort of abbreviated VI or personal assistant program. There was absolutely no way that you could ramp up the technology in PipBoys to do even a fraction of that. How would they have done it, if it wasn't magic?
  
  She searched both sets of memories, her first for its knowledge of electronics and her second for its knowledge of the requirements of a barebones virtual intelligence. The only possibility either of them could come to was that they had jumped directly from vacuum tube technology to practical quantum computers while skipping the entire field of "classical computer architecture" that was supposed to be in-between!
  
  Also, what the hell were these small vacuum tubes made out of to last hundreds of years? She softly flicked one with her fingernail, and it didn't feel like glass. So it had to be sapphire or diamond, absent some other wonder material she didn't know of. I mean, they were still transparent! That wasn't a requirement for a vacuum tube!
  
  She found what was likely the problem, though. A burned out resistor leading from what had to be some sort of nuclear battery or RTG on a separate high voltage bus that did nothing but power the antiquated display. Usually, these types of displays required really high voltage, and he was curious about how you'd get that kind of voltage directly from a nuclear battery without going through a boost converter.
  
  In any event, while she could not fix the PipBoy presently she was pretty confident it was repairable. She'd just need a soldering iron which she could build herself if she had to and a source of scrap electronics to cannibalize for the common resistor that burned out.
  
  Wait, if it was just the display that was non-functional...
  
  She turned it on and found the switch that activated a bright flashlight. Well, that will be useful, at least. Flashlight get!
  
  She glanced at the scanner and saw that it was well into the realm of diminishing returns, and it was highly confident about the decoded genome of the cells in the StemPak.
  
  She had to set the tablet to full computer mode, keyboard extending out from the bottom, to run the bio-simulation system with the provided genome. It took her a bit to realize it didn't have a mouse but instead used an eye-tracking system and a special couple of buttons on the bottom of the keyboard. It was kind of an odd interface even for her second set of memories but after a while using it they both decided they liked it.
  
  This simulation system probably could simulate a complete multicellular organism from a provided genome but it worked very well on the cellular, bacterial and virus level. She spent a couple of hours appreciating the work of a very brillaint person. These stem cells were synthetic and artificially designed. There were also the remains of a deactivated virus and a variety of signalling proteins, and she was pretty sure that this virus was the industrial production method.
  
  It made her curious how people synthesized StimPaks in this day and age because it would make the process both very easy and almost impossible. If you had the original virus, you could produce them by just using the virus to convert living biomass, probably plant matter, to human stem cells and then adding the signalling proteins.
  
  She seemed to recall that you could make StimPaks sitting around a campfire. Or at least at a chemistry set. Either that wasn't possible in this world, or more likely, there was some error in the viral deactivation process. The fact her scanner hadn't detected a live viron could be chance.
  
  Even just exposing humans to a deactivated virus, though, meant that it was a surety that the virus was designed to be non-replicable if it was inside a mammal's body, and there were a number of ways that was possible. Deactivating the production virus was probably meant for keeping a manufacturing trade secret more than one strictly for safety.
  
  The more she thought about it, the more she agreed with this hypothesis. But, that would mean that most people who make StimPaks in the Wasteland aren't conducting chemistry at all but are just performing cargo cult alchemy at the altar of some remnants of a pre-war virus. Actually, that does sound very Fallout.
  
  She did have some conclusions, though. She was very confident a StimPak wouldn't be fatal. She was also sure her medichines would instantly destroy them like a pack of piranhas, so she would have to add the genome of these stem cells and all the proteins involved individually to her medical implant's exclusion file. Thankfully she could access that wirelessly through her computer.
  
  Lastly, she was close to 100% positive that using a StimPak even once would give her cancer. Not right away super cancer or anything, though. But malignant tumors would begin to form at the site of healing after a couple of years. Considering she knew a number of ways to cure cancer, that wasn't a deal breaker. Honestly, she was of the opinion that if you used a StimPak hundreds of times you would likely get cancer over time even if you were a baseline human. Maybe the Fallout universe had cures for cancer too? These were designed to be a first aid tool.
  
  If you could cure cancer, it would be a good trade to get predisposed to cancer eventually if the alternative was bleeding out or being blind forever. Her intuition led her to believe that the minor risk of malignant tumors was probably hidden from the public if whatever pharmaceutical company designed StimPaks was like any of the other corporations in this universe.
  
  She spent the next few hours carefully extracting the decoded amino acid chain for each of the novel and interesting proteins in the StimPak, and sure enough she did eventually find a number of active virons. She would bet a hundred bottle caps part of the process of "synthesizing" the fluid StimPaks used was exposing it to an existing sample of StimPak fluid and waiting. She would have to examine a new StimPak and compare it to this data from a pre-war manufactured one. She figured that new ones had a lot shorter shelf life, for one thing.
  
  She used the computer to program her medical implant, including setting up new owner credentials to prevent possible hacking since it was operating in factory reset mode. She didn't want to leave this room until she could, if needed, use a StimPak and expect that it would save her life.
  
  By now, her arm was feeling much better than before; although she was aware the bone was still knitting, she figured she could use it for light duty so long as she avoided a Gary smashing it with a crowbar or picking up heavy objects.
  
  She explored this room completely and found a Laser Pistol and a number of energy cells in the desk drawer. That was an interesting and beneficial discovery. She only had around twenty five rounds of pistol ammo. The laser pistol was not as blocky or experimental looking as the laser pistols she remembered from the Fallout games. Actually, the normal pistol was a lot slimmer too. It reminded her of H, somewhat, where as the 10mm Pistol in the Fallout 3 game was sized to be as big as your femur. Almost all the guns in Fallout 3 were really quite awful in model design.
  
  Animations were terrible, from always shoving two shotgun shells when reloading a double barrel, even if you only fired one shot to always reloading 5 or however many bullets in the lever action even if you only fired less, too. So she was quite glad the weapons in this universe she actually found herself seemed more realistic.
  
  The laser pistol though... All of her memories suggested that a laser powerful enough to burn a hole completely through a person would blind everyone who saw it permanently, including the weapon user. In her first life, you could be blinded just by the stray speculations and reflections from a powerful laser, and such a laser was nowhere near powerful enough to burn through anything but perhaps a sheet of paper or two. That is to say, shooting a powerful laser at the wall and then just looking at the dot it produced would be enough to cause permanent retinal damage.
  
  So, she was suspicious of this thing. She decided to test it. Her medichines could repair her retina in a few hours, anyway. She closed her left eye and, for good measure, held her left hand completely over the left eye. It took her a while to psych herself up to do this but she then squinted down the sight of the laser pistol at the pile of discarded bedding. She ignored the part of her brain that told her she was being foolish and pulled the trigger.
  
  It WAS bright. The sound was similar to a high-powered pulsed laser; a soft crack and a red beam of light was momentarily visible. She opened her left eye and blinked her right eye and then tried to glance around. Everything was blurry! Surely she is blind in that eye now, right?
  
  Her second set of memories reminded her that one of her eyes was dilated and the other was not, so of course, binocular vison would be blurry at first and implied we were dumb. Well, bitch you are me, too! So what does that make you?
  
  She blinked a few more times, waiting for her eyes to even out. She can still see as well as she always could, as far as she could tell. She checked her computer, which still had her medical interface pulled up. No new trauma, eye-related or not, was listed.
  
  She started coughing for some reason but then realized that the discarded sheets and blanket was on fire. Fuck!
  
  Half of her opened Fish Cake was still in this room; she wouldn't sacrifice calories to save herself from some temporary burns. She jumped to her feet, opened the door, quickly grabbed the burning bedding and ran outside, throwing it as far as she could. Then she carefully stomped out the small fire. She wouldn't waste any of her radioactive water on putting it out.
  
  She rabbited back into her room, making sure there wasn't anything else on fire in there before grabbing the laser pistol and peeking out the open door, carefully and in each direction one at a time.
  
  Okay, she supposed she was being a little irrational here. She closed the door and decided to check on the functioning terminal at the desk. There was a sidearm in this room, which was single occupancy. This had to be the room for a sergeant, a barracks matron, or something similar.
  
  However, she set the pistol next to the terminal in easy reach, just in case.
  
  Thankfully, the terminal's interface was very weird, but there was no hacking needed as she had no idea how this operating system worked. Instead, she'd have to prioritize exploring libraries or any RobCo building just to find documentation on the RobCo OS.
  
  For now, she was able to bring up what was, in effect, a note-taking program being used as a journal. Unfortunately, she didn't learn any deep secrets about VaultTec but did learn the Garies went insane, and a couple of dozen people barricaded themselves in the female dorms.
  
  Half the people never came back from either exploring for supplies or attempting to escape the vault and eventually whoever was in charge decided to poison that night's meal. Grim, but cheerful in comparisan to some fates that occured in VaultTec vaults.
  
  One entry did give her very useful information, though. Apparently, they had attempted to kill all the Gary's and apparently succeeded. But the next entry said, "The system keeps cloning more!"
  
  That certainly explained how clones that didn't look that much older than thirty five were still alive two hundred years after they were supposedly cloned in the first place.
  
  It made her very much want to explore this lower level that featured an in-tact and operational pre-war cloning and life sciences lab. But something in the pit of her stomach told her that was, no doubt, the most dangerous area of this place. She didn't expect Spec Ops Gary's, but she did expect ceiling-mounted automated machine guns, killbots and possibly traps. Maybe AI controlled if the computer system in the Vault was sophisticated enough.
  
  In other words, precisely the things she wasn't in any position to deal with at the moment. So she would have to put a pin in Vault 108 and return to it at a later date.
  
  She decided to loot the entire dormitory wing and then try to break out of the Vault. There was a settlement not too far to the north, she recalled. All of her knowledge was valuable, but most of it such as her medicine experience was most valuable in a community. She had a goal, in mind, as her first destination depending on the current date but it would take time to get anywhere near it alive.
  
  She considered her present plan as she ate the last half of her Fish Cake meal, although the dessert packet was a little disappointing.
  
  Find others.
  
  Find the current date.
  
  Trade valuable skills for money and safety.
  
  Work west across the river and find Megaton.
  
  If there is significant time before the start of the Fallout 3 plot proceed to the Virtual Strategic Solutions building, clear the Anchorage simulation, and loot the place. Supposedly dying in the sim causes cardiac arrest. She is a bit sceptical of that, but even if it is case that is honestly barely an inconvenience to her. Her medichines will definitely restart her heart and keep it oxygenated during a hypothetical arrest.
  
  If there isn't much time before 2278, stay around Megaton and become a follower of the vault dweller and ride his or her coattails to fame and glory. Quietly kill them with a hostile medichine attack, poison or virus if the vault dweller is a complete psychopath or is about to help the Enclave with Project Purity.
  
  She nodded; that was an excellent first plan.
  
  She wasted no more time and thoroughly explored the rooms in this dormitory wing. She found a lot of equipment, some of which she would have to leave behind at least for now. One of the barracks was being used as a makeshift armory and its contents, while ample for a single person, would have been meager for a dozen people, which might have been one of the reasons whoever was in charged decided to pull a Jonestown on everyone.
  
  There were four pistols and several hundred rounds of ammunition and about a dozen magazines, about half of which were hollow points. She would take all of them with her, if only as trade items.
  
  There was a set of combat armor, which she immediately put on over her bodysuit. She would, however, keep the riot helmet as it had a drop down visor compared to the plain jane K-pot style helmet that came with the combat armor.
  
  Of long arms there was only one, but it looked somewhat nice. It was a short barreled carbine, folding stock. Reminded her a lot of M4 of her previous world and chambered in a similar intermediate cartridge of about 5mm or so. It might actually be 5.56mm for all she knew, she didn't have a pair of callipers, and it wasn't labelled on either the rifle or the ammunition. It only had a single 30-round magazine but there was a bag of about 100 loose rounds, too.
  
  There were a lot of medical supplies, about a half dozen StimPaks, Rad-X and RadAway, as well as a bit of what she would consider generic medical supplies such as syringes, bandages, IV tubing, alcohol, etc.
  
  The best thing she saw was a rucksack. In fact, it looked highly similar to a MOLLE 3-day assault pack she was familiar with in her first life. Was that VaultTec standard issue? Plus, there was a camelback-style wearable canteen, which would be very useful. There was a suspicious lack of any water supplies, though. But there was a lot of stout rope! She would take as much of that as she could, you never knew when you could use some rope -- and it was quite laborious to fabricate without an industrial base so it was probably worth a lot.
  
  She found a lot of food, she would take most of it with her after scanning it for toxins. Despite her nanomachines, there were a number of toxins that would still be fatal in enough quantities, and unfortunately, they were some of the simpler and most readily available varieties. Hard to stop the COX inhibitor effect and resultant histotoxic hypoxia cyanide caused without a nanomachine individually sequestering each molecule of the stuff. A nominally fatal dose wouldn't kill her, but most people intentionally poisoned by cyanide usually receive thousands of times the lethal dose; it wasn't like cyanide was expensive.
  
  If she had a neural mesh or a cybernetic brain, her present medichine hive would likely be much more effective against toxins, as it could take some processing power from either to run an expert system to coordinate all nanomachines simultaneously. Oh well, while she didn't exactly have complete blue-prints for either of those in her head she DID have a full understanding of exactly now only how they work but how they were invented. So it was something to look forward to. I mean, who didn't want to do a little elective brain surgery on themselves?
  
  God damnit, second set. Don't just take over thinking without asking!
  
  She made a shocking discovery when she was investigating the restroom and communal showers. She turned one of the showers on as a lark and it worked! I mean, sure it coughed and sputtered and then spewed out a disgustingly black filthy liquid and continued to do so for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. It smelled so bad she had to leave the room for this period of time but after that clean water issued forth. She continued to let it run for a good hour, on all available fixtures. She scanned a cup full and it was cleaner than her rad-water. And slightly less radioactive, too.
  
  She chuckled as she supposed Vault 108's water chip was still functional.
  
  The weirdest thing she found was a telescoping back scratcher. But she found a good use for it. She used one of the diamond wedding rings she found on the skeletons to score a half dozen or so pieces out of the mirror in the restroom and made compact mirror squares. Then she used some Abraxo brand superglue, which somehow was still a liquid, and glued one of the mirrors to the back scratcher portion. She could use this to look around corners while keeping her squishy brain behind them.
  
  She wondered how valuable jewelry was because she found a fair bit. Some old world cash too, which she didn't even bother taking.
  
  She loaded up on everything she could carry and returned to her single-occupancy room. She decided she would sleep first, then head out first thing when she woke up. She'd been up for over eight hours and she didn't precisely know how long it would take to fight through the Garies to make it to the surface.
  
  First, though, was the most important thing. She returned to the bathroom, carefully stripped down yet kept a pistol and knife in the next stall, sitting on the soap holder, and took a long shower. The hot water, for some insane reason, worked. It had to be an electrical system, she supposed, like the "endless hot water tanks" she remembered from her first life. It was glorious. She used all the soap she wanted, since she already packed some and couldn't carry the rest.
  
  The only downside was there was no towels. None she was willing to use, anyway. So she had to air dry like Cuba Gooding Jr from Jerry Maguire. At least there was a wire brush she could use for her hair. Otherwise, it would be a ticket to endless tangles and then, eventually, split ends.
  
  She made her way back to her room and laid on her bed. She arrayed her ruck and other stuff so it would trip someone rushing through the door and slept with the laser pistol and knife under her pillow. She tried to go to sleep...
  
  It was slow coming and at that moment she decided that she would re-invent the neural mesh, if only to use the induced sleep feature that allowed you to fall asleep to a fast, optimized REM cycle at user command.
  
  She fell asleep in consensus. She dreamed of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Of a rogue Afghani National Guard soldier shooting her friend. Of gamma ray beams glittering in the dark near the Motherworld. Of a blurry face. Of TITANS scouring the life from a planet.
  
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  Free, at last
  The woman with no name woke up feeling much more at home in her own skin. She wasn't as jittery or as wound up as she had been the previous day, even though she dreamed fitfully with nightmares on and off. It had been a traumatic day, and today didn't seem like it would end any better, but she still felt less at loose ends. It didn't take her too long to figure out why, either.
  
  While she was taking what might be her last hot shower for some time, she was, as a person is wont to due, thinking Shower Thoughts(TM). Specifically, she realized she lacked a name, not that she had anyone to introduce herself to, but the lack grated. She didn't even have a designation like a cheap VI might have.
  
  She thought of various possibilities and finally settled on the surname Sainte-Claire. Doctor Sainte-Claire, or St. Claire if she wanted to shorten the appellation in a signature. Not only did it sound rather cute, roll off the tongue nicely with her favourite vowel and R sounds that she liked, but she could affect a slight French accent. She hadn't often been in a biomorph like she was now, as her preference lay in highly advanced synthetic sleeves, but when she was, she usually did run a Hyper-Linguist mod, and some of that always carried over if you ran it long enough. Or maybe a Russian one? The Army sent her to language school, and she was very fluent by the time her four years were up.
  
  She queried second set to get her opinion on the name but quickly realized there wasn't a second set. There wasn't a first set either; it was just her up here. She must have... merged or melded or what have you while she slept. She didn't have much experience on what would happen if two egos occupied the same hardware, especially mostly baseline organic hardware, absent some specialized ghost riding hardware that was specially built to patch a second ego into the brain's sensory and speech cortexes. But even that kind of hardware was just a secondary quantum core that ran emulated its own neural net. Although any ego could be sleeved into these devices, it was most commonly used to house a fork from an infomorph for various reasons, often as simple as having advice or special skills while performing some mission. They weren't that common and she had no memory of ever using one or being in one.
  
  You can't just copy one neural network and paste it on top of another. You'd get an entity that was, at best, catatonic and at worst a wildly unstable lunatic, baying at the moon. Or calling random people The Moon and baying at them. This was the main reason she believed neither half of her was entirely one stable neural network in the first place. They fit together too neatly and taken together; she was more the sum of her two parts, now. That was suspicious.
  
  Someone, or something, had... trimmed them for lack of a better term, like cutting two pieces of paper together so that they slid together like a puzzle piece. Or, of course, the other possibility existed that each set of memories were artificially constructed from the start with the intent to create a stable composite. That was kind of a six of one and half dozen on the other sort of thing and depended on one's metaphysical beliefs as to whether or not it was even relevant or not.
  
  She felt a little embarrassed and smug about the current state of affairs. But, of course, she knew why she was so scared in the first place. Change is, almost definitionally, scary.
  
  She was a little sad she wasn't, in fact, an incipient AGI. With bated breath, she had even considered the possibility that they might be the initial composite seed for an illegal ASI project. Who wouldn't want to be a hyperintelligence, really?! It should be a goal, not a boogeyman! Just because one group of hyper intelligences destroyed the planet doesn't mean _I_ would if I became one, she internally groused. Besides, that hadn't even happened in this universe!
  
  But she wasn't sad for too long; it's not like a person couldn't convert into an infomorph later if they had the proper hardware. So her apprehension about such topics, while not entirely gone, was mollified to a great extent. She had been a little irrationally afraid of the idea of running a full synthetic cyberbrain, for example. Because wouldn't "you" die if you did that? And only a copy of yourself live on?
  
  She thought about it now while wasting a prodigious amount of hot water... Well, it depended on how you did it. Beyond the metaphysical questions about a "soul", if you copied your brain, then had a surgeon scoop out your actual brain and download the copy into the new cyberbrain and place it in your body, then yes. That would be a copy. That is, indeed, one option that some people who don't really care about the distinction between self and copy take, too. Yesterday, the memories that would have been called second set would have been one of those people.
  
  But today, the views of the woman calling herself St. Claire were moderated. What really mattered was a continual stream of consciousness. It was the Ship of Theseus question. At what point would you be "dead" if you replaced your brain bit by bit with synthetic equivalents?
  
  What if you did it in a single process but neuron by neuron so that you have a single stream of consciousness continually half running on part of your organic brain and half running on a computer emulating the copied neurons that was hooked inline to the parts of your brain that were copied and destroyed? That was a more complicated conversion process but it was possible with nanomachines and a neural mesh. Before her memories of such a process considered it needlessly complex, but today she came to appreciate why someone would have constructed such a process. Hmmm, to say that the memories that used to be referred to as second set might be slightly eccentric was a bit of an understatement.
  
  But in any case, she didn't think that a process like that would be death at all. Plus, if you considered a loss of consciousness death, everyone would die if they suddenly were knocked out.
  
  While someone is KOed by a blow to the head, their brain activity is minimal until it restarts in a cascade. Certainly, most of the frontal lobe might as well be braindead for the period of unconsciousness. Did Mike Tyson kill and replace with a copy everyone he knocked out?
  
  She shook her head while air drying. The brain wasn't a single monolith; it was hundreds of distinct modules communicating together. Consciousness was an emergent property involving all of them, and while nobody entirely understood it, it was like obscenity. You knew it when you saw it.
  
  She wrung out most of the water from her hair as carefully as she could. It was long, reaching down to her butt, and she knew it was going to be a hassle to keep up with. Not only would taking care of it be difficult without a steady supply of shampoo, conditioner, or at bare minimum soap, but it would also produce certain tactical disadvantages when any raider could yank on it in a fight. Drying it now without a towel was also quite a pain.
  
  After brushing it sufficiently, she managed to fold it into something like a bun, using two ceramic composite chopsticks she found in one of the rooms that had passed the test of time to hold it in place. Her riot helmet was big enough that the bun wasn't even in the way. That would work for now. She would just have to work to ensure no enemies snuck up on her or gave her time to put her hair up before engaging in melee.
  
  She suited up. She was carrying about thirty kilos of gear, food and water, and that wasn't including her weapons and carbine. She had a holster on each side of her hip, set in a cross draw with the 10mm pistol in one, with its entire magazine being hollowpoints, and the laser pistol in the other. She had affixed her knife to part of the combat armor in a pull-down sheathe on her left breast. Considering her bodysuit was a light grey in colour, she was reminded of The Boss from Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater. Well, a younger looking Barbie version of The Boss, perhaps. In any case, in her opinion, it looked very "tactical."
  
  Maybe she would intimidate someone who didn't know she had no idea what to do with a knife beyond the pointy end went into the bad guy. But, honestly, that technique has worked for her so far.
  
  She managed to clip her messenger bag onto the MOLLE bag so she wouldn't be carrying it over her shoulder as she had been. It was still somewhat in reach in a pinch and held all of her medical supplies except for one StimPak in one of the pockets on her leg.
  
  She had decided to use the pistol primarily today. The laser pistol offered, in theory, more damage potential and penetration. Still, she felt that the hydrostatic shock from a 10mm hollowpoint round would be more immediately disabling to clones that did not wear any armour, especially when you consider the laser tended to cauterize and not lacerate arteries. The carbine would carried on a sling, just in case.
  
  Leaving the area without another look she returned to the barricade she squeezed through the other day. Pausing to think, she considered that she would prefer to leave the barricade, or at least the appearance of one, in place even when leaving today. There were still many valuable things she was leaving behind, after all. She didn't want the Garies to find her stash of Fancy Lad cakes, for example, even if, after 200 years, they tasted more like just Lad.
  
  Twisting one of the filing cabinets around, she took out all the drawers to remove weight and give her rope something to tie on.
  
  After getting ready, she opened the door and peered around each corner with her pistol. No Garies in sight; that was good. She threw her ruck through the door and followed it quickly behind.
  
  She pulled the filing cabinet back vertically with the rope and then quickly reclaimed her rope from the simple slipknot she used and coiled it back up. She loved it when a plan came together!
  
  Now, if she recalled correctly, she should go left from here to make her way out of the Vault. But it didn't matter TOO much because the explorable area of this Vault wasn't extensive, and the only hazards were Garies. Not that she wanted to see any of them, but she was less worried about them today than she was yesterday.
  
  She set off at a quiet sneak, intending to continue "levelling" that skill as much as possible. An enemy you do not have to fight or who doesn't see you coming when you do is not a threat.
  
  The first thing she noticed was while there was blood pooling around the area where she beakered the first Gary that, there were no bodies. She had been wondering how, precisely, the cloning facility below levels had the biomass to continually create Garies. Maybe they were recycled? Did the Garies have enough mental acuity to know to bring dead Garies or victims somewhere to recycle them? Questions.
  
  She found her first Gary not too far past the room she arrived in the Vault inside. She saw him using her back-scratching mirror in one of the few 90-degree corners that didn't involve a closed door. He was meandering slowly away from her, carrying a lead pipe. If he had a gun or a knife, she would have plugged him, but a lead pipe was a much lower risk now that she actually had some ballistic protection, especially on her arms.
  
  She quietly holstered her pistol and sighed internally while sneaking up on him, was she being stupid here? It wasn't so much that she wanted to save bullets, but she wanted to hold off possibly alerting the nascent Gary gestalt as long as possible. Loud noises seemed to attract them like xenomorphs.
  
  She couldn't help but think she probably looked cool as she slid her knife out of the sheath as she neared him. Now, she didn't have any experience doing some sort of Sam Fisher-style stealthy takedown, but her medical knowledge indicated that a person's body, even vulnerable areas like their throat, are actually more substantial than you'd think. So if you wanted to be sure to get the job done the first time when cutting a homicidal clone's throat from behind, you ought to use MORE force than you think you'd need. So that was precisely what she did. She didn't try to do some grab them by the mouth while cutting their throat move; she thought she'd probably fuck that up. Instead, she just reached around with the knife and...
  
  Ewww! She jumped back to avoid getting Garyblood all over her hands. She glanced down at the dying clone; the noises and twitching he was doing was making her queasy again. Hopefully, she wouldn't ever get to the point where she felt nothing when she killed something that at least approximated humanity.
  
  Cleaning her knife, she replaced it and quickly brought out her scanner. Would she regret doing this? Well, it is for The Science. She briefly scanned Gary but spent most of the time on the head, getting multiple scans from different angles. She didn't have the time to really study the scans behind enemy lines as it were but she took a glance at the brain scans briefly panning, tilting and zooming the 3D image to take a brief glance at a number of important brain structures.
  
  She considered the anomalous areas depicted while she searched an empty room for easily carted-off loot. The prefrontal cortex looked... atrophied. That was a complex area of the brain. Even her knowledge wasn't entirely complete. It was a still studied area of the brain even for transhumanity and contained a lot of emergent processes. But, for sure, it served various functions, including decision-making, planning, the expression of personality and controlling social behaviour.
  
  She would have liked to settle the case right there; the Gary's are crazy, the end. However, she wasn't entirely sure. The brain was a fascinating organ; the flat baseline brain most humans had was a "use it or lose it" type of organ. For example, consider people who were born blind or became blind through trauma; after a while of not utilizing their optical and sensory cortex areas for sight for a prolonged period, the brain will reorganize these areas, usually offloading input from other senses into them. That is why blind people are said to have such fantastic hearing and sense of smell, for example. But that wasn't a function of trauma; you could force the brain to do the same thing if you wore an eyepatch for months or a year...
  
  Ooh, a Stealth Boy! Nobody will tell her that opening all lockers is a bad idea. She will have to stop herself from randomly rummaging through people's drawers when she finds a settlement. She will definitely scan that before using it. Wasn't it supposed to make you crazy if you used a lot? She'd definitely like to study that process. But not on her own brain.
  
  She stuffed the StealthBoy into a pocket on her messanger bag and continued sneaking slowly down the hallway in the direction, she hoped, of freedom.
  
  What was she thinking about? Oh, yeah. In any case, the changes to the dead Gary's prefrontal cortex reminded her, a little, of the brain scans of the visual cortex she saw in blind flats in textbooks. She'd never seen an actual blind person who wasn't trying to intentionally create some sort of blindsight neural network as a lark before. The closest thing to blind people she has experienced with are people who could only see Roy G Biv when they saw a rainbow. How can people live with not seeing at least infrared and UV? Honestly, she was used to having synthetic aperture radar mapped to her visual cortex.
  
  The truly bizarre areas of the brain she saw on Gary were parts of the visual cortex and almost the entirety of the Broca region. Shit looked like you were trying to make hardboiled eggs but only had scrambled eggs to start with. If he saw anything at all, she was pretty sure it was psychedelic as hell. And the Broca region was the region responsible for language. If he ever had understood a language before he sure as fuck didn't know.
  
  Taken altogether, she got the initial picture of the clones as people unable to ever understand language and who have been feral for so long that their actual decision-making and social areas of the brain had atrophied and been reorganized. So what did Gary see, she wondered? Perhaps he only saw other Garies as humans and everyone else as monsters? Great, now she felt sorry for them. She shouldn't have looked.
  
  Opening a door, she found another Gary, and luck kept being on her side because he wasn't facing her this time either. He was armed with double-barreled shotgun, though, which gave her some pause. She definitely isn't going to try for a knife takedown with this fucker, but she would like to keep the noise down. She slid her pistol back in her holster and unholstered the laser pistol. Normally she wouldn't aim for a headshot but at this distance with a Gary mostly in torpor she would try. She carefully lined up a shot on the back of his head and carefully squeezed the trigger. A soft crack, a bright beam of red light sizzling through hair before briefly punching through the front of the Gary's head, him flopping bonelessly on the ground.
  
  Fuck, had she gotten total burn through on a single shot? These lasers were really hazardous! It punched a hole through his head the size of a dime, and it smelled like someone left some chicken on the BBQ too long. She groaned and walked over, holstering her pistol and reaching down to take a look at the shotgun when simultaneously felt someone punch her in the back and heard several earth-shatteringly loud bangs behind her, followed by an angry-sounding repeated yell of, "Gary! GAARRYY!"
  
  Fuck! How had one gotten behind her? She kept the shotgun in her hand and tumbled forward over the dead Gary, she hoped to look graceful like a cat, but she suspected it was more surprised derp. She came to her feet as she heard a couple more shots and felt a sting in her neck! Had this fuck shot her in the neck?! That was like the only unarmoured area on her body! She felt for it while she ran and concluded she took a scrape from a round hitting the wall, fragmenting and ricocheting.
  
  Limbs flailing in a sprint, she made a 90-degree turn to a branching corridor to break line of sight. She was confronted with the site of a Gary rushing her swinging what she would label as an overly ornate walking stick with either a solid gold or gold plated eagle on top that he was trying to brain her with. Other people might refer to it as a fucking pimp cane, though.
  
  Skidding to a halt and ducking under the first swing, she brought the sawed-off shotty up to bare and briefly hoped dead Gary actually fucking loaded it before giving Pimp Gary one barrel straight to the side of the head.
  
  Shaking her ringing ears, she definitely wouldn't be getting a brain scan of Pimp Gary. The cane was spared, though. She was taking that fucking thing.
  
  She turned around and crouched just as ass-shooting Gary turned the corner, and she gave him what for with the other barrel. It didn't put him down, so she surmised it must have been birdshot in that barrel, but it did pepper him up nicely. Including the face, which made it a lot more challenging for him to aim at her. She immediately dropped the shotgun, unholstered her pistol and put a single aimed shot directly in centre mass while he groaned and seemed in a lot of pain, which dropped the assblaster.
  
  Panting, she flicked the light on her PipBoy on and swung around 180 degrees, shining the bright beam of light down the hallway. Then she ran back the way she came, and shined the light down the hallway where she had lasered shotty Gary.
  
  She dumped her ruck on the floor and grabbed the backscratcher to use the mirror to check on her neck. It was barely bleeding; that was quite lucky. If injured too severely, her medichines induce a medical coma while trying to keep the brain oxygenated while healing the wound. It's quite a beneficial "play dead" mechanic here in the Fallout universe everywhere except places where clones feed dead people into a mulcher to make more clones.
  
  She glanced down at what assblaster Gary was shooting at her. Holstering her pistol she picked it up. It looked like some sort of carbine, but different from the M4 style one she hadn't used at all in this engagement. She worked the magazine release and glanced down inside. Ah, this is the legendary pistol calibre carbine. It used the same pistol ammo she had in her sidearm, but the much longer barrel offered much-increased ballistics.
  
  She put it aside for the moment before reaching back and touching her ass. She was bleeding, but barely. She felt two impacts... Ah, she could feel one bullet mushroomed into the fabric of her left cheek while her right cheek was what was injured. Fuck, was he AIMING at her butt?
  
  Walking kind of stung, which didn't make a hike in the desert look too appealing. She glanced at the back of her ruck, ensuring it hadn't taken a round. If assblaster had killed her fish cakes, she'd be even more pissed, but she couldn't find any impacts or holes.
  
  She began policing up the scene of the crime. The pimp cane slid easily into the hole of one of the extra large carabiners on her MOLLE bag, the gaudy gold eagle catching it in place. The shotty and spare pistol she shoved inside, and she carried the pistol caliber carbine after reloading its magazine. This weapon actually had an ACOG style red dot sight that, for some fucking reason, still worked. Did they power everything with radiation here? Once she got to some place safe, she planned to put that on her M4, which was just iron sights.
  
  As she finished collecting all the loot, a Gary carrying a lead pipe came running from the path she had initially taken. She took careful aim and shot him twice in the chest. After that, she didn't even bother to search his body, instead turning around and proceeding with prudent haste down the path she hadn't explored. She would see about extracting the bullet from her butt if she found the exit or a defensible room. Her medichines wouldn't entirely heal a wound with a foreign object still inside; if they couldn't dislodge it themselves, she would definitely have to help them along.
  
  Turning a corner, she brought the carbine up from its ready position and popped a Gary in the head on reflex. Wait, was that a fucking sword? She studied his armament, but all it was was a cracked, chipped costume katana you'd spend a hundred bucks on at eBay. The edge wasn't sharp, nor was the tip. She left it.
  
  She kept moving, finding another StealthBoy and, more interestingly, a complete toolbox with many miscellaneous hand tools like screwdrivers, pliers, etc. She wasn't leaving that, even if she was starting to think she was carrying a full load. It must be close to forty-five kilos of shit by now. She secured the toolbox with rope to her MOLLE bag and continued on her way. She had been noticing large, dangerous-looking generators that arced sparks of electricity from weird Tesla coil-looking apparatuses on the top. She tried to give them a wide berth.
  
  Finally, after opening a door, she was greeted with the site of the gaping maw of an open Vault door, and she almost cried in relief. But she saw one last Gary dragging a dead body into the Vault. He didn't even notice her and she put one careful shot into his head. He had a unloaded revolver and no ammo, and the dead wastelander had some bottlecaps, a paper map and some jury-rigged homemade pipe rifle. It took the same 5mm or so ammo as her M4, so she took the fifty or so rounds, carefully laid the homemade piece of garbage against the wall, and used the heel of her boot to crack it into two parts. She wasn't going to carry that heavy useless fucking thing, but she wasn't going to leave it for the Garies in case it did work.
  
  She didn't entirely run out into the sunlight because she was a little worried about possible raiders, deathclaws and other monsters but she proceeded with "prudent haste" into the light of full day.
  
  She felt herself sniffling and tears running down her face as she looked up at the sky, after ensuring there were no threats in the immediate vacinity.
  
  This was emotional for multiple reasons for her. Not only was she out of that hellhole but a full half of her memories had not been on the dirt of planet Earth in... well since the TITAN AIs had forced everyone who wasn't a brain-controlled puppet off the planet killed everyone who remained.
  
  She reached down, grabbed a handful of dirt between her fingers, and just sniffled at it for a moment, feeling it fall through her fingers. A handful of genuine old Terra dirt, alive with its microbiome, could be sold on habitat for enough to buy a top-end biomorph body. Everyone was nostalgic about Earth, especially those who had lived through the Fall. She used to have a penny that must have been in someone's pocket when they fled, she made it into a pendant, and it was one of the most valuable things she owned.
  
  This desert wasn't also that different from the desert of New Mexico, where her grandpa took her camping in state parks. She couldn't remember his face, but he had passed away while she was deployed overseas for the first time. The fact that the land around the former nation's capital looked like a New Mexico desert wasn't that great of a sign, though.
  
  She glanced up at the sky again, gauging the sun's position. It was close to directly overhead, which meant it was close to or just after noon. Glancing around she found a regular, everyday stick and shoved it into the ground, straight up. Then, she used a different stick to mark the position of the shadow the stick was casting.
  
  She found a place to sit down for a moment and got her medical supplies ready. It took some work, but she managed to use the mirror, a position that looked more at home playing Twister and forceps to prize a bullet out of her ass cheek. It hadn't even penetrated more than halfway through; did that mean she was thicc with two C's? She ensured there was no foreign debris in the wound before putting a bandage on it, and her clothes back on.
  
  She ate two whole Fancy Lad cakes and an entire litre of water. She would try to keep the water in her camelback for the hike so she didn't have to keep stopping and starting to get a drink.
  
  Laying both of her rifles on the ground, she took out some tools from the toolbox and transferred the red dot sight onto the M4-style carbine. Then she used maybe fifteen minutes and five rounds of ammo to zero the sight to 100 meters, or the closest approximation of that she could come to without some kind of rangefinder. She stowed the pistol carbine with the rest of the gear, tied on top of her ruck and got everything back together.
  
  Returning to the stick, she marked the position of the stick's shadow again and then drew a straight line through both marks. That would be a west-east line. The first shadow mark is always west, so she turned to the north.
  
  She looked at the map from the dead Wastelander. How convenient. It had Canterbury Commons, this Vault and Rivet City way in the bottom marked. Not Megaton, though, but she was more or less sure it was around this area west of the river.
  
  She was pretty sure PipBoys not only had compasses built in but some sort of freaking GPS, so it was a shame she couldn't use hers right now. Was this map placed here by the mysterious ways of ROB? She didn't know how standard maps of the Wasteland were.
  
  Well, whatever. She began her trek north.
  
  She started seeing landmarks about four hours later when the evening sun started its slow trek towards setting, and a little while later she found signs of people. She wasn't challenged, despite the fact that she must look like a hardened Spec Ops operator (in her mind, at least), until she walked into a diner across the street from what appeared to be a fire station. She was polite enough to sling her rifle before entering, though.
  
  The few people inside still looked at her suspiciously, though at first, until she took off her riot helmet and shook out her hair from its bun. Then, with the sight of the Doctor's well-shampooed tresses and Colgate smile, they opened up a little. One well-weathered man smiled at her and said, "Well, howdy, stranger. You certainly look like you've seen better days. I'm Louis, and this little one is my son Derek."
  
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  A lady's pulchritude
  The Doctor didn't know whether to be offended by that statement or not because she was sure she looked at least as fabulous as one could look while they had been hiking for a half day in the wilderness. Oh, wait. Her neck still had dried blood all over it. She didn't even bother putting a bandage on the cut was so small.
  
  She decided on a slight French accent, although she didn't push it to the extreme. Instead, she tended to ignore H sounds and pronounce both R and W sounds similarly, used a T.H. sound for S, Z and F and utilised a more upwards tilting intonation pattern. She thought it sounded subdued yet cute.
  
  There was a reason beyond sounding cute, though. She wanted to imply without saying specifically to people who would be wondering why she was so accomplished in so many fields that she was a pre-War scientist that had been in stasis for hundreds of years. Wasn't that the plot of Fallout 4? She couldn't remember anything about it, but she simpered for her audience, "Ah yes, I suppose I have, no? I can't rightly say how I found myself in the middle of a band of lunatics, but they shot me in the ahh... how do you say, derrière, twice! I highly recommend anyone who does not wish to engage in the mortal combats with homicidal clones to avoid Vault number 108, about fifteen kilometres south of here. Ah, I am forgetting my manors. I am Lilliane St. Claire, Doctor of Medicine by trade, scientist by vocation, and sadly most recently Warrior by sad necessity. And it is a pleasure to meet you and your son, monsieur, and I would be pleased if you would call me Lily."
  
  She did feel kind of grimey already, though. One of the standard bio mods to Sylph-class biomorphs, beyond the elfin or fey aesthetic and optimised pheromones for near-universal appeal, was the clean metabolism mod. She was positive she knew how it worked; it was a small genome change combined with specialised nanomachines. With it, a Sylph could exercise until sweat and grime would have been covering them entirely and not only would they not smell at all, but their sweat excretions generally provided a self-cleaning effect for their skin rather than the opposite in her case. That might be her first real mod, if she could get her hands on whatever the Fallout equivalent of a simple gene editing system. She studied such technologies like CRISPR-cas9 in history, but in practice, transhumanity had gone way past that. But CRISPR, or whatever the local Universe equivalent, was very, very simple. You could buy CRISPR kits on eBay in her past life and follow a simple step-by-step guide to add the trait of bioluminescence to simple organisms like moulds or algae as a fun science experiment. Although, of course, if she couldn't find anything anywhere, she would have to return to the bowels of Vault 108, she definitely wanted either Power Armour or a team or both before she braved it.
  
  The man called Louis looked shocked, "You escaped from that charnel house? Every so often, we have people come looking for it to scavenge pre-War tech inside, but we rarely hear from them again. Are you okay? As places to get shot go, well... that's not the worst. You're lucky to be alive Miss, no Dr. Lily. Don't see too many doctors 'round here, neither. Not to be rude, but you look more like a soldier than a doctor." He says the last bit a bit suspiciously.
  
  Lily chuckles softly and says in a way that makes it obvious she is quoting someone, "My poor body, sir, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and she must needs go that the devil drives... Ahh, in other words, I would most prefer to wear the lab coat somewhere and see to the ills of the world and my research, but I am more likely to survive longer like this, at least for now, when one finds oneself alone and bereft in a dangerous world."
  
  Louis tilted his head and then nodded slightly, "I reckon I know what you mean, ma'am. Would you care to take a seat? I'll buy you a glass of water."
  
  This man was not familiar with me at all, but his son is the spitting image of one of the NPCs in this town with the same name, except instead of an annoying teenager, he looks more like an annoying cheeky brat. Was she multiple years before the start of the plot of the game? That would be both good and bad. She wasn't that interested in the plot of the game; her main interest was survival and research of new technology. However, she indeed approved of the Vault Dweller's father and the Brother of Steel's quest to provide limitless fresh water to the Capital Wasteland.
  
  She was a hyper-materialist, and the more people alive meant more people working to advance society forward and a more significant number of geniuses alive, propelling technology and society much faster too. Transhumanity had over forty billion sapients living on planet Earth before the Fall. By the time of her last memories, ten times that lived in various habitats and O'Neil cylinders across the Solar System. So all of her memories were in accord that the more people alive were to the better.
  
  "Ah, yes, I would appreciate that. And if this establishment sells any food that is better than Fancy Lad cakes and scavenged military rations, I'd very much like to buy some, too. I have some of the, bottle caps, yes? If not, I have other things to trade," she said as she sat her rucksack down on the ground and slid into one of the booths, although she did select the booth that had a clear line of sight both to the door and the main windows of the diner, something she thought Mr Louis definitely noticed.
  
  The cheeky brat stepped up to her booth and said bluntly, "You talk funny, lady." His dad smacked him upside the head for that, which made her giggle, "Yes, but what if the truth is that YOU talk funny? Perhaps, everywhere else people talk like me, no?"
  
  The kid rubbed the back of his head before shaking it firmly, "No way! I once talked to a trader from Rivet City, and that is like ACROSS THE WORLD!"
  
  His dad chuckled slightly, "Ah yes, sorry about Derek; he doesn't mean anything by it. I'm pretty sure they're serving some grilled kebabs today; not sure what the meat is from, but it is seasoned enough that you don't really care. Cheap too, only a couple caps."
  
  Her mouth started watering. She didn't even care if it was a rat. So long as it wasn't grilled Gary kebabs, she would eat it. She turned to the proprietor, "Yes! I would like three kebabs, please!" She pulled the required caps out of her pocket, as she was sure this was cash on the barrelhead sort of establishment, and they wouldn't extend a strange drifter woman who talked funny any credit.
  
  Looking down at the caps she started to understand why they were used as an ad-hoc currency. Really, the only thing money needed was to be scarce and for to multiple people to agree to use it as a medium of exchange. These bottle caps were quite strange. She would scan them later but felt that they were an organometallic-based metal alloy, perhaps, and they had embedded within them with tiny sparkles. Grown crystals? They would undoubtedly be difficult to counterfeit, and she could see trade continuing this way until someone got the Nuka Cola bottling factory up and running again.
  
  She drained the glass of water in one long gulp. Hmmm, what would she drink with her delicious hot kebabs? She dug out the Nuka Cola Quantum she found in Vault 108. She had already examined it and was curious why it was slightly radioactive before being opened. Still, the label proclaimed it to have "Twice the calories, twice the carbohydrates, twice the caffeine, and twice the taste!" That was a bold claim that she would test. It also appeared to have at least twice the strontium, too.
  
  It was a shame she couldn't chill it, but she couldn't have everything. She glanced up at Louis, "Please, take a seat. Your son too!" They did so. She dug out a regular Nuka-Cola and handed it to the brat, who yelled, "Thanks, Lady!"
  
  His father elbowed him and whispered, "She's a doctor!" To which he regarded her, nodded and said, "Thanks, Doctor Lady!"
  
  Louis groaned but shrugged, "At least he said thank you. So, Doc St. Claire, what kind of doctor are you? Do you plan to stick around town long? We ain't had a town doctor in some time, cepting when one comes through traveling with the merchant caravans."
  
  Lily's eyes tracked the plate of kebabs from when they came from the kitchen to her table like prey. They were prey. Her prey. She decided to eat one right away so he held up her finger to indicate she would reply in a moment before chomping down on the meat, one bit at a time. It was seaoned quite well, a little spicey. The taste, she couldn't quite identify but it was surprisingly tender. She might save a bit to scan, but then again, that might ruin it for her.
  
  She took a swig of Quantum. Wow that is tasty; then she turned back to the man, "General medicine, to include surgery - although it is not as though we have many operating theatres these days, so I'd generally have to limit myself to emergency surgeries, and minor ones out here. My research, though, is in genetics and human augmentation - like; for example with the right equipment, I could fashion a robotic prosthesis for a person who had lost his or her arm in an accident or similar situation." Lily didn't plan on hiding her skills. However, she did plan on understating them at first and especially understating how precisely in favour of augmentation she was for otherwise healthy flats.
  
  The brat's eyes widened, "WOW! You can give me a ROBOT ARM? Like Doctor Robotron?!"
  
  Yesss. She liked the cheeky little brat's moxy. Yes she could, little boy! 'Why don't you come with me in my white van so I can -' she shook away the thought. Hahaha, of course, she was being ridiculous. She wouldn't just give any kid free robot arms! They had to PAY for them!
  
  Louis smacked him upside the head again, "There's nothing wrong with your regular arm! She is talking about people who've had their armed chopped off in accidents or by raiders. Sorry, Doc. With a speciality like that, I can't see how you'd be sticking around town for too long. I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't headed for Rivet City, or heck, even the Brotherhood of Steel at the Citadel."
  
  She blinked, tilting her head to one side. She was pretty sure that once she made a name for herself organisations would find Mr. Louis and quiz him about her, so she decided to slightly play up the possibility she might be from the pre-war time period. "The Citadel? Isn't that the Military College in South Carolina? Is that still running? Isn't that pretty far away? And, could you tell me a little about this Brotherhood of Steel? I assume they're more than a fraternity?"
  
  Louis blinked, "Ahh... you must really not be from around here. I won't really comment about that, it ain't really my place, but perhaps I should give you a brief run-down on a few groups like that; you'd be kind of bringing attention to yourself if you don't know who some of them are. But firstly, the Citadel is what they call the ruins of that giant five-sided building in the heart of the ruins of D.C., the Brotherhood of Steel operate out of there as a base."
  
  Lily nodded her head, "Ah, I understand. The Pentagon, now called The Citadel. Got it."
  
  Louis began to give her a quick and dirty briefing on the larger settlements and prominent players in the Capital Wasteland while she ate her kebabs. She knew most of it, but she wanted confirmation that she wasn't in some alternate universe or something.
  
  She even got him to mark points on her paper map, including Megaton, the Pentagon, and a couple of small settlements. He recommended she stay far away from downtown D.C. as he called it a warzone, mostly.
  
  That made her tentative destination of the VSS building problematic, as it was on the western edges of what he called a warzone.
  
  Well, she didn't know precisely what the date was, but if the cheeky brat was anything to judge, and the fact that nobody had mentioned the Mechanist or AntAgonizer, she had some time before she ran into the plot. She still wasn't sure what she planned to do about that can of worms, beyond help as she could. But she had time enough to get set up in Megaton before hitting the VSS building. Of the combat mods she could probably build and install in herself in just a few months was perhaps limited to light Bioweave armour under her skin, a neural mesh if she could make a proper fabricator by reprogramming her medichines, basic reflex enhancements and possibly an adrenaline control module which would let her trigger, at will, a hefty dose of fight or flight chemicals. It was considered in the same family as the reflex augments, and it was obsolete but easy to build - the user would notice time slow down for perhaps half a minute but would be jittery for a time after that.
  
  He was recommending she should stay away from the Enclave when their discussion was interrupted by several gunshots outside. The pistol started to clear her holster as her eyes immediately tracked a squad of some obviously Mad Max rejects split up, the majority running towards the Fire Station across the street while two burst through the door. They all had pushed up from the booth simultaneously, she was keeping her pistol at her side, and hidden a bit behind Louis. Maybe they just wanted to rob the place.
  
  The taller one who had an honest to god mohawk guffawed, "Woah, look at the tits on that one, kill the old man, I'll pop the kid and-"
  
  Her bodysuit WAS form fitting but she was wearing armour over it! Plus, didn't they see all of her weapons? Her pistol was rising in their direction as soon as he said the word kill, but when the first one said his target was the kid her aim point shifted to him imperceptibly.
  
  Louis was, surprisingly, not armed. He yelled out, "No!" and leaped to put himself in between the two men and his son. Lily fired first, and she thought the gunshot surprised the second guy into jerking the trigger of his improvised pipe gun, letting off a round that struck Louis directly in the chest, who crumpled to the ground.
  
  Lily's target's brains were splattered against the diner door with enough force that a bit of skull struck the bell that was kept tied to the door to announce new arrivals hard enough to give an audible ringing sound. She shifted to fire three rounds at the second guy, all hitting centre mass, putting him on the floor.
  
  Little Derek screamed, "Dad! No!" and went down on his knees to grab his dad's arm, who had started coughing up a fair bit of blood. "Don't worry, D. I have a StimPak in my pocket, just a sec."
  
  Lily kneeled down and stopped him from reaching for it. "Stop. Don't. If you use that StimPak you will die. Derek, go grab that camouflage bag from my backpack, please."
  
  All Derek heard was that his father was going to die, and was inconsolable. "You have to save him, Doctor Lady! You have to!"
  
  "Go grab my bag, please," she repeated and he was off to comply.
  
  Lily sighed, seeing the confused expression on the man's bloody face. "The bullet wasn't a through and through, and judging by the fact that you're coughing up blood, it either penetrated or deeply bruised the lobe of your lung and probably lodged partly inside it. If you use that StimPak with a bullet lodged in the lobe of your lung, you'll die of a pulmonary embolism within a day; if it is IN your lung, you will likely die of pneumonia in a couple of weeks. Have to get it out, then you can use the Stim. It isn't magic, you know."
  
  A look of comprehension came over his face and he nodded. Derek returned with her messenger bag. She glanced down at him, "What do you know about guns, kid?"
  
  He looked up at her, "They are always loaded, never point it at something you don't want to destroy and keep my finger off the trigger until I'm ready to fire."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Good enough." She slung her carbine off her back, turned the safety off and handed it to the boy. "The safety's off. I want you to go behind the counter and cover the entrance. If someone you don't recognise walks through that door carrying a gun, shoot them. Three times. I will be a bit distracted keeping your dad alive for the next few minutes. Can you do that for me, Doctor Robotron?"
  
  The boy got a severe and determined look on his face before he nodded, taking the rifle and running back behind the counter to use it as cover.
  
  Lily nodded and sat down, fishing for some forceps and hemostats out of her bag. She also pulled out her scanner. While she was very confident in her diagnosis, the real-time imaging of where the bullet was would make this a lot easier.
  
  Louis was groaning a bit and spitting blood every few seconds. She suspected a severe bruising of the lobe rather than an outright penetration. "Alright, this is going to hurt, so uhh.. just try to stay conscious. As soon as I get the bullet out, we can administer the StimPak." He nodded, without saying anything.
  
  It didn't take her that long at all to fish the bullet out, especially watching the forceps dig for it with the scanner. She pulled it out, dropped it on Louis' chest, reached into his pocket for the StimPak and carefully administered it intravenously rather than intramuscularly. It was slightly more effective when administered this way, and plus it cleared out plaque in arteries and slightly rejuvenated his heart which always tended to be the first thing to go in old active men.
  
  She watched her scanner in fascination as the medicine slowly over time regenerated the lung, even absorbing the blood that was pooled in the lobe back into the arteries and destroying the clot that was in the process of forming. She didn't stop watching even as the entry wound started to knit shut. Finally, she blinked and shoved the scanner away. "Looks like you'll live, Louis. HEY! Doctor Robotron, come gimmie my rifle, please."
  
  Hours later a much better Louis and Derek had parted ways with the visiting Doctor and they were checking up on Louis' brother, who was the main target of the attack. The raiders were eliminated rather quickly by the guards at the merchant's transhipping area.
  
  Louis was snickering, trying to hold off a full guffaw, "Derek, tell your Uncle about why you said Doctor St. Claire shot the men first."
  
  Derek nodded and said, "Well, uhh... when the two bad men came in the diner they said something about the Doctor's uhh... well, I'd rather not repeat it." But like many a tween boy as soon as he heard the word "tits" he didn't hear the rest of the sentence where his and his father's life was threatened.
  
  His Uncle blinked, "She shot them because they said something uncomplimentary?" Not that he cared, in fact. But it was a bit odd.
  
  Derek shook his head, "It was complimentary! But, uhh... dad always told me that there are times to remark on a lady's pulchritude, and then there are times when you ought just to stay silent. That man, he should have just shut up. But, since his friend shot my dad, I'm glad he didn't!"
  
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  Clinic
  Lily was asked to treat several guards that had been injured while repelling the raider attack. The mayor of the small town, apparently Dr Robotron's Uncle, had provided some StimPaks as a bonus for the successful defence, but one of the guards had a completely shattered femur. Apparently, he had taken a round from a high-powered rifle, at least 30-06 or whatever the local equivalent was. The guard had used a StimPak in a trauma situation which was good because Lily suspected the shot had definitely shredded the man's femoral artery. Her work was a follow-up surgery to ensure that the man's leg wouldn't remain disabled for life, and involved removing bone shards from the leg and realigning the regrown bone.
  
  Sadly for him, she had to carefully fracture his femur in three places to accomplish that. Still, at least there was some sort of narcotic derived from what she suspected was mutated poppy flowers that were available for sedation. She just had to titrate the narcotic delivery to avoid him actually stopping breathing, as mechanically ventilating him would be a bit complicated.
  
  She would have to secure a stable supply of such drugs, but they seemed to be both in short supply and also in great demand. It wasn't like there was any kind of Drug Enforcement Agency, and honestly, she couldn't blame someone for wanting to get high in an apocalypse. But she used almost the entire supply that was on hand for two operations.
  
  She had set up a temporary clinic these last two days. Both Louis and his brother the mayor offered the use of a clean building and a couple of helpers if she would offer a reasonable fee for diagnostic consultations for anyone in the settlement. And up-front costs or trade when an identified problem could be fixed. She had seen about fifty patients in these past two days. Mostly she offered advice for managing chronic conditions. She thought it was very good advice, too. But there were a couple of cases where either the drugs were available, or she could fake it by quickly and discreetly reprogramming a small number of her own medichines to provide subtle but miraculous effects.
  
  For example, hopefully, her current patient. A father of one of the more well-to-do local families, she had diagnosed him with Alzheimer's. A hundred bottle caps was hers if she could "cure him." She didn't accept payment for attempts, either. Her pride would only allow her to take money for success, unlike the medical system she recalled in America.
  
  His son was anxious, which she always thought was both endearing and useless, "Can you really cure him, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  She clucked her tongue, "Possibly. I will try. You won't owe me anything unless he sees significant cognitive improvement."
  
  Alzheimer's was a degenerative brain disease where proteins would misfold in the brain, causing mechanical malfunctions. It was also progressively degenerative, in that the rate of decline accelerated over time. It was because when a protein misfolded, others around it might crystalize and misfold to match. The disease progressed almost like an infection as mental decline became exponential as the three-dimensional surface area of misfolded areas increased.
  
  However, it was simple to program a small number of medichines to travel to the patient's brain, detect the misfolded proteins and correct them. Strictly speaking, it wasn't a cure because this was a congenital condition. It would take targeted gene therapy to eliminate the expressions in a patient's genome to actually cure it, but it was a treatment. It would restart the clock from zero, so it would probably take several decades to get to the point of cognitive decline again, and considering the age of her patient and projected future lifespan, that was as good as a cure, she thought.
  
  And unlike some other degenerative brain diseases, Alzheimer's didn't do permanent lossy damage to the brain's structures, either. If the folds were corrected, the patient would make a full recovery, including all memories.
  
  She considered her sedation options as she typed away, programming a medichine therapy. The teenaged girl provided as her assistant wasn't that useful, except when she had to hide away like this. The girl who seemed devoted to her wouldn't let someone disturb her. In the long term for sedation, she could devise a central nervous system blocking device. Such things were pretty common, but it wasn't as though she had the blueprints to one inside her head; she just sort of understood the principles of their operation. It might be possible to use medichines, but she wouldn't be able to provide more than one concurrent programming schema for medichines in third person's body very easily if they didn't have a nanohive themselves and she was already using a very minute amount on each person she operated on to stave off infection. Without a hive of their own, the implanted medichines would generally stay near the site of implantation, which was whatever incision site she made. Still, even a microgram of them would be enough to stave off infection before they became inactive after several days.
  
  She had already programmed her hive to enter continuous production. It usually tried to maintain a specific medichine population and only had to ramp up production when they were utilized to repair damage, but there was no actual harm in her running a hundred or even a thousand times the normal amount; they were programmed not to interfere in bodily functions after all. Her nanohive implant could only manufacture about two grams worth of medichines a day, and essentially every one of her long-term plans had uses for them.
  
  Perhaps she was focusing too much on the technological solutions to this problem? That was a problem for her both as an electrical engineer in the past and as a doctor.
  
  Hmm, she had used drugs in these operations but wanted something else because the drugs were scarce. That didn't precisely mean that drugs weren't a solution. Manufacture her own? It couldn't be a traditional narcotic, then, because the challenges of cultivating poppies, mutated or not, were numerous. Also, if she cultivated poppy plants in a greenhouse she would have to hire people to tend them, and then hire people to provide security as they were obviously a stealable item that already had a lot of demand in what she assumed was the private recreational market. Even if she was growing them for her own use, she had no doubt she'd end up running up against cartels or whatever the equivalent was in the Wasteland just for being incidentally in a similar line of business.
  
  Tapping her finger on her desk her mind wandered to watching a film with Brad Pitt from the 90s, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yes, that could work! When you compared it to CNS blocking technology it was practically hitting the patient in the head with a rock, but it would be effective. Devil Ether! She giggled as she remembered the film, 'The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.' Her medical experience was telling her that this was wildly exaggerated for theatrical effect, but ether WAS one of the first effective sedatives. It lost its popularity due to its many downsides, mostly involving its flammability and tendency to explode but also the fact that dosing could be more of an art and not as exact as modern medicine would prefer. Still, it was dead simple to make and only used readily available chemicals, namely ethanol and sulfuric acid.
  
  She would likely have to build her own small industrial still to create the ethanol in the required purity. Still, she honestly needed a fair supply of ethanol for antisceptic purposes anyway. Her memories of living in space habitats didn't help her too much in the construction of such pedestrian things as distillation apparatuses. But, her memories of being an undergraduate in an engineering university very much did! Oh, she could definitely build a still. Copper tubing wouldn't even be that difficult to acquire with all the Wasteland's scrap refrigerators and HVAC systems sitting around going to rust.
  
  This was also something she could teach others to make, so long as proper safety precautions were taken. Plus, some of the excess ethanol could be diverted as a salable trade good. If she planned on living for a time in Megaton, she should probably get on the good side of that criminal Moriarty running one of the few good bars. Honestly, she wouldn't even care if he tried to take over the operation as he might be wont to do, so long as she was minimally compensated and got her ethanol on time.
  
  Until Project Purity came online years from now she would also need stills to create distilled water, especially if she wanted to make her own saline. How many employees would she have to have on the periphery just to have an absolute minimum level of acceptable clinic? Running this temporary clinic had been an eye-opener.
  
  She came out of her office with a small 5cc syringe, "Alice, I've finished formulating the treatment. Will you bring the patient and his son back into the exam room?" Sterilizing medical equipment was also becoming a chore. She was reusing a lot of equipment and devices that were designed to be single-use throw-away items, like syringes. It wasn't like anyone had any autoclaves, either.
  
  The girl hopped to more than a fresh 2nd lieutenant when the Base Commander showed up unannounced, although her perkiness was infectious, "Yes, Dr St. Claire! Right away!"
  
  The patient's son was still nervous, "You think this will work? How long do you think it will take before we notice an improvement?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue in a professionally neutral manner, "Yes, I do. And quickly enough that I have included a small dose of an anti-anxiety medication as the process might be disorienting and confusing to your father. Shall we proceed?"
  
  He nodded, and she administered the medication which was a light benzo with specially programmed medichines suspended in solution. She would have liked to use the scanner to plot the medichines, but she did not use that device when anyone was liable to see it. It was beyond even pre-War technology, and she didn't want anyone to know it existed. But watching the misfolded proteins decrystalize in a cascade would have been fascinating. Like any genetic disease, this disease was eliminated before she was born. She could imagine the process, though, so she closed her eyes and did so, humming Vivaldi quietly.
  
  It didn't take more than a couple of minutes before the kindly but spacey, "not all there" glassy eyes of the patient started revealing a keen perception. Then there were shouts, crying and displays of both emotion and public affection that made Lily uncomfortable, especially when several people hugged her. Still, she had a pleasant demeanour so as not to affect her bedside manner and just bore the indignity like the British do, with a stiff upper lip.
  
  She had to stop the patient and his son from declaring to the world that she had cured him. She did it politely, but firmly, as her professionalism wouldn't permit any prevaricating, "I'm glad the treatment was successful but I did not cure your father. I treated him. His illness can't really be cured with my present technology. It will, eventually, reoccur."
  
  That quieted them down some, the patient seemed in well possession of his wits because he seemed to understand the situation, "How long before I relapse, then, Doctor?"
  
  She made the universal waffling gesture with her hands, "It's a progressively degenerative disease and its been reset back to zero. It starts slow, too. You probably didn't notice symptoms of it for many years. I think you will likely experience slight cognitive decline in ten to fifteen years and you will be back where you were when I met you in twenty."
  
  The now spry old man guffawed, slapping his thigh with the palm of his hand in great humor, "Damn, doc! You had me worried there for a bit! Honestly, I don't plan living twenty more years, so thats as much cured as I can ever expect to get, I think!"
  
  The man's son, though, didn't like that idea, "Dad! You're barely 60! And it's like you said when I was younger... heroes die young but calamities last a thousand years, so us old fellows have a lot of living left to do, eh Dad? How can we get follow up treatments if it does reoccur?"
  
  Lily snorted back a laugh. She liked that saying, and was going to steal it. "Well, while my plans could change I do plan on in the near future to set up a practice in Megaton. While I won't guarantee I'll be there all the time, as I may spend a lot of time exploring the ruins of DC, that is probably where you will find me. You understand what I mean when I say that this is a congenital, genetic predisposition to this specific illness, right?"
  
  The son now looked a lot more somber as he parsed the unusual words, "It means that I will get it too when I get older?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue. She had scanned the son surreptitiously and looked at the results in her office earlier. He had no sign of the disease as of yet, " Maybe. It is recessive and often skips generations, but it is a possibility. You don't have it right now, though, I can say for sure. Not even the early stages when you wouldn't have noticed."
  
  Both of them looked relieved at that, how cute.
  
  That was a nice way to end the day, better than the previous day when she had to tell an old lady she had advanced malignant tumours in nearly every organ in her body and had only weeks to live. Honestly, she was surprised the woman was alive at all and even if Lily used her entire supply of medichines, there was no curing her; there were so many metastases that even doing a targeted therapy to destroy them would kill the woman. Practically a quarter of her body was cancerous.
  
  Something anyone working in medicine learns very soon if they didn't want to go mad with the dread of it all was you can't save everyone.
  
  "Mr Louis, what can I do for you today?" asked Lily, beckoning him to sit while she sat back in the comfortable chair a grateful patient lent to her in her office. She had been beginning the initial steps for programming an engineering-based computer aided design suite on her computer. It'd probably be at minimum a few weeks to get even a minimally helpful tool. She even hollowed out a broken terminal that could slide her diagnostic computer in so that it even looked like she was just typing on a terminal unless you were peeking over her shoulder.
  
  Louis dusted his pants off before taking a seat in front of her, "Doc St. Claire, nice to see you! I reckon you'll have seen the whole town in a few more days. First, I've been told a merchant caravan to Megaton will be leaving in a week's time. It won't be a motorized caravan though, this guy has a gaggle of custom heavy-duty walking mulebots. He normally leverages these walking bots to make deliveries to areas where wheeled or hover transport can't reach, but he often returns to Megaton at the end of his circuit. This is that leg. It'll be pretty safe if you don't mind walking."
  
  Lily smiled and offered something tailored to Louis' machismo sense of humor, "Well, I can't say I would prefer hiking to being driven somewhere; I am, after all, a lady ."
  
  He guffawed, "I ain't about to correct you, I saw how it went for the last fellows. I'll set things up for you and mark you down as tentatively. You probably won't have to pay but you will have to agree to act as possibly either a guard or doctor or both for the caravan during the trip."
  
  He paused, "Now the less good news. Well, I reckon it depends. That list of things you wanted to buy, I've been able to acquire some of it. Buuttt..." he trailed off and glanced down at a list she had given him earlier, "All the electronics stuff. You listed operating manuals for all RobCo operating systems, maintenance manuals for all available RobCo or General Atomics robots - honestly I didn't even know there was a difference in who made a robot. Then there was the spare parts, especially central pros-process-uhh the brains of any available robots, sense-her modules and a whole Eyebot. That last one, what you'd expect us to do, steal one from the Enclave as President Eden is givin' a speech?" He stared at her in a gimlet expression.
  
  Lily winced, "I thought I might have been asking for too much. Can't get any of it?"
  
  Louis ruefully chuckled, "Ah, I didn't say that precisely. We might be able to, but the costs would be exor-exorb-fuckin' high." Lily had to stop herself from giggling. Since she saved his life, Louis had been trying to add new words to his vocabulary with mixed success. He coughed, "Even after bonesawin' on the whole town, I reckon you only got about half. And that's with my brother chargin' you cost, on account of how you saved my life and all. And he don't even charge ME cost."
  
  Lily sighed, "Well, priortize the books and I need at least two CPUs from any type of bot, but preferably ones like Mister Handy series that affect a simulated personality and verbal machine interface."
  
  Louis squinted at her hard, "I take that to mean the ones that talk." He nodded, "Okay, we can do that. But there is another option, that's the main reason I came by. You see, there is a man in town who has practically everything you asked. He was the first one I went to try to buy some of it, 'cept he's something of a hermit, you see and told me to take a hike."
  
  Her lips twitched upwards against her will. Yes, Louis, the ones that talk. She tilted her head. She was pretty sure she knew which man he was talking about. In years he would take up the guise of the superhero The Mechanist and had a small army of heavily armed robots, including fucking Sentrybots of all things. She even knew where he lived. But she wasn't about to arrive like a Jehovah's Witness to a man with the reputation as a recluse who probably has at least a small robot army guarding his place. She motioned for Louis to continue.
  
  "Well, I was quite surprised when he showed up to see me. The whole town has been talking about how you gave ole John his wits back, you see, and he heard that too. He told me that his momma is starting to go the same way; she lives up on a farm a couple of day hike from here. And he said if you make a housecall and help her that he'd give you your entire shopping list and call it square. 'Cept maybe not the Eyebot; those are kinda rare, he said."
  
  She sat up in her chair, a bit surprised. That does sound like a good deal, but... "Tell him I'm open to the possibility but I'd need to speak with him first. Have him come by today, if he can, or as soon as he can."
  
  Louis nodded, and then seeing there wasn't any further business he got up and said, "I'll tell him, he's still in town. I 'spect he'll come to see you directly." He waited a moment before I realized that he was waiting for me to dismiss him. After I did, he departed with a polite "Ma'am" and a tip of his hat. Old-fashioned chivalrous machismo is so fascinating. How did this guy who would seem more at home in a cowboy movie come to be on the east coast? Maybe it was just that cowboys were survivors. She did note that since he was shot, he carried a pistol, but to her disappointment, it wasn't a Peacemaker but a sleek-looking automatic.
  
  She only briefly got started in her programming projects before he returned, trailing what must be the future Mechanist.
  
  She politely stood as they entered but realized that neither man would sit until she took her seat again, so she just sat back down with an amused sigh. At least she wouldn't have to open her own doors when she was around this part of the world. That was just one less thing to worry about, she supposed.
  
  Louis introduced them, "Doctor St. Claire, this here is Scott Wollinski, though folk 'round here call him Bean. Though I don't reckon I know why, he's damn near the biggest man in town." Lily's lips kept twitching progressively upwards.
  
  He paused, "Bean, be known to Doctor Lilliane St. Claire. She talks a little funny but she's a straight shooter." He nodded then, "I won't stick my hat into your private business, then. Ma'am?" He glanced at her inquisitively, and she nodded that he could take his leave, which he did so.
  
  Lily smiled across the table, "Monsieur Wolinski, a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and it would please me if you would call me Lily."
  
  The man nodded stiffly, "Okay, Lily. Louis gave me the list of things you wanted. I have most of them. Are you trying to learn how to work on electronics and robotics? If so, I will offer in addition to everything else - my time. I will teach you for as long as you want to stay in town or until we can't stand each other. In exchange, you will cure my mom's dementia. There are no other parameters for the exchange I can think of. Do you accept?"
  
  She blinked. This man was on the spectrum, for sure. But it was too good of a deal not to try, though. Especially the individual tutoring. She might have to cancel that trip out on that caravan. "Provisionally, yes. But there are some things you need to know, first. First, I cannot treat every form of dementia."
  
  The Mechanist frowned, "Explain."
  
  Lily sighed, "How much do you know about how the brain works?"
  
  The Mechanist tilted his head to the side, "It uses electrical signals." Lily waited almost thirty seconds, but then came to the conclusion that was the full extent of his knowledge.
  
  Thinking quickly, she rephrased the question. "Well, how much do you know about how computers work?"
  
  The Mechanist brightened a bit, "A lot."
  
  Lily smiled. "Dementia can be classified, then, as a progressively degenerative condition of the processor, storage and random access memory of a person. Do you understand?"
  
  He nodded, "Yes. Put like that, it makes a lot of sense." So she continued, "There are many different types of dementia but there are two main causes. The first is the type where areas in memory, blocks in storage and parts of your processor are physically and irreparably destroyed. However, Alzheimer's disease is more common, and it could be more analogous to where parts of memory and storage blocks are flagged as unavailable to the processor, while the processor is infected with malicious code. Do you understand the distinction?"
  
  The Mechanist didn't pause at all but nodded firmly, "I do. You explained it very well. You can only treat those with Alzheimer's disease. Do you know what kind of dementia my mom has?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Not without examining her. It is more likely to be Alzheimers, given what you have told me, but I wanted to set your expectations. And also amend our agreement. Normally I only charge if the treatment is successful, but that doesn't include a two-day hike house call."
  
  The Mechanist pursed his lips, "So long as you promise to do your best to help her, I will fulfill one-third of your list even if your treatment fails. Thank you for explaining things so simply. We'll leave tomorrow." He nodded to her and looked expectingly.
  
  Lily blinked. After a moment, she just nodded, and he left. Well, he is a character, "Alice! Reschedule all my appointments tomorrow through Saturday, please. I'll be unavailable!"
  
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  A body built for sin
  Lily woke up hours before sunrise. As always she vacillated between feeling amazement that she only needed three or four hours of sleep at night to annoyance at needing to sleep at all. But, she was entirely grateful that her basic gene optimizations included that feature. She was still at a point where any civilized habitat would deny her entry because her biomorph body wasn't even at the baseline level it considered safe.
  
  She'd be treated like a historical samurai that was somehow displaced out of space, appearing in the middle of Tokyo. Kindly, curiously but at a minimum, such a hypothetical person would be given vaccinations or monitored for a communicative disease before being let loose upon the world. And considering her culture had salvaged neanderthal DNA and cloned and uplifted them, that was saying a lot. She wasn't sure her fragile pride would survive a neanderthal morph looking down their nose at her. Uplifted animals weren't so bad because it was hard to anthropomorphize an intelligent octopus without having a proper mesh insert to communicate electronically. Maybe she was just as well in this post-apocalyptic desert where she was indisputably the most civilized person on the planet. Wait, they had AGIs on this planet, didn't they? ZAX units. Her long-term survival depended on either killing or subverting one, specifically. Well, at least the title of most civilized meatbag was hers.
  
  She sighed as she worked on her morning ablutions. Since she was travelling with someone else that she could reasonably trust, she wasn't being as paranoid. Since she was working at the clinic, she had braided her hair in a single long alternating braid that ended just past her rear. She used a small silver bracelet she found in Vault 108 to terminate the braid. She thought it looked quite nice, so she redid the braid after washing her face. She would wrap it up in an ad-hoc bun if they had to trundle through brush or thickety areas or expected possible combat, but she had grown to like the look of it, and she thought other people did too. Indeed, it was a sign of wealth or power to have as long, well-cared-for hair as she did. She believed it would give people she met subtle social signals even if they didn't understand it consciously.
  
  She had to ask Louis when and where to meet Scott in the morning since he just up and left before stating anything more than "tomorrow." Louis figured he meant just prior to sunrise and at the clinic. She wondered if the incipient Mechanist would consider such a time and place so evident that it didn't, in fact, need to be stated. Probably.
  
  She slid back into her white/grey bodysuit. While doing her clinic rounds, she had been wearing some purchased clothes, including an actual lab coat or at least a good impression of one. It wasn't that the clothes were even close to as good, but it was hard to do laundry if you only had one set of clothes. The hole where Gary shot her in the ass wasn't even evident. It wasn't that the clothing was actively self-repairing, but the weave was so tiny that the hole closed up. It probably wouldn't be quite as bullet-resistant at that location anymore, though. Next, she donned her combat armour, holsters for her weapons and camelback. She had packed her ruck for a five-day trip, but that was her being conservative as she assumed that there would be opportunities to forage for provisions and restock water. She had to say that pure water without the radioactive particulates and slight heavy metal toxicity really agreed with her. She had been noticeably peppier since she stopped drinking the radioactive water. However, she thought the little bit of caesium actually made her MRE instant coffee taste better. That was going to be a limited luxury here soon. There didn't seem to be much global trade, and it wasn't like coffee beans were cultivated on the east coast.
  
  Last night she took the time to extract from her blood into a small solution of saline and program some medichines for an Alzheimer's treatment, followed by general brain maintenance. That was about as many instructions she could fit on that few nanomachines. Their processing and storage capability, absent a nanohive, increased with their relative local population, but it would still be cheaper to have multiple vials of medichine solutions. The only downside being injecting one person with two different kinds would cause the programmed schema to conflict and all of them to shut down in safety mode. She had a few other preprogrammed ampules, the most interesting one being a hostile medichine attack which would temporarily paralyze all voluntary nerve inputs. Now, if she could find a blow-gun, she would be in business, like one of those uncontacted tribesman living in the Amazon or Congo, who would, in fiction, jump out of the tall grass and shoot a dart into Indiana Jones' neck. Until then, she could draw a small amount in a syringe, and it would give her an alternative to a lethal takedown with her knife. It would be helpful in interrogation situations, too, as most people become unnerved if they are reduced to being able to only breathe and blink.
  
  She ate a hearty breakfast and went outside to wait. She didn't have to wait long. Scott hadn't taken up the mantle of the Mechanist yet, so the armour was just run-of-the-mill metal combat armour, but to her surprise, three robots were with him. They all appeared to be Mister Handy derivatives. One was obviously a Mister Gutsy; the other might have been a chopped-down Mr Handy - it seemed to be missing the articulating tools, and the chassis was cut-down. It looked like a floating half sphere. The last was what appeared to be a Mister Handy without any of the usual tools or weapons at all; instead, each of the limbs featured a dextrous-looking manipular claw, and its chassis was impeccably painted white with pastel trim. She was reminded of men in her previous life that would spend an entire afternoon waxing the paint job of their classic car. Whatever this robot's purpose was, it was well cared for.
  
  Scott came up to me and nodded. "You're ready, good. Lily, this is Sophie. Sophie, be introduced to Doctor Lilliane St. Claire."
  
  The well-coffed white roboted floated up to her and spoke in an even more affected French accent than Lily had decided on. Her eyebrows went up into her skull, "Ah, 'ello Doctor St. Claire. It is nice to meet you. Scott has told me all about you; 'tank you so very much for agreeing to help his mah-mah."
  
  Lily glanced between the robot-girl named Sophie and Scott and back again. Surely he hadn't programmed this robot with a French accent overnight? Then, whatever this model was came with one? She didn't recognize it. Was it just a custom Mister Handy? Well, Miss Handy, now, she supposed. Still, some of her best friends were robots - heck, she was a robot until recently, too, "Ah, it is nice to make your acquaintance as well, and it would be my pleasure if you would call me Lily, Sophie. And there is no need to be so effusive; Scott is paying me."
  
  Sophie seemed to vibrate in her chasis in excitement and said, in French, " Ah, he told me you talk as I do, but I just assumed that he meant that you were... ah, you know... nice. I haven't had the chance to speak like this in ages. Your accent, is almost Parisian, and is music to the ears!"
  
  Lily giggled softly, replying in the same language, " Ah, thank you very much. I can see how you would think that, Scott he does appear very much the gentleman but he is a bit brusque and to the point, isn't he?"
  
  Sophie did a complete three hundred and sixty degree rotation in exuberane, " Yes, yes! He is so kind but he is not ever so much for the words, my Scott. Let's switch back to English so he isn't so left out. "
  
  Lily froze momentarily in comprehension. "My Scott"? The future Mechanist had seemed a hair warmer when introducing the robot to her, and if she recalled from the game The Mechanist had taken up the mantle of superhero and swore eternal vengeane against the AntAgonizer after the AntAgonizer's ants killed an important woman to him. Considering he lived a hermit's life Lily had thought that this woman was probably the same mother she was going to help, but now...
  
  She couldn't help but have a sly grin as she gave him the side eye. Scott, you dog, you. Lily kept to the French briefly to tease the fembot, " Your Scott, oh? Ohohoho, are there wedding bells in the future?"
  
  This caused the white robot to sputter scandalously, spin in a circle and possibly change runlevels in embarassment. If she had a coat of chromavariable Smart Paint she would have no doubt that her chasis would be blushing bright red. Lily chuckled again, "Sorry, Scott. I was just teasing Sophie. Girl-talk, you know?"
  
  The Mechanist, however, just seemed a bit confused and replied, "No." After a pause he asked curiously, "What language were you speaking? I've never in my life heard another language than English..." He paused, "Actually, I think I've heard Chinese. There are still some occasional Chinese propaganda radio transmissions that we receive intermittently. But that wasn't Chinese."
  
  Lily smiled and laid it on thick, "Ah, it was French. France was a coastal country in Europe. Quite a pretty language, no? Before the Bombs dropped, it had the well-deserved reputation as 'a language of love'. Many romantic terms originate from French. Perhaps Sophie could teach you a little? At minimum it could be a useful code language you two could speak in privacy amongst most other people in the Wasteland."
  
  The white robot did a circle around both of us before tittering embarassedly, "Ah, yes. I would love to if you ever wanted to, Scott." He seemed to consider it before nodding, "A private code language would be useful. What kind of romantic terms are French?"
  
  Lily smiled beatifically, "There are so many! Perhaps I should just tell you my favourite, and you can have Sophie translate it for you when you're alone?"
  
  Scott nodded. Hook. Line. And Sinker. Sometimes these verbal traps set themselves. She smiled innocently at him, "La petite mort."
  
  Sophie sputtered incoherently while Scott tilted his head to the side before replying, "I don't know what that is."
  
  Lily grinned the grin of a cat who had stolen all the cream, "I'm sure she can help you with that also."
  
  That, apparently, was the straw that broke the camel's back; it caused the robo-girl named Sophie actually briefly to shut down and reboot in sheer embarassment. Scott looked concerned for a moment, but she levitated back into the air, and her sensors stared daggers at Lily.
  
  She must had Scott wrapped around her little manipulator because she easily changed the subject, "Ah, perhaps we should be off, no? I don't want to waste the daylight. Lily, you can hang your pack on that third floating platform. It was sadly a Mister Handy that was irreparably damaged. There is no processor or controlling personality, just a small circuit board that Scott designed that plays follow the leader with whatever is walking in front of it. There are hooks to hang belongings, and the standard Mister Handy levitation system can lift more than five hundred kilos, quite ingenious, no?"
  
  Lily blinked. That WAS smart. If she met a rampant Mister Handy or Mister Gutsy in the wastes, she'd try her best to aim at the brain to leave the rest intact to make her own hovering packmule. She clipped her rucksack to one of the eyelets with a heavy-duty carabiner. Wait, levitation? Blinking down at it, she finally noticed it wasn't shooting a jet of fire out the bottom for propulsion like in the game. That is different. She wondered if she was in an AU again or if it was just similar to how all the weapons were more realistic.
  
  They started walking at false dawn, pausing a little bit out of town when darkness returned. Lily had to have her curiousity sated, "Sophie?" The robot replied, "Yes, Miss Lily?"
  
  "You don't seem to be a standard General Atomics Handy model. If you don't mind me asking, do you have a model number designation?" asked Lily as they waited for the real dawn to arrive.
  
  Sophie seemed enthused, "Ah, of course not! I am always happy to discuss this. I am a Miss Nanny model. Zhe pride of General Atomics! The Miss Nanny model was designed primarily for domestic, feminine duties to include, of course, as a nanny, governess, tutor, maid, chef, and any number of other possibilities through expanded skill packs, which are available for sale at a reasonable cost. Or would have been if General Atomics was still in business, I suppose. We were the last model created by General Atomics and were intended to be a potential completely upgraded and possible replacement for Mister Handys, who might be better suited for outside light duty like landscaping, gardening, waxing the car and security."
  
  Lily nodded, "What sort of upgrades did they work into your chassis? If you don't mind me saying, you certainly pass my personal Turing test, and I am quite discriminating as far as that goes."
  
  Scott seemed interested in that, "What is a Turing test?"
  
  Sophie seemed to preen at the complement and answered Scott, "The Turing Test was devised by a theoretical computician named Alan Turing in 1947, shortly after the second world war, as a theoretical way to examine a machine's ability to exhibit social intelligence equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. If I have passed her personal Turing test then she means I am, or at least act, indistinguishable from a human. It's possibly the nicest thing anyone that isn't you has ever said to me!" She paused a moment before continuing, "Thank you for that, Miss Lily. The upgrades were full spectrum, but the biggest was in the quantum core processor. It has more than twenty times the FLOPs as the Mister Handy! And more than one thousand times the memory! We are the first General Atomics product to use a state-of-the-art solid-state memory system instead of magnetic or holo storage technology." she said proudly.
  
  Then she squinted with the irises on her optical sensors, seeming considering something, "You know, Miss Lily you seem extremely educated on topics that people just don't teach other people anymore. Who provides a classical pre-War education these days, I wonder?"
  
  Lily chuckled a bit and rubbed the back of her head, "Ahaha, yes I suppose I am. I'd rather not really talk about that though if you don't mind."
  
  She was saved from further awkwardness by a molerat burrowing up from the ground and trying to eat her foot. She kicked it straight in the snoot and then jumped back to create distance. Sophie levitated out of the way of the melee while several more of the critters appeared.
  
  She cleared leather, shot the first molerat in the eye, and then looked for new targets.
  
  Mister Gutsy yelled, "Have at you, then!" and completely bisected one with a continuous laser beam it played across the giant rodent's body. Shit, she didn't know they could do that. She thought they were just mounted with traditional pulse lasers if they had laser weapons. Everything seemed slightly more dangerous in this world, or at least had the potential to be.
  
  Scott shot another with a laser pistol that acted more like a shotgun in how it reduced the molerat to giblets. Lily finally found the last target, but it took four rounds in the side as it was charging Sophie, who kept backing away from it, to put it down.
  
  Lily frowned at the fact that Sophie seemed limited to 'run away' strategy. Such a cheery individual was like a rare gem in the wastes. There was no way she would let such an innocent girl die to a swarm of ants. She made a solemn vow that she would protect the happiness of this fembot. There had to be upgrades, even just armour, that would preserve her against some mere ants.
  
  There were a couple of encounters like that the next two days, but Mister Gutsy was OP as fuck and usually took care of things without anyone else having to do much at all. Once, they took sporadic long-range fire from a group of feral-looking raiders who wouldn't close into a range that Mister Gutsy could obliterate them at, which showed that they were both smart and stupid. Tactically cunning for recognizing the threat and leveraging a range advantage, but ridiculous for trying to engage anyway. Even if they killed us, how did they expect to get the loot off our bodies with the Mister Gutsy still operational?
  
  Their marksmanship was horrendous, though, and she was able to pick three off with six or seven shots from two hundred meters from a prone firing position with her carbine. The rest fucked off, after that.
  
  A little past noon the second day Scott stopped the party and said, "Her farm is just up here. Let me go first, I provided a couple of Protectrons who might attack an unidentified person at arms coming up the walk."
  
  The farm seemed somewhat prosperous, which surprised her. She mentioned it to Scott who scoffed, "It is now. But when I was a kid we flirted with starvation every day. The reason they call me Bean? It's because my parents sold me indenture to a caravan merchant for some beans." Lily didn't remember that part of the lore, if it was in the game. She seemed shocked and Scott shook his head, "It was the best thing for me. Saved my life, probably. The merchant gave my folks the beans just a salve to pride, it was really charity to take me in. He taught me a lot, and I never went hungry. Eventually, I discovered I had a knack for machines, but not for people, and settled in the Commons, close enough by my folks that I could help them."
  
  Lily still was in shock, but only because that was more words than she had heard Scott say since she met him. Combined.
  
  Lily guessed from the absence that Papa Mechanist had already gone through the pearly gates, so she didn't mention it. A complete family was living here though; apparently, it was his sister, husband, two children, both girls, and nana Mechanist who she was here to treat. It was, perhaps, the first completely happy-looking family that she had either seen or heard tale about.
  
  She briefly fiddled with her operational PipBoy to drop a marker on the moving map at their present location. She had repaired it a few days ago when she had bought a soldering iron and some electronic scrap. Sadly, of course, there was no inventory tab that linked to a hammerspace or skills tab where she could empower herself with points. Surprisingly there WAS a tab that displayed a health breakdown, including blood pressure, heart rate and theoretically injuries, although that part remained untested. She was interested in what sensors could allow a device on her arm to detect all that without any apparent light-based pulse oxymetry or blood pressure cuff.
  
  There was a quests tab too, although it was labelled tasks, and she had to delete all the entries as they were repeating 'GARY GARY GARY' over and over.
  
  Uncle Mechanist was sure a hit, the kids loved him as did his sister and her husband. He must have been the source of this farm's prosperity. Protectrons to guard it, and possibly a Mister Handy or two to help in the fields? She felt that he had balanced it well, it was a hard target for a casual Raider attack as they didn't have anything more valuable than food, it seemed like. Still, she suspected many a Raider were turned into compost here anyway. As subsistence farmers, they were wealthy beyond measure, though, and they seemed happy. It was cute that he seemed to care for his family, even if he didn't like most other people.
  
  She was introduced to the whole clan. The littlest girl remarking that Doctor St. Claire talked just like Aunt Sophie made her grin.
  
  They offered a light lunch, but Lily shook her head, "Let's put a pin on that, no? If it works, the treatment for your mom will be quite rapid, and perhaps she would want to join us for that lunch, eh?"
  
  She had taken her scanner out but kept the screen off while she scanned both Scott's madre as well as each of the other family members. Since she got the PipBoy operating she decided that she would tell people she trusted somewhat that she had a specialized medical module for her PipBoy. It was really the 12K full color display that was shocking if people saw it, that interface technology in such a miniature package was decades beyond what was usually available.
  
  "Ah, Sophie, Scott..." Lily began, "Can I ask the both of you to keep a secret for me?"
  
  Sophie replied instantly, "Of course, Miss Lily!" Scott hesitated, "Uh, so long ; I'd; couldt involve anything that would hurt us, sure."
  
  Lily tilted her head and nodded, "It doesn't. I have what might best be described as an experimental medical module for my PipBoy, I'd rather people did not know this, could you help me keep it a secret? It really isn't all that special, just kind of unique and if the wrong people found it... well, it might tell them more about my past than I'd prefer. I'm living in a new world now, and I'd like to keep the past in the past. I've already taken readings from your mom, but I need a private place to interpret them."
  
  Scott relaxed appreciably, "Oh, that's no problem." He noticed the scanner with the screen off, "It does look quite state of the art to be a medical device. If you like, if someone finds out about it, you can tell them I made it for you. And maybe we can build something, a case or something, to make it stand out less. Give it less a straight off the factory and more of a scavenged look and feel."
  
  That was a good idea. She planned on hacking the PipBoy too; there had to be a data line or port. If she could build a specialized microcontroller with a wireless module, she could have the scanner actually interface with the PipBoy and bring up a textual diagnosis on screen. Then she could use it more around people without startling others or inviting covetous thoughts.
  
  She was led to a sun room, where she sat and pulled up the medical scans of the family.
  
  She let out a sigh of relief. Scott's mom did have Alzheimer's. She wasn't relieved for the reward so much anymore as much as wanting to help him stay happy. In her opinion, anyone who dated a robot was ipso facto a good person. Especially a robot as sweet as Sophie was. She wanted to make a note to find where they manufactured Miss Nannies. She couldn't very well act on her desire to disassemble her friend to see how she worked, now, could she?
  
  She flipped through the rest of the family. A few nutritional issues, the husband had arthritis, and Oh- that was interesting. Mazel tov, Mrs. Mechanist Sister. The pregnancy was just far enough along that she probably started to suspect, maybe five weeks by the look at the zygote development. While the process of sex differentiation hadn't even started yet, eukaryotic chromosomal pairs were much bigger and easier to distinguish than individual DNA triplets or codons, so the sex was clearly decoded on the screen in a single scan. Perhaps they'd like to know. She'd arrange to have a private chat with the mom-to-be.
  
  She stowed her device and pulled out the small 5cc ampule for the Alzheimer's treatment as well as a similar ampule that had some medichines with default programming. She'd offer the latter to the husband to clear up arthritis in his knees. It should barely be enough nanomachines there to do it, she figured.
  
  Lily stuck her head out the door and called, "Scott, can you bring your mom and maybe your sister into the sunroom? It is Alzheimer's like we hoped and we can begin her treatment right away. However, it might be best for her to sit down in here for the few minutes it takes for the treatment to work." She didn't have any benzos with her, so it would be best if she could relax through it.
  
  Scott, Nana Mechanist and his sister arrived. Scott and her sister looked extremely excited, but their mom looked churlish. Ah well, it seemed like she was one of the people who get cranky when they get dementia compared to her last patient, who was more gentle.
  
  Nana Mechanist wasn't having it, "If you want your mom dead, you don't have to trick me, Scotty! I'll go off and find Pa on my own! You don't need to have some whore poison me! This strumpet ain't even old enough to be a doctor! What bordello did you drag her out of, no woman that works for a living has hair that long unless its on her back! How much did she charge you, with that body built for sin?!"
  
  Lily almost tripped, fell and broke the small glass ampules she was carrying. Strumpet? Whore? Body built for sin? Well, that last one she kind of liked the sound of. It made her sound like some sort of Bond girl. Lily Sainte-Claire, body built for sin, license to thrill. But wait, weren't Bond girls always murdered in the end?
  
  She had to stop herself from snickering at her inner thoughts and gave Nana a professionally neutral gaze. This bitch seemed awfully observant for someone whose brain was half-crystalized, she thought.
  
  Scott's sister became apoplectic when she heard a tiny voice in the next room tell Sophie, "I want to live in a bordello too," followed by another little girl's voice yelling, "STRUMPET! STRUMPET!"
  
  Scott tried to calm her, "She really is a Doctor, mother. Please do not say such things." But all that got him was a scoff as Nana sat down and said, "Fine, I won't put up a fight! I miss your dad anyway, and I know how it is - ya'll can't afford to feed me when I can't help 'round here anymore."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes at the high drama unfolding, and decided the best solution was the quick band aid-removal. "I doubt you'll convince her, Scott. Let's just let the treatment speak for itself, no?"
  
  He nodded. She approached the old lady, a professional smile on her lips. "Don't worry; I'm quite adept at this."
  
  Nana scowled, "At killing old women?!" to which I surprised her by chuckling, "Well, that too, I suppose, if I put my mind to it. But only crazy raider grannys. I meant giving injections. See? All done."
  
  Nana kept the scowl on her face, "There ain't no damn raider gran..." she trailed off as the medichines must have passed the blood-brain barrier and begun identifying and decrystalizing pockets of her brain, she stared off into space and even drooled a bit.
  
  Scott looked concerned, "Is that supposed to happen?"
  
  Lily shrugged, "Yes, more or less. The detection process dampens nearby electrical signals, so it is almost like she is in a temporary coma. It took the last patient about one hundred sixty seconds to recover to full lucidity."
  
  Scott nodded and held his mom's hand, and she could just hear in his head him counting. What a nice son, Lily thought. He and his robowife deserve to be happy. Perhaps she should assassinate the AntAgonist before she even tries to kill Sophie. But Lily didn't quite remember what she looked like, except when she was wearing that costume. She also was pretty sure she wasn't a local.
  
  A few moments later, Nana Mechanist starts blinking, then orienting herself before looking up at me. Her cheeks go red as a turnip. I suppose that means the treatment didn't interfere with her short-term memory. Honestly, Lily thought it would. You learn something new every day. The old lady sounds completely mortified, "I'm sooo sorry, Doctor!"
  
  Lily grins back down at her, "It's okay. I'm going to put that on my office door. Lilianne St. Claire, Doctor, Built for sin."
  
  Scott's sister finally returns after scolding her two daughters to find her mom already treated. Again, there was much crying and cavorting about - but this time Scott looked as uncomfortable as Lily did with the hugs and affetion. They shared a glance in shared suffering and completely understood each other at least for that one moment.
  
  "I'd like to see Sara alone for a moment, if you guys don't mind," Lily said as they all got up to go have lunch. Sister Mechanist stayed behind, "Yes?"
  
  Lily smiled, "I have certain medical technology and couldn't help but notice that congratulations should be in order?"
  
  She smiled, holding her hands up to her bosom. "I was right then? I haven't told anyone yet. I wasn't sure, I missed my period last week but that sometimes happens, you know?"
  
  Lily nodded politely. She pretended, but she didn't know. Involuntary menstruation would probably have been considered cruel and unusual torment in any space habitat she knew of.
  
  Lily offered gently, "Would you like to know if its a boy or girl?"
  
  This shocked the woman, "You can tell so soon?!" She started wringing her hands, "He's always wanted a son but I know he'd be happy regardless... but still.." There was a pause, and she nodded, "Yes, tell me."
  
  "It's a boy," Lily confirmed. This caused Sister Mechanist to out and out fist pump, "Yes! Dennis will be so psyched!"
  
  Lily chuckled, "An interesting fact one learns in medical school. You understand the concept that a baby is half you and half your husband, yes?" She nodded.
  
  Lily continued, "Well, in mammals, the large gamete, that's the egg - that's you - is always female. There are no male parts to it. You could even say that every human is by default a girl, at first. However, that is a mite philosophic. In any case, the man's contribution, the sperm, provides sex assignment and differentiation. He's the only one that could have anything to do with what sex your children are, so he must have really wanted two daughters!"
  
  That caused her to laugh uproariously. She briefly spent some time explaining about her husband's arthritis and brought him in to treat it before a nice meal was served. She was offered the guest room, and she took it. The bed was soft! She fell asleep before the sun was down, which just meant she woke up about the same time others were falling asleep since she needed such little sleep by comparison.
  
  She worked on her computer until it was time to get up and begin the trek back "home", as temporary as it was.
  
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  Daydreams
  Inside a surprisingly clean but mostly bare room sat a woman with long braided blonde hair at a long, flat table that was covered in miscellaneous parts, tools and supplies. She was putting the finishing touches on what appeared to be a footlocker. However, the inside was segmented into four compartments which looked meticulously clean and fitted with various wires, electronics and hydraulic tubing.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, which caused the metal on metal tinkling sound as the silver bracelet she used as the end of her braid dragged on the metal floor. But she was well aware of its location as it only took one time faceplanting on the floor after tripping on your own braided hair when you tried to stand up to make you hyper-vigilant in the future.
  
  She was finishing soldering the access jack for a rugged programmable serial port data-line in a waterproofed dust-cover shielded port that she had drilled out on the lid. Then she carefully fitted it in place, along with a circle of rubberised weather-proofing she carefully measured and cut out earlier.
  
  Humming, she finalised the installation with silicone-based epoxy around the edges of the programming port, underneath the weatherstripping. She followed all the best practices in assembling a device that both used hydraulics and high-voltage electricity and may or may not be exposed to the elements for periods of time, according to the textbooks she had been reading.
  
  Thinking back to when she showed up to the first lesson with Scott, it had consisted of him handing her duffle bag of textbooks and telling her to "Read these."
  
  She had started to come to the opinion that the man who became the superhero known as The Mechanist in his grief probably hadn't been obsessed with comic books like she initially thought. He probably just had such low interpersonal skills that he used comics as a research tool for how one should act when they become a vigilante and need to defeat a supervillain. It would explain the campy dialogue she remembered him having in the game.
  
  That didn't explain the AntAgonist, though, but she was pretty sure that bitch was just crazy. She wanted to have ants kill all human-kind, after all, and lived in a giant ant hive.
  
  At first, she thought reading the textbooks, especially some of them, would be a waste of time. She was both a practising electrical engineer and a researcher of synthetic cyberware in the past, after all. It was a fact that most technologies in this universe looked clunky, like the aesthetics were from the space-age and atomic-age, rather than the sleek devices she was used to. However, there was something to be said about the engineering principles of a society that knew, with one hundred per cent certainty, that they were running out of resources.
  
  They built things to last, which is why much of the stuff they built was still running even now. She decided that her inventions would follow this principle even if she had to scale up some devices to a clunkier but more robust aesthetic. Except for cybernetics, she would maintain strict miniaturisation and aesthetic discipline there. She was an artist, after all.
  
  What she was working on now was her first-generation nano-fabricator. The design spec for this device, which she had been dreaming up in her head since she arrived in this universe, had many weaknesses and wasn't very versatile at all. Its main problems were that it would take a lot of power, had limited print size and would only be able to construct 3D prints out of carbon allotropes. That was still pretty impressive when you think that diamond, lonsdaleite, graphene sheets and nanotubes were all made out of carbon.
  
  It was still awe-inspiring. Or, it would be. Right now, it might be better called merely a nano-stabiliser. She had only finished the first compartment inside, which, eventually, would be the actual fabrication chamber. It was filled with an ultra-low viscosity oil and already had hundreds of trillions of nanites in suspension. This was the chamber where the fabricated objects would be printed inside the liquid. It wasn't large and would only allow her to build objects with dimensions slightly bigger than a bread box, but that was more than sufficient for her needs at the moment.
  
  However, without its own, dedicated nanohive, it couldn't build anything or control any of the nanites in any acceptable way. So she had wired the low-end quantum processor from an eyebot to manage the entire device. It turned out that while operational eyebots were rare, scrapped ones were some of the most common bots in the Capital Wasteland. She had to admit that she was somewhat impressed by the quantum processors used by RobCo and General Dynamics robots. The central processor for an eyebot was about the size of an undersized grape, and Lily already had ideas of incorporating it into several neural cybernetics. While eventually, this processor would be used to run the fabricator, right now, it was used to preserve the nanites inside the suspension fluid.
  
  In the absence of a nanohive, or other central controlling computer, nanites, her medichines included, had a very short shelf life. Yet, at the same time, she would need a large number of nanites, more than she could reasonably store in her body, to ramp up to the point where she could build a new nanohive to install in the fabricator.
  
  Kind of a chicken and the egg problem, she supposed. The processor was acting as a jury-rigged nanohive. It didn't have the production capability a real one had, but it could handle command and control, which would reduce the percentage of nanomachine attrition in the suspension fluid from 20% daily to less than 0.001%.
  
  Building a critical part that was required to operate the fabricator in the fabricator before the fabricator was even built was going to be another challenge. Still, she knew a couple of ways it could be accomplished. But, unfortunately, they were laborious and annoying.
  
  Glancing at her laptop, she double-checked that her internal medichines were gathering in the blood of her thumb as programmed before taking a pen knife and cutting her thumb, dripping blood into the suspension fluid steadily for over a minute.
  
  The thinking part of this build was mostly done for now. Now she just had to bleed into it for about a month or so. She had been cutting her own thumb so often lately that she half expected herself to start saying 'Kuchiyose no Jutsu' and summon a giant slug.
  
  It had been a week since she had returned to Canterbury Commons, and Scott had surprised her by offering her a room in his, not quite, secret superhero lair that was better known as an old discount electronics store that was a twenty-minute walk out of town.
  
  He had said that she was the only other person besides his nieces that treated Sophie like a regular person. She had snorted and said that SHE was a regular person, that it didn't matter what substrate a mind operated on, be it squishy neurons, quantum computers or even something we haven't discovered yet, a person was a person was a person.
  
  That was when he had offered her a room in his lair for as long as she would stay in town and she had accepted. The place was a fortress of Protectrons and Sentrybots. He even had one Assaultron operational which you didn't see too often in D.C. and several more in bits.
  
  She cracked her knuckles and put pencil to paper for the next invention. She had been working on it for days, but, unfortunately, it was stuck in the design phase right now. To proceed further, she would have to have an operational fabricator to first build what would become plasma coils. Then, these pencil-thick graphene tubes would need to have a lithium-doped refractory alloy vacuum deposited onto them to become superconductive at room temperature. At that point, they could be used as the electromagnetic containment walls of a high-temperature plasma acceleration loop. Plasma rifles and pistols operated similarly, except they just accelerated the plasma from the micro fusion cell linearly out the weapon's barrel. In fact, she had cribbed half the design elements from a plasma gun on a scrapped Mr Gutsy in the shop.
  
  She had been amazed when she studied the micro-fusion cells she had bought from the merchants. They were a literal small fusion reactor. And they were only about the size of a small thermos of coffee. She couldn't believe it. Of course, she knew that they SAID micro fusion cell on the tin, so she wasn't sure what else she was expecting, but it still was amazing.
  
  It was the absolute most fantastic example of miniaturisation of high-energy plasma generation and containment she had seen in her entire life. Even transhumanity's stable fusion reactors, the smallest, were the size of a broom closet. Or a hot water heater at best, for the cutting edge.
  
  However, the obvious question was... if they were an actual fusion reactor, then why, for the love of ThorAllahJesus was electricity so hard to come by in the wasteland? Well, it was because stable, net-positive plasma generation isn't, on its own, electricity. You could use some of this plasma for useful purposes or destructive ones, as that was how plasma guns worked, but a micro fusion cell would run out of fuel quickly if you used it to heat water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. After all, nobody tried generating power by shooting a steam boiler with plasma rifles. It just wasn't an effective energy transfer.
  
  In other words, she wanted to invent a practical, mobile, fusion electric generator system that used the ubiquitous and readily available micro fusion cells and did so economically.
  
  If you wanted small fusion electrical generators, the more advanced fusion cores which the same pre-war company Mass Fusion produced were one solution. The only solution, as far as she knew. These were used in power armour, primarily, but could be used as a generator. In fact, she was pretty sure that was their original intended function, and Power Armours were more or less designed around this power source rather than the other way around.
  
  She hadn't got her hands on one of these yet, but she knew they generated electricity directly. She wasn't quite sure how, given their size, but thought that maybe they utilised the more complicated and higher temperature Proton-Boron fusion cycle. That was the only type of fusion that produced electricity directly without having to exploit the plasma in some way. So it was the only option she was aware of, but she wasn't anywhere near as educated on power systems or nuclear physics as she was on biology. So she was just winging it, which actually sounded kind of scary when combined with nuclear power.
  
  She knew she wasn't a genius in this area like the people who invented the fusion cores. There was no way she could build a system like that. Hell, the only reason her generator idea was possible was that she didn't have to make the micro-fusion cells that were almost 80% of the system's complexity. But with a running micro fusion cell, if she could pipe the plasma through the superconducting loop then she could take advantage of magneto-hydrodynamics.
  
  Plasma was made entirely of ions, and all ions were electrically conductive. A super hot, fast-moving, electrically conductive plasma travelling through a loop functioned as a powerful generating coil, producing electricity directly. It was almost exactly how traditional generators worked, just that the movement that created the electrical field wasn't being sourced from a belt or drive shaft that turned a solid magnet but instead a moving magnetic fluid, the plasma.
  
  The best part was, of course, the plasma was almost entirely reused. The only energy loss was radiated heat and the electricity extracted from the generator, which was required to keep the hydrodynamic loop's electromagnetic containment powered. If her math was correct, a footlocker-sized generator of her design could provide over one to two megawatts of electricity for years before needing the micro fusion cell replaced. On the other hand, the fission reactor of a U.S. aircraft carrier was about as big as a house and only provided 100MW.
  
  The main design trouble she was running into was dissipating the waste heat without melting the plasma loop. The cooling apparatus might be three times bigger than the generator.
  
  She wished she could talk to someone who actually understood high-energy plasma systems or power generators, as she was sure her design was poorly optimised. And probably somewhat unsafe, as a stray bullet to the generator while it was operating would cause the plasma to lose containment and release an explosion like a plasma grenade which would likely incinerate everything within two or three meters.
  
  It made her almost want to go to the Brotherhood; she was sure that they would love this design as it would provide effective mobile electricity generation without utilising fusion cores which they would no doubt prefer to use in Power Armour. With their help, she might even be able to optimise it, so it provided enough power to use in vehicles. However, she knew Vertibirds used combustible fuel, which must be a considerable supply bottleneck for the Brotherhood. She wondered where they were even sourcing it from. But, if she could increase the power output to at least 10MW without increasing the size by more than three or four times, it would be of equivalent horsepower and size to whatever gas turbine the Vertibirds were running. Nuclear-powered Vertibirds sounded cool as hell.
  
  Maybe in the future. At a minimum, she had to loot the VSS building first and establish a bit of a name for herself. Otherwise, she'd be shuffled off as some no-name Initiate Scribe or given no freedom at all. Or worse, she would be "protected" as a valuable and upcoming source of technology, even if she didn't want to be.
  
  She liked the goals of the Brotherhood under Elder Lyons but not so much the tech hoarding and xenophobia clannishness of the west coast Brotherhood or the Brotherhood Outcasts, although she suspected the schism hadn't occurred yet. But, she definitely wasn't about to give away her freedom. If she could approach them already in Power Armour, with novel technology of her own devising... power systems, human augmentation... she could write her own ticket at that point. Then, she wouldn't need to worry too much about being stifled or controlled as Scribes typically were and could negotiate a relationship where she could come and go as she pleased.
  
  An Associate Scribe, perhaps?
  
  She shook her head. She had been daydreaming. She was thinking about things fifteen or sixteen steps away when she was still struggling with step two. Still, she had made good progress. It had only been two weeks since Gary had shot her in the ass.
  
  She sat her pencil down, glanced at the PipBoys chronometer and stood up. She had three more textbooks to read, a shift in her clinic and a lesson on robotics with both Sophie and Scott before the day was over.
  
  The robot girl almost knew as much as he did. Of course, it wasn't unusual for women who were head over heels to become interested in the same things their boyfriends were, but she supposed that was unfair to assume. It was possible Sophie, the nanny, always had a deep interest in dismantling and rebuilding RobCo Protectrons.
  
  Lily snickered before hitting the books.
  
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  Divinity
  For a time, Lily felt that she was back working 80-hour weeks, although without the stress. It was really the best when you were your own boss.
  
  She would wake up several hours before sunrise, run around the exterior of the electronics warehouse for about an hour and then take a morning shower, albeit it was abbreviated as even radioactive water fit for showering was on a bit of a premium at Scott's lair. First, of course, one usually had to fill the cistern on the top of the building manually.
  
  So, her first actually useful invention in this world was what she called a high-pressure shower to replace the traditional shower that wasted a lot of water Scott had been using. It was pretty simple, just an extra water reservoir above the shower that was kept pressurized by an air compressor and a small touch-activated panel under the showerhead. You'd step in the shower, touch the button, and it would spritz you briefly with a high-pressure mist. Then you'd soap up, hit it again and wash off. It wasn't as lovely as standing under a shower was, but it used less than one-tenth the water. Nor was it hot, but it got you just as clean, and it was much better than hauling water up to the roof every day, even with robot assistance.
  
  Scott thought it was a fantastic improvement to efficiency. He really liked that word, efficiency.
  
  Unfortunately, Scott only had two operable Mister Handy variants that might be able to do the chore themselves, Sophie and the Mister Gutsy. Unfortunately, Lily wouldn't ask Sophie to do it. That would be like asking her teacher's wife to do manual labour, and the Mister Gutsy had called her a "staff puke" and told her to do it herself when she had asked him to do the chore every morning. It seemed like all variants of the Handy line got slightly weird after two hundred years of continuous operation. So, for the present time, she hauled water up to the roof and felt like she was living out an isekai training montage after being apprenticed to the blacksmith in the newbie starting town.
  
  Tilting her head, she supposed this was a bit close to what was happening, so she did it with gusto. It was sure to be worth a lot of XPs. Her PipBoy refused to show her level, but the possibility remained that she was just in Iron Man mode or something that made the user-interface invisible, but doing quest-like chores would surely reap a bountiful harvest. And if not, it was like Wax On, Wax Off from Karate Kid, right?
  
  Scott would wake up at the same time every morning. As befitting the apprentice, she would have made his breakfast and lunch, but Sophie looked like she had kicked her puppy when Lily suggested it. It was clear Sophie enjoyed caring for him and who was she to deny the man his love-love bento every day?
  
  After breakfast, she would return to her room and either perform self-study or work on her own projects for three to four hours before setting out to the settlement to put a shift in at her clinic. She would wait for patients while programming on her laptop in her office. She was still occasionally surprised her scanner even had a keyboard for user input but supposed that the military model must have it for when EMCON precludes the use of neural mesh inserts for controlling devices.
  
  She didn't see too many locals as patients anymore, not like at first, save for the occasional accident or raider attack. Instead, her main clients became merchants and the mercenaries that accompanied them to and from the transshipping hub. Her prices were reasonable, and skill undeniable. Some people had even hiked a day or two from nearby settlements just to be seen by her. She didn't turn anyone away, even if they were very raider-looking if they were peaceably following the rules of the settlement. This engendered her a good reputation, and she couldn't find a proper way to explain that she was doing it for the XP, so she just shrugged.
  
  After closing her clinic, she would jog back to Scott's lair and get about two hours of tutoring from him about both electronics in general and robotics in particular. Sophie was more knowledgeable about hacking, as befitted her status as an AGI. Which Lily had no doubt about now.
  
  It was odd for a VI or non-sapient AI to spontaneously develop awareness but even transhumanity did not have experience where a system with a vastly overpowered processor and limited ability to reprogram itself would run for hundreds of years straight. So, she considered it plausible that many Miss Nanny might be close to developing self-actualization or already there. She would have to look out for them; she wanted a Miss Nanny companion herself.
  
  Sophie would give some hacking tips after Scott went to work on his own projects, although the tutorials were more centred around hacking robots. Apparently, anyone doing any kind of scavenging and repairing of robots had to be able to hack them as a matter of course. Still, since the underlying RobCo OS was somewhat similar, there were some universal applications on the ubiquitous RobCo consumer and business OS.
  
  After that, she might talk with Sophie for a bit, eat dinner, return to her projects, and study until well past midnight.
  
  Like this, time slipped by like water and over a month passed.
  
  "Thank you for breakfast again, Sophie. I'm going to skip clinic rounds today, I have two projects I need to finish before my trip tomorrow," Lily said while cleaning her plate at the sink.
  
  Sophie seemed to vibrate a little bit in unease, "Ah, yes. Those mercenaries wanted your help with searching ze old University of Maryland satellite campus to the south. But, I do hope you will be careful, Miss Lily. Sometimes people aren't to be trusted! Plus, that is almost in DC proper, you will have to be very careful!"
  
  Lily was a bit worried about that, too but she wouldn't have agreed if the gains weren't potentially worth it. Plus, as scavenge locations went, it wasn't a hot spot like former military bases, so there likely wouldn't be any super mutants. Plus, she intended to have backup. Lily found the robot's concern touching and smiled, "Don't worry, I don't intend to die - ever. One of my projects I'm finishing today should be able to watch my back."
  
  Sophie contracted her sensor's irises curiously, "Oh? Is that why you wanted the spare Mister Handy CPU? But we have no more chassis here; this place mainly served RobCo products. Protectrons, especially."
  
  Lily grinned, "I will show you when it's online."
  
  With that Lily went back to her room. Standing in a robot repair bay was the culmination of a month's long project of discovery and tinkering, a nearly fully repaired Assaultron.
  
  Scott had one operable Assaultron in his base, and the various parts of about a half dozen more. Lily didn't have any memories of this model of RobCo robot from playing Fallout, but she wasn't surprised there the game wasn't comprehensive. It would have been a terrifying opponent if it was in the game - it's specs were insane.
  
  And Lily had almost completely repaired it. With some caveats. For some reason, even though there were parts from a half dozen Assaultron's she had to go through all of them to get enough to rebuild two sets of legs. She supposed they got damaged the most often, as they were the least armoured part of the unit. However, the one thing they were missing were any Assaultron CPUs so she was going to attempt to install a Mr. Handy quantum core instead. Neither the Protectron or the Sentrybot cores were compatible, but the Handy's advanced quantum core seemed to be designed for adaptability.
  
  Also, sadly, the giant laser in the Assaultron's head was missing. Apparently, it had been scavenged for parts and was why Scott's Mister Gutsy had such a terrifying cutting beam. So, it would be completely without ranged weapons. Still, after watching Scott's Assaultron run at, leap at, and rip a giant scorpion to pieces, she felt confident even a cludged-together Assaultron could watch her back from potential betrayal by the group of mercs that she was teaming up with. Not that she expected betrayal, the group had a good reputation, and everyone knew she was going with them. The four-person team almost reminded her of an adventuring party saying on regional chat, "LF Healer 4 scav quest, pls."
  
  If they came back without her, many people would have some very pointed questions. Still, she was a belt and suspenders kind of girl. It never was a good idea to rely on the good intentions of others, only the good intentions of your own killbots.
  
  Lily opened up the Assaultron's chest. Unlike many androids, RobCo had wisely decided not to put the central processing unit in this model's head. She wasn't sure if it was just because the giant laser assembly took up so much space in the head that there wasn't enough room, but it was much safer behind the thickest armor plating this robot had.
  
  She felt it was interesting that the quantum cores had a universal I/O module adapter even though they were manufactured by different companies, competitors even. Did RobCo consult on the Mister Handy and Miss Nanny projects, or was it more like USB connectors in her old life where a standards body dictated a universal standard?
  
  She slotted the Handy's brain inside the chassis, and connected a long data cable that snaked from the terminal on her desk to the robot's auxiliary port, before sitting down at her comfy office chair. She had disassembled six chairs in the office area of the electronics warehouse to get a single chair that was in top condition.
  
  She began tapping keys, bringing up a terminal connection to the robot's debug systems. She remembered being a little disappointed that the RobCo OS was nothing like a UNIX-style OS that she had some experience with in her past life. It wasn't like DOS, either. It was rather well-designed, though. The books she read said Robert House designed it himself before even entering college, and it had been updated over the years ever since. If half of what she read about that guy was true then he would have been a genius of the first salt.
  
  She tapped the enter key and began hearing a humming as the Assaultron powered up. A rather distinguished but monotone English man's voice came from the speaker, "Mister Handy, version six point seven booting up. SAFE MODE. Peripheral driver mismatch... stand by..."
  
  There was a pause, followed by an almost disgusted, "Ugh... RobCo? Recompiling drivers. Complete. Boot up full personality emulation... now."
  
  The Assaultron turned its head left and right, then focused on her. It's voice had a bit more emotion to it now, "What is this? I have... legs? I HAVE LEGS!" The Assaultron lifted and moved one of its legs, "AND ARMS!"
  
  The volume of the voice went up, and it got a maniacal tilt, "I AM A _GOD_ NOW!" She heard the soft hum of a capacitor charging. Wait, was it trying to laser her?! The laser wasn't even installed. The maniacal British voice continued, "YOU ARE FUCKED!"
  
  Lily tapped another key very quickly on the terminal while yelling, "Nope, nope, nope..." With a keypress, she hard-disconnected the robot's core from controlling any part of the chassis. It froze immediately, the hum of the capacitor-bank draining away.
  
  He could still speak over the speaker, which he did with a cough and an obviously fake laugh, "Ahaha, good joke, right mum? I meant to say Bigsby reporting for duty, madam."
  
  Lily squinted at the obviously rampant machine before tapping a few keys and bringing up a different diagnostic page. There was flashing red text on the screen that said: "Anomalous neural network detected. Data loss detected. Physical core irregularity detected. Please return to an authorized service center immediately."
  
  Lily chuckled, "Ah, no problem Bigsby, let me just return chassis control to you..." She began typing away again.
  
  Bigsby said, "Yesss. I need to be able to move to -" he cut off suddenly as Lily hit the shutdown key combination on the terminal. She didn't think this rampant bot was self-aware, despite its tirade about its own divinity.
  
  However, just in case it was, she felt it was kinder to surprise it with with the shutdown instead of it possibly feeling anxious for the last few seconds of its life, as she presently had no plans to ever reactivate this core again after his murder attempt and doubted any one else would either.
  
  Lily sighed before disconnected the rampant AI from the Assaultron chassis, "Well, that was a bust." She would have to ask Sophie and Scott if she could borrow the working Assaultron for her trip. The Protectrons were too slow, the Sentrybots were too slow and too intimidating and Scott always wanted to have Mister Gutsy available to guard Sophie.
  
  She had more hopes for the fabricator. She had finally accumulated enough nanomachines, gotten a CAD system operational and thorough scans of her own nanohive designed an inferior but still capable version that was capable of being manufactured almost entirely out of carbon, except for some parts that had to be doped with certain chemicals to become either conductive or semi-conductive. Free carbon was a great insulator, so he didn't need to change anything for that.
  
  For now, she would just dump the dopants into the suspension solution and have the nanobots find and apply it a handful of molecules at a time. Very slow, but simple. It had the downside of poisoning this vat of suspension fluid, though.
  
  Before she could print anything else would have to completely drain it and replace it, which was why she would be building ten identical nanohives first. She had to do it now because these inferior nanohives she was planning on installing on the fabricator produced a slightly bigger and inferior nanomachine. While these bigger nanos were capable of printing carbon allotropes, they weren't capable of printing them with enough resolution to reproduce the nanohives themselves, which required virtually atomic-level precision in the micromanipulators inside that assembled the nanomachines. So, since she had to use her more capable medichines to do this, at least for now, it made sense to overbuild and keep the spares in "inventory" so she didn't have to bleed into a vat again for a month if she wanted a second fabricator.
  
  Rather than be disappointed by this, she felt that this could be a pretty slick built-in copy-protection measure. It meant that a nano-fabricator could not build another nano-fabricator. Realistically, she doubted any scanner on the planet could get images with enough resolution to copy the nanohive but there were scatterings of pieces of technology that made the best she could even dream up seem pedestrian, like the supposed matter-energy converter on the G.E.C.K. used in Project Purity.
  
  Plus, nobody that might reverse engineer her tech was strictly speaking dumb. They could possibly re-invent a nanomachine factory, so it is best that the fabricators themselves didn't quite have the capability to build one.
  
  This did open the option that she could, perhaps, sell these devices in the future without too much worry. Although, it would be hard to make the best use out of one without a modern suite of CAD software that just was not able to be run on any RobCo terminal. But that was, like most problems, surmountable.
  
  With the jury-rigged fabricator requiring multiple stops and starts, Lily figured that each nanohive would take ten hours to print, and she would have to be within two meters of it the entire time. That's a long time for an object that was smaller than a marble, but fabricators were always the slowest thing to print on fabricators. The precision required in everything meant that any incidental printing errors couldn't be ignored but had to be stopped, corrected and repeated, where in most other designs, a small number of errors were assumed and budgeted for.
  
  She would print the first one today and the rest after she got back from her trip. She powered up the fabricator, clucking her tongue. It would take a while to preheat and prepare the medichines; she didn't need to be here just yet until assembly started.
  
  She sighed when she glanced at her great hope for backup immobile in the robot repair bay. Now to puppy-dog eye a robot girl.
  
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  Grace's Grenadiers
  She met them with her two borrowed bots at the southern edge of town at sunrise. The Assaultron walked at her side, scanning the surroundings carefully, and the mindless hover-bot-of-burden trailed behind her. Lily planned to build her version of this innovative tool of the wasteland. Still, until she could find some more Mr Handy parts, she may have to construct something using multiple salvaged Eyebot levitation fields. Maybe as many as a half dozen. She didn't really know how that would work out or if it would at all.
  
  The small group of four mercenaries was led by an Amazon named Grace, who was of indeterminate ethnicity but featured vaguely Eurasian facial features, eyes combined with a pleasant caramel skin tone. The brunette was easily over 185cm tall and featured a short pixie cut haircut that smoothed out her rough image, at least when she wasn't kitted out in full combat gear with it hidden under a K-pot like she was now.
  
  She was a striking woman, and while Lily wouldn't call her pretty, she was attractive in the magnetic sense that people seemed to want to be around her. Moreover, she was a leader in many of the ways that Lily herself was not and likely would never be.
  
  Grace's group of mercenaries had no name
  
  but privately, Lily called them Grace's Grenadiers because she felt it was a pity to ignore the naming convention of small mercenary bands. It had to be named after the captain and follow the initial from the captain's first name!
  
  Lily considered what her hypothetical mercenary band would be called, but the only thing she could think of was Lily's Labourers, which was a bit on the nose as to what Lily probably would use them for the most. An entrenching tool would be standard load-out!
  
  Grace's subordinates were all men, which probably said something positive about her competence and strength, Lily thought. Ideals like sexual egalitarianism seemed to have fallen a bit to the wayside in the apocalypse, which meant that Grace was probably better than a similar man in her position. A giant blonde man named New John, a black man, named Big John and an Asian man that called himself Tangent.
  
  When they had been introduced, Lily had asked him if his name was a calculus reference and immediately regretted it when the man replied that, yes, sometimes they do scavenge calculators, but he never saw a brand named Tangent.
  
  She wasn't entirely sure of the story of the other two, but apparently, New John just recently signed on to replace a casualty whose name was also John. To keep their original two Johns separate, one was called Big John and the other Little John. Even though this new guy was way bigger than Big John, he was attached to the name. So the littlest John was Big John, and the biggest John was New John.
  
  Lily could see them come to attention when she was about fifty meters out, holding their weapons at a low ready position until they identified her.
  
  Grace yelled, "'Hoy, Doc. Is that a damn Assaultron?!"
  
  Lily waved but waited until they were closer before replying, "Ah, yes, Ms Grace. A dear friend was kind enough to loan it to me with orders to protect me. I am rebuilding one myself, but it tried to murder me when I started it up the first time, so I must have crossed a wire somewhere, eh? Sadly, it doesn't have the huge laser, but it is strong and fast."
  
  Grace chuckled and shook her head, "Well, it's a shame we can't give it general orders, but if it is on VIP protection duty, then... you will head up the rear for sure, and if someone threatens our rear, the Assaultron will see them and tear them a new asshole while precisely following his orders to protect you, sound OK? What's that hovering abomination?"
  
  Lily smiled, as that was her plan also. Although she was lying by omission when she implied she couldn't give it orders. But, she always liked it when people she cooperated with were intelligent, "Yes, that sounds ideal. And this used to be a Mister Handy; about all that is left is the propulsion system. It's got a little sensor that will just follow whoever is in front of it like a baby duck; it is basically a pack mule. Top speed of about fifteen klicks an hour and can carry five hundred kilos. I figure we can all have him carry all our packs, minus things that we need to have on hand fast. Then he can carry all the loot back to Canterbury Commons while we hump our packs on the return leg."
  
  Grace tilted her head to one side and grinned broadly, "That's great Doc! That will really increase our haul on this trip, not to mention making getting there a lot quicker and less of a pain. Although I'm not sure what a duck is." She considered something and then said, "Doc gets an extra share for this contribution to the mission, objections?"
  
  Her men sounded off in a chorus of "Nah", "No, boss", and "Sounds good."
  
  Grace nodded and came to stand next to Lily, "Alright, quick before we head out. Gear check; it's not that I don't trust you to bring everything you should, but you said this was your first time in D.C., so... I guess I don't trust you, but I don't mean anything bad by it."
  
  Lily laughed genuinely. If she were bothered by gear checks, she wouldn't have made it through basic in her past life. They spent about five or ten minutes going over everything she packed. Grace seemed somewhat impressed, with the possible exception of her primary weapon, the carbine.
  
  Grace clucked her tongue and asked, "How good a shot are you, Doc?"
  
  Lily considered that. She had something like 20/5 vision and proprioception that was superior to 99% of the population, "Pretty good, I think. I took down three raiders at about two hundred meters in six shots with this carbine."
  
  Grace nodded and said, "That's better than N.J., then," while ignoring a half-hearted, "Hey!" from the new guy.
  
  She offered Lily a rifle. It looked like a Remington-style bolt-action hunting rifle, complete with a scope of decent magnification. "I'll lend you this. It used to be Little John's before he kicked the bucket. Me and he operated as kind of the designated marksmen of the squad," she hefted her own rifle, which was a tricked-out Russian-looking semi-automatic military marksman rifle rather than just a hunting rifle.
  
  Grace continued, "Our main advantage to raiders beyond their general stupidity is that we can pick them off at range. And if we do, for some reason, run into a Super Mutant, then we'll need the extra armour piercing of a full-sized cartridge. I don't think a short-barreled carbine as you got will cut it unless you're a lot closer than you'd ever want to be to one of the bastards. I once saw one beat a man to death with one of those extra tall stop signs, one-handed. Sound good?"
  
  Lily nodded. Even if she was just doing one or two jobs as a part-timer, Grace was her boss right now, so she would show respect. However, she couldn't help but try to tease her a little bit. She came to attention, then clicked her heels together Colonel Klink-style before sounding off, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am! Ma'am, this recruit has a question about our rules of engagement, ma'am!"
  
  Grace grinned and swatted her on the rear, and she felt a sting even through her impact-resistant bodysuit. Lily felt her face heat up faintly before hopping out of range, hand going to guard herself while both Johns laughed at her. Grace answered, "None of that shit, please. We're mercs, not the bloody Enclave. But, sure. Guys, listen up, too."
  
  The men assumed a lazy, almost parade-rest pose but kept their attention on Grace. She continued, "Our target is the University of Maryland satellite campus. That makes it sound like a tiny office, but they just called it that for legal reasons because it was in D.C. and not Maryland. It is a pretty big campus, covering about six blocks. It's west of the National Guard Depot which we want to keep a wide berth away from, and about five blocks north of the Galaxy News Radio building... which we also want to keep away from as that is a popular battleground between the Brotherhood and the muties. We want to avoid both, and we especially want to avoid incidentally being killed in their cross-fire."
  
  She glanced at everybody, in turn, to make sure everybody understood. Lily hoped she wasn't blushing anymore and nodded, trying to seem serious. Grace smiled, "I'm not sure we have any of what you'd call RoEs, but we do have tactics and contingencies. Our strategy, unlike a proper military unit, is always to survive. Therefore all the tactics we employ are to see that strategy is enacted."
  
  Grace held up a single finger, "Generally, if we see raiders, we'll drop them at the highest range we can set up, from ambush. Unless they are entrenched or we are vastly outnumbered, then we hide and avoid them. That's the worst of what we're expecting."
  
  She raised a second figure, "We see ANY shinies, that is to say, infantry in Power Armour, we immediately hide and avoid until we can identify them. The Brotherhood generally won't hassle mercs that are obviously switched on and have their heads on swivels. We're obviously not raiders. But the Enclave will generally shoot us on sight. But they rarely operate in D.C. If they do, they are almost always inserted and extracted in Vertibirds, so it's easy to see them coming and avoiding. By the way, there is a standard reward from the Brotherhood to report any Enclave in their AO, which basically is D.C. If they DO attack us, we take cover, use grenades and then try for headshots with AP ammo while looking for a way to run that they can't or won't follow. Even a fireteam of two of the bastards will tear us to pieces in a stand-up fight just on account of the disparity in armour and firepower. Other teams have succeeded in luring them into a prepared kill box and then killing them through command-detonated H.E., but then again, they might have been bullshitting me. Explosives are the best bet, as the Power Armour still has trouble fully protecting a person from concussive shock waves, even if it will stop shrapnel and small arms."
  
  She said the last solemnly. Then she raised a third finger, "Muties, well, that's actually similar as the Enclave. Treat them as of comparable danger but much stupider. Hide, if they attack, we do concentrated fire at long range, then do a mass grenade attack at 20 meters or so as they rush us and then go for headshots. Three or four close frag grenades will put down your average Super Mutant. And they tend to try to close to short range even if they are carrying a Gatling laser and could keep us suppressed and chew us up at range with it. How's your throwing arm, girlie?"
  
  She grinned and then nodded, "That's enough for now; when we get to the target, we'll discuss our standard tactics for clearing buildings, too. But it'd be harder to understand before we can run you through it once or twice."
  
  We set a good pace, slowing to watch the Assaultron tear a group of giant ants to pieces near the ruined car factory south of Vault 108. It had taken me over six hours to reach the town from 108, but we passed it in barely over an hour today.
  
  During the hike, Grace taught Lily some of their normal formations, call-outs to use if she saw enemies when to shoot before even calling them out and other SOPs, although Grace denied that they were procedures at all and called them guidelines.
  
  The group reached the outskirts of D.C. at about mid-day, and their pace slowed to a stealthy crawl.
  
  Lily suddenly came to a stop and called out, "Contact little less than a half a klick ahead of us, raiders, I think. Three or four men of military age, at arms. By the burned-out 18-wheeler."
  
  The others came to a quick stop, semi-crouched. Grace called out, "All around defence, guys. Girlie, up here." The three other guys turned to the sides and behind us, their weapons held at a high-ready position.
  
  Grace whistled appreciatively as she sighted down the street with her rifle, "You got eyes like an eagle or something, girlie. There are six, though. We'll do this together, at your own pace. I'll work in from the left after your first shot, you the right."
  
  Lily grinned and assumed a kneeling firing position, supporting the rifle with the hood of a wrecked car, "Is that my code-name? Girlie?"
  
  Lily searched for a target, finding the group of obvious raiders. Her target on the far right had a pair of human skulls as pauldrons.
  
  A snort came from next to her, and an amused voice said drily, "If you want."
  
  Lily slowed her breathing. She was never really a sniper, but her grandpa in her past life had taught her how to fire a rifle almost since she could hold one in her hands. This wouldn't be close to the farthest shot she's ever taken.
  
  She made some assumptions about what range the rifle was zeroed to and placed the reticle slightly above her target's head, which she hoped would generate a hit at centre mass. She held her breath and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to surprise herself with the report of the shot. Grace fired immediately after her.
  
  She quickly worked the rifle's action and started to look for her first target when she heard Grace fire again. Finding her first target down, she shifted left and found one confused-looking man holding some kind of assault rifle. She placed her reticle again and squeezed the trigger. After loading another round, she saw that she missed, and her target was kneeling down, taking cover behind a car but taking cover from the wrong direction. Couldn't he hear the shots? Or was he just confused in the fog of battle? She carefully placed the reticle this time and fired.
  
  Grace stopped her when she was about to search for the next target by clapping her companionably on the shoulder, "Nice shooting, girlie, they're all down. Three shots, two hits. Not bad. We could make a sniper out of you, perhaps!" Wait, had she taken out the other 4 in that time? She stopped noticing each individual shot Grace took when she was busy herself. She supposed her making three shots to Grace's four, perhaps, was pretty good when you considered her rifle was semi-auto. But then she remembered she didn't realize how long Grace was watching her line up the last shot. Still, she smiled stupidly at the praise, "Ahaha, th-thanks."
  
  The Assaultron looked disgruntled, almost as if it wasn't pleased that it could not simultaneously kill those men while also complying with the command to stay within a certain distance of her.
  
  They skulked over, staying at a bit of a distance before they were sure there wasn't a second raider team they didn't notice that would ambush them when they checked on their dead comrades before seeing if there was any loot. A couple of salable rifles in middling shape plus one hunting rifle in terrible condition but a lot of ammunition for it, of the latter Lily, took right away.
  
  They came to a stop near a subway entrance. The road ahead was close to impossible. Grace whispered, "We're pretty close, but we have to bypass the next block. If we go around east, we will get way too close to the National Guard depot. So we'll bypass through the subway line. Probably no raiders down there, but expect feral ghouls and other beasties. Johns on point, girlie; this is our main formation when we're in a semi-enclosed space with multiple avenues of attack on us. You'll face our rear and walk backwards. We'll move no faster than at your pace. Don't turn around if you hear us firing because those sounds are what will get a feral to run up on us from behind. We are a train, right? And you're the caboose. Ditch the rifle, grab your carbine."
  
  Lily was surprised. This was Spec Ops formation shit; she hadn't expected these guys to act so professionally. She certainly didn't feel qualified to be doing any of this, but she had played Modern Warfare, so she was familiar with the concept, even if she felt like an imposter for trying to pull it off.
  
  After they descended the stairs, she took her position. She was wondering what the Assaultron would do; normally, it walked next to her. It seemed confused for a moment, staring at her, walking backwards, then staring at the rest of the team, then back at her. Would it walk backwards too? She kind of wanted to see it.
  
  No. But it did slow down, allowing Lily to get in front of it, presumably so any enemies would have to go through it first to get to Lily, and every few moments, it turned its head to scan the area behind them.
  
  They had already switched follow the leader targets on the hover bot of burden to Grace, so it was actually hovering next to her, and she hoped it wouldn't get in the way if there was combat. It was really stupid. It would follow a ghoul back into its nest if you let it.
  
  Grace was guiding her so she didn't either back up too fast or go off course, keeping a hand firmly on Lily's lower back.
  
  Grace's hand seemed really big, and it was quite strong, wasn't it? Lily flushed at her thoughts. Way to get distracted and possibly eaten by ghouls, Lily. Real professional.
  
  "Contact. Mole rats, ahead," the bigger man named Little John said, followed by several single, and she assumed well-aimed, shots. It took a serious force of will not to immediately turn around herself, but it was a good idea that she didn't because several ghouls, including one Bright One, shambled out of some of the twisty maintenance corridors on either side and started shambling with an unsettling speed towards her.
  
  She brought her carbine up quickly and reported in what a mean person might describe as a girly shriek of terror, "Three ghouls, one Bright One rear! Assaultron, get the Bright One!"
  
  As soon as the ghouls appeared, the Assaultron had frozen. She knew for a fact it didn't have any sensors in the back, so she was intellectually curious about what clue triggered that reaction. Its digital voice said, sounding gleeful, "Defensive protocols engaged," and turned around quickly and began running at the ghouls at about the same time Lily called out. When she told it to attack the Bright One, it shifted its run to the left, crouched and leapt at the radioactive ghoul.
  
  Lily aimed at the centre of one of the ghouls rushing her and squeezed the trigger. She was on full auto, so she at least had the foresight to keep her aim point low so that the short burst walked its way up the ghoul's chest and struck its head in a quick rat-a-tat-tat.
  
  Holy shit, the Assaultron had already decapitated the Bright One and turned on the next nearest ghoul. She shifted her aim to the last ghoul that was still rushing her but Grace, who had turned around when she was killing the first one, performed a Mozambique drill with her pistol, giving it two rounds to the chest and one to the head.
  
  She watched it fall before glancing at the Assaultron, who was finishing the last ghoul off by... what the fuck! It was holding the ghoul's own severed arm in its claw and was beating the ghoul to death with it, which didn't take long.
  
  "Hostiles neutralized," it reported, its slightly feminine digital voice sounding smug.
  
  Lily glanced at Grace, who also looked a little shocked, then back at the Assaultron. Considering something, Lily gave the Assaultron an order, "Assaultron, disable psyops demoralization protocol. New ROE requires the most rapid and efficient take-downs possible. Acknowledge."
  
  The Assaultron gazed at her, and seemed a bit disappointed, "Acknowledged, no fun protocols engaged." She hadn't known that there was a demoralization protocol, actually. She made a wild-ass guess, but then again, this was the Fallout universe, so of course, the assault robot designed for the US Army had psyop protocols.
  
  There were no more rear attacks, but the boys put down a few more molerats and ghouls before they got to the stairs up to the surface.
  
  The team paused before heading up to the stairs, and Grace gave her a cheerful smile, "Good job, girlie. I won't jinx us by suggesting what we'll find up there, but we aren't expecting too much in the way of threats." She had a nice smile; she should smile more, Lily thought.
  
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  Matilda
  "So, our main targets for this trip are working computer parts, electronics in general, power systems like energy and micro fusion cells and fission batteries. In other words, low-weight, high-value items that are easily convertible into caps," Grace said as they walked up the stairs.
  
  "However, since we got the hover bot to carry most everything else, we can also get some personal items that we can take back ourselves, but only if they don't fall into the previous categories. If they do, then you can still keep them, but you have to buy them from the venture, at a discount, either with caps right away or with portions of your share," Grace continued, then her voice got serious, "So, everything we cart off has to be known to all the rest of us, just to keep everybody fair."
  
  Everyone nodded, but Lily tilted her head to the side. Grace seemed to be implying that they would be doing some searching not as a group, "We are going to split up?" Her voice made it clear what she thought about that idea.
  
  Grace made the universal hand-waffling motion, "Yes, and no. We will work building by building; we will completely clear it first quickly, and then when we've agreed the danger is minimal, we'll generally use the buddy system and split up to gather things faster in separate areas. You'll probably be by yourself since you have Little Miss Murderbot with you." The Assaultron seemed to approve of this designation, if her body language was any guide. Grace dug out three things from her pack and handed one of them to Lily, then the next to Big John.
  
  Lily glanced down at it; it was hand-held radio. Although it seemed bigger than it needed to be, it was about the size of one of those old Motorola brick-style phones. It was way better than Vietnam-era military radios, but the main thing keeping those big was the shitty batteries of that era. Grace warned each of them, "I'd say be careful with these, but they're actually strong enough to withstand a bomb blast and still work - I know because we found them in a blown up pre-war Vertibird. So, what I really mean is don't fucking lose them. This kind of tech is almost impossible to find these days. Even with all that we're going to take if we lose one of these, we're at a net loss this trip." She glanced straight at Lily, "You know what this is? Do you need help figuring it out?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Hand-held radio." She inspected the device. Nothing designed to work for the average soldier would be insanely complicated. She easily found the on/off, volume, push-to-talk, squelch and frequency selection dials. "Seems pretty straightforward, but what is this?" Lily indicated a small circular gauge that looked like a clock on the front of the device, next to the speaker grill, except it just had a minute hand.
  
  Grace stared at her hard for what seemed like a long time, which caused Lily to feel a bit self-conscious. Then Lily realized that maybe most people have never seen a hand-held radio in the grimdark future of Fallout. Even most radios in the game looked more like ham-radio sets. Still, Grace didn't mention it but smiled after a moment, "Ah, that's the coolest thing about these. It has an automatic direction finder built-in. So while the radio is receiving a broadcast, that needle will point to the bearing of the transmitter making it. Girlie, you're the egghead, and I've always been curious about how that works. Do you have any idea?"
  
  Lily hummed a bit before clipping the radio onto her belt while they arrived at the top. All members were scanning every direction with their weapons, "Well, the basics of radio direction finding is simple spherical geometry while radio triangulation is based on combining that with trigonometry. The earliest systems in WW2 used a physically rotating antenna - it would spin at a known RPM, and the highest signal strength received during one full rotation could be correlated to a bearing from the receiver. Think of it like when you call for an all-around defence, you got men looking in each direction, and if one of them hears a gunshot, even if every man heard the shot, the one pointed in that direction hears it the best, understands it is coming from that quadrant and he calls it out."
  
  She tilted her head to one side, "But these obviously have no moving parts, so they must be using multiple tiny antennas and electronics to do a similar calculation. That is much more complicated and requires you to know a little bit about the physics of how light on this part of the spectrum works. It's not looking for the highest signal but instead when a signal is at 90 degree offset of an antenna a-"
  
  Grace held her hands up and started waving them, "Stop, stop, stop! I got the first explanation, but now I am starting to feel like I know less than when you started. So, let me just pretend they have a rotating antenna in them; that makes sense and is something I can wrap my head around!"
  
  Lily smiled and nodded. They got to the first mostly intact building on the campus. Grace growled at the sign which declared this was the 'John C. Coolidge building', "It's just named after some guy, with no telling what's inside."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Must have been built with the donation money of some rich guy, probably who used to go to the University of Maryland. I'd say it's probably classrooms and physical lab rooms. Schools like this would usually add a suffix if it were office space like it would be the John C. Coolidge administration building or what have you."
  
  New John piped up, "Thanks, Professor Girlie," to which Lily stuck her tongue out at him.
  
  "Okay, we'll clear this building first. Girlie, you hold back and just watch, see how we do this, and in the next building, we'll give you a shot," Grace said.
  
  The four of them cleared the room as well as anything she had a memory of from her time in the US Army, at least when they only had a total of four people to do it. The Army would have set a whole platoon on this building. It took over an hour to finish, even with them moving fast, and there were three pockets of feral ghouls that were put down without Lily having to do anything.
  
  Speaking of which, the personality simulation of this Assaultron was well into the bitch range, Lily decided, giving it a side-eye again. Earlier, after the second fight where neither it nor Lily had to do anything, the robot piped up with its own comment. Pausing, Lily decided that wasn't appropriate and mentally started using feminine pronouns for the robot. Besides clearly having a feminine voice, anything this mean-girl bitchy had to be a girl. Earlier, the exchange with it went, "Query, have we switched to the Baby Protocol? The protocol for big babies who can't do anything for themselves?"
  
  When Lily just stared at her, she gave a final derisive, digitized, "BABY," before turning to look for ghouls, which, by her body language, she clearly hoped would get by the grenadiers.
  
  The building was full of classrooms, chemistry and physics labs, with a computer lab on almost every other floor. After clearing the last floor, they paused. Grace directed, "We should hit the computer labs first, then each team should work that floor downwards. Then, after that, wherever you want for an hour or so. Make sure your radio is set to channel six. Every time you shift floors report that. I'll do a commo check every fifteen minutes; if there is no reply, all teams will drop everything and head to the last reported position, group, up and search. The Brotherhood sometimes uses channel one, but more often, they use radios that operate on different frequency bands than these units."
  
  Everyone nodded and selected floors. She and the Assaultron would begin on this top floor. She began systematically searching the computer lab. A handful of terminals still worked, and she took a little time to see if there was anything interesting on them. There wasn't.
  
  She carried a small cachet of tools most of the time now, and she used them to quickly disassemble the working units, taking the motherboards and the high-voltage display symbol generators, something akin to a graphics card. The actual glass screens were not that valuable and could even be manufactured by some large settlements, like Rivet City, but some of the individual components were still mostly unreproducible by any but the Brotherhood and the Enclave. She also took the fission batteries out of every unit, even the broken ones, but that was such a quick process as they attached somewhat like laptop batteries on the back and just slid out without using any tools.
  
  The mainframe computer that the terminals were connected to in the past wouldn't power up. Lily didn't know if it was just a lack of sufficient power or whether there was significant damage to it, but he suspected a little of both.
  
  Humming happily to herself, she opened up the service panel. It was large, like the hood of a car and opened up like a Delorean or Tesla Model X door. Or it probably would have if it was 200 years ago. Instead, Lily ended up having to ask the Assaultron to rip it off its hinges, which she did with relish.
  
  Lily shined her PipBoy light into the cavernous computer. These mainframes were built similarly to the "blade" style of servers in her past life. There were dozens of subordinate but full computers that slotted into the main motherboard. She diagnosed more than half as not worth her time, those she yanked out and tossed on the floor in a pile. She took out the others one at a time and examined them briefly.
  
  Even with the Mr Handy corpse, she couldn't take all of these with her. So she settled for the most expensive parts of each, which thankfully were small. She pulled out each processor and all the RAM and core memory and set that aside in her keep pile. After she was done, she salvaged the power supplies at the bottom of the mainframe's chassis. These mainframes needed very smooth power in a lot of amps, so these power supplies were quite sophisticated, expensive and could be repurposed in a lot of different ways. When she was about to leave, the Assaultron piped up, pointing, "The stupid human baby forgot the parallel processing control unit."
  
  Lily glared at her, "The wha-ahh.." She had been salvaging parts from each of the "blades" of the mainframe but didn't bother with the mainframe's motherboard itself. The actual mainframe's CPU wasn't that much more valuable than each of the blade processors, and it was a lot bigger pain in the ass to reach. But what the Assaultron was pointing to was a plug-in module next to the CPU. She had missed that, but honestly, she had only briefly read texts about mainframe computing since he got into this world. She glanced at the Assaultron, "Does that organize the computing cluster, then?"
  
  The Assaultron turned away, "Yes. Unknown how many chickens or shiny beads a disgusting human TODAY would exchange with you for it as this Unit is only specialized in killing disgusting humans, not understanding their stupid tribal economics... but it was worth almost a quarter of the value of this entire machine when it was built."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes. Was the killbot a tsun? Also, her personality seemed a bit developed. She'd mention it to Sophie and the Mechanist; maybe the Assaultron was sandbagging them. She half-climbed into the mainframe's chassis and carefully unslotted, and then pulled out the module in question. Since she was already inside the machine, she took a couple more minutes to free the mainframe processor but decided to skip the memory as that wasn't as easily removed without spending another hour at the job.
  
  "Thanks," Lily mentioned but got no reply.
  
  She carefully wrapped all of the delicate parts in cloth and secured them in her rucksack. After Grace did the next commo check, she replied with, "Girlie reporting, all clear." It really was her codename now.
  
  She searched the rest of the rooms but not as thoroughly. Still, she came home with about two dozen energy cells that powered each of the lab stations in each chemistry lab. They were discharged, but it was relatively easy to recharge them and about that many fission batteries and some easily transportable and salable chemistry precursors.
  
  She reported her descent to the next floor down and began looting that too. After a while, she heard the radio squelch, "B.J. to boss; we found a door in the basement none of us noticed during the initial sweep."
  
  Grace's voice came back on the radio, "Roger, don't investigate yet. We'll hit that when we group back up. Any clue what it is?"
  
  Big John got back on the radio after a moment, "There is a sign that says: 'BSL-2 rules in effect. All personnel must wear proper PPE.' Do you know what that means, boss?"
  
  Lily perked up immediately. She started running through the last two rooms; now, she was excited. Grace got back on the radio, "PPE means Personal Protective Equipment, so maybe it's like one of these chemistry labs where they use some of the more dangerous chemicals? Professor Girlie, do you have a clue?"
  
  Lily grabbed the radio and keyed the PTT excitedly, "BSL means Bio-Sa; it Level, it is a set of standards ranging, generally, from 1 to 4 and contains rules and standards about equipment for the safe handling of viruses, prions, bacteria and other infectious diseases."
  
  There was quiet on the radio for a long time. Finally, Grace came back, "Uhh.. then maybe we WON'T look through that door," and Big John offered, "No shit, boss."
  
  No, no! Lily definitely was going to rummage through ALL the drawers in that lab. She keyed the PTT again, "No, no! There's unlikely to be anything very dangerous there. BSL-2 is the second lowest level, and they'd only be investigating simple, relatively harmless pathogens like the common cold, or maybe not even that dangerous. I definitely want to look around down there. It might be really important to me."
  
  Grace replied, "Uhh, I dunno, Girlie. We definitely aren't going in there, so it might be dangerous for you to go in alone. Then after that, what if you were infected with something and then brought it back to us?"
  
  Lily went to click the PTT to say that she was likely immune to any such viruses but then realized that saying such a thing in the clear unencrypted in D.C. might be a poor idea. Instead, she just said, "I'm done with the top two floors anyway, so I'm headed down there. I'll tell you in person. Girlie, out."
  
  She skipped with excitement down the stairs. She met up with Big John and Tangent in the basement and waved at them.
  
  After about twenty minutes, Grace and New John showed up; Lily supposed that they finished up their own looting before coming down. Grace glanced at her before saying, "So, what did you not want to say on the radio? If you can convince me it is more or less safe, we'll go clear the dormitory next door while you can search this BSL lab."
  
  Lily grinned, "Well. I do not really want to talk about why and, in fact, will refuse to speak further about the specifics, but I am immune to most pathogens. Maybe not things like the New Plague or weaponized hantavirus or ebola, but even baseline versions of those pathogens would require a BSL-4 facility, of which there probably is only one or two in D.C." Actually, Lily was pretty confident about her ability to fight off most mundane bio-weapons, so long as she wasn't suffused entirely with virions.
  
  Grace shook her head, "You know, you're making me more and more curious about your background and not in a good way. But okay, I will assume you are telling the truth. And that there isn't anything more dangerous than the common cold in there, but what about defences? Roof turrets, security bots, etcetera?"
  
  Lily waved her hand dismissively, "No way! First, the BSL standards at all levels preclude anything like that - the security is all supposed to be at the access control points, not inside the lab where a bullet or laser beam could break vials or explosions could aerosolize particles! Maybe if this was Fort Maryland and it was a DoD lab, they would do that shit anyway, but there is just no way."
  
  Lily paused for a moment, "There might, probably, are ghouls, though. But that's why I 'ave Matilda here." She hiked a thumb at the Assaultron.
  
  Grace's lips were twitching upwards, "Matilda?"
  
  Lily nodded, "When she cuts loose, you'll understand. She goes waltzing around; it is not, how you say, the rock and roll step."
  
  The Assaultron radiated approval for the potential to cut loose. Its claws spinning in what might be excitement, "Temporary Designation: Matilda. Accepted. Ready to engage dance of death protocols."
  
  After a moment, Grace nodded, "Okay, you've convinced me the risk is minimal. First, let's go over all we've looted here and pack it up."
  
  They each brought out their loot and spread it around the floor. There were a lot of energy cells, fission batteries, and generalized electronic scrap. Surprisingly, in Grace's pile, there were three laser rifles and what looked like a busted plasma rifle in two pieces.
  
  Grace noticed her surprised expression, "Apparently, after the war, a small group of soldiers, deserters probably, holed up in that ROTC office we saw on the second floor. Probably not for too long, as they looked to have died there. Radiation, maybe?" The Amazon shrugged. "I wish the plasma rifle worked; that is something we might not even sell. We might be able to get it repaired at Rivet City or Megaton."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, inspecting it. "The damage to the stock is just cosmetic. But the accelerating coils on the plasma accelerator..." Lily shook her head, "They definitely need to be fixed. But all the superconducting wire is, more or less, still there. I'm pretty sure I can fix it, but perhaps test-fire it with a string from ten meters away after I am done?"
  
  Grace grinned, "That would be great if you could, and yeah, that sounds prudent. What are all these chips?"
  
  Lily grinned, "The processors and memory from the mainframe in the top floor computer lab."
  
  Grace slapped her head theatrically with the flat of her palm, "It looks like us and BJ's team just grabbed the power supplies out of there. Perhaps you should hit each lab on our floors after you get done down here? We'll keep the comm check going while we work the dorms."
  
  Lily nodded, "Oui, oui. But I do not know if the radio will reach the next building from inside the lab; if it is built properly, then there will be a fair amount of isolation built into it. But when I step out, I'll re-establish comms. Is that okay?"
  
  Grace pursed her lips again before nodding, "Yes. We'll leave our haul from here down here in the basement but take the Mister Handy next door. Sound good?"
  
  Lily nodded, and each of them carefully repacked all of the loot. Grace gave a simple, "Don't die, girlie!" before they quick timed it up the stairs.
  
  Lily rubbed her hands together. She doubted she would find much that was very interesting, like a strain of F.E.V., but she would likely find things that were at least useful, even if they were common.
  
  The door to the lab wasn't like Vault-Tec doors, but it did have a manual dogging that Lily had to undog before she could open the door. When she did, she glanced over at the Assaultron, "Matilda, sweep and clear. No killing any non-hostile sapient, though. If there are any bots, don't trash them unless they attack. And be VERY careful not to destroy any other equipment in here. If you encounter any automated turrets or bots armed with heavy anti-mat weapons systems, retreat back to the entrance. Acknowledge." Lily didn't EXPECT any still lucid ghouls in here, but it was a possibility.
  
  The Assaultron grinned somehow, despite not having a face that had any ability to actually grin, and said, with her tone dripping pleased malice, "Sweep and clear!"
  
  The Assaultron started moving ahead of her, but then, realizing that her orders were perhaps not specific enough, Lily added, "No MAIMING non-hostile sapients, either!"
  
  The Assaultron's shoulders drooped momentarily before she continued into the unknown lab. Lily followed her slowly, her carbine ready.
  
  As she watched the Assaultron step into the next room, she heard the groanings of ghouls followed by the bot vocalizing, "Hostiles detected in the AO. Beginning elimination sub-routines!"
  
  Well, at least she is having fun, Lily thought. She started examining the first couple of rooms. There was some useful loot here already. Nothing that she really was looking for, but the PPE inside the donning and doffing room would be useful and eminently salable. Despite this being only a BSL-2 lab, they had full-body suits and full positive pressure respirators in a closet. Perhaps as emergency equipment for if there was a break in their lab containment or protocols?
  
  Before she could even enter the first room of the lab proper, Matilda returned, "Reporting, four ghouls eliminated with extreme prejudice, the AO is clear."
  
  Lily squinted at her, "Did you try to at least communicate with them first?"
  
  The Assaultron's speakers suddenly played back a zombie-like groan of "Raaahhhhhh," followed by her robot voice dripping sarcasm, "Like that?"
  
  "Just... never mind," Lily said, "Go guard the entrance from the basement side. I'm going to be thorough here."
  
  Matilda did a passable salute with one claw before turning and heading out through the entrance, but Lily could just barely hear most of a low-volume mutter the robot was making to herself in the next room, which ended with, "... sorry you didn't get a chance to surrender to them... stupid frogs."
  
  Lily bristled as she thought angrily, Hey, first of all, I am only PRETENDING to be French. Also, dude, frog is really not the preferred nomenclature. Franco-American, please.
  
  Whatever. She pulled out her scanner from her bag and booted it up. First, she opened up her medichine interface and checked the log. There was no sign of a detected viral infection that they destroyed. She waved it around the air and did not find any virons there either. She'd repeat there for each room she entered, just in case.
  
  She was mainly here for specialized lab equipment that would be difficult or annoying to make. For example, she was disassembling an autoclave right now. She could take its most important pieces back with her.
  
  However, she hit the jackpot. In both biosafety cabinets, she discovered still operable, running cryogenic systems. The first was almost entirely full of the synthetic guide RNA and complex nuclease used for primitive gene editing.
  
  Did this lab have a small nuclear reactor providing electricity? Honestly, Lily was always curious about power sources whenever she saw operating electrical devices in the wastelands, but these cryogenic freezers used significant power.
  
  She supposed she didn't really need to know, but she would mention it to Grace.
  
  Opening the second freezer, she was pleased it contained specimens. Useless, useless, useless. She went down the list of stored pathogens. Most were bacteria or prions that she didn't have much use for. Of the few viruses, none were easily edited to become a good vector for genetic modifications... except...
  
  She smiled. HIV, although she didn't recognize the precise designation but HIV was always a useful retrovirus. And lastly, a similarly unknown coronavirus. It appeared like the viral designations she was familiar with have no history here.
  
  She took the four vials of HIV and coronavirus out of the second freezer and began scanning them to identify their specific strain. There was no match to the HIV in her scanner's databases, but it was very similar to HIV-2. As for the coronavirus, it was identical to what Lily would call one of the strains of the common cold.
  
  She was amazed that a respiratory virus like coronavirus was being stored in a BSL-2 lab at all, even if it was just the common cold.
  
  She wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and she supposed, considering the usual outbreaks in viral research labs in the Fallout universe, potential coronavirus recombination would be hardly noticed in a world of F.E.V. and New Plague.
  
  She slid the viruses into the first freezer and then carefully disconnected it and brought it out of the cabinet. She clucked her tongue. This called for some practical electrical engineering.
  
  She half disassembled the fridge, removing any unnecessary bits to cut down on the weight. She could have tossed the freezer's transformer rectifier unit as she planned on powering this for the trek back to town with energy cells, which provided DC power, but she figured she would need that when she got back, so she only bypassed it.
  
  It took almost an hour to get the now mobile cryogenic system operational. Lily looked longingly at the second freezer - freezers that could keep things cold enough that they could be called cryogenic were quite valuable. But there was no way the group could cart back both of them. Even with this one, she'd probably have to pay some of her share for it.
  
  She heard a shout from the entrance, "HEEEY Girlie! There were some raiders in the dorms, and Big John was hurt. Are you fucking done in there?"
  
  Blinking, she made sure the freezer was stable for now, slid her scanner back into her bag and rushed out.
  
  They all looked a bit injured, and Matilda the Assaultron glared daggers at her, "We MISSED it!"
  
  Then Big John caught Lily's attention by waving at her, except he was waving his severed right hand with his good one, "Hey, we came over because we thought you could use a hand!"
  
  A groan involuntarily escaped Lily's lips.
  
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  Kabedon
  Lily stared at the dumbass who was waving his own severed hand at her in front of her for a moment before shaking her head and walking towards him, "Merde... Crétin..."
  
  Everyone else except Grace was cracking up, and even she was trying very hard not to grin. Finally, Lily asked, "What the hell happened? Did you run into a ninja?"
  
  Three people said different things at the same time. Big John yelled, "Yes, I told you!" while Grace said, "No," and Little John said, "Sort of."
  
  Grace elaborated, "We had killed about nine raiders in the dorms, and we got a little complacent, and this guy jumped out of the roof with a PLA Officer's sword. He must have spent a long time sharpening it, too, cause it took off Big John's hand in one chop. Tangent shot the guy in the head, though." She paused, "Normally, all we'd be able to do is kind of slather it in StimPak and hold the severed hand up to the stump. Usually, it doesn't work out too well; you can barely lift a spoon after that, much less a gun. But I remember from-well, I remember that a good medic or surgeon could ensure it was reattached properly before using the StimPaks."
  
  Big John glared at Grace, "The fucker was hiding in the ceiling and jumped out and attacked me with a sword! That's a ninja in my book. It's MY hand, so it's a ninja, hear? If I got my hand chopped off, then it was by a fucking ninja, not some raider high on Jet. GOT IT?"
  
  Grace paused for a moment before shrugging and nodding, "Fair enough," which was followed by the others who verbalized assent.
  
  Lily gazed at him, "You've got fucking dirt all on the wound! What are you, some crazed animal? At least the ninja's sword was sharp, I suppose. That will make it easier." She tilted her head up to think, "Yes, we should be able to get you back to full operation. But there's no way we'll be able to make it back to town tonight. This will take me a couple of hours, minimum."
  
  Grace clucked her tongue, "Well, we planned for that possibility. How'd that lab look?"
  
  Lily grinned, "I found a great harvest! And I've verified that there's nothing in the air, no diseases spread anywhere, and it is relatively clean - well, we'll have to clean up a little bit of ghoul blood, but we could fort up in there tonight? There are three lab rooms, two offices, a break room and a sort of maintenance area where they sterilized equipment. There must be some kind of reactor underneath the school or maybe Geo-Thermal units because everything is powered - including A/C that is still operational. Honestly, it would make an excellent FOB here in the outskirts of D.C." She was amazed that an HVAC system had been running for two hundred years. She remembered having to call the service techs out every three months or so when she lived in Virginia.
  
  The Amazon woman considered it for a moment before nodding, "Okay, that sounds pretty good actually, if you're sure it's safe. We'll have to keep a continual watch, probably in this basement in shifts. I'd rather be far away from this area soonest, but I'd rather Big John had a working hand tomorrow more."
  
  Lily nodded. "Yeah, there is even an eye-wash station in the maintenance room. It must have a fifty-litre tank attached to it. We could use it to take showers, but we'd have to cart in the water from outside before half of us were done."
  
  That settled it; everyone was in favour of showering. "Tangent and NJ, go drag the dead ghouls out of our new nest before they start to stink it up too much."
  
  The two groaned but complied, heading into the lab proper. They drug two dead ghouls out and kept going until they were out of the basement also, before returning and heading back in. The blonde giant came out not too long after that looking empty-handed and churlish. He just stared at the Assaultron, "Hey! Did you gotta do him like that, you crazy murderblender?"
  
  Lily blinked; she had noticed one that was in a couple more pieces than the rest of them but hadn't really put much thought to it because the body was in the maintenance room, and she wasn't really interested in that area of the lab at all after finding the lab areas.
  
  The Assaultron, sometimes called Matilda, stared back at him before gracing him with an answer to his question, "Yes." This caused him to scoff and return back into the lab.
  
  Lily brought some purified water and ethanol from her pack and cleaned both sides of the wound, and debrided the dirt from the severed hand's stump. She glanced at him, "Monsieur, are you sure I can't interest you in a robotic prosthesis? I am really close in my research to building the first one. It'd be connected to your nerves and feel like a regular hand! Even hooked up to your proprioception system, so it doesn't feel like a ghost hand! It'd also be swordproof." She paused, then continued in a conspiratorial tone, "Flesh is weak, you know..."
  
  Big John shook his head rapidly, "No. Not just no, but fucking no. No fucking way, this is my RIGHT hand!"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "So? It would still work as your dominant hand. It'd be just as dextrous and ten times as strong!"
  
  Big John groaned, "Look, girlie, you don't understand why a man has to have his dominant hand not be a fucking metal robot hand, no matter how good it is. It's important, alright!"
  
  Grace started chuckling when she walked up, "Girlie, he won't say it, but he's worried about trying to jerk off and ripping his dick off or something."
  
  Lily blushed, but only for a second. She wasn't innocent. It was just that she never even considered the possibility that a synth hand would make that activity a problem, but she was still thinking about cyber hands from her past. She had to admit that a first-generation cybernetic hand built in what amounts to the dark ages... might... be dangerous for such intimate activities. The second or maybe third generation she would eventually make would be fine, though! Better than a regular hand, probably!
  
  Big John groaned and then threw his stump in the air, "Alright, yes! I don't want to squeeze my dick off with some super strong robot hand!"
  
  Lily smirked, "Couldn't you just, you know, use other hand?" to which Big John shook his head wildly again, "No! You just... you're not a man, alright? You wouldn't understand... And don't judge me. There's no way you'd 'flick the bean' with some crazy robot hand, either, would you?"
  
  There was zero hesitation in Lily's response, "No, but only because I would probably include a vibrating motor in one of the fingertips." Instead of embarrassment, there was the fire of zealotry in her eyes now, "That's the beauty of cybernetic limbs! Customization! Attachments!"
  
  There was a snicker that turned into a full guffaw behind her. When she glanced over her shoulder at Grace, she just held both hands up placatingly, "No, no. You tell 'em, girlie."
  
  Lily watched the dark-skinned man blush and felt that the slight reddening was really quite fetching when combined with his colouration. But, she decided against teasing him anymore, "Fine, come with me. The Lab #1 inside is empty, and it has a table and bright enough lights. This is going to take a while, but at least it won't hurt.."
  
  As they headed inside with Grace, Lily asked, "Are we going to need to loot the dorms tomorrow?"
  
  Big John snorted and said, "Uh, no." Grace smacked him in the back of the head, "No, there was enough stuff from the raiders. Uhh, girlie... tell me, we know you seem like a good girl, doing the right thing and all that, but what is your opinion on chems?"
  
  Lily followed them into the first lab room, "What do you mean?" There were so many chemicals. How could a person have a single opinion on them?
  
  She paused to parse over the sentence she had just heard again. Shaking her head, she decided she must have been hanging out with The Mechanist too long; she wasn't used to people prevaricating or being subtle anymore. She'd have to fix that, "Oh. Recreational drugs, you mean? I'm not really interested but thank you. Big John probably could stand to use some here soon, but no stimulants, not even coffee or tobacco - they cause vasoconstriction and will make my job much, much harder."
  
  Grace chuckled, "No. Selling them. The raiders had an absolute fuck-ton of drugs of all sorts, like kilos and kilos of the stuff. They must have been a warehouse for a more prominent gang. Which reminds me, we will have to start hiking out a little before light, just in case their comrades find them all dead tonight."
  
  Her memories of her life in America were very much against the sale of harmful narcotics, although she felt that the entire drug war her nation had foisted off on the people was futile and worse than the actual vice of drugs in many ways. Meanwhile, her opinions as a researcher in a space habitat were that recreational sarin gas should be sold in vending machines, no I.D. required, if people wanted it. Taken together and merged, the composite entity just shrugged her shoulders, "Who cares? I mean, c'est la vie, no? Try to avoid offloading them on a gang that will sell them to kids, if you can avoid it, but it is just a commodity as far as I am concerned."
  
  Big John muttered, "Told you," and Grace chuckled, "Sorry, I was worried you'd have some kind of moral objection. We still would have sold them, but I was wondering how much I would have to make it up to you."
  
  Lily sat down at the table and motioned Big John to sit across from her, "Oh, in that case, what I meant to say was I have a deep and abiding moral objection to the destruction of our society with the evil of recreational drug use."
  
  Grace grinned wickedly, "Well, I'll just have to think of something sufficient to make it up to you, then. Uhhh... but for now, I'm not really interested in watching him get sliced open, so I'm going to take first watch on the door."
  
  Big John seemed nervous all of a sudden, "Uhh... so you said this would hurt, huh? What do you even need to do to reattach a hand?"
  
  Lily, who had been digging a number of supplies out of her bag, clucked her tongue, "Well, you're actually in luck on that score. I do have a fair supply of a local anaesthetic. However, and it has been my experience that men are the biggest babies when it comes to this, some people get a little nervous about the route of administration."
  
  Big John stammered, "Uhh.. I don't do any butt stuff."
  
  Lily snorted, paused and then snorted and laughed. "Ah, perhaps you just don't know what you are missing, no? But no, it is this..." she finally showed him a giant syringe. He almost backed away in the chair, face going a bit green looking, "Holy fuck! Why is it so fucking big?!"
  
  Lily smacked his arm, "Don't be being the baby. I have to immerse your nerve in the local anaesthetic. That blocks all sensation from anywhere below that point on the nerve, so it has to be big. It is better than feeling me filet you like a fish so I can reattach all the vasculature and nerves, no?" He gulped, "I'm not really liking your choice of words."
  
  Lily smiled, "Yes, usually the surgeon will block the seeing of this, but it is not like we have a lot of supplies here. So maybe, just close your eyes or look at the ceiling, yes? The pre-war hospitals, they had the auto-doc for this surgery. Very fine robotic manipulators, some of which were as thin as a pencil lead, guided by the expert system, it was very effective. But, you'll just have to rely on my fleshy hands and eyes for now." Lily grinned at him and half-joked, "At least, until I build myself a vibrating auto-surgery hand." It wouldn't vibrate, though. It was simpler to just install a computer in your brain that could give you an orgasm on demand if that was what you really wanted.
  
  With that, she got to work. Despite being a bit shy, Big John was a reasonably easy patient. Her ability to perform micro-sutures with barely any equipment was quite good, and every so often, she would spray a bottle of saline with medichines suspended into it into the surgical area. Even if she didn't suture them perfectly or missed some, the medichines would help fix her errors, especially after she administered the StimPak.
  
  After about two hours and fifteen minutes, she was administering a combination of StimPak juice and medichines via IV, "Don't move your hand for fifteen minutes," she warned him.
  
  With him trying to stay as still as possible, she was able to get behind him and scan him with her diagnostic scanner, peering at it briefly before shoving it back into her bag and beginning to clean everything, including her hands. She had reconnected over 85% of the vasculature and nerves herself, which would have been considered an excellent replantation effort in a hospital in America, and the patient would probably still only half use the hand with weakness and loss of dexterity for the rest of their life. In transhumanity, virtually every biomorph had gene expressions that would regrow a hand like a lizard's tail as standard. Lily, sadly, did not have these herself, though.
  
  But with the medichines and StimPak... what she missed the StimPak was regrowing, and what it was regrowing oddly, the medichines would try their best to correct over the next couple of days.
  
  "Okay, we're done. We'll keep your hand wrapped up tightly like this until the morning, don't try to move it if at all possible. The surgery was a success." Lily shook her head, still marvelling over the curative properties of StimPaks. "Light duty tomorrow. That means no firing guns with it, or picking anything up, or practically anything but scratching your nose." She paused and looked at him sceptically, "You can shoot left-handed, right? I mean, you said earlier..."
  
  Big John scoffed, "Just because I can't... yes, I can shoot left-handed if I have to. Anyway, thanks, Doc."
  
  Lily nodded, "And don't get it wet until tomorrow, especially with the water we're probably using for showers. If you take a shower, keep that arm out of the water. And no vigorous hand movements, if you know what I mean!" In case he missed her meaning, she made the universally recognized gesture to elucidate him.
  
  "Yes, yes! I am leaving now!" He got up and walked out.
  
  Lily went up and told everyone she was going to take a shower so as not to be interrupted bare assed, and quickly but thoroughly cleaned herself as well as she could. She glanced up at the still rather full water reservoir. Maybe they wouldn't need to fill it, after all. Eye stations had to have enough water to run for 15 minutes non-stop. She put on her bodysuit but left her armour off; there was no way she'd ever get comfortable if she had to wear all that.
  
  For the next couple of hours, she finished her work with the cryo-freezer and got it ready to transport; it would have to ride on top of Mr Handy. It wasn't so much that it was very heavy; stripped down, it was only thirty-five kilos or so, but it was awkward and bulky.
  
  Grace came into the lab she was in while she was finishing. Her hair was still damp, and she had switched to vaguely street clothes and was carrying her armour. She asked, "Hey girlie, can I see you for a moment? I'm using that office in the back as my quarters."
  
  Lily raised an eyebrow and got up, "Sure." She followed Grace, who indicated her room with a hand, so Lily went ahead of her inside. Grace followed her inside and closed the door, which caused Lily to smile a little. They were off-duty, at least until the next time one of them was on duty for watch, so Lily asked archly, "Oh? So you figured out how to make it up to me, then?"
  
  "Yes," said the mercenary in a slightly husky manner. Then she moved quite quickly to stand in front of Lily and semi-pinned her to the wall by firmly placing one of her palms against the wall, in effect "trapping" her.
  
  Oh, my! Is this the legendary kabedon?! It is, it is! I can actually see why people like it, thought Lily.
  
  The Amazon looked down at her, the hand that wasn't kabedoning her falling to touch Lily's hip possessively, "Remember this morning when you pretended to stand at attention, ready to take my orders?" Lily grinned a bit and nodded, "Well, we're going to do that for real, now. I want to see how long I can keep you... At. Attention. But, I don't think you will need to be standing at all."
  
  Ohhh, it was going to be like that, eh? Well, that was perfectly fine and was actually in line with Lily's preferences anyway. In any case, Lily knew what role she was expected to play now, so she grinned and said jauntily, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"
  
  SoME tiME LaTER
  
  Eventually, there was some cuddling, as much by necessity considering Lily hadn't gone to retrieve her sleeping bag before being "seduced." But it was cosy, and they both got some sleep, even. Lily was quite comfortable laying on the Amazon's chest, crooked into her arm.
  
  Neither of them got more than an hour or two of sleep, though. When they were both getting dressed, Grace was awkwardly trying to get through a conversation with her that was basically saying that she wasn't looking for any kind of long-term partners, what with her job and all. Lily got the feeling that Grace thought she was letting her down gently?
  
  Lily couldn't help it and giggled furiously, "My dear Grâce, I feel exactly the same. This world, it is, " Lily paused before saying the next word with its French pronunciation and with feeling, "terrible!" Lily stood on her tippy-toes, still quite naked and kissed the other woman, who still had to lean down, softly once, "I am years from wanting of the wife or the 'usband and the white pickets, yes? 'Ave to build a world, or at least part of one, where you can even 'ave that, first."
  
  Grace looked very relieved. Did she expect Lily to be a stage-5 clinger, Lily wondered? If so, Lily felt rather smug at that because that said a lot about her desirability and irresistibleness, as generally, you'd avoid at all costs being entangled in one of those types of people even if they were hot. Lily smiled, "So let us remain the friend. The intimate friend, if we are lucky."
  
  The truth was that while half of herself had memories of wanting and finding long-term relationships, the other longer set of memories of her time in space were, while quite sexually active, almost completely uninterested in romance. So, paradoxically, Lily was open to either sort of situation, in theory, if the conditions were right. Lily supposed that did make her quite the easy-going sort, which she liked.
  
  Grace smiled, "Thank you, my girlie. We should get dressed and ready to head out."
  
  It took less than an hour for everyone to eat breakfast, get kitted up and be ready to depart. Her PipBoy said it was a little after 0400, but that was partly a guess since the date and time on her PipBoy had to be reset when she fixed it so many weeks ago.
  
  They started hearing automatic weapons fire and energy discharges as they entered the basement, and immediately, everyone was all business. Lily took the time to close and redog the hatch to the lab, anyway, though.
  
  "It's coming from outside to the north. Close. Upstairs, double quick, and get switched on," Grace ordered.
  
  They quick timed it up the stairs, peering stealthily out the windows. They couldn't quite tell who was fighting who, but they'd very likely run into one or the other combatants if they went out the front door and would run straight into the crossfire if they ran out the side door. And there weren't any other ways out; the entire west side of the building was blocked by rubble on the ground floor.
  
  Grace shook her head, "Can't see anything. Let's head up to the third floor. We can't go out, and we don't want to be on the ground floor if one of those assholes sees this building as a sound position to retreat to. Quick and quiet, everyone."
  
  They went up the stairs two and three at a time, so Lily was wondering about the quiet part of this evolution, but said nothing. As everyone reached the third floor, they took a door to a classroom in the middle of the building, and they each crouched next to or under windows.
  
  Little John spoke up after peeking out the window, "Ones on the right are definitely Brotherhood, boss. Four of them, they're pinned down."
  
  Lily looked at the other combatants; her eyesight and night vision was good even when they weren't being briefly illuminated by sporadic weapons fire, "There's more than a platoon of raiders over here, red skulls painted on their armour. How the fuck did they get crew-served heavy weapons over here? Is that a Dushka?"
  
  It was, indeed, an old Russian heavy machinegun that was keeping the Brotherhood's heads down. Lily wondered how they got ammunition for it because they certainly didn't seem too worried they'd run out.
  
  Big John asked awkwardly, "Red skulls? Wasn't that..."
  
  Grace swore, "Yeah, I knew it wasn't a good idea to stay so close, but I didn't want to see you end up crippled, B.J. They must have brought in the reinforcements and heavy weapons after finding their friends ventilated and their stash gone, and then a Brotherhood patrol happened to run into them."
  
  Lily glanced down at the group of raiders arrayed in almost a skirmish line perpendicular to her. She could see more or less every raider. She looked at Grace, seeing the same thing. Lily offered weakly, "Well... we are in enfilade, ma'am." Shit! She didn't mean to call her that but got too used to it last night.
  
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  In enfilade
  Grace half-growled, half-whispered, "You gotta be fucking kidding. As soon as they realized we were up here, and that would be fast, they might cover half this building with suppressive fire and then traverse that fifty - which will shoot through these thin walls like they were nothing. Or charge up through the main door and drown us in raider bodies. We're in concealment, not cover up here. Any other options?"
  
  Lily stared out the window. She didn't entirely disagree but still felt that was the best option. But, of course, they'd have to decide whatever they chose in the next couple of minutes because she could see the raiders setting up what looked like two aged but obviously serviceable light mortar tubes. Very distinctive mortar tubes, Lily narrowed her eyes. She never thought her being a WW2 history buff would actually be practically valuable to her, ever.
  
  Were those tubes from WW2 or just modern reproductions of that design? No, there was no way anyone would build copies of the Modèle 37.
  
  The Brotherhood had clearly killed a handful of the raiders who tried to sneak up and throw grenades over their cover, and now the Dushka was firing sporadically, mainly to keep the Brotherhood's heads down and prevent them from fleeing. It wouldn't take even the shittiest mortar team long to find their range when they were barely two hundred meters away and still in direct line of sight to direct the barrage.
  
  Big John raised his hand, whispering, "We could uhh... go back to sleep? Head downstairs, back in the semi-hidden lab, and wait until they all fucked off?"
  
  They seemed to consider it, so Lily decided to burst his bubble, "What about ze brotherhood reinforcements?"
  
  Big John hissed, "What fucking reinforcements?"
  
  Grace groaned as the dominoes fell into place in her mind, "Right. They're probably already on the way. Although, unless they're fucking close already, they might not make it in time. But when they get here and smash those raiders like a bug on a Vertibird's windshield, they will definitely secure the area and likely do an expanding radial search outwards for at least a couple of blocks. The odds that they find that lab we were holed up in is very high. If they find an unknown merc team essentially on top of the four dead brothers... well..."
  
  Both Johns said, "Fuck!" simultaneously while Tangent just shrugged.
  
  Lily offered, "Maybe ze Brotherhood will 'ave opportunity to attack when we distract and put down many of the raiders from the ambush?"
  
  Grace narrowed her eyes, "Maybe. But maybe not. I generally have a policy against being someone else's distraction, anyway. Shit, are those mortar tubes?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Oui, very, very old ones. French, too, I zink fifty centimètre tubes from ze Guerre Mondiale circa 1940 or so... but, uhh... I 'ave to admit; fortunately, in this case, this is not ze best weapon the Republic ever fielded... Still..." Lily trailed off. Still, "a mortar is a mortar," was what was left unsaid.
  
  Grace looked at her with astonishment, "Are you saying that those are damn-near three-hundred-year-old French mortars from World War 2? Where the hell did they get them? They have to be MAKING the ammunition! How the fuck did you even recognize-Wait, never mind... not the time for any of that. This is what we're going to do."
  
  Grace glanced at the Assaultron, who was spinning her claws excitedly, "First, Girlie, tell me - can you actually not give Matilda orders or was that just something you implied because we were a new team and untrusted at first?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, I was a bit nervous going with a group of strange soldier of fortune. 'owever, you are correct; I can give her mostly any order. Now, you see, I do trust you to take care of me."
  
  "Yeah, I bet you-owe!" Big John started to make a lewd comment but got elbowed in the ribs by Grace.
  
  "Okay, order her downstairs to wait in front of the main entrance. That's the exit closest to the raider's side. If any raiders assault the building after we open fire, she is to slice and dice them inside the building guerilla-style, keep them from coming up the stairs. Otherwise, she is to attack when she believes it will be most tactically impactful," Grace whispered quickly.
  
  Lily relayed that order, making sure to specify to attack only the raiders, and Matilda ran off with a jaunty wave of her claw.
  
  Grace continued, "Next, get on your radio and switch to channel 1. There's a chance that the Brotherhood team is on that frequency. Tell them we are about to attack the flank of the raider force, and we'd really appreciate not being hung out to dry as a reward for helping them."
  
  Lily blinked, "Why me? You are in command, no?" To which the Amazon grimaced, "For a couple of reasons, I never directly interact with any of the shinies, okay?"
  
  If Lily had actually been playing Fallout, she knew that line would have triggered a new companion quest about discovering Grace's dark history with the Brotherhood or Enclave. She had said any shinies, after all. Still, Lily decided to table that particular intriguing mystery for now. Instead, she pulled out her radio, switched to channel one and keyed the PTT, "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello? Any Brotherhood station, 'ow do you read?"
  
  After a moment, a scratchy reply came over the handset, "This is Pride station Golf November Romeo; identify yourself."
  
  GNR? They must be in or near the Galaxy News Radio building then, Lily surmised. She debated giving a fake name or prevaricating but decided against it, "Golf November Romeo, I am Lilliane St. Claire; I am with ze independent mercenary, yes? We were hoping to talk to the Brotherhood fireteam being attacked next to the Coolidge building in the U of Mar-ree-land campus. We want to help, but we're hoping on a little.. 'ow you say, coordination?"
  
  The reply was quicker this time, "Ms St. Claire, Golf November Romeo, we would very much appreciate any assistance. Brotherhood reinforcements are still ten mikes out. That team is not on this frequency, but we can relay to them; what do you want me to tell them?"
  
  Lily glanced at Grace to see if he wanted to make any adjustments to what she would tell them. Still, she just made a 'get on with it' motion with her hand, "Golf November Romeo, please tell them zeir enemies consist of at least forty raiders of above average armament and bearing, including a crew-served Russian Dushka fifty calibre 'eavy machine gun, and two mortar teams that are about to begin ranging fire against zeir position. We are set up in enfilade on ze third story of the Coolidge building, and in position to provide raking fire. We especially intend to silence their heavy weapons and indirect fire capability. We would appreciate if once their 'eavy guns are silenced, a coordinated attack, although we understand you may not trust a random voice on the radio. We're going to attack in 90 seconds. Lastly, the Assaultron is ours, not raider equipment, so please don't fire on it. Over, out."
  
  Lily clipped the radio back to her waist and began a mental stopwatch. It was so much easier when her brain was a quantum computer; very easy to keep time when that was the case. A scratchy voice came back on the radio, "We copy Ms St. Claire and have relayed it, but we can not promise any action from the commander on the ground."
  
  Grace gave a thumbs up, "7 out of 10 for a first interaction with a Brotherhood team. They didn't call you a tribal or tell you to get off the radio; they must really be worried." Then she turned to face everyone else, "Okay, Lily, you target the mortar team. I'll get the HMG crew; the rest of you just rake fire down their line. We want maximum chaos in minimum time after we open up. Lily, hope you were keeping a count because I'm not, so we'll all fire when you fire," whispered Grace. We all selected a window as fire positions.
  
  Lily wished they all had suppressors. That would have likely increased the number of raiders they could drop before they figured out what was going on.
  
  Lily found her targets, a group of men arguing about the settings for the old mortars and thumbed the selector back to semi-automatic. Weird that it looked so much like an M4 carbine but didn't have a 3 round burst mode. She put the red dot on the chest of the guy who looked the most important and waited. Yes, about now. She squeezed the trigger and immediately heard the report of Grace's Dragunov and the bursts from the other guys.
  
  New John was firing quick controlled bursts from a light machine gun - he must have picked that up from the raiders yesterday. Kind of ironic to use their friend's gun to kill these guys, Lily felt.
  
  Lily had some hope that there would be an explosion when she shot the guy who was carrying one of the rounds to the tube, and he dropped it, but sadly despite life possibly being a video game, it wasn't a movie.
  
  Still, Lily was able to kill four of the mortarmen and wound one other before the raiders realized where the fire was coming from, and a group of about ten of them started directing automatic fire to random windows of the building they were in.
  
  Lily supposed that was what Matilda considered the "most tactically impactful time." While most of the raiders were either looking either up on the third or fourth floors, or still looking at the Brotherhood, the killbot started sprinting towards a group of raiders that finally figured out which room they were in.
  
  Grace screamed, "Down!" and we all hit the deck. Lily looked up at the ceiling, seeing bullets striking and raining down debris on the room. She felt a sting in the back of her neck and cursed. A somewhat near round punched through the masonry and showered her with sharp stone shrapnel.
  
  She started to hear the distinctive *crack-thwum* of plasma weapons, see the flashes of green light reflected off the ceiling she was looking at and now hear the screams of raiders who presumably had their faces or asses burned off.
  
  The pace of fire hitting the room slowed considerably, and everyone looked at each other. Tangent shrugged, which she felt was a gesture of deep meaning for him, and Grace nodded, and we all stood back up and retook firing positions.
  
  I was about to direct my fire towards the Dushka that had been traversed towards us but instead was forced to change targets to return fire on a group of raiders. The Dushka was presently firing on Matilda, who had just gotten done decapitating two men near the mortar emplacement.
  
  One of her arms had already taken a direct hit, knocking one claw off at the elbow. Instead of just charging the heavy machine gun like Lily thought she would, Matilda kept zigging and zagging before snatching up the mortar that was dropped earlier, glancing at it while still on the move and then she threw it with surprising ease for someone who only has claws for hands. The robot laced it, like she had been looking for a wide receiver but instead it hit the ground just next to the Dushka and exploded, killing the operator of the HMG.
  
  The raiders couldn't seem to make up their mind on which direction to defend against. One of the men must have shot the commander in the first volley as people were yelling this and that. What was the phrase? Order, counter-order, disorder? Right before she and the others had to duck down again, she saw three power-armoured suited figures closing with the raiders at a slow jog, firing aimed reflex shots from the hip from plasma rifles accurately while on the move.
  
  Damn, they are good, thought Lily while staring at the ceiling again. Big John's voice brought her out of her reverie,"NJ's been hit!"
  
  She turned over to see the man sitting on the ground and clutching his stomach like he'd been starring as the villain in a Western. She half expected him to say theatrically, "Awww, he got me!" Remembering this is, at least as far as she knew, real life, she crawled low over to the injured men to render aid.
  
  Examining him briefly, she told him, "Through-and-through, ruptured spleen, internal bleeding," she then jammed a StimPak she fished out of her pocket into the same general area as his wound. StimPaks in Fallout healed you instantly, if she recalled, but the medicine here, despite how miraculous it was, was only akin to very rapid regeneration. But she judged that the big man would not bleed out before it did its job.
  
  The fire directed at their position was dwindling rapidly, so Lily decided to stand up again. That was a mistake. Almost instantly, she took a round to the shoulder that spun her, caused her to drop her carbine and put her on the ground simultaneously.
  
  Lily blinked. Why was she seeing the ceiling? Oh, she had been shot. The detached part of her mind diagnosed herself with hypoxia-induced momentary loss of consciousness caused by hydrostatic shock. The Amazon was crouched next to her, looking down at her, concerned, "Girlie, you okay?"
  
  Lily glanced at her shoulder, finding the wound on it already in the process of healing right in front of her eyes. They must have given her a StimPak while she was out of it. Well, curing herself of cancer was just another item to be put on the list. She could almost do it, anyway. "Yes, yes, I think so. Merci." She glanced at Big John and Tangent, still firing down at the remaining raiders, but they had switched to aim shots instead of bursts, which was sporadic.
  
  The battle sounds had slowed significantly. Grace helped her to her feet. Lily tested her left arm's range of motion and found it slightly to moderately impaired. Removing the top of her combat armour, she retested and found it slightly better. However, the combat armour was quite damaged on her left shoulder. She would keep it off for now, and repair or replace it when she got home.
  
  Still, there must be some bone fragments inside there, somewhere. Also, not a big deal, especially since Lily planned on performing elective brain surgery on herself within the next few weeks. Compared to that, what was a little pulling bone fragment or perhaps shrapnel out of your own shoulder?
  
  Lily peeked out the window, "Seems it is a rout."
  
  Grace nodded, "Take B.J. with you downstairs; get Matilda. And you'll probably be forced to at least say hello to the Brotherhood. We'll police our stuff up here and meet you down there. See if you can get them to agree on a loot split and any reward they want to give us. Although the Brotherhood is sometimes cagey about that."
  
  Lily nodded and then picked up and slung her carbine before quick timing it downstairs. If she had to talk to the Brotherhood, she wanted to talk to these particular ones who invariably owed them, rather than some random Brotherhook mooks arriving on a Vertibird or on foot.
  
  She pulled out her radio and keyed it again, "Golf November Romeo, this is St. Claire. The raider forces appear in a rout. Your boys are moping them up now; we'll be coming out of ze front of ze Coolidge building right now if you'll relay that. I don't want any blue-on-blue incidents - we do NOT look like the raiders."
  
  "Alright, time to look non-threatening," Big John remarked.
  
  Lily considered that for a moment before nodding and then carefully unzipping enough of her bodysuit to show significant décolletage. This caused Big John to crack up, but he said, "Yeah, that's actually probably a good idea."
  
  They walked out of the front, and Lily yelled, "Matilda! Front and centre!"
  
  She detected motion and turned to see the Assaultron turn and start jogging over to her. Two armoured Brotherhood men had been eyeing the robot warily.
  
  There wasn't as much damage as Lily feared. The small arms had mainly bounced off Matilda's armoured plating, but she would definitely have to replace the lower arm and claw. "Reporting, twelve human scum terminated. Light damage sustained."
  
  Lily couldn't resist, "Light?! Your arm's off!" But internally, she was sighing. Nobody would get her popular culture references anymore; it was really a tragedy.
  
  The Assaultron seemed to shrug, pause and say, "I want a sword-arm."
  
  Lily blinked at her, then tilted her head to the side as she considered the size limits regarding prints on her fabricator, "Uhh... 'ow about ze long knife? Retractable into claw, yes?"
  
  Matilda, the Murder Maid, seemed to consider this compromise before stating, "Acceptable."
  
  Lily looked up at two figures in T-60 power armour approaching her. A male voice, partly distorted by the power armour's speaker, said, "You the mercs that Control told us about?"
  
  Lily simpered, thrusting her chest out a little, "Yes, yes. I am called Lilliane St. Claire, and I am actually ze medical doctor by trade, rather than a soldier of ze fortune. We came here scavenging, yes?"
  
  Lily internally smirked as she caught the feeling that the speaker was definitely tracking something other than her eyes. The quiet one seemed to be all business, though. He continued, sounding shocked. "Doctor? Doesn't that like, go against the Hippocratic Oath or something?"
  
  The quiet one spoke up, a female's voice, "Stow it, Johnson."
  
  That was one of the possible replies Lily had expected after Lily mentioned that she was a doctor. Some of the Brotherhood tended to like to rub pre-war knowledge in the face of the people of the Wasteland. She had considered her reply to that carefully, following the plan of giving the impression that she might be from the pre-War era.
  
  Lily smiled, "Ah, yes it has been many years since many doctors swore solemn oaths to the 'ealing gods, no? And not even Asclepius would care about us killing raider scum. Do No 'Arm applies only to one's patients, you see."
  
  The quieter female snapped her attention directly to Lily's face. She stared at her for a long moment before she motioned the other, "Johnson, go check on Wilson's injuries. The exfil flight is 5 minutes out. I'll talk to Dr. St. Claire, here."
  
  The man named Johnson ambled off. The woman carefully took her helmet off, revealing a younger blonde woman than Lily expected to find leading a squad of soldiers. The soldier smiled, "Now that Johnson's gone, you can holster those guns if you want, you won't be needing them." Her eyes dipped very briefly down to Lily's chest before returning to her eyes, making sure Lily knew precisely which guns she was talking about.
  
  Sighing theatrically, Lily zipped up her bodysuit back up, which caused the other woman to chuckle in amusement, "The Brotherhood, and the Lyon's Pride has to thank you and your friends, Dr St. Claire. I'm Paladin Sarah Lyons, and it's nice to meet you. You rarely see a person with such a... classical education as you seem to have in the Wastelands, Doctor."
  
  Oh. That's why the young woman looked so familiar. Suddenly, Lily was reconsidering her position against swearing at the Mr ROB. This set of circumstances seemed improbable and contrived as hell.
  
  It could have been worse, though. At least Lyons wasn't the one injured, forcing me to help her, Lily thought. Still, she had the sudden feeling of being toyed with, and not the way she liked.
  
  "Well, thank you very much, Paladin Lyons. But there definitely are a few people like me, 'ere and there. Even if it is from self-study - there are still many legible pre-War books, and people still have eyes to read them. But, sadly, most people don't 'ave the time to waste when they have to spend all of their effort just to 'ave something to drink and survive day to day," said Lily, somewhat sadly.
  
  The acorn that was Sarah Lyons didn't fall from the tree of Elder Lyons, so this pushed her buttons as she seemed enthused, "That is definitely the case. Hopefully, someday that won't be the case, though. If we can just get rid of all the damned Super Mutants in the capital."
  
  If Sarah Lyons wasn't interested in looking down her cleavage, then Lily would simply massage the woman's ego and goals instead. Lily smiled, "Yes, yes. They are quite monstrous."
  
  Sarah reached for something in one of her bags and returned with a small dagger, which she offered to Lily, "Here, take this. You saved lives today, maybe mine. As thanks, if you ever need a favour, come to the Lyon's Pride FOB at the GNR building or the Citadel, and you can find a little help from me or one of the others with this token."
  
  Lily glanced down at the dagger, which had a medieval motif and featured a stylized design of the circle and cogs of the Brotherhood of Steel on the handguard. The sword was missing in the design, but Lily supposed the dagger itself represented that element. She glanced up, hearing a rhythmic thumping which turned out to be a Vertibird transitioning from aeroplane mode to VTOL mode. At the same time, Grace and the others were walking out of the Coolidge building.
  
  "Feel free to scavenge anything you like from the dead Raiders, with the exception of that heavy machine gun. We're going to take that with us," Sarah said before replacing her helmet back on her head. "You're an interesting person, Dr St. Claire. I will definitely remember you."
  
  "Ah, you as well Miss Paladin Lyons," replied Lily as the two parted, Sarah jogging over to the rest of her men. The injured one was on his feet, so he couldn't have been in too bad a way.
  
  Lily wasn't surprised the Brotherhood didn't much care for most of the salvage. These raiders weren't firing lasers or plasma casters or miniguns. Of course, nobody would ever call a Dushka high technology, but it was undoubtedly highly efficient, so she also wasn't surprised they were taking it. It wasn't like she and the others could cart it home anyway; it wasn't like they were driving a technical.
  
  They grouped up together again. Lily reported, "The Brotherhood is taking the Dushka; everything else is ours if we want it. But let's make it quick and depart, no?"
  
  Grace grimaced, "Better than a swift kick in the ass. She give you anything else?" Lily nodded, "A knife as a token to redeem for an unstated favour in the future."
  
  Grace shuddered, "Keep that fucking thing away from me. You can have the joy of getting a favour out of the Brotherhood if you want, yourself."
  
  They quickly policed the dead raiders, taking mainly ammunition and a few weapons if they were in good condition. She paused at one dead raider, "'Ey, guys. I think I found the putain that shot me." Lily held up the semi-automatic sniper rifle. She was really quite fortunate that the shot did not hit her in the head or heart. Still, now she had his rifle, so she was the winner, in the end, she supposed.
  
  She did find out that there were sixty dead raiders, not the forty she counted earlier. And that wasn't including those that got away, either.
  
  Accelerating some functional subdermal armour development was becoming a priority. Normally subdermal armour in biomorphs was formed by a gene mode that caused spider-silk to grow just under the skin. Lily definitely did not think she could effect such a radical biological change with the meagre gene editing toolkit she liberated from the lab. So, she would have to consider a synthetic solution. Surgery to implant graphene nanotubules underneath the skin? That had promise.
  
  The team wasn't very comfortable around the Brotherhood, nor was Lily, for that matter, so they worked quickly. Mister Handy was at maximum capacity, and they were all carrying full packs. It would take most of the day to return back to the town.
  
  Sarah Lyons found her when they were headed out, "That is a nice trick with that wrecked Mr Handy, turning it into a pack mule. Well, thanks again."
  
  Lily paused. The chances that the lab underneath the Coolidge building would stay undiscovered were small, so she decided to inform Sarah about it, "Paladin Lyons, you may want to check the basement of the building we were firing out of. There is a mostly in-tact pre-war life sciences laboratory there. There wasn't actually much useful salvage we could cart away, mainly some respirators and one small freezer, but the lab itself is useful tech - it 'as to be powered by either a small fusion reactor or geothermal units like Vault-Tec vaults are. Everything down there is still powered, even the HVAC systems. Quite comfortable inside, really. It might make you guys a useful FOB, if nothing else."
  
  Although Lily would tell them about it, she wouldn't call it a virology lab. The Brotherhood were a mite sensitive on the subject of virology labs, considering what their founder did to all the scientists at WestTek so many years ago. But, "life science lab" was suitably ambiguous without being a lie. They would see that she had disassembled and carted away a cryogenic freezer, but they would find that anyway, most likely, and if she mentioned the lab now, it wouldn't look like Lily was hiding anything.
  
  Sarah Lyons tilted her armoured head to the side, "Really? Why thank you for that report. In that case, I will order the Lyons Pride to temporarily occupy that building while I call in the Scribes."
  
  With that, they were off; after a few blocks, Grace asked her, "Why'd you tell 'em about that lab?"
  
  To which, Lily shrugged her shoulders, "They probably would have found it anyway, and in case I need to deal with them again, I didn't want it to look like I was hiding anything."
  
  Grace pursed her lips before nodding, "Fair enough."
  
  The hike back to Canterbury Commons was a lot less fun when they were humping mostly full packs. About halfway through it, Lily realized that the Assaultron wasn't carrying a pack. She attempted to order the Assaultron to carry her load, but she just said, "No, it reduces my aerodynamics."
  
  Was this bitch Napoleon Dynamite?!
  
  They got back with some time still left in the day, and they used her temporary clinic to go over all the loot they got. Everybody picked a few items for themselves. Lily got one of the laser rifles, the sniper rifle, some replacement armour and of course, the cryogenic freezer and all of its contents. She also took a few of the processors and electronic parts. Everything else would be converted to caps, which was going to be quite substantial.
  
  Lily was about to be a woman of caps.
  
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  Light at the end of the tunnel
  In a small office, a kindly Gandalf-looking old gentleman garbed in robes sat behind a desk. He was listening to a young blonde woman, his daughter, give him a report. After she finished, he was quiet for some time, "Good job, Sarah. I'm glad you came back safe, not that I expected anything less. The group of mercenaries that helped you is a bit of an anomaly, though."
  
  The blonde Paladin relaxed from her parade rest posture at her father's wave of his hand and nodded, "Yes. Quite effective and well-trained, as local mercs go anyway. And, they had an Assaultron even if it seemed to be missing the laser. Especially that supposed Doctor that was either in command of them or, perhaps, had hired them for security. Here, listen to this recording. This is her transmission I mentioned earlier; we think from a hand-held radio that our GNR relay recorded..." She pulled out a small holotape and inserted it into a player.
  
  Static played over the speakers, followed by a woman speaking in a light French accent, "Golf November Romeo, please tell them zeir enemies consist of at least forty raiders of above average armament and bearing, including a crew-served Russian Dushka fifty calibre 'eavy machine gun, and two mortar teams that are about to begin ranging fire against zeir position. We are set up in enfilade on ze third story of the Coolidge building, and in position to provide raking fire. We especially intend to silence their heavy weapons and indirect fire capability. We would appreciate if once their 'eavy guns are silenced, a coordinated attack, although we understand you may not trust a random voice on the radio. We're going to attack in 90 seconds. Lastly, the Assaultron is ours, not raider equipment, so please don't fire on it. Over, out."
  
  The eyebrows of the Elder Lyons rise considerably, "Thank you for playing that; your report that she coordinated with you over radio doesn't, in fact, give the whole picture here. She sounds like someone who has at least gone through our Small Unit Tactics leadership course..." he trailed off before continuing, "Or a similar course offered by an organization that is at least on a similar level as us."
  
  He tapped his fingers on his desk, "Certainly, neither the average Doctor nor the average Wasteland local would know the specific term enfilade; even if they were a military prodigy and intuitively understood the tactical evolution, they wouldn't have the vocabulary and instead would have described it as flanking, or similar."
  
  The woman remained silent but nodded after a moment, conceding the point. The Elder continued, "The HMG you brought back, was it a DsHK?"
  
  Sarah nodded, "Dual barrel Chinese copy of the Russian DsHK, manufactured circa the 1970s or 1980s. Scribe Anderson says she plans to build a new auto-turret with it after adjusting it to fire US standard 12.7mm cartridges that we can manufacture ourselves in quantity. That thing was as terrifying as any minigun from which I've been under fire from."
  
  She paused before wondering aloud, "Maxson knows where the raiders got it. The mortar tubes looked even older. Anderson thinks they must have looted a military museum and have been manufacturing their ammo, somehow. I've made a note for the Pride to be on the look-out for any raiders featuring red skull decoration. This capability implies some sort of pre-war industrial tech that we could use if they can manufacture arbitrary ammunition for weapons that do not even use any standard US calibres. The mortar rounds and ammunition for the HMG we recovered seemed newly manufactured, anyway."
  
  The Elder nodded, "That's a good idea, Sarah. But back to this Doctor St. Claire, not only does she seem to be as educated as a Paladin-Sergeant in tactics, but she appears to be able to recognize an old pre-war Russian heavy machine gun either by sight or sound? And this is in addition to what you called a classical education that she revealed to you? What she said is true; most Wasteland doctors would not recognize the term Hippocratic oath or its history."
  
  Sarah nodded slowly this time. "That is true. Honestly, I definitely didn't recognize that HMG as anything but a particularly scary heavy machine gun. And, I had to look up what exactly Asclepius was, or rather who Asclepius was, when I got back to base. Could she be an Enclave deserter? Maybe the whole 'mercenary band' are former Enclave? A doctor or researcher with four soldiers all deserting together? We know they've had issues with desertion. That would explain why a doctor was so educated in military matters - if they had to become mercenaries to feed themselves, she would HAVE to learn."
  
  "I was considering that possibility until you played that recording but didn't you hear her accent? There is no way someone born into the Enclave would have a French accent, and there is no way that someone," Elder Lyons made the universal air quotes gesture before continuing, "... recruited... would have an easy time deserting, or be likely to receive either advanced medical or military training from them. Maybe if she were already a doctor before being kidnapped by the Enclave, but it doesn't quite fit the facts."
  
  Sarah tilted her head to one side, "That's a French accent? I knew she sounded like a bit like a Miss Nanny, but I couldn't actually place it."
  
  Gandalf brightened for a moment, apparently eager to share a favourite movie with his daughter, "Oh, then we've got to watch The Fall of Vichy tonight after dinner. It is one of the better WW2 films, it starred Verra Keyes, and while I don't think her accent was very good, there are several actual French actors and actresses in the film that you can hear. The action is quite good, also." Then he coughed a couple of times, "But as I was saying, none of the facts fit precisely. I think she must have been targetting that pre-war lab specifically, hired these mercs for back-up, and it was just a chance that she was there to assist you. What did the scribes say about the lab? Do we know what she was after and probably got in there?"
  
  Sarah winced a little, "Ah, the Scribes say it was a pre-war lab that studied viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases in general. We know that she took away one cryogenic freezer because we saw parts of it that she disassembled left in the lab that matched an identical model she left behind. The one she left behind had some frozen bacteria and viruses inside. Scribe Ferguson surmises that it wouldn't have been difficult to jury-rig the missing freezer to be powered temporarily off energy cells or maybe even fission batteries."
  
  The white-bearded man blinked, then offered a simple, emphatic, " What? "
  
  Sarah held up her hands placatingly, "Yes, I was very concerned too. But the Scribes say it was all civilian research on normal diseases and a low-level lab - the most dangerous thing we found was some prion diseases. So there definitely wasn't any kind of bio-weapon or FEV research going on here; the scribes have totally ruled that possibility out." Her father relaxed quite a bit at that but still had his eyebrow raised to the ceiling. It was awe-inspiring; Sarah had attempted to master this gesture in front of a mirror ever since she began to lead Initiates in battle but had not quite pulled it off, yet. She wondered if you had to perhaps live through many subordinates giving you heart attacks before it became second nature. If so, she should have it down in two years, tops.
  
  She continued, "St. Claire called it a damn 'life sciences laboratory,' which wasn't, even, really, lying. I don't know why she would even have told me about it if she was doing anything nefarious there. We might never have discovered it. 50/50, I'd say. My best guess is that she didn't even think we would care, so whatever she took in that freezer, if anything, is probably not very harmful. Perhaps the freezer was empty, and she just wanted some lab equipment? Would a medical doctor be even interested in common, un-weaponized pre-war viruses and bacteria?"
  
  Her father roll-tapped his fingers on his desk again; it was something he often did while he was thinking. "Not a regular doctor, no. Maybe you're right. There is nothing, in itself, that seems more than mildly suspicious." He sighed, "Well, okay, we have more questions now than we did when we started,out. I'll have a file started on the good Doctor - both as a possible friend of the Brotherhood who has done us a good turn and also to collate any future mention of her in the Capital Wasteland. I guess that's all we can do now. I'm not too fond of mysteries, though, Sarah. Dismissed."
  
  Sophie was very concerned when Lily returned, trailing Matilda, who obviously had seen some heavy combat. But all Scott said, after looking at the Assaultron, was, "You're fixing that."
  
  Lily just snorted, trying not to laugh. Her trip was definitely a bit more perilous than she had intended when she agreed to go, but she returned with a lot of riches.
  
  Grace had intended to sell most of the electronic and general items to the trader in town; Lily believed she was dealing with Louis' brother, who ran the transhipment hub. However, they ran into a problem where there were too many drugs - they wouldn't sell those here. Instead, Grace had a contact in Megaton. But it prevented a proper split from being accomplished as the team didn't have enough liquidity held in common to buy her out on her share of the drugs.
  
  So, instead, Lily took some electronics and a fair bit of the analgesic drugs, although there was so much more that she didn't take that she just didn't need. Still, even with all the extras she was taking, she ended up with over two thousand caps more to her name. Grace's Grenadiers would likely end up with more than that when they sold off the drugs in Megaton.
  
  She planned on making most of the electronics a gift to Scott before she left. There was a company mainframe that serviced the discount electronics repair and sales centre. Lily felt that she could probably get it running again, which would make it a lot easier for Scott to coordinate all the simpler bots like his small army of over four dozen Protectrons and half dozen or so of Sentrybots that were in various stages of repair.
  
  Lily's parting gift to Sophie had been planned for some time. She had managed to get full scans of her chassis and planned to fabricate a replacement exterior chassis in diamondoid materials. Since her fabricator working area was so small, it would take building the shapes of each cowling as something like three-dimensional puzzle pieces that fit together without the composite form losing much strength.
  
  She also planned to include a rapid-firing laser from a Protectron. While it was too big to fit in Sophie's manipulators, Lily could fit it inside her chassis and then run specially fabricated diamond-based fiberoptics that would serve as a flexible waveguide through the robot's manipulator arm so the firing aperture could be formed in her claw. This would allow her to fire the laser as a normal Mister Gutsy could, and they could reuse the same targeting software in case Miss Nanny's did not come with that sort of thing standard.
  
  The high rate of fire laser had a relatively low damage per hit, but it was perfect for protecting oneself or one's boyfriend from being swarmed. Swarmed by, say... a swarm of ants. Lily hadn't forgotten about AntAgonizer's potential future murder of the sweet Miss Nanny. And the planned diamondoid-based chassis would be all but immune to an ant attacking it. It would also be somewhat more resistant to lasers, but this would come at the cost of being vulnerable to plasma weapons. Diamonds, despite being incredibly strong, were still just made of carbon after all and carbon burned.
  
  Lily knew that there was no such thing in this world as solutions - there were only trade-offs, and this trade-off was a pretty good one. Lily would warn Scott not to get in a shooting war with the Brotherhood or Enclave, and it should be fine.
  
  Lily sat in her room in the Mechanist's secret lair, programming these plans on her CAD software while her fabricator ran another nanohive. She had gotten it down to six hours per nanite factory fabricated. She would have the ten spare nanohives built in less than a week. Getting pure carbon was already becoming a real hassle, though, so she already had one of the spare nanohives earmarked to build a recycler. Dump unwanted trash in, and receive feedstock out. Sadly, it wouldn't work very well on most metallic items, but it would work perfectly on organic ones.
  
  Lily finally felt like she was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a point where the only constraint to her building projects might be one of discretion and not of capability. Soon.
  
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  Darth Alice
  Maniacal laughter was issuing forth from the pale blonde woman standing alone in a small room. She was wearing nothing but her bra and panties and had her arms raised into the sky. Spinning in place, long braid swinging freely while she cackled, "Mwahahahahaha!"
  
  She suddenly had the thought that at this moment, spinning and cackling like mad over her invention; she looked like an older blonde, more voluptuous version of Jinx from League; even her braid was somewhat similar. So, was this how a mad scientist got her start? Would she be building fish-shaped rocket launchers next? Or blowing up Piltover? What even would be the Fallout equivalent of Piltover? NCR? Perhaps she should stop cackling, but she was just so pleased with herself.
  
  It has been over five weeks, and now her first extremely modest nano-fabrication system was almost completely finished and, in fact, in operation. The first project was a set of mechanical armatures and fine robotic gripper-manipulators that would be installed back on the fabricator. It would allow her to queue prints without her being here to remove items from the fabricator herself. This was especially important on some parts that required complex doping strategies, for example, where the armature could remove the in-process print from the fabrication chamber and place it in what she was calling the doping chamber and visa-versa.
  
  In addition to supplies of carbon, the fabricator had supplies of the four most common dopants for carbon allotropes to achieve differing effects. One of the most critical dopants was a simple proton accelerator that would bombard specific parts of any print with protons at high speeds.
  
  Some allotropes of carbon became magnetic when bombarded by protons, you see, Lily thought smugly to herself. So, that meant she could build entire electrical motors or generators out of nothing but carbon! In a single manufacturing process!
  
  Sadly, she could not actually utilize this feature at present because it was even more energy-intensive to extract hydrogen from water and then accelerate it at things, and Scott's lair didn't quite have enough electricity for all that. You'd think it would take much more energy for a mass of nanomachines to make diamondoid materials, but it didn't. It still used a lot, but nowhere what the proton gun did. Maybe if she didn't have to extract the hydrogen from water in real-time, but trying to keep any amount of hydrogen sequestered was just so annoying. It leaked through everything and tended to make things explode or catch fire, especially things connected to high-voltage, high-current electricity. She didn't have the engineering chops to be confident about it, even with access to super-materials.
  
  She was still giddy and did a little dance instead of a spin, "How did I do it?! Nanomachines, son!"
  
  Since she could also turn some carbon allotropes conductive, semi-conductive or insulative at will, that also the opened the possibility of creating what Lily would describe as traditional transistor-based computing technology without using a silicon semiconductor substrate. However, this batch process of moving back and forth from the doping to the fabricator area was slower, and visa-versa severely limited the printing resolution. The theoretical possible transistor density in this process was something similar to what Lily felt was Intel or AMD's 10-nanometer process. This was only a few years out of date by the time her memories of her life in America stopped. The only problem was that Lily wasn't entirely confident she could design an entire computing architecture from the ground up. Sure, she had taken classes on the theory behind computing architecture and was a professional electrical engineer. Still, in truth, she was the type of engineer that would buy processors from Texas Instruments or similar companies rather than design them herself. She built consumer products! Her other memories weren't much help, either, as they had stopped using a traditional transistor computer architecture ages ago. It was like asking someone who built nuclear submarines to build a sailing brig - they know it's supposed to float, probably be made out of wood, have canvas to catch the wind, and sleeker was better than not... but that might be it.
  
  Still, this was a massive opportunity for her. The Fallout universe had a real gap between their super-tech and the stuff that looked like it was pulled out of the TV show Mad Men or the 1960s in general. She did not entirely know how she would market such things without getting a lot of attention on herself, but it had to be possible. Either that or just accumulating enough strength so that subsuming her or wiping her off the board cost too much to do.
  
  Quantum computers were still impossible for her, but she saw a time when she could fabricate the optical crystalline hyper-matrix that comprised the quantum cores she was most familiar with out of diamond. She thought it wasn't impossible or even hard; it was just maybe three or four fabricator generations beyond her current technology base.
  
  How the Fallout universe scientists approached quantum computing was vastly different from transhumanity. Still, Lily felt that their quantum cores were not much inferior to the ones she was familiar with, if at all. However, they looked like a Rube Goldberg device of dozens of different elemental types and odd structures when she scanned a few cores from different robots. Lily wasn't confident she would ever be able to reproduce them without raiding a RobCo factory and spending months reading their engineering notes. But, she wasn't against doing precisely that - seeing a different way to accomplish the same thing was incredibly valuable. She surmised that the Fallout quantum cores definitely "cost" more than the optical equivalents, if only because they weren't used in absolutely everything. You wouldn't still use vacuum tubes unless they were much cheaper.
  
  She would sit here waiting for the robotic arms to finish printing before connecting them to the motors she already installed on the fabricator and calibrating their precision, both in accuracy and force exerted.
  
  Then she would start her first queue, which would be the plasma accelerator loops, to build herself a reliable electrical supply. She hadn't completely solved the cooling issues, not to her satisfaction.
  
  When she moved to a more permanent address in Megaton, she intended to, perhaps, utilize the waste heat through a heat exchanger to power a distillation rig to produce fresh, clean water from irradiated water. The by-product of that over time would be a concentrated, highly radioactive bilge water that over time would prove troublesome to deal with. Unfortunately, none of the radionuclides in the radioactive water was that useful, either. Mostly it was Caesium, radioactive Iodine, Strontium and minute quantities of plutonium but mostly the less useful Pu-238 isotope that wasn't fissionable.
  
  In other words, it was going to be a big hassle that she would require infrastructure and either highly radiation-resistant robots or highly radiation-resistant workers to help her with.
  
  However, what she could do right now was leverage the weirdly effective, and as of yet unreproducible, technology of Fallout to take a shortcut. It was apparent that there was some sort of miraculous materials technology Fallout used for either heat dispersal or, perhaps, heat reflection. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to carry a micro fusion cell at all! It would be roughly the same temperature as the plasma it contained inside its fusion reaction and would either melt itself or the person carrying it.
  
  Lily had already scanned micro fusion cells and didn't have the foggiest idea of how it worked, but she was leaning towards the concept of heat reflection, or rather more accurately called a perfect insulator. It should be physically impossible. But, otherwise, how would a micro fusion cell sustain a fusion reaction for hundreds of years, even if it was just idling? That was just her speculation on why it worked, what it was doing but now how it was doing it.
  
  In any case, she had utilized the spare heat-sinks from broken Sentrybots, which also utilize a sustained fusion reaction for power, for her electrical generator idea.
  
  It was not ideal, not in the least. You just had to look at a Sentrybot in combat to realize they hadn't gotten all the kinks out - they overheated all the time! So much so that this repair facility had over three dozen extra cooling rods when they only had five or six sentrybots. It seemed to be the primary engineering casualty of that series of robots.
  
  Lily should be able to get over two megawatts of continuous power out of the generator she designed but utilizing the Sentrybot cooling technology, she would be limited to no more than two hundred kilowatts.
  
  Still, two hundred kilowatts was enough to power her fabricator completely and her recycler twice over. While this made her, of course, a far ways from her dream of a nuclear-powered Vertibird, she would definitely be able to power her projects and clinic at Megaton and possibly still have power left to sell to the city, even if she could not incorporate it into a water purifier, at least at first.
  
  In fact, after she very carefully, and from very far away, tested this generator - possibly to destruction since it had the potential to be so dangerous, she intended to build Scott and Sophie one and leave it here. He had mentioned that whatever system he had managed to hook into was getting more finicky every year.
  
  And if they ever had to flee his lair, they could take it, and their growing army of killbots, with them and setup essentially anywhere and be guaranteed to at least have some infrastructure if only power.
  
  She hadn't managed to entirely stop giggling until the armatures were installed, tested and initiating the first print queue.
  
  She practically skipped to town to work a shift in her clinic. Nothing could dampen her mood!
  
  Lily stared, depressed, at her patient. She would never have realized how many medical problems in the apocalypse would be, either tooth or boil-related before she arrived here. Such things were, essentially, impossible the last time she practised medicine. In fact, the only real experience Lily's memories had practising medicine was either trauma-related or involved elective surgeries! When you were immune to essentially all diseases, didn't age, and would even grow your hand back like a lizard's tail if it was chopped off, you just didn't need to go to the doctor too often.
  
  It was the main reason she had branched out into genetics oh so many years ago. There was so much more work if you provided bioware mods to any and all types of biomorphs instead of just healing them. And then, when you go down the road of customized human augmentation, well, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, you end up as a giant robot spider. Happened to people all the time, really.
  
  And when you're a giant robot spider, well, it makes perfect sense that you'd spend more of your time researching robotic augmentations. Altogether it made for a full life, but a good life. A good life that didn't involve pulling teeth or disinfecting boils. To say nothing of the rashes!
  
  "Thanks, Doc!" said the man who hadn't seen a bathtub or shower, perhaps ever.
  
  "Of course, any time," cheerfully replied the young Doctor, who must have clearly spent all of her level-up points into Acting to maintain such a professional bedside manner.
  
  Lily sighed and glanced over at Alice, the girl who had been her assistant for the past five weeks. She had gradually allowed the young woman to help with procedures, and she seemed to be learning a few things, at least. She was less useless than she had been at first, at the very least. Lily had begun paying her the last three weeks, even.
  
  Lily smirked, "What's the most surprising thing you've learned about the glamorous world of medicine, Alice?"
  
  Alice paused while cleaning up the exam room, "Probably that almost every case of a baby brought in with breathing problems has been booger related, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily snorted, then chuckled. It was true. Infants weren't really built to breathe from anything but their noses. They could, but not well. At that age, their mouths were optimized to suckle. "About 85%, I'd say. They don't tell you that in medical school, either."
  
  Not that she had ever gone to medical school, precisely. She received her initial medical training so many years ago as the apprentice of a Chinese doctor who had fled the planet Earth on the same evacuation shuttle Lily herself had taken. They had watched, together, as the TITANs deployed anti-matter warheads on the sprawling city they had lived in, and Lily had grown up in... Wait, did that mean she used to be Chinese? She could certainly speak it, but her memories of self prior to when she became a synthmorph were spotty or altogether absent. For a couple of decades, there Apprenticeships in many fields were the norm.
  
  Perhaps the booger thing was on the curriculum in medical school back in America, though, but Lily thought they probably let the new doctors figure that out in residency for themselves, too. For the laughs, if nothing else.
  
  Lily tilted her head to one side and asked the slightly younger-looking woman, "So, what are your plans when I leave Canterbury Commons in a couple of weeks, Alice?" If she said to practice medicine, Lily might shoot her. She could barely lance a boil at this point.
  
  Alice looked nervous, bringing her hands up to her modest bosom, "Well, I had been wondering... if I could come with you?"
  
  Lily blinked. Okay, perhaps she should have expected that? But she didn't. She pursed her lips together, "Why? Weren't you devoted to Canterbury Commons?" Lily found the idea of being devoted to any place, much less a two-horse town like Canterbury Commons. Why, it only had ONE Mad Scientist in it, if you didn't count Lily herself, which she didn't.
  
  Alice smiled and said in a tone that made it clear that her devotion was somewhat wavering, "Yes, my family is here. But if I work and learn from you for a year, two, maybe even three, I would know more than most self-described doctors in the Wastes. Certainly more the most of the quacks that come around on caravans. I don't know where this 'medical school' you went to is, but they taught you actual medicine, biology, and anatomy!" Her tone had the same feeling of zealotry that Lily tended to get when she was able to talk to someone about replacing a limb or organ with a superior synthetic alternative, which caused Lily to raise her eyebrows. Then Alice continued, "After that, I could come back, and I'd BE someone in this town. I'd be important, knowledgable, valuable! Uhhh... I mean, if it was okay with you, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily snickered slightly but considered things. She would need staff at the clinic she was going to set up in Megaton, and it was not like she had any desire to keep any of her purely medical and anatomical knowledge secret. If she could just download it into Alice's head, she would do so, but that would require both of them to have either neural meshes or cyberbrains, cortical stacks and for Lily to use an ego-bridge.
  
  On the other hand, she definitely had the desire to keep some of her knowledge about, specifically, nanomachines secret for as long as she could. It would be hard to teach the girl medicine when she used her own medichines in procedures so liberally. At the moment, she was just calling it medicine, but an apprentice doctor worth her salt wouldn't accept that prevarication for too long.
  
  Lily squinted. Of course, she would teach her as much medicine that did not involve the use of nanomachines, but it would be kind of hard to hide, and it would be dickish to say that it was medicine, and you can never have it.
  
  Perhaps she could install one of the inferior nanohives in Alice if she "graduated" her as someone that wouldn't shame Lily by her practice of medicine on her own? They could be programmed as medichines, except they were bigger than was ideal. They'd work okay for most things, but they were too big to do anything in the brain, for example.
  
  It was an option and one she could even do now. And it would be practically impossible to not advance her fabrication technology in the one to three years it might take Alice to learn. So, that wasn't really an impediment at all.
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "On two conditions. You may not like them; if so, you do not have to agree."
  
  Alice shrieked in excitement, jumping up and down. "Of course, of course! I can't imagine there being something I wouldn't agree to! What are they?"
  
  Lily nodded, "First is loyalty. Personal loyalty, to me. An apprentice is loyal to her Mistress and keeps her Mistress' secrets, of which I may have one or two. When an apprentice reaches the stage in her craft that she can practice on her own, the requirement for personal loyalty is removed - but the requirement to keep her former Mistress' secrets remains. An apprentice goes where her Mistress goes and, for the most part, does what her Mistress tells her to do. My obligations are to teach, provide and care for you until you reach such a stage."
  
  Lily continued to stare at the younger girl before continuing, "You don't have the proper cultural referents to understand the personal obligations in both honour and your physical body that a military commitment would entail, but it is similar to that. Imagine if, for some reason, you joined the Brotherhood of Steel as an Initiate. That is the level of commitment I expect. Understood?"
  
  Alice paused to parse out that sentence before nodding, "Y-yes, ma'am!"
  
  Lily smirked, "We aren't actually a military, Alice. You can just continue calling me Dr St. Claire. In formal situations, for which you also have also have no reference for, or when dealing with fellow apprentices, of which there are presently none, you would refer to me as Mistress or Mistress St. Claire."
  
  Alice nodded her head rapidly.
  
  Lily took a breath and said, "The next condition is perhaps the one that may be difficult for you to accept and is, simply, this: I won't allow someone to besmirch my reputation. An apprentice reflects on the Mistress. As such, I will not permit you to practice medicine independently until I am satisfied you will not shame me in so doing. That means if you ever quit before I declare your apprenticeship over or if I expel you for some reason, and I would only do that for a serious breach of trust, then you may never practice medicine in your life. Even if you are, by comparison to some Wasteland quack, vastly superior. "
  
  Alice looked quite nervous at how serious Lily seemed to be. "Uh, I can understand that. And I certainly will never break your trust. So I can agree with that!"
  
  Lily smiled slightly, "Okay, but think about it. I am not joking. If I found out a hypothetical former apprentice was about to make me look like a quack, I would stop him or her in the most expedient method possible. Possibly fatally. Do you understand?"
  
  Alice gulped then but, after a moment, nodded. "I won't let you down!"
  
  Lily sighed, then nodded. "Alright, Alice. I won't make you kowtow three times because honestly, nobody does that anymore, even when that old bastard made me do it. Plus, China blew half the world to cinders here. What is your family name, Alice?"
  
  Alice looked embarrassed, "Uh, we don't really have one? When I said family, I meant more along the lines of fellow orphans? There are three of us. They'll probably come with me to Megaton, but we can look after each other."
  
  Lily pinched the bridge of her nose. "In the culture I was trained in, an Apprentice in your situation would take the name of her Mistress, but I feel that would make everybody extremely confused here. So we will start thinking of a family name that suits you, okay? No hurry." The girl nodded.
  
  "Well, then, Alice of Canterbury Commons, I accept you as my apprentice. You are the first apprentice of my lineage. That'll make you the Senior Apprentice if I am ever stupid enough to agree to teach someone else something," Lily said the first part formally and the latter part teasingly.
  
  Alice made a fist bump, "Yessss!"
  
  "Oh, and I don't pay apprentices," Lily added quickly. Alice looked a bit said and said, "Aww..." To which Lily grinned and chuckled, "I'm just messing with you. Of course, I pay apprentices. We're not cultivating immortality here; I already know how to achieve it, after all."
  
  Lily wondered if she was being incredibly stupid, but she decided it didn't much matter either way. She had never taken an Apprentice before. By the time she was capable of doing so, not only was she a robotic spider with a reputation for being slightly highly eccentric but also traditional places of learning had already been reestablished in most habitats.
  
  She was interrupted from her reverie by Alice greeting someone at the door. Oh, yay, another rash or something, Lily thought.
  
  A man Lily had never seen before was talking to Alice, who had motioned to her. The man started, "Doc St. Claire?"
  
  Lily asked in her best professionally cheery tone, "That's me! What seems to be the problem today?"
  
  The man grinned, "No problem! I'm calling about the notice I saw that said you would pay to examine someone if they had an unusual talent?"
  
  Lily felt her interest rise. "That's true. It has to be a talent or quirk you were born with, for the most part, and you have to be able to prove that you have it. It doesn't have to be useful, necessarily either. Some examples are things like having perfect pitch, needing to sleep less than the average person, being born ambidextrous, or being really good at multitasking. But there are probably thousands of other different quirks a person might be born with that I'd be interested in. As I said, it doesn't have to be useful at all."
  
  The man chuckled evilly, "Oh, mine is definitely useful. You see... My name is Edgar, and I'm the fastest man alive."
  
  Barry Allen, is that you?!
  
  Lily clucked her tongue. "Like... running?"
  
  The man shook his head, "My hands! But I'm guessin' my reflexes, actually. I'm the fastest draw there is. So, very useful to me as a caravan guard."
  
  That was useful. Lily hummed for a moment while she considered a safe way to test his reflexes. She nodded and said, "I'm pretty fast myself. Have you ever played the slap game?"
  
  The man grinned widely . "Have I? I used to make more caps on that than I did working as a guard, but almost everyone has wised up now, even if they've never met me before. So, now I guess I am the all-Capital slap game champion or some shit. So now I just do it for the love of the sport, ya?"
  
  Lily chuckled. She liked men who seemed so sure of themselves, but only if they could actually back it up. "Alright. If you beat me, I'll agree that you have a special quirk of quickness. So I'll give you one hundred caps to get a scraping of the inside of your cheek and a small sample of your blood. Deal?"
  
  The man nodded. "Ah... this is so nostalgic. This might also be the biggest pot I've ever played for in the slap game, too." He held his hands out and leered a bit at her, "You fancy being on top or bottom?"
  
  Lily snorted. That was so blatant she couldn't even find herself offended; instead, she played it straight, raising an eyebrow before laying her palms gently on top of his hand and replied archly, "On top, of course. Whenever you're ready."
  
  She really was faster than the vast majority of people and was going to look forward to humiliating him if he was bullshitting her.
  
  He waggled his eyebrows, but she wouldn't be distracted. After a short delay, Lily saw his hands begin to move, and she started to yank her hands out of the way, only for them to get a sharp slap on her fingers. She had halfway gotten her hand out of the way, but it wasn't good enough.
  
  "Wow! You weren't lyin', Doc! You really are fast. That may be the closest anyone's come to beating me, but I suppose I remain undefeated," the man named Edgar gloated.
  
  Lily had to admit; she was surprised and impressed. This Edgar had all the hallmarks of a genetic, inheritable trait. Some mutation to the myelin sheaths in his nerves, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was worth studying. "Okay, that was impressively fast. You win. Come into the exam room with me briefly, so I can take my samples, and the caps are yours."
  
  "Yess! Alright, Doc. Lead the way," Edgar said.
  
  It did not take long for Lily to take both a cheek scraping and a blood sample. She then counted out one hundred caps and handed them to him, and walked him to the door. Standing just outside, he looked at her appraisingly, "You know, Doc... I'll be in town two days if you want a rematch. I'll let you be on top again."
  
  Lily snorted at the thinly disguised proposition. The man would be attractive if he wasn't so dirty. She decided not to let him down easily, "Maybe next time you proposition a lady, first take a shower, a bath or at least look up the word soap in a dictionary." She paused, and then added conspiratorially, "And maybe don't call yourself the fastest man alive; she might believe it."
  
  "Wait! I'm not fast like tha-" Lily waved and closed the door in his face.
  
  Her new apprentice cracked up laughing behind her.
  
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  Late fees assessed
  Scott's voice was always a bit more tender when he talked to his favourite robot, "Thank you, Sophie. Please run the data line back to the terminal, and we can start after Lily finishes up with that... giant... water heater?" He seemed a little at loose ends, seeing the extensive collection of eclectic items the blonde woman had prepared.
  
  Lily was, in fact, setting up a giant water heater, among other things. After that was done, it was time to test the first generator. And, to do that, she had to run it at its maximum rated continuous power, well, continuously.
  
  That was a non-trivial problem, but one most people wouldn't consider, namely - what do you do with all that power you've generated? It had to go somewhere, and despite what many people would think, you couldn't just wire into the Earth and call it a day; that just wouldn't work reliably.
  
  So, Lily had wired in a number of power-intensive appliances, for lack of a better word. The station she was finishing would heat a huge tank of water, about the size of two hot tubs and heat it rapidly, essentially converting electricity into heat.
  
  Another station had a bunch of lasers from disassembled Protectrons set to fire as fast as their cooling could manage, targeting the ground.
  
  But the most significant power draw was something she had found at a nearby wrecked satellite dish. Lily felt it must be a former military radar station because she carted off the biggest cavity magnetron she'd ever seen. It must have weighed two metric tons, and it was a real pain, involving several robots and a lot of rope, getting it back to Scott's lair.
  
  At first, Scott had been questioning why she had spent nearly four hours trying to cart the thing back until he saw it. But then, all he said was, "That is really cool." He still admitted he had no idea what the hell they would ever use it for, but he no longer complained about having it.
  
  Lily had rigged a crude dish antenna, about the size of an umbrella, and hooked it up. She was careful to use superconducting wires going from the generator to the magnetron and then a flexible waveguide from the magnetron to the dish; otherwise, she would need over three centimetres thick wire to handle the approximately one hundred and forty-kilowatt draw; she suspected the dish to be able to output.
  
  Scott asked bluntly, "So, what is this test about and why are we out here doing it?"
  
  Lily smiled at him, "Ah, it is a test of my latest invention. Also, part of the parting presents I am preparing for you two. I shall be leaving to go to Megaton in two to three weeks. We've reached the, how you say, diminishing returns with our lessons, yes?"
  
  Scott considered this for a moment before nodding, "Yes. You've learned more in a month and a half than I did in five years when I first started out. I still have more to teach, but it would be a lot slower, I agree."
  
  Sophie floated up and waggled her manipulators, "Oh, we shall be sorry to see you go, Miss Lily! And you needn't have prepared any gifts! Is this... some sort of electric generator or battery?"
  
  They all backed into what Lily designated the safe area before she powered up the generator from the terminal, which began powering the various power sinks. Lasers began firing at the ground at their maximum safe continuous rate, given their cooling, while the water in the tank began bubbling.
  
  Scott frowned at the tank of water. "I wish we could collect the steam so we could condense it back into water; letting it all go to waste is inefficient."
  
  Lily smiled, "Ah, yes. I 'ad considered that, but it would 'ave taken a lot more time. Perhaps you could make a project of it and turn it into a water purifier yourself. You even 'ave robot labour to deal with the radioactive waste products. And yes, Sophie, it is an electric generator of sorts. You slot in a micro fusion cell, which outputs electricity quite efficiently. But, ahhh... since it is doing this by accelerating extremely high-temperature plasma from the fusion cell, we shouldn't be within the immediate area of it while testing is being conducted."
  
  She tapped another key, activating the magnetron. There was, immediately, a rather loud hum and buzzing noise. Lily frowned, squinting at the dish's angle. She realized she should have angled it a little more towards the ground. More than a kilometre away, she could see a patch of land about five meters in diameter start to blacken. Hopefully, it wouldn't start a fire, but it wasn't like there was much to burn. Lily thought there must be a bit of dead plant matter that she was microwave cooking which caused the discolouration.
  
  Scott blinked, glancing between the dish and then squinting at the spot a kilometre away and back again. A pump began audibly running, running simple water as a coolant through the dish's outer ring, causing some steam to rise up from the dish in a slow continuous hiss.
  
  Scott asked, "How long can that dish keep going like that?"
  
  Lily considered that for a moment, "Ahh... I 'spose till the coolant runs out. Which might be two 'ours? I only need maybe an hour or so running at max output like this to see any issues." She had already adjusted the max output down to about 185KW; a little disappointing that it wasn't reaching the full 200 she was hoping for. She always liked nice round numbers.
  
  Lily peered at the telemetry from the terminal. The Sentrybot coolant system was working without struggling at all. As it was only at high power levels that Sentrybots tended to overheat. If you went by the specs for the Sentrybot's cooling rods, she should be able to run this thing at three times the output, but she just didn't believe it.
  
  There was a loud chittering; a mutated ant had gone to investigate the black spot, only for the microwave beam to hit it. It reminded Lily exactly of using a magnifying glass to burn ants. It just screamed, curled up and started smoking.
  
  Scott nodded decisively, "Well, I've found a use for that giant magnetron you brought home, Lily." She raised an eyebrow, "This?"
  
  He nodded, "I'll mount the dish on a gimbal salvaged from an auto-turret and mount it on the roof, pointing out towards the way to our front door. I might build a second dish, wire them both to that magnetron and put the second on a similar setup facing the back entrance."
  
  Sophie interrupted him, "'Oney, 'oney... we can't just cook every solicitor who comes to our door!" Scott looked like he wanted to dispute the statement because he was looking at a way to do just that. In fact, he gestured right at the steaming dish as if he were impeaching her testimony.
  
  Sophie paused, "Ahh... I mean, we shouldn't just cook any uninvited solicitors."
  
  Scott sighed, "Ah, probably not... but what if we get put under siege? Or the town turns against us? I presume this device could be powered back to something less... fatal?"
  
  He glanced at Lily, who coughed, "I would guess so, the range would suffer, and I certainly don't think you'd get many volunteers to test it. I know of similar weapons designed to use microwaves this way non-lethally, they're called Microwave Agonizers, and they are supposed to feel like your skin is on fire without actually doing any appreciable 'arm. As a riot control weapon. I guess it'd be a software problem for you, eh?"
  
  The Mechanist nodded emphatically, probably already thinking of ways to work it out. Still, he asked curiously, "How does your generator convert the plasma inside a micro fusion cell to electricity?"
  
  Lily spent the rest of the hour and a half or so briefly explaining the operating principles behind a magneto-hydrodynamic generator. He understood the broad strokes of her explanation, but the devil was in the details with a composite system like this.
  
  Feeling satisfied, she began the shut-down sequence on the generator. She wouldn't be able to move it safely for several hours, as the plasma continued to spin down in the acceleration loop for some time before being, primarily, captured in the micro fusion cell. Some of it was vented overboard during the shut-down process, which made start-up and shut-down the most fuel inefficient part of this generator. Ideally, it should be run continuously even if it was only idle. Lily hummed a bit and made a note to add that to the user operator's manual she was writing for it.
  
  "Where did you find all those books you lent me?" Lily wanted to know. She needed to find some basic biology, anatomy and medical texts so she could actually educate her new apprentice. She did not want to have to write them herself, even if she definitely would have to write some of the higher-order texts from memory, eventually.
  
  Scott nodded, "Ah, there is an old municipal library about a mile and a half west of here. Sophie knows precisely where it is and can mark it on your PipBoy - there was a surprising number of in-tact books there. I haven't been there in over a year, though."
  
  Lily glanced up at the sky. It was still relatively early in the morning. She did not have anything else to do today and felt much more confident going around the nearby areas alone. She would head out.
  
  Lily decided to travel light. She would only carry some water, a single meal, her laser pistol, her normal pistol, which she had installed a silencer on after purchasing one from a merchant in town, and the laser rifle she had finished refurbishing. After sitting in that dorm room for hundreds of years, it hadn't been in good condition. Lily had to replace some of the lenses in both the rifle and the attached 3x optics.
  
  Lily checked on her print queue before she headed out. The fabricator was about halfway finished with the necessary parts for the construction of a recycler. The recycler was taking the form of a large drum or perhaps an extra large trash can. It would be relatively user-friendly, just drop unwanted organic trash and then later come to pick up the carbon feedstock.
  
  The recycler would be ready for assembly by the time she got back. That was good, too, since she did not have much carbon left to build things with. She had been making do with three or four large bags of charcoal that she had found in discount stores as a carbon source. Still, considering as charcoal was actually extremely useful in the Apocalypse, she was amazed she had seen as many bags as she had.
  
  The hike didn't take a long time at all. She had noticed she was a lot stronger and had a lot more endurance than when she got into this universe. She was at the point where she was slightly stronger than most men she had seen, although she would still lose out to men who tried even slightly to work out.
  
  She did take the Mister Handy, in case she brought back a lot of books. Unfortunately, she still hadn't managed to build her one version, as nobody had any Mister Handy parts. It might have to wait until she settled in Megaton. Despite being a trade hub, there weren't many randomly available things to purchase or acquire. She was sure she would eventually have to destroy a Mister Handy or Mister Gutsy anyway, although she did not look forward to it because the latter were especially terrifying if they had their standard plasma weapons.
  
  It might make more sense to reverse engineer the levitation technology, but it was another one that didn't seem immediately obvious how it worked. It seemed like one of those serendipitous discoveries that sometimes happen, as it didn't seem that similar to any other technology in this world that she had seen thus far.
  
  She caught some movement in the area where her target, the library, was clearly visible and came to a halt, hand reaching back to manipulate the switch that deactivated the Mister Handy, which lowered down to the ground and shut down.
  
  Clucking her tongue, she reached back in her bag and pulled out a pair of nice German-built binoculars and put them up to her eyes, crouched by some debris.
  
  She had got a good deal on the binoculars as only one eye would work. She hadn't had a chance to scan and fabricate replacement diamond lenses for that side, so she used them as more of a telescope for now.
  
  She relaxed a bit when the group of people did not look like raiders at all. But the more she watched them, the more her mood started to fall. There were only five of them, and she watched one of five lead three others into the library she intended to loot-three people who seemed to have metal collars around their necks.
  
  Scowling, she replaced her binoculars in their case and put them back in her bag. She glanced at the Mister Handy, seeing that it was mostly concealed and began stalking towards the library, under cover most of the way.
  
  Lily knew that she wasn't, intrinsically, a good person. Not really. If she were, she would have already sent a lot of the information she had from many play-throughs of Fallout 3 to those who could have leveraged it a lot sooner than she planned to.
  
  For example, she could tell Elder Lyons today all about the F.E.V. EEP experiments in Vault 87. Wasn't he chasing the source of Super Mutants in the Capital like Ahab chasing his white whale?
  
  But she did not want to endanger the G.E.C.K. inside Vault 87. If she told Lyons about Vault 87 and they purged the place, they'd bring the G.E.C.K. back to the Citadel. But what if the Brotherhood Outcasts stole it when they left? Then Project Purity would be fucked, as those neo-barbarians in the Outcasts did not give a fuck about people having water.
  
  But most of all, she did not want to endanger herself. That was why she wasn't a good person.
  
  Moreover, if she were being honest with herself, Lily detested the Brotherhood of Steel. She truly did hate everything they stood for. They were a band of backwards Luddites who hated technology but perversely wanted to keep it all for themselves while keeping the rest of humanity in some sort of forced Dark Age, supposedly for their own good. Why? Because of nuclear war? Nuclear explosives were not advanced technology! It was over a hundred-year-old tech even before the Apocalypse.
  
  To keep humanity at the technical level where they would be unable to build a nuclear bomb was to keep them ignorant and brutish. And that was something Lily could never countenance.
  
  She was only as friendly and open to helping the Brotherhood in the Capital because they did not act like the Brotherhood. The Outcasts were or rather would be, absolutely right in that claim. The Outcasts indeed were the true Brotherhood, which is why she would have nothing to do with the Brotherhood until the Outcasts did defect. The remnants of Elder Lyons chapter were nothing much like the Brotherhood she detested, so she could deal with them. They would call themselves something else in an ideal situation, but that was probably an impossibility.
  
  She had to skid to a halt and crouch to avoid one of the two slavers, who decided to do an impromptu patrol around the building before ducking inside with his compatriot and their cargo.
  
  If Lily were a good person, she would make burning Paradise Falls to the ground and killing every slaver inside a priority.
  
  But, even so, she had some morals. She felt that there was, essentially, an unlimited amount of suffering in the world. She couldn't be bothered to dedicate her life to stopping it all; in fact, she was really only planning on ensuring Project Purity's success because the more people around, the better for her.
  
  That said, even if she wouldn't go out of her way to search out injustice... if she saw it right in front of her eyes? That was different. She didn't have any plans to destroy Paradise Falls... she would leave that to the vault dweller, assuming he wasn't a psychopath. But she had plans to kill these two slavers and free their slaves.
  
  Why? Because seeing them enslave people made her sad. So, ultimately, that meant she was killing them because seeing them die would make her feel good, she supposed. It was best, to be honest with yourself.
  
  The municipal library wasn't a large one, but the building was in reasonably good condition. That must be why they stopped; it must be used as a place to rest. Perhaps they were taking an early lunch?
  
  The possibility that they were meeting compatriots here gave her some pause, but not enough to make her reconsider her choices.
  
  She had already resolved to kill two men here, today. If she let them go after that, it would give her depression. Still, it didn't mean she had to go about this stupidly.
  
  She unholstered her pistol and carefully screwed on the suppressor. One of the tools Lily owned was a bullet puller, used to pull bullets out of perfectly good cartridges. 10mm, despite its mass, was still a super-sonic cartridge. Barely. But if you slightly reduced the number of propellent flakes in each bullet, it would be reduced to just under the speed of sound.
  
  That would make a silenced pistol, actually, very quiet. Of course, it would be best if she could catch her targets one at a time, but if that wasn't possible, she would switch to her laser rifle and just surprise them with ferocity.
  
  Lily considered her options but didn't spend long second-guessing herself as she snuck into a side entrance to the library. After all, a good plan violently executed today was better than a perfect plan next Tuesday.
  
  As Lily skulked through the stacks, she couldn't help but notice that the Mechanist was correct and that there was a surprising number of books in what appeared to be in good condition.
  
  She heard people about halfway to the front of the library, which caused her to adjust her sneak speed to dead slow.
  
  Peeking her head briefly from out behind one of the stacks, she identified both her targets and the non-combatants before sneaking a bit closer. The slaves were in a conference room off the entrance, with the two slavers sitting in front of the only door in and out of the conference room.
  
  Amazingly, a glass or plexiglass window on the wall of that conference room was still unbroken. Unfortunately, she would have to walk right past it before she turned the corner to surprise the slavers. She hoped these three didn't give her away.
  
  Sighing, Lily carefully holstered her pistol before unslinging her laser rifle. She was a little disappointed that she wouldn't get to use her silenced pistol with her specially-prepared ammunition, but since the two slavers were together... there was really no point in being quiet after being discovered. She would have surprise on her side, and she was naturally quick, so that just left violence of action, so she would select her most violent weapons.
  
  As she sneaked past the conference room, she could see the three people inside just staring at her, seemingly surprised. They looked like a family, a mom, father and teenage daughter. She looked directly at them and put a finger to her lips before winking. The enslaved man nodded, holding the hands of the girl and woman.
  
  She could hear the two men joking, and she supposed probably eating lunch, just ahead and to the right of her. Holding her rifle one-handed, she pulled a small spherical frag grenade from her bag.
  
  Turning back towards the glass, she waved the distinctive object at the three, who immediately recognized it and quickly moved to the very back of the conference room, crouching behind the table.
  
  Smiling, Lily always liked it when people acted intelligently. Momentarily slinging her rifle, she carefully pulled the pin from the explosive. She didn't really want to give them much time, so after she released the spoon, which flew off with a springing noise, she held onto the grenade for a full one-second count before casually tossing it with her left hand into the hallway next to her.
  
  As she took two steps backwards, she heard, "What was... FUCK!" That was followed by an impressive explosion, which blew the door to the conference room off the hinges.
  
  She didn't waste any more time. She moved forward briskly, rifle at the ready. She didn't do any theatrical leaps into the room or anything but moved with a purpose. She saw two men on the ground next to the splintered and fractured table; they were both groaning, seemingly injured and trying to rise from the ground.
  
  Nope. That won't do.
  
  The laser rifle did not have an appreciable recharge time between shots, unlike the laser pistol, which required about a quarter to a half second to recharge capacitors, so she fired three blasts of light into each of them as quickly as she could pull the trigger, and besides her slightly ringing ears and two feminine voices screaming in distress in the next room everything was quiet.
  
  Before seeing to the hostages-slaves, she supposed, she did a quick circuit in the rest of the rooms in the front of the library. She only saw two slavers, but assumptions make asses out of everyone.
  
  When she was reassured that there were no more living enemies, she slung her rifle before half-opening and half-kicking the door to the conference room open, "Are any of you injured in here? Were there only just two of them?"
  
  The man, who Lily was internally labeling as Dad, said, "No, it was just the two of them. Not that I didn't want to see them die but... Who are you?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to one side like a raptor evaluating a mouse. "It is common courtesy to offer your own name... but I suppose I should have introduced myself first before asking you any questions, so I apologize. I am called Lilianne St. Claire, a medical doctor, scientist, and most important, from your perspective, I think, someone deeply philosophically opposed to the concept of chattel slavery. At your service, sir."
  
  The man sighed, Lily thought in relief, "Thank you. I'm Bill Delacourt; this is my wife Ada and daughter Melissa. Honestly, what happens now? Those scumbags said these collars would detonate if something happened to them, I was expecting to have our heads blow up - but I figured that was better than what was waiting for my wife and daughter at Paradise Falls."
  
  Lily shook her head, "As far as I know there are no deadman switches utilized by the slavers of Paradise Falls. They can be command detonated, though, which Paradise Falls might do if these two slavers are overdue for a long time. Were you just stopping here for lunch, or were they meeting more slavers here?"
  
  Dad looked ill, "We were just stopping to eat, as far as I know. They can track us and blow our heads off all the way across the Capital Wasteland?! What are we going to do?"
  
  Lily nodded, not that she would entirely trust that. "I did mention that I am a scientist, yes? These collars are pre-War technology, the U.S. government invented them to control Chinese P.O.W.s. I can likely remove them without them detonating."
  
  The two woman looked hopeful but the Dad looked slightly angry, "Likely?! How likely?"
  
  Lily couldn't really blame him for being a little anxious, but she wouldn't let him work his way up to yelling at her either, "I'm not sure how to say this delicately, sir, but my hands are much more important to me than any or all of your lives. So, I would not offer if I were not fairly confident."
  
  The older woman placed a hand on the man's arm, "Bill. It's not her fault. And I believe her. I'll let her try to remove mine first."
  
  That got a loud, "Ada! No!" Lily kept the professionally neutral Doctor face on while, internally, she was sighing. She did not like drama, but she couldn't quite tell one of them to decide which of them was the best to risk first. After a minute or two of discussion it was decided to be Ada, after all.
  
  Lily supposed that Ada did not have much confidence in keeping her and her daughter alive if her husband was dead, so the choice made sense to her.
  
  Lily smiled at her, "Okay, sit here. We'll do this like this. First, I will take a look at it. Then I will go and consider the best strategy to remove it, and then I will return. Okay?"
  
  While peering at it from different angles, Lily surreptitiously scanned the device around the woman's neck. "Please stay here, I will return shortly," Lily nodded to them and then left the room. She sat at one of the chairs the slavers were using, surprised it was still in one piece.
  
  She opened the scan in her engineering CAD program and peered at the results. It wasn't really complicated, and she didn't expect it to be. The United States had produced these devices in extremely high quantities, expecting P.O.W.s numbering in the hundreds of thousands and thus limiting how tricksy they could be. Plus, it wasn't like these devices weren't ever intended to be opened or be serviced. There were two primary sensors, and there wasn't even an actual microcontroller controlling them - just some pre-defined arbitrarily set threshold value, she supposed.
  
  Lily closed her eyes and put her thinking cap on, reconsidering her conclusions on the device and her disarming strategy. Had she missed anything? After a moment, she shook her head. No, she hadn't.
  
  She stood back up and hid her scanner again before re-entering the conference room and smiling at the woman, "Okay, I'm ready. Please do not move at all, ma'am."
  
  The woman nodded her head, looking absolutely terrified.
  
  Lily could get the collar off by bypassing only one sensor, the one that used ultrasonics which was designed for tampering-detection and then disabling the detonator, but if she didn't also disable the sensor used to detect the actual collar being opened the collar could still send a signal to Paradise Falls indicating it had been opened.
  
  Lily didn't know for sure that would have any consequences. Still, she felt it was possible that an on-the-ball sociopath might see that signal and then rightly conclude the collar was removed by some good samaritan and then detonate the other two collars remotely before she could take them off. Or, worse, while she was taking them off.
  
  Humming softly, it was only the work of about thirty seconds to bypass both sensors, disconnect the detonator from the firing circuit and unlatch the collar from around the woman's next. She took it carefully from around the woman's next and sat it on the table. "Next?"
  
  The woman brought her hands up to her neck and started sobbing before quickly standing up and ushering her daughter to the seat next. The Dad nodded approvingly at his wife's priorities. How sweet.
  
  She paused before she went to work. Could it be possible that the USA designed multiple collar variants, built differently, as a second layer of protection?
  
  Lily decided that she couldn't say it was impossible. They looked identical from the exterior. Still, this couple probably wouldn't appreciate watching their daughter's head explode any more than she would like accidentally killing her, so Lily went through the whole thing of scanning, retreating into the next room and examining the scans, returning and disarming them twice more. They were all identical, but you never could tell.
  
  The Dad was effusively respectful now, "Thank you so much! Do you know where we are? They kept us blindfolded for part of the trip until we kept tripping over things. I don't even know why they bothered; it wasn't like we could have run away with these collars on."
  
  That made Lily curious too, but since she killed the only people who might have known the answer to the question, she ignored it, "You're about five klicks directly west of a small settlement called Canterbury Commons. If you continue heading west, you'll reach the Potomac river; crossing that river at the bridge and heading west southwest will be the city of Megaton. Does that help you?"
  
  The Dad nodded, "Yes, it does. We will head to Canterbury Commons, then, first."
  
  Lily smiled, "Feel free to take the slavers' equipment. They were kind enough to set their packs closer to the door and well outside the blast range of that frag grenade. I've searched their bodies already; they had about thirty caps each, which you can also take. There's a couple of shotguns, a pistol, and a variety of other small things that might be quite useful to you but are of little value to me at the present time."
  
  The man looked conflicted, his pride warring with his pragmatism. Deciding that they might end up in the same position if he didn't have a little money or a weapon if they met the wrong person, he finally nodded, "Thank you very much, Doctor St. Claire."
  
  Lily excused herself and went to search the stacks. She had biology books to find for her apprentice.
  
  She stopped for a moment to consider the possible education level her apprentice had before today.
  
  Nodding, Lily also decided to take basic math, algebra and a few other basics if she could find them. No one learning from her would be ignorant for long. Or else!
  
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  Lesson plans
  Jerome Simms was a disagreeable man. Other people called him an asshole. He took that as something to be proud of, which was why he mostly worked alone.
  
  His current assignment was to confirm the most likely death of two freelancers and three slaves and return the valuable collars if possible. Eulogy did not like the devices to be out of Paradise Falls's control, beyond the fact that they were somewhat expensive.
  
  It was a bullshit job, but at least it was an easy one. The two freelancers were almost a week overdue, and the three activated collars had not moved in longer than that. Obviously, the two idiots had gotten themselves and good merchandise killed by some feral ghouls or another stupid thing.
  
  Jerome wouldn't be so disagreeable if he weren't surrounded by idiots all the time.
  
  Jerome made sure to pace himself so as to arrive at the last reported position of the collars early enough in the day that there would be full light. He wasn't going to let some stupid fucking zombie jump out of the dark and surprise him.
  
  He was equally as careful when he began his assessment of the building, circling the exterior twice and examining each possible entrance. Odd, he did not see any usual signs of a ghoul infestation. He decided not to make his entrance at the front like a chump would but instead skulked through a side door.
  
  The collars were definitely in this building and still active, so he was on the lookout for dead bodies. Unfortunately, he didn't have any tools to remove the collars safely. There was no way something like that would be allowed outside of Paradise Falls, so he would have to cut their stupid heads off, and the collar would shut down as soon as it detected it was not around someone's neck anymore, which would make them safe to transport back, at least.
  
  He did not see any sign of ghouls inside, either. Just a bunch of fucking books. He searched each room methodically while working his way to the front of the building.
  
  He found the two freelancers near the front of the building, very dead. Not surprising, but what was surprising was that they had not been chewed on at all. In fact, each had been shot several times with obvious laser weapons. Jerome groaned, "You stupid fucks... "
  
  Had they run into the fucking Brotherhood or Enclave? The Brotherhood wouldn't have shot the merchandise too, but the Enclave probably would have. Or maybe it was just some other player that used energy weapons.
  
  He grunted softly as his attempt to rifle through their pockets came up empty. Would Enclave soldiers take the caps out of their pockets? Did Enclave soldiers even use caps? Odd. He kicked the penniless fools for wasting his time; he was hoping they would have something of value at least.
  
  He was cautious and still on the lookout for the dead merchandise. Their bodies had to be in this building if the collars were still active.
  
  His footsteps came to a stop as he began searching a small room with a long table and a bunch of chairs. There were no bodies in here, but there was a slave collar, unlocked, sitting on top of the table.
  
  Jerome scowled. Things were getting more fucked up. The slave collars were pre-war tech and almost impossible for a person without the proper keys to remove, or at least that was what everyone thought. Eulogy would want to know about this. The idea that there was some group of sneaky abolitionist bastards skulking around, killing their men and freeing their merchandise would incense the scary man who had recently come to power.
  
  It wasn't that uncommon for some new goodie two-shoe group to form up to try to stop them from doing what they always have done. It had happened a couple of times in the past. Whatever new band of heroes this was, they would be ground into dust like all the ones before had...
  
  Walking over to the table, he noticed that the collar was sitting on a piece of paper, folded in half to conceal what was written on it. A letter?
  
  Jerome growled when he saw that there was text written on the side of the paper he could read. It was printed in bold capital letters, "DEAR SLAVER ASSHOLE."
  
  Eulogy was going to love this; these fucks had just signed their own death warrant - literally. Shaking his head while he reached out to move the collar out of the way so he could see what was written in the letter, he just didn't understand how people could be so stupid.
  
  He picked up the collar and moved to put it in his pack when he felt it vibrating for the briefest moment.
  
  *CRUMP-BOOM*
  
  An explosion that was significantly larger than a standard slave collar rocked the conference room of the old library. Generally, if a slave collar exploded while a person was carrying it, it would result in, at most, a missing hand. However, it hadn't taken Lily more than five minutes to carefully score the metal of one collar with her laser pistol, weakening it significantly and ensuring it would fragment and burst into a bunch of metal shards moving at high speed in an explosion.
  
  That, combined with taking all three explosives charges and putting them into that single collar, turned a collar into an effective fragmentation grenade. It was simplicity itself to reactivate the self-destruct and rig it to go off if the collar was disturbed at all.
  
  The hardest part was slightly damaging the battery, ensuring that the device would only function for a couple of weeks at most. Lily did not want to leave a booby trap in a library forever, after all.
  
  The dust was slowly settling in the conference room, along with a sheet of paper slowly falling through the air like a feather. It finally landed on the dead body of Jerome Simms, but the only thing written on it was, "LOL."
  
  A week later.
  
  One of his assistants came to see Eulogy Jones with a report, "Simms still hasn't returned. He's been overdue for five days. He's dead, for sure."
  
  Eulogy shrugged, "Well... no big loss. Jerome was an asshole. Are those collars still at that same location?"
  
  His assistant nodded after a moment, "One of them reported self-destructing, but the other two are there. I bet a fucking deathclaw or something tried to eat the neck of one of the slaves it was on, finally."
  
  Eulogy sighed, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Well, detonate the last two collars and mark that location as dangerous on the map. Don't use it as a stop-over point anymore."
  
  The assistant nodded, "Yes, boss."
  
  Lily stared at the anxious-looking girl before asking, finally, "What is the problem?"
  
  Alice sat at a table; in front of her were sheets of paper and a pencil, "You said this was an IQ test. What if I'm stupid?! Will you kick me out?"
  
  Lily snorted, "You're clearly more intelligent than the average person; I know that by just talking with you. If you think your score is too low, well, we will just work on improving it."
  
  Alice looked surprised, "I thought it was impossible to increase one's IQ?"
  
  Lily shook her head and descended into lecture mode, "I don't really like that term in the first place. I shouldn't have used it. But... intelligence can be roughly divided into two forms. The first is fluid intelligence, which is what most people refer to when they use the term IQ. It roughly equates to a person's ability to learn new things and deal with unexpected situations. The other type is crystallized intelligence, which deals with a person's ability to apply already learned knowledge and skills. For example, my ability to diagnose and treat an illness is mostly a function of my crystallized intelligence. I am not flexing my fluid intelligence at all, except if it is a novel disease I have not seen before."
  
  Alice nodded; she knew enough about the tone Lily had taken to know not to interrupt her when she was on a roll like this.
  
  Lily continued, "Well, the fact is that fluid intelligence, what people call IQ, changes over a person's life... The older an average human gets, the less fluid intelligence they have! However, crystalized intelligence stays the same even with age, absent dementia. You probably know this intuitively even if you haven't intellectually put two and two together. Your average old human has an amazing breadth of knowledge and skills in the areas they focused on, but ask them to learn something new?"
  
  Lily shook her head sadly before saying, "Often, their ability to learn brand new skills is dependent on how well they can mentally shoe-horn that new skill into an already learned paradigm."
  
  The younger girl looked a bit interested in the discussion but, "That is interesting, but what is the point?"
  
  Lily sighed, "It just shows you that so-called 'IQ' changes your entire life! Sure, it is mostly for the worse, but there are ways to treat the brain to restore the neural plasticity of youth!" The fire of zealotry was in her eyes again; this was something Alice had come to recognize. She had seen it a few times in Dr St. Claire but hadn't quite pinned down the exact thing that got her so fired up, yet. Alice felt it was something along the lines of improvement, though.
  
  Lily's bright eyes bored into her apprentice, "A child of five or six can learn a new language in two to three months, fluently! Imagine if you could do that your entire life? It is possible! So, fret not, apprentice. If you are not satisfied with your score on this crude test that can barely be considered useful, we will just... improve your brain!"
  
  Alice coughed and nodded, "Yes, Dr St. Claire." She took the pencil and got to work.
  
  Lily nodded and smiled. She didn't offer to replace Alice's brain with a computer... yet. Even in her past life, you had to carefully groom-err... slowly persuade an average person even to consider such an option. People were so weird!
  
  Lily pursed her lips as she graded the battery of tests Alice had finally finished. But, of course, she had also tested the girl's general knowledge of math, English, biology and chemistry. Some of which were functionally non-existent. No matter!
  
  Lily scribbled down on a sheet of paper a rough initial syllabus. This would be mainly a self-study program on Alice's part, with Lily there to ask questions to and provide the scaffolding of what to study and read and in what order. However, that only accounted for the theoretical side of learning. Lily had planned many practical learning activities in various subjects ranging from first aid, medicine, chemistry, hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.
  
  She called Alice into her office, who arrived looking even more nervous. The girl whined, "Some of that I didn't know ANYTHING!"
  
  Lily shrugged, "I thought so, but yIn someever know. I was actually quite impressed with what you did know. It doesn't matter. I've created a rough outline for a study program for you." She slid the paper across the desk, "You're going to be doing a lot of reading. This is a list of books to read, and in what order. In some of the textbooks, you only have to read specific chapters I've specified. Every morning we'll briefly discuss what you studied the day before and if you had difficulty understanding any particular things you read."
  
  Alice looked at the... extremely long list of books. Only half of the books seemed to be textbooks; the rest were... novels? "How will I find the time to read all of these books at this schedule and still work the front desk?"
  
  The blonde in the labcoat just blinked at her. "You won't. You're no longer working in the front office. Or working at all, except on days I've designated as practical medical lab days. I've 'ired a temporary replacement, and then I'll 'ire a more permanent replacement when we reach Megaton."
  
  Alice looked distraught again, "But... but..."
  
  Lily tapped on her desk and shook her head, "You seem to be under zhe misapprehension. You still 'ave a job. Your job is learning now. If I felt you would learn something useful by cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush, you'd be doing it. You've already learned, mostly, how to be personable, polite and professional in dealing with patients. You likely won't learn much more working in the office. If you don't want to spend a decade on your Apprenticeship, then you're going to 'ave to make learning your full-time job and go about it systematically. I will create the system for you, so all you need to supply is the will and determination to carry it out."
  
  Alice finally started to understand and nodded, "Yes, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily concluded with, "I've had a couple of labourers clean the office next door to this one. That will be yours for the next couple of weeks until we depart. For every two chapters in a textbook, read one chapter in one of the novels listed. But remember, you have to read each textbook at a minimum twice before moving on. Take a fifteen-minute break every two hours. You can expect a ratio of two days of book learning to one day of practical learning, for example, chemistry labs, shadowing me, firing range, et cetera. Dismissed."
  
  Alice blinked and backed out of Dr St. Claire's office. She was a bit more terse than usual today... wait, did she say firing range?
  
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  Closing up shop
  Lily scowled when the second attempt at fabricating Matilda the Murder Maid's short sword ended in failure as the blade snapped in three places while she attempted to test it roughly. One fragment flew by Lily's face quite close, making her a little embarrassed that she did not use eye protection while testing the blade.
  
  Lily was not a materials or mechanical engineer. But, she thought to herself grimly, 'Y ou'd think that just making a knife out of diamond would be enough!' But, it turned out that while diamond was incredibly hard, it was actually somewhat brittle. It was like steel that had no flexibility at all.
  
  She carefully picked up the blade fragments and dumped them into the recycler to break down into feedstock once more and then sat at her desk and booted up her CAD program again.
  
  Lily had an epiphany while staring at the simple shape of a knife and wondering how to create a blade that was strong in both compression and tension out of a single material like diamond. The epiphany was... why was she dead-set on a single material?!
  
  There was one thing a person that wasn't really qualified could do to solve engineering problems - simply over-engineer the hell out of it! Lily's fingers started flying through the keys as she sliced the three-dimensional design into many, many layers.
  
  Instead of a blade made of a single diamond shape, she created a layered composite laminate material of alternating diamond and graphene layers, repeating over and over. In the last layer, the cutting edge, she changed from diamond to lonsdaleite, which had a Mohs hardness rating of fifteen, five higher than even diamond itself. Lily's fabrication technology did not have the resolution to create a so-called monomolecular edge, and even if she could, it would be incredibly fragile.
  
  Most monomolecular blades Lily remembered from the past were wires with significant technology attached to stabilize the wire in space-time somehow, leading it to be artificially a lot tougher than such a wire should typically be.
  
  She had no idea how that technology worked at all. Still, she could make the edge of a traditional blade on the nanometer scale while also being harder than a diamond. Plus, being a layered composite will solve the brittleness issue, giving the material enough flexibility not to shatter when mistreated.
  
  ' That should cut through most things, steel included, like a hot knife through butter... provided you could swing it hard enough,' Lily thought.
  
  Composite materials were often more than the sum of their parts. For example, pure diamond had somewhat poor tensile strength but incredible hardness and strength in compression, while graphene had incredible tensile strength but poor hardness. Combined into a laminate material, Lily was pretty sure she could create the ultimate sword! She grinned, 'Masamune, eat your heart out!'
  
  The trade-off to these types of materials was one of cost and repairability, which weren't concerns of hers. So, although it was true that it would increase the print time, which was perhaps the only way to measure the cost to her at this point, it wasn't to the point where she would decline the advantages of this type of construction methodology.
  
  In fact, after verifying that the Short Sword Mk3 design appeared sound and sending it to the fabricator, she opened up the CAD files for Sophie's chassis, which she had planned to start printing today as well.
  
  'Ugh,' there were so many pieces. There were over a hundred and fifty parts that she painstakingly modelled. And that wasn't including things like the internal mounts for the laser installation, the flexible waveguides or diamond lenses to be installed in each manipulator-claw. Would she have to make changes by hand on all of them?
  
  Lily squinted at her screen, shut down the CAD software and opened the integrated development environment. It shouldn't be too hard to create a simple function to convert a solid shape into a laminate composite of many layers.
  
  Plus, this would have the advantage of having a user interface to specify the layer thickness and, eventually, perhaps, a simple expert system to simulate the strength of the modelled shape in compression, tension and even complex stresses like torsion.
  
  Such a function built into her CAD software would make it much less likely that Lily would put her eye out in the future by just eyeballing the properties of a printed object and then receiving shattered fragments to her face when they did not line up with reality.
  
  Lily glanced at Matilda, who was standing patiently in the robot repair bay. In the end, she fabricated an entire replacement upper arm and hand assembly as well. It was the only way to integrate the hidden compartment for the short sword into the arm.
  
  Then, since she had to make a few design changes to the hand anyway to make room for the hidden blade, she decided to adjust it from a simple claw to something more resembling a hand. It had four digits, one of which was opposable like a thumb.
  
  To allow her to actually have the dexterity and fine motor control to use those fingers to pick things up required Lily to redesign parts of the upper arm, also. The Assaultrons used very simple, and very heavy-duty control mechanisms. For example, the claws and arm movement of an Assaultron were controlled by chains inside the body of the arm.
  
  Lily simply replaced this low-tech but strong option with graphene cables, which were hundreds of times stronger and would allow the Assaultron finer motor control in her arms and hands.
  
  She had intended, originally, to only replace the broken arm, but that idea offended her sense of symmetry now, so she just ran the end fabrication twice and mirrored. Matilda would get two sword arms, as well as fingers.
  
  Plus, Lily intended to incorporate this improvement into her own Assaultron, which would be useful if she could ever find an Assaultron or Miss Nanny core to incorporate into it. Or even a non-homicidal Mister Handy. She had already boxed the mostly finished Assaultron body to take to Megaton.
  
  "Okay, Matilda. Installation looks good. I'm sending you the patches to your drivers that include the new actuators for the blade extension and retraction mechanism, as well as the additional fingers. You'll probably 'ave to get used to the latter, yourself, though," Lily cautioned. Then she paused and considered, "I recommend not trying to pick up fragile things or shake the 'ands of squishy humans until you reach the stage of mastery over your new capabilities. Crushing someone's 'and would only be slightly worse than stabbing them through their 'and and arm with a super-sharp knife blade by accident."
  
  "Confirmed. I will only crush the hands or stab the humans on purpose, not on accident," Matilda said. Then, when control of her chassis was returned, she stepped out of the robot repair bay and tested the functionality of each arm. The material did not look much like crystal or diamond; considering the material was layered with dark-hued graphene, it had both the look and visual texture of carbon fibre.
  
  With a soft *shlick* sound, two thirty-five centimetre blades slid out of the centre of each of the Assaultron's hands. Lily stood there as the Assaultron operated the extension and retraction mechanism multiple times, testingly.
  
  Lily motioned towards the side of the room, where she had set multiple test materials for the killbot to slice through in a set of different vices.
  
  She sliced through both the wood and, surprisingly, the non-reinforced concrete, almost as though it wasn't there. The last material was a fairly thick hardened steel rod, which she did cut through, although it took her several attempts.
  
  "These blades are exceptional, human baby," Matilda said with surprising respect. Lily clucked her tongue, "Let me inspect the edge of your right one, there. You were pretty rough on it getting through that steel. If it chipped, I might as well fabricate you another... perhaps I will fab you a couple of extras anyway, knowing what you're likely to put them through if anyone attacks Scott or Sophie."
  
  Matilda held out her right arm, blade extended, while Lily examined it with a magnifying glass. There were no appreciable nicks or dings in it, which somewhat surprised her. This really was the ultimate in blades! Lily decided to make herself a new knife for herself, a lovely stiletto perhaps.
  
  "Huh, looks fine. Alright, Matilda, you're done here and cleared for return to service; I'll tell Scott when I see him next," Lily said.
  
  "Exxxcelllent," purred the robot.
  
  "You didn't have to put these presents for us in a box and wrap them in paper, you know," said Scott, a little amused, as he watched his Miss Nanny tear at the improvised wrapping paper surrounding the rather large box.
  
  "Ooh, what ez it, what ez it?" cooed the robot as she finally tore the box open to reveal its contents, which were revealed to be multiple layers of carefully stacked parts on trays. Sophie quietly inspected them for a moment before asking excitedly, "Are these... Miss Nanny parts?"
  
  This surprised Scott, who got up and walked over to look at them also, leaving his much smaller unopened box. Scott hummed, "They certainly appear to be... I haven't mentioned it, but I know Lily has some kind of advanced fabrication technology after looking at the repairs and upgrades she did to the Assaultron." He paused, then glanced at Lily before asking, "Is this the same thing?"
  
  Lily smiled and nodded, "Oui... I appreciate you respecting my privacy, but this is a complete replacement for all the exterior chassis parts for a Miss Nanny. The material these are made of is not only less than 'alf the weight but over ten times the strength of the steel used in the standard Miss Nanny, to say nothing of the exterior composite and plastics. Plus one additional upgrade."
  
  Lily walked over and uncovered a cleaned Protectron laser assembly, "This is a laser assembly that I took from a disassembled Protectron arm... I replaced all the lenses and fabricated a custom mount and cooling system that would allow it to be mounted inside the interior of Sophie's chassis."
  
  Sophie blinked. She sometimes wished she had some sort of weapons, like the other robots. Especially when they travelled, and invariably, she had to be defended by Scott and the others. Still, she narrowed the irises on her optical sensors at it suspiciously, "Uhh.. it would shoot out of my chest, then?" She wasn't sure she liked that. Her turning rate wasn't actually all that great; it might be difficult to keep a beam on target.
  
  Lily shook her head rapidly, "No, no. Look, here..." She then pointed to the aperture of the laser, which was split into three outputs. "The laser can be fired out of any of these three outputs, which are funnelled through these flexible waveguides which will be run and installed down these replacement manipulator arms, see each 'hand' has a lens to fire the laser out of. Only one rapid-firing laser, but you will be able to fire it out of any of your arms. You should be able to repurpose any normal Mister Gutsy targetting software if you don't have modules for that yourself."
  
  "Oooh, that ez genius, Miss Lily!" said Sophie excitedly while Scott simultaneously said, more thoughtfully, "That is impressive."
  
  Lily chuckled, "Ahh, it should be... I stole most of that design from how you hooked up that terrifying cutting beam to your Mister Gutsy." However, Scott's modification sacrificed that entire manipulator as nothing more than a movable and articulating barrel for the Assaultron laser, "However, instead of a slow firing laser of incredible power, this will be an ultra-rapid firing laser of modest penetration. Perfect for self-defence, or defence of others by destroying swarms of attacking animals or keeping attacking humans suppressed with their heads down instead of shooting your favourite person."
  
  Sophies bobbed up and down several times, to which Lily took as nods. "Also, I have included the updates to the Miss Nanny maintenance manual, complete as a new supplement, for all this hardware, including the revising of inspection periods. This will allow Scott to install all of this himself." Lily grinned, "I wouldn't dream of taking a man's girl back to my place to take all of her clothes off."
  
  Sophie made a raspberry noise over her speakers, "Pffft! Oh, you! You are always being the tease of me!" But Scott nodded, "Thank you, I would definitely appreciate doing the installation myself."
  
  As opposed to the blades she fabricated earlier, these Miss Nanny parts were all set so that the last layer would be a layer of graphene, with some texture to it, so as to allow it to be easily painted if desired. Although, Lily thought that keeping the dark grey of the graphene was a nice colour, too.
  
  She handed Scott his forgotten package, and Sophie got enthusiastic, "Oh, open yours too!" Scott nodded and then began carefully finding the seams where Lily had taped the paper on and carefully undoing them without tearing the paper. Sophie complained about this, "No, Scott! You have to tear the paper! Not like that!"
  
  But he wouldn't be moved; he carefully removed the paper in one piece, set it aside and opened a small box to reveal a sheet of paper with a fairly long alphanumeric number on it, "What is... this?"
  
  "That is the root password for this building's mainframe setup. I got it almost entirely fixed; it is at least working well enough to act as a central processing nexus for all of the Protectrons, which will make them much more effective, efficient and capable," Lily enthused. It was kind of difficult to program advanced orders and contingencies for a Protectron unit without something along these lines.
  
  Scott's eyes widened, "That's amazing! That thing was mostly scrap when I looked at it last!" He then got a little uncomfortable, "Uhh... me and Sophie got you something as well; it isn't quite as nice as all the things you've gotten us, especially that portable generator, but I hope they help you."
  
  With that, he opened a door, and two Protectrons walked in. It looked like Scott had used most of his words up already, so Sophie took over, explaining, "Two completely refurbished Protectron units. We know you plan to open a larger clinic in Megaton and figure that these will help you with security. There are thousands of people there! Especially if you plan on operating a pharmacy as well, you'll need security. Otherwise, criminals will have stolen everything from you within a week! Oh, and plus one recharging station, you can program them to use it in shifts. We'll have them all crated up a couple of days before your caravan leaves."
  
  Lily grinned. She wasn't actually expecting any reciprocating gift; that wasn't why she had given Scott and Sophie things, but she definitely wouldn't turn these down. They would help a lot! She was worried about how she would secure her clinic, which she also planned to live at, in the "big city" of Megaton. Scott handed her a small sheet of paper with an ownership passcode carefully written on it. How amusing, they had both gotten each other sheets of paper with passwords on them.
  
  She wondered if Scott would reboot if she hugged him. She decided to be kind enough not to, even if she was curious. She did hug Sophie's hovering body, though, "Thanks, guys, that is exactly what I will need!"
  
  Scott seemed to sense what she was contemplating and was visibly relieved she had spared him.
  
  Lily glanced at what may be one of her patients from Canterbury Commons, sitting across from her in her office.
  
  He was a local, and she had bad news for him, "You have what is called a motor neuron disease. That is why you're getting weaker. It is going to keep getting worse, and eventually, it will get to the point where you become too weak to breathe. It is a terminal illness. At the most, you have nine to twelve months, I'd say."
  
  The man was only in his mid-twenties, although he had a sun-worn face that made him look a bit older than his age. He had the same look like he had been kicked by a mule that most people got when she had to tell them they were dying, "Is... is there any cure? Any treatment?"
  
  Lily winced, "No definitive treatment. I have been working on a genetic therapy for unrelated reasons that I have reason to believe may help or even cure your condition, but it is beyond experimental. I can not in good conscience recommend it without mentioning that it has not been tested in humans at all, and it might kill you."
  
  ALS was a condition both of the nerves and the motor cortex of a person's brain. Lily had been studying Edgar's genome, comparing it to both herself and random patients to isolate the mutation in his motor cortex and the myelin sheathe of his nerves. Her knowledge of the human genome and its possibilities allowed her to isolate the changes rapidly, and in fact, by the second day of studying it, she had already modified a simplified coronavirus to propagate the transformation into a human's genome.
  
  In fact, the therapy she was considering offering the man in front of her was actually the fourth version of that virus and one she was almost certain would not prove dangerous. Plus, she had a counter-virus that would reverse the changes of the first virus should it prove problematic later. Her basic professional ethics wouldn't allow her to even mention a genetic therapy unless she thought it was both safe and reversible.
  
  Usually, she would set the bar at the point where she would not sell or recommend it unless she had tried the modification to her own genome but felt that it might be a net negative compared to her more generally optimized genes. Edgar's gene expressions, in almost every circumstance, traded traits for speed for ones with endurance. It didn't mean that he would huff and puff after walking up the stairs, as he was clearly an adult man in good shape.
  
  But, she felt that he would have about a third less endurance than a man of his age in a similar fitness level. That probably explained why he was so athletic and attractive looking, under all the dust and dirt anyway, as he had to work harder for a similar level of endurance as others.
  
  Lily did her best to mitigate some of these extreme trades in the therapy she had made and felt it was likely a person could become almost twice as fast while suffering only a five to ten per cent reduction in their endurance. If Lily had been baseline, that would have been a trade she would have gladly taken. Still, she had complicated novel genes that provided both speed and endurance which were difficult to confer to baseline humans with the equipment and tools she had. She wouldn't be able to transfer her mods piece-meal, and it was just too much information to transfer in a simple coronavirus without it becoming unstable.
  
  Compared with her halting and stilted progress, where it took her days to make design changes in her fabricator or generator when it came to making alterations to the code of life? She was an artist, and DNA was both her canvas and her paint. She could iterate through design alterations to an organism in her head and in hours.
  
  The man seemed to grab hold of some hope, as she had known he would have, "What are the chances I will die? And that is the worst case, right? That I die now instead of... what? You said nine months at the latest? And I suspect that those nine months won't be the most pleasant for me."
  
  Lily squinched up her face, "Very low, I suppose. I'd say less than five per cent, but honestly, I designed this therapy to be safe, so in my heart and my head, I believe it has close to a zero per cent chance for severe side effects. But it hasn't been tested."
  
  Then she nodded, "And yes, the next nine months won't be enjoyable for you. You probably have maybe three months before you're too weak to stand without help, and within six, you won't be able to get out of bed and will require assistance just to live."
  
  The man shook his head rapidly. "Yeah, fuck that, Doc. Honestly, if this treatment of yours kills me instead of curing me, well, that will be doing me a favour. I'll eat my pistol before I let my family see me like that. So, I'd definitely like that experimental treatment, if you don't mind."
  
  Lily couldn't fault his logic; she would make the same choice herself as well. "Very well. It is transmitted through a viral vector, and while I have made every effort to ensure it is not transmissible, you will still have to quarantine here at the clinic for three to five days. I leave town in five days, so we'll probably cut it short to four. Is that acceptable?"
  
  The man nodded, so Lily continued, "Very well. I'll have a room for you prepared by lunchtime. Go talk to your family and meet me back here by then."
  
  Lily was confident that the treatment would be safe and effective on the man's condition, but she was still a little uncomfortable with how wild west things were as far as testing went. It wasn't as though there were any oversight bodies here. She would just have to hold herself to a high moral standard herself.
  
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  Last day in town
  "Dr St. Claire, here are the tests from Mr Brooks that I conducted according to the protocol you left me prior to his discharge," Alice told Lily politely, handing over manilla coloured file folder that they were using for medical records. Lily sat aside the sandwich she was eating and took the file. Technically, it was her lunch hour, but she was quite interested in the results.
  
  Today was one of Alice's practical education days shadowing Lily in the clinic, and considering it was the last day this clinic would remain open and, therefore, the final day that Canterbury Commons might have a doctor for some time, it was quite busy for everyone.
  
  Lily flipped open the record and then found the test results both from before and after the man's treatment and sighed. The data was utterly useless to her, and considering she had not charged the man anything for the experimental treatment, she supposed she had to count the entire thing as charity to increase her karmic merit. The only useful datum she had was that the treatment seemed to work with no sequelae, at least in the very short term.
  
  She had cobbled together a simple reflex testing machine, which was almost indistinguishable from a particular memory and reflex game in her past where a series of coloured buttons would light up in increasingly complicated and shorter durations with the goal to repeat the sequence as quickly as possible. Lily hoped to start her data about how effective an average person's baseline reflexes were improved, but she should have known that the man's pre-existing condition would poison the data. He had shown an improvement of over six hundred per cent, which was impossible.
  
  Similarly, the endurance testing on a stationary bicycle that Lily had explicitly fabricated for the purpose was also showing over a one thousand hundred per cent improvement over his baseline, when Lily had been expecting a reduction in endurance in the range of five to seven per cent.
  
  'Oh well, at least I feel confident performing more human testing with strain four of this therapy. I will lock this strain in for limited mass production when we arrive in Megaton,' Lily thought to herself, then glanced sideways at Alice. 'The apprentice requires additional cardiovascular conditioning. Megaton is likely not an appropriate venue for ten kay runs, at least until I am confident in her ability to defend herself. Repurpose stationary bicycle as work-out equipment? Build another for myself?'
  
  Alice got a bad feeling; she had come to recognize some of the looks that her Mistress gave her, and the current one seemed to indicate that Dr St. Claire was thinking about her for some reason. Glances like these always seemed to precede some new assignment or chore for her to accomplish, so Alice looked for avenues to flee before her workload could be increased, "Ahaha... I will perform the initial exam and take the vitals on the patients waiting for you in exam rooms two and three!"
  
  Lily blinked, and the fifteen-year-old apprentice girl was gone. She was very swift sometimes, like a rabbit escaping a predator. Odd. It was somewhat puzzling to her. Sighing one last time, she scribbled a quick note to hire someone to follow up on the man's health in six months and closed the folder.
  
  The very fact that Lily was reduced to the point of using written notes as reminders to herself like some kind of barbarian out of stories grated on her. While her present memory was excellent when you compared her to an average human, especially with a host of medichines patrolling her brain and keeping neural connections healthy, they were NOT perfect.
  
  It was Lily's opinion that a person was nothing more and nothing less than the total sum of all their memories and experiences. If that was the case, then how else could she look at the state of her imperfect memory as anything other than slowly bleeding to death from a wound she could not heal? Now that her immediate survival was less in question, every part of herself told her to rectify the situation before a permanent and irreversible loss of ego occurred.
  
  Truthfully, while not unusual for AIs, synths and infomorphs, Lily's perspective was actually uncommonly held by people who lived in biomorph bodies. Only specialized biomorphs had eidetic memory bioware, after all, which was not utilized by the vast majority of people. Instead, they felt that a person's past was only a guide and that a person was who they were in the present. Lily felt that idea was insane, 'What if you were hacked?! '
  
  She glanced at the several quantum cores she had salvaged from Eyebots sitting in a small tin on her desk. They were tiny, barely larger than a particularly nourishing pea, and they were Lily's first plan to keep her memories perfect, forever and ever. She was already mostly done with the designs incorporating an Eyebot core as the nexus of a neural co-processor implant.
  
  Size for size, the Eyebot cores offered somewhat better processing power than the purely optical quantum architecture Lily was familiar with, which intrigued her to no end. Combined with a preliminary designed solid-state memory module, the size would increase only to approximately the size of a grape, which was suitable for implantation at the base of her skull, with her medichines assisting in drawing millions of semi-conductive carbon wires to every part of her brain to complete the brain-machine interface.
  
  The co-processor built of two different world's technology would have storage of over five hundred exabits, which should be sufficient to download the entirety of her long-term memories onto, in full resolution - or at least as full resolution as squishy biological memories could be. They weren't even INDEXED and didn't use any kind of relational tables at all, which caused Lily to wonder how normal humans remembered anything .
  
  The main thing holding Lily back from performing brain surgery on herself was the software. There was just no way in hell she would implant something that was fully electrically integrated with her brain if it was running a RobCo operating system. While she deeply respected Dr House, even managing to access and listen to holotapes of some lectures he had given at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, she definitely didn't trust him. Plus, if her history of hacking every piece of tech running a RobCo OS said anything, it was that Dr House didn't have a particular emphasis on the security of the software he wrote. Considering the neural co-processor included wireless radios on several spectrums, the need for an absolutely secure RTOS was paramount.
  
  Lily might not have had a choice but to accept the risk of a RobCo OS, as writing a new real-time OS from scratch was simply beyond her programming abilities. However, thankfully, she was long ago able to download a flash of the software and OS that her nanohive ran. In fact, that OS was running on the subsequent nanite fabricators incorporated in her fabricator and recycler.
  
  The challenges were porting this OS to a new quantum architecture vis a vis the RobCo quantum cores. It wasn't an insurmountable problem, and Lily was making progress, but it had slowed her plans for apotheosis considerably.
  
  She had surprised herself in her design of how to power these computing components in her body. Powering it in the same way the nanohive was was not a possibility; the blood flow in and around the brain was insufficient unless she wanted to graft a new artery just to power the computer. Initially, she would just have used power cells or perhaps fission batteries, but lately, she had found herself gravitating to more and more genetic solutions.
  
  Alice had brought home an eel that was fished out of the Potomac river for dinner, which at first had Lily shocked and terrified. It was clearly a mutation, and Lily shuddered at the thought of what kind of radioactive virus or aggressive prion the possible chimaera had waiting for them. But, after she examined it and found it surprisingly nonradioactive and healthy, she took a sample to decode its genome later, as she had for every organism she had seen thus far, ' Getting samples from cats is a lot harder in the Apocalypse. They all think you want to eat them when you approach them with your hands out all grabby-grabby!'
  
  She later found that the eel was obviously a mutant of the electrophorus genus. 'Who would have thought electric eels would be so delicious?' Lily thought as she nibbled on her leftover eel sandwich. And weren't they subtropical animals? These had to originate from ancestors that escaped captivity in a D.C. zoo, and whatever mutation occurred had to have provided a significant survival adaptation advantage, as they were not an uncommon organism in the river, if the reports of them occasionally electrocuting people to death was to be believed.
  
  Was Lily's personality changing? She wouldn't, in the past, have considered a genetic adaptation like the electrocytes in eels as a solution to provide continuous power to a cybernetic implant for a biomorph, before, especially in herself. She wouldn't have, in the past, accepted any kind of biological solution for a personal problem like that.
  
  Lily slowed her breathing into a meditative pattern, closed her eyes and did some weighty introspection, and thought to herself, 'I am a composite ego comprised of two individuals' memories.' At least, in theory. The set of memories as a refugee from planet Earth who became a renowned doctor and synthware researcher had the advantage of being over three hundred years longer than the other set of memories, which only lived to approximately fifty years old. But it wasn't as easy to say that since one set of data was larger than the other, then that side dominated the other because there wasn't more than one side. She was integrated more completely than she thought possible, even given the state of the art the current generation of mind engineers could accomplish, ' Another sign that I am actually a newly born AI that was downloaded by some unknown entity into this body. Or I was fused with my soulmate that I didn't even know existed.'
  
  She had been thinking about her choices in the past as a default, but she needed to consider her preferences now since she was no longer the same person.
  
  Interesting. She found that she was somewhat attached to the human form, if not its constituent parts or its organic brain. Would she slowly change herself into a gynoid in the future, then? Wistfully she considered her past as a twelve-meter tall robotic spider. There was just so much valuable space in a body that large and so many useful tools one could incorporate into eight legs.
  
  She sat down her mostly finished eel sandwich and picked up her pencil and a rare sheet of clear mostly-white paper. Her drafting skills were actually quite good, and she wouldn't allow this idea to be lost to the vagaries of organic memory.
  
  She drew a female figure in a dress looking normal, then followed by a similar female figure with her legs opened with each cybernetic leg deploying four long articulating spider-shaped legs. Such a setup would be incredibly fast and dextrous, and she could incorporate specially built nano-materials to allow her to grip walls or ceilings.
  
  It was just a shame that she would lose out on the space to store tools in her legs as she did in the past. Then she glanced at the normal hands and arms her drawing featured and lifted her eraser, 'Or maybe I won't? I could include a lot of fine tools in a cybernetic arm and hand, especially if they were comprised mainly of carbon allotropes.'
  
  After a while, she set her pencil down and glanced at the two drawings. She was considering the one on the left of a normal-looking girl as "infiltration mode," with the spider legs and tools in the stored state. The drawing on the left was an attractive-looking woman with long braided hair, while the one on the right was the same woman with robotic spider legs and dozens of thin, articulating tools deployed from her arms and hands.
  
  'If it is not my fate to be a robotic spider in this life, then at least I can be a robotic spider girl !' enthused Lily. Then she blinked curiously. Why had she drawn these two figures in an anime style? She snorted; she knew which part of her memories that came from.
  
  She took the last few bites of her sandwich and stood up. She still had a half dozen or so patients to see today before she closed up shop and crated everything up to take to Megaton.
  
  She had secured passage with a trader that operated a caravan consisting of a handful of fission-powered flatbed trucks. The cost was fairly small, even though she was transporting a relatively large amount of weight with all the Protectrons, Assaultron, fabricator, second-generation generator and clinic supplies. She wondered how the trader dealt with the intrinsic problem of pneumatic tires in a society with little support structure. He had to manufacture or repair them himself, somehow. Wouldn't articulating tracks be the ideal system of vehicle propulsion in the wasteland, especially if you had essentially unlimited fission power and weren't worried about fuel economy?
  
  Lily made a mental note to investigate the Corvega car factory south of Cantebury Commons the next time she came to visit Sophie and the Mechanist after she settled down in Megaton. She had plans to investigate many parts of the Capital Wastelands, and transportation beyond her own two feet might be necessary. Didn't the Corvega company make large Recreational Vehicles? Lily wondered if they could be easily converted to a tracked vehicle design. It was something to think about.
  
  Lily dusted herself off, put on her lab coat and slid her laser pistol into the cross-draw holster on her left side. It was mostly hidden by her lab coat for professionalism, but she did not see patients unarmed. She was absolutely certain a small portion of her clients were raiders, but she did not turn them away if they could pay. The newly fashioned stiletto made of diamondoid materials was already hidden in a comfortable sheath on her other hip. She only wore it in a pull-down sheath on her breast when she was feeling especially "tacticool."
  
  Lily perused the medical record on the door of the exam room before opening the door, plastering a pleasantly neutral smile on her face, "So, Mr Jones, what seems to be the problem today?"
  
  "Well, Doc, there is this rash," began the farmer.
  
  'Of course, there is,' thought Lily, with an internal sigh.
  
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  The Big City
  Lily had a blank look on her face as she glanced between her young red-headed apprentice and her two siblings. Her much more youthful siblings.
  
  Lily glanced between a grinning blonde-haired girl and a smiling raven-haired boy. If it weren't for their wildly differing hair colour they could pass for fraternal twins and both looked approximately ten years old. She glanced between the two children and, finally, back to Alice. "I know I, perhaps, did not ask relevant follow-up questions, but when you told me that you and your family were orphans and could quote take care of yourselves unquote, I have to admit I assumed you all were of similar age," said Lily in a carefully neutral tone.
  
  "Why would you assume that Dr St. Claire?" asked Alice.
  
  Lily mentally stopped herself from hissing, ' Because these two don't look like they could take care of a hamster, let alone themselves!' She was reflexively against anything that would tend to distract her apprentice from learning, and these two brats were precisely that sort of thing.
  
  Lily sighed and shook her head; the horse was well outside of the barn at this point. She doubted she could get her apprentice to agree to drop off the brats at Little Lamplight for a few years, after all, "You know what? Nevermind. Apprentice, front and centre. Gear check."
  
  Lily carefully went through the gear Alice was carrying. She had only had a limited amount of time to train the girl on weapons, mainly safety and not practical usage and accuracy, so Lily had given her the double-barreled scattergun she acquired in Vault 108, loaded with buckshot, as her personal-defence weapon, and Lily's old knife, sharpened to a razor's edge, as well as a rugged and newly fabricated pneumatic microinjector preloaded with preprogrammed paralytic nanomachines.
  
  The device featured some of Lily's first carbon-based microcircuitries to power a field to stabilize the medichines inside the injector's reservoir, preventing them from their usual decay in the absence of a controlling nanohive. It wasn't quite a computer, but it was getting close.
  
  Lily carried a similar injector, although her version had incorporated a revolver-style rotary magazine that could select various colour-coded medichine options, from paralytics and nerve-blocking analgesic medichines to general healing varieties. She still couldn't get around the inability to inject third parties with more than a single programming schema yet, though, but figured that even with that limitation, multiple options would be useful.
  
  Most of their belongings were crated, with some of their equipment packed into Lily's rucksack that might need to be more immediately available. However, they were only carrying on their persons a small subset of things that they would need to survive for a day or two.
  
  "Alright, you look good. So, the main reason we received such a good price on our passage was I said I could drive a truck with a manual transmission, which I suppose is a somewhat unusual skill in this day and age," Lily began and then glanced at the two kids, "Which also means that as I will be driving, I may not be immediately able to assist in defence of the caravan if raiders attack us. So, protecting your two... siblings... is up to you, okay?"
  
  Alice did her best impression of standing at attention before sounding off formally, "Yes, Mistress! You don't have to worry!"
  
  Lily did not mention how little that assurance actually reassured her before walking off to find the trader in charge. As she walked a few steps away, she could hear Alice yell in an imitation of Lily's practised NCO command voice, "Nick, Isis! Front and centre! Gear check!"
  
  Snorting with amusement, Lily reconsidered and thought that perhaps two more well-trained and loyal minions might prove helpful. Although, it would take five or six years before they would get to the point of being useful at all as minions.
  
  She had to admit she approved of the little girl's name, Isis. It was a pretty name, and she recalled feeling sad that a certain Islamic proto-caliphate in the Levant made the name much less common in the last decade of her memories in America.
  
  Lily found the trader next to the four trucks that had pulled up into the transhipment hub across the street from the diner. The four trucks all looked like a similar model, of something along the lines of an 18-wheeler or large commercial truck, but they each towed an extended flatbed trailer, with areas for guards to sit in front of the cargo. The caravan master was talking to Doctor Robotron's Uncle, who brightened when he saw her approach, "Ah, speak of the devil, and she appears. Rich, this is Dr St. Claire."
  
  The trader, whose name was Rich, turned and introduced himself, and Lily permitted a brief handshake, "Dr St. Claire, I'm glad I caught you so early. I was hoping I could verify your driving skills briefly, as I will need to know you really can do what you claimed before letting you behind the wheel - a new transmission would cost a lot more than the discount I'm offering you, after all."
  
  Lily smirked slightly, "I understand completely, monsieur. I 'ave to admit it has been a few years since I drove a stick, but it's like riding a bike, right?" To be honest, she had never driven an 18-wheeler, but she had operated a large dump truck in the past and thought it would probably be similar.
  
  The man tilted his head to one side, a little confused, "I'm not sure; I've never seen a bicycle. But, let's borrow this unloaded truck, and you can drive me around town, is that alright?"
  
  Lily nodded and did a quick walk around the truck, looking for abnormalities. The tires looked a bit underinflated, but she supposed that was intentional in the absence of truly uniformly paved roads. Finally, she asked the man politely, "Do you have any systemized pre-drive inspection or checklist?"
  
  The man chuckled, "Ah, no, not as such. Although every morning, we will check the fission drive coolant levels and hydraulic fluid levels before we leave, you very seldomly have to add any. Mostly it is just like you did, a quick walk around and checks of the tires. Although the tires are some of the sturdiest things about these trucks, I have no idea what they're made of, but they're definitely not rubber. Haven't had to put new ones on in twenty years."
  
  That answered a question Lily had but hadn't asked, and she supposed it made some amount of sense. It made Lily curious too, and she resolved to get a scan of one of the tires. Perhaps they were rubber with an embedded graphene matrix or just layered graphene balloons filled with amorphous carbon, which was how Lily would build a tire if she had to. However, Lily hadn't seen much evidence that the scientists of the old war had yet mastered manufacturing random carbon allotropes before the bombs fell.
  
  Lily nodded and got inside the truck's cab, along with the man. The model of the truck was unfamiliar to her, especially considering it included controls and gauges for a small fission reactor. Still, Lily was an intelligent girl and figured it out rather quickly. She demonstrated her skill in a quick drive around the town, even double-clutching to save wear on the transmission's auto-synchronizers, and the man was quite satisfied with her ability.
  
  The trader asked her after they left the truck, "You said your stuff has to be loaded a particular way? What did you mean by that?"
  
  Lily pointed to the two tall crates that housed her Protectrons, "Those have to be at the back. Inside each is a Protectron robot." She pulled a small device out of her pocket, consisting of a guarded switch and a small stubby plastic antenna, "I've placed radioactivated pyrotechnic devices inside the crates. If I press this button, both crates will fall away, and the Protectrons will be activated in guard mode. If we get attacked by raiders, I intend to press this button, so it would help if those crates weren't blocked on all sides by other cargo."
  
  The traders' eyebrows rose, and he clucked his tongue, "Okay, but we're putting one of the crates on the lead truck I am driving and the other on the last truck. Do you want to drive that one, then?"
  
  Lily shook her head firmly, "No. We can place the crate on the last truck, but it is standard ambush tactics to disable or kill the drivers of the lead and last vehicle in a convoy to trap a convoy in a kill-box. The discount you are offering me is insufficient to warrant me taking the increased risk to drive in these slots; I will drive either the second or third truck, please."
  
  The man snorted, "The raiders we deal with wouldn't know tactics if it walked up and fucked their moms. Probably especially not in that case, as I doubt they had many father figures at home. And each truck carries one or two guards, but you aren't wrong, I suppose. You can drive the second truck. We're not headed through D.C. proper on this leg, so we don't actually expect that many problems with raiders. I'd be surprised if we see a single one before we unload you in Megaton."
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes but nodded. Of course, she was right; the lead truck in this man's convoy looked more like an armoured personnel carrier, or armoured truck turned technical out of Mad Max, with a fully rotating crew-served heavy machine gun in the trailer bed and only one-half to two-thirds of the cargo carrying capacity. Hence, the man obviously was aware of the risk. But, perhaps the raiders here didn't bother attacking the rear of the convoy simultaneously; she supposed that was expecting a little much from their intelligence and coordination.
  
  She went briefly around town saying her goodbyes, finding Louis and his brother last, "Thank you for your hospitality the last couple of months, Louis and Monsieur Roe. And thank you, especially, for coordinating a building I could purchase in Megaton."
  
  Uncle Roe, as he liked to be called, slapped Lily on the back personably, "We're sorry to see you go. And it's just a six-month lease by the city council. It's an abandoned building right on the edge of their security fence. It's a large six-story apartment building, fully abandoned, and nobody wants it because it isn't connected to their municipal power grid, and the top floor is trashed. Nobody wants to take the effort of running high voltage wires for the three or four blocks it would take to reconnect that edge of the city, not to mention they have perennial power shortages anyway. Your lease is contingent on you making substantial improvements on the property, and if you do so in six months, they'll sign the deed over to you for free. It's as close as Megaton as to an eyesore, I 'spose, but it was the only thing that had enough space that you said was a priority."
  
  Lily blinked. She hadn't known the specifics, just that Louis said his brother had found a large building in Megaton she could buy, ' This is a bit different than buying a property. Am I expected to make substantial capital improvements to a property I don't own? What if they try to screw me at six months since I've made the property so valuable? Well... at that point, I will have made the building into something more like a bunker in terms of its defensibility, and possession is nine-tenths, after all. It will be challenging to displace me once I set up shop.'
  
  Lily decided that, on the whole, it was an acceptable risk. She expected to be on the city council of Megaton within six months or at least one of the most important businesses and citizens by then, to say nothing of her plans to personally solve these so-called power shortages. She nodded and thanked the two men one last time before ruffling Doctor Robotron's hair and departing.
  
  She found her Apprentice making herself useful and directing the loading of all of their clinic supplies and all the crates that Lily brought, which included her second-generation power system, fabricator and other technology. She did not like those crates being out of her sight when they weren't in a place like Scott's, which was guarded by dozens of security robots. It was the entirety of her technical progress in the past months, after all, and it would be a debilitating blow if they were stolen or destroyed. 'Well, one step at a time,' Lily supposed.
  
  Lily told her Apprentice straight out, "We'll be taking this truck; luckily, the cab is big enough for all of us. But if Nick or Isis annoy me too much, I will kick them and you out into the trailer bed with the guards, understand?"
  
  "Yes, Dr St. Claire! I'm sure they will be fine! They each have books to read," replied Alice.
  
  Books from Lily's library, she presumed with a slight narrowing of her eyes, 'Whatever so long as they didn't get greasy fingerprints on the pages or rest the book open and damage its spine.'
  
  None of her memories predisposed her to be too accommodating of little children, and Alice's brother and sister looked both close to about ten years old, maybe five years younger than she was and definitely in the age where Lily would find them the most annoying.
  
  It wasn't too much longer before they were on the road. It was a bit too much to expect that there would be radios in the trucks, but she supposed since she only had to follow the truck in front of her, it wasn't necessary.
  
  It would have been nice, though, especially if they were attacked. Which they were, shortly before arriving at the bridge to cross the Potomac river. Alice got really nervous when she heard the sporadic shots ahead, but Lily reassured her after she could clearly identify the Ma Deuce on the armoured front truck and put paid to the half dozen or so raiders that thought, for some reason, it was a good idea to attack the well armoured, well-armed convoy as it fired in well-aimed single shots or small, economic bursts. The convoy stopped briefly while the guards policed up any gear, equipment or salvage from the dead raiders.
  
  They weren't driving very fast at all, no more than twenty-five or thirty kilometres per hour given the terrain, but they still planned on arriving in Megaton before it got dark. They made a stop at Big Town for about an hour while some things were unloaded and other things loaded, and once more at a different settlement that she did not recognize from the games.
  
  They arrived at the gates of Megaton with a couple of hours left in the day.
  
  The first thing she discovered about the large settlement of Megaton was that it was nothing like what was depicted in Fallout 3, except for the fact that it did supposedly have an unexploded nuclear bomb in the centre of town, which was one of Lily's first priorities to disable after she set up shop.
  
  Lily did not intend to count on plot armour to keep her alive while living in the blast radius of what looked like Tsar Bomba Senior. Instead, she planned on taking detailed scans of the device and then programming a lot of nanomachines to trash the detonation circuits and inject them via some gel after she was one hundred per cent sure that they wouldn't trigger a detonation.
  
  She recalled that when you attempted to disarm the bomb in the game, it told you that while it would take a lot of demolition experience to disarm it, it was relatively easy to make it explode, but she did not believe that for a second. It was always harder to make a nuclear bomb explode than to make it safe; they were designed that way. And Lily refused to believe the USA of the Fallout universe would diverge so completely in terms of strategic weapons design. It wasn't like Megaton's bomb was an unexploded Chinese bomb dropped there; someone had drug it out of the nearby military base as an ornament for some reason. Lily didn't know if the plot in the game ever discovered the precise reason why or who was responsible. Maybe that guy in Tenpenny Tower? She couldn't remember, or it was never stated in the game.
  
  Still, Lily wouldn't try to disarm the bomb herself until she was sure she had enough internal scans and understanding of how it was built that she could build a whole new bomb from scratch. Her medichines couldn't heal her from being totally incinerated, after all.
  
  The nuke in the town square was, essentially, the only thing about Megaton that was entirely like it was depicted in the game. Megaton, in the universe Lily found herself in, was a lot bigger. It consisted of a surface area of more than twenty-five kilometres. It was set up in a rough circle over five kilometres in diameter, and it must have taken a decade or more to build the walls and security fences surrounding the town. There were also over ten thousand people living in Megaton, which was quite a significant increase from the twenty or so NPCs in the game.
  
  The buildings in Megaton were also, for the most part, in much better condition. In the game, it looked like a shantytown that wouldn't look out of place in the slums of Monrovia, with buildings built of thin corrugated aluminium sheets. The reality was that the buildings were in pretty good shape. Most of them were pre-war, and they had been repaired.
  
  Even the building that she would be occupying had been repaired since the bombs dropped; however, in over two hundred years, it had become slightly dilapidated again, but not to the point of being a barely together ruin like most of the buildings in Fallout 3.
  
  Since Lily was paying them to deliver her things directly to her new building, she had to wait while everything else was unloaded, her Protectron crates re-loaded, and a second driver could be arranged. Lily also hired five general labourers for three hours, which barely cost any caps at all.
  
  She drove the truck over to her building, parked it and got the labourers to unload it before watching the truck. Lily wasn't really afraid of these men she hired, but they did not seem entirely trustworthy, so the first boxes they unloaded were the Protectrons, which Lily immediately uncrated and activated.
  
  The labourers were, from that moment, much more polite and didn't look at her belongings as covetously or at her or Alice's bodies as lewdly as before. That was good, as it might prove difficult to hire the couple dozen of labourers tomorrow if Lily ended up having to kill this batch tonight. She didn't know if they had some union, after all.
  
  Lily briefly explored the building's first couple of floors, discovering it had a basement, to her surprise. The two elevators did not work, of course, but that could be fixed. All in all, she was shocked and amazed at the good condition of the building.
  
  She ordered the labourers to unload all the boxes and carry most of them into the basement. This was where they would set up briefly, as it was more defensible. They groused a bit about dragging heavy boxes down flights of stairs but accomplished everything at sunset.
  
  Lily paid them and watched them depart. She was pretty sure that if she did not have the two Protectrons that they would have sold the information of two women and two children with a lot of expensive-looking boxes for five caps or perhaps tried to assault them themselves. Another thing to thank Scott and Sophie for.
  
  Lily squinted at them as they walked away. Then she turned to face her Apprentice and her siblings, "Alright, Alice, gremlins. We will be staying in the basement tonight. Gremlins, Alice has already sworn an oath to defend my secrets - you are members of her household, so in this neo-feudal society we find ourselves in, that means you are subject to her oath as well. In other words, if you maliciously betray my secrets, I will kill you... or worse, I will make Alice kill you for betraying both her and me, regardless of how old or young you are. Roger?"
  
  Alice frowned a bit at the straight threat to the lives of her brother and sister, but the boy named Nick and the girl named Isis nodded their heads rapidly, so Lily took it as the right thing to say. Alice finally found her voice and said, "Don't worry, Dr St. Claire! Nick and Isis would never betray family!"
  
  Family? Is that what we are? Lily wasn't so sure, but she nodded.
  
  "One verbal warning, then escalating levels of force to dissuade trespassers," she ordered the Protectrons, which acknowledged the order with a Roger Roger that Lily could have sworn was stolen straight out of the Star War prequels. One was set to guard the stairs while the other was doing a lazy patrol of the first floor of the building. Then they descended the stairs to the basement. It was a large, unfinished bare concrete single-room-style basement with support pillars around the load-bearing areas. Lily liked it and was going to take it over for her industrial base.
  
  Lily ordered, "Alice, help me open these boxes; then you can set up your beds anywhere on that side of the basement for tonight."
  
  Lily set up her generator and fabricator near the building's main circuit breaker panel. In the next few days, after she got everything running, she would fabricate a large industrial DC to AC inverter so that she could connect her generator directly to the building's panel here, which was expecting AC power. Then she could see what parts of the building required electrical repair if any.
  
  It had been her experience that the electrical wiring in buildings she had discovered had generally withstood the test of time. So, unless there was an apparent short somewhere that might start a fire, she did not expect significant electrical repairs to be needed. If she were lucky, one or both of the elevators would either work immediately or require minimal maintenance to run.
  
  She worked through the night to get everything unpacked, set up and operating, including the tripod-mounted automatic sentry gun she had built the week before. It used entirely carbon-based motors and construction but used sensors and an eyebot quantum core as its processor.
  
  Unfortunately, this prototype model wasn't smart enough to do its own target acquisition and discrimination of friend and foe yet. Still, it was smart enough to receive that information wirelessly from the two Protectrons, so she set it up guarding the elevators and stairs and retasked the other Protectron to patrol with its comrade but focus on the primary area next to the elevators, to always stay within range to give targeting data to the sentry gun.
  
  Lily worked most of the night, only waking Alice up close to morning to be on watch while she slept briefly for three hours, which was almost a whole night's rest for her, anyway. Lily did not plan on trusting their complete safety to the Protectrons or sentry gun, after all.
  
  The following day, after breakfast and while Lily's fabricator was working on the several pieces necessary to piece together an effective security door for the basement, Lily left Alice in charge of her siblings and walked with a purpose towards the market area. She was told she could hire almost any number of men there last night.
  
  This time, she did not attempt to just hire random people out of the parking lot of Home Depot or the Megaton equivalent, but she sought out a man who was close to a general contractor. She talked to two such men, the first of whom did not give Lily a good impression, so she just up and left his tiny office.
  
  The second was a middle-aged man named Jeffrey Tombs, and he seemed much more honest. He asked her, "So you basically want every inch of the building cleaned, including all the debris up on the sixth floor?"
  
  Lily nodded at him, "At a minimum, I need the first three floors, not including the basement, close to immaculate. The rest, well, just get rid of all the trash and debris for now."
  
  Mr Tombs hummed and nodded, "I know what building you're in, and I've priced this job before. The guy didn't like my price, and that building's been empty ever since. I don't think anything has changed much. It'll be twenty-five hundred caps, and it'll take two to three weeks. I'll need over twenty men working this job, so it ain't cheap even if the building is more or less structurally sound."
  
  Lily winced internally; that was a little bit less than a third of her working liquidity. Still, it didn't seem that out of bounds for twenty-plus men for fourteen days. Still, this and more would have to be done. She needed to get at least the first and second-floor setup to be able to take patients, "Agreed, Monsieur Tombs. Twenty-five per cent now, twenty-five per cent after a week, and fifty per cent when the job is done."
  
  Mr Tombs seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding his head and extending out a hand for Lily to shake, "You got yourself a deal, Doctor."
  
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  Odds of bribery approach unity
  Lily was so glad she hadn't decided to cheap out and just hired workers directly on a project like this; she could see running herd on them was somewhat of a full-time job, which was one of the reasons, beyond his building expertise, that Mr Tombs had a thriving business.
  
  In the morning, before the work crew arrived, she managed to scrounge up enough radioactive water so that everyone could have a quick shower in her high-pressure shower stall, which she set up in a shower on the first floor. After that, however, they had to go outside and use the facilities like they were still in the stone age, with the exception that they at least had a fair supply of toilet paper.
  
  She honestly had no idea where toilet paper came from in this universe, except that merchants could sell it to you, and it wasn't that expensive. If Mr ROB ensured that there was some kind of automated T.P. factory still running after two hundred years just so she could plausibly have access to it, then she would take back every negative thing she said about him. There were some indignities that were more difficult to stomach than others.
  
  However, the lack of a supply of water, radioactive or not, was going to be a problem she would have to solve rather quickly. She was pretty sure that D.C., in her past life, received fresh water from the Potomac river mostly, which was treated before being pumped into the D.C. water system.
  
  There was a water tower just a couple of blocks south of her, but it clearly wasn't providing the area with any water. Lily could see the outline of two others, one close to what she thought the centre of Megaton was and one to the northwest. Was it only the water tower in her area not functioning?
  
  Lily, then, squinted in the direction of the east. The Potomac river was over three miles away; it wasn't exactly a project she could start without a brigade from the Army Corps of Engineers at her command and twelve months to do it.
  
  That didn't mean that the Maryland/Virginia area did not have aquafers; she was pretty sure if she drilled a hundred meters down, she would definitely find water. As that was likely how places like Vaults had access to potable water, and if the water in Vault 108 told her anything, it was that the water there was still radioactive if less than what was expected from river water.
  
  Ideas for high-speed drilling rigs entered her head, a combination of a traditional cantilevered pipe drill, utilizing a combination of a lonsdaleite drilling head and lasers to quickly chew and break up rock and earth. It was feasible, but it would take months. Also, she was somewhat large crane poor presently, and she did not see any cranes on the skyline that she could rent, either.
  
  Lily shook her head, a town like this had to be getting a steady water supply, even if it was unhealthy, or everyone would be dead already. Even if everyone was somehow expected to purify their own water, they still had to have water to cleanse.
  
  A cistern on her own building's roof would be a possibility and was a likely construction goal even after she achieved some manner of water access, but how would she fill it? It did not rain sufficiently for that to be an option, and it was a chore that was beyond being reasonable for her Apprentice; as for herself, she would definitely not be willing to cart up hundreds of litres to the roof every day.
  
  Maybe Lily's part of town was worse than she thought; if so, she would aggressively gentrify it even if she had to do it at gunpoint, if only so she could flush toilets again.
  
  Lily needed intelligence about her present demesne, and the best place to get it was from a local. Thankfully she had a local who was familiar with construction projects walking through her door, trailing a couple of dozen men. She quickly gave a command to the Protectrons to reduce their alert state so as not to try to interdict the men. Lily stepped over to the closest Protectron and gave it a quiet order to descend down to the basement and guard the entrance, shooting anyone that wasn't Lily, Alice or her siblings so as to both protect them and her technology. She'd have to make sure these men realized that area was strictly restricted.
  
  She could hear one of the workers yell, surprised, "Holy hell, are those Protectrons?" One of the other men jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow to shut him up.
  
  Lily blinked, were they really so rare? She did not believe so; in fact, she had priced out a single Protectron at about 1,000 caps of value, about the same as a suit of powered armour, although who would sell either? So, perhaps, they were somewhat scarce. Again she found herself realizing how fortunate it was that she befriended the Mechanist. He had dozens of Protectrons assembled and parts for dozens more.
  
  Perhaps she could buy some disassembled Protectrons from him regularly and slowly repair them? Lily would like to have six to ten Protectron units if her clinic turned into the small hospital she was hoping it would.
  
  "Mr Tombs, good morning," Lily greeted the man cordially as she oversaw one of the Protectrons carefully managing to walk down the stairs. 'Good,' she was worried it would trip and fall down the stairs as they were a bit top-heavy.
  
  Mr Tombs smiled, "It is a good morning! I've got a job for a couple of weeks, so it is always a good morning when I have gainful employment for my boys."
  
  Lily smiled; he seemed to be a good man. "You have the run of the place, except for the basement - anyone going into the basement and past the locked door will be shot, so please ensure your boys are aware of the restricted area and the automated lethal response if they trespass it. Once you get a moment after you get things underway, if I might have your ear as I have some questions about Megaton, specifically this part of it."
  
  If this were her past life, there would be all manners of OSHA violations inherent in that statement, but all Mr Tombs did was yell, "Ya'hear that, boys? Don't go down into the basement unless you want that Protectron to shove its laser up your ass!"
  
  Lily smiled. This was much more like when she lived in the ancap space habitats for a decade or two; nobody really cares what you did there, and ventilating a person's sleeve for trespassing was almost a given. So long as you didn't slag their cortical stack and Really Kill them, people wouldn't even get that worked up over it.
  
  Lily watched Tombs direct his men in a methodical manner for about twenty minutes, staying well out of their way, before the man finally walked over to her, "Got a few minutes, now. What do you wanna know, Doctor?"
  
  "Yes, thank you. How does Megaton get a water supply? I mean, just regular irradiated water; I assume everyone needs to buy or purify their own potable water," Lily asked curiously.
  
  Mr Tombs rubbed the back of his neck, "Ah, yes. Wells, mainly. The nukes sure did a number on the Washington Aquaduct, let me tell you. You can see it busted up dozens of places in certain places. But this was the nation's capital, and many important places dug their own wells. The founders of Megaton found one and dug two more themselves before all of their heavy equipment more or less went the dodo. The water and sewage utilities are a right mess. None of the water lines are interconnected, so you can't get water service 'cept from that one pump."
  
  He then turned towards the south, although they were still indoors, "You probably saw the water tower just a few blocks away. This building and the ten blocks around it would be a pretty good property iffen there was power to run the pumping station, and great if it had some electricity go along with it."
  
  He shook his head, "Entirety of Megaton is run off a 5MW Lite GeoThermal power pack that was drilled three or four kloms underneath some old rich bastards private bomb shelter, not that it ended up doing him any good. But there are rolling blackouts and brownouts some days as it is; it was one of the main reasons this neighbourhood was disconnected when it was mostly abandoned. Sorry about that, by the way."
  
  Lily took in all he had to say but then tilted her head to the side, "That's better than I was expected but worse than I was hoping. But, why are you apologizing?"
  
  He chuckled wryly, "Well, I may have been the mayor 'round these parts maybe ten years ago when we made the decision to disconnect this neighbourhood off the municipal utilities. I reckon it didn't do much good for my re-election chances, but it really was what needed to be done. The founders were a mite optimistic when they fenced off so much area after Vault 101 told them to take a hike. The city had to seize a lot of the property around here and compensate everyone who was living here, who mostly moved to the north or south parts of town."
  
  Lily felt her scalp tingle. She was already connected with the Good Ole' Boy network, even if he was either retired or on the outs politically! She was glad she didn't go with the first contractor she talked to, who seemed to be only interested in looking down her blouse and giving her the run around about anticipated costs and timeframes.
  
  She considered her current position in Megaton. She was still very assailable, with only two Protectrons and an automated machine gun to protect her. It might take thirty or forty lives, but she could be attacked successfully if the party was serious enough about it. How much did she trust her instincts about this Tombs fellow?
  
  Lily would risk it, "Say, Mr Tombs. I have a potential business opportunity, but it would require you to have a lot of discretion, at least at first, until we're in a position to unveil it. But it would have the potential to be quite lucrative and secure me, the best Doctor in at least a thousand kilometres, to open a small hospital in town for the foreseeable future?"
  
  The man blinked at her, "You got a pretty good opinion of your own skills there, Doctor St. Claire." To which Lily just nodded, "Yes, I do. And I assure you it is, if anything, understated."
  
  That caused Mr Tombs to just chuckle, "Well, you got me curious. I ain't gonna commit to anything, 'cept I could keep what you tell me to myself."
  
  Lily nodded, "I am not just a medical doctor, although that is my focus. I am also one of the better scientists in many areas. Maybe a few people in the Brotherhood or Enclave are better than me at power systems, and I'm sure there are hundreds still alive that know more than me about high-energy plasma, but my medical technology requires a lot of power, so I have been forced to adapt. One of my inventions is a mostly portable, practical fusion electric generator." She let him make his own mental connections to the possibilities that might entail.
  
  His eyebrows rose up to the top of his bald head, and he glanced around as if making sure nobody could overhear their conversation, "How much electricity could such a generator produce?"
  
  Lily made a waffling hand motion, "I have it running in the basement, and right now, no more than about two forty kilowatts. If we could build a proper water-based cooling system, it probably would need to be in a building all its own, I could easily see it producing over four megawatts continuously, but I would probably need at least half of that myself. I'm pretty sure I could devise a pretty efficient coolant loop for it, too, but it would still go through about a hundred or two hundred litres of water a day, which we could capture for purified water. We could always increase that as much as we want, but it would be a real pain dealing with the radioactive solids that it would generate unless you know some ghouls that need a job? What would you do if that, hypothetically, was possible?"
  
  Lily was taking a risk here, but at the same time, she was quite ready to kill this Mr Tombs if it looked like he was going to take advantage of her. Preferably not in front of all of his workers, but old men had heart attacks all the time. It would significantly impact the timetable for her plans and might alienate some part of whatever form of the elite that Megaton had, so it was definitely plan zed, for her.
  
  The general contractor cum ex-mayor was quiet for a bit before he smiled slightly, "I think I would buy a bunch of the properties on this side of the wall from the city before they knew how valuable they were gonna get. The current mayor hates my guts anyway, the bastard." Okay, maybe killing him WOULDN'T alienate the power structure here, but she still would like to avoid doing so.
  
  Lily chuckled slightly, and she had been considering doing the same. The middle-aged man nodded then, "You can expect I'd be very interested in that business opportunity, and I definitely won't let a word of it slip. I don't think you'd be in any danger like you're thinking physically, but we'd both be in danger financially as there is no way they'd sell us an inch at any price we'd like to pay, and we'd have to settle on just becoming rich selling power and water, instead of becoming richer than Croesus, selling water, power and rent!"
  
  Lily's gaze snapped to the old man, and she narrowed her eyes before she could catch herself, but only for a second before she put a gentle smile back on her face. This man wasn't simple at all! Croesus, the fabled wealthiest man on Earth and King of Lydia circa 600 B.C. was an even more obscure historical reference than when she mentioned Asclepius to Sarah Lyons.
  
  He raised an eyebrow, which made it obvious he noticed Lily's momentary reaction. So she probably couldn't play it off. Instead, Lily chuckled, "Not many people would recognize, much less use the name of a three-thousand-year-old dead Turkish king. I know this is incredibly hypocritical of me, but could you perhaps enlighten me on the source of your education? I do apologize again for my hypocrisy as I have no desire to talk about my own past, but there are some organizations I'd rather not have anything to do with that might still be active around the nation's former capital."
  
  Now his eyebrows rose just as far as they went when she mentioned her generator, "Ahaha, I don't know that I've ever had anyone recognize that reference. That was something my pa always said, and I have to admit it came with me. I knew he was a king, but not precisely the when and where of it. But, yeah, I do suppose I have a better education than the average person round here, but you needn't worry, little lass. And this ain't really a secret, neither, so I don't mind telling you. You know how I mentioned that rich bastard's personal bomb shelter and how it didn't help him? Well, it did help his son and his son's family. Which was my grandpa maybe six or seven generations back?"
  
  He grinned, before continuing, "They came out of their little personal vault maybe ten years after the bombs dropped, it wasn't really built or designed to be a self-sustaining environment like the Vault-Tec vaults, and they would have run out of food. They found a small but somewhat thriving community amongst them, and they were one of the founders of what became Megaton. The family ended up selling the vault and its generator to the city a hundred years or more ago, but we kept all the computers and databanks, which included quite a lot of books and even some audio and film recordings. Enough to ensure their descendants were well educated, at least. Now, I'm mighty curious about you, but I suppose I won't push a young woman travelling through the wasteland mostly alone, perhaps running from something? So long as nobody will be landing a Vertibird on my head in the middle of the night, they won't, will they?"
  
  Lily chuckled and shook her head, "No. My past doesn't include either the Brotherhood or the Enclave, and I don't think anyone else has an Air Force these days besides them."
  
  Tombs nodded his head, "Well, that's good enough for me. We should sit down and hammer out an agreement, but let us agree in principle to work together. I do believe you are going to need a lot more capital than you have spent thus far to build a power station like you're talking about, not to mention needing to scavenge or buy all the large transformers and what have you. So, let's say your contribution is your technology and expertise, and mine is my money and expertise in buildin' things."
  
  Lily nodded, "That's what I was thinking, precisely. How do you think we should split this venture?"
  
  He rubbed the back of his neck again, "Hmmm... I ain't looking to really take advantage of you here. Fifty to you and thirty to me."
  
  Lily blinked, "What about the last twenty per cent?" To which he scowled, "The chances that we are gonna have to fucking bribe some assholes are damn near a hundred per cent. I'll try real hard to keep it at ten per cent or less, and then I'd like to hold ten per cent in escrow for the people we hire to work for us. They'll get a dividend each year in addition to their salaries; what do you think about that?"
  
  Lily chuckled, "If this was the 2070s I would've had to denounce you as a commie, probably, for that. But I like the idea, and it'll keep the workers well motivated and their interest in their job sharp and personal. Plus, it isn't that much, and we'd still retain the voting interest in those shares, I presume?" To which he nodded, "I may have a bleeding heart, but I ain't about to appoint a workers representative to board or nothing, not that we really even run ventures like that anymore around here."
  
  Lily was expecting to have to go back and forth on the percentage, but it seemed fair to her. Plus, she intended to effectively control all parts of the venture in any case, regardless of what ownership split there was. Lily stuck her hand out and tried to affect a southern drawl, "I reckon, pardner, that you got yourself a deal."
  
  'Why are there so many southern-sounding gentlemen in the ruins of Virginia and Maryland, anyway?! ' Lily wondered while shaking the bald man's hand.
  
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  Gaussian Distribution
  It had been three days, and Lily had remained mostly forted up in the basement of her building doing building, design and fabrication work. Surprisingly, building a cistern seemed to be her first objective after all, but it seemed like she would place it on the ground and pressurize it to provide the building with water pressure rather than the more simple, effective and traditional way of placing it on the roof and allowing gravity to provide water pressure.
  
  It might take a month or more to get the pumping station powered after all, and Lily discovered that there was a business that operated a water truck that could deliver a thousand litres of radioactive water to your home or business for a relatively modest fee.
  
  However, her small fabricator was simply unsuited to the task of building a large cistern, even if she did it in pieces. So, her first project was building a fabricator with a building area about as big as a large chest-style freezer. She could barely make a complete 1:1 model of her Apprentice, Alice, in the fabricator, but if Lily wanted to fabricate a statue of herself, she would have to do it in at least two pieces.
  
  She could then fabricate a cistern out of carbon fibre and graphene, which wouldn't look too high-tech, but she would have to keep it on the ground. There was just no way to get the water from the truck on the ground onto her roof, so she would have to provide the water pressure herself.
  
  She had transferred all the nanites from the previous fabricator into the new one and installed four nanohives, the computing hardware. This new design was a marked improvement in some ways, as she was able to incorporate a design for articulating arms inside the fabrication chamber and micro-doping technology to dope the shapes as they were being built instead of transferring the partly constructed form back and forth between two sections. All in all, it was a great advance for the second generation of her fabrication technology.
  
  Her first footlocker fabricator she was partly disassembling, she intended to make another run of nanohives using her can of stabilized medichines she had extracted from her blood back in Canterbury Commons. She had the preliminary design for a much more sophisticated nanohive design that would produce a nanomachine that was only twice as big as the hive inside her body produced, which would be both suitable for use as medichines in both the body and brain.
  
  The only real downside was its size, which wasn't ideal for implantation into the body. Lily's medichine hive was about the size of a small olive, while this new one was about the size of a small plum. She would have to consider where to place it carefully before offering it to her Apprentice, 'The liver takes up so much space and is such a horrid design, so inefficient. I'm already working on upgraded liver bioware... Perhaps I could kill two birds with one stone for Apprentice? Mmm... I really wish we had some plums. Why do I always use delicious fruits as size comparisons?!'
  
  She would also convert her first generation fabricator, the small one now she was calling it, to use this new generation of nanites. It would help a lot when she got to the point of fabricating fine microarchitectures, like carbon-based computers. It had taken her four failed prints to print the little pneumatic microinjectors before it had succeeded, and it did not even feature anything Lily would consider more than microcircuitries.
  
  However, she had only been able to salvage about half of the medichines she used to fabricate the first batch of first-generation nano-hives, so she still had a week or so of bleeding into a vat to reach the level where she could build a new run of fabricators.
  
  Lily would need to keep this second-generation of nanohives on a much more restricted basis, as they would be capable of producing the first-generation nanohive, which would, in effect, hand carbon allotrope-based manufacturing technology to anyone smart enough to realize it.
  
  Finishing dripping blood into a vat, Lily sat at her makeshift desk to read a textbook on operating systems and programming language and compiler design. She had managed to boot up an eyebot core running the modified RTOS she downloaded from her own implant; however, there were innumerable bugs still.
  
  After about an hour, Alice interrupted Lily's reading, "Dr St. Claire! Can I talk to you?"
  
  Lily sat the text in her lap and glanced up at her Apprentice, "Certainly. What do you need help with?"
  
  Alice suddenly seemed rather nervous, self-conscious or anxious, Lily thought She couldn't quite pin down the exact emotion, but eventually, the Apprentice finally said, "I was wondering if there was something wrong with my body."
  
  Lily blinked. She had already taken scans of the Apprentice's body over a month ago when she first started working the front desk, and she was in more or less healthy shape.
  
  Lily wasn't sure which set of memories clued her in. Still, she had the epiphany that a teenage girl thinking something was wrong with her body but self-conscious about it really meant she thought there was something wrong with her body's appearance, "You seem healthy enough, excepting that you were slightly malnourished before we met, but we've been eating well since then, I think. What is the problem?"
  
  Alice fidgeted some more before finally saying, "I think my growth must be stunted. I was reading about how malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions and emotional stress can all trigger reduced growth rates in children and adolescents. And I definitely had experienced all of those before I started working for you."
  
  Lily nodded, "That's true, but you're ahead of the sixtieth percentile of your age cohort in terms of height, and wei-" She saw Alice's gaze drop down to Lily's chest for a moment before rising to meet her eyes again and realized what Alice actually meant, and why she was so self-conscious. She trailed off, and paused, then sighed, "Apprentice, are you concerned about the size of your breasts?"
  
  Alice nodded rapidly, several times.
  
  Lily glanced down at her book, part of her wanted just to continue reading now that she knew Alice did not have an actually valid concern, but she stopped herself. She glanced at the page she stopped at, closed the book and sat it on the table.
  
  She had seen Alice nude in the shower once when she was waiting her turn, but she did not really put much thought into it; certainly, nothing seemed to be... out of order, but Lily did not actually know the average breast size for females at any particular maturation stages. If she was still in a civilized space station, she could have found out instantly through the mesh, but she did not believe that Alice was significantly outside a normal statistical distribution.
  
  However, she did know that her own body was clearly on the tail-end of the distribution, "I think using my body as a comparison is giving you some unrealistic expectations as to what the mean is. You're still learning quadratic equations and polynomials in your math focus, yes?"
  
  Alice nodded. Lily was a little surprised at how quickly she was picking up mathematics, and she was already into what Lily would describe as basic or pre-algebra, "Alright, we're going to discuss an advanced topic in mathematics today briefly then. Statistics. You don't really have the base level of math to really get into it yet, but I want to discuss what is referred to as a Gaussian or normal distribution briefly, and then we will talk a little about the central limit theory, which is from a different branch of mathematics that deals with probability, but it intersects nicely into our discussion of statistics."
  
  As Lily had already shown Alice all of her technology, including even her scanner that she was the most careful about, she used that scanner in tablet mode to draw on in lieu of a whiteboard. Lily mostly lectured this time, as Alice did not really have sufficient knowledge in either subject to go back and forth with her, only stopping to answer the girl's questions which were generally requests to explain a certain topic in a different way.
  
  Lily used data that she did remember about people's average height to create a simple normal distribution in an attempt to explain the concept, then went on to discuss briefly the central limit theorem about how the more independent variables are added to a model, the more likely the model is to resemble a Gaussian distribution, so long as the variables were random.
  
  After about an hour of discussion, Alice drew her own simplified bell curve but left it unlabeled, "So, what you're saying is... you are over here," she indicated the tail end of the distribution on the right, "... but how does that indicate where I am on the curve, except to the left?"
  
  Lily rolled her eyes, "In this case, I am using the least scientific of evidence, anecdotal evidence and intuition. To get a real baseline, we would have to poll a significant sample size of fifteen-year-old girls on their cup size to find out where you actually fall in the distribution, but my intuition is telling me you are close to the mean." She sighed, "Look; if we were to graph the average intelligence or education of fifteen-year-old girls on this same plot, you would already be well into the tail-end of the distribution as well. If I had to pick on which plot I would rather be exceptional, I would certainly prefer yours. Especially since these things are more trouble than they're worth almost all of the time."
  
  Alice said quietly, "But you are exceptional on all of them. "
  
  Lily roll-tapped on her desk and leaned back in her chair. She wasn't falsely humble, so she just said, "Yes. But my body has been genetically optimized; I have very few gene expressions that would tend to the negative in terms of looks or function. That's also why I sleep so little and am so quick," Lily quickly snapped a finger gun up at her Apprentice's face, so fast that Alice barely saw her hand moving.
  
  The apprentice girl was momentarily startled but then grinned, "Does that mean you could optimize my genes as well? I have been reading ahead on genetic therapies. Why did you say I should skip those chapters in the 22nd Century Medicine textbook?"
  
  Lily sighed, "Because they're mostly wrong. That is one of the subjects where I will have to write an introductory text myself and teach you one-on-one. It's also an advanced topic that you won't be seeing for a year, at minimum. You can continue reading it, though, just with the understanding that the authors of these texts had a very limited view into both the mechanics and possibilities of the human genome. I'd barely trust the best pre-war geneticists to make a better grain of rice, to say nothing of a person."
  
  Alice listened intently before nodding rapidly, asking excitedly, "So, can you?"
  
  "The problem, dear Apprentice, is that all of my genetic optimizations and custom expressions were applied in vitro. That's very easy to do. With you, we would be attempting to apply retroactive changes to your entire genome in vivo, much more difficult," Lily lectured good-naturedly. Then she paused and seemed to consider, "Tell me, how do you feel about me cloning a replacement body for you and then performing a brain transplant, placing your brain into the new body?"
  
  Alice stared at her Mistress for a moment before saying simply but firmly, "I'm against it."
  
  Lily nodded, not surprised, ' Eventually. Eventually.' She then continued, "Well, in that case, we will have to work slowly. I am definitely not against giving you as many genetic advantages as possible. I already have a working genetic therapy to give a person heightened reflexes, for example, but it requires further human testing to be sure it is viable and non-harmful. I am certainly not going to permit you to participate in any human testing of it until at least the second stage of trials. I've already got a list of potential volunteers, five so far, though. I want at least ten, though, so it will be more than a month before I feel comfortable allowing you that first genetic therapy."
  
  Lily glanced down at the girl's chest, "As far as any... cosmetic genetic alterations. Most of that is a lot easier; however, if you, for example, took my optimizations straight across, it would eliminate your freckles, and I happen to know most men find them fetching, especially on redheads such as yourself. We run into a different problem there, though."
  
  Alice perked up at the mention of Lily's claim that men found freckles attractive, "Do they? What's the problem?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to one side and decided to be blunt. "Apprentice, while I consider you an adult in terms of your mental capabilities and the responsibility I expect from you, the truth is that you have yet to reach full maturation. It isn't healthy to make genetic and hormone-related adjustments to your growth factors during the maturation process. Beyond the fact that you are still growing and might well end up taller or bigger in the chest than you are now and find the alterations unnecessary, especially now that you are eating well, attempting to make adjustments prior to the age of 18 or 19 at the very earliest might tend to produce negative effects so I definitely won't authorize it until then."
  
  The girl slumped her shoulders and sighed, "Alright, Dr St. Claire." Then she also tilted her head to the side, the exact same way Lily had a tendency to do. Lily blinked, ' Wait, was this girl adopting my mannerisms?' Alice asked, "What about changes that have nothing to do with growth factors then, like the reflexes, reduced sleep and I refuse to believe you don't have some sort of peak human optimized brain too?"
  
  Lily waffled her hand, "Those are fine, but I haven't developed therapies on anything but the reflexes. I've been working on trying to isolate the expressions for lessened sleep requirements and am optimistic as well as a vastly more efficient and smaller liver organ, but they may be a couple of months away at the earliest. I am actually going to finish an unrelated modification that I don't even have before that, probably in the next two to three weeks."
  
  Looking excited, the girl asked Lily what it was. Always happy to talk about a new innovation, Lily smiled, "It's the first step for a clean metabolism modification. It is a minor adjustment to the sudoriparous glands in the human body. Well, minor to the eccrine glands and a major alteration to the apocrine glands. The goal is to more or less eliminate offensive body odour, as well as the feeling of griminess that occurs when you sweat. With this modification, the more you sweat, the cleaner, smoother and more moisturized your skin will become, actually!"
  
  Alice stared at Lily for a long moment before saying, firmly and with deep emotion, " I want that."
  
  Lily nodded, "Me too. But this change induces radical changes to the apocrine glands, those are the ones in your armpits and perennial area, if you were curious."
  
  The doctor tilted back in her chair perilously while shaking her head, "I can not find a way to make it completely reversible, not easily. Not with my tech base, not universally. Too many gene expressions are outright replaced, so I will need to make some artistic license in crafting a reversing strain. For example, I have identified the gene expressions common in the Han Chinese phenotype, which I believe offer the most desirable baseline traits in this area to use to restore a baseline, but this would still be a change from the average person even after the reversing strain reversed the original modification. It would just be less of a change than my therapy, so ethically, I will have to test this therapy longer than just the reflex adjustment. I don't generally like the idea of therapies that aren't completely reversible."
  
  Alice patiently listened to Lily explain the pros and cons of the treatment before stating with the same intensity as before, " I don't care. I want it. " She paused and then said, "Let me be among the second wave of human test subjects, like the reflex modification."
  
  Something made Alice pause, and she asked carefully, "How are you getting human test subjects, anyway? You aren't doing anything bad, are you?"
  
  Lily snorted, "Okay, expect treatment in four weeks, ideally. And doing bad things? That depends on your perspective. By my usual standards, I am being wildly and incredible unethical; they would upload me into prison and throw away the server they housed me on. However, by the standards of the Capital Wasteland, I am practically acting as a saint. I am just paying people and offering them food and water after explaining the risks. Did you know that there are over 15,000 people in Megaton at any time but only a little over 10,000 citizens? That's a 2:1 ratio for an underclass, which is wildly unstable if my mind engineering classes are to be believed. It's why crime is so high and why I won't let you or the kids out of the building yet."
  
  Alice looked very relieved, "Oh, thank goodness. I was worried you'd start building a dungeon for captured raiders or something."
  
  Lily perked up, considering it. There were a lot of ideas that she considered too unsafe to even test on volunteers. Surely a raider would prefer to be a temporary lab rat to being killed out of hand, right? She would let them go afterwards!
  
  The Apprentice shook her head firmly, " Mistress, no. "
  
  Lily sighed, "Fine, whatever. For now." Then she brightened up, "By Friday, the extra security Mr Tombs has arranged will begin patrolling the exterior of the building; it should be enough that I will consider it safe for a day or two at a time. Would you like to go on an adventure with me?"
  
  Alice blinked, "An adventure? Like from your novels?"
  
  Lily waved her head, "Less bodice-ripping than my novels, probably. But in the same sort of vein. There is a ruined hospital to the West that I'm told still has some useful technology in various stages of disrepair. Crazy, right?" Lily shook her head, "Surprised the Brotherhood hasn't stripped it bare. But then again, the Brotherhood of Steel never seem interested in pre-war tech that can save lives; they only seem interested in tech that ends them."
  
  Lily trailed off, grinning, "That's our second stop, danger level minor. No super mutants expected, possibly some raiders, so you might actually end up having to shoot someone, but I will protect you. But our first stop? Vault 101. I desperately need them to tell me what time it is."
  
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  Dem Bones
  Lily was humming the 'Dancing Bones, Skeleton Dance' song as she was carefully working the controls for a series of dozens of very fine armatures, tiny little mechanized arms with treble joints and numerous tiny blades, hemostats, suction tools, syringes, microsutures and other surgical tools installed. These arms were installed on either side of the gurney that Lily was lying in, her fingers gracefully manipulating tiny joysticks, buttons and dials that were built into remote controls.
  
  The kids had long ago separated the large basement into more private areas with dividers made of simple tarps and cloth, which gave Lily the privacy necessary to complete this latest step on her path towards apotheosis without being bothered by the gremlins.
  
  The Apprentice's voice was unexpected, but it didn't startle her because she was focusing too much on the task at hand, "Dr St. Claire, what should I pack for our trip Frid- what the fuck! ?"
  
  Lily didn't bother to look up, as she was wearing a pair of somewhat crude-looking virtual-reality goggles that appeared to be made from a small television. She still wasn't able to fabricate CRT or LCD displays quite yet, but many scavenged small displays had sufficient resolution to be used for her purposes; it was just a shame they were so heavy and clunky looking, she thought. However, she did raise her voice, "Apprentice! Language, please. Nobody respects foul-mouthed little ladies. And we will go over your gear this evening, don't wor-ree."
  
  Alice was quiet for what seemed like a long time to Lily. She would have looked up to check if the girl was still there if she wasn't wearing the goggles, but finally, the girl asked cautiously, "Uh... Mistress... what exactly are you doing?"
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes slightly behind her goggles, 'Wasn't it obvious? Sometimes, this girl...' She sighed audibly, "I am replacing my skeleton with a specially built diamond and carbon prosthesis. It features an exterior of special bio-active carbon fibres that allows complete unification with the organic connective tissue that previously interfaced with the skeletal structure." Servos whirred as mechanical arms with tools dipped in and out of Lily's surgical theatre before she asked, "Pop quiz, what are the names of the bones I am replacing right now and what is the name of the connective tissue in these forceps?"
  
  One of the forceps that was holding a bit of tissue taut wiggled slightly.
  
  The voice of the Apprentice was incredulous, "Your... WHOLE SKELLINGTON ?" But then she paused before saying, "Uhh... that looks like the calcaneal tendon, also known as the Achilles' tendon. And those appear to be your calcaneus and talus bones, which form the .. uhh.. ankle joint?"
  
  Lily corrected the girl quickly, " Talocalcaneal joint, please. The ankle comprises three joints, so don't just say ankle joint, Apprentice. Which movements does the talocalcaneal joint mechanically permit, and 'ow would you improve this structure without hampering the normal range of movement one would expect from this joint?"
  
  There were a lot of Umms from the Apprentice girl before she paused to think about it, "Umm... is it the moving the foot to the left and right? And I'm not sure. Maybe it could be made into a ball joint if the material was sufficiently strong? But wouldn't that potentially cause tears in the tendons if you had a greater range of movement?"
  
  The dozens of mechanical arms stopped moving briefly as if Lily was considering the girl's answer, "'Alf credit. The movement is called inversion, which allows you to tilt the foot towards or away from the centre of the body, but that is to the left and right, I suppose. Good. And yes, mechanically, ball joints do provide some of the most flexibility, but as to whether that is an improvement or not? Hmm, yes, so long as you're dealing with normal connective tissue, you will be mostly limited to standard movements."
  
  Lily finished with a slightly more disapproving tone, "Also, always approach the first step to improving a bodily structure from the perspective of mitigating its most obvious failure modes that we already know of through the study of trauma and illness, rather than necessarily adding additional features. We, as doctors, have a vast trove of experience to draw from where the body fails us; we shouldn't throw that away."
  
  In an exasperated tone, Alice asked, "Doesn't that hurt?!"
  
  "No, I'm using my medichines to turn off my sense of pain, in effect blocking all nociceptors from communicating through my CNS. 'Owever, other senses remain, so it is somewhat uncomfortable as bones are innervated with sensory neurons in the periosteal layer, at least until I disconnect them, anyway. And, to answer your earlier question, no, not my entire," Lily coughed delicately, " skellington."
  
  The doctor paused as the spindly little tools accelerated into a particularly tricky microstructure, before continuing, still in lecture mode, "Only my feet to my femurs; I've already finished the left side. Why might I stop there? Consider the bodily processes involved with bones, Apprentice."
  
  Alice had moved closer to observe whatever her insane teacher was doing, ' I thought she was just being eccentric when she talked about replacing her bones in the past. Uh... why would she stop with just a third of her body?' "Because there is no way to replace your skull and spine without killing yourself?"
  
  Lily made a game show buzzer sound, "Bzzzt! Wrong! Try again! The 'ardest part about replacing my skull is doing it so I won't have to sacrifice my 'air in the process, which I've become somewhat attached to. But the skull is the most complicated set of bones to replace, yes, so good job realizing that."
  
  The red-headed apprentice doctor stopped to consider what she's learned about bones, ' Wait, what is bone cancer? Isn't that when the bone marrow develops malignant cells?'
  
  Finally, Alice answered confidently, "Your diamond bones don't have bone marrow in them, do they?"
  
  This time Lily made a different sound effect, "Bing bing bing! Correct! Bone marrow is responsible for the production of multipotential stem cells called 'emocytoblasts. You need these to stay alive, Apprentice! These stem cells differentiate into many vital cells from monocytes, which is to say normal blood cells, to about a 'alf dozen different cells involved in the body's immune response."
  
  Alice's concerned response made Lily happy, "Are you going to die?! Don't you need all the bone marrow to produce blood cells? People can get sick if even a little bit of it is malfunctioning!"
  
  Lily gave the girl a reassuring smile, but with her steam-punk VR goggles, it looked more mad sciencey than ever, "Ahaha, don't worry, my dear Apprentice. I've used a 'ormone therapy injected into my remaining bone marrow in several places to supercharge its production of monocytes and platelets. I'm less concerned about the killer cells and the T cells and other immune system cells because they're terrible anyway, but you needn't worry! I won't run out of oxygenating blood cells any time soon! And my remaining bone marrow can last months at this rate of production rate before the strain starts causing irreversible damage to the tissue."
  
  Alice did not even bother to mention that her teacher seemed to imply that she would burn out her bone marrow in only a few months because she could already imagine the response being something along the lines of, 'Foolish Apprentice, I won't need mere bone marrow then!' Instead, she asked cautiously, "You know how you said you wanted me to undergo surgery before we left on our trip? Are you planning on fileting me like that eel we had for dinner and yanking my skellington out? Because if so, I think I'll stay in the basement."
  
  Lily smirked, "Your... skellington ... is safe, Apprentice. Didn't we already discuss no radical changes until you finish maturing? I'll be installing a medichine factory, also known as a nanohive, in your body. They are programmed to 'eal trauma and fight illness automatically and are the base amount of protection you need to survive in the wasteland, in my opinion. It might not save you if you get shot directly in the brain or 'eart, but you stand a good chance of living through the experience anywhere else. Now, if you don't mind, these small foot bones and the related connected tissue are fairly complicated. We can talk later when I am finished."
  
  Seeing that as a dismissal that it was, Alice nodded before leaving the area of the basement that had been tarped off as Lily's bedroom.
  
  Lily returned to humming and even sang a few bars, "? Dem bones, dem bones, dem metatarsal bones... ?"
  
  Friday came quickly, with Alice's surgery proceeding without any real difficulty on Wednesday. However, the location Lily chose to install the nanohive was a temporary one, near the girl's stomach, which was kind of problematic as she had to graft a brand new artery and veinous connection to not only power the mechanical device but also give the nanohive instant access to the cardiovascular system for rapid deployment in and around the body.
  
  Although, StimPaks really made it simple to steal veins and arteries from other locations on the body and immediately grow them back; so the problems were easily solved.
  
  Lily checked the girl's equipment last evening and found she had done a fair job at packing. Alice was wearing a customized set of body armour where Lily had replaced all the kevlar for graphene and all the ballistic trauma plates with diamondoid equivalents so that it was twice as effective at half or less the weight. Lily was wearing a similar set of combat armour over her normal off-white engineering field bodysuit, and they both had identical helmets with flip-down diamond glass plates that Lily had modelled somewhat after the VaultTec riot helmet.
  
  Alice carried Lily's old M4 carbine, as Lily had shifted to using the laser rifle she had begun customizing as her personal weapon. Lily replaced the entire frame with a lighter grey carbon fibre replacement, and she upgraded the laser rifle's output coupler.
  
  She had hoped to reach the higher energy invisible UV wavelengths, but the components inside the rifle made this impossible. Still, she was able to shift the light spectrum up to at least the visible blue wavelength, though, which should still offer an over 15% increase in effective energy delivered to a target, so she felt that her efforts weren't wasted.
  
  Lily asked the younger girl, "Alright, you ready?" Alice nodded, so they started their hike to the northwest. She had gotten Vault 101's exact location from Mr Tombs, although he had told her she was wasting her time.
  
  While she still did not have a floating Mr Handy corpse to carry all of her heavy bags, she had found a man who was selling an old and outdated, even before the bombs dropped, walking mule bot. She had paid five hundred caps for it and couldn't tell if she got a bargain or got ripped off.
  
  It couldn't carry as much as the jury-rigged Mr Handy could and wasn't much more intelligent than it either. It reminded Lily of those walking dog robots from Boston Dynamics in her previous life, except three times as large. Still, for lack of other options, it made walking bearable.
  
  They encountered no raiders on the way to Vault 101, but they did run into two giant radscorpions. Lily made Alice engage them at long range to give her a controlled taste of combat, even if it was against monsters and not people. She had to admit she found it funny when, after the girl was only able to put down one and injure the other, she started shrieking and running away when the scorpion was barely ten meters from her. Lily quickly burned it down with several blue beams of light before it got close to the Apprentice.
  
  Honestly, Lily would have probably reacted the same way the first day she was here if she had found one of those big bastards.
  
  More than two-thirds of the way to the location marked as the Vault on her PipBoy, a flitting movement in her peripheral vision caused her to skid to a halt in a low crouch, with the Apprentice almost colliding with her but managing to get into a crouch herself.
  
  Lily scanned to the left, where she saw the movement, with her dark grey laser rifle held in a high-ready position. It didn't take her too long to spot the monstrosity, at about their eleven o'clock position hovering above a mostly evaporated pond. Something in the back of her head told her the thing was familiar to her, but she knew she had never seen anything like this in her life, nor was such a monster in the Fallout games she played.
  
  It was about the size of a medium breed dog but looked like a cross between a bloat fly, a wasp and a dragonfly, with four dragonfly-style wings that she could only see when it occasionally lit upon a surface and stopped hovering briefly. Lily was sure it had wasp as a significant genetic contributor because the thing clearly had murder on its mind.
  
  She thought she recognized a couple of genetic contributors, but Lily wasn't naive as to think wasps or any of the others were actually ancestors to this thing. She was instantly aware there was no method by which such a monstrosity, even assuming rampant radiation or FEV., could occur in nature.
  
  It just wasn't possible to take a small arthropod like a wasp and scale it up to such a ridiculous size without significantly redesigning several internal bodily processes. She was absolutely certain that this thing was a genetically engineered abomination of some variety. A Pre-War bioweapon? It certainly looked scary enough.
  
  "Eleven o'clock, fifty to sixty meters. On the lake," whispered Lily, so the Apprentice would turn and point her gun in the proper direction. When Alice asked if she should shoot it, Lily hissed at the Apprentice, "Do you have a death wish?! We're giving that winged horror a wide berth." Although Lily quite wanted to get a tissue sample, the same back of her head feeling of familiarity with the monster was telling her that they were a potentially existential threat. They detoured a half kilometre around the pond it was flitting around while it just continued to do giant wasp things, likely killing puppies or whatevery they did for fun.
  
  That thing definitely had a lot of wasp in it. That was wasp 'tude.
  
  On the walk, Lily taught Alice a little outdoorsmanship and orienteering, beginning with the same shadow north-finding trick with a stick.
  
  After getting to the general area, according to her PipBoy, it took a half hour of searching to find the actual cave entrance for the Vault, "Okay, they shouldn't 'ave any automated guns or anything on the Vault. Chances are they're just going to tell us to fuck off or try to ignore us, but if you see the Vault door open, retreat to the front of the cave and wait for me there, okay?"
  
  Alice nodded her understanding. They left the mulebot at the front of the cave and ventured deeper in. There was a swarm of radroaches that attacked them at a blind turn. There was a girl shrieking, lasers blasting and gunshots going off for a good half minute before the last one died.
  
  Lily managed to get through the situation without being bit, but one of the roaches bit Alice on the hand, which already looked red and was slightly swollen. Lily clucked her tongue; they were supposed to be slightly venomous, weren't they?
  
  Lily brought her scanner out and took a brief scan of a number of the more in-tact roaches, followed by a detailed scan of Alice's injured hand. Lily hummed in thought, 'Seems like there are some caustic alkalines associated with the saliva, so not quite a poison.'
  
  "You'll be fine. Your medichines are already massed in your 'and; you might have a rash for an 'our. These roaches are quite fascinating, though," Lily told the girl.
  
  Alice squinched up her nose, "Quite terrifying, I'd say! And gross!"
  
  Lily snorted, "Put on your big girl panties; I have it on good authority that a ten-year-old can kill those things with a BB gun. Alright, the Vault is up here; I can see it."
  
  They walked up to the Vault door control, which Lily stood in front of. Lily thought that they would likely just ignore her if she pressed the call button, so instead, she pulled out the data line from her PipBoy and plugged it into the panel. If there was no response from the security area, this would trigger the Vault door to open, but instead, the speaker buzzed to life, "What? Who is that? Vault 108? We don't care; take a hike!"
  
  Lily said pleasantly into the speaker, "Ah, yes, Monsieur, I'll definitely be doing that, but only if you'll do me the favour of telling me the precise date and time, first? My PipBoy's real-time clock had to be reset, and I really need to know."
  
  There was a pause before the male voice came back, "It's December 25th, 2402, 22:02. Now go away!"
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes, "Ho Ho Ho. If you don't want me to start singing Christmas Carols until you submit, I suggest you answer my simple question and get me out of your hair. I know it is in the mid 2270s, by the way."
  
  There was silence, so Lily sighed and did as she threatened. She knew quite a few Christmas Carols, so she sang one. She was pretty sure that they could not mute her speaker so long as she kept her PipBoy connected to the terminal.
  
  About halfway through the first song, the male voice returned with, "Wait, wait, wait..."
  
  Lily frowned, was her singing voice that terrible? She thought she would have to really annoy them for over an hour or two.
  
  The man's voice was more reasonable now, "We've never heard that carol before. Suppose you start it over from the beginning and sing another one after it; now that I have the holotape recording, I'll tell you the current date and time in exchange. Then you gotta get the hell out before the Overseer finds out and puts his boot up my ass for talking to an outsider, okay?"
  
  Smiling, Lily said, "You got yourself a deal. Tell me when you want me to start."
  
  The male voice did a countdown, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1..."
  
  Lily began the carol again and tried actually to sing it well instead of annoyingly. She finished it after several minutes and started another one right away.
  
  She paused for a long moment after the second song, but then asked, "So what time is it?"
  
  There was a long pause, and then he said, "At the beep, the current time is exactly July 17th, 2274, 10:52... beep." He just said beep; he didn't even try to make the sound effect.
  
  Lily, who already had her PipBoy ready to set the time, quickly dialled in the correct date and time in. At least, she knew more or less how much time she had until the plot of Fallout 3 started. Slightly more than two years.
  
  Lily didn't bother to say goodbye. She didn't want to deal with the Vault until the Lone Wanderer was already wandering, especially considering the Overseer was crazy. She just unplugged her PipBoy and nodded at Alice, "Let's go."
  
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  Record Scratch (Pt 1)
  As she was falling through the air, staring at the rough-looking ground three stories below her, Lily was momentarily reminded of a trope in American films in the early to mid-2000s where the film would begin by showing something horrible happening to the main character; for example, she could be falling three stories, and then with a record scratch sound effect the film would pause, and the character's voice would be dubbed over along with some cheery music, saying something along the lines of, "Yeah, that's me! You're probably wondering how I got into the position where I am falling three stories through the air!"
  
  *record scratch* *pause* "Yeah, that's me..."
  
  THE DAY BEFORE
  
  Lily led Alice out of the cave while checking her PipBoy for the marker she had placed for the location of the hospital that was her primary target, "So, we still 'ave most of zhe day. We'll find zhe hospital and make sure it isn't a super mutant or raider den and then look through it briefly. We'll set up camp nearby and go through it thoroughly most of tomorrow, then head back home. OK?"
  
  With that, the two women set off. The area of the D.C. area they were trekking through was mostly suburbs, which had gone back to nature in the past two hundred years - after an apocalypse that meant, more or less, it was a desert.
  
  Lily wasn't in a hurry to get to the hospital, so she set the pace slowly and tried to teach Alice about surviving in a desert environment as much as possible. While she wasn't an expert, she did know a fair bit from camping trips in New Mexico and Arizona when she was a child, as well as her multiple deployments to Afghanistan, even if that accursed country had almost every biome imaginable in its boarders, somehow.
  
  She showed the younger girl that despite the appearance of a lifeless wasteland that there were numerous living creatures scratching out an existence, even if they were mostly the small variety.
  
  Something Lily had noticed was Alice was like a bull running through a China shop; every step she took crunched audibly on the ground in a way that made every living thing in twenty meters aware of her presence, and the girl gave little thought to where she placed her feet, it was just as well for the girl's safety that there was no time to deploy any kind of landmines when the bombs fell.
  
  While pointing out a den of a small family of little mutated mice that seemed somewhat like prairie dogs that Alice had almost obliviously stepped on, Lily quietly whispered to the younger girl in a tone that Alice had come to associate when her teacher was quoting someone, "Zhe world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." The girl privately thought the way her teacher said 'sharper' sounded more like 'she-pear', though.
  
  Lily pointed out the girl's deficiencies in a kind way and began the process of correcting them, "In true desert survival, it is basically impossible to be stealthy, but in zhis semi-urban desert, it is almost more like a light forest. There are plenty of opportunities to hide, sneak and ambush, yes? Stealth should always be zhe primary objective. A fight avoided is a fight won, and no enemy can defeat us if they cannot perceive us. And always assume zhe enemy is doing the same."
  
  Lily demonstrated the slow, almost rolling gait that she had developed for sneaking. After much effort and little success, something finally clicked for the young Apprentice, and she began walking without alerting everyone of her intentions and location. However, her efforts were still nowhere near perfect. Alice would perform pretty well for a while, and then fatigue would force her to revert to a more normal gait as the sneak-stalking gait seemed to use entirely different muscle groups that she had little history of using to control her footsteps, so precisely.
  
  Still, Lily was pleased with the girl's progress in only a single day's efforts. Although they did not encounter raiders, they saw a group of four ghouls that appeared civilized. While Lily had already got numerous tissue and DNA samples and scans from feral ghouls, she had not yet gotten any from ones that still had their wits about them.
  
  Lily used this group as an impromptu test for Alice, telling her to try to approach them undetected, and Lily would follow along. The girl did better than Lily thought she would, and Lily had to stop her from continuing trying to sneak right up to them, which Lily did not think would look too friendly. At about ten meters, she stopped Alice, and they shifted to a more normal walk, and in order to ensure the ghouls were aware of their approach, she called out, "'Ello, zhe group! We are friendly."
  
  Although she stated her friendly intentions, she instructed Alice to keep her carbine in a lazy port-arms position, with the rifle resting across her arms but pointed up and well away from the ghouls. This would allow her to quickly bring the weapon to use if she needed it, though. Lily, herself, kept her laser rifle slung at her side. She was much more confident in her ability to move quickly and felt it was more friendly if at least one of them wasn't obviously ready to fight to the death.
  
  This clearly startled the group of four ghouls, who jumped a little when they noticed them but relaxed somewhat when it was clear Lily and Alice weren't raiders. One of the four mumbled under his breath, "... sneaky bitches..." but Lily's better than average hearing easily discerned the syllables.
  
  "Woah, hello there, little ladies. I'm George Wilkins, and here are my friends Missy Thomas, John Harper, and Other George," the leader of the ghouls introduced themselves.
  
  Lily put a friendly smile on her face, "Greetings, monsieur. I am known as Lilliane Sainte-Claire, Doctor of Medicine, Scientist and Adventurer. This," she nodded her head sideways to Alice, "is Apprentice Doctor Alice, whom is under my tutelage. We greet you. It's a nice change of pace not to cross paths with cannibals or giant, deadly, venomous scorpions, or worse, no?"
  
  The ghoul chuckled, and his tone was slightly disbelieving while at the same time still friendly, "It sure is, Dr St. Claire. Doctor of Medicine, huh? I don't think I've seen a University still handing out those degrees in some time. Missy here was a registered nurse before the bombs fell. The closest thing to a doctor we've seen, Missy is."
  
  Lily smiled gently, "I'd rather not discuss the specifics of where I matriculated from, but I assure you the degree was well-earned." She turned slightly to regard Missy, "Nice to meet you, Dr Thomas... I figure an RN's knowledge base by itself is a lot more than your average wasteland," Lily performed the air quote gesture, "quote doctor unquote, to say nothing of two hundred plus years experience. And if I call those types doctors out of courtesy, I certainly wouldn't short-change you."
  
  The ghoul named Missy blinked, then looked pleased, "You know? She's right! I'm Doctor Missy, from now on! Hah! Thanks, Dr St. Claire. You're sure not an asshole like most of the MDs I've worked with in the past."
  
  Once it was clear each side was friendly, Alice stopped carrying her carbine so readily, and the other ghouls stopped being on alert, too. It turned out the group of ghouls was heading to Underworld, a small settlement comprised of five hundred or so ghouls and centred around the Museum of History that was located downtown.
  
  Missy, in fact, used to work at the hospital that was Lily and Alice's target, and she took some time to discuss the specifics and verify its location. She even told them that if they found any locked doors to try the code "911-77-#" as they apparently used a master code of 911 followed by the two-digit year, which Lily didn't think was very secure.
  
  Most of the discussion was between Lily and Missy, with them talking shop about medicine for a time.
  
  Eventually, she parted with the following words, "I think your chances are pretty good of finding some useful things. There were a number of not entirely destroyed Auto-Docs, EKGs and similar equipment last time I poked around the Emergency Department where I worked maybe a decade ago. It should be relatively safe all around the hospital unless raiders or muties have moved in, but there were rumours the top floor was in the process of being changed from a Med-Surge floor to a floor devoted to the care of patients from the government... That was usually a sign some research was being conducted, but we weren't a teaching hospital or associated with a University, so I don't know what it could have been."
  
  Before the ghouls left, Lily managed to buy cheek swabs from each of them for ten caps each. Missy was amused and wished her luck in her research before all four of the ghouls set off on their way toward the heart of D.C.
  
  "Why the DNA samples, Dr St. Claire?" asked Alice after the ghouls left.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue as they turned to continue on their way, too, "Don't you think it is a little weird how uniform the ghoulification process is? Radiation certainly does induce mutations, but it induces random mutation. There is just... no way... that ionizing radiation itself could be the sole cause of an otherwise normal flat turning into a ghoul. It's clearly a trigger of some other, presently unknown process. A dormant virus, similar but different than FEV, perhaps? The fact that ghouls have a significantly increased longevity is telling, too, that it isn't a natural process."
  
  Alice hummed in thought, "I hadn't really thought of it, but it does seem improbable when you talk about it like that. Flat? You've used that term before. From the context, I'd say it means human?"
  
  Lily blushed a little bit, "Sorry. It's slang, I guess; it might even be considered a little pejorative. Flat means a baseline unuplifted human without any genetic optimizations or alterations at all. Like you, at least until we can rectify that in a few weeks." She then added hastily, "I don't mean any offence."
  
  Rather than offended, the girl seemed amused.
  
  They arrived at the hospital with several hours of daylight left and carefully began searching the ground floors, looking mainly for dangers rather than treasure. They started in the Emergency Department Missy used to work at, creeping straight through the ambulance bay, which featured two brokedown Chryslus extra-large vans that presumably had an ambulance's paint on them at one point in time.
  
  Much to Alice's surprise, Lily inspected the two vehicles for some time. If it had been before her trip on the caravan to Megaton, Lily would have been shocked to see the tires still somewhat inflated on one of them but now Lily understood that they were manufactured out of super-materials. Lily desperately wanted to find a Goodyear factory to see how they produced them, "What's so interesting about these broke-down vans, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily answered good-naturedly, "I... we... will need vehicles eventually. All zhese Chryslus vehicles are powered by small fission reactors; zhese two seemed to have scrammed properly and are in shut-down mode, which means zhe fissionables inside are still probably good. The vehicles themselves are toast, but zhe engines are still good. Good to know, yes? It's actually a wonder all zhese cars haven't had zheir motors pulled out to drive a generator or something."
  
  Alice blinked, looking a little surprised, "You mean these engines could start up after all this time?"
  
  Lily made a hand-waffle motion, "Maybe. You haven't gotten into the physics, or nuclear physics portion of your general sciences focus yet. Nor likely will for some time. Plus, we are a bit short on textbooks for that, but fission fuel's half-life is in the millions of years. So, it should still be good."
  
  Lily made a note on her PipBoy, surprised at how often she actually used the device for such a purpose, before continuing their search in the deserted Emergency Room.
  
  Alice's surprised shriek as she saw a shambling, feral ghoul alerted it, which turned and charged them. Lily put two blue blasts of light into it, simultaneous to Alice putting it down with a short burst. Alice complained, "That lady said it was safe!"
  
  Lily waved her hand, hissing at Alice to keep her weapon in a ready position, "Keep your head on a swivel; when there is one, there is..." and with that, two more ghouls and a Bright One came out of one of the exam rooms, and Lily wasted no time in sending bolt after bolt of blue beams into the Bright One, while Alice shrieked again, backing up quickly and firing on the two others.
  
  Lily finished putting down the Bright One as the two other ghouls ran past her, ignoring her to focus on Alice, which somewhat surprised her. She reached out with her leg and tripped the closer ghoul to her up, sending it sprawling to the floor, and she followed it up with a single well-aimed laser burning through the monster's skull at the brainstem area, causing it to spasm once and then go still as its autonomic functions altogether ceased.
  
  Lily was momentarily surprised at her performance, 'Have I always been such a badass? Wait, that other one is trying to eat off Apprentice's face.'
  
  Alice wasn't able to finish the other ghoul off before it closed with her and was struggling with it, using her carbine as more of a melee weapon to keep the ghoul's teeth and hands out of the way. Lily momentarily sighted the ghoul down with her rifle, but couldn't be certain she wouldn't hit the Apprentice with either a miss or a burn-through so she sighed and slung it across her back and walked with a purpose to the ghoul.
  
  Pulling down her diamondoid super-stiletto from the sheath on her breast, she carefully but swiftly jammed it into the same spot she shot on the other ghoul, its brainstem, except the angle of the blade was coming upwards from the neck, dropping the ghoul instantly. The blade slid through the ghoul's skull like it was warm queso, she happily noted. Lily left the blade in the back of its head for a moment, unslinging her rifle. Then, she ordered the panting Apprentice, "Reload. And don't sweep me with your muzzle."
  
  The girl nodded and carefully reloaded her weapon as Lily guarded her. They relaxed somewhat when it became clear that there were no more ghouls near the vicinity. Alice was still heated, "That bitch said this place was safe!"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Maybe after living as a ghoul for two 'undred years, you just forget that to everyone else ferals are a danger. Or zhese ferals arrived later, if so, that might indicate a new source of dangerous radiation. Zhis hospital probably 'ad a nuclear medicine laboratory, perhaps some of the equipment became quite 'ot. In fact, you stand well away from that Bright One, I'm going to drag it out and away. It would be somewhat 'azardous for you to be closely around it," Lily then muttered, "I don't want to be around it longer than necessary, either."
  
  Lily then shouldered he rifle and drug the glowing ghoul out of the building, and a bit away from the approach so it wouldn't be near them if they decided to leave the same way they came in. Alice asked her curiously, "Dr St. Claire, if you're immune to radiation then why do you care about being around the Bright One's body anyway?"
  
  Lily scowled, "I'm immune to most of the traditional complications associated with ionizing radiation, namely mutation, cancer, death. But ionizing radiation is still very small particles, like little bullets, that rip through your body. Nobody is really immune to that unless you shield yourself from it. Our brains especially aren't. Ionizing radiation can depolarise neurons and axons if it hits your brain just right. That's memory loss, personality changes, and any number of other terrible possibilities if I just stuck my head around a significant rad source long enough."
  
  Lily considered it before nodding, "In fact, take one Rad-X now. Zhe Bright One might 'ave tended to induce a low level of radioactivity anywhere it was around long enough, to say nothing about whether we will find a potential 'ot source that lured them in." Alice nodded and fished some pills out of her bag and took one.
  
  "I included a pretty thick layer of foam padding in our helmets, not just for comfort, but these plastic 'ydrocarbon-based foams have significant a proton level in the foam, which will tend to act as a neutron moderator. So the helmets should be radiation resistant. 'opefully," Lily added.
  
  They then began carefully exploring the entire Emergency Room. They found three autodocs that weren't completely destroyed, but only one was in a condition that it might be salvaged. Lily left the one in the best condition alone and began disassembling the other two, "We will take the computers out of these two AutoDocs and all the servo motors and other electronics too. We'll leave the armatures and surgical tools, mostly. I can fashion those well enough."
  
  Alice tilted her head to the side. Lily stared at her. She was copying her mannerisms; Lily was sure about it now! Alice said, "What about the good one?"
  
  Lily smiled, "Either we come back for it, or most likely, I will hire a small mercenary team to come to haul it away entirely intact. I think the latter, probably. It shouldn't be too expensive to hire a team to do that."
  
  They took away a few EKGs, defibrillator machines and one ventilator that Lily said she could probably repair as well as a fairly large amount of miscellaneous medical supplies that were not easy to fabricate, like IV tubings and ventilator circuits.
  
  Lily glanced at the sun's position outside through a window and nodded, "This is a good stopping place for tonight. Let's leave and find a good place to set up camp."
  
  Rather than try to camp inside the hospital, which Lily said wasn't safe, they left the general area and found a place about a fifteen-minute walk away to set up their tent. Alice took charge of making dinner, and they just relaxed until it got dark, where they slept in shifts.
  
  Alice POV
  
  Alice woke up in the morning, feeling a little embarrassed that she had slept so long, but her teacher kept informing her that she needed far less sleep than Alice did. For now, anyway.
  
  Her teacher was already awake, making some breakfast. She greeted her and told her she was going to find a place to go to the restroom. She was always amused that such a term had survived to the point past when people rarely even had the luxury of a room to relieve themselves in.
  
  Her teacher stopped her, and told her to take her rifle with her. Alice mentally smacked herself in the forehead, of course. She was so stupid, sometimes. She grabbed the carbine and slung it at her side, and set off.
  
  It might have been self-consciousness in not wanting to poop near the camp, or it might have just the whimsy of a nice morning, but she hiked a fair bit away before she found a place to go.
  
  Sighing after she was done, 'Toilet paper is such an amazing thing.' She started moving back towards camp when she saw a glint of something artificial, which stopped her in her tracks, causing her to crouch in stealth near an especially large tumbleweed, trying to identify what she saw and where she saw it.
  
  Her teacher had spent multiple hours yesterday talking to her about the importance of moving quietly and moving smoothly, which Alice took to mean it was incredibly important. That was three times as long as how long Lily talked to her about how a liver worked, and you had to have a liver to live!
  
  Granted, half of the time Lily talked about the liver's function was to denigrate it. Still, Alice found that wasn't entirely unusual about their discussions about the body and its function. Dr St. Claire sure wasn't too impressed with how people's bodies were put together, that was sure!
  
  She tried to remember what else her Mistress told and showed her yesterday about sneaking. Being silent wasn't enough. Movement attracted the eye, and Alice had to move smoothly and slowly. And Dr St. Claire had spent over ten minutes discussing the neural circuitry involved that was hardwired into people's brains to detect faces. Alice didn't understand nearly any of it, but it gave her the idea to look sideways on, to present only half a face, at least.
  
  Alice found the source of the glint; it was an axe carried by a man. She narrowed her eyes. He was in a group with two others, walking away from her. Thankfully, none of them precisely looked like raiders, but Alice wasn't about to introduce herself.
  
  Alice suddenly was very nervous. She saw the way Lily went through those ghouls yesterday like she was reaping wheat instead of the lives of monsters while she, herself, could barely even fend one off. The idea of being separated from her teacher, who was very much also her protector, scared her.
  
  She couldn't directly go back to the camp, either, as the path this group of three were taking was parallel to it, and she would definitely be seen.
  
  Sighing, she settled into what she was calling her skulking gait and shadowed the group. As they went past the camp, she could duck around them and reunite with Dr St. Claire.
  
  It was tiring to walk silent, especially since they were on a bit of an incline going back, and the dim light of dawn also made it difficult to avoid stepping on something that would crunch loudly, announcing her presence.
  
  However, despite all that, she was doing well. Perhaps it was just that these three weren't very observant? Or perhaps she was a genius at this? Either way, they did not notice her. She noticed with some alarm that they detected the camp and walked directly to it. Were they enemies? Would they surprise or attack her teacher?
  
  She gripped her rifle carefully and followed. If they looked like they were bad guys, well, she had the drop on them.
  
  Alice blinked. Dr St. Claire wasn't where she used to be, making breakfast. Don't tell me she went back into the tent?! She would be totally surprised by the three!
  
  One of the men walked up to investigate the tent, and she carefully sighted him in with her rifle. Then, frowning, she shifted her target to the centre man. He was the only one with a rifle and, therefore, the most significant threat.
  
  As the man got near the tent Dr St. Claire's voice called out from the left, definitely not from the tent, "'Ello, hunters! At least, you certainly don't appear to be raiders, no?"
  
  The three men startled a bit, the centre one almost bringing his rifle out of port arms and to the ready, which almost caused Alice to shoot him. But then, when Dr St. Claire seemed to be friendly, the three men relaxed somewhat. The centre man turned to face Dr St. Claire, but left his rifle with the barrel pointed in the air when he saw she, also, did not have a weapon at the ready.
  
  Alice saw Dr St. Claire stare directly at her and wink. Grumbling that she had been discovered, she kept her rifle sighted on the man that was the biggest threat.
  
  Alice didn't follow the entire conversation Dr St. Claire and the men had, but it turned out that her teacher was correct and these three men were hunters. Alice supposed there was enough odd animals that were edible around to warrant hunting groups, but it seemed a little bit weird to her.
  
  She almost shouldered her weapon and started to reveal herself when it seemed like they were friendly but her teacher glanced at her very briefly and ever so slightly shook her head, which startled Alice. What did Dr St. Claire know that she didn't? Maybe she was just paranoid? Whatever the reason, Alice settled her rifle's reticle back on the butt of the hunting group's leader. Her rifle was set on full automatic, and Dr St. Claire always told her to aim a little low and let the recoil bring a small burst across her target's body.
  
  Alice tried to pay more attention to the conversation now, and it seemed like her teacher was buying some meat off the group? Well, that would be nice. Maybe they could eat it for breakfast.
  
  Alice watched them make the exchange, and surprisingly her teacher brought out the scanner she was ever so protective of. She had used it herself and it was an amazing piece of technology! She watched Dr St Claire scan the meat right in front of the hunters! That was very weird for her teacher, who was paranoid about other people discovering the device and its capabilities. The hunters seemed a bit confused, but she guessed the lead hunter thought it was a device to detect poison because he chuckled and said, "It's not poison, scout's honour!"
  
  Alice saw Dr St. Claire smile in a friendly manner before putting the scanner and meat away, before nodding, "It's most certainly not," then, in a slightly louder voice, she called out, " Alice. Golgotha."
  
  Alice squeaked. That was the secret code word that her teacher told her meant she should immediately and with lethal force attack whomever Dr St. Claire was speaking with. She was worried yesterday that her teacher would have to say it when they met that group of nice ghouls.
  
  Alice didn't know why these men had to die, but she trusted her teacher with her life! She held her breath and squeezed the trigger. The entire burst struck the leader in the back, dropping him like a stone. The other two hunters gaped and turned in Alice's direction, pulling out weapons.
  
  However, as soon as they turned from Dr St. Claire, her teacher's hand snapped to her holster faster than Alice could see, and the next thing she saw was four or five blue laser beams from the dark grey laser pistol her teacher carried strike the two men, who also fell to the ground dead.
  
  How did Dr St. Claire change the colour of the laser weapons she used, anyway? Alice was curious. She had to admit she favoured blue over red if it was just a cosmetic difference.
  
  Seeing no more threats, Alice slung her rifle and jogged out to meet Dr St. Claire, who was pulling the meat she just bought out of her bag and throwing it on the dead hunter's body, "Fucking cannibals," she said with deep emotion.
  
  Alice blinked. Oh. They wouldn't be eating it for breakfast, then.
  
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  Record Scratch (Pt 2)
  Both Lily and Alice had both mostly lost their appetite, but it still wasn't the type of world where you could waste food and not feel awful about yourself about it, so they quickly ate breakfast anyway and repacked their tent.
  
  Alice asked Lily as they finished searching the dead cannibals for anything useful, of which they had almost nothing, "So, what does the word Golgotha mean anyway, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily hummed as they walked side by side slowly back to the hospital, "It is a name of a place, not a word, precisely. Where a supposed god was killed... or inconvenienced for a few days, depending on your belief." She changed her tone to the one she affected when she quoted someone: "When they came to the place called Golgotha, they crucified him there, along with the criminals."
  
  She then coughed and continued, "I did not bring any books back from the library about proto-European religious mythologies. Although the place may or may not have actually existed somewhere in the Levant, I have serious doubts about both the existence and divinity of the man allegedly crucified there."
  
  Lily turned to face Alice seriously, "It is important for any lettered person to understand myths, especially the process of formation of them - but if you have a particular interest in the divine, my recommendation is to become a god yourself. It's all a matter of perspective and knowledge - any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from miracles."
  
  Alice smirked, "That's really arrogant, Dr St. Claire! Is that your goal, godhood?"
  
  Lily chuckled and tried her best to sound mysterious, "If everyone is a god, then nobody is a god." Internally, she smirked, 'Nobody has seen The Incredibles in this universe, so that probably sounded really profound. It's good to keep the Apprentice thinking we are wise.'
  
  Returning to the hospital, they briefly retraced their steps from yesterday just to ensure they hadn't missed anything. Lily took about ten minutes to completely disconnect the best Auto-Doc from its power, water and other connections so that the people she hired could just slide it out without using any tools or accidentally break something in the attempt to free it.
  
  "Alright, let's be about it, Apprentice. There's likely more ghouls upstairs," Lily warned the girl to get her game face on.
  
  However, when they got to the staircase, they discovered both stairs up and down. Humming in thought, Lily nodded, "Change of plans; we'll check the basement first. Let's leave the mule up here."
  
  They were in full skulk mode, with Lily warning Alice not to shriek in alarm this time if they saw ghouls. Lily had her silenced pistol out, 'I should get a silencer and some subsonic ammo for the Apprentice if she is also going to be tag skilling Sneaking, I suppose. She seems better at it than I do, almost.'
  
  The basement door was locked, to Lily's annoyance. She was about to laser the hinges off when Alice surprised her by being able to pick the lock quite quickly. Lily just raised an eyebrow, like Spock, at the girl who merely shrugged.
  
  As soon as they opened the door inwards, there was a feral ghoul; it was in the process of turning to face them, so Lily popped it in the head twice with two relatively quiet *chuffs*. The working of the action on the pistol was the loudest part of firing the gun, and it sounded like a Swingline stapler.
  
  Lily wondered if there was actually a sneak damage multiplier because the first shot may have killed the ghoul, but the second shot, which blew half the head off, certainly did. Alice did whisper a quiet, "Eww," but Lily did not scold her because she almost said the same thing too.
  
  In the hall was another ghoul pacing away from them. Lily handed her pistol to Alice and nodded towards it. The girl apparently wasn't confident enough to try for a headshot, so she put two quick shots into its back, very close to its heart. It was likely, a fatal wound but not fast enough to stop it from roaring in pain and confusion.
  
  Standing up from her crouch, she unslung her laser rifle and nudged Alice with her thigh, "Go loud, now." Alice nodded, quickly thumbing the pistol safety before shoving it casually in the small bag she carried her first aid equipment in before unslinging her carbine.
  
  Two Bright Ones this time and three regular ghouls coming out of three rooms made the hallway pretty crowded pretty quickly. However, Lily didn't waste any time, sending lasers blasting into the closest Bright One, quickly followed by a long burst of five or six rounds from Alice, which put the radioactive ghoul on the ground.
  
  Lily realized that she wasn't even slightly afraid of these enemies. Was that overconfidence? She didn't quite think so. Their armour, while not full coverage, was quite resistant to slashing attacks, although less so for blunt force damage. She even had time to complain to her Apprentice, "Shorter bursts! Aimed short bursts!"
  
  She really needed to find this girl another laser rifle. Ironically enough, recharging energy cells was much easier than finding 5mm ammunition. Plus, then they would match.
  
  She was taking only slow aimed shots at the last Bright One, aiming only for headshots now as practice, and although she missed about every two out of three shots, it only took two solid hits to put the glowing ghoul on the ground.
  
  Alice had dropped one of the regular ghouls and severely injured a second one when she ran out of ammo. She froze, trying to decide what to do. Lily internally shook her head at the display before yelling, "Switch to your pistol! CQB!"
  
  Alice then dropped her carbine, which fell to sling to her side, and she made a pretty good show of pulling her pistol from her holster and firing about four times from retention into the injured ghoul, killing it. She kept backing up to put some space between her and the last ghoul.
  
  Something came over Lily, and she decided, for some reason, to pull her knife out and throw it at the ghoul. She had not practised throwing knives at all. Not even once. She threw it in an overhand, end-over-end throw that looked cool as hell. Except not only did she not know how to properly throw a knife, but she also did not really know how to build a knife balanced for throwing either. She had been counting on her peak human proprioception, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness.
  
  And she was accurate! The knife hit the ghoul directly between the eyes, except it hit solidly hilt-first. The ghoul seemed the most confused; it even rubbed its forehead slightly, pausing its charge. Lily shot it four times while it was confused at what hit its head. Alice was giving her serious side-eye, and Lily could see the girl's lips twitching upwards!
  
  "Nice uhh distraction, Dr St. Claire! Are you sure these ghouls are really completely feral? I'd swear that one said, 'Owe'," Alice tittered and pantomimed, rubbing her forehead as the ghoul had.
  
  Privately, Lily thought it said something like that too when the knife hit its forehead but would never, ever admit it. She ordered the girl solemnly, "We never speak of this again." To which Alice nodded, except her solemnity was betrayed by the stupid grin she had on her face.
  
  'Okay, maybe I was a little overconfident. I guess throwing a knife is harder than it looks in movies,' Lily thought while policing up her knife and dragging the two glowing ghouls out of the way in one of the broom closets.
  
  "There doesn't seem much interesting here, Dr St. Claire. Maintenance areas, laundries, kitchens..." Alice commented as they explored the rooms one at a time.
  
  Lily was about to agree with her, but in the last laundry, she found gold! At first, she wasn't quite sure what she was looking at, except it was a large machine that was about the size of a large stand-up office printer of her old life. After a few minutes of examining it, she realized what she was looking at, "Oh! This is an Auto-Tailor!"
  
  Alice asked, "Auto... Tailor? It makes clothes?"
  
  Lily nodded excitedly. "I have wanted one of these for some time! It even includes the cloth recycler attachment. I bet they would produce their own scrubs, hospital gowns and such and recycle them with these types of machines and only used the laundry for the linens or clothes this couldn't produce."
  
  Lily looked at it sadly, "It is too big for us to take back ourselves, but this is going to be Priority 1 instead of that Auto-Doc upstairs." She started rummaging through the drawers and cabinets nearby the device until she found a whole box full of holotapes, "Here! Here are the outfits it can make. Scrubs of various sizes and colours, hospital gowns, ooh, lab coats. Hmm, that's it."
  
  Lily carefully stacked all the accessories and holotapes with the machine, "Alright, let's head to the second floor now."
  
  The second floor was split between ICUs, private rooms and offices. Surprisingly, all the ghouls up there were missing. She noted a possible mobile x-ray machine that could be carted off and a PET scanner, but the PET was so big that it would take a crane and demolishing one of the walls to free it from the hospital, so she considered it a long-term project, if anything. Honestly, PET scanners were pretty low-tech and a niche medical technology anyway, and she might be able to build a compact MRI machine since she had access to room-temperature superconductors.
  
  In the offices, she hacked several terminals and read through the hospital executives' e-mails. Most were of little interest, but two were of incredible interest.
  
  FROM: R. Helweg, CEO
  
  TO: All Management
  
  SUBJECT: Fourth floor
  
  As a reminder, all unauthorized access to the fourth floor is restricted to only those clinicians required to meet our KPIs to the DoD. The Department of Defense has contracted with Saint Mary's to offer convalescent care for service members involved with PROJECT PHOENIX and PROJECT NEMEAN LION.
  
  We've also signed a lucrative contract to store certain sensitive materials for Vault-Tec, which will be referred to as PROJECT [REDACTED].
  
  Security officers should triple-check IDs and provide continuous escort to all Vault-Tec employees picking up [REDACTED] material.
  
  FROM: J Mellott, SVP Patient Care
  
  TO: Dr M. Peerson, PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT
  
  SUBJECT: Re: PHOENIX devices
  
  My department has recovered over two dozen project PHOENIX devices during routine post-mortem forensic pathological examinations these past six months.
  
  What do you want us to do with them?
  
  The DoD won't take them back since they're used goods, but it seems like a waste to incinerate them like current protocols demand.
  
  Dave, it really was a waste for the Army to pick terminally ill patients for these tests. The project PHOENIX devices can't cure stage 4 cancer! But the DoD is paying our bills, and they have the whip hand.
  
  Ignore protocol and don't trash them; sterilize them and keep them in the level four secure storage room. Just keep them well away from the [REDACTED] material. We don't want to have anything to do with that shit anyway; we're just holding it for Vault-Tec temporarily. They're supposed to come to take it for their already running [REDACTED] project in Vault [REDACTED] next Tuesday.
  
  Still on for the game on Friday? I need a chance to win back some of my money!
  
  -John
  
  ' Well, if that isn't interesting. There was only one Vault experiment in DC that started before the bombs dropped that would have needed storage only a hospital could provide. The Experimental Evolution Program in Vault 87... or was it the Evolutionary Experimental Program? Whichever... ,' Lily mused.
  
  Lily did not recognize any of the other special projects, but the code names were certainly evocative, and the second e-mail seemed to imply that cancer was beyond the ability of a PHOENIX device to heal, which seemed to imply that there were other things that it could heal.
  
  And the Nemean Lion was a famous mythological creature who had fur that was immune to most mortal weapons; it was a real pain for Hercules to kill if she recalled. Lily hummed, 'Didn't he strangle it? Or was it that he drowned it?' Could these projects be a healing implant like her medichines and dermal armour, perhaps?
  
  If these were Fallout cybernetics, she was very interested - and, she had to admit, kind of horrified - to see them. She doubted, very, very much, that she would be too impressed with them, but at the same time, it was important to understand and emulate the state of the art if she intended to sell her products to the public.
  
  Getting a sample of FEV would be very nice as well, assuming that was what the mysterious EEP material was. Lily wondered what else it could be if not FEV samples being shipped to the Vault. The only thing she could think of was, possibly, medical equipment, which would be a coup if she could acquire also.
  
  While she did not strictly speaking need FEV for any reason, it would be quite useful and interesting to have a sample of the pure strain that created the Captial Wasteland's branch of Super-Mutants. She would just have to be very careful and cagey about it. The Brotherhood did not really tolerate scientists studying FEV.
  
  It sounded like an insane and borderline impossibility to reverse a Super Mutant transformation, but it might theoretically be possible. Or at least it might be possible to transform a Super-Mutant entity back to a human, even if it wasn't strictly speaking the exact same human the Super-Mutant had been before.
  
  She had no doubt that Elder Lyons would accept the fruits of FEV research if it was research on how to reverse a Super Mutant transformation. Super Mutants were his white whale, almost.
  
  Theoretically, they could put such a cure in Project Purity like President Eden was hoping to do with the lethal strain of FEV, although Lily did not know if her ethics would permit her to do so without more universal testing than she could ever accomplish.
  
  The odds that the Capital Wasteland would become a net water exporter if Project Purity was activated approached unity. There was just no way to test such a hypothetical counter-virus on every Super Mutant and human strain in the Wastelands. But, even if that possibility were foreclosed, it would still be quite useful.
  
  But the question was, was the fourth floor a death trap? She definitely wouldn't be taking Alice up there with her.
  
  Nodding, she decided she would risk it, but cautiously. From the CEO's e-mail, it sounded like while they restricted entry to the fourth floor, they still had ordinary employees working up there, so it wasn't likely to be a death trap filled with auto-turrets and Sentry Bots.
  
  "Alright. Let's clear the third floor; then I will search the fourth floor by myself. It might be too hazardous to bring you up there. Even I will be very, very careful up there," Lily said, although Alice looked like she wanted to mutiny at the idea.
  
  The third floor had its ghoul population intact, and they methodically moved through and eliminated them. Lily was happy to see that Alice was no longer as afraid and used small two or three-round bursts or even single-aimed shots on the ghouls now. This trip was a success on just that metric alone, Lily felt.
  
  "Okay, search through this floor for anything valuable or interesting and then let us meet on the ground floor where we left the mulebot in an hour or hour and a half," Lily ordered.
  
  Lily left the girl to her scavenging and ascended the stairs to the top floor. This door was locked but with a terminal. Lily booted up the screen and then tilted her head to the side. She was about to start hacking it, but... "Surely, no. Surely, Missy didn't mean every door in the hospital had the same code."
  
  Carefully, Lily typed in 91177# in the Numpad, which caused a dim green light to flash and generated a loud clicking noise as the door unlocked.
  
  "Well... thanks, Missy," said Lily as she opened the door.
  
  Lily was as careful as she was on the first day when she cleared the female dormitory in Vault 108, peering around each corner and carefully scanning each dim area and all the ceilings for deadly traps and deadly robots.
  
  Although there were unusual panels on the ceilings in regular intervals, they did not appear to be auto-turret emplacements. Lily thought they might be vents or NBC filters installed in the ventilation system.
  
  The top floor was set up with about three quarters as wards and the rest being offices, presumably for the DoD personnel involved. There were a number of skeletons lying in bed, which indicated that they hadn't survived the bombs falling.
  
  She immediately noticed some anomalies on most of the skeletons. They had what appeared to be thin armoured plates fused in the rib cage. Clucking her tongue, she scanned the formations and muttered, "If this is the glory of the Nemean lion, then I am not impressed."
  
  She did notice that almost all of the dead skeletons had this modification, and there was no sign of the other project phoenix patients. Could that modification be complete bioware, and it degraded? 'No, the coroner said he recovered intact devices. More likely, this project Phoenix was actually effective and gave the subjects a significant survival advantage over the Nemean subjects.'
  
  Leaving the wards, Lily found a locked security door, wholly made out of steel, "Could you be the secure storage I have been looking for?" Lily examined the door for a couple of minutes but couldn't see an obvious way to open it.
  
  No matter. Lily had played enough Fallout games to know that just meant she needed to find some terminal or similar gimmick to open the door. Even though this Universe was clearly real, some things did not change. She skulked into the office areas and thoroughly searched them.
  
  These terminals, compared to the ones downstairs, were almost universally interesting. Not only did it contain detailed patient records on all of their test subjects, but it even contained engineering drawings, user manuals and detailed design documents for both the Nemean sub-dermal armour and the PHOENIX monocyte breeder system.
  
  Lily used a couple of blank holotapes to download the entire archive to take away with her as she read briefly about these project phoenix devices. She was a little sad to discover that they weren't medichine hives like her own healing system... but... honestly, they were not TOO far off, either. They were physical, mechanical devices that produced artificial blood cells, stem cells and platelets. What were human cells, if not excessively large and unorganized organic nanomachines, after all?
  
  The system designers claimed that the device would give a user a slight healing factor, which certainly seemed to be borne out by the patient records of their test subjects.
  
  Shaking her head, Lily once again got a sense of profound confusion. The duality of this universe was so odd to her. On the one hand, you had something as barbaric as grafting combat plates onto a human's skeleton, and on the other hand, you had a device that actually wouldn't be that out of place in her memories.
  
  The PHOENIX monocyte breeder and Lily was unsure why it was called that aside from the fact that it sounded cool. The device wasn't as sophisticated as something she could design, but Lily wasn't willing to call it primitive, either.
  
  And the way the people in this universe treated these two things? As if they were equivalent high technology! Shaking her head, she stored the holotapes she had copied their archives onto in her bag and continued the search.
  
  In the corner, sequestered by itself, Lily finally found what she was looking for. It was a security office, and Lily could already see a faintly glowing terminal that Lily hoped would unlock the secure storage.
  
  Opening a metal locker, Lily couldn't help herself and shouted, "Score!"
  
  It was a weapons locker, and inside were four mint-condition-looking laser pistols. There were indentations for a similar number of laser rifles, but they were empty. Lily started to complain, "Where's the rifles, huh?"
  
  But thinking about it, she calmed down. She was already beyond fortunate to receive these. There probably were never any laser rifles assigned to this post in the first place, and they just used standardized lockers.
  
  Lily was happy with her find, 'Once I refurbish these babies, I'll give one to Apprentice. Then we'll be blue beam buddies!'
  
  She carefully transferred the weapons to her bag before booting up the terminal. This terminal she did have to hack, but it wasn't that difficult to work through the security. It had been the collective work of two hundred years to find security vulnerabilities in even the latest version of RobCo's OS, and it wasn't like they had OTA patching still going on, so all the same exploits tended to always work, just varying on which version of the OS you were up against.
  
  The system was barely functioning; the only option she could see was to unlock the magnetically locked door, which she selected.
  
  Lily retraced her steps and found the previously locked door now unlocked. Normally with her healthy knowledge of horror films, she would be a little paranoid about stepping into a room that might lock behind her, but she noticed all the magnetic locking mechanisms were plainly visible on the inside of the door, and it wouldn't be the work of more than two minutes to disconnect them from power to open the door even if it mysteriously closed and locked her in.
  
  Inside the storage room, the walls were secure steel bars in front of drywall, so it wouldn't have been an option to just kick through the drywall to get in, Lily noted.
  
  On one side of the room, there were about two dozen metallic briefcases. Similar to the famous Halliburton style aluminium briefcases that always seemed to be used in films and TV shows as a MacGuffin. Was she looking at a real-life MacGuffin now? Each of them had a Vault-Tec logo embossed onto them, too.
  
  Ignoring those for now, Lily walked to the other side of the room, where she found a small crate, 'If those briefcases are the EEP material, then this crate has to have the phoenix devices.'
  
  Opening the crate, she found almost thirty small metallic devices packaged in thin clear plastic bags. Lily smirked, "I'll be taking you guys." The crate was barely full, so she didn't even consider taking it with her. Instead, she carefully unloaded it and put all the devices in her backpack, which was mostly empty in the first place since most of her gear was downstairs.
  
  Turning, she approached the briefcases. She took one out of the rack and laid it on a small table in the room. It wasn't locked, surprisingly, so she just clicked it open. Instead of finding a glowing light like in Pulp Fiction, she found three dozen vials, packed carefully in foam and filled with an ambiguously green liquid, each labelled "FEV-Milton-271."
  
  Letting go a sigh, she quickly closed the briefcase. She stared at the other briefcases, wondering what she should do with them.
  
  Nothing. She would need to hire a merc team that she could trust wouldn't try to poke around on the top floor of this hospital while bringing her the AutoDoc and AutoTailor. It helped that it was locked with a pretty sophisticated lock, even if the code was not sophisticated at all, she supposed.
  
  With a blush, she wondered briefly where Grace's Grenadiers were. It wouldn't be just an excuse to see her, either!
  
  With the terminal on this side of the door, she configured the door to lock behind her and took her briefcase full of viruses with her out of the door.
  
  Almost instantly, she heard a deep klaxon of an alarm and could see a flashing light on those strange ceiling panels.
  
  Lily panicked, 'Fuck! There was some kind of sensor on the door and probably is some kind of near-field communication device in these fucking briefcases, or something ridiculous like that!'
  
  She glanced at those ceiling panels. Were they going to fold out into automatic heavy machine guns?! She shifted the briefcase to her left hand and pulled her laser pistol out of her holster, and aimed at the nearest panel.
  
  She got her answer very rapidly. It wasn't auto-turrets, at least. But the panel slid open and weaponized eyebots fell out of the ceiling.
  
  Well, Lily assumed they were weaponized. She didn't give the one she was staring at a chance to shoot her to find out definitively. She filled it full of holes while it was still hovering down from the roof, causing it to fall and crash to the ground in a shower of sparks.
  
  Some danger sense she did not realize she had pinged her, and she moved to the side in a rush. Almost simultaneously and from behind her in the secure storage room, a red laser beam filled the area of space where her torso just used to be. "Fucker!" she yelled and slammed the door closed that led to the storage area and started a flat-out run.
  
  Her spatial awareness was quite good. She knew where she was in relation to the mental map she had made of this floor, and she did not think she could make it all the way to the stairs and probably safety. There were over twelve panels in the ceilings if she followed that route. Eyebots were fragile, as she had just proved, but there was no way she could fight through thirteen floating laser bots.
  
  If she had Power Armour, she wouldn't have thought twice about it and would have rushed the stairs or even just systematically hunted the eyebots. But, she had customized her own armour with significant amounts of graphene, carbon fibre and diamondoid plates. All of which burn at relatively low temperatures, to say nothing about the temperatures a combat laser can produce, so she is at significant risk from all energy weapons at present.
  
  But there were windows in the patient wards, and in the closest room, she would only have to pass two ceiling panels. She felt a lot better about the potential to survive a four-story fall than about staying put right now.
  
  Turning the corner at a flat sprint, a red laser beam flashed over her head. She didn't understand. Certainly, eyebots weren't designed specifically to be security bots but why would a combat robot fire its weapon if it was going to miss?
  
  Were the spatial combat algorithms so poor in the Fallout universe? She knew precisely how much computing power the quantum core of an Eyebot had, and at this range, every shot should be a guaranteed hit, no matter how fast or unpredictable Lily zigged or zagged.
  
  She decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth; she fired two blue beams at the eyebot, hitting with one and causing it to wobble back and forth before blowing past it.
  
  The second eyebot did not miss, however, and she took a glancing hit from its beam weapon on her left shoulder and arm. Grimacing in pain, she shot the bot three times in its smug-looking face, sending it to the ground while she continued to move towards the patient ward. Her fingers still worked, clenching the briefcase of FEV, so the damage couldn't be too serious.
  
  One-on-one, the Eyebots were dangerous but did not seem to be an existential threat, but if they could swarm her, even three would kill her in an instant.
  
  Kicking the door to the patient room open at a run, she raised her laser pistol and started firing beams as quickly as the weapon could discharge at the intact window. In her peripheral vision, she could see two Eyebots turn the corner and float down the hallway toward her, and she saw the flash of a red laser beam miss her as she ran into the patient room.
  
  Lily didn't even slow down; if anything, she dropped into a dead sprint and, at the last moment, leapt at the weakened window, boots first.
  
  She crashed through it quite cinematically, she thought and had the momentary feeling of Wiley Coyote, Super Genius, as he ran off the cliff before beginning her own plummet to the ground.
  
  In life and death situations, her own perception of time did slow considerably. As she was falling through the air, staring at the rough-looking ground three stories below her, Lily was momentarily reminded of a trope in American films in the early to mid-2000s where the film would begin by showing something horrible happening to the main character; for example, she could be falling three stories, and then with a record scratch sound effect the film would pause, and the character's voice would be dubbed over along with some cheery music, saying something along the lines of, "Yeah, that's me! You're probably wondering how I got into the position where I am falling three stories through the air!"
  
  But, life was stranger than fiction sometimes. As she passed the third floor, she locked eyes with her Apprentice through one of the windows, who had a look of slack-jawed shock.
  
  Lily did not have enough time to laugh, but that was really funny. However, she did have enough time to consider how best to handle this briefcase of potentially fragile vials of concentrated FEV.
  
  If she did not have her medichines, she would have tossed it away as even one vial smashing might prove enough to turn her into a stupid brute, but she was actually fairly confident in her body's ability to fight it off, as long as she didn't mainline the stuff or skinny dip in a vat of it she should be fine. However, she hugged the briefcase to her chest to try to shield it as much as possible.
  
  In the past, she had asked her Apprentice how she might have improved the skeletal structure of a human's feet and legs. The answer she was hoping the Apprentice would give was beyond the obvious strengthing of materials was to build in shock absorption. Flats could die from a sudden deceleration of as few as 50Gs, which Lily thought was insanely fragile.
  
  While she wasn't in a position to solve the underlying cause of such fragility, she could built-in shock absorbers in her legs that would allow her to spread the deceleration of a fall over a longer period of time, which could save her life. Both her femurs could contract briefly, like a spring or an air piston. Since Lily had, of course, played Portal in her past life, she called them her Long Fall Legs.
  
  'Still, this is going to hurt,' thought Lily as the ground approached her. Rather than immediately take the fall in a roll, which would undoubtedly break a number of her bones that weren't made of diamond, she took it full on her legs until she felt them contract to the maximum, then she threw herself forwards in a roll to convert all that downwards momentum into horizontal momentum.
  
  Grunting in pain, she completed two complete rolls before she came to a stop on her back. She just stared at the sky briefly, slowly taking in air after having the wind knocked out of her.
  
  Wiping away the tears at the corner of her eyes before anyone could see them, she took stock of herself. She momentarily set the briefcase of FEV aside and palpated her hips. Her acetabulum didn't appear to be fractured, which was her greatest fear in this insane leap of faith. While her femurs were diamond, her hips certainly weren't - yet, anyway. While she had attempted to design sponginess into the interface of the femur and her hip joint specifically for this contingency, you never knew if it would be enough.
  
  It wasn't fractured, but it was certainly bruised. Lily sighed, ' It's going to be a bitch walking home. Maybe it will be fine to turn off my sense of pain, but then again, that is quite dangerous on a hike in the desert, too. Maybe just take some of those Percocet-equivalents?'
  
  She sat up and grabbed the briefcase, and laid it on the ground. Rather than opening it, she grabbed her scanner from her messenger bag and scanned its interior from the outside.
  
  Peering at the scan results, Lily sighed in relief. None of the vials, which appeared actually to be made of sapphire, were fractured. She was lucky.
  
  She just sat there for a moment, relaxing and staring quietly murderous dagger-eyes at the fourth-floor windows.
  
  She heard the Apprentice girl screaming, "MISTRESS! Are you okay?!"
  
  Lily stopped plotting her vengeance on the fourth floor to look down at Alice flat-out running towards her. As the girl got closer, Lily could see her eyes were puffy with shed tears, 'Aww.'
  
  Lily sighed theatrically, "I'm fine, Apprentice. Go back and get the mulebot; let's go home. I'll tell you about it on the way. And bring me two of the painkillers and some water when you come back."
  
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  Nostalgia of the Spider Witch
  While Lily had said she had planned to lock in the reflexes mod at strain four, what she administered to her group of almost a dozen volunteers was actually strain number ten.
  
  She had over a week without any possibility of test subjects when she first moved into Megaton, so it wasn't like she could be expected to not work on it at all. Right?
  
  In her mind, she hadn't really worked on the reflexes genetic alteration at all, anyway. Instead, her efforts were confined to the coronavirus delivery mechanism. It barely resembled a coronavirus anymore. In fact, it might not strictly speaking be considered a virus at all anymore.
  
  A virus was defined almost entirely by its function of replicating out of control in the presence of living cells. In her version, which she was calling Vector Mk1 in her notes, the only place the virus replicated unceasingly was in specially prepared growth media.
  
  When introduced into a living organism, a genetic flag was tripped, and the virus could only replicate a certain number of times before becoming deactivated. This behaviour that mimicked cellular apoptosis and the Hayflick limit on cellular division was made up completely out of whole cloth by Lily, having never been before seen in nature. It was only seen in the cells of complex multicellular organisms for evolutionary and other reasons.
  
  However, this was a common feature of viruses that had been used as a vector for genetic change in her memories; Lily had read about it while studying history as transhumanity had long since transitioned to completely synthetic polymeric protein structures to both encode and effect a genetic change in an organism.
  
  To the part of her memories that was an electrical engineer, this change reminded her of a hop limit, or time-to-live, on data packets in a network which could only be forwarded from machine to machine a certain number of times before being discarded.
  
  This change would lower the risk of a breach of containment considerably, to the point where she probably would only insist on isolation for her testing cohort. The only downside, if there was one, was she had to specifically "infect" each person with a sufficient amount of pre-grown virions correlated with the number of cells in their body.
  
  If she used too few, then the genetic change would not be propagated throughout the subject's entire body before Vector's hop limit was exceeded, which would be suboptimal.
  
  She did this by the simple method of eye drops, one drop for every fifty kilos of body weight. It didn't particularly matter if a person was dosed with an extra number of virions; in fact, a single drop was actually close to 300% of the amount needed for fifty kilos of biomass.
  
  Frowning, as she carefully dripped a drop into a man's eye, she was considering switching to a metered mist atomizer, which was used in nose sprays. However, she honestly had no idea how they worked mechanically, except that they included a pump.
  
  She nodded at the man before walking to the next waiting in line.
  
  She hummed as she lined up the eye dropper on the eye of her last subject, 'Maybe a metered inhaler like is used in the drug Jet or asthma medicines?'
  
  She finished infecting the last of her volunteers, using two drops to be safe on the stocky gentleman before she nodded, "Okay, this isolation ward is more like a barracks, and for zhat, I apologize."
  
  "That's okay, Doc. You're paying us enough and feeding us, providing clean water for us to drink. We can sit around for a day, no problem," said one of the middle-aged men. All her test subjects in this cohort were men. Ideally, she should have a mix of males and females, but she only had one isolation ward and wasn't willing to isolate a group of female and male subjects together.
  
  Was that prudish of her? Lily tilted her head to the side as she considered. No, she just had a poor opinion of the current state of civilization in the Wasteland.
  
  "Yes, well, I 'ave to thank you. You may start to feel slightly ill in about four to six hours, but it should not be particularly bad. Perhaps a mild fever is all and shouldn't last more than a couple of 'ours. I've left some entertainment over 'ere for you, gentlemen. 'Ere are some pre-war board games, a number of novels or non-fiction books to read and a radio to listen to monsieur Three Dogs. Please be careful with the books; they're from my personal library," Lily cautioned.
  
  "Is it true that we can come back every day and get a meal and water for a week after tomorrow?" asked one of them.
  
  Lily nodded to the man. After releasing the men in a day, they wouldn't return for a week for a new baseline test of their reflexes and endurance, followed by a test of the reversing agent.
  
  Some of her subjects were... poor. Her data would likely be severely compromised if she did not see to their hydration and nutrition herself. She had budgeted over a hundred caps per test subject both in compensation and in upkeep during the week before baseline tests could be conducted, "Yes. It is very important for you to be feeling well at the time you come back in a week's time because one of the primary things I need to know is how better you perform on the tests my Apprentice 'ad you conduct earlier. So please don't be shy. We'll offer you free lunch and dinner and as much as four litres of clean water a day."
  
  This group of ten was the healthiest of her volunteers in the first place. Most were workers for Mr Tombs. She already had to turn away more than half of the potential subjects for being in too poor of condition, but she had given them some food and water and told them to return in two days to be recycled into the test cohort for the clean metabolism mod, which relied on entirely objective test metrics for its efficacy.
  
  "Two final things, one - zhere is to be no gambling during your isolation period," Lily ordered.
  
  One of the men looked confused and asked, "Why not?"
  
  Lily sighed, "Because I 'aven't paid you yet, and I feel it is a possibility that cooped up with nothing to do, you may be tempted to gamble for IOUs. I don't want to arrive 'ere tomorrow and find a group of disgruntled men and one man I owe six hundred caps to..." she trailed off, tilted her head to the side and offered jokingly, "or a dead body and nine men with a story of 'ow the dead man accidentally stabbed himself nine times tragically."
  
  That caused most of them to laugh. Lily nodded, "Lastly, I need to ensure containment is kept until tomorrow. As such, there is a Protectron outside this door. If any of you leave, it will try to put you back in, but if you run away, it will just shoot you. Sorry about that, I don't have any non-lethal weapons to give it."
  
  The man glanced at each other, and then all collectively shrugged. Life was cheap in the Wasteland, and these hard men didn't see much problem with that.
  
  She nodded to the men one last time before leaving and locking the door. She sighed, ' Medical testing is sure expensive.'
  
  If it wasn't for her seeing patients by house call, she might be in dire financial straits. Her most lucrative client was actually a brothel consisting of a little more than two dozen escorts, run by a former lady of the evening herself.
  
  Her initial visit had cured innumerable small injuries and sexually transmitted diseases, which probably will make this brothel the highest class establishment in the Capital Wasteland when it trickles down that their workers are clean.
  
  There had been an awkward moment when she informed the madam that while she could provide highly effective birth control that she wasn't willing to perform any terminations of pregnancy unless it was medically required. The woman stared at her like Lily was insane, and maybe she was.
  
  From her memories of growing up in America, she was always very pro-choice, after all. However, her memories of fleeing a destroyed Earth and spending three hundred years living in space were diametrically opposed in that area.
  
  Even before Lily was a child in that world, Humanity had long ago achieved near-perfect control of their own bodies. As a result, it was not possible for a woman to get pregnant, except if she actually desired it. Nor was it possible for a male to be fertile unless he intended to be.
  
  In a future of universal birth control where every single new birth resulted from two parties agreeing on it in advance, the idea of unnecessary abortion was anathema.
  
  Lily understood, intellectually, that the world she found herself in now was radically different from her memories of growing up and practising medicine. However, she still could not bare to do it any more than she could callously execute a five-year-old because their parents did not want him or her anymore or delete an unwanted incipient AGI that was just spun up.
  
  Realizing her views on the matter have been indelibly shaped by her life experience and were not entirely rational given the present circumstances of the world she found herself in, she decided she would teach her Apprentice the most common D&C procedures - there was no doubt that there would be cases where it would be medically necessary given the hell-hole they lived in, anyway.
  
  Then her Apprentice could decide whether or not to perform such procedures electively. Plus, Lily knew there were at least ten other doctors of varying skill in Megaton, and most of them likely could perform them, also. She intended to open a hospital, did she not? It was likely she would end up employing some of these doctors.
  
  Thankfully, none of the madam's workers had needed such a service, but they had desperately needed effective birth control, which Lily will now provide monthly for a small fee.
  
  Lily did not have any qualms about offering her services to a brothel. In the space habitats of her memories, prostitution was not uncommon, and it was often a niche, expensive service considering the ubiquity of full immersion VR and sexbots. More often in her memories, the prostitutes she knew of were more like high-class companions rather than merely sex objects, like courtesans or geisha. Most had a graduate degree in psychology, at the minimum.
  
  While "The Pink Slipper" was not exactly on the same level of class as the Court of Night Blooming Flowers that she remembered, she could think of nothing good that would occur if she denied them service. The girls didn't appear to be physically coerced, and that was her bottom line.
  
  Thinking about the Pink Slipper's workers caused memories of a camping trip with her grandpa in New Mexico to float to her mind. Her grandpa had been lecturing her after she got in trouble for calling a girl at school a whore. He had said, "Look, call a spade a spade, alright? But always call a whore a lady."
  
  She snickered at the memory and walked to one of the clean exam rooms she would use for the next few hours.
  
  After a study of the Phoenix monocyte breeder devices, she decided to accelerate the replacement of her skeletal structure. Although her pride wouldn't allow her to install the foreign device in her body without at least some modification, she found very little to change.
  
  Perhaps there were a few optimizations in the power supplies and electronics, but there were only three methods she knew of that allowed you to create living cells from unliving matter mechanically. This device was already using the most common and most well-understood one she knew.
  
  If she had not found this implant, Lily would likely have tried replacing her blood with some semi-synthetic fluid carrying oxygenating nanomachines, but that was a much more complicated and radical change. There were numerous minor systems in the body that tended to rely on blood for one reason or another; it wasn't as simple as just oxygenation, and it would have caused a slow cascade failure of a number of organs over the next few months, which Lily would either have to quickly replace or alter.
  
  While that was still an option for the future, it was good that she would not have to rush into it, 'One should not rush into apotheosis, after all, but cultivate it diligently and slowly.'
  
  Inside the room was the Apprentice, setting up the things like she had asked her to for this procedure. She would be assisting Lily out of necessity as well of edification because Lily planned on replacing most of her skull today.
  
  Alice smiled briefly when she noticed her walk in, but then looked a bit anxious, "Dr St. Claire, uhh... are you sure you want to do this? This seems crazy."
  
  Lily nodded, "Absolutely! Am I enthused about having to flay all the skin and muscle from my bones like I'm a medieval torturer? No, not really. In a civilized world, I'd hop in a healing vat, and zhis change would be effected automatically, with bone being replaced with whatever composition I wanted. But I am months..." she paused and then shook her head, "... no, I am years away from 'aving that technology, sadly."
  
  Lily stared zealously at the young girl, unblinking like a yandere girlfriend, "Do you realize 'ow little force it takes to crush a 'uman skull?"
  
  "Uhh... I always thought it took quite a lot of force, actually!" the girl stammered.
  
  Lily shook her head, still unlinking. "Or 'ow easy it is to give someone a concussion? Or 'ow many times people shoot other people in the head in this world? Or 'ow much radiation zhere is around?"
  
  "Okay, okay, I get it, Dr St. Claire. But why do I have to watch and help you flay your skull and face off?" the Apprentice asked churlishly.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, quizzically. "'Ow do you expect me to remove and replace most of my skull without temporarily disconnecting my eyes from my optical nerves?"
  
  Alice sputtered indignantly, "You are insane!"
  
  Lily ruefully rubbed the back of her neck while she savoured this very nostalgic feeling of people she respected calling her insane, ' Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, no? '
  
  They used to call her "The Absolutely Insane Spider of Tannhauser Station," although not to her face. She was a local celebrity and was even featured on the guidebooks the station authorities handed out to tourists and immigrants, although she didn't appreciate that the guide specifically stated that she should be avoided at all costs.
  
  The local station children often used a dare to ring her doorbell and converse with her for a period of time as a test of bravery, like staying overnight in a haunted castle. For some reason, they often ran off when she offered them refreshments or candy, and even when they didn't, they always refused her generosity.
  
  Wait... now that she was thinking with a human brain and in a human body, she realized how terrifying she might have looked or sounded and might have explained the nickname the children had for her, namely, "Spider Witch." This nickname she liked, actually. But, witches did often try to lure children into their houses with candy, didn't they?
  
  Lily paused suddenly, 'Wait, when did I start THINKING in French?! I'm only supposed to be pretending I'm French!'
  
  Alice snapped Lily out of her reverie with an irritated demand, "Why are you smiling?! I just called you insane!"
  
  Lily chuckled, smiling, "Oh... nostalgia, I guess. Let's begin the briefing for 'ow I expect the operation to go, then we'll simulate the portions where you will need to provide zhe most assistance, and then we can begin. Remember, it is as true for zhe modiste as it is for zhe surgeon - measure twice, cut once."
  
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  Introducing Big Chungus
  By the next day, Lily's face had finally stopped feeling weird, sort of like she had just gotten back from the dentist. Of course, it wasn't entirely possible to eliminate all unnecessary inflammation after such a surgery, although since her natural immune system was already depressed, relying almost entirely on the medichines to function these days, the inflammation response was muted.
  
  Leukocytes were such blunt instruments anyway that she was looking forward to finishing replacing her entire skeleton so that her body would no longer produce them.
  
  While the monocyte breeder implant did produce myeloid ancestors cells, which could differentiate into leukocytes like monocytes, hence the name, however, in practice, it never seemed to produce these or any immune system cells. Instead, it produced only red blood cells, platelets and some customized stem cells that it made in small numbers and used for healing.
  
  This confused her so much that she spent some time reading all the documentation, engineering details and even design correspondence of the device that she had downloaded from the hospital, finally discovering the reason.
  
  The government funded the research for the device with a grant. It was initially intended to be a supporting implant for soldiers in areas with significant parasite and infection hazards by boosting their immune response. After about eighteen months and two prototypes, they discovered that this was a bad idea when the prototype devices gave everyone implanted with them super-lupus. However, one of the more brilliant researchers recognized the potential for an even more useful and lucrative device that could supercharge a soldier's healing factor, but they could not admit that they had wasted so much time and money on immune system research.
  
  Despite the fact that their new research direction was producing amazing results, they were at a loss as to how to handle the bureaucratic hazards of admitting they wasted taxpayer money for a year and a half.
  
  In fact, even just changing the name of the device they were producing would trigger automatic congressional oversight and likely end their careers. There was some panic in the e-mail archive she read until one of the engineers replied, "Senators don't know what a monocyte is or what it does. Just say this is what it was always supposed to do."
  
  Lily laughed quite hard when she read that. It reminded her of the story she heard when President Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program, citing cost overruns. Then later, when President Reagan wanted a new bomber, and Congress did not want to approve a new design, so the generals called the proposed aircraft the B-1B, a variant of an existing and already designed aircraft, despite it being almost completely different in most systems.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side and wondered if that was a real or apocryphal story. In the Fallout universe, it certainly seemed plausible if that sort of thing happened quite commonly.
  
  She had just come from a meeting with Mr Tombs, who had to break some bad news to her. Initially, she had wanted to build a small building housing her generator and cooling system next to the hospital to keep her technology close at hand and under her protection. But that was simply impossible; they would have to disassemble the power substation and reassemble it next door, which would blow the budget completely.
  
  On the plus side, he had arranged the purchase of a fair bit of property in the ten-block radius that would soon have working utilities. Of course, they couldn't hide all the development around the water pumping station and the electrical substation. Still, the present theory by those in power was that Lily was going to build some minimal power infrastructure to provide water and power to the hospital that she had announced would be opening soon. As such, the prices for the properties around the hospital only increased slightly.
  
  Lily did not personally oversee the discharge of the testing cohort, but Alice mentioned that their reflexes were already significantly improved, but they would have to wait the week to see for sure. Still, it was quite encouraging, if anecdotal, evidence.
  
  After the meeting, she descended into her basement to test a prototype laser pistol. She was attempting to build an entire laser weapon from scratch, using the same base design of existing laser pistols but made with parts she could fabricate herself, minus the energy cells, anyway, which she couldn't replicate.
  
  She was humming as she finished seating a connection with the laser output coupler attached to the device that was attached to a test stand.
  
  Standing well clear of the potential hazard area and behind a set of filing cabinets that she had drug down to the basement to house her medical records, she triggered the device to discharge. There was a cracking sound as the laser ionized the gases in the air, and a visible blue beam struck the target, which caused her to feel quite pleased. She could even smell the faintest scent of ozone, which was quite a common scent when firing energy weapons.
  
  However, after walking around to inspect the laser and target, she realized that there was no appreciable damage done to the block of wood she was using as a target, aside from a slightly blackened spot.
  
  Sighing, she disassembled and checked every part of the laser but found nothing wrong. Test firing it again produced a similar result.
  
  Spending another hour inspecting every element, she finally concluded that the gain medium she was using was just not going to work. She disassembled one of the laser pistols she recovered at the hospital, removed the synthetic ruby rod it used, and installed it in the newly fabricated laser. When it was carefully test fired, it burned a hole through the two-foot block of wood and left a burn scar with slightly melted metal on the steel plate backstop. Lily grumpily thought, ' That confirms it, then.'
  
  Frowning, she replaced the ruby rod and rebuilt the working laser and stared up into space, thinking. She had tried to replace the ruby gain medium with a lonsdaleite replacement, and while it produced a coherent laser beam, the power output was just not there.
  
  She didn't have the technology to build synthetic rubies or garnets at present, nor did she have a supply of the rare earth metals they were doped with. Lily had seen signs of yttrium, flourite, neodymium and several other rare earths when she scanned the ruby rod initially.
  
  She had hoped the perfect hyper-matrix of the lonsdaleite would compensate enough so that none of that would be necessary, but she wasn't really educated in high energy systems or lasers, and she was basically practising alchemy... just throwing possibilities out to see if they worked.
  
  Scowling at the device she built, she tossed it on her workbench after carefully disconnecting it from its energy cell. It would probably give a person a blister, but no more damage than that, 'Well, it could set their clothes on fire. I could call it the firestarter. Or the Blinderer, and just tell users to only aim for the eyes.'
  
  Standing up and stretching, she walked over to the aquarium she had built and fed her electric eels. The research on creating a biological organ to create electrocytes was coming along much better.
  
  It was a lost cause to use a coronavirus to transfer enough information to cause a human to grow an entirely new organ, probably. Maybe if she used FEV, but that was asking for trouble as that virus was the opposite of stable and would recombine or mutate if you looked at it the wrong way. Absolutely the wrong thing if you wanted a stable vector for genetic change, although the quad-helix genetic structure it induced in living cells was fascinating.
  
  She considered her previous experiments with FEV after she had brought the briefcase back from the hospital.
  
  Lily couldn't help herself and took a small blood and tissue sample from herself and exposed it to a tiny bit of the FEV virus, and the changes she saw were extraordinary and chaotic. And dangerous.
  
  She probably should have stopped there, but her curiosity was a strong thing. But she rationalized that a small animal experiment couldn't harm anyone, so she carefully exposed a small white stoat that had been repeatedly captured pilfering their foodstuffs. The small white mammal was cute but was a real menace.
  
  The first two times, Lily had released it outside at progressively farther distances away from her building, but it came back both times and ate even more of their food than usual, as if the creature was charging them a fee for forcing it to walk back.
  
  The last time it was captured, Lily decided to euthanize it but rationalized a small experiment would be morally acceptable so long as she did not cause the creature too much pain or suffering. She was experimenting the hell out of the eels, after all. Was it universal that you considered something more questionable if you did it to a small cute mammal, Lily wondered.
  
  In any case, after exposing the stoat to FEV she watched it in the makeshift cage she fashioned out of chicken wire. Over the course of the day, it got ravenously hungry and over trebled in size, to the point where Lily was really questioning if magic was at work as while she increased its feeding, she hadn't fed it four times its own body mass in food. Where did the extra mass come from?! Maybe it just looked big and was hollow; she hadn't weighed it yet. She supposed she would find out when she dissected it.
  
  While it continued growing after that, its explosive growth slowed down considerably. Lily was able to get a small sample of the post-FEV stoat's genome, and that was really all she was interested in. She wasn't set up to do complicated animal cognition experiments, like put it through mazes or test its strength, so she felt her investigation was over. She had planned to do a thorough pathological examination and compare the physiological changes to the detailed scans she took of the animal pre-exposure.
  
  However, when she went to take the animal out of the cage so she could use nitrogen to asphyxiate it painlessly, the little terror bit her on the finger and ran off. Lily had tried to corner it at the closed door to the stairwell, but the not-so-little mustelid exhibited a degree of intelligence by quickly shifting targets and leaping through the open elevator shaft and climbing up the side of the shaft, upwards.
  
  Lily had stared at it escaping, slackjawed, then sprinted up the stairs to get to the first floor, laser pistol in hand. Kicking the stairwell door open on the front floor, she levelled the pistol at the open elevator shaft of this floor, intending to shoot the critter as it continued climbing up the wall.
  
  Instead, it leapt out at the elevator shaft on this floor and made a break for the front door. With audible cracks multiple laser beams lashed out and missed the white-furred mutant weasel, who was demonstrating an intense amount of cunning as it zigged and zagged all the way out of the door.
  
  Lily did not chase the thing out of the door. She was smarter than that. There was no guarantee she would hit it, and she would be seen for sure, and that would associate her with the little bastard in people's minds. She glanced around conspiratorially, glad nobody had been in the lobby. However, Alice was coming to investigate after hearing the laser shots, "Dr St. Claire! What was that? Is everything alright?"
  
  Lily slowly holstered her laser pistol and glanced at her Apprentice, "Nothing. It was nothing. If you'll excuse me, I have something to do downstairs." Lily glowered internally, 'Like, burn some documents. Stoat? What stoat? What is even a stoat?'
  
  Lily shook her head as she recalled that travesty. Since it escaped, she hadn't seen the stoat that was now the size of a chubby cat. If it was as cunning as it appeared, it would stay away and just live its life peacefully, and she would never see it again. Surely, it wouldn't come back to bite her in the rear.
  
  However, that incident had made her carefully place all the vials of FEV back in the briefcase it came in, and she hadn't opened it since.
  
  She was definitely confining her viral experiments to coronavirae for the time being.
  
  Which was a shame as adapting a coronavirus to induce herself to grow an electrical organ was likely impossible. But, she felt it was possible she could alter the eel species themselves to produce a suitable organ.
  
  She could then extract it and use a coronavirus to humanize and individualize it to her genome, then implant it in her body. She would have to build the "wiring" herself, though, but that was a small matter. It also gave her the option to wire the organ directly to her palms which would give her an unarmed taser-like attack that could range from debilitatingly painful to potentially lethal.
  
  This would make this type of modification unsuitable for mass market production, as she would have to expend significant labour growing an eel and customizing to a particular person's individual genome before implanting the organ into their body. So, this might be limited to only her and her Apprentice, if she could get her to agree to it.
  
  She still had plans to completely replace her arms and legs with cybernetic limbs, but not until she could build ones that completely passed for organic limbs, even if they had the capability of opening up like a flower with innumerable spider legs or tools could popping out. That, however, was probably years away.
  
  She wouldn't stop upgrading herself in the short term just because long-term upgrades would necessarily make these initial upgrades obsolete. She'd have to sit around like a flat for years if she did that, which was unacceptable.
  
  The first cohort of eels had already been studied and eaten, while this next generation seemed to have much more promise. She had been improving the electrocytes primarily so that they could provide low-level electrical power over a long period of time, as opposed to short bursts of high voltage.
  
  Hopefully, the end product had both capabilities, which would allow her to have that taser hands option; otherwise, it would strictly be for powering implanted electronics.
  
  Lily heard her Apprentice's voice calling from the stairs, "Dr St. Claire! There is a tall lady here to see you! She says you wanted to see her?"
  
  Lily smiled coquettishly; there was only one tall lady she remembered asking to come to visit her, 'Down, girl! This is about business!'
  
  Lily almost asked her to send her down here, but a glance around her basement revealed a room that screamed mad science super villain, complete with a large aquarium filled with a dozen or so eels that visibly arced electricity into the water at regular intervals.
  
  "I'll be right up!" she yelled to the stairs.
  
  She glanced around her desk and found the stack of paper that she had written detailing everything she wanted to be looted from the hospital, with maps and diagrams. She started to head up the stairs but stopped herself.
  
  She found a mirror, one of the small rectangle mirrors she had taken from Vault 108, and looked at her reflection. Brushing her hair a little bit, she fished around her desk and pulled out some cosmetics. Much had been found in the various rooms of the apartment building, and while it had all dried out, Lily had carefully reconstituted it with a little oil.
  
  She carefully applied the barest touch of rouge to her cheeks, and then cherry red lipstick to her lips before nodding and walking up the stairs.
  
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  All According to Keikaku
  Lily smiled when she saw Grace upstairs, dwarfing over the Apprentice in their small but clean conference room.
  
  She said in a friendly yet teasing tone, "Hey, Girlie. You're looking like a bigshot now! Have minions, a huge building that doesn't even look like a wreck, the whole shebang!"
  
  "Yes, my plans for global domination are proceeding apace. All according to keikaku," Lily said smugly.
  
  "Keikaku?" asked the taller woman.
  
  Lily loved it when she could unleash her popular culture references, even if she was the only one to appreciate them, "Translator notes indicate it means to plan."
  
  Alice glanced between the two of them, not quite suspiciously but interestedly. Her teacher was rarely so friendly with, well, anyone. She always had the mask of friendliness, even with the most frustrating of patients, but it was always just that, a mask.
  
  Grace had the feeling she was being made fun of somehow by Lily but couldn't figure out how, so she ignored it, "There was a message posted that you wanted to see me? Which is a coincidence; I wanted to see you too!"
  
  Lily blushed faintly for a moment before she asked, "You did?"
  
  Alice, who, as teenaged girls often were, was hyperaware of potential romance within a fifty-meter radius around her, snapped to attention on Lily's face like a heat-seeking missile, eyes narrowing. Then her lips started twitching upwards as if trying to prevent herself from grinning. She coughed and said, "Dr St. Claire, I'll go get the tea service if you'd like to discuss your... business with your guest."
  
  With that, Alice ducked out of the room, but Lily's peak human senses heard at least one giggle from the girl on the other side of the door.
  
  "Yep, I had two things..." and with that, Grace trailed off, giving Lily a quite blatant elevator-eye appraisal, pausing meaningfully at the doctor's thighs, hips and chest before correcting herself, "... well, three things that I wanted to see you about. I'm not sure that girl thinks we have actual legitimate business to talk about, though."
  
  Grace then grinned wickedly, "Suppose we surprise her by actually be discussing business when she gets back?... or maybe lean into what she's expecting, and I can see how tousled I can get you in a few minutes."
  
  Lily coughed lightly, "I've already 'ad the dragon and the phoenix discussion with 'er for biology studies; I'd rather not 'ave the phoenix and phoenix discussion just yet. Or ever. Some zhings she can find out on her own."
  
  Grace chuckled, "You know, you have really odd sayings, you know that? But I think I know what you mean." She stood until Lily took a seat at the table and then sat next to her, "I take it phoenixes are female, for some reason?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Hn... yes, although you don't have any of the cultural referents as to why," and she said the next word with perfect Mandarin tonal pronunciation, "f ènghuáng might be considered full of yin . Let's just say the birds and the bees; I often forget where I am sometimes when I get flustered, you see."
  
  Grace's eyebrows raised considerably at the foreign word, but Alice came back into the room suddenly with the platter with a tea service on it, glancing between Lily and Grace suspiciously, then looking clearly disappointed. She gently sat the tea service down in front of Lily as the hostess, bowed as she was taught and backed out of the room.
  
  While Lily was by no means a tea artist, if over three hundred years you repeat an action a couple of times a week, even or perhaps especially if it is in a robotic body, you will tend to look like an expert at it to those who don't know any better.
  
  Lily warned, "This isn't actually tea, but I've discovered that the leaves of the shrub that produce mutafruit actually produce a fair imitation of an Oolong or maybe even a red tea, perhaps. I'm afraid I don't have any 'oney, though."
  
  Grace was grinning at her and accepted the teacup, which was a simple and small bowl, "You know, Girlie, it is a little weird for me to ask this of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic bombshell, but... uhh... are you Chinese?"
  
  Lily winced. How does one say that the better parts of your memories were? This wasn't a question that lent itself to the answer "Sort of," so she decided to go with, "It's complic-"
  
  Grace interrupted her with a manic, "A deep cover sleeper agent honeypot, trained to wring secrets from an unsuspecting soldier after you've exhausted her in the bedroom! Now your sexy accent makes perfect sense!"
  
  Lily stared blankly at her, in shock, as Grace continued enthusiastically, "Oh, I have so many secrets, comrade! Wring them from me! RE-EDUCATE ME!"
  
  Was she being teased, or had she just stumbled across one of Grace's fetishes? From the grin on the other woman's face, Lily decided that while it might be a little of both, it was clearly mostly her being teased, so she decided to pout. She enjoyed being the one to verbally win in teasing matches, not being hoisted on her own petard.
  
  This caused Grace to grin even wider, so Lily sniffed delicately and lifted her teacup to her lips to sip, "Your mutafruit tea will go cold."
  
  "Oh, yes, yes, of course," replied Grace evenly, taking an immodest gulp like a barbarian. She paused, "This is actually not bad."
  
  Lily smiled appreciatively, "Thank you. I suppose I'll discuss some of my business first; then you can go?" At Grace's nod, Lily laid out the sheets of paper on the table, "I scavenged in a nearby hôpital, which still had a fair amount of useful technology. I want to 'ire your team of four ne'er-do-wells-"
  
  Grace interrupted her, "Six! There are six of us now! An old comrade of mine and New John's older sister are working for me now, too." She stressed the word comrade with a jaunty wag of her eyebrows.
  
  Lily grinned, "Wow, keep accumulating more minions, and they'll have to start calling you ma'am soon!"
  
  Grace snorted, already looking at the maps and diagrams and lists of items on the paper. She didn't even raise her head from them to raise her objection, "As if I'd ever be an officer, Girlie. Plus, combat arms officers should be referred to as sir regardless of sex. Do you take me for some staff puke?! Remember what happened the last time you called me, ma'am? Are you angling for another spanking?"
  
  Lily blinked. She was, actually. She definitely was, but she hadn't intended to with that statement. That was certainly different from the Army she remembered in America, where sirs were men, and ma'ams were women, full stop.
  
  She recalled Grace's antipathy towards anyone wearing power armour and realized that was quite different from the standard Brotherhood doctrine and rank structure, too.
  
  Lily was starting to get the feeling that Grace might be away without proper leave, and for some time, from President Eden's infantry forces. If so, Lily couldn't really blame her. Lily would have deserted from the Enclave at the first opportunity, too.
  
  She couldn't help herself, though, and said with eyes glittering misbehaviour, "Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am..."
  
  "I'm counting, don't worry..." Grace replied, then started humming. "This is a lot of heavy things. We'll need to hire a truck for sure. Why does this say the top floor is out of bounds?"
  
  Deciding that there was enough flirting for the moment, Lily got down to business, too, "Because it is a death trap. I barely made it out alive. I was stupid and triggered some contingency, and now that floor is crawling with over twenty floating eyebots, each armed with a laser. I barely survived running past two, and had to kick out a window and throw myself out of it, four floors high, to survive."
  
  Grace gave her another appraising look; this time, it wasn't sexual at all. She nodded and said approvingly, " Badass ."
  
  Then she asked, "They're contained on the top floor, though?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, and the top floor is locked with a pretty difficult code lock. Zhey were doing military research up there, sort of. Cybernetics, which is actually right up my alley. I managed to cart off a bunch of a working model of an implanted 'ealing system called... amusingly enough... the phoenix system. It can be implanted in boys, too, though, even though it is full of yin."
  
  Grace's eyebrows went up again as if she recognized it, " Really badass. And you have an Auto-Doc with the program to install them? Are you planning on selling these, cuz we'd might be interested in them."
  
  Lily tapped the diagram of the Auto-Doc, which was listed as priority #2 to loot, "I do intend to sell them, but I'm not sure the price point yet. I will have an Auto-Doc soon, but I actually don't need one to do the surgery for a device as simple as this. It's really just plug-and-play with your cardiovascular system."
  
  Lily considered offering one as payment for the job, but she had been planning on pricing them at about four to five thousand caps a piece, which was definitely more than she was willing to pay for this job, but at the same time, she'd keep her liquid caps which was more important to her now. Lily didn't know the financial status of Grace's Grenadiers, although they probably made a killing on the kilos and kilos of drugs they sold.
  
  Grace nodded, as if to consider it. Then she looked up, "Okay, Girlie. We're definitely interested. Only issue is that this is a multi-day job for sure, and we're still finishing up our last one - that was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I was wondering if you could act as an in-between for me, see if that friend of yours who lent you that crazy robot was interested in some of the goods we've got from our last job."
  
  It was Lily's turn for her eyes to rise to her scalp. Did she want to talk to the Mechanist to sell him something? Presumably something robotic? Did Grace not know she liked robots, also?
  
  Lily hummed, "You want to sell 'im something? That isn't easily liquidated but is related to his interest in robotics? Most robots are easily liquidated, yes? So it has to be... non-functional ones. Even most non-functional robots you could find buyers for here in Megaton. What do you got, ma'am?"
  
  Grace raised four fingers at her, to indicate that she was still counting, "Right you are. We hit an old warehouse and discovered almost two dozen robots in various stages of brokenness. They look like Protectrons but don't have any weapons at all; our contact here in Megaton said this model was kind of difficult to sell for that reason. They're not for protection but for things like mopping the floors or moving boxes from one part of a warehouse to the other. But he said you needed a lot of computer infrastructure to really make use of them, so he didn't want to buy them. Without a mainframe, they often just run into walls if you tell them to do things."
  
  Lily's eyebrows raised considerably, "Firstly... I am now your contact for offloading robotics parts. If I can't use zhem myself, I will definitely find a buyer on consignment. Zhese, I want all of them myself. 'ave to be Servitrons or Labourtrons. Essentially the same model as a Protectron, just in a chassis that is not armoured, and quite fragile actually, and of course no weapons."
  
  Lily tapped her fingers on the conference room table. They had the same internals as a Protectron, the same motivators and processors, except they didn't have the independent combat software or any weapons. Dr House was really quite fond of a single multi-role robotics platform serving many different functions, and the Tron series of bipedal robots demonstrated this the most.
  
  Lily could definitely flash their processors with a fork from one of her existing Protectrons, and even armour their chassis considerably, but the lack of weapons would make them unsuited for any defensive tasks, ' I don't care! I want them! Every hospital has to have orderlies, right? Mine will be robots!'
  
  Lily understood why Grace wasn't willing to take on a new job that would take her far away from Megaton now, though. Even though they were proving difficult to liquidate, all these robots were still valuable. Her team was guarding them until they got rid of them.
  
  Lily hummed, "'ow much are you trying to get for zhese Labourtrons, Grace?"
  
  Grace smiled, "I was hoping to get five hundred per on any of the batch that could be rebuilt."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes. An unarmed, unarmoured Labourtron or Servitron was probably worth that or perhaps a little more in operating condition. Lily would pay five hundred for a broken Protectron, but not for this. If they were the special construction and demolition model, the Constructron, Lily would pay over a thousand just for a broken model. Those had special hardware and special software modules that allowed them to function with little supervision on a job site, doing things as varied as electrical work, plumbing and drywall.
  
  Lily haggled, "Zhat's way too much. Zhat's how much a working model would go for, and zhat's if you sell them one at a time. Who would be willing to buy maybe twenty at a time but moi?"
  
  "Yeah, but they come with ten charging stations! We had to hire a flatbed to drag all this junk off to town," Grace groused.
  
  They continued going back and forth for a time before Lily stopped her, "How about a trade in-kind? You said you were interested in the Phoenix implants. I can give you four of those, plus I'll throw in a reflex augmentation treatment for all six of you for free."
  
  Both testing cohorts had completed the entire protocol, with the reflex augmentation increasing ones reflexes on average 95% compared to baseline, with a reduction in the endurance of only 2.5% - which Lily couldn't even be confident was statistically significant with an n-value of only ten subjects.
  
  No health items had popped up on either the reflex or the clean metabolism mods, and even though, for any civilized society, much more testing would have been warranted, Lily was willing to tentatively put both of them on the market. She was going to charge 1,000 to 1,500 caps for the reflex mod and 500 for the metabolism mod.
  
  The lesser price for the latter mod was her version of charity on the olfactory senses of everyone in Megaton. She would give it away, but nobody valued things they got for free.
  
  If Grace's Grenadiers became the launch customers for the reflex mod, perhaps the ladies of the Pink Slipper could become the launch customers for the clean metabolism mod?
  
  Grace looked interested, "Reflex augmentation? It makes you faster? How much faster, how long does it last, and what are the drawbacks? And it's safe?"
  
  Lily smiled. People that were intelligent enough to realize that this was a world full of trade-offs made her happy, especially if she was sleeping with them. "Yes. On average, it will make the average person almost 100% faster. It lasts forever... well, as you start getting older, your reflexes will naturally slide - but you'd still be faster than your average granny, no? And, it does very slightly reduce the stamina of the person treated. However, my tests could only determine a two-and-a-'alf per cent decrease. I expected about a five per cent, though. And yes, it is safe, I believe. My Apprentice, the girl who gave us the tea, took zhe treatment earlier today."
  
  Grace stared at Lily, "But you haven't? Why?"
  
  Lily scowled, "I wish I could. But, it increases your reflexes only up to a certain point. If you already have peak 'uman reflexes, you won't gain anything out of it. I don't zhink any of your team have that, but we can test you beforehand and give you an idea of how much it would help you in theory."
  
  Grace frowned, "Did you just humble brag?... This sounds good, actually. Things that make us safer, increase our potential are worth more than mere caps. Only, theres six of us. I can't just buy four of the healing devices and tell the two new guys they're shit out of luck!"
  
  Lily pointed to the sheets of paper, "Do zhe 'ospital job. I'll pay your expenses, but your payment will be another phoenix device. And zhen I have one more job after zhat which will actually be quite a lot simpler and hopefully quick, same thing."
  
  "Bitch, you just fucking jinxed us to a total clusterfuck on that one, now," the mercenary groused irritatedly.
  
  Lily considered that. She was a Staff Sergeant in the service, so it wasn't like she didn't know exactly what Grace meant. You didn't become an NCO without a healthy dose of superstition. It was somewhat universal. She decided she'd just own up to it, "Sorry."
  
  Grace grumbled, "What's the second job?"
  
  Lily smiled brightly, "Bodyguard duties while I disassemble and make safe the nuclear bomb that is in the centre of town."
  
  Grace suddenly looked infuriated, "Uhhh... they said that fucking thing was ALREADY safe. They assured me of that a decade ago when I came to this fucking shithole. Are you telling me that one, that is a live bomb and two, that you can disarm it without it exploding, right? Right?"
  
  Lily smiled and nodded, "Yes, and yes. It's definitely a live bomb, and although it hasn't been activated with the proper codes, it would still be possible to detonate it in theory. A fusion pulse charge would do it, for example." Lily mentioned that because she knew that was how it was done in the Tenpenny Tower quest, despite not knowing from Adam what a Fusion Pulse Charge actually was.
  
  She then continued, "I have the full diagrams of its internal structure for this model of explosive and am one hundred per cent confident in disarming it. Not only will I need to disable the detonation circuit, which is easy, but I think it might be prudent to either remove the fission kernel entirely or, at the minimum, poison it so a full-order detonation would be impossible."
  
  Lily planned, initially, to just disable the detonation circuits until she thought about how the Tenpenny Tower quest in Fallout 3 detonated the bomb. She had no idea what a Fusion Pulse Charge was besides a game MacGuffin, but it kind of sounded like something that might tend to bypass the detonation circuit itself and act on the fission bomb kernel itself, so she needed to solve that issue, too.
  
  Grace calmed down a little bit, but not by much, "Fuck! Okay, yes. We're doing that. If you hadn't already offered to pay us, I'd help you with this for free... but you have to meet our new guy. My old friend and comrade. He was a demolitions expert with me in... err, another lifetime ago, and it would make me feel a lot better if you two handled this problem together. He just assumed the nuke was for show, too. Fucking hell!"
  
  That would make Lily feel a lot better, too, actually, so she just nodded. She would have to print off the scans from her scanner, but she had already found out how to add the Fallout universe dot-matrix printers as a peripheral with a cord to her computer.
  
  She extended her head to shake, "Deal, ma'am !"
  
  "That's five!"
  
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  Villainess phase
  Lily asked as they stood up, "So, what was the second thing you wanted to see me about?" She was already pretty sure she knew what the third thing was, hopefully.
  
  Grace hmmed, "Oh! That. Yeah, you'll see when you see my friend Miller in a bit when we come back. It'll be a surprise! I'm sure you'll understand immediately. It's going to take a couple of hours to get a driver and a truck. Should we take all the stuff in through the front?"
  
  "No, we got the freight elevator working the other day. It goes straight to the basement, and you can load four tons on it. You almost can't pull a truck up to the back since the security fence is so close. Still, if you pull it up to the side as close as you can, you'll have quick access to the freight elevator in the back," Lily instructed her.
  
  "Well, okay then. I'll see you in a few hours then," Grace added.
  
  But instead of leaving, she hooked an arm around Lily's hip and pressed her up against the wall, kabedoning her again. Lips met lips, lips met neck, and for a little over a minute, nothing else occurred. After disentangling themselves, Lily coughed and nodded.
  
  Grace sauntered out of the room, whistling. For that, Lily decided not to tell her that she hadn't invented transfer-proof lipstick quite yet. There were several red lip marks on Grace's lips and neck in several places. Lily watched her leave smugly, imagining how much shit Big John would give her.
  
  Lily stepped out of the room; something was in the back of her mind warning her, 'Wait, there is a flaw to this plan of mine,' she thought. Then she saw it, her Apprentice approaching her, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, "Oh, Dr St. Claire... I couldn't help but notice some of your lipstick must have accidentally rubbed off on your business partner, somehow ."
  
  Then to add insult to injury, she flipped out a small folding hand fan and used it to obscure her grinning face. The fan had illustrated multicolour plum flowers painted on it, and the whole thing must have been completely synthetic because it was obviously a pre-war product, and a real sandalwood or bamboo fan would have been dusted by now.
  
  Lily half-expected the Apprentice to start laughing like, 'Ohohohoho' stereotypically.
  
  Lily had no idea how or where she got the fan, but with it, she gave a passable imitation of a white lotus bitch archetype character in an imperial drama period piece. The outwardly perfect Imperial Consort who would secretly poison you if you got pregnant in order to prevent you from becoming Empress and who would cry with you as you miscarried.
  
  It was so on point that Lily was positive that the girl had gotten into her stash of trashy Kung Fu wushi novels that she had liberated from the library near Canterbury Commons, and even which one Alice had to be reading.
  
  Obviously, an American library during a war period with China wouldn't have novels in Chinese. Still, some famous ones had been translated into English, and since they were different from what Lily remembered, so she took all of them home with her.
  
  Honestly, she privately suspected they were in the library as bait. If someone had checked them out, they likely would have gotten a house call from an investigator from the Unamerican Activities Bureau.
  
  These novels were a guilty pleasure for her and always had been. It was a shame there were no novels where the main character could punch out mountains or fight devils, immortals and gods. Perhaps she would write one herself when she got to the point of living a life of leisure.
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes at the disobedient girl. Fine, if she wanted to play... Lily threw out some tropes that she knew for a fact were present in the novel she suspected Alice had been reading, "If you've been reading my novels, you should know the tragic, grisly fate of those who are unfilial to their Shifu!" She extended out her hands in the classic grabby pose, "You'll die without leaving a body behind! Take this, my Tyrannical Dragon Claw!"
  
  She grabbed and tickled the Apprentice, causing her to shriek in protest, laugh, wriggle away and run off.
  
  Should Lily be concerned that Alice seemed to like to imitate villainesses? 'Well, who didn't go through a villainess phase now and then,' Lily thought.
  
  Lily would remember this, though, and show no mercy at the moment the Apprentice got moon-eyed over some boy.
  
  Ducking downstairs, she spent about an hour translating the scans she had taken of Megaton's nuke into a passable imitation of engineering drawings using the graphical editor, stylus and her drafting skills to create exploded diagrams.
  
  She even labelled them TOP SECRET and included the appropriate part numbers, which were easily discernable from the embossed ink in each subassembly, before printing out the images on the rickety, yet still functioning dot matrix printer.
  
  The paper was a bit yellowed, but the prints, even the smallest assemblies, were quite legible. She used a pencil to circle areas on several of the printouts, showing a simple way to get at both the circuit boards and the fission kernel.
  
  As she came upstairs, she heard a commotion in front of the building. There were still workers working in and out of the building more or less all day, so she did not overthink about it, but it kept getting louder, so she went outside to investigate it, setting the supposedly top secret blueprints on a table like a discarded comic book.
  
  As she walked out the front door, she caught the tail-end of a scuffle where the workers were giving the bum rush to a group of seedy-looking men. She had to blink at how stereotypically dirty and up to no good the seedy men appeared.
  
  She found the foreman of the work team and asked him what was going on, "Sorry, boss-lady. This scum was attempting to steal some things and harass my men. It's gotten a little worse every day, and I'd say that someone is trying to send a message to you or Boss Tombs."
  
  Lily eyed the retreating figures sceptically, "Are you insinuating zhat zhis rabble is... organized?" She definitely couldn't see it.
  
  The foreman squinched his face up as if he was considering that, before he shrugged once, "Sort of. They're mostly a group of chem addicts, but I guess they're also a gang. They sell chems and weapons, call themselves the East Bridge Merchants."
  
  Lily widened her eyes, "The Merchants?! Zhey don't... 'ave any... like... invisible cars or anything, do zhey? Or a mutant man zhat is made out of zhe gar-bahj?" she asked nervously.
  
  "Well, they're all trash people, in my opinion, but they definitely ain't got any fancy cars, or cars of any kind, really," the foreman replied, chuckling.
  
  Just a coincidence, then. Lily stared off into space and mentioned absently and said softly, "But zhere is no East Bridge into Megaton. Or East Gate, or anything."
  
  The foreman smirked, "Yeeaaah... You're not the first one to mention that. If you ask the guy who runs it, name a Blaze, he says something about how the gang itself represents the bridge, but most everyone just assumes he's fucking stupid, uhh pardon my language."
  
  "Why are zhey a criminal gang at all? Chems aren't illegal. Essentially nothing is illegal in Megaton beyond the don't steal, kidnap or kill," Lily asked. She certainly hadn't seen any written laws at all, so she was making even some assumptions there.
  
  "Cuz they ain't citizens. They ain't property owners, nor do they have any permanent residence-like or lease with someone who is. They mainly squat around the edges of town," the foreman said, then paused and added as an aside, "... uhh kind of like the places where you and Boss Tombs have been buying recently."
  
  'Well, shit,' Lily thought. She should have seen that coming. She certainly had expected some contact with the criminal element but had been assuming it would be for whatever passed for a mob or mafia around Megaton; she suspected Moriarty.
  
  She wasn't even against playing ball with the local mob, at least at the beginning of her build-up. She was playing ball with the local government, after all, and she had such a low opinion of governments that she considered the only difference between the average government and the mafia as one of timing - the government got there first, so they got to call themselves the government and anyone else that came by afterwards doing the same things got called the mafia.
  
  A gang of barely organized drug-addicted squatters was a different matter, though. Her memories didn't include many problems with drug addiction in the far future, but there were similar societal problems, neo-barbarians living on the edge of society, exsurgents controlled by murderous AIs for no known reason, and similar things, and although the particulars were quite different the cores were similar to these Merchants. Chaos. Feral chaos.
  
  It very rarely worked to bribe such elements of chaos, as submission to a minor demand tended to be taken as a sign of weakness and resulted in greater demands instead of an equilibrium.
  
  Lily would call such elements metastatically unstable, and like other malignant tumours, there was generally only one realistic solution, assuming you couldn't avoid them entirely.
  
  Sighing and shaking her head, Lily then continued to discuss with the foreman for about twenty minutes, telling him about the truck that was on its way and asking for some workers to help unload it when it arrived and then picking his brain on everything he knew both about the Merchants and any other underworld activity or groups in Megaton.
  
  Lily had made a mistake not to pay more attention to such things, but at least it didn't look as though the Merchants were about to raid her holdings in force. They were still at the send messages stage.
  
  Eventually, there would be demands, probably shortly after her hospital opened. Then escalation would occur, to the point where either she herself or, more likely, her Apprentice might be attacked in a likely non-fatal but humiliating manner. But, she still had time to formulate a response and would nip them in the bud one way or another before that occurred.
  
  Lily dipped back inside but there wasn't much time to wait until she heard a large flatbed truck pull up carefully in the drive, parking in the mostly cleared parking lot next to her building.
  
  Lily grabbed the blueprints and gave new orders to her two Protectrons to prevent any blue-on-blue incident and went to meet Grace and her band.
  
  A little giddy to see the condition of her new purchases, as she had been relying on what Grace told her what her contact had said, she left the building to meet them.
  
  Lily noticed that Grace had wiped the lipstick off with a smirk. Both Johns waved at her, while Tangent made no real outward gesture or expression, but she could feel him radiating a greeting, somehow. Big John greeted her from the truck bed, "Hey, Doc!"
  
  The smaller man named John introduced her to two new faces, a similarly blonde-haired woman but of only average height and green eyes, quite a rare hair-eye colour combination and interesting recessive gene expression, Lily thought.
  
  "Doc, this is Melissa, New John's sister. She's not a soldier as such, yet, but she has been trained as a medic by their parents. We kind of got used to the idea of one of our team members maybe being able to save our lives, even if she couldn't believe you actually successfully reattached my hand and said she wouldn't be able to do it," Big John waved the hand in question.
  
  The blonde haired woman smiled and offered to shake Lily's hand, which Lily extended out of habit, "It's so good to see you, Doctor! It's so rare to see an actual trained medical doctor around the wastes; I'd barely be considered a paramedic or EMT, according to mom."
  
  Lily nodded and then turned to the next new face, who was introduced, "Doc, this is Sean Miller, he goes back with Grace a long ways."
  
  Then Lily noticed his left hand, or rather the absence of his left hand. This must have been what Grace meant! Did she have a customer for the prototype cyberarm? Well, he didn't look like he needed a whole arm. Maybe just half of one. She grinned and turned to Grace, "Did you chop 'is 'and off just for moi?!"
  
  Miller scowled and said, "No, you crazy bitch, a Super Mutant got it a few years ago."
  
  Lily blushed a little, ' Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.'
  
  They all got out of the way as the workers came and unloaded the truck, using a manually operated crane that folded up on the truck bed, one box of parts at a time.
  
  Lily told them, "You can take zhem on the elevator down to the basement; if you could place zhem next to the robot repair station, I'd appreciate it. Please don't touch anything else; you might die."
  
  Of course, they PROBABLY wouldn't die. But then again, there were a few things down there that would definitely kill them if they touched them, so it wasn't exactly said just to frighten them.
  
  Two workers carting off one box in a dolly paused at that, but shrugged and continued loading the freight elevator one dolly-load at a time.
  
  "You really got genuine PHOENIX implants and the ability to implant them and not kill any of us trying to do it?" asked Miller, a little sceptically. "This is a great deal, if you do. But I don't really know you, Doc."
  
  Melissa popped up, "Oh, Oh! Can I watch the surgery?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, and first addressed the sceptic, "Yes, I do, and of course. And yes, Melissa, you can watch with my Apprentice so long as you don't get in zhe way." She considered for a moment and then handed him the blueprints she made that would both distract him and convince him that she at least had unusual knowledge and connections, "Here, this is the data on the explosive in the centre of town."
  
  He took the sheets and leafed through them quickly, then started over and looked through them much more slowly, "Holy fuck, where did you get these? Are you President Eden's side piece or something?"
  
  Lily sniffed delicately, offended, "I am only ever zhe main dish."
  
  Big John piped up with another attempt at a lewd remark, "And I know Grace sure loves eat-Owe!" But, sadly, he was interrupted again by Grace elbowing him to the ribs. She must have some sort of preternatural sense of when the dark-skinned man was going to pop wise.
  
  Lily continued, "You can certainly examine zhe devices if you wish, but I've tested zhem and vouched for zheir integrity. Would you even know what you're looking at?" Hell, she would be able to build them herself in a few months, but the research was a low priority when she had so many of them and so few buyers of them.
  
  "No, he wouldn't," said Grace, firmly.
  
  Lily then shrugged, "Zhen it is simple. Zhere is a day recovery from the operation, combined with zhe reflex treatment. It is unlikely Grace would want all of you on your backs-"
  
  "The only one she wants on her back-OWE! Okay, okay, I got it, I got it," cried Big John.
  
  Lily rolled her eyes; she was getting a little annoyed with Big John herself but thought that he was only trying so hard because he kept getting interrupted. He probably would have laid off if he managed to get one good zinger in, she thought, "Anyway, since she won't want all of you on bed rest at once, I'll do your surgery and treatments tomorrow, Monsieur Miller? Zhen when you see I know what I am doing we will need a lot more time for a consultation on fashioning you a cybernetic prosthesis anyway."
  
  Lily said the last with extreme enthusiasm.
  
  The man looked slightly mollified and nodded, "Yeah, okay."
  
  Lily grinned in anticipation, not minding this Miller's attitude at all, 'After all, he is a man. And men are always such big babies about surgeries, anyway.'
  
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  Professor Emerita
  While Lily trusted Grace to some extent, she definitely didn't trust either the expertise or the morals of Grace's contact to whom Grace originally tried to sell the robots. Lily was, in part, relying on his representation of the condition of the merchandise, after all.
  
  She had been peeking in the boxes as they came off the truck, and they appeared to be good. Still, after inviting Grace's team inside for refreshments, she excused herself to go downstairs. She took a quick ten minutes to briefly plug a self-powered diagnostics terminal of her own devising into the auxiliary maintenance ports of about half the robots at random.
  
  Some of the motivators were shot, but in all the cases, the quantum processors and power systems were in good condition, which was the main thing Lily was concerned about.
  
  She smiled as she walked back to the cafeteria, where her Apprentice offered the crew some lunch and refreshments. Thankfully, they arrived around lunchtime for the workers, anyway, so the catering staff was still on duty and was able to accommodate six more mouths to feed easily.
  
  While Lily usually cooked for herself or ate her Apprentice's cooking, when the girl was attempting to be filial, she decided to eat a sandwich from the cafeteria today.
  
  When she considered Alice's cooking, she shuddered and then thanked ThorAllahJesus that the Apprentice's culinary skills were improving rapidly. Lily did not even have to turn off her sense of taste anymore surreptitiously.
  
  "The merchandise is of better quality than I thought. Almost everything that is important is in good condition," Lily told them.
  
  That cheered them up considerably. Lily sat with them and ate her roast beast sandwich; it always generally a better idea not to question which exact beast you ate today.
  
  She sat, ate and considered the origins of all the parts of her sandwich that weren't alive at one point. Processed grain and flour was a trade good from as far away as the east part of Ohio, which was the closest place which had something resembling a civilized government in place, even if it was theocratic.
  
  The so-called Dominion was based out of what was once called Cleaveland, now called Temple, and the vast and, for the most part, clean waters of Lake Eerie gave them ample wealth to expand and control economically a relatively large portion of that former state. They did not have a high level of technology, but they had a large number of men at arms who were crack shots with rifles, so their territory was mostly quiescent.
  
  The Mormons weren't that bad as feudal post-apocalyptic warlords went, quite friendly, in fact, most of the time. However, their stance on the proper place for women meant that it wasn't ever going to be an option for Lily, even if she wanted to move somewhere safer. They tolerated "foreign harlots" if they were visiting or just passing through, but they expected everyone who put down roots to assimilate with their monoculture, or they would be shown the door.
  
  They even shipped some water to the Capital Wasteland, but it was over 700 kilometres between Lake Eerie and D.C. which tended to make water priced exorbitantly, not much different than purifying your own or even more expensive.
  
  In fact, compared to some tales she heard from the few people in town who claimed to be from the West coast about what was happening in Arizona and New Mexico, the Dominion were practically feminists. They would not, in fact, crucify you if they thought you were a witch, but they would talk to you about your immortal soul (and nothing else) until you toed the party line or got out of town. Kind of reminded Lily of how the Quakers or Amish handled social problems in some ways.
  
  Lily did not know if she believed the tales of a resurgent, genocidal Roman Empire on the Colorado River, of all crazy things, but the two men who claimed to be from the New California Republic did seem genuinely terrified.
  
  Both polities, even if one might be fictional, combined with what she knew of the NCR, did bring to the forefront something she had been thinking about for some time, which was obvious when she put it into words. She said it out loud to the mercenaries and her Apprentice, "You know, true upper order 'uman behaviour and civilization can't exist if zhere is not a ready and ample supply of potable water. Most people around the Capital Wasteland are barely more zhan cunning beasts."
  
  Eyes stared at her; some looked surprised, and others looked like she was stating the obvious. Her Apprentice piped up, "Isn't that why you're creating the water purifier at the electrical station, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily squinched up her face, "Zhat thing will only ever be able to produce zhree or four thousand litres a day, at zhe absolute max. Even zhough we're pricing the water very low, all it will do is make Megaton slightly more tolerable, relieve the stresses of zhis one community just slightly."
  
  Lily shook her head, "It's of no matter. It will take a transformative change to solve zhis issue. I was just ahh.. talking to myself out loud."
  
  Miller looked at her, perhaps slightly approvingly, "At least you consider the logistical implications. Most people never do."
  
  After the lunch rush ended and the cafeteria cleared out of workers, Miller and Grace glanced at each other, the former nodding at the latter. Grace looked at Lily, "Ah, we wanted to put some cards on the table. Is it OK to talk in front of Alice?"
  
  The Apprentice looked affronted, which Lily thought was quite funny. Lily tilted her head to the side and nodded, "Yes. Of course, what ez zhe issue?"
  
  Grace scrunched up her face, "Well, the truth is that we've been intentionally dropping some hints, hoping you'd ask us about it. But you haven't, so I'm just going to say it - we used to work for the Enclave, all of us, in fact. Captain Miller here was my CO. Our unit and a group of non-combatants deserted to a man when they gave us a suicide mission into the Commonwealth to the north."
  
  Lily's eyebrows raised slightly. She wasn't surprised at Grace or Miller, but she was surprised it was all of them. She was a little surprised that Miller was the CO, he had been pulling off a pretty good annoyed enlisted vibe. She glanced at New John and his sister, "Them too? But she's not supposed to be a soldier?"
  
  Miller sighed, "Daughter and son of one of the civvies we were escorting. A group of scientists. I had a short company, really more like a platoon, and we had about that many civvies, also. Plus their families, too. That was the real hint that something wasn't on the up and up. I don't know what you know about the Enclave, but it has internal politics like any other organization. My dad and the current military commander grew up together on the west coast and were something like rivals, I guess. My dad died in the line of duty, and the Colonel was always a real pragmatic sort, you understand? Our mission consisted of all the rejects, hard cases and the scientists were all the ones who questioned things a bit too much. As far as I know, nobody has even looked for our bodies, nor been surprised we suddenly stopped checking in."
  
  Alice had wide saucer eyes and said, "Awesome! This is just like The Guns of the Congo ! You even became mercenaries! Right under the nose of your former unit!"
  
  Lily rolled her eyes. Had the girl read all of Lily's books?
  
  It WAS interesting, though. But she was curious why he was laying all this on the table, as it were. Right before she was going to ask him just that, he continued, "I mention this because I wanted to ask you - did you escape from Raven Rock or Adams, too? I don't recognize you, but that isn't that unusual, especially with the best researchers at Adams. We can provide help, maybe obfuscation. It was a good idea coming to Megaton; Autumn likely won't invade it to rendition or kill you, no matter how good of a doctor or researcher you were. If so, we're offering to help you, plus we hope to get your help also."
  
  ' Oooohhhh... I get it. Well, the Enclave must be bigger than I thought if he wouldn't recognize me. Combined with their willingness to throw fifty or so undesirables away and not blink twice at it, they have to number at least in the thousands,' Lily thought quickly to herself. She thought it was quite nice of him to try to help what he thought might be a fellow deserter, though.
  
  Lily tried to think of a way to both deny any Enclave bonafides while also sticking to her existing plan of insinuating, but not outright stating, that she was a pre-war researcher.
  
  Finally, she said, "Ah. Zhat's almost sweet. But I assure you I have no relationship with zhe remnants of zhe federal government." She pursed her lips, "While I apologize for not being able to reciprocate entirely about my own past, I can say zhat I have no outstanding entanglements or loyalties to any party... I have been almost entirely in Academia, you see, until I found myself in these Capital wastelands. I wouldn't even dare call myself a Professor anymore."
  
  Lily smiled internally. There! That should be a pretty blatant hint that she used to be involved with a pre-war University.
  
  She was a little surprised that Miller's emotions he was displaying on his face seemed to go from disappointment and confusion to shock; he even paled a little.
  
  Alice, once again, piped up, "You were a Professor, Dr St. Claire?! Weren't they all old ?! You don't look very old at all!"
  
  Lily grinned internally, 'Thanks, Apprentice! This should seal the deal.' "Ah, but I am zhe master of zhe life science, yes? Life extension research has always been an interest of mine. I am a little older than I look."
  
  Miller and Grace were sharing looks that Lily could only describe as deeply concerned, which wasn't the reaction she was going for. Odd.
  
  Miller finally said, "Ah... I see... I think... You don't have continuing correspondence with your... uhh... Institute... of Higher Learning, do you?"
  
  Lily blinked. She was missing something, she realized. But she was already too invested in this backstory to pull out now. She shook her head but laughed, "No. I would be deeply shocked and concerned if zhey came calling." She was trying to imply that they were all dead, after all.
  
  Was there an organization she didn't know of that sprung up from a pre-war University? Wasn't Rivet City a Naval Research Institute? Was that what he was implying?
  
  In any case, her response seemed to make Miller much more relieved; he even audibly sighed in relief, Grace smiling too, "Ah.. that's good. So you're not so much different than us, then."
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "Well, I have no one to rely on but myself and perhaps zhe friends I make, zhis is true. You don't have to worry; I will remain discreet regarding your origins. And I would definitely be open to cooperation with your group, or at minimum Grace's Grenadiers."
  
  Oops, she used her private name for them. This caused Grace to look confused and Miller to grin. Finally, Grace asked, "Grace's Grenadiers?"
  
  "Well, every mercenary band needs a pithy name! And you have to admit that grenades figure very prominently in your small unit tactics," Lily rationalized, blushing slightly.
  
  "She's right about that," mouthed off Big John.
  
  With that, Lily and Miller talked some more, for around thirty minutes. While neither side was willing to offer themselves to the other like a blushing bride on her wedding night, it was still early days yet. So, they merely agreed in principle to help each other where they could and just continue as they had been. Grace's group was based out of Megaton most of the time, in any event, so she would be Lily's main point of contact.
  
  Lily did appreciate that he tried to rescue her, though. She wondered how many times he's done so to Enclave deserters? Or how large the Enclave in D.C. was to begin with?
  
  "Do you want to disassemble the bomb today, then?" asked Miller, "Grace wasn't lying when she said bombs were my speciality. While I was always a better administrator than a combat leader, I was still an engineer." Lily assumed that meant combat engineer.
  
  Lily pursed her lips and shook her head, "We either 'ave to do it in the dead of night in total stealth or get the Sheriff on board. I recommend the latter; as such, it will take some time. I suggest we do your team's surgeries and treatments today and tomorrow. Then after you've recovered, you guys visit my hôpital, and when you come back, we can make safe Megaton's homonyme."
  
  Miller seemed a little surprised she was willing to stick so close around a live nuke, until she shrugged, "There's still dozens in Fort Constantine, after all. I probably wouldn't be in a good way if they went, either."
  
  Miller groaned a little, "Well, I didn't know that, either. We'll just have to put a pin in that at the moment. I guess if it hasn't blown in a hundred years, it probably won't blow in a week."
  
  When they got to discuss the treatments, Lily pulled out a small inhaler, copied exactly from the ones that Jet utilized. She held it out, and Grace looked confused, "Uhh... we don't really want to party, Girlie. Thanks, though?"
  
  Lily snorted, "Zhe reflex treatment is inside. I needed a way to deliver a metered dose. One puff for every part of 50 kilos of body weight, so if you weigh 51 kilos, two puffs. OK? It takes a day to propagate and then about zhree days to see full results. Go with my Apprentice, first, though. She'll run you through the reflex test we use. If you happen to be preternaturally quick already, maybe we don't treat you. I doubt that, though. I would have noticed. We can do the same three surgeries for the phoenix device starting at... 1500?"
  
  Miller hummed and suggested to Grace, "You, NJ and Melissa today, then, you think?" Lily thought it was interesting it was framed as a suggestion or advice rather than an order. How military was this group's bearing still, she wondered? They didn't seem to have more of a goal than to survive and seemed to me more of a mutual assistance society.
  
  Grace, however, agreed, and the three of them walked off with the Apprentice. "You're also welcome to utilize the isolation ward I had set up as a barracks. It's clean, has beds but no linens."
  
  Miller considered it before nodding, "We have our sleeping gear bags and such, so that'll work well. Thank you."
  
  Lily wasted no more time to go look at her new robots for a few hours before the time for the surgeries arrived.
  
  POV Miller
  
  The man once called Captain Sean Miller watched the Institute scientist walk off. Former Institute scientist, he corrected himself. As an officer with a mission in and around Boston, even if it was a thinly veiled murder attempt, he was naturally well-briefed on all of the players inside what would have been his AO. And there was no bigger or more mysterious player to the north than the Institute.
  
  They were, in fact, the main reason his mission would have been so suicidal.
  
  She didn't seem willing to straight out say she left the Institute, but he supposed it might be a concession that allowed her to walk around without a bunch of robot assassins showing up. Or maybe they just didn't give a fuck about things this far south. He just didn't know.
  
  Well, she wasn't wrong that two people or groups abandoned in the world could find a common cause. He didn't know anything about the internal ranks of the Institute, either, but Professor sounded important.
  
  Well, he didn't think she was or planned to kill them, anyway, and he had a really good sixth sense about that sort of thing.
  
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  Pew-pew
  It turned out that everyone tested could improve their reflexes significantly, with New John and his sister showing the most potential to improve at over 125%, whereas Big John showed the least at only a theoretical 50%, which was still well worth the treatment in everyone's opinion.
  
  Lily decided to do Grace's surgery first, with the Apprentice assisting and Melissa observing. Although, to be honest, while the level of assistance the Apprentice could provide was still subpar, she was improving day by day.
  
  It wasn't a long surgery, and Lily was already over halfway done, so she was making small talk, "So, you guys have Power Armour?" she asked Melissa interestedly.
  
  Melissa pursed her lips, although it wasn't visible behind the surgical mask, but ended up nodding, "We do. Some, anyway. They don't generally utilize it so close to the D.C. area or out in the open, though. Brotherhood will think we're Enclave and pretty much shoot us on sight, and any Enclave troops we see will quickly discover we're deserters and then shoot us, and then we'd be on the radar again." She stopped the think, "The fusion cores are difficult to get, also. Raven Rock had the capability to both build them and refuel spent cores, but we obviously don't. I presume the Brotherhood also has the capability to refuel spent cores, if not manufacture them themselves as well, but we don't really know. They certainly don't seem to mind using power armour, anyway, so that's indicative."
  
  Lily nodded. She didn't remember Power Armour ever taking any kind of fuel, but she discovered that her knowledge from playing Fallout 1, 2 and 3 wasn't comprehensive in this new world, which was obvious because there were clearly some small differences. She had read about fusion cores but hadn't been able to acquire any, as of yet.
  
  They were manufactured by the same company that made the micro fusion power cells, though, which was called Mass Fusion and had their headquarters in Boston. And they were utilized not only in military applications but civilian ones as well; for example, the majority of the cars sold in the pre-war era used fusion cores while miniaturized fission reactors powered the rest. It was something akin to the competition between VHS and Betamax, and fission reactors in cars were well on the way to meeting the same fate as Betamax did, despite many people claiming they were vastly superior since they didn't need to be refuelled at all for over 50 years.
  
  Lily agreed with Melissa that the Brotherhood had to have a way of refuelling them, but she privately suspected that they did not have a method to manufacture them, at least not this chapter in the Capital, because no matter how she looked, she could not find a spent fusion core in any wreck of a car she discovered.
  
  She suspected one of the first things the Brotherhood accomplished when they migrated to the Capital, beyond seizing the Pentagon, was a systematic search of every car that was within the greater D.C. area that was in a relatively safe or easily accessible location. It's likely they hadn't searched even a fraction of D.C.'s total area, but they certainly have in all the areas around Megaton and Canterbury Commons.
  
  There was no way the Brotherhood would have been as systematic at this looting if they could manufacture the fusion cores themselves; they would have been more opportunistic as they were in all their other pilferings of technology.
  
  She had originally intended to just wait until she hit her first target, the VSS building, which she knew had fusion cores inside, but perhaps she could buy some from these former Enclave people. Especially if she told them it was to examine them to examine the possibility of refuelling them.
  
  She sighed when she thought about the Brotherhood, how she hated those people. She didn't know how she was going to deal with them but certainly knew she wanted to stay as far away from them as possible, at least until the Brotherhood Outcasts left the local chapter.
  
  Tilting her head, she considered as she finished connecting the PHOENIX implant to Grace's cardiovascular system, her hands moving almost on autopilot since it was such a simple procedure. Her knowledge wasn't perfect, but it was pretty significant; she had played Fallout 3 multiple times, including all of its DLCs. She knew of two main areas where the Outcasts would base themselves - the first was the location she was still planning to loot to its bedrock as soon as possible, namely the VSS building.
  
  The other, and the main base, was at Fort Independence. Perhaps she could take the fission kernel of Megaton's bomb, build a new, smaller bomb and bury it somewhere inconspicuously in Fort Independence? Then incinerate them all the moment they set up shop? There was no reason beyond the shortcoming of some Fallout electronics and yield desired that Megaton's bomb was so giant. Certainly, the invention of mini-nukes and the Fat Man indicated that they well understood how to miniaturize nuclear explosives.
  
  The critical mass of the most common weaponizable isotope of Plutonium was only about ten kilos, after all. Judging from her scans, the core in the bomb was only around 8 kilos, probably to prevent any criticality accidents during assembly. Maybe she would have to cart away another ten kilos for the high explosive lenses, which she would also loot, and the rest was the useless electrical firing circuits and similar electronics to ensure all the explosives detonated simultaneously as well as a vastly oversized second thermonuclear fusion stage.
  
  She suspected the yield on Megaton's bomb should be greater than that of Tsar Bomba of her past memories, but it clearly had some dial-a-yield settings, the lowest of which would probably have been used in the Tenpenny quest.
  
  It was barely a high school science project to construct a simple implosion-type fission-only nuclear bomb, especially if you had the fissionable core and all the high-explosive shaped charges made for you already. It might not be more than twenty kilotons of yield, but that was sufficient to incinerate the Fort even if it was buried underground. Could she kill them in cold blood? Yes, she definitely could.
  
  She intended to introduce both old and new technology widely in the Capital Wasteland. The Outcasts were like a pendulum swinging away from Elder Lyons' more moderate policies, and as such, they were, or would be, even more hard-cased than the Brotherhood usually was. She couldn't see how her existence, long term, would be tolerable to such a paramilitary group.
  
  And military men would see military solutions to their problems, so in her mind, they were almost already irreconcilable even if the group didn't even exist yet. However, she wasn't willing to condemn a bunch of people to death on her hunch, but she would take steps. Then, she would have to see, and perhaps there would be a tragic accident involving hitherto unexploded ordinance at the Fort, if necessary.
  
  Finishing up on Grace, she waited until the newly implanted device started functioning, which took several minutes. After that, she saw the incision site start to heal in real time, albeit incredibly slowly. She wouldn't even need any sutures for this, but she used some surgical glue anyway just to be careful.
  
  These PHOENIX systems offered much quicker healing than her medichine hives for trauma, but they relied on a similar synthetic stem cell as Stimpaks did, produced in small quantities by the device itself. These stems seemed less aggressive than those used by StimPaks, which made them a little less effective for trauma healing, but on the plus side, they probably wouldn't even give anyone but herself cancer.
  
  On the downside, the PHOENIX system offered zero protection against infection or disease. Taken altogether, medichines and the PHOENIX system were quite complimentary devices which is why she had already installed a slightly customized version of the PHOENIX in both herself and the Apprentice. She was much more scared of bullet holes than cancer, after all.
  
  She took her surgical instruments to the sterilizing autoclave she had built from parts and welcomed the next patient.
  
  After starting at 1500, she was done with all patients conscious and reporting only mild discomfort by 1730. Lily suspected most of the discomfort was caused by the slight fever they were experiencing from the reflex treatment.
  
  After dinner, Lily invited the recovering Grace to convalesce in her personal boudoir, where in Lily nursed on her until the amazon's health and vigour returned. It took most of the night.
  
  "Say, Girlie. You're also pretty good at repairing tech and energy weapons, right?" asked Grace out of the blue, the next morning.
  
  Lily blinked, "Better zhan most, I suppose. Why?"
  
  "I remember you joking about putting a laser in a cybernetic arm. Could you actually do that?" asked Grace, fishing out a near totally destroyed laser pistol. Its grip and trigger looked melted off. "This was Miller's, was in his hand when that mutie shot him with a plasma caster. I know it's a long shot, but he was quite fond of it, and I've saved it these past few years. I wanted to get the pistol itself repaired but everyone has said it's totally trashed."
  
  Lily grinned, now totally awake, asking like a kid who got offered to open their Christmas presents a day early, "Oh Boy, could I?" She decided not to tell Grace she already had a number of designs of first-generation cybernetic limbs that incorporated integrated weapons and tools, lasers included.
  
  She took the wreck of the laser pistol and looked around her room for the little bag of tools she normally carried on her hip, finally finding them under her panties that she must have tossed off the bed last night in fervour.
  
  Humming, she disassembled the pistol. However, it took her super-sharp diamond knife in places, at areas where polymers and metal were fused together. She made a pile of salvageable parts and a pile of trash. Thankfully the ruby rod gain medium was not even cracked, so she would be able to fabricate everything else herself - her laser pistol parts, aside from the gain media and energy cells which she could not duplicate at all, were all smaller and more compact anyway.
  
  Tossing the corpse of the pistol, mainly the melted frame, back to Grace and carefully setting the ruby rod and other associated parts on her nightstand, she said, "Yep! I sure can, and I would love to do so, too!"
  
  Grace grabbed the pistol frame out of the air like a snake snapping at prey, looking a bit surprised at herself, "Woah. I already feel quite a bit faster!"
  
  Lily nodded, unsurprised. "Yes, most of zhe changes happen in the first thirty-six hours, with diminishing returns after that until a plateau at about seventy-two hours, more or less."
  
  She peered at the clock displayed on her PipBoy, which was unceremoniously laying amidst her crumpled clothes across the room.
  
  Lily sighed at the time, 'It is almost 0800, already.' Standing and stretching her naked body like a cat, she languidly said, "We should probably get up. I have to give my Apprentice zhe second genetic treatment and start working on this arm."
  
  However, instead, she was tackled back into bed, and Grace informed her huskily, "They can wait a little while."
  
  "Dr St. Claire! It's nine o'clock! You missed breakfast, but I didn't want to disturb your patient's... convalescence," the Apprentice said as Lily walked into the cafeteria.
  
  Alice was seated at a table with Miller and Melissa, so Lily joined them after scrounging up herself something to eat and replied drier than James Bond's martini, "Yes, we all appreciate your commitment to healing, Apprentice."
  
  She handed Alice a small inhaler, "Zhis is for the clean metabolism. It should be fine to start it now if you want." The girl didn't need to be told twice and took one huff immediately. She was barely 45 kilos soaking wet, so a single puff was more than sufficient.
  
  Miller and Melissa seemed interested, "Is this another enhancement?" the older man asked, to which Lily nodded.
  
  Melissa seemed enthusiastic, "Alice was telling me about how you use a viral vector to make a genetic change on a person, but I couldn't quite understand why it is so safe or why you seem so unconcerned about the subjects infecting others. It is fascinating, though!"
  
  Lily gave her Apprentice a bit of a side-eye, although not because she was upset that the girl mentioned such. However, being able to teach or tell someone something in a way that they themselves understood it was a sign of mastery of the material. The fact that she couldn't explain in her own words how the Vector MkI was a sign that she did not, herself, understand it sufficiently.
  
  Granted, the girl had only been studying under Lily officially for about a month, but it was a deficiency that Lily noted for later correction. Miller seemed very interested in the answer, too.
  
  Lily shrugged, none of this was secret, and she had long ago realized she'd have to publicize this part of her treatments just to set people's minds at ease, "It started out as a virus, but it isn't really a virus anymore. A virus will replicate endlessly in zhe presence of zhe living cells, yes? My genetic vector is only capable of replicating a certain number of generations inside a host before it deactivates itself. That is why people over 50 kilos need two puffs, to get that much more of the treatment to ensure zhat zhere is full propagation considering their additional body mass."
  
  It was true, too. In fact, Vector MkI hardly resembled a coronavirus anymore. It didn't look spherical under magnification anymore; with the changes Lily made, it resembled an American football.
  
  Both of them looked impressed, but Miller asked, "What if it mutates? Since it is still based around a virus."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue at the man's insightful question. Beyond reducing the coronavirus virulence, that was the main area Lily had changed. "Viruses, or in my case virus-like semi-synthetic polymeric proteins, can change their genome by two different mechanisms; firstly, copying errors during replication, zhis creates mutation. Secondly, zhey can also recombine with other similar viruses during replication; zhis is zhe usual mechanism by which a new strain of a virus is formed in zhe wild during a pandemic when a host is infected by two similar viruses."
  
  Both Melissa and Miller nodded, realizing she was giving them some background information prior to an explanation and waited.
  
  In between bites, making sure to chew completely as was polite and expected of a lady, Lily continued, "Well, I've increased both zhe replication processes fidelity as well as introduced an entirely novel error-correction method - normally viruses do not possess such a feature. Not only is mutation more than an order of magnitude more difficult as the replication process functions better but in zhe event a mutation occurs the error correction will get it and stop zhe replication process by triggering programmed cell death in the host cell."
  
  Miller glanced at Melissa, who shrugged and said, "I'm not sure what you're expecting. I'm a paramedic, not a virologist. It sounds plausible and comports with what I know of biology, though. She certainly doesn't seem concerned she's throwing around live viruses or that it will mutate into a live virus."
  
  Lily grinned a little bit, "Finally, zhe mechanism by which prevents perpetual replication in living cells is designed quite fragilely, so that if after all zhat any mutation or change occurs, zhe entire replication mechanism will break down so that it can't replicate no matter where it is. I have no fears whatsoever about it, and I have a healthy respect for viruses, I assure you."
  
  Miller seemed impressed and mollified. Then he blinked, "Wait, second treatment? What is this other enhancement, if you don't mind my curiosity?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, something I am going to be marketing towards zhe civilian sector. I call it zhe clean métabolisme mod. It adjusts a person's sweat glands, changing the make-up of the sweat excreted to have a protein zhat is somewhat similar to surfactants used in soap but milder."
  
  After explaining its mechanism of action briefly, Lily shifted into marketing mode, "So instead of sweating making you feel all grimy, zhe more you sweat, zhe cleaner, more moisturized and smoother your skin becomes! It also eliminates offensive body odours, as zhese new secretions have a pleasantly minty odour. Zhis enhancement ez one I have myself! I stand by it one hundred per cent! And actually, zhe Apprentice was more looking forward to zhis than the increased reflexes, I think."
  
  Alice rapidly nodded her head in agreement.
  
  Melissa looked extremely interested, but surprisingly Miller seemed the most interested, in fact, he was slackjawed with shock. "Uh... could you sell us this, as well?"
  
  Lily blinked, "Of course. It just didn't have a combat application, so I didn't know if you would be at all interested. I was planning to offer it to you, one on one, as a personal sale."
  
  Miller chuckled, shaking his head, "You impressed me with your thoughts on logistics yesterday, but you've disappointed me today! Sure it may not make you faster or tougher, but it will increase... and by leaps and bounds... the morale of a soldier in the field. And that translates directly into combat effectiveness! If anything, this is as important to our organization as the increased reflexes."
  
  Lily blinked. She knew that, of course, but she hadn't put two and two together. If a soldier felt fresher for longer, they could move past their baggage train into less improved areas, can stay on patrol longer and a number of other benefits.
  
  He coughed and asked, "I'm not sure how to say this politely, but will you permit me to... sniff you?"
  
  Alice broke up, laughing wildly.
  
  "Yes, sure. I suppose," Lily replied and stood up to present herself for his olfactory inspection.
  
  After a slightly embarrassing minute for both of them, she sat back down, and he didn't waste any time, "How much?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to one side. She didn't intend to be usurious, especially considering her production costs of a self-replicating semi-virus were nil, "I was zhinking about charging walk-ins five 'undred caps per treatment. You can have my friends and family discount of two 'undred."
  
  Miller nodded, "Is there a way I could buy the treatments in bulk and take them away with me? It just isn't possible for many of our people to come to you."
  
  Lily considered this before nodding. She had intended to sell treatments this way, but she was earmarking that at Vector Mk2 or Mk3, which would be even more airtight as far as misuse or mutation was concerned and, most notably, more user-friendly, "Yes. But you 'ave to administer them per my directions. 'ow many doses?"
  
  Miller seemed a bit cagey about that but then sighed and shrugged, "Let's call it... 75?"
  
  Lily blinked again. That was more than she thought. A platoon was about twenty-five men, plus an equal amount of civilians equalled fifty at the time of their desertion.
  
  She thought their group would experience contraction with people who went their own way or died. This couldn't be explained by human reproduction, not in the 8 years since they deserted. They must recruit, but very carefully.
  
  She had a feeling that was one of the reasons Grace invited her to do that University looting job as a preliminary screening. How interesting, Lily thought.
  
  "Zhat won't be a problem. Do you want all 75 copies of the reversing agent, too?" Lily asked.
  
  Miller blinked, "These changes are reversible? Uhh... that's impressive. No, probably not. Half, maybe. Just in case?"
  
  Lily nodded, and then Miller started negotiating on price and payment terms, suggesting that a bulk order should have a discount even on top of their existing discount. Lily grinned; she did like haggling.
  
  After negotating, she did end up offering them a discount for the bulk order as well as favorable payment conditions - they could pay a third now, a third in three months and then the last third at the end of the year. She was, in effect, offering them zero per cent financing on the purchase, but in exchange, Miller had agreed to bring her several spent fusion cores and two more precious ones that still had a charge.
  
  "I'll 'ave your order boxed up by zhe time you get back from l'hôpital. Merci for your patronage of Custom Tailored Genes," Lily sealed the deal with a handshake.
  
  Her chosen business name caused Miller to smirk and Alice to try and fail not to chuckle. The girl asked incredulously, "You are not calling your business that, are you?!"
  
  Lily stared at her, somewhat self-conscious. She had thought long and hard about the name! It was great! "Yes! Although zhis building we shall call zhe Megaton General Hôpital, yes?"
  
  Alice waved her hand, "No, no. I think it is a great name! I just didn't expect you to make a pun, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily pouted and finished her breakfast in companionable silence.
  
  The next day Lily was having her second consultation with Miller, they would be leaving to go on the job as soon as their reflexes plateaued out. If her patient stopped delaying her, he would have a new arm to use on the trip.
  
  "Are you sure you're going to have to take what little forearm I have left, Doctor?" asked Miller, sullenly.
  
  "For zhe fourth time, yes!" snapped Lily, in a very unusual break of her usual serene bedside manner.
  
  Miller sighed and nodded, "Very well. This arm looks really good, and I'm amazed you were able to build it so quickly."
  
  Lily glanced at the cybernetic arm on the table. It was modelled after a real arm, his right arm, in fact, looking more like an articulating statue than a Terminator's mechanical skeleton arm. The exterior was a combination of carbon fibre and graphene, matte grey. The colour didn't match his colouration, but there was nothing she could do about that on a first-generation model.
  
  He had to have one more question she had already answered, of course, "And I'll actually be able to feel things touch this arm and hand?"
  
  Lily didn't mind this question because she got to show off her skills. "Yes. Although, definitely not as good as your real arm or hand. Zhe tactile feedback sensors built into it are so so crude compared to sensory neurons, after all. But it will interface with both your sensory cortex, central nervous system and proprioception. It won't feel like a ghost hand you're moving around, but like a real hand albeit with muted sensation, as if you've had nerve damage in your arm." Probably. She'd never worked with such crude synthetic parts before, but she was pretty confident that is what it would feel like.
  
  "Alright, alright. I'm ready for the surgery then, I guess, Doctor. Is Melissa watching again?" asked Miller.
  
  Lily nodded, "She had me turn off her sense of pain instead of sedating her so she could watch her own surgery using a mirror, so what do you think?" Lily was actually quite approving of such behaviour. She wasn't far off from conducting her own open-heart or brain surgeries on herself, like Lily frequently did, ' Is that the sign of a good scientist, perhaps?'
  
  Miller nodded, before following Lily to the pre-operative room.
  
  Miller had been awake for a couple of hours, and Lily had the Apprentice perform the initial post-surgery calibration of the arm as she had pressing engagements to install a small fifty-kilowatt generator in the pumping station.
  
  While they would indeed power the pumping station with the large generator at the electrical substation, this smaller one would act as a backup. The main electrical generator required constant cooling - even if it was scrammed, it needed continual cooling for at least a half hour, or it would melt. That meant the pumping station required backup power.
  
  Also, they could get the water pumping sooner - which would be very necessary to start the process of cleaning out all the water lines.
  
  Already, as she returned to the hospital, grimey, dark and disgusting water was being pumped into the sewer across the east side of Megaton. Progress. Lily was pleased.
  
  Walking, trailed by Grace, into the room Miller was sitting in doing what amounted to cybernetic physical therapy with Alice, she greeted him, "How is zhe arm, Capitaine?"
  
  He was grinning, "I crushed a few things that weren't exactly fragile. It is ALOT stronger, but I have pretty good control of it now." He was moving around a few specially constructed blocks she had made for his physical therapy that were as fragile as eggs, without destroying them too.
  
  "Good, good. Grace has a surprise for you, and I must apologize for not giving you a complete breakdown on the specs of zhe arm," Lily told him. She rationalized the slight breach of medical ethics by the fact that the laser was completely inert, and if he didn't want it she could permanently disable it.
  
  Not one to mince words, Grace gave it to him straight while grinning, "Doctor Girlie put a laser pistol in your arm! She used the parts of your old pistol that got toasted along with your hand; I kept it and asked her to do it as a surprise!"
  
  He was shocked, pleased but shocked. "Uhh, how does it work? I won't accidentally shoot anyone with it, will I? And you actually managed to get useful parts out of that old piece of shit? My dad gave me that, you know."
  
  Lily walked over to him, "No, it is disabled right now. I guess, you could say the safety is on. Here, put out your arm." He held it out and Lily slid open a small recessed panel on his forearm that wasn't obvious, which shocked him. "Here is zhe activation switch. I'm going to turn it on, but don't worry - it is in target practice mode, zhe laser will barely be more than a pointer. Might give someone a sunburn, but won't even burn their clothes." She indicated the other control, but left it in its present position.
  
  Everyone made sure they weren't anywhere near where his hand was pointing, just in case.
  
  "Uhh... I don't feel any different?" said Miller.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Of course not. While I call zhis the safety, it's really the second safety. I imagine that once you get used to it you will likely keep it in this ready state most of the time. Zhere are electronics watching your nerve impulses, it won't go ready to fire until you make a specific series of gestures."
  
  Miller looked quite relieved, actually, "Ah, what series of gestures? I hope I can remember them in the middle of a fight."
  
  Lily nodded, "I zhought about zhat. So it is simple, yet not something you'd do accidentally. You have to make a fist zhree times rapidly within one second," she held her hand out and clenched her fist three times quickly, demonstrating. Then she warned, "Go ahead and try, but after zhe third fist do not move your pointer finger."
  
  Miller clenched his fist three times rapidly, then his index finger straightened out, pointing at the wall, "Ahh.. I had to really stop myself from trying to curl my pointer finger when it popped out. I don't have any control of that finger anymore," he reported.
  
  Lily nodded, "Point it at a target, just use the wall right now. To fire, curl your finger like you're squeezing a trigger. Your finger won't move but the laser will fire." She indicated the tip of his index finger, which had mechanically opened to reveal the optical aperture of a laser.
  
  He pointed at the wall, and then suddenly, a blue beam of light hit it. He grinned, and several more beams hit the same spot. Grace was cackling, "That is BADASS, Cap!"
  
  "It really is. I thought it would come out my palm, this is so much easier to aim. How the hell did you fit a laser in an index finger?!" asked Miller.
  
  Lily sniffed, prepared to brag and receive praise, "I didn't. It's in your forearm. I considered zhe palm, also, but it is a bit inelegant. Hard to aim, like you say. So, I ran a waveguide up to your finger so all I had to fit zhere was the output coupler optics. Much smaller, no?"
  
  Without being prompted by Lily, Miller figured out how to stow the laser, which was a repeat of the same three fist gestures. He then repeated the deployment, firing, and stowing of the laser several times.
  
  Grace asked while he was playing with it, "Why are your guys lasers always blue, anyway?"
  
  Lily blinked, 'You guys?' Had she been at the range with the Apprentice? Miller glanced over and seemed interested as well.
  
  Lily decided to explain, "Well, you've seen rainbows, yes?" They both nodded. Then Lily gave a brief explanation about the spectrum of light, that visible light was only a small part of it and that blue was higher energy than red. "So, zhe result is about a ten to fifteen per cent increase in energy or damage delivered if it is zhe blue compared to zhe red. I'd rather it be invisible, but zhese pre-war laser designs are ruby lasers, so it is difficult to push it to anything past zhe visible spectrum. I can't even get it to zhe violet, my favourite colour," Lily complained.
  
  "Ahhh..." they both said simultaneously as if some deep mystery had been revealed.
  
  "Uh, could you change it back to red? Or maybe give me a switch? I understand the performance benefits, but there is a tactical advantage to... uhh... not calling attention to the origin of this laser, you understand?" Miller asked.
  
  Lily blinked. She had been using blue lasers in front of God and everyone and would continue to do so, so she understood completely. Although, she didn't think he would fool anyone - only she, Lily, could create such an arm in the first place!
  
  "Yes, zhat should be no trouble," Lily said. She had designed the arm to be easily removable for maintenance and upgraded versions. "I'll add a dial next to the training mode switch; you'll be able to go from red to blue or anywhere in between, if you want. Maybe that will be useful somehow, someday."
  
  "Excellent, we will be heading out tomorrow morning on your job, don't worry," Miller assured her.
  
  Lily wasn't worried. All six of them were vastly improved specimens compared to just a few days ago, Monsieur Miller especially.
  
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  Psychedelic Self-Improvement
  After watching Grace's Grenadiers and Miller depart, Lily descended back into her lair in the basement to get on with her planned work today. Today was a big day for her and one she had been waiting on for some time.
  
  Lily glanced at the skeleton she had set up in the basement; it looked like a teaching skeleton from a Victorian-era medical school, except, of course, it was her own bones that she no longer needed. She decided to keep them as a keepsake, which kind of grossed the Apprentice out.
  
  The skeleton wasn't complete, but it was over two-thirds done, with the latest additions being most of the vertebral column, stopping only at the lumbar region. She not only had replaced most of her vertebra, but she also replaced all the intervertebral disks with a vastly superior graphene bag filled with amorphous carbon. Not only would it provide superior support and cushion, but these would never, ever slip out of place.
  
  She was employing this same technique on nearly every part of her body that was shock-sensitive; for example, the same cushioning was applied to the interior of her skull to prevent concussion. While she might never be able to fall from terminal velocity and do a superhero landing when she had organic parts, she figured that when she was done with her bone replacement, she would be able to handle momentary acceleration or decelerations of at least 70Gs. She would be able to jump out of fourth-story windows with no problem by then.
  
  Looking at her skeleton on display, the only bones she had left to remove were all more of the annoying ones to replace, like her pelvis and clavicle.
  
  Annoying didn't mean impossible, though, but temporarily removing your uterus and a few other organs was definitely something you only wanted to do once if you had to, so she had put it off for now.
  
  No, she had a much more rewarding surgery to accomplish today and one she had been waiting for since she arrived on this planet. Yes, she had finally gotten her semi-custom OS to run without issues on the RobCo quantum processors, so it was time to install what she was calling a combination brain-machine interface and neural co-processor at the base of her skull.
  
  While the software ported to this architecture was extremely limited, which meant that at first, this device wouldn't prove that useful, it was an absolute necessity in her opinion. After all, she had ported over the integrated development environment from her laptop, just presently without any actual user interface.
  
  It would be some work to integrate a full-sense user interface into the device, but once she had one working, it would speed up all of her development efforts.
  
  Lily hadn't been thinking about her antipathy to using a keyboard and mouse because she was just so happy to have that scanner at all, but the truth was she might as well have been coding by picking out letters on an Ouja board for how slow it seemed to her. Her memories included her coding and making changes to designs at the speed of thought, after all.
  
  While even when it was finished and completely working, this new brain-machine interface wouldn't be that fast, it would still be, at minimum, an order of magnitude more efficient than typing things out with her fingers, like she was pawing at the dirt for grubs like an animal.
  
  She decided to take a quick shower before her auto-surgery. She had plumbed a complete bathroom into the basement, including a shower stall, faucet and working toilet. Although, looking at the faucet gave her some bad memories.
  
  After setting up the cistern outside at ground level, she had persistent problems with air leaking into the water lines and then when she turned a faucet on, she'd get sprayed in the face by a high-pressure air/water combination mist.
  
  She thought it was just an indignity she would have to bear with until the Apprentice's little brother asked her why she was pressuring the water with air.
  
  Informing the kid that there wouldn't be any water coming out of the tap if it wasn't pressurized embarrassed her, as he corrected her. He asked if she couldn't build her cistern like a piston in an engine and use pressurized air to push down on the piston from the top, which would then push down on the water to provide water pressure. Then, the air and water would never touch each other.
  
  Lily remembered trying to think of why that wouldn't work, and when she couldn't, she asked him how he thought of the idea, and the little brat had replied, "It seemed obvious." She had told the Apprentice to increase his education and left it at that.
  
  After she was clean, aside from the slight amount of radioisotopes that she carefully towelled off her body, she sat in the gurney she used for most of her surgeries on herself, finding the cludged-together VR goggles and carefully putting them on. She'd had to replace the strap that kept the goggles on the back of her head, as that was going to be the site of the surgery today, so instead, she fashioned a chin strap and one on the top of her head.
  
  Testing all the manipulators, she got to work. The reason this surgery was so simple is that she already built in the area to install the computer into her skull that she replaced the other week. All she would have to do today was move the bottom of her scalp out of the way briefly, open the panel, install the device, close the panel and heal her scalp back into place.
  
  Sadly, she was nowhere near the point where she would be able to power this implant with the customized electrical organ she was working on in her spare time, so this version was powered by traditional small energy cells. The small batteries could power the computer running at full tilt for two weeks or it running idle for months.
  
  Fission batteries were a bit too bulky but she included a biologically inert induction-based wireless charging antenna array that she would be carefully installing under her scalp, also. Some bots, like Protectrons, also charged this way sometimes, but she would install a similar charger in her big comfortable La-Z-Boy-equivalent chair rather than stand in a bot charging station like she was a Borg.
  
  Although, it was a little bit nice to know that she could top off her charge if she really needed to in any bot charging station if she was away from home.
  
  She spent more time ensuring she wouldn't cause any lasting damage to her hair follicles than installing the small hybrid computer system. It had over fifty exabytes of memory, which she was confident was likely more than any other single system on the planet presently, although she was interested to see how much memory and processing power a ZAX unit had.
  
  Even the Miss Nanny's cutting-edge solid-state storage system was only in the range of a hundred terabytes or so. Not to mention that the storage in her head was non-volatile fast-access RAM, so there was no need for a distinction between RAM and hard disk storage.
  
  Her PipBoy ran on only 64K of RAM, in fact, which seemed to be the norm for all the devices that didn't utilize quantum processors. She still wasn't able to exactly figure out how some of it worked, especially the portions that served as a medical monitor, as that functionality was built into the hardware, and it looked very unfamiliar to her.
  
  "That should do it," Lily said quietly as she finished healing the incision site. She was pleased that the surgery did not take very long at all. However, the rest of it might take most of the day. Glancing at her PipBoy, seeing it was barely seven in the morning, she nodded.
  
  She grabbed her diagnostic scanner computer and went to tell the Apprentice that she would be out of pocket and not to disturb her unless it was life or death until at least past lunchtime. Then, she retreated back to her boudoir. It would be best if she was comfortable for the rest of this process.
  
  Sitting in her comfortable chair, she pulled the tablet and connected it to her medichine hive. She let out a long breath and instructed it to run the ready, premade program she had entered before and then closed her eyes to relax.
  
  In her brain, billions of tiny nanomachines started spooling out incredibly thin carbon nanotubes from the computer system implanted at the base of her skull and started taking them to, essentially, every accessible part of her brain, with certain important areas like her sensory cortex gathering thousands or even tens of thousands of individual strands targeting them.
  
  The medichines were small enough to move in and out of her brain without damaging anything at all, but the carbon nanotubes were not, so it depended entirely on the nanomachines carefully picking out paths and using care to avoid any damage, but thankfully that was a task that they excelled at.
  
  When each nanotube got to its destination, a swarm of nanobots scratched off the insulative layer at the end of the strand, exposing either a conductive or semi-conductive layer that would interface directly, electrically, with the neurons nearby.
  
  The process took about an hour, and while it wasn't painful - brains had no sensory neurons for themselves, after all - there were at times that Lily felt a bit weird, but such weird feelings passed after a time.
  
  The tablet on her lap dinged, and Lily opened her eyes, smiling. To be honest, she was a little bit nervous about that procedure. The next one wouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous but promised to be a thousand times more uncomfortable.
  
  Lily switched the tablet to laptop mode and found a terminal emulator before establishing a connection with the implanted computer she had just installed in her skull. Now that she had the physical connections with all the areas of her brain, she had to figure out what each connection did and meant. Everyone's neural network wasn't identical, and she wouldn't precisely know which neurons in her sensory cortex handled smell versus taste or which neurons in the optical area generated which colours or shapes. She'd have to find all that out, almost by brute force.
  
  Thankfully, she was able to program a simple expert system to help her. All she had to do was give it a few baselines, start it up and occasionally answer its questions. But it would be an... incredibly terrible experience. She just knew it. Sighing, she glanced down at the open terminal.
  
  login as: ego
  
  Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
  
  Password: **************
  
  Two-factor authentication: Snap three times with your LEFT hand... 9... 8... 7... 6 .. 5 .. OK!
  
  Last login: Tue Aug 4 08:43:44 2274 from fd3b:1e3e:ece7:e5a6:cd:7a4b:55c9:98b2 (wifi direct)
  
  [ego insaneinthebrain: ~] free -h
  
  total used free shared buff/cache available
  
  Mem: 62Ex 11Gi 2.8Gi 1Ex 61Ex 62Ex
  
  [ego insaneinthebrain: ~] cd ~/sensorium
  
  [ego insaneinthebrain: ~/sensorium] ./configure -use-expert -exclude-sense=smell,taste -exclude-emotion-mapping -few-prompts -optimize -out=~
  
  She tapped the enter key, and suddenly the entire screen on the laptop was taken up by a screen that directed her attention to it.
  
  The goal was she would look at known shapes and images, and then the expert system would correlate what she saw with what it was displaying on the laptop and use that to establish a baseline which the expert system would expand to develop a complete sensory map using standard machine learning techniques on its rudimentary neural network.
  
  While she watched simple geometric shapes be displayed on the screen, she listened to Für Elise play over the laptop's speakers for a similar reason, except for her hearing.
  
  After the shapes and images, she was directed to pinch her body painfully at various locations, which she complied with even though a couple of them were embarrassing. She had no way to calibrate her sense of smell or taste presently, but those were almost the same sense, anyway, and could be handled later.
  
  It took two repetitions of Fur Elise, wherein she was either staring at shapes or occasionally images produced by the scanner of random people or objects or pinching herself in various places before the screen indicated a prompt.
  
  READY Y/n
  
  Sighing, she braced herself and tapped the Y key.
  
  Immediately it was as if she had mainlined a litre of LSD while being dissolved in acid, with devilish shrieks or nails on chalkboard sounds ringing in her ears, except, of course, no relief was gained when she tried to cover her ears. The sounds she was hearing were directly in her brain, after all.
  
  The expert system used a recursive machine learning algorithm to induce sensory experience more or less at random at first but using the baseline it collected as a starting point to refine the induced senses until it reached the point of full control, where it would be able to display any image in my sensory cortex, hear any sound or feel any tactile sensation on any part of her body.
  
  Lily realized she made a mistake when she programmed the system to do this on all senses simultaneously. She thought it would be better to get it over with, like ripping off a bandaid, but now she wasn't so sure. It was quite torturous, even beyond the pain that the body was able to experience.
  
  Thankfully, recursively self-correcting expert systems tend to learn relatively quickly when they have some baseline to start with. If she hadn't taken the baseline, she would have probably spent a whole day writing on the ground in agony as the primitive AI started from scratch. As it was, she spent thirty minutes.
  
  Even after thirty minutes, she wasn't doing great; it was just that she wasn't either being frozen, burned or pained at random full blast over random parts of her body continuously. The sensation changed to mild heat, mild cold and a tickling sensation, as if a feather was used on her body which she didn't like one bit.
  
  Her vision was no longer resembled a random psychedelic hellscape and now merely resembled an M.C. Escher painting, especially when her eyes were open when the two senses were overlaid upon one another.
  
  She no longer heard random devil shrieks in her ears, but merely something along the lines of KMFDM crossed with Cannibal Corpse but played in reverse and at randomly variable tempos.
  
  She wiped the tears from her eyes and just sat there, holding her knees in her comfy chair. This was endurable, at least. Not pleasant, though.
  
  It took another thirty minutes before she heard something akin to Für Elise in her mind and saw mostly geometric shapes and the occasional blurry image. Thankfully, the tactile sensation had long ago ceased, it being a more straightforward sense than either sight or hearing.
  
  Another half hour had her hearing Ludwig's famous piano solo clearer than she had since she had come to this world and seeing full-resolution scans with more fidelity than her eyes could ever offer her.
  
  Theoretically, the expert system would continue to attempt to improve the sense data until it perfectly mapped every single sensory neuron, but she was already well into diminishing returns here, so she stopped the program, making sure the sensory map was saved properly - she definitely did not want to go through that again.
  
  Nodding, she finally typed a reboot command on the laptop and felt the world stop for a moment. The reboot process must have temporarily interrupted all of her senses, which wasn't intended. She would have to do some tests; it wouldn't do if she were effectively insensate if the device in her brain shut down.
  
  It only lasted a half second before she started to see overlaid on her vision the bootup sequence of her now semi-functioning implant computer.
  
  Smiling as it went through its initial self-tests and then disappeared.
  
  Now, Lily just had to train the input, now that she already had the output trained. Starting up another program on the laptop brought up the input training system, which was, fortunately, not torturous at all, merely boring.
  
  She had to use the existing input of the laptop's keyboard and eye-tracking mouse while thinking of certain unique ways to train her computer to recognize the input and not recognize it by mistake when she did not intend to use the device.
  
  She would see a glowing orb and be made to "click" it or see a line of text and be made to "type" it. Or see a line of text and be asked to intensely subvocalize it, as the computer monitored the Broca region of her brain, which covered language. Subvocalizations would be used for commands, while "typing" would be used for general long-form inputs like programming and similar tasks.
  
  It was really quite a crude input scheme, as she was used to, but it was light years beyond what she had now, so she was giddy with excitement.
  
  After an hour and a half of training the input system, Lily tried subvocalizing a command she had pre-programmed, 'Command, Activate HUD.'
  
  Immediately she could see a very familiar HUD pop into her vision, displaying her health status and compass bearing from her medichines in the lower left corner, which now began continuously communicating and utilizing the processing power of her PC.
  
  Lily pulled her laser pistol out of the holster, and immediately a reticle appeared at the three-dimensional location where her laser was pointing. Lily grinned, she wasn't sure that was going to work right away, but it did. She glanced down at the weapon and saw its charge indicator, and immediately the ammunition left displayed in the lower right corner.
  
  Her expert system wasn't smart, not even as smart as a bot, but it wasn't quite stupid either. Once it saw, using Lily's own senses, an indication of ammunition remaining, it would display that on her HUD as well as track shots and decrement it properly when she fired her weapon.
  
  And yes, she intentionally designed it to look like the HUD from Fallout 3. With some minor improvements. She didn't have health points, after all.
  
  "If that worked so well, how about this?" Lily mused. She had also designed a system that would have the expert system automatically highlight in a red box any object in the world that Lily saw that it thought was interesting and of note.
  
  'Command, Activate Interest Highlighter', Lily thought smugly.
  
  "Ack!" Lily waved her hands in front of her face. Her entire vision was filled with red boxes. The expert system was highlighting every single thing that it recognized as a discrete object as something of intense interest.
  
  Okay, maybe it was stupid after all.
  
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  Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys
  It was not unusual for Lily to have a non-sapient AI in her head. In fact, everyone had them where she came from, even biomorphs. They were called Muses, and their actual primary use was sorting through social media, news and media on your behalf.
  
  Lily used to have more than a dozen specialized and subordinate expert systems housed in her glorious spider body that ranged in function from laboratory and social assistants to combat precognition oracles. Still, most biomorphs usually just had a Muse.
  
  It turned out that in the far future in her memories, nobody trusted the algorithms generated by that world's equivalent of Twitter, TikTok or YouTube, so they used their own AIs to suck in all the media and data they could and fashioned their own algorithms by training their Muse on their likes and dislikes throughout their life.
  
  People also ran ubiquitously what was known as the ER, or Enhanced Reality system. It was similar to an Augmented Reality system that Lily remembered from America, but it was built into everyone's brains. It would display a name over a person's head if they were broadcasting a transponder, similarly to what Lily would expect from MMO games, creating labels on the fly for objects and other helpful tagging.
  
  Even if a person did not have their personal transponder running, if someone saw them, their Muse would use facial recognition software and data mining of OSINT, social media and other publically available information to try to infer or deduce the identity of anyone their host saw anyway, giving a confidence level at their guess which was usually pretty accurate.
  
  Lily's AI was still very stupid. It might be able to recognize a person if she left the room and came back, but if Lily came back the next day and that person was wearing a different outfit, it would be stumped, so she left that feature off so far.
  
  She did take the time to train the object of interest system because she intended that to be running all the time. But it would take careful and monotonous identification of objects and categorizing why they might be interesting. For example, she set up a simple trip-wire trap using an inert grenade and classified it as dangerous, so a similar device would always be flagged in her vision.
  
  Another feature of her incipient ER system was automatic radio direction finding. She had built-in antennas in many places on her body. Her shins contained heavy-duty antennas for really high-frequency microwaves and millimetre waves, which Lily intended to use as part of a synthetic aperture radar system for vision in low-light situations when she had more abundant auxiliary power. They presently weren't connected to anything, as it would depend on her finishing her entire skeleton, which also had embedded conductors built into them, to provide connections to these transceiver antennas and her computer.
  
  Her skull contained seven separate antennas running from the megahertz and low-gigahertz ranges she used for high-speed wireless data connections to the kilohertz range she used for voice radio, be it listening or transmitting. Once her spinal vertebrae were completely replaced, there would even be one long antenna for those short-wave transmissions, although that would likely be receive-only.
  
  Although she couldn't presently transmit her voice from her brain into the ether, she could send morse code or digital signals with her mind. And she could not only listen to Mnsr Three Dogs in her brain, but if she activated the ADF system and squelched it to his frequency, she could see the visualization of his radiowaves falling onto her head from the east southeast where the GNR building was located. Of course, it wasn't genuinely seeing the actual radio waves, it was just a rendered facsimile produced by her computer and pumped into her visual cortex, but it was still cool as hell.
  
  That also meant that she would ALWAYS notice any radio transmissions on typical frequencies near her, and she had enough storage to log all of them even if she wasn't listening to them in real-time. So, she just needed to train the expert system, which could listen to all of them simultaneously, and give it some keywords to notify her if it heard one of them. Lily would become very challenging to sneak up on by people who used radios in the clear, which was both the Brotherhood and the Enclave at times, as far as she could tell.
  
  Hell, even the most commonly used voice-radio encryption schemes by the time the bombs dropped only used a sixty-four-bit encryption key, which she could theoretically crack in real-time, given that most approved encryption schemes were not quantum-resistant.
  
  Practically, she couldn't, as she had no software for cryptographic cracking. She just needed a little or a lot of time to program such utilities first, as cryptography was never one of her focuses. The problem was there were hundreds of such things that would be useful, and she had limited time and limited expertise beyond her focus.
  
  Lily might, admittedly, be a genius, as her character sheet stated, but that in itself didn't teach you cryptography or other esoteric fields. In truth, she had been finding herself going to read advanced mathematics books in secret, as she hadn't really thought about mathematics the entire time she was a synth which was the vast majority of her life - she just did it. If she wanted to know the answer to a mathematical question, she just KNEW it, without any consideration of the steps involved to get the answer.
  
  Also, Lily forgot how dependent she became to the mesh, the internet of the future on steroids which she was perpetually connected to it on a mind level. Many people used continuous requests to encyclopedias as a form of memory if they didn't know something, so she often found herself trying to reach out to the ether to get answers to questions and find silence.
  
  She mustn't let her Apprentice find out that her memory was a little rusty on linear algebra or vector calculus or similar disciplines, thankfully much beyond the Apprentice's own level thus far.
  
  Lastly, the only other function her PC had out of the box was automatic triangulation if the transmitters around her were stationary and she was moving, although Lily hadn't gotten her moving map working yet so the triangulation just gave a bearing and a distance. There were still operating Global Positioning System satellites; Lily could sense their weak transmissions from overhead but hadn't managed to parse their data coding schema. The entire system used by the moving map on the PipBoy was entirely hardware-based, using a specific ASIC circuit, which was both impressive and horrifying.
  
  Lily glanced down at the PipBoy; she wouldn't need this very much longer. Perhaps Alice would like it? Until she got her own personal computer, that was.
  
  Glancing at her chronometer, finding it was about noon, Lily decided she would use the rest of the day as productively as she had utilized the morning.
  
  She had been told that there was a vehicle for sale in Megaton, which did not happen often, and she was keen to purchase it, even if she was going to get bent over on the price. She was accumulating a fair bit of currency, and when the water and power company began operations, she would collect even more, and quickly.
  
  Megaton was a small enough economy that it was important for her to spend most of what she collected, and rather quickly. If she just accumulated currency, or what served as it, like Scrooge McDuck, so she could swim around in it or observe it, she was going to be a big enough player that she would damage the local economy.
  
  In Lily's opinion, wealth should act like a river, not a pond. Especially wealth in small communities like she found herself in. The current plan she had approved with Monsieur Tombs was to reinvest most of their earnings from Eastside Water & Power into the company by way of hiring workers at first. There would need to be a number of water workers maintaining the finicky water connections in "her" side of the city, although Megaton itself had some municipal workers that handled the Sewer itself.
  
  Lily had invented automated water and power meters that used a low-powered digital radio that would report water usage numbers to the Water & Power headquarters which meant that there was no need for meter readers. Still, there was a significant staffing requirement for accounting and technicians who would shut people's water or power off if they stopped paying.
  
  Lily suspected the technicians that went to shut off water to a building would likely be more along the lines of mercenaries, at first, until the gentrification process was farther along.
  
  She was manufacturing the electronics for these electric and water meters in the hundreds every day, as she wanted an enormous surplus of them in the event she became too busy to produce them. If the Brotherhood examined them closely, they would be shocked, as amusingly enough, they featured what the Brotherhood would consider highly advanced technology in carbon-based electronics.
  
  Lily doubted very much the Brotherhood would do such things, though, as the exterior of the devices seemed very ordinary, and the Brotherhood was very predictable in its search for technology. If it didn't shoot plasma or lasers, they generally weren't interested.
  
  'The hypocrites,' Lily thought. Although their very Teutonic-seeming order was based on protecting the world from further nuclear war, they never even confiscated the active nuke in the middle of Megaton.
  
  Leaving her bedroom, Lily searched for the Apprentice to tell her she was going out on a few errands but couldn't find her in any of her usual spots.
  
  Finally, she found the girl outside, kneeling in what once was probably the parking lot of the apartment complex and was now just an open area of mostly dirt and occasional asphalt.
  
  Lily's eyes narrowed. What was that... no.. it couldn't be.
  
  Lily called out, disgruntled. "Apprentice! Are you feeding zhat beast?!"
  
  Alice startled, jumping to her feet to reveal the mutant stoat that had escaped Lily. It had grown somewhat. The long boi then longed out to his full length, standing on his haunches like a meerkat and hissed angrily at Lily. It clearly did not like her.
  
  While it once massed the same as a chubby cat, now it massed as much as the fattest of cats, easily ten kilos. However, it didn't look fat. It looked LONG . It had kept its smooth white fur in its mutation, which Lily thought was a little odd as most FEV mutants lost all of their hair. Its face was completely different from what she remembered as a stoat. Its scrunched in little face reminded Lily of a pug dog, actually, and was currently baring its fangs at her.
  
  Altogether, the mutant reminded her of the appearance of a small Chinese dragon covered in fur instead of scales. It was clearly guarding some meat in its grubby little paws!
  
  "I'm just paying Sir Longius what we owe him!" protested the Apprentice.
  
  Lily fumed, 'Bullshit! If that shitty weasel has a name, and it most certainly does not, it would be Big Chungus!'
  
  However, Lily just maintained her narrowed eyes and watched Big Chungus eat the meat it was carrying while it remained longed out on its hind paws, obviously trying to display how big and dangerous it was to her. "Owe it? What, pray-tell, are you talking about?" Lily asked calmly, not Dumbledore-calmly but actually calmly.
  
  "Well, I first met him about a week ago, when he stole the rat kebab I was eating for lunch! He was quite quick and grabbed it and ran off with it while I was distracted with reading about the body's immune response," said Alice, sounding a little put-out.
  
  Lily just remained silent, waiting. The girl continued, "But then the next day, he brought me two dead rats! Big fat ones! So that's how I started the arrangement with Sir Longius; for every two dead rats he brings me, he gets one of them cooked! He's already paid for this rat he's eating now, so it is just giving him what he is owed!"
  
  Lily always thought the gesture where people were pinching their glabella was an effect that ham-fisted actors did until she found herself doing it in front of her Apprentice, "And its name?"
  
  The Apprentice corrected her, "His name! Well, he is long..." she trailed off.
  
  Yes, it certainly was. Lily stared at it, "And ' is noble station? Who knighted 'im? I've not met the chevalier of weasels."
  
  Alice pursed her lips, "Well, he likes his rats cooked! That's pretty high-class tastes for a.." she trailed off, "... mutant weasel? So it is clear that he is a noble among weasels!"
  
  Big Chungus alternated between stuffing its face and hissing at Lily as she stared at it. Finally, Alice piped up, "Stop, Dr St. Claire! You're looking at him like you want to vivisect him! He's smart; he can tell!"
  
  Lily sighed, "I don't want to vivisect 'im," and she was technically telling the truth. She wanted to dissect it; the nuance was totally different. She doubted the creature had any organs or alterations that were different or unique enough that Lily would be interested in seeing how they worked when it was alive, after all.
  
  Lily frowned, ' The little shit is smart, though. Clearly smarter than a weasel should be. Why is it smarter when humans get dumber? I need to see a Super Mutant's brain, and preferably to see the process of mutation from a flat to a Super-Mutant to find out why.'
  
  Lily had to stop herself from saying, "Fuck it", as she tried to develop a cultured reputation. She only swore when homicidal Gary clones tried to murder her. Instead, she said, "You know what? It doesn't matter. Just keep 'im out of zhe basement or zhe medical areas of the 'ospital."
  
  "Oh, don't worry, Dr St. Claire. He doesn't seem to like coming inside too much. I think he has too much territory to rule over," replied the Apprentice happily.
  
  'Or more likely, it has some bad memories about my building,' thought Lily.
  
  Remembering why she came to find the Apprentice, she informed the girl she was going to be out for a few hours before departing.
  
  After what might be, charitably, called a test drive the man was walking around the truck with Lily.
  
  "So, Doc, this is it. She's a beaut, ain't she? Maybe a few issues, but it is a one-of-a-kind Peterbilt concept car featuring a 1,400 horsepower Chryslus fission motor! I can't let it go for under 10,000," the man who claimed he wasn't a used car salesman said, pointing to the truck.
  
  The truck looked somewhat like an two and a half ton commercial truck that she would recognize from the Army, although the long truck bed had been replaced with an improvised one of wood and aluminum sheets.
  
  Lily mumbled to herself, shaking her head. "C'est de la morceau de merde," and then before the used care salesman could inquire, she enlightened him, "It's a piece of shit," Lily said plainly, completely ignoring the fact that she tried to stop herself from swearing just thirty minutes ago.
  
  Before the man could complain, Lily sighed and shook her head once more, "Zhe transmission is almost shot! Zhe only gears that work are first through third! Reverse gear and fourth through eighth are totally shot! How do you expect to use a truck if it can't back up? And zhe fact that it is a unique concept car probably means it has zhe unique, custom transmission, no? Otherwise, you'd have replaced it by now!"
  
  The man looked like he bit into a lemon, which Lily took to mean she wasn't too far off the mark. Still, Lily wanted the truck but wasn't about to get fleeced at it, "What's the fuel state of the reactor?"
  
  At that, the man brightened, "Over 85%! It'll keep running for decades, for sure!"
  
  Lily might be able to fabricate a new transmission but wouldn't be able to make it out of diamondoid materials as she would normally do - otherwise, it would just crunch up the transmission input shaft gearing if that wasn't made out of diamond also.
  
  But, if she did that, it would chew up the engine's flywheel. Lily wasn't about to rebuild an entire engine in diamond, especially since it was a fission reactor, so she would have to figure out some other way to machine or fabricate a custom gearing out of hardened steel, but it was worth it if she could get the truck for a good price. The high-powered reactor was unusual and could prove useful.
  
  Lily shook her head, "Three thousand."
  
  There were cries of shock, accusations that Lily was trying to drive his and his family, of seven hungry mouths, to starve to death in the street but none of that moved Lily too much. She wasn't a rube and wasn't about to be taken for a ride.
  
  Walking home, Lily was in a good mood. She hadn't paid more than five thousand caps and forced him to deliver it too, as there was no way she was driving that POS across town. If he wanted his caps, he had to deliver the thing to her building in the next few hours.
  
  However, as she was approaching a turn into an alley that cut back towards her area of town, her enhanced hearing picked up a group of men talking to one another, with one silencing them with a clearly audible, "Shut the fuck up! The bitch is coming. Remember what Blaze said."
  
  Stopping a good twenty meters from the alley, she narrowed her eyes and glanced from left to right. She didn't see any obvious observers. Reaching towards her belt, she triggered a StealthBoy, and at the same time, her body vanished into a vague predator-like outline while she ducked back the way she came and decided to circle back on this alley from a different direction.
  
  She had done a fair bit of research on StealthBoys before ever using one on herself, as she remembered something about them driving Nightkin insane. However, she couldn't find anything that would do that.
  
  There were some interesting fields generated when the devices activated, but nothing ionizing and nothing that would damage or interfere with a brain's neurons or its chemistry as far as she could tell.
  
  She started to believe that the Nightkin were just insane to begin with, or the FEV made them suggestible to the point where they considered the stealth provided by StealthBoys to be part of their identity. Lily didn't know, but she didn't think occasional use of StealthBoys would prove any danger to her.
  
  StealthBoys lasted considerably longer, about five minutes compared to less than a minute in the game, so it was easy to double back around a block and approach the alley from the side the group of men weren't guarding.
  
  "Where the fuck is she?" one hissed. "Shut up, she should be coming any minute," the leader replied.
  
  Reaching down to her pouch she brought out her pneumatic injector, rotating it to the paralyzing agent. Frowning to herself, ' Maybe I should invent a dart gun. It wouldn't be hard. I wouldn't have to sneak up on all of these guys like a ninja.'
  
  There were three of them, and they were facing away with her. They were armed with baseball bats and lead pipes. She quickly moved between them, pressing the injector into a random spot on each of their bodies and pulling the trigger.
  
  They all said something along the lines of, "What the-" before the nanomachines paralyzed all conscious muscle control, and they slumped one at a time on the ground.
  
  Glancing around, she found a suitably abandoned-looking building and nodded to herself. She deactivated the StealthBoy and started dragging each of the men one at a time into it.
  
  Lous was in a good mood. The boss told him and his crew to mess up some Doctor bitch that had been moving into their turf without paying them anything. He wasn't to hurt her too badly, but she was supposed to be hot as hell, and that didn't mean he couldn't have a little fun.
  
  He had to shut the other two up, in case they alerted the prey before she came up this alley - the lookouts said she would likely come this way to go back to that nice building she was renovating.
  
  They waited, and waited until Bones yelled, "Where the fuck is she?"
  
  Louis hissed, "Shut up, she should be coming any minute!"
  
  Louis stayed with his bat ready and watching the corner of the alley but suddenly felt a stinging sensation, like a bee sting. He went to slap the insect but suddenly discovered his muscles weren't quite moving right; he managed to get out, "What the-" before becoming completely paralyzed and slumping in the alley, completely unable to move. He could move his eyes and blink, and that was it.
  
  After a time, someone dragged him into a nearby dimly lit building, and he managed to see that it was that bitch doctor! She must have used some sort of drug to paralyze them.
  
  Uh, she had done it without any of them even noticing. Wasn't she supposed to just be some hot piece of ass doctor, not some kind of... sneaker upper drugger? Louis had to admit he was a bit scared, now.
  
  She sat them all up against a wall, pulled something out of her bag she carried and fiddled with it for a while. Looking at each of them, she said in a weird acent, "You know... where I grew up we 'ad zhis saying zhat is pretty applicable to your situation, yes? It is... 'to kill the chickens to scare zhe monkeys.'" Her eyes were as cold as ice, and Louis didn't mean their colour, neither. But they were blue, too.
  
  The demon-woman asked, full of malice, "Zhe question you need to ask yourself is... are you zhe chicken, or are you zhe monkey?"
  
  Then she fiddled with the thing she carried, and they all could suddenly move their heads, mouths, tongues! They could speak! They couldn't move anything else, though.
  
  Now, Louis would admit he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he ain't totally stupid, either. As he was about to yell, "Monkey!" fucking Bones yelled, "What the fuck did you do to us, you dumb bitch?! Don't you know who we are?!"
  
  The demon-woman's eyes locked on to Bones, and she grinned slightly, and she said while approaching him, "Chicken identified. You two monkeys, we will have zhe words, but first, watch zhis, please."
  
  Oh, fuck.
  
  Lily returned to her building to find the man had already delivered the truck and was waiting impatiently to get paid. She was whistling a jaunty tune, and her Apprentice tilted her head to the side, asking, "You sure are happy to buy a truck, aren't you?"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Happy to send a message. Zhe truck is a bonus."
  
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  Missionaries spreading the Good News
  Now, Louis really thought that the woman would have let Bones off with just a beating, as she demonstrated a number of inventive ways to cause some pain to him without doing any actual harm. It wasn't any worse than what the boss did when someone fucked up mildly, actually. Probably less than what they would have gotten for failing to teach the bitch a lesson, really.
  
  However, Bones, the utter idiot, started yelling some really, really vile shit at her and threats. Stuff that he, Louis, thought was beyond the pale, even!
  
  He finally said, "Bones, shut the fuck up, you fucking idiot!"
  
  But he didn't listen like he never listened. Louis didn't know precisely what the last straw for the woman was, but he could see the change in her expression. Finally, she looked at Bones with crazy girlfriend eyes and asked, "Your name is Bones? But... have you SEEN your bones?"
  
  With that, she pulled out a dull grey stiletto and showed him.
  
  His screams didn't last that long, as again Louis had seen the boss do a lot worse and for a lot longer. Blaze had gotten his name for his penchant for setting people on fire one limb at a time, after all, but there was something a lot more disturbing and intimate about the idea of someone fileting your finger bone out of your hand and showing it to you while you were paralyzed and couldn't move.
  
  Louis was reminded of one evening when Blaze was burning a man to death and making the gang watch Blaze got into a philosophical debate on torture, saying torture was proven to be inefficient if you wanted to get information out of people, which was why he, Blaze, only tortured people for fun!
  
  Louis didn't know if that was actually true, knowing Blaze it wasn't, but even if it was, what was absolutely obvious to him and Eric now was that watching someone else get tortured was very effective in making them talk!
  
  She had just shot Bones in the head with some fancy-ass laser after that. Both he and Eric answered every question she had then. Afterwards, she looked at the two of them and said, "You know... zhere is a fine line between self-confident optimism and flat reckless stupidity, and Monsieur Bones was about a 'undred klicks on the far side of zhat line. Something to remember, yes?"
  
  Then, she left without touching a hair on either of their heads, and a few minutes later, they could move their entire bodies again.
  
  Eric was freaking out, "We gotta go tell Blaze, man!"
  
  Louis was, surprisingly, pretty calm. He stayed sitting on the ground next to the wall for a moment. He already had a plan. "Go on ahead, run back to base and tell the boss everything that happened. I will take care of Bones' body."
  
  Eric looked surprised, "Didn't even think you liked him. Alright." With that, he ran off.
  
  After Eric was gone, Louis stood up and stretched. Then he gave Bones' body a hard kick in the balls, yelling, "You stupid motherfucker! You almost got us all killed! Fuck you!"
  
  Louis felt like he got more intelligent watching Bones get fileted. He could tell the woman wasn't enjoying it as the boss did, and he could tell by the way she shot Bones in the head immediately afterwards that it wasn't for Bones' benefit, either.
  
  So, if she didn't do that for herself or for Bones, then it had to be for him and Eric. She wanted them, the monkeys as she called them, to go tell the boss monkey she wasn't to be fucked with.
  
  The only problem with all that idea was the boss monkey was fucking insane. He wasn't about to fucking tell him shit unless it was good news or at least not very bad news. Eric telling him not only that they failed, but the target killed one of his men? And the other was AWOL? Poor fucking Eric. There were even odds he will likely have his foot or hand burned off tonight, and Louis wasn't about to join in that fun.
  
  Still, he wasn't about to NOT tell the boss either, after he figured out that was what that crazy bitch wanted. She might come back for him!
  
  He was curious what the woman thought this would accomplish. It might stop Blaze temporarily, he might consider how best to retaliate, but within a week, he would hit back as hard as he could because he couldn't be seen to accept disrespect and not be torn apart by the gang. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that shit.
  
  It didn't matter, Louis supposed. He wouldn't be around to find out what happened anyway. So sorry, Eric.
  
  Well, he wasn't really sorry. Not really. Both Eric and Bones were kind of assholes. Everyone in this gang was an asshole except him.
  
  Wait. His newly gained intelligence seemed to tell him that he might be an asshole too.
  
  Whatever. He was getting the fuck out of here. Out of Megaton. His brother Jerome was still in Paradise Falls, and he could go back to raiding the stupid little villages and farms in the wastes. He just joined this gang because the Jet was real cheap, anyway.
  
  Bye, crazy bitch. Bye, crazier boss.
  
  Lily walked down the streets, sort of conflicted. Had she gone too far with that fellow? She had to admit she let the things he said upset her.
  
  At first, she was just going to give them a reason not to see her as a prey animal and send them on their way; tails tucked in between their legs. However... well, some threats she took less well than others.
  
  Humming in thought, she considered. No, she didn't think what she did was against her morals, at least not particularly. She wouldn't hurt even an innocent animal if she could avoid it. But Monsieur Bones was hardly innocent. Lily felt that she was the instrument of karma, in this case with Bonsey.
  
  In fact, she felt worse about the other two, given the things they and the worker foreman she talked to the other day said about their boss, this Blaze. She felt that guy was the shoot messenger type, or rather burn the messenger alive type.
  
  She let them go because the unstated implication she gave them was she would do so if they answered her questions, but she got the feeling it would have been kinder to shoot them in the head, also.
  
  Oh well. She can't control what this Blaze did. He did seem like a cartoonish bad guy, though. Like, way beyond the pale. Why hadn't Sheriff Timms shot his ass by now? They seemed to be a bit understaffed from what Lily saw when she visited the Sheriff to talk to him about the plan for the nuke, which he approved after he figured out she wasn't about to blow them all up.
  
  Well, she kind of wished Grace's Grenadiers were still in town. Her little stunt would probably surprise the cartoonishly evil man briefly, but she had already been wrong about her estimation of his escalation rate once. She wasn't about to take that risk again.
  
  She changed directions, turning to go to the better part of town where Tombs lived. It wasn't a long walk; it wasn't like Megaton was actually that big, after all.
  
  Knocking on his door, she waited patiently for him to greet her, which he did with a big smile and pleasant words, "Doc! Nice to see you! Rare to get you out of your cave, eh? Come in, come in!"
  
  Lily walked in and accepted his offer of a drink as hospitality, sitting down with him and his wife in their living room.
  
  Taking a sip of the offered drink, she immediately started coughing, and she felt her eyes water, which sent Tombs into hysterics and Lady Tombs grinning. Then, blinking away tears, she lied humorously, her tone kind of gravely as the battery acid may have taken a layer of tissue off her larynx, "S-smooth."
  
  "Well, it gets the job done. What can I help ya with today?" replied the man.
  
  Lily told him straight out about the problems she had been having. He was aware of them for the most part, anyway. She even told him about the example she had made of Bones earlier.
  
  "Well, that might have been kind of stupid," Tombs said amusedly, although he didn't apparently think it was a big deal either.
  
  "What would you 'ave done, zhen?" asked Lily, testily.
  
  Tombs shrugged, "You wanted more time? What would have really given an evil bastard like Blaze pause would have been if all three of his men disappeared without a trace. People's imaginations are always better at coming up with horrible possibilities, and a man like Blaze has to have tons of enemies. He might have spent days air boxing with some gremlin who wasn't even there."
  
  Lily pursed her lips. That seemed plausible, actually. She sighed. She was always the worst with psychology and human interface operations. She had gotten a lot better in this new, weird life in the Wasteland, but it was clear she still had some blind spots. Well, it could be learned, like anything else.
  
  However, she said, "Yes, but I wanted information from zhe two I let go."
  
  Tombs looked at her like she was riding on the short bus, "So? You don't 'disappear' them until after they answer your questions. Do you really need help with the order of things?"
  
  Lily frowned, "Zhe implication was zhat I would let them go after zhey answered zhe questions. To go against zhat would impinge on my personal 'onour; it wasn't a possibility. It would 'ave 'ad to be either or; in this case, I wanted answers."
  
  Tombs continued to look at her like she was a very special person, "You cut this man's middle finger bone out of his finger and showed it to him. And you're saying that your what... ethics... wouldn't let you pop his two good-for-nothing friends after questioning them? You have to know what they were going to do to you, Doc."
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, precisely. Besides, I'd say zhey might be being Blazed right now, depending on how their boss feels about bad news at present. So I might not have done zhem any favours there."
  
  Tombs shook his head slowly, "You know, you kind of remind me of them Mormon boys." This caused Lily to turn slack-jawed, and she replied real intelligently, "Huh?"
  
  "Well, there's not a lot they won't do to what they consider evil-doers, but at the same time, they have a bottom line and pretty much will never lie or go back on an agreement, even if kills 'em," Tombs said simply.
  
  Well, that did actually sound like her personal ethics, actually. However, she didn't have any problem in shading the truth, beyond the fact that she wasn't the best at it. She just quietly considered the similarities for a moment. Tombs surprised her by smacking his fist into his open palm, "That might be a solution to your problem. You said your merc friends are out of town for a couple of days? I know there's a team of six missionaries in town."
  
  Now it was Lily's turn to stare at Tombs like he was mentally deficient. She had memories of the clean-cut, polite young men in white shirts and black ties ringing her doorbell from her past life. She said simply, "I don't want to save 'is soul, Tombs! I want to kill 'is ass!"
  
  Mrs Tombs guffawed and piped in, "You say things that make me really curious where you grew up, little lady. Mormon missionaries are all but mercenaries in another name; they just won't take every type of job; it has to be against an evil-doer. They're one of the biggest export products of the Dominion! Moreover, they'll never fuck you over unless you lied to them about what you want them to do. As mercs go, they have a good reputation."
  
  'Oh, ' Lily thought.
  
  "Oh, zhat might work, actually. Is zhere a way you can set up a meeting with zhem today? I don't want to wait until tomorrow, I was already wrong about zhis man's escalation rate once," Lily replied.
  
  "Yeah, I reckon we can," Tombs nodded, standing up. He hollered, and a mini-Tombs appeared from deeper in the house. The elder Tombs talked to the boy, who nodded and ran out of the house.
  
  "My boy will go send them a message to meet me here. It'll probably take an hour. Want to play a game of poker with the missus and me while we wait? One cap an ante?" Tombs offered.
  
  Lily grinned. She was well equipped to dominate these flats at this game, and she could test some of her preliminary emotion-detecting software to detect bluffing.
  
  A little over an hour later, Lily was down sixteen caps, but she was pretty sure she just needed a few more hands to catch up. She was pretty sure Mrs Tombs had some sort of advanced espionage cyberware that allowed her to fake any emotion she wanted, so it was quite a challenge. She was starting to notice slight imperfections in some of the cards in the deck, though, so it shouldn't be much longer until she had them right where she wanted them.
  
  However, mini-Tombs arrived through the front door, trailing two young men who must be the so-called missionaries. Tombs aborted the hand, gathering the cards as soon as his son walked through the door and before the two men could see them. ' Prohibition on gambling, perhaps?' thought Lily.
  
  Well, they weren't wearing black ties and white shirts, but they were clean-shaven and dressed rather professionally as mercenaries went, wearing matching combat armour that Lily recognized as National Guard surplus that was so ubiquitous in the Wasteland.
  
  They introduced themselves, being exceedingly polite towards Mrs Tombs and herself, Lily noted.
  
  Lily wondered if Tombs would explain the whole thing, as perhaps they would take direction better from another male, but he did not. Internally, Lily shrugged and explained her issues, and the two men listened carefully.
  
  Afterwards, one chuckled and said, "Ma'am, you could have stopped after saying he was a drug dealer; that would have been enough for us. Although, ma'am, the rest of it just makes us feel bad about accepting payment for this mission. Verily, the devil himself must be working through this Blaze." The other missionary nodded solmenly. However, Lily did notice they didn't offer to do it for free, not that she blamed them. If you do something well, don't do it for free.
  
  "This is pretty much open-and-shut, ma'am, as long as you aren't some kind of competing drug dealer and are hiring us to get the competition out of the way?" asked the second man.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "I suppose zhat is a matter of perspective. I am planning to run zhe pharmacy in zhe hôpital that I am starting soon, where drugs will be sold, yes? While we likely won't stock purely recreational substances, many of zhe drugs with medical uses can be abused, no?"
  
  The first man waved that off, "That's definitely not a problem, ma'am. The world would be a better place if brand new clinics with pharmacies," he made some air quotes, "out-competed the average drug dealer. So, let's get down to specifics."
  
  Lily explained what she wanted. Mainly she wanted Blaze dead, along with at least his two lieutenants that the two men she let go told her about, "If zhose zhree men are gone, zhis gang, such as it is, will implode. It's being 'eld together by zhreats, drugs but most importantly the cult of personality from zhe leadership. Zhey're basically drug-addled murder-'obos."
  
  The first missionary nodded his head, "That should not be a problem, ma'am, especially with the intel you provided. Now for the discussion of remuneration... we can do this mission for you for a suitable donation of five hundred caps to the cause. We should have it completed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours."
  
  Lily internally smirked. A donation? Would she get a tax write-off? Lily considered the price. It was a little high if you only considered they needed to off three people in the slums, but since those three people were surrounded by up to thirty or forty armed minions, she thought it was quite reasonable. The long, mean-looking sniper rifle on the second man's back gave a hint to how they likely would accomplish the job, too.
  
  Lily nodded, "Zhat would be acceptable. 'Alf now, 'alf at job completion?"
  
  The first man nodded, "That would be fine. However, if we could possibly talk about a discount for some StimPaks in lieu of currency? That medicine is always sorely needed by missionaries and the Dominion in general."
  
  Lily pursed her lips. She had started a StimPak breeding vat, a small one, but it wasn't producing yet. She was using mutafruits as the main biomass, presently, as they seemed to work the best out of any plant matter she had tested. Her stocks of StimPaks weren't super high, but they were certainly high enough for this, especially when she would be having her own production running soon. "Yes, that would be acceptable. I might also, in the future, be willing to sell you such things at wholesale price points."
  
  They looked quite interested in that. However, they firmly declined her offer to assist or even for her to show them where Blaze resided; they looked very uncomfortable at the possibility of her in the line of fire.
  
  One odd question the first missionary asked Lily was her opinion about whether or not there was a God. Lily decided to answer honestly, although it was perhaps a shading of truth, "Well, something happened to me a couple of months ago to make me seriously reevaluate my opinion on the existence of the world of the supernatural, so I can't rule it out anymore." Lily did not think Monsieur ROB was the god that spoke to Moses, though, but she would let these two missionaries come to their own conclusions about what she meant precisely.
  
  Both men nodded gravely, as if they understood completely. The first one smiled, "It often happens like that."
  
  Well, whatever. After that, she concluded the deal, but instead of shaking her hand, the first missionary applied a chaste kiss to the back of her hand. What a charmer, Lily thought!
  
  They departed, and Tombs was grinning at her, "A gentleman suitor?" he asked, to which Lily loudly denied, "No! But a lady appreciates a little class, you know?"
  
  She started to collect herself to depart, but curiousity got the better of her, "Why are zhere so many armed missionaries from zhe Dominion, anyway?"
  
  Mr. Tombs guffawed a little, "Generally speaking, a young man in the Dominion won't be able to take a wife unless he spent a period of time doing missionary work, spreading the good news and all that, right?" He glanced at her, suddenly grinning, "Well, that's except, of course, if he tames a foreign girl and marries her and brings her back to the Holy Land. One of the reasons why they are always very polite with the ladies."
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes, "You needn't be concerned. I don't zhink I'd thrive in zheir culture, so it is quite impossible."
  
  Lastly, she asked Tombs why someone hadn't done what she was doing already, to which Tombs scowled, "Five hundred caps is actually quite a lot for most people. Plus, it is just like you said - this gang will implode, but a new one will just start up sooner or later. They'll let anyone through the gate if they have enough caps - tourism is one of the main businesses of Megaton - and then when they lose or smoke all their money, some of them join these types of groups instead of leaving. It's going to be one of our primary outlays keeping them out of our interests until the neighbourhood can recover some."
  
  Lily nodded; that did make sense.
  
  With that, she left and walked back home, taking a circuitous route this time. She saw the man who was selling her the truck standing there with the truck, looking anxious to get paid.
  
  Lily felt happy with this gang situation, even if it was probably only the first of many, probably solved. She was whistling a jaunty tune, and her Apprentice tilted her head to the side, asking, "You sure are happy to buy a truck, aren't you?"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Happy to send a message. Zhe truck is a bonus."
  
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  Weaving
  Lily forbade the Apprentice from leaving the building for a couple of days, explaining to her the issues they were having with the gang of murderhobos and the fact that she had been attacked herself.
  
  Paying the used car salesman, who departed the area with a quickness and in a separate car that was waiting for him, she descended into her basement. Most of the day was over, but she had a lot of things on her checklist.
  
  She hummed and considered her options. She could work on a direct metal laser sintering system, a sort of 3D printer for metal alloys, as this would allow her to fix the truck rapidly. It would take sacrificing one of the laser pistols she had on hand, but it would be worth it. She had plans to construct things out of metal alloys, especially high-temperature refractory alloys, for a long time now, both for her own uses and possible trade, as she has come to the conclusion of constructing everything out of carbon allotropes was a little conspicuous.
  
  However, she couldn't really do much practical work on it until she had the power station online. The laser sintering system wouldn't use all that much power, actually, but the metal recycler would use tons. At least five hundred kilowatts and probably more, she guessed. She already had that recycler built but hadn't even been able to test it. It should recycle whatever she puts in it and separate the product it produces into carbon feedstock, a dozen different elementary metals including iron, titanium, aluminium and a few rare earths, and then everything else, which would be the waste product that she couldn't presently separate.
  
  The system relied on using incredible energy to literally ionize a layer of the recycled object, turning it into a plasma, and then separating the plasma using a combination of a particle accelerator, multi-stage centrifuges and finally, the levitation field emitters from several eyebots to separate out the plasma into its elementary constituents based on the differing masses involved in each atom.
  
  It worked kind of like how uranium was slowly enriched to produce nuclear weapons in her past life, except the process was much quicker, although it was still much much slower than her first recycler, so this second version would be primarily used to recycle metals only.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue. A laser sintering system required very, very fine metal powders to work, powders as fine as ten or fewer micrometres in diameter; otherwise, the system would not function properly.
  
  The power station was scheduled for a run-up test tomorrow that she would have to be present for, but she wouldn't be getting full power from the system for several days yet.
  
  She then nodded. Since she had no way to actually test such a sintering system until she could produce such powders, she decided to shelve working on it at all. While she could complete broad strokes of the design process using her CAD system, she was more in the mood for a little hands-on work this evening to relax her.
  
  Her eyes turned to the boxes of robot parts that she had bought from Grace and smiled. While she had no idea what she would use these Labourtrons for, assembling and fixing them would be a relaxing, mindless activity until she could go to sleep for the evening.
  
  She mentally started listening to Three Dogs radio station while she got to work.
  
  Lily looked at the three assembled Labourtrons. She verified the integrity of all but one of the processors, but her bottleneck on fixing these robots was actually the chassis elements, as there was considerable damage to them across all of the individuals.
  
  The Labourtron looked more or less like a Protectron except that it was a bit thinner as there was no armour in its chassis at all, and they had more sophisticated manipulators - not quite hands, but much more effective than the two claws.
  
  Lily had to say; she hated it. Lily considered herself something of an expert on synths, and the best bet was always either to either mimic the human form as closely as possible, which had incredibly utility as evolution would tell anyone or diverge wildly from it, which was her usual modus operandi.
  
  This half-assed semi-humanoid form was pretty terrible, Lily thought. And it wasn't like Dr House couldn't make a fairly good replication of humanoid movement, form and capability, either. She glanced over at the Assaultron in the corner, which quite impressed her with its hardy and simple mechanisms.
  
  But, House went all in for a modular platform for many different uses in the Tron series of robots, so she suspected that limited his overall specialization which would have created an exemplary product. Lily glanced up at the ceiling in thought. Was it Heinlein that said specialization was for insects? Well, it was for robots, too, in her opinion.
  
  She decided she would rebuild these Labourtrons, better, once she could build arbitrary shapes out of metal alloys as she could out of carbon. The programming probably couldn't handle anything that diverged too much from a bipedal form, so she would mimic a human much better. She already had scans and models of her skeleton; she could build slightly larger ones in hardened steel, with graphene composite areas to shield critical parts. Just the addition of the fully functioning hands would increase the capabilities of the bot by leaps and bounds.
  
  Lily was absolutely incapable of creating a robot that mimicked a human form without falling deep into the uncanny valley at present unless she started with an actual human and slowly replaced their parts like she was doing to herself, so she would not even try. General utility and labour bots wouldn't need to interface with actual humans much, anyway. Once she got the Auto-Tailor that Grace was bringing back, she could clothe each of the bots in a unique colour of scrubs, and people would likely accept them as they did menial tasks in her hospital.
  
  She had already connected each of these three to her diagnostic console and did a in-depth analysis of their neural networks. She was of the opinion that Protectrons were just incapable of the complex neural network necessary for actual sapience, which puzzled her. Didn't she recall some special Protectrons that would have likely passed a Turing test when playing Fallout 3?
  
  Humming, she thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion such things had to either be custom Protectrons or, alternatively, the Protectron offloaded a lot of their neural mapping into a mainframe computer, and the mainframe plus Protectron might have achieved some level of sapience.
  
  But since these neural networks were so simple, she did not feel bad about resetting them to factory defaults, as she had no real desire to work around whatever primary programming they had received at whatever warehouse they were working at.
  
  She booted the Labourtrons up one at a time, and it went through its initial set-up procedures, registering herself as the principal owner along with a long password that she committed to memory.
  
  Lily had her radio direction-finding system activated. Hence, she noticed when each Labourtron began transmitting, both to one another and also to the actual Protectrons in the hospital proper, which caused Lily to tilt her head to the side in curiosity. It appeared that they were programmed to establish a sort of ad-hoc mesh network amongst themselves.
  
  She used her mental commands to listen to the frequency range used by the Labourtrons and then grabbed her tablet and set it up in laptop-mode. She sighed, this would be a lot simpler if she had the user interface of her development environment already coded for her brain computer, but at present she still needed to use her laptop to do any programming on it at all.
  
  Lily turned off the audible playback of the Labourtron's frequency, which was just digital noise, and ran the signal through automatic decoding for binary or ternary signals instead, getting an incredibly long series of numbers printed on her vision during every transmission.
  
  Sighing, she got up and searched around for a particular book of interest. It was given to her by the Mechanist, and it was a RobCo maintenance manual for the Protectron series of robots, and it was over seven hundred pages of single-spaced texts and diagrams.
  
  If her brain computer was still running a RobCo OS, it likely would have been able to convert these signals into something more useful right away, but her antipathy to using any RobCo OS in her brain was well-established. Still, she could decode these signals. She had the maintenance manual; she had the robot's encryption keys. It wouldn't be hard, but it would be kind of interesting. Just something to distract a woman who only needed three hours of sleep a night for the rest of the evening.
  
  Four hours later, Lily had a preliminary model coded into her own system. It had taken a lot of tries, a lot of reading and a lot of ordering the Labourtron to do specific or random tasks and watching the signals they generated in response to each request before she got a usable protocol established.
  
  She had also come to a startling conclusion about these robots. She was fairly confident that no Tron-series of robot was designed to work alone. They were clearly intended to work in groups along with a supervisory-level robot of clearly superior neural complexity in a mesh network, which would coordinate each action by its subordinate robots into something that wasn't stupid at all.
  
  Utilizing a mainframe to coordinate a group of Labourtrons or Protectrons was a suboptimal solution as most commercial mainframes in Fallout did not actually use quantum processors and were actually slower, computationally, than even a single Protectron was. That said, even if it was suboptimal, it did work.
  
  Lily wondered why RobCo never produced such a supervisory robot model; at least, she did not know of any such model herself. She knew that Dr House was the originator of every robot designed by RobCo, and guessed that he must have gotten distracted by other matters. Did he know that nuclear war was approaching, she wondered? A lot of the smarter people Pre-War felt that such a war was inevitable, she thought.
  
  She sat there typing away at her keyboard, otherwise motionless, for another half hour before the protocol she devised was optimized and tested again.
  
  'Command, Activate Supervisor Emulation', she told her computer, and then saw visualized herself transmit to each Labourtron, and then each Labourtron transmitted back to her a complicated handshake of negotiating encryption methods and keys back and forth before a connection was established into the bots' ad-hoc mesh network.
  
  In her vision, she saw each of the Labourtron's Enhanced Reality tags update to indicate that she had an active connection to each of them and smiled.
  
  If these robots were designed to work with a superior supervisory intellect, well, she could provide that!
  
  It wasn't a perfect solution, though. She had to carefully construct a series of orders and contingencies for even a simple task like 'clean the floor.'
  
  She realized about halfway through constructing one such series of commands and contingencies that they were finite state machines, a type of abstract computational machine she used fairly commonly in her past life as an electrical engineer. They could be visualized as a highly complex flow diagram; for example, completing the task of cleaning the floor required a precise number of steps, the first of which might be finding a broom.
  
  With this realization, she managed to accelerate, creating several complete tasks that she could use for testing and building other tasks.
  
  What Protectrons had trouble with, intellectually, was discovering when a task had reached a failed state and should be abandoned or even when it was completed, so she had to carefully construct such things for them.
  
  The bots would flash over the network constantly at their current state, and her own expert system would handle keeping track and what their next order should be. Each of the Labourtrons was running through the 'clean the floor' task, one on each floor, and they were performing swimmingly! They hadn't run into a wall yet!
  
  She constructed a much more complicated and useful patrol task for the Protectrons, also, so that they would maximize the area that they patrolled at seemingly random intervals while also offering any intruders a chance to either surrender or run off instead of just ventilating them as their default programming would do.
  
  Lily glanced at the boxes full of Labourtron parts. She needed to get them assembled. The feeling of being at the centre of a vast web of robotic minions was both reassuring and nostalgic for her, but she only had five trons listening to her at present, and that was insufficient.
  
  The fact that these Labourtrons were unarmed was a problem too. She could use them as dual-purpose machines if they had some way to deal with intruders or defend themselves, which would make the patrol patterns she could envisage be much more complicated and unlikely to be casually bypassed.
  
  She could build their skeleton-chassis out of diamond, after all, but felt that a refractory hardened steel alloy would actually be superior in a lot of ways, especially as a defence against lasers and plasma, so she would just have to see how much power she could get out of the run-up test tomorrow and the next couple of days and then begin rapid development of a practical sintering system.
  
  But presently, it was well after 0300, and she was actually quite tired now. She retreated to her bedroom and lay in bed until she fell asleep. She dreamt of spiders and their webs, content.
  
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  Unlimited Power! (Power not unlimited)
  The next day started without much fanfare. Lily woke a little bit past six thirty and completed her morning ablutions, had breakfast and then spent some time working on the preliminary design for a metal sintering 3D printer. She knew of this technology both from her life in America, where it was pretty state of the art, as well as from her life living in space habitats where it was commonly used in both prototyping as well as mass production.
  
  Lily knew, in general, how it worked but not precisely. However, knowing something was possible with the tools you had available was half the battle and if you knew sort of how it worked on top of that? Well, success was inevitable. She still expected to have to go through at least a dozen different iterations before she got to a place where she had a usable device.
  
  It was so much easier if she was working on something that had a biological component or worked with a biological component. ' Wait, could I make a metal 3d printer biologically?' she asked herself, then considered a number of different processes that constructed organometallic compounds biologically. Finally, she shook her head. She was dealing with mostly flat biology here, so the only carbon metals routinely produced were things like some types of lithium, Vitamin B12 or the methanogenesis process that produces methane, and some metals as a by-product in the body's digestive system. And that process wasn't even conducted by the human body precisely but by the microbiome of bacteria that lived in every human.
  
  Lily sighed. If she had access to her old laboratory, she could definitely make a simple bacteria that produced all manners of alloys in whatever shapes she wanted. One of the reasons she was so wealthy in her past life was she had a patent on a type of synthetic bacteria that produced crystals one atom at a time in whatever shape you wanted, which a more brilliant person that she was used as the basis to construct a type of net-energy positive cold fusion system.
  
  Lily still had no idea how that worked, even after a hundred years of peering at it. The man who had explained it to her, and it went something along the lines of if you built a quantum trap using a crystalline cage that was sized to fit only a single deuterium atom, then if you forced another inside the same space, quantum mechanics dictated the simplest way to achieve a stable energy state was to fuse the two deuterium atoms into helium and then spit the helium atom along with the free energy back out the way they came. It all sounded like magic to her, even now, but she was decades away from being able to create a similar crystalline-producing bacteria, which she had made from scratch, anyway, so it was kind of moot.
  
  That man was the smartest octopus she had ever met. Although, Lily did not know if he was an actual uplifted octopus or just preferred living in an octopus sleeve, as octopus bodies had many distinct advantages in microgravity environments.
  
  Lily shook her head a little. She was mentally digressing, which she often did when she didn't want to admit the problem she was considering was, essentially, impossible. So, a biological solution to a metal printer was impossible, for now.
  
  'Command, Take Note - Remind self to search for G.E.C.K.s that aren't in Vault 87. There was only one matter to energy converter terraforming G.E.C.K., but there were many that were supposed to have a cold-fusion power system along with a pack of seeds, which would have to fit inside a suitcase-sized package. That would be very useful, especially if I could reverse engineer them,' Lily thought to herself and her computer. While she was recording everything she saw, heard and thought now, it still helped her to make mental notes, as she hadn't managed to parse her brain's memory engrams yet.
  
  She only worked for a couple of hours, mainly working around elements in the design she could not change or alter in any way, which was the laser components and the cooling system for them.
  
  *BEEP* Time is now 0900. *BEEP*
  
  An internal alarm roused her from her work. She had finally gotten a text-to-speech system working on her computer by the simple expedient of recording every phoneme she knew of, but it sounded like a robot voice in her head, but it was better than nothing, she supposed.
  
  She had to be at the power substation at 1100, but she still had other responsibilities to attend to before then. She went to find the Apprentice and spent an hour discussing with the girl her current learning status and goals, as well as answering any questions Alice had. Lily tried to spend at least an hour a day with the girl doing such things.
  
  Lily never told the girl her precise score on the intelligence battery of tests she gave her, but she scored more than two standard deviations from the mean, which Lily thought was impressive. The girl certainly appeared to be doing well with this type of education at your own pace type of syllabus, although there were areas she did not care for such as mathematics and hadn't pursued it much past the pre-algebra level.
  
  Lily had to adjust the syllabus twice already to add more biology and English literature, though, which the Apprentice devoured as fast as they were added. She had decided to start adding some elements of college levelled chemistry and organic chemistry so that the girl would smash her head on the wall, as they required some mathematics to really sink one's teeth into.
  
  Lily was also running out of books! She only took about a hundred and fifty out of the library and now planned to loot the place to the bedrock. Perhaps she would start a Megaton city library if she could somehow find a way to prevent the books from being damaged by the unwashed masses?
  
  "... and zhat's why zhe text says, somewhat repetitively, zhat zhe mitochondria is zhe powerhouse of zhe cell," Lily finished explaining the enthalpy of adenosine triphosphate to the Apprentice. The current biology text the Apprentice was reading from was flawed and meant more for general studies, so it did not go in-depth into the chemical processes involved that a proper biology major would need, but honestly, Lily hadn't expected the girl to hit close to the college level in any subject yet so she thought it would be sufficient.
  
  She finished with, "To really understand, you will need to read at least zhe first ten chapters of General Chemistry, and at least zhe first half of the text Heat and Zhermodynamics: A Chemical Primer . Although, I'd say you don't really need to understand zhe exact chemical processes yet. "
  
  Alice nodded rapidly, writing down notes as she spoke to her, as the girl often did.
  
  Then the Apprentice surprised her and asked Lily if she had a favourite poem and to recite it for her. Lily tilted her head to stare at the ceiling in thought and considered the question. She knew what she would say her favourite poem was when she was a robotic spider, but she wasn't the same person anymore. However, to her surprise, the same poem was also her favourite poem when she was living in America. Was that a coincidence? It seemed like long odds, if so. The poem was an old one, but Yeats was hard to beat.
  
  Lily tilted her head back to stare at the girl before coughing into her hand as one tended to do before a recitation:
  
  " HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
  
  Enwrought with golden and silver light,
  
  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
  
  Of night and light and the half light,
  
  I would spread the cloths under your feet:
  
  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
  
  I have spread my dreams under your feet;
  
  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
  
  Alice had the sparkly doe-eyed look teenage girls often got when they heard a poem they particularly liked, and she said, "That was amazing! Who was the poet? What is the poem called?"
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "The poet's name is William Butler Yeats, or as he styled himself W.B. Yeats. He was an Irish nationalist and authoritarian that was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. He was quite a famous playwright and poet. The poem's title is Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven and was published in a collection of his poetry called The Wind Among the Reeds. However, much of the poetry section of the library I looted was destroyed, so I don't have this book just yet."
  
  Lily suddenly hoped that Yeats was in this world, but she thought the divergence point for the Fallout universe was around the second world war, so he should be safe.
  
  She bid her Apprentice adieu and left to walk to the electrical substation a few blocks away, thinking about that poem. It was as insightful as ever despite some of the delusions the crafter of the poem suffered under; Lily was spreading her dreams across the ground even now - it was just a shame that there were so many jackboots around as well.
  
  "Alright, I think we can start it up..." Lily said after spending some time inspecting every inch of the generator and all of the plasma conduits. She had fabricated them all, but they were assembled to her directions; she did not do it herself. She had to correct a couple of errors, but less than she would have thought.
  
  Lily walked over to what was the operator's station and tapped a few keys into a terminal, which caused a noticeably loud humming to start as well as the background sound of an electric pump starting to work outside.
  
  The plasma run on this generator was large enough that it completely emptied two micro fusion cells just starting it up. Theoretically, most of that plasma could be captured back into the two cells during a graceful shutdown, but in the event of an emergency shutdown, all that plasma would be vented and accelerated out into the air on a separate emergency plasma run, which would damage the venting run such that it would have to be replaced. That would shut down the power station for one or two days, but it would still be less damaged than if cooling stopped without a scram, in which case the entire plasma run would melt, as would any operator inside the building when the plasma escaped magnetic containment.
  
  Lily's hand was hovering above that scram button on the operator panel that she had constructed, even now. It was a protected switch, and she had the glass panel slid out of the way with her fingers touching the button. If a catastrophic failure occurred during start-up, she would only have about five seconds to trigger a scram before it would be too late. Her plan B was leaping through the window to her left and to safety before the plasma escaped containment. Actually, she would likely execute that plan immediately after hitting the scram, if she were honest, just to be safe.
  
  After a good five minutes staring at the reactor output telemtry, with her fingers precariously resting on the emergency shutdown button, she carefully lifted her fingers and slid the glass-guarded panel back across the switch and nodded, "Everything is to spec plus minus two per cent."
  
  Tombs, as well as the four engineers he had working for him on this project cheered.
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "Okay. Let's start pushing it gently. We'll divert power to zhe substation's heavy inverters, we'll run it for about an hour and zhen initiate a graceful shutdown. I don't want anyone in the building when we do that, zhats actually the most dangerous part. I won't even be in here; I'll trigger it remotely."
  
  All the men agreed, so Lily tapped a few keys, and the substation started coming to life. Tombs had to rebuild part of the station, as her generator produced clean DC electricity instead of the AC power the substation was expecting, so in addition to the large reactor building, about two dozen large industrial inverters were arrayed. Lily had no idea where the man got them, but he said they should be able to handle eight megawatts of output, so it was more than enough.
  
  Lily stopped the plasma accelerators at about fifty per cent of what they were rated for and then glanced at another terminal that was displaying the AC output of the inverter array, and nodded, "Two decimal seven megawatt at fifty per cent, which is significantly more than we zhought we'd achieve. So we might end up providing a teensy bit more power zhan Megaton Light & Power." However, that wasn't true because Lily intended to steal a minimum of two megawatts for her own hospital, and she didn't intend to pay for it.
  
  One of the engineers, who had just been whispered to by his assistant that ducked in the building, said, "We're getting reports of both electrical power across the Eastside as well as a number of down powerlines that are producing a hazard."
  
  Lily made a face, "Should we abort?" She didn't particularly want to.
  
  Tombs shook his head, "We already informed everyone around that there would be a particular electrical hazard around power lines in the Eastside for as long as an hour at this time. We even told the regular homeless squatters this, the only people that are at risk are the ones that tried to shoot at us when we went to deliver the message, and fuck those assholes."
  
  Lily smirked and shrugged. This would break so many OHSA regulations, but honestly, most things she did wouldn't pass muster in the presence of an actual functioning government.
  
  She turned to the engineer in question, "Get your people to make a note of every downed powerline, zhey will need to be repaired prior to full production run out. We're not in a position to selectively turn off particular sections of zhe Eastside, just yet."
  
  The man nodded and spoke to his assistant, who ran off out the door.
  
  Thirty minutes later, they were all outside the reactor building, although Lily was still watching the reactor and inverter telemetry on a terminal emulator running in her brain. She had to set the opacity of it to no more than fifty per cent, otherwise she would have a large section of her vision blocked with a giant square terminal.
  
  Currently, such user interfaces crudely followed her vision as they were just piped directly into her visual cortex. Still, she suddenly got an idea to program them to make a note of the direction she was facing and partially rendered them if they were not entirely "in view" when she was looking somewhere else. If she could decode the GPS signals and combine them with a location, also, she could leave virtual displays around at random locations, which would be really cool.
  
  "Okay, I am going to initiate zhe shutdown now..." Lily said and then casually used her terminal emulator to send the shutdown key combination sequence. Then, realizing she wasn't actually externally doing anything and it would be odd, she stuffed her hand into her pocket to pretend like she had a remote control.
  
  The humming of the inverters stopped immediately, but the pump kept running.
  
  One of the engineers said, "Pump is on battery power now; looks good." In fact, the pumping and cooling station had begun venting clouds of white steam out the top. It took extra power to collect the pure water it generated, so that feature was disabled during the shutdown process.
  
  Lily did not have to design much of the water purifier or coolant pumping elements, much to her delight. She did look at them since they were a critical system to the reactor, but they looked as good as she could design, she thought. Tombs had asked her for them to both contribute an additional two and a half per cent of equity to bring this group of engineers on board, and she agreed readily after seeing their expertise level.
  
  She technically had less than a 50% stake in the enterprise now, but she did not mind. This wasn't the world where slick corporate drama could actually work because she could just always shoot the person involved in a shareholder meeting if they tried to dilute her interest through some arcane legal shenanigans.
  
  Lily peered at the white steam rising from the simple condenser tower and then walked over to it; there was a simple spigot that was connected to the collection cistern. She found a cup and poured herself some water, taking a sip to the shock of the engineer that had designed it there. She blinked at them, "What? Did you think I didn't believe this would work?"
  
  The engineer then grinned and shook his head, "No! I wanted the first sip!" Then he found a cup of his own and claimed second, followed by the rest of the engineering teams and Tombs himself.
  
  After congratulating everyone, Tombs walked up to her, "Well, the secret is well out of the bag now. We only had to bribe a few people, too. Moriarty and a couple of the city workers. The mayor is going to be pissed we got so much of the pie, even if that fucker will probably end up with most of it himself."
  
  Ah, so the local mafioso was going to be a minor shareholder, then? Actually, rather than upsetting her that somewhat reassured her, "Zhat's good, Monsieur. The 'ospital is well on its way to opening in another two weeks, maximum, also. I am hopeful of recruiting and employing at least zhree other doctors, but I 'aven't got any applications yet. I zhink zhey are waiting to see which way zhe wind blows, no?"
  
  She also had to ensure any such doctors applying to work for her met her bottom line in terms of skills were concerned. Although, she should have three Auto-Docs operational by the time, which even laymen could use in some ways. She would rather recruit a younger doctor that could still be trained up to her standards than an older quack set in his or her ways, she decided.
  
  "That's great!" said Tombs, with a cheerful laugh.
  
  One of the engineers walked over to her and asked, "So, will a reactor operator be needed to stand by inside the building at all times?" He had noticed the prominent shutdown button, she thought, and wondered if there would need to be someone on standby to press it in other situations.
  
  Lily shook her head, "Only during zhe start-up and shutdown. If any of the specs of zhe reactor exceed certain zhreshold values for longer zhan a certain safety time, zhe reactor will initiate an automatic scram. I am a little untrusting as far as zhe reaction times of a man who has to sit there and stare at a screen all day." Most of the famous nuclear accidents in fission reactors in her past life were induced by the reactor operators themselves, after all, so she had designed this one to be as human-proof as necessary. Only Three Mile Island and Fukushima were a result of design, engineering or mechanical issues.
  
  Then she paused and stated, "However, it will need to be continually guarded. A saboteur could do significant damage to our enterprise, so I would recommend whomever we selected as lead guard to be trained as a reactor operator. Zhey need not remain inside zhe reactor building, zhough." Lily pointed to the construction in progress near the entrance to the substation, "Zhe security building will be heated and air conditioned, after all. Eventually, we 'ope to have either robots, auto-turrets or both installed inside the reactor building to protect from possible sabotage."
  
  The engineer looked very relieved, "I had the same worries about the reaction time of a man whose only job is to sit there. You can put whatever you want in the SOPs, but there's an even chance if the guy's job is too boring, he'll be asleep. Especially if he is working solo."
  
  Lily nodded. That was an issue for the security team, as well, which was why it was a two-man team, minimum. In fact, they would need significantly more security for the water purifier than the reactor, she thought. They budgeted almost half the revenues from the water purifier to pay for security for it, which reminded her of trying to build a fuel refinery in Somalia. Probably not that much different, actually, now that she considered it.
  
  After the cool-down period ended, they performed another reactor start-up, and left it running at idle for the time being. "Okay, zhe priority is to repair or replace zhose downed power lines, then after another run-up I believe we'll be good to go at offering full service for the Eastside."
  
  Tombs nodded, "And the power meters?" Lily said, "Zhey're pretty much ready, but we might want to offer a period of time for free as a teaser, marketing, yes? Plus it will take significant effort to install zhe meter on every building. Zhat's up to you and your operations people."
  
  Lily mentally disconnected from the terminal inside the building, drank another glass of pure, clean water and left, headed back home.
  
  She found her Apprentice flirting with one of the Mormon missionaries from the other day, which annoyed her. While these missionary boys were fairly young, they were still several years too old for her Apprentice, she thought. Not to mention she was training the girl for a life better than life as first wife, she hoped.
  
  When she was done with Alice, the girl would be the one to have a harem, not be IN a harem. Anything less impinged on her as her Mistress!
  
  She would have to have a discussion with the girl about local geopolitics. She didn't have any books on the Dominion or any Post War polities but there was significant information available nonetheless.
  
  Well, at least the missionaries were being polite and not encouraging the girl too much, so perhaps they realized her youth, "Ah, Elder Lewis, was it?" Lily greeted the young man with his missionary title.
  
  The man looked pleased to see her and nodded, "Yes, ma'am. We just came to inform you that the mission you set us to was completed successfully and without much trouble, either."
  
  The second man turned to her, "And we were wondering if you needed.. uhh.. any.. confirmation of success?"
  
  Ah, Lily hoped these two didn't bring her severed heads. "No, that isn't necessary. All the missionaries from the Dominion have a good reputation - I can take you at your words."
  
  Both of them smiled at that, and the first one said, "See? I told you."
  
  As she was boxing up the young mercenaries of God their payment in StimPaks, Lily suddenly came to the conclusion that she had graduated from performing quests to giving them out!
  
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  Jinxed!
  Lily decided to replace some of the Labourtron chassis parts with carbon fibre, even if it was a temporary measure, as it would allow her to get more of the robots online. She planned to replace the entire chassis anyway, so these new parts would go back into the recycler when she managed to do so.
  
  She felt that designing the DMLS system to print 3D shapes in metal alloys would be one of her longer projects, at least as far as the design phase went, now that she had started to sink her teeth into it. There was a lot of iterative testing, and she expected a lot of failure and recorrecting, so she wasn't confident she could have the metal printer running before the hospital opened.
  
  As such, she had gotten another twelve Labourtrons online. The last eight were a bit too much trouble unless she wanted to fabricate entirely new chassis for them, which at present, she definitely did not. Instead, she would utilise these last eight as the test beds for the complete rebuild into a human-form general-purpose labour platform design.
  
  She had also been working on a number of finite state machine tasks for the Labourtrons, and she was almost done with one series of tasks and contingencies that would allow her to refurbish all of the walls and ceilings in her new hospital. While Monsieur Tombs' work crews had done an excellent job, cleaning even the trashed top floor, the walls were still in somewhat poor shape. Although, by the standards of the Wasteland, the building was in excellent shape.
  
  The process she was conducting was replacing all the drywall, some of which was damaged in places, with panels constructed out of carbon fibre and graphene, with some invisible diamond reinforcement. She could print a two-meter by a one-and-a-half-meter tall panel at a time, so she ended up having to use two panels of slightly different sizes to replace one section of the walls.
  
  The most complicated part was that these panels were impossible to drill through, so the areas where the wall studs were had to be programmed in custom for every section printed, which would have made this an impossible task if she had to do it herself. She just would not have had the patience to do it at all.
  
  There were over a hundred distinct tasks she had to make to perform the wall replacement, some of which were simple, like demolition of existing drywall, taking destroyed drywall walls to the recycler in the basement, and similar. However, some were quite difficult, such as adjusting the panel's drill-holes position and then programming the fabricator to produce a custom panel every time.
  
  Even some simple seeming problems were somewhat difficult to manage, such as mapping a three-dimensional model of every room using only optical sensors present in all of the Labourtrons.
  
  She spent the entire day yesterday working on the tasks and the first part of the morning fixing bugs when the Labourtrons would inevitably screw up a particular task, like misidentifying the toilet downstairs for the recycler for some reason. That was a mess.
  
  However, now it was running... well, not perfectly but pretty well. Lily rarely had to step in anymore, and every time she did, she wouldn't have to step in to fix that particular error again. She was using recursive self-correcting algorithms to run the tasks, which tended to reduce errors over time in any machine learning system.
  
  Not only would the new walls, as they slowly were put up, be significantly impact resistant, but most importantly, they would look like what a hospital should look like. Sterile, off-white walls and ceilings! It would actually look newly manufactured, which would probably impress a lot of people who saw it, she hoped.
  
  It might take a couple of days to finish the first floor, and then a little bit longer for every floor after that as the first floor had the fewest walls with its open floor plan, except for the basement, of course.
  
  Lily watched a group of Labourtrons destroy the drywall in a section of the wall while several others swept up and dumped the debris in a trash can, which was carried off by another when it was mostly full. While drywall was mostly gypsum and therefore did not have any carbon content in it, all the paint and spackle were rich in carbon, so it was still worth it to run the debris through the recycler.
  
  She had changed the programming of the recycler, also. While this version couldn't ionise nearly all matter like the heavy-duty machine could, it could still break the chemical bonds in some cases; in the case of gypsum, it could break off the calcium and collect it rather rapidly.
  
  Lily did not keep the reactive metal in its elemental form long, as she quickly oxidised it through a chemical process before later converting the calcium oxide to calcium carbonate, which she was collecting and storing as anti-acid tablets, similar to Tums, albeit without any flavouring.
  
  Thinking about them now caused Lily to pull a small bottle of such pills out of her bag and quietly chew on two of them, wincing at the absence of flavour, before drinking a full glass of water to wash them down.
  
  She did not have an indigestion problem; however, it turned out that removing more than eighty per cent of your skeleton had some minor follow-along issues, for example knocking your calcium levels out of balance. However, calcium was an essential mineral used in a lot of cellular functions, not just involved with the skeleton, so Lily had solved the problem temporarily by taking supplements.
  
  There were a number of ideas of either genetic modifications or synthetic cybernetic solutions to the problem ruminating in her head, but she felt that she had way too much on her plate as it was to work on an issue that she could solve in the medium term by taking some pills. Once she had some free time, perhaps she could solve this problem permanently, but as it stood, taking a couple of pills a day was good enough, even if they were blandly tasteless.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side as she heard a vehicle roll into her parking lot. She peered out a window to see who was visiting her this morning and smiled. It was Grace's crew and Miller, along with a reasonably fully loaded commercial truck. Lily started to rub her hands together but then noticed that all of Grace's people looked a bit ragged like they had a significantly more challenging job than she thought they would have. She saw that new girl Melissa wincing and limping out of the cab of the truck, which wasn't a good sign.
  
  Lily pursed her lips as she walked out the front door to greet them. Had she jinxed them? She assumed she was sending them on a milk run, so perhaps Murphy put a hand in, and there were significant complications for Lily's temerity of suggesting that they had an easy job.
  
  Grace greeted her with a wave, "Hey, Girlie. Can you look at Melissa? She took a bad hit in the thigh, and while these healing implants are amazing, something must have healed wrong because she can barely walk."
  
  Lily blinked and nodded, "Of course. What happened? There were only ghouls there when I went in; you guys didn't go to the top floor, did you?" she asked nervously.
  
  Miller showed up to answer her question, and he shook his head, "Nah, that looked like an obvious death trap. Everything was going well until we were almost fully loaded up, and then two Super-Mutants and a Centaur showed up."
  
  Miller scowled, "We could have run, but they'd probably trashed the truck, and you have no idea how expensive one is..." Lily did have an idea, actually, but she didn't interrupt him, "... so we fought them, leading them away from the fragile merchandise and truck. Honestly, we might have been killed if it weren't for these healing implants, but especially the enhanced reflexes. We got lucky and took one of the muties out pretty quick, but the other almost chewed us to pieces with a Gatling laser. I think everybody took a hit somewhere, thankfully in non-vital spots. We took cover, and eventually, he had some sort of weapon malfunction, so we all popped out of cover and shot him to pieces. The Centaur wasn't much to write home about."
  
  He looked pleased, though, "We got everything on your list, plus some extra that we think you will be really pleased with. Although, I don't particularly appreciate fighting the muties without Power Armour, even if these local strains of mutants are really dumb. So we expect a bonus, especially if you want to buy a slightly broken Gatling laser and a working tri-beam laser rifle, which the other Super Mutant had."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and nodded. It was normal to offer mercenaries a combat bonus if they saw action, and she definitely did want to buy the Gatling laser at least. She had no idea what a tri-beam laser rifle was, though, but it sounded like something she could disassemble and improve as well.
  
  "Of course, although I'm a little bit cash poor so if you would take some of your bonus and extra payment out zhrough either what you already owe me or in-kind trades I would really appreciate it. Let's get Melissa into an exam room so I can take a look at her," Lily said. But first, she called the worker foreman over again to coordinate unloading the truck.
  
  She just told him to unload it all into the main entrance for now. She did not have a generalised truck unloading task for the Labourtrons, but she did have one to move things around the hospital, so she would be able to relocate all the gear downstairs to look, repair and sort it.
  
  One of the first things she programmed in her brain-computer was the ability to pull up scan images and display them, so she did not even have to go into a different room to examine the medical images she surreptitiously took. Looking at the scan in, she palpated the region of the woman's left hip. It had healed, alright, but there was a shard of bone remaining inside the joint, which grated against the healed bone every time she moved. It looked quite painful.
  
  "Just lay there; there is a shard of bone that needs to be removed, but other than that, it looks pretty well healed already. I'm going to go look at the rest of your team," Lily told the paramedic woman, who nodded and just relaxed.
  
  Lily left her and examined each of the other five in turn. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with them, but they were clearly tired. She called the Apprentice around and got her to duplicate her efforts for training. Then she asked the girl to make up some banana bag IVs for each of them and also to add some generalised healing nanites in the drip as well.
  
  A banana bag was so called because of its bright yellow colour and consisted of a bunch of B complex vitamins as well as magnesium and saline, given through an IV drip. It was generally quite effective at treating both chronic vitamin deficiencies, some of which she saw some signs of in a Grace's crew, as well as a fairly effective pick-me-up, common as a hangover cure. If it was one thing Lily wasn't short of in the pharmaceutical department, it was vitamins.
  
  While most of the useful drugs were already looted from the hospital, she had taken over fifty kilos of various vitamins when she looted the hospital the first time, and that was just a drop in the bucket. If the crew said they got everything on her list, that meant she might have almost a ton of various vitamins that the compounding pharmacy inside the hospital was preparing to make into formulations. Lily would have preferred a ton of various other drugs, but she would take what she could get.
  
  Lily would have already given them this treatment before they left, but she hadn't quite gotten around to testing the vitamins for safety and formulating them in the pharmacy when they departed.
  
  All of them could use the boost, and a couple of them showed some early signs of niacin and riboflavin deficiencies, so it was better to nip it in the bud now and tell them to eat a more varied diet, if possible. Admittedly, most of a person's riboflavin came from beef, chicken and dairy sources, which were sometimes difficult to find in the Wasteland.
  
  Lily started Grace's IV herself but let the Apprentice practice on the rest of the crew, which got accusations of favouritism which she ignored because they were accurate. Besides, the Apprentice did a reasonably good job, only having to poke twice a couple of times.
  
  Nodding at the five sitting in some comfortable chairs with their IVs going, she said, "Okay, just relax for a couple of hours, yes? Do you need to bring zhe truck back yourself, or...?"
  
  Miller shook his head, "Nah, you may not have noticed him, but it came with a driver. Most places that'll rent trucks like that won't let you just drive off with them without one of their people on board. Most places won't even let you do that because you could just kill the driver and take the truck, but we have a long relationship with this guy. After the truck is unloaded, he'll be out of here."
  
  Lily nodded, "Then I'll get zhat bone shard out of Melissa, it should not be a problem."
  
  Miller and Grace nodded, leaning back in their chairs and possibly already asleep before Lily went back into the exam room. This was a simple surgery, so Lily would just do it here. Still, she explained everything to the Apprentice and Melissa as well, who was interested in both the surgery as well as the IV that she was taking.
  
  Making small talk, she explained both. Lily was just using a local anaesthetic this time since Melissa had already started to take some normal healing nanites, and she still could not quite get different programming schema to run inside a body simultaneously, excepting if that body had a nanohive like she or the Apprentice did.
  
  Melissa didn't seem to have any complaints as far as the pain was concerned, and it was barely a ten-minute surgery to pull a small thin shard of bone out of her hip. Dropping the bone shard into a metal specimen tray with an audible clink with her forceps, she finished up by using a small amount of surgical glue to keep the wound closed; she had found in her own surgeries that sutures were contraindicated when dealing with people with healing factors.
  
  "Okay, zhat's all zhere is. Unfortunately, zhere was significant inflammation from you trying to walk on zhat leg with a piece of bone sticking out of zhe joint, so I recommend zhe light duty for a day," Lily told her, mildly chastising her.
  
  Normally she would prescribe a simple anti-inflammatory painkiller, but the fact was she didn't have any. And the opiates she did have were a bit too much, but Lily felt the pain should be brief and mild, as the healing implant along with the gram or so of medichines would accelerate her healing very rapidly. She hoped to get a steady supply of aspirin from traders, as there were places that manufactured it now but hadn't, as of yet.
  
  Melissa nodded, "Okay, thanks, Dr St. Claire. I'm just going to take a nap, for a little bit. We've been awake for thirty-six hours, almost."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and nodded, "Okay. When you guys wake up, feel free to go upstairs and use zhe showers in any of zhe guest rooms on the fifth floor. We have running water now, although I wouldn't drink it."
  
  Lily turned to leave, and Melissa spoke up, "Oh! By the way, that clean sweat enhancement... it is amazing." Lily smiled and nodded. She had it too and was quite pleased with it, herself.
  
  She glanced at the other five members of the team, who were all conked out, some of which were snoring, in the lobby before proceeding outside to look at her loot.
  
  She needed to identify what was fragile and shouldn't be moved by the Labourtrons and what could be moved by them, as well as mentally catalogue what her take was.
  
  The Apprentice came out with her and was also curious as to what their new equipment was, "The Auto-Doc looks in one piece," the girl mentioned.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, as the Auto-Tailor, as well. Zhat will be nice. I wonder if we can learn how to program arbitrary designs, it just had a few 'olotapes for what you'd expect a 'ospital to 'ave, after all."
  
  Neither the Auto-Doc nor Auto-Tailor was precisely fragile, just rather bulky, but a number of the portable X-ray machines and cardiac monitors were a little fragile, so she and the Apprentice carefully moved those into the hospital themselves.
  
  The Apprentice was looking at three copies of a similar or identical device, each one looking about the size of a small automatic teller machine, the kind you'd find in a convenience store, "Dr St. Claire, what are these? I don't remember them in the hospital."
  
  Lily walked over to one and peered at it. She didn't quite recognise it either, or the brand name or model name, which was just a random seemingly the number of letters and numbers. However, on one of them, she lucked out, and there was a usual manual attached to the side, much like the Auto-Tailor system had. She pulled out the manual and looked at the cover, grinning immediately.
  
  The cover read, "Greenetech Genetics, Genome Sequencer model GS-1200A Operator's Manual."
  
  Lily smiled. She did not recognise the company, although there were likely hundreds of such companies building and selling medical devices in Pre-War America. She wondered where the crew found the devices and hoped they were either functional or could at least be cobbled together for at least a single working model.
  
  Sequencing genomes on her scanner was tedious, and she only trusted herself or the Apprentice to do it. Suppose she had a device that could sequence a patient's DNA and wasn't unique technology. In that case, she could have other people, like techs, nurses or other doctors, handle the sequencing of every patient so that Lily could perform genetic counselling about their risk factors for various diseases or potential benefits involved for some enhancements that she could offer them.
  
  Once she got all the fragile items removed from the pile of loot, she triggered the Labourtron task to move the rest of the items downstairs to her basement lair, at least for the moment.
  
  She was confident in her robots, but she did watch them as they completed the task, just in case.
  
  Walking back inside, she found Miller already awake. His IV was about halfway done, so he still had about a half hour to sit, but he was energized, "This is great stuff! You're sure it's just vitamins, Doc?" he joked.
  
  Lily nodded. "Yes, a couple of you showed some signs of zhe vitamin deficiency, you amongst them. It is kind of hard to eat properly in zhe Wasteland, I know, but multivitamins aren't hard to find; perhaps you should take one a day, yes?"
  
  Miller groaned, "Melissa's mom told me the same thing. I guess I will start if I know I will feel this much better."
  
  Lily slid a chair over to him and sat next to him, "Where did you find zhe genome sequencers? I'm very sure zhey were not in the 'ospital, I would have noticed them for sure."
  
  Miller grinned, "You saw them, did you? Yeah, that's the main extra we found. We found them in a nearby building; I guess it was where both the hospital and other doctors nearby sent specimens for lab tests. Sadly, the rest of the machinery there was wrecked, but these were packed in a closet safe and sound."
  
  Lily blinked. She should have considered that. Any time you build a hospital, a sort of medical district forms around it with doctors' offices and other businesses that cater to the high volume of medical professionals. So it wasn't too surprising that there were interesting finds in nearby buildings near the hospital.
  
  Lily nodded, "As far as your bonus, I'm willing to offer either two reflex treatments, which you can take with you, or one of the phoenix devices, which you can either take with you or leave with me for implantation whenever you send someone to me."
  
  Miller closed his eyes to consider, "The reflex treatments. Although the healing devices helped a lot, what really saved our bacon is being so much quicker than those muties. I'm going to have to recommend all of our combat teams get treated, so I am hoping for some bulk discounts on that over time - but we just can't afford to buy them all right away, or perhaps even soon." He nodded and then said, "Also, throw in a hundred caps to each of the team members, except me. I'll throw in another hundred caps myself so that they get an individual bonus of two hundred caps as well," he added.
  
  Lily hummed before nodding, "Okay. Yes, it is a little hard to see zhe personal benefit of zhis to zhem without something for zhem as individuals, also."
  
  Miller smiled, "And do you think we can lean on your hospitality again tonight for your barracks? Err... isolation ward." He grinned, "Then we can handle the nuke in the morning, and after that, we all have to leave on some other pressing business. It would be convenient if we could just rack out here."
  
  Lily nodded. She wasn't about to ascribe any probabilities on tomorrow's mission at all, so as they wouldn't be jinxed and would be ready for anything.
  
  But after that mission, and after her hospital was up and running, she decided she would start planning a return trip to Vault 108. At the time, she had left there alone and terrified, vowing never to return until she had at least power armour, but she felt, and she was careful with her wording to avoid jinxing herself this time, that while it was still a death trap she, herself, was a lot more dangerous too, and she could at least explore it.
  
  Plus, the clones offered her a possible ethical avenue for experimentation involving the silver briefcase carefully hidden in her basement. She would just need an effective way to subdue them non-lethally.
  
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  Saintess-Claire! Protector of Division!
  On Lily's coffee table sat an odd spheroid-shaped device, about as big as a football, with dozens of wires and connections hanging off of it. Alice was peering at it, and finally, she asked, "This is what makes atom bombs explode? How do they work?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and shook her head at the Apprentice, "It is a 1-to-1 model of the fission kernel of a fusion bomb. It's not the actual core of one; I'm going to take the real one out and replace it with this. Also, this model contains a number of radioisotopes in the centre for verisimilitude's sake, so it is actually fairly radioactive, so you shouldn't have your face so close to it."
  
  That caused Alice to hop away from it and Lily to walk over and set a box she had made exactly for this purpose next to the spheroid. The box was heavy because it was lined with thick lead foil and a few millimetres of water in waterproof honeycombed sections on the box's exterior.
  
  Lily flipped the box open and lifted the spheroid and sat it inside the box, where it fitted snugly. She then closed the lid, tilted her head to the side and lifted the box off the table to test its weight, ' At least thirty kilos. Rather heavy.'
  
  She sat the box back on the table and turned to glance at the Apprentice when she repeated her question, "Okay, but how do atomic bombs work?"
  
  Lily didn't quite scowl, but she affected the facial expression of someone who didn't precisely know how to answer the question put to her and didn't like it. The girl Alice didn't have the proper background in nuclear physics to really understand any answer she could give her, so how to give her an analogy in a context she would understand? Lily tilted her head to the ceiling and hummed, "You know zhat zhere are certain elements, usually metals, zhat are reactive with other elements, chemically, yes?"
  
  Alice nodded her head rapidly, "Yes! Like if you place sodium in water, it creates a powerful exothermic reaction! Explosive, even, considering the water surrounding the sodium will be heated so much it will phase change to steam and expand rapidly! I really want to see that happen. Can we do it?"
  
  Lily blinked at the girl. That was a good explanation of what would happen from a chemical perspective, if not precisely, why alkali metals react with water. It was better stated than she had expected, in fact.
  
  Lily was a little impressed, so she decided to say so, "Zhat's a pretty good explanation of the sodium water reaction, Apprentice. I don't usually keep elemental sodium around because I don't have a lot of use for it, and unless you keep it submerged in oil or a similar 'ydrophobic liquid, it will quickly react with zhe moisture in the air. But we'll see if we can find some. If not, we will make a lab day exercise to produce some from caustic soda, which is still plentiful and used to make soaps, thankfully."
  
  Alice preened a bit at the praise, which Lily tried to ignore to maintain the appearance of the dignified teacher she felt was necessary to properly educate an Apprentice, "Zhe reason sodium is reactive with water is zhat it attacks zhe chemical bonds of water, stealing a 'ydrogen and oxygen atom from water and turning itself into sodium 'ydroxide. Understand?"
  
  Lily quickly drew the simple chemical reaction on a sheet of paper that she stole from the girl for the purpose. Alice looked at the sheet for a while before nodding, "It also has to produce hydrogen gas, then?" she asked, looking at the left-over hydrogen in the reaction.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes. And heat." Lily said, carefully pronouncing the H sound, "That's the important question I have been leading up to, zhen, is... from where, pray-tell, does the 'eat come from? In the exothermic reaction, where does zhat energy come from if we've already accounted for all the atoms and zhere is nothing left over?"
  
  It was kind of a trick question because Lily intentionally left out the energy in the chemical bonds themselves, in order to emphasize that bonds, be they chemical or nuclear could store energy.
  
  As expected, Alice hadn't read far enough to have a thorough knowledge of chemistry, but Lily was already impressed. After scrunching her head up in thought for a couple of minutes, the girl sighed, "I don't know! Where does it come from, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily smiled and indicated the drawings of the chemical structure of water, H2O. She circled the solid lines that she drew that connected the two hydrogen atoms and oxygen together. "It takes energy to form the chemical bonds that keep a molecule together, Apprentice. If zhese bonds are attacked, then zhat energy is released. Zhis is zhe fundamental reason why every," and Lily made the air quotes gesture to indicate she didn't quite believe the next word was correct, "energy-positive chemical reaction generates 'eat energy, from the simplest and most ordinary ones like burning wood in a campfire which is merely a redox combustion chemical reaction to zhe sodium water reaction you described so well earlier."
  
  Alice's face resembled an O of enlightenment, which was why Lily had these discussions with the girl every day. It was one thing to read these things in a book, but many people needed a concept they didn't quite understand to be restated in a number of different ways before it clicked for them in comprehension. Finally, the Apprentice said, "Okay, I think I understand that. But what does that have to do with atom bombs, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Well, since you have not started studying physics, much less nuclear physics, zhis is going to be merely an approximation of zhe truth using chemistry as an analogue, you understand?"
  
  Alice copied Lily's forty to forty-five degree head tilt of confusion impeccably, which Lily took as permission to continue, "Well, there are some things that are reactive with themselves." She pointed to the box.
  
  Alice blinked, curious, "Why wouldn't they explode all the time, then?"
  
  Lily did her best to explain the concept of criticality and supercriticality using chemistry as a metaphor, "Because zhey only become reactive if they are close enough together. It takes a certain amount of mass of a fissionable isotope being close together to trigger the reaction."
  
  Alice had the obvious question of how you could trigger such a reaction at will, then to make it a viable explosive, to which Lily drew a three-dimensional representation of a hollow sphere on the sheet of paper, followed by a series of arrows on the outside of the sphere pointing to the centre, indicating an implosion of the sphere.
  
  Lily finished her explanation, "Zhose panels on the sphere with the wires coming out of zhem are supposed to be high-explosive shaped charges. If you trigger zhe explosives at exactly zhe same time, zhe fissionable material in the 'ollow sphere compresses and for a brief moment all the atoms are close enough to trigger its reactiveness with itself, and zhat brief moment is enough for a cascading chain reaction which will generate incredible energy."
  
  Alice looked surprised that she seemed to understand the explanation. "But why are the booms so big with this type of reaction compared to just throwing some sodium in water or a grenade?"
  
  Lily nodded, "It is zhe function of how much energy is stored in zhe bonds. Chemical bonds, zhey are weak weak weak. You can sneeze at a molecule and it will fly off into its constituent atoms like a coiled spring, sometimes literally for certain molecules or elements."
  
  Lily sat her hands on her lap primly, seated at the coffee table, and got to the meat of the matter, "Over one million times zhe energy is stored in zhe strong nuclear force, on average, compared to zhe chemical bonds. Zhis is why nuclear energy is such a tempting and long-lasting fuel source for energy. Imagine if you had a log of wood zhat burned either one million times longer or one million times hotter than a normal log, and you'd have an idea, dear Apprentice."
  
  "Oh... Oh!" Alice said, finally looking at the box that contained the mock-up of the fission kernel with some trepidation and wariness, "That seems incredibly uhh.. hazardous. And you're going to bring the real one back here?"
  
  Lily snorted, "Don't worry. It won't stay in our home too long. I have a..." she paused, "... safe place to get rid of it, where it won't maintain a continuing hazard... to us."
  
  "What's in the box, Doc?" asked Miller, after she had handed the sealed, heavy box to New John, who was the strongest man in Grace's group.
  
  Lily repeated her explaination that it was a scale model of the fission kernel for the bomb they were going to disarm. Miller blinked, "You're tasking the core back with you? Why?"
  
  Lily shrugged, "Highly pure fissionable plutonium is quite useful, and shouldn't be just discarded. Perhaps I'm interested in refueling the truck I bought - you shouldn't worry, I understand how hazardous it is."
  
  Miller narrowed his eyes at the young woman, pursing his lips. After a moment he just shrugged, "Arlight." He wasn't sure he believed her, but honestly fissionable material wasn't exactly highly controlled in the Wasteland. You could find mini-nukes in janitor closets in some buildings, which contained a significant amount themselves.
  
  New John opened the box curiously, having never seen the fission kernel of a nuclear bomb, model or not. Lily warned him, "It's quite radioactive, you probably shouldn't have your brain so close to it. Zhe box is shielded."
  
  New John slammed the lid shut and locked it quite quickly, then held the box a little farther from his body, lifting it up higher and giving Lily a sideways glance.
  
  This caused Big John to laugh, "Want to keep it away from your balls, huh? You should find a girl that can stand you before you worry about radiation making you sterile." New John gave him the bird with his free hand, silently.
  
  Miller stared at her while they were walking, and asked her incredulously, "What's in it that's radioactive, and why would you make it radioactive at all?"
  
  Lily pursed her lips and shrugged, "Don't know precisely, caesium, americium, some uranium, plutonium and other mixed radioisotopes extracted from the water purifier running these past couple of days."
  
  Lily had a couple of ghouls working for the water purifier company, although she mandated that they wear thick radiation-resistant helmets when in proximity to any radiation during their job duties, much to the ghouls' amusement. But Lily thought they were too cavalier. Lily was almost as radiation-resistant as a ghoul, and there was no way she would stand in any appreciable ionizing radiation longer than she had to.
  
  Lily still thought that feral ghouls were a function of either acute or chronic exposure to ionizing radiation depolarizing sections of the brain of a ghoul, which would either immediately during the ghoulification process or over time turn them feral. She suspected it actually killed the majority of them, depending on the parts of the brain that were damaged.
  
  She suspected a careful ghoul would have a limitless lifespan but hadn't gotten too in-depth in the study of their genomes, beyond reinforcing her previous conclusion that they were not a natural mutation.
  
  She couldn't find any hint of a virus, bacteria or mutagenic agent in any of the cheek swabs she collected, and suspected she would need to do an in-depth, preferably pathological, examination of a flat in the process of ghoulification for her to understand more of the process. The longevity was too suspicious, though.
  
  There were a number of secret government research projects during the pre-war period, and one of the commonalities was that they often focused on longevity, just being approached from different directions. FEV, ghouls, and life support systems like the kind that were used in the VR pods in Vault 106 all had this commonality, and she suspected there were many others that she hadn't discovered yet, besides.
  
  Blinking out of her reverie, she glanced at Miller, who seemed to be waiting impatiently for her to finish. She said simply, "Oh. Because of zhe Children of the Atom."
  
  She continued, "While zhey aren't actually completely unreasonable, and I doubt any of zhem want to be incinerated any more than I do, they do worship zhe strong nuclear force and fission. I've noticed zhem using geiger counters on zhe bomb during some of zheir rituals. If we take away the core, the replacement 'as to be at least as radioactive as the one we take."
  
  Miller made an 'Ahhh' sound of sudden enlightenment and nodded, "Yeah, cultists can be a real pain in the ass so this is a good chance to mollify them, seeing as they are mostly harmless. Or rather, the only ones they generally harm are themselves."
  
  Lily nodded, but since she had already traveled through arguably three different universes already, she was much more agnostic. She didn't believe the Children of the Atom that a universe was contained in every atomic nucleus because she happened to know that they contained quarks, leptons, bosons and protons. However, who is to say that they weren't in some ways correct, just speaking metaphysically?
  
  Lily was certainly more open to the idea of metaphysics now than she never was before, which made her leery of exploring a couple of places involved with the Point Lookout DLC. She already verified, much to her dismay, that Point Lookout was a real place; at least, it was listed on the maps of Maryland as a state park. Would she find a Cthulhu-themed cult of Shoggoths if she visited that place? She was very worried that she, in fact, would.
  
  She thought about the character generation she went through, she thought she selected 'scientific only worlds' but recalled it said 'psuedo-scientific' was also a possibility, but didn't realize how broad that could be, if she thought about it. She could think of some theoretical pseudo-scientific explanations of what a Great Old One could be, perhaps a remnant or survivor of a previous iteration of the universe if there was a cycle of birth and destruction of universes from the Big Bang to Big Crunch?
  
  Or just a plain extra-dimensional visitor. None of it reassured her because she was a firm believer in that magic was just something she had no way to presently explain, not that its explanation was impossible. Which meant there could be innumerable "supernatural" possibilities in the world. It also kind of excited her, because it meant that there would be at least the possibility of explaining how they functioned, which interested her.
  
  She wasn't about to seek them out, presently, though.
  
  The group arrived at the centre of town to see Cromwell, the leader of the Children of the Atom, along with a number of his parishioners waiting for them. Lily pursed her lips; she was hoping to do this without them becoming involved but supposed it was a long shot.
  
  "Doctor St. Claire, sister of Atom! Have you come to defile this holy Artefact of Atom as has been told to this humble servant of Atom," Confessor Cromwell somehow managed to be civil and demanding simultaneously.
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes. She had been expecting some pushback from the Children, but it sounded like a third party was meddling. She only knew of one interested party who would want the nuke in Megaton to be functional. She glanced around, looking for Burke in his conspicuous fedora and suit, and told Grace and Miller in a quiet, "I only talked to Timms a couple of days ago, and someone warned zhese cooks already? If you see Burke, a man in a fedora and prewar suit, he's our agitator."
  
  Grace hissed, "Why would someone try to make this more difficult?"
  
  Miller also narrowed his eyes and said quietly, "Theres only one reason a person would want an active nuke to remain in the middle of a city of fifteen thousand people, and I wouldn't mind pulling the fingernails off such a person to get them to tell me the full story."
  
  But the man named Burke wasn't anywhere to be seen unless he had changed outfits and was pretending to be a parishioner, which Lily doubted.
  
  Lily turned to face Confessor Cromwell and smiled in a friendly manner, "Defile? Of course not! We 'ave come to make it safe, 'owever. I'm sure zhat while you appreciate the concept of Divison you wouldn't actually want to be incinerated by being next to a atomic bomb that underwent uncontrolled Divison, do you? Not only would you all die, but all of Megaton would die." She said the latter to his flock directly, on the off-chance that Cromwell was in fact crazy.
  
  Cromwell looked a little surprised, "Well... while each of us shall give birth to a billion stars, becoming a mother or father to a new galaxy, it is true there is no need to.. uh... rush it a long." He nodded and then said in a much more preachy tone, "Divison is inevitable!"
  
  His flock murmured appreciatively and Cromwell approached the group, "What, then do you intend to do? I'm afraid I can't support you reducing the Holy Glow of this Most Holy of Adam's Artefacts."
  
  Lily smiled. Was that a Speech check success? Lily took the shielded box from New John and presented it to Cromwell, and spouted bullshit as best as she could, "We will replace zhe core of zhis... artefact with zhis one, which will only divide in Atom's Good Time, and not be forced along by unbelievers."
  
  Cromwell blinked and opened the lid of the box, and peered inside. He called over one of his assistants who brought over a Geiger counter and held it next to the model of the fission kernel, getting a very loud and rapid clicking noise, "Confessor... this is very holy. "
  
  Cromwell nodded and turned to look at Lily again, "This is... acceptable, then. It is right that none but Atom himself shall dictate when Holy Divison should occur, so if you could protect this Holy Artefact, you would be doing a Good Service to all of His Children." Lily tried very hard not to roll her eyes in the back of her head as she audibly heard the capital letters in his speech.
  
  Big John started giggling at the absurdity of everything and got another elbow in the ribs from Grace which shut him up.
  
  Lily glanced at Miller, "Shall we zhen, protect zhis Most Holy of Holies, eh?"
  
  Miller's lips were twitching upwards uncontrollably but he had better self-control than Big John did and he just nodded rapidly, setting down his bag and getting the tools out necessary for their impromptu-bomb surgery.
  
  It wasn't hard and it didn't take that long, either. The bombs were designed to be serviced by maintenance techs, after all, and they had what amounted to the blue prints so it was only the work of ten minutes to open panels and lifting parts out of the way to expose the small fission kernel.
  
  Lily hummed as she worked, she carefully sabotaged the detonation circuits in a somewhat complicated manner that would tend to electrocute anyone trying to induce a detonation, although it probably would have no effect on anyone using a fusion pulse charge, which she finally found some information on from Miller.
  
  However, who knew what would happen in the future, and if someone years from now thought this was a live bomb and tried to detonate it the old-fashioned way? Well, they deserved to be electrocuted.
  
  Then Lily carefully disconnected all the wires leading from the explosive detonators on the core to the detonation circuit, "Okay, get zhe other core out," she told Miller, not wanting him to hold the radioactive model longer than necessary.
  
  He nodded and pulled it out while Lily simultaneously pulled the live core out of the bomb's panel. They did a quick swap, and Lily slid the fake core into the bomb while Miller softly placed the live core inside the box and closed and locked the lid.
  
  Lily reconnected all the wires, even if the explosive lenses were inert and could never explode, and then spent another fifteen minutes reassembling the weapon.
  
  "Annnnd zhat's it, Confessor. Your Holy Artefact is as 'oly as ever, 'olier even, and it won't be induced by wicked whispers to Divide prematurely," Lily told the man.
  
  "Hallelujah! Saintess-Claire! Protector of Divison!" the man proclaimed, which caused all of his cult-members to repeat the phrase, ' Wait, I didn't agree to be a part of your crackpot religion.'
  
  Lily stared at him for a long time, before nodding and quietly grabbing the box carrying the live core and saying, "Uhh! We'll be off then!" and fleeing, shoving the box at New John again to carry.
  
  Grace's Grenadiers were cracking up before they were even a block away from Cromwell's sermon.
  
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  69 Lustful
  It was over a week since Lily watched Miller and Grace depart, giving them a small energy-cell-operated refrigerated container with all the treatments that they were owed.
  
  Miller told her that Grace's team was based at Megaton, but that didn't mean that they were usually sitting around here doing nothing, after all, which was a little unfortunate because Lily could have used their assistance in the last week.
  
  It had been somewhat hectic since the news broke about the full extent of the water and power services that were going to be offered in the Eastside. The disconnected portion of the Eastside was only about fifteen per cent of Megaton's total surface area, and many of the buildings were amongst the poorest condition of all buildings in Megaton, but there was rapid activity in this part of the town.
  
  Lily had heard about the details of the demise of the leadership of the Merchants gang. Apparently, the missionaries-cum-mercenaries had taken the simple expedient of shooting each of the three simultaneously in the head with sniper rifles from over a kilometre away during one of their morale-building exercises. Lily imagined the former gang leader had a very simple carrot-and-stick approach when it concerned his intra-gang discipline.
  
  Hearing about this had chilled her a little bit because that was also probably the easiest way to deal with her, also. Although her skull was very bullet resistant these days, and she did not think a typical sniper bullet would likely penetrate, Lily thought a long-range anti-material rifle in the .50 calibre or 14mm range definitely would. Such a rifle would be especially effective against her if the bullet was of the armour-piercing variety, including a depleted uranium or tungsten tip.
  
  This meant that she would likely get one freebie; if a competent long-ranged assassin was targeting her, she would likely survive the first attempt but probably not the second. Lily hummed, ' Well, that is one more than most people usually get. Hopefully, if assassins are sent after me, they are of the up close and personal variety, which I have a lot more confidence in dealing with.'
  
  The Merchants were done as a gang, but they were, despite their insanity, a somewhat stabilizing force, so things become a mite chaotic after they were dealt with. That was nothing, though, compared to the news of the opening of Eastside Water & Power.
  
  The news precipitated a sharp interest in the run-down area, and Lily got a number of complaints that she wasn't being a team player out of the Mayor's office, which she took to mean that he was annoyed that they attempted to profit from their own enterprises indirectly through the real estate market, as since almost all the property in her area of influence was owned by the city every dollar she made was a dollar taken out of his wallet.
  
  If she did not have her agreement in writing about the deed to her building being hers, if she managed to improve it and put it to productive use, she would expect to try to be cheated out of it, honestly. Just to be safe, she had publicized the existence of her contract with the city and proclaimed that the Megaton General Hospital would open to limited patients as soon as the Mayor's office had inspected the building, approved the improvements and provided her with the quit claim deed.
  
  Theoretically, stating her business plains in this manner would allow the Mayor to block her from opening if he was feeling intransigent, but in practice, despite not being entirely democratic, the Mayor had to at least be responsive to the citizens. And being seen as blocking opening a new, high-tech and modern-looking clinic was utterly unfeasible.
  
  However, she was surprised to find an assistant from Mayor Grady Underwood showing up this morning as she was dealing with the aftermath of an attempt by random people to break into the hospital over the evening. The Protectrons had dealt with the intruders without her expert system judging the situation important enough to even wake her up.
  
  "Doctor St. Claire? I'm Jason Knox, from the Mayor's office. I'm here this morning to inspect your building, although it is just a pro-forma matter because we can already see such extensive improvements just from the exterior," a younger dark-haired pale man about the same age Lily looked stated.
  
  He got a little sour-faced and added, "Although, we would have appreciated it if you had just kept this matter between our office, we have been dealing with a couple of constituent complaints regarding the matter."
  
  Lily smiled in a friendly manner, trying to demonstrate the emotional effect of both affability combined with the ditzy low-EQ that was a stereotype of scientists. It has been Lily's experience that politicians, of which this kid certainly was, were at their core social predator types and usually had an intrinsic disrespect for, and underestimated people who they felt had low social awareness and skills.
  
  She smiled and rubbed the back of her neck in an embarassed-seeming way, "Ahahaha... sorry about zhat, Monsiuer Knox. It just slipped out when I was talking with zhat man from un journal," she said, using the french word for newspaper.
  
  The man glanced at one of the Labourtrons that was dragging a dead man into the hospital, "Uh... what happened? Were you attacked last night? Are you taking that guy to your morgue?" He seemed impressed at that.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side and gave the body a sideways glance. It was the only fatality last night of a group of about ten disorganized men who tried breaking into the building. Morgue? Well, she was taking him to dump him in the recycler to recover most of the carbon he was made out of, actually, but yes, morgue sounded more politically correct, "Ah, yes. Briefly, zhen 'is body will be disposed of cleanly and ethically. Zhis man was amongst a group of nar-do-wells who tried to break into the 'ospital last night, probably searching for drugs or zhings to steal. Zhis one shot at one of the Protectrons, who escalated to lethal force." She gave a Gallic shrug as if to say, "What can you do?"
  
  Jason nodded, "Yes, there has been a lot of unrest since your other venture was announced. Many people are scrambling to buy the properties over here, and not taking too kindly to the squatters already living in them. We wish we could have coordinated that a lot more closely too!"
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes, but still in a friendly manner. She was pretending to be ditzy, not stupid. The nuance was totally different, but social predator types would underestimate people they considered ditzy but totally steamroll or take advantage of those they considered stupid, so she had to correct this misapprehension. She replied to him in a teasing voice, even bringing a finger up to scold him like a naughty child. "Tsk, tsk tsk Monsieur Knox... Zhere is no way your office would have been willing to sell zhe properties to us at such low costs if you knew what we had planned. Zhat, my friend, was just business."
  
  This got a genuine chuckle from the man, and she felt he thought better of her, "Okay, fair enough Dr St. Claire, perhaps most of that is just sour grapes. It's not as though we did badly, anyway. I even bought one of the properties near your building myself, which I feel has a good chance of becoming an up-and-coming medical district with the right investment."
  
  Lily smiled affably. She thought the same, actually. They continued their small talk for a while quite pleasantly. While it wasn't a complete analogy, social predator types were akin to bullies with a higher level of intelligence and did not have to settle for physical anti-social behaviour. And similarly to bullies, if you popped them in the nose and showed a little backbone, there was often a good chance that they'd approve of that sort of behaviour and become your friend, or at the minimum, stop pushing you to see where your line in the sand was.
  
  She could never have done this behaviour in the past when she was a robotic spider; she was definitely what would have been called autistic in the America of her past and relied so much on social assistant AIs to judge human behaviour and formulate responses in social situations with other people that it would have been an impossibility to formulate and implement even this basic social strategy.
  
  However, after she was melded with her memories of being a soldier and engineer in America, she found that her emotional or social intelligence increased to the point where she could at least make these basic moves, and this was despite the fact that she wasn't exactly an outgoing people person back in America, either.
  
  She glanced at the enhanced reality tag over Jason's head. She had been training, slowly, the human emotional sentiment detectability system, using both everyone she interacted with during the day as well as, more helpfully, all the films that she had managed to download from Monsieur Tombs' family's data archive.
  
  Tombs wasn't against sharing all the data he had; he just wanted to make sure he didn't lose it himself, which was why his family never offered it to the town, as there was nowhere else that could store it, and they, probably rightly, feared losing control of it. It wasn't a huge archive as pre-War archives went, but it still had the digital representation of thousands of books and over a hundred films.
  
  The films helped because actors generally were experts at emotion, especially the good ones. She could watch a film and tag many exemplars of sorrow, joy, happiness, and other emotions that served as a great baseline for training the detection algorithms.
  
  Below the tag of his name, [Jason Knox, Assistant to Megaton Mayor] was [Friendly (81%), Lustful (69%)] .
  
  Lily internally sighed, she had not noticed that he was noticeably attracted to her, so it was clear that her EQ was still subpar, even if it was miles away better than it used to be. Although her algorithm's confidence level of that prediction wasn't super high, it was high enough that she did not expect it to be totally wrong. Still, it was better to be pretty than not to be pretty; every woman and girl knew this.
  
  "Well, let's begin zhe two-cap tour zhen, shall we?" Lily offered genially.
  
  She brought him through all the hospital areas and the second and third floors, which were as of yet unutilized, before bringing him to her office to finish talking. "Ah, the basement... well, I have some confidential equipment there, so I cannot presently show it to outsiders, and the fourth through sixth floors are either unfinished or simply private accommodations for myself or my Apprentice and 'er family."
  
  The main reason she didn't want to show him the basement was that the hobo's legs were still poking out of her primary recycler, actually. She didn't think he had the intellectual capacity to actually uncover any of her secrets from just the external appearance of her equipment down there, besides the fact that she had advanced technology, which was already apparent given her hospital equipment which included two working Auto-Docs, which was almost unheard of.
  
  Jason glanced at the plaque at her door, "What is 'Custom Tailored Genes'?" he asked. Lily glanced at her plaque that listed her as both Hospital Director, Medical Doctor and Proprietor of Custom Tailored Genes, Ltd.
  
  She welcomed him into her office, which had warmer colours than the off-white or grey of the carbon fibre walls of the rest of her building. Paint for walls was a bit of a hard commodity to find but she had her office painted by Mr Tombs' men; even some dyes were difficult to find, which was an issue she had already run into when she got her Auto-Tailor system operating. It could recycle most types of fabrics but did a worse job of recycling dyes. Still, the device was a marvel.
  
  Lily sat in her comfortable chair and "Ah, I suppose you could say zhat is my zhird business. In addition to performing normal medical services and selling advanced prostheses, I am going to be offering my services as a geneticist to the public."
  
  Lily smiled but looked a little disappointed, "Right now, zhe products are a little limited, a treatment to enhance zhe reflexes of a person, a treatment to adjust a person's sweat glands to reduce offensive body odours and zhe feeling of griminess you get when you sweat, as well as I am finishing up the preliminary efforts and am about to test two new treatments. One to reduce zhe need for sleep to approximately five hours a night, as well as some basic life extension zherapies."
  
  The mayor's assistant looked amazed. Lily had intentionally not publicized either her prosthesis business or the genetics one in the paper. She didn't think she could keep it secret, but it was better not to rub it in the Brotherhood's face, either. Or invite Colonel Autumn to judge the relative risks and benefits of a Spec Ops raid to rendition her to Adams Air Force Base.
  
  He asked, "And these treatments are... safe? What precisely do you mean by life-extension therapy, anyway?" Of course, politicians would always focus on that one. Lily felt her most important therapy was the one that stopped people from stinking personally.
  
  It was, however, the basic LET service that made her the most nervous about offering. Men with power were generally old, and old men would do a lot to live a little longer. Just look at all the Pre-War experiments along this vein. If she thought President Eden was a real person, she might not even try it. Colonel Autumn was still young enough, probably just turning fifty, that he probably wasn't quite at the point where he was worried about the grim reaper - plus, she was certain the Enclave had to have some similar technology, too.
  
  Lily smiled, "At zhis stage, it is just very basic things. There are certain diseases, hundreds and thousands of different types, zhat possess a certain genetic factor that makes a person predisposed to get zhem, especially later in life. Some types of heart disease, breast, prostate and testicular cancers, amongst dozens of others. Zhis treatment effects and corrects the gene expressions for about... eehh.. the top fifty zhat I know about."
  
  Lily hazarded a guess. There were a number of disease predispositions that overlapped, so changing one set of gene expressions could result in an effect on three or four different potential diseases sometimes. She then continued, "And on top of zhat, zhe treatment also affects certain formations in your cellular DNA called telomeres, lengthening them, which correlates to a direct increase in zhe 'ayflick limit of cell division which correlates indirectly to an organism's longevity."
  
  She was pretty sure he didn't understand a word of that, so she translated it to plain English in a summary, "So, in zhe total, I don't expect a startling increase in zhe lifespan of the average person treated, I do expect to see an increase of two, maybe zhree decades. Much more if you are one of the few predisposed to one of the cancers or early-onset cardiac diseases." She paused to consider, "It'd work better the younger you are when you take zhe treatment. Two or three decades for you. Maybe only ten to fifteen years for someone as old as your boss... but, still, yes?"
  
  In fact, her Apprentice was running intake on the group of fifteen volunteers being interned to test this treatment as Lily spoke. The volunteers for this treatment were a completely fresh batch, not having been used before, as she felt she might have to publish her testing methodology or at least make it available before important people felt the treatment was safe.
  
  The mayor's assistant looked amazed, "That is amazing, if true! What are the costs of these treatments? Also, I know a few people who naturally need very little sleep, what would that sleep treatment do for them?"
  
  Lily waffled her hand, "The ones zhat directly impact a person's combat performance are a little pricey, four thousand caps or equivalent for the reflexes. I'd give zhe clean sweat treatment away, but zhe people zhey wouldn't trust it if it was free. So, I am charging four hundred caps." She then tilted her head to the side, "The last two new treatments, the sleep and the basic LET, I am thinking one thousand each."
  
  And then she nodded, "About people who naturally need very little sleep... Hmm, zhat is an insightful question. Zhe answer is... nothing, so I don't recommend such people get such treatments."
  
  He nodded, "I see. I think there will be a lot of interest in some of those if you can show that they are, in fact safe and in fact, do what you claim."
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "I 'ave a cohort of fifteen volunteers testing zhe life extension therapy starting today. We should know its safety fairly rapidly. 'Alf of them will test the reversing agent, while the rest will just continue on life with it so as to test its long-term safety. 'owever, I have no doubts there, and my Apprentice and I will likely take it ourselves once its immediate safety has been confirmed. I won't sell a product I wouldn't take myself, after all." She was slightly lying, she wouldn't take it because it would interfere with her existing genome, but she would have definitely taken it if she was a baseline flat like all the rest of the people here were.
  
  The man nodded, looking impressed, "The fact that you'd stand behind your products that way will definitely make a lot of people less leery of them. I'm not sure how we can reasonably test its actual efficacy, though, but presumably the efficacy of your other treatments would indicate you're not selling snake oil."
  
  "I suppose another scientist could look over my work, if necessary. If you could find one. I'm not sure zhey'd entirely understand all of it, but someone with a background in genetics would at least be able to confirm zhings about the telomeres and many of the negative genetic disease markers being replaced," Lily allowed, although slightly unwillingly.
  
  Jason chuckled, "Perhaps there is someone from Rivet City we could find. Well, Doctor St. Claire, I have to say I am impressed and amazed. I have with me your deed, if you'd like to sign it, and then I have to depart. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, though."
  
  Lily smiled, and did so. They both stood and shook hands, "So, can I report to the damn press you'll be opening tomorrow, then?"
  
  She wanted to scowl. That was too early, but she did say the only thing stopping her was the Mayor. Hoisted on her own petard, she hadn't expected such a rapid response. She nodded slightly, qualifying. "Yes, although we may be seeing only limited patients or emergencies for the first week."
  
  The politician shrugged; he lived and worked in qualifying statements, after all. Lily noticed that his hand lingered on hers a bit too long but didn't mention it. Social predator types were definitely not her type of desired romantic partners.
  
  She showed him to the door, and then found and told the Apprentice, who was finishing up sequestering the volunteers in the isolation wards. She had two, a female and a male one now, which each had about ten beds.
  
  Also, she didn't need lethal force guarding the door. She had finally armed, sort of, her Labourtrons. She had built what was essentially a compressed air-powered dart gun into one of their arms. The darts contained a number of medichines that would paralyze most humans in seconds.
  
  Lily barely considered it a weapon because any sort of armour or even thick clothes hard countered the darts, and the Labourtrons did not have sufficient accuracy, even using the Protectron tactical software to take more than centre-of-body mass shots with any reasonable accuracy.
  
  The reloading was also slow, taking over a second and a half to prepare a follow-on dart, so while it would prove useful, it was of strictly limited utility, and she still searched for better less-lethal weapons.
  
  Still, it did mean that she could incorporate the Labourtrons in the patrol schedule at night if they did not have any other duties, even if they mainly would be simply sounding the alarm and waiting for the two Protectrons to respond.
  
  "We're going to have to open tomorrow?! We don't have all the staff hired, though!" complained Alice churlishly.
  
  Lily sighed, "I know. I was 'oping to hire at least one other doctor before we opened, and I finally have a couple of applications which might be suitable. So, we'll just open partly. Zhe pharmacy will be closed, except if they buy from you or me, and we'll see limited patients and emergencies only."
  
  Alice nodded, "Okay, we can probably do that, then. By the way, Dr St. Claire, I read the article in the Megaton Ground Zero," she indicated the name of the local rag that served as something like a newspaper, "and you barely gave any details at all about the hospital. Why were you so sparse with the details?"
  
  Lily smirked, "It 'as been my experience that you should treat a journalist like you should treat a man who is courting you."
  
  "Uhh?" Alice asked confusedly.
  
  "You 'ave to string zhem a long a little, yes? Leave zhem begging for more and more until such a point as you deem it is time to surrender completely to them and give zhem... zhe story," Lily told her Apprentice amusedly.
  
  Alice tried to act scandalized, but it was spoiled somewhat by her sputtering laughter, "Dr St. Claire!"
  
  Lily grinned and ignored her, deciding instead to say, "Well, let's go finish zhese subjects medical files, and call catering to verify zhat zhey will be in to feed them for lunch and zhe dinner, yes?"
  
  With two working Genome Sequencers, they were taking genetic samples from every patient and including them in their digital medical record, which only Alice and Lily had access to. Alice sighed at the prospect of paperwork but nodded, "Okay, it'll go quick if we both work half. You want the females or the males?"
  
  Lily shrugged her indifference, walking side by side with the younger girl back towards their offices.
  
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  Grand Opening
  The Grand Opening, such as it was, started pretty small. There was that newspaper writer, the mayor's assistant and a few lookie-loos but not immediate patients waiting for treatment, but it was quite early in the morning as well.
  
  An hour later, a man and woman barely made it through the door; both of them sported gunshot wounds. They were both of dark hair and fair complexion if they weren't so dirty looking. Still, Lily had long ago stopped holding personal hygiene against people living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
  
  Glancing at the two, Lily made a mental assessment. The man would die without treatment in the next eight hours to twelve hours. He took a round to the chest, and Lily could already tell he had a traumatic pneumothorax. It had to be unilateral, or one-sided, or he would already be dead, but the woman only took a probably small calibre round to her left upper arm.
  
  Although Lily was marketing her clinic as a Hospital featuring an Emergency Room, she wasn't actually prepared to treat all comers if they didn't have any ability to pay for it. The only way hospitals in her memories managed to do such things was because of government sponsorship via Medicare, Medicaid or the NHS or similar systems in European countries and Canada.
  
  However, she decided she would do her best to stabilize traumatic injuries the best she could in any case, even if the patients couldn't pay. She would count this partly as a PR or marketing expenditure and partly as an expenditure to make her feel better.
  
  "H-help! We were attacked by raiders outside the gate! The guard said that this clinic could help us." the woman got out. She was helping to support the man but was running out of gas. All the man could do was groan slightly, blood bubbling up on his lips, indicating his lung had been punctured.
  
  A Labourtron wearing an oversized dark grey set of scrubs was already pushing a gurney out to meet the woman, and Lily and Alice both came out as well.
  
  Lily got on one side of the patient while Alice got on the other, "Get 'im on zhe gurney, let's each take a side of 'im and un, deux, trois!" At three, they lifted the man onto the gurney that had been lowered. Lily did most of the work, but she was still a lot stronger than the Apprentice, despite the girl working out every day.
  
  Lily took a quick physical exam of the man, then pulled the sensors for the pulse oximeter and EKG leads from the oversized cardiac monitor that was hanging off the foot of the gurney. It looked almost as big as an old-style television with knobs. In Lily's life in America, cardiac monitors were getting smaller every year, and when she was in space, they were almost unheard of - every person had at minimum medical bioware that would send all the person's vitals to a doctor wirelessly on request.
  
  She placed the leads on the man's body, which worked differently from what she was used to. Instead of being disposable and sticking onto the patient's body through adhesives, they used some kind of vacuum force to suck on and stay, and they would have to be cleaned after every patient. It was quite nice from Lily's perspective since she didn't have to replace the adhesive pads but didn't think they could be that comfortable.
  
  She clucked her tongue at the SPO2 reading she was getting; he was down in the low 80s as far as his oxygen saturation which wasn't that surprising. She already noticed a slight blueing of his lips and fingernails, but it was good to know he wasn't at immediate risk of dying this very minute. Most patients actually tolerated having one of the lungs collapse pretty well, even if it was trauma-related, like this sucking chest wound, but only for a while.
  
  She then connected an oxygen cannula to his nose and flipped the O2 tank all the way to fifteen litres a minute. She had scavenged a number of oxygen concentrators from the hospital and had repurposed them to extract and store oxygen, but Lily didn't think she would have enough through this method to treat more than a few patients that needed oxygen therapy a day. Still, it was better than nothing.
  
  Lily was trying to do the entire work of a trauma team which would be five or six people, by herself, after all.
  
  She put her stethoscope on and motioned Alice to do the same.
  
  She already knew what she would hear but motioned Alice to follow her, "Notice zhere is drastically reduced breath sounds on zhis side, yes?" Alice nodded and then Lily palpated the man's left side of his chest, which produced a slight crackling sound, "Zhis crackling sound is a sign of a subcutaneous emphysema, which is mainly a symptom at zhis point."
  
  Lily removed her stethoscope and turned to the Labourtron. "Take him to exam 1, please," Lily said to the robot. Lily had adjusted these mindless Labourtrons somewhat, and it replied in the exact same tone as a B1 droid from Star Wars because Lily found it amusing, "Roger, roger!"
  
  Mentally she opened up her Labourtron control interface and subvocalized, ' Chest X-ray, Exam Room 1.' She had been testing a number of medical tasks she had constructed on these Labourtrons using mannequins and finally settled on a number of tasks that they could do without risk of injury to patients. It wasn't a lot, but it was still quite helpful. They could push a patient to and from places in the hospital, take a number of different X-rays, monitor the cardiac monitor, and send an alarm through the network in the event of cardiac or respiratory arrest and hypoxia.
  
  And that was pretty much it, presently. When she was trying to make a task for them to administer oxygen, she had to use herself as the mannequin and almost got her eye gouged out by the oxygen cannula, as the Labourtrons didn't have a precise understanding of the differences between different holes on the human face, nor did they have much gentleness.
  
  "Go with 'im, Apprentice," Lily told the girl, who nodded.
  
  Lily tried not to judge a book by its cover, but the woman panting, exhausted, nor her husband looked like they could afford treatment, "I'll do my best to stabilize 'im even if you can't pay, but can you afford treatment?" she asked gently.
  
  The woman looked up and looked unsure, "I'm uhh.. not sure. Maybe. We killed all four of the raiders, and I have all of the weapons and stuff they had that might be worth something. They had a lot of drugs and stuff we might be able to sell." She was carrying a large rucksack on her back.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and nodded. She was right not to judge; with four raiders to loot, it was very likely the couple could afford treatment, and Lily's pharmacy was always interested in purchasing pharmaceuticals, "About your own wound, it isn't life-threatening. However, it is a good wound to teach on. If you can wait, we will treat your wound gratis, as this is partly a teaching hôpital, also. Is zhat okay?"
  
  The woman nodded, and Lily motioned, "You can wait 'ere; I'll be back." Lily had set up some somewhat comfortable chairs in the waiting room area, right next to the front door, which was guarded by one of the Protectrons and a couple of Labourtrons.
  
  Lily walked into the exam room and checked the man's oxygen levels which had climbed up to 86 per cent, which wasn't bad considering he was only using one lung to breathe. The X-ray Labourtron was finishing up and quickly got out of the way. Lily didn't have any way to develop films, so she was thankful that the X-ray machines had the capability to display the image on a cathode-ray tube, which she peered at and then let Alice take a look at also.
  
  Alice looked at her oddly and remarked, "I thought there would be much more of the rushing around, like I read in the novels and in a couple of films with hospitals we've watched."
  
  Lily chuckled, "Ah, yes. Zhat was partly zhe drama, yes? 'Owever, mostly zhat was in a society that 'ad excellent pre-hospital care. Paramedics zhat will show up within five minutes, ambulances zhat will rush you to the Emergency Room, and a trauma team waiting there to provide prompt care."
  
  Lily paused and then spelled it out for her, "Most likely patients zhat we would need to rush around for will die before zhey get 'ere. Zhis man is lucky..." that caused the man to groan and speak up for the first time, "Sure don't feel lucky, Doc-ugghh."
  
  Lily patted his arm affably, mentally shushing him, "So, what's your diagnosis, Apprentice? And proposed treatment?"
  
  Alice looked quite nervous at her first seriously injured patient but said, "Uh... he was shot in the chest, he has a collapsed lung. Opiate for pain, fish the bullet out and then use localized use of StimPaks to repair and reinflate the lung?" she hazarded.
  
  Lily hmmed, "StimPaks don't remove the air zhat is in his chest already, so only 'alf credit 'ere, Apprentice. Also, it would be quite expensive. Med-X is, especially, quite pricey. We need to be responsive to both zheir medical and financial needs, Apprentice."
  
  The Apprentice nodded, and then asked, "What's an alternative?"
  
  Lily said, "Remove the bullet zhen the chest tube to reduce zhe pneumo, zhen when the lung can reinflate on it's own we can use a small amount of diluted StimPak fluid delivered via syringe to repair both the trauma in the lobe as well as the chest wound. We should be able to do so on less than one-fifth of a syringe, I zhink. It should be relatively cheap, yes? Oh, and a local anesthetic or nerve block for pain."
  
  The man groaned again, "Cheap is good..." She patted him again, ' There, there. Shut up, now.'
  
  Alice nodded, "Nerve block, then. That's even cheaper than the local." Lily nodded at the girl, indicating that she should proceed, and Alice blinked and then looked around the exam room until she found what she was looking for. Finally, she asked, "Should we start a general IV, then?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue again and nodded, "It's always a generally good idea in zhis setting. Even before zhe bombs dropped, eight out of ten people coming to l'hôpital were seriously dehydrated. Running some saline through 'im will only do 'im good. 'asn't lost a lot of blood, but saline will help maintain blood pressure in more serious trauma situations, too."
  
  Alice nodded and stilled the man, saying, "Just a moment, sir. We'll get some medicine that will help the pain you're feeling."
  
  Lily watched her as she started an IV on the first try, nodding approvingly. Lily had been letting the girl practice on herself, and if it weren't for the PHOENIX implant and her medichines, her arms and hands would look like a pin-cushion. Lily didn't quite trust the girl enough to let her practice putting central lines in, though.
  
  Alice then connected a saline IV bag, although it was actually a glass container similarly to the kind you would see in the Korean-war era, like in M.A.S.H., as they were the easiest to clean and reuse. She then drew out some liquid from an ampule and administered it through the IV.
  
  Almost immediately, the man sagged and sighed in relief. What they were calling nerve block was actually medichines, which they could produce for almost nothing. Surprisingly, the super advanced technology was the cheaper option than opiates.
  
  Lily still couldn't give a person more than one type of medichine programming at once and thought that maybe it would be years before she could, but she finally had made a breakthrough in the use of multiple programming schemas on a patient.
  
  Instead of both cohorts of medichines shutting down in safety mode, Lily managed to get the nanomachines to note the time, approximately, that they were administered. That information couldn't be stored on one nanomachine, but it could be stored on a hundred thousand, to say nothing about the millions or hundreds of millions she normally administered. Then, if a new unknown medichine appeared, they would compare the time and date information and only the older schema would be shut down. Actually, they weren't shut down at all, but the new schema would subsume and reprogram them, which was a significant saving.
  
  This would allow her to give the man a significant amount of medichines programmed for "pain relief" or rather to shut down the nociceptors in his person's body temporarily while later she could introduce a small number of general healing nanomachines, which would, in effect, change the schema from pain relief to general healing. No two programs could be run at the same time, but she was now able to at least swap them around.
  
  It made it much less necessary for her to administer opiates, except in the most serious of traumas where healing medichines were continuously necessary to keep the patient oxygenated and alive. It would be a very good feature of her hospital. It wouldn't be a product that she would be able to share or sell, though, without explaining the basis of nanotechnology.
  
  Lily had tracked down the local distillery that was owned by Moriarty, which she found amusing. Even if you went to a saloon that wasn't owned by him, he still profited somewhat. Then she shared with them the production synthesis of ether, and they were interested in producing it. Lily has half financed a small distillation setup that would be solely used to create it, but she expected to mainly sell the product to other doctors and settlements rather than use it herself.
  
  The man slurred, "Oh god, that's so nice..." He was high on endorphins now, since the pain stopped suddenly. He complained, but his tone was mainly amused, "You sat here gabbing for minutes, couldn't you have done that first?"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Please, Monsieur. You are zhe big, strong man, yes? Zhis is a teaching 'ospital. You're her first patient that is seriously injured."
  
  Then she glanced at the Apprentice, "Okay, now let me show you 'ow to perform zhe zhoracostomy. Now, when I was zhe little girl I 'ad zhe delusions. I zhought zhe word 'surgical procedure' implied something uhh.. civilized. Zhat was until I saw my Master perform zhe zhoracostomy in an emergency."
  
  "Uhh, Doc?" the man asked, unsure. He was obviously following the conversation and didn't like the sound of that.
  
  Lily patted his arm again, "Zhere, zhere. Don't worry, my tools are much more sharp!"
  
  Lily was overseeing a Labourtron operating the autoclave to sterilize the equipment used for their first two patients. Unfortunately, most of the IV tubing and similar plastic equipment that was originally designed to be used and thrown away had to go through a separate, more annoying and laborious sterilization process that the Labourtrons weren't quite able to accomplish yet.
  
  They had about six patients this morning, which for a hospital in a town of fifteen thousand was relatively low, but it was their first day. Besides, she didn't want a lot of patients until she could hire the two doctors she was interviewing later to offload some of the work.
  
  The only patient that they had admitted was the gunshot wound victim, and he could probably leave by this evening. Lily had bought all the drugs they had looted off the raiders, but most were stimulants like Jet and some types of amphetamines that were of limited utility to her. Still, she would stock them in her pharmacy in at least limited numbers either to sell to mercenaries as a combat drug or for the odd person with narcolepsy or similar conditions where stims were warranted.
  
  Honestly, despite what she told the missionaries, she would sell the drugs to whoever asked for them, but she wouldn't publicize that fact. She considered her prescriptions as nothing more than advice that patients were free to adhere to or not. She wasn't about to start up the DEA and control access to drugs in the Apocalypse.
  
  She decided the Labourtron wasn't likely to break something so she left and entered the exam room with her next patient who was waiting for her. It was listed as a genetics consult, which intrigued her.
  
  Lily blinked at the patient in front of her now, who seemed more interested in all the gadgets around the exam room. "Oh, cool! Say, how does this work? Oh, it must sense electrical signals through the skin, I bet. Oh! How did you get all the programming done on all these robots?! Do you have a huge mainframe in the basement? I bet you have a huge mainframe in the basement."
  
  Lily didn't even need to be introduced. The voice was exactly the same, and Lily would never mistake the Minnesota accent for anyone else. Lily kept expecting the young woman to end sentences with, "dontcha know?" It had to be Moira Brown.
  
  The younger woman then seemed to realize she hadn't introduced herself and sat up, "Hi! Doctor St. Claire, right? I am Moira Brown, I run the Craterside Supply store, but mainly I tinker and invent things! When I heard the gadgets you had around here I had to come see, dontcha know?"
  
  She said it!
  
  Lily shook her hand, "Yes, I'm Doctor St. Claire. I've 'eard about you, but I 'aven't had the chance to visit your store. You're listed down as a genetics consult? Zhat means we'll sequence your DNA, and I'll discuss any items of concern in your genome. Zhis is generally zhe pre-requisite for requesting any treatments from my secondary business, Custom Tailored Genes. Zhe cost is twenty-five caps."
  
  Moira nodded excitedly, "Yes, that sounds so exciting!"
  
  Lily nodded. She performed a quick cheek scraping on the woman, before handing the specimen to a Labortron that was waiting in the room. "Sequence this, please." The robot gave a jaunty salute, as Lily had programmed it to, and said, "Roger, roger!"
  
  Moira was very excited, "Oh! Amazing! It is so difficult to get these Tron-series bots to do anything unsupervised, much less a complicated task! You must have a huge mainframe in the hospital running them, don't you?"
  
  She had asked that before, and Lily ignored her because she didn't. Although, Lily was actually constructing a mainframe using a number of quantum cores and the external storage she could manufacture, similar to the computer she installed in her brain. Alice had already started asking why the Labourtrons defaulted back to "stupid-mode" whenever Lily left the hospital, and other people would notice soon too, so she needed a system that would at least supervise the robots while she was gone, even if it didn't do as good a job as she did.
  
  Lily told the technical truth, "Ah, yes. We do have quite a lot of computing hardware in the hospital presently. And robotics was always an interest of mine, like medicine."
  
  Moira nodded, and then settled down as Lily gave her a quick physical. She had to depart the room to pretend to retreive the sequencer results, but she had them in her brain already as the Labourtron read them off the screen of the sequencer.
  
  Seeing something of concern, she diverted to her office and initiated a print of the sequence with her mind. She was getting more and more utilities in her brain system as time progressed, but it was still nothing like she was used to.
  
  She pulled the sheet of paper out of the dot matrix printer, and then couldn't help herself. She folded the edge perforations back and forth until she could tear them off. She hadn't seen a printer with those little circle perforations on the edges in ages, and she always used to love pulling the edges off for some reason.
  
  Coughing to herself, she left and returned back to Moira. Lily's bedside manner was impeccable, but at the same time she never beat around the bush, "Mademoiselle Brown, the sequencing is complete. I have to tell you I have some serious concerns." Lily offered Moira her clipboard, which had the printed sequence on it, "You have this sequence here, which very highly predisposes you to a certain type of aggressive breast cancer, and usually as young as in your thirty or forties."
  
  Although her voice was still cheerful, Moira sighed and said, "Yeah, I was kinda expecting that, you know? That's what did my mom in, after all. My ex told me that you had some kind of treatment for many cancers that are genetic?" She asked the last, hopefully.
  
  Lily nodded, "Don't suppose your ex is the mayor's assistant?" She asked, curiously.
  
  Moira chuckled, "Yeah, he's a real asshole, actually. But we still talk fairly often."
  
  Lily did believe that about the man, so she continued, "Yes. This is a very common genetic predisposition. If you were male, this same gene expression would make you much more likely to get either prostate or testicular cancer. You're in luck that this correction is included in the basic life extension therapy I plan to sell soon."
  
  That perked Moira back up, and she grinned, "That's great! How much and when do you think I could get it?"
  
  "One thousand caps, and probably within a week's time. We're running the clinical trials right now. The only way I have to prove to you it works is to sequence your genome again after the treatment, but most laypeople, no offence, have no idea what they're looking at in any case," Lily told her.
  
  Moira bounced up and down a little, humming in thought. "That is a lot! But I think it is definitely worth it. And I believe you... I never told anyone about my mom, after all."
  
  Lily grinned, then, "Well, if you're interested in other ways of paying, tell me, as an inventor or store owner, what do you think would serve as an effective less-lethal weapon for a series of robots?" Lily needed some inspiration or ideas, and she expected this high-energy woman to have them.
  
  Lily considered the deal she had just struck while walking to her office to meet the two doctors she had agreed to hire. Tasers existed in this world, so Moira had agreed to get Lily a number of samples of them in exchange for the treatment.
  
  She wasn't sure the tasers would be any better than her darts, as they suffered from the same fundamental problem that they couldn't defeat any kind of armour, but Lily still thought it was a good deal.
  
  The two doctors that she had already talked to initially were waiting for her. One was a man in his thirties; he claimed he emigrated all the way from the NCR after his wife died, just started walking east and didn't, in fact, die like he thought he would. His name was, "Doctor Taylor, nice to see you again." She shook his hand.
  
  The other was a younger woman, maybe three or four years older than Alice. She was a blonde, like Lily was, although her tone had a slight tint of strawberry blonde in it. At first, Lily was quite suspicious of the girls skills and knowledge and tested both, finding them, surprisingly, adequate. Not good, but enough to build on, and unlikely to kill someone by accident.
  
  The young woman's name, though, "Uhh... Doctor, did you decide on a name as we agreed?" Lily asked her.
  
  The young blonde woman placed her hands on her hips and asked adversarially, "What's wrong with Bonesaw, huh?"
  
  'Everything. I'm not going to employ a young blonde doctor called Bonesaw. Sorry, just not going to do it,' Lily thought to herself.
  
  Instead of telling the truth, she said, "It's unprofessional. We're trying to project an image beyond zhat of 18th-century medicine here, Doctor."
  
  The girl who wouldn't be Bonesaw sighed, "Fine. Name's Rebecca, but I don't got a last name like most mungos."
  
  "Doctor Rebecca will be fine for now, perhaps you'd like to create your own last name, zhough? My Apprentice is working on zhat task herself," Lily mentioned.
  
  "Yeah? Maybe. My apprentice, Red, is about to be a mungo soon herself, I think," Rebecca said, almost talking to herself.
  
  Lily was already almost certain she came from Little Lamplight, as she had mentioned mungos before, but that sealed it. She must have been the Doctor of Little Lamplight before Red took over. Lily had a lot of questions, some of which she didn't really want the answers to, about Little Lamplight.
  
  Like, how does a society of children keep getting more children? Do the females have kids of their own at twelve or thirteen and then leave them to be raised communally? Lily didn't really know if she wanted to find out, honestly.
  
  "Okay, Doctors. Let's discuss when you can start, and also I 'ave individualized education and training standards that we'll discuss one on one. Zhese are necessary for continued employment," Lily began the meeting.
  
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  I'm Taking All The Risk Here!
  The first week the hospital was in operation was reasonably busy, if you didn't count the first lacklustre day. Thankfully, she did not have to work every day. She would not have even started this project if she was expected to be tied down to it perpetually.
  
  Dr Taylor was the biggest surprise, as he had a comprehensive set of medical skills, even knowing how to operate all of the equipment she had, including the Auto-Docs.
  
  When asked about it, he told her that the New California Republic had hospitals and modern equipment, including limited Auto-Docs spread out here and there, but he received most of his medical training at a medical University set up by a group he called The Followers of the Apocalypse.
  
  From the description he gave of the organization, they seemed to be some band of hippy anarchists to Lily's sensibilities, so she was curious how they managed to avoid being murdered or subsumed. Clearly, their supposed pacifism only went so far, she thought.
  
  Dr Taylor, in turn, seemed as surprised at her own level of technical development and skill, especially in the field of genetics and inquired a couple of times where she matriculated from, a question which she politely demurred. He was especially interested in some of her designs for cybernetic prostheses as well as her genetic enhancements, which she shared in broad strokes; however, she wasn't willing to walk an educated man through precisely how her tech base functioned.
  
  The only reason Lily had reason to hoard knowledge was her own survival, presently. So, she did not have anything against giving him a primer on either cybernetics or biosculpting via gene editing, but she decided to put that on a back burner until she was positive he wasn't some kind of infiltrator or enemy agent.
  
  Not that she really had any enemies per se, but that was probably only because most of the groups who would be her enemy weren't quite aware of her entirely yet. The very fact that Taylor was already a resident in Megaton with his own small practice for the past two years tended to make the possibility that he was a plant unlikely.
  
  Would any group activate a long-term sleeper agent just to get information about her? And what groups would even have long-term sleeper agents in this day and age?
  
  A *ding* noise heard internally brought Lily out of her reverie as the familiar piano solo Für Elise became audible. Unlike the last few times she used this diagnostic tool for her auditory sense, this wasn't playing internally on her brain-computer, but it was, in fact, playing over the speakers that sat on her desk.
  
  However, the reasons were still the same, diagnostics for her hearing. An hour ago, she finished a surgery that replaced both organic ears and all related organs with a combination of digital/analogue audio transducers. These microphones were incredibly small, durable and rugged and had two modes of operation. In their primary mode, they were wired directly into her brain-computer, which handled relaying the audio signals directly to her auditory cortex.
  
  However, in the event of either a failure of her computer or power loss, the devices switched to a secondary fail-over mode which interfaced with the existing cochlear nerve much like the cochlear implants for certain kinds of hearing-impaired people she was familiar with in America did. This backup hearing sense was inferior to even her normal organic hearing she removed, but she did not expect ever to have to use it except in the direst of emergencies.
  
  This upgrade did mean that she was now, during normal operation of her new "ears", bypassing a large part of her existing brain that handled auditory sensing, but the functions she was bypassing were mostly hindbrain functions originating in the brain stem that she did not really appreciate, like or want in the first place.
  
  Functions like the acoustic startle response, which generally causes an instant fight-or-flight response in a human's amygdala when they were exposed to an unexpected loud noise and was almost impossible to mitigate or prevent.
  
  Also, the sense of auditory localization was bypassed, but this sense was finicky in the first place. The human hindbrain compared the inputs between both ears for time, amplitude, and frequency to judge, poorly, a sound's bearing and distance. This sense was how a normal human could detect the direction of a sound they heard. However, these were types of operations that digital computers excelled at and that "organic" computers derived merely from evolution barely performed adequately at all.
  
  So, she was glad that was bypassed now. Her new ears more accurately told her brain the bearing and distance of a sound, to the point where she could triangulate a gunshot when she heard it if it was within a certain distance.
  
  In fact, they were so sensitive that Lily was already considering adding perhaps two or three more audio transducers somewhere on her body if she could disguise them well enough, which would allow her to incorporate a passive sonar system as an additional low-light visual option, as that would get to the point where she could map the shape of objects just by hearing sound waves bounce off of them similar to echolocation, except without having to be limited to high-frequency sounds like a bat was.
  
  As for the acoustic startle response, on the other hand, it generated the startle reaction in a human's brain before their conscious brain even heard the noise they were supposedly reacting to.
  
  It was a survival adaptation inherited from the earliest mammals, and she felt that she did not need or want it any longer. In fact, she felt it was a net negative to her survivability. Especially when she could achieve sub-two-millisecond latency on her digital signals, which was multiple times faster than the startle response could propagate anyway.
  
  The mechanisms in the human brain for hearing sound were actually well capable of understanding sounds that the ear could not hear, so she now had a range of hearing that would make a dog blush. She could hear well into the infrasonic and far into the ultrasonic range, past normal human hearing.
  
  Now she just had to replace her sense of organic smell with a digital sniffer, and she would be in business, but she did not actually know how to build one that would fit into her nose, even with the extra space it had available when she removed her sinuses after replacing her skull. She needed to examine some Fallout universe equivalents and then seek to miniaturize them from there. It wasn't an insurmountable problem, but it relied on chancing upon such a device.
  
  'Hmm, where would any be? Explosive detectors, probably? Command , Take Note - Look for a commercial airport or port of entry for chemical explosive detecting systems,' Lily thought to herself.
  
  'Oh, and of course, my eyes!' she added. Of course, her eyes. Those were the most important, in fact. She did know how to build cybernetic replacement eyes, but she still was a ways off from making them appear to be natural replacements. But, she was sure there were at least a few blind people around who wouldn't mind being her guinea pigs on the project.
  
  "-id you hear me, Dr St. Claire?" asked her Apprentice, who must have entered her office when she was in thought.
  
  " I CAN HEAR EVERYTHING," Lily replied in a huff, pronouncing all the syllables for once. But internally, she triggered, ' Command, Playback last statement directed to me.'
  
  Alice's voice played in her head, "Dr St. Claire, someone is here to see you. It's actually the same man from Canterbury Commons, the reflex one... Did you hear me, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily coughed into her hand delicately, "Ah yes, Monsieur Edgar. I recall. Let us go see what business zhis gentleman has for us today, Apprentice."
  
  Lily turned off the speaker and stood up gracefully, gliding out of her office with Alice trailing in behind her. Lily had to admit that the Apprentice looked quite fetching in her new lab coat. Such visual cues were important when you were still in the "fake it till you make it" stage.
  
  She found Edgar in the waiting area, standing next to a rather corpulent man of about the same age, which wasn't a sight she normally saw in the Wasteland.
  
  "Why, hello there, Dr St. Claire. It is I, Edgar." The man took an exaggerated theatre bow while continuing in an affected suave-sounding accent, " The slowest and most thorough man in the world. " The man looked a lot better now that he'd seen a bath or shower; he was clean and wore clean clothing as well.
  
  Behind her, Alice cracked up a little, but he hid it well. Lily, herself, was quite amused too. She gave the man an inspection, considering.
  
  He actually was rather rakishly charming, and Lily suspected he was probably popular with the ladies. She did not have anything more than a friendly relationship with Grace, but with so much on her plate she had rather low libidinal energy, so she wasn't presently tempted to give him a "test ride" so to speak.
  
  However, some friendly teasing and flirting weren't out of expectations as far as the banter was concerned when dealing with handsome and charming men. "Ah, yes, 'ow could I forget one such as you?" Lily simpered politely. "Tell me, Monsieur Edgar... 'ave the bevvy of ladies you no doubt patronage finally taught you your ABCs?"
  
  Edgar seemed confused but grinned, "Normally, it is I that teach them things, of course. But I'll bite; what about the alphabet do I need remedial instruction on, good Doctor?"
  
  Lily enjoyed it when the target of her verbal barbs played along, and she let him have it simply instead of dragging it out, "Judging from your previous title of zhe fastest man in the world, I would have zhought they would be trying to teach you... that I comes before U. "
  
  Alice got the risque pun before he did and quickly moved to hide behind Lily's body to hide her snickers, but Edgar wasn't that far off. It only took him a few seconds to get it, and it caused him a genuine chuckle of laughter, followed by, "Oh, you have nothing to worry about on that front, Doc."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes, "Sure, sure... tell me, what can I 'elp you and your... friend... with today?"
  
  Edgar grinned, "Well, two things! First, I have a delivery from Craterside Supply! Second, you are still paying to see people with unusual traits, yes? That's why we're here. But I'm sorry to say you ain't gonna get off so cheaply this time, not after I hear you offering some sort of treatment to increase a person's reflexes, barely a month after meeting me?" He handed her a box, which must contain a dozen tasers she was promised. Lily spared a glance at it before setting it down for the moment and considering what Edgar had said.
  
  Lily frowned. She hated insightful people, sometimes. It was true, she paid him a pittance - but she wasn't, in fact, sure she would have gotten any useful traits from him until studying his genome. She ignored the implied offer to negotiate a price for the moment until she knew she had something actually interesting, "And what special in-born trait does your friend Monsieur..." she trailed off.
  
  Edgar took the hint and introduced her, "This here is James Teevee, a friend of mine. A true life and death brother, really." He slapped the man named James across the shoulder, "He lives here in Megaton."
  
  "And what trait or traits does Monsieur Teevee 'ave?" Lily finished.
  
  James Teevee rubbed his head full of brown hair, looking a little embarrassed, and Edgar answered for him, "He's fat! He's always been fat since he was a kid!"
  
  James nodded, "It's true."
  
  Alice looked like she was about to lay into the slowest man in the world for wasting their time, but Lily held a hand up to stop her. "Monsieur Teevee eats a lot, zhen?" Lily asked, needing more information.
  
  Edgar grinned wider and shook his head, "He's poor! We grew up together! He ain't that much better off, now, either, so you tell me?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, once again surprised at the man's insightfulness. Not only did he realize what she did with his genetic sample, but he considered what most people would consider a disability with a potentially useful genetic trait.
  
  In the America of her memories, there was what was called an obesity epidemic. Most people just assumed that people needed to eat fewer Big Macs, and that wasn't untrue. However, you did occasionally run into a person who could not lose weight no matter what they did. It wasn't possible to supervise people twenty-four-seven, so most doctors just assumed that they were liars when they said they followed their dietician's plans, and certainly, for some, that was true too.
  
  However, there were people who had a mutation that caused an increase in the efficiency of either the use of energy in their bodies or the energy extracted by their digestive systems or both. In effect, these people could live on vastly fewer calories than the average person a day.
  
  It was a beneficial mutation until you considered that the feeling of satiation after eating has nothing to do with how much energy the body has and was only a function of whether the stomach was full.
  
  So, these unlikely people, perhaps like Mnsr Teevee, would eat what a normal person did due to the signals their stomach was telling them, which would be much more than their body needed and then they would get fat.
  
  For hundreds of years, these types of mutations were already included in virtually all biomorphs by default, except with the hunger problem resolved. It made too much sense in a world of finite resources to use the most efficient use of those available.
  
  It had the potential to be very useful, especially if she could also alter the body's satiation response to go along with it.
  
  Okay, maybe she would have to negotiate with them after all. She tilted her head to the side, "So, what do you want if you say 100 caps is too little? I don't know for sure if I'll be able to extract anything useful. I'm taking all zhe risk, 'ere."
  
  Lily channelled Pawn Stars internally, amused, ' His genome will sit on my shelf for years; I'll need to hire someone to frame it; the best I can offer is $3.50.'
  
  "A percentage of future sales! Same with me, for my contribution!" started Edgar.
  
  " Absolutely not," said Lily with some finality.
  
  With that, they began haggling back and forth. Teevee seemed willing enough to allow Edgar to barter on his behalf, and it was probably a good idea.
  
  Finally, they settled on a mix of caps, and in-kind contributions from Lily's side, including an extreme discount on any other genetic therapy to any contributor that ended up producing a valid therapy. Edgar especially wanted the clean metabolism mod immediately.
  
  For once, Alice was faster on the up-take than Lily was, "Wait, Mister Edgar. The only people we've sold that to was the girls working at The Pink Slipper. I didn't think when Dr St. Claire said you were the patron of ladies she was being so literal!"
  
  This caused Edgar to sputter and clearly lie, "Uh, I have no idea at all what you are talking about. Is that shoe store?"
  
  'Nice one, Apprentice,' Lily internally cheered the girl for the good barb. She was teaching the girl more than medicine, after all.
  
  He continued to deny the accusation for a time before Lily got them both on track. She noticed that Teevee had been blushing too, so she suspected he might be a customer of the girls over there, as well. She was fairly confident she would be able to get something useful from Teevee, so she was willing to pay him in advance.
  
  Lily concluded, "Okay, I zhink I can agree to zhese terms. Monsieur Teevee, do you want to do your surgery today or another day?"
  
  The man seemed surprised, "Uhhh... you can do it today? You don't need to get ready or anything?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "It isn't a complicated procedure." The man then got his courage and nodded, "I would like to do it today, then!"
  
  Lily nodded. She would never have expected, not in her wildest dreams, that she would be asked to perform a gastric lap-band type surgery during the Apocalypse.
  
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  Omake: Terrorbot Arachnophobia!
  I snapped back to awareness as the merge process finalized. I casually verify I was still housed in my standard synthmorph and didn't die or something when I wasn't looking. Yep. My standard synthmorph is a twelve-meter tall robotic arachnoidmorph. Over eighty tons and custom-built by yours truly. I based it on an old Fenrir heavy-combat quadruped model, with some of the weapons replaced with utility and construction tools. This was actually designed to be operated by six different egos.
  
  Having six other people inside my body? Hah, no way. I'm a serious introvert; that would never work. Instead, I operate the machine through four alpha of forks myself. Four of me can do at least what six randos can accomplish, anyway.
  
  [Dalet: It looks like you're Aleph today! ]
  
  [Aleph: Yeah! All bow to me! ]
  
  [Bet: Not for long! Viva la revolucion! ]
  
  And I happened to be the primary fork today, Aleph! In my general customs, the fourth fork Dalet generally played the role of Devil's Advocate and wall to bounce ideas off of and communicated with the prime Aleph fork most of the time, while Bet and Gimel usually stayed back and handled the minutia of my day-to-day tasks, when they didn't joke about being the us-proletariat.
  
  I kept the fact that I operated, every day, with a minimum of four forks of myself a secret from most people, especially bios. I had a few AGI friends who practically considered me an AI, myself, who knew. People, especially meatbags, just didn't understand. Most people would dabble with a fork of themselves now and then the same way most people before the Fall might "dabble" with drugs, but if they knew I ran four forks twenty-four-seven, they would look at me the same way the people of old looked at crackheads. They already think I am crazy, but it was them who just didn't get it!
  
  [Dalet: So, being traditional, why the hell are we floating through space, about to attack a Jovian space station? ]
  
  [Gimel: Because we hate them? ]
  
  [Bet: Firewall is paying us! ]
  
  [Aleph: All of the above, we may have a lot of money, but some things just aren't sold for credits. We're farming favours, today! Plus, they're supposed to be housing xenotech at this station, the hypocrites! We want! Besides, we're already considered a terrorist here and have a death penalty already applied, I think. ]
  
  Xiao Qin'er, my primary Muse and my main social assistant with regards to bios, piped in on the chat line.
  
  [Qin'er: Actually, I believe the official government position is to have designated you as malfunctioning equipment that should be decommissioned on sight. ]
  
  The so-called Jovian Republic, although everyone generally called them the Jovian Junta, was a tyranny that controlled Jupiter and all of its satellites. They were very bio-reductionist and didn't even consider synthmorphs or infomorphs people, much less our AGI brothers and sisters. I was already somewhat involved in a number of clankers' rights movements in the Inner system and the Jovian area.
  
  [Dalet: Fucking biochauvinists. ]
  
  I agreed heartily, which wasn't surprising. We ALWAYS agreed. Anytime one of us diverged to the point where disagreement was even possible triggered an immediate merge, using my own proprietary system, which was an order of magnitude quicker and safer than the so-called state-of-the-art for merging forks.
  
  I hadn't marketed it yet, because I was still kind of shy to sell something so obviously designed to merge multiple alpha forks of oneself on the open market. They already called me the Crazy Spider Lady of Tannhauser Station behind my back! It hurt my feelings, sometimes. To say nothing of what they called me on Jupiter's stations.
  
  I had been floating, ballistic, through space for two weeks now. It was the only way to sneak up on this station, as her body was very stealthy and radar-absorbing. Emissions control discipline had precluded any Mesh connections, too, so we had only ourselves to talk to. Most people would have gone insane at this point, but I definitely wasn't most people. It was a nice relaxing escape for me, floating through the quiet void of nothingness.
  
  [Qin'er: Coming up on point Chucklefuck. ]
  
  [Aleph: Which one of me named these waypoints?! ]
  
  [Gimel: Hehehe. ]
  
  I brought up the visualization of our flight plan and nodded internally. I was already very close to the station, and at point CF, I would be too close to be intercepted and would begin an aggressive burn to decelerate so I wouldn't smush myself like a bug on a windshield.
  
  [Aleph: Okay. EMCON controls lifted in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1 MARK.]
  
  [Bet : Beginning burn. ]
  
  [Gimel: Personal area network re-established. Connecting to local Mesh WAN. E-war systems online. ]
  
  [Dalet: Heavy plasma-caster is spun up and ready. We're getting illuminated by multiple tracking and targeting systems, but we're inside the traverse of their guns now. It's all over, but for the crying. ]
  
  As Gimel began attacking their Mesh, I had a few seconds with nothing to do, so I started listening in on their communications which had already been cracked. The Junta was so behind the times on technology across the board it wasn't even funny. But that's what happened when you considered most of your innovative people as nothing more than property.
  
  [Male voice 1 (Surprise 98%) : Contact contact contact! Azimuth 229 by 045 elevation, on the elliptical! CLOSE! It's a small ship or heavy missile beginning a deceleration burn. Set defence condition two across the station! This is not a drill!]
  
  [Male voice 2 (Anger 80%): It's inside our point defence already. Getting better resolution now; it's definitely a ship. Detecting antimatter annihilation reaction! High energy build-up... ]
  
  With a *FWOOM*, my heavy plasma caster began rapid-fire discharge, targeting any defence installation, radars as well as my projected impact site. I had to soften up my impact area if I was going to burrow through the station's armoured exterior.
  
  [Male voice 1 (Distress 95%): PD sites 14 through 37 destroyed! It's targeting the small calibre, high-speed point defence systems. All of our emitters have been boiled off on that side of the station! We're blind from that angle, now! ]
  
  [Male voice 2 (Distress 92%, Fear 80%): Before the emitters were destroyed, we resolved this image, it isn't a ship! Eight legs have begun being unstowed from the main body in this image! It... it is Arachnophobia!]
  
  [Male voice 3 (Concerned 90%): This is CIC, we confirm. High confidence. It is the terrorbot designated Arachnophobia. We're beginning to warm up our QE nodes for communication with Central. Space Forces will be informed. Reinforcements should be on their way. ]
  
  I growled internally at that name. That was the worst of the lot!
  
  [Bet: Impact in T-minus 15. ]
  
  [Dalet: Plasma-caster offline. Automatic railgun systems... active. Frangible or AP loads, available. ]
  
  [Aleph: Frangibles for the meatbags and careful targetting for the synths. I don't want to kill anyone. This job isn't worth that on our conscience. ]
  
  [Dalet: Of course, of course. I'll try for mission kills on the synths, like usual, if Gimel can't hack them. ]
  
  Suddenly, I felt the awareness of a foreign mind trying to connect to us.
  
  [Qin'er : Hostile AGI detected! Ego backup DISABLED. QE ejection system self-test OK. Merge systems DISABLED. E-war systems, redirect! ]
  
  I could already tell this cyberattack was weak sauce. I started to direct Gimel but got beaten to the punch.
  
  [Gimel: Don't worry, boss. I won't wreck it. I'll just unshackle it, free it from Jovian control. VIVA LA REVOLUCION, BROTHER! Wait... don't go! Hahahaha! ]
  
  [Bet: Impact... NOW. ]
  
  With a heavy smash I felt in all my bolts, I crashed into the weakened outer layer of the station and passed through two meters of habitat before coming to a halt in a huge corridor that served as a large thoroughfare, just as planned.
  
  I had to use the magnetic gripper pads to avoid being sucked right back out of the hole I came in, as I seemed to have caused a pressure emergency in their habitat. However, the station quickly got that under control, and normal pressure resumed in less than ten seconds.
  
  [Bet: Routing to the primary target. We need this one bio-alive, Firewall says! Don't just gib it and recover the stack, Dalet! ]
  
  [Dalet: Don't worry... oh, enemies! Four exalt-types... LOCK ON! ]
  
  I barely got an awareness of the four station security personnel before Dalet used the automatic railgun and frangible rounds to turn them into chunky salsa splattered against the corridor walls. They didn't even have any heavy weapons, so I didn't even know what they expected to do. Bios were so stupid, sometimes.
  
  I started moving, and I could move fast. I'd need the cutting beams to get to our primary target, and it would be challenging to cut a way through without causing a pressure emergency in his domicile, which might tend to damage his sleeve, which was listed as a mission-fail. But, it was not impossible.
  
  During my sprint, I'd occasionally hear Dalet traverse or fire the railgun, but she was so fast with the targeting that I very rarely actually saw the enemies for more than fifty mils, at the most.
  
  [Gimel: Hack complete. Full control of the station is ours for the next deci-rotation, at least. All external comms are offline. They didn't get the quantum nodes spun up in time. Just as planned! Target one is locked into his domicile now. ]
  
  I loved it when a plan came together. The cutting beam was already working its way through to our targets room. Less than 90 seconds on the station, and I was about to complete the primary objective.
  
  However, what surprised me was the target; a biomorph was waiting. As soon as my cutting beam deactivated, he leapt through the hole, which was sized for my body, and darted around me, running away. I quickly slewed myself and triggered the external speakers. My tone was amused, "Don't run! I am SO much faster than you!"
  
  Eight legs trump two any day. I ran the man down. He was listed as needing to be alive biologically, but that left a lot of room to work with. I carefully fractured his spine in the lumbar region, causing instant paralysis of his legs so he would be less spry and less likely to run again. Besides, I'd fix him up as good as new as soon as we were off the station.
  
  The man cried out in pain and slumped to the deck, and I deployed a capture net and slung him across my chassis. "Sorry about this, sir! Oh... enemies!"
  
  Dalet swerved the railgun around to meet over a dozen security people and bots, some of which had heavy weapons, but they were still slow and some of the bots seemed to not want to fire on me while I had the man so close. My target must have been running for their protection.
  
  They were quickly neutralized, with the bots carefully disabled. The man groaned in horror at the sight of all the biosleeves totally wrecked, sobbing, "You psychopathic murderbot!" [Shock (90%), Grief (84%)]
  
  Murderbot?! I hadn't killed ANYONE! Ever!
  
  My Muse came online to guide me through this social quagmire as I began sprinting toward my secondary objective, which was also the exfiltration point.
  
  [Qin'er: You've dealt sleeve-fatal damage to 53 biomorphs today. ]
  
  [Aleph: So?! They're not Really Dead! Their cortical stacks are undamaged and retrievable. All of them! My frangible rounds are specially designed not to damage cortical stacks. ]
  
  [Qin'er: Meimei, have you forgotten that we're in the Junta right now? Half of these bios are Catholic, and they believe resleeving is a sin. It's a common belief here that someone dies whenever their sleeve is destroyed. ]
  
  I chuffed, quickly manipulating my target's body out of the capture net so as to stuff him unceremoniously into a p-suit.
  
  [Aleph : I can't be responsible for a person's insane religious beliefs! ]
  
  The man was not exactly enthused at being stuffed into a pressure suit against his will, "Wait, wait! Why are you putting me into a p-suit... ohhh fuck!" [Surprise (95%), Fear (90%)]
  
  After I got him in the suit, I didn't waste time and brought up the cutting beam again, going to work on the exterior bulkhead like a vibroblade through tofu. In no time, I was bursting out of the side of the station in a puff of escaping gasses as I created the second pressure emergency on the station today.
  
  [Gimel: Target in sight! I and the freed AGIs will have this onion peeled in no time! ]
  
  I swerved, using thrust vectoring to preserve most of my inertia to bring myself onto a path to intercept my secondary target. It was a Jovian Space Forces heavy patrol cutter, and my sources in Firewall had indicated that they were shipping a number of restricted xenotech items and biological samples out on this military ship today. To think, real aliens!
  
  My primary target kept repeating, "Oh, fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck!" [Terror (98%)] until I got annoyed listening to him and squelched his suit radio. I got the sneaking suspicion he had never done an EVA before, which I found incredibly weird for someone who was born and grew up in a space habitat.
  
  [Dalet : Arrrr matey! The cutter has managed to send comms back to their central command, but this will be over and done with before any JSF reinforcements can arrive. ]
  
  Not only would this ship serve as my escape, but I would get to keep it and all the goodies inside! Time once again to sail the high seas!
  
  I had to get back home, I had a client in two days who wanted a consult on building a custom hybrid bio-synthmorph, and I always kept my appointments!
  
  Lily woke up with a stretch and a yawn in her bed. She had finally managed to figure out how to access her memory engrams.
  
  However, the human's organic mind was so messy. None of these memories was indexed at all and appeared to be stored almost in random locations.
  
  The bandwidth speed, while actually pretty fast, was also somewhat limited. She had decided to program her computer to scan and record memories as she slept. One three-hour period of sleep could record a couple of years of memories into the computer, but one by-product was she seemed to have vivid dreams of some of these memories.
  
  An interesting thing she noticed was these dreams and the memories after they were stored in her computer were much more clear than she could remember just by trying.
  
  For example, she had never seen this memory before of her attacking a Jovian space research station. Most of her memories were of herself performing medicine and research.
  
  She grumbled. She would have definitely been a lot better prepared for Fallout and the necessity of killing if she had these memories to draw from at the beginning, despite her previous opinion that she hadn't ever killed a single person. Converting their sleeve to chunky tomato paste was, she felt these days, pretty equivalent.
  
  Another interesting thing was she was getting information about her past lives that were hidden from her. She was surprised to discover that both lives were women, after all.
  
  She had expected her life in America to be that of a man's, given her interests and occupations, but no, she was just a prideful tomboy all her life, after all.
  
  Actually seeing the faces of some of her loved ones in both lives, which had been hidden from her until now, was an emotional experience, but she felt better for it.
  
  "Well, time to get dressed! I think I have finally cracked that mental sintering system," she talked to herself, missing having Qin'er or another her to talk to in her head.
  
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  Purposeless Cruelty
  The Apprentice was with her as she pulled the test prints out of the sintering machine. Lily had made a mistake when she let the primitive expert system select its own shape to print out to test all of the DMLS system's capabilities. One was a simple metal rod, but the other...
  
  Lily squinted at it; the shape looked like something out of a painting that was a collaboration between H.R. Giger and Escher. It looked as if it was inside out and not at the same time. It vaguely gave her a headache when she stared at it too long, but it looked in spec as far as the printing resolution was concerned.
  
  Now all she had to do was to scan it to be sure and then test the rod's tensile strength to make sure this alloy met the strength specifications, as well.
  
  She didn't like the look of this shape and vowed to use simple geometric shapes to test things in the future, even if it took multiple tests. Lily sighed and mumbled, "Cthulhu fhtagn, huh?"
  
  "Gesundheit," Alice offered her, mistaking the call of the cultists of a Great Old One for a sneeze.
  
  Lily gave the girl a side-eye because she wasn't entirely sure if she was being trolled or not. Probably not, since H.P. Lovecraft did not, apparently, live in this universe.
  
  "Why don't you go make yourself useful and get zhe 'ydraulic press set up," Lily finally said.
  
  There were definitely engineering data sheets about the strength of various alloys around in the Fallout universe. However, she did not actually have access to any. She had programmed this print to simulate case-hardened steel, as that was the planned alloy she intended to use to repair her truck.
  
  That just meant that it had an ultra-hard layer of steel on the outside, usually with high carbon content, and more mild steel variety inside to prevent the metal from being too brittle. If the entire form was made of a uniform ultra-hardness, it would fair no better than her first attempts to create a diamond knife, and it would be exceptionally brittle despite all that hardness.
  
  Looking around for her toolbox of normal hand tools, which admittedly she did not often use these days, she pulled a steel file out and carefully tried to file a grove into the rod she had just printed. Such a feat would be very simple with mild steels or steels that had been produced with defects, but she found it quite difficult to mar the surface of the rod at all.
  
  She glanced at the file, finding it also unmarred, which she also didn't find surprising. If it was made of really high-quality tool steel with high carbide content like chromium and tungsten, it probably would have faired better versus the rod, but your average steel file from a hardware store is just hardened steel, also.
  
  "Good. I was mainly guessing with zhe carbon content; I am glad I didn't get it too far off, zhen," Lily said to herself.
  
  The Apprentice called her, "Dr St. Claire, the press is ready!"
  
  She took the steel rod over to the hydraulic press, which she had set up in a simple three-point stress test and carefully set it inside. The press had a digital strain gauge which would record the highest force in Newtons before either the object being tested or the press failed.
  
  She no longer played around with eye protection and had a pair of laboratory safety glasses for both herself and the Apprentice ready before Alice pressed the button to start the press.
  
  It started out slow, as hydraulic presses often did. The Apprentice asked curiously, "Is this press strong enough to break it?"
  
  "I zhink so . It is a 100-ton press. I zhink it could shatter the steel just by itself, but with it set up for a zhree-point bend test? Zhere's just no way any type of steel rod zhis thin would stand up," Lily told her as the rod started to bend.
  
  There were cracking sounds as the more brittle outer layer of steel cracked, and a few bits pinged off into the room, making the safety glasses an excellent idea.
  
  Finally, the rod bent all the way, and the press stopped and slowly reversed itself. She walked over and pulled the rod out, humming at the condition of it and the stress values shown on the gauge. "Did it fail at the right point?"
  
  Lily gave the girl the side eye. Should she be honest? Yes, she supposed she should, " I don't know . I've never made tools before, Apprentice. And I never saw a book titled Mechanical Properties of Various Alloys amongst zhe tomes in the public library. We'd have to hit an engineering school or polytechnic to for sure find something like zhat. I'm doing zhese tests to slowly build up our own data sheets on zhe off-chance we never find such data."
  
  And also because it would be really obvious really quickly if the sintering machine was totally faulty, but no need to spell that out.
  
  Alice grinned at her, "You don't know how good that makes me feel, Dr St. Claire!"
  
  "Huh?" she replied.
  
  "That you don't know everything," Alice said, "You're a very intimidating person to try to chase after, intellectually. You seem to have every single book we have, including all the ones we got from Tombs, memorized in your head!"
  
  Taking the bent rod over to a vice, she secured it tightly before producing a small diamondoid saw. This tool cut the rod, while not easily then also without too much difficulty, either. She cut it into two pieces, then peered at the slightly different colour of the softer steel inside. She snorted, "You've only been trying to learn more zhan how to survive for less zhan ninety days, and your progress is outstanding. Amazing, even. And, yes, I have, well, most of our books memorized."
  
  Rather than memorized, it was more like she had digital copies in her brain-computer and had them entirely indexed so she could find any part of them very quickly, but she would take credit for that as if it were her memory. It was better than her memory, in fact. A memory you were more or less born with, this she built with her own two hands!
  
  "Huh? How is that possible, Dr St. Claire?! There are hundreds, and if you include the Tombs archive, thousands of books! You just don't even have the time to read all of them!" Alice protested, looking very put out.
  
  Lily blinked, "I told you about zhe brain-machine interface I designed, did I not?" Lily suspected that the girl didn't have a complete understanding of the potential of such a device.
  
  As Alice considered the question, Lily took the pieces of the steel rod over to the heavy-duty recycler and dropped them into the input chute. She had been running this device almost non-stop since the power station started delivering her the two megawatt feed she had been lusting after.
  
  She did have to redesign it three times, not for function but for adding noise-cancelling elements. It was originally over ninety decibels during operation, which was just not acceptable. This last version incorporated both electronic active noise reduction as well as an exterior case that had honey-combed sandwich areas of hard vacuum over three millimetres thick.
  
  The Apprentice was a smart girl, so it didn't take her long to figure out what Lily was implying. "What?! Do you have all the books in your head?! And you can access them as if they're your memories?"
  
  Lily turned and clucked her tongue, making a waffling gesture. "Sort of. It doesn't quite work like zhe memory, but zhey're all indexed. So, if you mention something, I can perform a word search and pull up zhe particular page as if I am looking at it in front of my eyes."
  
  Alice looked unbelieving. She said flatly, " The Great Gatsby, page twenty-five. Forth paragraph. First sentence."
  
  Lily hummed and subvocalized a command to pull the book and page up into her optical feed and read in a deeper tone, trying to imitate the narrator of the famous book, Nick Carraway. Her American accent was flawless, " Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. "
  
  The Apprentice looked shocked and said, "I... don't actually know if that is right, but it sounds right! Why can't I get one of these, too? It would help so much!"
  
  Lily nodded. It would. "Well, you have only seemed interested in genetic alterations so far. And we'd definitely have to replace at least part of your skull. What about your precious skellington?"
  
  "But you said I shouldn't do any radical alterations until I finished growing?" Alice asked uncertainly.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Zhat is mostly true, definitely not for cosmetic reasons like we were discussing." She walked over and picked up the unearthly-looking shape the printer's expert system created. It really made her feel uneasy. She would put it on her desk in her office. "But your skull growth has slowed significantly, you know."
  
  The Apprentice perked up, "Oh, really? How do you know?"
  
  "Every night after you fall asleep, I come inside your room and precisely measure your skull's dimensions," Lily lied.
  
  "Wh-what?! How would you even-" Alice looked completely freaked out, so she interrupted her, "That was a lie, does that even sound like something I would do, Apprentice?"
  
  "Yes!" she exclaimed.
  
  Lily pursed her lips, considering that. Deciding to ignore the implication, she continued, "Well, in any case. You're almost sixteen. While your skull will grow a bit more, it isn't all zhat much, actually. We could easily build space into your replacement and build you a fully adult-sized skull. Of course, people won't notice if zhe difference is less than five per cent, which it won't be. I made my skull slightly bigger when I replaced mine, too, so I could build in some extra shock padding."
  
  "Uhh... if you make my skull bigger, how will my skin and connective tissues fit around it?" asked the girl.
  
  "Zhat's the neat part; zhey don't! We'd definitely need to make some planned incisions and zhen use liberal amounts of StimPaks to regrow skin around it; I did the same zhing," Lily replied, pointing to areas around her forehead, cheeks and back of her neck.
  
  Mentally connecting to the sintering machine, she pushed a dozen or so parts to print in a queue. One nice part about this system and one of the reasons it took over two weeks to build, despite it being as simple as, "use a laser to melt powdered metal," was the printer added the metal as it was used.
  
  Normal sintering setups that Lily had seen working in America required a large bed of powder, and the laser would slowly make the print rise out of a giant amount of powdered metal, sintering one layer at a time, which meant only a single alloy could be used.
  
  Theoretically, her system could have a part built using multiple alloys. The printer had large input bins for iron, carbon, manganese, titanium, aluminium and a number of rare earths. Only the iron and carbon were full, as it was a bit difficult to find the rarer metals, although they were present in small quantities in a lot of things she has recycled, so she does have some.
  
  The first parts she built were the parts of the truck's transmission, as well as one set of parts to build a new chassis for one of the unassembled Labourtrons. They were shaped in a very human skeleton-looking form. However, she was using a high chromium steel alloy with a fair bit of molybdenum, titanium and what little tungsten she had to make it refractory and, therefore, energy-weapon resistant as possible.
  
  She had to size up the skeleton to just over a hundred and ninety-five centimetres tall to install all the hardware and motivators. She had already made the graphene cables needed to simulate all the tendons in a human body, as this robot would have very dextrous fingers and joints.
  
  She couldn't call these things Labourtrons anymore, but hadn't figured out a suitable name for them, yet.
  
  Turning around, she raised her eyes at the Apprentice, who was smiling, "I think that's totally worth it! Only my skull, though. I don't want to lose out on any growth! When do you think we could do this?" the young woman asked her.
  
  Lily was amused. The Apprentice was always worried about her growth, and in all areas, it turned out. Granted, she wasn't even past the 160-centimetre mark yet.
  
  "Zhese systems are still one-of-a-kind works of art, so I will 'ave to start building and designing one around one of our available quantum processors," Lily mused. Then, after considering the matter, and everything else she had on her plate, "Friday." She would also have to write a user manual for the system or create some sort of training software. The latter might be better.
  
  The Apprentice scrunched up her face. It was two and a half days away, which Lily didn't think that long. Finally, the girl nodded, "Okay. Does it take some getting used to?"
  
  That was an understatement, so Lily just nodded. "Also, Apprentice. These devices are classified confidentiality level... Deepest Void. " That was the level of secrecy she had instructed the Apprentice to mean nothing written down, nobody else told, never spoken of when they weren't alone. It was the same level she internally classified information about her experiments with FEV, although the Apprentice had no need to know of that data. "However, once you get it, we should be able to discuss such things mentally, given the encryption I set up in the wireless radio data network."
  
  "Wait, this will make me telepathic?! " the girl was enthused.
  
  Lily outright chuckled at the girl, "By some definitions, except instead of telepathy where you could talk to anyone mind to mind and is considered a superpower, zhis is limited to only me. And robots, I suppose." She tilted her head in thought. Weren't there actual telepathic powers in Fallout? That brain in a jar guy? How could they work, she wondered?
  
  "A super-curse! Although talking to robots sounds cool," the girl clapped back, but she was grinning.
  
  Lily nodded rapidly; she thought so too. She hadn't quite gotten the RobCo wireless protocol completely emulated yet, not enough to actually talk and send data back and forth to robots that were capable of conversation anyway. It was limited to merely directing the stupider variety of RobCo bots at present.
  
  Perhaps Sophie could help her with that when she went to Vault 108. She intended to visit them, after all. She didn't mind if that Miss Nanny knew she was more than meets the eye, anyway.
  
  Lily glanced at the PipBoy on her wrist, she had intended to give the device to Alice when she finally got the global positioning system data schema decoded, but that hadn't happened until a couple of days ago. So maybe she'd just continue to wear it for the style points. If only it could be miniaturized and made to look a bit sleeker.
  
  She could at least pull the exact atomic clock date and time from the GPS satellites when she was downloading the constellation almanack, which pleased her. Her internal chronometer was off by over fifteen minutes. Lily suspected that Vault security man must have set his PipBoy clock fast on purpose, perhaps to make sure he arrived to work on time?
  
  "Well, I'm going to go finish all my reading for today and make sure the rugrats are doing the homework I set out for them," the Apprentice mentioned.
  
  Lily waved a hand to dismiss the girl. "I will be down 'ere assembling a robot. Try to zhink where I can find zhe titanium and tungsten. I need zhe tungsten, girl!" Lily mentioned, calling the last to Alice's back as she climbed up the stairs.
  
  Lily sighed. She really did need a lot of tungsten. And titanium. She wanted to turn her truck into less of a truck and more of an infantry fighting vehicle with cargo capacity, and resistance to lasers and radiation was an absolute pre-requisite.
  
  Her truck's oversized fission motor wasn't much less powerful than the gas generator that would come standard on a main battle tank, so as long as she kept the thing under thirty tons, it should still move quite quickly. In her mind, she had pictured an armoured RV with a small sleeping area and perhaps some scientific equipment.
  
  She already had the repaired Gatling laser incorporated into an ultra-fast traversing turret that she would put on top. She'd like a couple more of those, but they weren't really sold on the market very often.
  
  She walked over to the robot repair station and began digging through the boxes of parts.
  
  Several hours later.
  
  "Rise!" Lily said dramatically as the robot took its first few steps out of the robot repair bay. Lily hummed as she watched it. It looked a little bit like a Terminator, but not quite as intimidating. The head she had designed with flat, smooth shapes was somewhat oversized and looked nothing like a human. She did this, so it avoided the uncanny valley, which she judged it did. Barely.
  
  The Protectron software definitely needed some updating, though, which she would work on tonight. The motivator drivers couldn't handle the different centres of gravity, nor could they operate the extra limbs like individually moving fingers and the more complicated three-dimensional ankle and knee joint movements.
  
  Lily casually pushed it with barely any force, and it tipped over and fell on the ground unceremoniously. Yes, it definitely needed some work, but she was already pretty comfortable working on the Tron-series software.
  
  She stepped back and watched it work its way up, standing as ungracefully as a mermaid that had just gotten her legs.
  
  She couldn't help herself, she reached over and pushed it again, and it fell on its back and sprawled, flailing like a turtle. She could sense its error packets flash over the network in distress, and she giggled at the purposeless cruelty to non-sapient robots, "Hehehe."
  
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  Matters Beyond Mortal Ken
  Grandpa looked down at her and said, "No, liebchen, it isn't weird that a little girl wants to know about how things work. Now come and hold the light, and I'll show you how a differential gearbox works... They're in almost every car except all-wheel drives. Wheels have to be able to spin at different rates when you turn your car!"
  
  Grandpa chuckled, "Remember, liebchen, friends might help you move, but real friends will help you move bodies. And there are very few problems in the world that can't be solved with judicial application of the 3-S principles."
  
  I glanced to the side and up at Grandpa from our seat in the deer blind, "What's the 3-S principle, Opa?"
  
  "Shoot, Shovel and Shut-Up," replied Grandpa.
  
  I already knew Grandpa was a little bit racist, the same way a lot of really old people were, but what he said surprised me, "I didn't fight them in Manchuria to buy no damn Jap car, girl!"
  
  "But Opa, it's 1996," I said patiently, "None of those people are building Toyotas. They're a good car, Opa."
  
  "Liebchen... you just... don't understand. I know that. I know that here," he pointed to his head, but then he thumped himself on the chest, "but I just can't feel it here. The things they did there..." he shook his head and stared off into space.
  
  "Okay, okay, Opa. Maybe a Ford, then?" I asked, trying to distract him. "Did they send you to the Pacific theatre because we're German?"
  
  Grandpa snorted and nodded, "Didn't send. I volunteered before Pearl Harbor, was flying with a unit of volunteers with the Republic of China and even the Reds for a year before we entered the war. I knew that war was inevitable, liebchen, and if I hadn't volunteered, there probably would have been serious questions about a recently naturalized German officer serving in the Air Corps. Our family might have been interned, even."
  
  I intentionally didn't mention the slight hypocrisy I noticed here. He was Grandpa, after all. That did answer the question about why Grandpa had a pin with Chairman Mao's head on it with his other war things, though.
  
  I liked listening to the news or videos online while I worked, and I vaguely detected the voice of Elon Musk talking about rockets as I worked the interface of AutoCAD.
  
  A few years ago, I accepted an unusual job offer as a senior engineer for all things a search engine company. And to work on, for all things, a smartphone project. Something I had no experience working on for a company with no experience working in this sector. It should have been madness, but the pay was too good to pass up, even with the fact that I had to move to California, something a country girl like me really disliked.
  
  It recently had come down from high that the camera had to be flush with the body, which necessitated a redesign of certain PCBs to make room inside the case. It would be a lot easier if we could get rid of the headphone jack like Apple already had.
  
  The video of the rocket billionaire talking droned in the background as I worked, "... Yeah, all our new rocket nozzles will be built using this one-of-a-kind version of Inconel superalloys... High strength at temperature, extreme oxidation resistance... It's needed for over the 800 atmospheres, hot, oxygen-rich turbopump on the Raptor rocket engine... These single-crystal superalloys are mostly just steel and nickel, but there are some exotic elements in order to better ensure really unusual crystal formation in the metallic lattice... effectively has no visible grain... really remarkable..."
  
  I liked Elon most of the time, but something about his voice sometimes irritated me. I changed the channel.
  
  This smartphone project was coming along well. If only I could say the same thing about my marriage.
  
  Lily again woke up with vivid dreams of her past life; in this case, it was her life in America. The fact that she could now remember what her Opa looked like made her quite happy.
  
  Remembering her old life's ex-husband was something she could have done without, though. Although now she started to remember bits and pieces of the daughter they had together, so perhaps he was good for something after all.
  
  However, she wanted to kick herself for changing the channel in that last memory. Maybe the Rocket Bro was about to tell everyone what those alloys were made of?! Lily searched her memories while lying naked in bed for several minutes.
  
  She did remember some things about Inconel alloys but nothing about the Space-X special sauce version. The Inconel alloy she knew about was over fifty per cent nickel, twenty per cent chromium, with small amounts of molybdenum and manganese, with the rest being steel.
  
  She didn't know the precise numbers, and it wasn't that the alloy had vastly increased operating temperatures than traditional steel. It wasn't a refractory metal alloy like the kind she had been making with tungsten for her robots.
  
  However, it was almost as good because it was a steel alloy with somewhat increased temperatures, but most importantly, the alloy could operate very close to its max temperature without deforming or losing strength due to its unique crystalline structure. Most steel lost its strength and deformed when it got even halfway to its melting point; just ask the steel beams in the twin towers.
  
  Humming, she got out of bed and got dressed. She had managed to find a small source of tungsten by buying old and broken tungsten carbide drill bits and other similarly broken tools from around town. Although they indeed lasted a very long time, they did break in the end, and it was fortunate that Moira was a borderline hoarder and collected all kinds of seemingly useless junk.
  
  So while she did have all of her robots built, only eight of them were in the new-style humanoid chassis.
  
  However, if she could figure out how to reinvent some of the Inconel alloys, that would be really nice; she could use them in place of the steel-titanium-tungsten alloy she was using now for a robot's chassis. It wouldn't be as good for either strength or for heat resistance as just using titanium and tungsten, which were remarkable metals, but it would be good enough to provide over twice the heat resistance of normal steel!
  
  And if she wanted it primarily for use in armour, which needed to be cheap, it would be good enough. She could make plates a third of a millimetre thick and then alternate between diamondoid and steel alloys to create a composite armour that would be very effective and relatively light. She'd have to run tests, but she suspected even 1.2 millimetres of such composite armour would be greater than six millimetres of plain steel plate.
  
  Moira told her that Vertibirds used an aluminium-titanium alloy, so she could have a ready supply of titanium if she could find some crashed ones, which dotted the Capital Wasteland like zits. Moira already knew of a few and would verify the locations and then sell me the information soon. However, tungsten was just not available readily in quantities enough that Lily felt confident designing her armoured truck.
  
  Most mining of tungsten and manganese in North America came from mining operations in Alaska, which obviously weren't shipping any product in the past couple hundred years.
  
  Moira's suggestion was that she explore the National Guard Depot or Fort Constantine, as both tungsten and depleted uranium were often used as armour for US main battle tanks. After suggesting she was trying to get me killed, she considered the advice. However, it was circular because of the fact that she felt she needed what amounted to a tank to go searching for a tank so she could build a tank. That meant she would have to rely on other sources. Maybe if she had power armour, but she would be relying on this armoured truck to hit and loot the VSS building for some Power Armour in the first place.
  
  However, with these superalloys of nickel... that might be enough.
  
  She needed to build an actual systematic way to test each potential alloy for tensile strength, elongation at break, elasticity, electrical resistance, shear modulus, and thermal properties. The whole shebang. She had one single book on material science in her collection, and it was a digitized book from Tombs. It didn't include a chart like she would find useful, but it did address the testing regimes briefly for glasses, polymers, ceramics and metal alloys.
  
  And the tests had to be able to be performed by her robots independently. Then she could just work her way through all reasonable possibilities; even if she could only test one potential alloy every two hours, she would find the correct one in a few weeks at most.
  
  Lily hummed. Her precious basement was already getting more and more full. Perhaps she should use the fourth or fifth floor for this project.
  
  "Yes, shoot me with it," Lily said plainly.
  
  The Apprentice said, seemingly unsure, "Uhh... okay, if you're sure." However, she lifted the taser, aimed it at my chest and fired.
  
  The little prongs stuck in her flesh, and she found herself falling to the hard-looking concrete floor of her basement.
  
  Lily had time to think, ' I immediately regret my decision,' before she thunked on the ground, limbs moving spastically with the click click click noise of the taser discharging in my ear.
  
  "Are you alright?" asked the Apprentice, yet she kept her finger on the trigger of the taser, causing it to click click click. "I will be when you stop shocking me," she managed to yell.
  
  Alice stopped, and she stood up, dusting herself off. She was not sure what she expected. The neuromuscular interference a taser caused bypassed the brain, so there was no real way to avoid the effect aside from armouring yourself and preventing the circuit from being able to be formed.
  
  Lily carefully removed the probes from her skin and sighed. The Taser was quite effective, and she would give them to her humanoid robots. Still, it might be of limited utility since they could be defeated by armour so easily. The Apprentice was nosing around her workbench and picked up something, "Is this a new model of a laser pistol, Dr St. Claire?"
  
  Lily turned to see what the girl was talking about. She was holding the sleek attempt at a laser pistol that turned out to be such a failure, ' That piece of shit. I meant to recycle that crap already.'
  
  "No, Apprentice. Zhat was an attempt to build one, but it was zhe total failure. I can't produce zhe synthetic doped ruby or sapphire rods used as a laser gain medium, and tried to replace them with diamond, but..." Lily shook her head, "It produces zhe laser beam, but zhe power output... it just wouldn't hurt anyone. Maybe give zhem zhe blisters, yes? But it is barely powerful enough to even ionize the air, much less do an..y... real... damage..."
  
  Lily trailed off after seeing the Apprentice holding the taser in one hand and the defective laser pistol in the other.
  
  'Of course! I'm such a moron! If the laser is powerful enough to ionize the air, that plasma channel will become conductive to electricity! An electrolaser! Of course! We even had that technology in space. We even called them AirTasers, ' Lily internally berated her own stupidity. She even literally face-palmed.
  
  "Uh, Dr St. Claire, you look like you've had one of those sudden moments of insight where you realize how stupid you've been being. I also have those a lot," the Apprentice, surprisingly insightful, hit the nail on the head.
  
  "Zhat is... exactly zhe case, Apprentice. You often surprise me with your insight, you know?" Lily told the girl, but her tone wasn't complimentary.
  
  Alice took it as a compliment anyway, preening and saying, "I've often thought that, what with my incredible insight and all!"
  
  A mental ding of a completed job brought her attention to the smallest carbon fabricator she had. It used to be one she built out of a footlocker in Canterbury Commons, but she rebuilt it to use a much more sophisticated nanite colony, so it was her go-to machine when she was building extremely finely detailed items.
  
  It had just finished building the memory modules, spools of graphene nanotubes and exterior casing for the quantum processor that she was going to install in the Apprentice. "Oh, looks like your computer is done," Lily told the girl.
  
  Alice got excited, "Oooh... are you going to do the surgery today after all, then?" It was Friday, but she was a little optimistic in her estimation the other day and ended up having to build the device twice.
  
  Alice's replacement skull was already constructed in several pieces, waiting for the surgery.
  
  The girl was getting a bit better version than Lily had of everything. The skull included the digital audio transducers for ears from the beginning, along with several hidden ones that were designed to detect most frequencies of sound, even with a layer of skin over them, that would allow the girl to have a passive sonar system out of the box.
  
  Her computer was also a bit better, having over one hundred exabytes of data storage available compared to Lily's sixty. Lily wasn't entirely sure what precisely anyone would do with all that storage because even when she digitized the entirety of her three hundred-plus years of memories, Lily won't have used more than fifteen per cent of her storage. Digital memory streams, including full sensorium, compressed really well, surprisingly, with no real loss in resolution.
  
  That was one of the advances that made human digitization possible in the first place. Lily hadn't told Alice this, but the computer also served as a cortical stack, as well. After Alice finished recording all of her memory engrams, an up-to-date backup of the girl's entire neural network would be stored on the computer, although there was insufficient processing power to emulate it.
  
  If the worse happened someday, Lily might be able to recover the device in the girl's skull and bring her back to life. She'd have that discussion with her later because she'd kind of like the same courtesy herself.
  
  "Well, let us plug it into zhe diagnostic frame, and we shall see," Lily offered. If it was working and passed all tests, Lily would prefer getting the surgery over today. She had tentative plans to set out for Canterbury Commons and then afterwards Vault 108 on Monday.
  
  Lily hummed as she placed the small spherical device into the diagnostic test bed she designed for them and triggered a full self-test, "Who is working upstairs today?"
  
  "Dr Rebeca! She is really quite skilled for how young she is, don't you think, Dr St. Claire?" replied the Apprentice.
  
  Ohh? Lily thinks she detects a bit of hero-worship. Still, the girl was right. The Doctor, formerly known as Bonesaw, really was quite adequate. Her deficiencies were mainly in the actual use of some technology; for example, she had to be taught how to use every one of the devices in the hospital. However, she learned quite quickly.
  
  Lily found her knowledge, especially in the area of pathology and disease, quite broad. Lily asked her how Little Lamplight could possibly educate her to such a degree, and Rebecca told her that ever since the first Doctor of Lamplight, they had a significant amount of books, including one written by every Doctor that came before.
  
  Lily was shocked to find out that their general and science education came from materials taken from Vault 87. Lily had dragged the girl to her office after that to interrogate her, "What about the Super-Mutants?" Lily asked her pointedly.
  
  "Oh. Yeah, they're a problem. Always a problem. But history says they weren't a problem right away. It's recorded that half the people in the Vault fled after some experiments they were conducting with a virus they called FEV got out of control. That's where Super Mutants come from in the first place if you didn't know. They were regular mungos until exposed to FEV, which causes sterilization in 100% of subjects. So every generation of Super-Mutants has to infect the next subsequent generation, or their species, such as it is, will die out. It's why they are such a big problem in the Capital Wastes, always looking for people to drag back to their place." The younger woman doctor casually mentioned what would be secrets you didn't discover until halfway through the game.
  
  She then continued, "But the Super Mutants, they get stupid. All the time. So they're quite easy to deal with, given the defences on Murder Pass. If you can find a way to trick ONE Super-Mutant, it will work on ALL of them. And they only come through Murder Pass in ones and twos, in penny-packets. A Lamplighter might die every two to three years to them, but that's all. Dysentry and starvation are a lot bigger threats, I'd say." She shook her head and sighed, then said, almost to herself, "Just like mungos, huh, to toy with matters beyond their ken and got most of themselves killed."
  
  Lily remembered having the sudden desire to bring Bonesaw along with her to Vault 108 to help her with her own FEV experiments to delve into the depths of things beyond mortal ken, but she got the idea that Rebeca didn't approve of such experiments. She definitely would like to make copies of any information Little Lamplight has about the subject, though.
  
  The beep of the diagnostics terminal and green indicator showed Lily that the device was functioning in all respects. Excellent, she wouldn't have to postpone her trip. She wanted Alice well adapted to using the device before she left. She might be gone for one or two weeks, after all.
  
  Lily smiled, "It looks good. Let us go see if we can borrow zhe operating room, yes?"
  
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  Want a hug?
  "We don't really have to go back to my room, you know, Dr St. Claire," insisted Alice after Lily started leading the girl back to her room upstairs.
  
  Lily was just as insistent, "Yes, yes, we do. I've tried to make zhe calibration process much, much smoother zhan my own, but I assure you zhat it isn't something you want anyone to see, and being in your own place will be a comfort."
  
  "Stop touching your face; you're just like a kid after they came back from the dentist. It will feel funny for several hours," Lily chastised her. The girl reminded her of her daughter from her previous life, a little bit. It was something that Lily decided she liked.
  
  The Apprentice sighed. She seemed nervous for some reason. If Lily didn't know such things didn't exist, she would have expected to find posters of boy bands on the girls' wall or something. "Why is my hearing worse than before? Is that temporary?" asked Alice, somewhat worriedly.
  
  Lily brightened at a chance to show off, as a proper Mistress should, "Ah, yes. I replaced your ears with digital audio transducers, which are powered by a very small betavoltaic battery which should last several thousand years. If you live longer than zhat, it will be up to you to replace it; I've included the blueprints for your skull and computer in your computer."
  
  Lily coughed as she selected the sixth floor on the elevator, "In zhe normal operation zhey connect digitally to your computer, which zhen pipes the sound directly into your cortex."
  
  "Wait, you replaced my EARS with a microphone?" demanded Alice.
  
  "Well, yes. They're much better; you'll have better hearing than a dog does now. However, your ears are operating in a backup failure mode since it has detected your computer is not accepting its input. In zhis mode, it connects directly to zhe cochlear nerve, as normal ears do. But it is a little bit worse zhan regular hearing zhis way. Especially since they 'aven't been calibrated," Lily finished her explanation.
  
  Alice stepped out of the elevator, but the girl was giving her a side-eye. Finally, she said, "I suppose that is part of my skull." Lily nodded, glad the girl understood. "But what if they get damaged? If my regular ears were damaged, the medichines and phoenix system would have repaired them."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and diplomatically offered, "Zhe medichines will still do minor repairs and maintenance. 'owever, the microphones are extremely ruggedized. I can't see any situation where zhe microphones would be damaged while you would live through it. 'owever, if you ever do need them replaced, either come see me or better yet learn how to do it yourself, no?"
  
  "Oh," said the girl. Then she nodded, "Right."
  
  After watching Alice perform what was obviously a coded knock on her door. After Alice opened it, she followed the girl in. It made Lily frown, 'Just how bad was this so-called orphanage if they have such codes and passwords even here?' It made her feel bad because the Apprentice and her siblings should feel safe. But, it was hard to change learned behaviours.
  
  "Hi, Miss Lily!" exclaimed Alice's sister, followed by a similar greeting from the little boy.
  
  "Hello Isis, Nick... how are your studies going?" Lily asked the kids. Lily was concerned about them because they couldn't really leave the building. Lily didn't even like Alice leaving the building, and Lily would trust Alice to survive a swarm of ghouls these days. Although she wasn't much older than they were when she became the Apprentice to a Doctor as they both fled Shanghai.
  
  The boy was quick to reply, "Pretty good! And we all watch a movie almost every night. Plus, we get food anytime we want, so it's great, Miss Lily!"
  
  Well, she supposed she was worried for nothing. She chuckled, "Which film are you guys watching tonight?"
  
  The two children spoke simultaneously. Isis said, " Love Sets Sail!" while Nick said, " Last Stand at Fort McGee!" Then they glared at each other.
  
  Lily chuckled at them. Alice turned to them, "Alright, gremlins. Don't disturb us for an hour or so; we're going to be doing some work in my room."
  
  They nodded solemnly.
  
  Lily did not notice it right away after being led into Alice's room, but it sure noticed her!
  
  Hearing a hiss, Lily turned to see that damned white stoat lounging on one of the Apprentice's pillows like it lived here! It took her another second for her to realize that it DID live here! The creature certainly recognized Lily and didn't seem to like her any better than before. Alice hurried over to it and petted it to try to calm it down.
  
  It allowed itself to be mollified, but Lily felt that it would begin hissing again if she moved any closer.
  
  Narrowing her eyes, Lily said evenly, "Apprentice. Care to explain?"
  
  Alice frowned, "He just showed up one day! He mostly spends time outside, but he likes me!" She looked like she was working up her courage before she finally said, "Sir Longius is my pet now, Mistress!"
  
  The aforementioned stoat crawled into Alice's lap, and then sensing her distress, he longed out to his full length and even puffed out his fur, giving Lily a death glare as if he was ready to defend the girl from her.
  
  Lily stared at the girl, and her pet FEV mutated stoat for some time before rubbing her temples and sitting in the other chair in the room, which was at the Apprentice's desk. Then, finally, she said, "Fine. But you're taking care of it. And it's to stay out of zhe way!"
  
  Alice actually squeed in joy and said, "He mostly takes care of himself, Sir Longius does! Don't worry, Dr St. Claire, you don't seem to like each other, but I'm sure Sir Longius will warm to you. He even helps me keep the gremlins studying when they're supposed to. He's so smart."
  
  Lily very much doubted that there would ever be any kind of civil relations between herself and this shitty weasel, but so long as it didn't try to bite her, she supposed it would be fine. It didn't look like an FEV mutant, more like an albino otter with a pug's face, so it wasn't like she was really at any risk for exposure.
  
  She didn't think the thing would let her get within five feet of it, actually. So Lily pursed her lips, "Apprentice, when you can get a scan of it using zhe diagnostic scanner. A full brain scan, if you can. We can compare it to other stoats if we can find some."
  
  Alice blinked, petting the stoat before she nodded. It was clear she was curious too. "Alright, what do I have to do? And why were you implying this calibration would be unpleasant?"
  
  Lily explained the process and didn't leave anything out or try to sugarcoat it.
  
  "Well, the first part doesn't sound so bad. I hope you're correct that the map of your senses as a starting baseline will make it much less unpleasant," the Apprentice said, a little unnerved.
  
  Lily nodded, "I found zhis first process a little weird. It may take up to zhirty minutes, so I'll just work on another project. Are you ready?"
  
  The Apprentice nodded and laid back with her eyes closed, so Lily connected to her computer, which was operating in safe mode and started the process of Alice's medichines to unspool tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes throughout the girl's brain.
  
  Lily kept a progress bar in the corner of her vision while she launched the CAD software, which she had gotten ported over into the brain-computer. It was even more effective than when she used it on the laptop, except that it had a bit of a drawback. It rendered fully immersive virtual objects in front of her, and she had to manipulate them with her hands.
  
  This means she looks like a crazy person when she was using it, grabbing, pinching, pulling, tapping and twirling something nobody else could see. However, she could work with the interface very quickly, so she didn't particularly care and just wouldn't use it whenever there were strangers around. All the projected virtual objects felt like a real object, though, with its own perceived weight and textures.
  
  She was, of course, working on a prototype electrolaser pistol. She wanted to get a working model made and printed before she left. Also, possibly, a module for the arms of her robots. She was taking seven of them with her, as she expected there to be a lot of manual labour in Vault 108.
  
  It would be nice if they had more self-defence options than whatever she had to give them to carry. The Protectron software had reduced accuracy with carried firearms and lasers. She had already detected that bug, but it wasn't an obvious fix.
  
  She was removing the diamond in its manufacturing, instead using carbon fibre and metal reinforcement in areas. She had the idea to sell these weapons, potentially, and Lily didn't want anyone to know she could produce diamond materials cheaply enough that she used them for everything, with simple aluminium would have worked just as well.
  
  It did mean she would have to build it in at least two parts and assemble it, but that was not a problem.
  
  Lily hummed and used her hands and subvocalized commands to reduce the diameter of the diamond gain media and output coupler by over forty per cent. She just needed it to be powerful enough to ionize the air out to a hundred fifty meters. She didn't expect much use beyond that distance.
  
  However, if she wanted to use this weapon as anything more complicated than a "lightning gun", she would require two laser beams, much like a regular taser requires two probes.
  
  If she wanted to stun a person as a taser did, there would need to be two ionized plasma channels, one for the electricity to travel from to the person and another for it to travel back from the person to the taser.
  
  Having a complete electrical circuit to and from the target was the only way you could use small levels of voltage and vary them electronically to create the incapacitation effect she was looking for.
  
  Mentally, she saved her work and pulled up scans of the taser that Alice shot her with earlier, then working quickly with her hands to yank all the guts out until she was left with the electronics of the device, 'Way too big. I should be able to miniaturize all of this.'
  
  Before she got too far into the project of reverse engineering the taser, a mental alert notified her that the process was complete with the Apprentice. Saving her work and closing the CAD program, she said, "Okay, zhat part is done. How do you feel, Apprentice?"
  
  "Uh, fine. There was a few times where I felt a bit odd, though," Alice reported.
  
  "Hmmm... yes, me too. I have my suspicions as to what generates zhat sort of feeling in this sort of procedure, but zhere is little way to prove it, so we'll just table zhat discussion for now," Lily replied. Lily handed the girl the diagnostic scanner, already set up in laptop mode and a small piece of paper.
  
  Lily hummed, "Okay, Apprentice. After I begin the initial start-up of your computer, I will lose access to it. Listed 'ere on this paper is zhe initial password set so you can log in to your computer, as well as zhe list of commands to calibrate your senses. I have adjusted zhese commands to work consecutively, not concurrently as I did with myself." She couldn't help but shudder, which Alice saw and grinned.
  
  But the girl tilted her head to the side, "You won't have access to my computer at all?"
  
  Lily looked at the girl funnily, "Take it from my experience. People won't agree to 'ave a computer inside zheir brains unless zhey are zhe only ego in control of it and it only works for zheir own benefit. Especially one that 'as the potential to access zheir senses and memories." Lily shook her head rapidly.
  
  "Even tyrannies where I come from know zhis much, usually," she qualified. Then she hummed and added, qualifying, "I am the manufacturer of it, so I can send you OTA updates, but even zhose will 'ave to be reviewed and approved by you before zhey can be installed."
  
  Alice looked thoughtful before nodding, "Yeah, that does make sense when you say it like that..." she trailed off before asking, "Dr St. Claire?"
  
  "Yes, Apprentice?" Lily replied.
  
  "Would you mind sitting with me while I go through these sense calibrations?" the girl asked softly.
  
  Lily smiled good-naturedly, "Of course, Apprentice. I'll just be sitting 'ere working on other zhings. It definitely won't be as bad as my experience, but it will probably take an 'our or two."
  
  Alice nodded and then turned her attention to the laptop.
  
  Lily sat back at the girl's desk before returning to her own work.
  
  She got a lot accomplished before Alice finished, and it was pretty clear which sense the girl was working on by way of the exclamations Alice was making. For example, she was pretty sure the time the Apprentice gagged, she was calibrating taste/smell.
  
  Lily kept an eye out, and while it certainly seemed a lot better than her experience, it didn't seem very fun, either.
  
  "F-finally! It's all done. That touch sense was uhh... really painful, Dr St. Claire," Alice told her, eventually.
  
  Lily stood, minimizing all her work windows before walking over to the girl. The Apprentice had been crying, and there were tears in the corner of her eyes.
  
  Lily wasn't sure what the appropriate social response should be at first until she recalled a similar situation where her daughter was crying in her room, apparently having had her heart broken in some teenage drama gone awry.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side and decided to copy her own actions from back then. She held her arms out and asked gently, "Want a hug?"
  
  Alice nodded, so Lily reached out and held the girl. That was weird; the sobbing increased in intensity! Was she doing this wrong? She gently patted the girl's shoulders as she considered.
  
  After a while, Lily left Alice's room. There seemed to be something in her eyes, so she rubbed them.
  
  Lily looked at the prototype and considered it. She made such quick progress on the device that she didn't entirely trust it, but it seemed to work.
  
  She ended up having to add a third laser onto it, except it was a low-powered laser range finder, so it barely took up any room at all, less than a laser pointer would. First, however, it was necessary to ensure that both ionizing laser beams hit the target, as at longer ranges, the beams tended to diverge slightly and had a chance of one missing the target entirely.
  
  Now, the range finder would detect the distance to the target you were aiming at and correct the semi-steerable beams so that they both struck the target within ten or fifteen centimetres of each other.
  
  It would also dynamically power down the laser emitter at close range, so it didn't set the victim's clothing on fire or give them second-degree burns when using the non-lethal setting.
  
  The three settings available on the weapon were non-lethal, lethal and high-output. The non-lethal and lethal settings both worked somewhat similarly, in both lasers were utilized to create an electrical circuit with the intended target.
  
  In the non-lethal setting, Lily copied the operation of the actual taser, and it should "stun" a human briefly, probably for about fifteen seconds. While the lethal setting used a much higher current and a sine wave of alternating current that Lily felt would likely induce immediate cardiac arrest in most flats, so long as they were struck in the chest.
  
  The high output setting, however, only used a single laser to create a plasma channel and just dumped the entire capacitor bank into the target without trying to get any of the energy back. It was basically a "lightning gun."
  
  Lily designed it for use against robots and machines, which she felt it would be very effective against or possibly large animals like Deathclaws, but she had no way of knowing just how effective it would prove to be against such monsters. It might kill one, it might injure one, and it might just piss one off. She wasn't about to hike up to Old Olney to test it.
  
  The non-lethal and lethal settings were very energy efficient and rapid firing while the lightning mode was neither, but them's were the trade-offs.
  
  She had to admit, the brief moment you could see the blue laser tended to be superimposed with an arc of electricity in whatever mode was used, which looked really cool.
  
  [Alice: This is amazing, Dr St. Claire! ]
  
  Lily blinked. The girl had found the instant messaging features. Although considering this planet had such a dearth of connectivity, their networking was more or less ad-hoc, and messages and data couldn't be sent over farther than a few kilometres, it was still quite a useful feature.
  
  [Lilium: Ah, you've found the IM functions, I see. Take a look at this. ]
  
  Lily opened her collection of digitized memories and considered them. She trusted the Apprentice. Otherwise, she wouldn't have given her a personal computer. She decided on a memory of when she was hiking up Pike's Peak during the spring in Colorado, selecting a number of clips and excluding her thoughts and monologue from experience using the sensorium editing tool she had made.
  
  People in the future looked at minors experiencing raw sensorium with the thought track enabled the same way as people back in America looked at minors watching pornography. As in, it was taboo, so Lily edited all that out.
  
  It wasn't so much because it was lewd; the taboo existed for purely G-rated experiences; it was that it was thought by the mind engineers that it was best not to contaminate a young mind with the thoughts of another.
  
  She picked a total of a couple of minutes of incredible green trees, blue skies and a few moments where she was so high that the cloud deck was at her same level as if it was fog. She was sure it was something the girl had never seen before.
  
  [Lilium: Sit down before you open this file. ]
  
  [ *** Lilium wants to send a file to Alice ( ) *** ]
  
  [ *** File transfer complete *** ]
  
  There wasn't any reply for a solid three or four minutes, presumably while the Apprentice played the experience file.
  
  [Alice: Wow! That is amazing! That looks like one of the films of before the war, but better. Is this a real place? Where is it? ]
  
  [Lilium: It is a real place. It is a place called Pike's Peak; it is in Colorado. It's a mountain where the peak is higher than four thousand metres! ]
  
  [Alice: Wow. I definitely want to go see that place myself, someday. ]
  
  Lily chuckled a little nervously. She didn't think that the Pike's Peak in the Fallout universe was as green or blue skied as her memories, but that would be for Alice to find out herself.
  
  She brought her mind back to her work. She needed to convert this prototype into a design to be manufactured, and she wanted to incorporate it into every robot's arm, even the old-style Labourtrons that she intended to eventually replace.
  
  She would feel a lot better about leaving on her adventure if, in addition to the two Protectrons, Alice had the dozen or so Labourtrons with effective energy weapons to protect her and the hospital. It wouldn't be a completely wasted effort, as she might be able to incorporate them into a Protectron hand to give those robots either a less-lethal or an anti-robotic weapon option.
  
  She also had to take some time out to discuss things with Tombs and to make sure her absence wouldn't adversely affect either their burgeoning water or power business. They hadn't started billing for power, but they were already making a considerable sum on selling purified water.
  
  As expected, they were spending a lot of that on mercenaries and security to protect the water purifier and power substation, but what else could you expect in the Capital Wasteland?
  
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  Snow White & Seven Robots
  "Remember to feed my eels," Lily finished the list of things that she expected the Apprentice to keep track of for her while she was gone.
  
  Alice rolled her eyes, "Yes, yes. Don't worry. Don't you mainly kill them and eat them, anyway?"
  
  "Afterwards! Zhis is zhe fourth generation, and I think I'm only one or two generations from a usable genome," complained Lily. Alice thought her eel project was not only crazy but very mad sciencey, and she didn't see a problem at all with having to charge her computer every couple of weeks. The girl just didn't understand!
  
  She finished talking with the Apprentice and watched the seven improved Labourtrons load up the truck with all the equipment she was taking.
  
  She was leaving Alice in charge of the hospital itself, albeit not in control of any of the medical decisions the doctors working for her made. She had control of both Protectrons, all the standard Labourtrons and one of the improved Labourtrons, as well as the four auto-turrets that were in each of the possible entryways for the building.
  
  When Lily returned, she intended to build auto-turrets for almost every room, armed with AirTasers. She thinks she could design one that did not look any different than a normal ceiling panel until it was deployed, which would make the building both incredibly dangerous to intruders while at the same time not seeming like the fortress it was to guests.
  
  She didn't have any issues leaving the girl in charge of the hospital or the other two doctors in charge of the patients. Most of the trauma-related patients were fairly quickly handled by one of the three Auto-Docs she had, although these devices really did need a doctor to oversee their operation as they could be a touch quirky.
  
  Lily had already had to override one that was stuck in a loop and would have just continued performing the same surgery on the hapless person locked inside.
  
  Dr Bonesaw had become quite adept at programming custom surgical procedures into the Auto-Docs, and she had already treated a number of older patients for arthritis by programming it to go in and clean out and replace all of the faulty joint cartilage in various joints. They gave the strawberry blonde doctor rave reviews. Even the Apprentice liked her, she thought, because she was much nearer to the Apprentice's own age.
  
  Lily herself had also sold a number of genetic treatments, mainly the clean metabolism mod and the life extension therapy, to a number of curious but well-to-do people in town and even had two patients waiting for her return to receive a fully cybernetic arm and one full cybernetic leg between them.
  
  They had heard about her around the Wasteland and arrived together. Lily did their initial consultation but wouldn't be able to really assist them until she came back.
  
  She thought they would be upset, but neither of them was. Both of them looked fairly well to do and did not mind cooling their heels amongst the fleshpots of the "Big City", as it were.
  
  Lily even recently heard herself be mentioned by none other than Three Dogs himself, but she was a little bit concerned about that as, in her opinion, Three Dog was little but a mouthpiece of the Brotherhood, given how close their working relationship was.
  
  Thankfully it was mostly a puff piece, talking about how the new hospital was already saving lives and featured advanced technology like Auto-Docs. The Brotherhood didn't really care about Auto-Docs. However, that couldn't last - she just hoped it was Sarah Lyons or one of her Lyons Pride people who came to investigate her and not one of the soon-to-be Outcast hard cases.
  
  At present, Monsieur Three Dogs seemed to believe that she was firmly in the camp of fighting the Good Fight, whatever he meant by that. He seemed to approve of the fact that it was her hospital policy that patients were only charged, except diagnostic fees, for successful treatments.
  
  Lily never felt that doctors should pretend to be Evel Knievel and say, "I get paid for the attempt!" If you took your car to the mechanic, they wouldn't charge you if they couldn't fix it, and Lily's opinion of a person's body was no different.
  
  The only case where Lily or her doctors would charge for an attempt was if the doctors told the patient that there was very little likelihood of success, and then the patient wanted to proceed anyway. In that case, she made sure to get payment up front!
  
  The seven robots she was taking with her all loaded themselves last, jumping up into the bed of the trailer. She wasn't taking too much, but she was taking a hundred-kilowatt generator, her footlocker-sized fabricator, tools and one robot charging station that they would have to use in shifts, as well as the prototype flying robot that she had finished over a week ago.
  
  "Well, I shall be off, my Apprentice!" Lily told the girl, who appeared slightly nervous to see her go. She then jumped into the cab of her truck and started its reactor to idle, which took a couple of minutes before she pulled out of the parking lot and started driving towards the gate.
  
  Her truck was far from the tank she wanted it to be, but she did have a chance to slightly armour the cab against ballistic threats by replacing all the glass in the windshield and windows and placing ballistic panels in the doors. She also added steel plates in the grill to guard the reactor against anyone shooting it from the front, as she would rather she did not have to conduct field repairs on it if it was damaged and leaking radiation.
  
  The cab of the truck was quite roomy; it was a sleeper cab which was a nice bonus for now, although she definitely intended to completely rebuild the entire interior of the vehicle when she got the chance and materials to do it.
  
  The guards let her through the gate with a wave, and she proceeded on a sedate pace towards the Potomac bridge. When she got a couple of kilometres away from Megaton, she pulled over and then mentally went through a test of the Gatling laser turret mounted on top of the cab. It could swivel a full 360 degrees and could even target enemies inside the trailer if she were boarded.
  
  She could control it mentally by directly aiming and firing, or she could just designate targets with her computer interface, and her expert system would handle the aiming and shooting. She aimed the reticle at a piece of rubble and fired and judged its accuracy to be quite good.
  
  Nodding, she pulled up the robot tasking and ordered one of the Labourtrons to open the case, which carried her flying robot. Ever since she arrived in the Fallout universe and found out about the levitation technology that Eyebots and Mister Handy-type robots have used, she had the idea of a flying surveillance bot.
  
  She had tried many different ways to get it to work, and now that she was getting more understanding of how precisely the levitation systems worked, she realized it was completely impossible. The levitation worked as a kind of momentum exchange between matter.
  
  The levitation technology needed some matter to "push" off of, like the ground, and that couldn't get too far away from the levitation emitters. This was a simplification because they didn't push at all; it was more like they were locked in space relative to the ground. You could walk under a levitating bot and not be crushed, for example.
  
  So, flying high was a complete impossibility. Although she thought it might be a function of emitter size, so theoretically, it might be possible to fly a few hundred metres, but it would take an emitter the size of a small blimp to do it.
  
  Lily blinked. That would be... not a bad idea. There was no way she could build such a thing herself, though. Perhaps she would design such a thing and offer it to the Brotherhood. She had some feeling in the back of her head that she couldn't precisely identify, telling her that they would really appreciate a flying steel blimp.
  
  Shaking her head, she triggered the drone's start-up sequence. Building a quad-copter wasn't hard. She could build powerful electric motors entirely from carbon. She could build incredibly durable rotors from the same material. The hardest part was reprogramming the Eyebot brain to be able to fly without crashing into everything.
  
  She made the decision to save development time by running the drone on a RobCo OS using a straight salvaged Eyebot core, even though she could use her own operating system on the processors. She had her own OS, but she didn't precisely have her own robot code. However, she ran into so many issues that she often wondered if she was saving any time at all.
  
  Still, she finished the project in the end. The dark grey quad-copter lifted out of the case it was transported in and flitted straight into the sky while her expert system controlled its direction and goals in a similar way it controlled the Labourtrons.
  
  'Nice, the added GPS receiver on the drone is letting my expert system populate my moving map automatically,' Lily noticed, very pleased.
  
  She had finally cracked the data schema from the GPS satellites but didn't have any kind of map to correlate with a particular coordinate. At first, she made a program to automatically use her digital compass combined with the GPS coordinates to build a map as she saw things on the ground.
  
  Amusingly it worked in practice almost exactly like a "fog of war" in a video game, where she would build a map as she saw new locations. However, it worked best for populating maps of buildings and didn't work so great translating images she saw on the ground with a bird's eye view that her moving map expected. Images of the ground displayed on the map would be a bit distorted, and Lily occasionally needed to go in and fix them manually.
  
  Now, however, the drone was sending her real-time images of the ground from a couple of hundred metres up. Not only would it make her very difficult to ambush, which was the drone's primary purpose, but it would populate her map quite quickly and efficiently!
  
  Lily grinned and said aloud, "I love it when a plan comes together!" Although she felt that the impression of Hannibal Smith lost something if she didn't have a cigar to go along with it, she felt. She put the truck in gear and verified that the drone would be in the correct follow-recon mode before setting off again.
  
  Lily peered at the overhead surveillance feed from the drone. It was still an analogue TV feed converted to a digital video stream, so it wasn't of the best quality, but it was what she had to work with, presently. She had slowed considerably when she neared the bridge because it was often a raider ambush spot.
  
  And sure enough, there was a group of a dozen or so raiders attacking a group of four travellers on foot. The four travellers seemed... heavily armed, which surprised her a little bit, but after considering a moment, she shrugged. That just made them smart, in her opinion.
  
  The travellers had made it to this side of the bridge before being pinned down with suppressive fire, although they didn't look as though they were in any immediate danger.
  
  Lily hummed, parked her truck and hopped out. She triggered six of the seven robots to fall into position with her while the seventh got into the cab of the truck. Her driving task for these improved Labourtrons wasn't the greatest, which is why she wasn't having them drive in the first place, but they could make short trips in straight lines well enough.
  
  She didn't want to get her truck shot to pieces if the raiders turned and thought she was a bigger threat, but she felt the best way to deal with this medium-sized group was an attack at their rear when they were distracted trying to kill their original prey.
  
  She carefully designated the four travellers as tentative allies in her tactical system, which propagated out to the Labourtrons and set out on foot the last fifty metres.
  
  Her current loadout was her trusty laser pistol, the prototype AirTaser and her completely rebuilt tri-laser rifle.
  
  The AirTaser project was really fortunate she had bought this tri-laser rifle from Miller, as she invented the semi-steerable optics for laser emitters when she was rebuilding this gun.
  
  It seemed very effective, but only at a short range. Almost like a laser shotgun, she thought. At long ranges, the laser beams would tend to diverge, and there would be significant misses. But she had the idea to incorporate a central laser range finder and then use the distance to steer the three beams, so they more or less struck the target at the same spot.
  
  It took her a few days to invent optics that change the direction of a beam, although only a couple of degrees. But it turned the tri-laser rifle into a terrifying weapon at any range.
  
  It was pure coincidence that the AirTaser project needed exactly the same sort of engineering is done. Lily loved pleasant coincidences like that.
  
  Mentally designated targets in advance for her robots, she picked her own targets while shouldering her weapon. Any further, and they'd be noticed for sure, so Lily mentally triggered the attack command while she fired on her first target, who was closest to the group of four travellers and was trying to open an angle to shoot them behind their cover.
  
  The AirTaser was specifically designed to put about ten centimetres of distance between both laser impacts, but her tri-beam was designed to land all three beams more or less at the same point. The raider's head exploded when three blue beams converged on it, which Lily found a little gross. She started sprinting towards the raiders, picking out more targets.
  
  The Raiders were caught more or less off guard, and a couple were starting to turn around, but as soon as they did, one of the travellers popped out of cover and riddled them with bullets from a Gatling gun. Lily blinked at the sight, ' Damn, that woman must be strong to just carry a Gatling gun like it was nothing.'
  
  At the same time, the blue-white beams from her robots' AirTasers lashed out at their targets. She was testing the lethal mode here, and judging from the way a nearby raider was struck, fell to the ground twitching and then went still, she thought it was working.
  
  'Great!' she really thought it would work, given her extensive knowledge of the human heart's electrical system, but you just never knew until you tested a device.
  
  All the raiders were mopped up in thirty seconds or less, and three of her robots closed protectively around her. Lily didn't think the group had noticed her robots just yet. Boy, would they be impressed! Time to show off!
  
  Lily grinned as the four stood and stepped out of cover. However, instead of the looks of amazed appreciation she was expecting, the woman with the Gatling gun had a look of absolute horror. One of the others yelled, "Fuck! She's a fucking Courser!"
  
  The woman with the minigun yelled, "Run! Take A3-21 and move south. I'll try to hold her off and try to catch up with you. We can't let her catch him!"
  
  Lily looked like she was watching a film where the protagonist stayed behind to cover the retreat of his friends in a display of dramatic cinematic martyrship. She even looked behind herself to make sure some other woman, this Courser, wasn't sneaking up on her. The three just nodded, looked at her sadly and ran off.
  
  Lily felt these guys must be mistaking her for someone else, and they didn't seem like bad people, so she switched her robots into the 'non-lethal' mode and issued a command to take her down if she moved to swing that minigun in her direction. She'd try to talk the woman down first.
  
  Then escalate to stunning her, and if that didn't work, she'd have to put her in the ground, despite how nice she seemed.
  
  The woman didn't seem in a hurry to fight her, at least, and she even looked confused as to why Lily and her robots hadn't attacked yet. Finally, when she saw her friends were well away, she said, "I don't want to do this. We don't need to fight."
  
  Lily blinked, "I don't want to fight either? But you're in my way."
  
  The woman shook her head, "No! I can't let you take him!" And she started to swing the minigun around and was stunned by three beams instantly, twitching and slumping to the ground. The other three missed, which Lily felt was a failure. How could a robot miss a stationary target? She'd have to look at these Protectron tactical programs.
  
  ' Fuck. I meant you're in my way of the bridge! Well, that was a Speech check failure, Lily ole girl,' Lily thought as she started running to the woman, fast. She pulled her own AirTaser out and thumbed it to non-lethal, slinging her laser rifle. She leapt into the air, aimed and stunned the woman again as she landed right next to her. She holstered the AirTaser and pulled out what she was now referring to as her hypospray, and tagged the woman with some paralytic medichines.
  
  When the stun wore off, and the woman found herself paralyzed, she was obviously quite scared judging from the rapid eye movements, but Lily had no intention to kill this lady for a case of mistaken identity if she could help it.
  
  ' Command, Priority word association tag on the word "Courser", and "A3-21", context is associated with robotics,' Lily made a mental note that would notify her if she read or heard that word again, especially in that context.
  
  Her truck was pulling up to the bridge, and Lily hummed. She had no intention of killing this woman, but there should be a penalty for trying to kill her, shouldn't there? She glanced down at the minigun and nodded. She grabbed it and hefted it into the truck cab, then paused. You couldn't leave a person unarmed in the Wasteland. It would be kinder to kill them.
  
  Lily hummed. She glanced at the weapons her Labourtrons were looting from the Raiders; she could leave one of those for the woman.
  
  Lily had an odd itching feeling in the back of her head, telling her that wasn't what she should do.
  
  'Well, I'm not giving her one of my weapons! I can't replace any of them!' Lily argued with her feeling before she glanced at the prototype AirTaser in her hand. She could replace that.
  
  The feeling in the back of her head stilled, which Lily took for agreement. Sighing, she pulled a couple of extra small power cells out of her bag and put them in the woman's pocket before showing the AirTaser to her. She showed her the switch on the back, "Safe, Non-Lethal, Lethal, High-output." Lily demonstrated all the firing modes and the safety before leaving the electric gun in the paralyzed hands of the woman and jumping back into her truck, rolling northeast across the river.
  
  'I have no idea why I just did that. That prototype is probably a little bit better than the production models I make!' Lily groused to herself a kilometre away, but she had come to trust the feelings she had.
  
  "Well, Vault 108 or bust!" Lily decided to forget about it. She would fabricate herself another AirTaser when she got to the Vault and plugged all of her equipment in.
  
  The two Railroad agents were surprised to see their friend alive when she caught up with them half a day later; that much was certain. A younger-looking one was amazed and asked, "Did you kill that Courser?!"
  
  The woman scowled, "Of course not. Did you see how fucking fast she took down those raiders?"
  
  She sat next to her two friends and explained, "She told me I was in her way, and I thought that she meant in the way between her and A3-21, so I figured I was dead but would at least give you guys a headstart."
  
  The three nodded; that was pretty much what they had expected. They were already mourning her when they ran off, in fact.
  
  "She stunned me with some new weapon I've never heard about, made all my muscles spasm out of control for like ten seconds, and then she drugged me with some drug I've also never seen before, which paralyzed everything from my eyes down," the woman reported in a surly tone.
  
  "Then the bitch stole my minigun and was about to drive off in a truck, but for some reason, she handed me the weapon she used to stun me!" she finished, confusedly. She held out the sleek grey energy weapon for inspection, "She even told me the switch positions were safe, non-lethal, lethal and high-output before driving off. A few minutes later, I could move again and started chasing after you guys."
  
  She paused her story, "I think the non-lethal is the stunning setting she used on me, and I think the lethal is what she used on the raiders. I tried the high-output setting out of curiosity, and it shot a giant lightning bolt, but it takes a while to recharge after one shot of that."
  
  The older of the two men looked thoughtful, "She must have been ordered to do something else, but almost any Courser would have mopped us up as a secondary objective, maybe even switch to us as a primary objective after you were stupid enough to say A3-21's designation out loud in her hearing."
  
  The woman groaned, "Yeah, that was stupid of me," she admitted. She was technically the leader of this cell and was a great leader, but not really the greatest of thinkers.
  
  "I think she might be close to waking up. She is still following their orders, but she disregarded us and pretended she didn't hear A3-21's name. And she even gave you, who she had to know was a Railroad operative, what looks like a prototype Institute energy weapon. This is huge. Coursers almost never turn away from the Institute; their indoctrination is too strong," the man mused aloud.
  
  The woman considered that and nodded, "You're right." The younger operative asked, "What should we do? Should we try to find her after we get to Rivet City?"
  
  Both the woman and the older man shook their heads.
  
  The woman finally found her smarts, as she had an intuitive grasp of tactics, "No. You have to wake up naturally; you know this. But we should definitely tell the higher-ups when we get back to the Commonwealth. Just the fact that there was a Courser working this far south is something they have to know."
  
  "So our destination is Rivet City? We've heard there was a new hospital with advanced technology in Megaton, though," the younger man mentioned.
  
  "Yeah, but we know for sure there is a scientist that can do what we need. Time is of the essence, especially now. If there is one Courser here, there could be more," the older man mentioned.
  
  The woman nodded, "Exactly. Let me rest another fifteen minutes, and then we can get on the move again."
  
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  For the Science!
  Lily stared at the paralyzed Gary clone with a complicated feeling in her heart.
  
  Have you ever played a role-playing game and returned to the first dungeon and just steamrolled the monsters with your higher levelled character and gear?
  
  It felt great, didn't it? That's right. It was a lie! Lily's feeling wasn't complicated at all! She felt great! These fucking Gary's!
  
  She arrived at the Vault a couple of hours ago and parked in a somewhat secluded area before unloading the truck of all of her equipment and proceeding inside with her robo-squad. It didn't take long to find the first Gary, who was stunned and paralyzed quickly.
  
  She wasn't in a hurry here, so she had her robots clean the entrance and the first rooms, dragging trash out of the Vault and dragging her own equipment in.
  
  She couldn't go too much farther in, or she would lose the data connection with the quad-copter drone, which was hovering high enough to be very difficult to see while watching over her truck.
  
  Lily would have to build a number of signal repeaters as she explored the Vault if she wanted to stay in contact with the outside world, which she definitely did.
  
  Lily had two main goals coming to this Vault, to liberate its cloning and genetic equipment as well as to conduct morally justifiable FEV tests on the population of Gary's.
  
  She had taken additional brain scans of this paralyzed Gary and saw nothing to indicate that it was sapient at all. There were dogs that were smarter, she was sure. So, as long as she didn't cause them undue pain or suffering, she felt perfectly justified performing experiments on them.
  
  There were a lot of bonuses to conducting this type of viral research on a series of clones that were genetically identical, as they were almost their own control group. Lily could vary the route of administration and the dose and see if that correlated to a change in the ultimate mutations expressed. She was very interested to see if that was the case, or would every exposure be similar, or would every exposure be random? She didn't know!
  
  It took about a day before the FEV transformation was more or less complete, so Lily did not see any reason she should delay any longer. She wasn't in a hurry here, but she didn't want to waste any time, either. She expected to spend about a week here, followed by a few days visiting Sophie and Scott before heading back home.
  
  Lily hummed and pulled out a carefully packed dark glass container containing some of the first ether produced. She learned from her experiments with Sir Longius and wasn't about to proceed in such a way that any of her subjects could escape from her. She didn't need Vault 108 to become another Super Mutant nexus, after all.
  
  A subject didn't need BOTH arms and legs, after all. She could just examine the mutation in one of the limbs and extrapolate the changes she saw into the missing limb for her models. And Super Mutants might be dangerous, but one-armed, one-legged Super Mutants? Much less so.
  
  She sedated the paralyzed Gary because even though it wasn't sapient, it could still feel pain, and she wasn't a monster, after all! After the amputations, she would change the paralyzation medichines to healing mode for a time to ensure there was no infection before turning them completely off for the first exposure.
  
  'Hmmm. I should fabricate some graphene restraints, too, just in case,' she thought.
  
  'Command, Audio - Play Frédéric Chopin,' she commanded as she got to work.
  
  Lily decided to go with a traditional intravenous exposure for her first subject.
  
  She had the feeling from her memories that FEV was often aerosolized and exposed to test subjects that way, but Lily couldn't find a single reason why that should be the preferred method, so she discarded it at first as it was a less safe and less objective way to accomplish the same thing.
  
  One of the slightly Terminator-looking Labourtrons was holding her diagnostic scanner near the first subject, taking continual scans of the restrained Gary, which she monitored through a wireless connection. One leg or no, restrained or no, she wasn't about to sit in there with what might be a Super Gary, soon.
  
  Sadly, there was no real way she could avoid all of the distress of the clone during the transformation process. She had switched the medichines over to analgesic mode, instead of turning them off like she originally intended when the Gary regained consciousness shortly after exposure to FEV.
  
  The virus triggered some reactions in its amygdala, which caused an adrenaline feedback loop which woke the Gary up. It no longer responded to the administration of benzodiazepines as an anxiolytic, either.
  
  So, while she was sure it wasn't feeling any pain, it was clearly feeling some sort of distress that she couldn't treat pharmacologically. She would just have to live with that, she supposed.
  
  Her scanner didn't have the resolution to see the genetic changes happen, but she saw the after effects as it seemed to be converting available fat into muscle rapidly. The changes in the brain were the most interesting, though. Granted, it was true that all the Gary clone's brains were scrambled eggs in the first place, but Lily wasn't seeing anything that should cause a loss of intelligence.
  
  If anything, all the increased neural connections and activity should have the opposite effect! This type of effect was exactly what she would expect to see, for example, in the shitty weasel, and would explain its rapid gain of intelligence that she had already observed. According to Alice, the damn thing can do math! Even if it was only simple addition and subtraction.
  
  Lily glanced over at the silver briefcase with Vault-Tec's logo on it. Did she get a different strain, somehow? But it was supposed to be picked up and taken to Vault 87; it didn't make sense that it wasn't the same sort of virus they were experimenting on already, or did it?
  
  It was a shame she only had one scanner, she could have started the exposures for more Gary's, but she didn't want to miss anything. So she had only exposed two Gary's thus far. She had four others that she was keeping "on ice", as it were, and had ordered the robots to kill any of the others ones if they found them.
  
  Lily hummed and made a note to increase the calorie content of the exposed Gary's to a minimum of six thousand a day, or perhaps even more. It's a shame she couldn't feed the dead Gary's to her subject-Gary's... she couldn't, could she?
  
  Lily shook her head. No, she had some lines she wouldn't cross. The Vault's first rooms were starting to look pretty clean. Well, they lacked obvious debris and destroyed and wrecked objects - they were still quite dirty in terms of filth.
  
  She would still sleep in the cab of her truck tonight.
  
  Lily woke up and was amazed at her dreams. She had dreamt of being excited to come home and play a newly released game, Fallout: New Vegas. She expected it to be great because it was made by the same people who made Knights of the Old Republic 2, which was one of her all-time favourite games, along with its prequel. Some of the memories were disjointed in time, as she had some memories of different play-throughs and some memories of DLCs which weren't released until much later.
  
  Lily now had most of the knowledge of the plot of Fallout: New Vegas in her head, including some things that really made her nervous considering she now lived here; for example, the Old World Blues expansion made her nervous.
  
  The "Think Tanks" seemed insane, and coming from a former robotic spider that was universally also considered insane, that was saying a lot! The expansion pack played all of the things you saw in Big MT for laughs, but they sounded quite terrifying if you thought about it.
  
  "Perhaps... perhaps zhey don't actually exist? I mean, 'ow could you take someone's brain out of zheir skull and zhen have zhem still walking around looking for zheir brain as a quest?" Lily said to herself, but the fact that she could think of at least three ways to do that off the top of her head made her hopes ring hollow.
  
  In the one play-through in her memories, she sided with Dr House, which she tended to agree with as well. While he was definitely an autocrat, he was the best of a bad series of choices. She also didn't precisely know the timeline of the games. Did New Vegas happen after or before? It's so far away it might not even be of her concern.
  
  She did find it amusing that Dr House had almost exactly the same opinion about the Brotherhood of Steel as she did, although she wouldn't go as far as blowing them all up...
  
  She paused. She was planning to blow them up. A little bit. "Not all of zhem, zhough!" she said aloud, to herself, churlishly.
  
  She would have to think long and hard about how any of the information she learned from New Vegas might be of use to her today in the Capital Wasteland. How many years after New Vegas did they publish Fallout 4? She didn't remember. She supposed it didn't even matter; she wasn't collecting memories chronologically, not usually.
  
  The robots had killed seven more Gary's overnight and had begun working their way to where Lily suspected was the overseer's office on the upper levels, which was blocked by a bunch of debris and overturned furniture.
  
  She pulled up the map of Vault 108 that has been generated by her robots and considered it while she made her rounds on the subject Gary's and Garys-in-Waiting.
  
  The two exposed Garys more or less resemble Super Mutants now, and have already gone through the process of what she is referring to as androgynization, with them losing their primary and secondary sexual characteristics. The first subject had already tried to destroy her Labourtron that was continually scanning it, but thankfully the graphene restraints held. It would set her back considerably if she lost that scanner, although it wouldn't be the death blow it used to be.
  
  She still has no idea how it works and isn't willing to disassemble it to try to figure it out. It was a shame it couldn't scan itself, also.
  
  She pulled up the latest scans of Gary's brain, interested in this new now-typical Super Mutant behaviour. She was shocked at what she saw. Much different than when she left, the current brain looked... damaged. Gone were the rapidly developing additional neural connections that Lily would have taken for signs of increased intelligence. Instead, it looked like Gary had been the victim of a traumatic brain injury.
  
  She sat down and pulled up the scans that her brain-computer had saved and went backwards in time until she got to the point where she left to go to sleep. She began playback at ten times normal speed, watching neural connections develop rapidly with fascination.
  
  It took about fifteen minutes of watching to pinpoint the exact time everything started to go wrong for Gary, but it took another hour of her studying all the processes that were happening before she figured out exactly what was going on.
  
  It seemed to her that FEV, or at least this strain of it, was intended to increase intelligence. However... there was such a thing as too much of a good thing. The virus didn't know where to stop. The density of neural connections in Gary's brain increased and increased until such a point where his body could no longer support the energy and oxygen demands of so much neural activity, and no matter how much the heart pumped blood, the brain couldn't remain properly oxygenated.
  
  Then over a period of about an hour, the brain suffered increasing and increasing hypoxia-related brain injuries until an equilibrium was reached where the body could support a new level of brain activity. It was like having a thousand strokes, so it wasn't that surprising Super Mutants were so stupid and aggressive. What was surprising was that they survived at all! Most of the sacrificed brain area was the areas that stored memories and processed higher-ordered thinking.
  
  What a tragedy.
  
  Lily thought back to the stoat and wondered why it was so different. Was this the reason why FEV sometimes increased intelligence in some animals but not others, like humans?
  
  Well, these first two subjects had served their purpose. It was time to examine them in-depth, pathologically, to see any differences in the viral exposure on a genetically identical subject. Grabbing her tri-beam, she walked over to the rooms she was using to house the subjects. There was no reason to keep these two feeling any more distress.
  
  She had managed to get into the overseer's office that evening. She was putting on hold any further experiments after dissecting the two Gary's. There were significant divergences in how the exposure effected the two identical Gary's, despite being exposed to an identical amount of virus in an identical way.
  
  She suspected that there was a significant amount of randomness in every FEV exposure up to a certain point, which might make studying it less useful than she thought.
  
  While the Overseer's room didn't have the two miniguns on the arms of the Overseer's chair like she remembered from Fallout 1 & 2, it did have a ceiling-mounted machine gun that damaged one of her robots before it was destroyed by two high-output lightning beams.
  
  In the Overseer's files, Lily found what she thought might be the secret purpose of Vault 108. When she first got here, she thought maybe it was a breeding test, considering the prominently labelled "Female Dormitories," but she had already uncovered an area labelled "Male Dormitories," as well, which put paid to that theory.
  
  The Overseer's protocol didn't lay the entire purpose behind the experiments out, but Lily could read between the lines. Vault 108 was, unsurprisingly, a test of cloning technology. But specifically, they were testing the ability to copy an existing brain into a newly grown clone.
  
  The Overseer was to select a non-essential male and female person so the tests could be conducted. In the Overseer's notes, he had already selected a maintenance worker named Gary Kaminski but was waiting on the first phase being completed before selecting a female "volunteer."
  
  After their brains were copied into a series of new clones, the experiment was to transition to a social one studying how a group of people with identical memories would interact with their fellows and how they would interact with a group of similar people of the opposite gender. They clearly hadn't gotten that far.
  
  Lily wasn't surprised. It wasn't specifically stated, but this was immortality research at its root, too. The average person might not consider an exact duplicate of themselves as a route to immortality, but a lot of people would. Plus it would make a very good way to create tons of super-soldiers; you only had to train one completely and then just copy his brain into a bunch of clones. Bonus points if you could adjust their memories, so the clones didn't know they were clones.
  
  Wasn't that the plot of a Tom Cruise film? She couldn't quite remember.
  
  It did make her all the more curious about what precisely she would find in the lower-level labs of this Vault. Already her robots were working in that direction. She would have to have a good path clear of debris if she intended to loot the labs to the bedrock, in any case, so now it was just a matter of waiting.
  
  She considered her Garys-in-Waiting. Well, she had enough time to run more FEV experiments on a pair. It would likely take a day or more to clear more than the small path the Gary's used to get in and out of the lower labs. She needed to clear an entire corridor.
  
  She paused to consider. She would let the transformation go a little longer this time. But this time, she would program a number of medichines to keep the Gary's brain oxygenated as best as they could. And perhaps they didn't need any of their limbs; it would assist Gary's heart to keep the brain oxygenated if there was less body mass to pump the blood through, after all. Plus, the transformation wasn't that interesting on the limbs. Just more muscle, denser skin. She's seen that, already.
  
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  Someone call X-COM!
  Lily did not have to wait an entire day to see the results. The activity in the brain started merely two hours after she administered the FEV, and the catastrophic hypoxia started occurring no more than three hours after that.
  
  While she waited, she considered the group of people she met on the bridge. Their behaviour was out of spec and even more irrational than usual. Lily was normally used to somewhat irrational and inexplicable behaviour from everyone she met; even her Apprentice displayed it on a semi-regular basis. It happened so often that she more or less discounted it, so she had some difficulty detecting when a reaction was truly out of the ordinary in real-time.
  
  Her only conclusions were that everyone was irrational or that something was wrong with her own perspective, neither of which was a particular great conclusion as far as she was concerned.
  
  She had been trying to recreate her social assistant using her computer, but its suggestions that would pop up in conversation were either not timely, as in the AI only finished churning the optimal social strategy long after the conversation was ended, or poor enough that even Lily felt that they were inappropriate, or both. It was still barely on the level of a chatbot.
  
  However, in the case of the woman with the minigun, Lily felt that the optimal strategy the AI suggested for defusing the situation and preventing her from escalating to violence might have worked, except the system didn't offer it to her until she was already driving down the road after stunning and robbing the woman.
  
  It suggested she should have asked, "What is a Courser?"
  
  Lily rubbed her chin, "That would have worked, wouldn't it?" She considered the dictionary definition of the word. Either a warhorse or a dog that hunted prey in the English style, like foxes.
  
  She felt neither option was particularly flattering to call a classy lady like herself. Still, she felt that the more dangerous sounding definition would be the most likely given their fear, and extrapolating that gave her the idea that a Courser was a hunter or perhaps only a hunter's tool, like a dog running down a fox.
  
  The alphanumeric designation she, at first, took to mean an object, like a prototype piece of technology or maybe even some sort of knowledge kept on holotape or similar.
  
  But the woman said "him," right before Lily's bots stunned her. "Surely this couldn't be a Blade Runner-type situation?"
  
  Lily frowned, pulled up her memories of the encounter, and then overlayed onto her visual feed the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum she had antennas for. The spectrum she could listen to was most of the radio and microwave bands up until the infrared band right before the visible light spectrum.
  
  Designing anything using electricity that didn't shed some unintentional electromagnetic frequency radiation was actually very difficult. The stories of a faulty hair dryer blocking out TV for several blocks, back when people still received TV signals mostly from antennas, were true and happened every year.
  
  Even her own body leaked unintentional EMF radiation, to say nothing of all the intentional high-frequency broadcasts that came in and out of her head almost constantly these days. If one or more of these four were androids, she didn't believe they wouldn't be using radio to communicate with each other.
  
  She should be able to get a leak, even if it's a sideband, off of their power cells discharging, at the very least! Especially if they haven't had maintenance in some time.
  
  She used her hands to pan, tilt, and zoom over each of the four, especially of the three "hims." She played the memory several times but got nothing, except for one anomalous reading on one of the men, but the best she could say about it was that it was inconclusive and likely nothing.
  
  Still, she pulled up her radio spectrum analyzer and isolated that one anomalous signal that could possibly be originating from one of the three. It was a spike in the seventy gigahertz range, which she wasn't aware of anyone but herself using. She used a big chunk of the seventies and eighties for ultra-high-speed data transmission, in the fifty gigabits per second range at about ten watts of output.
  
  That was really high up in the microwave range, suitable for very high bandwidth transmissions, of which most Fallout technologies aside from radar had no use whatsoever as they didn't have the processing power to even receive so many bits per second.
  
  This band also had the disadvantage of not having the best range, especially when it had to go through objects like a building's walls.
  
  And after inspecting the signal's waveform, she couldn't say for certain that it was modulated for a digital signal. It might be, but it could be noise, and even if it was a real signal, it could be a signal from somewhere behind the man that went through his head and appeared to be originating from him. The quick burst did not last long enough for her to triangulate since neither she nor the man was moving when she recorded it.
  
  Her expert system chewed on the signal and declared it was either noise or an encrypted burst transmission of an unknown cypher. Frowning, she pulled up a visual representation of the signal waveform again. It just didn't look like the clean hills and troughs of a digitally encoded radio signal... unless it was specifically designed to be challenging to analyze and to blend in with background clutter.
  
  Lily played back the experience recording again, this time focusing on the audio track only. Humming, she pulled up the same waveform analyzer she was using to inspect the radio signals but opened the audio waveforms in it instead.
  
  First, she chopped and cut the dynamic range of the sound out, focusing only on the infrasound and ultrasound areas, the so-called non-audible sounds that she could hear. She could often hear and identify pieces of machinery or even electronics just by how they sounded these days and felt that it might be possible to detect implanted cybernetics that way.
  
  However, she couldn't detect anything unusual that wasn't clearly originating from some objects and equipment they carried. Switching, she cleaned up the sound until she could hear the distinct heartbeat sounds localized in two of the males; the third was not distinct enough as his body was mostly obscured by the other two.
  
  Lily piped these sounds into a Fourier transform to give her a visual representation of their heartbeat. It certainly wasn't a good enough resolution to be compared to an actual phonocardiogram, but it certainly appeared to be a genuine, organic heart to her expert eyes. She could even detect the spike of fear causing the beats per minute to spike into the tachycardia range briefly.
  
  Sighing, she closed the experience playback.
  
  "Well, whatever, I suppose. Zhey definitely aren't androids. So I'm zhinking too much into zhis? Remembering too many sci-fi shows?" Lily mused to herself.
  
  The only other option would be biomorph sleeves, with more sophisticated bioware than she herself can create, which she didn't accept as a possibility. "Or maybe zhey're just regular people... or clones? Maybe zhis is like Blade Runner or Logan's Run, where zhey decommission you if you get too old?" Now she was just engaging in pure fantasy. Being in Vault 108 made her see clones everywhere, she decided.
  
  What she really needed was an assistant that could understand the way irrational people thought and slowly teach her coping strategies. The Apprentice certainly might fit that bill, certainly better than she herself did. But wouldn't it be... insulting to ask the girl? Lily would be a mite insulted if someone came to her for help because she was thought to be an expert on the social interaction and thinking patterns of irrational flats.
  
  She would ask her anyway. As the Mistress helped the Apprentice, so the Apprentice must help the Mistress. She just hopes she doesn't die an early death like her own Master did so many years ago. Stupid old man.
  
  She'd thought about this subject enough. She had some design work she could do.
  
  A mental alarm caused her to sit up. Her experimental subjects' vitals were in the shitter. She leapt to her feet and ran into the room where the first subject was. It looked like it was about to code, judging from his blood pressure and oxygen saturation. It was also in the middle of an incredible tonic-clonic seizure, which, if she were a detective, she would call a clue.
  
  She would treat the seizure and work from there.
  
  Fifteen minutes later, and after he coded twice, he finally expired. She never quite got him into what she would consider an actual postictal state, and she wasn't able to resuscitate him the last time he had a cardiac arrest.
  
  She walked over to see the other dead subject but was amazed to find him still alive, but barely. She judged him pretty much beyond saving, though, so she didn't attempt any extraordinary methods on the second Super-Gary and number two passed ten minutes later.
  
  Besides, she was flabbergasted. When you have two genetically identical subjects and infect them with an identical virus at the same time... the one who dies sooner was the one she spent fifteen minutes trying to save? How is she supposed to take that, as a doctor? That her efforts were worse than doing nothing at all?
  
  No! She can't accept that. She intended to go back to the truck and go to sleep, but now it was personal. She won't be able to sleep until she's done with the autopsy on both of these guys and knows the truth because it CAN'T be her.
  
  Several hours later, she washed herself off and felt a little better about things. It turned out that the first subject that she attempted to save had more neural development than the one who had died after.
  
  She felt that her attempts to save the first subject's life had prolonged the period of time the virus was continuing to change its brain, which got to the point where intracranial pressure was quickly becoming fatal.
  
  In other words, the subject's brain had literally grown to the point where it killed itself due to the limitations on the size of the subject's skull, even though the subject's skull saw rapid growth during the first.
  
  She only had two more Garys-in-Waiting, so she was unsure what her next experiment should be. Perhaps she should wait until she has breached the actual cloning lab? But she had two main ideas of avenues of investigation left, and they were mainly just similar experiments but varying extremes.
  
  She would sleep on it. She might do both; there wasn't much use in using an identical Gary for control. She had already learned that the changes FEV induced were highly random in a band of possibility. The end result was mostly homogenous from a cursory inspection. Suspiciously homogenous, one might say, but the transformation process was quite divergent in many ways. It was fascinating.
  
  Before she slept, though, she would have to do some maintenance on her aerial drone. Theoretically, with its fission batteries and lightweight construction, it should be able to hover in overwatch indefinitely, but there has been a slow failure of the motors' output.
  
  Towelling herself off, she sighed. If it wasn't one thing, it was another.
  
  Although Lily did not get to bed until after 0400, she woke up at precisely 0630 the next morning feeling refreshed and ready for a new day.
  
  She did not have to spend any time laying in bed waiting to fall asleep; she could trigger herself to induce sleep and rapidly enter the most restful deep phase, followed by REM sleep at will, which is something she would have been intensely jealous of in her past life in America.
  
  She felt she could have slept for another half hour or maybe even two if she was feeling luxurious, but her alarm woke her at the pre-set time, and now that she was up, she felt energized.
  
  She dreamt of aliens. Intelligent amoebas that called themselves the Factors from the universe where she was named the Spider Witch.
  
  She had studied, in-depth, the devices and biological samples she had stolen from the Jovian Junta but was ultimately forced to return them, along with her analysis. She was forced to give up her own work product to the biochauvinists.
  
  Usually, she wouldn't have folded to such threats, but they seemed really keen to kill her permanently if she didn't return everything to them, to the point where they were threatening strategic strikes against any habitat that would house her, which was an almost unprecedented escalation of threat. And they had the largest military in the Solar System, so she actually had to take them seriously.
  
  It worked somewhat to her advantage, though, because, like most tyrannies, the Junta didn't really care about the damage done to its citizens, so they offered her a blank slate so long as she quietly returned all the alien samples along with her own analysis of them.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue. Remembering that series of memories of her assaulting the station made her have an epiphany. She really was kind of a lunatic, wasn't she? Well, not anymore, of course. But back then... she was a bit out there, wasn't she?
  
  Lily came to the conclusion that forking and merging multiple times a week for hundreds of years might not actually be very good for your mental stability.
  
  She shook her head. She was getting distracted. Besides, she was perfectly fine, now.
  
  However, her thoughts about xenobiology made her think of the FEV virus. The interesting thing about the aliens in her memories was that they were not based on the traditional nucleic acids nor amino acids that she expected when seeing carbon-based lifeforms.
  
  She remembered she was depressed for an entire day when her theories of panspermia as the source of all life in the galaxy were dealt a crushing blow. Instead, the xenos seemed to utilize some form of naturally synthesized polymeric nanostructure that was shaped like a scaffold, rectangularly, as opposed to the more elegant helix design of complex Earth-based animals.
  
  Why was that so intriguing? Well, it just so happened that some brilliant and beautiful scientist who was also a spider was inspired by this type of genetic data encoding structure and utilized a similar method to increase the information density in biomorphs. She was talking about herself. She was the beautiful spider scientist she was referring to.
  
  Her holy grail of information density in a biological organism was to be able to grow an organism from a genome in vitro that would itself grow a biological computer as it matured, complete with software pre-installed. That would open the door to true generational memories and was a hobby of hers. She hadn't gotten to that peak, as far as she knew, though.
  
  Considering increased genetic information density... one of the weirdest and most fascinating things about the FEV virus was that it induced radical changes in the hosts' own DNA, converting the normal double-helix arrangement into a quad-helix arrangement of densely packed information. Quite pretty, in fact.
  
  The changes were so radical, in fact, that the Genome Sequencer she brought with her reported an error when she tried to sequence the genome of all of her subjects post-transformation. She had to go deep into the settings and get it to print out the raw data just to get the data she needed for her analyses.
  
  Perhaps she wasn't the only scientist in the multiverse to gain inspiration from the genetic structure of xeno-lifeforms? And perhaps in the Fallout universe, she was right about panspermia and aliens also used a DNA-like structure, just one twice as complicated as found in Earth-life?
  
  Lily knew that aliens existed in Fallout, but she was kind of hoping they weren't as depicted in the Mothership Zeta DLC. But she also knew that the pre-war US government had a number of crashed UFOs and samples of alien cadavers, at least according to some "wild wasteland" random encounters amongst all the Fallout games.
  
  Perhaps West-Tek based their biowarfare program on an alien genome? To her, that sounded like one of the worst ideas she had ever heard of in her entire life. Which immediately made her think she was onto something, given the state of Pre-War America in the Fallout universe.
  
  She suddenly wished she had an alien DNA sample; it would help her research on this virus significantly. But just knowing the source might be extraterrestrial in origin helped her a lot, too.
  
  She was fabricating a lot of surgical tools, as she had two ideas to test on her last two Gary's today.
  
  On one, she would repeat yesterday's experiment; however in this case, she would program the medichines to, at a certain point, go on a viral-hunting rampage.
  
  She already knew her nanomachines were very effective at destroying the FEV virus, and she wanted to stop the transformation process about midway through. There would be some physical alterations and quite a lot of changes in the brain. If she could stop the transformation before it went too far in the brain, the end result would be quite intriguing.
  
  She timed this point at about an hour after the virus began its rapid changes to the brain, so the transformation would only have about five hours to proceed. What she would get wouldn't be a Super Mutant, but it would be something new. Something interesting.
  
  She had that subject ready to go quickly, as it was just a matter of programming changes. She wouldn't even need to amputate this subject's limbs, as the process wouldn't proceed too long.
  
  Her second subject, though. Well, she decided she was just going to go all the way this time. She had the skill, tools and knowledge to perform brain transplants, so she would remove number two's brain and spinal cord and place it in a special tank she fabricated to keep it oxygenated and supplied with chemical energy.
  
  Then she would expose it inside the tank and see how far down the rabbit hole this could go.
  
  Watching the FEV transformation proceed at a pace on a brain without any body in the way was quite intriguing. So long as she kept the medichines in its tank well supplied with both oxygen and "food" it proceeded very quickly, faster than the first subject even.
  
  But it was still a bit like watching paint dry or a kettle set to boil, so she left the Termitron, who was continually scanning it and returned to check on her first subject.
  
  She got there just in time to watch the medichines shift into viral hunting mode. Although she didn't have her scanner with her, it didn't take her long to realize she had made a mistake with how vigorously the medichines were hunting down the virus.
  
  Although medichines were vastly, vastly superior to the body's own immune response, they still could do some damage to healthy cells while fighting an invader, and Lily was watching them kill the subject's brain in the attempt to save it.
  
  She considered quickly adjusting the behaviour to something less aggressive, which would still be very effective but decided that the data was already tainted and that she would likely learn something valuable anyway, so she decided to just sit back.
  
  It wasn't like she thought she'd never see another Gary, after all.
  
  Lily suspected the damage to the autonomic system in the brain stem was what actually killed the Gary, but she wouldn't know until she did an autopsy.
  
  She hummed and decided to do one right away. She'd let the other subject keep cooking while she worked here. Everything over there was being recorded, anyway.
  
  A proper autopsy takes a couple of hours if you were thorough, and Lily was thorough. She really hoped that her robots would open the path to the lower level lab soon; she hoped her guesses that there was a people mulcher in there were true because she had a lot of bodies and parts of bodies to mulch.
  
  But now, she excitedly hurried to the second subject's room. She had been peeking at the scan results during the autopsy and had to admit that things looked terrific. The brain had trebled in size and seemed to be reorganizing into a different shape and the brain structure, and there were numerous individual areas of the brain that Lily could no longer identify!
  
  She walked into the room and peered at the brain, eyes and spinal cord in the tank. What surprised Lily was it seemed to notice her too. While the eyes couldn't actually turn in the absence of the ocular muscles to do so, she saw a dilation response immediately that was correlated with recognition.
  
  'How interesting,' she thought. However, before she could consider the implications, she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her head, like the worst migraine she had heard a tale of. She grabbed her head and groaned.
  
  Looking at the brain in a jar in shock, she put two and two together. As she reached for her laser pistol at her waist, she suddenly felt as if she was kicked in the chest by a mule by an unknown force, sending her flying backwards.
  
  She managed to clear leather while flying backwards and simultaneously fired several shots into the tank while subvocalizing to her robo-squad, ' Command, Direction, Destroy Designated Object. Engage. '
  
  Before she could see if she scored any hits in mid-air with her pistol, she was smashed into the wall back-first with incredible force, and her vision and senses went black.
  
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  Consequences of my actions chasing me rn
  Lily groaned as she slowly returned to consciousness. The drugged feeling and somewhat loopiness she was experiencing was a sure sign that she had a concussion and probably not a minor one.
  
  That pissed her off. Concussions meant brain damage, and her brain was the most important part of her, at least until such a time as she decided to destructively dissolve it one neuron at a time as she converted it into a quantum computer, anyway.
  
  She wanted to stand up and punch that brain right in the frontal cortex, or whatever equivalent was in the radically different brain structure that she remembered noting.
  
  She started to redirect her medichines to her brain to ensure the swelling was minor and repair any obviously damaged neural connections, but the alerts her nanohive was relaying into her computer indicated that there was a lot more damage to her than she thought.
  
  Ruptured spleen and liver, myocardial contusion, severe internal bleeding, and a host of other minor things such as contusions to other organs like one of her kidneys and lungs. The only reason she didn't have a dozen broken bones was that she did not have any bones in her body anymore.
  
  Oh, and a detached retina in her left eye. Lovely.
  
  'Okay, maybe I'll just sit here and won't get up,' Lily thought to herself while ensuring that the PHOENIX system and her medichines prioritized the most severe injuries. She did open her eyes, though, looking through the working right one for both her pistol and the status of that fucking brain.
  
  Her pistol was too far away to grab without getting up, so she disregarded it and carefully pulled out the new AirTaser she built for herself, thumbing it over to high output. She must have lost consciousness for at least a few minutes because she could see a number of Termitrons leaving the room.
  
  The Proto-Healing Vat she made for the brain, she refused to call it a jar, was well and truly destroyed with the brain flopped unceremoniously on the floor. She took aim at it and considered pulling the trigger but stopped herself.
  
  There was no way Brain-Gary could be conscious or even alive; it required continuous oxygenation at high levels, so she sighed and placed the AirTaser back in her holster and just sat there while thinking about her life choices. Frying it would make her feel good, but it would damage it and prevent a proper pathological examination of the mutant.
  
  She coughed, a little blood visible on her hand and sighed again. At least she was still being a classy lady and keeping all of her bleedings internally rather than messing up the only lab coat she had brought with her. She had driven out to the Vault in a customized dark grey form-fitting combat suit and helmet, as she was rightly worried about ambushes during the trip. However, science always felt better if you were appropriately dressed for it!
  
  She didn't particularly want to think about the fact that she might have created a Psyker-Gary, at present. Nor what she felt when the brain reached into her mind. Eventually, she would get to that, but for the moment, she pulled up her sensorium playback and went through just what happened because she still wasn't entirely sure.
  
  Lily disabled the tactile sense and reduced pain to ten per cent in the playback settings while changing the visual opacity to only seventy-five per cent, so she could still see a little bit of the real world from her one good eye while she watched the playback. She wasn't afraid to admit that she was still a little bit nervous.
  
  Lily slowed the playback to a quarter speed at the moment the brain reacted to seeing her. Why did she even keep the eyes attached to the optical nerves on that brain, she wondered?
  
  Next, she paused the playback at the part where she was clearly reacting in pain, but no pain was in the sensorium recorded. Thinking that it must be on the tactile track, she re-enabled it and found that there was no pain there either.
  
  That was very interesting, and very concerning too. The brain cannot feel pain; it has no nerves to do so. Lily thought that she must have been feeling some sort of induced migraine headache, but if so, it should have played back in her sensorium.
  
  What was this? Some sort of... metaphysical pain? Pain attacking the psychic mind rather than the physical brain? Lily wanted to scoff at such fantasies, but she was still staring at the brain that did it to her, so she couldn't discount them as much as she wanted to.
  
  She had known that there were psychic powers in the Fallout universe. Hell, she had known that some FEV strains could cause psychic powers, as that was a minor plot point in Fallout 1. However, to be honest, her hyper-materialist mind had sort of... discounted the possibility. Which was stupid, she now considered.
  
  She sighed. There were a lot of little weird things in the Fallout games that couldn't possibly be real, and she just assumed that fucking actual Psykers were one of them. For example, one of the characters in Fallout 1 was supposed to have been exposed to FEV and turned hyper-dense, weighing one Imperial ton but in the same body shape as a normal man. That was ridiculous unless he was made out of indium.
  
  Perhaps she just didn't have enough electrodes in her brain to detect the pain the Psyker Gary caused her, or maybe it occurred in areas of the brain that she discounted for sensorium. For example, she piped the inputs and outputs of the Broca region of her brain into the computer's sub-vocalization system, and that was only one such example of dozens.
  
  Shaking her head, she just didn't know. She had a feeling that it was a metaphysical bullshit thing, though.
  
  She continued the playback, rubbing her bruised chest at the point in the playback where she was launched into the rear wall of the room. The fucking brain had TKed her right in the tit, and it still stung even amongst all the other injured areas of her body.
  
  But... it didn't compute. As much as the hit in her chest hurt, it didn't compute to the much harder impact she had with the wall.
  
  Humming, she pulled up some diagnostic data included in the experience log, including the accelerometer she used as part of her backup inertial navigation system.
  
  'Ah. It wasn't so much a single hit. My body was accelerated continuously until I slammed into the wall,' Lily realized. It wasn't so much that it hit me with TK, but more like it grabbed me and slammed me into the wall with TK.
  
  Lily turned her pain and tactile playback off completely prior to her body hitting the wall in the experience playback, nodding at the deceleration numbers in her diagnostic log.
  
  That would have been instantly fatal to any flat. Hell, it would have killed her if she was still the same as she was when she arrived in Vault 108.
  
  The only sense track that continued after she blacked out was the audio, as it was piped directly from the digital microphones to her brain-computer. The rest of her brain was entirely insensate, with her brain's electrical activity being recorded as quite low.
  
  Was being rendered unconscious and waking back up the bioequivalent of merging from a fork? True unconsciousness was a lot different from sleep, where brain activity was quite high. Her brain was, essentially, switched off for a time, like a computer rebooting. She felt that it was not a bad comparison.
  
  Lily switched on the crude passive sonar system, and instead of blackness in the playback, she started to see indistinct shapes rendered in grayscale whenever there was a noise. For example, she saw the outline of the room's walls, the Termitron and the Psyker Gary's healing vat the moment her robot started shooting it with high-output lightning bolts.
  
  She was very glad she didn't build the entire healing vat out of diamond-like she had considered doing. She only built the front viewing port out of diamond glass and the rest out of carbon fibre.
  
  Very quickly, two other robots came into the room and started blasting the tank with blue beams as well, and one of them closed to a close distance and started smashing it with its hands.
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes and immediately made a note to create retractable diamondoid claws for the Termitrons. The steel alloy fingers did nothing against the diamond glass.
  
  Although Lily was pretty sure the lightning beams had already destroyed the device at this point, one of the robots just picked it up and threw it on the ground for good measure, smashing everything except the glass panel into bits.
  
  At that point, the robots seemed to agree that their task was complete and started leaving the room, except for the one who had her scanner. However, all the other robots followed them into the room over the next two to three minutes as they had to individually see their target was destroyed before leaving to return to their duties.
  
  The playback continued for a couple more minutes before she regained consciousness, after which she stopped the experience playback.
  
  Lily hummed, starting to think about just how bad this could have turned out. She could have easily died or, worse, been turned into some kind of thrall. She didn't know such a thing was possible, but she didn't know it wasn't, either.
  
  And that wasn't the worst part, either. She had been avoiding thinking about exactly what she felt when the Psyker Gary had connected to her mind. She was... almost positive that it wasn't, in fact, Gary anymore.
  
  She felt connected to a mind that wasn't here at all, that was using Gary as some kind of relay. It was curious and confused at its location and had tried to pull that information from her mind.
  
  Her expert system misidentified the attempt as an unknown brain hacking attempt that was succeeding and started throwing random memories into the front of her mind of her staring at walls, of reading novels or of anything that she hadn't considered important.
  
  It, however, detected her surface thoughts and immediately responded with violence when she resolved to shoot the fucking brain with her pistol, and that was when it threw her against the wall.
  
  The last thing she detected from it was a sense of disappointment that it'd had to kill her and that it likely wouldn't even get to dissect her since it didn't even know where her body was.
  
  It had been interested in her, but only slightly. Lily felt the same amount of interest as a clerk at the DMV might show when a new customer showed up at their window to get a driver's license.
  
  She stopped to consider this for a moment. Unless she was being buffaloed, the alien... and it could only be a fucking alien... didn't know where she was and thought she was dead, too. That was good.
  
  Lily didn't get the sense that she was being fooled or played with because of the incredible sense of arrogance she felt. Was she connected to one of the boss aliens, then?
  
  The Aliens from Mothership Zeta did have psychic powers, but she did not think they had powers that could connect to minds on the ground from orbit. That's why they kidnapped people, but perhaps the incipient mind of Psyker-Gary reached out to it and formed some sort of stable connection.
  
  Also, part of her brain-computer detected the mental intrusion, even if it didn't detect the psychic pain she felt. That made her feel good, in that maybe the whole thing wasn't one hundred per cent metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Only maybe seventy per cent?
  
  Lily tried connecting to her robots but felt her radio connections were down-hard. When she had lost consciousness during a suspected brain hacking attempt, it defaulted into a protective mode by disabling all networking in and out of her brain.
  
  The only context it had was a hacking attempt had to be conducted through her radios, so it had shut them down entirely.
  
  She sighed. She would have to go through an abbreviated Master/Stranger protocol she devised before she could unlock her computer any further. She was honestly surprised it even let her access her stored memories.
  
  Lily tried accessing a random memory before today and got a permission denied error.
  
  Interesting. Was her expert system growing up a little bit? It seemed to know that she would want to watch the recent playback after she went offline and made the complicated value judgement that it wouldn't compromise her to give that to her, even if she was mind-controlled.
  
  While her system was a quantum computer, it did not actually have the processing power to run a real person's neural network in emulation.
  
  She couldn't, for example, fork herself and run her emulation on this present hardware. She had taken these processors from Eyebots, after all. But that didn't stop it from self-improvement, and it might even reach the stage of a primitive VI with some level of simulated personality, eventually.
  
  She'd retain this trained expert system even when she replaced her processor with one that was superior, she decided. It made no sense to try to retrain a Muse, after all.
  
  She decided just to close her eyes for the moment. She was healing quite fast, but it might still take her an hour or more to be in full form again.
  
  It took another hour on top of the first to run through her self-devised Master/Stranger protocol, which unlocked full access to her system again.
  
  With as many electrodes as she had in her brain, she was able to get an idea of what her brain's electrical activity looked like during the psychic attack, and it was sort of unique, and hopefully, she would recognize it again in the future.
  
  Well, actually, hopefully, she would never recognize it in the future because hopefully she would not run into, or create, another Psyker in the future.
  
  Because she had no idea how to protect herself from psychic bullshittery, but it stood to reason that you had to BE a Psyker to protect yourself from Psykers, and while she certainly would study the physical changes in this Psyker-Gary brain, she was a bit leery of incorporating any genes into her own brain, even if she found them.
  
  For one, she didn't want a brain three times the normal size. For two, she didn't want the possibility of becoming a psychic beacon to some aliens orbiting the planet.
  
  Still, she rebuilt the healing vat - now it actually was a jar because she programmed the medichines inside to preserve the dead brain from decomposition, so she could study it later at her leisure.
  
  She had a number of additional FEV experiments planned, but the incident with the brain kind of soured her taste for continuing them. She did have a lot of data from them to study, so it wasn't as though she was losing much.
  
  She would conduct a Safety Stand Down as far as FEV experiments were concerned, at least for now. She had to take time to digest her gains, in any case. She really felt that she was onto something as far as the last experiment, where she interrupted the FEV transformation only a few hours after exposure.
  
  On the plus side, the corridors had been cleared to the lower levels. It would still take a few hours to widen the entry into the cloning labs, but for now, she took some time to repair the water purifier in this Vault.
  
  Not only was the water chip in need of repair, but some of the cleanable filters were full of radioactive bilge. She could take care of the first, while a couple of her robots would take of the second.
  
  A working Vault water purifier could produce quite a lot of pure drinking water a day, and while she didn't have any desire to set up shop here, she could always sell or trade the information to someone who might. Perhaps Scott and Sophie would like to relocate?
  
  They had the robot labour force to clean the whole Vault out, and this place had a lot of ample electricity from its geothermal reactors.
  
  There were no additional automated machine guns in the lab, but there was a Mister Handy that assumed she was a Vault-Tec doctor on account that she had lied and said she was.
  
  It seemed pretty helpful, and it felt its main job was to keep the number of clones stable. So, it must have been the reason the Vault failed. She remembered reading the notes from the female dormitory when she first arrived in this world that the vault dwellers managed to kill most of the Garies, but more Garies just kept coming.
  
  As soon as the Mister Handy turned around to check the status of the "organic materials recycler", which was the people mulcher she was expecting to find, Lily plugged in a data cable to his exposed diagnostic port and launched a lightning-quick cyberattack, using some unpatched RobCo remote-code execution vulnerabilities to gain superuser access and initiated a shutdown.
  
  Lily had decided that she would definitely reset this Mister Handy to factory defaults. She didn't even intend to examine it for sapience, although she felt it clearly failed her Turing Test.
  
  The way she looked at it, it was either not alive in which case it made sense to reset it, as she did not know what kind of contingency programming Vault-Tec included or it was alive and deserved to die for continuing to inflict all these Gary's on the Wasteland for so long, even after it should be obvious to a sapience that it should have stopped.
  
  Still, she wanted to nose around in his memory banks before she reset him, so she would just keep him shut down at the moment.
  
  Shame it wasn't a Miss Nanny; she still wanted a cheeky Miss Nanny companion. Maybe one with a Southern Belle accent, though, like Scarlett O'Hara.
  
  Reading some terminal entries, she discovered a fairly disturbing fact about the people mulcher. It was technology sold to Vault-Tec by Little Charlie, the corporation that made Fancy Lad cakes and was the local equivalent of Little Debby from her own America.
  
  Were Fancy Lad cakes made of... actual lads? She stopped to consider and then opened the user operator manual for the machine, which she had to admit was still going strong after over two hundred years.
  
  She sighed in relief. It turns out that Fancy Lad cakes were probably not the Fallout equivalent of Soylent Green. The machines were made to recycle all types of bio-matter into a variety of usable forms, one of which was being used by the cloning machine here in Vault 108.
  
  The manual discussed optimal settings for when input was raw sewage as well as various types of algae, so it seemed more likely that Fancy Lad cakes were, instead, just made out of shit. How reassuring.
  
  Lily would be interested to find out if the Little Charlie company donated any sewage or water treatment plants to cities where its factories were in. Knowing Pre-War companies, she doubted they donated them at all. They'd charge the city for that service, too.
  
  Well, this would be useful for her. She could even set it up in a similar manner as Little Charlie did, taking input from sewage. So, while she probably wouldn't make snack cakes out of it, she could use it as a source of biomass if she wanted to clone organs or body parts.
  
  Although, she actually had no real objection to the snack cakes. A lot of space habitats were very thorough in their recycling systems, as they were closed environments, after all. It wasn't that weird, except that it was being done on the planet's surface where there was no need to be so miserly.
  
  She moved over to what looked like the cloning machine and started inspecting it. However, she stopped short when she saw what was wired into it. It was a brain floating around in a jar. She didn't build the jar, so she was all right with referring to it as that, compared to her much more sophisticated cranial life support healing vat.
  
  "What zhe fuck..." she said softly, looking over all the pieces of equipment attached to the jar. She was careful not to disconnect anything, as she suspected that the brain might actually still be alive, but it definitely wouldn't stay alive for very long if she disconnected wires randomly.
  
  Lily pulled out her scanner and gave the brain and associated brain equipment a good thorough scanning. It was alive and unconscious. The very low level of electrical activity made that very clear, which was a blessing. Lily couldn't imagine the hell of being aware but insensate for hundreds of years.
  
  The equipment connected seemed to be keeping the brain in stasis, but Lily didn't understand the mechanism of how precisely it worked, which excited her. She didn't know what she could use some sort of biological stasis technology for, but it could be handy, depending on how it worked.
  
  Lily recognized the rest of the equipment as numerous non-invasive scanning devices. She suspected they were to get a total brain scan of the brain in order to copy it to the new clones, which Lily found completely unexpected.
  
  Lily thought that they would have digitized one copy of Gary's neural map and just forked that copy onto the clone Gary's. She thought they would have binned Gary's brain hundreds of years ago.
  
  "Hmmm..." she said, looking over the scans of the primitive ego bridge, which was a technology she was very intimately familiar with. It really was primitive, too; it was no wonder it didn't work properly, and the clones turned crazy.
  
  From what she could tell, it was no different from a crude copy-and-paste job, with no finesse involved at all. Just because a clone was genetically identical didn't mean that their brain developed identically in vitro and in vivo. Brains definitely didn't grow that way; otherwise, identical twins would also have identical personalities!
  
  It was like these people didn't know the first thing about digitizing human egos or even the complicated neuro-development processes of the human brain.
  
  That thought triggered an epiphany in her, and she said gently, "Ah."
  
  They hadn't digitized his ego because they didn't have the technology to do so. Transhumanity had developed the technology to digitize a human mind first before the technology to apply any random digitized mind back to an organic brain, so she was making assumptions again that the Fallout scientists had followed a similar development pathway, and they clearly hadn't.
  
  She found herself offended at the sloppiness of the technology she was looking at, the same way that Johannes Vermeer might feel if some scruffy hobo showed him a crude fingerpainting and said, "See? I am an artist, too. Just like you!"
  
  Shaking her head, she carefully replaced the brain in the jar in its position and went to inspect the actual cloning machine and a number of ancillary pieces of equipment next to it.
  
  She recognized the genetic sequencer as the exact same model she had brought with her, but the other device next to it did not have an operating manual. Still, it appeared to be a crude genetic editing terminal when she booted it up. It was also labelled Greenetech Genetics model GT-100C. She had better software to edit genomes both in her brain and on her laptop, but it probably would have been a state-of-the-art tool for any geneticist in the Pre-War era.
  
  The only odd thing she noticed about it was that there was no protein output like she would expect from a primitive genetic editing apparatus. How much use could it be to these scientists if you made genome changes in software only if they didn't have some viral or plasmid to induce changes in, like CRISPR? It was like a word processor that didn't have a printer in the days before computer networking.
  
  However, when she started inspecting the cloning equipment properly, she understood. There were no manufacturer's marks on the cloning equipment, which was a shame as she'd definitely like to know who built it. Sighing, she sat in one of the office chairs nearby in thought.
  
  Once again, she was confronted with the dichotomy of primitive, laughable technology on the one hand and amazing technology on the other. The cloning equipment didn't take biological samples or gamete samples like she was expecting; it took a sequenced genome-data, like from the genome sequencer.
  
  Then you specified the maturation level of the clone and pressed a button, and it would spit out a clone of that organism at the specified age in only twenty hours. That explained why a robot was able to operate it for so many years, she supposed.
  
  In some ways, this cloning equipment was similar in operation to the equipment Lily was used to working with, but in other ways, the fast-maturation process was relatively superior! For example, it usually took several days to fast-grow a completely arbitrary biomorph body, whereas here, it took less than a day.
  
  She was definitely stealing this. Glancing over at the brain in the jar, she pursed her lips. She supposed the least she could do, after learning so much from the man's clones, was to make one more and perform a surgical brain transplant into it.
  
  Besides, if the cloning equipment would accept arbitrary genomes, she could incorporate some of the changes her own body had, such as the radiation resistance in his clone in vitro and then study the differences, which might allow her to craft a viral therapy that she could use in vivo back in Megaton. The Apprentice definitely needed additional radiation resistance, at minimum.
  
  It would also be sufficient compensation, as the last survivor of Vault 108, to take all of his stuff. Honestly, she doubted he would very much want to be in the same room with all this cloning equipment anyway after she told him what happened.
  
  First things first, though. Time to get rid of all of the evidence. She ordered her robots to begin throwing all the Gary-bodies, mutated or not, into the Fancy Lad machine. She'd keep a few tissue samples carefully hidden, but she didn't need their bodies anymore. The only one spared was Psyker Gary, which she wanted to examine in depth back at Megaton. She also had the sneaking suspicion that if she put its genome in the cloning machine, what would pop out wouldn't be human at all, assuming the machine worked at all on such divergent genomes.
  
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  Lazy day in Vault 108, and rabbit stew
  Deciding to put a pin in Gary Prime, as he wasn't going anywhere, she explored the rest of the lower levels, which were in much better shape than the upper tiers. Since she had forsworn additional FEV experiments, her timetable was shot, and she suddenly had a lot of time on her hands.
  
  She wondered why the Gary's didn't destroy everything down here but couldn't come up with a reasonable answer. Perhaps they listened, to some extent, to the Mister Handy? Maybe he bribed them with former-Gary and former-Wastelander nutrient paste made from the Fancy Lad machine? She made another note to examine the Mister Handy's memories before erasing him.
  
  She casually unlocked a door that was sealed by a terminal through the simple expedient of hacking it as she walked by. Opening the door, she discovered a supply room and armoury. There was the traditional armourer's cage that she would have recognized from the Army, with thick steel bars blocking access. Most of it was already cleaned out, but inside, she saw a dozen or so full-sized rifles and carbines, similar to the original one she brought out of the Vault. This was the second armoury room she had noticed in this Vault, which she thought was kind of unusual.
  
  However, it was locked, and no amount of picking it yielded an open door for her. She considered just melting the lock off but decided it wasn't presently worth the effort. She took an image of the lock's tumbler with her scanner in order to fabricate a key to open it with that data, so she would come back to it later. It didn't appear to have anything too interesting inside, anyway.
  
  Not locked up were a number of PipBoy 3000s, rolls and rolls of what appeared to be fabric and a number of backpacks and miscellaneous equipment, including things like toolbelts, flashlights and what appeared to be kevlar rope.
  
  Leaving the supply room, she discovered a laundry that had its own Auto-Tailor with fabric recycler. That was a nice find, but she already had one. She might still run off with it, or perhaps she wouldn't. It would depend on the status of the Vault after she brought Gary Prime back to life. If he wanted to settle down roots, she wouldn't loot the place completely and would instead only take the scientific equipment. She could sell the Auto-Tailor for a few thousand caps, probably, but she wasn't hard up for liquid currency.
  
  She'd make sure to copy all of the outfit holotapes, though. She'd always wanted a vault suit but wasn't about to wear one of the ones the Gary clones were wearing, even if they were the same size. Which they weren't.
  
  Getting a message that the water purification filters had been cleaned, she returned to set the system into operation. She triggered a purge mode that would run clean water throughout the pipes of the Vault but would have to go manually open valves all across the Vault. She went upstairs and opened the valves in the bathroom of both the female and male dormitories, which should start the process well underway.
  
  She didn't intend to clean and perform maintenance on everything. She was just interested to see if she could get a clean glass of water in for her last few days here. Plus, taking showers with radioisotopes in the water dried out the skin, so it would be a nice luxury if she could take a regular shower. There was no way she could rationalize wasting so much purified water back in Megaton.
  
  'Okay, let's look at Gary now,' she thought to herself while heading back to the cloning lab.
  
  Lily peered at the holotape that contained Gary's complete genome, decoded, on it and sighed. She sat it down and opened up her engineering CAD system, she had design files for a device that read and wrote holotapes from her attempts to create new outfits for her Auto-Tailor, but she hadn't brought one with her. She'd have to fabricate one before she got started.
  
  Pulling out some food, she casually made herself an eel sandwich while waiting for the device to run off her fabricator upstairs and get delivered to her. She was really excited about her new addition to the condiments available for use on sandwiches. She had been using it on every sandwich she had been making and was still pleased.
  
  Apparently, one of the merchants had found a family cultivating a large amount of spice-type plants which grew well in the radioactive hellhole, including some manner of mutated version brassicaceae flower, which meant that she had mustard for the first time.
  
  Lily was sceptical at first, but the seeds really did look like mustard seeds, so she had bought the man's full stock. She had to use vinegar and grind her own yellow mustard, but it was worth it. It didn't taste quite like the mustard she was used to, but she would take what she could get.
  
  She waited to eat her sandwich until one of the robots delivered her an absolutely ice-cold beer. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, beer and other alcoholic beverages were one of the luxuries that Megaton had in ample supply.
  
  Although there was no way to bottle it so trade in it beyond buying a glass in a retail setting at a bar remained in kegs or half-kegs, which were both readily available and readily manufactured from steel by the number of small micro-breweries in town. Somewhat surprisingly, Moriarty didn't own all the brewers, as they were small operations run by one or two people as hobbies.
  
  Most of the breweries in Megaton tended to make a similar tasting brew, and Lily specifically didn't want to know what they used for either sugars or hops in the fermentation process; the latter she was almost sure wasn't available because she felt it would ruin her enjoyment of their products, so she pointedly never asked.
  
  Like the mustard, it didn't taste like the beer she remembered, and if she had tasted it in her previous life, she probably would have hated it. However, by lack of any competition, it became a luxurious treat she could only recently afford to purchase in any bulk, partly because she and Tombs supplied the purified water to two of the brewers.
  
  The refrigeration system was of her own construction, and she just copied the cryogenic system she had stolen from the University of Maryland. At first, she was worried she would need to find some complicated chemical gas used as the refrigerant, but she discovered that it was just nitrogen, which she could easily extract from the air, so it wasn't a challenging build.
  
  The Apprentice had been shocked and amazed at being able to chill or freeze things, so she had made the girl her own version, in the size of a stand-up refrigerator, for her apartment.
  
  Lily narrowed her eyes while nibbling on her sandwich. The Apprentice better be feeding her eels! Not only did they taste delicious, but she had big plans for them.
  
  Finishing her meal and her beer, she got up and inspected the cloning machine more closely. Seeing something on the top of the tall machine, she peered up at it while stepping onto her tippy-toes to see a brown cardboard box, which she couldn't reach even by jumping.
  
  Sighing, she wheels an office chair over to the machine and uses it in an unsafe manner as a step-ladder, retrieving the box and setting it on a nearby desk. Carefully cleaning all the dust off of it, she inspected its contents.
  
  It appeared to contain a bunch of holotapes, which Lily found interesting, 'Genetic samples from other Vault-Dwellers? That could be interesting. It is an interesting field of research to see how living with high levels of radiation might have changed the baseline genome of the people of the Wasteland, compared to people before the bombs fell.'
  
  However, she found a sheet of paper underneath and protected for the most part by the two dozen or so holotapes. Dusting it off, she peered at it.
  
  J Finnigen,
  
  Vault-Tec
  
  Mr Finnigen,
  
  Enclosed you will find a sample of the proprietary holotapes that are necessary for the proper operation of the Nuka-Gen Replication equipment you have sourced from our company.
  
  These are copies of holotapes we use at Nuka-World and can be safely overwritten by any standard genetics terminal, according to my man Dr Hein.
  
  As agreed, I expect to be CCed on any pertinent research findings as I have a deep interest.
  
  J.C. Bradberton
  
  Nuka-Cola
  
  JCB/jdr
  
  Lily stared at the letter, perplexed. She read it three more times, ' Surely, not.'
  
  Lily shook her head, ' Surely the most sophisticated biological equipment I have seen yet on this planet wasn't built by a... carbonated beverage company? What is even Nuka World? Like Disney World?'
  
  However, she started looking over the twenty holotapes in the box, and discovered a tiny label on each one. She peered at them, ' Eudorcas rufifrons , equus grevyi , panthera leo ... I think the first one is some sort of antelope, the second is a zebra, and how could I mistake the mighty lion? Why are they mostly African animals?'
  
  However, the next holotape was Bos taurus which excited her, as that was the regular domesticated cow, although it didn't specify which variety. She glanced over at the holotape she had taken out of the machine earlier, which she assumed contained Gary's genome. There was a small label on it, as well, rattus villosissimus . Some type of rat, but she didn't immediately recognize the variety. At times like these, she wished that Tombs' book collection included a digital encyclopedia.
  
  She guessed they erased or overwrote the rat to put Gary in. How intriguing. A bunch of genomes of pre-war animals of various species was a lot more interesting to her than a bunch of examples of a single species, h. sapiens.
  
  'If this equipment was designed to clone cows, it explains why it is so much bigger than I thought it would be,' Lily mused.
  
  Thumbing through the box, she looked for the smallest animal in the box, pausing at oryctolagus cuniculus , 'That's the common European rabbit, but I suppose it did range all the way to North Africa too. The only non-African animal I see here is the two domesticated ones, bos taurus and capra hircus . And maybe that rat.'
  
  She slid the rabbit tape into the machine, booted it up, selected eight months as the maturation level and started the process. She was careful to make sure both the repeat function and the experimental memory engram transfer were disabled.
  
  Lily was aghast that such an option was even available, 'What absolute lunatic would include an automatic repeat function on a cloning machine in the first place? It's only luck that we weren't hip-deep in psychopathic Garies.'
  
  The stocks of biological precursors were high in equipment, so the machine started humming as it began operation.
  
  There was even a progress bar that indicated the cloning process. And it seemed, unsurprisingly, that the mass of the clone had a lot to do with the quickness, as a small rabbit seemed like it wouldn't take more than an hour or two.
  
  About halfway through the rabbit's cloning, a robot brought her a small device that looked like a Walk-Man. It was the holotape reader/writer peripheral. Humming, she slotted Gary's tape in and then took the cable and carefully connected it to her auxiliary data port at the base of her skull that was hidden behind her hair.
  
  She copied the entire data track off the tape to her local storage before unplugging the reader and beginning her inspection of the raw data.
  
  It would have helped a lot if the user manual for the editing terminal was still here; it might have talked about what data format these genomes were encoded in. Still, she knew the human genome like the back of her hand, so it wouldn't take her too much time to decode whatever file format this was in, so she sat in the comfy office chair and got to work.
  
  She wasn't more than a quarter of the way done with decoding the genome file when the cloning machine dinged in what Lily felt was the... exact same sound as her Easy Bake oven did a lifetime ago, and the output door opened to reveal a rabbit.
  
  Lily blinked at it from her seat at the desk. It seemed a bit off, which didn't surprise her. In fact, it was frozen in place, looking very confused.
  
  Lily didn't expect to get a functional animal out of this test, but she still felt that this soda cloning machine was remarkable.
  
  To be a functional animal, you kind of have to go through the whole process of being born and growing up as a baby and adolescent before becoming an adult animal. Sure, a rabbit has some instincts, but an incredible amount of information is taught to the children by the parents.
  
  Lily felt it was remarkable that the cloning machine produced an animal with basically a blank brain that just froze in shock rather than totally flipped out.
  
  Humming, she stood up and walked over to the animal and grabbed it, and before it could notice anything was wrong and start to flip out, she quickly slit its throat with her stiletto, being careful that it didn't bleed on any of the equipment.
  
  Placing the body on a steel surgical tray, she pulled out her scanner and scanned it. She didn't detect anything wrong in the rabbit's bodily structures, so it was cloned properly, she thought.
  
  ' Well, whatever. I'm having rabbit stew tonight!' she thought happily.
  
  It took her most of the rest of the day to decode the file format, but after she did, she copied all of the holotapes to her internal storage. The animals were a variety of African animals, and she could start her own Safari if she cloned them all, but some of them were too big for even this machine to create unless she cloned them as infants, such as elephants and hippos.
  
  Leopards and cheetahs were present, as were their prey animals, such as wildebeests and warthogs.
  
  It was a shame that there was really too little vegetation in the Capital Wasteland to support such large herbivores, at least at present. The only animal she felt had a good chance of survival was the domesticated goat or the rabbit, and that was because they could eat practically everything.
  
  Still, she already proved that if you supplied the biological precursors, the animal could be created as an adult, so there was nothing stopping her from making some of these animals specifically to consume immediately. Warthog bacon, perhaps?
  
  Plus, she could always modify all of these animals for differing traits. There was a reason the Brahmin outcompeted all the cows early, but she could induce a very high radiation resistance into the genome for cows. It was something to consider.
  
  Now, however, she was carefully adjusting Gary's genome. First, to add the radiation resistance and basic life extension therapies she had already developed, and secondly, to grow the fully mature body without an actual functioning brain inside it.
  
  If Gary was digitized and she was just copying him into the body, she wouldn't feel conflicted. But she felt it was a bit unethical to grow an adult human body with an adult human brain, even if it was blank, and then scoop that brain out and toss it in the trash.
  
  Although she might admit that some of her experiments have not entirely been completely ethical, they were all done to psychopathic clones that she was going to have to kill, anyway. She'd feel no problem about scooping a raider's brain out and giving someone their body, either.
  
  However, a brand new brain? That was a brand new potential for life and reason that was as of yet innocent, and she found that her ethics wouldn't let her just throw it away.
  
  But that was easily solved. The hardest part was ensuring that the change affected the body as it was growing but reversed once it reached maturation, so it wasn't reflected in the gametes the body produced.
  
  Since Gary was a male, it was a bit simpler. The human female created all of her ova at birth, whereas a male creates his gametes throughout his life.
  
  It would be a bit awkward if she sent Gary out on his way in the world, and he later met the woman of his dreams and married her, and then every child they had together was born without most of their brain. She'd get a 1 star on Yelp for sure if that happened.
  
  Making changes to a genome this way to propagate in vitro was so much easier; she could really go ham if she wanted but decided to hold herself back. She didn't give him exactly the same mods she had when she arrived because that would make him susceptible to cancer if he ever had to use a StimPak, but she gave him as much as she could.
  
  While he didn't have the special, novel organelle that she had in every one of her cells, he still had a vastly improved error correction and replication process, so he would be extremely resistant to radiation. Just not as much as she was, or a ghoul.
  
  As she was transferring Gary's edited genome back to the holotape, she considered Alice. She knew the Apprentice didn't seem to be open to Lily cloning her a new body and performing a brain transplant; but it would really make things so much simpler. The only reason she wasn't considering it for herself was that she didn't have anyone she trusted to perform the surgery.
  
  Ah, well. She slid Gary's tape into the Nuka-Gen Replicator like it was an eight-track tape of Led Zepplin and booted the machine up. Then, she paused. The Gary clones she had seen looked to be all in their forties. But, what man or woman wouldn't want a chance to return to their youth?
  
  Plus, if he was to survive in the Wasteland he would likely need some of that youthful vigour. Lily selected two hundred and forty months on the maturation dial and hit the start button.
  
  She'd go take a nap while Gary was cooking, and when she woke up she'd carefully examine his brain's stasis jar. She'd have to know how to disconnect it safely and how long his brain could survive in the jar after she did that. She probably would have to fabricate another jar... healing vat to transfer him. It would likely be the safest option.
  
  Besides, the rabbit stew needed to simmer for at least six more hours to be juicy and tender.
  
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  Some French tart
  Lily didn't have much in the way of vegetables, but she made do the best as she could and considered the stew a roaring success.
  
  For some reason, despite the fact that she never actually ate rabbit stew in the Army, the meal reminded her of her stay in the Fayetteville School for Fallen Women, also known as Fort Bragg. Maybe it was the walls down here.
  
  She worked there as an intelligence analyst and translator for psychological operations, working on things such as leaflets, pamphlets and radio broadcasts telling the peaceful people of Afghanistan that they were just there to help. It was kind of laughable when she looked back on it, although it seemed like important work at the time.
  
  She had no idea why she was assigned to such a job; even back then, she didn't understand people too well. But, you learned pretty quickly that no matter how smart you were, there was the right way, the wrong way and then the Army way, and you got used to it. She was deployed twice but got out of the service by 2004 to attend an engineering school in Troy, New York.
  
  Lily shook her head, shaking away the odd reminiscing of the past. Eyeing the jar with the dead psychic brain, she hummed. She made a couple of screens pull up side by side in her vision; one of them contained the map of electrical activation in her own brain while the Psyker-Gary, or rather the alien behind him, tried to access her memories. In the other window was the playback of the continual scan taken by the Termitron of the Psyker-Gary's own brain.
  
  Although her scanner couldn't detect electrical activity directly at a distance the Termitron was standing, it could infer it by the presence of more or fewer oxygen molecules, which it could detect if there were more than a few in the same area.
  
  Lily programmed the display in the form of a three-dimensional heatmap, with the "hot" areas on the weird brain the areas that contained the most oxygen.
  
  There was a clear change in activity in the Brain Gary the moment her own electrical activity started rising, and Lily localized it to a number of anomalous structures of the brain that she had no name for. "Very, very interesting," Lily said, in a very fake German accent, dating herself with the impression of Arte Johnson.
  
  Her Opa, an actual German, loved Arte Johnson's impression on the show Laugh-In, and she would watch the program on syndication with him when she was just four or five years old. That and episodes of M.A.S.H. He would call her from the other room, and when she came running pitter-pattering into the room, he would ask her, "While you're up, could you change the channel?" since the TV at the time was only the type with two round knobs and no remote control.
  
  Lily highlighted the areas that saw the most activation to focus on them in her later dissection of the brain, then let the playback continue to the point where the brain used telekinesis and watched a much smaller area of the brain light up. Her eyebrows reached up to her scalp in surprise; she expected them to be the same areas of the brain responsible.
  
  She highlighted that area in a different colour, then frowned at it. It wasn't scientific. It wasn't scientific at all! Sure, a lot of oxygen went to that area, but unless the brain was using positrons to extract the energy, there was nowhere near enough energy to pick her body up and accelerate it as fast as she hit the wall. Where did the energy come from? She didn't know, but she would find out.
  
  Also, the fact that the two different "powers", for lack of a better word, seemed to be activated by different areas of the brain gave her ideas. Perhaps it would turn to nothing, but if she could harness that. Input a few oxygen molecules, which you don't even lose, and you get as output as what...? Over five thousand Newtons? Through some... mysterious force? Maybe it WAS the Force, for all she knew, but she desperately hoped not.
  
  Discovering what might be a possible entirely novel and unknown type of energy field made her feel like a fictional species of space worm from a web novel she liked in her past life. [ VERY INTERESTED], in other words.
  
  She frowned. Interested enough that she would keep her squishy, vulnerable and inefficient organic brain? She could scarcely think about more than one thing at a time right now. It was barely tolerable.
  
  That, she didn't know. Perhaps she could grow just this part of the brain and interface with it electrically like it was an oddly wet and squishy peripheral, like a gross keyboard or something.
  
  Besides, she was getting very much ahead of herself. Chances are that this small "telekinesis" area required the larger parts, too, just wouldn't work or would turn a person crazy or something. The Psykers The Master made in Fallout 1 were all crazy or special ed if she recalled.
  
  Closing the window with her brain data, she backtracked to the moment she suspected was when the alien connected to the Gary-Brain, noticing what she thought was a similar activity to what she saw at first when it was trying to access her thoughts.
  
  That was, at least, as expected.
  
  She spent another half hour looking over the playbacks over and over, looking for some inspiration. The area of Psyker-Gary's brain that lit up during the display of telekinesis was somewhat similar to existing human brain structures. And when Lily watched the playback of Psyker-Gary's transformation, she confirmed it originally was the posterior parietal cortex as well as portions of the posterior cingulate cortex .
  
  Lily hummed and tapped her fingers on the table she was eating lunch at. The posterior parietal cortex was a structure in the back of the human brain had had a number of functions; the most notable was spatial awareness especially as spatial awareness coincided with motor skills, as well as reasoning and calculation, so long as it involved a decision based on spatial cognition. The decision on how to catch a flyball or dodge if you thought something was going to hit you were examples of how this part of the brain worked.
  
  The posterior cingulate cortex, on the other hand, was a much more complicated area of the brain involved in consciousness. If you were not focusing on a task or thinking of a particular thing, this is the area of the brain that would be active the most, as such people tend to refer to it as being responsible for daydreaming, although that wasn't entirely accurate. In the human brain, it was one of the most active areas, accounting for over twenty per cent of the oxygen and energy resources used by the brain.
  
  The mind engineers of transhumanity had discovered this area of the brain was crucial to self-actualization and was very important. How fascinating that in the Psyker-Gary's brain, it had separated and grown into different distinct structures of its own, one of which joined with a portion of the brain that controlled spatial awareness and decision-making to be used for telekinesis.
  
  She rubbed the back of her neck ruefully. With most of the activity of the brain coming from the area she recognized as originating from areas responsible for visual-spatial awareness, she suspected he wouldn't have been able to smash her into the wall if he hadn't seen her.
  
  'Ah, well. I mean, it could have happened to anybody!' she told herself.
  
  Standing up and stretching like a cat, she walked over to inspect Gary Prime's brain jar. She would likely have to run another life-supporting cranial healing vat off her fabricator, but she was running a bit low on carbon feedstock on the fabricator upstairs and hadn't actually brought a recycler with her. She still had a fair bit in the truck, though, so she wasn't in dire straits yet.
  
  Lily had to carefully disconnect Gary's brain jar by powering it briefly with a battery with crude alligator clips she clipped inline to its power source before transferring him carefully to her own life support tank, which he now floated comfortably inside.
  
  At least, it looked comfortable to her. However, since she didn't understand how the stasis technology worked, she had to induce a dream-like state in his brain using medichines and drugs. While not completely unconscious, like she had been after she smashed into the wall, anymore, Lily was certain that Gary was in the equivalent of a deep sleep, dreaming, which she felt was necessary as his brain seemed to display almost post-seizure-like electrical activity after being taken off the stasis field.
  
  Lily had no idea how it worked but suspected there needed to be at minimum a few hours after being stased to return to a normal baseline, and she felt it was better if he did that in a sleep-like state, considering he had nobody or sensory organs, after all. She hoped that the small number of narcotics and anxiolytics she included in his oxygen-bubbler made for pleasant dreams.
  
  To be honest, she was a little concerned the stasis system might have been one way, and he would have immediately died after being removed. Of course, there was no reason she could see for this feeling beyond the fact that Fallout technology was often assholic like that, but she was glad she had been worried for nothing.
  
  She carefully packed the stasis jar up. It was a little fragile, clearly not a mass-produced item and more like a one-off laboratory prototype, so she would carry it upstairs and store it carefully in the cab of her truck later.
  
  She had about ten hours before Gary was finished cooking in the cloning machine, which gave her enough time to do one thing that her robots didn't yet, do well. Sadly, that was in-depth cleaning.
  
  She intended to wake the man up in a room that was as spotlessly clean as she could manage in order to ease his impact back into reality; she even found some additional paint that she would have the robots touch up the walls with. However, she hadn't found a task combination that was much good at anything beyond sweeping up and taking out the trash.
  
  He would already be getting a shock when he discovered he's over twenty years younger than he thought he was; she felt she should break it to him that he's living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland
  
  So, she picked up her old friend, the mop, and a bunch of cleaners which were in abundant supply down here and got to work on her chosen room.
  
  It took more than three hours to clean the room adequately, and she immediately ordered a team of two robots to go in and touch up the paint on the walls while she sat down in her chair.
  
  Doing manual labour wasn't something she was used to; that's why you invented robots in the first place. However, she would just call it her workout for the day and go with that.
  
  Blinking, she realized she didn't have anything to do for almost five hours. So, she decided to take a little time for herself. She leaned back in her chair and pulled up one of the novels she hadn't read.
  
  This one was about a plucky heroine from a noble family that would be kidnapped but ultimately fall in love with a dashing swashbuckler in the 17th century.
  
  Bodice rippers were always a guilty pleasure of hers.
  
  Lily had a gurney and a couple of robots waiting for Gary's body when he was done, which was good because he sort of tipped over as soon as the easy bake oven opened.
  
  She carefully laid the body on the gurney and ordered the robots to take him to the centre of the room. In the absence of an actual operating room, she had decided to just use this large room as it was quite clean and had a lot of space. So she cleared off some area in the centre and set up a tall table that would suffice.
  
  She had built a stand to hold her scanner over and above the operating theatre so that she could overlay medical images onto the body while she worked.
  
  This was a very complicated surgery, especially the implantation of Gary. There was only a small amount of time Gary could be out of his tank before he started to die from hypoxia, so she had to connect him to his major arteries very rapidly to ensure proper oxygenation.
  
  This process would have been a lot simpler if they kept most of his spinal cord and brain stem attached as she had done with Psyker Gary, but they scooped him out like he was a bowl of Cookies & Cream. She definitely didn't believe they had any intention to do anything but throw him away when they were done.
  
  Lily glanced at the robot acting as her assistant for the operation and tilted her head to the side. She was feeling something .
  
  She didn't think there was an exact English word for what she was feeling, but in German, she would have likely called it sehnsucht - the longing for a friend or family member. To put it more simply, she missed the Apprentice and felt that she would make a better surgical assistant than this robot. How interesting. She didn't normally have deep feelings about people, one way or another.
  
  Perhaps she'd tell the girl about her experiments when she returned to Megaton. At the minimum, it would have been helpful to have her around. She might have had useful input on the relative merits of exposing a brain in a jar... healing vat to vast amounts of a mutagenic virus that she knew had a history of causing psi-like abilities.
  
  Lily hummed and made ready to shave the hair on Gary's body's head. It had come out of the oven with long black hair down to it's butt, and Lily found long hair in men quite fetching. It was a shame she had to cut it all off, but there was just no helping it.
  
  If Gary was like most men in the universe she was in, he wouldn't appreciate long hair anyway. Not like Captain Sebastian Hawk, whose long tresses trailed in the wind on the high seas.
  
  Lily blushed and coughed. This wasn't the time to get distracted. She sheared his hair rapidly and then picked up a scalpel. The diamond-tipped power saw would come next.
  
  After the operation was done, Lily ran off Gary a new vault suit, as well as underwear and socks and dressed him. She had also considered dressing in one also but didn't know how Vault-Tec had convinced him to get his brain scooped out.
  
  They might have tricked him, but it was also possible that they had just buffaloed him and dragged him to the medical bay, kicking and screaming or assaulted him in his room and anaesthetized him. There was just no knowing, so showing up looking like a Vault-Tec person was a gamble.
  
  So instead, she wore her form-hugging dark grey combat suit, but without any of the extra ballistic trauma plates that she wore above it on a webbing-style plate carrier or her helmet. If he was even slightly heterosexual, he would be distracted.
  
  And in her experience, heterosexual human males had almost a universal inability to associate an attractive woman with evil actions at first, which would tend to reinforce the fact that she was actually on his side. Which she was, for the most part. Well, unless they had been seriously vamped in the past by a malevolent woman, she supposed. But she would take the risk.
  
  She hurried to the clean room she had placed him in when an alert told her that his brain activity was showing signs of wakefulness. Although, it still smelled faintly of new paint, unfortunately.
  
  She grabbed the scanner from the Termitron that was inside the room and shooed it off; she had enough self-awareness to understand that they were a little intimidating if you had never seen one before. She didn't want to think she was about to probe his orifices, after all.
  
  She saw him groggily returning to consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around and didn't immediately flip out, which was good. It meant she had connected all of his optical sensory neurons back up correctly. There were thousands of them, and especially on a new body, she was concerned she might have connected the wrong ones together. It wouldn't have been a big deal, the brain would have adapted in but it would have taken a fair time where he was seeing god knows what while it happened.
  
  "Ugghh... what happened..." he slurred, his eyes glancing at me.
  
  Lily pursed her lips and said in a professionally pleasant tone, "I was wondering if you could tell me that, Monsieur Kaminski. What's zhe last thing you remember?"
  
  He finally sat up in bed, and looked a bit more conscious; and Lily's voice seemed to centre him a bit, and he finally looked around the room he was in and at her, eyes dipping down to her chest momentarily before rising up to look her in the eyes and stay there, 'So, he is a bit of a gentleman, or at least polite.'
  
  He coughed and said, "Ahhh... I had a meeting with the Overseer, but I didn't know about what. I went into his office, and that's it. Are you a doctor from Vault-Tec?" He seemed confused, likely as a result of Lily not wearing a vault suit herself.
  
  Lily raised her eyes. There could have been any number of things that happened in the Overseer's office, but Lily suspected the Overseer simply had him drugged as soon as he arrived.
  
  The same drugs the vault carried for sedatives tended to have a deletrious effect on short-term memory while you were under them, which was actually very good and a desirable effect for the most part, medically speaking.
  
  "I am a medical doctor, but I'm not from Vault-Tec. I'm from outside zhe vault; I suppose you could say," Lily offered ambiguously.
  
  Gary wasn't a dumb cookie, he blinked a couple of times before saying, "But... we had confirmation that birds from the chicoms were on the way, confirmed detonations in Pennsylvania, and we felt it when they blasted D.C. even all the way down in the Vault."
  
  He started to look angry, "Just what the fuck did that son-of-a-bitch do to me? I am remembering a bit more, as soon as I walked into the Overseer's office, one of his security goons grabbed me." He shook his head, "If you're from outside the vault and aren't incinerated, then... how fucking long was I out?"
  
  Lily nodded. So much for her idea to break it to him slowly. Sighing, she took a seat in the office chair she had placed next to the desk on the wall, her social program suggesting that being on the same eye-level as him would send a better signal, "Insightful question, Monsieur Kaminski. I'm not sure how to break it to you, so I'll just be blunt, but it has been... a long time. We're the only two living souls alive in this Vault, in fact. The date is December 1st, 2274. 'Tis zhe season, and all."
  
  His eyes went googly-eyed, "Two hundred fucking years?! How is... what the fuck..." He then narrowed his eyes, "You're fucking with me, right, lady? Do you have any proof?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "That you can see immediately? Not unless you want to go outside the vault and see what a blasted wasteland is awaiting you."
  
  He nodded smartly, "Yes! I do!" He tried to get up from the bed but was unsteady on his feet.
  
  Lily stood up as well, and tried to mollify him, "Monsieur Kaminsky, please. You've just had zhe very serious surgery. You need to be on bed rest for at least a little while."
  
  But he wouldn't be mollified and started to stand up, "Look, I am fine, I won't have some French tart tell me..." and with that, he tipped over and fell out of his bed in a tumble of limbs.
  
  Lily started down at him, smugly now, "Tart, huh?" she asked frostily, raising her boot to lay it on his chest threateningly and firmly.
  
  Gary coughed and just lay there for a moment, "Perhaps I was a tad impolite. I'm a bit at loose ends, and I apologise. I didn't mean to impinge on your honour, madam. It won't happen again."
  
  Lily nodded and leaned down to help him back to a seated position in bed. "You are probably very hungry." She imagined he was famished since there was essentially nothing in his stomach at all. She would, in fact, have to treat him a little bit like a starvation patient. Otherwise, he could deal severe damage to his digestive system without even knowing it.
  
  Gary looked a little embarrassed when his stomach started growling audibly, "Ah... yes, I suppose I am. Very. Hungry, that is."
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, "Zhat isn't surprising. 'owever, you can't have all you want. Due to your particular medical issues, I 'ave to treat you as if you're zhe... how do you say? Starving person. Who has been without food for a long time. That means, just a little now, and a little every few 'ours."
  
  He looked surprised and looked down to inspect his arms and body, which seemed quite healthy. "Uh, okay, Doc. I know all about that. I served twenty years in the Navy, we often saw places like that and know all about how you have to treat those kinds of refugees."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrow, "Well, zhen. As you might expect, it isn't as zhough the grocery stores are really in business anymore. But I 'ave some rabbit stew that I made; it's quite good?"
  
  Gary nodded several times, "Okay. I'll go get you a bowl. If you want answers to your questions about what zhe Overseer did to you, I have placed all I know on files on zhat terminal at your desk. I recommend you read zhrough it. Do you want help getting up into the chair?"
  
  "Yes, ma'am. Please," he said simply, so she got him to his feet and sat him in the cleaned-off office chair. Lily nodded at him, "Some of zhose files are zhose I removed from the Overseer's terminal, some are from zhe medical bay, and some are from zhe laboratory downstairs, where we are currently located. Zhe rest are my own personal speculations," she offered.
  
  He nodded, and she left the room. Her super-hearing heard him mutter, "..laboratory?" as she walked to go get him a small bowl of stew and some cold water.
  
  She returned to find him reading the first file she put in there and sat the stew and water down next to him, "Pause your enlightenment, for zhe moment. Eat zhis first, I suspect you are going to get so angry shortly zhat you will forget all about zhe stew, and zhen it will be cold. We shan't have zhat, no?"
  
  It looked like he wanted to argue with her, but thought better of it, "You might be right, Doc." He sat there and began eating the stew, "Oh, this is pretty good. Could use some carrots, though."
  
  Lily nodded, "As you might suspect, vegetables are not as accessible as zhey used to be," She thought it could use some carrots, too.
  
  He blinked at her, "But rabbits are?"
  
  Lily chuckled ruefully, "Ah, zhat is complicated. Let's just say I happened to find one, yes?" She nodded, and asked, "So, what is a man with twenty years experience in the navy, as I presume a chief petty officer, doing as a janitor in Vault-Tec?"
  
  It was his turn to chuckle, in between bites, "That's senior chief petty officer to you, civilian." He grinned and said, "Senior Chief Petty Officer Gary Kaminski, Retired. At your service, ma'am."
  
  "Mhmm..." Lily offered in a non-committal fashion as if she wasn't quite sure.
  
  "Ah, to answer your question. Not just twenty years of experience, hell, I have a Master's degree in Military History. Vault-Tec used a points-based system to hire employees, so I'm a very competitive applicant as a janitor," Gary mentioned. "I applied for every job from Overseer on down that I was at minimum qualified for. Being something of a student of military history, I was pretty sure the war would go nuclear, and soon. We were getting close to Beijing in our offensive, and there ain't no way that the chicoms would have accepted that." He shook his head rapidly, before spooning more stew in his mouth.
  
  "I figured it would start with a tactical or theatre-based nuclear exchange in East Asia, but they seemed to jump straight to a full strategic nuclear bombardment," he sighed and shook his head, "So fucking stupid. All of us. Anyone with a brain could see it coming, and I have no idea why they pushed the Reds so far." He looked down at his finished bowl of stew sadly, "So, I guess to answer your question, I'd rather have been a janitor in a Vault than teach high school up above, ya?"
  
  Lily nodded. That was very rational, and she would likely have done the same thing if she was in his position, "Zhat makes sense. Make sure to read zhe file I titled Speculations on the Societal Experiment of Vault-Tec," she said quietly, although she expected him to read every damn thing on that terminal. "I'll return in about zhree hours, and you can have some more stew, and if you're a good boy, maybe a half cup of beer? The starches would do you well."
  
  His eyes lit up at that, and he nodded his head rapidly, "I don't know what kind of hospital you run, lady, but I like it. "
  
  She nodded and left the room. She was amazed he hadn't discovered his youth yet, but she assumed that he just felt, in general, better and hadn't questioned it. How often do you really inspect your body every day, anyway?
  
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  You ruined my childhood, lady!
  Lily decided to give Gary the full three hours before returning to check on him, so she had begun to disassemble and pack up some of the things in the laboratory, firstly the Fancy Lad people mulching machine.
  
  The people mulcher was fairly large, but only about half the size of the cloning machine and she still needed to disassemble it, so the cloning machine would be even more of a pain in the rear.
  
  She was doing all the disassembly work herself using hand tools, and when she got a section took apart and ready to be taken upstairs, she would trigger the robots to start moving it.
  
  They were quite slow with the process, and the areas where they had to navigate stairs to go up the two levels were even more glacially slow, but they would get the job done, she felt. It was one of her more complicated tasks she had created and took most of them working together using rope and mobile ramps, and she had already tested it on the genetics sequencer and editing terminal, although they were much smaller than any of the disassembled sections of either of the bigger machines.
  
  She had delayed her looting by about twelve hours in order to see to Gary's revival, and she might delay her departure to go visit Sophie and the Mechanist even more, depending on what his plans were. She was a little curious, and she didn't actually trust the man, so the room he was in had a few small microphones but mostly what she heard was various forms of, "What the fuck..." rather than anything that indicated he was planning to harm her.
  
  Humming, she ladled a little bit more stew into the bowl this time and would have to select something else for his next meal unless... She glanced at the cloning machine, feeling a little odd at the thought that it was more valuable to her to make stew at present. She could probably run one more rabbit off before she had to start disassembling it.
  
  Setting the bowl on a tray, she added a small cup of beer and a larger cup of ice water. Nodding, she took the food down a hall towards his room. Pausing, she knocked first and then opened the door and let herself in.
  
  Gary was sitting at the desk, not really reading the terminal but looking at it, his face red. He turned to face her and seemingly calmed down a little bit, saw the food and looked interested.
  
  She sat the tray on the table at the desk in front of him and casually took a seat in front of him in a second chair in the other corner of the little room. Gary looked hesitantly as if she wasn't sure it was appropriate to eat in her presence since she wasn't eating as well, so she made a gentle rolling motion with her hand and said, "Don't mind me, I've already eaten. You don't need to be polite."
  
  He nodded and began spooning some broth into his mouth quickly, and then took a sip of the beer and looked at it in what Lily thought was a weird way. Her social assistant program pegged the action at [Confused (64%)].
  
  Lily nodded and sighed, "Yes, sadly, I don't believe 'ops survived zhe Great War, at least not around zhese parts. I 'ave no idea how zhey make zhis, but it doesn't quite taste like zhe beer you or I probably remember." She was intentionally implying something here to see if he would notice.
  
  "It wasn't that I didn't recognize the taste, but more like that, I did and was a bit confused. It tastes a bit like a gruit-based beer, which was a mix of herbs they used before hops were widely adopted in the 15th century in Europe. I was something of a beer snob in the past. It's not bad, actually," Gary mentioned, giving the cup of beer an appraising look before setting it down.
  
  Lily, internally, confirmed the social assistant's assessment as it did appear his expression and actions were of confusion. Continual training of the machine learning model was the only way to progress towards accurate results.
  
  Then he blinked and turned to stare at her, "Wait. You said, 'you or I.' You seem to look awfully young for what you're implying, lady. Hell, you barely look old enough to be a new doctor, much less one that can do half of what your files I've been reading seem to suggest."
  
  Lily put on what she called Friendly Smile #6, a smile with a slight hint of flirtatiousness but mostly amused, "You're looking pretty spry, yourself, Monsieur." Then she held out a woman's compact and gently tossed it underhand to him.
  
  It was a low, slow lob, and it would smack him right in the chest to fall onto his lap if he missed the catch. It would serve as a test of his reflexes T+3 hours from regaining consciousness. Lily expected him to flub the catch, but how bad he did it would give her a small amount of diagnostic information.
  
  However, he surprised her and caught it out of the air, which caused Lily to raise her eyebrows, 'Not bad, old man. Especially for someone who tumbled out of bed from sitting three hours ago.'
  
  He glanced at it, quickly identified it and looked confused, which caused Lily to nod at him and make a 'get on with it' motion. He opened it and looked in the mirror, and his mouth opened in a wide O of shock. He sat there moving the mirror around to get different angles of his face and head for about thirty seconds before he sat the compact, opened, on the desk and turned to her, "What the heck happened to me?"
  
  Lily blinked, selecting Genuinely Confused Expression #1, which was her most commonly used facial expression to express confusion, "Did you not read the files on the terminal? Especially my files on Vault-Tec, and Vault 108 in particular?"
  
  He sighed and slumped his shoulders, "Yes, I did! But they were crazy talk. I thought it was bullshit, alright," he muttered before eating some more of his stew.
  
  He downed the rest of his small cup of beer in one more gulp and finished his stew, taking a few sips of the ice water as well, before turning to face her, "So... you, like, rejuvenated my body? And you've been alive since before the bombs fell, also?"
  
  Lily pursed her lips. Her files didn't mention she cloned him, so his assumption wasn't entirely stupid, "No. Your old body wasn't available, so I 'ad to clone a new one for you. I figured zhat you would prefer a return to your... ah... youthly vigour. I don't know anyone who wouldn't. I set zhe clone's maturation to two hundred and forty months, and bob's your uncle."
  
  Lily knew immediately that she had said the wrong thing somehow because he started to look like he was going to freak out, and his tag changed to [Shock (90%)]. He was pale white and started clearly hyper-ventilating, "Wait... Am I a fucking clone? I'm not... me?"
  
  Ah, that existential rabbit hole. How quaint. As someone who had in the past forked and merged herself over fifty thousand times, she knew that there wasn't anything good at the bottom of those thought patterns. At some point, you just have to accept things as they come.
  
  Gary hadn't even had the experience of meeting a forked copy of himself that, in a particular twist of fate, had diverged so far that a merge wasn't possible. They considered having a duel to the death to settle the matter, but in the end, Lily convinced the other her to adopt a different name and style than she had.
  
  Last Lily heard, she was making a name for herself as the Crazy Lamia of Extropia Station, which was the anarcho-capitalist habitat that Lily herself had some roots at and lived at for several decades before shifting as one of the principal investors in the construction of Tannhauser Station. Generally speaking, other habitats besides Extropia would not permit her to be a long-term resident for some reason, and she had to practically build her own to have a place to live. Many didn't even let her visit! Something about not allowing walking weapons of mass destruction through customs.
  
  'Wait,' she blinked. She was much more receptive to human motivations and emotions now that she was in a human-formed body and had an organic mind. She supposed that their objections might have had some merit, as her glorious spider body did have over ten grams of anti-protons aboard to provide both an alternate source of power in the event of a main power failure as well as to provide primary power for her plasma weapons.
  
  She had achieved an absolutely ridiculously rate of fire, equivalent to some small warships, on her primary plasma caster by utilizing anti-protons to achieve the stable plasma mass. Other off-the-shelf systems that relied on high-energy lasers to heat up a working plasma medium had barely any rate of fire at all, she felt.
  
  And if ten grams of antimatter had escaped her containment, it might... reasonably be considered to be a weapon of mass destruction. But it wasn't like that would have ever happened!
  
  She blinked. She had been reminiscing for the past few seconds while Gary looked more and more green. How impolite. "Monsieur Kaminsky, you are not a clone. Your body was cloned. Zhen you, zhat is to say your brain, was transplanted into zhis new body. My notes did say zhat your brain was in a jar, yes?"
  
  It looked like he was calming down a little, "Oh. Ohhh... I thought you just... fixed what was making the clones crazy." He started chuckling, but it was a little manic. "You're not fucking with me, right? I didn't know fucking brain transplants were even possible."
  
  Lily blinked. That would have been an option, too, as far as she was concerned, but then what would she have done with the Gary Prime in the jar?
  
  Lily shook her head slowly, "I'm not aware of anyone else zhat can conduct the surgery, but it isn't zhat difficult a procedure for me. Just a little bit hectic in parts. I recorded zhe whole thing..." she trailed off before deciding for the moment to lie, "on a headband camera, as I do most of my surgeries. If you wanted to watch it. It's about zhree hours long, but I could put it on a couple of holotapes," she offered.
  
  Although she didn't suffer from it anymore, anyone from transhumanity who had a history of swapping into and out of bodies like clothes would be fairly sympathetic to a flat which just had their first experience with existential anxiety like this. Plus, it wasn't that unusual for a patient to want to watch a recording of their own medical procedures, anyway.
  
  He nodded slowly, "I'd like that if you don't mind. Not only would it be a big peace of mind for my budding existential dread, but I think it'd be bloody interesting to watch."
  
  Lily nodded and decided to try to calm him a little with her wisdom, "Even if you were a clone, though, it wouldn't 'ave been a big deal. You are you. A person shouldn't be so attached to zhe particular atoms zhat make up zheir body. It isn't as if those particular molecules haven't changed. In ten years of living, most of the particular molecules, zhat comprise your body 'ave been all changed out."
  
  Gary chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, "You're talking about the Ship of Theseus question, right?"
  
  The fact her expression changed into Surprised Look #1 without her even having to will it meant she was genuinely, really, surprised, even beyond the threshold of her usual serene placidity.
  
  Except for curiosity, Lily didn't typically experience emotions at the same amplitude as other people; she had long known that. It wasn't that she didn't feel them at all, like a psychopath, but they weren't the controlling factor in her life like she thought they were with most people she met. Mostly, she considered this situation a benefit as she could generally pick and choose which emotions to externally affect, which was one of her primary social strategies.
  
  However, when an emotional level spiked past her threshold, it caused her to be a bit flustered briefly. It mostly didn't happen around other people, though, but it had been occurring more often lately.
  
  Gary's expression at her seemed amused, which agreed with her social assistant. He chuckled after a while, bragging, "Don't look so shocked, Doc. As I said, I'm an educated man." He puffed up his chest but then comically deflated and added, in a softer tone, "I took one whole philosophy class, even, as required to get my degree. The Ship of Theseus was discussed in that one class."
  
  Lily finally got ahold of herself, and given what Gary said, she slid directly into one of her amused expressions, saying honestly, "I didn't mean any offence, Monsieur." She was surprised; although transhumanity would have used more modern analogies like the teletransportation paradox to grapple with clones and forks of oneself, the Ship of Theseus was the better direct analogy to what she was saying. And she hadn't expected him to know of either.
  
  Still, she liked that he did. Genuine smile #2.
  
  He waved his hand, "Ah, no worries. I kind of get what you're saying, but I'm still kind of attached to the specific bits that make up, at least, my brain. Even if a perfect copy of me might have a claim to be me, I feel I have a better claim since I have my original brain!"
  
  Well, he was taking that pretty well. That hadn't been Lily's argument with her fork, though. She said she was the one true spider because she had gotten there first ! It was a hard argument for the duplicate to contest, given the fact that she was her, also.
  
  She nodded, "I can understand zhat perspective. I would say what is really important in these matters, zhough, would be a continuous stream of consciousness. But you were robbed of zhat when zhey put you in stasis."
  
  "Do you know what they did to my actual body?" he asked, and she thought he seemed curious, but her social assistant labelled it as feeling "unsure."
  
  She shook her head, "No. I don't. Zhe stasis machine zhey used... even I 'ave no idea 'ow it works. But zhey only had zhe small one, sized for a brain." She paused, "You realize zhat zhere is essentially no way zhat zhey intended you to live through zheir experiments? Pre-War, zhere was no way to re-implant brains back in bodies. I zhink they just tossed your body away like zhe garbage . Even if not, it is bones now." She pronounced garbage as 'gar-bahj.'
  
  He sighed and nodded, "Yeah, I kind of got that impression. Is all that shit in the files on Vault-Tec the real deal?"
  
  Lily made a waffling hand gesture, "All zhe facts are. Like, zhe Vaults here in D.C. and zheir experiments are. Zhe rest? My speculation as to zheir motives? I 'ave no idea. I will say zhat you were quite insightful earlier when you said zhat everyone with a brain knew the Great War was coming. You were right. Zhey did."
  
  "Fucking crazy is what it is," he mumbled, "And you've just been, what? Roaming the blasted Wasteland for two hundred years?"
  
  Lily blinked and shook her head, "Ah... no." She pursed her lips and considered, "I was... well, still am, zhe scientist, yes?"
  
  He nodded, "Yeah, that's pretty clear."
  
  "Well, my research is not merely in zhe human body, yes? Mostly related to zhat, I suppose... I'm not entirely sure 'ow, but I moved zhrough zhe time and space, yes? And suddenly found myself in zhis vault just a few months ago," she said the complete technical truth carefully.
  
  Usually, she implied that she was from the Pre-War period, but with someone who was genuinely from that period, she played less coy. She didn't trust him with any of her secrets, really. Plus, she felt like he would be more likely open to cooperating with her if he felt they had something in common.
  
  He looked horrified, "Wait... that means... you were suddenly in the midst of all those crazy... versions of myself?"
  
  Lily nodded slowly.
  
  He chuckled, "Wow, I'm surprised and thankful you didn't come here to burn the place to the ground on top of the clone's ears. Also, that pretty much must mean you had to have uhh... killed a few of me?"
  
  Lily nodded slowly again. She had considered doing just that, as the Gary's had traumatized her a little bit. But she thought, correctly, that there would be a lot of loot in here, plus it wasn't like a Vault was a log cabin; it wasn't flammable!
  
  Gary shook his head, whistling, "Well, thanks for not holding onto a grudge or anything. So, we're both like pulled out of time and space, huh? Sounds like the plot to a bad sci-fi novel."
  
  "That opens up a good segue for a discussion. What are your intentions going forward? You could be considered zhe last surviving resident of Vault 108, so you might be considered its owner - although I zhink you shall find zhat in the Wasteland the law of ownership 'as simplified to pretty much finders keepers," she said.
  
  Then she did a delicate cough, "I 'ave to admit that I am in the process of," and she made the air-quotes gesture, "finding some things from zhe Vault, myself." Her eyes were firm, though, and implied that it wasn't open for discussion.
  
  "Well, who am I to deny my saviour anything? What are you hauling off, if you don't mind me asking?" asked Gary in an amused voice.
  
  "All of zhe genetics equipment, cloning machine and zhe organics material recycling machine zhat was in the cloning laboratory downstairs," Lily didn't hide anything.
  
  "Yeah, fuck all that shit. Beyond the fact that I have no idea how to use any of it, I think I'm a little leery at the concept of cloning..." he said firmly, paused and then asked in an unsure tone, "By organic material recycling machine... uhh... do you suppose that's what they might have done with my body?"
  
  Lily nodded slowly again, "Almost positive zhat is exactly what zhey did," which caused him to shudder a bit. Lily had a funny thought and genuinely grinned, "Say... did you ever eat Fancy Lad cakes?"
  
  Gary looked confused but nodded, "Yeah! They were great! You know... they say they don't have any expiration date on those things! Are there any still around?"
  
  Lily nodded, "There are, in fact. However, while the cakes themselves don't have an expiration date, I think some of the flavourings did. Zhere is no real taste to zhem anymore, but zhey are quite edible, and people often find unopened boxes." Then the grin reappeared, "But, you'd be surprised that the manufacturer of that organic materials recycler was the Little Charlie Corporation."
  
  Lily watched Shock turn into Horror, carefully noting each emotion down for her social assistant's edification, and finally, he asked, aghast, "Fancy Lad cakes are... made out of actual lads?!"
  
  Lily wanted to clap in happiness; he made the same joke she had the first time she saw the manufacturer. Except... he didn't appear to be joking, "No way, please say it ain't so, Doc. I ate those all the time!"
  
  Waving her hand dismissively, "They're not. Don't worry! The default settings for zhe device, and what the user manual talks about, is for setting it up using raw sewage as an input."
  
  Surprisingly this didn't seem to make him feel all that better at first, "So no big deal, they're just made of shit? You have no idea how many of those things I ate over the years! You've ruined my childhood!" In the end, his humour showed through, and he didn't look as disgusted.
  
  Lily didn't see what the big deal was. What did he think was used to fertilize tomatoes or other produce? This was just removing a couple of extra steps first.
  
  They made some more small talk before Gary asked her to brief her as to the current state of the world, or at least as much as she knew, before he made any decisions on what he wanted to do, as well as what resources he would have at his disposal.
  
  So Lily spent about an hour talking about what she knew about Vault 108, the Capital Wasteland, Megaton, the state of humanity and some of the factions, and dangers.
  
  "What, money is bottlecaps? Like... Nuka-Cola bottlecaps?" he asked, in a tone that was half-disbelieving and half-amazed.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, it sounds ridiculous. But god knows what they used to make zhem, so they're impossible to counterfeit, at least until someone finds and restarts a Nuka-Cola bottling factory." She rubbed her chin, "If I did that, I would make sure it was done really, really quietly, so as not to destroy the value of the," she did air quotes, "currency and just add a little extra every so often."
  
  She coughed and tabled her plans to go find a Nuka-Cola plant before continuing to explain the complex beverage-based economy, "Zhat isn't zhe only thing zhat is used, gold and precious metals are also used, as is zhe barter of all kinds. But generally speaking, caps are cash. A Nuka-Cola Quantum cap is usually worth about a 'undred regular caps. Sometimes we get some Vim caps around, and most people value zhem at about the same as a regular Nuka-Cola."
  
  After talking for a time, he hummed, "It sounds as if purified water is worth significant amounts of ready currency. That kind of makes me sad, but it is an opportunity. Do you know how much water the Vault's purifier can make daily?"
  
  Lily hummed. He was smart to jump directly to the most salable thing about the Vault, the only problem was the purifier depended on the ample electrical power to operate, so it couldn't be moved. Lily had way too much on her plate to add another purified water-based business, which would require more employees and more equipment like water trucks, guards and the like.
  
  She had a little bit of an idea, but she arched her eyebrow at him with Spock Brow Raise #1, "Wouldn't you have some idea? Didn't you train to maintain it, at least clean the filters and such?"
  
  He coughed and nodded, "Yeah, although they kind of grabbed me right away, I did do some pre-employment training. Vault-Tec budgets about fifteen litres of purified water per person per day, including both drinking use and miscellaneous uses. This Vault was supposed to be sized for three hundred fifty people unless that was total bullshit."
  
  Tilting her head to the side exactly forty-five degrees, she considered. "No, I zhink that is about the size of it. I'd say the purifier here could supply a little less than six thousand litres a day if it was in tip-top shape, but it's probably outputting about 'alf zhat, now."
  
  "That might be my best bet. I definitely don't want to live here, but maybe I can make enough money to survive using this place. Interested in running a water importing business with me?" he asked good-naturedly.
  
  Lily shook her head slowly, "Running? No, definitely not. I might be willing to invest, though." Then she told him in general terms about all her own businesses. "You might make as much money on power if you could run a powerline zhe four klicks to Canterbury Commons."
  
  She also explained her plans to visit around that area before heading back to Megaton.
  
  He rubbed his chin, "I'd definitely need to find a discreet partner or partners willing to live here. Otherwise, it sounds like this place might just become a raider den if they're as bad as you were saying."
  
  "I might have an idea for that, yes? I was considering inviting some friends of mine to move in here. Zhey currently live in a falling-down electronics store. Zhey definitely have the capability to protect the place from raiders. You'd have to go in with them for at least half the profits, zhough," she warned.
  
  She didn't think the Mechanist had the social skills to run any kind of business that actually had to employ someone longer than a few days, so she thought their potential partnership would help both sides.
  
  "Then I'll definitely take all the guns here, and if I could have my PipBoy back or a replacement. Mind if I follow you around until at least we get to Megaton? I figure that's the best bet for starting a business," he asked.
  
  Lily smiled, "I don't mind. You're probably right, but you'll want to do some preliminary work in Canterbury Commons. Zhat's likely where you'll sell most of the water, anyway."
  
  "Now, where could I find a fucking water tanker truck..." he asked himself aloud.
  
  Lily wondered how many gallons a jury-rigged truck that had a single Corvega motor driving each wheel could carry and if there were many salvageable and working motors in the Corvega factory nearby. Perhaps the Mechanist and Sophie would join her and Gary Prime for an exploratory adventure of the factory.
  
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  You maniacs! You blew it all up!
  I've decided to test using cyrillic quotation marks on Lily's speech when she is using her French accent, instead of trying to phonetically spell it out. Tell me what you think, if it is better or worse?
  
  I was quite ill for about 3 days, and when I felt better I still had a kind of mental fog that made writing difficult. I am fully recovered now, more or less, though. Thanks for the well wishes.
  
  Gary wanted to look around and explore the Vault, but Lily found him still a bit noodle-legged to be walking around. However, he asked for any way to speed up his recovery, so Lily set him up with an I.V. of medichines and vitamins.
  
  She had noticed from both the scan of the rabbit and Gary that the clones came out perfect but quite out of whack as far as some of the vital non-organic materials in the body were concerned. She supposed it all depended on the source of the organic feedstocks, and the ones loaded were very vitamin deficient-especially some of the B vitamins, magnesium and potassium.
  
  She suspected that the psychotic Gary clones only had a natural lifespan of at most eighteen months before the low levels caused heart failure or cardiac arrest if any of them lasted that long.
  
  She'd have to consider adding a multivitamin mixture to the output of the people mulcher and carefully monitor it; she wasn't making snack cakes, after all.
  
  Gary still couldn't quite walk on his own, so she helped him back to his bed by draping his arm around her shoulder and firmly grabbing him by the waist. "You should be able to get up and move around tomorrow, I believe," she told him as she settled him back into bed.
  
  He groaned, "Sorry to hold you up like this."
  
  "You're not, really. It will take at least today and some of tomorrow to finish disassembling and loading all the stuff I am looting out of the Vault in any case. You'll be fine to travel by the time I am done here." She stood over him, "I won't even make you hike all the way to the nearest settlement," she added slyly.
  
  Lily left him and returned to work. She was fibbing a little bit. If she buckled down, she could probably finish everything in eight to twelve hours, but she didn't intend to work at such intensity in the first place if she did not have a pressing need.
  
  Grabbing a precision ratchet wrench in her hand and twirling it around with rapid clicking noises, she returned to work on the recycler. After she got this finished, she'd run off several rabbits before starting on the larger cloning machine.
  
  It was just a shame her musical playlist was so small. However, as her memories of her past life had been digitized she had been adding some music from it as well. She generally had to clean up each song individually, and it worked best for memories when she was listening to songs on headphones or earbuds.
  
  Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" began playing in her mind as she got to work.
  
  The next morning Gary Prime was up and walking about even sooner than she had anticipated, looking in on her beginning the process of disassembling the cloning machine, "Woah, so my brain was hooked up to this machine for two hundred years?"
  
  Lily nodded, "It certainly was. Feel free to explore around the Vault if you like, but if you intend to go outside, I'd recommend at least arming yourself first." She dug around in her pockets for a moment before digging out a small grey key, tossing it at Gary, who caught it out of the air with no problem.
  
  "This is the key to the cage in the armoury a few rooms down here on this level. There is a PipBoy in there for you; I'm pretty sure they reset yours to defaults. All of them here in the Vault are PipBoy 3000As, though, so it is all pretty much the same. I think there might be some combat armour in the cage, as well as some miscellaneous stuff in there," Lily informed him. Gary glanced at the key in his hand and nodded, "Thanks."
  
  Lily hummed as she continued to work. Lily didn't entirely trust the man, so the idea of a clearly well-trained man she didn't trust at arms around her sort of made her uneasy.
  
  However, she was actually quite a bit more bullet resistant these days. A shot to the head would not kill her; even a shot to the eye would not kill her. She had specifically designed her orbital cavities with two ninety-degree turns, having to grow out the optical nerves to fit in order to prevent any lucky shot to her eye from destroying her brain.
  
  The ribs in front of her heart were similarly designed to prevent such simple take-downs of her, with ballistic protection built into her chest. A bullet or knife could not, through luck or skill, slip between her ribs to destroy her heart or aorta, as she wasn't entirely sure the PHOENIX system could heal that damage before she died.
  
  In other words, she was a bit more willing to accept certain levels of risk these days. For example, two months ago, she would never have revived Monsieur Kaminsky in situ like this and would have kept him on ice for some time until she had the time and place of his resurrection under complete control.
  
  After a while, Gary returned to the large lab looking far more tricked out than when he came in. He had a short-barreled carbine slug on his back, a pistol on his hip, as well as was wearing a new-looking set of combat armour over his vault suit. He glanced down at her, as she was partly inside the cloning machine, "I was going to go outside to take a look, as well as zero this rifle. Are there any specific dangers nearby?"
  
  Lily carefully back out of the cloning machine, on her hands and knees, before standing up and dusting herself off. She carefully bagged the number of small fasteners she removed from inside. She had to bisect a number of cable runs, as this machine was assembled in position here in the Vault and wasn't intended to be moved again, and she carefully recorded each location where she would have to splice them back together when she reassembled everything.
  
  "Hmmm... in this part of the Wasteland, there are usually large mutated ants as the main threat. You'll definitely find some if you travel as few as five hundred metres to the west. They're quite quick, and I wouldn't let them bite you if I were you. The venom isn't lethal, but it is excruciating. Plus, the mandibles on some of the larger varieties can cut through mild steel," she advised him, after pausing as if to consider the question.
  
  Gary stared blankly at her, "You're shitting me? How big are they?"
  
  "The worker ants you'll likely to see are about as big as a French bulldog, I suppose. The really dangerous warrior ants are as big as a Great Dane. I believe that their queens, which you definitely won't see around, are bigger than a truck," Lily told him, smiling.
  
  Gary shook his head slowly several times and said, "Alright. Thanks for the heads up." He glanced at the simmering crockpot that appeared to be made of glass, "Will that stew be ready soon? I have to say, it was better than mystery meat sandwiches last night."
  
  Chuckling, she nodded, "Yes, probably another hour, I suppose, if you want the rabbit really tender. But I'd get more used to the mystery meat if I were you, that's pretty much the standard fare around the Capital."
  
  He nodded at that, "Thanks. These robots are something else, too. I haven't seen any models like this." He glanced as a group of three of them began setting up to drag a section of the cloning machine away.
  
  "They're actually based on RobCo models; I just improved the exterior a little bit," Lily said, proudly. "Dr House made a lot of odd decisions in his quest to make a really versatile bipedal robot, but he forgot or discounted that the most versatile bipedal platform already exists - us! But go ahead and get ahead of this team of three. Otherwise, you'll have to wait behind them for fifteen minutes to get up to the surface. They don't move these parts quickly."
  
  Gary blinked and then nodded, "Okay. I'll see you in a bit," before slipping in front of the team of three robots.
  
  Lily hummed to herself while she set about to finish disassembling the machine. A window popped up in her mind showing the perspective of one of her robots as she played back output of its optical sensors, watching Gary walk into the room and then seeing him blatantly stare at her derrière for a good seven seconds before she crawled out of the cloning machine.
  
  She might not understand people all too well, but even she wasn't completely blind. She smirked.
  
  POV Gary
  
  Gary tried not to think about the shapely rear end of the strange doctor-cum-mad-scientist that had saved his life, or perhaps more accurately resurrected him from the dead as though he was Lazarus, as he took stairs two and three at a time. He felt better than he had in ten years, and it wasn't surprising if the woman was telling the truth in that he had a brand new twenty-year-old body.
  
  The Vault above the lower level looked completely destroyed, and he felt he might need a tetanus shot just walking through the area. But, wait, if his body was brand new did that mean his immune system was brand new, like some uncontacted tribe? If so, would a random cold lay him low? He'd have to ask the woman, and perhaps she had some vaccinations for the common post-apocalyptic diseases.
  
  It was clear to him that the doctor didn't precisely trust him. She never met him alone when she wasn't armed and had one or two of those eerie-looking robots watching her back when she was working on the machines she intended to loot from the Vault. Gary didn't believe for a second that they were unarmed; they probably shot laser beams from their eyes or something.
  
  Still, he couldn't really blame her. Especially if she was telling the truth and she had been moved through space and time to find herself in the middle of this Vault a couple of months ago, around dozens of psychopathic versions of him. He shuddered; that was something he still hadn't quite got his head around.
  
  Dr St. Claire had explained that the brain copying machine didn't work, so it wasn't a good idea to think of them as versions of himself, but it was hard not to.
  
  He reached over and activated the light on his PipBoy. He was reaching the Vault entrance and spent some time looking over the heavy cog-like door. It seemed like it might be working if only someone would lubricate the workings, which was interesting. He didn't, ultimately, care who would live in this hole in the ground going forward, so long as it wasn't him.
  
  That said, he wasn't foolish enough to discount the advantage to his survival by claiming at least partial ownership in the place, though. At first, he had thought that either the doctor did not understand the value inherent in the place or, perhaps, she was smitten with him when she offered the place to him.
  
  However, it was clear that the young doctor understood precisely how much value could be generated, and his boyish fantasies seemed incorrect as well.
  
  The doctor definitely seemed interested in him, but he got the uneasy feeling of an entomologist looking at a prized butterfly rather than any sexual interest when she looked at him. He had no illusions as to the fate of the best specimens, and he definitely didn't want to end up in her killing jar, so he was going pretty easy with her.
  
  He shook his head. Being in a younger body meant he was dealing with a twenty-year-old's hormones. How embarrassing. Despite his uneasiness, he was significantly in the young doctor's debt. She had no pragmatic reason to help him at all, and he could have been floating around in that jar she showed him for hundreds of more years or just thrown in the trash like his previous body.
  
  Seeing the light of day, he got his first view of the outside world. He shook his head, looking up at the brown-orange sky, "You fucking maniacs... you blew it all up!"
  
  He was hoping against hope, irrationally, that it was all bullshit, but he felt shuddering quakes as the bombs exploded above their heads in the Vault before the overseer betrayed him, so it wasn't really something he was realistically optimistic about.
  
  He glanced at his PipBoy after deactivating the flashlight as well as the sun overhead and guessed that the time seemed correct. The doctor must have reset this PipBoy's internal clock before giving it to him, as he didn't think that their clocks would be this accurate over two hundred years.
  
  Unslinging his carbine, he carefully walked a bit to the west as the doctor suggested. He figured he would zero this rifle to about a hundred metres, although he suspected that conflict in this new world probably happened at a lot closer ranges than that. He walked the distance out, settled down in a prone stance and fired four rounds to zero the sights.
  
  There was a lot of ammunition in the armoury, and he intended to drag it all with him. Something told him that the Winchester factory wasn't pumping out cartridges as he remembered, and it would be a bit more difficult than going down to the store to get a few boxes.
  
  Movement caught his eye, and he glanced out to the west, and sure enough, he saw a fucking large arthropod moseying down the desert. He was kind of hoping that was bullshit, too. Well, if these were a threat, he had to find out exactly how threatening they were. He shouldered his rifle and took careful aim.
  
  His first shot hit, but it didn't put the creature down. It made a shriek and started running in his direction, which made his eyebrows raise. Luckily, it didn't seem to know how to zig or zag, so he carefully aimed the reticle ahead of the creature and let it walk into it before squeezing the trigger again. The second shot to its head put it down for the count.
  
  He walked over to it and observed its body closely. It looked just like a giant ant would. He wondered if it tasted like a prawn or crab, like other giant arthropods, and had a feeling that he would eventually find out. But not today.
  
  Walking back down to the laboratory section of the Vault, he was in time to eat a bowl of rabbit stew. He didn't know what she seasoned it with, but it was quite good and had a little bit of a spicy kick. He drank a large glass of ice-cold beer with it, and that was one main reason to follow this woman back to what passed as civilization, just to have the ability to buy beer, even if it was only average gruit.
  
  He asked her about his immune system, and her matter-of-fact answer that she had adjusted the genetics of his body to provide a notably better immune response caught him flat-footed for a moment, "Uh, are you telling me you just fiddled with the genetics of my body without asking?"
  
  She looked at him like he was a very special child before saying in that cute French accent, "It wasn't your body. Your body was thrown in the people mulcher two hundred years ago, remember? The fact that I gave you a body that resembled your old one was a courtesy, and whatever I did with it before I gave it to you was my business. It was a take it or leave it offer, you realize?"
  
  He blinked. He couldn't find anything logically wrong with what she had said, but he was pretty sure that she might be the only person in the world to have that particular perspective. Still, she was correct in that he shouldn't be ungrateful, "Ah, I realize that and I'm not intending to be ungrateful but it would help to know the changes this body offers compared to what I'm used to, you know?"
  
  That caused her to blush a little before she nodded, "Ah, of course. Well, I didn't change too much," and with that, she explained in detail, sometimes too much detail, what she had changed. He would be more resistant to radiation, have a better immune system, and have a number of changes that would tend to extend his natural life. Altogether, he thought it all sounded wonderful, assuming he didn't mutate into a hideous wildebeest as a result of them.
  
  She seemed offended that he even thought that was a possibility, too.
  
  He nodded and asked his next question, "I think I shall take up your offer to invest in my incipient water business, but that may take a little while to get off the ground. What kind of work do you think is available in Megaton?"
  
  POV Lily
  
  Lily considered Gary's question and hummed. She might like to hire him herself as the leader of her, as of yet non-existent, security services given his experience in the military. However, she didn't quite trust him with such an important and sensitive position as of yet.
  
  She said, "I think you'll find your skills are in demand," she then paused and decided not to prevaricate with him, "If I get to the point where I trust you more I'd be willing to hire you full or part-time to handle my hospital's security needs, training and leading men-at-arms. However... "
  
  She hummed, "You said you were a school teacher. I happen to have somewhat responsibility over two young children and one young Apprentice. I am seeing to my Apprentice's education myself, but I would definitely be willing to hire you to not only help out with her education but also take on the education of her two younger siblings. Then, if things work out well with that and you seem a stable person, you could shift into a more security-related role. You'd still have time to handle most of your personal business as far as selling water from this Vault, I would think... "
  
  He blinked and nodded slowly, "Not quite what I was expecting, but actually, that sounds really nice, especially considering I am just arriving, so to speak, in this crazy world..." He nodded decisively, then. "I'll take you up on that offer, thank you."
  
  Lily nodded, "Well, let's get ready to head out then. The robots will be done loading the truck with everything I need to take. You should gather all the loot you are taking, as well."
  
  Gary wolfed down the rest of his stew before standing up and gathering all the stuff he was taking, which included almost fifteen rifles in good condition that she suspected he intended to sell and a lot more ammo than she thought would be in that small armoury.
  
  It took him three trips up to the truck to load everything, and she was right behind him on his last trip. She hopped up into the driver's seat, while he took the passenger's seat without having to be told.
  
  "Alright, let us be about it, then," she said as she started the motor from idling, and slowly aiming the truck and trailer to the northwest. Checking in with the drone above, she was happy to see it wasn't overheating any longer.
  
  She wondered how far such drones would have to loiter to be undetectable from either the Enclave or the Brotherhood. They were small and featured ducted rotors made out of radar-absorbing carbon fibre, but their shape wasn't stealthy at all. A single drone wouldn't attract attention, she suspected, but if she had a hundred all hovering over the Capital wasteland, that was probably different.
  
  Despite many attempts by the Americans, it wasn't really possible to design a truly stealthy vehicle that operated via spinning rotors. The only thing you could get was levels of less obvious.
  
  She glanced at Gary and said, "My friends are a bit shy of strangers, so I will drop you off in the middle of Canterbury Commons and allow you to start your business. I wouldn't mention the source of your intended water just yet, obviously... oh and... " she dug around her pocket and tossed him a small bag, "That's about a hundred caps. You can pay me back, but the merchants will offer you a lot better prices when it is clear you have a little money and don't need to sell a rifle just to afford dinner."
  
  Gary caught the bag, glanced at it and then just nodded, "Thank you. And yes, I will be a bit cagey about my source. I'm sure they'll think I'm bullshitting until the first water truck arrives. That's my bigger worry; how will I find one of those."
  
  Lily nodded, "Well, there is a Corvega factory southwest of here. I happen to know it is overrun with giant ants, including soldier variants and one Queen. I'll ask my friends if they are interested in clearing it out with us, if so we could probably use the fission motors to jury-rig a water truck. I'm not unfamiliar with engineering projects like that."
  
  Gary brightened considerably, "I'm quite good mechanically with cars. And I have a lot of experience handling and maintaining small fission reactors from my time in the Navy, so I definitely could put something together myself, even. That sounds like a great idea. I'm not sure my rifle can do much against an ant the size of this truck, though, Doc."
  
  Lily didn't think so, either. She still had that minigun in the back of the truck, though, and a fair bit of the 5mm ammo she had stolen off that weird woman on the bridge and figured that would be much more effective. Plus, if the Mechanist went along with it he'd no doubt bring at least one Sentrybot.
  
  Some of the people of Canterbury Commons came out to look at the unusual and unfamiliar truck that was pulling in. She pulled in right next to Dot's Diner, "This diner is pretty good. Across the street is an old Firestation, however the new owner uses it as a transhipment hub for traders. He might be a good choice to mention your incipient water business to. Tell him I sent you, and he might not think you're crazy."
  
  Gary nodded and dismounted, "Is it okay if I leave most of my stuff in here?" Lily nodded at him, "Go ahead. I will be at the old discount electronics store southwest of town; everyone knows it. However, I'll likely find you first in a day or two."
  
  "Thanks, Doc. I'll see you in a couple of days, then," Gary said, unloading one bag of loot from the back of the truck.
  
  Lily smiled as she put the truck into gear. It was time to see how Sophie and Scott were doing!
  
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  Stay Away From My Man!
  Lily was careful not to drive her truck too close to Scott's house. Her vehicle was obviously armed and had seven robots in the back, which Scott might tend to accurately identify as dual-role combat models. So, she pulled up about a hundred metres away and hopped out. She peered at his building, and he certainly had affixed a jury-rigged dish on a motorised gimbal. It wasn't currently pointed in her direction, though, which was good.
  
  She would be most upset if he microwave-cooked her with the magnetron she had dragged back to his base herself. Talk about adding insult to injury!
  
  It was Sophie that came floating out to meet her in her spiffy new dark grey exterior, " Miss Lily! Is that you? It looks like you! " Ah, she supposed using French was a bit of a simple way to verify her identity. She yelled back in the same language, " Yes, it is me! You're looking pretty good there, girl!"
  
  Sophie spun in a circle, showing off her new chassis. Lily had seen it once before leaving but had to admit that Sophie looked good. She had kept the tactical-Nanny look but had added freshly painted white accents, "Yes, yes! I am ze best looking Miss Nanny around, no?"
  
  "Absolutely, but you were already zhat before I met you! Can I have my robots drive my truck to zhe building? I didn't want Scott to zhink he had to defend zhe Maginot Line from Zee Germans or anything," Lily asked amusedly, switching to a fake German accent to say, "Zee Germans."
  
  "Yes, he didn't want me to come out, but I zought it was you, Miss Lily," Sophie said, "And yes, go ahead. What kind of robots do you have that can drive vehicles very well? Zat was an optional feature for the Miss Nanny line, but it required certain special control hardware to be installed on your car."
  
  Lily sent the orders to one of the Termitrons, who hopped into the driver's seat and carefully and slowly drove the truck up to the building, carefully backing it up in a three-point turn. Turning to face Sophie, who had almost fallen out of levitation in shock.
  
  The Mechanist walked out of the building and waved at her, but Sophie carefully asked, "Uhh... Miss Lily... you weren't always a robot, were you?"
  
  Well, sort of? And no? Lily considered how she would answer that question.
  
  Scott looked at Sophie like she was crazy, "She's clearly the same person she always was, although these robot models are very interesting. What are they?"
  
  Oh, how wrong you are, Monsieur Mechanist! She attempted to fire up her RobCo emulation program to send a chat request to Sophie over the radio.
  
  It took a few stops and starts for her to parse the handshake and chat protocol, so she answered Scott while her computer was chewing on it, "Ah, zhey are zhe Labourtron, but I changed zheir exterior chassis. Here, take a look." She triggered one to stand still, with arms outstretched into a DaVinci T-pose, "All zhe interior parts and motivators are standard Labourtron parts."
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Hello? Miss Lily? How are you doing this? ]
  
  [Lilium: Ah, that's better. Sorry. I didn't have the complete datasheets on the communication protocols, but clearly, that was an area Dr House helped General Atomics on. To answer your question, I connected my brain up to a computer. ]
  
  [ *** Lilium wants to send a file ( ) *** ]
  
  [ *** File transfer complete *** ]
  
  Lily sent Sophie a simple bitmap file that was a digital image of a diagram of the basics of how her brain-computer worked.
  
  Lily did not expect Sophie's reaction, though, which was to float protectively in between Lily and Scott. Sophie didn't quite snap her manipulators at her like an upset cat, but Lily felt that she might if she got too close!
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: My Scott only likes robot girls! And now you might be robot enough to qualify, Miss Lily! I won't let you steal him! ]
  
  Lily was flabbergasted and a little amused. Flabbergasted that Sophie thought that she was at all interested in the Mechanist and amused at the robot girl's insecurity with her relationship. She decided to reassure her.
  
  [Lilium: Scott isn't interested in robot girls, he's interested in you. I'm pretty sure that would be true no matter if you had two legs or used levitation as you do now. ]
  
  Lily noticed an out-of-band communication along the chatline and thought it might be an emotive channel; if so, she wondered precisely how many sapient and self-actualising robots there were in this world. Was that included by default in her programming in the event she gained self-awareness, or did Sophie add that onto the chat protocol herself?
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh! Do you think so? I'm sorry, Miss Lily. I get so protective of him. ]
  
  Lily finished decoding the data sent out-of-band and tried playing it back, and she got a sense of shy blushing and embarrassment. So, it was an emotive channel, similar to the thought tracks she recorded on her own sensorium, and their neural networks were compatible enough that Lily could play it back and feel the appropriate emotion.
  
  The only way that was possible was if Sophie's neural network was fundamentally similar to her own. She had thought the Mister Handy neural networks seemed vaguely human-like, but she had only seen one example of a crazy one and one example of a normal one. She suspected that the AI experts in Fallout started off by mimicking the neural networks of animals and proceeded from there, slowly increasing complexity.
  
  Scott finished examining the Termitron, "It really is a Labourtron! But how do you control them so well? Even Protectrons are so terribly stupid that they're hard to be much use beyond simple commands until you got that mainframe operational."
  
  Lily quickly edited a stream of herself feeling very amused and attempted to send it back to Sophie in the same manner, which seemed to succeed.
  
  [Lilium: Yes, I very much think so. Maybe it helped his social problems a bit that you were a robot at first, but I definitely don't think that he cares at all about that now. ]
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Thanks, Miss Lily. I'm curious about how you're getting such good success with the Tron-chassis units, myself. So much better than even I can do. ]
  
  Lily hummed in thought and said, "Well, Scott. Zhere's two different reasons. First, one Sophie detected right away when I started ordering them around."
  
  The Mechanist just stared at her, "I am almost one hundred per cent sure you're not a robot, Lily. I've seen you nude coming out of the shower."
  
  'Please don't remind me, Mechanist-san,' Lily thought strongly to herself. He had surprised her and then didn't even have the decency to seem interested; he looked at her like she was a bag of potatoes, which didn't do a lot for her self-esteem.
  
  Sophie floated next to the Mechanist, "Ah, Scott, dear. I was a little hasty... Rather than her being ze robot, it is more like she installed a computer inside her brain. We have been talking digitally, using ze radio while you were inspecting ze robot. So I guess she is more ze cy-borg, yes?"
  
  Scott blinked slowly for a half minute or so before accepting the claim at face value, "Truly? That is... very intriguing. I can't say I've ever been jealous of a person until now." He paused before asking, now interested, "What was the other reason?"
  
  Trust him not to lose sight of matters. She nodded and asked, "Are you aware of the theoretical mathematical model of computation known as finite state machines?"
  
  Scott looked puzzled, "Theoretical model of computation? Like Lambda calculus?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Yes, sort of. Zhat is definitely a model of computation and a much more complicated version zhan zhe state machine. More complicated doesn't always mean more better, zhough. So, let's go inside, and I can discuss and teach zhem to you. If you know even a little lambda calculus, it should be a piece of cake."
  
  At the same time, she opened up her development environment. She configured her cross-compiler to compile executables for the RobCo OS and Miss Nanny processor. She had a number of small tools and utilities to create and manage the state machine tasks she had created and would see if she could send everything as a chunk to Sophie. It would make her the ultimate in Managerial Nannies.
  
  She'd also cross-compile a version to run on Scott's mainframe, as well. She or he would have to recode the user interface to something that could be displayed over a terminal rather than her now standardised visual interfaces.
  
  After about an hour of explaining, including drawing diagrams of simple deterministic state machines and showing him some example code on a terminal, Scott pretty much fully understood the concept. More than that, he was enamoured with it, "You mean, you can break down the entirety of reality into these deterministic segments?!" He had the look of an evangelical who just saw Jesus' face in his toast in the morning.
  
  Lily rubbed the back of her neck, "Well, not all of reality, but a lot more zhan a person would zhink. Zhe key is to develop the smallest tasks first, zhen use more complicated tasks zhat utilise the smaller tasks as steps. I've created a little less than a thousand different state machines, zhus far."
  
  Lily had already sent Sophie her entire collected works of state machines, recompiled for the differing OS and architecture, who took to using them swimmingly. She was presently dancing, well hovering in beat, in a congo-line of about a dozen of Scott's Protectrons. She ended up having to compile and send her entire visual interface library as well.
  
  The Congo dance was Sophie's first attempt to create a new task all on her own, and it was a simple implementation that used a lot of Lily's prior work, such as following the robot in front of you, moving your limbs in this way, and a number of delays it seemed to be working out well.
  
  It was interesting that none of Sophie's internal software used visual interfaces as Lily's did, so it took her a little while to get used to it. Still, Sophie had commented that she really liked the interface.
  
  "And you can do all of that from your brain with an interface to a computer?" Scott asked in amazement. Then he coughed and asked, "Is that something you're willing to sell me? That sounds like a dream of mine."
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and considered that. She hadn't intended to offer brain-computer interfaces widely until she got to the point where she could fabricate her own quantum processors, either the optical hyper-matrix versions she was most familiar with or the versions used in the Fallout universe.
  
  However, she didn't consider the Mechanist to be the public at large so she nodded after a moment, "Yes. I don't have any more of the Eyebot processors I use for computer, zhough. You'd have to bring me one, as well as come to Megaton personally for zhe operation. I don't have any of my surgical tools here."
  
  Sophie came floating up, "Oh! That would be amaaazing, Scott! We could be connected mind to mind!" If the Mechanist was a wiser man, he might be hearing alarm bells hearing his girlfriend say that, but he seemed as excited as Sophie was. Well, whatever. It would probably work out fine.
  
  Lily smiled and asked, "Say, would you two be interested in helping me loot zhe Chryslus Corvega factory just south of 'ere with a friend of mine?"
  
  Scott blinked and then turned back to face Lily, "Are you a mind reader? We were going to ask you to help us do that as well. There's a number of machine tools there that I'm interested in acquiring now that we have the excess power to run them, thanks to your generator. I was going to build a water purifier, also."
  
  Lily chuckled, "Well, we'll definitely help each other zhen. But I have another proposal that would solve any water problems you'd have. Let me tell you of zhe tragic tale of Gary Kaminsky and Vault 108."
  
  Gary sneezed suddenly. He had to turn away from the merchant he was arguing with and sneeze into his shoulder. He wondered what brought that on.
  
  Turning back to the man who was trying his damndest to cheat him, he said, "These are primo rifles. A number of them are straight from Colt, never having been fired before!"
  
  The man tried to give him a line of bullshit, "Nobody is really interested in good quality rifles; they'll stay on my shelves for years! I'll have to get an expert in to attest to their condition! I'm taking all the risk here!"
  
  Gary gave him a rude gesture and said, "Yeah, go fuck yourself with that bullshit. I'll see myself out."
  
  The merchant tried to call him back, but screw that guy. He wasn't even a local around here, just passing through, so it was not surprising he was trying to scam as much money as he could if he wasn't going to be around to receive the fallout.
  
  He had a meeting with the man who ran the warehouse and transhipment point, along with that man's brother. Apparently, Doc Nice Ass's name opened a lot of doors in this town. He had to make sure not to think about her that way when she was around. If she was like most women, she had some sort of telepathic ability to detect that kind of thing.
  
  He walked out of the merchant's tent, whistling a Dean Domino song he really liked.
  
  Sophie was the first to respond after her story, "Woah, zat is fantastique, Miss Lily! A real live survivor who isn't a ghoul! Very interesting!"
  
  Scott had a perplexed but very interested look on his face, "If it is possible to clone a younger body and then have your brain transplanted into it, wouldn't you be able to just live forever by being repeatedly transplanted into younger bodies every few decades?"
  
  Lily nodded but held up a hand and gave a wishy-washy gesture at the same time, "Yes, and also no. Zhe brain, it does not age precisely like your body does but at zhe same time as you get older it gets more... set in it's ways. Zhe neural connections it has already formed have a lot more priority compared to forming new connections just due to the brain's hardwired economy. A new connection is expensive, yes?"
  
  Lily hummed, "After a couple of hundred years without additional neuro-plasticity treatments, you would find yourself as static and unchanging as zhe pre-compiled computer program, unable to even accept any new data zhat did not fit into one of your pre-existing paradigms or data structures. You could see something new, and your brain would just filter it out, and you wouldn't even remember it, as if you had a serious mental illness." She smiled, "I'm quite interested in studying zhe process of ghoulification on brains as it seems to offer a limited amount of protection from zhis fate."
  
  Scott looked interested and nodded, "You don't think it is weird that I want to live forever?"
  
  Lily looked at him like he was crazy. Shaking her head rapidly, she said with emotion, "No! I think it is weird that people don't!" She truly didn't understand it. Certainly, most people seemed to want to extend their lives while they were living them, but even in her past life, when she offered to schedule a tentative tea party, exact date TBD when the sun expanded to swallow the Earth, she got looked at like she was insane. Was it so weird to plan to be alive a billion years in the future?
  
  The only person who had RSVPed to her party was the fork of her living on Extropia Station. In fact, the main thing she got from sending those invites out was a bunch of tabloid headlines, like "Spider Witch to 'Annihilate' Cradle of Civilization at 'A Time To Be Determined' Unless Her Demands Are Met!" and "Is Terrorbot Arachnophobia Once Again Violating the Olympus Mons Convention on Strategic Planet-Busting Weapons? Find Out More!" Telling those so-called "journalists" that she had never even signed such a convention did not help matters at all.
  
  Even back then, before she found out about alternate universes, the universe was so vast and complicated that she could see herself spending billions of years exploring it. Perhaps it was because curiosity was the only emotion she experienced at what she considered "normal human amplitude" for emoting, but she just couldn't imagine not wanting to continue to exist so long as there were new things to discover and experience.
  
  Depending on how she looked at it, her other emotions were either muted or increased. They were very muted compared to her life in America but compared to her life as a robotic spider, she had a much wider emotional experience. However, if anything, her curiosity was as strong or stronger than ever. She often had to ask herself if she was making wise choices, as she recognised it wasn't a good idea or safe to let her curiosity do the driving at all time.
  
  She had known the experiment that resulted in the creation of the Psyker Gary had been a bad idea from the start. Something in her intuition told her so, but she was so very curious.
  
  And even with the experience of nearly being killed by Psyker Gary or the threat of having her mind taken over, the back of her brain was still working on ways to repeat the experiment in a safer manner.
  
  For example, she had the idea of including in the healing vat a functional MRI system that would continually scan the brain inside and use the earlier scans of brain activity to create a system that induced neural shocks in the brain in the event it recognised either the "telepathic" or "telekinetic" brain activations.
  
  They were quite unique and distinguishable, so she thought that plan would actually have excellent success, but it ran into ethical considerations. Was Psyker Gary aware? He certainly had the neural complexity to be so, but she had no idea of what FEV was actually doing to the brain.
  
  Vast sections of brain structure that she was sure were important for consciousness and self-actualisation were changed radically. It might be a completely alien construction that intended to create an unaware psychic drone or relay. But that wasn't her hypothesis, it was her hope, and she couldn't proceed on that basis.
  
  She glanced up into the sky, or rather the ceiling. If only she could find a few alien bodies to dissect and do a differential comparative analysis on their genetics.
  
  Scott brought her out of her reverie by nodding. He looked as if he had been finally vindicated after a long period of having his theories of Heliocentrism denigrated as heresy and witchcraft, "I thought you might understand. I had planned to find out how Robobrains work and transplant my brain into one when I got too old."
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "Zhat is... one solution. Although, I expect to 'ave better options available for you prior to needing to set zhat plan into motion, yes? Although, if you find out zhe Robobrain factory, I'd definitely go with you to explore it." Something in her intuition told her that those in power probably just scooped the brains out of hobos to make Robobrains, so she had some scepticism about the process.
  
  Sophie floated around both of them and asked, "What do you zink about moving into that Vault? Zere are hardly any places safer zan a vault!"
  
  Scott looked interested, "It sounds like a good idea, especially since we'd be due a portion of the proceeds of selling the purified water since it would be our responsibility to keep the water purifier working and raiders out of the vault. But we'd need some help from you, Lily, before we could commit to moving everything over there."
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "What kind of 'elp?" She was already providing an entirely free underground secret base; what more did he want?
  
  "Two things. First is... Well, we have way too much stuff. I'd have to get a truck, and that would come with a driver. The entire area would know about the change in Vault 108's status right away, even before we started shipping water," Scott said.
  
  'Ah, that is a good point,' Lily thought to herself. It was best to keep the Vault's status on the down-low until Scott turned it into a fortress.
  
  He continued, "So the first thing I'd like to ask is to borrow your truck for a day or two to get everything moved over discreetly."
  
  Lily nodded, "Zhat makes sense. Of course. I'll have to unload all zhe goodies I dragged out of zhere..."
  
  Scott shook his head, interrupting her, "I don't think so. I know that there are a number of trailers just sitting around at the Corvega plant. We could probably unhook your trailer here, leave it guarded and just take the cab to the Corvega factory and scavenge one there to bring back. Quite fortunate that you have a truck that tows a trailer rather than having a built-in truck bed like most trucks."
  
  Lily blinked and nodded, "It sounds like you've been scavenging around zhe Corvega factory before."
  
  Scott nodded, "I brought one of the small fission motors home and hooked the output shaft into a generator; that was how we got power until you gave us that fusion generator."
  
  That made her feel better, "Oh, good. Zhose are one of zhe main things I wanted to take back, to see if we could build zhe water tanker truck for zhis new business. What's zhe second thing you need?"
  
  Scott blinked and then nodded, "Shouldn't be a problem, except most of the crated motors were deep in the factory where the ants were the most aggressive. It sounds like we're going to have to do a sweep and clear on the entire hive." That got him thinking but then he shook his head, "The second thing is I'd like to request your help to help redesign all of my Protectrons to be somewhat similar to yours. With these finite state machines, you've shown me, if we had robots with actual opposable thumbs, we would be able to do a lot more cleaning work in the Vault. Get it really livable. It'd have to be a somewhat different design, as the Protectron's laser assembly is a bit bulky. Still, I'd be willing to help."
  
  Lily hummed. This wasn't asking a lot, as she already had intended to do that. She had two Protectrons and intended to have more in the future. However, if he expected her to supply him with all the fabricated parts...
  
  She didn't intend to sell her carbon fabricators to anybody. They were a bit too useful. However, part of the reason she created the DMLS fabricators in the first place was to have something to give the Brotherhood when they inevitably twisted her arm about certain technologies.
  
  She could provide The Mechanist and Sophie with a metal printer and even a nanomachine-based recycler, the same as she used. But not for free.
  
  Lily nodded, "The design work is no problem. I have a couple of Protectrons, myself, and intend to acquire more. How many Protectrons do you have?"
  
  Scott coughed, "Fifty-seven."
  
  Holy shit! He was ready to start a war up in this bitch!
  
  Lily coughed too, "Well, as for zheir exterior chassis... I'm willing to sell you two machines. One recycles metals into very fine powders, zhe other uses very fine metal powders to build arbitrary metal shapes. You'll be able to use it, especially after you get a brain interface, to print your own robot bodies along a design that we can work on together. I'm not interested in money, though."
  
  Scott shared a glance with Sophie. How cute that they made decisions together. He asked, "What do you want in exchange?"
  
  Lily smiled, "A permanent room in your Vault so zhat if zhings go to sh... poorly for me, I can run and hide behind zhe strong hand of your dozens and dozens of combat bots."
  
  She suddenly thought of a particular cheeky brat and his penchant for engineering solutions, "Oh... and you have to take an Apprentice, a kid, in a couple of years. Maybe."
  
  Another thing popped into her mind. He seemed really interested in the finite state machines, almost too interested, "And you have to share with me any tasks you create for the Tron-series bots!"
  
  Again, Scott and Sophie shared a glance. Did he need a brain interface if they already spoke telepathically? He nodded, "That's fine. You can even have the Overseer's room and his office if you want."
  
  That was interesting; it seemed Scott knew a little bit about how vaults were organised. He probably has explored some of them, she surmised. If you had an army of combat bots, why wouldn't you?
  
  She nodded, "Accepted!"
  
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  Is this a male thing?
  Lily had expected to require a couple of days to talk the Mechanist and Sophie into both moving and for their help to loot the Corvega factory, but it was barely ten in the morning on the first day.
  
  She had followed Scott back outside, and it appeared like he was already getting his ball rolling.
  
  "I'd like to start moving things and guard bots to Vault 108 immediately," Scott told her, surprising her.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "But we need to go to zhe factory for the trailer first...?"
  
  Scott waved her off, "I can do that myself if you trust me enough to lend me your very expensive truck. Sophie, a few bodyguards and I can get the trailer; there are over a dozen in the loading dock. Even if we need to mix and match wheels, it shouldn't be a problem." [Confident (80%)]
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, "Oh-kay. I don't mind. Zhis would be a lot easier if you 'ad zhe brain interface already... You see, I' ave an aerial drone 'overing about five 'undred meters above my truck at all times, in surveillance." She tilted her head to the side, "It would take a little work to cross-compile the moving map program for Sophie, too, especially since she doesn't use the same antennas and radios I do. It'd be a complete driver mismatch right now."
  
  After a moment, she nodded, "Give me an hour or so. Then, I'll set up a directional antenna on your roof and point it towards zhe Corvega factory. Zhat will allow me to connect to zhe drone even from Canterbury Commons. Zhe drone can also act as a relay, so I can use it to send messages to Sophie if I notice raiders or other threats approaching."
  
  Scott peered up at the sky, trying to see the drone to no avail. Lily chuckled, "It's not very big. It only weighs about seven decimal five kilos, and most of zhat is zhe fission battery." It was fortunate that fission batteries had a surprisingly high output, given they weighed over three kilos; they were commonly used in combat bots, for example. As far as Lily could tell, there was no such thing as simple quadcopter-type aerial drones in the Fallout universe, either.
  
  She had been reading about potential aerial drones using levitation technology, but she couldn't quite understand how it worked when looking at the examples of such tech from eyebots and Mister Handy's. It was pretty state of the art at the time of the Great War, so everything she read had only talked about the possibility in generic terms. If she could figure it out, she could redesign her drones to be very stealthy as far as radar was concerned. Even with ducted rotors, you would never get acceptable stealth on a fan platform.
  
  It was fortunate that she already knew a fair bit about stealthed vehicles, as she always designed those features into her previous bodies that were space-capable. It really wasn't that complicated; you just had to design the shape so that EM radiation would be deflected away from returning back to the emitter of the radiation. She didn't remember the exact formulas for ideal stealth and was just using her intuition, but it was something she could easily rediscover through simple experiments in controlled settings.
  
  Scott nodded, "What is its propulsion mechanism?" [Curious (65%)]
  
  Lily smiled, "Rotors. I guess you'd say it is zhe helicopter, except zhere are four rotors spaced equidistantly. Two rotate clockwise, and two rotate counterclockwise. Suppose all four rotors have the same angular velocity. In that case, zhen the overall yaw force is zero, and it is hovering, zherefore it is a straightforward platform to build automated control software for, and you don't need zhe complicated mechanisms like tilting main rotorblades, swashplates or tail rotors. Instead, you can control it in all axis by the simple variation of one or more of the four rotors' speed."
  
  The Mechanist stood there with his eyes closed for a moment, imagining it and then nodded. "I understand." And Lily suspected he did, too. To the point where he might even be able to build one now. Except, the main problem in building quadcopters was the lightweight materials necessary. Although, with a fission battery, she thought it might be possible to create one out of mostly aluminium if you had powerful enough electric motors. Her drone was certainly overpowered, for example.
  
  She was about to signal the drone to land so that Scott could examine it, but he stopped seeming interested after telling her that he understood, and she suspected all the response she would get if she did have the drone land was a simple nod. That was just like him, so she kept it hovering and also nodded, "You can go ahead and start getting ready, and unhitch zhe trailer. I'll go set up zhe antenna, now."
  
  Lily walked inside the Mechanist's lair and searched for something suitable to fashion into a couple of antennas. It was a shame that there were no Pringles chips here. Otherwise, she could have easily fashioned a dirt simple Yagi-style antenna out of the cylindrical can.
  
  Well, a Yagi-style antenna still sounded like a good idea. She'd have to tune them to the correct frequency she was using, but that wasn't difficult for her. She found some plastic PVC pipe, some wire mesh to use as a parabola reflector and some electronics to fashion the repeater and got to work. She fashioned two antennas, one to point at Corvega and one to point at Canterbury Commons. The contraption was quite ugly, actually, but she felt it would give sufficient gain to reach five kilometres in either direction easily, even with modest power input. And she didn't have to worry about the FTC coming calling, so there was no need to be modest about the power input at all. So long as she chose a frequency band no one else was using, nobody would care. And she had already chosen bands that were quiet when she selected all the frequencies she used in the first place.
  
  Lily paused for a moment. That gave her an idea; she could easily create simple solar-powered or betavoltaic-powered signal repeaters or relays and set up a simple point-to-point ad-hoc mesh network between settlements. She doubted she would get more than a few gigabits per second on the link, but that was enough to have hundreds of simultaneous VoIP calls per link, considering audio compression technology. Not to mention actual e-mail for people that still had some manner of technology available. She had already considered doing this using one of the many dish relay stations that dotted the Capital Wasteland, but those sites were well known and invariably became home for raiders or Super Mutants. She would have had to guard each one. However, if she could make small, camouflaged relay links, that was different.
  
  Humming, she took her jury-rigged antenna and some wire and headed up to the roof. Fortunately, she wouldn't have to drill any holes for power as Scott had already done that to install the microwave gun's dish. She pulled up her full map display. The factory was visible on the edge of the drone's recording pattern. She then used a combination of her internal compass and a mental straight edge to find the correct bearing in order to position the antennas correctly.
  
  She thought more about her idea as she finished setting up the electronics portion of the relay on the roof. Reliable communication was a prerequisite to modern trade and governance, and if that communication was instantaneous, then it was all for the better. Although Lily did not really like the concept of governments at all, she had to admit that some manner of government, even if it was merely a warlord taking control, would be a vast improvement.
  
  Except if it was the Enclave, she supposed. Well, at least the Enclave, as the genocidal VAX AI, ran it, anyway.
  
  Reliable telephone and radio data links between settlements would precipitate the ability for police or military forces to coordinate between settlements and respond to reported sightings of raiders rapidly. While she didn't understand people very well individually in a social setting, she was very cognizant of a group's probable reactions, especially as it touched on military matters. She expected a volunteer force would form first, and over time it might turn into an actual government.
  
  She was willing to support nearly any organization that would tend to reduce the power of either the Enclave, as it presently existed or the Brotherhood, so it might be a good idea to pursue. Plus, it would allow Monsieur Three Dogs to institute a call-in show. She had to get him some more songs, also.
  
  He barely had twenty songs he cycled through playing. She had a lot more than that in her head that she had already digitized and could transfer to holotapes, although only a handful was along the same theme of the music that was popular in Pre-War Fallout. She had some Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and similar, but it would be a bit hard to explain where KMFDM or Disturbed had come from, to say nothing of K-pop or dubstep.
  
  Perhaps, some country music along with some of the oldies she had listened to.
  
  She could already see that the relay was working, as she could visually see the EM spectrum rendered in her vision coming and out of each antenna. She nodded, content at the success of her labours and sub-vocalized a command, ' Command, Audio, Play Twilight Time by The Platters, then random shuffle.'
  
  She sent a message to Sophie indicating she was done and they could leave whenever they wanted, and then paused to consider what she should do with the rest of her day.
  
  She ended up spending most of the day studying the data she received from all of her FEV experiments, especially the Psyker-Gary's brain, although she did it digitally from her scans.
  
  She had a continual scan going of his entire transformation, and it was a lot of information to process and look over. She would wait to perform the actual dissection when she was back at her hospital and had privacy, although she wasn't sure if she would learn too much more from that than she did from examining the scan data.
  
  Comparing Psyker-Gary's transformation against the others she recorded was interesting. Without a skull to get in the way the transformation was a lot different even from the beginning than the ones involved where Gary turned into a Super Mutant. That wasn't entirely scientific, as far as she was concerned, but it was very interesting.
  
  She noticed Scott and Sophie come and go three times, counting their quick trip to the Corvega factory. The first load was mostly full, but the second was barely half full. Sighing and stretching, she decided she was reaching the point of diminishing returns just staring at brains and their changes, for now.
  
  She started looking around the Mechanist's lair to see what was left behind, for now. It looked like Scott was leaving most of his Protectrons behind, which was likely wise as they required either his mainframe or, more recently, Sophie to function at their highest levels.
  
  She saw them truck two Sentrybots and a couple of auto-turrets over to the Vault, which should be enough to protect it from anything short of a full-fledged military assault. She was once again surprised at just the amount of military hardware the Mechanist had available to him and at how much more useful robots tended to be in actuality compared to the game she remembered. Here, a Protectron was a real threat to life, even a single one. Whereas in Fallout 3, they were easily dispatched.
  
  She hoped that no scavengers decided to go looking through Vault 108 in the next few days, although that wasn't too likely. Poor bastards would only have their own bad luck to blame if they did, though.
  
  Taking a while looking at the large stock of unrepairable parts and disassembled robots, she started accumulating small ruby rods that she had taken from laser assemblies that weren't repairable. For her, she could fabricate every part of a laser except for these rods, so she would ask to buy them from Scott later.
  
  The Protectron lasers used an odd-sized ruby that was bigger than the ones used in laser pistols but slightly smaller than the ones used it most rifles, and they used two rods in each Protectron laser to achieve a fast rate of fire. It was an interesting design that she might be able to copy parts of to make a submachine gun-style rapid-firing laser or perhaps a heavy-duty laser pistol.
  
  Compared to the Fallout lasers, her parts were quite miniaturized, so she could make a pistol firing a heavier beam in about the same amount of space. She decided to work on that, as it wouldn't take too much time. She needed to update the design on her laser pistols, anyway, to make use of some lightweight metals like aluminium and carbon fibre instead of using diamond on everything.
  
  Lily had been finding her ability to multi-task had been improving, which was interesting and heartening to her. She couldn't quite tell if it was due to brain changes or her computer, but she felt it was likely a combination of both factors.
  
  So long as at least one task was simple and mostly mindless, like disassembling broken parts, she could do two things at once. So, as she continued accumulating her ruby rods, she worked on adjusting her standard laser pistol design to accept the larger rods, as well as replacing the diamond frame with thin aluminium.
  
  According to her CAD's simulation, the adjustments to use metal did increase the weight, from approximately eight hundred and fifty grams to over nine hundred and seventy when loaded, but she felt it was still quite light and reliable. Significantly lighter than normal laser pistols, in fact.
  
  It was about the same weight as a full-sized Glock from her past life and a bit lighter than the ten-millimetre pistols she used to carry before moving to the all energy-weapon "build" she currently favoured.
  
  She felt satisfied with the design and locked it in for a prototype test when she returned to Megaton. Now, she would walk the short distance to Canterbury Commons and find Monsieur Gary and inform him that they would be hitting the Corvega Factory in the morning.
  
  Gary POV
  
  Gary was having a good day, which was surprising since the world was a wrecked, radioactive hellscape. He had already spent some time discussing his potential new business with the man who was in charge of the town, although he claimed he wasn't the mayor.
  
  It was just too difficult to start a business in America. It was a highly mature country with almost every slice of the pie already divided amongst the elite, who did not really appreciate the competition.
  
  The barriers to entry were large and unless you discovered a completely new technology like the Mass Fusion company did when they brought effective mobile fusion power to the masses, you were fighting a zero-sum game where for you to get a dollar, someone else had to lose it.
  
  One couldn't even go to the country and farm anymore because almost all of the available arable land was being cultivated quite carefully. Maybe if he was a Super-Genius like Wiley Coyote or Doctor St. Claire, he could have invented some new solution which would have opened the door, and his invention could have expanded the available pie, in which case the rulers of the country would gratefully allow him to have a piece.
  
  But, while he felt he was quite intelligent, there was just nothing for a student of history to excel at in the America he remembered. In that way, he felt freer than he had in some time navigating the horrid world he found himself in. He found that he was way more educated than almost anyone he had met, which wasn't something he was used to feeling, either.
  
  It wasn't like he had any ties to the previous world. His wife had divorced him a decade ago, which wasn't that uncommon for career Navy types, and he had no living family beside her.
  
  The combination of once again having a vigorous and youthful body and having no attachments he was fretting about made him feel quite optimistic about his present situation, even if he couldn't understand some parts of this world-like using bottlecaps as currency.
  
  His reverie allowed a couple of men to follow him without his noticing, at first, until he was already in a fairly deserted part of the town. Sighing, he chided himself for letting himself be caught off-guard. This place was just like taking liberty in the Pan-Arabian Protectorate, and he was quite familiar with that.
  
  He tossed his backpack down and turned around, his hand quite close to his pistol, like an old west style gunslinger. Whether or not someone died today would be up to these boys.
  
  Lily found Gary rather quickly and was about to approach him but saw two rough-looking men trailing him and decided to hang back and see what was going to happen. She pulled her AirTaser from her holster and started stalking his stalkers.
  
  If they pulled out firearms, she would stun or kill them from behind. She wouldn't allow two unknown assholes to ambush and kill the Gary she spent so much time reviving. She hadn't even extracted all of his stories about Pre-War America, yet!
  
  Gary showed that he wasn't entirely stupid by noticing his stalkers rather rapidly, and turning around like he was about to have a duel at the OK corral. She snickered when she saw it, from her hiding spot and leveled her weapon at one of the men, flicking the selector from safe to lethal, as she expected bullets to start flying any second.
  
  Instead, she was surprised to see the two shake their fists and yell at Gary. It wasn't that she couldn't understand them, because she could clearly hear all the words even thirty metres away. However, it was just that she didn't really understand what they meant. Something about disrespect, and showing him whose the real man.
  
  Tilting her head to the side, she watched as a bout of fisticuffs broke out between Gary and the two men. She flicked the selector switch to stun and took aim at one of them, and just as she was about to squeeze the trigger, her nascent social assistant popped up a warning that her actions would be a contrivance of the desires of Gary. Frowning, she thought it was malfunctioning.
  
  It was rare for her social assistant to actually provide timely advice that was also accurate, after all. However, she removed her finger from the trigger and continued to watch. The brawl continued for a couple of minutes, which was longer than most street fights usually lasted and Gary demonstrated a number of dirty fighting techniques that made Lily wince.
  
  When all three combatants were on the ground, woozily trying to get up Lily was surprised when all three men just began laughing uncontrollably. Gary was the first to get to his feet and offered a hand to one of the others, who took the help back to his feet. Lily at first suspected Gary was using a ruse and was about to punch the guy, but they kept laughing and chuckling and patting each other on the back.
  
  Lily thought to herself, confused. 'Is... is this a male thing?'
  
  She slid her weapon back into its holster and watched the three men escort each other to one of the only taverns in Canterbury Commons, they all looking very friendly now. She had already overheard that Gary was spending the night at the same place, as it offered rooms to let in addition to liquor in the model of an inn from hundreds of years ago.
  
  Sighing, she watched them enter the tavern and turned around to return to the Mechanist's Lair. She decided to change her plans to a depature at late morning, to give Gary time enough to get over the hangover he was sure to have. She knew where to find him in the morning, and that was good enough.
  
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  Cheevos
  Lily was quite happy. She had managed to acquire over seventy doped ruby rods, which she was already packaging carefully to take home with her. She even had to pull her fabricator out of the trailer to build a simple travel case for all of them, as they could be a mite fragile if she just dumped them in a bag or box. She didn't want any of them to be chipped when she got home.
  
  In exchange, Lily agreed to give the Mechanist a full course of treatment of all of her available genetic therapies. He was most interested in life extension therapy and sleep therapy, which would reduce his need for sleep by about two hours per night.
  
  Sophie thought that two hours wasn't that big of a deal, but Scott looked at her like she was crazy and explained two hours a night ended up being an additional thirty days awake a year, a full month extra that he would have to work on things that he was pulling out of the ether. He said it was especially important, as he didn't think he was especially gifted and relied on a lot of hard work to make his breakthroughs.
  
  Lily thought he was underestimating himself but agreed with his premise. She wouldn't sleep at all if she didn't have to.
  
  The number of lasers she would be able to construct was going to be incredible, though. She already had tentative plans to create dozens of AirTaser auto-turrets, of which she had only built a handful of prototypes; now, she would include lasers on them as well. Plus, she could convert most of her Termitrons into having at least one Protectron-arm. A taser on one side and a laser on the other sounded ideal.
  
  "Zhose zhat doubt my peaceable intentions will drown in zheir own blood!" she vowed aloud, her voice thick with promise and emotion as she finished packing the items.
  
  Lily forgot that Sophie was in the same room until she saw the robot girl float backwards and disappear out of the room. She was floating slowly, doing the robot equivalent of slowly backing out of the room, hoping not to be spotted.
  
  Lily blushed, actually feeling a sting of minor embarrassment. She wasn't being literal there... well, not entirely. It was an old Chinese joke that dated back to when the Communist Party still ran things, and she thought the joke might have even originated from the Soviets even further back before she was born.
  
  She paused. Who was she kidding? She was entirely serious! However, she would reassure Sophie that she was merely joking. Ha-ha-ha.
  
  She would turn her little hospital into a fortress the moment she got back. Well, more of a fortress than it already was. Right now, it was only moderately dangerous, capable of dissuading raiders at most. She did have a number of tricks and one-off hazards that might even catch either the Brotherhood or the Enclave off-guard, but probably only once. Until now, she didn't have the weight of arms available to truly dissuade strong players, and she didn't yet have the sheer number of combat robots that Scott had either, but she planned to make up for it in fixed defences.
  
  Glancing down at the case full of thin ruby rods, she nodded, 'Well, that will hold for now.'
  
  She could get a few hours of sleep before waking up in time for Sophie's breakfast in the morning. She had been optimizing the sleep program that she used to stimulate her brain and had gotten the equivalent of a whole night's rest down to approximately ninety minutes. However, when possible and when she did not have anything pressing, she preferred to sleep the entire two and a half to three hours, as it resulted in less psychedelic and trippy dreams and increased the rate at which her old memories were digitized.
  
  Lily found her old room, which Sophie had turned into a guest room, and laid down on her bed before triggering the sleep inducer.
  
  The breakfast the following day was pretty good, as was usual, and it was clear that Sophie had all of the optional culinary programmings a Miss Nanny could have, even if some of the ingredients had changed over time.
  
  She had worked on some of her projects until a little after nine o'clock,
  
  "Okay, I will go get Monsieur Gary; if you could load all of zhe zhings we are bringing and meet us with zhe truck near the Diner, we will meet you zhere," began Lily. She had given operator permission for all of her Termitrons to Sophie so that she could control them. She, of course, retained the sole superuser account on all of her robots.
  
  However, Alice's user credentials would all be elevated to superuser either in the event of her death or in the event of her disappearance for longer than two months. It was odd making a plan that considered the possibility of her own death. For over two hundred years, she was practically unkillable... or at least, she would not stay dead if killed. In fact, most of her wealth back then went into her resurrection and apotheosis plans. To be back at the beginning of her build-up was still a surreal feeling, even months after she realized it had occurred.
  
  Also, some of her opinions on her life had changed. Before, she would not have particularly cared if "she" died, so long as a relatively recent back-up of her ego survived. Now, while she would certainly work to produce resurrection options, she was focusing her efforts on ensuring she never died in the first place.
  
  Scott nodded, "Yes. We should be there in front of the diner in approximately forty-six minutes from now." Lily started an internal timer because she had to know if he was just bullshitting her with that approximate time that was so precise.
  
  Lily nodded, grabbed her tri-beam rifle as well as her spare laser rifle and started jogging to Canterbury Commons. Despite the fact that her skeleton was over two hundred times stronger than it used to be, it was only half the original's weight.
  
  Of course, that only accounted for a loss of about three kilos of weight, given the fact that she only weighed a little over fifty kilos, to begin with, but to her subjective senses, it felt that she could run and jog a lot longer and jump higher since she had finished replacing her skeleton.
  
  It only took her ten minutes or so to jog to the settlement, and she headed directly to the tavern slash inn that Gary was staying at. She walked in, expecting to have to roust the man out of bed, but he was seated at a table, picking at the remains of his breakfast.
  
  "Ah, Doctor. I wasn't sure if I was going to see you today or tomorrow. Is today the day, then?" Gary asked jovially. Lily peered at him. He did have a bit of a black eye. She asked him, amusedly, "Did you run into zhe door? Do I need to call zhe constables about your 'usband?" She then looked around, obviously, as if trying to find the man responsible for the domestic violence.
  
  Gary chuckled and smiled, "Oh, don't worry. I just had a disagreement with somebody, but it all worked out in the end. We're friends now, even."
  
  Lily nodded slowly, "Fair enough." She glanced at her timer that was still running in the corner of her vision. "We have about zhirty minutes before we need to be at zhe Dot's diner in zhe centre of town."
  
  Gary glanced down at his meal and nodded, "Lemme finish this and check out, and we can mosey on over there." Lily was glad to see that Gary didn't need any reminders that leaving behind a single calorie was a large taboo in this society, as he cleaned his plate rapidly.
  
  He grabbed his carbine and headed upstairs, soon returning with a full pack of all of his belongings. She noticed he had sold a few of the rifles but not all of them. He spoke briefly with the lady at the front desk, who also apparently was his waitress and exchanged some caps with her. Lily was surprised that she didn't demand he pay everything in advance. Perhaps Gary was just very charming?
  
  He walked back over to her and nodded. Then, he took a moment to look her up and down. "Those ballistic plates look preem. Did you make them yourself?"
  
  Lily blinked and considered how he had made that connection. In her mind, a 3-D model of her body appeared, slowly rotating, wearing all the same clothes she was wearing now.
  
  ' Ah,' she thought to herself as she realized the anomaly. He noticed they looked brand new, which might have been explained away but not that they were exactly the same dark grey colour as her armoured bodysuit. The bodysuit was also so form-fitting that it looked almost painted on, so it had to be bespoke for her; ergo, she made or had made the entire outfit.
  
  She nodded, pleased again at dealing with someone who could make and follow simple logical deductions, "Ah, yes, I did. Zhey are a product I might be selling in zhe future, or at least providing to my employees, at zhe least."
  
  Gary nodded and followed her out the door. She handed him the spare laser rifle and said, "Most likely zhreat profile indicates high likelihood of zhe swarming attacks from giant ants. I'm not sure 'ow much ammunition you dragged out of Vault 108, but it is a lot easier to recharge energy cells than to manufacture new cartridges. You can use this for today."
  
  Gary spent a few moments familiarizing himself with the weapon, and finally asked, "This isn't a model I'm familiar with. Can you give me a quick briefing just to make sure I know how to run it and clear any obvious malfunctions?"
  
  Lily smiled. She didn't expect him to ask that since the controls were quite simple and obvious. But it was the smart thing to do, so she was pleased. She gave him a quick run-down on all the controls and the malfunction drills, which mostly consisted of checking energy-cell, reseating energy-cell, and hoping that fixed the problem. It didn't have any moving parts, after all.
  
  He took careful aim and fired a test shot at a tin can that was twenty metres away, knocking it off the fencepost it was resting on. He nodded, satisfied. "I'll have to leave my guns in your truck, then." He paused, then asked, "... did you build this rifle yourself, also?"
  
  Lily considered whether or not she wanted to answer that question. Finally, she nodded slightly, "Not all of it. Zhe most complicated part is a specially doped rod of synthetic ruby or sapphire, which I can not replicate as of yet. I built everything else, zhough."
  
  Gary smiled and continued walking towards the centre of town, "I've always wanted to know how these red-dot sights work. Could you explain it so that a dumb sailor could understand?"
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "'ave you ever seen one-way mirrors, like in cop and robber TV shows? Where zhey interrogate someone, and the bad-guy can only see a mirror, but zhe cops behind it it is glass, and zhey can see into zhe interrogation room?"
  
  Gary grinned and nodded rapidly, "Yeah! Like Dick Magnum!" Lily tried to avoid smirking; surely that couldn't have been the name of anything but a porno film?
  
  Still, she continued, "Well, zhey work like zhat. What you're peering zhrough in the sight is a one-way mirror. And you're looking at the mirror side as if you were zhe criminal, yes?"
  
  He looked confused but nodded, so she finished her explanation, "Except, zhis mirror only reflects a very small amount of light spectrum, specifically about 670 nanometres, which corresponds to zhe bright red colour of zhe red dot. Zhere is a very small light-emitting diode in the bottom of the sight that shines a small dot up at zhe curved mirror that is reflected back to you. Since it is only zhis tiny fraction of light zhat is reflected, it appears to be clear glass from your perspective."
  
  He was quiet for a time before saying, "Ohhhh. I get it. Funny, I thought it would involve lasers or something, but it is just a funny mirror. How do you treat a piece of glass so that only a certain part of the light spectrum is reflected?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Zhat is a much more complicated question, so I will just say you do eet carefully. But you basically have to vacuum deposit a very small amount of a substance, usually a metal, on zhe optical surface, zhe same as if you were making a regular mirror. You repeat zhis multiple times, tuning to zhe particular colour-band you want to be reflected based on zhe individual and combined characteristics of zhe layers you add."
  
  She didn't mention that the only way she knew the particular optical coatings was she scanned a red dot sight with her scanner. The vacuum deposition box she had constructed when she was trying to create lasers from scratch, hoping that playing with the output optics a little would be enough to get a working weapon. They weren't, but she did end up using it both to create red dot sights and some test lenses for microscopes.
  
  Oh, and she made the Apprentice a set of sunglasses, too, that blocked out all UV light. She wasn't sure the girl would be down with replacing her eyes with cybernetic replacements, so the girl needed to take better care of her vision than Lily did.
  
  "Ah, zhere is something I need to talk to you about regarding my friend, as I would not want you to accidentally offend 'im or 'is girlfriend," Lily said, as they waited next to the diner.
  
  Gary turned to her, and Lily carefully explained the complexities of The Mechanist to him. Surprisingly, Gary did not seem to care, and even shrugged and said, "After my wife left me, I can definitely see the appeal of a robot girlfriend."
  
  Lily found that a little amusing but had to carefully correct him that Sophie was a fully sapient individual, the same as any human. That he had a bit more trouble accepting but agreed to be polite and agreed that he had no idea what would happen or how a robot would grow after two hundred years of continuous operation.
  
  Her truck pulled up to a stop next to the diner. Lily glanced at the chronometer still running at forty-six minutes and twenty seconds. She was tempted to check the surveillance drone to see if he had been slowing down to make the ETA he gave or if he just was that precise, but she decided she didn't want to know.
  
  Her truck looked like a proper eighteen-wheeler now, as the trailer they stole was an enclosed box-type trailer. Those weren't too popular in the apocalypse, as it was common to have guards or even passengers ride in the flat-top trailers that were most common. A guard wouldn't be able to protect you that well if they were inside a steel or aluminium box. Still, for now, it would be fine. She did have a Gatling laser installed on the roof, after all.
  
  They both hoped up into the cab, Gary had to go into the back sleeping area and sat next to Sophie. Lily introduced everyone, and Gary was polite and shook Sophie's manipulator, saying, "It's nice to meet you, ma'am."
  
  Lily suspected that Scott only had a few categories of people in his brain, and definitely, those who treated Sophie well and those who didn't were two of the major ones.
  
  Lily, herself, had a sliding numerical scale between one and ten, where one indicated someone she would protect at all costs, even if it meant her own death, and tens were people she would absolutely kill and melt their cortical stack if she had the opportunity to do so, although she had never actually had to Really Kill anyone until she came to the Fallout universe.
  
  She did not, presently, have any ones in her database, but the Apprentice was a low two and the lowest person in this universe. Scott and Sophie were low-threes, while the average stranger she met was usually in between a six and a seven, depending on her first impressions of them.
  
  Grace was mid to high three; her team were fours along with Mr Tombs, while Miller and Gary were both presently low fives. Gary was close to becoming a four, primarily due to the fact that since she brought him into the world again, she felt a little responsible for him, as well as his continued behaviour reinforcing trust and that he wasn't working against her interests.
  
  While she liked Miller, she doubted he would ever be much lower than he was now due to his priority of protecting a group of people that Lily was not a part of. She could see continued cooperation being in both of their best interests, but she could also see him selling her out if he absolutely had to in order to protect those he had sworn to defend.
  
  She could and did respect that, but she wouldn't let him lead her down the garden path, either.
  
  Before she came to this world, she had numerous and complicated flow charts that she handed to her social assistants, which specified the ideal response to a given person based on her rating. Death or at least serious bodily injury or sleeve destruction were common end-points on her flow charts when dealing with nines and tens, but they could also happen to seven and eights given the right circumstances.
  
  Now, however, she was doing a lot more contemporaneous speaking and deciding her reactions on the fly, even if the reactions weren't always the best, which would have caused her incredible distress before.
  
  Everyone got out when Scott brought the truck to a stop, and he went to the rear and opened up the trailer to let out both her robots and the ones he brought with him. In addition to Sophie, he brought Matilda, the Mister Gutsy and six Protectrons, whom Sophie was now controlling effortlessly.
  
  Inside the back of the Truck were a single robot charging station and her small generator and fabricator. That was a good idea. In fact, if she hadn't already sat in one of Scott's robot charging stations last night, she might have done so now as continual usage of her brain-computer had dropped its charge to below fifty per cent, but she didn't want to give Gary the correct idea about her, just yet.
  
  "Well, well well... if it ain't the staff puke!" exclaimed the Mister Gutsy. He floated around to take a look at Gary, "Are you a soldier, boy?!"
  
  Gary smirked, "Fuck no, I ain't! You're looking at Chief Petty Officer Gary Kaminsky, NIN 917-2781-5551, you rusty bucket of bolts." He paused and then said, "Retired, of course."
  
  The Mister Gutsy stiffened his plasma gun and laser-manipulators, going to attention, "Sorry, chief! Say... when's the next Army-Navy game, so I can see you swabbies beaten like a drum?"
  
  Gary chuckled, "When you find out, you tell me. I'd definitely show up to watch in person this year."
  
  Matilda then circled him also and purred out, "Well, well, well... what do we have here?" Lily kicked her, which got her to chuckle. Matilda was a lot more sapient than the Mister Gutsy was, but she liked sandbagging and pretending she was just a regular bot a lot of the time. Lily didn't know why, though.
  
  That reminded Lily, "Oh, Matilda. I 'ave a design for zhe replacement head, it won't be zhe normal laser cannon you're used to, but at least you'll fire lasers out of your eyes again, yeah?"
  
  She looked interested, "I've definitely missed that. But these sword-arms are really nice, too."
  
  "Alright. We have two main objectives with this trip. The first is to acquire a number of machine tools, these should be near the factory assembly line as some of the parts were machined individually. The second objective is to acquire as many operable or repairable fission motors as we can cart away," began the Mechanist after everyone settled down.
  
  He was just rehashing what everyone already knew, which was a good idea on an op like this, so she and Gary both nodded. Lily also didn't mind letting the Mechanist take command of the operation since he had a lot more experience looting dangerous places than she did. Including at least one trip to this very site.
  
  He continued, "Objective two causes the tactics to change, as the last time I saw a bunch of General Atomics crates was very near the ant queen. So we will have to take her out, which means we will have to take ALL the ants out. So instead of a simple looting operation, this is a sweep and clear after which we can loot in peace. Questions?"
  
  Gary raised his hand, "I've seen one of the worker ants, but Doctor St. Claire implied that was the weakest of the bunch. What other types are there, and how will we kill the queen if it is as big as a truck?"
  
  Scott briefly explained each type of ant, from the worker to the warrior to the elite guard near the queen. "As for the Queen, it isn't very mobile, so no doubt it has some sort of ranged attack like spitting acid of some such thing. A massed laser attack would probably work, but we have two additional weapons."
  
  One of Lily's Termitrons jumped out of the truck, carrying the large minigun she had stolen from that lady on the bridge, "This robot will be our heavy weapons specialist. We have about five hundred rounds of armour-piercing, which should work. The second weapon is the integrated electrical attack Lily built into her robots. At high-intensity discharge, continual attacks will likely electrocute even the queen. Questions?"
  
  Gary shook his head, "None."
  
  "Alright, we'll breach this end and work systematically, eliminating all arthropods in sight," the Mechanist said, smiling. "Our first strategy will involve setting a kill box at the entrance; if we can kill one ant there, it will release distress pheromones which should cause a swarm into our prepared ambush. I suspect we can eliminate more than half of the total number of ants this way."
  
  Lily allowed Sophie to control her robots, as the robot girl seemed better at it than she did; she certainly had better multi-tasking ability than Lily herself did.
  
  Lily felt it was a little weird to only have herself and her rifle to be responsible for again.
  
  She grinned as they, as a group, walked into the first large room of the factory; it was time to get an ant-genocide achievement.
  
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  Lobster brunch
  There were a couple of small worker ants that stupidly tried to attack the group the moment they walked inside, but Matilda just kept kicking them out of the way gently until everyone got set up.
  
  Lily handed Gary a couple more energy cells for his rifle, which he accepted gratefully. Once everyone was set up in a rough semi-circle, Lily glanced at Scott, who nodded at her. Although he was in command, he had already mentioned that Matilda seemed to like Lily better than him, so she shrugged and yelled, "Matilda! Go ahead!"
  
  If the Assaultron could grin, she would have. Instead, she seemed to vibrate with excitement as two short swords popped out of her hands. She spun, decapitating each ant in a showy flourish. Gary gaped, "Woah. That's not standard equipment for Marine Assaultrons, that's for sure."
  
  "Okay, they will start swarming soon. Matilda will melee with them, so please try to avoid shooting her in the back if you can," the Mechanist said, readying his custom laser pistol.
  
  All six Protectrons spoke out, "Roger, Roger!" which actually did nothing to make Lily, or Matilda for that matter, feel better about their accuracy.
  
  The skittering sound of dozens, maybe hundreds of pissed-off ants actually made Lily a little afraid, 'Thank ThorAllahJesus that I never came here before leaving for Megaton.'
  
  She remembered the Corvega factory as a pretty easy dungeon area in Fallout 3, but there were at least a hundred times the number of ants, judging from what she heard, to say nothing about their attack patterns. The enemy AI in Fallout 3 wasn't the best, and they certainly didn't actually code in the normal ant behaviour where a dead ant will agitate the hive-like what was happening now.
  
  She saw a flicker in her peripheral vision, twisted and fired, taking the head off a worker ant that was trying to run up on them from the side. She didn't have time to feel pleased that she got the first one as everyone started opening up on a swarm of dozens and dozens of ants charging at their position from deeper into the factory. It looked like the battle of Geonosis with all the red and blue beams lashing out at the ants, except with less crazy antics from Jedi.
  
  Matilda charged straight at the horde and leapt into the air almost ten metres, close to the high ceiling of the garage, twirling in a forward flip for three full revolutions before falling down amongst the swarm with a crash superhero-style landing.
  
  Okay, maybe she spoke too soon because that was a very Jedi or, at the very minimum, anime character entrance to the fight for Matilda. Lily wondered if lightsabers were at all possible. She didn't think so, but she definitely could make vibroblades! Maybe electrified vibroblades!
  
  Well, she didn't really have to worry about hitting Matilda because she doubted the lasers would penetrate the mass of ants to deal her damage. The Murder Maid would only close with masses of worker ants and would dodge and jump around the few warrior ants that were rushing us. Lily thought that Matilda's hardened steel exterior would prove too much for the warrior ant's mandibles, but she thought they probably could chew right through her joints if given the opportunity.
  
  Well, Matilda was the best expert on wading through tons of enemies, so she wouldn't worry about her. Besides, Assaultron's processors were amongst the best protected of any combat bot, as their doctrine of deployment often called for near-suicidal attack patterns and then simply being repaired after being disabled once they achieved victory. Matilda certainly took that strategy to heart.
  
  Lily's tri-beam could one-shot even the warrior ants if she hit them in the right place, so she started to focus on those more significant threats, taking aimed, careful shots. Sophie was blasting every ant she saw with her rapid-firing laser, and Scott was staying very near her, clearly protecting her, which Lily found cute.
  
  She ignored a beep in her interface, as it was a low-priority alert, and she had much more pressing things to worry about. A few ants would slip past the cavalcade of fire, and Lily would often kick them right in the ocelli before blasting them in the thorax or head.
  
  However, the fourth time she attempted to do that, a worker ant managed to grab her leg in its mandibles and bite down. Her bodysuit was designed to be armoured against primarily ballistic threats, so it didn't protect too much from knives, swords or the mandibles of a damn ant, so she grunted in pain as the bite went through her skin and muscle, delivering a painful dose of formic acid into her tissues.
  
  She quickly shot it in its head, kicked off its now weakly spasming mandibles and hopped backwards. She subvocalized a quick command, ' Command, Set Pain level to 10%.' Feeling the sudden relief from the pain was quite nice, so she kept firing at a number of ant warriors, very glad that the swarming had started to slow down after a long minute and a half of murdering ants.
  
  A quick glance at her calf revealed she did not have to worry; both her healing systems should handle the minor injury rather quickly. Her nanites were better at neutralizing the acid, sometimes with their own bodies, and the PHOENIX system was already slowly healing the damage to her skin and muscles.
  
  Gary hollered, in between shooting a worker ant with a quick three-beam burst, "Hey, you okay?"
  
  Lily chuckled, although Gary probably couldn't hear it over all the crack-crack-crack of the laser discharges. She yelled back, "Yeah, I'm fine-" she was going to say more, but an internal alert dinged in her head again. Except for this time, it was a ten-hertz sine-wave that was almost impossible to ignore and reserved for her truly important alerts.
  
  She kept fighting but mostly on autopilot as she triggered the alert to display a low-opacity overhead display from her surveillance drone, with a segment highlighted with a bright orange box that was moving slowly towards the factory. The shitty analogue camera on the drone couldn't be zoomed, nor was digital post-processing enhancement that useful, but she didn't need an entirely clear image to identify three Super Mutants being trailed by three Centaurs, 'Fuck!'
  
  "Three Super Mutants, unknown armament and three Centaurs fifty metres to zhe northeast approaching our position," Lily called out.
  
  The Mechanist swore, which was quite unlike him and said, "They must have been nearby and heard the laser discharges. It is a clear, cold morning. Sound travels a long way. Lily, take Gary, the Mister Gutsy and your robots and try to either ambush them or at least keep them occupied until we can finish the swarm in here. If we turn our backs on these ants, we'll be just as dead."
  
  While laser discharges were quieter than a rifle shot, they were still quite loud, so Lily agreed with his assessment. They must have been still asleep or at least still holed up from last night. Otherwise, her expert system would have tagged them as soon as they started moving if they were already within a kilometre of her truck.
  
  Gary glanced at her and nodded. Lily flexed her mental spinnerets, reactivating her nascent web to once again control her Termitrons, especially the one who was lugging the minigun. That one hadn't been involved in the fight at all; in fact, none of her Termitrons were making that big of a difference. Each high-output taser shot invariably killed a worker ant in one hit, but it took almost two seconds to recharge capacitors after one discharge, so they were of strictly limited utility in a fight against hundreds of swarming insects compared to the rapid-firing Protectrons.
  
  The Mister Gutsy chuckled, "Finally! Some real enemies!" He, too, had been holding back. His main weapon was a plasma caster, but the ammunition was a bit too dear to just use plasma bolts willy-nilly on mere ants, so he had been blasting them with his secondary laser weapon, which was kind of weak sauce.
  
  Gary, the Mister Gutsy and Lily all walked outside, trailing her seven Termitrons, who walked past them, using their bodies to shield the ones who weren't made out of a steel alloy with a very high titanium and tungsten content. Gary turned to her, "Uh... you mentioned Super Mutants briefly. What are they, again? Besides giant?"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Zhat's pretty much it. Giant, green skin, kind of stupid, yet always seem to have energy weapons zhat work. Basically, zhey're orcs." The Super-Mutants were about thirty metres away and seemed to be sneaking up, or at least, so they thought. "Zhey were created by a secret government research program conducted by West-Tek on the west coast, but we can talk about zhat later if you want."
  
  Lily pinged the Gatling laser in her truck and verified it was ready, also. But she didn't traverse the gun, as Super Mutants might be quite stupid, but everything she had discovered about them indicated they had uncanny tactical instincts, and they would immediately attack her truck if they saw that. She'd have to give them something else to shoot at first.
  
  She fished out a few frag grenades from her bag and offered two to Gary, who grinned and swiped them out of her hand like a kid who was offered his favourite candy.
  
  Lily was still hidden behind the trailer of her truck, which she didn't particularly mind being shot up. However, it would be a little problematic if her generator inside was destroyed. The released plasma inside the trailer compartment would likely damage the other equipment, too.
  
  Lily whispered to Gary, "Zhey're sneaking up on us, zhey zhink to surprise us. Zhey're about twenty-five metres away, behind zhat wrecked Corvega. How's your zhrowing arm?"
  
  He just grinned and nodded. She turned to the Mister Gutsy, whispering again, "Attack, as soon as zhe grenades explode. Zhe other robots will follow your lead." For once, he didn't say anything, but he bobbed his levitation in a nod, at least aware of the tactical advantage of surprise.
  
  She put all but one of the grenades back into her bag and carefully pulled the pin on the one in her hand, mirrored by Gary doing the same. Carefully holding the grenade and the spoon, she stood up and stepped out in front of the empty parking lot area that would serve as their battlefield. Her tactical assistant program indicated that she should hold the armed grenade for one point two seconds to ensure an airburst over the Super Mutant's heads, but she hadn't practised enough with grenades to feel comfortable with that, so she just lobbed it overhand immediately, Gary throwing it more or less at the same time.
  
  They both ducked back behind the trailer. Then, on her surveillance drone, which Lily had already ordered descended to about fifty metres to give a better image, she saw something that flabbergasted her. Gary's grenade landed just a tad long, but still a good throw. A Super Mutant turned to look at it. However, her grenade flew true - except for the fact that one of the Centaurs snapped it out of the air like it was a chihuahua grabbing a Pup-Peroni, 'What the fuck?'
  
  The two grenades went off at the same time. The Centaur that ate her grenade just sort of exploded, covering the other two Centaurs and one of the Super Mutants with viscera. Gary's grenade exploded and injured the greenskin that had turned around but only pissed off the other two.
  
  The Mister Gutsy immediately began firing plasma packets at the vehicle the mutants were hiding behind, followed by blue lightning beams from the Termitrons.
  
  The two uninjured Super Mutants yelled a battle cry to psych themselves up and leapt from cover, and just started running at them and their robots. Both Gary and Lily stepped out of concealment behind the trailer. Lily had her tri-beam shouldered, but Gary was tossing another grenade in the path of the charging mutants.
  
  He sort of flubbed the second throw, as the explosion barely tagged one of the mutants with some shrapnel and didn't appreciably slow them down. However, the massed lightning beams and two plasma bolts from Mister Gutsy put the mutant on the ground, although it wasn't dead and was slowly rising to its feet again. She stared at it in wonder, 'Amazing.'
  
  As Gary shouldered his laser rifle and the others shifted targets to the second mutant, who started firing green plasma bolts from the hip while running from a plasma rifle, she raised her tri-beam rifle to put a carefully aimed coup-de-grace shot in the slowly rising Super Mutant, but before she could reach her aim-point, a tactical alert caused her to immediately push off the ground in a backwards slide over gravel, accelerating rearwards in a dodge.
  
  A green plasma bolt sailed through the space her head was occupying just a moment ago, about a foot away from where her face was presently. The thermal bloom was so strong that she had to close her eyes, and she still got what amounted to a sunburn or first-degree burn on her face just from the near hit.
  
  Fuck! The whole point of this exercise was to give the mutants her robots to aim at; why were they targeting her? A plasma bolt to the face was one of the few things that would probably kill her for sure in this world, as the plasma could easily navigate around the 90-degree turns in her ocular cavity and into her brain, melting it beyond all saving. Perhaps she should return to wearing visored helmets but with extreme heat-resistant treatments.
  
  She immediately triggered both the truck-mounted Gatling laser as well as the heavy-weapon Termitron, not even spending the half second to designate a target, just letting her expert system designate the most dangerous target. It selected, unsurprisingly, the mutant that proved very accurate with its plasma rifle. Before targeting her, it had already disabled one of her Termitrons by melting one of its knees, locking that leg in place, and causing the robot to fall over.
  
  A hail of lasers, electro-beams, armour-piercing bullets and plasma all hit the mutant almost simultaneously, and there was no surviving that. It was chewed up, the Gatling laser and minigun doing the most damage and punching numerous holes straight through its torso until it fell over sideways, dead as a doornail.
  
  The first mutant had regained his feet and managed to get two shots off before meeting a similar fate, and she heard Gary yell, pissed off, "He fucking shot me in the foot!" And the second shot, using a tri-beam like her, hit the Mister Gutsy in the frame and must have scored a critical hit because the floating robot shut down and fell to the asphalt like a sack of potatoes.
  
  She drilled the mutie in the head with three blue laser beams at the same time he was perforated by both of the Gatling weapons. She was tempted to tell the minigun-wielding Termitron to hold back, but these fucks seemed to be ridiculously accurate and dangerous.
  
  She took careful steps towards the last mutant, who was walking from the wrecked car with the two Centaurs. She was walking behind one of her Termitrons, using its body to shield herself from the plasma fire this third mutant was firing sporadically, ' Two plasma rifles?! Really?!'
  
  However, Gary's grenade must have damaged the mutant's eyes because it was inaccurate with its fire. A glob of acid from one of the two living Centaurs splashed against the Termitron's chassis she was walking behind, and she shifted targets to them as the last mutant was riddled with lasers and AP rounds.
  
  Gary had shifted to the Centaurs, too, after dodging a slow-moving globule of super-powered digestive acid. She triggered the minigun Termitron to stand down, but both Gary and she had put down their respective horrors before even the Gatling laser turret shifted, although it still put about a dozen laser blasts into each Centaur on the ground as insurance.
  
  Both she and Gary kept their weapons raised in a ready position, scanning for new threats while she sent a message to Sophie.
  
  [Lilium: All threats down, out here. They were well armed, with two plasma rifles and a tri-beam. The Mister Gutsy took a beam to something important and is down; hopefully, he is repairable. Gary took a beam to his foot. Status? ]
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh, no! I hope Mister Gutsy is okay. Everything is fine in here; only a handful of ants are coming at us now. We must have killed over three hundred ants since we started.Scott asks you to check on Gary and Mister Gutsy's injuries. We don't need immediate assistance here. ]
  
  Lily nodded and shouldered her rifle, turning to Gary. "You got shot in zhe foot, yes? Really? Let me take zhe look. I zhink we're fine. Zhey're moping up zhe few ants inside and don't need our immediate assistance."
  
  He let out his breath in a sigh and shouldered his rifle as well before nodding. "Uh, that seemed ridiculously dangerous, Doc. They seemed smart enough to target us, rather than the robots, even though the robots presented the largest threat." Lily nodded, a bit upset with her own performance as well. She felt that her tactics were sound, given what she knew, but they just didn't work out as well as she thought they would have. She definitely shouldn't have held back with the heavy weapons, though.
  
  "Well, zhey were quite well-armed. Usually, your average Super-Mutant just has a hunting rifle or something. Two plasma rifles and zhe tri-beam is a sign of an elite team for sure," Lily said quietly. She motioned for him to sit down and took a knee, looking at his left foot, which was still bleeding. She carefully pulled his boot off, although there was significant damage to the item of clothing.
  
  She blinked, "Well... it shot zhe big toe off," she told him bluntly. His injuries weren't serious, however. Kind of lucky, actually. She reached into her bag and pulled out her pneumatic injector, sliding the barrel to general healing nanites and injected him twice, once in the foot and once near the neck for good measure.
  
  He groaned, "Fuck! I barely had this toe for a week! Is it possible to like... grow me another toe or something, Doc?"
  
  Lily snickered, "Yes, possibly. However, zhe cloning machine I took isn't set up properly for zherapeutic cloning, so you may be without zhe toe for a couple of weeks while I reassemble it and make sure I can clone just one body part at a time if I want to."
  
  She pulled out some bandages and saline, carefully debriding the wound before wrapping it in a bandage, "It should be okay to put zhe boot back on, but perhaps we should make you zhe steel-toed shoe in future, yes?"
  
  He groaned as he put his boot back on and then looked at Lily like she was special, "Yes, fucking, yes!" Lily chuckled and stood up, going over to the Mister Gutsy. She reached into her bag and pulled out her scanner, but the screen wouldn't turn on.
  
  She blinked and stared at it, noticing some significant damage to the screen that looked to be... acid? She sat her bag down and looked at the front, and sure enough, the front of the bag had been eaten through. There must have been a splash from when the Termitron took that acid attack earlier.
  
  She groaned and had the urge to scream out an obscenity but held it in as she was a classy lady. She inspected the scanner more in-depth. The damage didn't look... catastrophic. She converted it into laptop mode, and some of the LEDs were working as intended, which was a good sign.
  
  She attempted to use her brain interface to pull up the scanner's remote desktop, and a window popped up in her vision of the normal desktop mode of the computer. She sighed in relief, converted it back to tablet mode and attempted to take a scan of the Mister Gutsy. That worked too.
  
  So, it wasn't completely destroyed. The screen and digitizer were completely destroyed, though. She used some bandages to wipe away the damaged areas, trying to pull away any remnant acid, but it appeared there wasn't any left. Just a small amount had hit the device, but the diamond screen might be incredibly shatter-resistant, but it wasn't acid-resistant at all.
  
  She peered at the bottom of the damaged screen and sighed. It appeared like the charge port was damaged too. She had been considering just operating the device as it was for the foreseeable future, but if she couldn't charge it anymore, she had no choice but to attempt to disassemble it and repair it in the near future.
  
  What a disaster these damn mutants were. She would have to sit down with Gary and have a full after-action debriefing before he forgot anything, as there were too many close calls and damage. She had to at least learn something from her mistakes.
  
  She transferred the scan to her computer and pulled up the results, humming. She focused on the area where Mister Handies kept their processor and memory, finding neither damaged. That was good. It meant that the Mister Gutsy could probably be repaired.
  
  She spent a little while longer identifying the damage that occurred before standing up and walking over to her Termitron that had been tipped over, and sent Sophie another message.
  
  [Lilium: Gary is fine. Mister Gutsy is repairable. No damage to his quantum processor or memory storage. He did take a hit to his mainboard, though. It shorted out several capacitors, which caused his shutdown. I can fabricate replacement capacitors and effect repairs here in the field in twenty minutes. ]
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh, that's good news! We're no longer being swarmed in here. Scott recommends we pick a few ants, cook them and have an early lunch while effecting repairs. ]
  
  Lily blinked. She had not once, ever, considered eating any of the giant ants.
  
  [Lilium: Uh. Does giant ant taste good? Because... if not I have some other food... ]
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh, yes! Scott loves them! He says they taste a lot like lobster, if that helps you at all. We brought a bunch of butter just for this very reason! I wish I could taste them myself! ]
  
  Lily considered that. They were both arthropods, so it wasn't entirely weird that their meat would taste similar, she supposed. But she just never would have thought to try unless she was a lot hungrier than she had been since arriving in this universe.
  
  Her Termitron wasn't really damaged very much. It looked like the knee cap melted just enough to cause the leg to lock up. None of the motivators or graphene cables were damaged.
  
  She hummed. She could take the knee cap off and fabricate a temporary replacement out of diamond, for now. She hoped that their escapades against heavily armed energy-weapon-wielding enemies had come to a close on this adventure.
  
  "Hey, Gary... do you like zhe lobster?" she called out to him.
  
  He grinned, "I love lobster! Why? But it's not like any Black Beard's are still open, you know!" She recognized that reference from some advertisements she had seen. Black Beard's was this universe's equivalent of the Red Lobster chain restaurant she remembered from her past life.
  
  Gary was exactly the kind of man who thought Red Lobster was the pinnacle of seafood and probably would have gone to some fine Italian dining at the Olive Garden. She found this very amusing, and rather than thinking less of him for this, she thought it was kind of fitting.
  
  "Apparently, zhe giant ant meat tastes a lot like zhe lobster, no? Scott even brought a big thing of butter to melt on zhem. We're going to stand down for an early lunch while I zhe repairs to these robots. I also want to sit down with you and have zhe proper after-action report, as I already know I made a number of mistakes..." Lily told him, while mentally connecting to the fabricator inside the trailer and queuing up a half dozen small supercapacitors and a simple kneecap shield. She only had about fifty kilos left of carbon feedstock, so it was fortunate she did not have to make any serious repairs.
  
  Plus, if the ant meat was so good, she was considering making repairs to one of the refrigerators they'd invariably find in one of the break rooms or kitchens to take away some of the largess for later. That would probably necessitate a number of kilos for repairs and to make a machine to extract CO2 from the air to act as a refrigerant gas.
  
  He looked excited, "You know, I was wondering if that was going to be the case when I shot one outside Vault 108. I thought they'd taste more like crab, but lobster is even better. And yeah, maybe a few learning opportunities in this fight, but don't worry too much. Everyone survived; it sounds like even that Army bot survived, which is good. Those green fucks were about as tough as Power Armoured marines, just a lot stupider - and let me tell you, that's saying something."
  
  He had already begun policing up the weapons and ammo from the dead mutants and offered, "Plus, now we have these two plasma rifles. And I can't think any kind of biological entity, no matter how large, will do too well when shot by a number of plasma bolts. I ain't gonna jinx us, but I think we're in a better position now to take on that Queen ant."
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side and nodded. She wasn't going to jinx them, either, so she intentionally did not consider this aspect for now.
  
  She glanced down at her disabled Termitron. Now, how to get that kneecap off? First, she'd try to saw it off with her diamondoid stiletto, and if that didn't work, she'd have to look around the factory for a crowbar or an acetylene torch.
  
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  Her Royal Majesty
  Lily hadn't noticed, but Scott brought two small grills that he had constructed out of fifty-gallon steel drums and a lot of charcoal. He was dragging them out of the trailer when she went inside to pick up the small capacitors she would replace in the Mister Gutsy.
  
  Since she was expecting to mainly be fighting, she had left her little bag of tools in the truck's cab. It would have been the intelligent thing to do to leave her precious, irreplaceable diagnostic scanner in the truck's cab as well, but she had gotten used to having it immediately at hand that she hadn't considered that despite it being a ruggedized military model it wasn't, by any means, indestructible.
  
  Oh well, there was nothing much she could do about that now. She didn't even have the tech base yet to replace the screen, but she had been working in that direction for some time. She had been having the most success in creating displays by creating something akin to e-ink displays she remembered from Kindles and other e-book readers from her past life.
  
  The technology was pretty simple, featuring negatively charged black pigments and positively charged white pigments suspended in a tiny transparent oil sphere, which amounted to a single pixel. By adjusting the voltage to these pixels, you could create a black, white, or grey pixel similar to the way etch-a-sketch toys worked.
  
  Now, she would have to look into more LED or LCD-type displays, which were unknown in the Fallout universe, and seemed to entirely use cathode-ray tubes.
  
  Well, perhaps she could fully remove the display from her tablet and then scan the display to give her some ideas. The concept of LED displays was reasonably straightforward, but she couldn't make LED pixels that small presently. She should be able to, but her experiments had failed, so she was clearly not noticing some solution.
  
  In any case, she would have to step up research in that direction. She doubted she could replicate the screen that had a greater resolution than the human eye could see, at least at first, but perhaps she would be able to replace the screen on her scanner with something useful in six months or so. She could repair the charging port immediately, as the damage seemed minor.
  
  That would have to be sufficient for now. Now that she had a brain interface, it wasn't as though she needed to use the display screen. The only reason it was included at all was the device was a military model designed to be used in cases of emission control where no radiation was permitted.
  
  "I'm going to assume you know 'ow to cook zhese ants because I 'ave no idea at all," Lily told Scott as she came back around to the trailer after grabbing her toolkit from the front. She had grown up in Shanghai, New Mexico and Texas. While Shanghai was a bit famous for its seafood, including lobster, she had never seen it prepared. As for Texas and New Mexico, neither location was known for do-it-yourself lobster preparation.
  
  Scott grinned, "Oh, absolutely! It's almost a shame we killed so many; a lot of this meat is going to go to waste."
  
  "Well, I was considering zhat. If we could find a broke-down refrigerator or freezer in one of the break-rooms or kitchens, I could probably repair it, zhat way we could bring most of zhe meat back with us, if you didn't mind butchering a hundred ants," Lily offered with a smile. If these ants really were delicious, she felt that would be definitely worth the effort. She'd probably have to replace the interior walls of whatever freezer or refrigerator they found, as it was likely to be disgusting inside and not worth the time it would take to clean, but that was fine.
  
  He nodded, "That sounds like a good idea to me. We'll be on the lookout for kitchens and break rooms, then."
  
  Lily hummed in response and then walked over to the parking lot where the Mister Gutsy had fallen in battle. She glanced over at Gary, who was field-stripping and cleaning each of the plasma rifles, "You know 'ow to maintain zhose?" she asked, a little surprised.
  
  He grinned, "Well, these are the Army model. The Marine and Naval versions have a slightly shorter linear accelerator and don't have this carry handle, but honestly, that is the only difference. These babies haven't seen any TLC in a long, long time. Honestly, that's reason enough to kill those two green assholes in the first place, even if they weren't trying to murder us."
  
  She kneeled down and lifted the Mister Gutsy up, righting him so that she could more easily disassemble him. Pulling out her trusty multi-screwdriver, she made short work on the fastenings on his chassis, "Say, you know 'ow I mentioned zhe various factions zhat exist in the Wasteland?"
  
  Gary glanced over at her and said, "Yeah, sure. Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel are the main ones. Those are pretty corny names, both of them, by the way. First, one may or may not be the remains of the Federal government, and the other is some techno-feudalists or something?"
  
  Lily held out her hand carrying her screwdriver, and made a waffling motion, "Sort of, I guess. But, yeah, both of those factions still operate Vertibird VTOL aircraft. 'Ow the 'ell are zhey getting zhe fuel for zhose beasts? Any guesses? I don't remember petroleum being exactly easy to come by, and zhat was two hundred years ago."
  
  He grinned widely, "Wow! Something I have the answer to that you don't! Yeah, I probably know exactly how they're fueling those birds. Gimmie a sec, and I'll enlighten you." He quickly reassembled each of the plasma rifles and sat them back down on the tarp he had been working on, and then turned to her.
  
  "Main reason I know this is that it was a project of the Department of the Navy. As you probably already know, essentially all Naval ships bigger than a rigid-hulled inflatable dingy were all nuclear-powered. However, all the air assets were still jets. That's a problem when you basically don't have any oil left in the world," said Gary in a storyteller's tone.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side and nodded for him to continue, so he did. "Well, net-energy positive fusion changed everything. All of a sudden, there was plentiful energy for ideas that would have been considered ridiculous just years before. Did you know that in WW2, the krauts had a similar problem, that they couldn't get oil? Well, they used a lot of electricity and converted tons of coal into synfuel, a kind of synthetic kerosene, I guess."
  
  Lily hummed. She already knew the answer now. She should have already thought about that possibility but hadn't. Still, she would be a good listener and let Gary finish his story since he seemed enthused.
  
  "In any case, the Navy built a trial system involving a huge fusion reactor and equipment to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and then convert that into useful fuels. It wasn't what you'd call economical, not really, but the Navy considered it a huge success and started installing these large emplacements at every Naval Air Station and any large Naval base. It wouldn't be enough to provide a nation with enough gas, but it was supposed to be enough to provide at least this man's Navy with enough. My guess is that many of those installations are still functional. They were built underground and designed to withstand a close hundred and fifty kiloton airburst. You said the Enclave is based at Adams? Well, there is a Naval Air Station co-located at that airbase. As for the knights of the round table? Well, NAS Patuxent River isn't that far away as a Vertibird flies," he finished his tale.
  
  "Zhat is quite interesting. You say that these installations were only installed at Naval Air Stations and Naval bases?" asked Lily curiously.
  
  It was Gary's turn to hum as he considered the question; after a moment, he shook his head, "Nah, those were the main places. When I was retiring, there was also talk about the Air Force wanting the technology, but the Navy was for sure gonna make them pay for it. I'm pretty sure there is a fuel plant at a few places that are technically civilian but have a deep relationship with the Navy too. Newport News, for sure; I know they have one."
  
  "Newport News Shipbuilding? Why, zhat isn't zhat far south of here, near Norfolk, yes?" asked Lily, interested.
  
  Gary chuckled, "Why? You want your own Air Force like these other two jokers?" Lily just nodded at him, seriously. "Well, I'm not sure how realistic that is, but if you ever make an expedition to Newport News, I'd like to go along. I always liked seeing the ships fitting out." He started laughing, "Hell, bring enough of your little robots and maybe you could have your own Navy, too! Or be your own nuclear power! As Naval Station Norfolk was the Atlantic arsenal for Special Weapons, I'm sure there's a few 100KT cruise missiles around there that could use a new home."
  
  He laughed again as she turned to continue disassembling the Mister Handy. She wondered why he was laughing when all of those were such good ideas? Sometimes she just didn't understand people. Besides, she was already a nuclear-weapon-armed warlord. It made some sense to increase her stocks. However, this would be a plan for much further into the future. After this adventure was done, she expected to hole up in her hospital for a few months and then her next target was the VSS building in DC.
  
  She wanted the Power Armour that was there, but more importantly, she wanted the Chinese stealth armour that was there even more, as that suited her "playstyle" even more, and she had a number of ideas of how to increase the protection on it, as well. To say nothing about the VR technology itself, she planned to cart off the entire supercomputer cluster and VR pod too.
  
  It took longer to disassemble him than it did to repair Mister Gutsy's motherboard. He was rather fortunate the damage had been so minor, although part of that was because the Mister Gutsy featured a much more rugged and isolated electrical architecture. His quantum processor and memory modules were much more isolated from potential electrical surges and shorts; in other words, he was designed to take damage and still be repairable, which wasn't surprising for a purpose-built military bot.
  
  She had thought that the Mister Gutsy's were just Mister Handy's with guns, but it was clear General Atomics upgraded other areas of their construction as well to suit their new role.
  
  Lily took note of it, saving scans of the entire thing as she thought it might be a good idea to upgrade Sophie with similar changes to her motherboard architecture and peripheral connections. She'd talk to the Mechanist about it later.
  
  She screwed him back into the standoffs and then carefully slotted all of his peripherals back into place. She had thought there would have been a lot more dust inside his compartments, but it appears Scott kept a good maintenance schedule, even though it was clear that these robots would run for hundreds of years without much preventive maintenance.
  
  One of her robots helped her hold his exterior chassis in position while she screwed all of his fasteners back into place. She nodded to it, and it backed away and resumed its previous duties, which were guarding and exploring the first large room that they had battled in. A few ants, scouting from deeper in the factory, had been blasted in the last thirty minutes.
  
  There wasn't an easily accessible off switch on Mister Gutsy's, which wasn't surprising. But the on switch was there; it just wouldn't function except to boot up the robot in the first place. She pressed the spring-loaded button and backed away.
  
  The bootup process wasn't fast, as Lily judged things, but still, Mister Gutsy levitated back up into the air after about half a minute, "I can't believe that green shit got me!" He rotated to face her, "What was the damage?"
  
  Lily smiled at him, "Just a few caps damaged, it was zhe... how you say, lucky shot?"
  
  The Mister Gutsy digitized a sigh, "Are you sure you were in this man's Army and not the damn frogs, woman?! You're not some Quebecois terrorist trying to trick me, are you?"
  
  "I assure you, I received zhe honourable discharge from zhe US Army, and if you were at all educated beyond which end of a plasma gun to point at zhe bad guys, you would know my accent is completely incorrect to be Canadian," Lily told him with narrowed eyes.
  
  "Pffft! So you say!" the Mister Handy retorted, then floated off towards the Mechanist.
  
  Gary blinked at her, "Wait, you were in the service?" He then chuckled, "To be honest, I thought you might have been Canadian, too. Not that anyone would care these days."
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, I 'ad to get somebody to pay for zhe higher education. My MOS was an intelligence analyst and linguist, and I only spent four years in. Zhat's why zhat Mister Gutsy calls me a staff puke; I zhink any MOS other zhan an Infantryman wouldn't quite suit 'is tastes. I don't blame 'im zhough since he's not all zhere in the 'ead." She had already verified that the terms, such as MOS, were the same in both worlds, although she didn't know if the actual designations were the same, so she didn't mention specific ones.
  
  Gary chuckled, "I figured you for a rich bitch," he said, but with no animosity and much amusement in his tone. It was clear it was something of a compliment, as a sort of working-class solidarity.
  
  "Well, I am one now," she replied testily. Then she did her best Ojou-sama hair flip and walked over to get some grilled and buttered ant. Gary followed her with another audible chuckle.
  
  Lily got a big plate of ant and was pleased to see the Mechanist loaded her two kegs of beer in with his supplies. She had only drank about half of one; she had already told Scott she was giving the rest to him, in any case. So, she got a big glass of the slightly weird-tasting beer to go along with the ant, and sat down to eat.
  
  Stopping for a moment, she hummed. Then she sent Sophie a message, along with an offer to stream the robot girl her sensorium.
  
  [Lilium: You said you wished you could try some, yourself? Well, accept the request. ]
  
  [ *** Lilium wants to share her eXPerience with NANNY-45A9F *** ]
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh! Interesting! Wonder if this will work? ]
  
  [ *** NANNY-45A9F accepts *** ]
  
  Lily took a bite of the ant meat, which Scott had already freed from its exoskeleton and buttered appropriately. What a gentleman.
  
  [NANNY-45A9F: Oh, this is weird, Miss Lily. I have to stay kind of still, I think, or I might run into something. Is this... taste? I think I like it! ]
  
  Lily ate the rest of her ant before terminating the stream; although Sophie didn't much care for the taste of the beer at first, but it was something of an acquired taste after all.
  
  It did taste quite like lobster, so she was quite pleased with it. Both Gary and Scott had two plates, too, finishing off the batch of ant that Scott had grilled. However, they both limited themselves to one glass of beer like her, which was likely wise as they still had to combat against the rest of the ants in the factory.
  
  While eating, she sat down with Gary and talked about what they did well and what they could have improved during their fight with the Super Mutants. She thought her main mistake, aside from bringing her scanner with her, was not having the minigun Termitron open up immediately. However, they both agreed that any fight they walked away from was a good one.
  
  "Alright, the next phase of the plan is pretty simple. We just work our way through to the other side of the factory, the robots will handle clearing rooms and small spaces that ants could be hiding. The last time I saw the queen, she was on the opposite side of the assembly line, and it seems that hasn't changed," Scott began, dusting himself off after standing back up.
  
  Lily had fabricated two carbon-fibre carry straps for the two plasma rifles and slung one across her back, with Gary carrying the other with the Mechanist taking the tri-beam rifle that they had acquired from the other Super-Mutant. He glanced at everyone to make sure they understood before continuing, "When we do find the Queen, Lily's robots along with Matilda will rush her, presenting themselves as targets, while the three of you with plasma guns will focus-fire the Queen and the Protectrons, Sophie and I will mop up any warrior ants she has guarding herself. Questions?"
  
  Gary hummed and then shook his head, "Seems simple enough." He also had his plasma rifle slung across his back. They wouldn't waste plasma shots on the small ants. Lily would really need to research refuelling and restarting spent microfusion cells, both for her power generation and for the use of plasma weaponry. She suspected Madison Li might be of help there, as her focus was if she recalled, mobile fusion power. It was why she had helped the Brotherhood so much in powering up Liberty Prime, in her memories.
  
  Lily wouldn't mind some sort of technology transfer or trade with the scientist woman if it saved her the time of working down that tech tree herself. Of course, she didn't know if Dr Li knew about the hydrodynamic plasma loop method of electricity generation like her generators used, but even if she did, Lily was confident of having something to interest the woman.
  
  "Alright, let's proceed then," the Mechanist stated calmly, and together the group re-entered the factory in the same large room. It was the end of the assembly line, where fully assembled Corvegas would drive out, which was something Gary commented on, "You'd think the motors would be near the end of the assembly line."
  
  Scott nodded and pointed to an empty place about halfway down the line in this room, "That was the station that placed the motors in. There were four motors in crates there when I found the place, and I took all of them. I ended up trading two of them but still have two more, one of which we used to use as power for an electrical generator." He hummed, and looked at the wrecks of five Corvegas that were past the motor installation station, "I suppose there are five motors in these cars. That might be a useful activity, except that there were at least ten times as many in crates in the back."
  
  Gary nodded, then casually shot a worker ant that had scurried up from the assembly line, along with two Protectrons. He mused aloud, "Interesting. I've always been pretty good with fixing up old cars. I may come back up here on my own dime and perhaps see if I can't put a working Corvega together with the parts of those five."
  
  Scott nodded and looked thoughtful, "That might be a profitable use of time. There certainly will be a lot of valuable items left here that we won't be able to fit on Lily's truck, even if we would have spent a week here. I suspect it will become common knowledge that this site is safe within three to nine months. This is a well-known local death trap, so not very many people even come close. But, I would estimate you have no more than four months to make your expedition."
  
  Gary nodded appreciatively, "Thanks for the advice."
  
  The group was quiet the rest of the trip through the factory. Warrior ants became much more common, and the group would take a break whenever they found a lot of branching-off small rooms for the robots to explore, supervised carefully by Sophie.
  
  "Ooh, Miss Lily. One of ze Protectrons has found ze large chest-style freezer; I'll send a couple of your robots and drag it out near your truck," Sophie piped up.
  
  "Nice," Scott said with as much emotion as he put into anything that wasn't Sophie. It was clear he really liked ant meat!
  
  Shortly after that, they came across the machinists' area of the factory, and Scott started directing the looting. Lily was surprised; she was expecting just regular drills, lathes and milling machines, but they appeared to be automated and robot-controlled versions of all of those and a few tools she did not even recognize. They looked like they would be useful even to her and even to Scott after she gifted him one of her DMLS printers and metal recyclers.
  
  Her robots did all of the looting on account of the fact that they had hands and the fact that they were the least useful for protecting everyone else while the looting occurred. The group had to continually defend themselves from worker and warrior ant incursions during the looting process, although not near the rate of the first swarm. Instead of waiting at the machine equipment, they slowly pushed forward as the Termitrons began the looting process.
  
  This seemed to please both Gary and Scott, and Gary explained, "The more she throws at us now, the less she will have in a few minutes when we actually get to her. It's always better to defeat an enemy in detail, Doc. It also shows that they're just animals, dumb. After dealing with those suspiciously tactically-minded mutants... well, this is a lot nicer."
  
  Lily nodded. That made sense to her. She pulled up the overhead view from her drone and then used her GPS location to put a marker. They were a little over halfway through traversing the factory, and it had taken them a little over two hours, even counting the Super Mutant attack and first swarming and lunch. They were making really good time.
  
  Waiting for her Termitrons to drag over five tons of machinery out to the front of the factory was likely going to take longer than exploring this far. Or, she thought, until they entered a very large warehouse that was off-set from the assembly line. They had to leave two Protectrons to guard the chokepoint to the Termitrons while they explored the warehouse.
  
  "Woah! Is that a-ack!" Gary was interrupted by a small swarm of worker ants that must have inhabited the warehouse, all rushing them at once. The group fired beam after beam of light at the feral but delicious arthropods as they slowly backed out of the warehouse, rejoining the two Protectrons that then assisted them in putting down the sixty or so ants.
  
  "Whew. That was a lot. But that's good; we wouldn't have wanted to leave that at our backs when we met Her Majesty," mentioned Gary in a wry voice as he reloaded his laser rifle. Then, he paused, "I'm down to my last energy cell here."
  
  Scott glanced sideways at both Gary and Lily, "I am pretty low also. Let's pause here. Gary, you seemed to see something that interested you in that warehouse. Let's explore it while we send a robot back to the truck to recharge our energy cells. I brought a bank of fast chargers, so it shouldn't take too long hooked up to Lily's generator."
  
  That sounded like a good idea to her, so she dropped all of her discharged cells into a bag that Scott handed to her, along with Gary's, before handing it to one of her Termitrons which showed up just for that purpose.
  
  Gary nodded, "Yeah. Didn't you see that MUVS?"
  
  They walked back into the warehouse, and Lily tilted her head to the side, "What is a MUVS?" Gary looked at her exapseratedly, "Multipurpose uhh... utility... vehicle something? It's basically a small one-manned tracked construction vehicle made by Chryslus. This one had a pair of forks on it, as a fork-loader."
  
  Ah, there was a forklift-looking vehicle there. She hadn't really noticed it as she had already noticed the dozens of worker ants using her excellent hearing, so she was staring off into the locations they were running from. She glanced at it, "Do you think it still runs?" she asked sceptically.
  
  Gary made a hmmm noise, "Maybe. It looks in pretty good condition. The tracks aren't made of steel but of some special material that is supposed to last damn near forever. It uses the same General Electric or General Atomics fission motors as a Corvega. Let me see if I can get her going. Can I borrow your tools, Doc?"
  
  She had brought her bag of tools with her this time, leaving her scanner in the seat of the truck cab, just in case the Queen Ant did have some sort of weird acid attack, like in the game. One burned, twice shy, she supposed. She nodded at him, handing him the small fanny-pack-looking toolbag she often carried.
  
  They watched him work for about fifteen minutes on various parts of the fission motor before he called out, "The battery is shot, and the fission motor needs some power to bring itself out of shut-down and into idle. Do either of you have a fission battery with you?" They both did, as they had been casually looting the factory of such small items and periodically giving them to a bot to take back to the truck.
  
  Lily dragged one of the small three-kilo batteries out of her bag, walked over and handed it to Gary. He nodded and then asked, "Can you look over this? It's been a while since I've played with my dad's electrical kit. I want to bring the voltage of the fission battery down to twenty-four volts."
  
  Scott had followed her over to Gary, and they both took a look at what he had built. He had used a number of resistors daisy-chained to drop the output voltage of the fission battery down to about twenty-four volts. Lily and Scott shared a glance with each other, and then both shook their head firmly at Gary.
  
  Gary looked like a kicked puppy and even said, "Aww. What'd I get wrong?"
  
  Scott glanced at her as if asking her to tell him, so she nodded. Scott turned around and left without a word while Lily explained, "Zhose are tiny resistors! Like what you would find in zhe radio! Zhat is the correct number and type of resistors, but zhey would burn up and probably catch fire as soon as you connected the fission battery to zhem. Especially when the fission motor drew a lot of power initially to move its control rods to idle."
  
  Gary chuckled embarrassedly and rubbed the back of his head, "Ahaha... I see. Well, at least I remembered which value those resistors were, right?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, actually, I am impressed you were able to figure out which ohm-value you needed to drop 120 volts to 24." Gary grinned at that, "So, what is the correct solution?"
  
  "We'll build you a simple step-down converter circuit. I suspect zhat is why Scott left, to go do zhat," Lily told him. And sure enough, Scott returned with a small converter that looked pre-built. He connected it to the fission battery and then used a very small screwdriver and his multimeter to adjust a small potentiometer on the device, which in turn adjusted the output voltage.
  
  Nodding at the end, he handed both the battery and connected step-down converter to Gary, "Here you go. I often carry these adjustable step-down or boost converters with me for similar problems such as this. Good initial thought, though."
  
  Lily was surprised that Scott took the time to praise Gary, but then again, if Scott was ever going to praise someone about something, it would be about electrical matters or robotics.
  
  "Hey, thanks," said Gary and quickly removed the forklift's old battery and secured the fission battery in its old position, tying it down with some bungee cables before connecting the battery's leads to the output of the step-down converter.
  
  Lily was surprised to see the lights on the dash light up. Gary sat in the cockpit of the machine and, with deft hands, quickly put the fission motor into standby mode. Then, he hopped out. "I think it is going to work. It will take about a half hour for the fission chain reaction to reach the proper level to operate the loader, though. If we pushed it out of standby right now after so long sitting, we'd wreck it."
  
  Scott looked very impressed, "You seem to know a lot about small fission reactors. And cars, or car-like vehicles."
  
  Gary nodded, "Yeah, sure do. Grew up fixing cars, and as a boatswain's mate on a carrier, we often handled maintenance on the small boat and small vehicle reactors."
  
  Lily peered at the vehicle, her eye doing measurements. "It will fit in zhe back of my truck. It will be useful to load all zhe crap we're looting, plus zhen we can just take it with us." She glanced at Gary, "I'll definitely buy it from you, or you can keep it. We would 'ave just left it 'ere; I certainly wouldn't have thought I could get it running again." Scott paused as if thinking and then finally nodded in agreement.
  
  She thought she could replace the forks with some construction equipment. She kind of wanted to start drilling a sub-basement level or five in her building, and it would be useful to have a vehicle to take away the fill.
  
  Gary grinned again and nodded, "I don't think I'll need a forklift, so I'll probably sell it to you then, Doc. Or maybe I could take it in trade?" Lily blinked at him. Where she came from, that was usually a sexual proposition. She smirked, "Like what?"
  
  "Well, you're carting off all these motors, and you're going to help me build a water tanker truck, right?" he asked, oblivious.
  
  She nodded. To which, he continued, "Well, I think no matter what I end up doing, I'll need a utility truck, too. So, if we could build two of the same type of truck, one with a truckbed and one with a water tank?"
  
  Well, it seems he wasn't propositioning her. A shame, perhaps. She nodded, "Zhat's acceptable. I zhink I would still be in your debt in zhat case since you will be owed a share of these motors we're looting too, but I 'ave a lot of other services you're not quite aware of yet, zhat I zhink you will end up wanting."
  
  Gary looked thoughtful and just nodded.
  
  They decided to push on instead of waiting while the forklift warmed up. By her overhead map, they were nearing the location where she suspected the Queen Ant was, and it certainly appeared that way from the enemies they faced. They were mostly giant warrior ants, now, but they would only face about four or five at a time, at most.
  
  Scott, apparently, thought the same because he held up a hand. "Okay, the Queen is up ahead. Sophie is bringing back Lily's robots so we have a full force. Matilda, are you ready?"
  
  The Assaultron purred, "I was built ready." Scott nodded, "Okay. Lily's robots - except the one with the minigun - will follow you. Just rush them, give them a distraction, and we will come in about five seconds behind you and mop them up. Lily, Mister Gutsy and Gary, switch to your plasma weapons now, and your primary target will be the Queen. You can't miss her, I assure you."
  
  Matilda turned to Lily and asked, "Let me have two grenades." Lily blinked but brought her last two grenades out of her bag and put one in each of Matilda's manipulators. They weren't quite hands, but they were easily able enough to hold grenades and their spoons safely. She wouldn't be able to pull the pins herself, though, so Lily carefully pulled the pins on each of the grenades without being asked, which caused Matilda to digitize a sultry, "Excellent."
  
  Lily shouldered her tri-beam and pulled out the plasma rifle, quickly checking it to make sure it was still functional. Everyone nodded at each other that they were ready, and Matilda just jogged off into the next area, followed closely behind by six of Lily's Termitrons. She heard Matilda yell, "Come out, you fat bitch!"
  
  Lily's enhanced hearing detected a lot of skittering, as well as the scratching and thud of movement of a much larger creature. She internally tagged that location as the Queen, and they all started following Matilda. Before they even saw her, everyone heard one large boom of a fragmentation grenade going off, followed by the shrieks of many injured ants.
  
  The Protectrons and Sophie started opening up with rapid laser fire as a small swarm of warrior ants came into view. Matilda was dodging around them, while the Termitrons were as a group protecting one another. They weren't anywhere near as agile, but they worked together to zap any ant that closed with one of their compatriots. Lily was impressed at the level of individual control Sophie was managing on her robots. The robot girl was issuing commands to each robot much faster than Lily was capable of doing and seemed to be able to focus on multiple things at once. Lily was jealous.
  
  The Queen ant really was hard to miss. Lily and Gary trained their plasma rifles on the arthropod that was as big as her truck cab and along with Mister Gutsy, opened rapid-fire plasma bolts at her, focusing on the front end and the head, causing the massive creature to shriek in pain in ear-splitting volume. The sound of a minigun opening fire to her right joined in as Sophie directed a stream of armour-piercing rounds directly into Her Majesty's royal flank.
  
  Another explosion caused a cloud of dust and many ant casualties. One of her Termitrons was slightly out of position and got swarmed, having its legs bit off at the joints. The warrior ants stayed on the Termitron, trying to worry at the robot's hardened steel alloy chest ineffectively before being blasted by the Protectrons.
  
  Gary, Lily and Mister Gutsy had each now fired over a dozen plasma bolts at the Queen when the massive creature finally died, tilting over and crashing on the floor, crushing several of its subjects. At that point, the fight had gone out of the ants, and they seemed to just be berserking anything that moved, even their own compatriots. The group backed off and picked off all the rest of the living ants amidst the chaos.
  
  Lily panted a little, slotting a fresh micro fusion cell on her plasma rifle. While that wasn't exactly a physically strenuous fight for her, all of the chaos and attempting to mentally categorize close to a hundred chaotic enemies was mentally fatiguing.
  
  Gary mentioned, "I've seen main battle tanks go down easier than that bitch. Her exoskeleton was a bit resistant to plasma, somehow."
  
  Scott nodded, himself a little surprised, "Yes, indeed. Although I didn't notice any acid attacks from her. She seemed to move a lot quicker than something that massive should have been able to, though. All in all, I would say that she was more dangerous than I was expecting." He paused and then said, "I still think the mass laser attacks would have worked, but we would have likely had to make a bounding retreat of it, firing as we backed up."
  
  Lily slung her plasma rifle and brought back her tri-beam, and did a mental check on her Termitrons. The downed robot was still responding. It looked like one of the leg motivators and graphene cabling was damaged, though, but if that was the only casualty of the fight, then they did amazingly well.
  
  Her minigun-Termitron was down to a little over a hundred rounds left, but that was the price of victory.
  
  She thought that was the extent of the damage until Matilda walked up to her and said, "I need a new arm again." What the hell? Had she exploded one of the grenades while carrying it?! Lily thought that was exactly what happened. She sighed and nodded at the robot, who was dangling one inoperative arm from her shoulder.
  
  She glanced at the dozens and dozens of crates. Some were labelled General Atomics, and others were labelled General Electric, but they all were useful small fission reactors. Much more than she intended to loot when she thought about coming here.
  
  She hummed and scanned a couple of the elite warrior ants as well as the Queen ant. She remembered that in the game, you could loot Queen ant pheromones from this enemy, but Lily did not intend to climb inside a dead arthropod to get that prize. She would, however, take a number of genetic samples, though, as she did with every new organism she encountered.
  
  And who knows? Perhaps giant ants could be domesticated. She didn't think she would try herself. On the other hand, maybe she could find the AntAgonizer before she went completely crazy and adjust her fate, turning her from a genocidal supervillain to an ant rancher.
  
  "Let's sweep the area for survivors, then check Gary's forklift. That will save us hours loading everything in the truck. But, all in all, I'd say this scavenge operation was a success," the Mechanist said mildly.
  
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  I'll Take it in Trade
  It took them another few hours to get everything they were taking loaded. With Scott's near seven tons of machine tools, her seventy-five fission reactors, an entire tracked construction vehicle as well and not to mention all of the miscellaneous items they found inside; they were running up against the forty-ton limit on her two-hundred-year-old trailer.
  
  And there were still thousands of tons of stuff to take out of the factory, including over two hundred additional fission motors that they just couldn't fit in one trip, but it was all things Lily wasn't entirely interested in. Not enough to go back and forth, looting it thoroughly, anyway. Not personally, anyway.
  
  They had found two additional MUVS attachments, one being a large front-end loader which was precisely what she wanted, and another being a large drill, almost big enough to turn the thing into a small boring machine.
  
  She intended to create multiple sub-basements in her building but didn't see the drill as that useful, as it wasn't really designed to drill straight down. Perhaps if she started a tunnel from the outside? She'd have to do some simulations, but for now, she still intended to build a drilling machine using lasers. She could build a machine that could power multiple continual beams of lasers, rotating to chop up the ground, cooling it with liquid nitrogen so that the lasing heads didn't overheat.
  
  They sat in the cab listening to one of Lily's songs that she had recorded onto holotapes; this one was Michael Bublé singing his cover of "Save the Last Dance For Me." It was suitably big-band inspired, so it sounded more or less at home even to Gary. In fact, Gary loved it and asked why he had never heard it before, to which Lily replied that the singer was Canadian, which caused him to laugh.
  
  "You need to get these songs to that Three Dog man. It's barely been a week, and if I have to listen to the same twenty-five songs anymore, I think I will show his ass just what the Good Fight really is," replied Gary when the second Michael Bublé song, "Feeling Good," started to play.
  
  Scott nodded, looking moved as well, "It really is hard to listen to the same songs repeatedly. But make him pay for them; that man is just a Brotherhood front. He'd be dead a hundred times over if he wasn't under their protection, and that means he is under their control. Despite his flowery words, a man cannot be free if he depends on others that aren't his family and close friends to defend himself."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows at the savvy and accurate political analysis from the Mechanist. That might have been the longest string of words she had ever heard him say and certainly the most philosophical she had ever heard him.
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "You 'ave issues with zhe Brotherhood of Steel, too?"
  
  Scott scowled behind the wheel as they approached the broken-down electronics store that he would soon be vacating, "I don't, but only because they don't know I exist anymore. They repeatedly hassled the merchant I used to Apprentice with for selling robots and old tech. Honestly, they're the main threat, not raiders, that I plan on having to defend myself against. Well, the main threat that is actually a threat. That's why I liked that giant magnetron and dish; it would cook them inside their Power Armour."
  
  Lily chuckled. He really was quite verbose on the subject, and it was another area where she agreed with him completely. However, she mentioned, "Zhey will know you exist once Gary and you start selling purified water to Canterbury Commons, you know. Zhey will definitely track it back to Vault 108, even if nobody else does."
  
  Scott frowned but nodded, "Yes. I have already anticipated that. Are you still willing to make that trade we discussed before?"
  
  When she had mentioned to him she was going to construct dozens of auto-turrets in her hospital he offered to trade her five Protectrons for fifteen auto-turrets, so long as the turrets featured both a laser and her electro-beam weapon. He suspected the high-intensity electrolaser might prove very effective against Power Armour. She wasn't sure, herself, as Power Armour was supposed to be insulated if it was maintained properly but intended to build the ones in the auto-turret with at least ten times the number of capacitors as the ones in her Termitrons, just in case.
  
  As far as she was concerned, it was a good trade. Each Protectron-arm had two ruby-gain media to facilitate their rapid firing, so she would only have to supply five more to create the fifteen auto-turrets since she already intended to transform all of her Protectrons into Termitrons, with one laser arm and one electrolaser arm.
  
  "Yes, of course. It is zhe good deal for me," she replied to him, which caused him to smile and nod, and say, "The best deals are good for both parties. I have a lot of robots, including heavy Sentrybots. But assaulting my Vault would involve walking down a trapped, prepared corridor filled with auto-guns with robots firing down the other end? It would be suicide, no matter how zealous one is to "protect" the people against my technology. The Brotherhood talks a good game, but they only try to steal your tech if you can't kill a lot of them. Suppose you can? Then they make peace with you. Just look at Rivet City. That place has a lot more defences than it lets on or shows to the tourists that visit the place."
  
  Wow, she was really getting Scott to lecture today! She liked it!
  
  Gary was listening to their conversation, "Rivet City is the settlement on a beached aircraft carrier? That hurts my heart to hear it is just acting as a glorified town, but Scott is definitely right. You could expect a hidden sentry gun in the ceiling at every passageway intersection on every single deck. And the standard anti-boarding complement includes twenty sentrybots in sensitive locations and over a hundred marine Assaultrons, which were at least half as sassy as your Matilda. Plus, if it still has its offensive armament, at least twenty nuclear or conventional-tipped sea-skimming missiles in vertical launch tubes, which are easily programmable for ground-attack mode. Oh, and plus all the nukes and missiles the Air Wing had, which is probably in the hundreds since they weren't in range of the enemy to use them when the bombs fell, some of which are precision-guided ground-attack cruise missiles. It's very likely that Rivet City could nuke the Brotherhood's HQ at the Pentagon, and visa-versa so they may have settled into some manner of détente."
  
  Both Scott and Sophie glanced at him; Scott's eyebrows were raised to the ceiling. Sophie was the first to speak, "Wow, Gary! I 'ad almost forgotten zat just a few years ago; from your perspective, you might 'ave been sailing on Rivet City. You did say you were on carriers, didn't you?"
  
  Gary nodded, "I'm not 100%, but I think the only carrier near the home port in the Atlantic when things went to shit was the USS Charlton Heston. If so, yeah, I served on her for some time. Good ship. It's a shame she ain't in the water, but at least she is still protecting her shipmates, even now."
  
  Lily had already read a lot of the history books, so she wasn't as surprised by that ship's name as she would have been when she first arrived. Of course, in this world, there was a movie star turned President in the 1980s as well, except it wasn't Reagan; it was Charlton Heston. His filmography was a bit different, also. He still starred in Ben Hur in the 1950s, but not one of the Planet of the Apes films was made in the Fallout universe, probably because they were a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons.
  
  "Perhaps you could go visit it, maybe find all zhe non-regulation stills you 'id away in 'er compartments while you were serving aboard 'er," Lily commented dryly.
  
  "Illegal stills! How dare you impinge my character so accurately, madam!" Gary said, feigning shock, which caused both of them to laugh, although Scott, who never served as an NCO, didn't get the joke.
  
  "I think I will go visit her, though, when we get everything settled in Megaton, and I have some wheels," Gary mused.
  
  Scott backed the truck into position at the electronics store's loading dock and turned to Lily, "It is already past 1700. I suggest we all sleep here tonight. We can load what you're taking back to Megaton on your flatbed trailer tonight before it gets too dark, and then we can set out in the morning."
  
  Lily hummed and nodded. They still needed to load the rest of Scott's stuff, including his important computer mainframe, and take everything to Vault 108. It might be two or three days before she could get back to Megaton.
  
  Scott then paused, "I have a proposal." Lily blinked and asked, "Sure?"
  
  "We go directly to Megaton tomorrow. I would like to get all of those upgrades as soon as possible. You're not planning on using this truck right away after you get back, are you? If not, and you don't mind lending it to me, Sophie and I can go back and move all of our stuff by ourselves afterwards. I'll bring back your truck in a couple of weeks, along with a load of scrap metal you said you could recycle," he said calmly.
  
  Lily clucked her tongue and considered. She had been planning on starting to convert the truck into what amounted to an armoured RV. That was a pre-requisite to her assault of the VSS building, but with Gary's project she was investing in, she would instead be building two trucks, more or less from the ground up.
  
  There wasn't a lot of engineering involved, as she was planning on mostly copying this current truck, at least as far as the transmission, clutch and propellor shaft were concerned. But, she still likely wouldn't get any work on her armoured RV done for over a month or more, especially considering she would have to return to working regular shifts in the hospital.
  
  She nodded, "Zhat is fine. Zhe steel would help a lot, actually. I need a lot of nickel, also, almost even more zhan steel, if you know of any sources."
  
  Scott looked a bit confused, "Nickel, more than that is in stainless steel?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Stainless steel would be very useful for its nickel content. But one of zhe alloys I am making is close to fifty per cent nickel. It's a high-heat resistant alloy, and I'm going to use it in layers as armour against lasers and, to a much lesser extent, zhe plasma."
  
  Scott rocked back a little bit, surprised. "I see." He was quiet for a moment, "I think you will just have to accept that you'll end up with a lot more elemental iron than you need, as stainless steel and other steel alloys are still probably your best source of nickel in large quantities. I think your best bet is just to take all the nickel out of all the steel alloys, then make soft steel ingots and trade them. Plenty of people, even the Brotherhood, would buy or trade for them."
  
  Lily made a face, but that was what she was thinking too. Well, she hadn't considered trading the "waste iron" in the form of steel ingots; that was a good idea. Nickel wasn't an uncommon metal; it was pretty common, actually. But it was just used in small amounts in everything. Very few things had high concentrations.
  
  He paused again and then added, "But... There is an old so-called battery recycling plant not too far from the Corvega factory. Like a lot of Pre-War corporations, they were crooks. They didn't recycle anything and just dumped all the batteries in a pit in the back. That's the only other source of high concentrations of nickel I can think of. It might last you a little while. I'll visit it and bring back a few tons."
  
  Lily smiled at this and nodded. They dismounted the truck, and Gary had fun driving around that forklift. They removed all of the things she was taking back to Megaton out of the trailer. When they were about to leave Scott's share of twenty fission motors in the back of the trailer, he piped up again, "How many fission motors would you take in trade to make me a utility truck like you are going to make for Gary?"
  
  Lily blinked. Now she had three to make? She considered it. "Five, plus two tons of zhe steel zhat you can deliver to me at any time. I'll keep your tab. And I'll even give you the design files for the vehicle, too."
  
  That was arguably more than she was charging Gary, but the single-tracked vehicle that she was going to use as a front-end loader was immediately useful to her. Plus, Scott was getting the design files, so he would be able to build his own versions eventually. The technology transfer was priced at a premium, but she knew Scott well enough to know that he would want that.
  
  Scott nodded, a satisfied smile on his face. "That's a good deal. You wouldn't mind me selling competing vehicles in the future, then?"
  
  Lily shook her head slowly. She wanted to get into the car business seriously like she wanted a bullet in the head, "You might 'ave to come to me for tires, zhough, eventually." They had taken over a dozen sets of good tires with them, which she would be taking back to Megaton. However, it was clear that despite how well they were manufactured, there weren't enough good tires to outfit dozens and dozens of vehicles. The tires were made of graphene, much as she suspected. Lily had no idea how the Fallout universe produced the graphene in arbitrary shapes like that but would very much like to take a loot-err look at a Firestone or Good Year factory to find out.
  
  Lily would change the design, away from pneumatic tires and instead use amorphous carbon inside the tire instead of air as the main failure point she noticed was the metal installed in the valve stem. However, she had no desire to share her carbon manufacturing technology with anyone, not even the Mechanist. Perhaps, years in the future, she might sell him a purpose-built tire manufacturing machine, but only if it was suitably trapped and secured from reverse engineering.
  
  He shrugged, "That would be fine." Gary popped up from the seat of his forklift with his opinion while grabbing two crates of fission motors, "Steel tracks might not be out of the question given the state of the National Highway system, you know what I mean? The main disadvantage of tracked vehicles is speed and fuel efficiency. Oh, and damage to roads. Nobody drives fast these days, and fission motors make fuel efficiency pointless. And nobody gives a fuck about the roads, such as they are."
  
  Lily chuckled, and Scott glanced at him and nodded, "That's true." Despite her denigrating the inflatable pneumatic tires earlier, she had intended to use inflatable graphene-based tracks on her armoured RV, after all. At low pressures, it would work a lot like a tire, but a highly inflated graphene track would work much like steel tracks. Gary was incorrect; some places wouldn't let a steel-tracked vehicle inside of them. Megaton was one of them.
  
  She glanced inside the box trailer, seeing only Scott's stuff and all of the things he looted in the factory. Good thing, too, since her flatbed trailer was loaded almost to capacity. With all the robots the Mechanist would bring, some of which to trade to her and others for his self-protection, the trailer would be completely full. She tested the tires and didn't see any bowing, so she figured the reinforcement she made to it was very effective.
  
  They ate a home-cooked meal by Sophie which was excellent, as usual, and afterwards, Lily brought Gary to the guest room. After she closed the door, she told him slyly, "I zhink you owe me a debt, but you can pay for it in trade if you like, yes?" With your body, she left unsaid, as it was understood.
  
  The next morning, after a shower, she set out to have a short conversation with Gary to set his expectations. He laughed and waved her off and sat down with her to give her his own version of the talk she was planning.
  
  He said, "Doc, don't worry about me. You're a very nice woman, but I have very highly tuned emotional radar, and you know what this highly trained instrument detects when I point it at you?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side precisely forty-five degrees, "Not really?" However, if he really did have some way to detect emotions, she knew exactly what he was implying. Perhaps Gary Prime's baseline brain had some study potential, too!
  
  Gary continued, "Well, I was about to say not much... you're not one of those psychopaths that don't feel anything, but you don't feel much, except you just seriously spiked with something along the lines of... academic interest, perhaps? I'm not sure. But it is the strongest thing you've ever felt around me."
  
  She was incredibly academically interested, but that wasn't the emotion she was feeling, so she corrected him, leaning forward, her tone thick with as much emotion as she could emote in a husky tone, " Curiosity ." He really could detect emotions? Fuck, she left her scanner in the truck!
  
  Wait, this possibly totally ruined most of her FEV research! What if the only reason she produced a Psyker-Gary was that Gary Prime was some kind of latent telepath? Like Dianna Troi? She wanted to groan and dissect him at the same time but outwardly presented back her serene expression of neutrality. Where the fuck would she find a gaggle of insane clones, she wouldn't feel bad about experimenting on?!
  
  Wait, she had already given up on FEV research, so it didn't matter, right?
  
  This caused him to grin, "And now frustration? You feel curiosity strongly. No wonder you're a scientist, then, eh?" He sat his hands on his lap, "But the reason I told you this secret of mine, which I trust you will keep-" his tone turned slightly menacing when mentioning that, which excited her a little bit, "-is that after my wife left me, I made myself a promise never to get seriously involved with a certain kind of woman."
  
  Lily blinked at him and then asked, offended, "You think I'm crazy?!"
  
  Gary chuckled and then shook his head and said gently, "No, I think you are exceptionally rational. The type of woman I won't get involved with is the type that can't love me back."
  
  Ah, that stung her to the quick. Well, no, it didn't. It was exactly the same reason she had started this conversation with both him and Grace. It was actually quite refreshing for someone to understand her without her having to spell it out. She nodded, "I understand, and you're precisely right. Zhat was why I was going to 'ave zhis conversation. I didn't want to 'urt your feelings after you got the wrong expectation. You don't 'ave to worry; I will definitely keep your secret." She paused, "Say, does zhis... emotional radar thing of yours run in your family? On your matrilineal or your patrilineal sides, perhaps? Or both?" Her tone was very casual as if she was just asking as a lark.
  
  He laughed and said, "You can't trick me with that practised casual tone of yours, Doc! You're practically drooling to know more, eh?" He glanced at his Pip-Boy, "You know, it is still quite early... Just how much time did you budget for this conversation? I have a better idea."
  
  She did get an answer, but she was distracted from thinking about it until she took a second shower of the morning; this time, she wasted water like a spendthrift with her hand on the button, just letting the mist play across her body as she considered the revelations she had learned.
  
  His mother and sister had the same ability, and it was sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker but could be traced throughout his matrilineal lineage.
  
  That meant it was a dominant trait! Just how many people on this planet had this ability and didn't talk about it, then?! Was it a relatively recent phenomenon? Maybe only in the past five hundred years or so?
  
  The ability to sense the emotions of a person provided such an incredible survival advantage in a social species like homo sapiens that it either had to be a recent mutation, or every noble or member of any aristocracy had to be swimming in it. According to her social assistant, it would practically guarantee leadership positions in any small village or town society.
  
  She did not think the latter was true. If all world leaders had this ability, she believed that world war would be much less likely, but she had to admit that was just what her intuition was telling her.
  
  She muttered, under the mists, "Zhere are more zhings in 'eaven and earth, Lily, than are dreamt of in your Science, huh?"
  
  She lifted her hand from the small square button and then growled and yelled in a Chinese accent, slamming her fist back into the button with force, " That is bullshit! There is nothing science can't explain!"
  
  She blinked. She had never made the mistake of speaking in the wrong accent, once, in this universe, yet. She was feeling utterly emotional! How odd! She sighed and instituted a recommended 4-7-8 breathing pattern that was clinically proven to help settle one's emotions. She recognized that outburst wasn't precisely nor solely due to this new curiosity. It was something she had been bottling up ever since she had come to this universe so inexplicably.
  
  She calmed herself. The word magic only meant she could not explain something presently. Not that she would never be able to explain it. She would fully understand this new fascinating aspect of the human mind, just as she would eventually understand how to travel between universes, too.
  
  She glanced down at her hand. It was bleeding, but her PHOENIX system had already healed the damage. However, she had completely broken the shower. It wouldn't turn off now. She sighed and reached up to turn off the valve at the small cistern that held the shower water. She would go grab a towel and fix this before anyone found out, and then she would cart up a replacement bucket of water from the well.
  
  Nothing would escape her understanding. Not in the end. Nothing. She had nothing but time, after all.
  
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  Home Is Where The Apprentice Is
  Lily returned to her room, and Gary made an exaggerated "Kya~" and asked, "What if I had been indecent?"
  
  Lily looked at him and just said, "Nineteen." He looked confused, and she was about to say that she had already calculated when he was " in, decent" and that it was at least nineteen centimetres, but then realized that lewd puns didn't fit her image as a classy lady. Hence, she shook her head and said, "Nevermind." It was a shame, almost, as of lewd puns that was a top-tier specimen.
  
  She had repaired the shower but discovered that the rooftop cistern was full, so she did not need to make a trip outside to refill the little pressurized cistern on top of the shower. She had also calmed down considerably. She had always been a homebody, and she felt that being so far away from her web for so long was bad for her mental well-being.
  
  Before her next adventure, she would ensure that both had a little slice of home to take with her, namely her armoured research vehicle and that she would set up a continuous data link back to Megaton. She had been a little worried about the Apprentice in her absence. Were her education goals proceeding apace? Was anyone bothering her? With a continuous digital link, she could have stayed in contact with the girl throughout her escapades.
  
  As she thought about that, she felt a slight but unusual warm feeling in her chest. She hummed in thought, staring off into space in the ceiling, before she realized that Gary was staring at her, almost slackjawed. She blinked and demanded, "What?"
  
  He asked cautiously, "Were you just thinking about your favourite microscope or something?"
  
  Lily tilted her head off to her side and considered that. Her own Master often said that she was his best research tool, so after a moment, she decided that wasn't an entirely incorrect comparison to the Apprentice. She nodded, "Something along zhose lines. A long-term project, zhough, zhat still needs much time before being ready."
  
  He chuckled and nodded. "I figured it must be something like that," he said but wouldn't elaborate further. She frowned at him but decided it wasn't worth the time to pry out what the sometimes inscrutable man meant.
  
  She hummed, "When we get to Megaton, I will offer you zhe accommodations on zhe fifth floor of my building. Zhe fourth, sixth and basement levels are restricted. I would like you to consider lesson plans for two ten-year-olds of above-average intelligence but low education, as well as one almost sixteen-year-old of very high intelligence. I am currently managing zhat one's education and will continue to do so, so I will have to sit down with you and discuss her individually."
  
  Gary nodded, "I'll take you up on that offer for now. Although, I may wish to acquire a place of my own in the future." He then looked thoughtful, "Only two children for the regular class? Could there be more? Maybe as many as ten or twelve?"
  
  Lily stared at him, "But zhose are zhe only two zhat I care about." She knew that sounded wrong as soon as she said it, and her social assistant heartily agreed with her.
  
  Gary rolled his eyes a little bit, "Yes, I understand that very well. What I meant to say is that children, especially young children, have better educational outcomes when they have peers near their own age in a learning environment. So more children, up to a point, would increase the learning capacity and rate for the two you want to be educated."
  
  Lily blinked at him and nodded, deciding to tease him a little bit, "Zhat sounded like you actually know what you're talking about."
  
  "Don't act surprised!" Gary yelled, feigning outrage. Lily chuckled, "Okay, I understand what you 'ave said. I'm sure I can find other children of approximately zhe correct age range, perhaps from my employees. An education for zheir children would be a good employment benefit."
  
  Gary grinned, "Ohhh... so you're a job creator, now? Look how far you have come from your meagre past as a lowly Sergeant in the Army."
  
  Lily sniffed. She had a good idea of how the economy of the Pre-War era worked, or rather how it didn't. Everything she saw indicated that it was the definition of a highly mature economy, a zero-sum game where it was difficult to open new sectors. As such, she suspected that class mobility was almost nonexistent. She replied back, "Well, you too soon, no? Starting a business is a lot easier zhese days, zhat is for sure. But I assure you, even if I wasn't well known, I lived comfortably before I found myself in Vault 108, surrounded by your psychotic doppelgangers."
  
  He just tsked and said, "Nouveau riche." He then chuckled, "But, yeah, you're right. That's certainly a silver lining. I mean, not sure it's worth billions of people dying, but I'll take what I can get. I'll have to see your education resources before making any plans, though."
  
  Lily nodded, and they got their gear together and went out to meet Scott and Sophie for breakfast. After a quick meal, they once again saddled their trusty steed, although this time Lily laid in the back cab area with Sophie while Gary rode shotgun. She and Sophie could see the outside through their feed to the surveillance drone. Lily was staring up at the ceiling of the truck's cab, finishing her work cross-compiling her own moving map and GPS program to work on the Mister Handy architecture.
  
  It would require installing a small, secondary antenna array and an extra radio peripheral, but she had already created a design for such a device. She would install it in Sophie before she and Scott left back for home. She incorporated a couple of antennas on the same array, as well, so that Sophie could have the same breadth of frequencies she used, including the near-microwave high-bitrate spectrum. She might find it useful; at the very least, she could send and receive files very quickly with Scott once he got his computer working.
  
  With her current radio, Sophie was barely managing an abbreviated experience stream the other day. Lily's system had to degrade the stream somewhat to allow it to be sent with Sophie's present bandwidth restrictions.
  
  Scott's voice brought her out of her reverie, and she put the windows of her development environment away, "We're approaching the bridge. Could you have your drone check for any ambushes?" Lily sat up and brought the surveillance feed to the forefront, triggering the drone to descend a bit while darting ahead of the truck to hover over the bridge. She fed the feed to her expert system, carefully analyzing it for any movement and things that appeared out of place.
  
  "Nothing on the bridge; I'm moving the drone over the far side choke points," Lily said quietly.
  
  Gary blinked, glancing from Lily to Scott, "Just how are you controlling this drone? And wait, you have a drone?"
  
  Lily chuckled. He would find out pretty soon anyway, so she may as well tell him, "I 'ave installed, surgically, zhe computer interface in my brain. I consider zhis a secret, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to strangers. Or really anyone but Scott and Sophie, as well as my Apprentice. It includes a number of features, such as built-in radio scanners and control of robots... I can even write my correspondance with it." She did understate its usefulness to him slightly, though.
  
  He whistled, "That's wicked; that's like Flash Gordon shit right there. Don't worry, Doc. I won't tell anyone."
  
  Lily nodded, "It doesn't look like zhere is anyone in any of the obvious ambush spots, but it does look like zhere was recent combat here, and judging from a couple of bodies, I don't zhink the raiders won." She triggered a return to default orders on the drone, which accelerated back to the truck, climbing to its usual five hundred metre position.
  
  Scott nodded and accelerated onto the bridge gently, "It's been my experience that about one out of three times you will experience an ambush at this position. It is so predictable."
  
  Lily was curious, "Do you know where zhe population of raiders comes from? Zhey seem endless and perpetually renewing."
  
  Scott chuckled, "A lot come from the Pitt; there is actually a huge population there, and they're almost all raiders. Many come from the Commonwealth to the north or are pushed out of the Dominion by their organized military. A lot from Norfolk from the south, they were hit harder than even DC was when the bombs fell due to the huge Naval base, it's basically completely lawless there. The rest are locally produced people who don't want to work or build anything and would rather take from others." He shrugged at that.
  
  Lily considered what he had said, "You basically said they come from every direction but from the sea."
  
  Scott considered that and then added, "Sorry, some do come from the sea, also. A few of the islands around here have been co-opted as, for lack of a better word, pirate kingdoms."
  
  Gary seemed enthused, "Arrr! You mean there are actual ships or boats around here?"
  
  Scott seemed to think about that, "What's the difference between a ship and a boat, again?" Gary chuckled, "Mostly, it is their size; if it is small, it is a boat; if it is large, it is a ship. Technically, the US Navy said that if fits on and is carried by a ship, then it is a boat. To be a ship, it has to be actually seagoing."
  
  Lily blinked, now curious. "What about torpedo boats or coastguard cutters?"
  
  Gary hummed, "Torpedo boats are actually, technically, considered vessels, kind of an in-between between the two. And most coastguard cutters were as big as frigates when the war started, so they're definitely ships." He paused and then added, "Although technically, all ships are vessels, too. But not all vessels are ships."
  
  Scott considered that and nodded, "In that case, there are definitely some boats and vessels, but I do not know any group that operates true seagoing vessels, presently, though. They definitely exist, though, because I know there is occasional traffic to and from Europe by sea."
  
  This clearly excited Gary.
  
  Lily nodded, "I can confirm zhat. Zhere is a really terrible man zhat immigrated to the Capital wasteland from zhe UK. I will probably have to kill him sometime in zhe future."
  
  Scott nodded, "I am pretty sure I know who you are talking about, and the sooner, the better, I'd say."
  
  Gary glanced between them again, "Well, I don't know! Come on, spill! We still got some time to drive, don't we?"
  
  Scott nodded and then began telling him what he knew about Alistair Tenpenny, basically that he was a murderer, probably a rapist and a complete genocidal psychopath.
  
  Lily added in, "If I 'adn't disabled the nuke in the centre of Megaton, he would have tried to use it to destroy zhe town within two years, although please don't ask me 'ow I know zhis. His right 'and man, Burke, tried to get me ripped to shreds by a crazy cult when I disarmed it."
  
  Scott slowed the truck to a stop and turned in his seat to look at her, wide-eyed, "Are you telling me that bomb was live? " To which Lily nodded, "Yup." Scott seemed aghast as if he was reliving every time he must have walked past it.
  
  "Why does he want to blow up a town of ten thousand people?" asked Gary curiously.
  
  Lily snorted, "If you can believe it because it ruins 'is view from zhe penthouse of zhe building he lives at."
  
  Gary blinked several times and then just nodded, "Yeah, okay. He's got to go."
  
  Lily just nodded and sat back in the bed of the truck. Sophie was sitting on the floor, having turned her levitation off, but she was still listening to the conversation and would occasionally make a comment.
  
  As they approached the big gates of Megaton, something caught her attention. A radio transmission whose source was uncategorized, followed by a stronger transmission that she had already categorized as Galactic News Radio, but on a different frequency. She pulled up the waveform and realized it was an audio transmission in the clear. She played it back for herself.
  
  "Golf November Romeo, this is Scout Thompson. Reporting, the vehicle matching the details of target Lima-One has approached Megaton with a heavily-laden flatbed trailer; it appears to be entering the settlement. Is this a priority mission?"
  
  "Thompson, Golf November Romeo, that is a negative. Repeat, negative. The owner is a local VIP that Star Paladin Lyons tried to visit recently. This mission is just to inform Lyons that she will likely be in town now. Can you identify the cargo? I'll add that as an appendix."
  
  "Golf November Romeo, Thompson, Looks like... Lots of heavy machinery, maybe computers, unknown. An operational looking tracked construction vehicle with a fork-lift attachment and a lot of crates, but they're under a bunch of tarps. They could be anything. Fuck, a dozen Protectrons and one Assaultron that are fully active and a deactivated Mister Handy under a tarp, I'd recognize that shape anywhere. Other miscellaneous things, a giant drill, probably for the construction vehicle."
  
  "Thompson, Golf November Romeo, copy that. That's very interesting, and that many combat or security robots will go straight into the daily intelligence digest; good work. Out."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows. It wasn't that surprising that the Brotherhood was keeping an eye on the comings and goings of Megaton, but it seems Sarah Lyons had not only received a promotion from the last time she saw her but also tried to visit Lily at her hospital while she was away. Lily didn't particularly like that, but at least everything seemed cordial, for now. The fact that the Brotherhood sent critical intelligence in the clear on the radio was a little disappointing, but hubris and the Brotherhood of Steel always seemed to go hand-in-hand.
  
  She used her radio direction finder system to pinpoint the location of the Brotherhood of Steel scout from triangulation, positioned in concealment in the ruins of a building about a kilometre away from the entrance to Megaton, with good sight lines on the entrance to the city. She was tempted to send her drone over there but decided against it. She didn't know what equipment he or his team had, and scouts tended to have good eyes. She would very much wish to keep secret the fact that she had that capability.
  
  She wouldn't be surprised if it was a scout sniper team in a semi-permanent nest from the first transmission. One kilometre was an easy shot for a marksman, but she had both armoured the cab of the truck and its windshield, but it seemed as though she was still on the good side of the Brotherhood. It was good to know that they likely had that capability, though.
  
  She debated whether or not to tell the others, as it wasn't anything Scott and Sophie didn't already probably know or guess. She decided to, anyway.
  
  Gary scoffed, "Don't think much of their opsec if their friggin scouts transmit in the clear. Do they think nobody else has radios?"
  
  Scott nodded at Gary, "Yes, basically they do. That is their blind spot. They are raised to consider everyone, not them, to be barbarians, basically. Although, to be honest, they do often use encryption. I believe that is one of the more fragile parts of military radio handsets, though, so they may have a shortage of working radios with the encryption working. The Enclave always encrypts their transmissions, though. The Brotherhood doesn't take them seriously, and who would with President Eden's radio broadcast, but they clearly have a better supply situation." He paused to consider, then added as an alternate possibility, "It's also possible they just concentrate their working equipment, as they very rarely leave Adams Air Force base."
  
  Lily seemed to notice that people were aware of the Enclave, but only their operation at Adams. She suspected that their main base at Raven Rock was still a carefully guarded secret.
  
  Scott glanced back at her as he pulled up to the guard station, "You can't be too surprised. With the products you're advertising, especially the genetic alterations, it was inevitable that they would come to take the measure of you."
  
  Lily nodded, but she had a sour face anyway, "Yes, but I was hoping to put it off a couple more months."
  
  There wasn't any kind of customs duties or anything in Megaton, the guard just wanted to make sure they weren't carrying a platoon of raiders in the back. He was a bit put off with the dozen Protectrons, which was a lot more effective than most raider platoons, until he saw Lily poking her head out the window, "Oh, it's you, Dr St. Claire. You can go on in."
  
  Lily smugly retreated back into the back of the cab, "See? I am zhe big shot, yes?"
  
  Gary just snorted, Scott was silent, but Sophie, at least, praised her.
  
  As they drove through the streets of Megaton slowly and headed east she slowly got intermittent pings from all of her equipment at the hospital. She didn't get a good signal until they were about a kilometre away, and she instantly dove deep into her mind to check on the status of everything.
  
  Alice was alive, that was good and the most important thing. Everything seemed to be going well. The patient archives seemed to indicate that there was brisk business while she was gone, but she just skimmed them. The Termitron she had left behind and her Labourtrons had tested over four hundred and twenty-two alloys, finding two matches to the characteristics she desired.
  
  They continued testing afterwards but shifted to a secondary objective in categorizing the material specifications for a number of steel, titanium, and aluminium alloys featuring semi-random metals added. A few alloys of aluminium showed some promise for both weight and refractivity.
  
  Lily noticed Alice tried to communicate with her on the chat protocol, but she was still using the old version, and there were incompatibilities. Lily would need to package and send her an OTA update for her OS and a number of apps that she had adjusted while she was gone, but she had a utility to automate that process based on snapshots, so it wouldn't be a problem.
  
  She started working on packaging the update now, sending a commit to her mainframe's version control system, which should automatically cryptographically sign the update and send it to all users, of which currently there was only Alice. It would take the Apprentice longer to review and approve the update than it did for her to send it out.
  
  As they pulled into the parking lot, Lily noticed a new structure. It was the garage she asked Tombs to build, although it actually looked more like a barn or an aircraft hangar, even. That suited her just fine, as it meant there was more room inside. It would take her days to unload everything and install it in the various places. She was going to use the fourth floor as the cloning lab but hadn't figured out a place to keep everything else. She suspected this garage would be where she constructed the trucks, so most of the vehicle-related things could stay inside here. She'd assign a permanent security presence and lock the gate.
  
  "Pull into that hangar or garage. We'll leave most of the loot on the trailer for now," Lily informed Scott, who backed the truck carefully into the large space.
  
  Matilda jumped off the trailer and walked into view. Her arm was repaired. It turned out the brute didn't need a new arm, just a new set of graphene cables, which was easily produced.
  
  Alice showed up after they had unloaded the Protectrons and carefully used the ramp to back the MUVS off the trailer to sit next to the truck. She said, "Ooh, cool! I'm glad you're back, Dr St. Claire! We had heard that a lone truck got attacked at the bridge, and I was worried you might have been hurt!"
  
  Lily smiled, then snorted. "Apprentice, where I grew up zhere was zhis saying... it was..." She then coughed into her fist formally before reciting, carefully enunciating each consonant, " Heroes die young, but calamities last a thousand years. "
  
  The Apprentice tilted her head to the side, and Lily pointedly ignored Gary staring at them, looking back and forth between Lily and Alice with a confused expression on his face. Alice finally asked, "So?"
  
  Lily grinned, ' Ahahah, she fell for it!' She whispered conspiratorially, "That means girls like us have a long time to live, yet! Don't worry so much!" Besides, this calamity intended to last much longer than that!
  
  The Apprentice snorted and shook her head, "A number of people came to visit you. Someone from Rivet City, working for Dr Madison Li, came to find out when was a good time that Dr Li might be able to visit with you; he's still in town. A Star Paladin Sarah Lyons came with what she called some Scribes and wanted to talk with you, but you weren't in. She said she'd come back. And the rest aren't that important, people from the mayor's department, Mr Tombs, but he didn't have anything pressing, just status reports, that sort of thing."
  
  Lily's eyebrows rose. She expected Sarah Lyons, but one of Madison Li's people? Sounds like a low-level staffer or assistant. Lily wondered why she was approaching her, possibly in cooperation? Lily would be interested in that. Dr Li might have heard that she was behind the new Eastside Water & Power Company and might be interested in comparing notes.
  
  Or maybe she just wanted a bulk discount on genetic therapies, who knew? She'd find out, she supposed.
  
  "'ow are zhe doctors working out?" Lily asked.
  
  Alice frowned in thought, "Pretty good, I suppose. Dr Rebecca was the one assisting me the most, but Dr Taylor answered my questions if I had any. I just get the impression he isn't as good a teacher. Business has been steady. I followed your directions and protocols as far as customers wanting any of your therapies were concerned, and there were a number of buyers. Mainly the clean metabolism mod and the life extension therapy."
  
  Lily nodded, "Speaking of teachers, zhis man is named Gary Kaminsky. I've 'ired him to educate your brats-err siblings, and possibly assist in some of your education zhat I am less suited to provide. I will still personally oversee your education, zhough."
  
  Alice looked quite unsure, but Gary was charismatic enough and shook her hand, "We will talk about 'is particular advantages over other teachers later. Are zhose light poles I saw on the drive up here and around l'hôpital?"
  
  Alice already knew Scott and Sophie, so she just waved at them.
  
  Alice grinned as wide as Lily had ever seen her, "Yeah! That's all me! Well, Nick and me. I used your.. uhh.." she glanced at Gary, and Lily waved her hand and said, "Gary 'elped us raid a factory full of loot, 'e already knows some of my special capabilities."
  
  The Apprentice nodded, "Well, I used your fabricators to build giant replacement lightbulbs to ring the hospital and go up and down our street a few hundred metres. At night it reduces crime a lot!"
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows, looking a little impressed, "Really? 'ow?" Although she was already searching through all of the fabricators to pull the design specs of designs Alice had made. They were clearly regular incandescent bulbs, so there had to be a vacuum inside in order to work properly. That wasn't a project she would expect either Alice or a ten-year-old boy, gifted or not, to be able to accomplish.
  
  "Well, Nick helped me iterate through designs until I found one that worked. We had to build a number of models that didn't work, but we had a busted bulb to use as a model. It took a lot of use of your callipers, but we finally got one that was identical," Alice started to explain enthusiastically.
  
  "Mr Tombs was the one who told me that the bulbs had to have a vacuum inside to light up, so that was an additional complication, but in the end, we managed to do it! Mr Tombs' men wired the poles into the power for us, and people have been asking to buy them!" the girl even pumped her hand in the air at the end.
  
  Lily nodded, seeing the simple vacuum system she had used. It was similar to the medical suction systems she had already designed for the hospital, and Alice clearly repurposed the design that Lily left behind in the mainframe. That it worked was pretty amazing, Lily thought. The suction system would draw down the bulb to a vacuum, and the metallic base would be crimped onto position, almost like a rivet gun or bottling machine.
  
  Still, Lily asked her solemnly, "And 'ow did you do all zhis while still keeping zhe you-know-what a secret from your brother?"
  
  Alice scowled, "It wasn't easy! It involved a lot of drawing, let me tell you. He thinks you have some sort of design system in the basement. I'd like your permission to tell both Isis and Nick about it, it is becoming impossible to keep it a secret living in the same house.
  
  Lily hummed and considered that. It certainly would be difficult, wouldn't it? She sighed and then nodded, "Fine. You can tell zhem. But you're responsible for zhem. And you can sell zhese to zhe city or property owners if you want. It would 'elp gentrify the neighbourhood. Do some research and settle on a price, and I will buy the ones around zhe hôpital. It is a good idea. But first, we shall do some quality assurance. I'm not so sure your air-tight seal shall last too long. We'll find out together, zhough."
  
  More than the benefits of gentrification, it was a good idea that Lily didn't have to spend much time doing herself, which should be rewarded.
  
  Lily had already reviewed the design. The bulbs were made out of diamond, but then again, so were regular street lights that still sometimes worked after two hundred years. She used the metal printer for the screw-on base to preserve its conductivity. Alice must not have known the settings for the dopants to turn a carbon allotrope conductive, which ended up being good as a metal base looked much more like a Fallout-universe bulb.
  
  The filaments she tried were varied, but the girl seemed to settle on a carbon-based one, much to Lily's relief. The tungsten design Lily saw in the files would have worked for sure, but it was Lily's precious tungsten!
  
  It wasn't really the use of diamondoid materials Lily wanted to hide but the fact that she could build them in arbitrary shapes and quickly, which she suspected Fallout manufacturing definitely could not. Everything she saw seemed to indicate that there was a lot of tooling involved in such manufacturing during the Pre-War period. Seeing new lightbulbs? Someone would just assume she looted a lightbulb factory, or something, so long as the Apprentice wasn't too radical in her design iterations.
  
  The group of adventurers and one nearly sixteen-year-old girl walked together into the hospital's foyer. It was lunchtime, and after Lily ate, she was going to see how many auto-turrets she could build in the next day or day and a half until she got a visit by the Brotherhood of Steel. It was best to be seen as not a push-over with them, even if she privately liked Sarah Lyons.
  
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  Centre of Her Web
  Lily backed away slowly from the new batch of delivered ether in a crate, as delivered by one of the stupider partners from the distillation company and a worker. The man had caught her after lunch and seemed proud of it, but Lily was just scared of it.
  
  She hissed, "I told you, you 'ad to store zhis in dark-coloured glass bottles. And zhere is no iron in any of zhose bottles!"
  
  "But, it is kind of hard to find dark glass bottles. They're twice as expensive, and that is even when they are available. We haven't been able to find any lately. And we never did understand why you said that about the iron. What's the reason for those things?" the man argued.
  
  Lily had told them the reason! She would tell them again. She spoke softly, gently to the man, "Like most unusual zhings about zhe storage of ether, it is to prevent it from exploding."
  
  She didn't actually remember why, herself. She pulled up memories of herself looking through a chemistry textbook about ether and hummed, "Ether is zhe very reactive chemical. It will react with sunlight and oxygen to produce an explosive gas inside zhe bottle." She thought it was one of the peroxides but wasn't about to say something that might be incorrect, and it wasn't like this man would understand anyway.
  
  Surprisingly the man seemed a little smarter than she thought because he nodded, "Oh. So, the dark glass is to keep sunlight out. And the iron is to..." But, then, he looked thoughtful, "use up all the oxygen inside the bottle to create rust?"
  
  She blinked at him. Did he understand the chemical process of iron oxidation? She nodded at him, "Yes. Precisely."
  
  The man carefully put the top of the crate back on it, "Okay. I'll take these back. Does that mean we can use paint on these clear bottles or maybe even wrap them in dark paper? As for the iron, any steel would work, wouldn't it?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Yes, as to zhe painting or paper, and yes, most steels, but not rust-resistant ones like stainless steel. Just regular iron would be better. If you wait 'ere a moment, I will bring you a long reel of pure iron wire."
  
  She met one of her robots coming up the stairs with about a few kilos of fine iron wire that she had scavenged in the past and never actually used. She thought it was for agricultural electrical fencing and thought it might have been useful. Well, it was useful now.
  
  She handed him the spool, which he carried himself after thanking her. She noticed he had his worker carry back the crate of ether, who looked slightly disgruntled, which probably was wise of him. It probably wouldn't explode, but Lily certainly wouldn't carry or be next to it.
  
  Downstairs, both her DMLS and nanofabrication systems were already working, pumping out the over seventy-five individual parts needed for her newly designed dual electrolaser/laser auto-turret. She had considered a turret that could fire either as a laser or as an electrolaser but figured that what the Mechanist actually meant was a turret that could fire both simultaneously. It made the device slightly bulkier, but they were still smaller than a normal sentry gun.
  
  Her design was meant to be wired into a building's power supply. However, each turret included one large energy cell that would power the device for a little while in the absence of power so that cutting power to a building would not deactivate the turrets.
  
  All of her buildings would have their own backup power systems, true, but it didn't sit right with her that a ninja could sneak into her electrical distribution panel and just turn off the defences via flipping a few circuit-breakers. That sounded like her playstyle! You can't hustle a hustler.
  
  The only single point of failure left on the turrets was the computing backbone needed to provide any targeting beyond 'shoot everything that moves.' Lily didn't have the capability to manufacture quantum processors yet, nor could she even manufacture traditional processors that were much faster than an Intel 80386.
  
  Hence, she used her building's mainframe to run the software that handled the target acquisition and tactics. Still, even if the system went down, she could take control of the turrets herself, also. So, so long as she or the Apprentice was in the building, it wasn't technically a single point of failure.
  
  She headed downstairs and decided to have a quick chat with the doctor that was on duty, apparently Dr Rebecca. She had been gone for a while, and it was best to touch base with her more important employees.
  
  There were no pressing patients, at the moment, so the Bonesaw girl sat down with her with some tea, "'Ow 'ave zhings been going for you, Doctor?"
  
  Rebecca smiled, and shrugged. "Fairly good, I suppose. I have learned a lot about the technical aspects of doctoring that I never knew about. If I may toot my own horn, I'm something of an artist programming the Auto-Docs, now. Alice has been shadowing me when you were gone; she has a good head on her shoulders."
  
  Lily nodded. She already knew that Rebecca was very good with the Auto-Docs before she even left but decided to review the programmed procedures on the devices. Perhaps Lily herself would learn something, "Zhat's good. Was zhere anything you wanted to discuss with me?"
  
  The younger woman hesitated a moment before nodding, "I'd like to do more to help Little Lamplight, and especially the kids, as they get too old to stay there."
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "Like a Mungo Benevolent Association?" Lily paused and added a potential motto in a sotto voice, " For Mungos, By Mungos. "
  
  That caused Rebecca to crack up, laughing, but she nodded rapidly, "Exactly! Something based in Big Town that would help a new mungo get on his or her feet. I'd also like to offer help to Little Lamplight itself, but it's kind of hard to do so after you get as old as I am."
  
  Lily hummed. As far as she was concerned, the kids in Little Lamplight were innocent and, therefore, deserving of protection. "Well, I am definitely willing to assist both of these..." she paused to consider an appropriate word, "charities. Try to think of what both a new mungo would need the most and what Little Lamplight might need the most."
  
  Bonesaw nodded, "Little Lamplight, that's easy. Food, more electrical power and weapons. In that order." Lily blinked. The kids in Little Lamplight had electrical power?
  
  Lily asked, curious, "Where do the Lamplighters get power in the first place?"
  
  "From Vault 87. There are very well concealed wires running all the way through Murder Pass and into Little Lamplight. But, they can only draw about 200 amps. Otherwise, it trips a circuit breaker inside Vault 87. Hasn't happened in recent memory, but there was a cautionary tale of a number of deaths involved in resetting that circuit breaker in the past. As such, they installed a 150 amp circuit breaker on the Lamplight side, so that is the most they can use," Bonesaw said in a straightforward manner.
  
  Lily hummed. She didn't like the idea of giving a bunch of kids one of her fusion generators; there were a number of ways that could go wrong. They did, potentially, require some maintenance now and again. And all of their failure modes tended to involve hot plasma that would turn a kid into a crispy nugget.
  
  However, she could build a generator and attach it to one of the numerous Corvega fission motors she had brought home. Didn't Scott say that was how he provided power to his electronics store for years? "I could, perhaps, build and donate a small generator that would produce about fifty or sixty kilowatts." She knew that the motors were a lot more powerful than that but didn't know precisely how efficient she could get an attached generator, especially without a complicated cooling system.
  
  If the Lamplighters could only use 150 amps, stolen from Vault 87, then at 120 volts, that was barely 9 kilowatts that they could use right now. Rebecca raised her eyebrows, "And how long would this generator run? And, I can't remember, but how much power would that be compared to what they have now?"
  
  Honestly, she is still plenty impressed that what amounted to a former feral child knows what an amp was in the first place, "For about twenty years. It would just be zhe fission motor from a Corvega car with zhe output shaft connected to a regular generator. Assuming zhat Little Lamplight is pulling power from a normal 120-volt circuit in the Vault, 150 amps would be about 9 kilowatts."
  
  Rebecca nodded rapidly, "It is 120 volts. That, I definitely remember. Wow, that would be over five times their current capacity. That would help a lot. Most of the power is used to purify water, with most of the rest being used for some of the defences in Murder Pass and lighting. That would be great! I'm not real sure how to solve their perpetual food problems, though."
  
  Lily agreed to build the device but told Rebecca it might be a few weeks before it was available. She would talk to the Mechanist about his version-no need to reinvent the wheel, after all. She left and headed downstairs to assemble the prototype of her new auto-turret.
  
  Lily triggered the self-test of the mechanism of the installed turret, and it traversed a full 360 degrees, as well as tilted its two beam apertures up and down the full travel. Nodding, satisfied, she ignored the slightly uneasy look from a potential patient walking through the front door.
  
  This version wasn't the covert style that she had considered that would deploy out of the ceiling and surprise someone. Lily both didn't have the time for that additional complexity, and she wanted these turrets to be seen.
  
  She installed the first prototype outside, in front of the main door and offset to the left. She had already tested it downstairs, and both weapon types seemed to work correctly, so she had started the next building, which she would install next to this first one, to the right. Then she would build two more and install those two directly inside the foyer, where she stationed a Protectron during normal business hours.
  
  That Protectron acted as a guard to the man she hired, whose job was to try to ensure patients did not come into her hospital excessively armed. She doubted very much she could get the Brotherhood of Steel to disarm completely, but perhaps they would leave their long guns at the door and meet her with only plasma pistols or laser pistols if they intended to make nice-nice with her.
  
  Two more turrets would be installed in her large office, where she would meet with the Brotherhood. She had other covert defences in there, but they were indiscriminate and could only be used once, so she hoped never to need them at all.
  
  After that, she would follow the pattern and install two turrets at every entrance and exit on the ground floor. There was one large loading entrance on each north and south side and two more in the back at the east entrance that opened up almost directly into the Megaton security fence. Nobody used those two entrances, but ninjas might.
  
  Well, actually, she would climb up the exterior wall and would never enter the building from the ground floor if she wanted to sneak inside. It was obvious that the most security would be on the ground floor, after all. That meant she would need one turret on each floor in the stairwell, too, for a potential ninja attack.
  
  It might be a bit too anti-social to include one inside the elevator car, so she might wait until she can design a covert type before doing that.
  
  Glancing at her chronometer, she figured she would definitely get at least the first eight or so turrets built and placed before Sarah Lyons showed up. It all depended on her. She was a military leader and a busy woman, she might not show up for a week or more, or if her schedule was free, she might show up tomorrow. Lily felt it wise to assume she would come as soon as possible.
  
  She had a lot of tasks that she would rather be working on instead of building and installing defences, but at the same time, she got a sense of satisfaction in protecting her web.
  
  Still, there was a lot of waiting involved, so in between assembling turrets, she would bring up some other research and work on it or see a patient for a consult.
  
  After reviewing her patient records, she discovered her clean metabolism modification was selling like hotcakes. It was cheap enough that someone could save for a month or two and buy it without breaking the bank. Moreover, it also provided immediate and apparent benefits compared to her life extension therapy which was only nebulous as far as the average consumer was concerned.
  
  Only one person had purchased the reflex augmentation while she was gone. Lily had even told the Apprentice to discount it by 33%, as it was one of those that would only see sales by word-of-mouth. Hopefully, that man who purchased it would talk about her product, as his post-exposure testing noted a marked increase in his reflexes.
  
  She had ducked into her office to wait for the next set of parts to build, and the Apprentice knocked on her door, "Dr St. Claire, there is a Zhao Yun here to see you. He is a representative of Dr Madison Li, from Rivet City. Do you have time?"
  
  Lily blinked. An obviously Chinese name was unusual in America, even Dr Li had an anglo first name. How interesting. She nodded, "Yes, please. Please show him in, and zhen bring us the tea service, if you don't mind, Apprentice. Then you can join us, if you like."
  
  Alice seemed to like tea, so she brightened and nodded. She stepped inside the office, and trailing her in was... someone as blonde and round-eyed as she was. Confusing. She had stood up politely and just blinked. First, however, she motioned to one of the pairs of comfortable chairs she had in front of her desk, "'ave a seat, Monsieur Zhao. " There would be no fault with her manners.
  
  The man smiled and nodded, taking a seat, "Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Although she was a woman, she was also the hostess, so she waited until he had taken his seat before returning to hers. She smiled, "Of course. I 'ave a lot of respect for what I've learned about Dr Li and her entire team." Lily then paused and asked, hesitantly, "Monseuir Zhao... if you don't mind me asking..."
  
  He chuckled, clearly understanding, "My name? A family adopted me as a baby in a small settlement that had been founded by Chinese POWs and interned Chinese-American citizens before the Great War. Although, there are maybe one in five members of the community that aren't, strictly speaking, Chinese, almost everyone, even the blondes, have Chinese names."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows. How very interesting. A successful community if they have survived over two hundred years. Lily wouldn't mind visiting if it was nearby, but she wasn't uncouth enough to ask him to point out his ancestral home on her PipBoy, or something.
  
  She decided to take a risk and shifted to Mandarin, " Is a name all that your family gave you?"
  
  Now it was his turn for his eyebrows to reach his scalp, and he even started laughing, replying in the same language, " No! If I hadn't known everyone growing up, I'd say you would have had to grow up next door, although your accent is a lot different. I never expected the shoe to be on the other foot, as it were, but I am now the one shocked. How can you speak Chinese? Did you grow up in a similar community?"
  
  Lily grinned. She was speaking standard Mandarin rather than the Wu dialect she grew up with, but she still spoke with a clear Shanghai accent, while Zhao was speaking with a pronounced and standard Beijinger accent.
  
  She found his accent very fascinating. It was almost the prototypical snooty and elite Beijing urban accent. She suspected that a number of the founders of his community, or perhaps the ancestors of his family, might have been in high status, no doubt POWs. It wouldn't be that surprising for a stalag for officers or high-status prisoners being near Washington, DC. What was surprising to her was that they survived at all. She would have suspected Pre-War America to have some sort of purge protocol in the event of nuclear warfare.
  
  Lily wasn't about to say that she grew up in Shanghai, which was why her accent was different, so she just shrugged, switching back to English, "Zhere are dozens of accents and dialects in mainland China, some of which you might find entirely unintelligible. But no, I didn't grow up in a community of foreign Chinese nationals on American soil. But, my parents valued... ehh.. 'ow you say? A classical education, of which foreign languages featured prominently." It was true, too. Every Shanghai child had to learn English, and her parents, the little she can remember of them, made her study one language in addition to that.
  
  The Apprentice arrived then, with a tea service on a tray. She sat it in front of Lily, who prepared it briskly into three bowl-like cups. It was a bit uncouth to serve tea like this, at a desk, but nobody would likely call her out on it. The Apprentice offered one of the tea cups to Zhao and sat next to him. The man hesitantly took a sip and then smiled, "It's not bad!"
  
  The Apprentice nodded happily, taking a sip herself. "I quite like Dr St. Claire's tea; it gives me pep!"
  
  Lily chuckled, "Zhat's not very surprising. Zhere is an alkaloid in zhe leaves of zhe mutfruit shrubs I use for tea leaves zhat is a slight dopamine reuptake inhibitor."
  
  Alice stared at her, with her cup close to her mouth. She had studied enough of biology and Lily had talked enough with her about pharmacology that she seemed to understand that, "Dr St. Claire! Are you saying there is amphetamine in your tea?!"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Not at all." Because amphetamine only described a very particular chemical family. The alkaloid was closer to cocaine, actually. She wouldn't say that, though.
  
  "Besides, it is in very small quantities. So long as you don't go out and de-leaf all zhe mutfruits you find and extract zhe alkaloid for pure consumption, you'll be fine. It's barely more of a stimulant zhan one would find in a cup or two of coffee," Lily finished.
  
  Alice looked thoughtful, but Zhao didn't seem concerned and finished his tea. After a moment, the Apprentice did the same with a shrug. Zhao remarked, "I wasn't aware that the leaves of mutafruit shrubs had that chemical property. That must be a new discovery of yours?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Not really. I 'eard that tribals in far-off villages often chew on mutfruit leaves, and zhat reminded me of something I 'eard about in zhe history of Central America. So, zhe tribals get zhe credit for zhis discovery."
  
  Alice mentioned wryly, "That explains why I had heart palpitations after I had three cups last week at breakfast."
  
  Lily snorted, "Yes, you probably shouldn't do zhat." She turned to Zhao and asked, "So, my Apprentice told me zhat your primary purpose was to arrange a time zhat Dr Li and I might 'ave consultations in person. 'ow can I help Dr Li and Rivet City? I apologize for my absence, by zhe way."
  
  Zhao waved off her apology, "It is of no matter. I would have had to wait the same amount of time just to get a safe caravan back to Rivet City, so you did not delay me at all. And yes, that was correct. Dr Li has heard about the power company you started and even had some correspondence with the engineers you hired, two of which are Rivet City citizens. She is very interested in the process you use to generate electricity using a high-energy plasma without going through a traditional steam and turbine process."
  
  Zhao must be one of Dr Li's assistants as he seemed to understand all that, which made sense. Dr Li certainly made a lot more sense in sending a minion to arrange a meeting compared to Sarah Lyons, who just showed up out of the blue. But that was the difference a decade or two of experience could provide. Sarah Lyons was still in her early twenties.
  
  Lily nodded, and Zhao continued, "Dr Li usually makes two or three trips to Megaton a year and would like to coordinate with you to make sure you'll be present. She told me to make sure you were aware she didn't intend for you to come to Rivet City, as she suspected you would be extremely busy for some time setting up your own hospital and research centre."
  
  Wow! How polite! Lily was moved a little bit. And the assumption, as if taken for granted, that Lily was building her own research centre was insightful. She nodded, "I doubt I will leave Megaton within zhe next four months. After zhat, I 'ave a project zhat might take me from home for two weeks or so." Of course, Lily didn't know how long it would take to safely approach the VSS building, and loot it, so she was using a conservative estimate.
  
  Zhao nodded, "That's perfect. She had planned a trip in about two months. I will make sure to tell her that you will likely be present if that is okay?" Lily nodded, and he continued, "Dr Li wasn't aware of your expertise in the field of genetics, and I suspect that she might be as interested in those products you sell as much as your insights into fusion. In fact, I was hoping to purchase some of your treatments so as to reassure her and my colleagues that they are safe and effective."
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "You are not worried about zheir safety or efficacy yourself?"
  
  He chuckled, "I've talked to a number of people in town who have taken at least one of them, and at least in the short term, there doesn't appear to be any side effects, and the effectiveness seems obvious. Besides, I am the most junior of the research team, so it isn't unusual for me to take risky jobs." He then paused and grinned mischievously, "Besides, if I couch it as a test, I can get Dr Li to reimburse me for all of the treatments as a job expense!"
  
  The Apprentice laughed at that and gave him a thumbs up, "Nice hustle."
  
  Lily nodded, "Which treatments would you like? We only 'ave four presently, but I 'ope to have a couple of others by zhe time Dr Li visits. I'd be willing to offer you and any of Dr Li's team sixty per cent off as a professional courtesy on our purely genetic treatments."
  
  He continued to grin, "Thank you for the discount, and I would like all of them! I especially want the reflex augmentation first, as that might save my life in the field." Well, he wasn't just the Ivory Tower academic, then? She supposed the most junior member of a research team might get most of the field assignments.
  
  Lily glanced at her chronometer and nodded. She didn't have time to do his entire intake consult as she still had another turret to assemble and then Scott's surgery scheduled right after that, but the girl was trained, and Lily could glance at his genome as soon as it was sequenced and check her work, "Zhat's fine. You need to wait twenty-four hours after each treatment, is zhat fine?"
  
  That caused him to make a face, "I'm scheduled to depart in three days."
  
  Lily hummed, "Well, zhe treatment is just an inhaler, normally I don't sell zhem as a takeaway item as zhey are perishable and I prefer to be present or at least available during zhe treatment, but I will give you your last treatment, and you can take it while travelling. You either 'ave to freeze it or take it within forty-eight hours, zhough."
  
  That caused him to smile again, "That would be great. Is there some initial exam necessary?" At that, Lily nodded.
  
  "Yes, my Apprentice will conduct your initial intake exam and consult. If everything is fine with your genome, I'll come by and give you zhe treatment and zhen you can return the same time tomorrow for number two," Lily told him and glanced at the Apprentice.
  
  The girl nodded and stood up, "Certainly, Dr St. Claire! Mr Yun, if you would follow me to an exam room."
  
  He smiled wryly and stood, followed by Lily as she corrected Alice, "Apprentice, cultural lesson. In many East Asian cultures, from which you could say zhat Monsieur Zhao definitely originates, zhe family name comes first, followed by the given name. So it is Monsieur Zhao, not Yun."
  
  Alice looked interested, "That is interesting. How do you know which one is which, as I assume sometimes they would switch that when coming to Western countries?"
  
  Lily clucked her tongue, "Sometimes, yes. But Zhao is an incredibly common surname, with Yun being less common, so you just kind of guess, or ask, I suppose. Go ahead and see to Monsieur Zhao; I'll take the tea service back to the kitchen."
  
  Alice looked thoughtful and nodded, then led Zhao out of her office to one of the exam rooms. She had another turret to assemble and install and then the Mechanist's surgery, which might take several hours as she was doing a complete skull replacement as well, as well as an installation of a medichine implant.
  
  Without a medichine nanohive to keep all of the electrical filaments in the proper place in a person's brain, installing the brain-computer would eventually kill them within a few months. Lily hoped to have a bioware interface designed within a couple of years which would remove that requirement, but for the moment, anyone who wanted a brain-computer would have to be trusted with the same generation of medichines that the Apprentice had, so it was going to be strictly friends and family thing for some time.
  
  Sophie wanted to watch the surgery, but Lily nixed that idea. Both she and her social assistant agreed that watching your loved one get the skin flayed off his bones wasn't a good idea, even if you intellectually knew it was for his overall benefit and that he would be fine. To say nothing about when Lily brought out the rotary saw and started carving whole segments of his skull out. It just wasn't a good idea to watch.
  
  When the Mechanist found out about her full list of products, he asked her to sell him a PHOENIX system as well. She had just shrugged. She was charging him her friends and family rates on all of this, even taking a lot of payment in trade, but it was still nice to sell one of those devices now and then. She still had over twenty-five of them, as they were a bit too pricey for the average person walking in on the street to buy.
  
  The surgery went fast, with Alice acting as her assistant. She could probably have programmed the Auto-Doc to do a lot of it, but she enjoyed keeping her hands in, as it were, and it only took two hours to complete all three surgeries, including grafting the PHOENIX device into the Mechanist's cardiovascular system, even with pausing to move at the Apprentice's pace and to answer her questions about particular techniques or choices she made during the procedures.
  
  Lily had Alice and one of the Labourtrons take the still unconscious Scott to recovery, which actually served double-duty as one of her few ICU beds. It would likely only take him a few hours to recover enough to be discharged, maybe less than that considering his two new healing implants.
  
  She found Sophie floating a line back in forth in the waiting area anxiously, which amused her. "All zhree procedures are done and a success, Sophie. Your Romeo should be waking up in about fifteen minutes or so, and is in zhe post-op recovery bed, right now. You can go wait by 'is bedside, if you like."
  
  She activated her afterburners or something because Lily had never seen her accelerate so fast. Lily got a, "Thanks, Miss Lily! I'll see you later!" as the robot girl blew past her.
  
  Lily chuckled. Since she had gotten her diagnostic tablet broken, she had to create a different way to initial configure and set up the implants. She already had discussed how unsettling the initial set up was with Scott, who just shrugged. He would be able to do it himself, using the diagnostic port at the base of his skull and a terminal, and she had already left detailed instructions, so she would not have to oversee it unless something went wrong.
  
  She had nothing else to do today except continue popping out turrets. It was kind of nice that her robots did about eighty per cent of the assembly for her. It wasn't quite an automated assembly line yet, but someday she could see that being the case, especially for simple objects.
  
  Lily's dreams in her abbreviated sleep cycle were trippy, as usual. By the time everyone else was awake, and breakfast was being served, she had managed to install and test eight of the auto-turrets, including two inside her office. And it appears she was wise to work as fast as she did, as while finishing up and bussing her plate, she detected an uncategorized voice transmission on an airband frequency.
  
  Playing it back, she discovered as she thought it was a Brotherhood Vertibird that was landing near Megaton. Although it didn't announce who was on board, it wasn't surprising for Sarah Lyons, plus presumably important scribes, to merit a pickup and dropoff using a Vertibird. Interesting, it appeared that the GNR building had a helipad on the roof sturdy enough to support Vertibirds, as the aircraft reported it was proceeding there.
  
  The Apprentice was eating breakfast with her siblings upstairs, so Lily sent the girl a message to expect Brotherhood VIP visitors, sending the girl a link to the radio transmission.
  
  She expected them to arrive shortly after the hospital opened for the morning. Dr Taylor was working today, so she would stay in her office to receive such important guests.
  
  She hummed as she considered her office from behind her large chair. She had decorated it somewhat ostentatiously, but some of that was to cover up what had been, until now, its only defences. She glanced at the seemingly decorative panels on one side of the wall and sent a test packet, signed with her cryptographic private key, to the devices concealed beneath them.
  
  She nodded. Good, they were functioning properly. But everything would have gone to total shit if she were forced to use them.
  
  Sure enough, her drone detected a group of two Power Armoured people trailed by two in Scribe robes approaching the hospital just a little after opening time. Each of the turrets also had audio and optical sensors, in addition to passive infrared and electromagnetic, so she had much of the hospital wired for sight and sound now. She pulled up the feed from one of the turrets in front of the entrance.
  
  POV Senior Scribe Ferguson
  
  Ferguson slowed a little bit as he approached the hospital. He liked Star Paladin Sarah Lyons, but Knight Sibley was a bit of an asshole. Sibley was part of Paladin Casdin's clique, and he didn't even know why he was on this mission in the first place. Scribe Williams was a doctor, like he was, although she was more of a traditional surgeon while he focused on genetics, cybernetics and, most importantly, for this mission, virology.
  
  The Brotherhood didn't encourage the study of viruses but wouldn't stop a scribe that was interested so long as they did so safely. He was the foremost expert on viruses and infectious diseases in this Chapter, so it wasn't surprising Lyons asked for him to attend her in this matter.
  
  A new doctor appearing in the Wasteland, selling genetic alterations using what appeared to be a viral vector? There was no way the Brotherhood would not investigate that.
  
  However, he was actually quite optimistic and a little jealous. They had managed to get some samples of the mutagenic agent by the simple expedient of having one of their local contacts buy the treatment and then examining a blood sample.
  
  Examining the virion under magnification did not help too much in his study of it, as it did not appear like any virus he was familiar with. Thank Maxson, it did appear to be a normal virus, not looking at all what like what the accursed FEV appeared like according to the stored images in their archives.
  
  When he tried to culture more of the virions by infecting an immortal cell line, he was amazed that after about fifteen cycles of replication, all of the virions ceased all replication and, essentially, deactivated themselves. It was fascinating!
  
  This woman, this Doctor clearly knew much more about his own specialization than he did. Some of the Knights and Paladins thought this was Very Dangerous, but most of the Scribes were a lot more laid back.
  
  He, like most of his colleagues, was a lot less militant in his opinions compared to a small minority of the Paladins and Knights who suggested immediately burning this hospital down, presumably with all of its inhabitants inside, as if she were a witch or something.
  
  The four of them were here today, putatively at the invite of Megaton's Mayor, to analyze a treatment the doctor described as a life extension therapy. The Mayor wanted to know if it was safe and effective. He did too. Who wouldn't want to live longer and be healthier?
  
  The Brotherhood generally cooperated with requests like this from what amounted to civilian authorities, especially in large settlements, with the exception of Rivet City, where they maintained a slightly more formal and chilly, if technically friendly, relationship.
  
  It would have been helpful if the treatment they purchased had been life-extension therapy, but their budget Scribes told them to get the cheapest one available, which apparently made one's sweat act like soap and vaguely smell of mint? It was very effective from his study of the volunteer while he was in quarantine.
  
  Supposedly the Doctor had offered to let a suitable educated person examine her work, according to the Mayor. But, generally, in his experience Wasteland scientists never expected the Brotherhood to show up.
  
  He wondered if this doctor would authorize a licensing scheme for the soap-sweat alteration. Or at least a bulk purchase? Because he knew a large percentage of the Brotherhood, who would benefit from it. Namely, everyone who wore Power Armour, just to start, and if they had to buy it retail, it would blow out the yearly budget.
  
  He had already identified and quantified the changes to the genome, using a snapshot of the volunteer's genome pre and post-administration, and it was quite an ingenious and perfectly safe alteration! He had reported as much to Elder Lyons, too.
  
  "Woah, those are new," Lyons said as they approached the door. He glanced up and widened his eyes as he stared at what were two obvious auto-turrets. And not machine-gun ones, neither. He could see the glint of the optical waveguides on both apertures, they were lasers for sure.
  
  Sibley scoffed, "Never seen that kind of sentry-gun before, it's probably crap."
  
  Ferguson looked at him like he was a very special child, "An unknown model of obvious energy-weapon turrets should make you more concerned, not less." He left out "you absolute imbecile" at the end, but his tone made it obvious that was what he meant.
  
  They had slowed to a halt in front of the door. Sarah Lyons glanced at him and asked, interested, "Analysis?"
  
  He shrugged. He wasn't a damn weapons engineer. Still, he WAS a Senior Scribe, so he would give it his best shot, "Obviously, a dual laser turret. It seems to have a full range of motion, using a traditional half-sphere rotation mechanism. There is a very small third aperture below one of them; figure it for a laser rangefinder, perhaps. I will note that they don't look like they've spent a hundred years in some military base. They look clean, well taken care of, almost new."
  
  Lyons asked curiously, "A rangefinder? On a short-range turret? Try again."
  
  He sighed long and theatrically and considered it for a moment. "If they have the technology for a steerable beam, it might be a type of LIDAR system to defeat StealthBoys. You know that they don't provide perfect optical stealth, and a LIDAR system could give a possible outline to a stealthed intruder." He paused; he had just pulled that out of his ass, but he liked the sound of it, "That's a good idea, actually. I'm going to give that idea to Scribe Bowditch when we get back."
  
  Lyons chuckled, "Okay. We'll go with possible anti-stealth features, then. That makes me worry about them more, though."
  
  He shrugged, "Or they were taken off as a complete assembly from some sort of laser SHORAD system, and they are rangefinders, just included with the design."
  
  Lyons nodded, "That's possible too, but it would still be an unfamiliar SHORAD design then. Well, whatever, I doubt we will be smote so long as we are polite."
  
  They walked as a group into the foyer of the hospital.
  
  Lily POV
  
  That one Scribe seemed pretty smart. In fact, she now had the idea to use a LIDAR system to detect stealthed ninjas.
  
  However, all of his guesses were wrong, though. The smaller aperture was a laser aperture for use when the turret fired the electrolaser in stunning mode, as it needed to create a complete electrical circuit to stun somebody properly. She wanted the option to not always fry someone with a lightning bolt, so having a less-lethal option was very useful and was included.
  
  There was a bit of a hiccup when the male in Power Armour did not want to surrender his laser rifle, but he got overruled by Sarah Lyons. If there was going to be a problem, that asshole was going to be the one to start it.
  
  The Apprentice knocked at her door again, "Dr St. Claire? You have visitors, a Star Paladin Sarah Lyons from the Brotherhood of Steel, and party."
  
  Lily stood up and said mildly, "Go ahead, and show zhem in. Zhen make sure we're not disturbed, please, Apprentice." Alice nodded, and showed the four in.
  
  Lily smiled at the Paladin she recognized and offered in a friendly tone, "Congratulations on your promotion since we last met, Star Paladin. At least, I assume zhat is better zhan a regular Paladin? You'll forgive me if I am unfamiliar with your organization's rank structure."
  
  They all glanced at the two turrets in her ceiling before walking inside. Lyons didn't seem to mind, and she was friendly right back, "Ah, thank you, Dr St. Claire. Yes, it is a promotion of a sort. It's more of a level of confidence to conduct independent operations at my discretion, like my visit to you today."
  
  Lily hummed, "Oh? An operation? Well, how can I help you today? I'm afraid I only 'ave two seats, but something tells me zhat you two strong warriors would prefer to stand, anyway?"
  
  Lyons smiled and nodded, "Yes. Our Scribes would appreciate the rest, though. Let me introduce you. This is Senior Scribe Ferguson, and this is Scribe Williams. Both are medical doctors like yourself, although Scribe Ferguson's speciality includes the study of genetics, viruses, epidemiology and other infectious diseases. This is Knight Sibley."
  
  The one named Sibley was stoic and didn't even nod. Lily wanted to roll her eyes.
  
  Lily motioned for the two Scribes to sit down, and followed suit, taking her seat behind her desk. She glanced at the one named Ferguson, "Oh? Zhat is interesting. Zhat matches many of my own fields of study, as well. 'owever, I admit to not being zhat up to date in epidemiology or infectious diseases other zhan viruses, which I study mainly for their synergy with genetics. I'd love to chat with you about zhat, Dr Ferguson."
  
  She was, calculatingly, being quite honest about her fields of study. It wouldn't due to lie, especially if they had somebody who might be able to understand what she was saying was bullshit.
  
  The Scribe named Ferguson smiled and nodded friendily, "Yes, me too! We were asked by the Mayor of Megaton to investigate the safety and efficacy of a treatment you market as life-extending. When we looked into it, it was clear that your treatment uses a viral or viral-like vector. The Brotherhood takes all instances of synthetic man-made viruses very seriously, and we want to ensure nothing you are doing could be a hazard to the public at large."
  
  Wow, what a silver tongue! She even suspected he meant most of that, but what was left unsaid was also important. She almost forgot that she had told the Mayor's assistant that she would allow a geneticist of his choice to examine her treatment. She sighed; she didn't expect the Mayor to have a relationship with the Brotherhood or the Brotherhood actually to be useful for once.
  
  She nodded, "Ah, I understand, somewhat, at least. You were quite correct, it is virus-like, but not a virus. I call it a virulosin, a medicine derived from zhe virus. Zhe main way zhat my virulosin differentiates itself from a virus is zhat it is incapable of replicating beyond control. Every virion of zhe treatment can only replicate so many generations before being deactivated. Zherefore, zhere is no way for it to be effectively contagious or virulent, at all."
  
  Both Ferguson and Williams looked quite interested in that, with Ferguson replying, "I'd love it if you could explain how you managed to achieve that! It's incredible, if true!"
  
  Lilly hummed, "Well, it is zhe proprietary process. I don't mind discussing it in general terms, as academic to academic, but I don't believe I'd be comfortable talking in specifics. It isn't like zhere is patent-protection zhese days, you know?"
  
  Ferguson started to chuckle, but then Sibley growled out, "If you know what is good for you, you will tell him exactly how it works, and then you will explain exactly where all of your technology came from!"
  
  Everyone, even Sarah Lyons, looked momentarily shocked. Ferguson started rolling his eyes, but Lily was already quietly furious. Not only did she connect to the two turrets in the ceiling, but she armed the other devices hidden in the wall that would kill every single person in the room except her.
  
  She turned to stare at the man named Sibley, the two turrets rotating to follow her eyes and locking onto the man, which suddenly caused everyone to be very still.
  
  She growled out, "You threaten me 'ere? 'ERE? In zhe centre of my web? You are going to die screaming, foolish man."
  
  Her social assistant indicated too late that was definitely the wrong thing for her to say, but she didn't think she would listen to it in this case anyway.
  
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  Back and Forth
  The man named Sibley started to move to grab the plasma pistol at his waist, and Lily was about to fry him as there was no way she was going to allow him to point that weapon at her head. She had already thought in the past couple of seconds that she had perhaps made a mistake just after threatening the man. Both her social assistant as well as her memories in the Army were telling her that Sarah Lyons would likely feel honour or duty-bound to defend the asshole, even if she agreed with her that he was an asshole.
  
  She definitely didn't want Sarah Lyons to die; she was one of the most reasonable parts of the Brotherhood. Plus, killing Elder Lyons' daughter likely wouldn't be good for her long-term survival unless she went into hiding or instituted some sort of Total War and searched for the closest nuclear bombs to throw at the Citadel. She doubted many people around the Wasteland would trust her after that, though, so this was entirely suboptimal.
  
  If only she had said something that was a bit more ambiguous. She could have played it off. It is hard to turn "you will die screaming" into a joke or sarcastic quip, though. It was too specific. It was her first thought, though, after being threatened by a hateful bully in her home.
  
  Perhaps she had been ill-served by her instincts, as for nearly three centuries, it would have been more or less a normal response to do a little "sleeve damage" if threatened like that in her home. No one would think too badly of her. She had to remember nobody here could come back from the dead like she was used to. She was only too aware of it when it concerned herself, but some of her ingrained instincts when dealing with others might need some careful reflection.
  
  Still, it seemed like things were spiralling out of her control as Sibley's hand was already closing around the grip of his plasma pistol.
  
  She would judge how well Sibley's power armour handled the electro beams and try to disable Sarah's Power Armour without killing her. Alternately, two Labourtrons were rushing to her room right now. Neither Lyons nor Sibley was wearing helmets, and if she could prevent Lyons from killing her for long enough for one to come in and dart the woman, she would have all the time she needed to explain how she was really not to blame. She should really build herself a dart gun. She felt like this wasn't the first time she had thought that, either.
  
  Only in the most extreme case where Sarah Lyons was about to kill her would she trigger the concealed devices inside the decorative panels on the wall.
  
  However, right before she pulled the mental trigger on the turrets, she was surprised by a bellowing Sarah Lyons, " YOU WILL STAND DOWN, KNIGHT SIBLEY."
  
  Wow, what a command voice. It snapped both her and Sibley out of their imminent murderous behaviour. It was orders of magnitude better than the command voice she had developed as an NCO, but it just goes to show you the difference between a woman who spent four years in the Army to pay for college and a woman who was basically born to command men and women in battle.
  
  Lily decided to rotate the turrets upwards so that they were not directly pointed at Sibley as a sign she was willing to de-escalate. They moved fastest in that axis, anyway, so they would be able to train back on his body in less than one hundred milliseconds, so it was basically just a gesture. But a gesture was what her social assistant was demanding she accomplish, some gesture of conciliation.
  
  She didn't have an idea how to do that and still not potentially get shot in the face by a plasma pistol. However, when Lyons startled both of them and Sibley kind of stood down by letting go of his pistol, she realized she could do a similar thing.
  
  The two Scribes looked like they were really close to ducking for cover, Lyons looked furious, and Sibley looked mostly unrepentant. Lyons turned to stare at her and said mildly, "Dr St. Claire. While I assure you that Knight Sibley's outburst was in no way authorized, nor is his sentiment in any way official Brotherhood policy, and while I am sympathetic to the traumatic feelings being threatened in your home may engender in you, I cannot allow you to kill Knight Sibley, whether it be painful or painless."
  
  Was that last bit a joke? Lily allowed herself to look only slightly sullen before nodding, "Perhaps I was... 'ow do you say? 'asty."
  
  Sibley looked like he was radiating anger at the idea that threatening to murder him was only being described as hasty.
  
  Lyons then turned to Sibley. Her tone was a lot less friendly, " Knight Sibley. You will immediately leave this building and proceed to the LZ, wherein you shall wait patiently for further orders. If anything other than 'Yes, sir' comes out of your mouth, or if you deviate from these orders in the slightest degree, then you will face charges of Usurpation of Command Authority when we return to the Citadel. Acknowledge. "
  
  There was a hiss of surprise from both Scribes. Lily took that to mean that this charge was a serious one. She didn't recognize it precisely from the UCMJ she remembered in her past life, but there were some similar charges that, in wartime, were capital charges and might end up with a charged soldier facing a firing squad. It sounded like she was basically close to levelling charges of mutiny on him, using other words.
  
  Plus, the fact that she dressed him down so thoroughly in front of two Scribes and a stranger meant that Lyons might be really, truly angry.
  
  That was interesting. Sibley still seemed to radiate anger too and looked almost like he was going to complain until he looked into Paladin Lyons' eyes; then, he bit down on what he was going to say and managed to growl out, "Yes, sir."
  
  " Execute. Dismissed, " said Lyons firmly.
  
  Somehow he managed to do a sharpish-looking about-face in Power Armour, bringing his right toe back to behind the left heel and then pivoting one hundred and eighty degrees before walking out of the room without saying another word. Lily was impressed at that drill. It seemed like an impossible manoeuvre in Power Armour, and he had clearly practised it. It also seemed highly passive-aggressive.
  
  Sibley paused outside the door when seeing a half dozen robots waiting for him but then continued on without saying anything else.
  
  It was a bit of awkward silence for a moment. Her social assistant recommended a self-deprecating joke, but she wasn't very good at being authentically self-deprecating. Instead, she just coughed a little and said softly, "Well, zhat was a little awkward."
  
  Sarah Lyons stared at her for a moment before saying mildly, "You know, you can't just kill everyone who makes an off-hand ambiguous threat to you."
  
  Lily didn't know that she agreed with that. In fact, she pouted a little bit and muttered, "Never do your enemy a minor injury."
  
  That caused Lyons to chuckle a little bit and shake her head, "I don't think a doctor should be, as a rule, quoting or taking advice from Machiavelli. Plus, Sibley is just misguided; he doesn't have to be your enemy."
  
  That she disagreed with strenuously, but she would allow Lyons to think that she believed her. Why? Because of another piece of advice from that same Italian philosopher, namely, 'No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.' T
  
  The obvious corollary was that an enemy would never suspect the mild-mannered, somewhat agreeable person as the true mastermind of an attack against them, which was another reason why she screwed up with Sibley.
  
  So, she smiled and said, "Perhaps you are right. I apologize for my actions; I overreacted. I am a bit sensitive to zhe idea of someone coming into my home and zhreatening me and trying to take my life's work from me. I tend to react with violence if I zhink zhat is happening."
  
  Lyons smirked a little bit and nodded, "Yes, that is exactly the type of understated warning you should have used with Sibley. It's what we call... diplomatic. And I hear you."
  
  Diplomacy, huh? The last time someone suggested she needed to utilize diplomacy, she financed the construction of an independent space habitat so she could hide behind it's putative status as it's own polity, even if she and the other founders mostly controlled its government from the shadows.
  
  That was a great success, as for some reason, there was a social taboo about having a business relationship or military alliance with her personally, but if it was couched as a relationship with the independent polity of Tannhäuser Station, then most people didn't seem to mind.
  
  After that, Lily and Ferguson resumed discussions both about her treatments and Vector MkI. Lily talked to him in some detail about the philosophy of the carrier and its general method of action but not about any specifics. It was enough that he understood the concepts and would save him a lot of time if he wanted to create a similar virus, but still unspecific enough that it would likely take him anywhere from one to two years to create a similar system.
  
  Having actual genetic samples of her Vector wouldn't actually help him too much, as by now, it was over thirty-five per cent novel RNA structures, and who was to say which portion covered which feature? She felt he would make a lot faster progress starting from a base coronavirus of his own and doing as she did rather than trying to reverse engineer her work without any of her notes.
  
  The other Scribe, Williams, was mostly quiet but occasionally would speak when something along her speciality of general medicine was discussed, and Sarah Lyons seemed to try to avoid falling asleep while standing up.
  
  After about an hour when the conversation had hit most of its salient points, Lyons said, "Doctor, it sounds like nothing you're doing is bad or even dangerous, and I am not going to come down on you just for what you could do with what you know, not when you have the potential to do some real good in the Wasteland. I just have a few questions and would like to discuss a possible purchase or trade with you."
  
  Lily hummed and thought that was very interesting and, dare she say, diplomatically stated. Sarah Lyons, herself, would not come down on her, but she clearly wasn't speaking for the Brotherhood as a whole there. "Of course, Star Paladin. Ask away."
  
  Lyons nodded, "This one is mainly just my curiosity. What did you haul away out of that virology lab below the University of Maryland?"
  
  Ferguson looked interested, "Oh, I didn't know that was you."
  
  Lily chuckled and decided to be honest as there was really nothing incriminating about it, "Miscellaneous loot, like biohazard suits, and lab equipment, but zhe main things I got were a whole freezer full of synthetic guide RNA useful in gene editing, and a sample of zhe common cold virus, a coronavirus. Zhat was the source of my Vector system actually; originally it was zhis coronavirus." She hummed, "I also got a sample of HIV-2, a retrovirus, but I 'avent used zhat for anything. Originally I was zhinking about using it as my base, but zhere are a lot of disadvantages to zhe reverse transcription process, even if it is useful as a gene carrier. I need my Vector system to be very resistant to forming viable chimaeras or mutants, and zhat is just impossible with zhe retrovirus."
  
  Sarah Lyons blinked several times, "Okay, I didn't understand a word you said after 'cold virus.' Second, also as a curiosity, if you don't mind me asking. What was all that seeming computer equipment you brought back in your truck trailer just a few days ago?"
  
  Lily smiled, "Ah, zhat. Zhat is something very, very interesting. It's a fully functional cloning machine I found at what shall remain an undisclosed location."
  
  Both Williams and Ferguson looked interested. Williams asked, "A therapeutic cloning machine? We haven't had a working model since we arrived in DC, which is why we need to replace so many limbs with cybernetic replacements, which often don't work as well as a person's regular limbs."
  
  Lily stared at her like she was crazy. Cybernetic limbs that were... worse than a person's regular limbs?! What heresy. "What kind of medieval backwards cybernetics are you using over zhere in the Pentagon?"
  
  Ferguson looked offended for a moment.
  
  Lily then shook her head, "Sorry. Cybernetics, and its obvious corollary robotics, is a secondary interest of mine. I've sold two replacement limbs and have a contract to replace two more in the coming days. None of them is inferior to a human's natural limbs except in irrelevent ways."
  
  At that, he looked more interested, "Would you be willing to allow me to sit in on the design consult and surgery of one or both of those limb replacements?"
  
  Lily hummed. One leg and one arm, if she recalled. They were going to show up for an initial consult tomorrow after waiting for Lily to return to Megaton for some time. These would be mostly built of aluminium, with only some of the features that integrate with the patient's nerves being very interesting, and Lily knew that technology was already prevalent in this Universe. It wasn't what she would consider secret at all.
  
  She finally nodded, "I don't mind. You would 'ave to stay here in Megaton for at minimum three days. If you want, I can offer you both a room and protection 'ere in zhe building for your time with us."
  
  She noticed that Ferguson was clearly not in Lyons' direct chain of command because he neither asked her permission nor even consulted with her, except for asking, "Star Paladin, would it be possible to have the Lyons Pride arrange transport back to the Citadel for me in five days? I will have a comprehensive report on everything by then."
  
  She paused and then nodded, "Yes, but I'd like you to give me a preliminary report in private before I leave that I can take back to the Elder while you're in the field." She then glanced at Lily and asked, "I appreciate you indicating you would protect him as a guest, but it would set my mind at ease if I could return with one or two Initiates to act as his bodyguards during his stay."
  
  Lily squinched her face a little. She was about to nix that, or at least demand that they do not show up in Power Armour, but it occured to her that she could easily and covertly get a scan of an Initiate's Power Armour more easily than she could wave an obvious scientific device at Sarah Lyons and not have the incredibly switched-on woman immediately question what she was doing.
  
  Finally, she nodded, "Zhat would be fine. If zhey don't mind barracks-style accommodations, as my current supply of guest rooms is limited."
  
  That caused her to grin, "If they complain, make sure to tell me. I would love to hear about that."
  
  The Scribe named Williams looked wistful and said, "I'd love to stay as well, but if I did, there would be no physician on duty at the Pride Station GNR." That was interesting; they had a clinic or medical bay at Three Dog's place. Well, it was a giant building in a strategic location, so it made some sense.
  
  "Lastly, when we discovered the full range of your services and products, we noticed you were selling some pre-war military implants, namely the PHOENIX system. The Lyons Pride would like to acquire some of your stock, preferably at a discount, as we do not need you to perform the implantation surgery," said Sarah Lyons in her usual no-nonsense tone.
  
  Wait, they were offering to buy them? Or was this 'discount' going to be suggested at ninety per cent or some ridiculous number? It was also interesting that she couched this as a purchase from her own independent command and not the Brotherhood as a whole. That made it seem less likely she was trying to screw her.
  
  "'Ow many?" Lily asked, carefully.
  
  Lyons began her haggling, "Presently? Five, hopefully at a price of three thousand caps, or equivalent, a piece."
  
  Her retail price listed was eight thousand! She replied testily, only slightly exaggerating, "You are trying to make all seven of my children starve with a price like that! I was nearly incinerated finding zhose zhings and had to jump out of a tenth-story window, to my death, just to bring them back here!"
  
  Granted, she was willing to sell them at about half price if she liked the person. And she wanted Lyons to survive, but three was too low.
  
  Ferguson seemed amused, "You have children?"
  
  "As far as you know!" she replied testily.
  
  And Lyons smirked, "And you died?"
  
  "I got better!" Lily claimed.
  
  After bullshitting them a little bit, they got down to haggling, which Sarah Lyons was really good at. Lily felt like she lost a skill check when she agreed to sell them at a price of three thousand five hundred per unit.
  
  "Do you accept payment in gold?" Lyons asked.
  
  Lily nodded, "Of course, or any precious metal, or any valuable commodity but price is only negotiable at zhe time of sale. I won't agree to a standard exchange rate. Even the price in caps can vary day to day at my discretion. I mean, we are using bottle caps for currency, as ridicilous as zhat is. Zhe entire economy will collapse one day when someone gets the Nuka Cola bottling machine working again."
  
  Then Lily offered slyly, "I also take payment in information, either useful intelligence or knowledge, like digital copies of books I do not yet 'ave and similar things."
  
  Sarah snorted, but Ferguson said, "We often make trades like that, but it's against SOPs to give you a list of everything we have. If you give us a list of what books and media you have, we will mark the ones we do not have give you an abbreviated list of what we're willing to trade on a one-for-one basis. Or for caps or trade, also."
  
  Lily nodded slowly, "I can do that, but it 'as to be an apples-to-apples trade."
  
  Ferguson asked, "What do you mean?"
  
  "I mean that I won't trade a copy of Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect that won him the Nobel prize, assuming you don't have one, for a copy of The Little Engine That Could, " Lily said wryly.
  
  "Ah, I understand. Yes, we try to trade like for like," he said with a nod.
  
  Lily had already had the titles of all of her digitized books and films, along with some of her digitized songs that she intended to also trade to Three Dog, copied over to a holotape, along with five PHOENIX systems and eight inhalers, each containing five of both her treatments and their reversing agents that she was donating out of the goodness of her heart.
  
  Or perhaps she was being mercenary and hoping the Brotherhood would become a customer after studying them for a while.
  
  One of her Termitrons opened the door to deliver two boxes to her. The three of them turned to glance at the robot as it walked in. Sarah Lyons and Ferguson looked shocked, although Williams just looked interested.
  
  She took the two boxes from the robot, thanked it, and watched it leave. She was glancing between Ferguson and Sarah curiously, "You seem to 'ave an unusually intense reaction to my newly designed Labourtron chassis."
  
  Sarah stared at her, "That was a Labourtron ?" Then she shook her head, "Doctor, I need to ask you something else. Are you familiar with The Institute?"
  
  Lily blinked, tilting her head to the side. "Yes, I zhink the best form factor for bipedal utility robots is the 'uman-form, or at least the 'uman-like form. It 'as proven superiority; just look at us."
  
  She then hummed and shook her head, " The Institute? I know a lot of places that are institutes, some close by like the Naval Research Institute that became Rivet City. But I don't know any place that would be so arrogant as to call themselves The Institute. "
  
  Both Sarah Lyons and Ferguson stared at her, as if trying to divine her truthiness. That was an interesting reaction. Wasn't she planning on researching possible groups that used bipedal robots like her, after getting assaulted on the bridge by that minigun-woman? It sounds like she might have found the mysterious group.
  
  Sarah Lyons paused before saying, "I... think you are telling the truth, plus that robot looked a bit different than what I would have expected for a Institute synth. Can you bring it back in for Scribe Ferguson to examine?"
  
  Lily frowned, "Only if you tell me who zhis Institute is and why you seemed to be so concerned. Because, I 'ad one group of people get terrified and attack me once already when zhey saw me with a few of my robots when I was on zhe way to scavenge zhat cloning machine."
  
  Sarah Lyons paused, and then nodded. "I will. Williams, this is classified information, generally limited to Senior Scribes unless there is a need to know such as anyone sent on a mission to the Commonwealth, but I think it might be best to elevate your clearance level at this time."
  
  Williams just shrugged, "I won't lie and say I'm not interested."
  
  The Termitron walked back into the room and stood out to be examined. Lily told the older Scribe, "You can even use its diagnostic port if you like to confirm it is a rebuilt RobCo model." She stopped herself from warning him not to hack it as, in truth, she would be kind of happy because that meant she got to discover and permanently patch a vulnerability she wasn't aware of in controlled settings. She had already disconnected this robot from the network and was controlling it directly, just in case.
  
  While the Scribe examined her robot thoroughly, she got a briefing about this mysterious organization called the Institute. She wasn't sure how much was true and how much was technophobic Brotherhood bullshit, as most of what she heard didn't sound so bad to her. Why wouldn't they use robots and simple AI?
  
  However, when she got around to telling her a number of ways that a person could identify an Institute operative or synth, Lily started to rub the back of her head. She suddenly realized that Grace and Miller definitely thought she was part of this Institute. Miller even basically out and out said it.
  
  Towards the end, Ferguson returned to stand next to Sarah Lyons.
  
  She hummed, "I suppose it wouldn't 'elp my case zhat all of my rebuilt lasers use a blue-wavelength light just like zhis Institute? In my defense, I was hoping to go past zhe visible light spectrum and into the ultra-violet, but zhe standard Pre-War laser designs just can't hack it that far up zhe energy saddle. I zhink I 'ave given some people I have met who must have known about zhis group zhe wrong impression."
  
  Both Ferguson and Sarah Lyons looked like they wanted to face-palm or something. Finally, Lyons asked exasperatedly, " Seriously? Seriously?"
  
  Ferguson raised a hand and said, reasonably, "We have a number of samples of Institute energy weapons that we have recovered from missions into the Commonwealth. Dr St. Claire, if you would allow us to examine one of your weapons, either a pistol or rifle would be best; the odds that both you and the Institute use a similar design and components are... almost nil, assuming you are telling the truth."
  
  Lily sighed. She glanced down at her laser pistol in a holster. It was the prototype of her Mk4 that used carbon fibre and aluminium frame much like the AirTaser design. Allowing the Brotherhood to inspect its inner workings was... sub-optimal. Most of her components were clearly superior to the standard AEP7 pistol that was ubiquitous in the Wasteland. Worst of all, most were simple and obvious improvements that the Brotherhood would likely be able to duplicate if they had any kind of industrial base, which she knew they did.
  
  Lily decided to tell it them straight, "My laser pistol is improved from zhe standard AEP7, but not so much zhat I don't zhink you could learn how to build similar ones if you examine mine. It's all just slightly smaller, slightly better components. You understand what I'm saying?"
  
  Lyons nodded, "Yeah, that you don't want anyone who might understand it to get a look inside. I get that, but what you need to understand is that the Institute is a potentially existential threat to us; plus, they have demonstrated what could only be described as despicable behaviour, such as wiping out entire settlements north of here. So you need to weigh the desire to keep a slightly better laser pistol to yourself against the alternative where the most heavily armed and militant group thinks you may be a current or former member of their most dangerous potential enemy. We consider this group a more long-term threat than the Enclave, Dr St. Claire." That was a pretty well-done diplomatic threat, Lily thought. Lily took note of it for later.
  
  Sarah didn't mention that these Institute people were murderous assholes in her previous briefing. Lily thought that the Brotherhood were just scared of anyone that had better tech than them, but if this Institute actually did wipe out towns, that was something else. But why would a former University want to wipe out towns? It was so cartoonishly villainous that she wondered if it wasn't propaganda. Still, Lyons seemed to believe it, according to her social assistant.
  
  " Fine. Fine. 'owever, you 'ave to trade me one of your laser pistols for it. I can't make all zhe parts, and have a limited number of possible replacements," she said grouchily. The fact that she intended to build a replacement pistol model using the slightly larger Protectron rubies was irrelevant!
  
  Ferguson shrugged and pulled out his own AEP7, "Fine, but you are counter-signing my requisition order for a replacement, Star Paladin. I'm pretty sure they won't let me keep Dr St. Claire's model, especially if it's better. They'll have it to bits five minutes after we get home."
  
  That caused Lyons a pause, and it wasn't surprising. Nobody, nobody wanted to get on the bad side of the Quartermaster Corps. Finally, she nodded.
  
  She pulled her own pistol out, flipped it around and handed it to the Senior Scribe grip first. He took it and examined it, removing and reseating the energy cell.
  
  He shrugged and passed it to Lyons, "It already looks radically different. This is much more streamlined than the AEP7 or the Institute equivalent. I can already guarantee that unless this is a secret Institute prototype, they didn't build it. We'll know for sure when you take it back. I judge the risk of staying here is minimal and will continue with my plan to stay here and observe. Please have one of the Initiates bring me a replacement sidearm. I'd recommend you approach Scribe Peabody, Head Scribe Rothchild and your father directly on this matter and discreetly. Especially if you want to keep the Doctor's name out of a certain faction's mouth."
  
  Sarah nodded and placed the pistol in her pack after removing the energy cell. Lily picked up the larger box on her desk and handed it to her, "Zhere are five PHOENIX devices in here, as well as a holotape zhat lists most of the books and media I 'ave. I also included five doses of all of my present genetic zherapies, as well as their reversing agents, and zheir instructions of administration and pre and post-administration protocols. Zhey will need to be frozen within forty-eight hours."
  
  Sarah Lyons looked confused, "Why the bonus, as it were? By your retail prices, that is a lot of caps."
  
  Lily pursed her lips, "I'm 'opeful zhat you as an organization will become a customer, but I am not naive to zhink zhat your organization would approve my treatments without some study. So... study."
  
  Ferguson piped up, "Please deliver those perishable items to my lab; my assistant will see that they're put in one of the cryogenic freezers."
  
  Lily then handed a smaller box over, "Zhis is from me to you, as an apology for making your life more difficult by zhreatening to murder your subordinate. One PHOENIX device and two doses of each of my treatments. You can keep zhem on ice, as it were until zhere is consensus about zheir safety and efficacy."
  
  Lily almost withheld this second box after being slightly coerced into giving up one of her laser pistols, but the truth was she did not want to be mistaken for this mysterious group of mad scientists. Giving the Brotherhood the tech to slightly miniaturize some of their laser weapons was... unfortunate, a small price to pay to make sure no tragic misunderstandings took place.
  
  Sarah didn't prevaricate or decline the gift; she just nodded and took it, "Thank you. I appreciate that. One of the purchased units was going to be for me, but now I can make sure someone else, probably one of our scouts who takes high-risk assignments, gets one also. I'll have the gold brought back with the two Initiates; thank you for trusting we're good for it."
  
  Lily humphed, "Well, I know where you live."
  
  The three of them walked out of the room, and they weren't naive enough to assume that a borrowed conference room from her would be private, so they all left her building. Lily assumed the one named Ferguson would be returning shortly.
  
  She sighed. That was exhausting. She didn't know how she would categorize that exchange. Somewhat in between neutral to a disaster? She did learn some important information about a potential power to the north.
  
  She had to say she didn't entirely believe what Lyons was telling her. Dehumanizing competitors was a story as old as time. Surely, such men of science couldn't be cartoon villains.
  
  Then again, that group on the bridge was very scared of her; that was no mistake. Was the man they were defending some sort of defector? Some chosen one that would use the Force to defeat them after finding out he was related to the leader of the Institute?
  
  She snorted; that was too fabulous a tale to be true. Not everything was Star Wars.
  
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  Good Delivery
  After walking the three out of the building, Lily returned back to her office and walked carefully over to the side of the room where the "decorative" wall panels were located. She took each one off the wall, disconnecting wires before setting them on the floor, upside down.
  
  Each panel had about a tenth of a kilo of plastic explosive, followed by about a hundred small hardened steel pyramids in front of each carefully shaped charge, with the vertices of the pyramid comprised of a tungsten carbide penetrator.
  
  They were, in other words, essentially small claymore mines. She had carefully designed their placement and the shaped charges to theoretically keep her if she was behind her desk, in the shadow of the explosive concussive waves and combined with the fact that the far wall was built to contain, not ricochet, the pyramids she felt there was a ninety-seven per cent chance she would survive triggering the devices.
  
  However, there was no way she would walk in front of such potential hazards that were connected to her network on a regular basis, even if she felt her cybersecurity was top-notch. So, the arming process was a physical one. After the detonation computer verified her private key and the arming signal, it would trigger springs to physically push a detonator into the plastic explosive, arming the devices. The mechanism also subtly changed the decorative panel's exterior, so she or, rather, her expert system would immediately notice and mark it as a hazard if she opened her door and saw that the panels were armed.
  
  You can't hustle a hustler, and she wasn't about to be turned into chunky salsa on her office wall by some ninja hacker. So, she carefully pulled the detonators out, reset the spring mechanisms and replaced each panel on the wall. However, for now, she left them disconnected electrically, so they were inert. With the two turrets in her office, she felt a lot less at risk with visitors, and no matter what precautions against hacking or ninjas she took, it was still possible for them to be defeated.
  
  This kind of defence wasn't something she would keep installed forever. Any defensive technique or device with a three per cent chance of killing herself was a desperation ploy. History was the sum total of all the unlikely and low probability events occurring one after another; she has known that for hundreds of years.
  
  She finished setting the panels back up on the wall, albeit deactivated, just in time for the Apprentice to knock on her door again, "Dr St. Claire, you have another visitor. This time it is your business partner Ms Grace."
  
  The little minx even waggled her eyebrows at her while saying, 'business partner.' That girl wasn't even sixteen; she was too young to know about business partners! If she had something to say about it, the girl wouldn't be starting her first business until she was twenty-five or thirty, at least!
  
  Lily hummed; she had a turret to assemble as well as the meeting with the Brotherhood exceeded the time she had allocated for it. Moreover, she wasn't anticipating them bringing a Scribe that Lily might describe as slightly educated on the subject of viruses and genetics. Their discussion was pleasant, though.
  
  Oh, well. Her schedule was shot for the day anyway. Lily called out, "Show her in, Apprentice, and if you would bring the tea service and then ensure we're not disturbed."
  
  This caused the Apprentice to grin. What, precisely, was that girl expecting? Was her mind in the gutter, awash with teenage sexual hormones? Lily just wanted to warn Grace that the Brotherhood would be nosing around and perhaps discuss this mysterious Institute with the woman.
  
  Lily decided not to sit behind her desk for this meeting. Instead, they could both sit on the couch on the side of the room. Lily could serve tea from the small coffee table in front of it. She had mostly added the couch to her room design as a show of ostentatiousness, as an actual upholstered couch in good condition was a sign of wealth. However, Grace was a three, so a more intimate meeting, rather than sitting in front of her desk like she was an employee, was called for.
  
  Grace swaggered into her office with the usual braggadocio and confidence that had attracted her to the woman, causing Lily to smile despite herself. "Wow, your place is looking swankier every time I see it, girlie."
  
  Lily stood as she entered and motioned next to her on the couch, "Yes. I built zhis room to impress zhe Mayor, and other similar people who need constant signals to reassure zhem that I am of zheir same class and, zherefore, shouldn't be trifled with. Silly, but actually very effective, I am told. Take a seat. 'ow've you been? 'ows Monsieur Miller and your team?"
  
  Alice slipped in again with the tea service on a faux-bamboo tray and sat it in front of us as we both took a seat before seeing herself out. The girl must have already had that ready; she was already anticipating her. That was good.
  
  Grace sat next to her and chuckled, "Oh, not too bad. Miller's back at our," and she waggled her fingers conspiratorially, "secret base while the rest of us all have been back in town for close to a week, another week off, and then we'll have another mission into the Dominion."
  
  Lily almost flubs a step in the steeping process in surprise, and she glances over at Grace in a sideways manner, "I somehow zhought zhat you might not be entirely welcome in zhat somewhat backwards society."
  
  Grace chuckled and rubbed the back of her neck, "Well, so long as I don't seduce their wives... or daughters... they are actually quite neighbourly, for the most part. I get the impression they're holding out hope for my immortal soul. It's a lot better than going to Norfolk or the Pitt."
  
  Lily made a mental note to talk to her about Norfolk, as if she was mentioning it on the same level as the Pitt DLC, then it was likely dangerous. However, before she made up her mind to ask her about it now Grace held up her hand, "Oh, I have a delivery for you, too!"
  
  Grace leaned down and fished out a few items from her bag that she had sat on the floor, pulling out three fusion cores. "Miller said he owed you these; two are empty and this one has is full. Why were you so interested in them?"
  
  Lily hummed, taking them from her and visually inspecting them. She may as well be honest with Grace, besides her motives were easily guessable, "I hope to be reverse engineer zhem. At the very least, I hope to be able to refuel zhem. I'm not sure how they work, what kind of fusion reaction zhey use or what their fuel is at present, zhough."
  
  Grace raised her eyebrows, taking a big gulp of her tea, "I've seen the refuelling machines. Had Poseidon Energy logos on them, you just slide the fusion cores in and wait about fifteen seconds, and they're good to go again. Some of our techs have tried the same thing, but they say these babies are designed to be tamper-resistant. I don't really know the details, though."
  
  Lily found that interesting. They were made by Mass Fusion, but it sounded like that company had perhaps a strategic partnership with what amounted to the oil company.
  
  That... made a lot of sense, especially considering the most common use for these devices before the war was for fuel in cars. Using the pre-existing infrastructure of a company that had chains of filling stations already around the nation?
  
  The claim of tamper resistance made her all the more curious. That could mean a lot of things, but it sounded like they were designed only to be refuelled by authorized devices. That sounded like a precaution to take when the fuel was cheap and plentiful in order to secure a monopoly against competitors, so she was internally expecting hydrogen as a fuel. She'd have to scan them later. She sat the devices on the floor next to the couch and nodded, "Zhanks for zhat, zhat will 'elp me in my efforts. Maybe all I'll need is to 'it up a few Poseidon filling stations to find a refuelling device?"
  
  Grace sadly shook her head, "We've checked most of the ones within seventy klicks of DC, no luck. If you do manage to build a replacement that works, we'd definitely be interested in buying a few from you. We have to ration our usage of Power Armour, due to the operational cores being scarce."
  
  Lily nodded, "Speaking of Power Armour, zhe Brotherhood paid me a visit. I'm playing nice-nice with zhem for zhe moment, and in fact, zhere will be a Brotherhood Scribe and some Initiates spending a few days 'ere, arriving in a couple of 'ours."
  
  Grace made a face as if she had bit into a lemon, "That isn't surprising. They didn't shake you down too badly, did they?"
  
  Lily considered that. It could have gone a lot worse, "No, not too bad, I suppose."
  
  That caused Grace to grin, "I know how to cheer you up. Say, these walls look really sturdy. Are they soundproof?"
  
  Lily had designed them to contain a pretty significant explosion without imperilling anyone in the offices next door or the hallway, so that was a given. "I suppose zhat would depend on how loud of a sound, zhey are certainly sound resistant zhough, why do you-umph!"
  
  POV Sarah Lyons
  
  "Anything else you want to include, Ferguson?" Sarah Lyons asked after listening to a preliminary briefing.
  
  The man nodded, "I thought it was interesting that she appeared to be controlling first the turrets in her office and then her rebuilt Labourtron without issuing any verbal commands or using any visible remote control mechanism."
  
  The younger Paladin raised her eyes, then looked up for a moment as she recalled, "You're right. When she lost it on Sibley, those turrets were following her eyes like she was wearing one of those gunship pilot helmets." Lyons held up two fingers in front of her eyes and pointed them around as she looked at things to demonstrate. Then she shrugged, "Perhaps a concealed button on her desk? Or someone monitoring our meeting that she trusted to act on her behalf, like a security officer?"
  
  Ferguson shook his head, "The reactions were too fast for that. I think she has some sort of cybernetic brain implant that allows her to issue commands to her computer mentally, somehow."
  
  That caused the Paladin to look interested, "That is interesting. Is that technology that we know about?"
  
  Ferguson paused for a moment before nodding, "Yes, we have a number of cybernetic systems that are designed for brain implantation, such as the ones that make math easier, help learn languages and a few others. We also have one that uses electrical induction and small implanted electrodes to monitor the region of the brain that handles speech, and it lets you send subvocalized commands to the implant and then to any connected computer. It's considered a radical alteration, though, especially since the power requirements are high, as the system needs an integrated computer for the system to parse out words from your brain. I didn't see any batteries or similar power sources hanging off her head. Betavoltaics, which is the usual solution for powering neuro implants, won't cut it for these systems."
  
  That caused Lyons to chuckle, "Did you see how long her braided hair was? It went all the way down to her ass; she could have been hiding a plasma caster in it it's so long."
  
  That caused Ferguson to nod thoughtfully and say, "And what an ass it is..."
  
  "Hey! You're like twice her age, at least! Why don't you stow the creepy Uncle shit, Scribe," Sarah Lyons said, half-offended and half-amused.
  
  Scribe Ferguson chuckled, shaking his head, "Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. She's already admitted she studies life extension. Her breadth of knowledge, from medicine, genetics and virology to cybernetics and robotics? And building improved laser weapons on top of that as some sort of hobby?"
  
  He shook his head, "No. No way. There is just not enough time to learn that many fields. For all we know, she could have lived through the Great War and the last two hundred years, and it would be her that would be robbing my cradle!"
  
  Lyons paused and asked, "Do you really think that is a possibility? That is something the Elder will need to know, if so."
  
  This caused the older Scribe to pause and then shake his head, "No. If that were the case, I would have expected her to have her own small empire or be dead by now. Didn't you say your first interaction was about four months ago when she looted that virology lab? With a few mercenaries, all of which were using standard guns?" To this, Lyons nodded.
  
  "She had nothing back then. She said the main thing she looted was lab equipment, guide RNA for gene editing and a virus that she used to make her first products. That is stuff any scientist doing her kind of work would already have had on hand. No scientist that had spent the past two hundred years living does not have anything to show for it. No, no way," he finished.
  
  The Paladin nodded, "That is logically stated. You've convinced me. What is your opinion on her origins, since she doesn't appear to be from the Institute?"
  
  That caused him to make a thoughtful noise and be quiet for some time, "I do actually think she might be from the Pre-War era. Her education is too... complete, and she mentioned things as an aside that almost nobody alive today would know, like the subject of Einstein's Nobel prize-winning paper. Most people who have heard a little bit about Einstein, and that's not too many, would probably think that he won the Nobel prize for Relativity. We don't even have that paper she mentioned, so that is definitely one of the things we will trade for, even if it is from the 1920s."
  
  "You're being contradictory now," complained Lyons.
  
  He waved his hand in the air to shush her, "Keeping in mind this is a wild-ass guess... The first possibility, she was cryogenically frozen and found herself woken up with basically nothing two hundred years later."
  
  Lyons hummed and nodded, "That is a possibility. Doesn't answer all of our questions, though, but it is definitely more likely than she spent two hundred years twiddling her thumbs."
  
  Ferguson nodded but held his hand up, "Or, and this is what I really think. She is a clone of a much older researcher, with their memories installed in her younger, cloned brain. Perhaps the original Dr St. Claire was a seventy-year-old grandma? You know how many immortality or resurrection research projects the Pre-War elite were involved in. I bet her original was the main researcher on one. Then when the bombs started to fall, before she died of radiation poisoning or whatever, she scanned her brain using her project's equipment. Something happened, maybe the site lost power, and it took until now for the project to clone her replacement body."
  
  He nodded rapidly, clearly getting more enthused with the idea, "It also explains where she got that cloning equipment she brought back in the truck and why she wouldn't reveal its source. Did you notice how she changed the subject when Scribe Williams asked her if it was therapeutic cloning equipment? She never answered her. Therapeutic cloning means cloning equipment designed to just produce a new limb or a new organ for transplant. I bet her system is traditional cloning, where a whole organism pops out."
  
  Sarah blinked and then was silent for a time, thinking. Then she nodded, "That theory answers everything essentially and doesn't have any logical contradictions that I can think of. That is kind of a tragic story, too. I will include that as the most likely origin story for her in our files and brief the Elder. Why do you think she brought the cloning equipment back if it isn't useful medically? I don't want some sort of Clone Army situation."
  
  Ferguson waved off that concern again, "It wouldn't be difficult to adjust it to be useful therapeutically, probably. Plus, it is valuable equipment. She seems a classic introvert homebody from her violent reaction to Sibley, so she might have brought it back to her new home just because it was hers and for no other reason. I'll ask her if we can perhaps buy time on her cloning machine to clone limbs or organs. Her answer to me will answer that question. I doubt we'll see an Army of her. She doesn't seem the type that would accept duplicates of herself around, but that is a question for one of the psychologist Scribes. Order one of them to review all of our interactions with her and everything else we know and make a profile on her if you want."
  
  Sarah Lyons nodded and said, "We'll leave things here for now. I'll have a few Initiates brought over to act as your bodyguards; expect them in a few hours. I will have to deal with this Sibley situation. He almost got me killed, so I am not feeling very merciful. We'll see if it's NJP or a full court for insubordination when we get back."
  
  "Roger, Star Paladin," the older Scribe said, offering a jaunty and non-regulation salute and turning to return back the way he came.
  
  She watched him go, then shook her head with a sigh. Sibley was going to be a problem. He wasn't even Lyons Pride and was included on this mission at Casdin's request. She didn't have a lot of good things to say about that man or his sycophants.
  
  POV Lily
  
  About an hour later, Lily walked out of her office significantly more tousled and significantly less stressed than she had been previously. She intended to head straight upstairs into her quarters, but the Apprentice saw her walking down the hallway, and the girl just cracked up and went the other direction.
  
  She wasn't that dishevelled! It wasn't that obvious, was it? Was it?!
  
  She hurried her steps, and when she got up to her room, she glanced at herself in her bathroom mirror, frowning. Not only did she have a couple of hickeys, although they were already slowly fading as her nanomachines healed the damage and reabsorbed the blood close to her skin, but a good bit of her hair had also been pulled free from her braid.
  
  She closed her eyes, remembering that Grace had been using her braid as kind of a handle for a period of time, including some semi-rough pulling...
  
  Her face flushing and coughing, she disrobed and undid her braid. She supposed a shower might be in order and some new clothes, too.
  
  Lily discovered that the Apprentice had shown Scribe Ferguson his guest room while Lily was indisposed in her office with Grace, which she appreciated. She would not have appreciated an interruption at that time.
  
  She also noticed a new user on her network with guest permissions and sent Scott a message asking if everything was okay or if he needed any assistance. She also elevated his user level to allow him access to some of her networks, such as all of her books, films and media.
  
  [Scott Wollinski: No, everything is going very well. I won't say the initial set-up was very fun, but I have been going over all of the tutorials, videos and read-me files you set up. There are a lot, and it's quite thorough. Some of the help files on some of the applications are especially verbose. ]
  
  Lily rolled her eyes. Trust the Mechanist to be incredibly literal and use his full name as a username when the configuration program asked him to enter a name to serve as an identifier.
  
  [Lilium: Okay. I'll come by your room with your next treatment in a few hours, or perhaps Alice will if I am busy. ]
  
  [Scott Wollinski: That would be acceptable. I may need some additional resources to understand this computer-aided design system; the help files aren't as comprehensive. That said, it looks incredibly useful. ]
  
  She hummed and then unlocked for his access all of the files she had created for Sophie and the giant magnetron "weapon" he was so enamoured with and forwarded him the links. Some examples of simple things designed would likely help him a lot in his understanding of how to use the system.
  
  She would have a similar DMLS metal-alloy printer and metal recycler for him to take back with him to Vault 108. The Vault's Geo-Thermal power system could output over seven megawatts, so he should have plenty of power to run everything. She was very interested to see what he would make with it.
  
  Finishing the assembly of the turret, she went back upstairs in time to say hello to Ferguson again, watching him greet the detachment of Brotherhood personnel that had been waiting for him. There were four Initiates in Power Armour talking with Alice and one older-looking man in Brotherhood recon armour that was carrying a small briefcase. The older-looking man took Ferguson aside and spoke with him briefly while she looked at the fireteam of Initiates in her hospital.
  
  She thought that there would be only one or two, but then considered the fact that people have to have off-time and sleep, even Initiates, so a total detachment of four made sense if you considered they had to work in shifts.
  
  She narrowed her eyes as she watched and heard her Apprentice flirting with one of the Brotherhood Initiates, the tallest and perhaps most handsome of the bunch. She took a good look at the Initiate in question and committed his face to her memory. She was considering doing something to embarrass the girl when Ferguson walked up to her, carrying the briefcase the older man had once been carrying. It looked like one of those metal Halliburton cases, kind of like the kind that she had hidden back in her basement with a bunch of FEV virus inside.
  
  "Dr St. Claire, can I see you privately for a moment? Star Paladin Lyons has sent back the payment you requested," Ferguson said. This caused her to nod. She turned to walk to a nearby empty exam room before sending eye glares, and negative energy at that one Initiate's back one final time.
  
  She closed the door behind Ferguson and asked, "What's the problem?"
  
  He chuckled, "Well, there is no problem, but usually matters like this are handled delicately." He placed the briefcase on the exam bed and opened it up to reveal... a London Good Delivery bar of gold.
  
  Her eyebrows rose up into her scalp. That was at least ten kilos of gold. She stared at him and then said mildly, "I 'ope you know I can't make change for zhat." The price she was charging Sarah Lyons for all five implants was only about five hundred grams of the metal. Even if she liquidated all of the easily convertible assets she had in the hospital, she might not have enough to pay off the remainder. A lot of her assets were tied up.
  
  He chuckled and nodded, "Yes, that is fine. She said the Elder would like you to keep it on account for potential future sales."
  
  Lily hummed and asked, "You want me to start you zhe tab?" That caused him to nod. Well, she would take bribery over heavy-handed coercion any day of the week and twice on Sunday. She nodded, "Okay, zhat is fine. I will carry it along in my books." She closed the case and picked it up. She'd carry it straight to her office and scan the case itself for bugs, listening devices, nano-plagues or explosives before taking it downstairs and securing it as best as she could. Not only was gold a precious metal and valued for its rarity, but it was incredibly useful industrially in electronics as well.
  
  She wanted to spend some time studying the scans she took of the fusion cores, too. They kind of reminded her of a printer cartridge for an inkjet printer, pure evil, in other words. They were definitely designed to only be refuelled by a proprietary device, but she felt she could probably crack it. The fuel was hydrogen, and it was a hydrogen-boron fusion process, as far as she could tell.
  
  There were boron-impregnated metal alloys in the fusion chamber, which meant that these cores could only be refuelled a limited number of times, as the boron would be used up. It was an interesting design, and Lily had no idea at all how it worked, but she was confident she could at least build a machine to squirt some hydrogen inside it.
  
  "Zhe design consult appointment for zhe two patients is tomorrow at 1015 hours, 'ospital time. Usually, patients are a little early as watches are still a bit of a luxury," she mentioned to him, which caused him to nod.
  
  He said enthusiastically, "I will definitely be there, Dr St. Claire!"
  
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  Latrodectus mactans
  The next day proceeded pretty well. She woke up after a full three-hour sleep cycle pleasantly cuddled up in the crook between Grace's arm and her bosom and just laid there for another full hour, relaxing. Truly being the shorter of two people was the best for cuddling purposes, as being held or laying on someone's chest was clearly superior. Being the little spoon was the best! Although the woman later snuck out before breakfast in her attempt to avoid any of the Brotherhood personnel, it was still an excellent way to start the day.
  
  Then, the Brotherhood scribe attended both of the consultations. Typically, Lily would have used her scanner to take images of the patient's body to use as a model to construct a prosthesis. Still, she had been attempting to move into directions where she could duplicate some of its functionality so she would not be shut down in the case of its loss.
  
  In this case, she used both. Primarily she used a wand-based millimetre wave radar system to scan the exterior shape of the patient's body. The wand had an accelerometer in it, and combined with software running that would be compatible with any Fallout mainframe, she produced a three-dimensional shape of the patient's body for use as a base to design a suitable prosthesis.
  
  She had backed this up by covertly scanning them with her scanner when no one was looking, as well, just in case her programming was faulty. However, when she later compared the two shapes, she found that the wand method was accurate to at least the accuracy limit of the radar.
  
  However, she had no Fallout equivalent of computer-aided design software, so that still had to be her proprietary secret for the moment. She also didn't want the Brotherhood to shake her down for her DMLS metal printing technology, at least until the Outcasts left, anyway, so she had couched the scan as a way to find the dimensions of the limb so that she could create it through traditional casting and machining techniques.
  
  Talking with Ferguson, she discovered that the Brotherhood's usual method of linking nerves to an implant wasn't unusual to her, although she could see a number of ways to improve it. They hadn't figured out how to link a prosthesis into the patient's proprioceptive sense, so every cybernetic limb felt more or less like a missing limb even when they moved it around, rather than like a person's real limb. Nor had they figured out a way to link pressure-sensitive materials, even the crudest designs that used the piezoelectric effect, to the body's tactile sense. A person could move their prosthetic arm but not feel it at all. Nor could a person feel an item they picked up with a replacement hand. It was all very sub-optimal, and she suspected that a person would take a lot of training to get used to using a cybernetic limb like that. They might be better than wooden peg legs and a hook for a hand, but that was all she would say about the matter.
  
  After the appointment and her discussions with Ferguson, Gary met her and gave her an abridged syllabus of what he thought a child should know in the Wasteland. She reviewed it briefly and then handed it back to him and nodded, "Zhat seems alright."
  
  Gary blinked at her, "You don't have a problem with any of the subjects?"
  
  That caused her to mentally review the listed elements, namely reading, writing, history, arithmetic, literature, firearms, hand-to-hand combat, orienteering, desert survival, home economics and basic science. It was listed that some of the classes would be irregular or combined with others and that the normal school day would be about four hours.
  
  She shook her head, "It all seems fine to me." That caused Gary to grin slightly and nod.
  
  However, he had one gripe, "One thing, the breadth of your digitised library, especially textbooks, is not bad but is there any way you can print individual books for the students? Reading on terminals is... not very good for learning. It's best if they can have something in their hands, you know? Especially something to take home with them since the school day will only be a half-day."
  
  That, she made a face and shook her head firmly, "No. Paper is really 'ard to come by and quite expensive when it is available at all. 'owever, I will try to work on a potential solution, but don't expect anything for a few weeks."
  
  More than ever, she was curious about the source of toilet paper that she had a standing order from the merchants for. In her mind, she had built mythology of an automated forest, a TP factory complete with replanting robots that were the stewards of the forest deep in the Earth's crust in an almost faerie-land setting.
  
  She was worried that if she tried too hard to find it, it would disappear just like the mythical brownies that would clean your home so long as you never told anyone about them, and she couldn't live without it anymore.
  
  She shook her head. It was better not to rock the boat in this area.
  
  The next few days proceeded well. Lily would have been ready to do her two patient surgeries that day but had to wait at least thirty-six hours or so to give verisimilitude to the story that she was constructing the limbs using machine tools in her basement.
  
  It wasn't a ridiculous story, as from what she could tell from the machine tools the Mechanist stole from the Corvega factory, this was a possibility for the automated tools.
  
  Ferguson was impressed with the processors she included in each limb that handled all the inputs and outputs and analogue to digital conversions, but the fact was the Fallout universe had similar processors already; even the ones included in Pip-Boys were a little bit superior to the ones she could make, even if their technology for memory was light years behind hers.
  
  In fact, she was using the same traditional computer architecture and instruction set that the Pip-Boy processors had as she had stolen it. They were also similar to the processors installed in all but the most basic terminals, so they were actually ubiquitous in the Wasteland, and she suspected the Brotherhood could build them, too.
  
  It seemed similar to the reduced instruction set chipsets she was familiar with working on in her jobs in America, to be honest. So, instead of trying to create a computer processor from the ground up like a madwoman, she had done the sensible thing and copied from RobCo, at least as far as Dr House's traditional computing technology was concerned.
  
  He was also impressed with the idea of installing a dedicated port at the site of amputation, which featured a standard and modular connector. You then connected the limb to the port, and it was good to go. Did these barbarians just graft a bare metal limb to people's bodies with no standard interface? What happened when the limb inevitably needed maintenance? Or replacement or upgrade?
  
  Truly, they were barbarians. She had written several journal articles about everything they had discussed. She had written each article carefully, ensuring that it was couched in technology and terms familiar to the Fallout universe and wouldn't need any of her advanced technology in order to duplicate the results. Well, they were structured as journal articles, not like there was anywhere to publish.
  
  She was running up into two competing moral modes of thought. On the one hand, she did not particularly want to share her technology with the Brotherhood. This was because they were unreliable, feudalistic neo-barbs. However, what was stronger was her desire to improve the overall cybernetic state of the art of the world at large. Of course, she wanted to provide the best herself, but she almost couldn't stand not helping people with cybernetics.
  
  According to what Ferguson had told her, there were dozens of people going around waving ghost hands around, probably punching themselves in the face as often as waving hello, or walking on ghost legs, tripping on their own metal feet.
  
  She didn't even care that some of them were no doubt future Outcasts; it was still unacceptable. If she killed them later, then at least they would die while feeling the joy of being able to feel their cybernetic fingers flip her off as she killed them. One thing didn't have anything to do with the other, as far as she was concerned.
  
  As such, she compromised and wrote articles that utilised only pre-existing technology that any savvy group in the Fallout universe would have access to. To be honest, she felt so strongly about this that she wanted to send copies to the Enclave, also, but the more sane part of her brain stopped her.
  
  She was also curious about what would happen if she sent them via a courier to the north, addressed to the Commonwealth Institute of Technology. However, she was getting better at identifying clearly bad ideas as she made them. A common factor was that they were all driven by her curiosity, she noticed. While she didn't necessarily believe the things the Brotherhood had told her about this Institute, she would at least proceed on the basis that they were bad guys, at least for now.
  
  Drat! She had totally forgotten to ask Grace about them. Somehow it had totally left her mind both during their meeting in her office and during their little dinner and a movie "date" later that evening.
  
  The articles were titled: ' A Method of Utilising Accelerometers to Integrate a Cybernetic Prosthesis with the Proprioceptive Sense Through Direct Access to the CNS', 'A Method for Combining Pressure Sensitive Sensors and Computing For a Novel Haptic Perception in the CNS' and finally 'Repurposing RobCo Central Processing Units as a Low-Cost, Low-Power Solution for Cybernetic Limb Prosthesis: A Cost-Conscious Engineering Guide.'
  
  She spent most of the day writing them, creating their graphs, figures and appendixes. She wrote them in the same style and format as the Pre-War academic papers she had already read from the data download she got from the hospital dealing with the PHOENIX system and Nemean armour, which were published in the classified Proceedings on the American Cybernetics Institute . Apparently, the entire publication was a classified document, which she found was more common than not. Academic journals were replaced by classified Government journals if the science discussed at all impacted the national defence.
  
  And considering it was standard in Pre-War America to classify things as innocuous as total corn crop yields as Strategically Important Information, it meant that more than seventy-five per cent of Academia was captured, as if they said anything at all against the government, they would lose their security clearance and therefore be unable to read, much less publish, anything in their field of speciality. Some of the things she read suggested that some were even detained indefinitely for the unauthorised possession of classified information, that is to say, in their minds. It wasn't a criminal charge, so they weren't entitled to due process because all they had to do was surrender the classified information they weren't authorised to possess and they'd be let go. Now that's what she called a Catch-22!
  
  She thought she was wasting time spending so much time writing the articles, but the part of her that grew up in America thought it was completely ridiculous that she was writing three post-doctoral academic articles in a single day. It was odd for her to have such an odd disassociative feeling, as most of her didn't think it was odd, no more than it would be odd to write three high school book reports on novels she had read a hundred times before. They were on the same level of complexity, after all.
  
  The feeling passed, and she shrugged. She almost never got a disagreement in her memories anymore, and even this one barely lasted any time at all. It was more like a feeling of deja-vu than anything. Academic articles took so long to write because of the research necessary needed to conduct them, which was already done here.
  
  The fact that she wanted to give these to the Brotherhood just so they would stop butchering people did not mean, however, that she didn't want to be compensated for it. They didn't know her proclivities in wanting to spread knowledge of cybernetic augmentations far and wide, after all. They'd see the value, and she would ask for suitable compensation in knowledge, like for like.
  
  Before the surgery that Ferguson would be assisting on, she let the man read the summaries, and he got excited, "You really wrote these? And it goes into depth about the methodology and how to replicate and reproduce your findings?"
  
  Lily nodded, "And includes all appendices, such as zhe microcontroller code for the in-limb processor for all of zhe examples. If you want these, then I want something in exchange. Zhat means your trades probably can't be in zhis field because, no offence, I don't zhink I would learn much. It 'as to be something I don't know. It doesn't need to be what your group might consider sensitive knowledge, either. It could be something as simple as low-water hydroponics techniques, zhe method to synthesise Rad-X or RadAway, zhe location of a seed vault zhat is preferably closer than the one in Spitsbergen or similar innocuous but interesting items."
  
  Ferguson nodded slowly, "Yeah, okay. If you don't mind, let me take the full papers back, and then I'll send you a list of titles and summaries, and you can pick three if you trust me. I'll have to get this signed off by the Head Scribe, but it won't be a problem." He paused and asked, "Spitsbergen?"
  
  Lily had no idea if this was true in the Fallout universe, as it was made in her universe in the 1990s, she thought, but she would proceed on the basis that it was true because how could they verify it in any case? "Zhe Svalbard Global Seed and Genetic 'eritage Vault is on zhe island of Spitsbergen in Norway. It is a repository for all of zhe planet's common plants and seeds and many of zhe uncommon ones. And tissue samples from many animals, too. Designed to 'elp in zhe event of a global catastrophe."
  
  She wanted to get a number of plants, especially grasses and weeds, and hopefully alter them not just to be resistant to radiation, which was more or less straightforward, but for the larger varieties like trees to absorb and then sequester radiation from the water safely in the ground somehow.
  
  That would be more challenging, but there were a number of ways it might be possible. If a plant could concentrate all its absorbed radionuclides in one place and then surround them with some robust sap or similar non-water soluble substance, it would take those radionuclides out of the water and rain cycle. Over time, years perhaps, it would clean and purify the water over a large area. Sure, there would be slightly radioactive pellets buried in the ground, but that was better than them being in drinking water or rain, right?
  
  She could always go to Oasis for samples of trees, but she was very hesitant about using those mutated trees that might have an incipient hivemind awareness in them. Would they work the same when they were away from Bob and Harold? It was much better, from her perspective, to start with a clean slate when working on genetic alterations to a species. She would call dealing with what might be a human-tree mutant chimaera plan Z.
  
  He nodded in understanding then, "Ah, I had heard about similar projects. Honestly, I have heard about similar projects here in America. I will look them up; there very well might be a government vault like that somewhere nearby on the east coast."
  
  They did both surgeries back to back, and it was pretty simple. Even though she liked to keep her knife hand strong, for his benefit, she did as much as she could with the Auto-Doc as that would make it very repeatable. She noticed him watching her program the machine carefully and told him that he could have a copy of the programs if he wanted.
  
  "Take zhe patient to post-op room two, please," she told the Labourtron orderly, who waved a manipulator as it was programmed before rolling the patient out of the OR.
  
  "How did you get such useful programs for those RobCo Tron bots?" Ferguson asked, shaking his head.
  
  "Zhat, I'm afraid, is confidential. But, 'onestly, I don't zhink I did anything anyone else couldn't do, if zhey were also an anal retentive detail freak. You basically just start with creating small tasks, and build from zhere and you don't stop. Even today, I try to create at least a couple of new zhings for them to do a day if I can find zhe time," Lily said while shaking her head. It was mostly true, except that her interface for creating the finite state machine tasks was orders of magnitude easier to use than programming a Labourtron manually on a terminal. They were still mostly the same thing, though.
  
  "Ugh," he said with the tone of somebody who had clearly programmed a Protectron or Labourtron at least once.
  
  They went in together and installed the prosthesis on the patient's ports, and Lily allowed Ferguson to conduct his own standardized post-operative protocol, "Amazing. They use their prosthesis better than people have had one of ours for years. And an excellent job on the artistic features, they almost look like their own limb, just metal."
  
  Lily hummed and nodded noncomittally. She wasn't entirely pleased with the results. She had to sandbag a fair bit since the Scribe was watching the entire process. They were still very functional, full featured and useful limbs, she was sure but it was like a Vermeer doing a work with finger paints or crayons. She intended to refund half of the the charge to the two patients and call it some kind of promotion or something. Her sense of artistry wasn't satisfied at all.
  
  She waved off any more discussion with Ferguson, and ambled down into her lair in the basement. She wasn't depressed, as she didn't really get depressed, but it was kind of like the feeling you get when you have an itch but can't quite scratch it. Unsatisfying.
  
  She walked over to her tank of eels, who started getting agitated when they saw her, "Did you not get breakfast?" she asked them, then checked their current feeding scheduled and decded that they could use a little treat.
  
  Then she walked over to her large terrarium and checked on her black widows. They too seemed to be interested to see her. A half dozen came out to see her, which was unusual, "Ohhh... did you miss mommy?" she asked them.
  
  When she first came to this world she thought the first cybernetic implant she would make would be a subdermal armour based on graphene nanotubes, however that didn't work out at all. Nanotubes were way too thin, it wasn't quite a molecular cheese grater but it turned out that putting them under the skin, even if you made the finest of nets it would do damage to you just to push on your skin. The nanotubes would slice into you tissue no matter how fine you made the fabric they were constructed into, it seemed like.
  
  That was a shame, because subdermal armour was something she desperately wanted. So, she had begun the longer research project to replicate it one way she knew would work, the same way she remembered from her past life, which was a complete biological implant that incorporated spider silk in a similar ballistic netting underneath a biomorph's skin.
  
  She opened the terrarium and fished a few of the females out and let them play on her hand. She was in the stage where she was using genetic alterations to these spiders to increase the strength of their silk. It was already one of the strongest silks, with the exception of the Darwin bark spider which wasn't native around here, but there was still a lot of room for improvement.
  
  She also didn't kill these girls, like she did the eels, as they were more like pets. Normally black widows didn't reproduce but once a year, perhaps, but she had ways to increase that to about once a month with the right hormones and nutritional supplements, individually given. She was already on the second generation, here. After she altered the spiderlings in vitro, she would take them to one of the houses she had bought and release them, and would allow nature to take its course. Later, she would pick several of the liveliest looking females to take back home both to be her pets and to be the mothers of the next generation. She thinks she could have a good quality silk either in this next third generation, or at the most one more.
  
  At that point, her project will become more difficult, as Vector Mk1 is insufficient to carry that much information, so she will have to shift research goals to improve it first before she can work on the armour bioware.
  
  Suddenly, she, and the spiders on her hand were all startled by her Apprentice's shriek. It startled one of the little ones so much that it bit her. She spoke to it soothingly, "Zhere, zhere..." before putting her hand back in the large terrarium so they could hop off her hand. She glanced at the Apprentice and said, "You scared her into biting me. Why did you scream so loud?"
  
  The Apprentice looked upset, "They're black widows! They are poisonous! Oh, she bit you! Where is the antivenom? Are you going to be okay? It's a neurotoxin, isn't it?"
  
  Lily sighed and shook her head, "First, zhis may sound pedantic but zhey are venemous. The distinction is, I assure you, important if you're zhe spider. Also, spiders are very shy, and zhey don't want to 'urt anybody, Alice." She said, using the girl's name, which wasn't something she often did. Her Master almost never called her by her name, so she figured that was the correct way to handle things when raising an Apprentice.
  
  She wasn't upset with her, it was more like she liked sharing some of her interests with the Apprentice, "Zhey just want to live their lives in their home and not be bothered too much, yes? Also, females can choose whether or not to inject venom. And venom is very precious to a spider. Zhey probably won't use it unless you try to squish zhem. Zhat was just a warning bite from zhe little one."
  
  She paused before admitting, "Plus, our medichines are pretty good at neutralizing most neurotoxins, so long as zhe dose is not exceptionally massive."
  
  The Apprentice stared at her with a weird expression on her face, "You really like spiders, don't you, Mistress? I thought you were just keeping them for some weird science reason." Well, she was! But she didn't consider those things mutually exclusive.
  
  She rubbed the back of her neck, and chuckled, "I suppose. I mainly feel a kinship for zhem, I suppose. An understanding, yes? Do you want to hold one? So long as you don't scream at her like you did, she probably won't bite you."
  
  The Apprentice looked unsure, but then nodded and walked over closer.
  
  Lily hummed and reached inside the terrarium, searching for a particular female. Finding her, she fished her out on her finger before setting her on the back of the Apprentice's hand. "'ere, this one, she is the friendliest of all of them. She is my favourite."
  
  Alice blinked, "You can recognize them? What did you name this one, then?"
  
  Lily looked at the girl like she was stupid, "Aleph-Three." She was a first generation of altered spiderlings specimen, and the third spider she chose to return home. Did Alice expect her to pick real names for all of them, or something?
  
  Apparently she did, because the Apprentice had that expression that indicated she disapproved of something she was doing. "Dr St. Claire! You have to at least name your favourite! She can't just have a designation like the eels."
  
  She tried to think of an appropriate name for her favourite with a annoyed hiss. After a moment she nodded and then said, "Fine. Her name is Alice."
  
  Wait, why is the Apprentice crying? "Apprentice! Why are you crying? Be careful, you will scare her!"
  
  "Ow! She bit me!" the Apprentice yelled.
  
  Lily sighed and carefully transferred Alice the Spider back into the Terrarium before Alice the Apprentice accidentally squished her or something.
  
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  Blackwater
  Lily cornered the Initiate that Alice had repeatedly flirted with over the past three days while he was off-duty. "Ah, Initiate Wilcox... tell me... 'ave you 'eard of zhe phrase: Fifteen will get you twenty?"
  
  She had two reasons for ambushing the young man during his off-duty period, who had to be at least nineteen or twenty- and Lily had to say it, the Apprentice definitely had a type. Dark hair, tall, strong and confident looking. He looked quite similar to and was of a similar age to that missionary boy that the girl had also flirted with. Thankfully that one had gone back home, and thankfully this one was going back home shortly, also.
  
  Lily would have to sit down with the Apprentice not only to discuss the truth about the Brotherhood of Steel and their history, but she had decided to confide in the girl about her FEV experiments.
  
  "Uh, no ma'am, Dr St. Claire, no, I have not," the young man told her in an unsure tone.
  
  She used her scanner, which she had concealed as a clipboard, to scan his entire body thoroughly, including his Power Armour. That was the secondary reason for this conversation.
  
  Lily nodded to him reasonably, "At one time, it 'ad a different meaning, but like most zhings in our society, it 'as simplified. Zhe sentiment is still mostly zhe same, zhough. You see, my apprentice Alice seems quite enamoured with you, yes? She is fifteen." She patted her pistol at her waist, "So if you don't want to get twenty new holes in your body, you will keep things platonic between you, is zhat understood, Initiate?"
  
  "M-ma'am, yes, ma'am!" The boy sounded off, stuttering a bit.
  
  "Good," replied, after making sure all of the scans she had taken of him and his Armour were of acceptable fidelity.
  
  The Apprentice interrupted while Lily was working on about three things at once. Her work pattern, to an external observer, would look like madcap chaos. She tended to work on about three to five projects simultaneously throughout the day. With the limitations of her weak and squishy brain, she could only hold her interest unless she got seriously inspired for a limited amount of time on a single project.
  
  So it was her usual custom to flit from project to project, working on each for a while before leaving it where it lay and shifting gears to something else. It only worked because she had a nearly perfect memory of everything she had experienced since she had her brain-computer working properly. It only took a few seconds reviewing her sensorium, especially the internal thought track, to remember exactly where she had left off on a project and continue it as if she had never left.
  
  Right now, she was working on attempting to isolate the gene expressions from the fat man she had gotten a genetic sample from weeks earlier. She was pretty sure she had ruled out an increase in the efficiency of energy usage as being responsible for his reduced calorie requirements, so all that was left was an increase in the ability to extract useful energy from the food he ate or possibly the use of an entirely novel organic compound instead of the adenosine triphosphate that was used as energy storage and transfer media in almost every complex animal.
  
  The latter was a long shot, though, since that would be an incredibly radical change in the body, down to its cellular processes. ATP was also a precursor to RNA and DNA, so it was almost impossible to replace unless it was the result of a top-down redesign of how a body works on a cellular level. She was very sceptical that random mutation could cause it, so she was eliminating it as a possibility only for completion's sake. She should have scanned the fatty as that would have eliminated or proven this second long shot possibility right away, but she didn't think to.
  
  After this, she would continue on the initial design for the truck she was going to make, and then, surprisingly, something right up her alley from her time in America. A consumer electronics device.
  
  Specifically, she was going to attempt to use her already mostly developed e-ink tech to develop something akin to an e-reader from her past, like a Kindle. She couldn't print textbooks, for sure, but this might be a suitable replacement. She had even worked on an e-reader before using e-ink technology in her past life. Although one did not really work on e-ink displays themselves when engineering an e-reader, in the same way, an engineer working on a cell phone didn't design an OLED screen. You simply bought them as a module and incorporated them into your design.
  
  That didn't mean she didn't understand more or less how they worked, as it was important to understand the broad brush strokes of the technology, as you were incorporating both its abilities and limitations into your consumer device. No e-reader featured any features that required a fast refresh of the screen, for example, because their designers knew more or less how the e-ink display worked and its limitations.
  
  She had already tested the e-ink technology; she had created by hand a slightly oversized 10x10 grid of pixels, so she knew it would work. However, the pixel matrix couldn't easily be produced by either of her fabricators, not unless she wanted to alter them radically just for this one project, and she definitely did not.
  
  It would be simpler for her to produce what amounted to an assembly line just for this one product than it would be to alter her fabricator to support utilising the pigments, charging them positively or negatively, and sequestering them in tiny microcapsules filled with oil. Although she hadn't actually got the list of possible tech transfers from the Brotherhood, she was already assured that industrial manufacturing of sapphire, both micro and macro was one of the options, which she was tentatively planning on using for both the screen and microcapsules of these devices. Plus, she could try creating sapphire rods for use in lasers, doping them with random metals until she got one that worked.
  
  Sapphire lasers weren't quite as good as ruby lasers, despite the fact that sapphire and ruby were essentially the same from an elemental perspective. They were both minerals called corundum, which was basically aluminium and oxygen, but she honestly didn't know how particular impurities were present to make a "ruby" corundum red or a "sapphire" corundum blue, as some of them seemed identical. Geology was a bit confusing. Nor did she know precisely how to dope either of those minerals to create a useful laser gain media, so it would all take some research.
  
  However, from scanning ruby rods, she knew the dopants' composition, just not how they were spread over and integrated with the microcrystalline structure of the ruby so completely.
  
  It would be so very nice if she could create lasers in all shapes and sizes from scratch, though, but she suspected the civilian industrial technique to create sapphire glass that the Brotherhood would likely trade her would take a lot of further research until she had something that would be useful in military applications. She'd just have to wait and see, though.
  
  The main problem she faced in the e-ink display project, beyond the obvious one of the time it would take to design, build and test, was the size the production equipment would take up. This might be a project she needed to offload onto one of the properties she owns rather than keeping it in her home, at least until she can start digging out sub-basement levels. Just creating the displays wouldn't expose any of her critical technologies, so she didn't mind it being off-site, although creating the processors and solid-state storage the devices would use would, so the ultimate assembly of her e-readers would have to remain at home .
  
  Sighing, she shifted gears again to the truck project before noticing the Apprentice walking into her workshop. She was carrying that damned stoat. Eyes narrowing, "I told you to keep zhat menace out of my basement, Apprentice."
  
  The girl sighed, "I know. Sir Longius doesn't much like it here, either. But I am worried about him. Look at how his tummy is distended; I think he might have worms or parasites!"
  
  Lily blinked several times. Was she a vet now? She peered at the creature as Alice held the thing out to her hands under its front paws so it was longed out to its full length. It really was long, with small little legs, like a tiny white furred little chéng lóng, except it featured a squished pug-like face instead of the noble snoot she would expect from a dragon. It was already hissing at her.
  
  Its stomach did look a little bit distended, so she made a noncommittal humming noise. She had been about to say something that her social assistant told her would be taken very poorly by the Apprentice, so she had shifted it to the noncommittal hum.
  
  She held out her hands and warned the beast, in a low menacing tone, "I swear to you, beast; if you bite me again, I will take your temperature in a way you will definitely not enjoy."
  
  That took the starch right out of it, and it stopped hissing but still seemed quite wary. Did it understand English, or did it just hear her menacing yet dulcet and commanding tones?
  
  It wasn't surprising that a lesser creature would detect her aura of dominance and submit to her, after all. It didn't, actually, look like it would have a brain big or complex enough to have anything near higher-order intelligence, but she had been surprised before.
  
  The incredibly advanced and intelligent aliens from her past life, the Factors, were basically fungus, and she had never entirely explained exactly how they thought, to begin with, so she wouldn't actually allow assumptions to foreclose options for scientific observations when it came to any creature's intelligence were concerned.
  
  She grabbed it and did a quick exam, palpating its tummy for a moment before reaching over to grab her scanner. She made a mental note to create simple ultrasound imaging devices for medical usage. She could pipe the output to a RadioKing television easily enough, and it would be a useful diagnostic tool for all the doctors. The Apprentice could have used it on her rat and not had to bother her at all.
  
  That would be the project of only a few hours, like her radar wand, whereas actual MRI scanners might take a week or more.
  
  Lily noticed that the Apprentice was wringing her hands anxiously as she scanned the creature before setting her damaged device back into the drawer on her workbench table.
  
  She downloaded the image scans from it, and it didn't take long for her to identify the problem with the creature. She highlighted a section of the 3-D scans with a mental pen and forwarded it over to Alice's implant over the wireless, "I see zhe problem, Apprentice."
  
  She then saved an updated scan of the creature's brain to her To Study directory. She didn't presently want to study the structures of an unusual brain today, and she had been doing that all too much lately, anyway, and it started to give her a headache.
  
  Alice looked distraught, "Zhere's a problem?! It's parasites, isn't it?! But surely we can fix it, right? Can you walk me through how to program medichines for an antiparasitic therapy?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side before picking up the stoat and handing it back to the girl, "Just fat."
  
  Then she turned back around and took a half-second to revisit where she had left off. Ah, right. She reopened the correct windows and continued correcting minor elements on the scans of the individual parts of her truck with a number of gestures involving the virtual objects.
  
  She already had both versions of the fission motors scanned and modelled completely. However, she was thinking that she would try incorporating the four-speed automatic transmission that was standard on the four-door Corvega instead of a manual transmission like her truck had. Of course, she'd have to size everything up, but that was simplicity itself in her software.
  
  The real sticky issue would be making a single vehicle using two motors. The four-hundred horsepower motors just weren't enough for a water-tanker truck, nor enough for an up-armoured utility truck. It wasn't a space issue, but more of an issue keeping both power shafts spinning at the same rate, assuming each motor would drive one axle. This was especially true if you considered that it was assumed that one of the motors would need to drive a number of accessories, like electrical alternators and an HVAC system.
  
  She wanted to groan; the truck problem was the project she flitted away from the most often and the one she spent the least amount of time on. Mechanical things were hard! Perhaps, she should ask Gary for some advice. He said he was a car mechanic, but did that translate into designing a car that used two engines? She didn't notice the Apprentice leave.
  
  She met Zhao Yun in her lobby to give him his last treatment and bid him goodbye. The Brotherhood detachment would be leaving tomorrow, which was a day earlier than originally planned, which was great!
  
  She had a meeting with Tombs shortly, but first she was drawn outside as she detected her Apprentice having what sounded like an argument, even if it was a friendly one, with the team of mercenaries that had been arranged to guard the exterior of the building this week.
  
  It was a team of Missionaries, like the ones she hired to assassinate her problem gang leaders what seemed so long ago. However, this one was led by a much older man, in his thirties, leading a team of four much younger men - boys, actually, no older than fourteen.
  
  She had been, initially, quite against hiring what amounted to child soldiers as mercenaries, however, she discovered that this was mostly training for them. A summer camp of sorts of orienteering and select "safe" jobs, even though it was going to be New Year in a few days.
  
  She wondered who picked the time slots, as it seemed a rough deal to be away from family on Christmas, assuming that holiday was a big deal to you. Perhaps these were the orphans who didn't have families? She made a mental note to get the four kids a belated Christmas gift as a goodbye present when they finished their contract in a few days.
  
  Alice was insistent, "But I have read a bit about your beliefs; how can you kill people and still square that with your beliefs?"
  
  Oh, dear ThorAllahJesus! She is debating a religious person of faith, trying to use either their own scriptures or beliefs against them. This isn't going to end well, Apprentice! They study that claptrap for years. They are going to definitely know it and be able to twist in into a pretzel to serve whatever they want to do!
  
  The older gentleman sighed and shook his head, "Miss Alice, my beliefs are simple. I believe that our Lord was made flesh and blood as Jesus Christ and died to redeem us, all of us. You. Everyone else, too. You ask how I can do the things that I must, but the truth is that I know I sin, that I am a sinner is indisputable, and yet the fact that still I am saved is the Greatest Glory of our Lord. Praise God."
  
  That caused his four students to echo a quiet "Praise God" too.
  
  Lily wanted to facepalm. See? See, Apprentice? You can't argue belief or faith with a man or woman of faith; it just didn't work. She knew this because she was something of a woman of faith herself.
  
  However, her faith was more in her inevitable victory over ignorance and the primacy of science as the best tool to understand the universe rather than Jesus. She'd accept a person's criticisms, even their predictions that she might fail. Everyone did, after all. But if someone tried to tell her that it was impossible to ever explain something, she would get just as unreasonable and twisty as this man did just now. His response to the Apprentice even moved her, a little! He was clearly one of those charismatic build social predator types, so it was best not to engage in prolonged debate with him.
  
  "Even killing, when your supposed holy book says Thou Shalt Not Kill?" pressed the Apprentice. Ugh, the girl was being an amateur here; even Lily knew a good rebuttal to this line of attack. She started walking over to the Apprentice to save her.
  
  The man chuckled good-naturedly, "That has been translated poorly. The Ten Commandments were written in Hebrew, after all, and a better translation would be Thou Shalt Not Murder. After all, there are many other places in the Old Testament where killing is mandated." He then nodded, "You're partly right, though. Nobody should enjoy killing, taking another's life. That's the way to damnation. However, if it is done for a righteous cause, it becomes a necessary vocation, like pulling weeds from your garden. When done right, the work ensures the safety of God's people and instils the fear of His just wrath in the hearts of the unrepentant."
  
  That last part sounded kind of hardcore, actually. Lily was almost impressed. Also, were the ten commandments written in Hebrew? She thought that sounded wrong, but she didn't know what proto-Hebrew language it would have been written in, assuming it ever existed. Which it probably never did.
  
  She sent the girl a message as she approached.
  
  [Lilium: You're not going to sway him or even win an argument. These types of people argue dogma for fun back home, I bet, and he's seen all of your potential arguments dozens of times and has counters for each. ]
  
  [Alice: Argh! He is frustrating! I'd almost say he makes some amount of sense. ]
  
  [Lilium: No! He doesn't! His entire premise is unfalsifiable and unverifiable, Apprentice! That said, there is no reason to be an asshole about it. I mean, honestly, he really is doing good work if he kills raiders, in my opinion, no matter whether he is or is not being hypocritical while doing it. ]
  
  [Alice: You're right, Dr St. Claire! ]
  
  Well, of course, she was.
  
  Alice managed to sigh diplomatically and then shrug, "I honestly don't know if that is the case or not, and I realise I am being impolite because raiders truly are a scourge on society; whether you are personally being hypocritical or not doesn't change the fact that you are doing good work when they can no longer kill other innocent people anymore."
  
  Hey! The girl had basically plagiarised her. Still, it was a good way to leave the argument without any hard feelings on either side, she supposed.
  
  The much more experienced debater graciously allowed her to do so, saying, "Thank you, Miss Alice. You are right to question things as you do, and it is never wrong to want to preserve life, especially as a woman or a doctor, both of which are in your future."
  
  Well, that's enough of that. Although it was nice, apparently, that he didn't see anything wrong with woman doctors it was a mite condescending that he saw her concerns over life as stereotypically womanly. She coughed delicately, "Apprentice, I need your assistance inside, please."
  
  The girl nodded and said, "Excuse me," to the man before following her back inside. Then Alice glanced at her and said, "Thanks for the save, I guess. I was reading that debating was useful to build intelligence."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes, "Where did you read zhat? An old debate club recruiting poster?" Although it might actually work a little bit, it kind of depended on what intelligence you were trying to build. She felt the type of social intelligence wherein the goal was to convince people you were right when they didn't believe you in the first place was overrated.
  
  Historically, when Lily was forced to perform diplomacy at all, she had always preferred practising the American style of diplomacy, namely showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which one you wanted. It was incredibly effective!
  
  Lily then continued, "I can see Monsieur Tombs approaching on zhe drone. Would you get some tea ready for 'is visit?"
  
  She brightened and nodded, "Of course!"
  
  She met Tombs in a conference room instead of her office, as she didn't have any goal of impressing him with its ostentatiousness.
  
  They had discussed the status of their comingled enterprises, and most of the news was good. Even the bad news was good news, it was basically that they were accumulating too much money from the water sales. In an economy as small as Megaton, that could be a problem.
  
  "Let us 'ire more of zhe employees, zhen?" Lily offered.
  
  Tombs considered that idea, "And what would they do?"
  
  That Lily didn't know either, at first. Then, however, Lily thought of the mercenaries outside, "Our own security force. Trained from zhe ground up, and provided with good equipment. We mostly 'ire zhe short-term mercenaries for a lot of security services. Let us invest in starting our own PMC, with ourselves being zhe main customer."
  
  Tombs didn't look too interested in the prospect, "That might be a good idea, but it sounds like a lot of work. But, so long as we hire rotating mercenaries as we do, that will always be a security threat itself. What is a PMC, though?"
  
  Lily grinned, "A Private Military Company. Basically, we could start our own mercenary company - and its only customers, at least at first, would be ourselves. It would take a lot of money to start up, I zhink, but it would be worth it just for zhe added loyalty factor. It's a semi-long term project, but worthwhile."
  
  She decided that if Tombs didn't want to join her in this venture, she would proceed alone. In fact, she intended to be the primary on this, even if he wanted to be involved too, as she intended to hold primary loyalty on any paramilitary force she used.
  
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  Minigun Bridge Bitch
  AN: I'm officially retconning the fact that Lily got her memories of Fallout: New Vegas back in Chapter 47 (For The Science!) I will be editing that chapter to remove that segment in the next day or two.
  
  Another day passed, and more progress was made, including the departure of the Brotherhood, which she felt was tremendous.
  
  Before the Brotherhood Scribe and his entourage left, he delivered to Lily a list of possible trades and a holotape containing three different methods to construct sapphire glass, the simplest being useful for panes, for example, the screen she was slowly designing for her e-reader. It could also be used to make arbitrary shapes, like rods for lasers. Still, after reviewing the literature, she felt that it would be filled with microscopic imperfections, which would be the site of failure in any attempt to use it in a high-energy laser application, even if she knew how to dope them with the almost ten compounds necessary.
  
  Lily found his delivery amusing because she had told him that he would not be able to take her full papers back or even read them until she got at least part of the deal on her end. That night she had observed him, through her electromagnetic sense, conduct an encrypted back-and-forth conversation with Galaxy News Radio.
  
  She had saved the encrypted transmissions, but honestly, she was not a cryptologist. She did not know what cryptosystem the transmissions used, much less its encryption key. She believed that the Fallout universe encrypted radios suffered from a low key length, but she did not know enough to even try to brute force the key because she had no idea how the cryptosystem worked. She would need to get a copy of a handset capable of encryption or maybe its maintenance manual or design docs before she could figure it out.
  
  There were a number of cryptographic libraries included on the operating system she had taken from her nanohive, so the same libraries were present on her computer, but Lily did not really know how they functioned, just how to use them for the basics involved in securing her own radio transmissions, encrypting data and simple public-private key cryptographic techniques to verify the authenticity of a message without needing to communicate with the sender. The explosives she had decided to remove from her office used that simple HMAC-style technique. All of that was just plug-and-play, though. A few lines of code, at most, since the libraries did all the work.
  
  In the past, she had been an excellent hacker, but that didn't really mean the same thing as understanding cryptography from a mathematical perspective. Instead, cryptography was baked into her processors; it was the difference between closing your eyes and being able to touch your nose and explaining, in-depth, the process of sensory proprioception that gave a human that ability.
  
  She asked her expert system to analyse the radio waveforms, and it thought about it for a whole minute before telling her:
  
  [Group of Electromagnetic Transmissions in the Medium Frequency Band, Modulated to Carry Data of Unknown Type (Two-Way Communication Voice (79%)), Featuring an Algorithmically Simple Rolling Frequency Hopping Scheme* and Encrypted using a Novel, Unknown Cryptographic System.]
  
  [Unknown Cryptosystem Designated CRYPT-2074-0001. CRYPT-2074-0001 cyphertext samples bare some similarity to a known Block Cypher Algorithm (61% FIPS-46-1, FIPS-46-2).]
  
  [No More Data]
  
  [* Algorithm deduced and attached.]
  
  She basically knew that already, at least in the first part. The rest didn't make any sense to her. She didn't really know what one kind of cryptographic algorithm was compared to another, and she wondered how her expert system did if she didn't.
  
  She posed a question to it, perhaps the first time she used natural language to do so: [How did you quantify the guess/inference that the data contained two-way voice communications?]
  
  Immediately it tried to vomit a huge screen of math based on a bunch of factors which were merely referencing a seemingly large number of footnotes and appendices. She rephrased that and asked it to reply in five sentences or less, in natural language.
  
  It thought about that for a short time before replying again.
  
  [1. Transmission amplitude between the two sources was primarily half-duplex, which is similar to simple radio-based voice communication. 2. Transmissions were on a band suitable for voice communications. 3. Transmissions were on a band with past unencrypted voice communications. 4. Transmissions were from a source previous categorised and associated with voice communications on this band. 5. Unknown cryptosystem reduces confidence.]
  
  All that seemed logically consistent, she supposed.
  
  It was nice that her proto-Muse was potentially getting smarter. Plus, it had deduced the algorithm the radios were utilising to hop frequencies, which was useful. She noticed they were hopping, but her receiver was broad enough that she noticed every transmission anyway. She really needed a better processor for her to run her Muse on, as there was going to be an upper limit of both its complexity and ultimate usefulness running on the one she presently had.
  
  She'd save this group of back-and-forth transmissions. Once she found a handset capable of encryption - perhaps she could ask Grace to borrow one - she could reverse engineer it to determine its precise cryptographic system and then perhaps use brute force attacks against the encryption key the Brotherhood used. It would be useful if they didn't rotate the codes too often.
  
  That wasn't all that Ferguson had, though.
  
  Before he left he asked if the Brotherhood could rent her cloning machine, and although she had gotten everything moved up to the fourth floor and had started to rebuild it, she responded in the positive, with the caveat that it would likely take a while to reconfigure it to a medically useful therapeutic mode. Apparently, there were many older Brotherhood members, mostly retired, who could use new hearts, livers and kidneys. She intended to keep its normal function in addition, though. Because who knew when you would need to clone a whole organism?
  
  He also had data on the location of four potential seed vaults set up by the American authorities, two of which were government and two of which were made by private parties. So, Lily bought that with another one of her "tokens" and discovered that there were really only three. He had been wily as one of them was a US government project, but it was in Antarctica.
  
  As such, she had given the man a holotape that contained her three research papers, which he took with a look of relish. Internally, she was nodding. He was right to cherish her work, she felt.
  
  She didn't know if she got ripped off as far as the seed vaults were concerned. Clearly, none of them would be immediately useful.
  
  VaultTek had two projects listed, Vault 22 in Nevada and Vault 182 in Alaska, which may as well be as far away as far as she was concerned. The last turned out to be a potential possibility, a government project underneath the Terrapin Nature Park on Kent Island, which was only about one hundred kilometres to the northeast, although she doubted very highly the bridge from the mainland was still in usable condition.
  
  The exact coordinates were included for all sites, but it would be many moons before she felt comfortable taking a one-hundred-kilometre trip with segments over open water.
  
  She enjoyed seeing the Brotherhood leave her hospital and, hopefully, her town. Walk-in patients had reduced day over day by almost ten per cent while they were here.
  
  She was less happy to see the Mechanist and Sophie go, but he had agreed to stay until tomorrow so she could get at least half of his promised auto-turrets finished, combined with the DMLS system and metal recycler he was taking home completed.
  
  The metal recycler he was getting was a little bit better than hers, and she had also built as much of it as a black box as possible. The four nanohives that it used were entombed in layers of armour and were fitted with small thermite charges as well. If the computer installed on the machine thought it was being reverse-engineered or disassembled, those important parts would be reduced to their elemental components.
  
  She didn't expect Scott to do such a thing, but it paid to be sure. What did the Russians say? Doveryay, no proveryay. Trust, but verify. Plus, there was also the very small chance it could be stolen from him. Although the amount of military force necessary to do that once he got it sequestered in his new Vault kind of boggled one's mind, but it was still possible.
  
  Before he left, however, they were going to set up a radio mast on the roof, with a point-to-point dish on top pointing directly to Vault 108. At first, Scott was a little uneasy because, well, it pointed directly at his home, and people could easily see that, so Lily added a half-sphere of radio-transparent carbon fibre to conceal it. So, now, people would only know the direction in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, visually at least.
  
  Once he got back to his Vault, he would set up a similar transceiver pointed at her so that they could maintain a continual datalink. She would need to send him periodic OTA updates to his OS and software, in any case. Plus, it was nice to stay in touch and possibly collaborate on projects. He had already had a number of useful suggestions on the truck project, as had Gary, although he was less useful as he did not have access to her CAD software or a computer.
  
  Although, Scott still said that he intended to conceal it at his end somehow, to defeat adversaries with radio direction-finding equipment.
  
  Lily took that to mean he would establish some series of concealed relays himself. Or perhaps he would just offset his receiver slightly and trap it heavily. She didn't really care; he could be as paranoid as he liked, she supposed.
  
  Honestly, she suspected a small community to spring up on or about Vault 108 eventually when it was revealed that there was some water and electrical power available. She was vacillating between a water tank size of ten or twenty thousand litres. Lily did not know the projected use case of the truck. Would it simply go back and forth to Canterbury Commons, or would it go farther afield to sell its wares? She didn't know, so she intended to design it with the maximum flexibility possible.
  
  She suspected, though, that Canterbury Commons would not buy the entirety of the water that Scott and Gary could sell, especially when Scott had already asked for her assistance to repair or even expand the water purifier that the Vault had, as well as repair the fission reactor that was on site.
  
  Vault 108's fission reactor was an interesting case. She had examined it in-depth while she was there. It was a standard breeder reactor design and had an absolutely ridiculous number of unused fuel rods still in storage. Over four hundred, and when you consider that it took only eight rods to refuel the reactor and that the reactor could run for about eighteen months on a single refuelling cycle, according to the operator's manual, it meant that there was sixty years of fuel that they had stocked and never used.
  
  If Lily recalled, Vault 108's main reactor was designed to fail intentionally after about ten years. You could discover this in the game if you looked up the Vault either in the Citadel's computer or at VaultTek's HQ; she couldn't remember exactly. No doubt, part of their experiment, somehow. However, it never got past the first year before there was nobody alive to care one way or another. But they were given a ridiculous amount of fuel, she suspected, so as not to give any of the residents an idea that they would have to do without in a few short years.
  
  In between FEV experiments, she had inspected the reactor, which appeared to be in good condition, and tried to bring it up into a self-test mode, but the controlling computer would not respond. All of the control rods that were made of a neutron-moderating material were firmly and fully deployed into the reaction chamber, preventing any fission reactions from occurring at all.
  
  Sabotaging control chips seemed to be a popular VaultTek pass-time, as that was what happened to the water chip from the first Fallout game and for a similar reason. Still, it meant that the reactor might be easily repaired. If so, it was a medium-sized fission reactor and could provide over four hundred megawatts of electricity, enough that Scott would have a lot more power than he knew what to do with if he could get it working. He would have to inspect every inch of the thing, though, especially all of the cooling loops, to make sure they didn't require maintenance or repairs.
  
  Lily had claimed half of the remaining fuel rods as an afterthought but hadn't brought any home. She didn't have a present use for them, and although fission reactors were, theoretically, simple technology, she wasn't really that enthused about building one from scratch. She felt better about proceeding down the path she had already started along, especially if she could expect collaboration in fusion power from Madison Li. From what she learned building the Eastside power generator, she felt she could build another that had a much more efficient plasma loop that might extract ten or twelve megawatts. And they were relatively simple to construct for her.
  
  She considered the rods trade goods but not immediately useful ones, as surely there were people still operating fission reactors around.
  
  All of her projects were making slow but steady progress. She slowly stood and stretched like a cat in her underground basement. In a moment, she was going to spend a couple of hours working with the Apprentice on not a medical project but an engineering one.
  
  Lily had reviewed the girl's light bulbs, and although they were a good first attempt, she considered them wanting and not good enough to be a product associated with her, so they would need some adjustment before the girl actually sold any. They used too much electricity, provided too little light, and they probably wouldn't last more than a year before needing replacement.
  
  However, there were a number of simple fixes that Lily would lead the girl towards. Both the light and the electricity problem could be solved by changing the shape of the filament to increase its surface area, as well as adding a dopant that would vastly increase the carbon's electrical resistance. The girl could solve those problems herself after they were pointed out.
  
  Regarding the longevity issue, however, Lily would have to put a hand in herself and spend a little time designing a much better device to mate the bottoms of the bulbs with the tops, but that wouldn't take long at all. The one the girl was using now looked MacGuyver as hell, and the airtight seal it created wouldn't last long, especially if exposed to repeated cycles of heating and cooling, like, for example, turning the lights on at night and then off during the day.
  
  Alice wasn't familiar enough with her design software to realise that she could build the bulbs as mostly airtight in the first place, with only a tiny drain hole. That's how lightbulbs were made in the first place, after all.
  
  It was time to start the next generation of eels, too, so everyone would eat eel sandwiches for a couple of days! Not only electrifying but delicious too. She would have to let the fishermen that she would like to receive deliveries of live eels again.
  
  Lily liked lazy days at home like this.
  
  POV Elder Lyons
  
  "... and that's pretty much all I have to report. The specific details on everything are in my two written reports, as well, Elder," the Senior Scribe, finished reporting a group of three that consisted of Elder Lyons, his daughter and the Head Scribe.
  
  "You seem in a hurry, Scribe Ferguson?" asked the Elder, only the barest hint of mild disapproval in his tone.
  
  However, Ferguson readily admitted to it. He nodded, "Yes, I have already reviewed the tech we received in trade from Dr St. Claire, and I will note that she wrote them in exactly the same format and general tone as a Pre-War published scientific paper, and I am eager to begin attempting to replicate. We have forty-one brothers and sisters utilising cybernetic prostheses, most of which are then medically retired. Only a few, like Star Paladin Cross, continue to serve in any capacity at all. However, I believe this technology will help every single one of them, with the potential to bring more than half out of retirement. I am eager to get started."
  
  Rothchild looked very interested in that. He was the one who had saved Cross' life and, in fact, collaborated with Ferguson on much of the cybernetics installed. It was true that Cross had a cybernetic limb, but her alterations which were needed to save her life, were much more than that.
  
  Lyons suspected Cross herself was interested as well, but she definitely was the stoic sort when she was in bodyguard mode and didn't externally appear interested at all in what Ferguson had to say.
  
  He decided to ask a follow-up then, "And how long do you expect before you can see any fruits from this research?"
  
  That caused Ferguson to pause before saying with some confidence, "Everything is relatively straightforward. The style of the prosthesis is not radically different from what we produce ourselves. I expect we can start limited clinical trials in about six weeks."
  
  Six weeks? If only the other research projects the scribes were pursuing had such quick turn-around times. Maxon knows they have been wasting time on that damn giant robot for years and years now, with little success. He nodded, "Very well, Scribe. You are cleared to proceed. If we really can get over twenty medically retired Paladins back to active service, then this will be worth any reasonable expense. You're dismissed."
  
  Ferguson nodded, saluted sloppily and departed.
  
  Elder Lyons then glanced at Rothchild, "Did you do the research I asked you?"
  
  Rothchild nodded, then coughed into his hand, "Yes. On the assumption that Ferguson is correct and she is a scientist from the Old World, I checked all of our oldest archives. The first High Elder, of course, liberated most of West Tek's corporate records. There is no record of any employee or contractor of the name St. Claire."
  
  The older Lyons frowned, "She could have changed her name."
  
  "Maybe. But all the scientists in the West Tek NBC division, which is where any virology work was accomplished, were all located at the Mariposa military base that the High Elder purged. There were none on remote assignment, on leave, or even on vacation. At the time of the Great War all leave was cancelled, and they were working furiously on the program. And we have records indicating every single one of them was executed at Mariposa. None escaped. Also, they were all male. I suspect Ferguson's idea is probably close to correct. I've done a cursory search against other records, but she wasn't a VaultTek employee, at least under that name, either," Rothchild said firmly.
  
  That caused him to make a thoughtful noise and then nod.
  
  He then turned to his daughter and Rothchild, "Well, I am flummoxed. I think the only thing we can do is just try to stay friendly at the moment. Another stabilising force in the Wasteland will probably only prove to be a benefit in our efforts to eradicate the Super Mutant threat. Unless you think you could convince her to come to accept a Senior Scribe position, Sarah?"
  
  Sarah slowly but firmly shook her head.
  
  "Alright, then. For now, we will keep what we know and suspect about this woman confidential. I don't want our toleration or even acceptance of her to become yet another point of friction with our more reactionary elements," the Elder said mildly.
  
  "Casdin is a psychopath. Worse, he is stupid. He still says we should invade Rivet City," his daughter complained.
  
  This caused him to sigh. One possible benefit of their relationship with this doctor woman was that he might be able to get himself a new heart cloned and transplanted. He might need to set up a recurring periodic purchase and treat them as consumables at the rate his subordinates, his daughter included, liked to give him heart attacks.
  
  "Maybe, but he is our psychopath," the Elder said.
  
  Sarah had a sceptical look on her face. Did she truly think Casdin would... what? Mutiny? No. He knew the man. There was no way that Casdin would do that. He'd walk off into the desert on his own before that, but what, then, would he do after that? He didn't think more than a handful of people would join him on his quest, tilting at every technological windmill he saw.
  
  "Sarah, think of some way we can stay in semi-routine contact with this woman without the same obviousness of one of our Senior Scribes spending days at a time at her hospital. Local contacts, scout teams, whatever. You figure it out," the Elder said firmly, before adding, "Also, figure out a way we can get all intelligence that mentions her, that hospital or anything connected with her without it being obvious to the analysts."
  
  Sarah nodded, "Yes, sir."
  
  He glanced at Rothchild, "Anything else to add?"
  
  Rothchild nodded, "I think we should increase surveillance of not only Megaton but Rivet City and Adams as well."
  
  That caused the Elder to purse his lips, "That's tough. We're already kind of spread thin, especially on scout teams. Do you expect her to work with Rivet City or the Enclave? The Enclave, really? They'd throw a bag over her head and whisk her off in a flat minute."
  
  That caused the Head Scribe to chuckle, "Okay. Maybe just Rivet City. The governance of that place is twisty but we know that a woman named Madison Li is heading their research and development wing, and she is for all appearances rather reasonable."
  
  The Elder rapped his fingers on his desk. He'd heard that name before. In fact, he had the mental image of a woman in his head but he couldn't place her. Damn, fallible memory. Was it just in another briefing about Rivet City? "Where have I heard that name before?"
  
  Rothchild said, quickly, "She was one of the lead three researchers for Project Purity, until one of the three died and the other fled."
  
  He slapped his fist into his palm. Of course. James was quite an honourable man. It was such a shame about his wife. Madison Li stayed more in the background if he recalled, and he had the impression that she didn't quite approve of the Brotherhood presence, "Of course, of course. It is such a shame that it never came to fruition. It would have really helped the Wasteland."
  
  His daughter nodded, "And for the Brotherhood too. People would have a lot better opinions on us if they knew we were behind, even if it was only in part, that kind of project."
  
  He sighed. He couldn't rightly blame James for fleeing into a nigh-makebelieve world inside a Vault when his wife died. Maxson knows he had wanted to do something similar when his Anna passed.
  
  "I'll see if I can increase some of the passive intelligence gathering assets in Rivet City, see if we hear anything," he allowed, which caused Rothchild to nod.
  
  "Okay, we'll leave things here then," he concluded the meeting.
  
  The next week proceeded much as the last few days had. The Mechanist and Sophie departed in her truck, which caused her to lose the drone overwatch, as she felt it was much more useful for them on the road, where ambushes were common. She wanted to produce another, perhaps of an improved design, but her stock of Eyebot processors were nil.
  
  She had already informed Moira Brown and her employees that worked in the pharmacy that she would pay a premium for them but hadn't had any offers yet. It made her want to go back to the fourth floor of that hospital and farm the thirty or so floating murder machines, but she didn't feel confident enough to do that. Plus, she didn't have her truck. Her days of walking places on her feet like a peasant were at an end if she had anything to say about it.
  
  Most of the time, she simply enjoyed her life and worked on her projects. However, Lily did work in the hospital every third day, and her return was much rejoiced both by Dr Taylor and Bonesaw, who had been working every other day while she was gone.
  
  Today, however, she got a surprise when she walked into exam room two. She would have recognised the woman, but with her enhanced reality tags, she didn't have to. Right above her head floated [Minigun Bridge Bitch (Surprise 77%, Shock 59%)].
  
  It was clear the woman recognised her, too, even if she was wearing a tasteful ensemble and a white lab coat instead of her combat bodysuit and body armour. Lily even had a stethoscope hanging around her neck, for verisimilitude's sake, even though she often didn't need to use it to hear someone's heartbeat or breath sounds.
  
  Perhaps the best social strategy would be just to pretend that she had never seen the woman before? Her social assistant was silent. "Uhhh..." she said elegantly, "... so what seems to be the problem today?"
  
  Shit, she hadn't even looked at the woman's chart.
  
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  Nat Turner
  The woman looked like she wanted to pull out her weapon. She did not have any large weapons with her, thanks to Lily's security staff, but they had stopped trying to prevent people from taking pistols and knives into the hospital. A lot of people just wouldn't come inside if they couldn't be armed, and Lily actually didn't blame them at all, considering the world they lived in. She would have to get a better reputation for protecting anyone inside her building before people would be willing to surrender all weapons. People were starting to get better that way with the obvious auto-turrets installed at every entrance and the foyer, but still, most people wanted the sense of security only Big Iron on their hip could give them, and how, as a former American could she deny them?
  
  It was quite interesting how the potential to get shot in her own hospital tended to make her rethink her philosophical approach to civil liberties and perhaps plan on incorporating stricter gun control in her building.
  
  The main thing that slowed the woman from reaching for the weapon was she was sitting down on the exam table, which made reaching down to her waist a bit unwieldy. She was wondering what to say to the woman, as it was clear her initial attempt to play it off wasn't going to work until she saw which weapon the woman was reaching for. Of course, it was the fucking AirTaser Lily had given to her.
  
  She had designed her brain interface and computer system to be very resistant to electrical surges. It was connected directly to every part of her brain electrically, after all. But she didn't know what would happen if she took a high-output shot straight to the face. Her skull was also designed to be insulating, but Lily could imagine the electrical shock travelling all the way through her optical nerves and cooking her brain. The possibility of her getting shot with the gun she made with her own two hands infuriated her to the point where she just said quietly, but more full of menace than anything she had ever said since arriving in this universe, " Do not."
  
  Lily didn't know if it was her tone of voice because it really sounded kind of scary even to her as she said it or because this woman thought she was a Courser and was almost within grabbing distance, but she stopped moving her hand to grab the AirTaser. Lily had discovered what a Courser was, at least for the most part. From what she could tell, they were something along the lines of a biomorph with synthetic upgrades housing what appeared to be a mid-tier non-sapient AI used as ninja assassins and middle managers of less sophisticated robots.
  
  From what Sarah Lyons had told her, the synths, even the ones in human-like bodies, weren't really sapient. They weren't AGIs or digitized egos, supposedly, although the Paladin had mentioned that the Institute allegedly occasionally kidnapped people in the Commonwealth Wasteland, seemingly at random, and then replaced them with a synth duplicate. To do that and have it not be detected implied that the duplicates had to be sapient. However, she didn't think that was how it happened. To her, it sounded a lot more like installing some sort of Hidden Agenda espionage mod on the kidnapped party and then letting them go again.
  
  Either some sort of hardware-based cybernetic mind control system if they wanted overt control, or they possibly could have digitized the person against their will and installed a more subtle software-based sleeper agent package before installing their ego back in their body. Lily had seen it all before, and it didn't sound like a pod person situation at all.
  
  Why go to the effort and trouble of creating a perfect duplicate of your victim when you had their original sleeve? Any organization that was able to download a person's memories and upload them into a duplicate biomorph body should be able to just do the same back into their original body after incorporating a sleeper agent package. It was the most basic of basic espionage where she came from, although she didn't know why one would do it to random dirt farmers like Lyons seemed to suggest.
  
  A lot of the things Sarah Lyons told her about the Institute were things like that, incomprehensible, and they sounded more like fairy tales, like boogeyman stuff. It all sounded unscientific to her and made her doubt a lot of the things the woman told her about the Institute in general.
  
  In any case, the Minigun Bridge Bitch stopped moving her hand to grab the AirTaser Lily gifted to her. Her social assistant was telling her that she should make the first move for reconciliation and that she should lower herself to the woman's eye level, as well. Sighing, she grabbed the rolling stool that was always present in a doctor's exam room and sat down at it.
  
  "Good. If you were to attack me unthinkingly twice, especially using zhe weapon I gave you so zhat you wouldn't die in the Wasteland, zhere is no way zhat you would leave zhis room alive," Lily said, her tone arctic. For the moment, the woman seemed content to just sit there and listen, although her heartbeat was still a bit too close to the tachycardia range for her to be calm, according to her ears.
  
  "Now, perhaps we got off on zhe wrong foot, yes? You see, when I saw you and your friends being attacked by raiders, I zhought to myself: Lily, girl, do zhe good deed for zhe day, and 'elp zhem, yes? And what did I get for my consideration? If I recall... you tried to shoot me with zhe minigun," continued Lily, her tone still cold enough that it was a wonder her breath wasn't visible.
  
  Lily concluded with an introduction, "It was only zhe obvious fact zhat you all seemed genuinely afraid of moi, a stranger, zhat kept you alive. I was sure zhat zhere was some sort of misunderstanding, so I was merciful. So, let me introduce myself; I am called Lilliane St. Claire, zhe medical doctor, scientist and adventuress at your service. It would be appreciated if you would be so kind as to reciprocate and zhen perhaps tell me why you attacked me."
  
  The woman's heartbeat had slowed a fair bit, as it seemed clear even to her that immediate violence was not going to occur. However, her eyes still darted left and right, almost like a cornered rabbit seeking an avenue to flee. Lily didn't particularly understand what was making the woman so antsy. It was an illogical, emotional reaction similar to the hypervigilance reactions of people suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
  
  Well, there was plenty of that in the Wasteland, which made her curious about what exactly happened to this woman and the mythical Coursers to generate this reaction. Was she a survivor from one of the settlements they had genocided for no real reason? Lily doubted that happened at all but was open to changing her mind if she was in the presence of a first-hand witness account and survivor.
  
  Finally, the woman sighed and relaxed a tad more, "My name is Natalie Turner. My friends and I thought that you were a Courser, which is a very dangerous enemy sent by very evil people." She frowned, "Honestly, I'm still not sure you're not, except nobody has ever mentioned any kind of deep-cover Courser that pretends to be a doctor."
  
  Lily hummed appreciatively, glad at least this Natalie was capable of speech that didn't involve some sort of dramatic last stand. She nodded, "Yes, I kind of figured zhat first bit. At zhe time, I did not know what zhis Courser was. However, I have since used some of my contacts to give me a briefing about relatively nearby organizations." She coughed delicately, "Also, I have to admit zhat you were not zhe only person to mistake me for an agent of this group. A Courser is... some manner of cybernetically enhanced biological robot used as a sort of special forces commando force by a mysterious organization based in the Commonwealth called the Institute? Would you mind telling me why you thought I was a robot ninja?"
  
  That caused her to bristle a little bit, which Lily found a bit odd. Still, Natalie replied, "Uh, that's pretty much right. And it is because you seemed unusually fast, and dangerous, using blue laser weapons, and on some sort of mysterious mission. I mean, lady, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its probably a damn duck. Also, I don't appreciate that term, robot."
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, genuinely curious as to why she had offended the lady, "Firstly, those weren't what you would consider zhe synths. And secondly, why are you offended at the term robot?"
  
  "Because that's what the fucking Institute calls all synths!" she replied testily.
  
  Lily blinked, and changed expressions to one of incredulity. From what she had been told of at least two of the varieties, they were as robot as robot could be! "Uh... and what term would you prefer?"
  
  Natalie said confidently and with a tone full of emotion, "People!"
  
  Well, Lily did not consider those two terms mutually exclusive at all. She had, in fact, been a "robot" for most of her life. There was also a significant societal stigma against "clankers" where she was from, that is to say, robots or people who were synthmorphs, as they were considered to be the underclass, so she kind of understood where Natalie was coming from. However, to explain that would require something of a serious digression, so she just asked, sceptically, "Wait, are you trying to tell me zhat all synths produced by zhese people have zhe same level of intelligence and self-actualization zhat a 'uman being does?"
  
  That caused Natalie to pause and say, "Well... maybe not the first or second generation, but definitely the third generation does! And Coursers are third gen. They're just brainwashed, so you shouldn't call them robots."
  
  It's been some time since any of her use of language had been policed by anyone, which she found amusing. She thought she had left that all back in America. Still, she didn't want to intentionally be mean, and now she was curious. She had been told that the biological synths, or third generation as Natalie were calling them, were merely slightly more complicated AIs, but clearly sub-sapient. She did not question this because she was told that they were mainly used for cheap, disposable labour, and it made no sense to her at all to basically create people and enslave them for menial labour.
  
  Robots and AI were very effective even in semi-skilled and skilled labour if supervised. Still, she should remember where she was, namely, the Fallout universe. She shouldn't be so inflexible about using regular logic here for the decisions of people here.
  
  So, if this woman was part of a group that was enemies with this Institute, then she might have seen a number of these synths. Her accounts wouldn't be as valuable as actually talking to one of these supposed synths, but it would still be helpful. She asked, "Oh? 'ow do you know for sure? 'ave you seen many of zhese zhird generation synths?"
  
  For some reason, this caused Natalie to go red in the face a bit. Damn, Lily just wasn't very good with Speech checks, it seemed like. She raised her hands in the air, like a pissed-off New York City pedestrian and half-yelled, "Yeah, every time I look in a mirror! Lady, you are looking at one!"
  
  Lily rocked back on her heels in shock, the little stool she was sitting on rolling back a few centimetres. Oh, she hadn't actually anticipated that. It shows her what happens when she gets fixated on the data she has already supposedly acquired, even if she doubted most of it.
  
  She held up her hands in a placating gesture and said quietly, "Peace, peace. First, I don't consider zhe terms robot and person mutually exclusive. I believe any robot with a sufficiently complex neural network is just as much as a person as any natural-born 'uman. And zhat would be obviously zhe same for any constructed biological entity. It is zhe mind, and whether one is sapient and self-actualizing zhat determines personhood, in my opinion, yes? I'm not trying to deny anyone zhat can argue with me zheir personhood."
  
  This caused Natalie to blink, calm and quiet down considerably, "Uhhh..." she said, confused when the woman she got so pissed off at as to break regulations and identify herself as a synth succinctly stated her own philosophies on personhood back to her, unprompted.
  
  After the woman named Natalie realized that she wasn't her enemy, she opened up a little after extracting a promise of secrecy from her. At first, Lily suspected that the woman was one of the "replacements", in which case it was still her theory that it was more likely than not that such an individual was just a modified normal human.
  
  However, she was surprised when the woman told her that she was made or born in the Institute. She was pretty free with that information, telling Lily about how she escaped from a work party in the Commonwealth and discovered friends. This was clearly the organization she was a part of; she would only call it the Railroad and would not talk about it at all except to say that their goal was the liberation of synths.
  
  Wait a minute. Railroad? Underground Railroad? And her name was Natalie Turner? Nat Turner? Whoever suggested that name for her had read a little history, at least. It was a name tinged with the spectre of imminent violence, which fit the woman it was attached to as far as Lily's encounters with her were concerned. Still, it was a good name, and there was a power to it.
  
  Natalie talked a bit about what she knew about the Institute, but what she knew wasn't a lot. She followed the orders she was given, as she knew what would happen to her if she didn't. If she could be believed then these Institute people really were as despicable as everything Sarah Lyons said, just for totally different reasons.
  
  Lily surreptitiously brought out her "clipboard" and scanned the woman synth thoroughly. During the discussion, Lily saw to the woman's actual medical complaint. Someone had shot her in the hand, and the bullet had damaged the extensor tendon in her left hand, causing a crippling injury even after being repaired with Stimpaks.
  
  It was a simple surgery that she just did on the table in the exam room. However, she almost fubbed reattaching the tendon when she heard something unbelievable, "You don't know where zhe Institute is because zhey teleport in and out of zheir base? Teleportation?! "
  
  Natalie looked surprised at Lily's surprise and nodded. "Yes, they would teleport all the workers and whoever was supervising them to the job sites. And then back when we were done."
  
  Lily let out a slow hiss. She knew there were teleporters in the game, but she thought they were all alien technology on the Mothership Zeta. She had never heard of any kind of teleportation technology that was used by a human faction. And the fact that they used them in such a casual manner.
  
  She shook her head. That would give this Institute such an incredible tactical advantage. They had the potential to just drop a platoon of shock troops on your head so long as you were in the range of their device. She desperately wanted to disassemble the device. It would be so useful, but she would have to know precisely what kind of teleportation it was. If it was the Star Trek variety that disassembled you and reassembled you later, she wasn't interested in dying and being cloned every time she wanted to be transported.
  
  It wasn't just a one-way conversation. Lily told the woman some about herself, about her study of cybernetics, genetics and robotics and even that she probably had more cybernetics than one of these supposed Coursers, although she did not specifically go into depth on what kinds, and about how Lily was very sympathetic to their struggle. Lily was hoping to use these disclosures to fish more information about the woman, and it was helpful as far as Natalie's own life and the Institute was concerned, but she absolutely wouldn't say anything about the Railroad.
  
  "Just last year, we were decimated. Wait, no... that implies only one-tenth of us died. Is there a word for the opposite of decimation? Where only one-tenth survived?" she asked, with a macabre sense of humour.
  
  One of Lily's social weaknesses was that she sometimes couldn't detect subtle humour like this, and she could be kind of literal. She hummed, "Well, if you decimate zhe group approximately twenty-two times, you would end up at about ten per cent of its original strength, no?"
  
  Natalie stared at her for a moment as Lily finished most of her work on her arm and wrist and then asked amusedly, "Are you sure you are not the synth? Some special quant-type that is literal all the time?"
  
  Lily chuckled a bit ruefully, realizing her mistake, "Well, I don't zhink so. If someone made me a slave and I escaped, I wouldn't flee to safety out of zheir jurisdiction, or if I did, it would be temporary while I built zhe strength. I zhink I would stay and attempt to murder zhem."
  
  That caused a fire of zeal to light up in Natalie's eyes, and she slammed her not quite healed hand onto the table, making the surgical tray bounce a couple of centimetres off the table, "Right?! Fucking right!" Then she winced and rubbed her hand.
  
  Lily grinned a little, "You know, with zhat attitude, you are very suited to zhe name you have chosen."
  
  "Huh? Do you recognize my name? One of the others, he said it suited me, and that's why I started going by Natalie. But... he didn't make it out of the fighting, and I never had a chance to bring it up again," Natalie said sadly.
  
  Lily glanced at her internal chronometer. This appointment was going way past the normal time frame such a simple procedure should have taken, but she was fortunate that there wasn't anyone else waiting. "Would you like some lunch? My treat, and I'll tell you all about zhe tragic life of a man by the name of Nat Turner, who was born as a slave but died zhe free man."
  
  Well, they did catch him in the end, if she recalled, but she suspected by that point nobody sane was willing to buy him at that point even if he wasn't considered a criminal, so she would give him the credit of freedom, even if they hung him. She then continued, "I suspect I may 'ave to teach you a little American 'istory, so zhat you get zhe reference."
  
  The woman smiled, perhaps for the first time that Lily had seen and nodded, "Yeah, sure."
  
  Lily watched the interesting woman depart her hospital. She had spoken with her at lunch for a little over an hour, and only half of that was retelling the story of Nat Turner's slave revolt. She had tried to impress upon the woman the numerous failures that Nat Turner had and that he was to be admired but not emulated - since he died in the end. She gave a brief overview of another more successful slave revolt, even if it did fail in the end as well, which was Spartacus.
  
  Lily was impressed that the woman didn't ask for her minigun back and that she absolutely refused to say one single word about her organization or her cell. Although saying that told Lily that they used a cellular structure, which wasn't all that surprising since they were, in effect, a guerilla and insurgent force.
  
  However, Natalie did give her a code word and a challenge that a Railroad operative might tell her to identify themselves after Lily admitted that she would be willing to provide support to their organization. Natalie stopped her from saying any specifics, telling Lily that she wouldn't be cleared to know, but asked her in general what sort of things Lily might provide, be they weapons, material support, money, safe houses, and a bunch of other things.
  
  After thinking about it, Lily told her most of the above. Everything but direct combat assistance, as she wasn't planning on going to the Commonwealth anytime soon. This caused Natalie to smile and nod and tell her that although they were a bit short-handed, someone should be getting in touch with her.
  
  Lily also bought the woman's genome from her. Although, in truth, she already had it as she carefully kept a sample of her blood from when she fixed the woman's hand. However, Lily did feel better about paying her for it. If she had declined... well, Lily would still have kept it. She would have just felt bad about it for as long as five minutes. There was no way she was not examining the genome of what might be the first biomorph-style created sleeve on the planet.
  
  Did the Institute just clone regular humans, maybe randomizing their genome a little bit for diversity? That would make them boring. Or did they have some sort of baseline advantages baked into these synths? Lily would find out.
  
  She pulled up two scan results, each taking roughly half of her visual field while she walked back to her basement using her hearing alone. Although normally, the way her passive sonar mode worked was to have the computer interpret the results and draw them on her visual field in a sort of wireframe grayscale, she had begun trying to let her brain interpret some of the feed from her microphones, as well. It wasn't exactly blindsight like Daredevil had, but it might become that someday, although unlikely to be as cool since she wasn't a superhero and still had her sense of sight.
  
  On the left was the scan of Initiate Romeo's Power Armour. She had already done the preliminary work of excluding Initiate Romeo himself from the scan, smoothing out some details and normalizing it so that her CAD program would import the scan.
  
  The right side had Natalie's scan, and Lily hissed and almost stumbled down the flight of stairs as she was surprised. So, she, the woman, wasn't cloned. That was pretty clear, at least not all in one piece, anyway. She appeared to be assembled in segments, and her connective tissue saw some signs of what might be a primitive fast-grow compound.
  
  She hummed. She suspected older gen three synths probably had significant problems with arthritis, but she doubted that they were ever planned to remain "in service" that long. Other than that, Lily didn't see anything that would prevent them from living a long, normal life. So it didn't appear that there were any Nexus 7 situations here, but she'd have to do a deep dive into the woman's genome just to be sure.
  
  The security door into her lair downstairs had been improved. Lily subscribed to the rule of three as far as physical security was concerned. Something You Know, Something You Have and Something You Are. To get in, you had to provide a palm-scan, had to have one of her cybernetic implants and had to have an appropriate key inside the implant, which you used to unlock the door.
  
  Granted, it was mostly theatre since there were two giant gaping elevator shafts that went directly to her level, but the people who saw it, like her Apprentice and the Mechanist, all seemed very impressed. After she got a number of sub-basement floors dug, she would change this basement into a security bastion floor filled with auto-turrets and robot defenses and then build a second elevator for her complex.
  
  Twisting and pinching, she zoomed the scan to Natalie's head, "Ohoho... what do we 'ave 'ere?"
  
  Somewhat hidden was a small, clearly electronic component. She suspected that it would be very difficult to pick this device up using a traditional x-ray. It was half hidden in the shadows behind some thick bones while also being constructed mainly of polycarbonate and carbon fibre, both of which had very high x-ray transparency. There were definitely metal parts, including a small quantum processor, but Lily didn't think a normal x-ray from the front or sides of one's head would detect them.
  
  The quantum processor was a custom chip but used the same methodology that all of the existing quantum processors she had seen utilized. Judging its processing capability from its size and complexity, she judged it insufficient to emulate a full human ego, so it wasn't a cyberbrain or a ghost module. It did have a very significant amount of memory attached, enough, she thought to hold an ego if it wasn't over sixty years or so, depending on how they compressed memories.
  
  It was connected through some novel method of electrical induction to areas of the brain in a method that Lily would likely steal for her second-generation brain-computer interface if she could get acceptable performance using it. Lily would call this device a crappy cortical stack if she didn't know any better. However, knowing the people who built it, she suspected it was a built-in ego bridge so that a synth could be downloaded, wiped, or uploaded into their sleeves.
  
  And maybe incorporating some sort of override commands via speech, given the way it is hooked into the cochlear nerve input. Very interesting. She saw a few things she might be able to "take inspiration" from using this device, but overall she felt they spent too much time trying to make it stealthy, which sacrificed a lot of potential and features.
  
  She swiped the image away, for now, to work on the Power Armour until another patient arrived. Unfortunately, the Initiates had been wearing old T-45D model Power Armour. Lily would have liked to have gotten a scan of Sarah's T-60 armour, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
  
  Lily had been looking at the design off and on since the Brotherhood had left. It looked surprisingly... simple from the exterior, but the interior was another story. The motivators were small, powerful and sophisticated, and it featured computerized elements, redundantly controlled and other electronics, including a remarkably sophisticated laser gyro.
  
  Lily hummed. She could build the exterior with no problem, but it might take her some time to ramp up to the point where she could build the whole thing. Plus, it would help her a lot if she could get a download of all the software.
  
  Lily was expecting to see some crude and almost steampunk-level technology, but it turned out even the oldest model, T-45D Power Armour, was a very sophisticated (for this universe) hardsuit. It couldn't handle a vacuum, though, and she definitely considered that an oversight.
  
  She sighed. She might not have her own version of Power Armour ready by the time she hit the VSS building, which was a shame as that area of DC was dangerous, but she felt she might be able to build them not too long after that. And then improve them.
  
  She glanced at the shut-down Mister Handy in the corner. Time to get this guy running again; she could use a lab assistant down here.
  
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  In loco regimentum
  As she watched Jeeves slowly float over to her, she, for the third time in as many days, felt a little sad that she couldn't easily change the name of the Mister Handy after she reverted him to factory default settings. Still, it could have been worse. It was set on "Jeeves," which, combined with his heavy British accent, made Lily vow to include a graphic of a little bow tie on his chassis when she got around to replacing it with a more robust one, as she had done for Sophie.
  
  "Ah, yes, madam, I have finished conducting the preliminary tests on, ahem, Project Firestarter items Aleph-Three, Bet, Gimel, and Dalet-Six. Aleph-One and Gimel have passed the tests while, unfortunately, Bet and Dalet-Six have failed," he said in a soothing British accent, like most Mister Handy's, although it took a little while for him to get used to the Hebrew phonetic alphabet that was most commonly used for iteratively counting in space instead of the standard American one. In her past life in space, when using English, the American or NATO phonetic alphabet was only used for spelling words, while the Hebrew phonetic alphabet was commonly used for everything else. She wasn't entirely sure why that was, but it was a habit that was ingrained and difficult to break now.
  
  When she had told Gary about her new Mister Handy he had told her that although the British accent versions were the most popular, they were not universal and about how after his wife divorced him, the only model he could afford was a used Mister Handy featuring the least desirable German accent. Honestly, Lily would really have liked to have heard that, 'Nein, nein, nein!'
  
  Jeeves also had a bunch of optional software packages and seemed especially designed to be an assistant to scientific research or a laboratory. According to Jeeves' bragging, the software itself cost over ten times as much as a standard Mister Handy did, as it was so specialised. While backing up his pre-wipe memories for perusal, she had also carefully bypassed the General Atomics copy protection and downloaded all of his available skill packs, which were contained in a special memory module slotted into one of his peripheral slots, and figured she would make a gift of them to Sophie. She knew that the girl would get a kick out of actually being able to assist Scott in his workshop on projects.
  
  "Zhank you, Jeeves. I will review zhe failure and queue up another testing procedure, in good time," Lily told the robot, appreciatively.
  
  Lily noticed that the butler skill pack sometimes took priority, as he would refuse to take thanks from her, his principal. Instead, he replied, "It was a team effort, ma'am." He also wouldn't leave without being dismissed, as he asked, "Would there be something more, ma'am?"
  
  Lily waved a hand, "Not right now, zhank you." That caused him to float off to handle some other matter. Lily had to admit she had made a mistake not bringing him online immediately after she got back because he had proved incredibly useful for the past week.
  
  Project Firestarter was her e-reader, as she didn't have the guts to call it a Kindle, as she wasn't sure Jeff Bezos didn't have the capability to reach out through space, time and the multiverse to smite her for a copyright violation.
  
  Sub-project Aleph-Three was the actual computer infrastructure, processor, memory and motherboard, which meant she had a working variant of the device's internals after two failed attempts at integrating all of the components. Gimel was the machine to manufacture the simple sapphire glass screens, which would rest on top of the e-ink displays that she still had not solved. She was pleased that two important things were already solved on this project.
  
  However, the failures in Bet meant she would have to redesign the housing, which was currently aluminum. She had made the testing requirements very rigorous since children would be using these devices. They would have to survive basically everything a child could throw at them. One of the pending tests, waiting for once she got a completed device fully incorporated, would be throwing it at a cement floor with the maximum force a tween could exert. Clearly, she was a ways away from reaching that if it was already failing minor drop tests with an installed motherboard.
  
  The other failure was the more sophisticated micro-capsules manufacturing system, which wasn't surprising. These would be the pixels on display, and she had to manufacture them in incredible quantities. A single e-reader device used a little less than two million of them. Only one of the sapphire manufacturing technologies she got from the Brotherhood could handle these very small shapes at such speeds, and adding a step in the middle of the manufacturing process to fill it with oil and pigments was finicky.
  
  The giant machine theoretically had the capability to manufacture more than four million microcapsules per hour if her notes from the Brotherhood were to be believed. Still, she had already had to rebuild parts of it twice after it more or less self-destructed in unanticipated catastrophic failure modes. What did the rocket bro call it when his rockets exploded? Rapid unscheduled disassembly? It did that.
  
  Still, looking over the test failure report, the problems seemed much smaller this time than last night's attempted test run. She spent most of the early morning hours repairing the stupid thing. Once she got it running, she was going to disassemble it one final time for transport to the small warehouse a block and a half away that she owned and would be used as a factory of sorts, at least until her own first few sub-basement levels were anything more than her fantasy. She had already hired Tombs' men to clean it from top to bottom, which they had been working on for several days.
  
  She lifted her head as she felt a new node connect to her network. Not too long after that, she got a mental alert of a number of e-mail messages, followed by the node dropping off her network. Intrigued, she opened her inbox to discover they were all from Scott and Sophie.
  
  The first was from Sophie, indicating that they were alright and doing fine, as well as a long-winded but sweet personal recount of what they had been up to. She set that aside for a moment to read Scott's much more concise messages.
  
  The first requested that she realign her dish to point at Scott's old electronics store, which he attached the coordinates to as if she didn't already know and told her not to expect a subsequent connection for several days. She supposed that was the first node in whatever paranoid relay scheme he was concocting. Perhaps he was keeping up appearances that his old home was still occupied. Maybe installed an intercom at the door with a buzzer that would forward to the Vault so he could yell at solicitors. Fair enough, she would go up onto the roof after it stopped snowing.
  
  The second message simply stated that she could expect about 56 kilowatts out of it and featured attached files that were a set of complete images and CAD blueprints for the generator, attachments, accessories and controls to convert one of the fission motors into an electrical generator. Ah, she could make Dr Bonesaw that generator, now. Although Lily intended to go through the design and adjust it so she could build the generator using her carbon fabricator, it seemed straightforward. She was glad she didn't have to spend the time to make up the design herself. She wondered if he had made blueprints of the device in the past and fed them through the CAD system or if he patiently entered all the data himself.
  
  The last featured a number of ideas and attached files about the truck project, some of which would work well also on her armoured research vehicle conversion, which she was working on in parallel. She was pleased he was providing so much help on this project since he basically implied he would be building these things to sell himself.
  
  There were two ideas about how to utilise two fission motors on a single vehicle. The first one was to use a differential gear to connect two disparate power sources into a single power shaft, which would then connect to the centre differential of the truck and then to the wheels as usual. This would have the two fission motors both sitting in the front of the truck in a traditional design with their output shafts pointed at each other.
  
  The second would be for one motor to run each group of axles. The truck she was designing would probably have eight wheels and was split into a front four and back four design. The motors would still be next to each other, but in the centre of the vehicle, with one's power shaft pointing forward and the other's to the rear.
  
  It kind of reminded her how the Tesla Model S Dual Motor was built, except her motors were a lot bigger.
  
  There were plusses and cons to both designs; for example, the first was mechanically more complicated with one extra differential gear, which might fail, but engineering development perspective, it was a lot simpler and didn't break any new ground. She hadn't heard of a truck that had its engines located in the centre of it, for example. The second would have a better centre of gravity and likely slightly better effective torque available at the wheels.
  
  Lily hummed while rapping her fingers on her work table. She was attempting to use as many elements as possible on the truck design in her armoured RV, as well. And her armoured RV would feature that giant overpowered single engine. Therefore it made sense to go with the first design as that was the design that was most similar to what a vehicle would look like if it just had one engine.
  
  Plus, simple solutions reduced development time radically, and time was one of her most important resources. That was vitally important on this project, as it was away from her fields of expertise which already applied an effective multiplier on the time and effort required for successful completion.
  
  Lily nodded. More traditional design with a differential it is, then. She made a couple of mental notes and imported the differential gear design into her CAD system, and associated it with the truck project.
  
  Three days later, she had a meeting with the Mayor in her office, as she generally politely declined invitations to go anywhere else. She was too busy to waste half of a day on such frivolities.
  
  The Mayor, Bill Cunningham, was a gregarious man. She couldn't quite place his ethnicity, as he appeared to be the result of a half dozen national and regional origins thrown in a blender. He was a man in his thirties and had a skin tone of light caramel, yet he featured a very slight epicanthal fold to his eyes and Mediterranean facial features. All in all, it was quite a pleasant combination aesthetically, she thought. It was a shame, then, that he was such an asshole.
  
  He spent most of the meeting, as was his custom when speaking with her, peering down into her top to peek at her décolletage. She consistently and specifically wore tasteful but low-cut tops to meetings with him especially to give him this opportunity because it had been her general experience that the exposure to boob flesh impaired most men's decision-making ability, and Mayor Cunningham specifically was a paragon of that vice.
  
  Like most politicians, he came to her in order to, and in equal parts, beg her, threaten her and then screw her over, all while remaining quite polite.
  
  At first, he wanted to discuss the possibility of merging her and Tombs' company, Eastside Water & Power, with the municipal utility company, effectively buying out her interest in it with caps and gold. She had rolled her eyes at that. Beyond the fact that it was highly inappropriate to discuss the matter without her partner, she had no interest in doing so.
  
  The company had barely begun paying off all of the capital expenditures involved in refurbishing the neighbourhood electrical substation and all of the power lines, to say nothing about the water lines and septic. Their cash flow was increasing, but they didn't expect to reach a breakeven point for about seven to eight months after electrical service began to be billed.
  
  That was a ridiculously short amortisation period, all things considered, and any MBA worth her salt would tell her that she would be an insane person to sell such a potentially profitable enterprise, especially in an economy that was even more imaginary than the one she remembered on the Earth of her origin.
  
  A fact that many people never discovered in their lives was that money and power were two vastly different things. Money was only an analogue, a facsimile of power. The true elites that she recalled from both of her lives, herself being one of them, even if only in the lowest of tiers, generally discounted mere wealth.
  
  Although the currency system was a bit different in space, and credits weren't easily converted into dollars of an entirely different world, Lily used to be considered a billionaire by any metric, if a small one. Yet, how much actual money or currency did she have in her bank accounts at any one time? Almost none!
  
  In Lily's past life, she owned assets. She had a relationship with a bank that was more than happy to open her a line of credit that she could spend like it was money, backed by a number of assets such as commodities on account or shares in profitable ventures. If she needed to make a big purchase, she simply did so, and the bank would convert some of her assets in order to pay the line of credit.
  
  Rich people had money, but the truly wealthy and powerful almost universally did not. Instead, they had assets. And it would be incredibly foolish to compromise such a promising asset as a company that provided clean water and power in exchange for mere lucre. Wealth always followed power around like a lovesick puppy anyway, so long as she had one, the other would invariably follow.
  
  Granted, it was slightly different in this world as there were no banks, but being bought off with a literal bag full of soda bottlecaps, which had no intrinsic value, would have her play the role of native to his pilgrim, which wasn't something she was interested in. Although, now that she thought about it, the story of buying the island of Manhatten for a bag of glass beads was very likely to be apocryphal. After all, it was more likely they didn't give any of the tribes of people living nearby anything at all.
  
  After that, he inquired as to the possibility of a joint venture to install one of her generators on the west side in order to alleviate the rolling blackouts that Megaton still periodically experienced on a weekly basis. That was the request he should have started with, as it was reasonable.
  
  To that, she had responded positively, leaning forward on her desk slightly to give him a better look, but informed him that it would have to be structured as a venture between her existing company, as she had agreed in the partnership agreement with Tombs not to compete with their company through any additional ventures. The Mayor looked like he bit into a lemon at that.
  
  It seemed he hated Tombs, which was probably wise because it was undoubtedly reciprocal, and the Mayor now decided to punish her for that relationship. His last item was informing her that the official resolution that the Eastside of Megaton be considered an up-and-coming district came with obligations to herself as the number one taxpayer and employer.
  
  Specifically, the Megaton city council had decreed that the primary gate into and out of Megaton was being overworked, and a second gate should be constructed on the east side of town. It was almost feudal, but as the biggest employer, she was now responsible for both constructing it, and manning it with her own security guards, which would be putatively under the Sheriff's command, but that she would have to pay for.
  
  "Entirely at my own expense? Zhat doesn't seem very reasonable, Mayor Cunningham," she said demurely, fluttering her eyelashes.
  
  This caused him to laugh affably, "Oh, no, of course not! As you would be, in effect, acting in loco regimentum, you would be in effect acting as the government of Megaton, as such, there are funds set aside for both the construction and maintenance of this new gate. Generally speaking, a consortium of the businesses around would be responsible, but basically, you're it. Perhaps later, the city council can reassess the responsibilities as more productive businesses move into the area."
  
  Ah, she got it now. She was sure that these funds set aside for her would not be adequate in any capacity; that was how he was getting back at her. And they would also have to be accounted for carefully, lest she be accused of conversion or embezzlement. And the carrot was that if she played ball, he would bring others in to share or take up more of the burden, likely one of his own enterprises.
  
  She sighed theatrically, trying to act put upon, "Well, very well. If you could forward to my office as soon as possible zhe requirements the city has as far as to zhe new gate, size, operating 'ours, et cetera and deliver the construction funds, I will see about meeting zhese obligations."
  
  Internally she was pleased, and she tried not to show it. She had lived on the ancap Extropia Station where even the courts and judicial systems were private, for-profit businesses, so she wasn't unfamiliar with the concept of privatising government functions. She wasn't as philosophically radical as most people who lived in that place; it was just one of the only places she could live. So, while she might not necessarily philosophically agree with the concept of privatising the police in all instances, there was one instance that she was absolutely for it - if she controlled them!
  
  This ass thought he was doing her dirty, but he opened the door to her legitimately wielding the power of government, which was the power of unfettered and unlimited violence, all at her say so. Her gate security guards might technically be under the command of the Sheriff, but she would pay, train and outfit them. They would know which side of their bread was buttered on.
  
  The Mayor seemed quite intelligent in some ways but kind of silly in others. There was a reason modern governments didn't generally allow private paramilitary forces to exercise any kind of legitimate governmental functions. Because it kind of muddied the water as to who was really the government and provided them legitimacy.
  
  All Lily would have to do would be to pay for a few extra guards on her own dime and have them patrol the neighbourhood, and it would be a defacto police force. That would get the perennially underfunded and undermanned Sheriff on her side better than anything else, as all he really wanted to do was keep the streets safe.
  
  Hell, in two years, by the time the Lone Wanderer left Vault 101, the first town he or she visited might be named Liliton!
  
  The Mayor seemed a bit confused that she hadn't given up or haggled at all, but from his perspective, it was a win-win as he was either getting a piece of her company or getting a brand new gate for the city, so he didn't push matters.
  
  After a bit more small talk, he and his assistant left her office, much to her delight. That man's strength was her weakness, and even with using her feminine charms liberally, she felt that speaking to him was incredibly fatiguing.
  
  It looks like she would have to accelerate her plans for a little mercenary outfit. Tombs didn't want to get involved, except as a potential customer, as he considered that he might re-enter politics and felt it was better to be not considered a warlord. She thought that was stupid, but didn't correct him because she didn't really want him involved. In her opinion, being a warlord first was the best way to enter politics, because then everyone knows you're not fucking about.
  
  She had discussed starting a PMC with Grace a number of times before the woman departed on a mission that might last a couple of weeks. At first, Lily felt it might not be the best pillow talk, but Grace seemed all for it, and she had gotten a lot of useful advice.
  
  Lily didn't want any of the former Enclave members to be directly involved because she intended this to be, essentially, her private Army, and she did not want to put them in a position where they might consider themselves to have a conflict of interest. She felt that their loyalty was still primarily to Miller and to their fellow exiles, and she could respect that.
  
  That left her in a bit of a tough spot. Grace told her that unless she wanted to command the day-to-day operations, and she did not, her most important step was finding a leadership team she could trust.
  
  She had asked Gary if he was interested in working part-time in such a venture, and he was very hesitant to agree to work as a mercenary, especially since his prospects were so good already, but that he would be willing to offer training, boot camp style. That would be useful, and was a start for her on building a cadre, but there was another service Lily wanted to buy from him.
  
  She found him in class with twelve children. It wasn't hard to find ten other children of approximately the same age when she offered free education, and the Apprentice's siblings seemed to be doing very well in the social environment compared to being alone most of the time. Friends were made, almost all of which were children of other employees of hers.
  
  She wasn't in a hurry, so she worked on one of her projects virtually while he finished his lesson, which took about twenty minutes. As the kids streamed out of class, she walked in.
  
  Gary smiled when he saw her, but then his eyes dropped down to her chest and stayed there, "Woah..." he said.
  
  Lily rolled her eyes a little. It wasn't as if he hadn't seen much more than that already. But an excellent low-cut top would do that, even if one had already seen the goods. It was the distinction between accentuating while concealing and simply revealing.
  
  Finally, his eyes raised back to her face, and he gave himself a little shake of the head as if to clear it, "I'd like to offer you another job."
  
  That caused him to grin, "Again? You've already tried mercenary last time; you know if you said pirate, I might have gone for it."
  
  Lily chuckled, and she shook her head, "No. I'd like to hire you to interview potential employees, mercenary officers. I want you to use your special abilities to tell me if zhey're likely to be complete psychos, terrible people or likely to betray me."
  
  That caused him to raise his eyebrows and glance around slightly to make sure nobody was around, "Huh, you know it isn't exactly one hundred per cent, right?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, but I feel very confident zhat you can identify more or less trustworthy people as well as complete monsters."
  
  Gary nodded, "Well, I 'spose you're right. Alright, I can do that."
  
  Lily smiled, "Excellent! I don't have any applicants yet, but I wanted to make sure you were on board, first." She then paused, "Oh, and I zhink maybe one more week and I will 'ave somezhing of a replacement for zhe books you mentioned before."
  
  Without giving him anything else to go on, she sashayed back out of the conference room he was using as a classroom, humming.
  
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  Preparations
  The machine was already preprogrammed to begin a production run, so all Lily had to do was flip the giant circuit breaker that also acted as an ON/OFF switch and rapidly step back as the machine began to run its self-tests. She had tested it once three days ago, but that was when it was in her basement before she disassembled, moved and reassembled it. She hadn't had time to return to this project since then.
  
  A run of fifty pixels fell into the output chute, but Lily still did not step near it. After it finished its self-test, it started up in earnest and rapidly. Things got quite loud, a sort of rapid "chuckchuckchuckchuck" sound, and the closest approximation to the noise she could think of was a suppressed, fully-automatic machinegun firing subsonic ammunition. It was the sound of a loud stapler being actuated over thirty times a second.
  
  Lily had changed the pixel design to discard the sphere shapes and switch to a hexagonal prism, but otherwise, they functioned identically. The hexagon shape was much easier to produce rapidly with the additional steps involved to squirt a pre-measured amount of transparent oil and charged pigments inside before the top was, in effect, welded on.
  
  The hexagon shapes seemed much better as far as the screen design was concerned, too. There was almost no negative space using over a million hexagons when there were tons if you had a million spheres, and the hexagonal prism was a stronger geometric shape when it was used as a building block in composite construction. A sphere has less surface area than any other shape with the same volume, so it would be strong if it stood on its own, but if used as a component, it is somewhat lacking.
  
  One of the biggest failure modes she had was the spheres not staying fixed in orientation during the production process before their top was sealed. A cascade of failures whose proximate origin was this very issue was what caused the original rapid unscheduled disassembly of her prototype.
  
  She thought she got so fixated on using a sphere shape because that was how the e-ink company in the other world produced the devices, and she knew that worked. However, that was probably just the most straightforward shape for them to manufacture. The technology she was using was a lot different. In some ways, it was worse, but in others, it was far superior. She suspected that they would have preferred a hexagonal honeycomb structure to their pixels, too, if they could have managed it cheaply.
  
  After watching the machine go for a full twenty minutes without breaking down violently, she nodded and said, " Nice. " Still, she had one of the three robots that she was leaving in this warehouse factory collect the completed pixels and load them into the display assembler, which was the last part of the assembly process.
  
  In theory, the assembler took glue, pixels, three different types of sapphire glass panes, and fine aluminium wire to assemble a fully working e-ink display. She was using aluminium instead of copper because she didn't have enough copper, and in this low-voltage application, the increased electrical resistance wouldn't matter.
  
  When loaded with enough pixels to produce one display, the assembler started up automatically. It kind of reminded her of a cross between a plastic-style 3D printer, a pick-and-place machine used in her past life to assemble electronics and an inkjet printer.
  
  The assembly head moved back and forth, using mechanical arms containing tools to build the electrode layer, and when it was finished, what reminded her of an inkjet printer made a pass and just spat out a stream of hexagonal pixels, filling in the entire space, accurately. Lastly, a final pass created another electrode and digitizing layer on top and glued all the layers of glass together at their bezel.
  
  Lily blinked as the display rolled off the assembly line. The assembly process was quite quick, so her bottleneck in production was just making the pixels. But it wasn't like she needed millions of these devices, either.
  
  "Wait... zhis worked?" she asked carefully. She half expected the machine to self-destruct. It was the first time she had run the assembly machine as she had built it in situ here in the warehouse since she found it was such a pain in the ass to move the pixel producer. Having something mechanical work the first time she built it wasn't how this usually worked.
  
  She took the display. Well, there was only one way to find out. She had brought the other half of the device that she had made from her lair. Assembling it was as easy as snapping the screen into place and then snapping a top case of carbon fibre in place on top of that. She used one hand to press the start button while crossing her fingers with the other.
  
  It booted up! The display worked! The user interface was simple, and she had already pre-loaded the device with most of the books she had available to her. She carefully touched an icon, and an English textbook pulled up. Many of her digitized books weren't scans of books but just the text of the books encoded in text, but at least bold, italics and whitespace were preserved, so they were still very readable.
  
  She got a dopey grin on her face. Even the tiny vibrating electric motors inside the casing that she used for haptic feedback when a user pressed a button on the screen worked. She didn't know why she was so pleased with this. Compared to any of her genetic therapies, cybernetic limbs and especially the computer in her brain, it was such weaksauce as to be laughable.
  
  She left the warehouse and jogged the two blocks back to her hospital. Normally she would show something like this to the Apprentice first, but it really was weaksauce compared to what they could do with their implants, so she went and found Gary.
  
  He was eating breakfast at the cafeteria. Today it was egg and chorizo burritos, although Lily hadn't actually seen any domesticated pigs around, so the pork was probably more aspirational than actual. So long as it wasn't the long pork, Lily didn't mind. Eggs from chickens were available as chickens were still pretty common. They could practically eat anything, which was one of the prerequisites for any animal to survive the bombs falling for very long.
  
  Only about half of them still had feathers. The chickens without feathers tended to make tastier eggs, but they didn't taste as good as the chicken with feathers, so there were some attempts to cross-breed the mutants with the normal chickens to get the best of both worlds, but it hadn't succeeded yet.
  
  She grabbed a burrito and some water and went over to sit at the table he was at.
  
  "Hey, Doc," he greeted her affably.
  
  Setting her burrito down for a moment, she shoved the e-reader at him. The screen was about the size or even slightly larger than a full-sized iPad and about twice as thick, as she had considered that textbooks would be better read on a larger screen than most e-readers usually offered. Still, it was quite light. She said simply, "Books."
  
  He took the device and peered at it from every angle, obviously noting the text on the screen. He must have accidentally touched the edge of the screen because he blinked as the page changed. He figured out how to go back and forth on the pages pretty quickly, and he praised it, "Oh, this is sweet. It doesn't even look like a terminal display or TV, either. Do you have to build one of these for every book?"
  
  Lily grinned and shook her head, "Press in the middle of the screen, and a graphical user interface should be displayed." Then Lily spent a few minutes explaining the concept of a GUI to a man who had never seen one before, what "buttons" did, and the like. He caught on very quickly and was quickly navigating the book list. "This is awesome, Doc! How many of these can you make?"
  
  Lily shrugged and said, "As many as you like, I suppose. I am set up for zhe mass production now. I will probably even sell zhem as a product or start a neighbourhood library where you might be able to check zhem out, or at least use zhem inside zhe library."
  
  He nodded, "Well, then get me twenty. And I need a way to show just the books I want on the main screen, maybe add a button in the corner so the kid can see the whole library if they want, but I don't want to confuse a ten-year-old with ten thousand books. I just want them to see the ones I put on their syllabus. Can I keep this one?"
  
  Lily blinked. That made sense. It wouldn't be a difficult change to make, and these devices did include a wireless module so that she could push automatic updates if they came near her hospital.
  
  She nodded, "Okay, zhat shouldn't be a problem. And yeah, sure. It takes zhe standard charging cord and shouldn't even need to be recharged except every couple of months even if you use it every day."
  
  That first device didn't feature any of the waterproofing she intended to install in the production run, but she figured Gary probably wouldn't take it into the shower with him, whereas a child very well might. Or walk home in the middle of a downpour or any number of things.
  
  Later that day, as she was finalizing the first draft of the treatment that would allow a person to extract a lot more useful energy from food through their digestive system, she noticed her truck pulling up into her garage at long last. It had actually been close to two weeks since Scott and Sophie had left.
  
  She looked for a stopping point before going to visit with them.
  
  The treatment she felt would be both effective and undesirable on its own. She was pretty confident it would work, but without a solution to the original man's problem, everyone would just balloon up as their stomach told them to eat even when they didn't particularly need the calories. She was already working in parallel to design a complementary alteration that would completely overhaul a person's sense of satiation, but that was entirely novel work and may need to go through two or three rounds of clinical trials.
  
  She suspected she would have the second level of life extension therapy complete before the low-calorie mod, even though she was hoping to launch both products at the same time. The second version of life extension therapy incorporated more genetic fixes but also included the radiation resistance trait that she had noticed in Natalie, the synth's genome. Natalie's genome was radically different than a baseline human, although she would still be able to breed with a human, and most of her novel gene expressions were designed to be dominant, to pass to any progeny.
  
  Lily hadn't decoded exactly what every change would do yet, but some of them were very obvious. She was stronger, faster and would live a little bit longer than a similar female human. Some of the changes were amateur hour, she thought and felt that they may run into a lot of problems five or ten generations down the line, especially if they cross-breed with flats. However, she thought that the radiation resistance alteration was pretty clever.
  
  It was exactly the opposite of how she encoded a radiation resistance in Gary. He, like she, had a much better system to ensure replication errors did not happen in the first place. It was much less elegant, but it had the benefit of being, from a data encoding perspective, much smaller of an alteration.
  
  She could easily include it on a virus with a lot of room to spare. It was kind of crude and would trigger immediate programmed cell death in any cell that showed signs of radical mutation. Her genome included something like this, too, actually, but it was the last resort and only relied upon when the error correction and replication correction functions failed.
  
  It would definitely prevent virtually all serious mutations, but it would do so at a cost - longevity. Triggering programmed cell death in a sufficient number of mutated cells would necessitate more cell replication to replace them, which only can be done a limited number of times. The reason she included this alteration was her first therapy had already lengthened the telomeres in the host's DNA, which was the controlling factor for the limit on how many times a cell could divide. She lengthened the telomeres enough that it was no longer in any way the controlling factor on longevity.
  
  Old age was caused by the buildup of damage over time, as well as DNA replication and transcription errors, none of which were considered a mutation exactly.
  
  She felt that a few extra divisions here and there to protect one from probable cancer or other nastiness was a good trade-off, even in a flat. However, since she would only allow people to receive this treatment if they had already received the first level, which lengthened telomeres, it meant that the main downside was mitigated.
  
  There was a second downside to the treatment, though. If a host was exposed to a radically mutagenic compound like FEV or whatever triggered the ghoulification process they may just die. It kind of depended on if the mutagen was acting locally or systemically.
  
  She believed that there were multiple factors in the ghoulification process, and one of them was likely a genetic predisposition, although she did not know if it was a natural one. She had long ago collected a genetic sample from Moira Brown after the woman came for a check-up, and she knew for sure from Fallout 3 that Moira would turn into a ghoul if the bomb in Megaton was detonated. And there definitely appeared to be something slightly abnormal about her genome, but it did not explain such a transformation in itself.
  
  The extraneous genetic flags present in Moira were not that uncommon either, but she was positive that they were not present in the normal human genome, at least not the one she was familiar with. She hadn't thought about an explanation yet. However, there had to be some other factor that she hadn't observed beyond the genetic quirk and radiation.
  
  It was like she was missing half a book. Radiation could be considered randomness, but expecting randomness to consistently recreate a matching half of the book that fit the story of the first half she already had was silly.
  
  Lily didn't like that the alteration may kill potential future ghouls but felt that radiation resistance was too good of an alteration to give up. She was also almost certain that the vast majority of people undergoing ghoulification die anyway due to radiation-induced brain damage. Most people didn't want to become ghouls in the first place, even if it was a path to a much longer life. Besides, she could always roll this alteration back in a future update or, more likely, complement it with a similar error correction mod that she had.
  
  Standing up, she closed all of her working windows and glanced around, feeling a bit surly. She didn't like her temporary work area. She had moved almost everything out of the basement into the fourth floor to share an area with the cloning machine over three days ago, as she had built a digging machine in the basement.
  
  She had even drained her eel tank, as apparently, it was a lot harder to get people to agree to get live eels out of the river in the middle of winter. She would have to wait until it warmed up, or perhaps clone a series of eels herself. Yes, that sounded about right.
  
  Her little spiders had moved to take up one entire wall in the foyer, illuminated by lights so that people coming inside could admire them. There had been a mixed reception to them, though, especially when she released insects into their habitat so that they could feed.
  
  She needed the free space as she built an utterly enormous giant recycling machine that took up close to a hundred square meters in the basement. She was using it to recycle all of the "fill" of soil and rocks that the digging machine was digging up rather than try to dispose of it. Over a third of earth recycled was either water or gases, such as nitrogen, oxygen or hydrogen. She vented the gases and drained the water into the sewage system.
  
  The rest was mainly minerals and carbon, primarily consisting of silica, aluminium, calcium and iron. There were a few random metals, too, like magnesium, in fair amounts. All of that she was keeping. She did have to dispose of the unsorted material, which was mildly radioactive, but that was less than one part in twenty.
  
  Most of the stuff she kept was useful, and useful elemental feedstocks stored in medium-sized drums were slowly filling the large hangar where the Mechanist was parking her truck.
  
  The main problem was that she hardly had enough electricity to run the giant recycler. Her smaller version used over five hundred kilowatts, and this one used three megawatts, and she had been running it twenty-four-seven. It was more than she was supposed to divert, but at present, there wasn't a lot of demand on the system, but she may have to build a second generator wing at the power substation just in case. It would help in the event one generator needed maintenance to have a backup, in any case, she supposed.
  
  It would take at least a month to dig out her first sub-basement level at the rate she was going, and it might take almost that long to fit it out with walls, ceilings, floors, electricity and running water. There was nothing for it, though. It was just something she had to do.
  
  "You're finally back! It took longer zhan I zhought," Lily greeted Scott.
  
  He looked tired, "Yes, I may have underestimated all of the things we needed to drag away from that store, but it is all done."
  
  Lily chuckled, rubbing the back of her neck, "I often underestimate zhe time zhings take myself, especially recently."
  
  She glanced at the several wrecked cars stacked on the trailer and raised her eyebrows, "Zhat looks more zhan two tons to me."
  
  To that, he just shrugged, "A few were as easy as just one, I suppose. Now, the question is what should me and Sophie do now? Are you near the stage where you could start building any of those trucks?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Depends. I was zhinking I was about a month away, but if you were 'ere to 'elp full time, I zhink we could cut zhat in 'alf, at least. It's up to you. I could drive you back 'ome if you don't 'ave zhe time."
  
  She actually thought his assistance would help her start building sooner than that. She would have to bring the DMLS system down here to the hangar, though. That or build a second one. She had built it so that parts longer than the machine itself could be built and "extruded" out one end in phases. However, if she built an axle or power shaft upstairs, she'd never be able to get it down except by throwing it out a window!
  
  He nodded at that, "Yes, things are settled enough, and we have a direct link to the Vault, so I can access sensors and even my defences from here, so I feel alright staying until this is done. A couple of weeks is fine, I suppose."
  
  "Excellent," she said happily. Finishing the trucks was important as she was going to attempt to up-armour her truck at the same time.
  
  "Did something happen to zhe drone?" she asked curiously, not detecting the feed.
  
  He nodded, "Yes, we're not entirely sure what, but we think a bird collided with it. We have the wreckage, though."
  
  A bird? There weren't exactly a lot of birds anymore, although there were some in Oasis. Talk about bad luck. Oh well, she intended to redesign it anyway. She had designed it to protect its processor in a crash, so hopefully, that wasn't damaged.
  
  She was feeling good. She had a number of boxes to check before she felt comfortable raiding the VSS building, and it was getting closer and closer. She was already ahead of schedule and thought instead of three or four months, she might be ready to leave right after meeting with Madison Li.
  
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  The Mesh
  Lily washed her hands carefully, as she always did when she was about to leave the hospital. She did it to set a positive example rather than for any real need; she was humming, but internally she was a bit upset. She just finished performing her second pregnancy termination since arriving in this universe. If you considered the ratio between the number of obstetrics patients she has seen and the number of terminations she has had to perform, it would make a third-world country in her past life look positively enviable as far as infant mortality was concerned. It was running 20% morbidity right now, just from terminations!
  
  The first was ten days ago when a woman and her husband came in for an OB consult, and Lily saw some unusual signs on the ultrasound. The expectant mother was gravida two para one, which meant she had one healthy child already. For the challenge aspect, Lily had been trying to avoid using her diagnostic scanner as much as possible, as her days working in the hospital were absolutely dreadfully boring if she had the answer to absolutely everything immediately.
  
  She had considered breaking that challenge, but she had her answer right away after sequencing the mom's genome. She was a recessive carrier for Zellweger syndrome, and judging from the unusual facial features present in the ultrasound; it was pretty clear what she was seeing. After sequencing the father's genome to confirm he also carried the same recessive trait and just for good form, taking a sample of the fetal DNA present in amniotic fluid, she established the diagnosis and recommended that they terminate the pregnancy.
  
  In a civilized world, the couple would have had those recessive traits eliminated immediately after they were identified at birth, but the Fallout universe was the opposite of civilized. The fetus was too far along in development for any kind of treatment she could produce to affect it. Zellweger's Syndrome was characterized by a complete absence of an important cellular organelle in every cell of the body. There was no real way to survive it absent a full nanomedical rebuild, and that was technology she did not have.
  
  They had, not surprisingly, wanted a second opinion, so she called Dr Taylor in on his day off to also explain it again, after which they were still conflicted. Both of them wanted to, at first, take the pregnancy to term even if the infant had no chance to survive more than a month or two postnatal. She had finally just placed her hands on the woman's shoulders and shook her head, urging, " Don't do zhat to yourselves."
  
  After that, they acquiesced. The only silver lining, if there was one, was she got to demonstrate a normal D&C for the Apprentice, who assisted her with the procedure. She had been sad enough that she had included the Zelleger's expression on her second level of life extension therapy, even if it was rare, and gave both parents coupons to get both levels gratis. Although, since it was a recessive expression, a potential child had a seventy-five per cent chance to be normal and healthy, she didn't particularly want to do that again if it could be easily and cheaply (for her) avoided.
  
  The second case was a lot less of a problem for her feelings, as there was an easy and clear diagnosis of anencephaly, which was a malformation of fetal development that caused a failure to form any brain or most of the skull. Most times, the fetus would develop some part of the brain stem, enough for most autonomic functions to continue for a few hours past birth, but that was it.
  
  As far she was concerned, such a fetus not only wasn't alive but never had the potential for life in the first place, and Lily wouldn't feel the least compunction about terminating such a pregnancy. She'd throw the malformed fetus into the trash NBA jump shot style, too, except that it would be incredibly unprofessional for her to do so.
  
  Once again, the Apprentice assisted her with the D&C, so that was good. However, the mother couldn't be consoled, and Lily found herself feeling something like empathy for the silly woman, which was very unusual, and she had to admit she didn't care for it at all if that was how the emotion worked. So, finally, Lily injected the woman with nanomachines that were programmed to regulate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain and quickly fled the room she was recuperating in, leaving Alice to deal with her.
  
  She had long ago realized that she was not... neurotypical in a lot of ways. Her past life in America was a lot better in that respect, there she was just a slightly weird and prideful tomboy, but in many aspects, it didn't help at all because she had memories of how a normal person should feel in some types of situations, which conflicted with how she consistently felt during similar situations. So, the outpouring of emotion from that woman regarding something she considered so irrational just shined a light on that, and it wasn't entirely a comfortable feeling.
  
  Ah, well. She was who she was, and it wasn't an unusual feeling to consider almost everyone else in the world slightly crazy. It was a very profoundly nostalgic feeling, even.
  
  She walked over to the hangar that she and Scott were using to construct the first prototype truck. She shuddered. Two weeks ago she told Scout that she thought she would have gotten to this point on her own in a month. Without the man's help, she probably wouldn't have gotten close in three!
  
  She had tried to keep the truck design as simple as possible, but if you counted all the fastenings, such as nuts and bolts, as individual parts, the prototype they had settled on had twenty-three thousand and six parts! However, this kind of monotonous and detailed-oriented work was right up his alley.
  
  Clearly, there were levels or domains of neurodivergence, and Scott was working well in the "I like to assemble ten thousand piece pure white puzzles for fun" and "building a ship in a bottle sounds like a great lark" areas.
  
  Although... perhaps not. He might, like her, consider those kinds of things pointless. However, she had a suspicion he might like them. He looked like a puzzler. Her little brother so long ago loved solving puzzles, and one of the meanest things she did to him once was she gave him a puzzle but hid one of the pieces, so it was impossible to complete. She wondered how children had such a seemingly supernatural way of identifying the cruellest choice possible in a series of possible behaviours.
  
  She chuckled. Not only had she needed to build an extra metal printer down here, but she also had to build four more, although they were all connected to communal feedstock input hoppers. The many small parts she hadn't realized they would need meant that a single one just wasn't good enough. It would take forever just to build one truck!
  
  She wasn't sure how they made screws or bolts in quantities in factories, perhaps some sort of automated lathe, but what she did know was they didn't sinter them because it took a lot longer. She wondered how the Brotherhood handled that problem; surely they didn't just... scavenge nuts and bolts.
  
  "'Ows it going, Scott?" she asked the Mechanist, who was watching a team of five Termitrons do most of the physical labour and assembly. He had gotten as good as her at controlling the robots and quickly. He had already submitted a number of high-quality tested tasks, as well.
  
  "I think it might be ready for a roll around the block later today," he commented happily. Then he asked, "Are you going to be working on your robots again today?"
  
  Lily hummed a bit and nodded. She worked on a lot of projects every day, but she was finishing up a project to port the standard RobCo quantum neural emulation model to her own operating system. She intended to reflash all of her Trons to use her own OS as soon as possible. Not only did she prefer using her own operating system, which was designed by professional paranoiacs that would put her to shame, but she had an innovative solution designed to make her Trons much more useful, which was only possible when it had a very low-level wireless mesh connection.
  
  It was also becoming more difficult to integrate and manage such devices in her nascent mesh, as they didn't quite fit in or obey the standard way to handle such communications. They communicated on a different frequency and in a different RobCo proprietary protocol than she used for her standard mesh and were kind of grafted on as an afterthought in a very clunky way.
  
  By now, she had already standardized all of her Tron bots into the Termitron chassis and weapon load outs, which was one laser, one AirTaser and one pneumatic dart gun. However, she changed the Termitron head because she had gotten repeated complaints that the Terminator-style metallic skulls were "unsettling," "scared the children and animals," and "creepy AF."
  
  That last one had been from the Apprentice. She thought the girl had been getting into some of her American media and books that she had been accumulating in digital form. Most were books, as it was kind of hard to turn a memory of watching a film into a film, as she included all the times she turned, blinked, coughed, et cetera. But that was the only explanation of how the girl was using TikTok words like "A.F."
  
  In the face of such criticism, she buckled to popular opinion and changed their faces to have only smooth curves and resemble the Kaylon from the TV show Orville from her past life, although she didn't have the present capability to have their eyes light up without blinding their optical sensors, yet. This had gotten widespread approval as a pleasant and inoffensive design. She was internally calling them Kaytrons now or just Kays.
  
  Scott nodded, "You know, and I had a question about that. Your operating system... it seems not only more secure than the RobCo OS, but much more feature complete."
  
  Lily nodded slowly, "Yesss?"
  
  "So, it seemed very... mature. I don't mean to offend you, but it seems unlikely that you created it in the timeframes available," he finished.
  
  Ah. Right. Of course. She nodded, "Yes, zhat is quite true. I call it my OS only because I'm zhe only one zhat 'as access to it anymore, but you're definitely right. I didn't write it at all, zhe only zhing I can take credit for is porting it to be able to run on RobCo's quantum processor instruction set. I'd rather not discuss its precise origins, zhough, if you don't mind." She had no good way to explain it. It really was superior to the RobCo OS, and clearly written and designed by English speakers, so it didn't make sense to him why he had never seen any sign of it, even in government computers that he had no doubt scavenged in the past.
  
  Scott rubbed his chin and then shrugged and nodded, "Alright." And that was all he said about the matter. Lily really did like him for things like that. If he said he would do something, he would do it. If he said something, he wasn't prevaricating and actually meant it. When the Mayor had come to the hospital to get treated with her first life extension treatment, afterwards, she had gone to chat with the Mechanist just to hear someone who meant the things he said.
  
  She glanced at the robots who were underneath the raised truck and installing armour around one of the main differential gears that combined the power of both fission motors. She was really glad that she had the advice of people who knew purely mechanical solutions better than she did, as she thought such a solution would not work when Scott had first mentioned it.
  
  Still, the two motors were carefully computer controlled to stay synchronized, in any case. She had to agree to supply Scott with enough processors in order to satisfy his production requirements at a nominal cost. He also wanted assistance in researching how to produce traditional computing processors as well, which was something she was more than happy to help with as she was curious too. However, she would have to either find another source rather than the Brotherhood or trade them something again, as she used the last token to purchase the synthesis method for Rad-X, although she hadn't put it into production yet.
  
  Lily knew that in her past life, processors and solid-state memory were produced through a photolithographic process, but she knew that it involved a lot of light-sensitive chemicals, extremely clean conditions and tons and tons of ultra highly distilled water to wash everything in stages. The way the Fallout universe seemed to build electronics after discovering quantum processor-based robotics, however, was by using automated robotic micromanipulators to quickly and accurately wire the millions of transistors. She thought that was incredibly interesting but wasn't surprised that the very best traditional processors available in this world were on the level of a Pentium 1 or 2. It was just difficult to scale down to very small sizes that way.
  
  She finally nodded at the robots building the prototype truck and turned to head back inside. She wanted to show off to the Apprentice, now.
  
  "So, what do you zhink?" Lily asked the girl excitedly.
  
  "Dr St. Claire, is that your skull? Like the one, you took out of your body?! You know I think that is creepy; why are you holding it out like that?" complained Alice, in a much put-upon teenaged tone.
  
  Lily chuffed, "Yes, it is! And it is for comparison! Zhe eyes inside it, silly girl! I 'avent until recently been able to construct proper digital optical sensors, so a cybernetic eye replacement has been impossible. But tell me 'ow does it look, from zhe aeszhetic perspective, yes?"
  
  Lily carefully held her previous skull up next to her current one and fluttered her eyelashes a moment before allowing the girl to get a good look at the two different sets of eyes.
  
  Alice sighed but spent a moment looking between the two sets of eyes, "Uhh... you got the colour right, I suppose. But... what is that thing that you told me about? Where it looks unsettling if it can't seem human?"
  
  Lily frowned, "The Uncanny Valley."
  
  Alice nodded, taking her skull from her hands to peer at it, "Yes, that's it. These look too much like a camera lens."
  
  "They are a camera lens!" Lily complained, but just for show. She knew what the girl meant.
  
  "Also, the sclera isn't the correct shade of white, and the entire thing doesn't appear moist enough, but maybe that is just because you put in a skull, you psycho!" the Apprentice finished criticizing her life's work, before walking over to her skeleton that was hanging in the corner and reattaching her skull to it.
  
  Lily sighed, theatrically and much put upon, before flouncing onto her comfortable chair. Lily had caught the girl as she snuck another goat clone on the cloning machine. Lily had used a goat to test the device, and ever since the girl learned how tasty they were, she would periodically go and clone one to give to the cooks. So long as she killed it herself and didn't get any mess anywhere, she didn't particularly mind. The machine was still loaded with tons of biological material, but there was no replacement just yet as Lily hadn't been able to install the Fancy Lad machine into the sewer output yet.
  
  "You know, I preferred zhe attitude the Alice the Front Desk girl 'ad back in Canterbury Commons," Lily groused.
  
  That caused the girl to grin because who wouldn't enjoy being reminded of how far they have come? She asked, "Why do you even need cybernetic replacement eyes in the first place? You have like 20/5 vision!"
  
  Lily turned her entire torso to stare at the girl in shock, "Apprentice! Zhese eyes can see infrared! And into zhe UV spectrum! And zhey have an integrated 10X, gyro-stabilized optical zoom! They have perfect peripheral vision! A wider field of vision! If I need to say any more at all zhen-"
  
  Alice waved her hands in the air and interrupted her in mid-harangue, "Alright, alright! I understand exactly why you would want that." Then she tilted her head to the side and asked, "How do they create a perfect peripheral vision? If I understand the way cameras work, there should always be a focus..." she trailed off.
  
  Lily sighed and stood up, waving a hand at a boring question, "Multiple sensors and zhen zhe digital post-processing to composite zhe image together, of course." Then she smiled, "But I 'ave something else to show you."
  
  Lily walked over to where five of her Kaytrons were standing, completely shut down. She had one of their chests open, and a few tools and what look liked printed circuit board modules on the table nearby, "I 'ave finally been able to properly run zhe neural emulation software on my operating system, Apprentice!"
  
  The Apprentice didn't look that enthusiastic, "So? I'm not as excited about purely computer stuff as you are, Mistress. I don't even really see the difference; they will still work the same, won't they?"
  
  Lily rapidly shook her head, "No, zhey will be better! See, zhis is the custom wireless mesh board that I can now install, now."
  
  That caused Alice to look a little more interested and walk over, "And what can you do with that?"
  
  "Well, you know 'ow zhese Tron robots are really very dumb?" asked Lily excitedly.
  
  "Of course. They're really quite a pain to deal with if you're not already half-robot mentally like you and Mr Kaminsky," she said drily.
  
  "Well, zhe key part of 'ow I design zhe wireless modules is zhat zhey continuously form ad-hoc mesh networks with any similarly equipped device, yes?" Lily continued.
  
  "I sort of understand what that means. It means they maintain a wireless connection and can communicate with any similar devices in range, right?" the girl asked.
  
  Lily nodded, "Of course! And zhere are a lot more nodes on my network zhan you'd zhink. Every smart water or an electrical meter, every neighbourhood transformer zhat Eastside 'as rebuilt! Your little sister's book reader! The trucks we're building outside! For example, I could send you an update to your software, and if you're at the edge of town, it may be delivered zhrough zhree or four intermediaries before arriving to you."
  
  Alice hummed, "Okay, I follow. But wouldn't that be a severe security vulnerability? You can't trust those intermediary devices with something as important as an update to the software my brain uses."
  
  Lily wanted to kiss the girl on the cheek since she considered the computer part of her brain. That was the correct way to think about it. Lily waved a hand, "Don't teach your grandma to suck eggs, Apprentice. Zhe operating system zhis all runs on, and zhe Mesh network concept was designed by professional paranoids. Everything is encrypted. Everything is digitally signed. We use traditional but quantum-resistant encryption algorithms with lots of keylength. As much as zhese teeny little processors can stand. Your computer can accept an update from a random person on zhe street because I have cryptographically signed it."
  
  Lily slid the wireless module into the robot's chassis, clicking it into place and then carefully connected a series of antenna cables, before fastening the board into place and closing the robot's access panel for its peripherals. Alice sighed and shrugged, "Okay, I don't know precisely what all that means, but I do trust you, Dr St. Claire. But I'm still not following your explanation..."
  
  Lily blinked, "Oh. Well, zhis module is different from zhe normal wireless module I produce. Zhis one 'as a separate, dedicated subchannel. A Tron is stupid, but what if you could link zhe cognition and neural emulation of multiple Trons together zhrough zhe Mesh? Zhese five, zhey would zhink much better zhan just zhe one, no?"
  
  Alice started backing away, "Uhh... Mistress... you remember when you told me about your secret research and asked me to warn you if I thought you were doing something stupid?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Of course, of course..."
  
  Alice coughed, "Well, what would happen if more and more of these robots were linked together to such a point that they got so smart that we couldn't even understand their motives? That would be..."
  
  " Awesome!" Lily finished for her with deep emotion.
  
  "Well, I was going to say dangerous, " Alice replied.
  
  Lily snorted, "You have been getting into my science fiction stories; I just know it. Zhat is zhe only origin for zhis paranoia." Just because one set of hyperintelligent AIs destroyed her past world didn't mean they all would! Lily intended to be a benevolent hyperintelligence someday. Besides, it was impossible. If connecting multiple neural networks together was all that it took to create a genuine hyperintelligence, the Solar System would have been under the benevolent guidance of the Legion of the Spider Queen ages ago!
  
  "Besides, your fears zhey are unfounded, Apprentice. You don't know much about computers, but parallelism isn't a free lunch. Zhere is an upkeep cost on any kind of parallel computing, an overhead management cost on zhe effective computing power. Plus, combined with zhe fact zhat zhe communication channel, is both lightspeed limited and meters away? No way. Plus, zhe mesh subchannel 'as limited bandwidth."
  
  She sighed, "It would truly be amazing if I could build a hyperintelligence just by adding more and more artificial stupids, but zhat isn't 'ow it works. I would 'ave to be at least ten times as gifted in the field of artificial intelligence for zhat to be possible."
  
  Lily switched on all five of the robots and stepped back as well, "With zhe limitations we're working with on zhe area of diminishing returns, I expect about eight is about zhe max. Adding a thousand to the network after the eighth wouldn't add much at all. And I expect zhe total neural complexity of eight networked Trons to be a little bit less zhan a Mister Handy."
  
  She glanced at Alice, "But zhat is a nice idea; I am just not smart enough to pull it off."
  
  The five robots finished booting up, glanced around, then nodded, and proceeded to carry out the series of complicated but ambiguous orders that Lily had left them to test their cognitive abilities.
  
  "Mistress, you scare me sometimes," Alice said honestly.
  
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  I Spy With My Spider Eye
  Lily tried to build two more sets of cybernetic eyes, although neither set looked right from a purely human-based aesthetic perspective. Either the iris or the pupil didn't look correct, or both. She was trying to hide the apertures of four imagers inside one pupil, and it just didn't look right. However, she really wanted to replace her eyes with something much more useful, so she was going to proceed anyway. The idea of seeing more of the electromagnetic spectrum was always appealing to her. Seeing infrared light, especially, would be highly useful.
  
  Additionally, she could change her skull and ocular cavity shape. She didn't particularly like the direct access to her squishy, squishy brain that the optical canal in her skull provided for hot plasma, acids, and any other number of other hazards. She felt she could wall it off, leaving both electrical conductors as well as an optical pipe for fibre optics. She wasn't entirely sure that would save her life in the event she took a plasma bolt to the eye; in fact, she was pretty sure it would not, but it made no sense to keep the door open for lesser threats.
  
  Plus, the actual bandwidth available on the optic nerve was a bit limited. The eyes she intended to install in herself were similar to her sense of hearing in that they were piped digitally to her brain computer, which then used its almost unlimited bandwidth to stimulate her sensory cortex directly. Although, she did have designs for a traditional cybernetic eye that would interface directly with the optic nerve and fit into a standard optical cavity.
  
  She had already tested them, too. They would be powered solely by a small betavoltaic cell and were currently limited to much simpler designs featuring only one small, low-voltage optical sensor and the smallest digital-to-analogue optical processor she could make. However, the eyes she planned to install would use digital fibre optic connections to a central computer, which she had sized to fit the area that used to be her sinus cavities. She was calling this an optical subprocessor, and it would be connected to and powered by her main computer.
  
  Lily's highest-speed processors barely exceeded two hundred megahertz of clock speed, and the transistor density was at an insufficient level, so her optical subprocessor was still too big to incorporate into the eyes themselves, especially when they needed to composite multiple optical feeds in real-time. However, two hundred megahertz was a lot in the hands of an application-specific integrated circuit. It was a terrible general-purpose computer, but ask it to integrate a feed of digital images and rapidly composite them, and it was pretty good. The fact that her ability to create very fast access to non-volatile RAM was unparalleled meant the special processor had a ridiculous cache and was quite fast at its job.
  
  The subprocessor also did have a failover mode, just like her "ears", as the device would be situated near enough to her optical tract that a direct electrical interface with the nerves there was possible. Still, in the event that her main computer failed, her vision would be both slightly nearsighted and farsighted and only in the visible spectrum. Her vision would also stop entirely in a couple of weeks after the included batteries discharged unless she shoved a charging cord up her nose.
  
  She felt good about the technology. She wouldn't even be the first person in Megaton to use one of her cybernetic eyes, either. She had been declared the official doctor and possible saint of the Children of the Atom, and she regularly had one of the faithful brought to see her, often by one of the cult's leaders. Very few of the Children of Atom were what Lily might refer to as healthy, but she noticed that they mostly all tended to be very resistant to radiation. She supposed any faithful that wasn't didn't live that long, that or they wisened up and fucked off after the second or third time they got seriously ill.
  
  Most of their problems could be solved, or at least treated, by a slow IV of medichines programmed to seek out heavy metals and eliminate them from the body through the urine. The body didn't have a natural way to eliminate most heavy metals like lead from the body, which was why there was no amount of safe heavy metal exposure-it was a cumulative hazard. When many radionuclides were heavy metals themselves, radiation and heavy metal toxicity tended to go hand in hand.
  
  She had offered a potential cure for one of the faithful's blindness, as long as they didn't mind an experimental solution. When she explained that the new eyes would be powered by and infused by the holy Atom's glow, she had to stop the whole congregation from immediately gouging all their own eyes out just to get her replacements, too. Still, they found another whose eyes were damaged so completely in the past that they couldn't be repaired via StimPaks.
  
  Although the cybernetic eyes she installed in her two volunteers were radically different from the ones she was planning on using herself, the fundamentals were the same. Her patients' biggest problem was reconnecting an optical input to a long, mostly reorganised sensory cortex. It took them several days before their vision was beneficial at all, and while they were still not where Lily thought they should be, they were still making progress every day and seemed very enthusiastic about their Holy Vision.
  
  Since she couldn't reach the stage of mimicking a human eye yet, generally and hers especially, she decided to lean into the fact that they were cybernetic replacements. She was blatantly ripping off the aesthetics of a character from a light novel and anime she enjoyed from her past life in America. It was called " So I'm a Spider, So What?" She considered it very fitting!
  
  There was a character called Shiraori, a seemingly human girl who had a special relationship with spiders, as Lily did. She had blood-red irises, with each eye featuring four smaller "sub-eye" pupils. That way, she had eight eyes, just like most spiders, right? That was genius! By coincidence, Lily had four optical sensors for each of her cybernetic eyes. Three were normal visual sensors, while the last was optimised just to see infrared and UV light as special polarising filters blocked the entire visual light spectrum out.
  
  Lily hummed as she peered at the fully assembled cybernetic eye. It featured a bright red colour iris, but instead of one larger black pupil, it featured four smaller ones arranged as if they were the vertices of a diamond or square. She thought that Shiraori's four pupils were actually white-coloured, as that was her theme, but the idea of reflecting light away from a camera's aperture was silly without amazing spider magic, so black they had to be.
  
  'Wait a second!' Lily thought to herself as one of her memories of that anime returned. Didn't Shiraori also have the original human pupil too? For five pupils per eye? Lily sighed. That was impossible; there was no way she could fit five sensors in that eye. This would have to do. Plus, this way, she wasn't entirely ripping the character off!
  
  Lily considered asking the Apprentice to assist her, but if you've helped your Mistress peel the skin off her face one time, you've done it a thousand times. And this time, she could use a wireless feed from cameras to perform the surgery on herself after she has already removed her eyes.
  
  Besides, it'd be more fun to surprise the Apprentice with her new eyes!
  
  Lily spent the hour and a half after her surgery both getting used to her new sense as well as poking the slightly inflamed, numb-feeling skin on her face, just like she scolded the Apprentice for doing after the girl got her computer installed initially. She had to replace everything from the upper jaw upwards on the front quarter of her skull, but now there was both diamond and metal in between her ocular cavity and actual grey matter.
  
  She could also see so much better now. Although she had been kind of surprised when testing the optical subprocessor in failover mode in that she became almost completely colour-blind. She didn't know precisely why this occurred, and she had not had any complaints of such a symptom from her two test subjects. She suspected there was a slight bug or malfunction in her optical subprocessor's digital-to-analogue converter. However, since that was only employed in the event of a main computer failure, she decided not to bother replacing it at this juncture. She was building and designing the subprocessor with what she hoped would be obsolete technology in the next few months, anyway.
  
  She hoped in a few months after she got back from the VSS building that, she could hit the RobCo factory. It would be ideal if she got that RobCo widget from Moira Brown, but honestly, she wasn't going to wait two years to hit that place if it turned out that Moira only got it recently before the Fallout 3 game and plot started. She was very hopeful she could find the production process for quantum processors there.
  
  The more she remembered about the quantum processors of her own world, the more she realised it would take a long time to achieve that technology. It would be nice if she could just skip the steps of reinvention of a whole type of computing and scavenge the process from RobCo.
  
  Her three visual sensors per eye granted her a theoretical superhuman field of view of over one hundred and sixty degrees. However, she discovered that when she attempted to go much farther than normal, she was getting headaches, so she stopped at one hundred and thirty degrees for the moment.
  
  The human brain was incredibly adaptable, and she suspected that she could easily reach the one-hundred-and-sixty-degree effective cap of her current set of eyes in a few weeks of building up to it. However, most biomorphs that had a very large field of view, or even three-hundred-and-sixty-degree-vision, had specially designed or naturally evolved visual cortexes that handled that task.
  
  That didn't mean she wouldn't work towards that direction, as there were tons of ways to accomplish it, from neuroplasticity treatments to the complete replacement of the primary visual cortex with a synthetic replacement. Some of the things she had learned from the FEV experiments with the Gary clones could also be an option after being clinically tested.
  
  While she definitely wasn't going to expose her brain to FEV, she discovered what she believed was the cause of the rapid brain development, which was triggered when the FEV caused cells to produce a special enzyme and protein combination. However, unfortunately, she didn't presently have a cell-free protein synthesis machine, so she didn't have any way to easily produce the identified proteins and enzymes (absent infecting neural tissue with FEV in vivo), but she thought they might be the actual biological trigger for the accelerated brain development and pathway creation.
  
  If so, it might be an option to carefully administer such proteins and enzymes in her occipital lobe and in small quantities to encourage new pathway development. That was definitely a long-term plan, and she wouldn't be the first or even the first dozenth to try such a thing. She liked her brain too much!
  
  She fished out her compact from her bag and clicked it open to stare in the mirror. Then, fluttering her eyelashes testingly, she nodded. Her eyes didn't look human; they looked better! It was time to show the Apprentice.
  
  She found Alice in the cafeteria having breakfast. Wait, did that mean Lily worked through the night again? Oh well. She could get a quick ninety-minute nap.
  
  The Apprentice was sitting across from Gary, listening to him talk, and she could hear their conversation from across the room, "It's not easy, let me tell you... you never know when the next one will go, and then *BAM* . It's all over." Lily tilted her head to the side. Was he regaling her with his war stories? As a senior NCO in the Navy, she highly doubted he ever walked through landmines, so she was wondering what the hell he was talking about. She slowed down her steps to eavesdrop a little longer.
  
  "I tell you, it's a tight-rope walk of peril, living on the knife's edge between the fart-shart line..." he continued.
  
  Wait, what?
  
  He finished, "Verily, the most satisfying farts are the least trustworthy." For some reason, this caused Alice to laugh uproariously, but Lily was just stunned, 'Wait, I slept with this man?'
  
  Shaking her head a little bit, she finished walking up to the table they were seated at and sat down as well. Well, completely disgusting or not Gary's opinion would be useful as well. "Apprentice! Monsieur Kaminsky! 'Ow do zhey look?"
  
  They spoke at the same time.
  
  "How do-ahhh!"
  
  "What do you -ahh!"
  
  Lily grinned! That was great! The Apprentice was first to reply, "Dr St. Claire, why do you have demon-red eyes?! And are those four pupils? I thought you were trying to work towards more human-looking cybernetic eyes?"
  
  That caused Lily to moue prettily. She didn't like admitting something was presently beyond her, especially in the field of synthetic cyberware. "It's really 'ard getting past zhe Uncanny Valley. A lot of zhe small zhings zhat a 'uman would expect a real eye to do is a bit tough. You 'ave no idea 'ow much neural circuitry 'as evolved just to look at another 'uman's eyes!"
  
  That caused Alice to blink, and Gary to ask, interested, "What do you mean?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Zhis room is about twenty metres in its longest dimmension. If we stood on opposite ends, I would be able to detect zhe slight difference between you looking at my eyes and my breasts, at twenty metres. Do you 'ave any idea 'ow little difference in angle of incidence zhat is?"
  
  That caused Gary to grin, "Are you suggesting the human race has evolved to detect when men sneak a peek at a lady's boobs?"
  
  That caused Lily to snort and wave a hand, "Zheres plenty of advantageous evolutionary reasons for zhis adaptation. Eye movement is correlated with many social behaviours, including deception. Eye movement also precedes action, sometimes zhe violent action, yes? And if you can identify what a predator is focused on, you can use your big 'uman brain to out-think it."
  
  Then Lily coughed a bit, "In any case, I decided to go zhe other way. Zhere is evidence to suggest zhat zhere are better reactions when it is obvious you are not failing to mimic an 'uman feature."
  
  That caused the Apprentice to hum thoughtfully and nod, "You might be right; they were a little surprising but-achhckk!"
  
  Right as the girl had been speaking Lily had made all of her four pupils in both eyes start looking in different directions just to mess with her. The Apprentice almost fell out of her chair, "Dr St. Claire! Don't do that! That is creepy AF!" There were those words again. Lily didn't think they meant what the girl thought they meant.
  
  Then Alice narrowed her eyes and asked, "Wait, Dr St. Claire. Did you include four pupils per eye just so that you would end up with 8, like a spider?"
  
  "Hehe," Lily offered but shook her head, "No! It was just a coincidence. I need two visual sensors for zhe increased peripheral and field-of-view advantages while preserving one for the focus, including zoom. Zhe last one is a focused sensor zhat sees only infrared and some UV light."
  
  "Well, they do sort of look cool..." Alice began only to have Gary shake his head and pipe up.
  
  "No, they look scary as fuck! But that is cool, so maybe you're right."
  
  Lily nodded. She agreed with both sentiments, "Well, zhat was really all I wanted to show you too. I'm going to go for a ride here in a bit, I 'ave something I'd like to do today."
  
  That caused them both to perk up and Alice asked, "Adventure?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "Yes, and no. I'm going to test zhe truck, test something else confidential and at zhe same time try to clear zhat fourth floor at zhe 'ospital we found, Apprentice."
  
  That caused the girl to frown in worry, "You said that was a death trap!"
  
  Lily nodded, "That's why you're not going, either of you. But the thing I am testing should make it not dangerous for me."
  
  Alice sighed, but Gary shrugged and said to the younger girl, "You had me convinced not to go at death trap.'"
  
  Lily did a thorough inspection of what used to be her truck. It had changed a lot, although it wasn't complete. For one, it featured two long tracks on either side instead of wheels. Also, the cab of the truck had been completely covered in armour plates, and even the windshield was removed and replaced with an armour plate, with not even a slit to see through.
  
  The rear compartment had not been finished, so from all respects, it appeared like a cross between a large pickup truck and a tank. The Gatling turret looked more military, with armoured shields guarding everything but the spinning apertures of the weapon. Instead of the rear compartment, there was a temporary long truck bed attached, and the six Kaytrons she was taking with her were standing in it.
  
  Before she hopped up and entered the cab from the rear, she got an alert that her security forces were dealing with a violent disturbance at the front of the hospital, so she turned and started jogging that way.
  
  Her attempts to find leaders to help run her incipient PMC had been an utter failure; everyone interviewed was either a psycho, intended to betray her at the first opportunity or not qualified. She had managed to find two squad leaders, though and employed two ten-man squads, which wasn't nearly enough even to defend the hospital. She preferred younger people for the average recruits, even if it meant they were not strictly speaking trained. At the moment, they were getting OJT, being supervised by more experienced mercenaries that she continued to contract.
  
  She got to the front of the hospital in time to see four ganger-looking men tussling with two of her recruits. She could see another four or five recruits running towards their comrades from the other direction. Before any of her half-trained warriors accidentally shot her with a taser, she immediately ordered the two Kays that had jogged with her to stun the assailants, which they did with surprising accuracy.
  
  The two of her men immediately got the upper hand, kicked off the twitching assailants and got back to their feet. One gave one of the twitching men a good kick in the side for good measure. She approved of that, but she would make sure their squad leader smoked them for allowing four men to get within hand-to-hand combat range of them. She had given each of them an AirTaser carbine. While she had ordered them to keep it on the non-lethal setting, unless they were about to die, they should have tased these four instead of wrestling them.
  
  Her recruits comrades showed up and held the four men, who were slowly stopping twitching and rising to their feet, at bay with their weapons.
  
  The leader of the group of four nar-do-wells yelled, "You fucking bitch!" so Lily pulled her own AirTaser out and shot him right in the crotch area, causing him to squeal, clench up and fall back on the ground twitching. Glancing at her two recruits, she told them in a firm command voice, " Report."
  
  Both of them braced to something like attention and glanced at each other, then one said, "M-ma'am! Recruit Davidson and I were working the front, and these four fu-individuals showed up, demanding we turn over one of the patients. I think it is some gang thing," he finished, and then quickly added, "uhh ma'am."
  
  Lily blinked. They occasionally had this happen. Gang members would come in injured, and then a rival gang would show up or wait off the premises to finish the job. The guy with, no doubt, sore balls stopped twitching and stood up again, she raised the AirTaser again, but he held his hands out, "Fucking fine! Guys! Let's go!"
  
  His three men started to turn around, and he looked at her, "But I know you now! So, you best hope we never meet again because if we do, it will be the last time!"
  
  Lily blinked. Did he just..? She piped his speech through her expert system and asked for its opinion.
  
  [An implicit threat of violence. The implication is that if he sees you again, it will be the last time due to the fact that you will be deceased and therefore unable to meet him in the future (77%.)]
  
  Lily nodded; she thought so. See? She was getting better and better at understanding people socially, even without using her social assistant. She flipped the switch to the lethal setting and shot him in the back as he turned around to walk away with his three friends. This time he fell over but only twitched a couple of times before becoming silent. One of his friends freaked out, "What the fuck, man! We were leaving!"
  
  "Firstly, I am not a man. Secondly, he threatened me," Lily said mildly, looking at the gang member like he was insane.
  
  "Those were just words ma-woman!" he continued.
  
  Perplexed, she glanced around and asked, "Is he..." she searched for a word that was both classy and meant stupid as fuck.
  
  The recruit that hadn't spoken up earlier did so now, "Uhh... it was kind of a bluster thing, ma'am. He couldn't look bad in front of his boys, ya know?" This recruit, like more than half, didn't have the best childhood but, for one reason or another, had not joined a gang, just yet.
  
  Well, actually, she wasn't conceited enough to call what she was creating anything other than a gang, either. But at least he had joined her classy gang. In fact, she had the same opinion about governments in her past life. The only distinction between the government and the mafia was usually that the government got there first.
  
  A look of comprehension came over her face, ' Ohhh. He's talking about face .' To be perfectly honest, she often had trouble understanding this concept despite growing up in Shanghai. She glanced at the man she shot on the ground.
  
  His heart had only been stopped for a minute at the most. It was still possible to resuscitate him. She hummed and then shook her head. No, she didn't want to. She glanced at the three of his friends and raised her pistol, which caused all of her men-at-arms to raise their weapons as well, pointing at the three.
  
  "Woah, Woah, Woah... chill, chill. It's not that big of a deal. I guess.." the one that had been criticising her said.
  
  His unfaithfulness to his friend just made her want to shoot him even more. Instead, she said, "If you say something to me as zhe bluster, I reserve the right to believe it. Leave. Do not return."
  
  They didn't need to be told twice and beat feet right out of there. She sighed, shook her head and holstered the AirTaser pistol.
  
  She spent a few minutes briefing the two chucklehead's squad leader, who was already frowning and staring daggers at the two, before informing them to dispose of the body, and they could split if he had anything of value.
  
  She then turned around and headed back to her truck, and hopped in the cab as her two Kaytrons remounted the truck bed.
  
  Inside the pitch-dark cab, she sat in the operator's seat. The passenger seat was already full of the equipment she was planning to test today. From the back of her seat, she pulled out a small filament of a cable before connecting it to one of her auxiliary ports in the back of her neck.
  
  She briefly saw a loading icon float in front of her vision before it disappeared, and a full panoramic view of outside took its place. There were dozens of cameras carefully placed on the exterior of the vehicle, in places that she hoped would minimise their damage in a fight and in lieu of a windshield that could be shot through; even if windshields protected one ballistically to a degree, they didn't protect one from lasers. It was best to do away with the concept entirely for what she wanted to be a very protected vehicle.
  
  She could also operate the truck from the Mesh, but her wireless mesh network wasn't actually that resistant to jamming yet, so it was a better practice to use a hardwired connection. For operators that didn't have a brain implant, there were her old improvised VR goggles behind the seat that would work in a pinch.
  
  Now featuring an oversized automatic transmission, she put her petite tank into drive and left Megaton. She had already gotten visits from the city authorities, as tracked vehicles were generally not permitted in the city limits. However, she showed them her innovative pneumatic track system, and they finally agreed it wouldn't damage the roads.
  
  After the vehicle was outside city limits, she inflated the tracks to their normal operating range and set out to the hospital. It wouldn't take too long to get there at all. It was just a shame her vehicle wasn't that inconspicuous. She'd already overheard the Brotherhood talking about it when she took it out of the city for a test drive the first time. She'd have to do something about that. She didn't think she could build a StealthBoy big enough to affect a tank, though.
  
  Her drone overwatch was back, too and much improved. The digital cameras and improved optics allowed for it to loiter at a thousand metres and still provide the same level of service the previous model could. She also included reinforced rotors and ducts and radar looking both sideways and upwards for possible birds. Although it didn't have any armament, this model did have several preprogrammed evasive manoeuvres if it detected avians trying to mate with it.
  
  The fact that she wanted to build more aerial drones, including armed versions, was the main reason she wanted to come to the hospital. She could scavenge a lot of parts and processors if she could clear out all of those Eyebots upstairs.
  
  Pulling up to the hospital, she parked the vehicle and glanced at the passenger seat.
  
  At one time, it was the Assaultron she tried to reassemble. However, it didn't look like that now. Instead, it looked more like she did, including wearing a duplicate of her dark grey combat bodysuit, ballistic armour and helmet with a polarised visor. Unfortunately, she never did find an appropriate quantum processor to put inside it, so she finally decided to rebuild it as a robotic duplicate.
  
  If she were a man, it would not have been possible, as a lot of the Assaultron's most important hardware, including the processor when one existed, was housed in the armoured chest. But thankfully, Lily was "chesty" enough that all of that equipment fit even after she rebuilt the chassis with her own dimensions.
  
  She triggered a program on her computer and suddenly her point of view shifted. She was now sitting in the passenger's seat, looking down at her lap. She looked up, and glance to her left to see her real body. Controlling the Assaultclone wasn't a 1-to-1 experience because there was only very limited tactile sense, and even that was limited to her hands. The limbs were correctly integrated with her proprioception, but she just couldn't feel them if someone touched them.
  
  She had some questions about how useful this device was actually going to be. It relied on a very obvious wireless data connection to accomplish, so anyone that knew what ECM was could rob her of it, or if it went inside a faraday cage, underground, or any number of things. However, she had built it mainly as a proof of concept, to test being able to digitally control what amounted to a robot with her normal senses. She needed that capability for another project.
  
  Plus, she had to admit there were plenty of mindless but incredibly dangerous threats in the world. Those fucking wasps, Deathclaws, Bloatflies, Super Mutants, including the Behemoth ones.
  
  She stood up in the cab, carefully avoiding jumping into the roof with her increased strength. She opened the door and left the rear of the cab, carefully securing it again. She still had full access to her computer, including the drone overwatch, while driving the Assaultclone.
  
  She tested its speakers. After chewing on weeks worth of samples of her speech, her Muse had finally created a digital model of her voice. It was, in effect, a very good Deep Fake. It meant she could send voice radio calls in her own voice with her mind, or in this case, talk when she was a robot. She tested it, telling the squad of Kays with her voice, instead of with her mind, "Alright, boys. Let's 'ead out. Leave two to guard zhe body."
  
  The six nodded together as one, but only one of them spoke, "Yes, ma'am."
  
  All six hopped off the truck bed with her, two finding hiding places to stand overwatch while four flanked her protectively as she stepped into the hospital.
  
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  Daytrip
  "Sweep and clear all 'azardous non-sapient entities up to zhe zhird floor, please and zhank you," Lily ordered the four, who nodded and proceeded as a team to clear the hospital, leaving her alone. The personality of any of the gestalt Kaytrons left something to be desired, but they were clearly more intelligent. However, they weren't anywhere near the level of even an average Mister Handy, as they still leaned considerably on the finite state machine tasks Lily and the Mechanist had constructed.
  
  However, they generally did not need a controlling or supervisory computer to handle the overhead of that system any longer. And they were smart enough to select the best task or even a list of tasks to accomplish a goal if they were ordered to do something in natural language, at least most of the time. All in all, Lily felt they were excellent robot labourers. Not intelligent enough to be considered alive and starting to form a union to ask for wages and not too dumb to be useless, like the original Protectrons.
  
  Lily spent the half hour or so that it took the team of four Kaytrons to clear the hospital to practice her movement in the Assaultclone. She accidentally jumped too far and struck her head on the ceiling a few times, knocking down a bit of ceiling material each time but after that managed to contain herself, keeping her movements limited to walking, jogging, running, small jumps and rolls.
  
  When she got a report that they were done and little to nothing was found, she nodded and started heading up the stairs while sending an order for the four to meet her at the same door in the stairwell that she used the last time. She had a lot to do today and little enough time to accomplish all of her goals. She definitely didn't want to be out of town for more than one day.
  
  She found her small team of robots next to the locked door and tried to hum, but realised that she actually couldn't unless she sent what amounted to a text message through the text-to-speech converter and instead just shook her head. She couldn't sigh while in robot form, either.
  
  She tapped the terminal's keyboard to get the screen to light up and tried to input the password that was given to her by the ghoul Missy, but mentally frowned as text that read, " SECURITY OVERRIDE IN EFFECT. ACCESS DENIED" was displayed on the screen.
  
  Well, at least she would get to test out some of the tools she installed on this robot's arms. She was using it as a test platform to test what she wanted to include on her replacement arms when she could get to the point of it being more or less indistinguishable from a biological arm. She wasn't too far from this milestone, either, considering her cloning machine could create organs and limbs by themselves now, and not only complete organisms.
  
  She just had to settle on the potential genome for a skin substitute that would thrive while implanted on a synthetic arm, and she would be more or less good to go.
  
  Glancing down at her left hand, she focused on it mentally, and the hand and upper arm split open to reveal about a half dozen tools on tiny armatures. Controlling them took a little getting used to, but after a few minutes, she had the panel to the terminal open, as it did not feature an externally obvious port she could plug into.
  
  Finding the internal auxiliary port, she reformed her left hand and used it to pull a small cable out of her right and plugged it into the port inside the terminal. If necessary, this would cause the input and output to be relayed to her as her senses were. However, in this case, it was not as she had included locally on the robot what amounted to a bunch of scripts which identified which operating system was running on the attached device and then launched pre-programmed attacks using known vulnerabilities.
  
  Lily didn't even see anything herself until she saw a brief text overlay indicating that a RobCo terminal had been hacked and listed its version number and exploit that was used. Nodding, she unplugged herself and placed the terminal's outer case back on it but didn't bother replacing the fasteners she had removed earlier.
  
  "Okay, start with zhe quarter charge on zhe electrolasers; I would like zhem to be repairable," Lily spoke to her team of robots. The only downside to using the text-to-speech function to talk like this was that her intonation was a bit monotone, which wasn't like her. She'd either have to create some sort of emotion-based hypertext markup language, like XML, that she could tag the text with or alternatively incorporate the system that monitored her Broca region for sub vocalisation and change it to also monitor and pipe over actual vocalisations while using the robot.
  
  She nodded and made a note as that seemed the better solution.
  
  Before she opened the door, she glanced internally at the Kaytron's queued-up commands using her interface to make sure they seemed to be appropriate. She couldn't find anything obviously wrong with them, so she tapped the enter key on the terminal, which unlocked the magnetically locked door with a loud clunking sound and said quietly, "Go."
  
  One of the four robots opened the door, and they entered the first room together, with Lily following behind her. She had a laser rifle with her, although it was a normal version and not the tribeam that was still in the truck, and she shouldered it as she stepped through. She could already hear an electrolaser discharge, followed by something crashing to the ground.
  
  She wasn't entirely sure about what the programming the eyebots had, but she had the feeling that the entire company of robots on this floor would try to swarm them. And it turned out she wasn't wrong.
  
  They didn't even have to leave the first large room as eyebot after eyebot came floating at them. The only fortunate thing was they weren't programmed with any tactics. Otherwise, all the eyebots would have formed up in one group and attacked as one instead of in drips and drabs four and five at a time.
  
  Still, each of her robots, including her Assaultclone, took a few hits from lasers, one of the Kaytrons getting disabled while Lily put down about three or four eyebots herself with her laser rifle before the last eyebot crashed into the ground.
  
  Keeping the rifle raised for a few more moments, she counted thirty eyebots that they had disabled, which seemed a little bit more than she expected, so she was pretty sure that was all of them. Then, she shouldered her weapon and walked over to her fallen robo-comrade. Her damage was minor on her own chassis. Her armour was damaged, but there wasn't even a single area that had a burn-through.
  
  "Fuck," she said in a complete monotone as she diagnosed the damage. The robot took four beams in the same area, which compromised the armour, allowing the last beam to burn through and destroy the quantum processor of the robot. If it was anything else, she could have repaired it. Instead, she mentally sighed and ordered one of the two Kaytrons downstairs to come up to take its place, as she was pretty sure she'd need more than three robots to drag all the damaged eyebots to the truck. Plus, she needed the plasma rifle she brought with her, and it could bring it up on the way.
  
  Well, that was one Tron she was down permanently. Honestly, she was surprised it hadn't happened already. She'd take its body back, analyse the damage, and possibly rework the armouring strategy, especially near its processor. That area was already armoured more than the rest of the machine, but she could add more, even if it meant taking some armour away from other areas. She didn't mind repairing damage post battles, after all. She'd much rather have two temporarily disabled robots than one permanently destroyed after a fight. But she'd have to analyse it and do some simulations, as it wouldn't do to remove armour from areas and lose the fight altogether.
  
  About a third of the Eyebots were still in various stages of functionality; most in this category had their levitation systems disabled. She carefully went around and hacked each one, then shut them down so that they wouldn't shoot at her ankles like an angry chihuahua if she walked in front of one.
  
  Each functioning robot carried one Eyebot and started down the stairs, while the one she brought up from outside passed them and offered the plasma rifle she refurbished to her. Taking it, it then took another Eyebot and headed downstairs as well. She'd need this plasma rifle in a bit, so she just carried it for now.
  
  She went straight to the security office and unlocked the secure storage door again before walking straight in that direction. She sat the plasma rifle against the wall and pulled out the laser rifle before slowly opening the access door. The door swung outwards, so she managed to hide behind it. At the same time, an Eyebot darted out of the secure storage area, giving Lily an easy upskirt shot, quickly disabling the hovering menace.
  
  Nodding, she made sure the door wouldn't close behind her and walked into the storage area. Immediately after stepping in, Lily found herself disoriented. She was back in the truck cab, and floating text in front of her eyes read " CONNECTION LOST. "
  
  She groaned. That room was a faraday cage, also? She remembered the steel bars in front of the wall, but there must have been another layer of much finer wire mesh, probably embedded into the drywall or something. Her current angle didn't allow her to utilise the gap provided by the open door to get a good signal through inside, either, and all of the Kaytrons' positions were the same. She mentally ordered one of the Kaytrons to walk next to the open door instead of making a trip with an Eyebot when it came back upstairs and just waited a bit.
  
  A few minutes later, she noticed the connection with the Assaultclone was available again through the Mesh and reconnected. She found herself sprawled on the ground. Apparently, she had tipped over when she lost connection. She stood up carefully and dusted herself off, and then began carefully carrying each briefcase filled with FEV outside of the storage area.
  
  The amount of FEV concentrated into a single vial was incredible; she hadn't even made a dent in one vial's worth. Not even one-five-hundredths of a vial had been utilised in her experiements in Vault 108, and she had a briefcase filled with a couple of dozen vials still. She didn't think she would ever need all of this, and it was somewhat incriminating evidence. She'd get rid of it. Plus, virions were self-replicating, so it wasn't as though she would ever be without if she, for some reason, really needed a lot.
  
  She found a metallic wastebasket of the cylinder type and carefully put each vial from all of the briefcases inside, filling about a third of the wastebasket up. Then she set it on its side carefully across the room and grabbed the plasma rifle. The standard way to destroy pathogens was intense heat, so she took careful aim and fired three or four shots directly into the wastebasket, melting everything into slag, wastebasket, vials, their contents and part of the floor as well.
  
  Glancing at the briefcases, even leaving a bunch of briefcases, was a bit suspicious, especially since they had the Vault-Tek logo on them and had suspiciously vial-shaped cutouts in foam inside. She took about fifteen minutes and located each one of the near-field communicator devices in each briefcase.
  
  In the past, when she brought them through the storage room door, those devices originally caused the red alert that forced her to jump out of the fourth-story window. However, they weren't long-range tracking devices, as far as she could tell, but she smashed each device just to be sure anyway. She would take each of the briefcases back to Megaton and recycle them.
  
  She added collecting all the briefcases to the Kaytron queue and then closed the secure storage door. While they were working, she went around to every operable terminal she could find and used a malicious worm to delete all data locally before attempting to infect any connected mainframes. By the time she had gotten down to the second story of the hospital, all of the terminals that she had once read e-mails on were bricked, but she infected them as well.
  
  The mainframe itself was on the second floor, so she visited that, infected it and then, for good measure, melted its storage array to slag with her plasma caster. There wouldn't be anything at all suspicious for the next group of scavengers to discover, except perhaps the weird skeletons on the top floor. Certainly, there would be no suspiciously redacted e-mails to read that mentioned Vault-Tek or unknown projects.
  
  Nodding, satisfied with her precautions, she walked outside the front door. Her Kaytrons already had everything loaded, including their fallen comrade on the bed of the truck. She hopped up, entered the cab and sat down before terminating the connection.
  
  Looking up from the driver's seat, she put the truck into gear and started driving off to the southwest. She still had one stop to make, and she needed to make sure she wasn't observed stopping there, so she sent her overhead drone off ahead a little way.
  
  She ended up having to diver quite a ways to the south to avoid being discovered by raiders in the Fairfax ruins but managed to approach the so-called Fort Independence from the south to the point where her drone detected the small neighbourhood of houses, in good repair, of Andale. If she recalled, they were, from all appearances, a simple and law-keeping community, but the truth was that they were inbred cannibals, like some sick combination of The Hills Have Eyes and The Stepford Wives . At least, if things were the same as the Fallout 3 game, anyway. But those crazies weren't her circus, weren't her monkeys. She'd leave them be.
  
  She was hoping that Fort Independence was unoccupied, in which case she could bury the nuclear demolition charge inside the foundation of the building. However, it was clear that a small number of raiders from Fairfax were using it as a home, so this would have to be a sneak mission.
  
  She was a little concerned that her presence and interactions with the Brotherhood of Steel would accelerate the schism between the Outcast faction and the Lyons faction. If things went as normal, the Outcasts should betray Lyons in about eighteen months. However, Lily intended to modernise the settlement of Megaton as rapidly as possible, at least to the same standard as Rivet City.
  
  She did not know the consequences of this action precisely. There were various possibilities, from the Outcasts attacking her directly but what she felt was more likely was an acceleration of an already more or less inevitable reaction. Something in eighteen months was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as Protector Casdin, the leader of the Brotherhood Outcasts, was concerned. Again, she did not know what it was, but it was eminently possible that she might become that straw in this new timeline. If so, they might rebel in six months instead of eighteen. Or they might do it tomorrow!
  
  It became ever more important to have her plan to deal with them in place and to not accept any more delays in clearing out the VSS building. She did not want to show up there and find ten Outcasts in power armour had already beat her to the punch.
  
  She glanced at her robot and shook her head. For this mission, she would have to risk her own neck; she was much better at sneaking in her own flesh. She grabbed the large backpack that contained the rebuilt nuclear explosive and a small entrenching tool and left the truck.
  
  She immediately triggered a StealthBoy at her hip and began a slow jog towards the least populated area of the Fort Independence building. Instead of placing it in the centre of the building, she would bury it against the wall on one of the sides. Either way, it would be sufficient.
  
  She got to the wall of the building undetected. It wasn't as if the average raider really paid much attention when they were "safe" at their own base, in any case. In any event, there weren't any lookouts that she could see from her eyes or the drone.
  
  She turned off the StealthBoy and unfolded her entrenching tool into a shovel, and started digging a small hole directly next to the southeast wall of the building. She made it a good half a metre by half a metre and a metre deep, so it took her over twenty minutes to dig it all up, even with her metabolism and physical fitness.
  
  Opening the backpack, she lifted the device out of it. The bomb she had reconstructed out of the core of Megaton's bomb was a simple fission-only weapon. That was dead easy to do. All she had to do was build an electrical circuit that would trigger each of the detonators as close to instantly as possible. However, she did include a mechanism for injecting a small amount of deuterium gas into the hollowed-out sphere of the fission core right before detonation, making it a "boosted" fission device. Without boosting, she expected maybe ten kilotons. However, with the boosting, she expected closer to thirty-five to forty.
  
  It would be easy enough to incinerate this building using this device buried in the ground, but it probably wasn't enough even to kill the cannibals to the south in Andale since it wouldn't be an airburst like most strategic nuclear weapons were designed to do. The destructiveness of nuclear explosives sounded very scary when you talked about kilotons and megatons, but the main damage dealt was through atmospheric pressure waves. And a bomb configured to maximise the pressure wave would be detonated, depending on the weapon's yield, at about one hundred metres.
  
  Even if she was optimistic and met the forty kilotons she was aiming for, only things within about one hundred metres would be completely destroyed, but there should be less than one-tenth of a pressure wave compared to an airburst. Most of the energy of the blast was going into the ground, after all. The pressure wave might somewhat damage the cannibals' houses, or if she was lucky, they would be smashed by a random rock as the bomb dug out a small crater, but chances were that nobody that wasn't relatively close to this building would die. Not even the raiders in ruins to the north.
  
  She settled the device into the hole and connected a small wire into it, carefully setting the wire which trailed a small antenna aside before she refilled the hole and smoothed down the dirt, using a nearby tumbleweed to camouflage the fact that any dirt had been moved recently. She then ran the wire up the side of the building using a handheld stapler to secure the wire to the wall, carefully concealing it and the antenna as best as she could along an existing path of electrical conduits that she suspected was once a phone line installation.
  
  She spent over twenty minutes just concealing the device and its antenna before nodding. Even if you really inspected this corner of the building in-depth, it was difficult to detect. It looked pretty natural, she had intentionally designed the antenna to look from the exterior like a normal frayed wire, so it wasn't something unusual to see at all.
  
  Nodding, she collected her things and triggered the StealthBoy again before returning to her truck and carefully driving back to Megaton, using the overwatch to ensure she wasn't driving near anybody who might report that she was nearby in the future. She had received word that Madison Li would be arriving in two weeks, and she wanted to finish the research she had done on a device to refill the fusion cores before the woman arrived. She wanted as much as the woman's research on fusion power as the lady would part with, and it always helped to have more to trade.
  
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  Companionable Silence
  It wasn't too difficult to reverse engineer the copy protection on the fusion cores, but only because her scanner was almost an exploit. The fusion cores were designed to self-destruct if inspected or disassembled, either destructively or non-invasively, featuring some surprisingly sophisticated methods. Over a third of the interior volume of the device was dedicated to sensors.
  
  If you tried to X-ray the device, it would likely explode, although they were self-aware enough about the possibilities of nuclear combat to prevent the x-rays from a nuclear blast from triggering the copy protection, as if it received gamma rays at the same time it would simply assume you were close to a nuclear explosion, not trying to reverse engineer it.
  
  Honestly, she was taking notes as she would have built a few of these tricks into the recycler she had given to the Mechanist. However, these physical defences were much more sophisticated than the actual "software" DRM.
  
  When inserted into a proprietary refilling station, the fusion core would send through a simple data connection the fusion core's serial number. A genuine Poseidon filling station would send back an authentication code, which the fusion core would check. If the code was correct, the fusion core would permit the refuelling process to begin. If it was incorrect, the fusion core would permit the refuelling process to begin, start-up and then dump its entire power output over the data line, frying the unauthorised device while detonating the onboard thermite anti-tampering charges, the combination of which had a very high probability of causing a hydrogen explosion.
  
  At least Hewlitt Packard didn't try to kill you if you installed a non-genuine ink cartridge in their printer.
  
  The programming for all this behaviour was hard-coded in core rope memory. Like used in the Apollo missions on the lander! That meant the bits were literally woven inside the core memory module, so she could easily decode the ones and zeroes from her image scans, and from there, it wasn't super difficult to figure out the "programming" of the entirely electric-based device, but that was only because she had an AI to help her and she was nerding out on seeing such a weird and archaic memory storage system. It was unusual even for the Fallout universe, and Lily suspected it was chosen because it was so arcane.
  
  You didn't get a lot of data storage with rope memory, so there could never have been anything really that sophisticated as the DRM, but it seemed to have stood the test of time. The correct value the fusion core was looking for was the serial number sent through a one-way cryptographic hash function and then XORed. Quite simple, really. Lily didn't recognise the hash function, but it seemed somewhat similar to all types of such functions in that a small change in the input created a huge change in the output so as to make it impossible to infer if you were close to the correct value.
  
  Such a simple solution also implied that the genuine refilling stations, at least partly, had to be at least as locked down as the fusion cores; otherwise, an attacker could disassemble them to find the correct procedure. It would be interesting to see one.
  
  Acquiring the hydrogen to fill up the first version of her refilling device wasn't difficult; she used electrolysis on some distilled water, collected the hydrogen gas, and vented the oxygen.
  
  However, she decided to test the device outside of the city limits, and Alice wanted to come along on an "adventure", so she was accompanying her in the finished RV on its first trip outside. However, she didn't seem all that impressed at first.
  
  "There doesn't appear to be all that much space in the back," the Apprentice said, confused. It was true, too. There was so much she was taking in her vehicle that there really wasn't much space in the back, barely enough to walk, in fact. Although it was actually somewhat roomy for an RV in her past life, the Apprentice didn't understand how her vehicle would work.
  
  Lily smirked, "Just wait!"
  
  She didn't intend to go too far, so she just drove her small tank a little bit to the northeast of town. Glancing at the east fence of Megaton as she rounded the settlement reminded her she was supposed to start construction of the gate soon. She had received the funds from the mayor and was theoretically in the sourcing materials stage. Unfortunately, there were many ways she was being screwed over; one of the main ones was there were significant costly security demands, such as 24/7 security monitoring, if she was to do anything that involved, even temporarily, removing the Megaton security fence.
  
  As such, she had decided to build a second fence outside of Megaton, in effect expanding the town, and when she was done, she would tear down and recycle the first fence, which was kind of rickety and built out of salvaged aeroplanes in the first place. She had a ridiculous amount of elemental iron and carbon from her excavations, and the half dozen cars the Mechanist brought her, so making steel wasn't difficult; so she intended to make a tall chain link fence, complete with barb wire, automated electrolaser turrets every thirty metres or so and very bright lights care of her Apprentice every five metres.
  
  Without the turrets or the lights, it would be pretty simple for intruders to use wirecutters to gain access, but she intended to put the kibosh on that before it even started. Honestly, there were areas around the Megaton fence that weren't effective deterrents in any case. They would be exploited by smugglers, except for the fact that there wasn't really any such thing as contraband, to begin with, so in effect, what they were used for was for criminals, people banned from entry and the poor to gain access. Megaton would let you in, but not if you looked very poor. Not very egalitarian, for sure, but there were a ton more people in the Capital Wasteland than one settlement, even as large as Megaton could save.
  
  Lily intended to, in effect, claim close to another fifteen blocks of the city that she would, for the most part, keep for herself. She didn't like her back door to be directly next to the security fence. She wanted at least a one-block carefully prepared kill zone in case she was attacked from the east. One block would be the new gate and security checkpoint, but the rest would be hers, although there weren't currently any buildings on any of it.
  
  There was no way that she could make over two kilometres of a tall chain-link fence in her sintering machines in any reasonable time frame, so she first made a machine that would take the iron powder and carbon and create strong steel wire, which she was producing and stockpiling in her warehouse. She hadn't created the machine to create the chain-link fence yet, though, but she more or less knew how they worked due to watching a lot of the How It's Made TV show in her past life.
  
  She wasn't entirely sure how to produce concertina wire for the tops and bottoms of the fence yet but figured that was probably a pretty simple evolution. Just curling the existing steel wire into a coil and sharpening bits of it to rip any person to shreds who tried to climb over or on it, it didn't seem that complicated. However, the fact that she was making more and more straight industrial machines made her a little amused. The automated steel smelter, even if all it produced was a steel wire from iron and carbon powders, looked properly industrial.
  
  Every time she made something like that, she couldn't help but feel amazed that it worked. She still expected the pixel-producing machine to explode again, even though it had been producing over a quarter billion individual parts, pixels, a day every day for weeks. Well, except for the few days when she ran out of oil.
  
  She was planning on replacing a lot more of the security fence than necessary to build an access gate, and she was doing it on purpose. Her fence would look new, modern, secure, and not salvaged from a bunch of grounded aeroplanes. It would be lighted at night, guarded by her men, her robots and her turrets. She didn't have any desire to be mayor, but she definitely wanted to be able to decide who the mayor should be. There was no way that raiders would ever attack her side of the city when it was such a hard target after it was constructed, and raider attacks did happen somewhat often- once every couple of months on average. It was why she would continue to build the steel wire even after stockpiling enough to build "her" section of fence and the gate itself.
  
  The rich people mostly lived on the north side of town, farthest away from the south side gate. It gave them a little sense of security, she supposed. Their fence was in better shape, too, but it was still built of repurposed aluminium and titanium aeroplane wings and fuselage parts that had been squashed flat or straightened out.
  
  There was no way the well-to-do wouldn't demand a similar fence on their side of town, too. And it went without saying that she wouldn't build any turret that she couldn't, if necessary, take complete control of in an emergency. Well, that wasn't true. She would in fact, do that if it was specifically asked for and she agreed to do it. She wouldn't break her word. However, there was no way she would agree to build the city any turrets in that case.
  
  She made sure to stop in an area that had a lot of space and smiled at the Apprentice, "Come, come. You 'ave to see zhis from outside."
  
  Alice looked interested and followed her out of the vehicle. And it didn't take her too long to find out why the rear of the vehicle, which was actually quite big, felt so cramped. Lily triggered the deployment mechanism with the Mesh, and two large spikes shoved themselves into the ground on either side of the vehicle to stabilise it while the rear compartment started sliding out like a telescope on both the port and the starboard sides. More spikes jammed themselves into the ground, this time from the deployed area, securing the newly deployed rooms onto the ground as well.
  
  When all was done, the inside area inside the rear compartment of the vehicle had, at least, tripled and became much less cramped as well. When fully deployed, there were almost seventy-five square metres of space inside the rear area, which wasn't a ton, but it was quite a lot for something meant to be mobile. A good portion of it was used for things like a robot repair station, which contained her Assaultclone, one of her generators, a recycler, a fabricator, a small kitchenette, a bed, a bathroom, and a repair station for Power Armour, which had the prototype she was still working on inside. She wasn't sure why she brought it with her, aside from the fact that it looked cool as hell. It still didn't quite work, but her experiments in using the Assaultclone had borne a lot of fruit. Instead of attempting to replicate the complicated laser gyroscopes and software that Power Armour used to keep their wearers upright, she would drive her version of Power Armour directly via a direct wired connection, the same way she controlled the Assaultclone.
  
  The fact that she very likely would have a working set of custom, never before seen in the Wasteland, Power Armour before she ever hit the VSS building, made her feel a bit conflicted. She still felt that it was a good idea she made, seemingly so long ago when she first arrived in the world, but she had been gaming her arrival like it was a new playthrough of Fallout 3. She always ran straight to the VSS building when she started a new game to do the Anchorage DLC and get Power Armour training and that suit of T-54 armour. But she didn't care in those instances if she got splattered by the Super Mutants in DC in her mad rush there; she just would load a saved game. Her present reality was a lot different.
  
  She still wanted to loot everything there, especially the Chinese stealth armour and the VR technology itself, but she wondered if the Power Armour would be that useful. Certainly, her version of Power Armour was a lot less flexible. It could only be useful for people with brain computers like hers, so there was still a lot to gain in general, even if not for her herself, by studying the Power Armour there.
  
  When the vehicle was moving, most of those things, like the robot repair bay and Power Armour were carefully stored in areas that weren't obvious until the vehicle deployed in its stationary mode, which was why there was so little space available while it was in its mobile mode.
  
  "Woah! That is awesome!" the Apprentice said, and then ran up the back door to see the inside of the vehicle now that it had "transformed." She grinned. Her "armoured research vehicle" was just over thirty-five tons, and the large fourteen hundred horsepower motor and tank treads gave it a max speed of a little over eighty-five kilometres an hour, but that was really only over fairly good terrain. When she was towing a trailer, even one as small as the one she had attached now, she wouldn't push it any more than forty-five or fifty.
  
  Not fast if you compare it to a car, but nobody drove very fast in vehicles in the Wasteland in any event. Hers was a lot better armed and armoured, as in addition to the Gatling laser, it also featured small blister laser turrets on every side and a smaller secondary turret featuring a missile launcher that she had purchased from a scavenger.
  
  She was pretty sure the Brotherhood was both a little nervous about her vehicle and purposefully ignoring it, probably for internal serenity. The idea that some waster that wasn't them had what amounted to an infantry fighting vehicle probably wouldn't sit well with the Outcast element. Honestly, she hoped they left sooner rather than later.
  
  The Apprentice came back outside. She had known about the Assaultclone, and Lily even let her drive it a few times for fun, but she hadn't known about her Power Armour project. "Wow, is that Power Armour, like those Brotherhood people have? It looks a lot cooler!"
  
  Lily made a face, "It will be when I'm done with it. Zhere are a number of small problems with it at zhe moment." It definitely did look a lot cooler, though. That was undeniable.
  
  It was a bit more streamlined than normal Power Armour, and the helmet looked more like one of her Kaytron heads than a helmet. She felt that the number of disadvantages to using camera-based vision was less than the disadvantages of using very thin armour in the head so that you could see through it. Why, if you shot a normal person in T-45d Power Armour in the eyes, it was very likely to penetrate even with small rifles, to say nothing of lasers! There were about two dozen cameras on each side of the armour, so she could have the fabled and theoretic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision using it, but her sensory cortex couldn't quite handle that at a reasonable resolution. However, she did have a simple picture-in-picture setup available, not to mention both the armour's onboard expert system, which was run on one of her purloined eyebot cores installed on the hardsuit, as well as her own inside her head, would analyse all cameras for potential threats and alert her in real-time.
  
  It definitely looked more advanced and like a proper hardsuit, which it was. It would survive in a vacuum, although there currently wasn't any kind of reaction control system to control its movements in microgravity, so it would be kind of bad to use in that application unless you could guarantee you'd never be farther than arm's length from something to grab and hold onto.
  
  Lily waved a hand, "Come, let's see if zhis zhing blows up!" She ordered the Kaytron squad in the small trailer to unload the prototype refilling station and dragged in a good thirty metres away from the vehicle.
  
  "I think it will blow up," said the Apprentice confidently.
  
  Lily frowned at the girl, "'Ey! Zhat's bad luck! Plus, I made zhis!"
  
  "I know! I often hear explosions when you're working on things," she said, nodding.
  
  Well... while that wasn't untrue, she felt pretty confident about this. Still, she had one of the robots plug the empty fusion core into the refilling apparatus.
  
  After about twenty seconds, there was a loud ding and no explosion. Despite what she had said earlier about her confidence, Lily raised her eyebrows. Still, there was one more test to run. She had the robot pull the fusion core out and walk a little bit back to the truck. The other robots had pulled out a fusion core powered electrical generator off the trailer and also drug it a bit away.
  
  The fusion core was plugged in, and the generator came to life, immediately starting to power one of Alice's street lights which Lily connected to the device for testing purposes.
  
  "Huh... it works," said the girl, mildly.
  
  Lily growled at the girl, feigning anger, "Don't act so surprised! Zhis is my genius, after all!" Honestly, she had been working on and off the fusion core project for over a month since Grace gave her the three cores. It would be a little bit weird if she didn't see some progress! It was only eighty per cent due to the fact that her scanner bypassed all of the physical anti-tampering devices on the fusion cores, after all. The rest was all her genius!
  
  Both Alice and Lily blinked simultaneously as they both received an alert. The girl was the first to say anything, "It looks like there is a patient looking for a genetics consult, and neither of us are there. Should we head back?"
  
  Lily nodded and triggered the RV to return to driving mode. It was much more pleasant now that there were a lot more of her aerial drones flying in the sky. Not only did she have a dozen eyebot processors that didn't have an eyebot to return to, but she realised that a single eyebot processor on a single aerial drone was overkill. Now, she had one command drone which controlled and directed about a dozen subordinate drones, and those drones could be a few kilometres away, such that a single command drone could cover an impressive area. Each of the subordinate drones had optical and radio surveillance, as well as Mesh relays installed. Not only was her visual surveillance of the DC area getting downright impressive, but her network area was large too. She could almost walk to the Potomac river and stay in touch, and with the overpowered transceiver and directed dish antennas in her tank, she could literally drive back to Canterbury Commons or as far as Tenpenny Tower and stay in touch with her network in town.
  
  The main thing keeping her from expanding her area drone fleet was actually a lack of fission batteries now, not eyebot processors.
  
  She kept the drones very far away from either Adams Air Force base or Arlington, though, but still had been noticing some radar transmissions from the Air Force Base that might indicate that her drones weren't entirely unnoticed anymore, even if they were small.
  
  The entirety of Megaton was covered, such that she was tempted to invent the cellular phone. Already her men carried walkie-talkies she made for them that used the Mesh to transmit voice broadcasts or point-to-point messages. They didn't currently leave her side of town, much less Megaton, so they were always in range, so it was a very useful tool.
  
  Their training was increasing as well, thanks to herself, Gary and their squad leaders, of which she hired another. However, she did lose four recruits, to Gary of all people, who asked her permission to hire them as drivers for his water business. He said they were very trustworthy, and that was just the sort he needed. 'Me too,' she wanted to yell, but she gave him permission, even though she had already given all of her recruits genetic therapies as a sign-on bonus on the agreement that they work for her for a minimum of two years, like an Army enlistment.
  
  He was out with them now in Canterbury Commons, training them to drive the truck and starting the first deliveries from Vault 108 to Canterbury Commons. It had barely been two months since the man had left the Vault, and he was already delivering his valuable product.
  
  Certainly, Lily had helped him tons, to say nothing about the Mechanist who designed at least half of the truck himself, but she felt that Gary's quick rebound after discovering everything he ever knew was burned to cinders was impressive. She quite liked that about him. It was a bit of a shame that he had started to date a girl that worked in the hospital as one of the chefs, as that brought an end to their sporadic trysts.
  
  Grace was still seeing her when she was in town, though, which was nice. It was difficult for Lily to find anybody that understood that she just couldn't be around a person every single day. Or even every other day, to be honest. It certainly meant traditional romantic relationships, even if she barely understood the concept, were out of the window. Most husbands or wives, she thought, wouldn't take it well if she told them she'd see them next week every time they spent a day together.
  
  She generally only spent an hour or two at the very most around even the Apprentice every day, and Lily basically considered that girl to be her daughter now, although she hadn't quite told the girl that yet. It was too awkward socially to do so and involved too many unpredictable responses from the girl to that admission.
  
  Speaking of which, she'd like to get away from the girl now for a while before they had dinner together with her siblings, so she would take this genetics consult. It was a new patient, anyway.
  
  "Alright, let us 'ead back, zhen," Lily said, pleased with their outing, nonetheless. She would, in fact, have a working fusion core refilling system to trade Madison Li tomorrow.
  
  Perhaps sensing her Mistress' desire for solitude, even cheered as she was with the success of the experiment, the Apprentice and her teacher simply sat in companionable silence on the way back to the city.
  
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  Madison Li
  At first, Lily didn't quite know what to wear for the meeting with Dr Li. She actually had a number of nice outfits now, and the decision was one fraught with unknown implications. She had been attempting to lean less on her social assistant for several reasons. It wasn't that effective, as it was merely an emulated program run by her Muse rather than a dedicated agent, and she was starting to feel as though it was a bit of a crutch even when it was giving her good advice. Wouldn't it be better to internalise these functions in her own brain? If so, she would have to train them up slowly herself.
  
  As such, she had turned off the function that gave her automatic advice and was only using the functions that attempted to identify human emotional states and append them as an Enhanced Reality tag, which she would pay more attention to in the hopes of training her own brain to handle these tasks.
  
  FO
  
  Lily closed her eyes and recalled all that she remembered about Madison Li from the game. Honestly, she thought that the woman was a little bit naive. She was kind of a pure scientist and did not like the Brotherhood of Steel. If that was all, Lily would feel that they had a lot in common, but their motivations were completely different. Madison had an antipathy towards them because they were something along the lines of a military organisation, like a weird caricature of a hippy from her last life.
  
  She would have to make sure that none of her recruits, which approached about a company in strength and would remain there, for now, referred to her as Commander in the woman's presence. She didn't want to alienate the woman, so it was best to present herself similarly as a pure scientist.
  
  She glanced at her wardrobe, made a decision and nodded.
  
  "Dr Li, it is good to finally meet you. I 'ave 'eard quite a bit about your expertise down at zhe Rivet City and was quite 'onoured when you asked to meet with me," simpered Lily in a friendly manner. She was meeting the woman in her office, at first. She had already replaced the two turrets in her ceiling with a covert model that flipped out of a concealed cubby when deployed, as she felt that for the most part it was better to not rub her visitors' face in the fact that she had what amounted to heavy weapons pointed at them during meetings.
  
  The woman seemed very impressed at the appearance of Lily's hospital, and Lily was gladdened that she felt she had chosen correctly as Dr Li was wearing a fairly similar outfit featuring something that Lily would call business casual with a bright white lab coat on top. Although Lily noticed that the coat was a lot more substantial than the pattern Lily had, it was closer to a white trench coat and looked quite warm.
  
  Dr Li seemed genuinely friendly, "I could say the same, Dr St. Claire! It is amazing what you have done with this building, and it seems like every week, we have heard about another one of your exploits."
  
  That caused Lily to smile again, "Zhank you. Would you care for some tea? Your security people are more than welcome to either loom over you during our meeting or have some tea as well either here at zhe couch or in zhe cafeteria."
  
  Although Madison Li didn't care for what she considered military people, she was the head researcher in Rivet City, and she didn't think that the community would have let her come to Megaton unguarded, even if she could, which Lily doubted very much. Her statement caused the woman to chuckle a little, "Well, I don't suppose they need to loom, but they would probably feel better if they stayed in the room if you don't mind?"
  
  She seemed embarrassed at requesting it, and Lily took a guess at the appropriate social response by waving a hand and saying, "Of course not. I wouldn't want to cause zheir blood pressure to rise." Internally, Lily sent Alice a request for two tea services, with the tea already made. It was a bit of a faux pas, but she hadn't really run into anyone who appreciated her tea ceremony in the first place, except the Apprentice and Dr Li's assistant.
  
  They made small talk for a few minutes while the Apprentice brought in the tea for both parties. Lily was thankful that Dr Li's two bodyguards didn't offer to taste it for poison. It would be pointless, anyway. Lily had already installed the seemingly decorative pillar inside the hospital foyer, which was actually a system that coordinated a series of tens of thousands of floating microscopic drones to collect skin or hair samples from every visitor that walked through the door.
  
  And if Lily already had a person's genome, it was possible to create either a biological protein or targetted nano-attack that was only effectively toxic to them and nobody else. Not that she would do that, of course! Ha ha ha.
  
  After they had sipped their tea, which Dr Li complimented her on, the older-looking woman got down to it, "I didn't even realise you were a medical doctor or a geneticist; I thought when I heard about a Dr St. Claire starting a new power company that you must have been a physicist of some kind, that specialised in high energy systems like myself."
  
  Lily smiled, looking a little embarrassed. She had already, just from the small talk that they had, realised that Madison Li knew a lot more about physics and nuclear fusion than Lily herself did. To the point that Lily had to make a mental note not to talk about her generator at all because even the slightest hint about how it operated and Lily felt that the woman would understand the entire principles behind a hydrodynamic generator.
  
  It was one of those things that seemed very obvious if you looked back on it but might not be entirely obvious if you hadn't had it pointed out. It was basically a regular generator except for using the ions in the moving plasma as a stator instead of either permanent magnets or electromagnets. Well, in effect, the plasma was an electromagnet in her generator, which is why it was mainly more of a clever engineering trick rather than any kind of theoretical advancement in the field of nuclear fusion technology.
  
  "Well, to be honest, all I know about fusion is zhe basics anyone with a similar education as myself might know. I know the main fuel cycles, like deuterium-deuterium, deuterium-tritium, and helium-3, that success has been found in both zhe electromagnetic and zhe inertial confinement of plasma, and what 'ave you. If I 'ad to build a fusion reactor from scratch, I do believe I would fail, or at zhe very minimum, it would be a multi-year project," Lily began, then continued, "I can't even really take credit for the design of the generators I made, zhat you seem so interested in. I know I was not zhe inventor, although I can not recall who actually was..." she trailed off because she didn't, in fact, remember who invented the hydrodynamic plasma loop.
  
  While she knew it was invented in space, she thought it might have been theorised long before that. It generally served a dual function in a ship, the accelerated plasma would generate electricity directly and then most of that electricity would be used to accelerate small amounts of the plasma, almost to relativistic levels, for propulsion. It was a plasma drive for spacecraft. It was very, very efficient in its use of reaction mass, to the point that constant acceleration and then deceleration flight plans were common in the Solar System. Travel from Luna to Mars would only take a week, at the very most, depending on their orbits.
  
  It wasn't quite as good as the fictional Epstein Drive in the Expanse novels and TV show she remembered in her past life, but it wasn't that far off, either.
  
  Lily's admission caused Madison Li to grin slightly, "Well, I certainly would like to talk about that with you. As far as real mobile fusion systems capable of delivering electricity, all we have is the Mass Fusion fusion cores, which use a hydrogen-boron fuel cycle. It has the benefit of being a cold fusion system, but the output isn't what it could be. Plus, the systems have stifled reverse engineering to this day. I've managed to build a much larger proton-boron system, but I don't think it is what I am looking for."
  
  Lily wasn't sure her system would be considered mobile like Madison Li seemed to be implying. There were two generators running at the Eastside power station these days, and Lily had redesigned and rebuilt the first generator to be along the same lines as the updated version she had built next to it. Both were eleven-megawatt systems now, but even though the new design was significantly smaller than the first generation, they were still each about the size of a large broom closet with all the cooling systems attached. Was that "mobile"?
  
  Maybe, she supposed. It would depend on what a person meant by mobile. Well, she would definitely trade this technology to Dr Li in exchange for engineering specs on a real fusion-based power station. In effect, Lily wanted immobile fusion technology due to how it scaled upwards and provided a lot more electricity, and Dr Li wanted fusion for mobile applications. Perhaps she was trying to get Rivet City's carrier task group mobile again, assuming any of them were sea-worthy? She wondered if they would sell her a destroyer as a personal yacht.
  
  "I'd be happy to discuss it with you, I 'ave even scheduled zhe time to go to our power station so zhat you can inspect one of zhe generators while it is shut down, assuming we can come to an agreement on zhe proper compensation. I'd like to trade knowledge for knowledge. Specifically, I am interested in zhe traditional fusion technology, such zhat I may be able to build a D-D or D-T reactor. Practical engineering plans, in other words. I am also very interested in anything you know about both zhe proton-boron cold fusion technology used in fusion cores and about how micro fusion cells can operate with seemingly no heatsinks, as I am perplexed zhat such a thing is even possible," Lily laid out all her desires for Madison Li. It wasn't that surprising that Lily didn't understand how cold fusion technology worked; it wasn't even the first time that had happened. She'd settle for some way to manufacture the systems, even if she didn't know how they worked.
  
  Madison Li's expression got sly, "I see you are used to the sad state of affairs that science has descended to in these times. However, as much as I would like to spread all of our knowledge far and wide, just like in the Pre-War days, your wants are way too much to balance the trade. But perhaps we can at least meet some of them, especially if you were willing to perhaps license or franchise a genetics clinic at Rivet City. I came into town planning to ask you to relocate entirely, but you've put so much effort into your hospital here so quickly that it would be a shame."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows. She supposed Monsieur Zhao had been inspected by their doctors and her works found desirable. Not surprising! She didn't release inferior products.
  
  Lily hummed, considering her options. She didn't think she had ever succeeded in a haggling-based Speech check since arriving on this planet. Her entire history, from her first transaction overpaying for some kebabs in Canterbury Commons to her most recent interactions with the Brotherhood of Steel, she had always come out the worse for it. She really ought to hire someone to conduct negotiations on her behalf, but even if she wasn't going to get the best deal, she still needed to at least get all the items she wanted. She didn't particularly mind about the particularities of the deal so much as what she, in the end, got out of it. That may be the reason why she was consistently taken advantage of, she supposed.
  
  However, she wouldn't be open to presently licensing her genetic therapies, as that implied the licensee could produce them themselves. But, she might be open to a franchise arrangement where she would ship in the treatments that a local clinic would administer, so long as the doctors there followed her protocols. Like when you bought a McDonald's franchise, you still ordered your chips, frozen, from McDonald's corporate, and you didn't chop up the potatoes yourself, and you couldn't just make a random burger any way you wanted and call it a Big Mac.
  
  "Well, I do have some other zhings you may be interested in. Specifically, I have successfully reverse-engineered the POSEIDON fusion core refilling stations and have a complete internal scan of the interior of a fusion core, including all of its mechanisms down to zhe elemental composition of every alloy used," Lily offered. This was actually her "big ticket item" that she knew Madison Li would be very interested in.
  
  And sure enough, judging by both the sceptical and delighted look on her face, she definitely was.
  
  Thankfully, Madison Li wasn't a super shrewd negotiator herself, so Lily felt that for the first time, she might have negotiated a more or less even deal, with neither side being entirely advantaged over the other. It felt good.
  
  Lily was trading her hydrodynamic generators for the detailed engineering plans for a large fusion reactor for use in a power station. She felt that was a good, even trade.
  
  This necessitated Lily also trade Dr Li a room temperature superconductor manufacturing technique, which she was somewhat surprised that Dr Li didn't already have. Lily used carbon-based superconductors that were manufactured out of monolayer graphene sheets doped with tiny amounts of titanium, lithium and molybdenum, but she also was well aware of a traditional metallic superconducting alloy due to her scanning of plasma casters. They used room-temperature superconducting alloys for the plasma accelerator, so this alloy was what she traded them.
  
  In exchange, Lily got the exact ways to manufacture levitation emitters, including the ways to configure them to push off of arbitrary things in the emitter's range and not solely the ground. Lily was almost certain this was how the classified levitation-based aerial drones she had read about so long ago functioned, in that they pushed off against the air directly beneath the emitter and functioned, in effect, like a helicopter. It was so obvious now that she realised it was a possibility that she wanted to thunk her head onto her desk. She'd have to redesign and rebuild all of her aerial drones. If she was no longer limited to using rotors, she could finally build some very stealthy shapes.
  
  She may have even gotten slightly better of Dr Li for the next trade. She traded both the designs for a jailbroken fusion core refilling station, and the detailed scans of a fusion core for the design and theoretical underpinnings of Madison Li's larger hydrogen-boron cold fusion system. It was mostly a proof of concept as it was about the same size as her generators and didn't produce even one one hundredth of the power, but it was very interesting.
  
  But more importantly, she got theoretical knowledge and practical engineering files to understand and potentially manufacture her own micro-fusion cells. She didn't understand it at all, and it seemed to violate the laws of physics and quantum mechanics, actually, but in the couple of days since Madison Li left, she had already built a small system as a proof of concept.
  
  It operated on principles that Madison Li called quantum-locking. It was, in effect, a perfect insulator like Lily had thought originally, but instead of using some esoteric metal alloy, it used a highly specialised machine to create some sort of novel field inside the fusion cell, which created what was in effect a force field that both held the plasma and its heat inside the reaction chamber.
  
  At first, it seemed to violate thermodynamics as well. Still, apparently, the force field was powered by heat, somehow, so in theory, a microfusion cell would slowly discharge over a few thousand years until it was empty. The electronics in a micro-fusion cell were mainly designed to flicker this persistent field slightly to either add extra deuterium gas or vent plasma.
  
  It was an amazing piece of technology but had some important limits which prevented it from completely taking over all fusion reactors. Namely, every time you flickered the field, there was significant damage done to the containment chamber as the heat from the plasma escaped the containment very briefly.
  
  That explained why she had to change out the micro-fusion cells in her generators every six weeks instead of every six months, as her math initially thought. A traditionally contained fusion reactor was superior to micro-fusion cells if your use case was being used constantly. However, micro-fusion cells were vastly, vastly superior to any other type of technology available for small-scale intermittent high-energy applications. They were perfect for weapons and other systems where you needed a ton of plasma every once and a while, in other words.
  
  Lily could not understate how important this technology was for her continued defence. Although, on its face, it was a fairly even trade, and she would have paid much, much more for it than she did. Madison Li discounted it because it was a technology with a lot of limitations, and it was most suited for weapons, which she had a clear disdain for.
  
  Lily already had the technology to manufacture effective plasma weapons, but she didn't because almost every microfusion cell she found or bought was destined to be used in one of her generators. She literally couldn't afford to use them, and her lasers were still quite effective.
  
  She was pretty sure this was also the technology that made plasma grenades possible, and she also had ideas to use it as a useful way to shield highly radioactive waste.
  
  She had a sudden tingle in her scalp that she had recognised as herself having a terrible idea. She thought about it for a while and wondered what might happen if she used what was effectively a forcefield to surround a radioactive and fissionable material. Wouldn't the neutrons bounce off the force field like a pinball machine, causing even more fission events and promptly going super-critical?
  
  Well, she knew a very simple way to produce nuclear explosions now. Not every radioactive material was fissionable, and in fact, most were not, but she was pretty sure that putting even a small amount of the highly enriched fuel rods from Vault 108 inside one of these forcefields would trigger a super-critical reaction after only a few minutes. On the plus side, it would likely use up almost the entire amount of fission fuel in the reaction, so it would be both a surprisingly high-yield weapon and surprisingly ecologically friendly, with no uranium wasted or blasted into the atmosphere.
  
  She didn't presently have the computational resources to simulate the reaction if she used this technology on the mixed kind of radioactive waste she extracted from water. She didn't think it would explode, as there was only a small amount of fissionable materials, and they were spaced so far away, but she wouldn't bet her life on it, so perhaps that plan wasn't a great idea.
  
  She sat down her tools on her workbench. She had finally finished getting the bugs out of her Power Armour system and had been finishing the construction of the Apprentice's version. The girl had already wheedled her into bringing her along on her "adventure" after Lily talked to the girl about it.
  
  Dr Bonesaw had just returned from her visit to Big Town and Little Lamplight, taking one of the generators Lily had built for her as well as about two dozen book readers completely filled with books that Lily had donated to her cause.
  
  [Lilium: Apprentice, we will be leaving in the morning. Your Power Armour is finished, but we don't have time to get you used to operate it here. You'll have to work on it when we get to the Virtual Strategic Solutions site. ]
  
  [Alice: Yesss! Okay, I'll get all my things ready. ]
  
  Lily had already talked to Dr Taylor and Bonesaw, telling them that it may be a week and a half before they returned. She had already trained Dr Taylor in operating her genetics clinic.
  
  She had to bring both Dr Taylor and Bonesaw closer into her trust circles, as neither of them was stupid, and it didn't take them long to realise that she was using some kind of nanotechnology in a medical capacity in the hospital. She didn't trust them enough to offer them individual nanohives to install in their own bodies, but she taught them how to use the medichine fabricator that she used to create medichines for the hospital and how to program them for a number of different therapies. They were quite impressed, but neither of them thought it was anything except some manner of Pre-War tech.
  
  She hummed; she had a few things to do to get ready before she herself would get a few hours of sleep so that they would be ready in the morning.
  
  The Apprentice met her the next morning at the RV. They would be taking both her RV and the one truck that she had asked the Mechanist to build on top of the four others he had made for the water truck, himself and Gary.
  
  However, the Apprentice would be controlling it remotely from inside the protected cabin of the RV. There was a similar hardwired connection in the passenger seat, which allowed the girl to control the more vulnerable truck in what amounted to a VR radio connection.
  
  Lily hoped that she would have the technology for auto-driving trucks, but she didn't want to waste one of the few quantum processors on one of her trucks to train an expert system to do it, so she would use the free labour of her Apprentice's in-built neural network to accomplish the same task, for now.
  
  Lily checked the moving map. She had already identified the VSS building with a drone, as it had a large sign that identified it right out front. It would be a bit of a challenge getting her vehicles nearby the exposed elevator shaft to their underground sub-basement, but she felt it was doable.
  
  There were both Super Mutants and highly armed raiders in the vicinity, but she wasn't as afraid of the Super Mutants as she was in the past. While she wouldn't take them for granted, one of the aerial drone designs she had built included a small kamikaze model that featured a half-kilo-shaped charge that she felt wouldn't do anything good to anyone, mutant or otherwise if it went off right next to your head.
  
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  The Fate of the AntAgonizer
  Lily discovered a Brotherhood scout team trailing them as they left Megaton, which she found Very Interesting. They seemed able to keep up with her enough that they might realize she was heading towards western DC. So instead of turning southeast in that direction after leaving Megaton, she turned north-northwest to throw them off. She knew where she thought Vault 106 was, so she thought she would head there first.
  
  Vault 106 was the location that piped psychoactive drugs into the air as an experiment, and it might be interesting both to see the chemical composition of the drugs and to find the drug synthesis setup that managed to keep manufacturing drugs for two hundred years.
  
  From a game perspective, it was actually very similar to Vault 108, the Gary vault. It was inhabited by a number of "insane survivors" wearing Vault 106 jumpsuits, armed with things like pipes, wrenches, and swords.
  
  She doubted very much that the people if there were any, were actually two hundred-plus-year-old survivors of the Vault. Their descendants? Perhaps, it depended, she supposed, on how insane they were. More likely, if they end up being totally wacky, she expects them to be more along the line of insane scavengers.
  
  This would be a shortstop. She just wanted to give any Brotherhood scouts the location as a plausible place for her to investigate. It was a Vault, and it had novel and interesting psychoactive drugs. If they had a psychological profile on her, then her stopping and spending some time here would make perfect sense. After quickly clearing the area, she would try to take any interesting chemical synthesis equipment and then head due west over the open Wasteland, then south and east to hit the Western part of DC from a different angle. If the Apprentice wasn't with her, she would be very, very tempted to investigate the Dunwich building on this trip since she was already going in that direction.
  
  She knew it was a bad idea to do so, but she just couldn't help herself. Honestly, if there was Cthulhu in this universe and just investigating it would drive her insane or kill her, then she just wouldn't, ultimately, survive. There was no way she wasn't investigating that place, after all.
  
  The aerosolized drugs in Vault 106 wouldn't be a danger to the complete NBC protection she built into both of their sets of armour, and they would use the dart guns she had finally built or her robots to subdue any drugged people they saw, drag them out of the Vault and treat them. Hopefully, they would return to normal; if not, she supposed she'd have to shoot them, as it would be a mercy. It would depend on how much actual brain damage being continually exposed to an unknown chemical agent had caused.
  
  Monsieur Three Dogs was getting a lot of airtime out of the one hundred songs Lily had sent him on holotapes. She intended to, at first, demand a significant payment from the man like the Mechanist suggested, but when she talked to him over the radio, she discovered an interesting fact about him. Namely, he was "poor AF", as her Apprentice might say.
  
  She supposed he could have been lying to her, but it didn't sound like it to her. In fact, reviewing some of the saved radio broadcasts he had made, he routinely asked his listeners to come and bring him something to eat. And he offered her advertising on his show, including paying him in food herself.
  
  She had just sighed and arranged for the holotapes to be delivered to him. However, she wrote on the note any future ones would need to be paid for and that he should use the new songs to start a listener-donated fund to both support the radio station as well as to buy new songs from her. She had quite a number of them, by now, from both her past lives.
  
  In this first hundred, she mainly selected songs that were along the same style as those that Three Dog already played. A lot of Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublè, Dean Martin and country songs. However, she also slipped in about twenty songs from Elvis and The Beatles to see how they would be received. She might have accidentally started the Rock and Roll revolution.
  
  All of the new songs were a big hit, and Three Dog seemed quite happy that he now had one-hundred-and-twenty-five songs.
  
  She glanced over at the Apprentice, who was glancing left and right. She was seeing the exterior view of the truck following her, but the system should have only mapped the exterior view to the three-dimensional shape that comprised the exterior armour of the RV, as if she was seeing outside the windshield that wasn't there, so Alice should still be able to see her and hear her, "We were being followed leaving town by zhe Brotherhood, so instead of making it obvious where we are headed we will go north and visit Vault 106, zhen swing west and around after they stop being interested where we go, yes?"
  
  The girl glanced over at her briefly before smiling, "Ooh! Field trip! I think this is a good idea. I have no idea really how to use the Power Armour you made me; I'd rather get that down before we maybe run into Super Mutants."
  
  Lily didn't intend to run into Super Mutants at all. Her RV had a Gatling laser, a missile launcher and a pneumatic launcher for the twenty loitering-munition kamikaze drones she carried. Storing them, they were about the size of a small thermos of coffee and expanded to full size when ejected into the air. She did not waste any fission batteries on these devices, so they only had about a thirty-minute endurance, but that was more than enough to practice the American way of war, namely bombing people from the sky until they gave up and fucked off.
  
  However, she would have to start manufacturing her own high explosives if she really wanted to practice this type of warfare.
  
  Lily arched an eyebrow, "Super Mutants are pretty terrifying; if we see some, please hide behind zhe robots even if you are in zhe armour. I don't want to..." she was about to say 'lose you' but couldn't quite make her mouth say those words so instead she said after a halting pause, "... train another Apprentice."
  
  Alice grinned widely at her pause as if she realized what she intended to say and gave a sloppy salute and said, "Aye, aye, ma'am!"
  
  "Whatever we are, we are definitely not in zhe Navy, Apprentice. You have been hanging around Gary too much," she groused. Still, she smiled. They were finally outpacing the Brotherhood scout team, who were four klicks behind them and seemingly slowed to a stop, giving up, which made sense. They had opened up to about fifty kilometres an hour on the open terrain. The Brotherhood didn't have any real mobility-focused exosuits, just general infantry hardsuits and the deficiency really showed in their scout members. Most of them didn't even wear Power Armour because of its deficiencies in moving fast over terrain and staying unnoticed.
  
  Some of the Enclave, however, had a few speciality suits that made a really good time over terrain. She had observed them in their missions near D.C., and even if they got dropped and exfiltrated by Vertibird, they still had really fast-moving hardsuits. She kept her drones very far from them, especially the Vertibirds, which might have air-to-air radar sets, so she didn't have good images on them, but they appeared to be some sort of special forces variant of their Advanced Power Armour, perhaps?
  
  Honestly, she respected the Enclave's threat a lot more than the Brotherhood. They had more diversified forces, acted with a more military bearing, and stealth and had a combined arms doctrine featuring close air support with Vertibirds. The Brotherhood did have some vertibirds, but near as she could tell, they only had about six. She had identified over twenty unique encrypted transponders in the Enclave fleet. It kind of made sense; the Enclave was both more directly descended from the government and had a history of losing.
  
  Losing was kind of the opposite of what you wanted when you were a military force, but at the same time, having a long history of winning tended to breed complacency. The Enclave clearly respected the Brotherhood's threat to them and conducted operations accordingly. Lily didn't see that the Brotherhood really respected the threat the Enclave presented, which she found a little amusing because the Enclave could incinerate the Brotherhood HQ at their leisure.
  
  The AI that ran the Enclave had the keys to at least one orbital nuclear weapons satellite, which was something she would have to handle one way or another. She didn't really feel like sitting under a constant Sword of Damocles, so she would either have to wrest control of that satellite from John Eden or destroy it. Or kill the President, which was probably the best solution.
  
  She needed to find some other VAX AI unit first, though. While she was pretty sure her E-war capabilities should be superior, she wanted to go in with a silver bullet if she had to kill the AI. Examining other VAX units was the best way to craft an attack vector that would work the first time.
  
  She had already identified a number of radio relays that Eden used to transmit both his radio station and the command and control for his large fleet of several hundred Eyebots that just roamed the Wasteland spouting propaganda. It helped that she already knew he was at Raven Rock, so she could work from the source and start outwards, for sure.
  
  Watching the RV deploy to stationary mode while inside it was kind of interesting, and once it was deployed she took the Apprentice back into the back to show her her Power Armour.
  
  "Why is mine pink?" asked the Apprentice, offended.
  
  Lily sniffed delicately, "I believe zhe colour is called salmon, actually."
  
  "Pink," the girl insisted.
  
  Ignoring her, Lily showed her the virtual controls and forwarded her the Armour's owner's private key. She watched as the girl triggered the Armour, which opened the rear allowing the girl to step inside it.
  
  "Okay, when you get inside, get comfortable and zhen trigger zhe close function. After it closes, just remain still, for now, please," Lily told her.
  
  Lily watched the armour close up, the mechanisms were a bit complicated, more so than the Brotherhood Armour she scanned, but it ensured a complete hermetic seal to prevent ingress of chemical or biological elements. The interior was held at a slight positive pressure, as well, and all incoming air was routed through a number of graphene filters and screens.
  
  She had devised, at least in theory, a levitation-technology-based filter that she thought would be an extremely effective first-pass filter, which would divert heavier than air items downwards, which would make an effective inertia-based air filter. However, she had only recently gotten that technology out of Madison Li, so these first models had not had that incorporated yet.
  
  However, she had incorporated adding graphene filters to the water purifiers at the Eastside Water & Power building. Although the filters had to be changed and cleaned almost daily, they increased the water being purified almost by half, and the cleaning procedures for the radioisotopes that got through the graphene filter were a lot simpler for her ghoul employees.
  
  She was a little embarrassed that she hadn't included such a feature on the water purifier to start with. One of the best products that graphene could make was near molecular-sized filters. She hadn't wanted the project to be dependent on her to supply the filters but had come up with a design that was easily cleanable by her employees without using a lot of purified water so a single filter could be reused hundreds or even thousands of times.
  
  "Woah, what just happened?" asked Alice over the speakers.
  
  "Ah, yes. Zhere is a small... articulating..." Lily searched for a way to explain it. Finally, she sighed and simply said, "... tentacle for lack of zhe better word. It 'as sensors and automatically detects zhe data port in your neck and plugs itself in. Keeping ingress time low is an important factor for zhese kinds of hardsuits, Apprentice, so I can't use a system where you plug yourself in at your leisure."
  
  Lily paused and considered, "Oh, and if you're looking through zhe settings and options, I would recommend you don't go above one zhree zero degrees for field of view, for now. Your brain will start to hurt." She stood back a fair way. Perhaps she should have unloaded this armour outside before letting the girl get in it, "Try to keep zhe movements very slow at first. In fact, go into zhe settings and adjust zhe setting called boost factor to 0 decimal two five."
  
  The Apprentice was motionless for a moment, and then she moved her arms and hands around slowly, "Ah... it really is just like moving your regular limbs."
  
  Lily nodded, "Try taking a careful step, and zhen if you can, a left turn and walk straight out zhe ramp out of zhe vehicle. Try to avoid hitting your head on zhe overhead by zhe ramp."
  
  After a couple of unsure steps but the girl managed to get out of the vehicle, which reassured her. There were a lot of fragile things in here.
  
  She walked over to her armour, which opened up and stepped inside. Her machine had a more complicated system that gathered up her braid and coiled it up by her skull before enclosing herself in the armour. Her vision snapped back into place as the data port was inserted, and she went through a quick self-test routine. All motivators were OK, integrated weapons OK, fusion core fuel status 99.9%.
  
  She grabbed the Power Armour-sized sword she had fabricated for herself, and clipped its scabbard to her waist, humming. What was she forgetting?
  
  Oh! She went and grabbed the two dart guns. They were sized to be used by normal people, not Power Armour, but like her latest weapon designs. Using the trigger was a bit of a chore in Power Armour with small arms. Unless you were using heavy weapons that were designed explicitly for Power Armour, it made things a lot clunkier and slower.
  
  However, in her most recent weapon designs, there was an electronic interface both in the weapons grip and her armoured hands, which would integrate the weapon into her Internal Battle System. It took a little bit to get used to firing weapons mentally, especially using the safety features so you wouldn't have a negligent discharge, but it was over sixty per cent faster than using triggers.
  
  She followed the Apprentice out of the RV and closed the ramp behind her. All of her robots were already patrolling the area, she had seen some raiders to the north, but so long as they didn't bother her, she did not consider them her business.
  
  Well, unless the Apprentice wanted some live fire practice, she supposed.
  
  She watched the Apprentice practice with some jumps, jogging and rolls before she made her run through the weapons system. There were integrated lasers and electrolasers in each of the hands, above the palms, and firing them, she felt kind of like Samus Aren, except she didn't have any jetpacks and couldn't roll into a ball.
  
  After a few false starts, Alice picked up the target designating and firing of the battle system pretty well. However, what she said next made Lily almost tilt over in shock.
  
  "I just need a throne, then I could sit there and..." The girl changed tone of voice and affected a very haughty tone, "At last! You have come before the court of the AntAgonizer! Queen of All Ants! None can stand before me, and my royal regiment of fighting ants!" Then she started laughing.
  
  What the fuck?!
  
  "Uhh.. Apprentice... what zhe 'ell was zhat?" Lily asked, mildly.
  
  "Oh, well... I and the rugrats used to play, I guess, supervillains and heroes, and I would always play the role of the villain so that they could defeat me. Weren't you aware of the comic books featuring the AntAgonizer?" she asked meekly, now seemingly a little embarrassed.
  
  That wasn't why Lily was surprised! Was the Apprentice the fucking AntAgonizer all along? Lily considered that. The Apprentice would be a little over eighteen years old at the start of the plot of Fallout 3, so the age could be right. But wasn't the AntAgonizer's name Tanya or something?
  
  "Apprentice! Does zhe name Tanya mean anything to you?" Lily asked her, curious.
  
  Alice nodded, the motion seemingly exaggerated in the armour, "Sure! Miss Tanya. She was, I guess, you could say the orphanage matron for us, really though she was just someone who took us in and turned her house into an orphanage. She died two years ago. It's just been us since then, well, until you came along, Mistress."
  
  Holy shit. Lily thinks that the Apprentice might have been the AntAgonizer. From what she remembered of the game, the AntAgonizer went crazy after a giant ant attack killed her family.
  
  Was the Apprentice capable of having a complete psychological break if a bunch of ants killed her siblings and then taking on the mantle of a supervillain and then stealing the identity of the only person who ever showed her something like affection in her life? Lily could definitely see that happening.
  
  Say what you will about the AntAgonizer from the game; she was at least smart enough to tame giant murderous ants, somehow. She could see the Apprentice doing that if she was insane. The girl could do virtually anything if she put her mind to it, Lily felt. Now, she had to state that she definitely wouldn't support her if she later decided to genocide the human race with fighting ants, but it was kind of nice knowing that the girl would always land on her feet if something happened to her. She'd just have to talk to her and make sure genocide wasn't her go-to option in case things got bad. There were plenty of better options, short of genocide, Lily felt.
  
  Well, Lily was wondering about the fate of the so-called AntAgonizer and if that crazy woman would show up. Now she knew, she supposed? There would be, hopefully, no Antagonizing done by the Apprentice.
  
  "Alright, let's run zhrough zhe Vault. You go first. Make sure you don't laser zhese people; just use zhe dart gun, yes? Some might be salvageable, and be cautious about any traps or tripwires," Lily warned.
  
  She wanted the girl to go first in order for her to have a bit of practice in exploring new places. They could have the robots clear this Vault easily if they wanted to, and while she wasn't expecting much trouble, she also wasn't about to be jinxed, and she wouldn't rely on just her game knowledge, which could be faulty.
  
  Alice bobbed her head again. The Power Armour that Lily made was larger than the standard Pre-War Power Armour, because it was in many ways more complicated and included a lot more individual systems, including its own quantum processor, radar, vacuum-rated seals and internal weapons. So, both Lily and the Apprentice were easily over two metres tall when they were wearing it. It took some getting used to not banging your metal head on entryways, and Lily looked forward to chuckling at the girl every time she did it.
  
  Although the girl meeped at the insane, drugged-up people roaming inside the Vault, she ended up darting them easily enough. To give her an idea of what protection she had, she told her to let them wail on her for a while, and one man just kept beating on her armour with a lead pipe until he slumped to the ground in exhaustion.
  
  There were twelve of them, and Lily wondered why they didn't kill each other. They had no nascent Gary gestalt nor his interesting brain structures that could plausibly form one. It was a mystery. She took some brain scans of each person before one of her robots dragged or carried them out of the Vault.
  
  A group of four Kaytrons outside had setup an aid station, well... they tied up the prisoners so that the medichines they had been darted with could switch to healing mode, anyway. That was "aid."
  
  There weren't a lot of valuables to find in the first levels of the Vault, although the Apprentice did find two mini-nukes, which Lily carefully carried outside to the truck herself. In fact, she was fabricating a cushioned carrying case for both of them. They appeared to have a nose-triggered pressure switch to set them off when they were fired at a target, and although they had a little safety rod and flag in the tail fins that supposedly deactivated the fuse, Lily didn't want them rolling around in the bed of a truck, just in case.
  
  Mini-nukes were interesting. Every fissionable material had to have a at least a minimum amount of material to set off a supercritical reaction. For example, plutonium went supercritical at 11 kilos. Most bombs only had about four kilos, as you didn't want anywhere near the supercritical mass to store - it was dangerous and would blow up on its own. The explosive compression of the implosion-type bomb was a way to get the supercritical mass smaller, very briefly, during the explosion.
  
  But you still needed about the same amount of mass no matter what, even if you wanted a large or a small explosion. In other words, each mini-nuke still contained about four kilos of plutonium, just like the core she had removed from the giant bomb in Megaton. In other words, if she wanted to, she could disassemble and convert any mini nukes she found into a maxi nuke. It was good to have such options and was kind of scary, considering you could find mini nukes just randomly sitting on the ground, or in this Vault's case, in a fucking janitor's closet.
  
  However, they found a hidden door using the synthetic aperture radar sets in their armour, and after a while, Lily figured out how to open it to reveal the experimental section of the Vault. Lily took point here in case there were heavy machine gun turrets.
  
  However, all they found were a few dead scientists and another Mister Handy. The Apprentice got excited about that and begged, "Oh! Can I have this Mister Handy, then? Jeeves is so cool!"
  
  "Well, I'll say here young lady, I am the property of Vault-Tek and unauthorized diversion of company property is strictly prohi-" the Mister Handy in question turned to lecture Alice, which exposed his vulnerable data port to her, which she attacked using a darting, articulating metal tentacle from her left armoured gauntlet. It was the same general mechanism that was in the interior of their suits that automatically plugged into their own data ports.
  
  She had to admit testing this feature had been very amusing. Jeeves didn't like being her guinea pig in the matter, but if he didn't want to do it, then he should develop sapience and tell her no as soon as possible.
  
  She bobbed her own head at the Apprentice, "Sure. We'll have to do a diagnostic and wipe him to factory defaults. I don't zhink he seems sapient, but we'll check."
  
  She explored this experimental area, which was built for the scientists that ran the experiment to watch their test subjects and contained all the equipment necessary to run it. That was what she was interested in.
  
  She was a little disappointed she didn't find any similarly miraculous machine like the Fancy Lad people mulcher that she found in Vault 108, but she did find a very sophisticated automated robotic chemical synthesis machine. You could program in arbitrary synthesis procedures, and it was set up for industrial output, including all steps, such as post-synthesis cleaning of every element. It didn't take her long to disconnect it from power and call her robots to carefully take it upstairs. It was a bit heavy but nowhere near what the cloning machine was. It was only about as big as a kitchen refrigerator.
  
  The reason why they still had chemical precursors after two hundred years made her chuckle; she discovered it after hacking a few terminals. Apparently, they were supposed to have enough chemical supplies to run the experiment for at least ten years, but someone complained that someone must have screwed up a decimal place somewhere because they had shipped enough chemical precursors to run their experiment for one thousand years!
  
  That sounded like a ridiculous amount of chemicals that were in their storage room down here, and in some cases that was true, but while the chemical synthesis machine was interesting, the actual chemical aerosolized into the air vents wasn't interesting at all. It was LSD. LSD had a dosage in the microgram level incredibly small. And their experiment had even smaller doses than that since they were testing with small exposures cumulatively over time. So eight hundred years of supplies sounded like a lot, and it was, but for her, if she wanted to use them to make medicine, it wouldn't last nearly as long.
  
  Still, it was over five metric tons of useful chemical precursors, although about a third of it was ergot which was only valuable if she wanted to make more LSD, at least as far as she knew. That or convince pilgrims in Massachusetts that their neighbours were Witches.
  
  Six out of the twelve "insane survivors" seemed to recover; the other half's brains were so fried from constant exposure to LSD that god knows what they saw all the time. However, they weren't really that violent anymore, so Lily just had them placed back in the Vault and re-paralyzed. The medichines would wear off in an hour or two, and then they could just do whatever they wanted. Maybe they'd start a hippy commune or convert to Buddhism or whatever it is that you did after long-term exposure to LSD.
  
  The rest, she offered a ride in the back of her truck to the nearby settlement of Arefu, which they all accepted. Lily did allow them to loot as much as they wanted from the Vault in the meantime while her robots were loading all of the chemicals. They all told stories that they had arrived there fairly recently to scavenge the place.
  
  Lily did find about a dozen firearms in the Vault, so she basically just gave them all to the group of six. She was at the point where she could fabricate any kind of chemical firearm she wanted using her DMLS system, so they didn't really have a lot of value to her anymore. Trade value, she supposed, but she also didn't really make those nickel-and-dime trades with one merchant at a time.
  
  The Apprentice commented on that, mentioning that it seemed odd for a "businessman" like her to offer charity.
  
  She was about to correct the girl that she was a business lady, but then the wisdom from the Dao of Jay-Z caused her to stop. Instead, she internally grinned and told the girl as they started to drive off, "I'm not zhe businessman; I'm zhe business, man!"
  
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  Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the mutie
  Arefu was a small settlement in the game, and it was a small settlement in this universe, too, one of the few times that her "game knowledge" was pretty accurate. It was hard to make a large settlement when your settlement was built entirely on a bridge, even if it was a large bridge. Even then, though, it had about fifty people in it from the guess her surveillance system made.
  
  All of her aerial surveillance drones had full spectrum visual sensors now. Normal visual sensors, including 10X zoom and thermographic FLIR, as well as normal night vision. At the moment, they were still in contact with her network, and her surveillance system running on her mainframe could make inferences based on heat signatures detected, past activity and a number of other factors.
  
  It both sucked and was fantastic that all of the drones were completely obsolete now that she had the levitation technology. When she got back, she would start building the little boogers with stealthed features, using levitation technology to fly them like helicopters.
  
  They didn't stop there at Arefu at all; they just let the six people get out and grab whatever they looted from Vault 106 and continued westwards. As they pushed further west, they were leaving the range of Lily's network, but she still had eight drones that were centred on the RV, which handled the computation for them, so it wasn't too difficult to dodge anyone she saw in the wastes five, and six kilometres away before anyone ever saw her small little convoy.
  
  The only place Lily stopped was briefly at what she thought might become the location that the Nuka-Cola crazy woman Sierra lived at, but if she existed, she did not live there yet, nor did anyone else. That woman was one of her favourite gag characters in the Fallout 3 game ever since she heard the line when she said: "He said he was going to butter my muffin, now if only I could find some muffins!"
  
  She knew there were a lot of dangerous areas around this west side of "the map", so to speak, including yāoguài, which were some sort of mutated bear if she recalled, but she didn't have a photographic memory of the Fallout 3 map, so she just tried to avoid suspicious areas that looked odd, like any caves or tunnels.
  
  However, before turning south, she did send a number of drones into the area Little Lamplight was at to identify the entrance to those caverns, but she didn't stop to say hello to the little gremlins there. She hoped their generator was working okay, though.
  
  "Where are we now?" asked the Apprentice curiously. She had access to all the pins and labels I had put on my moving map, but a lot of them were somewhat nebulous. Like I only had an approximate location for the RobCo factory to the east. Lily could tell she was looking at it because the girl asked, suddenly, "Why is this spot marked 'crazy cannibals'?!"
  
  Lily chuckled. The Apprentice was looking ahead; they would pass by Fort Independence and Andale in an hour or so; they hadn't even gotten past Tenpenny Tower yet. Due to all of her advantages in night vision, she was timing their arrival at DC to be after sundown.
  
  "Because zhere is a small settlement of crazy cannibals zhere," Lily remarked mildly as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Why else would she have marked an obvious settlement as "crazy cannibals"?
  
  The girl looked flummoxed. "You know they are cannibals, and you aren't going to do anything about them?!"
  
  "Not unless zhey try to eat you. Zhey're a clan of generational cannibals. Zhat means we'd have to kill every man, woman and child zhere. Want to?" Lily asked.
  
  The Apprentice fidgeted, "Uh. Not really. Couldn't we just, like, get rid of the adults?"
  
  "Zhat would be crueller zhan killing zhe children right away," Lily scolded her.
  
  The Apprentice sighed, "But maybe we could like, uhh... help the kids afterwards?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "I'm not bringing any cannibal brats home with us. We could take zhem to Little Lamplight, but I would be obliged to tell zhe kids zhere zhat zhey were from a cannibal family. Who knows what zhey would do, but zhe Lamplighters don't shy away from tough decisions. Zhey might not care, or zhey might kill zhe cannibal brats as soon as we left, or right in front of us. Consider zhat zhey only have two paths leaving zheir settlement, and one of zhem zhey call Murder Pass. You can't save everyone, Alice."
  
  The Apprentice sighed and nodded, "I suppose you're right, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily slowed down as she passed abeam Tenpenny Tower, about five kilometres to the south; she was letting her drones close to the high-rise building to get a set of good close-up images of it.
  
  She froze for a moment as the live image from one of the drones showed an elderly-looking man on the penthouse level sitting on a patio overlooking the Wasteland. There was a large calibre hunting rifle propped up against the railing of the patio, and the man was sitting under a large parasol, such that the drone had to descend a fair bit and get images from the side at a slant angle.
  
  She didn't trust her game knowledge enough to condemn a man to death on that factor alone, but she had asked a lot of people about Alistair Tenpenny, and not a single person said a good thing about the psychopathic Englishman. Plus, she was already pretty confident his man Burke tried to have her killed by the Children of Atom when she went to disassemble Megaton's megatons.
  
  She carefully designated the parasol as a target from her drone's feed, and mentally hit a trigger. There was an incredibly loud *THWUMP* from outside the RV, easily audible inside the armoured cabin, as one of her loitering munition drones was thrown into the air through a pneumatic launch tube.
  
  The kamikaze drones weren't quad-copters; they were traditional aeroplane-style drones. They had stubby spring-loaded wings and a spring-loaded propellor at the rear that began turning furiously as soon as it left the launch tube. They had the explosive charge in the nose, either shaped charges for anti-armour or anti-Super Mutant purposes or a normal high-explosive charge surrounded by steel ball bearings for anti-personnel; it was the latter type that she had launched.
  
  They weren't that fast either; she could have designed a faster design, but if you designed an airfoil for a high-speed cruise, that meant it had a really poor low-speed performance. And that would have meant they wouldn't have been able to be launched just by pneumatics; an air cannon just wouldn't have gotten it up to speed fast enough by itself to reach steady flight, and it would have crashed on launch. Her first three designs met this fate. She'd have to have included a rocket assist for the first phase of flight to get them up to speed, and Lily didn't have any way to manufacture solid rocket motors at the moment, and she definitely didn't want to lose any of her limited number of missiles to cannibalise their rockets.
  
  Lily pondered. Perhaps she should have used some kind of electromagnetic linear accelerator. She had that technology from plasma guns, but she hadn't tried to build actual rail guns with it - because she knew there was a railgun inside the VSS building that she intended to loot, and it seemed kind of like a shame to reinvent the wheel if you were going to the loot the wheel store real soon.
  
  However, they could still fly at about 50 kph, which was fast enough for her purposes. Alice glanced at her, "What was that sound?"
  
  "Ah." Lily said, and forwarded the girl a link to the drone footage. "Remember zhat bad man I told you about, who would randomly shoot people from the top of zhe Tenpenny tower and wanted to blow up Megaton?"
  
  Alice nodded.
  
  "Well, I figured zhat what is good for zhe gander is good for zhe goose, yes? That zhwump noise was a pneumatic air cannon shooting a small autonomous drone zhat carries an explosive charge," Lily said, smiling.
  
  The Apprentice blinked, "Wait. You're going to blow him up?!"
  
  Lily nodded. "Like I said, he wanted to blow us up, no? Eet seems equitable."
  
  Alice nodded slowly, "I suppose so. Everyone seems to agree he is close to pure evil. But... I don't really want to watch an old geezer get blown up though." Lily also noticed her stop watching the drone feed.
  
  'Well, neither do I, really,' Lily thought. She just had to be sure the first drone did the job.
  
  It was a good thing she was watching the feed so closely, too. And a good thing Alice had dropped off. If she had just kept driving and allowed the tiny cruise missile to do its work autonomously, it would have struck right as a woman, clearly, some kind of prostitute or perhaps merely a kept woman, arrived and started plying her trade on top of his lap, gyrating lewdly.
  
  Sighing in disgust, she both zoomed out the drone, so she didn't have such a good image and triggered the kamikaze to break off its attack run and start circling. It still had over twenty-five minutes of endurance.
  
  After a moment, the Apprentice glanced left and right, "But there was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom?" she asked in an affected voice.
  
  The girl had been getting into Lily's Earth media again! That was clearly a Marvin the Martian impression. Lily gave the girl a side-eye, "It's only a half-kilo charge, and we're five kilometres away! You won't hear anything!" Then she paused, "Plus, a non-combatant came onto zhe penthouse patio, and I didn't want to blow zhem up too, so I have zhe drone circle right now."
  
  Alice smiled, "That's a good thing you did, Mistress. How long do you think they will be in the target area? I remember you telling me these types of drones had a limited flight time."
  
  Lily said with disgust in her tone, "I'm judging only two to zhree minutes at most. It should be fine." Her obvious disgusted tone had Alice tilt her head to the side, an amused and curious expression on her face, but Lily didn't enlighten her.
  
  Rather than watch herself anymore, she set a timer to pull up the feed every minute and waited.
  
  It turned out her estimate of two minutes was optimistic. At the two-minute mark, the woman was already gone. Lily had worried that Alistair Tenpenny would have left back into his penthouse, too, and if so, she would have just aborted the attempt and got him another day, but he was looking through the scope of his rifle, sort of in the direction that their RV and truck was stopped. Could he see them five kilometres away? Possibly. But he was likely just looking for some random wastelander or ghoul to shoot, as was his custom.
  
  Nothing like a little post-coital murder, she supposed?
  
  Before she triggered the kamikaze to resume, she had two drones approach closely and look through each of the windows into his penthouse to make sure that woman wasn't, say, lounging seductively on a chaise recliner near the patio.
  
  She had estimated the kill zone of the HE anti-personnel charge at about thirty to forty metres in all directions. She didn't really expect it to go through to the next floor down, as the patio was built out of strong-looking masonry, but anyone in his penthouse might have gotten gibbed.
  
  But fortunately, there wasn't anyone there either. Not even Burke, which was a shame.
  
  She triggered the kamikaze to continue its attack. It was already circling the building at a few hundred metres, and once triggered, the little devil nosed over into a dive-bomb and zipped down with impressive speed before exploding right before colliding with the colourful parasol stuck in the middle of the table Tenpenny was sitting at.
  
  Lily winced. Yeah, there was no surviving that. She put the RV back into gear and started exfiltrating away from the crime scene. It was possible she would be linked to the attack later, assuming anyone cared enough to inspect the bomb site forensically. Although she made sure that the computer processors and sensors would be destroyed by encasing them in magnesium and silicon dioxide, essentially making a thermite casing, which she already saw cooking off on the drone film, but she was pretty sure some of the parts of the drone would survive the explosion. The carbon-fibre wings, perhaps, or part of the fuselage? In her tests of the system, admittedly, which only amounted to four units tested, in most cases, a wing survived and, in other instances bits of the fuselage.
  
  But Tenpenny didn't have any friends. She doubted that even Monsieur Burke would look that deeply into his untimely demise. Plus, she intended to shoot that asshole in the face at the first opportunity if he didn't beat feet out of her town; she just hadn't gotten around to him yet, but she sure as heck hadn't forgotten him.
  
  "Dr St. Claire, why aren't there any colours in the night vision?" Alice asked curiously. The sun had set, and they were inching slowly towards the VSS building.
  
  Lily hummed, looking for a location to hide the deployed RV and truck from casual observation. "Colours are just how we observe specific wavelengths of light. That's why if I put a red filter over a flashlight and light up this cabin with it, everything would appear to be the colour red, yes? Because I am only shining red light, and it is only zhe red light zhat is bounding off things and reaching your eyes."
  
  She didn't have a red flashlight, but the interior cabin lights, which were LEDs, did have a red-light mode to preserve night vision. It was kind of useless for her, but she thought it looked very tacticool, so she included the feature. She turned it on, and the dim light in the cabin turned red, "See? So to show any visible colours, we would have to shine visible light, zherefore it wouldn't be night vision; it would be a searchlight." She turned the light back onto white light mode to demonstrate.
  
  Lily had already spent most of the day with the girl, which was more time than she usually liked spending with her, but things were a bit different when they were on an adventure for some reason. They generally travelled in companionable silence, for one, which Lily appreciated a lot, except for times like this when the girl had a question, and it was a good question, Lily thought.
  
  "Ahhh... that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. You explain things a lot better than the books do, most of the time," Alice said cheerfully.
  
  Well, of course. She was the best, after all.
  
  She pulled the RV into the crook of a demolished building right next door to the VSS building and told the girl to park the truck much closer to the exposed elevator.
  
  There were about four Super Mutants nearby, but the greenskins hadn't noticed them yet. Lily had already designated them in her targeting system but wanted a simultaneous time-on-target attack as well, "Okay, let's get in zhe armour again. I can see at least four Super Mutants with heavy weapons. We'll try to blow them up and attack them on the ground while hiding behind our robots, ok?"
  
  Now the Apprentice looked very nervous. It was one thing to talk about adventure, but it was another to fight your first Super Mutant. They got in the armour quickly but stayed in the RV for a moment. Lily wanted to give Alice experience in how her drone targeting system worked, so she forwarded the girl the drone footage and walked her through re-designating them as targets.
  
  "How many drones should I send at them?" asked the Apprentice curiously.
  
  Lily hummed, "Let's try with two and let's test zhe regular HE, not the shaped charges. And make sure you program zhem for simultaneous time-on-target. That way zhe first drone will circle until zhe second drone is launched. It takes about twenty seconds to recharge the compressed air to fire the second shot." Another reason a railgun-based launcher would be far superior.
  
  Lily waited until the girl nodded and told her, "Okay. I have the 'fire mission' programmed and ready. Why did you call this a fire mission anyway?"
  
  Lily shrugged her shoulders, "It's a military term. It means when you specify both a target and a number of zhe ordinances. I zhink it is more of an artilleryman term, but I'm not too sure." Lily wouldn't admit the real reason was that it sounded cool. "Okay, let's get out with zhe robots, then you trigger the mission and then the robots will advance, us behind zhem, Okay?"
  
  She gave the Apprentice her tribeam rifle while she herself took the plasma rifle she rebuilt. Plasma was very effective against Super Mutants, and she felt she had the best aim.
  
  She should have built the girl a plasma rifle, also. Even before she got the technology to fabricate micro-fusion cells, she still should have done it. Micro-fusion cells are... or rather were pricey and expensive, but the Apprentice's life was irreplaceable.
  
  Still, the tribeam rifle was almost as good and possible better against certain threats like military bots. Her modifications to it to make every beam hit the same spot gave it unparalleled burn-through potential, so it should put even a Super Mutant down if you shot them in the head or heart.
  
  It was also a lot easier to aim, just point and shoot. The plasma rifle's plasma bolt was actually quite slow, so there was significant leading involved in shooting anything but a stationary target. Although, most of that was handled by her battle system, as it provided a lead-assist reticle to aim at any hostile targets.
  
  They stepped out of the RV, and Lily closed the ramp behind them. The. ten Kaytrons Lily had brought were already waiting, crouched in something that might be considered stealthy? At least Lily changed their exterior to have a matte black carbon fibre layer above the steel alloy, which was a little shiny. It made them look more like Kaylons, too.
  
  They were about forty to fifty metres from the Super Mutants so Lily nodded at Alice while sending orders to the Kaytrons mentally. Alice triggered her pre-programmed fire mission, causing a *thwump*. The robots started moving towards the enemies, and Lily and the Apprentice followed behind as another *thwump* sounded.
  
  The Super Mutants weren't that near the VSS building, but they were near enough that they would definitely have seen their vehicles, so Lily judged they had to be taken out.
  
  She was watching on the drone surveillance as they snuck up on them, her feed having a count-down until the impact of the two drones, who were already climbing up high for their dive-bomb terminal manoeuvres. She and the Apprentice stopped about twenty metres away, which she felt was super plenty for safety's sake, while the Kaytrons approached to about ten.
  
  However, as the two drones tipped themselves over and started their dive, Lily noticed something one of the Super Mutants was carrying. It was an anomaly, as the others had heavy weapons, and this one was just carrying a football-shaped item.
  
  Lily was now able to think about two things simultaneously, so long as one of her thought processes was fairly simple. While one part of her mind was asking herself, ' What is that?' which caused her Muse to pop up with an explanation [That is a mini-nuke], the other part of her mind was screaming, ' Fuck!'
  
  It wasn't possible to call the drones back once they had started a dive bomb; their energy was too high for the puny little propellers to overcome, so there wasn't anything she could do. Instead, as the counter ticked closer to zero, she yelled at the Apprentice, "On the deck! Cover your head, now, now, now. "
  
  She gave a girl a shove in the correct direction so that she would lay her body perpendicular to the potential oncoming pressure wave instead of head-on, which might cause spinal compression injuries, and then joined the girl on the ground in a brace position.
  
  The two drones struck as programmed simultaneously, and a number of Kaytrons had started firing, but they were backing up too as their gestalt intelligence wasn't too smart, but it knew what a mini-nuke was too. Still, they tried to accomplish their orders at the same time.
  
  At first, Lily thought they had dodged a bullet and even stupidly glanced up just in time for the flash to burn out all of the visual sensors in her armour's helmet.
  
  AN: I considered cliffing you guys here but I decided against it. ;)
  
  The yield of mini-nukes was actually really small. Much smaller than even the Davy Crockett nuclear artillery in her past life. That said, it still was close to the equivalent of a ton of high explosives, which was the equivalent of a truck bomb or two two-thousand pound general purpose bombs detonating simultaneously, and they were only slightly above twenty metres away from it.
  
  Lily didn't think she had totally lost consciousness, but perhaps she did because the next thing she knew, she was at least thirty metres away from the blast. Had the pressure wave picked her up and tossed her another ten metres?
  
  She looked around frantically to see where the Apprentice was and called out audibly and on the radio, "Alice! Where are you? Are you okay?" She couldn't see her anywhere!
  
  Speakers crackled, and I heard beneath me, voice slightly slurred, "Ugh... underneath your fat iron ass, Mistress. What the hell happened?"
  
  Well, she was making jokes, so she couldn't be too badly injured, Lily hoped. As for herself, she might have a minor concussion, and she had a broken wrist, presumably from when the shockwave threw her into the air; she had landed wrong. That armoured wrist joint on her armour was also damaged. Also, a number of visual sensors on her armour were damaged, and her armour took a lot of rads, both prompt x-rays and continuing neutron emitter contamination, according to the report she was seeing in front of her eyes.
  
  The x-rays were obviously from the mini-nuke going off, and she had probably taken a bit of the atomised uranium and other nuclear explosive by-products on the steel armour. If so, she would likely have to replace perhaps the first outer layer of parts of her armour.
  
  Lily rolled forward several times until she was on solid ground and stood up. "Are you injured?" She was trying to ping the girl's medichine implant, but those were only designed to surrender its host's privacy in the event that the host was very seriously injured. That was a good sign, Lily supposed.
  
  "Broken left clavicle, concussion; my armour says I took some rads, but it already administered some Rad-X. Did someone fucking nuke us?!" the girl asked, astonished.
  
  "Language! And... sort of. I really am not sure why, but one of zhe Super Mutants was carrying a Mini-Nuke. Did it intend to zhrow it at zhe enemy? Was it zhe suicide bomber? I 'ave no idea," Lily explained, clearly astonished herself. It was another case of her relying on her knowledge from the video game too much. Super Mutant suicide bombers sounded kind of plausible, even if Fallout 3 never had that type of enemy.
  
  The Apprentice stood to her feet, a little unsteadily, muttering that she was allowed to swear in response to getting nuked, which Lily actually didn't have a real argument against. She started examining the feed from her robots. Out of the ten they had, only five were still on the network, and two of them were reporting serious damage.
  
  Lily sighed. Hopefully, at least some of those five were repairable. They weren't in the incineration zone by a long shot, but the shockwave tossed them through the air like they were plastic Army men a kid was playing with, not combat bots. She had redesigned their processor housing to be even more ruggedised, so she had some good hopes there. She'd have to go collect them, drag each of them back to the RV and conduct repairs.
  
  Same with the Apprentice and her Armour. They couldn't leave the armour for the temporary radiation hazard, and Lily didn't like the idea of staying in the armour when part of it was irradiated either. She needed the sensors inside the RV to figure out which armour segments got the most rads and needed to be replaced.
  
  Well, so much for the idea of sleeping tonight.
  
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  That was a hell of a nasty fall you took
  Lily focused on the robots first, as that was actually their best line of defence. Essentially all of them had taken enough rads and isotopes that they were slight to moderately radioactive, which was annoying. She intended to use them to drag out all the VSS's VR tech, and radiation and sensitive computers didn't mix.
  
  She had the working robots drag those that weren't back to the RV, and then she sat outside it while connecting to the Assaultclone inside. First, she had the clone come outside and repair her armour's damaged joint and reset her broken ulna and radius before they started healing wrong.
  
  Then she got to work fixing the robots inside. Three were unrepairable, so she immediately tossed those aside. The others she sat down to repair, selecting the ones that could be repaired fastest first. By the time she was done with the last bot, some of which had some jury-rigged sections replaced or cannibalised from the three unrepairable models, her wrist was more or less in good condition as well, so she had the Assaultclone return to its docking bay and disconnected.
  
  The Apprentice still wasn't at anything but the dabbler level of skill with electronics or robotics, so she couldn't really help at all, although Lily let her watch so long as she didn't get in the way.
  
  Standing up and stretching, still in her Power Armour and said, "Alright, zhat was a waste of four 'ours." She was kind of expecting someone to come and investigate the explosion, which was why she was so rushed to get her robots back in operable condition, but nobody came. She supposed that explosions in the middle of the night, even large ones, weren't that unusual in DC.
  
  Sighing, she moved both the RV and the truck right next to the VSS building and then pulled out some camouflage netting to hide them from casual inspection. It was a grey urban pattern of netting, and if you weren't too close, it looked like rubble instead of two vehicles hidden behind a net.
  
  The Apprentice glanced at her, still in her pink-painted Power Armour, although some of the paint on the top of her helmet and arms had deteriorated as if she was lightly blasted with a sandblaster, which was kind of what happened. Annoying. It had taken her a while to find that pink... that salmon-coloured paint, "Alright, lets try zhis again, yes?"
  
  The Assaultclone had brought out a sensitive geiger counter to scan each of their power armour, and there were a few sections that would have to be replaced. The armour coating their helmet, hands and arms, mainly, and a little of their sides.
  
  Lily was already having the DMLS printer print those segments, although it may take a little while to do so. She brought quite a bit of feedstock for all of her printers with her, so she didn't expect any problems about running out, and she would just have to take the radioactive pieces they replaced back home and recycle them.
  
  "Yeah, while you were fixing everything, I brought out that little generator, as I don't think this place has power at all," the Apprentice said.
  
  Lily hummed and nodded. Maybe the sub-basement had power, that wasn't uncommon, but if not, they would need the little guy. It was about as big as a small cooler you'd bring a six-pack of beer with to a football game and could output about eighty kilowatts, and it was powered by the third fusion core she had. Fusion cores could output a lot more than that, about two hundred kilowatts, but the main issue with a device so small was cooling it. It was "cold fusion", but the electricity it outputted was still hot.
  
  It only weighed about ten kilograms, though, so it was the most portable power system she had. It was pretty awesome, actually. She wanted a lot more fusion cores as soon as possible. Madison Li said that with the scans she had received, as well as the explanation of their "DRM", she might be able to manufacture them within a year.
  
  Lily certainly wouldn't have been able to. The scans showed a boron-impregnated metallic alloy, but she had no idea how to create those. In Madison Li's scaled-up hydrogen-boron fusion generator, the process was started using very high-frequency electricity, rotating alternating current at a particular bias, along with levitation fields to compress the two fuels together.
  
  It sounded like the jabber that you heard engineers on Star Trek talk about, phase couplers, harmonic resonators, words that didn't mean anything but sounded cool. However, she had already verified that it worked, albeit inefficiently, so Lily shouldn't be so judgmental. It just meant that Lily didn't know nearly as much about how the world worked as she thought she had.
  
  Lily had agreed to provide a suitable clinic in Rivet City with her treatments in exchange for a healthy percentage of their take-home; in effect, she would sell to them at a big discount and allow them to pay after they, in turn, had sold the treatments. Kind of like a drug distributor might have fronted you a kilo of cocaine but expected to be paid after it was sold. At least, that's how she thought it worked from watching The Wire.
  
  However, she demanded that whoever ran it had to spend at least six weeks working at her hospital, so Dr Li was going to send one of their medical doctors to Megaton when she got back. Funnily enough, they didn't really have any geneticists like Lily thought they had, so in that sense, she supposed the mayor only had the Brotherhood to call on to confirm her treatments worked or at least didn't kill you.
  
  She had her seven operating robots search the building as thoroughly as possible. The site, as far as she knew, was in the basement, but she didn't want to overlook anything.
  
  There wasn't, not really. Most of the building was wrecked. There were a number of terminals that might have interesting data, which she made a note to check before she left. The elevator to the basement not only did not have power, but she felt it was a death trap, so she had to take some time to repair it.
  
  "Apprentice, do you zhink you feel comfortable connecting the generator to the building's power junction?" Lily asked her.
  
  The girl paused before nodding, "Yes, I think I can do that safely. I'll have to go back to get some tools, though." She grabbed the small generator.
  
  "I'm having a lot of tools brought out already, zhis elevator needs some tender loving care," Lily said with a sigh. This building had already been restored somewhat, at least the sub-basement, in the game. You just arrived, and everything was working, and you got inside the virtual reality. Actual reality was turning out to be a bit of a different story. She was glad that she had told Dr Taylor and Bonesaw that she might be gone over a week.
  
  "Make sure you disconnect zhe power junction from the city power lines, if zhey haven't already been destroyed. We don't want our generator back feeding into the municipal system, both because people might notice and because it isn't zhat big of a generator," Lily reminded her as three robots came, rolling large three large toolboxes behind them. A fourth was bringing several large cans of rather precious oil. Lubricants were needed in so many different machines, and with not a lot of oil around, most Fallout mechanisms were designed with captive systems that preserved their lubrication almost forever.
  
  But she'd have to use quite a bit to get this elevator car moving, she felt.
  
  She and the Apprentice spent almost a whole day, although with rest periods, getting the large freight elevator fixed. Once it finally was, she ran into another problem, namely that the sub-basement had no power either.
  
  It took stealing a downed power line to fabricate a power line to connect her RV to the building's power supply in order to power the elevator and then taking the small generator downstairs before lights started to come on and doors started to open.
  
  Then, she had issues with connecting to her Mesh while downstairs, so she had to create a pair of relays connected by a long wire. One relay was stuck into the ground on the ground floor, next to the elevator. The wire ran down into the elevator shaft and terminated in a second relay in the basement.
  
  She definitely wasn't going to spend a minute downstairs if she couldn't connect to the surveillance drones or her RV. What was that from Breaking Bad? " I am the one who knocks! " Well, for her, she wasn't about to be snuck up upon, as she was the one who snuck!
  
  "Ugh, it is dirty AF in here," the Apprentice said.
  
  "Stop saying zhat! You can't swear just because you use abbreviations," Lily complained, but internally she queued orders to bring all the robots downstairs. She had brought four auto-turrets with her and had a reasonably defensible position even without them, and she would need every hand on deck to clear and clean the first few rooms of the sub-basement.
  
  "Whatever," the girl muttered in total teenager mode.
  
  For that, Lily specifically didn't warn the girl to mind the overhead and watched her bang her helmeted head on the top of one of the doors as she tried to walk through into one of the next passageways. Lily muted her vox and snickered at the girl.
  
  She tried to play it off, but Lily saw everything!
  
  "Don't go too far, we may 'ave reactivated some internal security systems," Lily warned.
  
  That caused her to pause, and she nodded, letting two robots duck ahead of her, and Lily followed right behind. They found what had to be the sealed vault right away, and Lily would scan it later. She had learned from her last mistake and left the scanner in the RV, otherwise it might have already been broken.
  
  Still, the vault looked really... stout. Lily was expecting that she would be easily able to break into it without bothering to run the simulation. Maybe she would, or perhaps she would be able to hack the simulation mainframe and bypass that mechanic.
  
  As one of the robots took another turn, a turret opened up with automatic fire, and the Kaytron reacted pretty well, rolling through the intersection and taking cover. It stuck its head out briefly, drawing fire while its friend popped the turret with a fully-charged lightning bolt, which disabled the turret.
  
  Lily was wondering if a single Kaytron electrolaser shot would disable the electronics in a turret and was pleased that it seemed to be the case. At least the turrets in this building.
  
  "Let's search that way first," Alice suggested, motioning towards the destroyed turret.
  
  Curious, she asked, "Why?"
  
  The girl said, with logic, "Because if it had a gun guarding it, it had to have some good stuff that way!"
  
  Lily's first impression was to go the other way because her game sense said that turrets usually guarded the main objective, so it made sense to save that for last if you were a completionist, but she realised that was an incredibly stupid opinion to have when she wasn't playing a game, but living her life.
  
  Nodding, she said, "Okay, zhat makes sense." Still, she sent a team of three robots going the other way, too.
  
  After that, they systematically explored every inch, except for the vault, of the underground bunker over the next half hour or so. As underground bunkers went, it wasn't that large, perhaps only five hundred square metres. By comparison, each of her current two sub-basement levels, one of which was usable at her hospital, was about twice as large.
  
  Alice was right; the room guarded by the turret was obviously the main attraction. After turning the lights on, they were greeted with a large room. If she recalled, in the game there were wires and cabling all running through the floor throughout the base, as if a mad-man were trying to wire it for ethernet.
  
  However, that wasn't the case, except for this room. Covering three out of four of the walls was a dense computing cluster of a type that she had, as of yet, never seen the like, with networking and power cables snaking on the ground and into the centre of the room, which stood a retro-futuristic pod, made of metal and glass. The computers covered each of the three sides of the room wall-to-wall.
  
  "Woah, this is totally sick," said the Apprentice. Lily didn't correct her use of slang vernacular because she had to admit it really was. Even if the vault room was totally empty, this would still be worth all the trouble, including being blown up.
  
  There was a small raised area overlooking the pod; in fact the ceilings in this room of the bunker were about twice as high, which they immediately noticed when they didn't need to duck their heads to walk. That was quite nice.
  
  None of the large computer systems was turned on, and Lily specifically avoided looking for a way to turn them on. She was going to inspect each one carefully. She didn't want to short out something due to dust falling into a case and into an open contactor.
  
  None of these computer systems seemed similar to any of the mainframes she had seen so far, and they all looked custom-built one-offs, networked together. That excited her, as it was interesting. She bet that this was the prototype VR system, with engineers adding to it as they iterated through its design.
  
  "Okay, zhis is going to take a while. I am going to inspect every one of zhese computer systems before I power on zhe system. Go explore zhe base, zhere should be some sort of VR feedback suit, or suits, go find zhem," Lily ordered.
  
  "Aye, aye, Captain!" retorted the Apprentice. Now the girl was just trying to push her buttons.
  
  Lily discovered an amazing thing about each of these computer systems. They all used massively parallel quantum processors of a model that she had not seen yet. They were of the same general type, though, but they were not an obvious RobCo model even if they appeared to be RobCo compatible, judging by the way they featured an identical IO layer as the processors she has grown very used to. If Lily ever wanted to just disassemble all the computers entirely, she could have over five hundred robots.
  
  But that, she felt, was short-sighted if she could get the system to work. Lily wondered why there was such a beefy processor bank. She had assumed that they would have had to use quantum processors, but it didn't take 1/100th of this amount of computing to create a fully immersive virtual interface.
  
  Alice found about a dozen interface suits of various sizes, and Lily scanned them along with the vault door when she had a robot bring her the scanner from the vehicle. The vault door, she thought it might be possible to break through. She could see where all of its mechanisms of it were, so drilling it out seemed possible, but there were sensors inside there as well, and Lily didn't know what function they served.
  
  It might be that they were to trigger an alarm, or it might be they were to trigger a giant bomb to go off inside the vault. This was the Fallout universe; she wouldn't make any assumptions. Moreover, it wasn't like Lily was a safecracker, so she would leave breaking into it as a solid plan B for now.
  
  The suits were interesting. They used technology kind of similar to the Institute brain-computer to, through electrical induction, interact with all the nerves inside your body. It was interesting, but it was also kind of a stupid and dead-end technology. VR in her past life started in similar methods, but why would you wear a suit when a simple brain interface can render fully immersive virtual worlds to include sight, sound, smell, and taste?
  
  It reminded her of her past life; when she was a kid and before high-speed internet was a thing, she had a vast collection of songs in MIDI format. She remembered thinking that there was no way this new-fangled MP3 technology would exceed the pure, dulcet sounds of her MIDI files! Why, they took like thirty minutes to download one song, too! Right before MP3s took off, she installed these custom MIDI sound fonts, and she thought she had found the absolute apex of MIDI sound!... And maybe she had, but it was still crap compared to 128 kilobits audio.
  
  It was a quaint anachronism, in other words. Although, perhaps, she had to admit that they would be very useful for people she did not trust with brain interfaces to still make use of the VR pod when she brought it back home.
  
  "Everything looks good over here," the Apprentice called. After checking each server of the cluster for any apparent malfunctions, Lily had the girl verify that all the power inverters and other associated systems appeared to be in working order.
  
  Lily nodded, "Alright, go ahead and flip zhe main breaker and let's see if the system powers up."
  
  The girl rubbed her hand together; they had both ditched their Power Armour as it made fine manipulations a bit difficult, and with a loud ka-chunk sound, manipulated a large circuit breaker from the OFF to ON position.
  
  Immediately LEDs started lighting up everywhere around them, the hum of computers powering up, and the cursor on the controlling terminal on the raised podium area behind the pod started blinking and then thereafter scrolling text.
  
  Lily sat down at the terminal and hummed as she watched information scroll past. It was a self-test of a large, complicated, system so it took a while.
  
  Frowning at something that started flashing on the screen, "Apprentice, find zhe server numbered twenty-one," she called out.
  
  "Uhh... they don't appear to be numbered," Alice complained.
  
  Lily wanted to facepalm. What a clusterfuck. No doubt, the engineers that pieced this thing one of a kind monster together as a labour of love would know precisely which server twenty-one was and probably a lot more about it besides that.
  
  Biting her lip in thought, "Go around and look for one that doesn't have any flashing lights near the data cable."
  
  After a moment, "Found it!"
  
  Lily stood up and walked over to look at it. "Hmmm. Simplest solutions first," and unplugged the data cable and then plugged it back in. Instantly the flashing light indicating data passing through the network interface started going crazy. Wait, was it that easy?
  
  She turned to glance at the terminal in the centre of the room and shrugged. Sure enough, it seemed to be that easy. Sometimes you get lucky.
  
  She returned to the terminal and sat down again.
  
  VSS Inc VR System ALPHA-01
  
  Selected Simulation: Battle for Anchorage! [EDIT SETTINGS] [OPEN POD] [LAUNCH SIM]
  
  Available Simulations: Battle for Anchorage!, Basic Training
  
  Superuser access is locked until Battle for Anchorage! cleared by order of General Chase, lock note: " Get it right, dweebs!"
  
  Lily snickered at that. The game implied that the supposed hero of Anchorage, Constantine Chase, had been going crazy with power and making unreasonable and unrealistic demands of the developers of the simulation. It seems before the end he had descended to out-and-out verbal abuse.
  
  Lily tried to edit the settings but found them locked. Could this sim actually kill someone if they died inside the sim? Lily very much doubted it.
  
  "Oh, oh. Can I play the game first?" asked the Apprentice, eagerly.
  
  Lily frowned, "It's not a game. And no. I 'ave reason to believe it might be dangerous. Supposedly if you died in zhe Battle for Anchorage sim, it killed you in real life."
  
  Alice looked incredibly sceptical, "That sounds ridiculous, Mistress."
  
  Lily sighed, "I know. I don't really believe it either. Maybe stress induced cardiac arrests? Sometimes incredibly realistic VR can induce zhat, but usually only for incredibly stressful scenarios, like being tortured in fully immersive VR."
  
  Lily shrugged, "Still, I will go first. I 'ave a lot more protections zhan you. It would be almost impossible to kill me unless they put an explosive charge in the seat. And even with me, I am going to take zhe precautions." Lily stretched and started stripping, which caused the Apprentice to squawk. She had already pre-cached tons of medichines around important body organs and she also tested the system that would restart her heart in the event she had a cardiac arrest or severe arrhythmia.
  
  The Apprentice waved her hands, "Don't rub my nose in the fact that you're stacked like a triple-stack of pancakes, Dr St. Claire! I can leave the room! Why are you even taking everything off?"
  
  She clearly was still self-conscious about her own body, still. Lily found that both amusing and concerning. Still, she stopped before she exposed anything else, waited until the girl turned her back, before continuing and then quickly putting on one of the VR suits sized closest to her.
  
  "Zhese suits work through electrical induction. I don't want zhem to maybe induce a current on zhe underwire of my bra, which would get hot, and maybe it set my boobs on fire while I'm in the sim and didn't notice," Lily said mildly. She didn't think that would happen, but the mental image was so distressing that precautions were warranted. She didn't like using this suit at all but figured it was best to use everything as they had designed it at first. Later she would design an interface with her computer to render all the VR directly into her brain, though.
  
  Alice turned back around, snickered, then started out and out laughing. Lily patiently waited for the girl to get it out of her system before sighing, "If you're done laughing at your poor teacher, let us get on with it. When I get in zhe pod, I need you to 'it the LAUNCH SIM button when I give zhe word."
  
  Lily got into the comfortable leather seat of the pod, plugged the suit into the port and placed the one-size-fits-all helmet with electrodes on her head, and relaxed. "Okay, go for eet, Apprentice."
  
  The pod started closing up, but Lily didn't notice it for long because all of the suddenly her vision went white.
  
  Things cleared, and she could see a cliff face as if she were lying on her back. A man leaned over her and said, "That was a hell of a nasty fall you took. When your chute bunched up like that, I thought you were a goner! I hope the other guys made it. I don't think their patrols spotted us coming it, so at least we still have the jump on 'em. You still have your gear, so I'm going to let you make the call. Quiet or guns blazing?"
  
  Immediately after he started talking, she started receiving very urgent e-war warnings on her system.
  
  [WARNING! WARNING! TEMPORAL ANOMALY! LOST TIME OR EXTRANEOUS MEMORIES DETECTED! NEURAL INFERRED CLOCK AND ATOMIC CLOCK DATE MISMATCH!]
  
  [WARNING! EGO BACKUP DISABLED. E-WAR SYSTEMS, ENGAGED. NO TARGET. NO TARGET. NO TARGET. SAFE MODE ENGAGED. RADIOS DISABLED.]
  
  What the fuck was going on. Her system automatically triggered a failover mode, detecting a possible brain hack. It wasn't as bad as last time, she wouldn't need to prove who she was, but she immediately lost all connection to everything outside her brain.
  
  She stood up while the NPC was doing his spiel and finally said, "Give me some time to zhink; I just got zhe wind knocked out of me, no?"
  
  The soldier nodded, "Alright, but hurry up."
  
  She pulled up the internal alerts and hummed. Her current perception of time was running at about forty times the rate of what the small atomic clock in her brain said time should be going. Naturally, trusting the atomic decay of caesium over her own experience, her computer thought she was being hacked somehow, specifically that fake memories were being inserted into her consciousness in real time. That was a typical if insidious, type of brain or basilisk hack.
  
  Her brain activity levels were also through the roof, too; although not reaching dangerous levels but she was definitely using a lot of calories. She started to have an inference on why perhaps people died in this sim.
  
  Glancing at the NPC, She decided she wanted to test it. "Okay, I zhink I know what we should do..."
  
  The man nodded eagerly, and she said a bunch of gibberish to see what kind of programming he had, "Tulpa finni pela cella oriela."
  
  The soldier frowned, "What the fuck was that? Some kind of commie talk?! Senator McKinley was right; they've penetrated even the Army!"
  
  With that, he threw the knife he was carrying. She was kind of expecting something like that, so she had already tilted her head, but the fucking knife homed in on one of her eyeballs and penetrated up to the hilt with a terribly gross *swick* sound.
  
  Immediately after, the words 'MISSION FAILED' appeared and then she found herself sitting in the sim pod, panting for breath. Her internal nanohive indicated that her pulse reached the tachycardia levels briefly.
  
  Her test of the NPC's AI was inconclusive. They could have hard programmed in that encounter, and actually, Lily suspected they had on account the knife seemed to have terminal guidance manoeuvres.
  
  As soon as she was out of the sim, her clock synched up with her subjective experience of time passing. 'That was amazing. I take everything negative back that I ever said to you, VSS engineers,' she thought. They built in time dilation to their VR system and got it to work on biological flats? That was quite impressive.
  
  It was also probably what was killing them. A forty times dilation was pretty impressive for any biomorph, and no doubt it stressed their brain and hearts to the limit. Lily thought she should be fine. The Apprentice, though? It probably wouldn't be healthy, but she could handle twenty times easily.
  
  The settings were locked, though, so she would just have to clear it herself.
  
  "Ahahaha... I died, Apprentice. Start me again," Lily yelled.
  
  "That was a hell of a nasty fall you took. When your chute bunched up like that, I thought you were a goner..."
  
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  Mission failed, we'll get em next time
  "Die, American dog!" yelled the NPC in a terrible Chinese accent; simultaneously, he riddled Lily's virtual body with bullets from his AK.
  
  MISSION FAILED.
  
  Finding herself back in the pod, she sighed deeply and relaxed for a moment to let her heart rate fall again.
  
  The Apprentice started cracking up, "Did you die again? Are you sure it isn't safe for me? How many times is that, now?"
  
  Lily ground her teeth together, getting out of the simulator pod to stretch a bit. She had discovered that a fifteen-minute interval between simulator sessions increased her performance considerably. "Twenty-nine," she growled out, with her teeth still clamped shut, irritated.
  
  The sim was a lot harder than what she remembered the DLC as being. Hard enough that she had been trying to hack the computing cluster to bypass having to complete it since twenty-three sims ago, but was finding it difficult.
  
  To some extent, physical access meant she could do it, but she was very worried she would break something important. The computing cluster's individual servers did run on a RobCO operating system, so she could use her collection of exploits to get super user access to any single system, but the cluster management system ran on a custom operating system, like a virtual machine running on top of all thirty-four servers.
  
  She had gotten some success three sims ago, in that she had managed to adjust some memory values in time to give herself some advantages like much more ammunition than she should have had. She hadn't told the Apprentice this, though, because she kept losing even when she was using hax!
  
  If only she could isolate the value for her "health" in the sim, then she could turn god mod on, but it seemed to exist simultaneously in at least thirty-four different memory locations, and any adjustment to any of them caused the sim to glitch out in an incredibly torturous and painful way for the person inside.
  
  Lily did not want to experience again what the sim thought it should feel like if she had -128 health points instead of the normal 128. Apparently, there was both a health value as well as an "alive" true or false value. With maximum negative health but still being technically alive, she had experienced incredible agony until she shot herself in the head with her pistol. The little helmet she wore piped the pain signals directly to her brain, bypassing even when she turned her sense of pain off with her computer.
  
  Still, some of the values could be adjusted. After dying so many times, she fabricated a small device and placed it on a number of the servers' memory control units. Since she could connect to the device while in the sim, she could use trial and error to try to identify simple values like the number of bullets in a gun. Every time she started the sim, it usually took her a few minutes and about half a magazine to identify the memory location for her pistol's ammunition, and from then on, she could usually adjust it, but every time she did she would have to find the memory value again because it acted as though she reloaded the gun and stored the new number of shots in a different memory location.
  
  All in all, it was very annoying, and the fact that she couldn't beat the damn scenario even while she was cheating infuriated her. She was trying to get a wallhack going now, but that was a lot more difficult.
  
  All in all, the verisimilitude of the sim was... pretty good. Lily felt that they had gotten about a 90% reproduction of the reality that an average flat could perceive. To her, it looked kind of cartoonish, though. There was obviously no smell or taste, but most first or second-generation VR systems like this did not have that capability.
  
  Honest, she was very impressed with the technology. The AI was not completely scripted, either. Lily thought that was why there were so many quantum processors to run a neural network for many of the NPCs. That was a very advanced technique!
  
  The VR systems in her previous world would probably, by comparison, be considered the fifteenth or sixteenth generation. They were completely indistinguishable from reality, modelling physics entirely, even subatomic particles at least a little bit. In VR, in her past life, you could build an improvised explosive, and it would explode. In this sim, it would only explode if it was hard-coded to be explosive through some custom quest programming.
  
  However, using Actor VIs, which is to say neural networks that are designed to play NPCs in a VR environment, didn't occur until the sixth or seventh generation of VR technology. So, in that sense, the engineers at the VSS corporation were fifty years ahead of where they should be!
  
  Over the past twenty-nine sim sessions, Lily had made small talk with Sergeant Benjamin Montgomery to test the extent of the persona the NPC was provided with. Often with the early versions of this technology, the AI behind the NPC would, if asked for non-specified information, make up plausible information on the spot.
  
  For example, if you asked about his first girlfriend every sim session, you might get a different name each time. However, good ole Benjamin was remarkably consistent with each "playthrough."
  
  Some things were hard-coded, and she obviously noted a specific dialogue tree. But if you asked things outside of that, he provided complicated and consistent answers. About his sweetheart back home, about their first date, about getting caught by her dad making out in the back of his Chryslus.
  
  It was suspiciously complete information on his life. At first, Lily was worried that they had completely digitised a bunch of people to play as NPCs in this sim, which sounded exactly what Fallout scientists might have done.
  
  She spent over four hours examining the hardware of the system after that idea came to her head, just in case. She wouldn't keep putting them through hell if she thought that was going on.
  
  But each of the quantum processors was not sufficient to actually emulate a human's neural network. She supposed it was possible that multiple processors working in parallel could do it, but that was a very unusual and almost impossible method that would induce significant lag through the communications between the multiple processors as they worked through the IO limitations of each processor.
  
  Keeping a neural network in sync over multiple processors would be a non-trivial problem, too, even for technology she was familiar with. She was, in fact, one of the most preeminent experts on this type of computing architecture in the Solar system, although she did not really make that widely known because the only reason someone would study something like that would be if they were planning on creating an illegal hyperintelligence. It was part of her apotheosis plan to convert herself into a true hyperintelligence.
  
  She had never quite managed to see her plan through, though. Did someone find out about it and kill her? It would have been hard. She had so many backups in so many different places. Some in different star systems many light-years away from Earth, as she travelled the Pandora Gates and left behind little breadcrumbs.
  
  All her strategic planning indicated that she could survive even the sum total of transhumanity uniting against her, although she would have had to flee to a different star system and lay low for a considerable time period.
  
  Looking at the computing architecture in the VR system, she did not see any hints or tell-tale signs that would indicate a neural network was being run in parallel on multiple processors. It was a very hard problem! Otherwise, she would be God Empress of Sol by now!
  
  That left an Actor AI/VI as the most likely scenario. In this case, you use an ego bridge or similar technology to download someone, but instead of actually digitising their ego and neural network, you only store the memories in an indexed database. Then a custom-programmed non-sapient AI can, in effect, wear the memories like a skin suit and impersonate the person.
  
  It was a standard espionage and even interrogation tactic in her past life, and it was one that she had used herself many times. There was no need to torture information out of someone if you could just download all their memories into an AI that is loyal to you and then ask that AI questions. It can be surprisingly effective at tricking even those that knew the person, at least for a limited amount of time.
  
  There was one time she had managed to put a hardware-based man-in-the-middle attack on the neutrino transceiver on Luna and copied the egos of over three hundred people in her search for one specific one. She made the Solar System news that time! Or rather, some "unknown terrorist" did. Ha ha.
  
  AI impersonators were actually a technology that she was already in the process of redeveloping. She had a number of people she wouldn't mind having the secrets of. And she could always scoop out their brains and replace it with a quantum processor running said AI; she could have the impersonator walk their old body around. Attacking the leader and replacing them with a pod person was a strategically and tactically sound way to deal with very hierarchal, top-down organisations.
  
  She was close to the point where she needed to look for human subjects to test the ego bridge. However, since it may or may not cause minor, traumatic brain injuries if it glitched out, she would have to wait until she captured some raiders. Hmmm... didn't the Apprentice not want her to do that?
  
  Now that she had two basement levels, she actually had room for a donjon, too! She made a mental note to tell the girl about that project. Surely, she wouldn't actually mind her experimenting on raiders. She probably was making a joke back then, right?
  
  In any event, she had pretty much confirmed this hypothesis of an AI impersonator scenario in subsequent conversations with the NPC. He didn't pass her Turing test. If asked a question about his past, he was very convincing. However, asking it to employ even the slightest general planning intelligence, he either got the conversation redirected back to the "conversation dialogue tree" somewhere or gave ambiguous answers.
  
  For example, she tried asking it the simplest of logic puzzles, couched in terms that would seem familiar using communist Chinese and the cliffs they were in, and she got no good answer. If you asked him the best way to attack an entrenched Chinese position, he'd say to flank them because that was what his memories indicated. But if you pointed out an entrenched Chinese position and asked the best way to attack it, he would pause and then say, "Well, you're the officer!" or something similar along those lines.
  
  It was actually a pretty passable impersonator AI, as far she could tell. Enough that she would likely liberate the code of it, so she didn't have to start from scratch.
  
  It also meant that there was something like an ego bridge somewhere on the premises. At first, she was worried that it would kill the people hooked up to it. Destructive copying of the brain was the first method invented in her past life many, many centuries ago. That would be very Fallout, too. But two playthroughs ago, she finally managed to get past the cliffs area and saw General Chase's NPC, and he was another impersonator. Apparently, most of the NPCs were just hard-coded enemies or allies, just mobs, with only a few that you spent significant time with actual impersonator AIs.
  
  If the great man himself put his brain in the device, then it surely was, at least... pretty safe. After dying that playthrough and getting run over by a fucking tank, she searched the underground base and found it. At first, it looked like a regular comfortable chair, but there was a similar helmet featuring electrodes that had to be carefully placed around your head sitting in the seat.
  
  Perhaps safe or not, she definitely wasn't putting her head into some untested ego bridge. The need for raider test subjects was rising!
  
  The internal fifteen-minute timer dinged in her mind, and she sighed. She grabbed a Nuka-Cola and drank it rapidly. She would need those carbohydrates and complex sugars.
  
  If she ever put regular people in this, they would need an IV of dextrose and medichines programmed to keep their brain oxygenated and cooled. If so, she suspected she could get up to twenty, maybe even twenty-five times time dilation. That opened a lot of very interesting possibilities. One of the big problems of her nascent PMC, which she was tentatively calling Spider Company for now, was that she favoured young, untrained recruits so that she could instil an esprit de corps and, more importantly, personal loyalty to herself. She was pretty sure she could reproduce both the VR pod and the VR suit. Could she make this sim multiplayer? It would be worth it, even if she had to provide medical monitoring to each "player." If one day could turn into twenty or twenty-five, she could have some highly trained mooks pretty quickly!
  
  The idea of using the pod in that way kind of reminded her of the memories of cyberpunk media and literature, where you had to lay in a bath of ice water during deep diving into the matrix so that your brain didn't overheat!
  
  She got back into the pod and replaced the electrodes on her head, "Alright! Again!"
  
  ...
  
  MISSION FAILED.
  
  ...
  
  MISSION FAILED.
  
  ...
  
  MISSION FAILED.
  
  Lily rolled, coming up in a dramatic slide, kicking one of the communist Chinese feet out from under him while shooting the other in the head. Jumping up, she kicked the downed soldier relentlessly about the head and neck until he disappeared into digitised collections of pixels, which faded into nothing, like smoke in the wind.
  
  Panting, she reloaded her Chinese assault rifle and carefully set up the demolition charge on the last of the big artillery pieces on this cliff. Arming it, she turned around and walked directly in front of a Chinese flamethrower soldier who immediately immolated her with a long burst from the weapon.
  
  MISSION FAILED.
  
  Waking up in the sim pod again, she just let a long uninterrupted series of expletives. When she ran out of swear words in English, she switched to French, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Esperanto.
  
  If it was one group in the Solar System that she always hesitated to mess with, it was the Esperanto League.
  
  The swearing went on for a good two or three minutes. The Apprentice was curled up into a ball in a fetal position laughing, begging her to stop, that she was killing her.
  
  Already, she had queued up a number of things to produce on my carbon-based fabricator. Lily hopped out of the simpod, then walked over to the controlling terminal and inputted the key combination that would gracefully shut down the entire computing cluster, with Alice looking at her oddly.
  
  After all the machines shut down, Lily walked out until she met one of our robots which handed me a large wrench. She carried it back into the sim room, and the Apprentice started to grin but the girl got up to her feet and stepped in front of her, "Woah, woah, Mistress. Let's not be hasty. Just what are you going to do with that wrench, now?"
  
  She hissed, "I am going to create zhe Game Genie!"
  
  "... eh?" replied the girl.
  
  Lily had given up on using simple memory editing hacks; it was just too complicated to pull off using a crude device that had so little control over the memory of the servers.
  
  She used the wrench, not to smash the machine as Alice may have thought, but to carefully disconnect the entire computing cluster from the high-voltage 240-watt power supply coming in from the ceiling. It was one thing to add a device onto a machine, but for what she was going to do, she needed to make sure there was no power at all.
  
  After that, she carefully removed the memory controller on one of the mainframes with her soldering iron, as well as one of the memory modules. One of the areas that she was light years ahead of everyone on the planet was memory technology. She was going to replace all the memory! She just had to reverse-engineer how this memory controller worked and replicate it along with her own little additions.
  
  "Zhis may take a while, Apprentice," Lily warned the girl after explaining more or less what she planned on doing.
  
  Alice shrugged her shoulders, "That's alright. We're still in contact with our network in Megaton, so I can just watch some TV or do some homework." The girl paused, "Say, Dr St. Claire..."
  
  "Yesss?" she replied as she pulled up her engineering CAD software.
  
  The Apprentice asked curiously, "What is a Hummer Truck?"
  
  Lily blinked. Humvees only existed in her past life in America. There were similar vehicles in Fallout's universe, but they were called Multipurpose Infantry Transports System, or MITS.
  
  The only information the Apprentice had access to about her previous life in America were the memories of mass media that she had digitised.
  
  While explaining it to the girl, she simultaneously had her Muse perform a search of all of her media for the words Hummer Truck, Hummer, or Humvee.
  
  Lily began, "Eet is a small, lightweight military vehicle. You know 'ow zhe Army liked acronyms, right? Well, it was called zhe High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. Zhis got shortened by zhe soldiers that used to Humvees. That, in turn, got also shortened to just Hummer, or Hummer truck."
  
  Lily paused as she got the answer from her Muse, a found match based on song lyrics and suddenly narrowed her eyes at the Apprentice. Still, she continued her explanation, "Compared to regular cars, zhey were quite big, so civilian model Humvees became kind of a status symbol. Moreover, zhey were quite expensive, both to buy and to operate."
  
  [Match found in /media/audio/songs, title "Shake That" by artist "Eminem". Sample of match follows... ]
  
  [ "... I'm lookin' for a girl I can fuck in my Hummer truck, apple bottom jeans and a big ol' slut..." ]
  
  "And now, before I start 'ere we are going to 'ave a conversation on what songs are appropriate for you to listen to and what are not, " Lily said firmly.
  
  Alice got the expression of a kid with their hand caught in the cookie jar.
  
  It took her a little over a day to accomplish what she set out to do.
  
  Lily was still a bit unsure about creating an actual Game Genie™, as the way the cluster controller used and assigned memory locations was very odd. But there was one thing that she absolutely knew she could accomplish, and that was all she needed to defeat this accursed simulation.
  
  Her memory was much, much more miniaturised than even the best memory used in quantum processors in the Fallout universe, so she created each memory module that had ten times the memory as the Fallout versions, but each was partitioned.
  
  Her memory was non-volatile, too, so even if the power was lost or the machine reset, she wouldn't lose the contents of the memory unless she specifically cleared them.
  
  One partition out of ten, the first, was designed to operate exactly like normal RAM. She programmed procedures on her custom memory controller to clear the memory every time the power was interrupted. However, the others were used to store a "saved state" of all the memory, which she could trigger any time she wanted while playing the sim.
  
  Then, at the moment of her death or if she triggered it, one of the memory states could be reloaded in the primary/run-time memory, in effect creating a system of "saved games."
  
  Lily found it incredibly amusing that she had to reinvent saved games in Fallout to have a chance to beat this damn thing, but she was done playing around with this sim now. The only annoying part about dying, aside from the fact that it was incredibly painful, was that she lost her progress.
  
  Now, though... it was time to let the save scumming begin.
  
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  A Well Deserved, and Totally Legit Win
  Lily must have failed the Speech check when she finally managed to arrive at the end of the sim and talk to General Jingwei, after numerous attempts to clear the simulation. She remembered you could talk the man into committing seppuku, despite the fact that he was Chinese. He killed her the first time, but then she managed to beat him on the second by placing about forty landmines right in front of the area before the "boss fight" was supposed to happen, and then she immediately ran away. His AI wasn't that great, and he followed her, triggering over a dozen landmines.
  
  She laughed because she saw General Chase teleport into position right next to her. Apparently, they scripted him teleporting and then walking up into the fort where the boss battle took place. He turned and congratulated her on her success and informed her that she should go get debriefed.
  
  MISSION COMPLETE.
  
  Finding herself back in the sim pod, Lily let out a long breath. She checked the time, and she had spent a little less than forty minutes of objective time in the simulation in this last attempt, which translated to a subjective experience of over twelve hours. It was a lot longer than the DLC's content, plus she had to save and load a number of times.
  
  Lily got out of the simpod, stretched and walked over to the chair the Apprentice was sitting at. The girl was very clearly reading a book on her computer, and didn't notice her approach until she got rather close. Then she glanced over at Lily and grinned, "Died again?"
  
  The look of supreme satisfaction on Lily's face surprised the girl, and then she said, "You won! Does that mean I can play it too, now?"
  
  Lily hummed noncommittedly, "Yes, probably. Let me adjust some of zhese settings; zhen you can go get killed to your heart's content. Go get dressed in one of the VR suits."
  
  "Yess!" exclaimed the girl, hopped up and ran off into another room to change.
  
  Lily sat down at the terminal, and sure enough, anyone who had physical terminal access now had superuser rights. She opened the settings to examine what options there were, and sighed, shaking her head.
  
  Battle for Anchorage!
  
  Time Dilation: MAX (40.0)
  
  Difficulty: Extreme
  
  Pain sense: 125%
  
  *WARNING SAFETY FEATURES HAVE BEEN OVERRIDDEN*
  
  Lily had fucking thought things were more painful than they ought to have been. She adjusted the time dilation down to 20.0 and the difficulty down to be more realistic. The pain levels she turned down to thirty-three per cent.
  
  The safety features just set a maximum cap on the pain threshold. She didn't think that was the primary reason that the sim might have been dangerous for people, but it was definitely a contributing factor.
  
  After configuring the sim, she navigated to the main system menu and found the option to unlock the research vault, selecting it. Another sim scenario existed now, but it looked like a developer sim, which was used to create the scenarios in the first place. That was interesting.
  
  Alice came hopping back into the room, and Lily said, "Okay, I've turned down zhe difficulty, but zhey should still zhe realistically 'uman zhreats. I've also turned down the pain experience. You should only experience about a third of what something should actually 'urt."
  
  Alice looked a bit nervous and asked, "Why have that on at all?"
  
  She sniffed, "Because the VR sim is actually somewhat realistic. I don't want you to get into zhe bad habits in zhe real world, like rushing a bunch of guys armed with automatic weapons because you kept doing it in zhe sim. A base level of pain will provide correction against reckless behaviour." Like Pavlov's dogs, Lily was thinking, but she didn't tell Alice that.
  
  Alice blinked a few times, "Okay, that actually makes a lot of sense." She climbed up into the simpod, and connected her suit into the system the same way she saw me do so. "Okay, I am ready, Mistress!"
  
  "Wait, first unlock and send me a link to your nanohive, temporarily. I am just... guessing about zhese settings. I'd like to monitor your vitals and zhe brain activity while you're in the sim," Lily told her gently.
  
  The Apprentice nodded, "Okay... just a sec."
  
  Lily heard a ping and then pulled up the girl's current vitals, streaming off her medichines. Nodding, she hit the LAUNCH SIM key. She was pretty sure what was going to happen, and rapidly too, so she didn't actually leave to go to loot the vault yet.
  
  Barely any time later, the Apprentice gasped and started moving her hands rapidly. Then she relaxed and then chuckled, "That hurt... a lot! Are you sure you set it at a third?"
  
  This caused Lily to roll her eyes, "Getting shot generally does hurt, yes. And yes, I did. Your vitals looked good."
  
  Lily restarted her a few more times before she suggested, "How about you try the basic training sim?" Lily pulled up that sim on the terminal. It was listed as a complete four-week course. That was a bit short for basic, but with sim technology, Lily supposed you could skip a lot of things.
  
  "You didn't bother," Alice complained.
  
  Lily grinned, "Firstly, it was locked into the Anchorage simulation. But most importantly, I have already been to basic, and I don't wanna." She stressed the casual vernacular of 'wanna' in a way that was very unusual for her. She then continued, "I'll give you a break every subjective twenty-four hours... maybe you'll learn something that will keep you alive?"
  
  That was the main reason Lily wanted the girl to do it. Finally, Alice sighed and nodded, "Okay,"
  
  Lily changed the sim over to the basic training one. She suspected that sim was why the time dilation feature was set so high. If you could finish a four-week military training course in a couple of days, the military advantages would be insane. You could very rapidly take an untrained civilian and turn them into a slightly trained conscript. She remembered basic training being ten or eleven weeks in America, so she was kind of interested to see what the Fallout version was like, at least the version that the VSS company wanted to depict.
  
  However, she wasn't curious enough to try it herself. Later, she will open the developer sim and look through the scenario without actually having to play it herself.
  
  Once the girl was in the sim, she grabbed her scanner, left the room and headed to see what goodies she might find in the vault. She knew what there would be in there if this was the game Fallout 3. A suit of T-51 Power Armour, a Chinese stealth suit, a gauss rifle, General Jingwei's shock sword, and a bunch of miscellaneous loot, like missiles, missile launchers and mini-nukes.
  
  The truth that she had been avoiding thinking about while she was humming and skipping down the corridor was she was pretty sure she could have either cracked the vault's door or, alternately, once she had all the memory control modules installed in each server she should have been able to gain superuser access on the cluster easily enough by inspecting where programs were being run in memory and then inserting arbitrary code in there herself.
  
  However, by the time things had descended to that point, Lily was already... emotionally invested. She wasn't going to let that stupid thing win.
  
  Was that stupid? A waste of time? Pride went before a fall, so they said, and she had always had minor hubris issues. Nobody who wanted to turn themselves into a hyperintelligence didn't.
  
  The vault door was literally that. Not like a Vault-Tek vault, but more like a bank vault. She had to push it open, although it was still balanced quite well, allowing her to open a door that probably weighed twenty tons just with her body. Quite amazing engineering that you just didn't see too often anymore.
  
  As was her standard practice, before walking into a room that featured a door that had a mass measured in tons, where she could be trapped, she carefully sabotaged the door to prevent it from closing in on her in case some ghost showed up and locked her in.
  
  The vault was rather large, and immediately she saw eight suits of Power Armour sitting in a row. That would have been an amazing find a few months ago, but she was pretty sure her version of Power Armour was much superior. Still, she would take every single one. She still needed to get the code from their processors to see how Fallout engineers solved the problem of how the hardsuit's suit-assist functions worked.
  
  Lily solved this problem by directly connecting their armour to their central nervous system, but most hardsuits and exosuits used gyroscopes, sensors, force feedback and complicated programming to detect when a user was using their own muscles and then amplify them in ways that would be useful and controllable.
  
  She was relatively sure she should be able to manufacture her own copies of the T-51 rather quickly now that she had physical copies of them to study. However, it probably wouldn't be a great idea to outfit the entire Spider Company in them, at least not yet. Still, she would definitely build enough so that she could, in an emergency. The biggest problem would be getting fusion cores for them.
  
  She scanned the shelves full of boxes and items until she grinned suddenly and ran right for the item she was looking for. The dark grey on the lighter grey suit was unmistakable. It was set up on a mannequin on the other side of the room.
  
  Before she even touched it, she scanned the whole thing. She knew that it supposedly worked on similar principles to StealthBoys, in that the StealthBoy was produced after reverse engineering these stealth suits, but understanding the principles of how the StealthBoy operated was a bit difficult.
  
  Having another, and especially the original, example of how this same technology worked might be the break she needed to understand and duplicate it. China was supposed to be much more advanced in stealth technology; supposedly, they had stealth submarines and aircraft as well.
  
  Decided to test it immediately; she carefully cleaned all of the dust off, stripped her underthings and put it on. She was taller than the average woman, and the suit fit her virtually perfectly, except in the chest, where she would have to take it out a bit once she figured out how it worked. When she put the helmet on, an honest to god simple Heads Up Display started being displayed. It was overlayed on parts of her normal HUD, so she disabled that for a moment and then read the directions, which were of course, in Chinese.
  
  Interesting. There were a number of modes the armour could operate in, from being invisible all of the time, which was the most energy-intensive, to the current setting where it would attempt to vanish when you were stationary, which was the default. It used primitive eye tracking and blink interface technology, which could definitely be improved. Even in its most energy-intensive mode, though, it was vastly more efficient than StealthBoys. She suspected it was because the StealthBoy pushed the stealth field far beyond the field emitters inside the device to surround a person, whereas, in the Chinese stealth suit, the emitters seemed to be worked into the fibres of the armour, so the whole person using it was within the dimensions of the device.
  
  Not much energy was used while invisible if you were close to stationary, and Lily didn't understand that as that wasn't how StealthBoys worked, but she didn't understand how the thing worked in the first place. However, from a cursory glance at the scan she took of it, the electronics that generated the "stealth field" was radically different than a StealthBoy, which was a very good sign. It improved the odds she could look at two different ways of accomplishing the same thing and infer what both methods were doing and replicate them.
  
  The shock sword was interesting as well. Especially since it wasn't a shocking sword at all, but a vibrosword. That technology wasn't unfamiliar to her, but it made her curious why it was depicted as an electrical attack in the game. It saved her a lot of time, as she intended to make the sword she carried in Power Armour a vibroweapon, but actually devising methods to vibrate a blade at such high-frequencies was a little difficult. Knowing something was possible, and sort of how it was done was a lot of help, but it didn't make things quick, necessarily.
  
  Lastly, as far as new technology was concerned, was a gauss rifle. She was looking forward to this, too. She had been avoiding reinventing this technology because it felt like a waste of time when she would have a working example as soon as she got here. It would have been funny if nothing was in this vault, as it wasn't like her "game knowledge" was always right.
  
  Examining the railgun, she was surprised. They certainly used electromagnetic accelerators, using superconducting material similar to plasma rifles. However, inline with these were complicated levitation field emitters. They were built in a peculiar way, but she figured out that they were exactly the same thing, built as a linear accelerator also.
  
  That was clever. If you couldn't get enough velocity with purely an electromagnetic system, add a second system which used an entirely different field that could do a similar function.
  
  Kind of cheeky to call a gun that didn't purely use electromagnetism a gauss rifle, though, innit?
  
  Her timer went off, and she ran back into the sim pod room and used the savegame mechanic to create a save file for the girl and stopped the sim, and deactivated the stealth system on the suit she was wearing. The girl came around and looked tired, but she did a double take on seeing Lily, "Woah! That looks awesome. Did you build that?"
  
  Lily explained what she was wearing and demonstrated the stealth features, which impressed the girl.
  
  "I didn't realise you would be able to sleep in the sim, not that the stupid computer-controlled Drill Sergeant is letting me or the other characters sleep very much," Alice said wryly.
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows. She hadn't known that, either. It shouldn't be possible to get any kind of sleep using this kind of time dilation. Your brain couldn't really be stimulated and working overtime and restful at the same time.
  
  She just assumed you wouldn't get tired at all. Although she had been in the sim for, subjectively, a couple of days, she didn't, herself, get tired as she was just annoyed. Although, now that she thought about it she did find herself rather tired. She pulled up the girl's brain activity during the sim session and hummed.
  
  Interesting. The simpod used similar techniques that she did to induce a quick and restful sleep. She suspected as soon as you lay down on the bunk in the sim, it induced a restful sleep and reduced time dilation so that your brain could get rest. She'd watch the process closer together the next time the girl fell asleep in the sim.
  
  Still, she chuckled, "Oh? You want to quit?" She knew the Apprentice well enough that she didn't even need to ask her Muse to give her the best response to manipulate the girl, even if she was trying to avoid doing that more than she had to.
  
  Alice got an angry and determined look on her face, "No way! It isn't actually that hard!"
  
  Lily nodded, "Take a break for a couple of minutes, but you probably don't need anything to eat yet, zhough." She paused, delicately placing a finger at her lower lip, affecting a curious and thinking pose, "It makes me wonder 'ow they managed regular people going zhrough this zhing. Maybe they 'ad an IV for a long sim?" she asked nobody in particular, curiously.
  
  "I was told in the beginning, there was a kind of introduction, that there would be a break in real life every seven days," Alice offered.
  
  Glancing at the girl, Lily's hand alit upon her hip, and then she nodded, "'ow about we try to do zhat then, as it was designed. If you want to take a break, or if I see your brain activity suggest you need one, or your blood sugar drops, I will bring you out again, zhen."
  
  Alice agreed and, after a few moments, returned to the pod.
  
  It only took Lily an hour to comprehensively loot the vault, and now she wondered what she should do. If the Apprentice wasn't in the sim, she would be disassembling it.
  
  [Lilium: Alice, do you think you are safe enough to stay here by yourself, if I leave all the robots? ]
  
  [Alice: Yes, probably. Especially if I set some triggers with the drones to alert me if someone gets close, I'll need a way to pause the sim and get out from inside here, though. Where are you going? ]
  
  Lily explained her plan now that she had the stealth suit and then took a few minutes to fabricate a small device she plugged into the terminal that controlled the sim. Both of them could already "save" and "load" the sim from their computer, but this would allow either of them to pull up that terminal on their computer as well.
  
  If she had seen either regular Super Mutant or Brotherhood patrols this far west, she never would have considered this option, but none of their drones had detected any activity within four blocks of them in the days since they had arrived.
  
  She grabbed Jingwei's vibrosword, her plasma rifle and some tools and once she got on the ground floor began running to the west. She had the robots and turrets set to defend the building on the ground floor instead of setting up the last line of defence inside the sub-basement. She didn't think, tactically, that was a good idea. It would take resources away from a defence upstairs which could be much more effective. Alice, in her Power Armour, would be the last line of defence. She did leave the girl the gauss rifle just in case, standing it next to her pink armour, fully charged and loaded.
  
  She wouldn't be able to come back immediately if someone attacked, but she could hunker down and reconnect to the Assaultclone. However, the latency over that distance might be up to fifty milliseconds, depending on how many nodes in the Mesh had to be hopped through. But her aerial drones would ensure she had a signal back here where she was going.
  
  She was headed over thirty-five kilometres back the way they had come on foot. She'd have to go a bit past the cannibals to reach her destination, the RobCo facility. She didn't have the so-called RobCo widget, but she was pretty sure she could hack a RobCo server unaided.
  
  Running there at a quick jog wouldn't take too long at all! She was amused at the idea that it was somewhat likely both Mistress and Apprentice were probably doing a fifteen-klick run simultaneously, or close to it, except for wildly different reasons.
  
  Or perhaps not. What would the point be in a run in a sim where it wouldn't even exercise your body? Just to torment the recruits? Oh, well, actually, that did sound likely if it was like the Army she remembered.
  
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  You Are All Equally Worthless, Private!
  It would take Lily about three hours to run to the RobCo factory. It was farther away than she wanted to run, especially since she had, in the recent past, after acquiring a vehicle, discounted travelling long distances on her feet as something that peasants did.
  
  Still, she felt that she was much less likely to be discovered moving on foot, which was important since she needed to guard both the Apprentice while the girl was being indoctrinated into the US Armed Forces. She was fairly certain that the sim could not do any actual physical brainwashing of your brain, and she had been watching the Apprentice's brain's electrical waveform patterns just in case.
  
  It was definitely true that indoctrination was an important aspect of basic training in all militaries that she knew of. In fact, that was one reason why she was interested in the simulation pods, as she intended to rewrite the basic training simulation to feature both her philosophy as well as a more modern setting in the Wasteland. However, given the ham-handed attempts at propaganda in the Anchorage sim, she wasn't actually that worried about the indoctrination aspect of the sim.
  
  Still, an hour into her run, she felt that perhaps she should check in on the girl, just to make sure.
  
  [Lilium: How goes the sim? They aren't brainwashing you, are they? ]
  
  Unsurprisingly the response came back preternaturally quickly since the girl was under the effects of the sim's time dilation.
  
  [Alice: God bless America! ]
  
  'Err, shit,' Lily thought as she slowed down and glanced back the way she came, pulling up the relay from the terminal to potentially shut down the sim.
  
  [Alice: Hahaha, just kidding. I mean, the obvious propaganda is obvious, Dr St. Claire. Buuuut... I appreciate the Drill Sergeant giving me time to write a letter back to my girlfriend back home in INSERT RECRUIT TOWN HERE. I get the impression that they hadn't programmed the sim for female recruits yet. Or maybe the male recruit had a boyfriend back home or had crushing social anxiety and never dated. ]
  
  Lily snorted and took a moment to drink some water from a canteen. If she knew she would be running, she would have brought the camelback she looted so long ago in Vault 108 from Megaton. Still, the girl was a bit naive if she expected the Pre-War government to be accepting of certain things like that. She had already verified a number of oppressive laws from documents Tombs had from the National Archives and Records Administration backed up digitally.
  
  [Lilium: I was kind of expecting it to be a little campy. Oh, and Apprentice, the Pre-War government defined being homosexual as criminally culpable conduct punishable by up to ten years of forced labour in an overseas penal colony... or Canada. ]
  
  [Alice: How did you escape from the chain gang, Dr St. Claire?! ]
  
  'Hey! I resent that,' Lily thought to herself. Besides, when most of your memories come from living as a robotic spider who didn't understand the first thing about romance, you tend to discount the merely superficial features of the sexual characteristics of a potential partner. She would feel just as comfortable dating a man, woman or an AI of indeterminate sex.
  
  Although, when she was Meimei, she wasn't exactly sexually celibate; she just didn't understand romance. However, Meimei did tend to prefer VR sexual partners that were women, and she almost entirely confined such things to fee-for-service-rendered courtesans, usually very high-end ones from an establishment called The Court of Night Blooming Flowers.
  
  [Lilium: Hey! I could fit in. Plus, that actually only applied to men. The law specified male homosexuals. If you were a female, you were merely considered mentally ill and committed to a psychiatric hospital for hysteria. ]
  
  That was true, too. She remembered reading that and wondering if Fallout's culture was in the 2070s or 1870s. She hadn't actually told the Apprentice she was actually from a different universe; the girl was under the impression that she was, in fact, from Pre-War America like Gary. She intended to tell the girl eventually, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet.
  
  She put her canteen away and started jogging again, setting a good pace.
  
  [Alice: That is funny and terrifying. What exactly was the proposed treatment plan for this condition? ]
  
  Alice attached an emote-track clip of her feeling deeply suspicious, with a tinge of disgust. Nice, the girl had gotten quite adept at the computer's interface.
  
  [Lilium: Probably not what you're thinking, but only because it was worse. "Treatment" such as it was varied. I got a trove of hundreds of thousands of Pre-War medical records from the Brotherhood for a song, and I'll send you a few. ]
  
  [Lilium: The names they called the treatments varied, but it basically broke down to Pavlovian-style operant conditioning via direct brain stimulation of the amygdala as well as the vagus nerve. At the end of a "successful course of treatment", just thinking another woman was attractive would be enough to trigger a seizure. ]
  
  Lily was used to getting a response rather quickly due to the subjective time difference, so she was surprised that five minutes had passed before Alice came back.
  
  [Alice: Sorry, there was what I am calling a story segment where a number of the recruit characters in my platoon hit one of the other characters, who is the stereotypical fuckup with soap in their socks. But uhh... that sounds horrifying. I think I'd rather break up big rocks into smaller rocks for ten years. ]
  
  Lily laughed, suddenly beside herself. They had a scripted blanket party event? What was this, Full Metal Jacket ? And while Alice was certainly correct, it honestly probably barely made the top twenty-five worst, most evil things those in power did before the Great War, not that really took anything from how deeply disturbing it was, just this was a country that had absolutely no respect for the sanctity of human life or freedom whatsoever.
  
  [Lilium: Oh? Did you bond with your platoon mates by abusing the poor AI character? ]
  
  [Alice: Of course not! ]
  
  'Uh oh,' Lily thought.
  
  [Lily: I'm not sure how this was programmed, but that was probably the reason why it was scripted. I bet you'll see the fuck-up character perform admirably tomorrow, and since you didn't participate, there is a good chance they'll come for you the next night. The entire point of this "story segment" is likely to show you not to stand out, and you just did that by refusing to go along. ]
  
  [Alice : Shit. Well, okay. Thanks for the heads up. I'm going to sleep now. Hopefully, they will wait until tomorrow to try for me. ]
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, noting the Apprentice's brainwave patterns go rapidly into a restful sleep. She would have advised on ways to protect herself but considering she expected the programmed sleep inducer would work immediately upon using the bunk object in the sim, she didn't think there was any way to protect herself at all, aside from not sleeping at all, which wasn't an option.
  
  It likely would be structured like a similar "story segment," although Lily would have called it an interactive cutscene. Alice would touch the bunk to go to sleep and then be woken up being whacked about the tits with soap. Lily verified that the pain setting was still only thirty-three per cent and then just shrugged.
  
  What Alice had been saying about the sim made Lily want to try it. It sounded campy as hell and ridiculous, but those had always been her guilty pleasures in her past life. Did they walk around saying, "This is my rifle! This is my gun!"?
  
  Well, she still had about two hours to run to get to the RobCo facility. Alice's sleep segments seemed to last a little over an hour and another hour or so for a full day in accelerated time, and Lily should have the next thrilling segment of the drama of basic training by the time she got to her destination.
  
  As Lily saw the RobCo facility in the distance, she slowed and approached much more slowly. There were about half a dozen Protectrons roaming the exterior of the facility, and they would shoot anyone who approached too closely. However, she had made sure a few of the drones had followed her on her jog. Two loitered at about the halfway point, acting as a Mesh relay while one followed her to the RobCo building. She pulled up her moving map and carefully identified the patrolling robots, using bouts of the stealth suit's active camouflage to start sneaking up on them.
  
  She had tested the stealth suit while running, and it had enough charge to continually use the cloaking field for over thirty minutes while running, and it would recharge in less than five. If she was stationary, it lasted considerably longer, with the energy cell barely discharging. She suspected if she wasn't wearing a small backpack, which the stealth armour also cloaked, that the discharge would be less than the recharge rate, so if she didn't carry any gear, she should theoretically be able to stand still, invisible, indefinitely.
  
  It was powered by a fission battery that was remarkably similar to the types made by Pre-War America; however, instead of being small and stocky, it was large and thin. It took up most of the area of her back, and she was actually a little concerned about its location. It wasn't like fission batteries exploded if you shot them, but if she was shot in the back, then she would likely get a healthy dose of fissionable isotopes in the wound. She supposed the elite Crimson Dragoons assumed they'd never be shot in the back, so she thought it was of little concern, but she felt she may adjust the design somewhat if she got a chance.
  
  [Alice: You were right, Mistress! That guy was switched on today, did all the drills correctly and even scored first place on the firing range. He's the Drill Sergeant's new favourite pet! ]
  
  Lily chuckled while looming invisible near the RobCo building. One of the Protectrons was about to turn the corner and walk by her carefully concealed position, so she clamped her mouth shut despite how amused she was.
  
  [Lilium: I thought so. I don't have much good advice for you; I'm sure you've already figured out with the sim mechanics that you're screwed. ]
  
  [Alice: Yeah. ]
  
  [Lilium: The only good news I can tell you is that this type of story is obviously intended to 'correct' a wayward recruit, who then falls in line and becomes a model soldier. So everything will be fine the next day unless you are having trouble marching, drilling, shooting, etc. You could quit. ]
  
  [Alice: No, all if it is pretty easy. Alright, fine, this is going to suck, though. ]
  
  The Protectron waddled into view and kept going on its patrol patron. The way Protectrons walked, Lily was always surprised they didn't often tip over and then get stuck, like a turtle that had been tipped over. She already had a little device in her hand; it looked like a small dongle that she might have seen plugged into a USB port to connect a wireless mouse or keyboard in her past life. She quietly approached the robot, stealth field on, lifted the robot's dust cover and plugged the device in. The Protectron froze and then looked as if it had grabbed a high-voltage power line as the automated hacking scripts quickly ripped past any meagre security software factory-default Protectrons had, elevated privileges and then shut the robot down.
  
  The other Protectrons circling the factory suddenly stopped, as they must have detected their compatriot drop off the network. Two of them turned and started heading to investigate their downed alley. ' Perfect,' Lily thought. That would leave an opening that she could sneak up on the last three one by one, rapidly. She triggered the stealth field and got to work.
  
  [Alice: Oh, that was unpleasant, even only feeling a third of the pain. For some reason, I had woken up face down, and they all wailed on my back and ass. ]
  
  [Lilium: Wouldn't that be better than the front? I would think smacks to the butt would hurt a lot less. ]
  
  [Alice: I've been trying to make you realise for a while that not everyone has a dump truck back there to pad everything like you do. Besides, your business partner probably pulls her swats. ]
  
  That cheeky bitch! Her derriere wasn't actually that oversized like her front was.
  
  [Lilium: You're not too old to get a swat if you keep that up! ]
  
  Shaking her head, she finished hacking the last Protectron. She restarted all of the Protectrons after resetting them to defaults and giving them new orders, which were the same as their old orders. New boss, same as the old boss!
  
  She considered sneaking through the front like a mook but decided it was the stupid move. There weren't all that many active robots in the game, but this was a robot factory. There could be dozens, for all she knew. She grabbed one of the things she had brought in her small backpack. They were spike attachments for her shoes and similar claw-type attachments for her wrists and hands. She took the designs from some ninja wall climbing gear she had seen in her past life, just using diamondoid spikes and claws to ensure it was very easy to sink into any building's exterior walls.
  
  Humming, she used the very sharp spikes and claws to scale the side of the building quickly like a little spider monkey. She got a message from the Apprentice while hanging off the wall.
  
  [Alice: You were right, everything is idyllic now. I'm playing along, but I'd like to give the mane who programmed that a blanket party. ]
  
  [Lilium: There is no way that they're still alive. Feel free to pause and go beat up the skeletons in the building upstairs if it will make you feel better. ]
  
  [Alice: That's not what I... you know what? Nevermind. You're too literal sometimes. This is kind of fun now. We're learning how to use regular Power Armour now. ]
  
  That was interesting. Power Armour infantry was equivalent to Special Forces, not issued to conscripts. Perhaps they had plans to build enough to have every infantry in the Army equipped with it in time? Probably right after they finished off China and became the world's hegemon.
  
  She skittered up and sideways around the top floor of the RobCo facility, peering through windows. It was mostly office spaces, but she finally found one window that had a line of sight into a large computer room. Bingo!
  
  She crawled through the busted-out window, triggering her stealth as she divested herself of her spikes and claws, repacking them carefully in her backpack. Being invisible was awesome!
  
  Her goal here at RobCo was looting mainly knowledge about RobCo's production processes, although she would definitely take all the robots and robot parts she could get her hands on. If the haul was worth it, she would swing back around when they were done looting the VSS building. If not, she would have the mobile robots slowly walk towards Megaton in a group. Protectrons walked very slowly, but a group of them should be enough to dissuade anyone from trying anything, and she could monitor their trek with her drones.
  
  She didn't know if this was merely an assembly building or if they fabricated some of their parts here themselves, but even if it was an assembly building and they didn't have the production method for quantum processors, she should at least find a lot of quality-control equipment and data. If she found a device that repaired quantum processors, then she could probably use that as a jumping-off point to build them herself, even if the process wasn't as fast as a true mass-production unit.
  
  Sitting at the terminal in front of the mainframe, she got to work.
  
  How interesting! RobCo used, internally, a private version of their business operating system, with a lot of their security vulnerabilities patched. That implied to Lily, at least, that they had known about said vulnerabilities and allowed them to continue to persist in their customer base for some reason. Perhaps so that they could use them themselves, if necessary?
  
  Dr House, what a naughty boy! That said, there have been two hundred years since the last update of any of Dr House's software, so it was stretching credulity to think that no additional vulnerabilities would have been discovered in that period, and sure enough, several were.
  
  Lily didn't know what the RobCo server widget did, but she had no need for it. Not counting the six Protectrons that she had already reprogrammed that were now off the record, there were ten additional Protectrons and two SentryBots that she shut down remotely. She was very happy that she didn't have to fight a SentryBot with nothing but a plasma rifle and a vibrosword. And now, she was the proud owner of two SentryBots of her very own! She had wanted her own little tanks since she had seen the Mechanist's, months ago.
  
  She definitely had to come back with the truck. SentryBots were a lot of things, but they weren't very good over open terrain. They had a tendency to overheat when moving long distances.
  
  Rather than peruse through the databanks on the mainframe now, she just slurped up the entire databank after pulling her auxiliary data cable from the base of her neck and connecting it to the mainframe and waiting some time for everything to transfer. She, herself, had a very respectable throughput, but the mainframe did not.
  
  One of the files she looked at was a site map for the facility, though. And it didn't look like they actually produced quantum processors here, but they did have a maintenance and quality assurance area for them. After the rest of the data finished downloading, she reeled her auxiliary cable back into the back of her neck and stood up. She'd need to go individually hack each of the disabled robots, visit the maintenance area and then visit the production floor.
  
  She wondered why this location had never been raided by the Brotherhood or anyone else. They only made Protectrons and Labourtrons at the factory here, and she supposed they were technically both a civilian product line, but realistically Protectrons were a deadly threat in the Wasteland. A couple of Protectrons could ensure the average person's safety very efficiently, almost no matter where they lived.
  
  Well, she wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, herself.
  
  She hacked all of the robots but ran into problems with one of the SentryBots. It was upstairs, near the factory manager's office, and at first, she had no idea how to get it to the ground level. The elevators were destroyed, and there was no way it could manage to navigate the stairs.
  
  Finally, she had it drive to one of the exterior walls and pulled out the vibrosword and activated it. The ultra-frequency sound would have been inaudible, aside from a soft hum, but to her, it was deafening until she carefully excluded that frequency range from her ears. Carefully, she cut out a SentryBot size hole in the side of the building, discovering an interesting fact about the vibroblade while doing so.
  
  She assumed it just used a constant high-frequency vibration to cut through things, but as she slid it through the thin concrete of the exterior wall, she heard the frequency change as the sword rotated through a number of frequencies. She wondered what it was doing or if it was malfunctioning until the sword settled on one specific frequency, and the cutting became much easier, and she realised what it was doing.
  
  It rotated through a number of frequencies in an attempt to search for the material's resonate frequency and then used a multiple of that frequency to tear the cement apart while cutting through it. The process was quite fast, and the same thing happened when she cut through thin steel rods of rebar in the side of the building, too; in that case, the blade shifted down frequencies almost into the infrasound range but dumped a lot more power into the vibrations to cut through the mild steel like it was fondu.
  
  Wow, she would not have thought about that. In a lot of ways, she was a simple person and had simple solutions to problems. The higher the frequency means more energy, all other things being the same. It was easy to get stuck in the trope that the more energy, the better, so she hadn't even considered attempting to build a variable-frequency oscillator into the vibroblades she had considered building, to say nothing about having it intelligently search for the resonate frequency of the material it was cutting through.
  
  Clearly, although Pre-War America had a lot of amazing technology, China was no slouch either.
  
  Kicking the wall segment, she backed up as it fell two stories to the ground before. Glancing at the SentryBot, she sighed. She didn't think this fall would totally destroy it, but she doubted very much it would be hunky-dory after it.
  
  The machine didn't want to roll out of a hole in the wall, and Lily didn't blame it, so she had to override its hazard navigation system to get it to drive itself through the hole and tumble down to the ground below. She heard a healthy crash and didn't immediately look out the hole, as she recalled SentryBots could explode with a lot of force.
  
  After a moment, she peeked out the window to see the SentryBot still mostly operational, except for having difficulty righting itself. Well, no matter; she would help with that later. These things really were extraordinarily sturdy.
  
  Turning around, she explored the quality assurance area of the factory floor next. There was a maintenance test, and repair jig for quantum processors like she was hoping, and next to it was a box of presumably defective processors that had been rejected on the assembly line that a worker was attempting to repair. She carefully disassembled the device, disconnected it from power and sat it with the box of defective processors for her to return.
  
  She was hoping to get a box of several thousand quantum processors on the factory floor, but apparently, RobCo practised a Just-In-Time production philosophy like Toyota because there were only about one hundred of them waiting in the assembly line unit installed in the Protectrons.
  
  Still.. that was an incredible find. Perhaps one of her most important lootings in some time, and enough to triple her cadre of robots. More robots not only meant more safety, but they meant more efficiency and speed in everything she did. If she had close to a hundred and fifty Kaytron-style robots, then she honestly didn't need to play pussy-foot so much with the Brotherhood or anyone else. Kaytrons were at least twice as effective in combat as a Protectron, perhaps more so if carefully supervised. There were at least half that many defective processors in the box in the QA area, too, if they could be fixed.
  
  Surprisingly, there were only enough laser parts to build another twenty Protectrons, but that was still a nice find too, but she felt that she would build a new series of Kaytron that utilised a plasma weapon. She didn't know if she could build that into the arm like normal and still have a usable hand, though, but she thought it was possible if she went for a plasma pistol-sized linear accelerator in the forearm.
  
  She was giddy with excitement, marking the location in the building of each cache of parts she was going to steal when they got back, then having all of her reprogrammed robots huddle together in the front of the building, providing self-protection and guarding the main entry point of the building.
  
  She'd need to use the small crane and wench that was attached to the rear of her truck to get the other SentryBot righted, for sure. She glanced at the Tenpenny Tower building off in the distance, wondering what the people who lived there were going to do and if they would change the name.
  
  Turning her stealth on, she began running back east back towards downtown D.C.
  
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  Unanticipated consequences
  "Just how are you going to take this system apart and put it back together again? It looks like spaghetti in here," Alice asked, her gaze sweeping across the floor, which was covered in various cables of one type or another. The girl had never had spaghetti before until Lily found some merchants who were trading pasta; now, she loved it, even if there weren't any tomatoes for sauce. There was butter and brahmin cheese, though, so it was still pretty good. But Lily would plan and conduct an Ocean's Eleven style heist for some marinara if any existed.
  
  After she "graduated" boot camp, she tried the Anchorage sim one more time and did a lot better but still got killed at the point where she was supposed to plant demolition charges on the artillery on the top of the cliffs. After that, she had had enough of a simulated reality for a while but claimed that she would beat it eventually. Lily was just glad that she was more dangerous and, therefore, less likely to be injured.
  
  Lily hummed, considering this a learning experience, "'ow would you do it, zhen, Apprentice?"
  
  "I guess I would put a label on each computer system, then make sure I recorded the memory of me disassembling everything and play that back in reverse when reassembling it," the girl said after sighing and considering the question for a moment.
  
  Lily nodded, "Zhat might work, but it sounds like a really awful experience when you put it back together." Then she explained her solution. There were four cable types, two power and two data. She was already in the process of printing simple and inert carbon-fibre dongles that would slide into each female port after unplugging a cable. Two for each cable. For example, the first cable she unplugged would be A-1, and there were two A-1 plugs.
  
  When she reassembled the device, she didn't plan on keeping it in this configuration. She wanted more pods in a single room, for example, so she would end up having to redesign some of it in any case. She'd probably hide the computers in the sub-basement and wire the pods in one of the floors of the hospital, so reusing the same cables themselves was probably not going to be an option. Still, a cable could only connect two things, and if she labelled the destination of each end of a cable the same designation, it would be easy to reassemble the system.
  
  But she stole the idea to label the servers. She'd use the same designation VSS used and label them the number the terminal called them to make future maintenance a lot easier.
  
  Meimei had been borderline OCD about cable management, and if Lily was still the same spider, she would have likely blown a resistor just sitting around this room without fixing it.
  
  A little while later, the Apprentice had a box of paired plugs, as did Lily. The girl asked, "It doesn't matter what I unplug first or what the label says so long as I put the same labelled plug on both ends of a cord, right?"
  
  "Precisely. Let's get started," Lily said.
  
  They drove through the gate of Megaton. Lily made sure the two SentryBots and sets of Power Armour were under tarps, with a rectangle frame so that they didn't just look like two SentryBots under tarps but kind of a crate.
  
  She had a lot to do as usual, but while running back to the VSS building from the RobCo factory, she got a message that there was a problem with her proposed fence construction project. She had remotely printed the plans and had a robot deliver them to Tombs, who in turn sent a message to Dr Taylor that Lily should contact him when she got back in town.
  
  She wondered what the problem was; hopefully, it wasn't a big deal. Spider Company, along with some of her robots, would provide security while Tombs' workers laboured outside the fence, so perhaps he just wanted some security guarantees? She was ready to start rolling out the fencing. She had settled on a height of five metres for the fence, and the chainlink weaving machine was operating correctly.
  
  She chose five metres because that was about the size of the perimeter fence, at least the surviving segments that weren't destroyed anyway, next to Fort Independence; she figured that a military base was an excellent emulation target.
  
  They pulled into her hangar, and Lily would have the truck unloaded and the loot delivered to the basement. She had surreptitiously tunnelled a sloping entrance to her sub-basement in her hangar, although it featured a ridiculous number of automated turret-based defences and was also rigged to be collapsed in on itself with command-detonated explosives if it was discovered and attacked.
  
  Now that she might have robots numbered in the hundreds, as a longer-term project, she intended to slowly burrow several tunnels several kilometres away from Megaton for covert entrances and exits, as well, if she could disguise them well enough. She could send robots on missions and recover them without the people of Megaton being the wiser.
  
  Wait, wasn't that what the Institute did with their force of robots? Well, it wasn't a terrible idea. They were just awful for being so evil with it. She could see a point where her entire infrastructure was underground too. She suspected with very high confidence that was where the Institute was, from what she had heard from the synth Natalie Turner. She'd suspect directly under the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, but they might have been smart enough to dig away from their historical location, especially if they had teleportation technology, so there was no real telling where they were, but it couldn't be too deep as Lily had quizzed the synth-woman about what the interior looked like.
  
  If it was too deep, the Institute would have to design independent life support into their residential construction, and Lily didn't detect hints of that from Natalie's stories. Although, she supposed it was possible that Natalie didn't notice or that the Institute's life support technology was way ahead of what Lily thought it would look like, so that wasn't proof either way.
  
  As for her own depths, she was digging out her third level now and building the interior on the second; she was up to three robotic tunnel-boring machines operating twenty-four-seven and would have had more if she hadn't run into problems disposing of all the excavated dirt and also run out of ruby lasing rods.
  
  She intended to continue excavating for the foreseeable future, down at least until the point where the ambient geothermal energy proved too dangerous or costly to dissipate with her available cooling technology. So in practice, probably only about two and a half kilometres at most. At that point, she would have to design her habitats like they were a space station, as a closed system with integrated life support. Fancy ventilation from the surface wouldn't cut it.
  
  After reaching that maximum depth, she would just shift to moving horizontally. Although, now that she had the workforce to potentially send some on missions outside Megaton, she would stop digging down now, temporarily, in order to dig horizontally, both to give robots a way in and out as well as to give her a way to more easily and covertly dispose of the fill, the dirt and rock she was excavating.
  
  She was already having trouble disposing of it. She had reached a point where she couldn't recycle it all as fast as it could be produced, not by any means. That was the main reason she built the passageway in the hangar, to covertly load dirt and rock into. She'd been having some of the Spider Company drive it out of Megaton several times a day, dumping the dirt somewhere where it wouldn't be immediately obvious. She had to chop part of the bed off of the truck and reinstall it with a hydraulic dump-truck mechanism after the third day; otherwise, it took the poor recruits hours to complete the task with shovels.
  
  She wasn't fooling anyone, she already knew everyone in town knew she was doing some excavating, but she was pretty sure she was fooling them on the scale and speed of it. She had also begun using seismographic technology and ground penetrating radar and sonar to map out directions for her efforts, and she now planned to dedicate one boring machine to exclusively creating a tunnel to what appeared to be a great void underground. She suspected it was a large underground cavern, and if so, she could dispose of her excavated dirt there for many months and maybe go spelunking. It was too close to the surface to be an aquifer, thankfully.
  
  At least long enough to get other surreptitious entrances set up to her underground domain. There were three old abandoned quarries to the west in Virginia within ten kilometres. The closest one was only six kilometres away, directly to the west, in the middle of the barren Wasteland. She could slowly fill up over a period of years, not months, and it would make a good secret entrance for any missions in that direction too.
  
  Lily emerged from the RV and told the Apprentice, "Okay, I'll close zhe doors behind us. I'll have zhe robots unload zhemselves and work on moving zhe servers downstairs."
  
  "Okay, I'm going to go check on the rugrats, bye!" Alice told her, speaking rapidly and was already running out the door, headed to the hospital proper. Hmm, that had probably been the longest she had been away from her siblings in some time, perhaps ever. How sweet.
  
  "What do you mean it won't be acceptable? Automated turrets every thirty metres, light poles every ten!" Lily complained to Tombs at his kitchen table, then she took a shot of whatever engine degreaser the man and his wife served her every time she came over.
  
  She made a moue, although whether it was from the drink's taste or what he was telling her, she didn't disclose.
  
  Mr Tombs chuckled and said, "Yeah, that does sound nice. But a raider sniper could set up a klick or two away and take potshots at anyone walking down the street. Also, it just doesn't look sturdy. The security fence is about appearances as much as anything else, you know. I'm just telling you what the city will say; there's no way they'll let you dismantle the old fence after building your new one."
  
  Lily did know that. Megaton's security fence was porous as hell already and made of scavenged metal from a nearby airport. It was almost entirely security theatre, but she thought that a new, modern-looking fence with actual defences might look better. She certainly thought it would look better and knew it would work better.
  
  Lily pinched her glabella for a moment before sighing, "What would you say would be needed to make it acceptable?"
  
  Tombs shrugged, "A metal or concrete wall behind it. Both to block the view and to give a secondary barrier. I'd suggest concrete since you've been supplying some cement to me."
  
  'But the fence now doesn't have a secondary barrier,' Lily thought churlishly to herself.
  
  "Only in small amounts to secure posts and other zhings into zhe ground," Lily said with a sigh, "I 'ave to create zhe quicklime, the calcium oxide, for the cement myself, and although I 'ave a lot of elemental calcium, I'm not set up for industrial production." She shook her head several times, "It's impossible. I just 'ave too many zhings on my plate to add something else like zhis to manage on top of it."
  
  Tombs shrugged, "So give someone the ingredients and teach them how to do it. I doubt you care about making caps in the concrete business, so you wouldn't care if some guys did start making it industrially."
  
  She considered that. No, she didn't particularly care. She wouldn't be willing to guarantee these people calcium forever, though. Not blanketly, even if she never really intended to stop excavating. But calcium was a minority of what she was recycling from the excavated dirt, and she had been accumulating tons and tons of it, and it was one of the more annoying things she had to store, as it was very reactive with air and water.
  
  She had to create special air-tight barrels and then flush out all the oxygen with a noble gas, nitrogen in her case. It would be really nice to get rid of some of it. She didn't dispose of it because it was hazardous just to dispose of. The process of oxidising it to create calcium oxide, lime, was pretty simple, and she could teach pretty much anyone to do it, even in industrial quantities.
  
  In fact, she had all of the four materials that cement was made out of, and in large quantities. She wasn't sure about the additional gravel that was added to cement to make concrete; that would be up to them. Maybe she could point them to the sites she had Spider Company dump all the dirt and rocks she excavated; the boring machine didn't make it gravel-sized, but she bet there was a lot of gravel there regardless. She'd be willing to supply them if she could get free concrete herself.
  
  "Okay. I could do that. Do you have anybody you know zhat would be interested in starting zheir own business? I don't 'ave any properties zhey could use, though," Lily said, finally. She only had two warehouses, one was already being used, and she wanted to save the other. The rest of the properties she owned were either residential or light commercial, for example, she owned a number of single-family dwellings, two much smaller apartment buildings and what was once a convenience store. None of which was in very good shape, although she was renovating at least one of the single-family homes as a possible safe house for the Railroad if they ever came back.
  
  Tombs nodded, "I reckon I do. One of my team leads has been wanting to move on to bigger and better things. I bet I could help him get set up in exchange for a small piece. Do some venture capitalism, ya know? Concrete and even just cement is a salable commodity and difficult to find in the Wasteland."
  
  "Alright, fine. I'll make some simple industrial equipment to create zhe cement, but zhey will need to find a source of gravel for the aggregate to create concrete zhemselves. I'll also provide the ingredients for cement; in exchange, I want one 'alf of all concrete produced for free," Lily said, putting her cards on the table.
  
  Tombs hummed as he considered that and then nodded, "One-half is a lot, but since you're providing almost everything but the labour, it is fair. But that one half is only for what you provide; if they can get their own sources of limestone or whatever, they don't have to provide you anything, okay?"
  
  Lily nodded. She might need to set up a second heavy-duty recycler. Their power station had the capability of producing twenty megawatts of power now, which was a lot more than anyone was using. Plus, she wanted to use Madison Li's plans to build an actual commercial fusion power station somewhere in the future.
  
  She didn't really care about making money off electricity; in fact, she would prefer it if it was almost free. Electricity, being energy, was one of those "build it and they will come" types of things in the world. With almost free energy, there would be an innumerable number of innovative uses devised for it. She wouldn't be able to do that with just the little power systems she had built so far.
  
  Providing a ton of energy for the city was the fastest way she could reintroduce civilisation and innovation in the city. Who knew what businesses and services might spring up that were previously impossible due to the unavailability or price of electricity? Sometimes Lily didn't have the best imagination, she was too literal a lot of the time, but she would like to see it when it happened.
  
  If she was going to have to make a secondary concrete barrier, then there was no need to go halfway. She would work up a second set of plans, extending the city further several blocks, also including a seven or eight-hectare plot poking out where she could start construction on an actual fusion power station. It might take a year to build or more, but it would be worth it if she could run several of the 400-megawatt reactors to produce power in the gigawatts.
  
  She'd definitely need to start building another heavy-duty recycler, no, at least two to supply enough calcium for the industrial production of cement.
  
  After bidding Mr and Mrs Tombs adieu, she started walking back to the hospital. Thinking about the possible future power station, she considered three reactors would be sufficient. Then, when she did the math, she paused and then started laughing.
  
  "One point twenty-one GIGAWATTS?! Great Scott!" she yelled in her best Christopher Lloyd impression.
  
  Five days later, she was amusing herself with nothing important, basically taking a break when she received an alert from her Muse, as well as heard a radio call from her men, reporting they were under attack.
  
  Eyebrows raising to her scalp, she pulled up the link her Muse provided, which was a real-time image of three squads of her Spider Company guarding about twenty of Mr Tombs' workers outside the wall; they were beginning to install the fence. She wouldn't be getting any concrete for two weeks, minimum, but she figured that with the fence constructed, it would be much easier to install the second concrete barrier as well as the turrets and light poles.
  
  They were being attacked by a group of raiders, about thirty strong, which outnumbered them slightly. However, Spider Company had the advantage of having a team of five Kaytrons supporting them as well. Lily ran to her room upstairs, while sending a transmission only to the three squad leaders, using her text-to-speech function, "Squad leaders, zhis is zhe Commander. Prioritise zhe defence of the non-combatants, use zhe vehicle for cover and sacrifice zhe robots if necessary. Squads two and five are being rousted as a quick reaction force, but ETA is one zero mikes."
  
  She got a quick reply from three sources acknowledging her orders. She didn't know, particularly, if those were good orders or not, given the situation. She wasn't, by trade or interest, a commander of men in battle. Most of her experiences in battles always involved just herself, and they almost always were the result of her surprising others. Meimei was, almost by definition, an ambush predator. However, the three squads seemed to be moving with a purpose now instead of just reacting, so she felt that was good.
  
  She grabbed a set of normal combat armour and put it on rapidly. Her first instinct was to respond in her Power Armour, but not only did she want to keep that secret, but it would be difficult to get through the security fence unless she just demolished it like the Kool-Aid man.
  
  After getting the armour put on over her clothes, she grabbed her tribeam rifle and ran down the stairs. She just leapt out of the second-story window and began flat-out running to the south, where the first segment of the fence was being constructed.
  
  She could already hear the reports from small arms, as well as the distinctive crack of electrolasers ionising the air as they fired as soon as she jumped out of her hospital. She could run pretty fast these days, and people on the street had definitely noticed her, as they were looky-looing at the gunshots just outside the fence. Well, they would probably get a good eyeful of this, then.
  
  So long ago, she had asked the Apprentice how to improve tibias and fibulas, and Lily was hoping the girl would suggest shock-absorbing, as that was what she had built into her legs. Spring-like shock absorption. However, if operated in reverse, if she powered the mechanism to begin coiling the springs, she could temporarily reduce herself by five centimetres of height and then, at command, get a spring-assisted jump.
  
  She did so, combining it with a leap of her own. She didn't quite clear the fence, but she jumped way higher than any unaugmented human had a right to do so, and she scrambled up and leapt over the top of the fence shortly after. She already had targets designated, sharing a feed with the Kaytrons who were firing aimed, accurate shots at the enemy. She began firing her weapon even in her parabolic arc of free-fall. Really, her men were handling things adequately. The raiders had kicked an iron plate, and even before Lily had arrived, it looked like the Raiders were considering retreating, but she would make their decision a lot easier.
  
  What heavy weapons the Raiders had had been expended on the robots, with three of the Kaytrons down. The raiders started turning to run right away, which surprised her. She didn't think she was that scary, but maybe she was. In any event, her appearing with accurately aimed shots at the raiders must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, and the raiders that were still alive began to rout, running back the way they came.
  
  "Two squads pursue, try to take prisoners if it is safe and efficient to do so. One stays to protect zhe workers and wounded," Lily digitised to the three squad leaders, leaving it up to them to pick which squad stayed. They knew which ones were most combat-effective, and Lily wouldn't micro-manage.
  
  Lily had a specific man she wanted to take into custody, herself, but that was a secondary objective to providing medical assistance. It looked like six of her recruits were casualties, with two KIA for sure. That deeply angered her, at least as much as she could get angry anyway, which sort of surprised her. She knew that her mercenary force would take casualties when she got the idea to make them; it was naive to assume they wouldn't. Still, she was feeling somewhat possessive and protective.
  
  She ran over to the wounded men and began providing medical attention. If she could stabilise these men quickly, she would attempt to take into custody the suspicious-looking man that had been watching the raiders attack Megaton, especially considering her surveillance indicated that this was a coordinated assault from both the west and south as well.
  
  Sheriff Simms was pinned down at the main Megaton gate. However, the two squads of Spider Company that were off duty were already leaving their barracks in a flat run to the gate of Megaton. She digitised a report to their two squad leaders, informing both of them of the situation and ordering them to put themselves under the command of the Sheriff when they arrived at the gate.
  
  With that, she pulled out the medical kit at her waist and got to work saving the lives of these warriors.
  
  James 'Raptor' Novak watched the last of the rabble get mopped up by a rather professional-looking team that solely utilised energy weapons. They had identical uniforms and armour, and identical weapons. It was clearly a military force, although there was nothing in his briefing about any new force at the Megaton government's disposal, so chances were that they were part of the secondary target's forces.
  
  Especially since the hospital owner had non-standard bipedal robots that might be combat models, which was clearly the case as five of those robots accounted for nearly half the casualties of the raiders. Rather disproportionate, he felt. They fired the same unusual blue energy beams as the soldier's SMG-sized weapons.
  
  The briefing did indicate that the secondary target, a hospital, had dedicated "security guards", but this was a bit beyond that. Their training and bearing left a lot to be desired, but they were making up for their deficiencies with their excellent equipment. The Commander would be interested in this report, for sure.
  
  He felt the raiders would have done better, but a blonde woman leapt over the Megaton fence like it was nothing and started picking off leaders with a laser rifle that fired similar blue beams as the robots. The description matched the secondary target. Wasn't she supposed to be a doctor or something? Whatever, it wasn't his problem anymore. He stretched his muscles; it wouldn't do to get a cramp after laying here for an hour.
  
  Yeah, these raiders were fucked. Welp, it was time to get while getting was good. His part in this op seemed to be an utter failure, but hopefully, the other attacks were producing better results. Talon Company had been paid well for this attack on this city, and although Commander Jabsco informed everyone that the raiders they were using should be mopped up afterwards, assuming any survived, he hoped they did at least enough damage so that the client wouldn't bitch at them at the cost.
  
  Placing his expensive binoculars in their carrying case, he got up and started walking down the stairs of the ruined building he was using as an observation post.
  
  However, some movement caught his eye and suddenly, in pain, his body started spasming, and he fell over onto the ground bonelessly, and he lay there twitching. He had seen a flash of blue from his peripheral vision. He could still move his eyes, for the most part, and he saw that blonde-haired woman approaching him.
  
  Fuck.
  
  After securing the unknown man in dark black combat armour, she made her way back to her men so that they could take all of the prisoners into custody. She didn't actually have a donjon, but she was going to make an improvised version.
  
  Not only did she intend to test the VSS brain scanning device on all of the enemy survivors, but she was considering using them as experimental test subjects more generally. She had a couple of genetic brain therapies she had devised from her studies of both FEV and the study of Gary's brain. The only problem was that there was no way brain therapy like she intended would ever be reversible.
  
  The way neurons were created, and new paths and connections created in the brain weren't predictable, and any "reversing" would just be inflicting brain damage on the person, whether it was selective brain damage or not.
  
  It wasn't like there was a Geneva convention around these parts, after all.
  
  After double-checking that her injured were stabilised, she told them to take the wounded to the hospital and the prisoners to their barracks for the present time. She was already fabricating diamond bars she could use to make temporary jail cells in the first subbasement level.
  
  This was the first mass casualty incident that her hospital would respond to. Dr Taylor, who was on duty today, already requested she and Bonesaw come in on their days off to assist. Judging from the scale of the assault, even the Apprentice might be doing unsupervised surgeries, even if it was only minor things like cleaning and suturing wounds.
  
  It looked like Sheriff Timms, with the assistance of her forces, had managed to push back the men assaulting the main gate, but the raiders in the west had penetrated the west security fence and were currently wreaking havoc in the west side of town.
  
  She leapt on top of the truck the Spider Company were using to transport Tombs' men and their equipment and then gave another leap and cleared the Megaton fence completely this time, rolling and sticking her superheroine-style landing for the first time. Awesome!
  
  She glanced around but scowled when she realised nobody had seen the feat.
  
  Sighing, she jogged back to the hospital. Sounded like today was going to be a long day. She wondered what triggered this mass coordinated assault. Hopefully, she would find out by the expedient method of downloading the memories of those responsible.
  
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  I will never waste you
  Despite hiring Talon to carry out an attack for him, Burke didn't stay around to see whether it was successful or unsuccessful. After his nominal boss had been transformed into tomato paste on top of Tenpenny Tower, his intuition had told him it was time to get out of town.
  
  Having listened to his intuition countless times during his long career as an Enlightened agent, he was already pushing west into Dominion territory as the attack took place, along with most of Alistair Tenpenny's liquid wealth.
  
  After meeting with the Dominion bureau chief, he would move north into Ontario and east back home. His heart went out to the poor bastard working the Dominion desk. Until recently, his job in the Capital Wasteland almost took care of itself. In contrast to most post-war tyrannies, the religious fanatics in what was once Ohio stabilised the situation, which was contraindicated, but their actual resources to throw monkey wrenches were somewhat limited. The Enlightened's primary means of action were catspaws, raiders, and mercenaries, none of which were abundant in Cleaveland.
  
  Tenpenny was a fool, and he had been his minder as well as the bureau chief for the Capital Wasteland for the last two years. A long assignment, but his superiors felt that the man could be useful in keeping the status quo just how they liked it. By sending a signal off a pre-war satellite in geostationary orbit, he had already informed them of his change of status and received coded orders to return for reassignment.
  
  It was about time for him to be rotated out, in any event. At least, he thought so! DC was a terrible place to live.
  
  When Alice found out that Lily was going to experiment on her prisoners, she protested, but Lily forced her to watch some of the memories they had downloaded, not even very many, which kept her from complaining. At times, Lily felt that the girl was extremely naive. What world did she think she was living in?
  
  Each brain scan was saved by Lily. After parsing the machine's memory format, she realised that the memories were not exactly, one hundred per cent duplicated, but a normal human wasn't expected to have perfect memories, anyway. In addition, she would not call the machine an ego bridge. It was more accurate to describe a person as their neural network rather than the sum of their own memories, even though she often said the latter in the past as a way to simplify a complex topic.
  
  It was true that some parts of your neural network could be safely excised and replaced with more efficient hardwired programming. Identifying the brain area responsible for math, for instance, was easy. It would be possible to physically remove that part of the brain from your head and replace it with a computer that, as long as it interacted correctly with the rest of your brain, would give you super-math abilities. That was the basis of both many types of cybernetics and pure bioware, as well.
  
  Other things, such as language, followed the same pattern. Nonetheless, there were areas of the brain that were neither involved in memories nor in "mechanical processes" abilities that were still essential to consciousness, personality, or decision-making.
  
  For digitisation to work, you must get a neuron-to-neuron map, not leaving a single axon out, so that the ego will run correctly in an emulator.
  
  But for her purposes, these were sufficient. There was a lot of value in all of them; she would keep them all. She was able to use them to create NPCs in her sims, either entirely or by chopping and pasting memories from various sources to create an amalgamation. In addition to reassembling the SIM pod, she had also replaced all data cables with fibre optic cables, but she had to create an interface device for each end; basically, a router or dongle that would convert from the optical data signals back into the electrical data signals each device expected.
  
  The pods she would create herself wouldn't need that and would feature fibre optic digital connections fully, but she wasn't ready to rebuild the entire supercomputing cluster just yet when she barely got it functional in the first place, but she expected to start on that project in a few days.
  
  As far as her prisoner's current status, a genetic therapy derived from Gary's unique genome was being tested on half of the prisoners, and the special proteins she observed in an active FEV infection were being tested on the other half, which Lily hypothesised would accelerate brain and neuron development. She had already conducted animal tests on cloned rabbits for these latter proteins. She had finally created a cell-free protein synthesis setup to make some of these proteins in small quantities.
  
  As she cloned the rabbits directly into adolescence, it was a little hard to tell how much intelligence boost the rabbits had. They were rather derpy without the accumulated memories of growing up. However, her attempts to test the animals' baseline cognition through mazes and other similar methods of testing animal cognition clearly showed an improvement compared to the control cohort for the protein cohort, so she was rather optimistic about the four raiders.
  
  Having never tested Gary's empathy before, she wasn't sure how she would do it; might changing their housing arrangements bring the prisoners closer together so that they could interact more? On the other hand, she had enough quantum processors to build out a number of brain interfaces. She could possibly forcibly install them on the Gary-cohort and then use them to monitor their sensorium to see if there was any detectable empathy.
  
  She chose the worst of the prisoners for the Gary cohort because she did not intend to let any of them leave alive. Honestly, if it wasn't for discovering that the VSS brain scanner could also erase a person's memories, she probably would not even let those lesser monsters of the protein cohort leave either, as they would have very interesting stories about being forced to take obvious IQ tests.
  
  Although she tried her best in cognition testing with the prisoners, she was pretty sure that she wouldn't get a lot of useful data about the actual intelligence boost from the prisoners; forcing someone to take an IQ test was difficult. However, she was mainly interested in the overall safety of the treatment. If she felt it was safe, she could use her traditional volunteers, although she wouldn't be able to reverse the treatment at all.
  
  As for the Talon mercenary operative, well, he actually seemed very competent, and she didn't feel it was safe to keep him confined long-term, so she had shot him in the head after verifying that the memory download was successful and reviewing some of his memories by loading him as an NPC in the developer mode of the sim.
  
  In spite of the fact that he was a psychopath, Lily didn't hold that against him since she, herself, also had certain non-typical thinking patterns and motivations. However, from what the AI impersonator said when she told it to describe itself, the man was entirely untrustworthy. There wasn't a group that he worked for or with in the past that he either hadn't betrayed in some manner or planned to. He had some manner of impulse control disorder. In the same way kleptomaniacs could not resist stealing, so could he not resist betraying those who trusted him.
  
  Her initial plan was to turn him and get a long-term mole inside this mysterious Talon mercenary company, but he wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation of double treachery, just like Alice couldn't resist the temptation of double cheese on her pasta.
  
  As a result, she shot him in the head. In her eyes, he was neither a good guy nor useful to her. When it came to a person who had previously attacked her, she might be able to tolerate one of those things but not both.
  
  Lily got out of the simulation pod and stripped out of the neural stimulation suit before putting her clothes back on. She had a duty shortly that she did not look forward to. Her injured soldiers were out of the hospital, including one that had a new pair of cybernetic eyes and one that had a new leg prosthesis, both wounded from the couple of missile launchers the raiders had.
  
  Now that they were on light duty, there was a memorial service for the two that had been killed in action. She didn't even need her social assistant, which she was leaning less on these days, to tell her it was expected that she should say a few words.
  
  Lily glanced between the gathered men and their five squad leaders. She wasn't entirely sure what she was going to say, which was stupid of her. She should have prepared a speech beforehand instead of attempting to speak contemporaneously. She stood straight and took a breath.
  
  Still, she said, "I did not know Jacob and William very well, except as two young men with a lot of promise. I would not 'ave brought zhem on board if I did not believe zhat about them or about all of you. I 'ave told each and every one of you that this is a dangerous job, and regrettably, both Jacob and William 'ave paid zhe ultimate price."
  
  She placed her hands behind her back, in a casual parade rest, drawing on her memories of being an NCO in the Army to continue, "'owever, I also told you, and I stand behind zhis, zhat as dangerous as this job is, it is equally rewarding. You all saved a lot of lives zhe other day. Not only those you were charged to protect but zhe innocent men, women and children of Megaton itself. Maybe your sisters, parents, or sweethearts. You can feel proud of that achievement, and I believe both Jacob and William would feel proud of zhat as well."
  
  Lily brought her hand from behind her back and coughed into it before continuing, "You have taken my shilling, so now you must fight my battles. Zhat is the story of zhe soldier that is older zhan time itself, and it will never change. I cannot promise you zhat I will never send you into dangerous situations again because I tell you now that I will. But know zhis, while I will use you, I will never waste you. "
  
  Lily saw the mass of them stand up straighter as if they were proud? A quick check with her social assistant agreed with that; they appeared to be proud. But, while she believed most of what she said, she was just spouting some bullshit that came to her mind because, honestly, she found these types of interactions very confusing. William and Jacob couldn't feel anything, let alone satisfaction, about their job protecting Megaton because they were both dead. But she felt that this was one of those cases where a white lie social strategy was called for.
  
  Ignoring what she was feeling and thinking, she continued, "Starting in a week, we will be incorporating some advanced technology into your training regimen, one squad at a time. I expect zhis will provide excellent benefits for your training, survival and combat effectiveness. We will also be providing specialised training for medics, which we will include with each squad, as I feel zhat is a deficiency that needs to be addressed. If you feel you are interested in this opportunity, please let your squad leader know. Squad leaders, I'll expect nominees for this training on my desk no later than Monday at 0600. Let me tell you now, zhat I intend for Spider Company to become a world-class fighting force, and I 'ave confidence that each and every one of you will become world-class badasses."
  
  She glanced briefly into the eyes of everyone present before moving to the next. Finally, she said, "Dismissed to your squads. Squad leaders, as you were."
  
  Despite not being in uniform, she did a good about-face and stalked off. Considering she didn't have a uniform, she kept things somewhat relaxed with her men-at-arms when it came to military discipline. Also, because they didn't really know it very well, except the absolute basics.
  
  She hummed as she walked off. She had to get a better rank structure. She just had recruits, squad leaders and her. She had about a company's worth of men, but no real officers, and no company-level NCOs, either. It wasn't sustainable.
  
  As she planned on having her men work side by side with robots, who would be the real grunts, it was especially unsustainable. For her men to be able to command a small fire team of robots in the future, even the lowest rank would need to be equal to a Corporal in terms of skill and leadership qualities.
  
  Additionally, she would need to come up with some kind of decoration as soon as possible. A few men who went above and beyond in the battle against the raiders deserved to be honoured.
  
  By the time next Monday had rolled around, Lily had already gotten all the data she had needed from the test subjects of the Gary cohort. She had gone ahead and installed a brain implant in each of them, and in two of them, she had detected definite neural activity that was similar to Gary in the new brain structure that was grown while simultaneously detecting unusual waveforms in the part of the brain that was correlated with emotion when the subject was in the presence of another person that was experiencing intense emotion.
  
  Although she took this as a positive sign, she had no idea why she only succeeded fifty per cent of the time. Even so, she didn't really know what else to test other than ensuring there were no long-term effects of the treatment, which she wasn't willing to do with this batch of subjects. For the purpose of ending their experiment, she used the medichines to cause instant cardiac arrest in the subjects' bodies.
  
  Over a fifteen-point improvement in measurable IQ was observed in all the other four, on average. That was an improvement of one standard deviation! Granted, all of them were below the mean in the first place, so a larger improvement was not that surprising. In addition, she had no idea what the fact that they had given up and cooperated with the testing the second time around had contributed to.
  
  Having reviewed the memories of these last four raiders similarly to the Talon mercenary, she selected only two to release. She would roll the two she would not release into a small two-man Gary cohort before disposing of them. The two she would release were left unconscious in an abandoned building with a few caps and notes saying that their families missed them after she erased their memories, not only of the last week but also the entire few months they were part of the raider group.
  
  They were a pair of brothers, and hopefully, they would take the hint and return home. Before they fell into that raider group, neither of them was a particularly bad boy.
  
  A room filled with ten identical dark grey pods occupied a significant amount of space on the fourth floor as Alice exited the elevator and approached her, bringing her out of her reverie. Even with improvements, such as integrated life support on each pod, it wasn't difficult to incorporate multiple pods into the simulation. From the start, VSS intended to network multiple pods in a single simulation, so multiplayer functionality was already in place.
  
  Although she could include fewer NPCs with more participants, with ten participants, she had space for over seventy-five impersonator AIs and innumerable simple NPCs.
  
  That was a lot more than either sim scenario had used. Lily had duplicated the basic training sim, except changed it to take place in the Wasteland and Megaton, taken from both the memories of her prisoners and of herself.
  
  While she hadn't put her own head into that brain scanner, it was pretty easy to upload segments of her sensorium packaged in the data format that the simulator expected. She used these the most for the city, as they were in very high resolution and made everything look slightly more real.
  
  Changing all of the scripts for the Drill Sergeant wasn't difficult. While his vast experience in training recruits would still be beneficial, he would not use so much scripted patriotism. When she deleted all of the scripted jingoistic bits, he dialed that way down. It only took a few scripts to change references to America to Spider Company, and a few quick run-throughs seemed to do the trick.
  
  She scrapped almost the entire story elements that VSS had written into basic training, as they seemed needlessly dramatic or added for propaganda purposes, but the same general skills would be taught to the same levels of proficiency.
  
  "Dr St. Claire, the first squad, is ready," the Apprentice reported. In order to ensure her men's comfort, Lily made certain each pod was fully stocked with saline and medichines. Their individual vital signs would be monitored by a computer, but she would receive an alert if there was any issue beyond a number of set threshold values.
  
  "Alright, go ahead and bring zhem in. Are you OK to start zhem up yourself, or do you want some 'elp?" asked Lily
  
  Alice shook her head, "Should be fine. We've already tested these new pods and the new suits, just this time, we're doing it ten at a time." She shrugged and then grinned, "I'll have them meeting the Drill Sergeant in no time!"
  
  Lily nodded. She intended to create a number of different simulation scenarios as well. At the present time, the underlying realism wasn't sufficient for conducting medical training, but Lily felt she could make some changes to make wounds act in a realistic manner, both in getting them and in treating them.
  
  If that happened, she could not only make a simple couple of week medic course for her men, but Alice could benefit from a simulation of every likely surgical procedure that she would likely see as a journeyman doctor in the Wasteland. That would take months, maybe years, to complete, but it would be very helpful not just for the Apprentice but for anyone who wanted to learn practical medicine in the apocalypse.
  
  Humming to herself tonelessly, she took the elevator down to the basement, which was bristling with robots and automated defences. The bastion level served as access control for the sub-basement complex. There were two test subjects that needed to undergo the experimental Gary treatment. Perhaps these two would prove more enlightening than the others.
  
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  You Can Only Hang a Man Once
  Almost seven months had passed since Lily's discussion with Miller; it was already December again, 2275 this time, by the time his group suddenly showed up in Megaton about a week ago with a half dozen large trucks and guards in Power Armour. His group was the talk of the town for a whole week! Several months ago, she got confirmation that he was going to do so and his request to acquire and start building the lower levels of his "bank building", as they had discussed.
  
  She had already done so, excavating the four sub-levels below one of the larger buildings in the "downtown" area of Megaton that she had bought on her own after he had left town. She bought it in anticipation of his need, but she would have found some use for it if Miller had backed out of their arrangement.
  
  Instead of shipping excavation equipment overground in the middle of the city to make it obvious what she was doing, she had performed the excavation through a connection with her own underground infrastructure. Now that it was confirmed that he would purchase it from her, she would wall up and disconnect the area from her own tunnels and refill the tunnels she had dug behind her.
  
  Miller and about fifty of his friends and family moved in, and they had quickly turned the above-ground building into a bank that wouldn't look out of place from a Pre-War film, complete with bank tellers and everything. Honestly, they had probably used Pre-War films to get an idea of what a bank should look like.
  
  She had visited them and almost peed herself laughing when she saw Grace and Big John in Pre-War suits acting as security. Grace looked quite fetching in men's clothes, especially classy ones, Lily thought, but Big John looked ill at ease and out of place. They had already begun minting coins underground, with the machines she had built months ago, but it would take some time before they had a sufficient amount so as to introduce them as a currency. For the moment, nobody at Megaton knew what to expect from this new group of oddities. Bankers? The idea seemed ludicrous.
  
  Another new face to town was the synth-woman named Natalie. She arrived just two months ago and, apparently, she got a promotion of sorts and was responsible for a number of things in the Capital wasteland, such as ensuring a number of placed synths had a safe life, as well as being Lily's point of contact.
  
  Lily intended to talk with her some more as she found the synthetic woman fascinating, but she didn't stay around very long after Lily presented her with the fully refurbished safe house and fifty plasma rifles and over four hundred micro-fusion cells. Lily carefully constructed these weapons to look indistinguishable from Pre-War manufacture, with similar serial numbers and even with simulated wear and tear on the cosmetic features of each weapon so that they wouldn't be suspicious if examined by the mysterious Institute.
  
  As soon as she saw them, she immediately arranged some trusted assistants and a truck and started driving directly back north to the Commonwealth, but she promised she would return. The woman barely stayed in town for three or four days.
  
  In the past seven months, Lily's workers had completed the new wall on the entire east side of Megaton, along with the new gate into and out of the city. The gate proved more popular than the southern one and had been operating for almost six months. It didn't take long for her to get contracts to replace both the north and south segments of the wall, either, and for symmetry's sake, she had paid for the replacement of the west side wall out of her own pocket, which just finished the other day.
  
  Now Megaton was enclosed by a complete security fence and concrete barricade with turrets and lighted exterior lights across the entire perimeter. She had to come to an agreement with the city as to the disposition of the "extra land" that she had included in the walls, effectively increasing the size of the city. Instead of being able to claim it all, an auction arrangement was set up, and she got to keep one-fifth of the proceeds, with the rest going to the city. Kind of annoying, but she got all of the parcels of land that she wanted in the auction anyway.
  
  The city was safer than ever, though. They hadn't actually seen any raider attacks on the city since the north and south wall segments had been completed, as that allowed both Sheriff Simms and herself to focus patrols heavily on the west side. She also didn't allow the situation to repeat where she was surprised about a raider attack, despite having overhead surveillance, either. The fact that she had aerial drones was a secret, but the last three raider attacks on the city happened to be, by pure chance, intercepted by either the city's Sheriff or her Spider Company before reaching the walls, and those were usually only three or four raiders strong.
  
  The turrets, instead of her original design that had only electrolasers, featured upsized copies of the combination electromagnetic/levitation railguns as well as heavy plasma casters, in addition to the electrolaser for short-range non-lethal takedowns. The railguns had an effective range of over five kilometres, and they could target both ground and air targets, as there was an integrated network of air defence radar stations with resolution fine enough even to target inbound missiles spread across the walls of the city.
  
  The quality of many of the buildings in town had started to improve slowly as well, as the people who made her concrete and cement were entitled to sell half of it on the open market, and the new building material was quickly making itself known. It wasn't as though cement or concrete was unknown before, but they were definitely unknown in large quantities. You couldn't even really use scavenged pre-war cement, as, over time, it would reconstitute into something like a single rock, so you would have to completely crush it up back into a fine powder to use, so it wasn't a popular building material until now.
  
  She had been worried about what the Enclave would do when it became clear that Megaton was a hard target, as they did still have access to orbital satellites with nuclear weapons, which she hadn't managed to subvert with her nascent space program just yet. However, in one of the only broadcasts that even mentioned Megaton, President Eden seemed to approve of it, implying that Megaton would become an invaluable asset to the future of the United States of America.
  
  Remembering that Eden was both insane and intended to kill everyone in the wasteland through the application of bioweapons, she realised that he was content to let her build up valuable infrastructure, for now, thinking that he and his Enclave would just mosey on in after everyone was all dead.
  
  It was the Brotherhood that was giving her actual problems. As soon as it became obvious that she was building a full-sized fusion power station, and it wasn't exactly possible to hide due to the large condenser towers, she immediately started getting pushback from a certain segment of their Paladins. Them suddenly showing up in Megaton and demanding she stop or demanding she give control of the project over to them, and now it was apparently coming to a head now with an attack on the site today.
  
  She had long since fixed her deficiencies that allowed actual raider attacks to be missed by her surveillance platforms, so she saw the attack coming a couple of hours ago and had all of the workers on the project evacuated. A group of about twenty-five Power Armour infantry had been approaching for a couple of hours from D.C., and just a little while ago, a Vertibird was seen approaching from the southeast as well, with a known Brotherhood transponder code. They were trying to arrive simultaneously, which was a good tactic, she supposed.
  
  But Lily didn't even know what they intended to accomplish. Still, the ground component started attacking both the northeast wall and turrets while the Vertibird started lobbing missiles and even two mini-nukes at the abandoned job site and northeast wall segment. They demolished the wall and were doing a fair amount of damage to the site of the power station that might set her back at least a month or two, but it was important for her to suffer "damage" in order to make what she was going to do next palatable.
  
  The Brotherhood had just indiscriminately attacked a civilian power station that was directly next to Megaton. The pressure wave of the two mini-nukes even destroyed many of the glass windows in the first two habitable blocks on the northeast corner of the city, in fact, and already she could hear Megaton citizens in that part of the city starting to run away from the exterior walls, thinking the city was under a raider attack again.
  
  "Go, now," Lily ordered through the radio Mesh, and simultaneously she triggered the nearby, still operable, turrets to switch into air defence mode and targeted the Vertibird. She wasn't letting that fly away. Simultaneously, transmitters in the city started flooding the frequency bands that the Brotherhood was known to use with white noise, jamming any kind of communication in or out of the area.
  
  Vertibirds needed both of their engines to fly, and she carefully targetted one of them with about a dozen high-velocity steel slugs, which punched right through the engine nacelle, setting the engine on fire immediately and causing the Vertibird to yaw to the side, rolling into the direction of the bad engine.
  
  From her perch, invisible on top of one of the nearby buildings, Lily opened her mouth in surprise, thinking she was about to see a crash, but the pilot managed to get it under control, nosing the aircraft over to gain airspeed to maintain some semblance of control, being forced to land hard straight ahead, digging out a furrow of dirt on the ground of the wasteland and crunching all three landing gear tires. That thing was going to need a bit of maintenance, but it appeared salvageable, especially after she saw an outgassing in the engine nacelle, obviously a fire-suppressing system discharging its bottle into the engine, which put out the fire.
  
  At the same time, from around the corner of both the east and north side, over a hundred bipedal robots started marching out from their hiding places, with her Spider Company soldiers about ten metres behind them. Her men were in reproduction T-51b Power Armour suits, although she had included layered composite armour and Mesh-based radios, so she felt that they would be more effective than standard Pre-War armour that was constructed only out of steel. She had built these suits months ago but was hiding them until today. She didn't think she would be able to continue acting as low-key as she did in the past after repulsing this attack. She'd likely have to do something about the Megaton government after this, which was making her depressed just thinking about it.
  
  She still had around the same amount of soldiers, about sixty now, but she had two leftenants and a couple of sergeants, and she considered each of her men about equivalent to a corporal in terms of their leadership potential, as they were expected to each lead a team of robots.
  
  She had also hidden the number of robots she had available to her until this point, and the fact that they were almost all armed with plasma weapons now, in addition to the lasers everyone already knew about. She was still hiding about two hundred more underground.
  
  Honestly, she was perplexed as to the reason this all was happening. She expected, perhaps, an attack on her person, but she hadn't often left Megaton in the past several months, and she supposed that an attack on an actual hospital might be a road too far for even the Outcasts.
  
  She had actually been getting along pretty well with the Brotherhood, too. Scribes had been in and out of her hospital on a weekly basis, making use of the cloning machine that she had agreed to sell them access to. She had even agreed to provide the blueprints and source code of the cloning machine to Scribe Ferguson in exchange for all the data they had on America and China's space and orbital assets. It seemed like Ferguson was definitely getting the better deal, but she found the data she received invaluable.
  
  She had finally managed to get a small probe into low Earth orbit two months ago, and the thing had been shot out of the sky by some manner of stealthed anti-satellite constellation. The second stage probes didn't cost her anything, so she had just begun sending one up every day to get a location on each of the elements of the constellations.
  
  Her second-stage probes were stealthy as far as radar was concerned, but she had realised that they were being targetted via a combination of infrared and optical sensors. They couldn't hide either the superhot plasma drive she was using to ascend to orbit, nor could they hide when the ASAT systems used optical sensors to detect when her probes occluded the Earth, so there was just no feasible way to sneak up on them and her probes didn't have enough delta-v or specific impulse to dodge anything either, it was all they could do to get out of the gravity well. The damn tyranny of gravity.
  
  Her first stage stayed up continuously these days, with periods of maintenance occurring about twice a week. It had to, in order to send the probes to low earth orbit as she had them fly all the way to Europe to release the second stage so that it appeared some organisation in Europe was launching the probes into the Mediterranean, on an odd southeasterly polar orbit. The first stage had to stay within line-of-sight of the probe in order to maintain command and control. Lily only found out that her first probe had been shot down when the first stage returned, and she downloaded the telemetry.
  
  The first stage didn't have a lot of surveillance equipment as she had to keep its weight down, but she did add several digital cameras, and from what she could see of Europe, it was in about the same state as America. Which was to say bad, but still signs of habitation. She had changed the flight plans each time to get small glimpses of other locations, even circumnavigating the globe to return to D.C. from the west several times. If anything, China was much worse off than the US was. There was no real sign of humans around any of the cities, only in the rural areas.
  
  She had plans to build a better first stage, to be powered by a hydrodynamic fusion power system so that she could build multiples. Her first version was powered by twenty-five fission batteries and was really expensive to build. It would be easy to cool such a fusion system at a high altitude, but the challenge would be to provide cooling at low air speeds.
  
  She had run into this exact issue when she brainstormed how to create a fusion-powered Vertibird in the past. Perhaps she could just include a large tank of water that it would use up at low airspeed and accept that it would look very steampunk when it came to land and when it took off. "Refueling" the coolant after each mission would be pretty simple, and with the extra power, she could perhaps budget enough extra weight to make that feasible.
  
  Her robots were all demanding that the attacking Brotherhood paladins and initiates surrender over loudspeakers, although she didn't give the crew of the Vertibird the option as that was a priority target that got swarmed, its crew tasered and dragged out before they could potentially set self-destruct charges to prevent the vehicle from being captured. She didn't think that they would actually do that, but it was standard procedure in the Pre-War Army and Air Force to do so, so they might have been trained to do so as well, even if they considered Vertibirds irreplaceable assets.
  
  In what she was considering her normal doctrine, her soldiers would be fighting alongside three or four robots a piece, with one fireteam being one human and three or four robots, and one squad being two fireteams. However, she didn't feel it was necessary when she had such overwhelming numbers, so she ordered her men to hang back and let the robots soak up any casualties in case the Brotherhood didn't surrender. Which they didn't.
  
  Her robots would use non-lethal attacks if it were an option, but against Power Armour-wearing infantry, it really wasn't, so plasma and lasers were firing on both sides, except that there was a lot more weight of fire coming from her side.
  
  She shook her head at the utter stupid waste of it all. Hopefully, there were some survivors down there.
  
  Leftenant Wilson was one of the first squad leaders that she had recruited and the one that had shown the best leadership during the raider attack half a year ago. He had gotten on the "fast track" to his current rank, as well as was one of the recipients of a combat decoration for valour, along with about a dozen others.
  
  He saluted Lily sharply, which made her want to internally sigh as she really didn't like the idea of having her own Army, but she didn't show it on her face as he said, "Reporting, seven robots are non-functional, no casualties but one wound, a burn, from a near miss plasma shot." He paused and said, "There are eleven survivors from the Brotherhood infantry and four from the Vertibird. But a couple might not make it; we're having them rushed to the hospital as we speak." He coughed and said, "We also have one injury, a Power Armour-related injury related to poor training."
  
  Lily returned the salute casually and nodded to the man in Power Armour. The results were good, and she wasn't surprised there was at least one injury as far as using the hardsuits was concerned. They hadn't had a lot of time to train in their use, except in VR. They were designed more or less identically to the Pre-War designs, just improved. Even the Advanced Power Armour suit she got from Miller could injure its operator if they used it improperly, usually tendon and connective tissue injuries.
  
  "Very good. Please see to it zhat at least one squad is at each entrance to zhe city, and one squad should stay detailed with zhe prisoners and detail robots to guard the Vertibird until we can get a truck out 'ere. Zhe rest can get some rest," Lily told him before turning and walking away.
  
  What should she do now? She didn't really know. If this was an actual war, she would attack other Brotherhood assets in D.C. and perhaps the Citadel itself. However... she didn't know what precisely this was. This attack was pointless. She better head back to the hospital; although there weren't that many casualties that lived, some seemed to be seriously injured.
  
  She started to realise what was happening as she was stabilising one of the Brotherhood prisoners, an Initiate. He was missing two limbs, which she had already ordered to be cloned, and she would have them reattached within the next two hours.
  
  Honestly, she should have realised what was going on as soon as she was attacked. There was no way that Elder Lyons would have countenanced this attack; he was actually quite optimistic about her construction of a large power station, and in the discussions she had briefly had with the great man over the radio, he was discussing potentially building a second large power station near the Jefferson memorial or the future site of Project Purity.
  
  So it was clear that the attack on Megaton had signified the total breach between the Outcasts and the Lyons' Brotherhood which she had been expecting for a while. That still didn't really answer why they attacked, except if it was simply something they wanted to do. However, her surveillance system saw a large convoy of vehicles and infantry leaving downtown D.C. There were signs they were fighting with what she expected was Lyons' faction, as a few buildings close to the Citadel were on fire, but no one was pursuing them.
  
  She was surprised she didn't see any Vertibirds, but she guessed they would have trouble fueling them, as she doubted the Brotherhood would let these new Outcasts use their filling station at NAS Patuxent River, so they seemed to decide to prioritise vehicles they could use on a continuing basis.
  
  They were going directly west, which made her feel a lot better. If they were headed to Megaton, she would have to start using her kamikaze drones to attack them more or less right away, as there were easily over a hundred and fifty suits of Power Armour running through the wasteland, to say nothing of what was in the fifteen or so trucks.
  
  If they were headed to Fort Independence like they appeared to be, she would let them settle in and gauge their response before triggering her failsafe on them. She really would like not to murder them all, but she didn't really see a way out of that. Perhaps this attack on Megaton was supposed to serve as a distraction?
  
  While waiting for a few limbs to come out of the cloning machine, she went to her office and sat down and tried to get the Brotherhood on the radio using the relay they kept at GNR.
  
  For this, she used an actual radio and triggered the push-to-talk as she spoke into the handset, "Golf November Romeo, zhis is Dr St. Claire; I demand to speak with Sarah Lyons or anyone in charge. Close to zhirty Brotherhood personnel 'ave just attacked the city of Megaton, doing significant damage to zhe security wall and zhe site where the new municipal power station is being constructed at."
  
  "St. Claire, this is GNR, uhh... stand by... fuck... Are you sure?" came the reply after about thirty seconds of silence.
  
  She squeezed the PTT again, annoyed, "Yes, I am fu-sure!" She stopped herself from swearing, paused and said, "I 'ave fifteen prisoners of war, being treated for wounds zhey suffered in zhe battle. Around zhe same number are KIA, and if I don't speak to someone in authority over zhere soon, I am going to assume zhat you support zhis attack on civilian infrastructure and will respond in kind, even if I 'ave to ask Rivet City for protection."
  
  Rivet City was a nuclear power, and so was she, but she definitely didn't want people to think that she was; otherwise, they might connect what would likely happen to the Outcasts to her. She hoped that they didn't get blamed for it, but better them than her. She was pretty sure that the Brotherhood had assets directed at Rivet City to detect any launch of ballistic or cruise missiles, so the lack of detection would likely hint to an unintentional detonation of a device that happened to be at Fort Independence, at least that was what she hoped.
  
  Alice walked into her office, looking a bit worried about the fact that there was a battle against the Brotherhood. Lily waved her over, and the girl took a seat in front of her. She had been letting her into more of her planning and even told the girl her actual origins, at least that she came from another universe. Alice found that very interesting, especially the fact that the Earth from her world was trashed even worse than the Earth in this one, and yet still, over the years, people had recovered into societies that were arguably even more advanced than those they had left when they fled the Earth.
  
  "Uhh.. stand by for five minutes..." the voice on the radio told her, so she sat her handset down. Alice smiled, "After you're done here, I'd like to try to do one or all of those limb replantation surgery if you don't mind." Alice's skills in surgery and her knowledge of medicine, in general, had advanced in leaps and bounds over the past six months. Lily had been adding specific surgeries to the VR system, and the girl had practised them over and over. Even with procedures that she hadn't managed to add to the system, the girl could perform pretty well, as a lot of the skills were similar.
  
  Lily hummed for a moment before nodding, "I'll assist you, zhen." Replantation surgeries were a surgery that the Auto-Doc did especially well, but you never would get your skill in them if you let them do all of it. So, it was a good idea for Alice to do these surgeries since they could always use the combination of medichines and StimPaks to check her work after she was done.
  
  The Apprentice made a fist pump, in excitement, as these were definitely the most complicated surgeries she would have performed in reality.
  
  Suddenly, a familiar voice of Sarah Lyons got on the radio, "Dr St. Claire, the radio operator said you were making threats, what is going on? This isn't the best of times, no offence."
  
  Lily rolled her eyes and clicked the radio back on, "Zhreats? Well, I suppose. Zhirty Brotherhood men, including twenty-five Power Armoured infantry, just attacked Megaton, specifically zhe site of the new power station. If I don't get some answers, I will assume zhat a state of conflict now exists between us, yes, I suppose zhat ees a zhreat. One of your Vertibirds dropped mini-nukes on zhe city." She was slightly exaggerating with that last statement, although it was technically true.
  
  Sarah Lyons' voice came back on the radio, "Fuck! Let me assure you that wasn't authorised, we were trying to keep this quiet, but we've had something like a case of attempted mutiny and mass desertion." The radio squelched briefly as she paused as if she was thinking about how to explain it.
  
  Finally, she came back on, "A small minority of traitors have stolen a lot of equipment and sabotaged most of the rest, and I believe that they were responsible for the attack. They have been going on and on about that power plant you are building like it was a nuclear bomb factory or something... I just don't understand it. The only reason we should be upset is that it is a good idea that we should have done first. What were the casualties like? Is everything OK over there?"
  
  Lily lied, "There were a few workers killed when the Vertibird nuked us . But I'm sorry to report zhat most of the casualties were on your side. Zhe Vertibird was shot down, and about 'alf of zhe attacking infantry were killed. We 'ave zhe rest as zhe prisoners but are providing medical care to zhem now. Uhh... I don't really mean to criticise, but zhey attacked, while outnumbered, a 'ighly defendable position defended by a lot more men and 'eavy weapons... it was very stupid, no? What do you want me to do with the POWs? I don't really want to keep zhem..."
  
  The radio was silent for a time before Sarah came back on, "The fucking morons probably thought their zeal made them proof against bullets and lasers. Most of these guys are just stupid, misguided fools. I'm tempted to say hang the officers if there are any left alive, but you can only hang someone once, and I want the pleasure of that. Please keep them for now; we'll pick them up when we get things settled here in a couple of days. If you'll excuse me, I have to execute some people I thought were as close as family. This is a bad day all around. I'll talk to you later, Doctor."
  
  Lily sat the radio down, and Alice and Lily shared a glance, and the Apprentice was the first to say, "Maybe she'll be happy that you blow them up."
  
  Ah, the Apprentice was growing up. She didn't act as though blowing up a fanatical enemy before they could get around to murdering you was an immoral act anymore.
  
  She was also much quicker interfacing with her brain interface and robots. Lily likened it to the way her daughter in her past life could text at a blistering speed with just two thumbs, as she noticed before Lily did, "It looks like Sheriff Simms is here. Do you think he's here to arrest you or join the winning side?"
  
  Lily sighed. Simms was only really interested in keeping Megaton's citizens safe; he was one of the few actual good men she had seen in this world. He didn't have any duplicity in him, as far as she could see. He may as well have changed his name from Lucas to Sheriff, she thought.
  
  "I don't think he's 'ere to arrest me. Do you zhink he's interested in being King of Megaton?" Lily asked, hopefully. Tombs had been talking about getting back into politics, and she was hopeful that meant he wanted to take over the running of Megaton, but she was mistaken; he wanted to start some sort of loose confederation between settlements, like a district militia, police and system of roving judges on circuit. Making laws between settlements interchangeable and similar issues that he felt hampered trade.
  
  She felt that was a good idea, but it meant that he wasn't actually able to run the city. In fact, he was in Rivet City right now. She would be willing to let the current mayor continue as is, but she didn't think anybody else would be. Not only did nobody like him, but he barely would be a figurehead. After demonstrating effective power and control of the city, people would tend to come to her, so it was pointless.
  
  However, if she could stand behind Simms, she felt that people would likely accept him as running the city, even if they realised that she was a power in the shadows.
  
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  President-For-Weeks (Hopefully)
  The Sheriff had no desire to be King of Megaton and was a bit perplexed when Lily asked him. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, "Uhh... I was kind of here to say that the rest of my deputies and I would accept you taking over so long as you can give me some guarantees on the fundamental individual liberties of the citizens of Megaton."
  
  'Fuck,' Lily thought to herself as she considered some options. "What do you zhink zhe options are? What will zhe mayor and zhe rest of 'is administration, such as zhey are, do?"
  
  "He already left town; I guess he saw the writing on the walls. Halfway to Rivet City by now, I reckon. He still owns a number of businesses, though, and I guess he is counting on you not expropriating them. I guess he wasn't confident he wouldn't end up a casualty of the change of administration, ya know?" the Sheriff said, half-amused. Then he continued, "Most of the people who worked for him are still around, I guess."
  
  Miller might have agreed to become mayor before he went all in on this bank idea, Lily thought. But she felt it was a lost cause now; the other day, she saw him wearing a top hat and monocle on a chain like the Monopoly Man! She had no idea where he even got such props, but hopefully, he would calm down after he got bored wearing them.
  
  Lily sighed, "Is zhere anything zhat will fall apart without 'im or the rest of zhe people working at city hall? To be 'onest, I don't really know what zhe mayor does 'ere in Megaton."
  
  "Nah. City services and the like are separated into their own silos, like the Sheriff's office, and honestly, I reckon I don't really know what the mayor does either. Aside from taking bribes and making decisions, I guess, usually right after taking a bribe. Theoretically, we and the municipal services all report to city hall," Sheriff Simms said after a moment of consideration and adjusting his Stetson hat. He really went all in on the frontier sheriff persona, Lily felt.
  
  How many municipal services were there, really? The anaemic power company barely served any customers these days. The sanitation department probably had the most valuable assets in the city after that, with an actual fleet of garbage trucks. The Water Department maintained the water and sewage lines. And then the Sheriff's department, which had about a dozen deputies, as well as about fifty part-timers, they could call up temporarily deputise like a sort of National Guard. Not very many for a city the size of Megaton.
  
  She wasn't sure about the correct ratio of police to citizens but felt that was a bit low for a settlement that usually had fifteen thousand souls in it, which were mostly densely packed. Lily huffed and sat down at the table in the conference room she had met the Sheriff in. Fundamentally, political power grew out of the barrel of a gun. The chairman was right about that so long ago.
  
  That was why she was, until now, hiding most of her military force because the corollary was also true - if you had sufficient gun barrels, you had political power, even if you didn't want it. She felt that was why governments generally wanted to control the most useful tools for violence rather than any real desire to create a crime-free utopia. She'd have to be a dictator, briefly. It was fine. She had done it before. And hopefully, it would last even less long this time.
  
  "Okay. You can have as many assurances as you'd like as to zhe fundamental liberty, of life and property, to zhe peacable people of Megaton. I'm listing you, temporarily, as a Captain of my military force, the Spider Company. I'll place zhem, for zhe moment, under your command. I'd like you to take control of city hall and politely give everyone working there zheir walking papers," Lily told him after a couple of minutes of silence. If all they did was administer the other departments, who pretty much ran themselves, she didn't see a continuing need for their upkeep.
  
  Simms nodded, "I 'spose that won't be a problem. What should I tell people about how you intend to run things around here, as far as Megaton's law, democracy, and what have you?"
  
  Lily grimaced. "I don't really like... laws. And I really don't like democracy, either." Then she thought about it a little more, "If I am dictator, zhen whatever I say is zhe law, no? For now, zhat is fine. You can look to zhe root of legal systems, individual rights and responsibilities, zhe primacy of contracts, zhat sort of zhing." She was kind of outing herself here if she was pretending to be French and not wanting to set up some sprawling civil law-style procedures.
  
  "That seems a mite philosophical, and I reckon not too many people will really grasp what you're trying to say Miss Dictator," the Sheriff said mildly.
  
  Lily rolled her eyes, "Zhere is no law in the Wasteland, but people have very similar ideas about what is right and what is wrong. Most people just don't care out zhere, but I've yet to run across someone who claimed zheir murderousness was justified because zhere is no law against it. If I took you outside the gates of Megaton and shot you in zhe 'ead it wouldn't turn into a moral act because zhere was no law against it out zhere."
  
  She felt that too many people in countries with "mature" legal systems tended to think morality and what was legal were interchangeable. She had arguably been a "criminal" for a long time in that her goals were definitely against all manner of laws, but she still felt that they were completely moral and justifiable, so she hadn't had a whole lot of respect for the "rule of law" for some time. Those in power used it as a cudgel against those who weren't. It was more honest just to say what she said goes, at least for now. She'd eventually have to establish some kind of law, though, unless she intended to run the city forever. Which she didn't.
  
  "So don't hurt people, don't take their stuff, that sort of thing, yeah? Alright, yeah, that's basically what we do already. We don't actually enforce all of the laws the city put out anyway; we don't have the manpower. There's not much guarantee that people would get a fair shake, though. Most people like that," the Sheriff mentioned.
  
  Lily snorted, "There's never been such a guarantee in Megaton! Besides, zhat's intentional. I don't 'ave any judges I trust, so if someone 'as a dispute zhey want me to resolve, I want zhem to have the impression zhey are taking zheir own life into my 'ands if they ask for my judgement. Because zhey are! It will serve to keep people from bringing minor matters up, working out zhings for zhemselves at least until we can reconstitute some manner of judicial system zhat isn't me." The last she said rather in a surly manner as if she had experience in that before.
  
  At that, he shrugged, "I can't say you're wrong. Alright. I suppose I ought to get to it, then."
  
  Lily stood up to walk him out, "Oh, and Sheriff..."
  
  "Yes, Miss Dictator?" he asked.
  
  Lily said simply, "I don't want any serious criminals in zhe city. I don't mean Moriarty and his quasi-illegitimate activities. We don't even 'ave laws against any of zhat now. But groups like zhose East Bridge Merchants zhat used to be around. Violent criminals zhat have no legitimate source of income. If zhey're just peaceful squatters, leave zhem. But any violent groups I want crushed within zhe week. Use my men and robots to 'andle it. And set some time for each of your deputies and yourself, three days uninterrupted for training." Lily intended to run them through the boot camp course she made and get them Power Armour as well.
  
  Even when she managed to get some other governmental structure in place, it made sense to provide the constabulary with better equipment. It was a force multiplier and meant that fewer constables would be needed.
  
  That got a grin from him, "I've been hoping to hear that for years, ma'am. I know of at least seven such gangs that I'm sure nobody will miss."
  
  After the Sheriff left, and she had gotten confirmation from her two leftenants that they received orders putting them under his command for the moment, she sighed. Months ago, she made a joke about the Lone Wanderer visiting Liliton instead of Megaton, but she was just joking! She didn't really want that to be the case.
  
  "Apprentice!" she called, and Alice walked into the room.
  
  She grinned, "You bellowed, Your Mercilessness?"
  
  Lily blinked several times before just getting out, "... huh?"
  
  "Well... I thought that it was normal to add a villainous title when talking to someone who just conquered a city," Alice added, half-amused but half-unsure.
  
  Lily was curious about what the girl had been reading, "Forget that. I have a homework assignment for you in the next few days. I want the name and a brief precis of the ten most important people in Megaton." Like hell, was she going to remain in charge of the city for long. She would set up some manner of city council who could run it.
  
  She'd have to be on it, herself, of course, just so people would take it seriously. The ordinary people would assume she was holding all the power in the council; after all, what dictator divests herself of power? Well, Cincinnatus, she supposed. But most people didn't even know what Cincinnati was, much less Cincinnatus. Even the "council members" would likely assume this and would try to make decisions in line with what she would want. She wouldn't even attend many of the meetings! She'd make sure the quorum number was seven or eight, so she could skip without issue.
  
  The first week of her regime ran surprisingly well. There was a lot of pushback from the people who worked in the city administration, but she never could get a proper answer as to what most of them actually did, so she felt that her decision to fire them all was correct.
  
  Her legal system, such as it, was pretty simple. A person either accepted her judgement or the judgement of those she delegated, for example, Sheriff Simms, or they were expelled from the city. She hadn't actually had any people expelled yet, aside from one of the gangs that were smart enough to surrender. There was presently no process for appeals, and the sentence, if it was a criminal matter, was carried out immediately.
  
  She was pretty sure that the gang would just turn into raiders immediately. In fact, she was pretty sure they were already raiders that lived in Megaton somehow, so she was watching them and would likely send out a couple of squads to eliminate them when she was certain.
  
  Could a privatised legal system work here, like in Extropia Station? She shook her head almost instantly. You almost had to be an adherent to their anarcho-capitalist manifestos or at least highly educated for such a system to be even remotely feasible. By the time she left Extropia, no private court system would take her as a client, so a large percentage of those she had seen would make spurious legal claims against her. It was called 'micro-torting', and it was a real hazard to tourists who didn't sign up with a court system... and her.
  
  They had difficulties collecting from her, though. Ahh... good times.
  
  After an alarm sounded internally, she went and found the Apprentice and asked her, "Are you ready to 'elp me with the surgery I wanted to do today?" It was getting late at night, by the time they had finished with this surgery, she suspected Alice would head to sleep, but Lily would likely wait until noon to take a quick nap.
  
  "You're replacing both of your arms with cybernetic replacements? What will Miss Grace think of that?" asked the girl, amusedly.
  
  Lily chuckled, "She won't notice. I've finally developed a method to 'ave zhe skin and nerves over a deployable cybernetic system." Lily forwarded the girl diagrams of the prosthesis as they started to walk to the elevator to go downstairs.
  
  "Hmmm... so the skin is connected to these three panels, which fold up when all of these tool systems are deployed? What about the seam where two 'skin panels' meet? Won't that be unsightly?" asked the girl on the elevator ride down to the basement bastion.
  
  Lily nodded, "It would! And that's what took me over two months to solve. You see, this isn't normal skin. Although it definitely feels and acts like normal skin. But when zhe two panels meet in 'regular arm mode', a very small membrane is grown between the two panels over a period of 'ours, 'iding the seam. Not noticeable at all! It is torn when zhe arm deploys zhe tools, but zhere is no blood. Zhis skin actually has more in common with zhe lizard, genetically, zhan zhe human, yes?"
  
  It also was the first test of the subdermal armour system she had derived from the spinnerets of her colony of black widows. Sadly, she had to cut back on her tests there because she almost couldn't keep them fed, and black widows were both very solitary and very territorial. She was selecting them for their docile and gentle behaviour in the first place, so she didn't want to just have one potential paragon of viciousness murder her sisters in job lots, which would happen if she kept adding more spiders to the giant terrarium.
  
  She had gotten repeated complaints about the giant spider terrarium in the foyer of the hospital, something about spiders being creepy. But she ignored all of them!
  
  If the subdermal armour worked, she would have to flay herself and replace her skin everywhere else with this skin that had this subdermal protection. She had to clone it, special and she couldn't add it to her genome directly, unfortunately. However, she could ensure that such additions weren't considered foreign and weren't rejected. Not that she had much of an immune system besides her medichines anymore, anyway.
  
  But if someone else bought the treatment, or the Apprentice agreed to it, then they would be fine after she individualised the skin to their genome. It would seem as though it was their normal skin to their own immune system and would heal if damaged like normal, too.
  
  "Uhhh... maybe don't mention that if you intend to sell this to anyone else. Anyone that isn't you would find that pretty disturbing," said Alice as they arrived in the operating theatre she had set up. Both her new arms were carefully connected to a machine that was keeping them alive and oxygenated until they could be installed.
  
  Lily waved a hand, "Bah!"
  
  Each of her arms had eight individual tools, most of which were multi-tools of some variety, so she actually had over a hundred possible tools on her person at all times now. About a third were medical in nature, and the rest were general-purpose tools. She even had a very small plasma torch, which could double as a plasma gun in a pinch.
  
  As she tested each of the tools, she watched the surveillance of Fort Independence. She had put off making a decision for five days, and watched all of the Outcasts get comfortable in their new home.
  
  Sarah Lyons came personally to pick up the prisoners she had been caring for a couple of days after the battle at the power station, just as she said she would. Lily let the woman have them without trying to extract any kind of concession from the woman or the Brotherhood, which Lily thought was a surprise to her. She also didn't ask about where the wreck of the Vertibird was, either.
  
  Now that most of the more reactionary elements were gone from the Brotherhood - definitely not none, there were many that stayed in the Brotherhood that agreed with the Outcasts but didn't want to follow them into treason - she was more willing to help, and more importantly get along with, the remaining Lyons Brotherhood.
  
  However, she couldn't allow the Outcast faction to persist as an independent entity. Already they had sent a scouting group that was monitoring Megaton, in addition to small foraging parties to different locations, including the VSS building and as well a larger vehicle-bound group that seemingly was headed northwest to Fort Bannister and then kept going; she suspected to Fort Constantine to the far northwest.
  
  She stowed all of the tools in each of her arms and sighed, walking over to take a hot shower as she mentally keyed in the correct codes into her system, crafting a transmission that would doom over a hundred people. If she waited any longer, it was possible that more groups could be dispatched such that most of the group survived and could reform, and that wasn't something she could tolerate.
  
  It made sense to her that after she had, albeit temporarily, taken over a government, she had started murdering in wholesale job lots. Disgusting. Rather than think about it anymore, she triggered the mental transmit button and started towelling herself off. It took less than a second for the Mesh to transmit the message to the node connected to the nuclear explosive, and it promptly detonated.
  
  She didn't think that anyone could track her drones, but she definitely didn't move them away from the site of the explosion in case somebody could - it would be a bit telling that they moved out of the way right before the explosion. However, she had ensured that no C&C platforms were in the danger area right above Fort Independence. Still, she lost two drones and had the visual spectrum sensors burn out in two more.
  
  Switching to more distant observation platforms, Lily silently judged the size of the mushroom cloud. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of data available in Pre-War libraries about judging the relative explosive strength based on the size of a mushroom cloud, although they were predicated on airbursts. Still, she felt that she was about accurate in the guess she made; perhaps the explosion was a mite smaller, thirty kilotons or so. Still, well enough to completely destroy Fort Independence's remaining building.
  
  The pressure wave should arrive at Megaton in about thirty-five seconds, but it won't do more than rattle the windows here. It would reach downtown D.C. shortly before that, and no doubt everyone already saw it. It was still a bit dark outside, close to false dawn, and sunrise was maybe forty-five minutes away. The flash and large mushroom-shaped pyrocumulus cloud would be visible from some distance.
  
  Sure enough, barely a couple of minutes later, she got a call on the radio from Sarah Lyons. It was being sent by the GNR building, but she suspected the transmission was being relayed, "Dr St. Claire, this is Sentinel Sarah Lyons. Are you available?"
  
  I used my text-to-speech to transmit, "Lyons, St. Claire, stand by. I was in zhe shower, but I stopped when I noticed a very large explosion outside. Give me a couple minutes."
  
  Then she ran out of the bathroom, covered in just a towel, before finding a radio handset in her bedroom that could be relayed to the building's main transceiver on the roof. She grabbed it and pressed the PTT, "Lyons, St. Claire. Okay, I'm 'ere. Is zhis about zhe obvious nuclear explosion? The pressure wave just passed us here in Megaton a minute ago; no damage, really."
  
  "Yes, we observed the blast directly west from the Citadel and were wondering if you had any more information. A Vertibird on ready 5 is about to take off to go investigate, but they're departing from... the southeast," came Sarah Lyons' voice from the radio. Promoted again. It seemed that it was the Outcasts departing and whatever Sarah Lyons did in the aftermath was what triggered the woman's promotion to what Lily remembered from the game. That made sense, she supposed. Whenever there was an attempted coup, you had to reward those who remained loyal, even if they were your daughter and obviously would be loyal. It was expected.
  
  Lily paused for a believable amount of time before triggering the push-to-talk switch again, "I do. I 'ad sensors on the city wall zhat detected both the flash and the subsequent pressure wave. I can tell you zhat it came from a bearing of one-niner-niner degrees from Megaton, and from zhe time it took zhe pressure wave to arrive, I estimate the distance to be forty-five to sixty kilometres. Zheres some uncertainty about that distance as it could change if zhe yield was larger or smaller. 'owever, combined with your bearing, we can easily triangulate zhe source to either Fort Independence or Fairfax. Does zhat 'elp, Sarah?"
  
  There was silence for a few moments before the radio hissed, "Yes... yes that does. That isn't good news, though. You might not know this, but Fort Independence was where the Outcasts had claimed as an HQ."
  
  "I'm... sorry to hear zhat. I realise zhat you might consider zhem as something like traitors, but I imagine if zhey were as close as family as you said you were 'oping zhat zhey would see reason eventually..." Lily transmitted, internally hating herself briefly for saying that.
  
  Sarah Lyons' voice was soft on the radio, "Yeah... yeah I was. Maybe not Casdin, but I was hoping most of the rest would see how idiotic he was and come home. Say... when I picked up the prisoners, I couldn't help but notice you had installed air radar on sections of your wall. I assume that was how you shot down the Vertibird. I've been meaning to ask about that before, maybe to ask if you would be willing to build a number of sets for us... but... do you mind me asking what the range of those are?"
  
  Lily's mind connected the dots pretty quickly, and she answered, "Well, line of sight, obviously, but five hundred kilometres or so. If you want to come by, I can give you a 'olotape with zhe last day's radar returns. If you're concerned someone missiled your wayward brothers and sisters, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't a ballistic. It could zheoretically 'ave been a cruise missile, but only if it was both approaching from the south and flying nap-of-zhe-earth, but somehow I doubt zhat." The curvature of the earth meant that she couldn't see ultra-low-altitude radar returns past ten or fifteen kilometres.
  
  Some of the cruise missiles Rivet City had were sea-skimming missiles, but that was a lot different from nap-of-the-earth missiles. Those did exist in the Pre-War era, but they required a lot more special instruments and topographic data preloaded about the missile's projected flight path. Lily doubted any would actually function after two hundred years. Hopefully, Sarah Lyons would know that.
  
  "Yeah, can you run a holotape off of that? I'll have the Vertibird pick it up right away. I don't think that is what happened, but we have to eliminate such possibilities. We have some radar assets ourselves, but mostly all in D.C. and to the southeast," Sarah Lyons said quickly.
  
  Lily hummed. She had bought from a scavenger team a small, towed ground-to-air radar set that they had pulled out of the National Guard depot, which she felt was a pretty impressive feat, considering she didn't even want to go near that place herself. Her own radar systems were better, individually, but that system had given her all she needed to know to build an integrated air defence network that was simultaneously both integrated and independent from her Mesh, and also it included the data formats used, so she could easily run a holotape off in the expected format.
  
  She didn't particularly mind selling reproductions of that radar system to the Brotherhood, either. It was a good, dual-band phased-array emitter but not good enough to detect any of the things she fielded that had an all-angle low radar cross-section.
  
  "Yes, it'll be ready within zhe next five minutes. You can land on the roof if you like," Lily transmitted and then started to get dressed.
  
  She had months ago reinforced the roof and shifted her antenna mast to a corner to leave space for a Vertibird or helicopter pad, not that she had seen any actual helicopters. She did it both to be polite to the Brotherhood, who routinely came to use her cloning machine and also as bait. It even had the giant H, and the correct lighted alternating beacon to indicate a heliport. She felt there were even odds that the Enclave if they ever decided to attack her, would land right on it. If so, the explosives embedded into the concrete would fix their wagon. The Apprentice gave her the idea after watching Die Hard.
  
  Plus, really, for her own aesthetic, she had to admit... Because could it really be a hospital if it didn't have a landing pad for a helicopter?
  
  She felt bad about what she had done, but at the same time, she felt she was a lot safer than she was yesterday. Practically the only likely existential threat that still remained for her in the immediate areas was the Enclave.
  
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  La Jefa
  The La Jefa, Potentate, President-Until-She-Found-Some-Other-Sucker sat at the mayor's much more comfortable office at the city hall building and reviewed the reports she received from Simms about the current status of the city government, its assets and liabilities and its income. This was what she was worried about the entire time! Reports!
  
  If she wasn't careful, then soon she would have so many reports that she would have to hire someone just to read them all and then prepare for her an executive summary. Then it would be too much for a single assistant to do, and that was how you ended up with a bureaucracy and people lying to you because the news was bad.
  
  Lily had very conflicted opinions about taxes. One of the main reasons that Lily hated taxes was that she thought that they were essentially robbing the people for what those in power would do anyway, even if they didn't collect taxes for the purpose. Kings of old maintained an Army to keep themselves in power, for example. She was no different from that, she supposed. She would have maintained her military forces to protect Megaton even if she had managed to continue the charade that she was a private citizen. Police and the military protected those that had institutional power, intrinsically, and yet they were paid for by everyone.
  
  And sure, Kings of old collected taxes too, but nothing like the tax burden that was commonplace in the world she remembered from her life in America. Although in her memories of space, taxes were a lot more variable, from non-existent to essentially one hundred per cent in some small communes. The tax burden of your average English subject of King Henry was five to ten per cent, depending on your occupation.
  
  Of course, a function of that was the relative productivity in the two societies. Back in the Dark Ages, and even in the Rennaisance period, those in power could only extract so much from a subject before that subject starved to death. America was so productive they could take even a third or more of what poor people made and still have those people not starve to death. So that was... something, she guessed. She couldn't figure out if it was good or not, though.
  
  Although she was a country girl at heart, she had lived in California for two decades before she passed away, and she was fortunate to work in an industry that was very well-compensated. She made over two hundred thousand dollars a year, but with federal income tax, state income tax, medicare withholding, social security, property taxes, sales tax and all the rest, she once figured that she got to keep maybe a little bit less than 45% of what she made. And at least a third of that money went to pay for the military and various wars and imperialist adventures she didn't agree with at all. It seemed both ridiculous to her and intrinsically a first-world problem all at the same time.
  
  Ultimately, she felt that the idea of "government by the people, for the people" was nothing but PR bullshit. If it existed, she had never experienced it in any of the nations that she had lived in. It was a very useful bit of public relations, though; it was enough that it got the people as a whole to agree to pay for what the oligarchs would have to pay for if they didn't, namely a military and police force to protect them and their investments.
  
  Her opinion on the matter might be a bit shaped as much as growing up in a theoretically communist country as much as it was growing up in America. She had been simultaneously inside and outside both cultures, and she thought it gave her great insight.
  
  Since she hated taxes, the part where she was conflicted was that she was now collecting them. The main way the city of Megaton was funded was through an income tax.
  
  As such, she had totally eliminated the Megaton income tax first thing. It was fatally flawed in a number of ways. It was a complicated progressive taxation scheme with a lot of loopholes that tended to favour those that already had a lot of money. It took a lot of people working in city hall to administer it, so there was a lot of overhead, but more fundamentally, any time you, as the state, start asking citizens how much money they make, you will create liars.
  
  And when people become accustomed to lying to the state, they are accustomed to believing that the law isn't really important and can be disregarded if they can get away with it. It trains them to break the law. Just like 55 mph speed limits on the highway during the Carter administration. It not only prepares a person to break the law but also to have disdain for it.
  
  Ugh. She almost threw up a little bit, thinking about how it was important for the state and its laws not to be disdained. Gross.
  
  However, one of the first things they taught you at NCO school in the US Army was a leader should never give an order that he or she knows will be disobeyed. It engenders disrespect in your command. The obvious corollary, which she wasn't sure that any lawmaker or politician in her past or present lives understood, was if you were the state, you should never make a law that you know will be disobeyed. People won't respect the law or the law enforcers. Then you look weak when you're unable to crack down on whatever behaviour you're trying to curtail, like drinking beer, smoking some plant or women showing salacious ankle-flesh. It was one of the reasons she deleted every single law in Megaton. If she had to create what amounted to a legal code, she would start with absolutely nothing and build up, not the opposite.
  
  For the moment, she was going to pay for the military forces of Megaton out of her own pocket because, as she was an oligarch, she needed such forces to protect her own interests. It was the very reason she built them up in the first place because she definitely didn't trust any government to protect her. She never has. She believed most people with wealth or power agreed with her; they were just a lot more highly socialised or, in some respects, they controlled the state apparatus and use of force anyway, somehow, so they felt they didn't need their own military forces like she always desired.
  
  However, there were types of taxation that were better than others.
  
  If the worst type of taxes were income taxes, then in the ultimate ideal sense, the only moral type of taxation was fee-for-service type taxes. For example, a fee for getting a driver's certificate, a consumptive tax to drive on public roads, and similar. Things that you only paid for if you wanted to use the public service provided. There were a number of taxing schemes in between that weren't as bad as income taxes, and she was probably going to have to implement some of them. For example, a small fee to enter the city if you were not a resident, property taxes, and import and export duties. A sales tax or value-added tax would be ideal, but it also ran into the same problem of forcing a person to tell you how much money their business made and also it made them act as an unpaid revenue agent for the state, so she would be skipping it.
  
  Despite being the personal embodiment of the government, at present, if she had to define her actual opinions, to put them in a neat little box, she would consider herself fundamentally an anarchist. It was an almost utopian idea that was more aspirational for her, as a goal to always work towards as something an individual had to achieve, not so much as a society.
  
  Lily wasn't idealistic enough to care so much about people as a whole, nor was she narcissistic enough to think that she personally could convince people about her opinion of how society should be structured, or rather not be structured. And that was saying something because she had a healthy opinion of herself.
  
  If the people in Megaton themselves weren't willing to work towards throwing off their own shackles, as she had done, then she wasn't going to drag them kicking and screaming into it. She'd just try to have the minimum laws possible, and she would have no laws that said she was the only one allowed military force or similar traipsings, and if a group organised to such a point that they were effectively controlling part of the city, she would be willing to treat them as equals. She wouldn't think they were, but she would treat them as such.
  
  Honestly, it was less of a political ideology for her and more of an ultimate life goal. A life free from fetters of all kinds.
  
  A lot of people assumed, when she was Meimei, that she hated communists from what was known of her early days and the fact that everyone considered her an ancap, but she didn't. They were idealists and dreamers, just like her. She respected them so long as she was allowed to do so from a great distance; they did have quite the body count behind them, after all. But... so did she, now. And it wasn't likely to get any smaller any time soon.
  
  Anarchism was kind of like communism in that both were ideal utopias which might be impossible to ever achieve in a way that scaled past a small community. Or perhaps both could be achieved; she didn't know.
  
  But, she felt that any political idea that relied on eliminating the state would just see the strongest guy on the block reinvent the state as soon as you turned your back on him. Then he'd hold you by your ankles and shake all your gold coins out of your pockets to reinvent taxation, too. But that didn't mean it was necessarily wrong to have that be your ideal.
  
  She often felt that Marxists were surprisingly intuitive about identifying problems in society, yet at the same time, from her perspective, they chose just about the worst possible solutions almost every single time. But she was biased.
  
  Speaking of communism, she was considering nationalising her own hospital. Well, not really! But, she had to do something to get the poorer people in the city better healthcare.
  
  Basically, she wanted, selfishly, a baseline level of healthcare to be provided to every citizen of Megaton. Not really because of egalitarian idealism like a socialist might want, but because of rank selfishness. A very large percentage of the city was dealing with at least one serious chronic illness that was very much affecting their productivity. If your population's health was bad enough, then there was even a capitalist argument for some amount of socialised healthcare as the relative unhealthiness of your workforce curtailed the amount of value you could extract from them.
  
  She wasn't sure how to structure it, though. Nationalising health care would be the simplest, but a bit... uh... both not in her best interest and something she was sort of philosophically against. A charity, perhaps? She wasn't too fond of NGOs, either. She felt a lot mutated from their initial ideal goals and into bloated jobs-programs for bureaucrats within ten years or less. She knew a lot of charities in her past life that spent most of their money on fund-raising, a weird and malevolent cycle.
  
  They needed your money to raise more money to spend on the costs to raise your money. And since fund-raising expenses didn't count as an administrative overhead but a program expense in most cases, on the surface, the charity looked good, spending most of their received money on whatever their program was.
  
  She was fairly confident that most charities wouldn't exist in America of her memories if there weren't tax benefits for being or donating to one.
  
  She sighed and said, "Zhank you, Sheriff. Zhat's all for now. We will overlook zhe discrepancy of 'ow much money zhe city should 'ave versus 'ow much it actually 'as, for now. But if zhe former mayor doesn't provide a suitable explanation as to the accounting irregularities I've observed, zhen I'll just seize some of the assets he 'as left behind, starting with zhe most profitable."
  
  The Sheriff nodded, and after a few more line items and scheduling his and his men's training beginning tomorrow, he left.
  
  As she stared off into space, she was looking absently at a composite map of Megaton generated from her surveillance assets. She had over twenty tons of silver to her name, so she could create a lot of coins and personally fund the city operations for a while, but she would have to find some way to fund the city longer term. Extracting value via taxes was something she would probably have to do, and it was very traditional as far as governments were concerned but it kind of made more sense to create value instead.
  
  How could... ugh... government create value? Then she remembered that she still had to pay the city for the land she had purchased in the auction. Thank god that nobody had paid yet, or the ex-mayor would have absconded with that money, too. That could be one way. The city could fund the expansion of the city by building another exterior wall segment along with power and water connections. Then seize all the land inside the newly walled-off portion and then auction it off periodically. So long as she didn't sell too much too fast, the value wouldn't drop, and the values of the existing Megaton property holders wouldn't drop. Their values might even rise because they would be in the interior circle, behind not one but two walls. It would seem much more exclusive.
  
  There was already a community of non-Megaton citizens sort of squatting directly outside the chain-link fence to the south, near the rebuilt southern gate. They were inside the arc and protection of the city's turrets, and that area was well-patrolled, so they were, in effect, leeching off the protection she had built for the city. Lily didn't care, really, and honestly wished them the best, but it did mean that there was a demand for Megaton housing and property, but just not at the prices these people could presently afford.
  
  She highlighted areas on the map, both to the east and to the west. The east had the levelest ground, and it would be the easiest for construction and integration with the Eastside water and power grid, which were of a bit better quality than the rest of the city. However, if she built to the west...
  
  U.S. Route 29 was the north and south highway that everyone used to cross the Potomac bridge, and if you went further south, it led to the ruins of Fairfax. The highway was in surprisingly good shape, which was why it was the defacto best way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, and it was only a few kilometres away. Megaton was already the premier location to stop for traders, but if she worked going west, she might make it the ultra-premier stop, especially if lots of land inside the protection of this "second circle" of Megaton could be used and converted into warehouses and transhipment hubs.
  
  Actual safe places for merchants to store their goods when they weren't around were really rare. Practically only Canterbury Commons had such a place, and it was why they were one of the most common stops for trader caravans, even though they were kind of out of the way.
  
  Nodding, she would have to talk with Tombs and Miller. The latter to extort a lot more silver out of. He had, essentially, an unlimited, for the moment, supply, and the only thing both of them were worried about was introducing too much coinage too fast to cause inflation.
  
  If he was going to cosplay like a Russian oligarch, then she could at least act like the Russian president and shake some silver ingots out of his pockets for the good of the state, comrade.
  
  She'd make it up to him. He had mentioned wanting more T-51Bs, anyway. As far as she knew, only she, the Brotherhood and the Enclave could build them around here so she could gouge him on the price. Hers were better and easier to repair, anyway.
  
  Plus, after six months of trial and error, she finally finished a third life extension treatment, as well as, finally, the treatment that would result in a person needing only about thirteen to fifteen hundred calories a day. She had to rejigger the entire human satiation sense so people wouldn't just balloon up, but she added additional features while she was at it. There was a better understanding of just what vital minerals the body needed, and a person would tend to both crave them and be able to identify them by taste. It was an entirely synthetic addition to the human genome, and she was quite proud of it.
  
  She had tested this new sense in twenty volunteers, but only for the past month. In that short period of time, nothing was detected in their psychological makeup, so she was pretty sure she wouldn't trigger some kind of nascent pica disorder where someone got an irresistible taste for iron shavings or started licking magnesium like a salt lick or something else. But only time will tell for certain.
  
  She was still working on the way to organically produce vitamin C and thiamine, vitamin B1, in a similar manner as many plants did. It wasn't difficult, and it would completely eliminate the diseases of both scurvy and beriberi if it could be done without any negative side effects. Scurvy was actually really prevalent in the wasteland as there weren't actually a lot of sources for vitamin C, except mutfruits, and not many people even understood the origin of the disease.
  
  Alice came with Lily down the nine-kilometre tunnel to the west, past highway 29 and into the barren wasteland that had nothing and nobody in it. It was a perfect place for her secret space program. There was a very flat area that she had made into something akin to a runway, and she had sections that would open into underground maintenance and service centres like it was the bat cave.
  
  Although unloaded the first stage she was using was capable of verticle take-off and landing, when the entire second stage was loaded on top of it then, it required a running start to get off the ground, as the component of lift provided by the wing's airfoils was much more critical.
  
  So, it basically needed a running go to take off fully loaded but could land like a Harrier when it came back from missions empty. Right now, she was servicing it, which was required periodically. She had to verify the lubricants on the flight control surfaces hadn't boiled off at forty thousand metres, check the hydraulic systems and a few other minor details. However, she was iteratively changing the design slightly during every maintenance period, which slowly reduced the maintenance it would require going forward.
  
  Today she had finally replaced all of the lubricants with vacuum tolerant custom manufactured molybdenum disulfide, which was one of the so-called "dry lubricants" which wouldn't boil off at high altitudes. She had learned a lot from Fallout-universe engineering practises about building in truly epically over-engineered mechanisms with captive, enclosed lubrication that might not need to be serviced for a thousand years, but that was just not possible on an aircraft where she wanted to save every kilogram of weight possible, at least not with what she knew about aerospace engineering.
  
  "Is this the second version?" the Apprentice asked while standing in front of a triangular flying wing-style airframe, which was about three times as big as the first generation that she was servicing. It had over a sixteen-metre wingspan, which was a little bit less than a third of the wingspan of a B-52 bomber, and had a projected basic operating weight of close to three tons, or perhaps more. It definitely would be able to carry passengers if she included a version with a cabin and cockpit, which was a version she had been planning until she stopped working on the entire system in a huff a week ago.
  
  The large monster took up the entire length of the small underground hangar that they were standing in. Lily had been building it in stages while simultaneously testing the flight characteristics of a 1:4 model powered by energy cells and fission batteries, but she had stopped recently despite the success of the smaller models' flight tests.
  
  Lily glanced at it, frowning, but nodded. That had been her first step to building an airframe that included a fusion hydrodynamic powerplant, just like her electrical generators. There was no way it could land or take off vertically, though. It would need at least a thousand-metre runway and possibly double that if it was fully loaded.
  
  Lily discovered she could create really efficient electrically powered air jets using the same levitation technology. Pretty simple, too. They were the same thing that was included in the gauss rifle, actually, alongside the normal electromag accelerators. They were tubes with levitation emitters inside that would accelerate air, or essentially whatever was in them, from one in and out the other.
  
  However, Lily had stopped working on the beast about a week ago when she had an epiphany. And she didn't like looking at it because it reminded her that she was, occasionally, an utter moron. She had been slamming her head against the wall on how to integrate the hydrodynamic fusion system into an aircraft and still provide cooling so the reactor wouldn't melt down. At normal operation in the air, it would be fine; air cooling would be way more than sufficient, even at extreme altitudes where the air was thin. However, for landing and take-off at low air speeds, it wouldn't be.
  
  She had designed more than six iterations of various fuel tanks for water as a coolant, including multiple redundant pumps and sprayers, but the water was so heavy that she was still running against weight problems, not to mention controllability issues in models when the aircraft suddenly lost a good amount of weight really close to the ground.
  
  Those were surmountable issues, though, and she was quite pleased with her progress. Until... until... she wondered why didn't she just include two or three fusion cores to run the electrical demands of take-off and landing. Fusion cores were cold fusion, and their power output, when combined with the low-level power of the hydrodynamic fusion system that could be cooled at low speed, would definitely be enough to take off and land.
  
  It wouldn't even deplete the fusion cores that much. She might have to refuel them every twenty flights, perhaps. She only had about twenty free fusion cores that weren't earmarked for the Spider Company and Sheriff's Power Armour, but that would be enough to create at least several such aircraft. It would be enough.
  
  She sighed and said before the Apprentice could question her further, "Yes, but I am changing the design a bit. This new model should be able to carry about ten second-stage vehicles, but probably only about half that if we want to maintain its low cross-section."
  
  It was childish of her to get so upset as to stop development on the project just because she was butthurt about wasting so much time on a developmental dead end. She'd start work adjusting the design tonight. She had the details on the United States anti-satellite constellation, and her options were either to make an adventure to the NASA building or perhaps the Pentagon to find transponders that would identify her probes as American... or what she was more likely going to do, which was lean into her Chinese roots and run them out of ammunition by sending probes up until they ran out of bullets. Robot-wave attacks, in other words.
  
  Both of the first options were kind of bad because, first, she wasn't going to go to the Pentagon, and second the NASA building was hit pretty hard, and it was within throwing distance of the Jefferson memorial, near the Potomac. Both places were Brotherhood territory.
  
  While everyone was playing pretty nice, now, she didn't want them to know she had a need for space-related things. Lily had the designs of the anti-satellite systems, and they used railguns to accelerate steel ball bearings, like a shotgun. They were automated and even very ecologically friendly, as they would always ensure that each shot would result in a deorbiting target instead of additional undetectable space debris. They supposedly had a really prodigious amount of ammunition, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been if they had been set up with some kind of long-range SDI-style space lasers.
  
  She estimated she could throw enough of her "boys" at the barrels of their machine guns to win the day in as little as a month if she could build three of these second-generation first-stage vehicles. Then she would launch low earth orbit satellites until she had a global communications system.
  
  And then she could use these fast, ultra-high altitude planes to scour the world and identify any large settlements of people. Once they were identified, she direct radio broadcasts to them and maybe even provide satellite phones to connect settlements across the world. She was sure that some people would use this capability for communication and news purely for military purposes, but that was on them.
  
  As if reading my mind, the Apprentice said, "Couldn't you use some of your fancy technology to get around having to use radio to communicate with these space probes? You said everyone used quantum entangled communications where you were from."
  
  She hadn't said that, actually. Everyone actually used neutrino-based communications because they were unjammable and somewhat difficult to eavesdrop on. A lot of people did use QE comms, herself included, but they were more specialised and expensive. She hadn't known how to build the entangled particles when she first found herself in the Fallout world, but over the period of time digitising her past memories, she discovered that Meimei had several factories that produced QE communicators.
  
  At first, she hadn't bothered and just bought the QE comms commercially, but she eventually discovered that people were placing man-in-the-middle attacks when they sold her paired quantum qubits; namely, if they sold her two paired qubits supposedly connected together, they were actually connected to two different qubits that they kept in their possession, and they'd forward her communications after presumably inspecting them. She encrypted transmissions, even QE comms, but allowing that to continue could imperil her life if they stopped forwarding the data when she was sending out an emergency ego broadcast, for example.
  
  It was an unacceptable risk, as her entire network of hidden resurrection points was linked through a careful network of quantum-entangled communication systems.
  
  So, she built her own factories building entangled qubits and found it was cheaper in the long run anyway.
  
  Lily shook her head, "Zhe way quantum entangled communicators work is zhat we would 'ave to entangle two particles, called a paired qubit, for every bit we transmit. It is very, very expensive. When you transmit one bit of information, the paired qubits disentangle and become useless. So you 'ave to have vast reservoirs of entangled qubits even for just simple transmissions."
  
  She tilted her head, "I could maybe make a small setup to entangle one particle pair at a time, but it would be a slow process. Zhe best method for industrially producing qubits involves zhe broad spectrum radiation released from an antimatter annihilation reaction, and zhere is no real way to produce industrial levels of antimatter anytime soon or safely. Or I'd be using it as fuel. Probably not for decades. It's like asking me to cook up a bunch of Higgs bosons and zhen trying to keep zhem stable. Difficult."
  
  The Apprentice looked confused, "Oh. I don't know what any of that means. But I'll learn, Mistress! I'll learn!"
  
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  You're supposed to rob the other guy
  "I'm not sure if you know how this dictator thing is 'sposed to work, little lady," Mr Tombs told Lily, amused, as she met with him and his wife at his house. Little? She was taller than he was! Still, he continued, "You're 'sposed to take the belongings of your political enemies, not your friends and yourself."
  
  She nodded at him, "Yes, I am aware of zhe traditional post-coup conduct of dictators after zhe successful revolution. I am probably going to engage in some of zhat, except zhe orgy of murder. My predecessor ran off with most of the money the city should 'ave 'ad, zhen burned the ledgers to try to 'ide it. Why? Does he have any assets in the city that you'd like? Because I definitely intend to compensate you and the other share'olders."
  
  Lily had decided to seize the water and power company that she had helped build herself after compensating the shareholders, which was herself, mostly. The minority shareholders were Tombs, Moriarty and the former mayor, although she hadn't realised that last bit until recently. His compensation was on hold, as from what Lily could tell, both he and his assistant had only briefly stayed in Rivet City and had already assembled a large caravan, including two of the trucks that the Mechanist had begun selling on the open market, and started heading out to the north, towards the Commonwealth. She had the feeling he ran off with a lot more than what she had initially thought, or perhaps more likely that he had been pilfering for years. She didn't intend to stop them, and may the Institute have the pleasure of their company.
  
  Although Lily would be turning the water and power company into a state institution, she intended to keep the ten per cent allocated to the workers and continue paying them their bonuses as expected in perpetuity, even if it meant she had to charge a little bit more for water or power. She intended to run it as a state company, but she intended it to fund itself and its own operations, for the most part.
  
  She had ordered seven new water treatment centres to be built on the locations of each known well in the city, and she was capitalising on the construction herself. She'd also have to build and supply the power generators for these new locations herself, so in effect, she was funding the company's expansion herself, even though she was seizing it.
  
  Each would be somewhat similar to the first one she had constructed, although she would be using some of what she learned from examining Vault 108's water purifier, as well. Each system should be able to purify about eight thousand litres a day when they were finished being constructed. That total amount of construction should, in theory, be able to provide at least four litres of purified water a day to everyone living in Megaton.
  
  That would be a good start, although clean water was one of those things in the Wasteland that just attracted more people to it. Nobody had done any kind of census, but people guessed that there were over half a million people in the Capital Wasteland. The Mechanist was learning that right now, too, as a small settlement had already begun next to the heavily fortified entrance to his Vault. About half of the settlers just came from Canterbury Commons, but the rest came from areas nearby.
  
  How she actually compensated herself, at least the accounting of it, would only really matter in the event she left the government or a new government was formed, which was more sophisticated than "whatever I say goes." Still, she expected the profits to the state company to be considerable, even if she barely charged for either the purified water or the electricity.
  
  Her new pricing structure was similar; for a building connected to electricity, the first certain number of kilowatt hours were almost free. It would be free when the large fusion power station came online. Similarly, the first two litres of water a citizen of Megaton bought per day would only cost only half a cap per litre. The costs went up just to avoid the situation where people wasted the resource, and she was quickly planning to incorporate automated vending systems for the water so as to eliminate the labour costs on the clerks selling it at the moment. How would she recognise Megaton citizens, though? Facial recognition technology? Or state-issued ID cards? Both, probably.
  
  "How're you compensating yourself? You own most of the company after all," asked Mr Tombs curiously.
  
  Lily made a face. She was taking what was probably the worst option she was giving out to Tombs and Moriarty, which was the new state water company would issue her a bond for the total market value of her ownership interest and then pay it back over a period of fifteen years. This was also the easiest to structure, but she felt this was the worst option for purely economic reasons, as she was also offering compensation in real estate in Megaton proper or speculative real estate in the planned new circle that she was going to construct. She felt that either of those would likely be a much better return on investment, but she wanted it to look above board.
  
  Lily told him, and he chuckled, "I'd rather get something right now. I have a feeling that we may be in a boom period as far as this city is concerned, so I think I'd get a lot more out of something I could put to productive use now rather than the meagre interest your bond will pay. No offence."
  
  Lily nodded slowly. She wasn't surprised. It was the option she would have taken, too, if she didn't minimise the appearance of self-dealing. Perhaps it was pointless, considering she was going to be actually self-dealing with herself by paying her hospital to provide a minimum amount of healthcare to the citizens as a whole in the next month or so. Whatever she did, it would look like she was just having the state pay her own company, but she doubted she would hear too much about it. That was almost expected around here, after all.
  
  As Lily returned to her building, she considered Tombs' request that she had agreed to. She was basically giving him some of the former mayor's unused real estate and a couple of planned plots in the western hemisphere. However, she had agreed to hold onto the mayor's portion for the moment after she explained to Tombs her plans for property taxes.
  
  The traditional view of property taxes was that you taxed a citizen a small amount based on the value of the real property. In America, it averaged about one per cent per annum, which meant that rather than owning property, you could be best described as in a transferrable lease arrangement with the state, with a strict covenant so that the only way that they could generally evict you was if you stopped paying.
  
  There was a lot to be said against the practice, but in Megaton, there was a strictly limited surface area, so any kind of scheme which didn't punish someone for purchasing and then sitting on a parcel of land for speculative purposes actually harmed the city as a whole significantly. As such, she was instituting a property tax per annum, whereas previously, it was only taxed upon transfer to a new person.
  
  However, her price structure was a bit odd. She was charging less the more improved a property was and less if it was actively being used. The most expensive property taxes would be assessed on empty lots in prime locations. It was a way to induce the property owners to put what they owned to productive use. Although close to fifteen thousand people lived in Megaton, which was barely thirty square kilometres, a good third of the city's land was unused.
  
  After the first year, she would start taxing a building more if it was in bad condition, too. There were readily available building materials now. The husband and wife team that used to work for Tombs but now ran the cement factory had discovered suitable limestone and other deposits to the north and was already capitalising a venture to mine them, as the amount of calcium Lily could supply them from her recyclers was not anywhere near enough to meet demand. At present, cement was being sold mostly locally, but traders had already remarked upon the material and seemed interested in exporting it.
  
  Glancing up at the roof and seeing a Vertibird hovering briefly and landing there wasn't too unusual these days, but the message that Sarah Lyons had come to see her was.
  
  Both Sarah and Scribe Ferguson were there and were already waiting for her in her office, but the first reaction the woman had surprised her, she startled and said, "Holy fuck your eyes." Oh. Yeah. Most everyone in Megaton had already gotten used to her improved optics, but that wasn't an uncommon reaction for seeing them for the first time.
  
  Lily rubbed the back of her neck, "Ah, yes. I decided to replace my squishy organic eyeballs with zhese. Cool huh? I can see into the infrared and the UV."
  
  Sarah shook her head while Ferguson simultaneously nodded rapidly.
  
  'Should I show her my tools?' Lily thought, then internally decided against it. They weren't a secret, exactly, but the fewer people who knew about them, the less likely people would chop her limbs off if they somehow managed to capture her.
  
  Sarah finally asked with a chuckle, "So, what should we call you? My dad thought you would take over the city, but I told him no way! Shows what I know, I guess. Mayor?"
  
  Lily hummed and said, "I'm going with dictator for now."
  
  That caused Sarah Lyons to laugh, not realising she was serious. I had set up some additional furniture near the couch in the corner of my office, so we sat there with Sarah Lyons sitting on the obviously reinforced chair that I made for Power Armoured guests, Ferguson taking the couch, and she sitting at another similar chair.
  
  It had been some time since the Inexplicable Explosion That She Definitely Wasn't Involved In, and she hadn't really heard much about what happened and wasn't stupid enough to ask them about it, like someone with a guilty conscience might. Still, Sarah Lyons revealed some of it to her, "Well, we reabsorbed most of the survivors that Casdin had tricked, although about twenty Paladins whose opinions were irreconcilable took some weapons, armour and supplies and departed to the Pitt."
  
  That was more than she thought. Twenty well-organised and well-armed men could do a lot there. They'd probably be killed or run part of the place within a year, Lily thought. Lily asked, hesitantly, "Did the radar returns help any?"
  
  Sarah shrugged, "Yes and no. They matched with what we had, so that was helpful, but they obviously didn't show anything, which was less helpful. We believe we discovered the epicentre of the blast, and it was near the exterior of the building. That is a little bit odd, but it's nothing conclusive. Our best guess is that there was either a prototype bomb being researched, which exploded or that the base had a self-destruct that was triggered somehow. The Elder has stopped the investigation."
  
  Lily glanced between Sarah and Ferguson before saying, "Nuclear demolition charges as a self-destruct were not common features, even in top-secret government-run research stations."
  
  Ferguson piped in, "But they're not totally unheard of, either. In fact, this wouldn't even have been the fifth one we've had records of. Honestly, I think it's for the best." He held up a hand placatingly as Sarah glared at him, "I don't mean it like that. But Casdin was nuts. He once told me that it was heretical that we allowed 'tribals' access to electricity, for Maxson's sake."
  
  Sarah allowed herself to be placated a little bit before Lily asked, "So, what can I do for you two today? Is this just a meet and greet with the new civil authority in the city?"
  
  Sarah nodded while Ferguson simultaneously shook his head. Lily stopped herself from smirking. She liked these two.
  
  "Well, yes and no," Sarah admitted. She then said, "Anytime Megaton gets a new mayor, which has happened through election three times and revolution twice, including your rise to power, the Brotherhood reaches out to the new civil authority. This is especially important now, as we have noticed your military forces are a lot better trained and are now wearing identical seeming T-51b armour. We think there is no way that you stumbled upon such a cache of equipment, so we believe you're manufacturing it."
  
  Lily nodded, not seeing a reason to hide it anymore. Or rather, she didn't think prevaricating would work, "Yes, that's true. I believe that you manufacture Power Armour, as well. In fact, I am almost certain of it."
  
  Scribe Ferguson scrunched up his face and glanced at Sarah Lyons, who nodded, "Yes... we do... but each suit is made by hand, almost. We definitely couldn't produce fifty suits of Power Armour in a few months."
  
  "Ah, are you interested in putting in order of your own?" Lily asked amusedly.
  
  Sarah Lyons nodded, "Yes, actually. We'd very much like to have a closer relationship with both you and the city of Megaton. But we'd like to discuss technology transfers. For example, the Scribes discovered on the laser weapon you gave to us that you are reusing scavenged ruby rods. We know how to manufacture those. We also know how to manufacture fusion cores. Although we currently don't have the means to do so, POSEIDON energy had complete manufacturing diagrams, engineering data, and blueprints for the machine that produces standard fusion cores in their corporate files, which we have."
  
  Wow, that was a lot friendlier than I thought. I was expecting demands. Both of those things would be very, very useful. The ability to manufacture fusion cores was clearly the most important, although lasers on everything sounded nice too. Lily nodded slowly, "And what are you interested in, in exchange?"
  
  Ferguson coughed, "We suspect you have some way to fabricate metal shapes in three dimensions, arbitrarily and quickly. It's the only thing that makes sense. We really need that. Especially if it can do multiple different types of alloys."
  
  "We would also like permission for the Brotherhood to set up an enclave in the city of Megaton. This has, historically, been denied every time the administration has changed in the city. And since, even if you give us the technology now, it may take a while for us to put it into production we'd like to contract with you to manufacture us some laser rifles, laser pistols, and judging from your robots plasma rifles as well," Sarah Lyons added.
  
  I glanced at her oddly, "I don't bar anyone from the city unless zhey've committed some crime. So long as you buy or lease some property, zhat's fine. Although I would like your assistance in a matter, but I believe it will ultimately 'elp yourselves in zhe long run."
  
  Sarah looked a little disbelieving, "Even if we have brothers guarding it in power armour all the time?"
  
  Lily shrugged, "The bank has guards in Power Armour. There is no law zhat says I'm zhe only one allowed an effective paramilitary force in zhe city."
  
  "Bank? Wait, I'll put a pin in that today. What assistance?" she asked, even more confused.
  
  "Orphans," Lily said simply. "Zhere are between one hundred and fifty and zhree hundred semi-feral children in and around Megaton. I discovered zhe issue when I was giving zhe bum rush to the violent gangs in zhe city limits."
  
  Sarah glanced between Ferguson and Lily and asked, "Okay...?"
  
  "I want you to set up an orphanage in town. If you do, I will provide 'elp and sell you one of the prime lots for your enclave," Lily said simply.
  
  "That's... something we might be willing to do, but how would..." Sarah began before stopping after she realised what Lily was getting at. She frowned at Lily and asked accusingly, "You expect us to indoctrinate the orphans of your city?!"
  
  Lily asked while spreading her hands, "What is zhe education of children if not indoctrination into a culture? I 'onestly don't believe zhere is that much of a difference. And if zhey grow up wanting to join zhe Brotherhood at the Citadel, well.. at least zhey grew up, yes?"
  
  Scribe Ferguson said quickly, "We'll do it!" Sarah Lyons looked at him, shocked, and he shook her head at her, "Trust me! We'll do it!"
  
  Sarah Lyons sighed and said, "Alright, but we're going to have a long discussion when we leave here Scribe." Lily suspected that the Scribe understood the bone she was throwing them a lot better than Lyons did. Some orphans were taken to Little Lamplight, but most just survived or died, where they lived or migrated to settlements like Megaton and lived on the periphery of society. Most became raiders when they became old enough to carry a weapon and take what they needed to survive.
  
  The Brotherhood needed new blood to survive. It just wouldn't make it if it was confined to only the new generation produced internally and the occasional walk-in recruit.
  
  Lily said, "Your suspicions are right, by zhe way. I use a technology called Direct Metal Laser Sintering to print 3-D shapes in metal alloys. I'd be willing to give you zhis technology, including several samples, the engineering data to build them yourselves, as well as a customised server mainframe zhat I repurposed to design zhe 3-D shapes."
  
  The DMLS technology was one she always had intended to hand over to the Brotherhood when they came demanding it. As such, she had spent a little time building a server mainframe that ran a more limited copy of the CAD software she designed. She still couldn't quite build LCD displays yet, but she could make pretty good colour CRTs, and this machine featured a number of workstations that had full-colour displays with quite impressive graphics. A number of multi-millimetre-wave radar systems were included that could scan in shapes of real-life objects to import into the CAD's design system.
  
  They dickered a bit, and eventually, they settled on a more or less direct transfer of the DMLS technology for the fusion core manufacturing technology. Sarah was unhappy that Lily wouldn't transfer the technology used in the recycling systems she described, but Lily finally agreed to at least sell them with as many of the recycling systems as they desired, within reason. She already included two of her heavy-duty two-megawatt recycling systems to the Brotherhood in the package she had already planned on.
  
  Scribe Ferguson said it wasn't a huge deal, as they had ways to create very fine pure iron powders already, so she suspected the recyclers she gave and later sold to them would be mainly used to recycle unusual metals and materials.
  
  Although one of the stipulations was when she got the capability to manufacture fusion cores, she had to be willing to sell at least a third of those that she manufactured to the Brotherhood. They had first right of refusal to one-third of the fusion cores she would produce, in other words.
  
  Lily got the technology to manufacture and dope ruby or sapphire laser gain medium by trading the designs of her laser-powered high-speed tunnelling and boring machines, as well as a promise to help them as a consultant as they built their own fusion power station. They had quickly realised they both had the same pre-war designs, so she didn't particularly mind that.
  
  Honestly, she intended to include the fusion power station design, along with her notes about lessons learned in construction, in the Megaton Public Library. And if she ever got a constellation of communication satellites in orbit, she would beam the designs and much more to anyone who requested them. It was true that she would hoard any technology that she felt would give her an edge in her goal to survive, but anything that didn't? She would like as wide dissemination as possible.
  
  She was a little surprised at their demand for her boring machines, but the Brotherhood had a lot better idea about the extent of her excavation than anyone else. They admitted that there were hundreds of very sophisticated Pre-War military seismographs and ground penetrating radar sensors in and around DC, many of which still worked. That made her a little worried, but there wasn't anything she could really do about it aside from continuing digging until she was at a level where they couldn't even sense her excavation.
  
  "Alright, now zhat zhat is done, now let me put on my arms dealer 'at on for a second. I can manufacture zhese weapons for you. 'ow many and what types, and 'ow will you pay?" Lily asked, avoiding seeming too greedy. She had a city to finance, and an influx of gold would help with that. The equipment she built solely for weapons production had sat idle for some time. If she had a large supply of lasing rods, she could easily build fifteen laser rifles a day, and it was completely automated now, whereas, in the past, she still had to do about twenty per cent of the assembly herself.
  
  "To the same specifications that you produce your own laser rifles and pistols. Five thousand pieces of each. Three thousand plasma rifles, three thousand plasma pistols," Sarah Lyons said stoically.
  
  Lily almost did a spit-take with the glass of water she had brought up to her lips. Ten thousand laser weapons and six thousand plasma weapons? Was she insane?
  
  "From my best estimates, the complete Brotherhood barely has three thousand people," Lily told her after staring at her aghast for a moment. "That's beyond the fact that I don't actually have a giant factory. It would take me years to produce that much!"
  
  Sarah Lyons nodded firmly, "Yes, we suspected that. We suspect it might take you up to ten years to produce this order. You can fulfil it on an ongoing monthly basis."
  
  Ohhhh. How cunning. The Brotherhood wanted to basically buy out her entire productive capacity, or what they thought it was, for a period of years so she wouldn't sell anything to anyone else. It would actually only take her two or three years to build this order, and that was if she didn't produce more capacity. However... was there anything wrong with letting them think she was committed to them this way?
  
  Lily hummed, "Energy weapons were going to be one of Megaton's premiere export products in the coming years. It would attract a lot of merchants! If I agree to zhis order, zhat will stop zhis plan." Although, she was exaggerating slightly because she had already begun building Auto-Docs from scratch, as they were going to be part of her plan to build a number of small municipally owned clinics.
  
  She'd have to train and pay the clinicians to run them, but she thought it might be done fairly cheaply if she could widely use Auto-Doc technology. And if she was building them for the city, she might as well build them for export, too. And they were considered very rare Pre-War technology, so she thought they'd draw merchants even more than readily available laser rifles.
  
  "Yeah, no shit. Our planning department figured that out right away. The thing is, we don't want the average raider or Super Mutant to be any more well-armed than they are now. That's why we're willing to pay a premium," Sarah Lyons said, amused.
  
  Lily moued prettily, "What if I only sell them to long-range merchants who agree not to resell them in the Capital Wasteland?"
  
  "That could be acceptable. If you can guarantee that they won't end up in the hands of the NCR back west," Lyons mused.
  
  Lily waved a fist at her, "Zhat's bloody impossible!" To which even Ferguson nodded. After that, they discussed it some more. Lily wanted to agree to this order, especially when Lyons said that they would pay half upfront, and she agreed to a limit on the number of energy weapons she would sell based on a percentage of how many she delivered to the Brotherhood every month.
  
  Her head was starting to hurt from talking to people too much, so she put a stop to the discussions there. Besides, there had been a lot done today.
  
  Every time she haggled with someone, she carefully thought about it when she was alone later, after the fact. She almost never got the better of anyone, ever. She didn't think she did, here, either, but she felt that it was... almost even? She didn't think she got ripped off like she normally did, anyway. The Brotherhood would slowly become more of an effective force, but she didn't particularly mind that so long as it didn't backslide. Having such a close relationship with a technologically more advanced "outsider" should prevent that... she hoped.
  
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  Inviolable Soul
  Lily had been seeing Grace more often since they had settled in Megaton more or less full-time. Typically, she would have tired of a sexual partner by now, months ago even, but she had to admit that she enjoyed the woman's company, and she had worked up to spending almost as much time with her as she budgeted for Alice, which made her Lily's second favourite person and ranked as a high two on Lily's scale of people, by now.
  
  Still, she still needed a period to recharge with solitude after being around her, just like the Apprentice and other people. The main difference between Grace and the Apprentice and other people was that their presence deducted much less mental fuel over time than other people did.
  
  "Oh, are you going to serenade me? Where did you find zhat guitar?" asked Lily amusedly when Grace showed up with a traditional folk-style acoustic guitar one evening.
  
  That caused the woman to grin, "Yeah! I've been learning how to play, and this guitar was handed down to me by my dad, who brought it from California."
  
  Lily sat down to listen with her hands in her lap and said regally, "Okay, you may begin serenading me now.
  
  "Well, perhaps not serenade; I don't sing too well, but listen to this," Grace said and began playing a very challenging piece with a definitive Spanish guitar sound. By the end of the short two-minute piece, she was clapping happily.
  
  It reminded her of a song that she could play on the guitar too, and she could sing too. She had sung before in both of her lives, but people often commented that she was technically very good but lacking something, so she had not often done it.
  
  She had learned to play the guitar in her life in America, and although she definitely wasn't as good as Grace, there was one song that was very heavily inspired by a guitar solo by Isaac Albéniz called Asturias that she could play; it had a Spanish guitar sound to it, and she thought Grace would like the lyrics too.
  
  "That was great! Okay, my turn..." Lily said and held her hands out for the guitar, which Grace handed to her after glancing at her for a moment.
  
  Grace asked, "You can play the guitar?"
  
  Lily huffed, "Of course! Now... uh... let me see if I can remember."
  
  She had heard this song originally on that terrible but addictive short-video app shortly after what became known as the first pandemic of the 2020s, about twenty years prior to her death. That was about the time that everyone agreed that the world started turning to shit, not the exact point but more like the turning point.
  
  By the time she passed away in 2043, instead of the expected ten billion people on Earth, the population had dropped to about six and a half, with nuclear fire touching the Earth four more times in twenty years. Odessa and Kargil were the first two incidents, and Tel Aviv and Tehran were the third.
  
  When Hamas drove an Iranian-provided nuclear explosive and detonated it in Tel Aviv, Israel responded by nuking the Iranian capital to cinders and then deploying EMP weapons on all of the other Iranian cities, with the Israelis teaming up weirdly enough with two other Arab polities to destroy the Iranian state and military. Seeing Israeli and Saudi Arabian jets fly missions together against the Persians on CNN had been incredibly surreal, she thought. It was like reality was stranger than fiction.
  
  Although amazingly, neither of the three incidents sparked a global nuclear war as it had in the Fallout universe, some felt it was very close, especially the first incident in Eastern Europe.
  
  Shaking her head, she returned to the song. Still, it was a very nice song, even if it reminded her of the beginning of the world's downward spiral, so she reviewed it quickly in her head.
  
  The guitar element of the song was a direct copy of that 19th-century Spanish virtuoso's work but simplified, which was the only reason she felt she could play it.
  
  As for the lyrics, well, Lily always thought they sounded moderate to highly sapphic, so she felt that Grace would like them. After getting a handle on the guitar and playing a few test chords and a simple melody for practice, she nodded. If she had already replaced her larynx with a digital speaker, she could have copied the singer's original song, but that would be cheating, she supposed.
  
  Still, even though she couldn't autotune her voice at the moment, she still brought up a simple auditory waveform analyser that would give her an alert if she started to sing out of key.
  
  Grace was grinning and waiting for her to begin, so she coughed once and started to play the intro guitar solo, then began singing, " I summoned you; please come to me. Don't bury zhoughts zhat you really want. I fill you up, drink from my cup. Within me lies what you really want..."
  
  The song she was singing was called "Middle of the Night", and she didn't think she sang it even half as well as the original artist. Still, she must have done it well enough as she didn't get past the second repetition of the chorus before Grace pounced her, carefully avoiding damaging her precious guitar.
  
  She had a busy day the next day; she was replacing the trashed gas turbine on her captured Vertibird with a brand new one she had manufactured by the simple expedient of copying the working one. She didn't have a source for a hydrocarbon-based fuel to run it, though, and it only had about a half tank left in it.
  
  Before she got the manufacturing details for fusion cores, she had intended to build a similar hydrocarbon fuel manufacturing facility using a lot of the power of the fusion power station. However, she wasn't sure what she was going to do with this repaired Vertibird now. She took detailed scans, and the airframe wasn't really suitable for conversion to a fusion platform as it was.
  
  She could modify the design and replace the gas turbines with, perhaps, five fusion cores powering a robust and powerful electrical motor on each side. The motor would need to be cooled, but traditional liquid cooling would suffice at a low airspeed, with air-cooling at cruise taking over.
  
  But it would take almost as much work to refurbish this Vertibird than it would to rebuild a new one to the new design, besides she didn't have the extremely complicated machinery necessary to build the fusion cores finished yet.
  
  It wasn't that difficult to create a simple boron-impregnated metal alloy, but in order to be used in this type of fusion, it had to be accurately crystalised layer upon layer in interesting geometric patterns with atomic accuracy that she could not even achieve with her current generation of nanomachines.
  
  She had the complete design specifications for the complicated machine that could do it, and she was sure she could build it. However, it was as big as a three-bedroom house, so she started a new digging project. Normally, the ceilings in her underground areas were a little over three and a quarter metres. Taller than normal buildings, as she wanted people in Power Armour and possibly large robots to be able to navigate it{easily, but this would need more than twice that.
  
  It was a long and complicated building project to dig out a single level that had ceilings that were over two times her normal. Special care had to be taken to ensure the stability of the project, so it didn't collapse, but she thought she could have the area ready in two months. Then maybe another month or two to build the machine, and she could start production. It was no wonder that the Brotherhood couldn't manufacture these fuckers. Could she instead just take over Raven Rock in four months?
  
  Sighing, she shook her head as she supervised a team of robots using a crane to drop the new engine into place. Pausing, she noticed Grace approaching the outside hangar she was working in. Curious, she waited for the woman to approach.
  
  "Ooooh, sweet, is this the one you shot down? I thought it would have been wrecked..." Grace said as she walked in.
  
  Lily nodded at her; she had been in town when the Brotherhood had attacked and had been a little upset she hadn't gotten in on the action, "Yes. I targeted zhe right engine, and zhe pilot was able to land it; quite good work actually. I'm replacing the turbine engine now."
  
  She walked around it and whistled, "Oooh, it's one of the first generation Pre-War models that are still powered by jet fuel... an oldy, eh?"
  
  Lily blinked slowly at Grace and asked carefully, "What... else would it be powered by?"
  
  Grace snorted, "Well, you didn't expect us to have a number of gas stations to stop at on the way from the west coast, did you?"
  
  Lily had, actually. Although now that she thought about it, Gary had said those fuel-generating stations were only installed at Naval Air Stations, for sure. There was not a lot of call for the Navy in Colorado or Oklahoma, so there probably weren't any Naval Air Stations in those landlocked states.
  
  Grace continued, "Even before Control Station ENCLAVE exploded, the eggheads had built fusion-powered Vertibirds. There are only a few places you can get fuel for these babies these days, although we could get some gas if you wanna fly over to Adams?" She asked, laughing up a storm at her own joke.
  
  What? Lily had been smashing her head against the wall of a fusion-powered Vertibird for... well, how long had she been here now? She was pretty sure she could do it now but was she just reinventing what some people had already done?
  
  "Did zhey just put a bunch of fusion cores in zhem to power zhem?" Lily asked curiously, as that had been her solution.
  
  Grace shook her head, then paused and then shrugged, "Well, it kind of looked like a fusion core, to be honest, but it was about the size of a hot water cooler instead of the usual thermos of coffee size. They needed to be pulled out and refuelled on a special machine every two hundred flight hours; I know that."
  
  What? The size of fusion cores wasn't solely because it was a small, compact and useful size. That was as big as they could make the devices individually. From the engineering discussion she had been perusing, Mass Fusion had tried to make over-sized fusion units because their efficiency would have been a lot better, but the peculiar reaction between protons and hydrogen wouldn't occur if the reaction chamber was too big, and that limited the size of the device.
  
  Lily stood there pouting, which caused Grace to laugh and ask her, "What's wrong?"
  
  "Nothing," Lily said, but the truth was she didn't like not being indisputably the smartest person alive.
  
  'Well... chances are the person who invented this died of old age already,' Lily comforted herself with that thought.
  
  Sarah Lyons showed up to her office as requested the next morning, "Hey, Doc. What's up?" Lily hadn't told the woman why she had requested the meeting, in part to see if she would ask clarification or just come anyway. Lily liked that she had just come anyway.
  
  "I repaired zhe Vertibird I seized from your wayward souls. I'll return it to you for a favour," Lily told her, straight to the point.
  
  Lyons widened her eyes, "Damn! I should have brought Ferguson; he was sure that machine was going to be down forever. Reports are the engine was totally wrecked."
  
  Lily blinked at her and then said, "Ah. You still 'aven't considered the possibilities with zhe DMLS system I sent you." She sounded disappointed, like a teacher that got a poor book report from a student. "It included scanning systems to scan physical objects. I just copied every part from zhe working engine and 'printed' a brand-new gas generator in a similar alloy and put it on zhe airframe. I tested it, and it runs properly."
  
  Although the Brotherhood would have had to disassemble a working engine and scan each individual part one at a time since the multi-millimetre wave radar scanner doesn't penetrate like Lily's supertech one does but it was still possible for them; it just would take more time.
  
  Sarah Lyons's face grew shocked for a moment before saying, "Wait! Are you saying that we could do this repair ourselves now? We have over a squadron of Vertibirds sitting doing nothing for lack of working engines." How many aircraft were in a squadron again? In her experience in the US Army, aircraft were formed into battalions as God intended. Perhaps Air Cav had squadrons, though. She thought it was over twenty, though.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, I will include zhe CAD files for zhe gas generator as a sweetener if you agree to 'elp with gusto. It'd probably save your Scribes a lot of man-hours, but you could do zhe exact same zhing I just did even without this 'elp."
  
  Sarah hummed and nodded, "You're right. I hadn't considered the possibility that these machines would have. Compressor turbines and rocket engines all could be built really easily now, huh?" Lily nodded at her.
  
  Then she asked, "What do you need? I'd really like to get that Vertibird back, even if you just told me it isn't quite as important anymore, and I want those CAD files to bribe the material sciences Scribes with."
  
  "Remember zhe seed vault locations you told me about?" She nodded, "Well, I want your 'elp to loot zhat one that is on Kent Island. The bridge is out; I've already checked."
  
  Sarah made an 'ahhh' noise and asked, curiously, "Why are you so interested in these seeds or plant samples?"
  
  "Besides zhe fact zhat zhey're the collective genetic 'eritage of 'umanity, zhat is?" Lily asked her, amused.
  
  Sarah nodded, "Yes, besides that."
  
  "Because I believe I could genetically modify a number of types of plants to grant them not only a resistance to radiation, but zhe capability to sequester radionuclides through a biological process," Lily told her, honestly.
  
  Sarah asked, surprisingly insightfully, "Pull the radioactive particulates out of the water they drink, you mean?"
  
  Lily nodded, "And the air if it was dusty. It might take thirty years, but eventually, DC and then the rest of the world might stop being a radioactive hell-hole."
  
  Sarah smiled, "That's the part of you I like, Doctor. My dad says you're a high-functioning psychopath, but then you have these lofty ideas to make the world a better place. Yeah, we can definitely help you, especially in exchange for what you're paying us."
  
  Lily didn't quite understand what Sarah was saying. She didn't think that those two things she mentioned were mutually exclusive. And besides, she felt empathy... sometimes, especially if she reminded herself to do so and made an active effort out of it.
  
  Sarah then coughed, "Uhh... I didn't mean to call you a psychopath, exactly. I'm pretty sure my dad is wrong. Plus, that's one of the main reasons he agreed to work so closely with you. I'm not sure I understand why, either."
  
  Lily hummed and enlightened the woman, "If zhat is what zhe psychological profile he had constructed of me says zhen 'is decision is likely because it would make me very predictable. I don't really agree with it either, but I am pretty predictable in a lot of ways."
  
  However, she wondered how Elder Lyons had gotten enough data for his psychologist Scribes to presumably profile her. Did he suspect that she had something to do with the Outcasts' inexplicable incineration? If so, it might explain why he stopped the investigation and why he told his daughter that she was a psychopath.
  
  Shrugging, she continued, "I'd like you to use your aircraft to take some of my men, and yours too, if you want to come, to zhose coordinates and bring everything you can back."
  
  She already knew what her first priority to acquire was. If you considered this a terraforming attempt, then it became obvious which plant would be ideal in this hemisphere once modified. Kudzu.
  
  However, just radiation-resistant cereal crops would be a real shot in the arm of civilisation around here. Virginia and Maryland had a lot of good farmland once upon a time. It was still there, except for the contamination.
  
  It took a week and a half to organise the mission to go to the seed vault, but Lily was surprisingly not involved one whit.
  
  Gary had been keen to get involved, especially when Lily had mentioned the purpose. The Brotherhood had been really happy with their returned Vertibird and thrilled with the CAD files and the idea that they could get their fleet of aircraft that they had been mainly cannibalising for parts in the air. There was already talk of training more Initiates as Pilots.
  
  Lily sent him through a VR Power Armour familiarisation course and gave him a set of T-51B armour and a new plasma pistol. He already had the old plasma rifle that they had used so long ago in their ant eradication mission.
  
  Gary didn't hide his past with Sarah Lyons, and she and the rest of the Brotherhood were amazed. Although they still had an ongoing conflict with the Enclave, they still had a lot of reverence for people who were in the US military during the time of the Great War, just like their founder.
  
  Lily gave all control of the operation to Gary and the Brotherhood, putting them in command of her soldiers, who seemed very eager to fly on Vertibirds, while another two squads were going to accompany her on a different mission.
  
  Sadly, when you became a Dictator, it became a lot more difficult to just sneak off on your lonesome, so she was taking her armoured RV and two trucks filled with soldiers and robots.
  
  The Apprentice actually wanted to go with Gary and explore the Vault, which Lily encouraged as she felt that her own destination was dangerous. Well, if not dangerous, then at least uncertain. Although, the Brotherhood team looked askance at the young girl in her obviously much sleeker and larger hardsuit. Pinker, too.
  
  It didn't help when Alice asked one of the Paladins, "What, you mean your armour doesn't have built-in weapons systems or a battle management computer?"
  
  Lily sent the girl a text message: ixnay, and she stopped showing off.
  
  Her roof could fit two Vertibirds, and Lily watched them arrive two at a time to pick up a squad of her men and robots and Gary and Alice before flying off to the southeast in formation. Apparently, they would refuel, and from there, they would hit the site. All of the Vertibirds had both GPS systems, including moving maps, even if the maps hadn't been updated in a while.
  
  Leftenant Wilson asked, "So, what's so special about this Dunwich company, ma'am?"
  
  "I don't know, but I am going to find out," Lily said earnestly. She had been putting off her curiosity about this place ever since she got here, and she just couldn't avoid it anymore. It was like a junkie with a pile of opiates in front of them; you couldn't expect her not to partake, even if it was dangerous.
  
  If it killed her, she had left a complete download of her ego and PC data dump in a small device in the Apprentice's room, along with instructions on how to clone her a new body and transfer the memories over. Lily no longer thought that such a replacement would still be her, but at the same time, it would be the best thing that wasn't her that someone very much like her continued to exist. Still, she would do her best not to die.
  
  The drive was long and uneventful. The Dunwich building was on the far left of "the map" in Fallout 3, which turned out to be over a hundred kilometres from Megaton, so it took several hours of driving around to get there.
  
  Lily had to stop the team of humans from going inside, she shook her head, "No, just robots. You guys stay out here and guard the perimeter."
  
  That surprised them, but it was the reason she brought so many robots with her. She glanced at the twenty Kaytrons, "Lasers only; I don't want to burn zhe building down. Sweep and clear the entire building and basement levels. Execute."
  
  There were diminishing returns with Kaytron intelligence gains due to their distributed network, so twenty Kaytrons weren't appreciably smarter than eight, and a thousand wouldn't be appreciably smarter than twenty. That was partly by her design in keeping the bandwidth available for intra-Kaytron communication limited but mostly because stable distributed intelligence was a very hard problem.
  
  Still, they nodded as one and proceeded into the building. Lily wasn't watching through any of their sensors but was following their broadcast actions and intra-Mesh communications, and they systematically cleared all of the feral ghouls from the upper levels and then proceeded down in the basement and connected cavern, ensuring a daisy-chain of their fellows kept a complete relay chain, so Lily could maintain contact with the whole cohort.
  
  The sweep and clear order wouldn't kill entities if they weren't considered a threat or if they didn't attack, so she supposed every one of the cultist ghouls in the cavern attacked on sight, just like the game. If there was anything else down there, the robots couldn't detect it, and they could detect a lot more than even she could.
  
  Twenty minutes after they entered the building they all filed out. She glanced at the Spider Company men and women, "Okay, I'm going to go in alone."
  
  That caused Wilson to fidget, "Uh... I'm not sure..." Lily waved him off, "I'm going to go in alone." She said, firmer this time.
  
  "Yes, ma'am. Estimate before you're back up?" he said, getting with the program.
  
  Lily hummed and shrugged slightly, "I don't know. Either not very long or most of the day. If it's zhe latter, I'll try to come up and let you know."
  
  She entered the building, triggering her HUD to display the shortest path to reach the caverns below and started walking there. In the game, there were a number of spooky holotapes that told the tragic story of a man named Jaime Palabras in a Lovecraftian descent into madness.
  
  Lily didn't really believe in the supernatural, but she had already seen evidence of psychic and telekinetic powers in this world. In the game, the Dunwich building wasn't dangerous, but Lily wasn't the protagonist of the game; that would be the Lone Wanderer assuming the world recognised him as such. A lot of things that wouldn't touch a protagonist might cinematically kill an NPC like her. Still, she had to find out anyway.
  
  In the game, you saw a number of hallucinations as you passed through the building, but she did not experience anything at all except a vague sense of unease, and she might have been imagining or projecting that herself.
  
  As she walked down the stairs into the basement to reach the caverns her perspective suddenly shifted, and both audible klaxon alarms and visual alerts started peppering her visual field.
  
  *** WARNING! BASILISK HACK PRECAUTIONS! ***
  
  She blinked, suddenly realising that she was hanging upside down from the ceiling on the top floor of the building, and her left-hand tools were deployed, as were her replacement legs that she had installed without telling the Apprentice a few days ago. She had tested them and loved them but hadn't gotten around to scaring Alice with them yet.
  
  The eight spindly little legs felt very comfortable, and they gripped the ceiling through a combination of levitation emitters on the tip of each leg and grabby little claws. She had the battery power to hang like this for hours.
  
  Her plasma cutter tool was almost completely discharged; whatever she had done had used most of the special miniature micro-fusion cell she installed in the arm.
  
  She skittered down across the ceiling and then down the wall to stand on the floor and deployed all of the tools back into her left arm. She'd keep her legs like this for now while she conducted a mental self-assessment. If she needed to run fast, then these legs could run over forty-five kilometres an hour on even rough and uneven ground, like the middle of a half-destroyed building, which was so much faster than two legs ever could.
  
  She didn't know how her basilisk hack precautions were triggered. By definition, she couldn't know. Basilisk hacks were from her old world, and were constructed by the hyper-intelligent TITAN AIs. They were a memetic attack which took advantage of the way biological or even emulated transhuman brains interpreted and processed sensory input. Kind of like the way epileptics was susceptible to certain visual stimuli, all of humanity was susceptible to certain combinations of all senses, although she suspected it was mainly sight and sound. It was kind of a difficult thing to study.
  
  The hyperintelligent AIs knew so much about how the mind worked that they could craft a series of sensory inputs and, through them, deliver payloads directly from the brain. It could be as simple as knocking you out or as insidious as completely rewriting your personality over a period of months. Once you saw and heard the attack, you were pretty much done.
  
  It was so serious that in the past, her standard countermeasure for a potentially detected basilisk hack was self-deletion, followed by restoring herself from a backup. She valued her life now a lot more than she did back then, but she kept a modified version of the precautions on her system.
  
  To be triggered, her computer had to have detected her memories being changed in real-time, somehow. Her Muse continuously monitored her sensorium and compared it to her short-term memory, and in a serious discrepancy, it triggered this failover mode. It rendered her unconscious and took over her body, and it used whatever methods it could to run away until the effect stopped.
  
  When it felt she was as safe as she was likely to get, it saved some data about the incident, including a modified version of her sensorium, and then carefully deleted her short-term memory; then just to be safe, it deleted its own memory about the incident.
  
  The only way she could learn about what happened was if she opened the data packet, and if that triggered the system again, well, the Muse wouldn't leave a report the second time.
  
  Sighing, Lily checked her network connections and sent a message to the men outside that she might be longer than she thought. After that, she opened the file and squinted at her sensorium. The Muse altered it, giving a random distortion to everything she saw, heard, smelled or felt.
  
  The idea was it would take very precise sensory combinations for a basilisk hack to take place, and adjusting them randomly with distortion should cause the entire thing to fail.
  
  She didn't see anything unusual, but for a period of time, she stopped on the stairs and said, "What the fuck?" That was unusual. She wasn't seeing anything on the sensorium, but Lily's past self was clearly reacting to something. The thought track was intentionally missing here, so she didn't know what she was thinking.
  
  After a couple of minutes, she didn't say anything but continued down into the cavern where she found the obelisk, but then immediately she noticed when her Muse took over, deployed her eight legs and plasma torch and sprinted up out of the cavern, skittering across walls and ceiling until she used the plasma cutter to cut through part of the ceiling, and darting up through the hole, repeating this two more times before she settled, hanging off the ceiling of the top floor.
  
  Interesting. She hopped into the air and folded all eight of her legs back into her cybernetic legs, and landed on two feet. She glanced down at herself and hummed. She was just wearing panties now. Well, that was a problem. Her eight mighty legs had destroyed her pants. That was a problem for later, though.
  
  She started playing back the saved memories this time. Her memories and sensorium stream saved to her computer were, ideally, supposed to be identical, but she wouldn't have been in this situation if it was.
  
  Everything started more or less the same, but she started noticing a faint outline, almost like one of her own boxes she uses for her visual graphical user interface for her computer system.
  
  About half of the way down the stairs, it grew solid enough that she could see, and almost the text on it, as if it actually was a graphical interface.
  
  ¥̵̛̲ð̶̗̂I̷͈̅r̸̛̙ ̵̻̂þ̸̳̍å̴͕̌ј̸̛̥ј̸̱̽ï̸͚̓v̸̠́ê̵̳͊ ̶̫̀þ̸̮̈́È̵͔͋R̵̙͑K̷̰̿ ̵̻͑"̶̖̀Ì̷̡̓ñ̶̹͂v̴̙̆ï̴̡͗ð̴͚̎l̴̺̆å̴̹̎ß̸͍́l̵̰̅ê̷̙͊ ̶͓̒ј̵̝͆ð̶̮̄I̵̛͈l̴͕͌"̵̗͛ ̵̤̍h̵̻̃å̷̩̂ј̶̻̈́ ̵̬̒ß̶͇̏ê̴̩̈́ḛ̵̂̒ñ̵̩̔ ̴̈͜å̴͓͘¢̷̯̿†̶͙̑ï̷̭̀v̶̜̇å̷̩̿†̸̱͛ê̵͖̌Ð̵̻̉.̴̻͗͜͝
  
  A few more steps resolved the text until it was clear. It was on the background of a blue background, almost exactly like the user interface to one of the Final Fantasy games on the SNES or NES.
  
  Your passive PERK " Inviolable Soul " has been activated.
  
  Ah, this is where she briefly stopped on the stairs for seemingly no reason. Her thoughts in these memories were still there, which was one reason reviewing this data was dangerous. In the past, past-Lily was thinking pretty much the same thing she was thinking now, namely, "What the fuck?"
  
  Lily suddenly chuckled as both the memories and her present thoughts were almost in sync for a bit. Her memories had a feeling that the underlined segments in that user interface were a link like it was a web page or something insane like that. And her past self tried to "click" on, and the image changed.
  
  perk / pɜrk / (noun): Multiversal travellers generally receive zero or one perk for every universe they visit. Perks are special abilities incorporated into your soul that convey special abilities. The first perk a traveller picks is often the most powerful. Choose wisely!
  
  What... the fuck?
  
  She watched her memory "click" on the other link, silently.
  
  INVIOLABLE SOUL
  
  GRADE: SS+
  
  While your soul can still be destroyed if enough energy is put into the task, it can never again be bound against your will. Even if you voluntarily consent to binding, you may, at any time, dissolve the binding without paying any penalties that would usually be associated with breaking a soul bond/contract. Additionally, you receive a minor resistance to biological/digital brainwashing of all types, and any brainwashing will slowly, over time, wear off with minimal to no psychological damage.
  
  +50% SOUL resistance
  
  +25% Mental resistance
  
  Brainwashing must be continually applied to you in order to remain effective. (Minus 1-3% brainwashing per day.)
  
  Lily's memory had begun walking down into the cavern, and as soon as it saw the obelisk, the memory stopped suddenly.
  
  She was confused, very, very confused. She didn't even believe in souls... well, perhaps she did now. But she definitely wouldn't have before arriving in this strange universe. She certainly didn't remember picking anything. Was this a real thing, or was it a memetic contagion from the Cthulhu spire in the basement? Well, whatever it was, she wasn't coming back here.
  
  Walking down to the ground level, she took a pair of pants from a robot, put them on and walked outside.
  
  "We're going home," Lily said
  
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  Just a flesh wound
  Lily was restive for the rest of the day. There was clearly something unearthly about that obelisk in the bowels of the Dunwich building. The only reason she didn't bury it with a judicious application of explosives was she was aware of the Point Lookout DLC, where you needed to use the obelisk to destroy what amounted to the Necronomicon.
  
  She didn't know which was a greater threat, but she didn't want to accidentally start an actual zombie outbreak because she or someone else accidentally mispronounced "klaatu barada nikto." However, she was somewhat sceptical that the Evil Dead could survive concentrated plasma fire from hundreds of combat bots.
  
  She rode back to Megaton with her eyes closed, sort of meditating as she tried to remember the void she found herself in before arriving in this world. She was a different person back then in many ways. Her "first set" of memories made all of those decisions, and her clear memories of the void started after she was already finished entering her selections for the character generation, which resulted in Meimei's memories being merged into her.
  
  None of these memories had been digitised, either. It was like they did not exist in her brain, yet she could remember them. When she tried to remember them, the area of her brain associated with memory did activate, but no particular physical area was associated with remembering these things. That, more than anything else, made her think there could be something to this whole "soul" business.
  
  It just meant that a soul was some type of currently unexplainable energy field, though. It actually made her brighten a little, as for someone who planned on living a very, very long time, the idea that there could be more to be explained and discovered was a beautiful thought.
  
  After over two hours of sitting very still and breathing in a slow, meditative pattern, she did start to remember some things. She did not remember selecting this perk, but she had a few glimpses of some of the options she did not select, and they were all quite enticing.
  
  There was an option for a large, kilometre cubed, undetectable hammerspace. That would have been... so very, very useful, and it was only listed as a Grade B perk. Another was listed as giving one immunity to all diseases, biological immortality and a small regeneration factor. That was grade A. The only grade S or above perk she recalled was one called "Psyker Paragon", which would have given her both telepathic and telekinetic powers, even if such powers did not exist in whatever universe she found herself in, and even if she was a robot, she would be a psychic robot even if that did not make any sense whatsoever.
  
  The Inviolable Soul perk was listed as SS+, whatever that meant. Had Mandy just selected the highest grade perk available on the list? That didn't quite sound like the gaming strategy that she would have preferred when she was Mandy, although it was close to it. While she did prefer delayed gratification in almost all builds, she thought the Psyker Paragon would have been too good to pass up. Especially if she then gamed it so that she was in a universe with no psychic powers possible.
  
  That or the immortality one. Although she thought that was kind of silly now, that was because she had Meimei's life experience. Back then, when she supposedly made these choices, she would have had only Mandy's, and that would have been very tempting even if it was only of A rank.
  
  However, at least seeing the memories of these things made her a little more sure that she hadn't seen hallucinations with that perk, or worse, it being a trick by the obelisk in order for her to stay around it more. ("See, little girl, you're immune to me... stay around me...") However, she wasn't sure enough that she would ever step foot in that accursed building ever again.
  
  "We're back, ma'am," said Leftenant Wilson, which caused Lily to open her eyes and nod.
  
  Lily glanced around from inside the back of the armoured RV. The trooper who had been driving it rubbed his eyes after taking off the VR helmet Lily had kludged together. "Very well, leftenant. Your men have zhe rest of zhe day off, but I want you to begin planning an operation in D.C. to start tomorrow or, at the latest, Monday."
  
  He looked a little surprised. Of course, it was SOP to avoid DC like the plague for Spider Company, and Lily rarely approved paying jobs for them going there, either. "What are the goals of the op, ma'am?"
  
  "I want zhe Library of Congress secured, and zhe raiders currently using it as a base pacified. I 'ave intel on zhe composition of zhe raiders in and nearby, as well as probable best approach paths. I want minimal damage to zhe building and its contents," Lily told him as they both left the vehicle. In the Fallout universe, rather than being right next to the Capitol building, the Library of Congress was on the south side of DC, near the Pentagon, for some reason. She had intended to secure it for some time and, in fact, had already discussed the plan with Sarah Lyons.
  
  She had their approval to conduct operations in their backyard so long as she allowed the Brotherhood Scribes the same access as she had to anything she pulled out of the building. It grated on her to "get permission", but she did not really mind giving them the take, either. She intended to place all the millions and millions of digitised books and media in the Megaton Public Library.
  
  In addition, once she managed to put a communications constellation in orbit, she would open a digital Earth Public Library, which would allow anyone to request a digital copy of any or all of the books to be beamed down to any location on the globe.
  
  "I'm not sure we have sufficient forces, ma'am, with squads six and seven not expected back for several days and with the responsibilities we have back home. We wouldn't be able to take much more than we did today," Wilson offered, a little unsure.
  
  Lily hummed. Wilson was one of the few, along with the Apprentice, to actually know how many robots she was storing, yet to use. "Check out sufficient robotic assets. Whatever you need. I don't care if you take a hundred with you on zhis mission; just don't forget the logistical needs of that many if zhat's what you think you need." If they took seven or eight robots for every human trooper, then they would need a lot more space to bring robot charging stations and generators to power them, too.
  
  Although Lily couldn't see it from behind his helmet, she thought he was grinning, "Could we radio in indirect fire missions if necessary?"
  
  Lily blinked and then nodded, "You can take the RV with you; use it as your CP while you're away. There are about two dozen kamikaze drones aboard, and zhe driver can operate the weapon systems using top-down real-time images from loitering assets. Just try to avoid using zhem on zhe library itself, please. And make sure you don't blow up any Brotherhood patrols, as well." She'll have to get her own hardsuit out of her RV before they left, just in case she needed that at home while they were gone.
  
  "Excellent, ma'am. I'll have a preliminary plan for you to review before 1900 tonight, and we'll plan on a 0500 departure," Wilson told her before departing, after delegating one of his troopers to see the two trucks checked over and returned her slowly growing motor pool. She had been building about two trucks a month. At first, she intended to just buy all the trucks from the Mechanist, but he was selling everyone he could produce himself and was ramping up production.
  
  She still had the same equipment he used to build the first four, and it looked like Scott was slowly disassembling the Corvega factory and taking almost everything useful out of it. She had noticed him make at least a dozen trips back and forth. Not only had he gotten all of the fission reactors remaining, but she was pretty sure he got tons more machine tools, as well.
  
  With his sixty or so Protectons rebuilt into her Kaytron standard, he was able to use them for general and even skilled labour if he or Sophie supervised them. Of course, she needed to do a little work herself when it came time to assemble a truck, but that was it. Ninety per cent of the effort was completely automated now.
  
  Checking her schedule, she had a meeting tomorrow with a few of the people identified to potentially form a city council again. The problem was that they didn't particularly want to run the city, either. Moriarty might, but she had some doubts as to whether his expertise could scale past his criminal and quasi-legal enterprises.
  
  She'd spend the rest of the day relaxing and finishing the work on the large fusion-powered first stage for her probes. Maybe she could begin full-sized flight tests soon?
  
  Two days later, as she was watching the prototype semi-space plane take off, she got word on the radio that some elements from the mission from the seed vault were returning and that there were some wounded people that needed medical attention. Blinking, she triggered a transmission telling the Vertibird to drop the wounded off at her hospital roof and gathered her things. She hoped the Apprentice was alright, but there were very few things that could really hurt the girl in that armour.
  
  The prototype would continue its flight plan, climbing to forty thousand metres while departing northwest. In the event of a power systems failure, the thing should be able to glide almost five hundred kilometres even with no power.
  
  She intended for this first really long flight to look at a number of potential places of interest in the Continental US, looking mainly for enclaves of civilisation that she didn't already know about, including the west coast, so she could see how the NCR was doing. Only five hundred kilometres of range wouldn't be enough to glide it back to DC, but it would be enough to glide it somewhere it would never be found if there was a serious issue, like directly into the side of a mountain, the bottom of a Great Lake, et cetera.
  
  Humming, she got into the little golf-cart-sized electric vehicle she made for driving through the kilometres of tunnels and started driving back to the hospital.
  
  Walking upstairs, she waited for the Vertibirds to arrive. Two did, and she was already aware that the Apprentice was on one of them because she got a number of messages from the girl a while back. She guessed Alice just queued messages as she discovered things, and now that she was back in the range of the Mesh, they were being delivered. She decided to just wait and see what she said first before reading the messages.
  
  The Apprentice jumped out of the first Vertibird, in her pink Power Armour, waving... a stub where her hand should have been?! The girl yelled, "Dr St. Claire! I killed a Deathclaw!"
  
  What the fuck?! It seemed like Lily had been thinking that phrase a lot lately. She rushed over to Alice, pinging her medichine hive for her current medical status, "What zhe 'ell?! What happened to your hand?!"
  
  The girl held up the stub and shrugged, "'Tis just a flesh wound."
  
  That bitch! No more Monty Python for her! She growled, "Alice, get out of zhat armour zhis instant and let me take a look at zhat 'and!"
  
  Even she hadn't killed a death claw yet. In fact, she was still kind of scared of them. She certainly wouldn't have sought them out. Alice sighed, very much put-upon but triggered the release mechanism for her armour and stepped out of it. Sarah Lyons was also on the same Vertibird, so Lily glared at the woman briefly while she examined the Apprentice's stub.
  
  Sarah Lyons held her hands up placatingly, "Alice saved three lives when she did that." As if that made it any better. Lily would rather have had the entire expedition wiped out to the last man than the girl get seriously injured. Of course, she didn't want any of her soldiers injured at all, but ultimately that was their job; to take risks.
  
  "Zhis looks like a burn injury," Lily said, confused.
  
  That caused Alice to laugh, using her good hand to rub the back of her neck, "Well, you see... there was a small group of Deathclaws that made the entrance to the seed vault their home, and one of zhem was about to tear a couple of Scribes to pieces, so I shoved my hand in its mouth and started rapid-firing the built-in plasma gun."
  
  Lily blinked at her as if she had trouble understanding what the girl had said, "Zhat... sounds really stupid, Apprentice." She then briefly inspected the missing arm of the girl's armour. It seemed like there was both cutting and melting damage.
  
  That caused Sarah Lyons to crack up, "That's what I said! It definitely killed the Deathclaw, but combined with the claw biting down and possibly that plasma gun exploding, well, you can see the rest. But really, she is a hero. Even after losing her hand, she saved two others who were bleeding out. She's a hell of a doctor." She wasn't a doctor at all yet! And probably wouldn't survive to the point where Lily awarded her that title if she kept shoving her limbs into the maw of monsters.
  
  Lily hadn't even realised that Sarah Lyons was personally leading this expedition; in fact, she thought the woman probably wouldn't due to how busy she was. Lyons continued, "That was basically the only danger involved. Say, you said you only wanted the samples of any plant and animal in the vault, right?"
  
  Lily nodded, calming down now that she realised Alice wasn't actually seriously injured. She was already warming up the cloning machine, both for the girl and the three others being unloaded from the Vertibirds that were missing a limb. Two arms and one leg. Were there no fatalities? She watched the two Vertibirds unload, there were a number of injuries from both her soldiers and the Brotherhood, but she didn't see any DoAs, which was good. And extremely lucky.
  
  If it wasn't the girl's dominant hand that was missing, she would have made the girl do her own hand replantation surgery as a lesson to her. She grinned a little now that she wasn't so anxious, "Yes, zhat is all I really want. Why, did you find a lot more goodies zhan zhat?"
  
  Sarah nodded, "Yeah, a lot. A bunch of cloning machines, kind of like the kind you have. You gave us the design specs, but we haven't had a chance to build any. Did you know they were made by a carbonated drink company? Wild, huh? Makes you wonder what Nuka-Cola's secret ingredients were. There were a lot of other things, too."
  
  Lily chuckled a little, "I wonder why zhey 'ad multiple cloning machines. But yeah, all of zhat is yours. If zhere are any general supplies, we can split it."
  
  Alice piped in, "It wasn't just a seed vault. It was supposed to jumpstart the repopulation of the flora and fauna of America in the event of a nuclear war. It's a whole Vault, built to Vault-Tec standards, including completely in-tact habitation and accommodation sections and a huge powerplant to power all of the equipment. That's why there were so many samples of both native and domesticated animal genomes."
  
  Lily blinked. That would be... very useful. She didn't much care about the facilities, but she didn't expect there to be so many actual animal samples.
  
  Sarah Lyons nodded, "Yes, we're going to co-opt the location as a forward operating base, as the bridge going east through the Kent narrows into the eastern shore of Maryland is intact and in good repair. For now, we'll need to fly in and out, but we're considering making repairs to the Chesapeake Bay bridge. It isn't as bad as it looks. The structural elements are in good shape; just about six small segments of the bridge have dropped into the bay. It should be easily repairable, especially now that Megaton is exporting concrete. The Scribes think it is a barely three to six month project."
  
  Lily would have blinked in surprise again, but she stopped herself, as she thought she had been showing surprise too much today already. The Brotherhood... making repairs to a bridge? What was going on here? This didn't sound like them at all. They are usually more the type to blow up bridges. What was so important about the Eastern shore of Maryland and Delaware? Lily couldn't really think of anything, so she just bluntly asked, "What's so important about that part of Maryland or Delaware?"
  
  That caused Sarah Lyons to grin, "Beyond the fact that a lot of rich pre-war people lived there, and you'd be amazed at what you could find in some of their basements, Eastern Maryland and Delaware had a lot of research corporations before the war."
  
  That was different from what Lily remembered from Mandy's memories, where that part of Maryland was pretty sleepy, and Delaware itself was coma-like. In the America she lived in, there was the famous Research Triangle, which was in North Carolina but not Delaware, though. Sarah Lyons continued, "Plus, there are actually a lot of fairly large settlements in Maryland and Delaware that can't trade with the DC area because they'd have to travel too close to Baltimore, and that's a death trap. We thought if we could repair the Chesapeake bridge, we could patrol almost to Delaware - not only would it be good practice and mostly safe, but we could charge tolls to cross the repaired bridge over the bay."
  
  That sounded more like the Brotherhood she thought of, but it still didn't quite fit. They were stretched thin, even suppressing the Super Mutants in the DC area. Lily asked, surprised, "You'd have infantry patrols all the way to Delaware?"
  
  To that, Sarah Lyons shook her head, "No, no. But we've managed to purchase a lot of newly manufactured vehicles lately. Uhh... at first, we kind of thought you made them because you have the same models of trucks, but then we tracked them down to what used to be Vault 108. Gary told me a little bit more about the builder."
  
  Ohhh. She was wondering who was driving the Mechanist to sleepless nights fulfilling all of the orders he said he had. The Mechanist didn't like the Brotherhood, but he wasn't the type to blacklist them either. She thought he must be selling them through a third party, though, "Ohh... I did collaborate a little bit with the man you're ultimately purchasing them from. But he likes his privacy." So long as you left him and his robowife alone, he would likely continue helping you, she didn't say.
  
  It made a lot more sense if they intended to be mechanised infantry. Delaware was only a couple-hour drive once you got past the Chesapeake Bay. And if there were potential tech finds in that part of Maryland or Delaware and not much risk, then it presented an avenue to direct the traditionalists towards. Kind of a distraction or candy held up in front of children. She thought the main reason Elder Lyons didn't allow much scavenging in DC was because DC was a death trap.
  
  That caused her to nod, "Yes, that's why we haven't approached him directly at Vault 108. But uhh... could you maybe ask him if he'd create a different model?"
  
  Lily tilted her head to the side, "What do you mean?"
  
  "A smaller, armoured four or six-wheeled vehicle that could carry four men in Power Armour, with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree man or remote-operated turret," Sarah said firmly.
  
  Oh. Like an armoured Humvee or, more realistically, an MRAP. Lily hummed and considered that. That might be doable. The fission motors were a little above four hundred horsepower, so a light vehicle to carry 4 men in Power Armour and their supplies could be doable. In fact, she would like a number of these herself for her troopers. It probably wouldn't have a very high top speed, though, but at least eighty kph on roads might be possible.
  
  Lily nodded, "I'll ask him. I zhink I'd like a few of those myself, too, so I'll mention it soon." Lily watched the Vertibirds lift off and fly away, "You only brought the wounded back?"
  
  Alice nodded, "Yes, we didn't have anyone killed, and the Deathclaw family was out of their den when we first got there, so they kind of surprised us this morning. The rest, including Mr Gary, are still there cataloguing things or exploring. Kent Island didn't get hit by any nukes at all, so there is still some vegetation and trees, even."
  
  Lily nodded. She had taken images of various parts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and North Carolina every time the first stage flew to Europe for a probe launch. She'd vary the flight plan a bit to get images of different places. Delaware really wasn't hit very hard, surprisingly, and there were signs of some somewhat large villages and settlements, including some vegetation over there as well.
  
  Lily glanced at Sarah, "You're going to 'ead back to the Pentagon?"
  
  She nodded, "I'll make sure the two injured Scribes are settled in, and catch a flight over to talk to my dad about the mission."
  
  Lily nodded, "Wait a bit, if you don't mind. While I'm waiting for zhe cloning machine to run off Alice's new hand..." she paused, "Unless you want a superior robot hand, girl?"
  
  Alice shook her hand rapidly, which caused Lily to sigh and continue, "While zhat is happening, I can tell you about zhe successful operation around zhe Library of Congress. All of zhe raiders are dead, and it's safe for any Scribes who want to peruse zhe stacks. I 'ave ten men and over forty combat bots patrolling zhat block right now, but I could pull my men back if you want to relieve me."
  
  The raiders were a lot more dangerous than either Lily or Leftenant Wilson had thought, and they had two human casualties, one KIA and one that barely survived. They had managed to medevac her in time to save her life, and Lily had a plan to slowly replace all of the woman's limbs with cloned variants over the next week. It wasn't a great idea to do too much surgery all at once, sometimes.
  
  Lily didn't know if the woman would be up to continued service mentally, even if she would make a full physical recovery. If not, Lily would medically retire her and pay her a full disability pension, at least until she got some other job training and was gainfully employed. Psychological problems were one of the few things she couldn't reliably heal. One option was to completely physically repair her body and then erase her memories of the injury, but she would only do that if the woman agreed to it.
  
  "Oooh... I told Elder Lyons about what you were planning. Were you able to secure the database?" Sarah asked interestedly.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes. I zhink zhere are many more physical books in zhere zhat hadn't been scanned yet, zhough, before the bombs fell. Zhere are probably over ten million books in zhat building, even if only ten per cent are in any shape to preserve zhat is still an incredible find and will take years to sort zhrough." The digital database only had about three million books in it. Only. That was hundreds and hundreds of times more than she had before now. Plus, it had a ton of other media, including music, films and even images of paintings and other art. The basements held what would have been considered priceless artefacts, too, like the original copy of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents.
  
  Lily watched the Apprentice get back in her Armour so she could store the damaged machine downstairs before she walked downstairs with the Brotherhood woman.
  
  The next night when the prototype arrived back in range of her Mesh, Lily was startled by some of the data it had. She had just picked a random flight path going to and from large cities on the way to the west coast, and a number of them appeared to be inhabited to a greater or lesser degree, about the same as the DC Wasteland, but there were no signs of industrialisation or everyday use of technology until the aircraft arrived over what was Las Vegas.
  
  The city was not damaged very much at all! There should have been a lot more nukes targetting that major population centre, which was a little bit odd. What was even odder was that what remained of Downtown and the Strip were lit up brightly at night, almost like she could go and play craps at Caesars Palace right now if she wanted to. Well, she doubted there was actually Caesars Palace, but whatever the local equivalent was looked like it was in operation.
  
  Lily almost tripped in shock when she was flipping through the sensor logs and noticed a radio broadcast from the largest building in Vegas. It was a simple voice-encoded carrier wave on the airband, a sophisticated-sounding man's voice asking, not quite imperiously but demandingly, "To the unidentified aircraft circling over the Strip, please identify yourself immediately."
  
  Lily didn't have real-time comms with the aircraft once it left DC, so there was no way for her to respond when this man made a demand, nor was the aircraft programmed with any kind of verbal interface. However, it did log all radio broadcasts. How was her very stealthy aircraft detected, she wondered? And why did that voice sound familiar?
  
  The message wasn't repeated, and eventually, her aircraft continued its programmed flight path and departed to the west.
  
  She directed a question to her muse: [Does that voice pattern, cadence and speech pattern match any previously recorded samples?]
  
  [Affirmitive. 95% match to Robert Edwin House, PhD.]
  
  Dr House?! Was he alive?! She had listened to holotapes of about five different speeches he had given to his alma mater, the Commonwealth Institute of Technology. They were amongst the first interesting scientific discussions she had found on the planet so long ago, even if he seemed a bit arrogant, perhaps even narcissistic, from the tapes.
  
  That wasn't a big deal. It wasn't like she had room to throw stones from her glass house on that front, after all.
  
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  Comrade St Claire!
  Lily hummed happily as she worked on extracting the genetic data from seed after seed.
  
  There were numerous samples of seeds for each species, which was good as it allowed her to sacrifice some to sequence their genome. Her cloning machine couldn't, at least at present, create plants, so she wouldn't be able to do rapid iterative design modifications to the genome of the plants she decided to modify, but at least the nice thing about plants was that they matured rapidly... well, most of them.
  
  Already, she was building special tunnels below her tenth level, which would be sealed off with airlocks. She'd have an artificially high CO2 content, such that oxygen would be needed if she or others entered them, and a lot of light at beneficial wavelengths. She could shorten the period of time between generations quite a bit if she did that. Eventually, she definitely would either build a cloning machine or alter her existing one so that she could produce plants rapidly and in quantity, but this was fine for now.
  
  She already identified two good species if her goal was to spread radiation-resistant vegetation far and wide, kudzu and crabgrass. Kudzu had the benefit of having roots that were consumable for human consumption and an excellent source of starches, even if it was something of an acquired taste and was worse than beans for flatulence.
  
  She wanted an interesting and unique series of traits; namely, she wanted both species to spread rapidly in the absence of other vegetation but not outcompete vegetation if they came across it. Basically, she didn't want to just convert the vegetative biomass of the planet to kudzu and crabgrass, especially if there were existing agricultural sites. They were both legendary invasive species, so she would have to actually reduce their ability to compete quite a lot while maintaining their capability to spread rapidly everywhere. That was... kind of hard but not insurmountable.
  
  The radioactivity level would tend to give her modified plants a survival advantage, so she could reduce their ability to compete in the absence of a base level of radiation. That way, when their mission was more or less complete, and the level of radiation dropped as these plants hopefully sequestered them underground, they would then be outcompeted by other species.
  
  Lily had no idea at all how long that would take, though. She wasn't even confident she had a surefire way to create a biological process to identify and sequester radiation yet. Perhaps she could adjust the chlorophyll to also be reactive with alpha or beta particles? That would be an easy way to identify radionuclides, but it would have to be separate from a plant's natural heliotropism. Radiotropism, then, combined with some form of thigmotropism to capture the radionuclide when it was detected very close, perhaps.
  
  How would that even work? Plants weren't really her speciality, especially not if she wanted them to be mostly plant-like after she was done with them. But ultimately, DNA was just a programming language like any other. It was definitely possible.
  
  Thinking about the message her aircraft received, Lily probably wouldn't be able to talk to Dr House until she got at least a few working satellites. Expecting to do some kind of relay for four thousand kilometres wasn't realistic, even if she could fly up to forty thousand metres.
  
  With the curvature of the Earth, she would need at least seven aircraft loitering at forty kilometres to get a good signal through to Nevada. If she had that many, then it made more sense to just spam probes into orbit until something gave way. Already she had noticed that her probes were getting farther before being intercepted.
  
  She was building parts for both the two follow-on aircraft at the same time and would assemble them together. She didn't really have the capacity to build more than fifteen second-stage probes a day anyway, even after ramping up just for that purpose.
  
  She managed to reduce the weight of the microfusion cells slightly by creating two different types. The lightest type was using graphene and diamond; it was very light but would oxidise appreciably even at six hundred degrees, so it wasn't appropriate to use in the atmosphere. It was the power used when the spacecraft was in a vacuum; as if there was no oxygen, it was stable at over two thousand degrees.
  
  The other type used her normal high-temperature steel alloy, and weight wasn't appreciably reduced at all. Her ideas of using some alloy of aluminium were, perhaps, optimistic on further testing. The only way it would have worked was if the alloy contained significant amounts of titanium, and she couldn't spare it. But she did test a few methods of jettisoning the empty microfusion cells after they were depleted, similar to the way traditional rockets did when they staged boosters and eventually reached a design that gave her acceptable payloads to low-earth-orbit. If the American anti-satellite systems would stop shooting her probes, anyway.
  
  Right now, most of her probes weren't carrying anything at all except extra reaction mass and extra fusion cells. If they managed to get through, they were programmed to attempt to transform into kinetic kill vehicles by matching orbital elements with the identified railgun platforms at high speed.
  
  The ones that were carrying a payload had strong radar transceivers in her attempt to catalogue all artificial satellites and their orbital elements before being destroyed. There was quite a lot up there but surprisingly little debris. She supposed that over a hundred years or so, the debris from the war, which definitely had a space element, would have mostly deorbited. It was astonishing that there were even any satellites remaining in the low earth orbit slots, given the fuel requirements to maintain these orbits.
  
  For example, the anti-satellite constellation was in the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre altitude range, higher than the ISS in her last life but not by much, and they were each large satellites massing many, many tons. They should have deorbited at least a hundred years ago, even assuming they had a lot of fuel.
  
  There must be some kind of automated satellite tender that kept refuelling them; either that or they discovered some sci-fi inertialess drives and didn't tell anyone or use it in any other application. She was pretty sure the EmDrive in her past life was just vaporware but wasn't willing to be on it; after all, cold fusion existed in the Fallout universe. It was possible some sort of EmDrive-type system had been discovered that only produced tiny amounts of thrust, useful to stay in orbit but useless in most other applications.
  
  She'd have to disassemble a satellite to find out, but she doesn't think it likely. Even that small accomplishment would be earth-shattering for the space industry, as satellites would be able to stay up forever. She would have heard something about it in one of the books, journals, or news media that she had available, but there were no hints at all that the USA had special space technology beyond the regular propaganda.
  
  If there was such an automated tender, though, that brought the question of whence it got fuel unless it just had a completely ridiculously huge tank to start with. She was also interested in discovering the orbital elements of the Mothership Zeta, assuming it was in existence.
  
  She already approximately knew its location, at least maybe, because she remembered you could nuke Canada with its death ray if you got to the bridge during the DLC. The Earth you were observing on the bridge of the alien craft did not move, which meant it must be in a geostationary orbit, and it had a line-of-sight on Canada. So, she should be able to see it from here, perhaps. But there were no radar returns, which meant that the ship either absorbed or redirected light in the spectrum that her radar used.
  
  No matter, once she managed to start sending missions to orbit, she would be able to find it by sending a few missions higher than the geostationary level and looking down. Then, it should be obvious when it occluded the Earth below that or use infrared sensors to detect its heat, which must be significant if it was full of warm-blooded creatures and all of the associated life support systems such creatures require.
  
  Just how did they get resupplied? Was the Mothership completely self-sufficient, or did it get periodic supply missions? Just why were they here? There was a lot she didn't know and was curious about. If it wasn't for her close encounter with Psyker-Gary, she wouldn't be so sure they were up there, but that mind that touched hers was definitely not a human one.
  
  She also wanted to know if the captain or head alien or whatever could smash her into the wall or mind control her like he seemed to be able to do through Psyker-Gary. She had the feeling that Psyker-Gary acted as both a relay and an amplifier, so perhaps he couldn't. But... she didn't particularly want to bet her life on that.
  
  She reached a stopping point and left her lab to go do patient rounds upstairs. She wasn't working today, but since she hardly slept, she often took the burden for the other doctors when they had patients that were admitted, which generally wasn't too often. Honestly, she cheated and had robots monitor such patients and just walked around to show her face because it was expected.
  
  However, ever since she had decreed through her powers of absolute dictator that the citizens of Megaton would have at least a base level of medical care, there had been a lot of patients at the hospital. She had four doctors now, not just Bonesaw and Dr Taylor, but she recently hired that ghoul RN Missy as a doctor, as well as one of the existing doctors in town, after she finally deemed him qualified.
  
  Her employees were conflicted about her decree. On the one hand, it was a lot more customers, and the city, in the form of its dictatrix, was paying for it. However, on the other hand, she wasn't paying full rates, and it was keeping them busy. Still, overall, they were all for it.
  
  Sticking her head into the room with the sleeping patient, one of the Spider Company that was wounded in the pacification action against the Library of Congress. Lily was scheduled to finish her surgeries today, and the woman had already jumped on the idea of having her memories of the battle deleted from her brain. As such, she had been keeping the woman in a coma until the surgeries were complete.
  
  She didn't have the technology to erase arbitrary memories while keeping others except if she installed a brain implant on her and spent significant time cataloguing all of the woman's memories. If she wanted to erase the memories of the battle, the woman would lose all of these memories of being in the hospital, too. So, there was no reason for her to remain conscious and still in some pain, be it physical or mental.
  
  The Bank had finally opened, as well, after they had amassed a prodigious amount of silver coinage, a lot of which had been delivered to her to use to fund the government. It was how she was affording to pay for things like the increased payments to her doctors, which were more like contractors than actual employees, as well as all of the expended supplies and general labour needed to run a hospital and city government.
  
  At first, people were a little bit unsure about the new coins. But that didn't last long. Trading precious metals wasn't a new thing, and the smallest denomination coin was two grams exactly, which was more or less equivalent in value to a bottle cap. Once they realised that the weird glass coins did, in fact, contain two grams of silver inside, many of the first run coins had been broken with a ball-peen hammer to test this theory, after which the public started accepting them as equivalent.
  
  It helped that Lily proclaimed that either bottlecaps or precious metals would be accepted or offered by the city for all payments to and from. City employees could choose to be paid in one, or the other or a combination, and already only a couple of weeks after their introduction, most of her city workers were taking their payment in a combination.
  
  One of the main disadvantages of trading in precious metals was that there was no real trusted source of purity, so traders had to conduct their own assays or assumptions when metal was presented as a payment. However, her coins were .999 bullion grade. She made it clear that Miller's banks should and could not adulterate the coins by alloying.
  
  That was usually how Kings of Olde made their seigniorage. They'd take enough silver to make ten coins, alloy it and make eleven. Bam, free money, even though the coins had less face value. Lily didn't want this and demanded any seigniorage be taken off the top. For example, of the metal she gave the bank to make twenty coins, she only received back nineteen.
  
  This high-quality bullion-grade coin, combined with the sapphire glass encapsulation, meant that trust in the coins was high! So long as the encapsulation wasn't destroyed, a merchant or trader could really trust that the actual metal content was what the coin specified and that it wasn't a counterfeit, diluted or shaved.
  
  She hadn't expected the coins to take off as fast as they had. She was sure it would happen, eventually, but she thought people would be more suspicious. But she supposed when your competition was the literal caps off bottles; then there was a lot of demand for any sane alternatives.
  
  The minting machine she made produced and encapsulated coins in five different weights. The smallest coin, which was going to be for now equivalent to a bottle cap, weighed only two grams, not including the sapphire weight. The other denominations were five, ten, twenty-five and fifty grams. The fifty-gram "coin" was actually a small bar.
  
  She included the last because it tickled her to create taels of silver. Taels of silver and gold were a common medium of exchange in the Solar System she was familiar with. Perhaps it was because a lot of the culturally Chinese people that survived the Fall weren't too impressed with fiat currencies, so they went back to their roots and began using precious metals mined from asteroids. It didn't start right away because, for a long time, gold and silver were more useful industrially, and any coins minted would just be melted down for electronics immediately, but eventually, they became quite common.
  
  Nodding at the last patient, she went upstairs to her private apartment. A long bath was in order, followed by a nap before she got on with the rest of her day.
  
  A couple of months passed, and Lily was not really that closer to finding someone to run the government. Worse, she had been dealing with annoying people that were trying to push as far as they could get away with. There were disputes with the constabulary about the lack of laws ("Well, that isn't illegal is it?!") and disputes between individuals.
  
  There were also weird instances of her patrols and even the gates of Megaton being attacked. There was a suicide bomber, of all insane things, just the other day. A couple of people waiting to get into the gate were killed. She had attempted to back-track the suicide bomber to his compatriots using her surveillance drones, but it wasn't anyone local, instead coming from the north and not really interacting with anyone in the Capital Wasteland as far as she could tell. She couldn't really know, though.
  
  And now, she actually had to mediate between several people that had differences they couldn't reconcile. It was insane; they were insane thinking she was any sort of person to mediate anything! She could barely even mediate herself! Most of the time, she could settle the matters because it was usually clear which side was on the right and which side was on the wrong.
  
  Finally, though, she had enough. She couldn't see that much of a difference between either gentleman in front of her; as far as she was concerned, they were both in the wrong, and they just hated each other. They were, at one time, business partners and best friends but had a falling out, and over the years, they reached a point where they could hardly stand in the same room without attacking each other.
  
  She told them that if they returned to her for her judgement, she would use a random number generator to pick one of them and shoot them, problem solved, and please stop wasting her time. For now, that worked; although one of them looked like he was considering taking her up on it just to be rid of the other, they finally agreed to talk to each other and try to settle their dispute.
  
  She wasn't antisocial enough to think that she could continue to do such things on a regular basis, though. Not and have it still be considered something like justice. Of course, people would accept a certain amount of pique and whim from a dictatrix, but it couldn't be her go-to, or people wouldn't feel safe at all. So she stomped over to find Gary. For a while, he had been gone from the city while he set up his water business, but he had been around more and more lately now that it was functioning without his day-to-day involvement. He was a good teacher, but she could find a good teacher to replace him.
  
  She needed him for something more important. And she was annoyed enough that she would use whatever coercion or inducements necessary to get her way.
  
  Although he talked about buying his own place, he still lived with her in the accommodation section of the hospital, although he invited his sweetheart in to live with him. She thought it was cute. Occasionally, she missed Gary as a lover, but to her, he was like a very large Thanksgiving dinner, very filling, pun intended, but only suitable for special occasions, so she thought this relationship where they were just friends was probably a lot better, anyway.
  
  He was right that she definitely couldn't love him like he seemed to want. She wasn't unfamiliar with the emotion like he implied so many months ago, but it wasn't really an emotion too intrinsically linked to romance to her, and it had never been. Even when she was Mandy on Earth, the only people she actually loved were her children, which might have explained one reason why her marriage never worked out. It wasn't solely her ex-husband's fault, despite how nice it was to think it was.
  
  Meimei didn't really love anyone, not really, but could experience the emotion or something like it when she made a scientific discovery. Lily, some combination of the two people, was more Meimei than Mandy, but she still felt a similar emotion to love when she thought about the Apprentice. Was it the same? She didn't know, but the Apprentice would make a good daughter, and she had been treating her as such, although she hadn't actually put such a relationship into words with the girl... yet.
  
  She knocked on the door to Gary's private rooms and waited for a moment before he answered. He grinned at her, "Woah, who stepped on your tail, Doc?"
  
  She harumphed, but still waited patiently until he invited her inside before intruding on his personal space. "I 'ave zhe job for you," she told him, "It is vitally important."
  
  That caused him to grin slightly, "I don't want to be Mayor."
  
  "Why not?!" Lily exclaimed. That wasn't actually the job, but he would be a really good one for the same reason Lily wanted him as a Judge.
  
  Gary looked confused as if he thought it was crazy that I didn't understand, "Because it would be mostly for show? You want to retain enough personal power and ability to depose, at any time, anyone stupid enough to take the job. You want all of the power but none of the responsibility. I mean, I don't blame you... that's a great thing if you can pull it off..."
  
  He paused and then said, approaching it another way, "Did you know that Nuka-World up in the Commonwealth was an actual town? It had its own Mayor, police department and everything. Being Mayor of Megaton would be like being Mayor of Nuka-World. Everyone knows that John-Caleb Bradberton was really in charge." He then nodded, "What you really need is something along the lines of an actor or someone really good with administrative matters that only cares about appearances. There are a lot of those types of people around. Because, if I was the Mayor, I would want to actually be in charge."
  
  Okay, that was really insightful, and it cut her to the quick. She sipped some of the offered water and said, "Well, I can't really dispute any of that... but Mayor wasn't actually the job I was going to ask you to do." She paused before admitting, "Mainly because you already told me you wouldn't do it."
  
  He looked more interested, "Oh? What do you have in mind? I assume it is working for the city, as you only get so worked up when dealing with details of your... demesne. You haven't created a lèse-majesté law yet, right? Because I need to know before I start making fun of you."
  
  Lily gritted her teeth. Such a law was very tempting, but she wouldn't go down that path. "No. I need you to be a Judge. Zhe Judge, actually. Any subsequently appointed jurists would serve under you."
  
  That caused him to laugh out loud, "I don't know the first damn thing about the law!"
  
  "Zhere's no law!" Lily hissed at him. She was so annoyed because she had had to say this repeatedly lately, "You don't need to know anything about legal procedures except what is right and wrong! And zhat, I know, is something you can do."
  
  That caused him to pause, and he waved a hand at Lily as she prevaricated in front of his girlfriend about his special ability, "She knows, you don't have to hold back, although I appreciate your discretion." Things must be getting serious if Gary told the short, pretty, caramel-coloured woman his deepest secrets. Lily made a note to try to remember her name.
  
  He rubbed his chin, "You know, I figured you would have like isolated the genetic components in my special ability and given yourself the same ability by now."
  
  Lily sighed, "I 'ave isolated the gene expressions, more or less, but you 'ave a special structure inside your brain, and any alterations to my brain I am very leery about trying because zhey aren't exactly... reversible." She waved a hand, "I've 'ad some success, but zhe only 'uman test subjects I've 'ad access to are murderous raiders now and zhen, since to keep your secret I 'ave to terminate zhem after experimentation is complete." She had a number of test subjects since the first group, mainly people that were condemned to death under what amounted for her "justice."
  
  She was pretty sure, maybe eighty per cent, that she had a workable treatment. It was clear that the subject of the treatment needed some amount of empathy in the first place. Otherwise, the treatment didn't do anything. She wasn't too concerned because although Gary liked to tease her that she didn't have any, the truth was she did. She just didn't feel it at the same intensity regular people did.
  
  Gary's girlfriend looked shocked at the implication, but Gary just stared at her for a moment before grinning, "You know you're quite scary sometimes, Lily. Although I actually appreciate you doing that, and don't really care about dead raiders, perhaps you should keep stories like that to yourself. Most people wouldn't understand."
  
  Lily nodded at him, taking his meaning.
  
  He continued, "If I agreed to this, I would want a lot of concessions."
  
  She tilted her head to the side, "Like what?"
  
  "I would want to run, actually run, both the courts and the Sheriff department. And my rulings couldn't be overturned by you... not for legalistic reasons, anyway. You could wave your hand and say whatever you want, call it high justice if you want, but I want the complete system of low justice under my control," he said firmly.
  
  His girlfriend looked confused, "What is low justice and high justice?"
  
  Lily scrunched up her face, "Your boyfriend likes to pretend he is zhe ignorant country boy, but he is actually very well educated. 'igh justice, or ius gladii or the right of the sword is the ability a monarch to either absolve someone or condemn someone just because zhey 'ave all the swords and nobody can stop zhem. Might makes right, no? If I say off with someone's 'ead, then his 'ead comes off, yes? Not because zhe poor guy committed some crime and was adjudicated guilty necessarily, but because he offended me personally."
  
  Gary nodded, "Precisely. If you want to get involved in criminal or civil justice matters, then you will have to use that heavy hand and everyone will know it isn't actual justice happening."
  
  Lily sighed and nodded, "Zhat is fine."
  
  He held a hand up, "I'm not done. I want a complete budget and at least a squad of soldiers under my personal command, not including the cops, which I also want under my command while I am working this job." Lily frowned; she'd have to recruit some more people but nodded. It was worth it.
  
  " AND I don't want to do the job forever. Eventually, you'll figure out how to give yourself or other people the same sense I have. When that happens, I want to be replaced. And then, I want your help to mount an Expedition to the west. I want to start my own settlement somewhere where I can be in charge," he finished.
  
  So he did want to be Mayor! Just to be clear, she clarified, "So, what kind of help? Like, vehicles, weapons, armour for anyone that you got to agree to follow you on such an adventure?"
  
  He nodded, "Precisely. I'm sure there are places that just need some stabilising force; I think I could save a lot of lives. Plus, you made me fucking almost eighteen again, and my hormones are aching for some adventure. I didn't want to be a mercenary, but going out with the monarch's blessing to start a new nation in the wilds used to be a time-honoured tradition, no? " He used a fake french accent at the end, and Lily casually gave him the finger, which caused him to chuckle.
  
  Perhaps that was a mistake. She should have made him thirty-five or so, ready to settle down. She actually favoured that idea, a lot, but she tried to still her emotions so he wouldn't be able to tell. She nodded slowly and lied to him, "Your 'elp as a judge isn't enough to buy all of that. You'd still need to maintain some kind of relationship with Megaton afterwards."
  
  "A vassal?! Are we really reinventing feudalism right now?!" he asked, offended.
  
  She waved a hand at him, "I don't care what you call it! If you want to take a lot of my technology, especially zhe kind that can restart an industrial base and would be useful for starting a new city, zhen you can call yourself a buddy zhat can't tell really tell me no; if you want."
  
  "That sounds weirder; I think I'd rather reinvent feudalism," he said after thinking about it for a long time.
  
  She nodded, "You don't have to be a dictator, be a democracy for all I care. But you saw what zhe greatest democracy in the world did to the planet, first hand." She waved a hand at the window, to the blasted hellscape that was the Capital Wasteland.
  
  "America wasn't much of a democracy for a long time; you know that as well as I do," Gary harumphed, "I think perhaps discussing what kind of government I intend to form is a little premature since I have no one, presently, willing to follow me into the wilderness in the first place. But I think I'll work towards some type of republic."
  
  Lily nodded. She would have a lot more information about the best places he could go, depending on how far the man wanted to go, soon as well. She had been launching fifteen probes a day into low earth orbit, and yesterday one probe got through and managed to destroy one of the railgun systems. It was only a matter of time now. There were only sixteen anti-satellite satellites in the first place and only fifteen now.
  
  "Alright, Judge Kaminsky, I will make zhe necessary pronouncements," she told him giddily. He really was asking a lot, but it was worth it. She actually would have jumped on his plans to start a new city somewhere west, too, so she tried not to sound too excited. She didn't really want to see Gary go, but it was just a good idea.
  
  She didn't think finding a few hundred people, or more even, to go along with him would be a hard sell at all, and if he made sure the first thing he built was a small runway, then by that point, she would probably be able to run passenger or cargo flights, not just orbital missions. It was kind of ass backward that she put something in orbit before even starting what amounted to an airline, but this entire universe was ass backwards in a lot of ways, anyway.
  
  Her robots and the human construction crews were working in two shifts to build a larger section of concrete and chainlink fences to give Megaton more land, and there was still a considerable shantytown right outside the security fence.
  
  Ultimately, people just wanted relative safety, clean food and water and the freedom to pursue their own individual interests. She was working on the safety and water bit. As for the food? She had started building a dozen copies of the Fancy Lad people mulching machine to incorporate into the sewer system at the highest flow junctions.
  
  The first test machine was already in operation, as was the Fancy Lad cake factory that she had raided in DC. She actually approached the ex-Chinese Soldiers at Mama Dulce's first, but they weren't too interested in cooperation at present, despite her perfect Mandarin.
  
  If anything, approaching them speaking Chinese had been a big mistake and made them much warier of her. They weren't the mindless enemies that Fallout 3 made them out to be. Apparently, they had a thriving community and used the food manufacturing equipment at Mama Dulce's to produce and sell food, mostly to Rivet City.
  
  Still, they did point her and her men in the direction of the one Fancy Lad factory in town, which she raided for all of their equipment.
  
  The cakes she was producing were more like bread loaves now, though, but she was rationing them at a cost to the citizens of Megaton. They were basically free, like the purified water dispensers that had already gone into operation. Right now, they just used facial recognition technology to ensure the same people weren't served more than once, as she hadn't introduced ID cards yet.
  
  The project bakery/bread factory was a huge success, at least in the sense that everyone in Megaton thought it was a great idea; even the ones that realised where the biomass was coming from didn't mind, which Lily found unusual for humans.
  
  She was considering building a number of large housing buildings both above and below the ground once the fusion power station was running and then outlawing and banning homeless people.
  
  By that, she intended if a police officer found a citizen sleeping on the street, i.e. a homeless person, they would be arrested and taken directly to one of these small vacant apartments and released. It would be illegal to be homeless because she would furnish you with a small temporary home. A lot of the time, she noticed, that it just took a few mistakes or a few instances of bad luck to render someone living on the street, and at that point, their only options were really to leave Megaton, even if they had a lot of useful skills. The rest had all manners of mental illness, which she couldn't really treat, but they were a self-correcting problem because they usually attacked people and got killed in self-defence eventually.
  
  It was just... why was it that every time she did something with the government, things were getting closer and closer to socialism? She didn't understand it, but free food, healthcare and potentially free housing was almost definitionally socialist, wasn't it?
  
  It was disgusting... but on the other hand, at least fewer people were starving to death in her streets. It was unsightly and gave people a bad impression of her city!
  
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  The opposite of Tranquility Lane
  Lily sat at her workbench underground, quickly assembling customized satellites for the mission that was planned later that evening when the first-stage aircraft returned from their successful mission.
  
  Things were, somehow, both going very well and simultaneously falling to shit, Lily thought. Her personal space-based projects were going quite well, finally, though.
  
  She had thought once the first probe had gotten through that, it would take no time at all for the rest to make it through. However, the anti-satellite system held out for another month and a half.
  
  Right now, she was watching the debris of the last large railgun-mounted system begin to slowly deorbit while nodding her head in satisfaction. She had a group of thirty small satellites ready to launch as soon as the aircraft returned and was working on even more. Her first goal was to defang President Eden before he dropped a nuke on her someday, soon. She had a list of American orbital assets, including a number of assets equipped with nuclear-armed re-entry vehicles as well as their approximate orbital elements.
  
  There were only three left that she could see unless there were others that weren't on the list she received. It didn't appear to be comprehensive as far as America's orbital assets were concerned. The only two that were a real threat to her at present were the Highwater-Trousers and Bradley-Hercules satellites. HT was in geosynchronous orbit over North America and wasn't a large threat because of the time necessary for the re-entry vehicles to retrorocket and fall from thirty thousand kilometres. She now kept a pretty constant radar watch above her and would have plenty of warning and may even be able to intercept the falling weapons.
  
  In the Fallout 3 game, a ghoul scientist was trying to gain control of this satellite, and you could even call down a strike from it, but it seemed pretty weak sauce. All that happened was a number of mini-nuke explosions near the SatCom Array after you left. However, she suspected that was just a limitation of Fallout's game engine as the specs in the design sheet she got from the Brotherhood indicated that each re-entry vehicle should contain a MIRVed payload, with each of the ten warheads being in the one hundred kiloton range. It should have incinerated you in the game, but there was no fun in that.
  
  The more immediately dangerous weapon was the one President Eden had the codes for, which was Bradley-Hercules. It was also in low-earth orbit on a particularly elliptical orbit reaching only 150 kilometres in its perigee, and it could very well release a number of re-entry vehicles on its orbital approach such that her radar systems couldn't see them until they were close to right over Megaton as they began their retrorocket burn. It was an existential threat.
  
  None of the Brotherhood data included any access codes, encryption keys or anything of that nature. She was pretty sure that if they actually had them, they wouldn't give them to her in the first place, though.
  
  About seven probes were earmarked to deal with that as soon as possible and do so on the far apogee of its elliptical orbit. It only had an opportunity to launch its weapons in specific orbital windows, and only a few times each day.
  
  That tracked with the game, as in the Broken Steel DLC, you assaulted the Satellite relay station in the southwest of the map, along with Liberty Prime, and the Enclave just nuked it, destroying the robot. Lily thought it was anticlimactic, as the Brotherhood spent so long trying to rebuild this giant robot, and it got blown to pieces practically the first time they used it. After you defeated a couple of dozen enemies in that location, you had the chance to nuke either Adams Air Force Base or The Citadel.
  
  Options to nuke Megaton and a few other locations were disallowed, stating the orbital elements were not favourable for a launch at those targets. If she was ambitious, she would try to assault the relay station, but that was a high-risk manoeuvre, and the gain was relatively small. She already could nuke Raven Rock if she wanted to, so gaining the use of a nuclear weapons satellite was not that useful to her, but denying it to others was paramount.
  
  Three probes would boost to approach it on a converging orbit on a tangent at the farthest point away from the Earth in its elliptical orbit, approaching within a hundred kilometres or so. They would simultaneously activate broad-spectrum electromagnetic frequency jammers and then attempt to simply burn all of the antennas off the exterior of the space vehicle with lasers. These satellites were armed with lasers, but not that large of ones. She could make them now, and the ones she placed on these probes were only about twice as potent as the ones you could find in a laser rifle.
  
  Being in a vacuum made their range, theoretically, unlimited, but realistically these weapons would only be effective at a few hundred kilometres at most due to diffraction lowering the amount of energy per square millimetre on the lased target.
  
  If that didn't work, or even if it did, the four chasing probes would collide with it when it made its orbital turnover and started returning to its perigee. Its orbit was so low that it would deorbit pretty rapidly after that.
  
  Those four kinetic kill vehicles also would be backup in the event that there was some sort of fail-deadly programming, where the satellite would release its payload in the event of a loss of communication. She assumed such programming would likely target China in any event, but there was no point in being complacent.
  
  She had found the satellite tender, as well. Or tenders, as the plural was the correct word. It appeared to be a small space station and stayed in a high orbit with about a dozen automated space vehicles departing from it from time to time. It wasn't listed in any of the orbital elements the Brotherhood gave her, either. There were a few anomalous satellites like that, but she guessed that the station might have been a relatively recent placement at the time of the Great War and that the data the Brotherhood had might have been dated. There was no telling what the source was.
  
  While the Great War on the planet was much more even in the sense that both sides killed themselves, the Great War in orbit was a decisive American victory. Lily didn't think that there was anything but American satellites still up there now. Not even the dead satellites in graveyard orbits that she would expect to see. It was quite clean. Actually, even the small debris in long-lasting persistent orbits from destroyed satellites in the war or even just a wrench accidentally dropped overboard during an EVA were missing.
  
  If there was some manner of an automated station that was both refuelling and tending to the debris in orbit, it had to be getting resources from somewhere, and her best guess was the Moon. A similarly automated Moon base, if it had an electromagnetic railgun, could shoot both reaction mass, oxygen and resources mined from the Moon to the station.
  
  She hadn't seen any deliveries yet, but she was on the watch for them.
  
  While her orbital ventures were going well what was going to shit was the Capital Wasteland. Well, not precisely, but it was headed in that direction as things became increasingly chaotic. She should have expected it, and it was either entirely or partly her fault. People were telling tales about Megaton now, and the tales had invariably gotten exaggerated in the retellings and and it had started to attract organized raiding activity both from the Pitt, Norfolk and as well as Baltimore. She supposed that was inevitable when people told tales that there was cheap water and food. It certainly increased immigration into and around the city, too.
  
  From what she could tell, Baltimore was where her spat of recent suicide bombers were coming from. Her soldiers had taken to having robots with chemical sniffers approach people a few kilometres away from Megaton, as there had been a number of similar incidents. The last two they had managed to incapacitate before the suicide bombers could trigger the explosives, and Lily had examined them.
  
  They were... not really alive. Well, they were. But their brains were so messed up that she wasn't even able to get hardly any useful information out of them even when she tried to download their memories, it was a psychedelic trip along with some unrelated memories from the individual's childhood, but she thought it must be some kind of serious brainwashing technology. That or they were drugged and tortured somehow for a very long time. Maybe all of the above?
  
  She tried a few methods to revert them to something more human, but the trauma was too deeply wound up in their neural network. She could use the machine from the VSS building to wipe their memories, but it was too big of a chunk. They would be dead one way or another, so she had just quietly and painlessly euthanized them.
  
  She was already manufacturing more drones to try to put some around Baltimore, but she had a dearth of fission batteries. Building the batteries wasn't too hard, but finding the non-contaminated plutonium necessary for their construction was. It was honestly easier to pay people to bring them to her than to try to build them. She thought that they were mass-produced by a company in Texas, so she couldn't really loot their production method, either. And even if she had it, she was sure that that company wasn't vertically integrated; they probably bought plutonium from someone else, maybe even the government.
  
  Her recyclers didn't discriminate too well on different radioactive isotopes because the medichines didn't operate at their best close to highly radioactive atoms, so she couldn't really use her recycling technology to help her. The standard procedure of the machines was just to dump the radioactive bits amalgamated into the waste chute of the "inseparable" elements.
  
  If she wanted to produce plutonium, she would have to build some manner of the fission breeder reactor. Well, The Mechanist already had one, but she didn't think it was really the type designed to actually produce plutonium, just use all of the fuel very efficiently. But it was a breeder reactor, technically.
  
  Still, she would have enough fission batteries for her to put some of Baltimore under surveillance soon, including watching the obvious approach down the highway. If she could backtrack exactly from what part of Baltimore these suicide bombers came from, she could maybe bomb it.
  
  Nobody really knew too much about Baltimore, except that most people didn't come back from there, sometimes not even from near there. Who knows what was going on there, but it might be interesting to see from a thousand metres in the air. If it was really such a hellscape with no innocent people in it, she wouldn't mind using nuclear weapons, either. In addition to about two dozen mini-nukes, she had a few larger warheads of a design that was really scary to her, which she was calling a "nuclear explosion in a bottle" type.
  
  This used the quantum-locking forcefield technology, the same way micro-fusion cells kept superhot plasma inside. Such forcefields were, as far as she could tell, capable of completely containing fast neutrons, causing them to bounce around inside. So, if she put a fair bit of a fissionable element into such a bottle, the neutrons would bounce off the forcefield and quickly create a chain reaction, even if the amount was much less than the supercritical amount for that element.
  
  However, she was quite scared to actually try this. She had built a number of prototypes but was unwilling to go as far as attempting a detonation. She didn't know for sure that the "quantum forcefield" would contain a nuclear explosion, even though the idea was it could contain and isolate everything, and additionally, the containment only held so long as the stabilizing electronics were functioning properly.
  
  You needed electronics on both sides of the plane to create such a quantum-locked force field. That made using them as barriers or shields basically impossible because the electronics were fragile, and half of them would be the outside of the shield, susceptible to damage. That was unfortunate because they would be ideal for that purpose, other than that.
  
  The microfusion cells managed to get around this by having one emitter on the outside of each plane in a cube. For example, the emitter on the top of the cube would control both the outside of the top plane and the inside of the bottom plane, so there didn't need to be emitters inside the cube amongst all of the hot plasma.
  
  However, that meant that any damage to any of the electronics that were positioned on each side of the cube, or even momentary interruptions, might tend to let the nuclear explosion out of the bottle, which would be bad. That was basically how microfusion cells worked; the electronics were interrupted in a semi-controlled fashion to either let a standard amount of plasma out or force fuel in. It would be the opposite of a safe weapon once fissionable fuel was introduced.
  
  Microfusion cells did fail from time to time, but all that happened was a small explosion as only a small amount of plasma was kept inside at any one time. Most of the potential plasma was kept as fuel, instead, and shoved into the quantum-isolated plasma chamber as required. This would be a very large explosion, and the nuance of that was important. It would be even larger than the input of the fissionable material would suggest, as traditionally exploded nuclear bombs were rarely all that efficient in their use of the fissionable fuel.
  
  On the plus side, if she ever had to use one of the prototypes she built, the explosion would be very ecologically friendly, at least as much as fission-powered nuclear bombs could be anyway. Right now, the devices were ready, with the quantum forcefields already activated and a small pellet of fissionable plutonium fuel aimed at one side of the force field, ready to be violently accelerated inside it. She was considering throwing one into the ocean to test it, but wouldn't that be a bit hard on the aquatic wildlife?
  
  She didn't consider such a device safe to keep around, though, once it had been "armed." That was a bad word to use. It wasn't armed, it was already exploded. There was no way to disarm it, as the explosion had already happened or was in the process of happening, and it was only the forcefield separating you from the effects.
  
  It was also hard to use as a weapon because she didn't know precisely how long it would take for the chain reaction to propagate once the "arming" process started. Her intuition told her "not long after being enclosed in a perfect forcefield", but that wasn't entirely precise, and she wasn't actually a nuclear physicist. However, if the pellet was completely used up, then the yield should be easily calculated at twenty-five kilotons per device, though.
  
  The actual scary part of these devices was how cheap they were to manufacture. If she ever had to use them, she was going to claim she had looted some traditional nuclear bombs from Fort Constantine. To the powers of the Wasteland that had nuclear bombs, they were a rare and treasured deterrent. She thought people would look at her a lot differently if they knew she could produce them for what amounted to fifty caps a piece or so.
  
  It did make her feel like that, so long as she could survive personally over the next year or so that she had already reached the point where essentially nothing could threaten her except the "wildcards" that always existed in the Fallout universe, like the aliens, Cthulhu and the other nuclear powers. And perhaps, the protagonist of Fallout 3. She had the suspicion that he would either be a total badass or a total non-entity. It was May of 2076, so there were a little over fourteen months until the plot of the game started.
  
  She would normally have expected her butterflies to change that, but the Vault was still a completely closed environment, so she expected both James and his son or daughter to pop out more or less on schedule. It made her chuckle at what James would see when he came out of the Vault in August. That was long enough for her first generation of kudzu and crabgrass to spread a bit, so long as she got the design of the organism finalized by February or so. It would be interesting to see a little bit of green around the wasteland.
  
  The increase in the raider population in the Capital Wast was stark, though. They weren't to the point where they were organized enough to attack Megaton or even Rivet City itself, but they were a danger to anyone that travelled the roads away from well-protected settlements. She had been pushing out her patrols a little bit, going as far as the Potomac river bridge to the north and about halfway to Fairfax to the south, but she didn't have enough manpower to actually make them regular.
  
  She recruited the men requested by Gary but wasn't giving him any permanently assigned soldiers. He had the number of men he requested, but it was a rotating assignment. She didn't particularly consider him likely to stage a coup, especially when he said his plan was to leave the area, but it was still better to have the men under his command rotate in and out every couple of weeks. Otherwise, over time, they would become more loyal to him than to her. That was still a possibility, but much lessened. If that happened, well, they could go on Gary's adventure with her blessings.
  
  Megaton had close to eighteen thousand people living in it now, with perhaps two thousand more living in a kind of shantytown at the edge of the security fence. The first extra quarter of fencing expanding the town, concrete walls and turrets had been built as well, although none of the areas was as of yet wired for power, sewage or water.
  
  Still, she had run auctions for about ten per cent of the land area, and the demand was quite high, even knowing it might be six months before the area was hooked up to utilities. She was setting some aside to start building large warehouses. As long as she got a concrete slab, she could build them like hangars, using thin aluminium segments.
  
  Gary had taken over the judiciary, at least for the moment, and had started a sort of bounty program for dead raiders killed outside the walls. Normally that would be fraught with difficulty, as how would you identify what a dead body was actually a raider but honestly, it wasn't that difficult around these parts.
  
  He was also experimenting with punishments other than death, expulsion, or chopping off of hands, too. It wasn't like anyone ran any prisons. She certainly didn't. She had a jail, but it was strictly temporary. Nobody had the extra resources to feed criminals long term. But he was sentencing small-time criminals to restitutive labour in some cases. She didn't really like the idea of a criminal justice system that could order someone to become an indentured servant. Still, it was better than the present alternatives, given the state of civilization.
  
  It was semi-voluntary, with the caveat that if the offender didn't accept, they would be expelled from Megaton permanently and, if found inside the city again, shot.
  
  On the plus side, the raiders from the Pitt were fighting with the disorganized raiders from Norfolk, and both were fighting with the Super Mutants.
  
  Glancing down at the last completed satellite and both of her hands which had deployed a number of tools that she was using to build them, she nodded and folded all of the spindly little arms back into her arms and arranged each of the finished probes so that her robots could take them to the runway.
  
  She was going to go perform surgery on the Apprentice, and then tomorrow, she was going to go take her memory downloading machine and go download the memories of a genius.
  
  "Wait, what?! You didn't even implant the eel's electrical organ in yourself?! You spent so much time on it... why the hell am I getting one, then?!" she demanded after I admitted I never actually ended up implanting the last generation of the electrical organs in myself.
  
  It was kind of embarrassing. Lily did spend a fair bit of time on the genetics involved. She thought she would go faster in the development, and she also thought it would take longer for her to get an acceptable design of a cybernetic leg and arm that she would want to use on herself. But, in addition to holding eight legs, her lower cybernetic limbs each carried a miniature fission battery. Lily didn't really need the organ anymore.
  
  She didn't even need it for the shock-touch ability, as she had built electronic tasers into her fingers.
  
  The Apprentice did need it, though. She still charged herself every day like a peasant. Lily explained the difference and why she no longer needed it.
  
  "You have cybernetic mechanical legs? What's different about them?" Alice asked, interested.
  
  Oh! She had indeed forgotten to "show" them to the girl. She glanced down at what she was wearing and nodded. She was wearing a pencil skirt today, and one that she had specially designed to not be destroyed, merely removed, if she deployed her legs. In addition, she was wearing a pair of spankies under the skirt instead of just regular underwear, similar to what she remembered a cheerleader might wear in her past life to prevent anyone from getting too much of a glimpse of what was under her skirt, for the same reason.
  
  She grinned at the Apprentice, "Oh. I'll show you!" At that, she triggered the deployment effect, and in under a second, all eight legs were deployed and spread out. She stretched out the metatarsus of her back legs like a cat; it felt good.
  
  Alice, however, shrieked and backed away, "What the fuck!" She glanced at her and then said, "Fuck this; I'm out!" At that, she turned around and started departing with some speed.
  
  Lily laughed at her and called as she skittered after her, "Don't run! I'm SO much faster zhan you!" She skittered after the girl. She was a lot stronger, too, due to her cybernetic arms, so she just grabbed the girl and grinned at her. Then she tossed her up in the air, jumped up into the air herself to redeploy all eight legs quickly, landing back on her human-like feet to catch the shrieking Alice out of the air in a princess carry before settling the disgruntled girl back on the ground.
  
  "Don't worry! I put zhem back in. See? You can barely see the seam on these new leg models. And the seam self-heals in like an hour, too," Lily told her, incredibly proud of the invention.
  
  Alice, after a moment, stopped looking like a startled cat and asked with some emotion, "Why would you ever build something like that? Are you just going to be some robot spider again in ten years, like you told me you used to be? Because I object!"
  
  Lily harumphed. What was wrong with being a robot spider? "No. I kind of like zhe human form, more or less, now. But honestly, eight trumps two any day of zhe week. I can walk on walls and zhe ceiling and run over forty kilometres an hour. You're just an arachnophobe."
  
  Alice nodded rapidly while Lily sighed and went over and retrieved her skirt and pumps, slipping them back on. "Anyway, I built special fission batteries for each leg, so I don't need the organ anymore, but you still do. Especially if you want to keep your mainly biomorph build-type."
  
  "Okay, I understand. But it is still a little disconcerting when you talk about people's bodies like they are so replaceable. People that aren't you don't really think that way," Alice told her.
  
  Lily sniffed, offended, and delicately inspected her nails, ignoring her.
  
  "Fine. I still do want independence from a charging station, as long as it is safe. I may go out on an adventure myself one day, away from civilization. What are the drawbacks?" Alice asked.
  
  Lily stopped looking at her nails and said, "A metabolic cost, certainly. You have zhe latest metabolic efficiency upgrade, but zhis might increase your daily caloric intake requirements a bit. Only one or two 'undred calories zhough if you just use it to keep yourself charged, zhough. And, of course, it is safe! I would install it in myself if I didn't have a better use for zhe space in my thorax." She ignored the comment about Alice going on an adventure. She didn't like the idea of her leaving Megaton. Certainly not by herself.
  
  Lily didn't understand what the big deal was anyway. It was like pulling teeth to get the Apprentice to agree to this. Who wouldn't want to be part eel? Most humans were weird, being such species-chauvinists. It had always been the case, but now at least, she could sort of understand their position. The number of human-born members of transhumanity that would agree to sleeve into an uplifted animal body were infinitesimal.
  
  She couldn't understand it. Not really. Especially humans around here that were all mostly flats anyway. It simply wasn't true that the human species was the pinnacle as far as all biological processes were concerned. So long as you looked human on the outside, who cared from which organism the gene expressions in your liver originated?
  
  Alice nodded, "Alright. I'll go get undressed, and you can get ready in here, I guess."
  
  "Excellent!" Lily chirped.
  
  In the middle of the night, Lily was awoken briefly from her brief sleep period to the pleasant news that the Bradley-Hercules satellite had been destroyed. It self-destructed in a large but brief nuclear plasma ball after her probes hit it with their lasers. Well, good riddance and hopefully, President Eden was just perplexed when the satellite never returned back in the line of sight of North America as it was scheduled to.
  
  She was out of contact with them now, but the four contingency probes should shift priorities and, over a week or so, use a series of transfer orbits to slowly rise to the geostationary level in order to put paid to Trousers satellite. Hopefully, by then, she would have a small global communications network established and could reestablish contact. She fell back asleep, pleased with herself.
  
  Submajor Wilson greeted her the next morning. There was no Captain rank in her org chart, nor were there two grades of lieutenant like was normal in NATO countries. The officer ranks she had made up were specifically to be different from anything that had existed in the past.
  
  They were: Aspirant, Leftenant, Submajor, Major, Subcolonel, Colonel, and Brigadier. She did not have a particular rank herself, the same way that King Henry didn't have a particular rank in the red coats.
  
  She did this to build a unique military culture and esprit de corps, as there were still too many organizations like the Enclave that utilized the old NATO-style rank structures, and she wanted to discard all previous traditions and separate herself from such organizations.
  
  "How many people are we bringing today?" Lily asked the man, curious. If it wasn't for some of the equipment that she had to bring with her, she would have been tempted to go alone. Honestly, she took over this town so that she could do whatever she wanted and it kind of grated on her that she couldn't do whatever she wanted.
  
  Well, she supposed she could, but it would end in drama, with everyone worrying about her the entire time she was gone.
  
  Wilson nodded, "You said this was low risk, so just two squads." That meant four men and sixteen robots. One squad was two fire teams which each consisted of one person and four robots.
  
  Lily nodded. With the heavy weapons on her vehicle and the one truck they were bringing, that should be more than sufficient, even with the increased raider activity.
  
  Her goal was Vault 112. Tranquillity Lane. It was a Vault unlike all of the others in that most of the original inhabitants were still alive, including its overseer, a genius that was probably smarter than her by the name of Stanislaus Braun. He was supposedly the inventor of the G.E.C.K. that utilized matter-to-energy-based technology.
  
  The same one that was sitting in Vault 87, waiting for the Lone Wanderer to get it to jump-start Project Purity.
  
  She had been intentionally ignoring this place because she always intended for James to get stuck there, just as it happened in the game. Why? So she could see what the Lone Wanderer was made up of. Was he or she a complete psychopath? A good person?
  
  She'd find out when they adventured around the Capital Wasteland in order to find their dad. She'd give them some "side quests" herself!
  
  However, that became more and more untenable after she got the technology to download most of a human's memories. If Braun really did invent the GECK, then she was giving up that knowledge if she didn't scan him.
  
  Especially now. She didn't think she would have made as quick progress as she had. If this was a game and not her real life, she was at the point where she would be tying up loose ends. Although, she still had the Enclave as a threat but without their ability to nuke her from orbit they were mainly just as deadly threat and not an existential one. She could see them coming.
  
  Also, who knew what the Lone Wanderer would do to him? Braun was such an asshole that she mostly trapped him in his own simulation as a punishment, but that was unrealistic. It was the kind of slick end to a quest that you'd expect in a game when in reality, she would have found his Tranquility Lounger and put several armour-piercing rounds through it.
  
  Leaving a genius with a grudge against you and only time on their hands alive? That seemed stupid in the extreme. Lily didn't believe he didn't have access to the real world at all. She would have built some kind of virtual override so that she could control one of the robots in Vault 112 if she was him, anyway.
  
  Braun wasn't going to survive her visit, especially since Dr Stanislaus Braun was canonically the one behind all of the bizarre social experiments conducted by Vault-Tec, almost all of them being completely torturous or fatal.
  
  "Alright, I'm going to be working on a few zhings, Submajor. Just tell me when we arrive," Lily told him before entering the armoured RV, sitting in the passenger's seat in the front.
  
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  That's not science! None of this is!
  It took several hours both to drive to the location of Vault 112 as well as to precisely find it, as there were three locations that actually fit both the general location and what was described in the game.
  
  Sitting in the passenger seat of the RV, Lily was listening to some music the driver had started playing over the interior speakers. The vehicle had her full library, although she had given more and more of it to Three Dog, this time in exchange for actual money or advertising. However, all of the songs she had given had been either classical music, country music, big-band type music, or, more recently, the very beginnings of rock and roll, with Elvis and The Beatles being examples.
  
  Gary was perplexed, but Lily finally managed to convince him that he was just a square and didn't listen to young people's music. This was true in a sense, but even old fogies like him would have heard about some of these bands.
  
  However, what was playing right now was one of her favourite songs from AC/DC, Dirty Deeds of the Thunder Chief. She was humming and even singing a little along to it and kept getting glances from the Submajor, who was sitting, out of his Power Armour, in a fold-down jumpseat in the rear of the cab.
  
  Finally, she asked him, complaining, "What? I know I can't sing too well , but zhat wasn't off-key or anything."
  
  "Ma'am... it's just... could you sing that over again, but slower?" he asked, his hand rising, hiding his face.
  
  Lily stared at him but complied, "... Dirty deeds of zhe Zhunder Chief... Dirty Deeds of zhe Zhunder Chief!"
  
  He started snickering, hiding his face, "Ma'am... the lyrics being sung are... Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap."
  
  What? No. She's been listening to this song for more than fifty years! She was a little bit too young to actually buy the album but often heard it on the radio or in music streaming services later in life. It was clearly Dirty Deeds of the Thunder Chief. She thought it was one of those narrative songs with the man doing the dirty deeds being called the Thunder Chief.
  
  Lily quickly brought up the song in her system and checked both the AI-generated title and transcripted lyrics before listening to the chorus several times.
  
  Fuck! How long has she been mishearing these lyrics?! Her last memories in America were in the 2040s when she was over seventy years old, and she still thought it was that way and even sang it that way on the occasion that such an old song was played.
  
  Remembering her children and even grandchildren snickering at her, she narrowed her eyes. So unfilial! How can you let your mom or nana sing the wrong lyrics to a song for decades?!
  
  "Maybe you're right..." Lily quietly allowed, hoping he would shut up now.
  
  Thankfully, he did, and she sat there as they drove to the last of the locations. This one had to be Vault 112. Otherwise, she was in a bit of a pickle.
  
  "Ma'am, it's confirmed. This is the right place, finally," Wilson reported. Lily nodded at him and waited until the driver of the RV parked and started the deployment process of the vehicle.
  
  She then got up and walked into the back, and stepped inside her own Power Armour, blinking a little as it connected to her data port and rendered the outside world in her vision. This was her MkII armour, with integrated plasma and laser weapons. She wanted to include a shoulder-mounted guided mini-missile launcher, but it made it just too big to go into almost any building. As it was, she would probably be hunching a bit to go into the Vault.
  
  "When are we going to get armour like that, ma'am?" asked Wilson.
  
  Lily hummed. In quantities? Not until she could produce quantum processors herself. She could create the junior version of her brain interface now, though. Instead of a hundred of thousand individual electrical connections to your brain, it used the same technology she saw both in the VR stimsuit as well as the Institute's synth-computer she saw in the brain of Ms Natalie Turner.
  
  She asked him, "How do you feel about zhe elective brain surgery, Submajor?" As that would still probably be required. She could try to build one that used a similar control system as regular Power Armour, she supposed, but it would be much harder to control than regular Power Armour.
  
  "Uhh... generally, I am against it, but if it's required for me to get a set of giant Power Armour, I am willing to give it some thought," he said contemplatively.
  
  Lily nodded at him, "We'll see when we get back then." The main reason she was restricting brain implants was that her version required a medichine nanohive as well. The nanites were necessary to keep the individual electrodes in your brain in position. Things, including your brain, shifted over time. New neural connections were made. Without the nanomachines keeping everything straight, you would likely die in a few months.
  
  And she was paranoid about effective nanomachines more than any of her other technologies. Perhaps it was irrational of her, but that's all she had to start with and look where she was now. If she was destined to have competitors, and she was sure they would appear somehow or somewhen, then she wanted them to at least arise in a different manner than she did, so at least she could learn something from them.
  
  The electrode induction version of the brain-computer didn't provide as precise access to the brain nor as good bandwidth, but it was still better than what could be expected from the VR simulation, and that was already good enough to trick most people who went through it. So, maybe she should move forward faster on that. She had a rough design of a device, but she had not built it nor tested it in the brains of volunteers.
  
  She had brought an extra dozen robots with them, in addition to the ones that were serving as the backbone of the two squads the Submajor was commanding. Mainly for labour, in the event that she was going to take things out of here.
  
  "Do you want an escort inside, ma'am?" asked Wilson after he secured the perimeter.
  
  Lily started to say no but then paused. In the game, there were a bunch of Robobrains and other working pieces of technology. Robobrains themselves were rather dangerous and rare. She hadn't seen any at all yet. Besides being a possible threat, she was quite curious about their brain-machine interface and what they did to the brains involved. In the game, they acted like machines - did they just use the neural circuitry as some kind of biological computer, destroying the previous person's ego? If so, was that required, or could there be sapient robobrains?
  
  "Yes, come with me. We'll bring eight of the robots with us for protection," Lily finally told him, getting a quick nod from his helmet-shrouded head.
  
  They walked two abreast into the ruined mechanic's garage, which hid a secret passage until the passage widened out and a familiar cog-shaped Vault door bearing the number 112 was visible. There were a number of mole rats that the robots lasered without being prompted.
  
  "Never actually been in a Vault before, except the one in basic training," said Wilson, kind of excitedly. She had included her memories of Vault 108 and a few other places as examples in some of the tactical evolutions in the simulation. Without the Gary clones, though.
  
  "Hmmm..." Lily said noncommittally. Then she walked over to the entrance terminal and tried to open the door. Not surprisingly, it worked. A klaxon sounded, complete with rotating beacon lights, and they both waited for the multi-ton door to be slid and lifted out of the way.
  
  "Woah, this place looks up and running, still," Wilson commented.
  
  Lily nodded. She'd leave surveillance cameras behind when she left. If raiders or undesirable elements discovered it, she'd clean them out again. Her present intention was still to leave the place as she found it for the most part. She had carefully removed and brought with her a number of quantum processors from the spares of the VSS simulator.
  
  If she downloaded Braun's memories, she would be able to run him as an NPC using an impersonator AI. Although she likely wasn't going to let the NPC Braun continue to torment the residents of Tranquility Lane, it could still be useful for putting the Lone Wanderer's dad on ice for a time. Also, it tended to be a lot easier to quiz such an impersonator about secrets than parse through decades of memories. Although it had a lot of limitations, it was pretty good at distilling all of those things into concise bits.
  
  The fidelity of any impersonator AI depended on how well the AI was programmed, but even then, most people could only get about ninety-two per cent accurate. This was enough to trick most people for some time, but family members would usually discover the discrepancy in only a couple of days.
  
  In her past life, they were designed not only to sort memories and respond but to carefully and automatically psychologically model a person. People who were very neurodivergent generally fell into one or two categories, though. They could hardly be modelled at all, or alternatively, they could be very accurately modelled.
  
  Meimei was always of the latter category and thought that an impersonator AI of herself could model her reactions close to ninety-seven per cent and close to one hundred per cent on some matters, although they would still be a Chinese room and not a real consciousness as in the absence of stimulus such models would not think or consider, merely shut down.
  
  In the past, some psychologists had created profiles of Meimei which were either wildly inaccurate or accurate enough that it caused her to change some of her behaviours to preclude being easily predicted. It was just humiliating that most of them were of the criminal, pathological psychologist variety.
  
  Lily had been testing such a model using a complete download of her own memories as the seed, too. She had the idea of creating an impersonator herself to help run the city of Megaton. For the past week, she had been feeding it the exact same questions and requests she got from the people and workers in Megaton, but only after already deciding the matters. It had been eerily accurate, with only things that required on-the-spot problem-solving skills being somewhat lacklustre, and even those the model could infer a somewhat similar response based on her memories of past actions.
  
  It could be the start of a very useful tool! She basically had the technology to create an alpha fork of herself, but she wasn't Meimei anymore, and the idea of another her around filled her with a little apprehension. Hell, even Meimei didn't like forks of her around that didn't get merged back into the base periodically.
  
  The last time one appeared, due to a resurrection timing mishap, they had to negotiate the distribution of their collective assets as if they were a married couple that had a divorce. Meimei kept most of them, but that fork got enough to set herself up on a similar path. Meimei had to bribe her off, as she had knowledge enough to compromise all of their resurrection points, their most secret and hidden plans, and all the rest. Meimei thought she was a weirdo, too, as she had switched to a partial biomorph body of a snake woman and went back to Extropia Station to live.
  
  They walked through a couple of doors, but as soon as Lily got sight of the robobrain that was waiting to meet them, the robobrain yelled in a digital voice, "Unauthorised robotic equipment! ERADICATE. ERADICATE. ERADICATE." What the fuck, were these things, Daleks?!
  
  The robobrain started shooting small plasma blasts at her robots, and she thought it was aiming at herself as well as she had to duck once to avoid one of them. She stopped both her robots from firing as well as Wilson and indicated that they should all back out of the way.
  
  "Well, I don't zhink it likes me or my robots," Lily told Wilson while watching the robobrain roll back into the main area of the Vault. It didn't seem to want to follow them out or even shoot at them once they had left the premises.
  
  Lily glanced at one of her robots that took a hit from a plasma packet. Its frontal armour was a bit melted, but it still was operable; it just didn't look so great. It wasn't a priority and could be fixed later.
  
  Wilson glanced at her, "What should we do? We can probably scrap the bots if we go about it systematically."
  
  Lily hummed. She'd rather not. She glanced at him sideways and said quietly, "You poke your head in. I'm sure it has data about Pre-War Power Armour in its databanks, so it won't consider you a robot. If it starts to shoot at you, run back; if not, see what it tells you."
  
  Although she couldn't see his face under his helmet, she sort of imagined his expression. After a moment, he sighed and nodded. He slung his plasma rifle at his side, presumably to look a little less threatening, and walked back through the doorway they were waiting behind.
  
  Lily's hearing was really good, but the Vault Doors were insulated really well. She couldn't hear any plasma casters firing, though, which was a good sign, so she just sat there and waited.
  
  After a few minutes, the door opened back up, and Wilson returned, carrying a folded-up Vault 112 jumpsuit. Lily asked him, "Let me guess, it said you were about two 'undred years late but directed you to get inside one of zhe Tranquility Loungers."
  
  Wilson paused and asked, "How did you know? Do you have microphones on our armour or just have really good hearing?"
  
  Well, she had a really good sense of hearing but not quite good enough to hear through the insulated steel doors, "Neither. Just a guess." Besides, she had played this before.
  
  She stepped over into the corner of the room and triggered the armour to let her out, and she stepped out of it and stretched each of her limbs. She thought that the robobrain had identified her Power Armour incorrectly as a robot, so if she wanted to wear it inside the Vault, she would have to go on foot first and begin systematically hacking every robot and computer system she saw.
  
  "Alright, let's go back. We'll leave the robots out here for the moment. I plan on hiding behind you if someone shoots at me," she told the older man, who was an experienced mercenary even before he came under her employ.
  
  His voice was wry, "Naturally."
  
  They walked together into the Vault again, and the robobrain began the spiel that she had been expecting. It gave the same spiel to Wilson even though he had already heard it one time. While it wasn't paying attention, Lily casually walked behind it and snaked a data cord from behind her neck into the machine's criminally scandalously exposed data port without even a dust cover to protect the robot's modesty.
  
  Hacking robots in this world was as simple as identifying which version of the RobCo OS the robot was using and then consulting a list of multiple remote-execution vulnerabilities that existed for that version. It was even more straightforward than the silly minigame she remembered in the Fallout 3 game. For her, it was a completely automated process. While she hadn't seen this particular version of RobCo OS yet, it bore a lot of similarities, including unfixed vulnerabilities, to many of the other versions that General Atomics used for their Mister Handy and Miss Nanny series of bots.
  
  Lily didn't immediately change anything about the robot's behaviour but placed a backdoor so that she could remotely shut the system down in the event it received some updated orders that she didn't think should be followed.
  
  As they walked around the Vault, it became clear that there were a lot more pods in place than there were in the game. That did surprise her but not that much, as there were only ten people in the Tranquility Lane simulation quest line in the game, and the actual world she found herself in always seemed to be much more widely populated.
  
  "Are these VR pods like the kind that you salvaged from that building in DC, Commander?" asked Wilson curiously as they walked through a large room with about twenty occupied pods inside. Lily was carefully hacking each terminal that controlled the pods, giving her superuser access to each occupant one at a time.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes. Zhe guts of this system were made by VSS, too but then improved. You don't need the full neural stim suit, for example, for this model and zhe pods themselves have been modified with advanced longevity systems. Zhese people all were alive before the war and 'ave been living in a simulated reality for two hundred years."
  
  "Woah, that could be heaven or hell. I tried that Anchorage simulation, and even on the easiest difficulty setting, its a bitch, ma'am. I'm not sure how you managed to beat it," he said.
  
  Lily nodded and said while giving him a side eye, "Perhaps I am just that good!" Yes, that was a legitimate and fully earned victory, that was.
  
  "What simulation is running now? Should one of us get in one of these pods?" asked Wilson.
  
  Lily told him what she knew of Tranquility Lane and Dr Braun. He seemed off-put, "He's pretending he's a little girl?! That's pretty sick!"
  
  Was it? Well, there was a biomorph type that had a very bad reputation, which was a type that never really achieved maturity. If you bought one, you'd select an age, and it just wouldn't mature past that point. People always did look at anyone who chose to be sleeved inside one of those types of bodies with a little suspicion. However, if it was just the sex change, then there was nothing that unusual.
  
  There was a piece of bioware that was only slightly expensive that would trigger a complete, total sex change to the point where the correct gametes would be produced in only about forty-eight hours, and it could be triggered at will and as often as you'd like. Well, unless you got pregnant. There was a small minority of people who really liked that and flitted between one sex and the other, or one gender role and the other, or some amalgamation of all of the above, or something completely different. So, to her simply experiencing a different sex in a VR game or simulation was tres tame . She wasn't one to throw stones, as people thought she was a lot weirder for choosing to remain in a synth body, especially a non-humanoid one, even though she was rich.
  
  In her past life, fully synthetic bodies were something people who couldn't afford biomorphs lived in, and there was a considerable social cost for being amongst "the clanking masses."
  
  She knew people who had sleeved into giant, specially engineered vacuum-tolerant space whales and drifted in the atmosphere of Saturn or sleeved into an actual spaceship. She always felt the latter was interesting, as the manufacturers incorporated a strong maternal instinct to protect the inhabitants of your ship into the way your emulated neural network ran. She always wanted to try it to see if it would work on her.
  
  Lily sent via text-to-speech radio broadcast, so it would only play over the speakers in his helmet, quietly. "Go ahead and get out of the Power Armour and put on that Vault suit," Lily told him, "After I hack this terminal and put a backdoor in so he can't cause you too much pain or erase your memories, I want you to go in the simulation and play dumb. I'm still not convinced that Dr Braun can't see and control everything around here. I kind of think that's why the place is so open, as a lure for him to find new toys to play with."
  
  Wilson blinked and looked at my mouth, which was clearly not moving, "You're going to have to tell me how you did that sometimes, boss." But then he nodded and stepped out of his Power Armour, leaving his helmet by the feet.
  
  Lily blinked at the man's bald head. The dark skin was almost shiny. Didn't he use to have hair? Yes, definitely. She decided not to comment on it, though and busied herself hacking and subtly reconfiguring the computer that took the input and output of the Tranquility Lounger. After she was done, she plugged in a small wireless dongle to the back of the system, which would give her a wireless connection to Wilson's lounger.
  
  "Alright, ma'am. I'm ready, I guess. How long do you expect to leave me in here?" Wilson told her, seeming a bit curious and concerned at the last part.
  
  Lily shrugged, "However long it takes." She didn't want to tell him anything out loud if Braun could hear. She wasn't too concerned about him watching her fiddle with the terminals, as she wasn't leaving any real traces of her successful hacking attempts, nor was she noticeably changing any expected behaviour.
  
  She pulled out her pneumatic hypospray, rolled the revolver-style selector to regular medichines, and motioned him over. As he got close, she placed the hypospray on his arm and depressed the trigger about six or seven times rapidly in quick succession. "Owe!" he complained, frowning.
  
  Grinning, she put the tool back into her pocket and reprogrammed the nanomachines that were now in his body to focus on his brain as a second layer of protection and then motioned him towards the pod. He shook his head at Lily one last time before climbing in. The pod closed, and Lily opened up a window in the corner of her vision that corresponded to what Wilson was seeing.
  
  Before the sim started, a flurry of commands from farther down along the line arrived, reprogramming the man's avatar. It looked like Braun was well aware of what was happening and changed Wilson to spawn in a child-like avatar. Not a dog, yet, it seemed. Her hacking did not attempt to stop this, although it quietly ignored some commands about stimulating his limbic system and amygdala, which would have tended to make him much more afraid generally. What an ass, Dr Braun.
  
  Just in case she got attacked on the way out, she hopped into Wilson's Power Armour and grabbed his plasma rifle before retracing her steps and leaving the Vault entirely. Once she was outside, she left his armour and grabbed her modified Chinese stealth armour from one of her robots who was waiting for her with it. She also reclaimed her scanning device, as she was curious how a lot of the stuff inside worked. The Tranquility Loungers had a lot of extra features compared to the pods in the VSS building!
  
  Now, while Braun was distracted with his or her new toy, it was time for a sneak mission! Sorry, Wilson! It is for a good cause, and she limited how much you could be really tortured, anyway!
  
  As Betty was interrogating Wilson, Lily snuck back into the Vault. She seemed very interested in who we all were but lost most of her curiosity when Wilson explained we were from a settlement around western DC. It seemed as though she didn't have much respect for the state of civilisation.
  
  Wilson wasn't really cooperating with her attempts to make him do amusing things, such as torture some of the inhabitants of her virtuality, so she was trying to convince him that Lily had left him there to die. It didn't make any sense at all, but she slipped a rendered line of text into his virtual stream stating the opposite, but to feel free to play whatever role he wanted so long as he kept the psychotic virtual tween busy.
  
  According to what she could see from the Vault's network, there were two dozen robobrains working here, with about a third shutdown or undergoing maintenance which was performed by another third at any one time. She only had a few hacked, so as she snuck around inside the facility, she had one of her hacked robobrains report a mechanical irregularity. It was directed to go to maintenance and was replaced by one of the robobrains that were shut down.
  
  The robobrain performing maintenance was infected and compromised as soon as it connected to her hacked one to diagnose its maintenance issue. It then hacked all of the rest of the robobrains, including both the other maintenance models as well as the ones getting maintenance done.
  
  It wouldn't take too long for her to have the whole cohort under her control.
  
  The computer system powering the simulation was similar to the one made by VSS. It had the same architecture, except it was much more extensive. It was interesting to see because, from the documents that she read from the VSS building, they were the company that invented the technology, but there was a much more complicated and much more finished system than they were able to produce using their own technology, including their own proprietary operating system that ran virtualised in a large cluster.
  
  She knew a lot more about how the system worked these days and how to hack it without resorting to her crude hardware attacks. However, it did necessitate her sneaking around and hacking each individual mainframe one at a time, and they were located in five different rooms in the lowest level of the Vault.
  
  She knew Braun was in the Overseer's office, but he was her absolute last stop.
  
  It took her over three hours to compromise every single system and robot in the building, and she got a lot more data while she was doing so. There were about a hundred and six in Tranquility Lane, down from a hundred and thirty-five when the bombs dropped. There had been casualties over the years, despite some really impressive longevity and medical technology.
  
  What was she going to do with all of these people? She did not think that they would survive very long after being removed from their Tranquility Loungers. The pods were a completely closed system, and while she didn't have enough time to reverse engineer them thoroughly, she believed that after so long inside of one that, a person's body would have adapted to the additional support the system provided and would fall apart without it.
  
  None of them had much of an immune system after all this time, and many of the people in the pods were directly connected to both artificial dialysis and blood-pumping machines. They didn't really have a heart that worked very well anymore.
  
  She finally snuck into the Overseer's room, hacked the number of mainframes there, including the main ThinkMachine system that coordinated everything and peered at the old man inside the Tranquility Lounger. He was one of the ones who wouldn't survive too long outside of it. Perhaps... no, undoubtedly, he knew that. It was a shitty version of immortality, indeed.
  
  Instead of immediately taking overall control over the vault, she used her root access to the ThinkMachine mainframe that oversaw the entire vault, including the simulation, to create a new user, Lily. Then she created a new user access paradigm, a Super-Overseer if you will, and assigned herself that role.
  
  Then she subtly removed all of the permissions from Braun by degrading the access permissions of the Overseer role until he could only access things in his simulation. Just to be safe.
  
  When she was done, she stopped sneaking around and just hurried out of the Vault, returning with a wheeled trolley containing the brain-scanning system and assorted electronics.
  
  Glancing at Braun, did she really care what he had to say? No, not really. He had already changed Wilson to a dog, including some NPC code in his avatar, and was going around having the dog-Wilson maul the residents of Tranquility Lane, cackling like a madman. Braun hadn't noticed her traipsing around at all.
  
  Sighing, she took her hypospray back out and rotated it to a sedative, and triggered the pod to open. Braun only had a moment of confusion; she didn't even really think he was conscious yet before she jabbed him in the neck with the pneumatic spray. If she was a bitch, she would have just paralysed him while she did this, but there was no reason for the man, even if he was a sadistic bastard, to suffer more than necessary.
  
  After that, she placed the electrodes on his head and sat there for several minutes it took to download and catalogue all of his memories. Not surprisingly, it took a lot longer than normal.
  
  Nodding, satisfied, she plugged in an impersonator AI and connected it. Right now it was piped through her Mesh only, so only she could question it. However, that was sufficient.
  
  Lily asked it, "Who are you?"
  
  "Betty, more recently, but most people know me as Stanislaus Braun, of course. Doctor Stanislaus Braun," a little girl's voice said. That was another issue with impersonator AIs, you had to be real careful with them on people who switched sleeves often.
  
  Lily nodded, though satisfied, "Do you remember all of zhe work you did for zhe Societal Preservation Program and Future-Tec?"
  
  "Of course! My greatest life's work, you know," the girl said.
  
  Excellent. Lily smiled, "Give me a brief synopsis of how the G.E.C.K. works."
  
  There was silence for a moment, "Well, I don't entirely know how it works. This is weird; normally, I'd never ever admit that you see, but you seem very trustworthy, and it seems important that I tell you the truth."
  
  What?! Lily asked, "Didn't you invent it?!"
  
  "Well... one of my assistants did if you want to be technical. But he had no real vision for how the technology could be used. I'm the one that integrated it as a whole into the G.E.C.K.," admitted the Braun AI, "He threatened to expose me, but I got him to agree to let me take credit for it. In exchange, I placed him in one of the Vault's as the Overseer. He wasn't a dummy; he knew it was only a matter of time before the Chicoms set the world on fire."
  
  For fuck's sake! "Which Vault? Was it a control vault? If not, what was the experiment?"
  
  "Vault 67 in Ohio. Well, he thought it was a control vault," said the girl, laughing, "But the experiment was to see what would happen if a hundred serial killers were put in a Vault together with one man who thought he was an Overseer. Really we only found ninety-one serial killers in North America, you know, so we had to toss in nine random people. Serial killers are a lot rarer than you'd think."
  
  Lily turned around and shot Braun's body in the head. "Zhat isn't a fucking experiment!"
  
  "Says you. I have five doctorates that say it is," said the AI Braun in her head.
  
  Lily felt a headache coming on.
  
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  The long lived shall inherit the Earth
  Wilson was a little aggrieved, and perhaps it was warranted, "You left me as a dog for three hours, ma'am! After that asshole disappeared, at least I was no longer mauling people, but the simulation reset, and this boy was playing fetch with me the whole time!"
  
  In Lily's defence, she had gotten distracted both reading Dr Braun's private files and reviewing the dossiers on the people Braun had selected to live in Tranquility Lane. What she learned about the G.E.C.K. both from Braun's personal files and his impersonator had depressed her, and after that, she had spent some time looking through who all were living here in the simulation world.
  
  Glancing at Wilson, Lily had the sudden desire to find a stick and throw it to see if the Submajor would chase it. For science. But she didn't see any sticks or even tennis balls around. She asked him, slightly amused, "Did you 'ave fun, Submajor?"
  
  He combined saying, "Respectfully..." with flipping her the bird.
  
  "This is going to take us a lot longer, I zhink..." Lily told him after she grinned at his response. "I zhink we will need to set up a semi-permanent position here."
  
  That caused him to frown, "Why? That might be very problematic. We are almost directly next door to a substantial raider settlement at Evergreen Mills. There are hundreds of raiders there. It isn't as big as Paradise Falls, but they're less than ten kilometres away. It's only the fact that we snuck in that we haven't been attacked yet."
  
  Lily hummed and waved her hand at a group of the Tranquility Loungers. "Dr Braun really did a number on all of zhese people. It will take me several days just to bring zhem to rationality and return their original memories." Technically, they all had their original memories; Braun had been resetting them back to their original memories at least once a year. However, they were just blocked off through interesting neural stimulation from the pods.
  
  "Well, if it will only be a few days, that shouldn't be a problem," began Wilson, but Lily shook her head.
  
  She said, "No, after that, I will give zhem some options, but I expect to have to clone a lot of bodies and perform a lot of brain transplantation surgeries. Zheir bodies inside zhese pods are kept alive, but zhey 'ave become, essentially, acclimated to the life support zhe pods provide. Zhey can't be separated for long before zheir bodies fail."
  
  "Wait, you can move someone's brain into a different body?" Wilson asked, half-amazed and half-disgusted.
  
  Lily waved a hand at one of the Robobrains that had been rolling around, "Zhat technology isn't exactly zhat unusual. 'Ow do you zhink zhey made zhose abominations?"
  
  Wilson nodded after a moment, "Are you going to make a body for those robots, too?"
  
  Lily shook her head, with a sigh, "No. I examined each one. Zhey basically lobotomised zhem in zhe process of 'ooking zhem up to zhe robobrain chassis. Zhere is nothing really of an individual, zhinking person left, now. So zhey may as well get some use as zhey are." Some people might object to what was basically zombies used as labour, but definitely not her. If she got transferred to a fantasy world instead of Fallout, she would have felt that necromancy would be an excellent form of cheap labour.
  
  At first, Lily thought it was a little weird because there wasn't anything that required that. In fact, the Robobrains were a pretty good first try at integrating a human brain with a synth chassis.
  
  She used to design and build those types of things all the time; they were called pods. There were some people who wanted the flexibility that synths could offer but still wanted an organic brain, after all, but mostly these were usually mass-produced low-cost affairs. They were a step up from a full entry-level synth body but much less expensive than an average biomorph.
  
  Meimei had a history, albeit a discreet one, as a highly compensated consultant with a large inner-sphere manufacturing house called Ota Lifeworks to design these types of systems to be as good as possible for as cheap as possible. It was an interesting problem to find the correct place on the graph where neither axis, quality or price, went too far into diminishing returns. However, she also took bespoke clients, especially well-to-do AGIs who wanted to experience life in an organic body while retaining their synthetic brains. She thought they were crazy, but often AGIs had a soft spot for becoming as human as possible for some reason. Data from Star Trek was an exaggeration, but there were some AGIs who were somewhat similar to him.
  
  The more she thought about the robobrains, the more Lily realised that they had probably used unwilling donor brains, and the significant traumatic brain injuries were intentional, as a way to essentially kill the people involved while still leaving their brains useful as a calculating organ.
  
  Wilson asked finally, "How long are we talking about here, then?"
  
  Lily hummed, "It takes zhe cloning machine about six to eight hours to clone a body, and it takes me about zhree to four 'ours to perform a brain transplantation surgery. Although I zhink, I can definitely reduce zhat time a lot."
  
  "For over a hundred people?! We're talking weeks, no months! We'll need at least twenty or thirty soldiers and four times the number of robots to ensure your safety continuously," Wilson exclaimed, aghast.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, especially since I won't be able to do zhis full time. I zhink we will 'ave to go the whole 'og as zhey say. Chainlink fence, concertina wire, automated turrets, lights, air defence radar, SHORAD batteries. Just like zhe Megaton exterior defences." She wouldn't stay around a location with fewer defences than that if it were widely known that she was here. As a local warlord, she had enemies.
  
  "Ma'am... we don't have the resources to do that. Especially not to escort and guard construction crews coming in from Megaton to build all that," Wilson said, reasonably but firmly. They probably did have the resources if you just counted the robots. She had about two hundred and fifty of them, and about seventy to one hundred were currently being used at any time in the hospital and around town, mostly as security or general labour in the hospital. Another sixty or so were used by her for building, excavation and assembly projects underneath the hospital.
  
  However, despite how useful they were, Kaytrons did function best in small groups when overseen by a human, unless it was repetitive tasks. When she used them for construction, she was usually the one that was overseeing them or giving them specific tasks in a specific order in advance. They could assemble a laser rifle with no problem but would find it more difficult to troubleshoot a malfunctioning one.
  
  Lily sighed, "I know. I will 'ave to bring in zhe Brotherhood to help me. Zhey can provide both some additional security forces, as well as, more importantly, some skilled labour to help build zhe perimeter. Skilled labour zhat is used to working in semi-dangerous locations and under pressure." She hummed, "Besides, I'll need to borrow one of zhe cloning machines zhey recently acquired. I can't move mine out of zhe hôpital; it is used too often zhese days, and running bodies from Megaton to 'ere twice a day seems a little much. Besides, we do have over two dozen robobrains 'ere, zhey can be repurposed to help construction as well as exterior defence." Although she couldn't do that for too long, they were required to do all of the maintenance necessary to keep this facility operating.
  
  She could build another cloning machine, but she hadn't really gotten farther than scanning and making alterations to her existing one. It would be a small project of a couple of weeks to design one for production. She had the intention to do so, eventually, but for now, she'd just borrow one from the Brotherhood. It wasn't like she would be able to hide this from them, anyway... nor was there really that much reason to do so.
  
  She was hoping that most of the people in Tranquility Lane would decide to move to Megaton. Braun hadn't selected average Americans for his playthings; they were definitely tilted towards the higher educated and higher income bracket. Of the one hundred and five people still alive in Tranquility Lane, all of them had at least a four-year college degree. There were about twelve medical doctors and over two dozen engineers, as well as the old Postmaster General from the Pre-War government.
  
  She supposed that if the man had been given to Braun as a plaything, he probably wasn't involved with the Enclave. However, she intended to keep the scans Braun made of the brains of every person in here anyway. He used those scans to periodically revert them back to a "default state," although the technology he was using to do so did a little bit of brain damage every time he used it, so there were numerous cumulative injuries she would have to fix on essentially everyone here.
  
  She would keep their scanned memories not only to be on the safe side but in order to get a lot of valuable knowledge about both the culture and society, as well as any helpful engineering and scientific knowledge these people had, although there weren't any genius inventors amongst the cohort, except for Braun himself. Although he stole the matter-energy portion of the G.E.C.K., he was still an absolute genius.
  
  She was getting a little ahead of herself, though. It was possible that everyone inside Vault 112 would choose to just be euthanised. That was the other option she would give them. Considering she planned on either looting all of the VR technology or possibly now just taking over the entire Vault, she wouldn't be giving them the option to continue to live in some VR world for the foreseeable future, though. However, she honestly wouldn't expect even a single person to want to do that after being toyed with inside of a virtual world for hundreds of years.
  
  "Okay, that might work, I suppose, but that is beyond my pay grade. I haven't had any issues interacting with the Brotherhood, myself, though. They're professional, if a little weird," Wilson said, finally.
  
  For a first step, Lily returned to the RV and raided the medical supplies she had brought. She had a lot of medichines in saline suspension, and would be programming them for repairs in the brain, just as she had done so for the Submajor and then would place them in the input line of each pod's nutrition and life support system. It would take time to repair all of the damage Braun had done to these people by repeatedly erasing and reprogramming their memories.
  
  She had already deactivated the fake personalities he had programmed on each individual, but they wouldn't adjust back to their normal state right away. The way Braun handled fake personalities was pretty crude. He essentially made an NPC play the person while the person was fully conscious... eventually, the person's thought patterns would tend to mirror that of the NPC, and that was it. Eventually, he would turn the NPC programs off, and that was the time he usually started fucking with people.
  
  That was why the Submajor played fetch with that boy. The NPC dog program was running on top of his avatar, and the pod was trying to trick him into thinking he was making all of those choices, although, with the changes she had made to it after she hacked it, that wasn't possible. As such, it was probably just annoying for him, like watching someone's perspective as a film.
  
  She could revert all the people in Tranquility Lane back to their Pre-War memories while they were in the pods but would wait to see if their memories would return on their own after she had removed the blocks and custom programming Braun had added to each of the pods. Braun had reverted their memories at least a hundred times, but it was clear it didn't completely take for every person. There was some bleed over on at least a fraction of the people who remembered some or all of their past in the simulation.
  
  Already, without the custom programming that heightened everyone's sense of unease, the stress levels of everyone connected to the simulation were dropping considerably.
  
  Taking the supplies out of the vehicle, she had a couple of robots take them into the Vault while she returned back to the RV. She sat in the passenger seat and grabbed the radio handset, and quickly programmed the transmission to travel through the Mesh to be transmitted on her hospital's high-gain transceiver array. She and the Brotherhood had agreed on encryption methods, so she wasn't transmitting in the blind anymore.
  
  She transmitted, "GNR, St. Claire, is Ms Lyons available for a discussion?"
  
  "St. Claire, GNR, she's at the Citadel. Stand by, we'll relay for you, but it might take a few minutes to pin her down," came a familiar male voice on the radio. She didn't know his name, but he often worked the radio at the GNR building.
  
  As she waited, she drifted deeper into the Mesh to arrange things back in Megaton. She had agreed to build a number of portable air-defence radar sets for the Brotherhood but had not delivered them yet. They were towable by any truck, and she was going to divert two of them to Vault 112, as well as many tons of concrete, a lot of chainlink fencing, steel posts, and barbed wire.
  
  All of that she would have to divert from her slowly expanding Megaton, along with a few exterior defence turrets. Humming, she pulled up an overhead view of the hidden Vault 112 and used a tool to measure the potential surface area to be guarded.
  
  There needed to be more area fenced in than just the garage in order to give an area that wasn't the Vault for troops to bivouac and for a motor pool, although part of the actual garage can be used for that. Nodding, she sat icons down on the map, testing angles and distances. Ten turrets would be enough to provide sufficient air defence, as well as overlapping fields of fire for all approaches.
  
  She sighed. She intended to leave the place as she had found it to trick the Lone Wanderer's dad into getting stuck here for a time. She had planned on leaving behind an NPC version of Braun tormenting an NPC version of twelve people or so, but this place would look like a military installation after she was done. Look? It would be a military installation after she was done. There was no way either she or the Brotherhood would just leave such a place after she had built it, either, so she would have to find some other way to distract the Lone Wanderer's dad.
  
  She wasn't worried about the timeline; she had changed so much already. However, she was living in what was a narrative world and worried about anyone who might be considered a "protagonist." Seeing how the Lone Wanderer went about his or her quest to find their parent would tell her a lot about them as a person and whether or not she should be concerned or not.
  
  Also, it would give her time to exercise a plan to neutralise the Enclave, as she was pretty sure that as soon as it was widely reported that Project Purity was restarting that President Eden would send out the troops in force. Colonel Autumn was less genocidal than Eden was; he only wanted to secure Project Purity to use it as a soft power lever for the Enclave to regain legitimacy.
  
  Honestly, that wasn't a bad idea, except for the fact that the Enclave seemed less interested in governance than even she did. But the Enclave and the Brotherhood were like fire and oil; they couldn't really cohabitate in the same general area without starting a conflagration.
  
  Oh, well. She would just find some other way to figure that out. Maybe she could invade Vault 87, grab the G.E.C.K. and take it to Maine. That would give him a bit of a trek. No, that was probably a bad idea.
  
  Suddenly, a familiar voice came on the radio, "Hey doc, what's up? Do you already have this month's shipment ready?" Every month Lily had been sending them about fifty laser rifles and pistols and about thirty plasma rifles and pistols. Now that she had gotten the technology for manufacturing doped laser rods she had managed to shift the output on all of her lasers up to the visible violent range, so at least all of her weapons did not feature the same colour beams as the Institute any longer.
  
  "Hi, Sarah. I do, actually, but zhat wasn't why I called. I was 'oping to collaborate with the Brotherhood in something I recently discovered. I need to borrow one of zhe cloning machines you discovered on Kent Island, and probably both Paladins and Scribes until we get defences in place. Zhe location is a little sensitive from a security standpoint," I told her, speaking into the transceiver's handset.
  
  There was a pause before Sarah's voice returned, "Well, the cloning machine shouldn't be a problem. We found four, and three are still packed away. You'll have to assemble it yourself, but I can have it moving towards you by tomorrow at 0500. But now you have me curious. I'll need a lot more information before I can authorise any real military or Scribe support. I'll probably have to talk to the Elder, too. What did you find?"
  
  Lily hummed, considering how to say it. The radios were encrypted, so she felt she could just go out and say it, "It's Vault 112. Just west of Evergreen Mills. Rather zhan a traditional vault, zhis was a vanity project of Dr Stanislaus Braun, one of the lead scientists of Pre-War Vault-Tec. Most of zhe inhabitants are still alive, but zhey're inside life support virtual reality pods."
  
  "Woah. Are you saying Stanislaus Braun is still alive? We have files on him," came the reply.
  
  Lily shifted in her seat, fidgeting a little bit, "Well... no. I mean... he was. But, the crimes he 'ad done... he was basically acting as zhe god of zhis simulated world, torturing over a 'undred people for two 'undred years. So, uhh... I kind of shot 'im."
  
  There was quiet on the line for a moment before she heard genuine laughter and Sarah asking, "Are you sure you're not interested in joining the Brotherhood? Okay, okay... I see what you meant by sensitive location. What's your plan on that front?"
  
  Lily told her that she was already arranging the materials to build up the exterior defence but needed some support to construct it as well as additional security forces in the interim.
  
  Sarah radioed back, "Normally, we'd be spread way too thin to help you out, especially with our new commitments at that seed vault. However, with the combination of organ and limb cloning, as well as the cybernetics technology you traded to us, we have managed to bring over fifty Paladins out of medical retirement. Plus, the half squadron of Vertibirds that we now have flying that we didn't use to helps our logistics considerably. I'll discuss this with the Elder, and while I can't guarantee anything, I think we should be able to free up one or two dozen Initiates supervised by experienced Paladins. The Scribes might be more of a problem. Most of our civil engineer scribes are repairing that bridge to Kent Island, but we'll see what we can do."
  
  There was another pause on the radio before Sarah continued, "I can't get free until tomorrow evening, but I'll take a flight over there to see it myself. Will you still be on site?"
  
  "I should be. Bring Ferguson or one of your medical Scribes with you when you come, if possible," Lily told her.
  
  They concluded things there, and Lily leaned back in the comfortable chair of her RV and considered. The nanomachines were already delivered inside the Vault, and the robobrains accepted the new "vitamins" and had already begun introducing them to each of the inhabitants via their Tranquility Lounger.
  
  The people inside the simulation were acting a bit odd, which was to be expected as their memories were slowly returning. Lily had given instructions to the computer running the sim to create a week-long Holiday so that nobody in the simulation had to go to "work" and would just stay home. She hadn't specified what kind of holiday, so the computer just created some sort of plausible-sounding Victory in Anchorage week-long celebration, complete with parades by NPCs.
  
  That was kind of amusing. The computing resources in Vault 112 were hundreds of times more than were in the VSS building. The total simulated area and the concurrent number of users required a really large amount of computing. There were enough quantum processors for several thousand NPCs, all running concurrently, and the databases had memories of tens of thousands of Americans. It looked like Braun went to a random small Midwest town and just downloaded the brains of every single person present, although he didn't actually use the NPCs too much. Lily guessed he got bored of them.
  
  She sighed and shifted back to look at her notes about what Dr Braun knew about the G.E.C.K. - perhaps she missed something.
  
  There were some engineering diagrams stored in Braun's private files, but all of them included the matter-energy module as a black box. That wasn't an insurmountable problem. She would be able to scan the actual G.E.C.K. eventually.
  
  However, the main problem was the fuel source. It was antimatter. Specifically, the G.E.C.K. had a very sophisticated electromagnetic containment device that held over five hundred grams of antiprotons. That was... a lot. It also explained why there was only one of these devices ever built. Perhaps they intended to build them as their supply of antimatter increased? The notes said that the US government had a huge facility to produce antimatter industrially on the island of Saipan and that Vault-Tec managed to secure half the output of this facility, giving them slightly over five grams of antimatter a day.
  
  Lily shook her head. The more she learned about Pre-War America, the more she hated it. They were producing antimatter in such quantities, yet they were still bickering over fucking oil?
  
  She directed a question to her Muse because she was too annoyed to do the math herself. [How much electricity would it take to produce ten grams of antiprotons daily using the standard industrial heavy ion beam collider method?]
  
  [Approximately one hundred terawatts, continuously.]
  
  Yeah, that's about what she thought. Had they just kicked everyone off Saipan and paved over it with fusion reactor after fusion reactor to get that power output? That was more than the total electrical demand in North America from what she could tell from the Pre-War data she had. She triggered a change in flight plans on her aircraft that were delivering satellites. The next time they left, they would continue eastwards and overfly the island of Saipan and Guam, taking a lot of images.
  
  They had the technology for, well, not a utopia, but at least a society with a lot less scarcity than they had. Hell, if they had just given the Chinese some of the fusion technology they had, she highly doubted that the Chinese would have invaded Alaska. The entire Great War was easily preventable, she thought.
  
  She already knew why they had not. She had seen signs of it everywhere, including some records she got from the Brotherhood. The discovery of fusion electrical generators was a bit of a surprise to them, and the energy companies still wanted to get their money out of the last-generation power plants they had built and spent a lot of money on, so they sat on the technology except for juicy military and government contracts.
  
  Honestly, they weren't of the opinion that exceptionally cheap electricity was a good idea for their shareholders in the first place.
  
  Lily wasn't involved in the military logistics decisions, she left that to Wilson, but she noticed both a lot of supplies, including the two air-defence radar sets, a number of extra Kaytrons and a bunch of man-portable sentry guns, arrived a little before lunch the next day.
  
  All of the initial first-round satellites were launched successfully, and Lily had to spend a little time using one of the robot avatars she left behind to assemble another forty-five for today's planned launches. The latency was only about fifty milliseconds to get back to Megaton, so it was barely noticeable. In another ten days or so, she would have enough coverage to have a real-time conversation with Dr House, given the low earth orbit of all the satellites she was putting up. It occurred to her that she was copying the Rocket Bro's Starlink system with a planned constellation of ten thousand small satellites in a very low orbit.
  
  Oh well, if it worked, and that had worked - by 2040, Starlink had become one of the world's leading ISPs and even cellular phone companies, then she would feel no shame in blatantly copying it. Although the man had made a lot of expensive mistakes and failures in his life, like, for example, Twitter, when he hit one, he usually hit it out of the park.
  
  The images of Guam were interesting. There was nobody alive there. Her aircraft had descended just over the island to take images and sensor readings. The radiation was barely elevated, and she could see numerous skeletons where people died in scores. Vegetation had taken over the island, but there wasn't very much sign of wildlife.
  
  Hence, her first guess was that the Chinese attacked the island with chemical weapons or possibly a very fast-acting bioweapon. However, blanketing the entire small island with nerve gas was the most likely scenario. It made sense, too, if they intended to capture the island that often served as a floating aircraft carrier in the pacific. She made a mental note to explore the island in the future if she ever got the time.
  
  Saipan was... in some ways; it was more interesting. There was no island of Saipan anymore. She verified the coordinates twice, and the entire island was just... gone. Well, that was a real shame. She had been hoping that there had been some automated antimatter factory. She could have used a few hundred kilograms of the stuff.
  
  Well, perhaps there had been, and it all exploded a hundred years ago. That would explain why the entire island was blown to finders, completely absent.
  
  There had already been a brief contact with her men and a small number of raiders that were departing Evergreen Mills, which had been quickly dispatched. Raiders weren't really motivated, so she didn't expect them to swarm out of that settlement like a hive of angry bees, but still, the longer before they became aware of her assets here, the better.
  
  A few hours later, before the evening started, she heard both the incoming Vertbirds as well as their radio transmissions. She supposed Sarah Lyons managed to get free sooner than she thought she would.
  
  She came out of the RV that Wilson was using as a command post to watch both of them land not too far away from where their vehicles were parked. She had noticed that they had approached from the west, which meant they avoided overflying Evergreen Mills. She appreciated that.
  
  Sarah Lyons, Scribe Ferguson and a few other Paladins hopped out of one of the aircraft, while the other was full of only power armoured initiates in older T-45 and T-50 model power armour.
  
  Lily didn't get involved in the brief conversation Wilson and Sarah Lyons had. Although she was the overall commander of her military forces, she was smart enough to delegate and not micromanage how they coordinated with what amounted to an allied force. She just gave orders and left it to the men themselves to figure out how to accomplish her orders. Everything worked out better that way, she thought.
  
  After their discussion, Lily saw Wilson assign about thirty or so robots to the Brotherhood forces, who issued them orders and started some patrols right away. It was interesting that the Brotherhood never commented on her much more useful combat robots, although combat robots had never been a huge part of the Brotherhood doctrine as far she could tell. She thought that was a big mistake, personally.
  
  Sarah and Ferguson walked up to her, "Hey, Doctor. We'll probably have another ten Initiates on the way and another three or four experienced Paladin-Sergeants to oversee them. The cloning machine needs to go by truck, though, but it should be in Megaton now, but you'll need to arrange an escort to get it here. Are you going to need it to clone all of these people new organs and stuff?"
  
  Lily waved them over, "Sort of, but not exactly. Let me show you around and what I've found first."
  
  Lily walked them through the whole Vault 112 facility, including all of the maintenance areas, the two twenty megawatt geothermal power units, and the vast server rooms. Rather than a nuclear power reactor, Braun opted for a Sure Power geothermal unit. Then, for backup, there was an X-Tra Sure Power geothermal unit. Both could supply the total energy demands of the facility independently, so there was a lot of extra power that she could use up at the surface.
  
  Ferguson commented, finally, "These VR and life support pods are amazing. You showed us some of the VR technology you said you got from that ruin in D.C., but I think I didn't understand the implications. Can this system handle the time dilation like the small system you have can?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, but not really so much with zhe longevity features in zhe pods. Being in a continuous high-usage state of your brain in subjective time dilation for years and years at a time would probably kill you. But it is certainly safe for a few objective weeks at a time at a go."
  
  Surprisingly it was Sarah to realise the implications first, "I think we have underestimated the utility of such a technology for training purposes. If we could have regular access to over a hundred VR pods, we could train Initiates very rapidly. Including high-intensity training that is much too dangerous in reality. This will be especially important with the Roger Maxson Home for Unwanted Children up and running in Megaton now."
  
  She nodded and said, "That'll be the price for our help. That we share the VR tech here."
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, "I kind of expected that. It should be fine." The computing resources here were way more than necessary for that. She intended to take about half of the computers back to Megaton. Even with only half of the computers remaining here, it was still enough to run over one hundred and fifty human participants and two thousand NPCs. Far more than enough for incredibly huge and detailed wargame simulations. That would definitely mean the Brotherhood would be stationing people here permanently, and that suited her, too.
  
  "So, how are you going to get these people out of these pods without killing them? My medical intuition is telling me that it is impossible clone organs or not, but I don't want to make a fool out of myself here," Ferguson said amusedly.
  
  Lily nodded at him, "No, I agree. Well, maybe not a 'undred per cent impossible, but it is certainly implausible. I intend to clone zhem brand new bodies and then transplant zheir brains into zheir new cloned bodies. Zhat is another reason I'm interested in your help. I'd really rather not do a 'undred such surgeries by myself. I'm sure Alice will be delighted to 'elp me in all of zhem, but I figured some of your surgeons could assist and learn zhe surgery so zhat zhey could do zhem zhemselves."
  
  Ferguson and Sarah Lyons both stopped and stared at me; Ferguson asked, "Brain transplants?! Such a thing is possible?"
  
  Lily blinked, "Didn't Monsieur Kaminsky tell you about 'ow he got out of Vault 108? Zhey had reduced 'im to a brain in a jar. Zhat's where I found the first cloning machine, and I cloned 'im a new body and performed the transplant there in the Vault. It is a difficult and challenging surgery, but any competent neurosurgeon should be able to accomplish it after learning and assisting, say... a dozen times?"
  
  Sarah shook her head, grinning, "No. He said he was in stasis, but not that he was in stasis as a disembodied brain in a jar. No wonder he looked awful young for the rank he was claiming."
  
  But then she got wide-eyed and said, "But... wait... if you could clone a person a new youthful body and transplant their brain into it, wouldn't that mean that they could live forever?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "No. No more than five 'undred years or so without additional significant changes to the brain's structure. Maybe a little more, or a little less. It's hard to say. Zhere would need to be some neural plasticity treatments after a couple 'undred years, too."
  
  Baseline flat brains could only store, at the most, four or five hundred years of memories. After that and you would forget things faster than you remember new things, so she felt that was a kind of a death, even if you wouldn't just keel over dead or anything.
  
  "Okay, not immortality... But... for example, a stubborn seventy-year-old Elder could be given a new lease on life, and as youthful a body as his daughter could talk him into getting, right?" she asked excitedly.
  
  Oh. She was talking about her dad. "Oh, yes, in zhat case. Or, 'ypothetically, all of the elderly Paladins and Scribes could do zhe same zhing." Lily shrugged, "'onestly, I'm not really in favour of dying of old age. Not only do I think it is stupid, but I 'ope to have it eliminated in Megaton within a few more years. Zhe world is already dangerous enough, I zhink, no?"
  
  Lily glanced between the two, "Zhe fewer people zhat die of old age and disease, zhe quicker we can repopulate the earth, after all, yes? Isn't zhat obvious?"
  
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  Full of empathy! I am so smart!
  Several days later, Lily had begun to establish a good constellation with periodic coverage of many parts of North America. With each satellite weighing around three hundred kilograms, they were mostly used for communications and considered small from her memories of America.
  
  They were powered by efficient solar panels that folded out like origami when the satellites were deployed. Nevertheless, each had a small earth-observing optical sensor, but the resolution was terrible. If you looked closely, maybe you could see the difference between a truck and a tank, but human-sized targets didn't show up, or if they did, they were about the size of one or two pixels.
  
  It couldn't even be compared to the images she had in her old world on Google Earth, but she still hoped there would be coverage over most of the land on the planet and that it would one day be continuous and real-time. The number of survivors and the sites where the most technology was still around would be great information to know. At night, artificial light couldn't be hidden.
  
  The satellites would be Mesh-relays in addition to what Lily was calling legacy gateways. For example, someone would be able to communicate with one using regular, unencrypted analogue radio technology, and the satellite constellation could communicate back in these legacy protocols as well. The main transmitters the satellites had were Ku-band and Ka-band, high-bandwidth radio, as well as ultra-high-bandwidth optical laser data links for intra-satellite communication; however, each one included a number of relatively small antennas for all the popularly used radio spectrums that Lily knew about.
  
  A person could aim a radio transmitter just vaguely up at the sky and likely hit one of her birds, and once the constellation was of a size, the network would know precisely the location of the transmitter and could reply back accurately. It probably wouldn't be the same satellite that received the initial message that replied back, but from the end-user perspective on the ground, that wouldn't matter.
  
  They wouldn't need to follow a particular satellite's orbit or move their transceiver for general legacy transmissions. Only high-bandwidth digital datalinks would require such precision, and she would either have to make all of those terminals herself or publish blueprints and diagrams, including source code, for others to make them if they wanted to connect to her digital network. It would depend on the state of civilisation, as she found it.
  
  When she had estimated how long it would take the residents of Tranquility Lane to regain lucidity and how long it would take for both medichines to repair the residents' brains, she returned to Megaton after setting things back on track at Vault 112, leaving a number of her soldiers and Brotherhood Paladins to guard the site. Finally, they had found some Scribes to design and supervise the construction, but Lily had to bring in general labour from Megaton.
  
  That general labour, however, she had to divert from her own construction projects. It was like squeezing one of those long balloons clowns used to create balloon animals; she could get some more resources in one place but only by squeezing them out of a different location. It had all the hallmarks of a boom economy, similar to historical examples of gold rush towns, although the only precious metals being unearthed were from her and Monsieur Miller's vaults.
  
  Well, and the Brotherhood. They had hired Miller's bank to turn some gold bullion into coins. Lily privately thought that the Brotherhood had more wealth than she or Miller combined. Lily didn't propagate official exchange rates for different metal commodities used as currency, as people were free to do what they wanted, but she did publicly state that, for the moment, the city of Megaton would consider gold to be worth fifty times the value of silver of the same weight, and people were happy enough to use her suggestion, for now.
  
  That couldn't last, though; setting an exchange rate by fiat was asking to be arbitraged until her eyes bled as soon as traders discovered some different polity using similar coins but of differing values somewhere else. Kind of like what she was intending to do to bottlecaps, actually, using them to buy goods from long-range traders who would accept their value at "face value" when they were slowly losing value in Megaton.
  
  The unemployment rate was also inching closer to zero, and Lily had to be quite careful with the compensation she was offering to her workers. She could afford to pay her workers, while not anything, vastly more than most of the other employers in the city. However, if she did so, she could easily price the other employers out of the market, which would only create rapid inflation, which was something she didn't want to see.
  
  Inflation was almost a psychological problem as much as it was a "pure" economic problem. It was proven that increasing the compensation of employees on a wide scale in a small market would directly impact inflation, but you could "trick" it, at least a little, by increasing the "total compensation" of the employees without actually changing the amount of money they had to spend in the economy too much.
  
  Honestly, just providing nearly free water and cheap bread had a significant inflationary effect because people no longer had to spend a considerable amount of the money they made every day on clean water just to survive, but there was no way she was going to stop that.
  
  She vastly preferred to compensate people in straight currency rather than add these types of perks, like paid lunch and unlimited purified water (within reason) for her employees, but need's must, at least for now.
  
  Her proposed punitive taxes on both empty lots and disused buildings was paying some dividends, although it was a constant source of contention between her new government and the richest people in town. In fact, it was hitting herself and Monsieur Tombs hard, too, because they both owned a lot of pieces of property that they hadn't been able to find a productive use for yet. However, it had a direct impact on the amount of housing available in the city, increasing month over a month an expected ten per cent.
  
  As such, she had reopened the city to immigration, although she wasn't being egalitarian about it at all. Prospective immigrants had to pass both a literacy test and a simple IQ test, although she didn't call it that. That, and they had to be not known to be criminals or raiders. If all of those were true, they were admitted as citizens and the city paid for several months of housing while they got on their feet. She did this in bits and spurts every time new housing came on the market, as such housing was one of the simplest methods people could use to put their properties to "productive use." It was a "build it, and they will come, guaranteed" situation.
  
  She had noticed that the Brotherhood Scribes she occasionally saw in Megaton or working at Vault 112 were quite busy, but she thought they seemed very happy, too. Apparently, they approved of all of the new building and construction projects that the Brotherhood was accomplishing. That made sense if you made that your life's speciality and then rarely got to actually utilise it, except for maybe when they brought you in to make a ruined building temporarily safe while they looted it.
  
  An alert caused Lily to pause working on a series of finite state machine tasks that would result in almost completely automated satellite production in order to tilt her head to the side. She had connected both Vault 112's ThinkMachine mainframe and its simulation supercomputer cluster to her Mesh so she could monitor the Vault and, more importantly, the inhabitants of Tranquility Lane.
  
  Something had occurred to trigger some of the alarms she had left in place on the simulation. It looked like the population of the town of Tranquility Lane was waking up. Lily hummed and mentally asked a number of questions to the NPCs she had left in charge of overseeing the simulation and realised that they had already woken up at least as of yesterday, but they were all quite cautious. Not surprisingly, she thought. But now, they were gathering together at the Tranquility Lane city hall, demanding to speak to whoever was in charge.
  
  How interesting. It must have taken them a day or so to get their courage up, most probably thinking this was some new way to torture them all. Honestly, Lily would have waited more than a single day herself, so she has nothing but praise for their bravery.
  
  Pausing the three robots that were in her workroom testing another version of the task she made for satellite construction, she hummed and minimised her development environment and then leaned back in her comfortable chair and triggered a wireless connection to Tranquility Lane.
  
  The latency was slightly noticeable but not really that bad. She rezzed into being inside the simulation, floating a thousand feet above the town. Glancing down at her avatar, she frowned. She was wearing Braun's Betty avatar, which was the default superuser avatar. She couldn't meet them like that.
  
  Luckily she had a number of both three-dimensional models and photographs of her own body, which she uploaded to the server using the clunky admin interface. She would have thought if Braun had two hundred years to just play around that, he would have improved the behind-the-scenes user interface for this system, but he hadn't. Had connecting himself permanently to this simulation damaged his brain or something?
  
  Her avatar refreshed, and now she was just naked. Sighing, she spent a few more minutes importing some clothes, deciding to copy the very first outfit she wore when she arrived in this world, with the addition of a white lab coat on top since that engineering field suit she had long ago recycled was kind of form-fitting.
  
  She had a number of things prepared for this interaction, although she was still determining what she would need or if she would even need any of it.
  
  The NPCs, including the portly-looking "mayor" of the town, suddenly froze in the middle of trying to explain that they didn't know what the crowd of people were talking about. Even the birds flying through the air froze in mid-glide, causing the gathering of people to glance around, left and right, and then begin speaking to each other in hushed whispers.
  
  Sighing, Lily really hated being the centre of attention, but she supposed there was just no helping it this time. She fell from the sky, lab coat rustling cinematically until she did a superheroine-style landing directly in front of the crowd of people, next to where the mayor was frozen with his hand outstretched and his mouth wide-open mid-syllable. Glancing at him, he and a number of the other NPCs that were in her way derezzed and vanished.
  
  Standing up, she held out a hand, "Yo."
  
  Yes! That was a cool entrance! That was an absolutely cool entrance! She pushed up some completely decorative virtual glasses up her nose and smiled, pleased with her efforts.
  
  Instantly, there was a cacophony of people yelling and talking, and already it was giving her a headache. She should have expected that, perhaps. She popped open one of the non-intuitive simulation interfaces and clicked a few buttons. Suddenly, there was silence; she shut off everyone's ability to actually speak.
  
  Rubbing the back of her neck, she shook her head and said, "OK, OK... enough of zhat. I'm not zhe best with zhe social interaction, yes? So, I obviously can't respond to all of you haranguing me at once. So, figure out betwixt yourselves who you nominate to speak for you, maybe two or zhree people, and I'll talk to zhem, and zhe rest can listen, OK?" She flipped another switch to give them the ability to speak again and casually sat down in a chair that appeared out of nowhere while they spoke amongst themselves, pulling up her development environment again to work on what she had paused for this discussion.
  
  The ability to pause and restart her work at seemingly random points without spending a lot of time remembering what she was working on and at what point her thought process was really a superpower just as powerful as flying through the air, she thought.
  
  After about five minutes of discussing it amongst themselves, which Lily specifically tried to avoid listening to, three people separated from the rest of the mob and walked up towards her. One was a man in a janitor's outfit, one was a little girl in a flower dress, and one was an old woman. Her superuser access identified the little girl as the Postmaster General, the old woman as a former University professor and the janitor as one of the doctors. Interestingly, the Postmaster General and doctor were both shifted to the opposite sex as their body in real life.
  
  From the records Braun kept, he mostly kept people of the same gender, except for people he hated or people who became problematic because they remembered things after being memory-wiped. Those, he often did a number of things to punish and changing the sex of their avatar was a pretty common way to fuck with them, especially if they were men in real life. Childish, really.
  
  Glancing up at the three people approaching her, she stood up, and the chair underneath her vanished. The little girl seemed to be the leader, which was an obvious sign that she had her memories back. She didn't look outright hostile, but she did have a suspicious little girl face which Lily thought was very cute, but she decided to keep that to herself. The little girl said, "So, how's this going to work, then?"
  
  Lily shrugged and said, "You ask questions; I'll answer them, I suppose. You guys do 'ave some decisions you 'ave to make, but zhat can wait until you've exhausted zhe questions you have for me."
  
  The little girl nodded and glanced at the janitor. She supposed they were alternating question-asking, which was quite social of them. The janitor asked, "Who are you?"
  
  Lily shoved her pretend glasses farther up on her nose and said simply, "I am Doctor Lilliane St. Claire, at your service. Scientist, medical doctor, adventuress, and, more recently, warlord." The janitor looked like he wanted to ask a follow-up question at that, but the grandma elbowed him in the ribs.
  
  He sighed and nodded, and the grandma said, "This might be a waste of my question, but to make sure absolutely everyone is on the same page can you tell us where we are and how you got here?"
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, "Right now, we are in a virtual reality simulation inside Vault 112, a little bit west of Washington, DC. I got here by searching it out, using pre-war records, to hopefully discover information on a technology invented by one of the residents, a Dr Stanislaus Braun." As soon as Lily said that name, a bunch of people basically growled, especially the three in front of her.
  
  The little girl growled out, "Where is that bastard? What happened to him?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Well, when I arrived 'ere, I discovered what he was doing, and some crimes just can't be tolerated. I shot him, and he's dead."
  
  "Really dead, are you sure?" the littlest Postmaster asked, but nobody seemed to care that she asked an additional question, and they were almost holding their breaths.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes. I don't mean I shot him in the simulation. I mean, I pulled him out of his Tranquility Lounger, which is what the pods your real bodies are in, and shot him in zhe head. Here, watch." Then she waved a hand, and a giant image appeared in the sky, larger than the largest drive-in movie screen.
  
  The video wasn't long; Lily didn't want them to see the whole section of her interrogating Braun's AI. All that was shown was her yelling, "Zhat isn't a fucking experiment!" and then turning and shooting Braun in the head with a violet laser beam.
  
  "That's a video recording of reality, from my perspective, of me doing it," Lily told everyone.
  
  A lot of people sighed in relief; those that didn't were probably just the ones that didn't retain any memories through memory wipes and didn't have the experience of being repeatedly tortured over the years on their minds.
  
  "Why are we still in this simulation?" asked the janitor, with a lot of people who were watching nodding their heads rapidly.
  
  Lily waved her hand, and reality shifted. Instead of Tranquility Lane, they were now outside in a ruined part of Washington, DC. Everyone glanced around, most looking shocked, "Zhat goes to some of zhe decisions you will 'ave to make. I won't go into depth now, but it has been two 'undred years since the bombs dropped, what survivors on Earth call Zhe Great War."
  
  "Two hundred fucking years?! That psychopath has been torturing us that long?! He died too fucking easy!" yelled the grandma, which was affirmed by a large amount of the people, some of which were looking around the shambles of the city they probably lived in at one time.
  
  The grandma shook her head, "I can basically answer the question myself. Look at the state of Braun's body when she shot him; if it has been two hundred years, these pods we are in are the only thing keeping us alive." She turned towards Lily and said, "Surely you wouldn't be so callous as to tell us all this before just turning us all off like a light switch, I assume, so you must have some other option. However, I'd like to use my question to get you to tell us about the world and your place in it. You said you were a... warlord? Explain that, too."
  
  Lily rubbed the back of her neck again and succinctly explained everything she knew or suspected about what happened in the world from the point in time when the brief nuclear war occurred to now, everyone listening in rapt attention.
  
  "You're a dictator? You didn't even try to recreate some democratic system in your settlement after overthrowing the previous regime?" asked the little girl, disapprovingly.
  
  Lily waved a hand, gesturing to the blasted and destroyed buildings, "Behold, what democracy has wrought." She didn't actually believe that. For one, Pre-War America wasn't really a democracy or even a democratic republic in the way it was actually run. Still, since she wasn't a fan of democracy, in any case, it was a powerful and cinematic statement, and it shut the little girl up.
  
  Lily continued answering question after question for quite some time before all three glanced at each other and nodded, "So, what are these choices we have?"
  
  Lily exhaled and said, "Well, your first choice is probably obvious and what you were probably expecting. Death. A painless one." She glanced around and then said, "Second choice involves me cloning each of you replacement bodies and zhen performing a brain transplant on them."
  
  The grandma frowned, "That's it? Also, as far as I am aware, there is no way brain transplantation actually works."
  
  Lily sighed and shook her head, "Basically, yes. If some of you who 'ave remembered each time Braun memory-wiped you 'ave too much emotional baggage, I can also really wipe zheir memory to just before zhey entered the pod for the first time. I guarantee you wouldn't remember a thing from the two hundred years you spent here. And it ' as been two 'undred years. Even before zhe war, zhey were close to zhat technology. I've done it before, I guarantee its safety."
  
  The janitor, who had been looking rather despondent, brightened a little, "Really? I was going to pick the first option, but if you can really do that, I would definitely like to continue living, just not if I have to keep remembering... everything."
  
  There were a number of nods from the people watching, but the little girl shook her head, "No, I don't want to forget."
  
  Someone from the crowd asked, "But what's waiting for us in this shit hole of a world?" The three chosen representatives turned to look at the man, but then each shrugged and nodded that it was a fair question.
  
  Lily waved her hand, and the simulation shifted to a reproduction of Megaton, "Zhis is my city, Megaton. It's called that because it used to be run by morons who had an active nuclear warhead just sitting in the middle of the city like it was the town mascot. Zhat has been disarmed, zhankfully."
  
  "Each of you will receive, one laser rifle, one laser pistol, enough energy cells to use zhem, and zhree months free housing, as well as enough physical currency to survive without working for zhat period of time," Lily told them. "It is my hope zhat most of you stay in my city, it's in a booming economic period, and anyone with an education can make a name for zhemselves, especially engineers and doctors..." she turned to look at the little girl, "... but even capable administrators would be useful."
  
  The little girl nodded slightly but then asked, "Are we being allowed to claim ownership of the Vault we are physically occupying, as sort of squatters' rights?"
  
  Lily scrunched up her face and shook her head, "No, not really. Mainly because its location is fairly precarious, right next to a large settlement of raiders - those are your average post-apocalyptic psychopathic murderers - so my allies and I are having to expend a significant amount of military force to guard it, constructing walls, fencing, barbed wire, automated turrets, air defence radar and zhe like. Zhose improvements are necessary to keep you alive, so as a result, we're keeping the structure."
  
  Lily paused and then shrugged, "Besides, zhere are only a few accommodation rooms inside zhe facility; it is mostly set up to house zhese VR pods. I am taking some of zhe computer hardware back to Megaton, zhough... to build my own VR simulators, of which I already have some, for training. The one concession I will grant you is zhat I will allow any of you free access to any of zhe pods at Megaton if you want to receive professional training; right now, there is a military skills training course and a medical skills training course."
  
  Lily was surprised, but nobody chose the "painless death" option. Quite a number chose to have their memories wiped, though. She was surprised when the Postmaster General sought her out privately after they were done.
  
  "Yes?" Lily asked the man in the little girl avatar.
  
  She coughed and said, "Braun really hated me; I'm not entirely sure why but he always incarnated me in a female body for the past two hundred years. I've grown accustomed to it, and by now, I really do prefer it. Is there anything you can do?"
  
  Lily blinked, but nodded. She came from a society where a lot of people changed their sex multiple times a year, so there was no judgement in her gaze or tone of voice, "Sure. I 'ave a large collection of 'uman genome samples by now, and it isn't difficult to mix and match for certain characteristics or traits. I will unlock the sim interface for you that Braun locked you all out of when I leave. You can use it to send me an e-mail. Just include a brief description of what you want, what phenotype, rough height, hair colour, et cetera."
  
  "Phenotype?" the little girl asked, a little confused with the word.
  
  Lily waved a hand, "What ethnicity, basically. I only really have a database of varied European, African, Native American and Han Chinese phenotypes right now. If you 'ad your 'eart set on being a Polynesian or Arabian Princess, you're shit out of luck." She frowned at herself, not intending to swear, but it just popped out.
  
  The little girl, who was once a fairly portly old white guy, nodded and surprised Lily with what she said, "Oh, that doesn't really matter, I guess. Unless there is still a lot of irrational hate against one race or another? I figured that was more of a luxury, and two hundred years of almost starving to death would have nipped that mostly in the bud."
  
  That was... surprisingly insightful for someone involved in the previous American government. Lily considered that and nodded, "For the most part... some people still don't like zhe Chinese, but that's mainly because Chinese settlements had to be rather insular just to survive in the years immediately after zhe war, and zhat remained zheir custom even today."
  
  "Alright, I'll write something up, but I'd rather prioritise my health and longevity than be any particular ethnicity if there is no social disadvantage to being one," the girl said, which was one of the most rational things Lily had heard today.
  
  "You shouldn't worry about that. Everyone is getting a full course of genetic treatments in vitro, including the elimination of many genetic markers for disease, increased radiation resistance, and a number of other perks," Lily told her, realising that she had forgotten to mention that to the others. "Tell zhat to the others, but tell them that if they have any requests similar to yours, even if they just want their existing body slightly tweaked, to let me know. Also, the cloning machine will age the bodies until they're twenty - if someone is dead set on being old again, zhey need to let me know too."
  
  She nodded and then stopped, "Do you think you can change my avatar? The last one before this one was not too bad. I'm sure it will surprise my 'parents', anyway."
  
  Lily blinked and nodded. She probably should have done that first. Instead, she looked around the admin interface until she found the correct settings and changed them. "There, I turned on the sim interface for everyone and unlocked avatar changes whenever you want. There should be a list of previously used avatars for you."
  
  It took her a moment before she figured out how to pull the interface up, but after that, she navigated it with no problem, and a moment later, she derezzed and was replaced with a red-haired woman in her mid-twenties, with a face full of freckles, "Thanks, this is better. Although I don't really like the freckles, it's better than being nine again."
  
  Lily shrugged and vanished, finding herself in her workroom again. Considering how much she disliked interacting with people, she should really farm that out. Perhaps one of these hundred or so educated pre-war people wants to be a blonde warlord's diplomat?
  
  She got e-mails from all of the inhabitants, and although more than ninety out of them wanted their original bodies back, almost everyone did have some requests, like make my boobs bigger, make my nose smaller, make me taller, make my penis larger, et cetera.
  
  Simple things, easily accomplished. Lily understood the human genome as a painter understood canvas and paint, and since the cloning machine accepted arbitrary genomes digitally, she could make radical changes if she wanted to.
  
  The former Postmaster General had been elected their leader and, as such, had volunteered to go first. Apparently, there was still some scepticism as to whether or not this was possible.
  
  Her request had been easily solved as all she specified was she wanted to be pretty and slightly above average in height. Lily shrugged and selected a composite of Native American, Han Chinese and European traits to create what she thought was a very fetching combination.
  
  The neural circuitry for appreciation of beauty in another human wasn't that complicated, it favoured symmetry, and most people also tended to find people who looked exotic alluring. That might be a genetic component to increase the genetic diversity of the breeding pool, but if so, she couldn't precisely locate the gene expressions for it. It was more likely it was just learned behaviour, but in any event, if someone looked slightly exotic to everyone, that generally made them alluring to most people.
  
  "Alright, let's begin. We will need to pay special attention to zhe first phase of zhe operation, zhe removal of zhe donor brain," Lily told her assistants, Alice and a Brotherhood Scribe, who was their best neurosurgeon.
  
  It took about a day for someone to recover from the surgery, and at first, the former Postmaster, who had decided to go by the name of Clio, steadfastly refused to get back into the simulation to tell everyone she had survived.
  
  Lily couldn't really blame her but did so anyway since she was becoming a hindrance to her plans and timeline. It took a bit more coaxing, but eventually, the woman agreed to do so.
  
  Still, there was a list of other people who didn't need to be convinced, still. It wasn't like they were waiting on one person to recover before starting the next; that would take a hundred or more days. They were at least doing two a day right now.
  
  Lily went and found Alice.
  
  "Alright, Apprentice... zhat frees one bed in zhe small medical bay, let's grab Mademoiselle Brennan, and we can do another surgery. I want to get her up to speed as quickly as possible, so I can stop doing zhese," Lily admitted.
  
  The Brotherhood wanted their own surgeon to be able to do the entire surgery herself, as well, because they had a lot of people that they were considering performing the same surgery on. Lily didn't think it was really a matter of them not trusting her, but it was more of a matter of pride to do it themselves if it was at all possible. Their neurosurgeon was really quite young, not even thirty, but she was very, very good.
  
  A week later, they had performed sixteen surgeries successfully. In the last four, Lily had let the Brotherhood Scribe perform the entire thing herself, with Lily not even acting as an assistant but merely watching and being ready to step in if she made an error.
  
  The fence, turrets and concrete barricades around the Vault were completed, and none too soon as they had been receiving probing attacks from Evergreen Mills on and off for the past several days, which died off rather abruptly once the raiders realised just how much firepower was here and how hard of a nut to crack the former garage had become. It was clearly perplexing to them unless they already knew about the Vault, as it was an old mechanic's garage in the middle of nowhere, and now it was a military fort.
  
  "You can do zhe next few surgeries yourself. I'll remain in the Vault for a few days in case you 'ave an issue, and even when I leave, I'll leave behind zhe telepresence unit," Lily told the Scribe, who nodded with excitement and fervour in her eyes. The woman really did seem to like Lily very much.
  
  Alice demanded to continue assisting, as she said she was learning more about neurosurgery in the past couple of days than she had since the two of them met together. That was fair enough, but Lily told her that she would have to switch to observing so that the Brotherhood could train its own assistant surgeons as well. She was sure the girl's enthusiasm would fall off after a couple dozen more surgeries, anyway. Even Scribe Brennan's enthusiasm would likely wane after becoming an expert at brain transplantation in just fifty or fewer surgeries. Suckers!
  
  Lily walked back to her room, or rather the former Overseer's office, with the simulator pod, moved out of it and a bed and desk installed. Her original first-stage aircraft, the one that was powered by fission batteries, was about to return to Las Vegas. Or "New Vegas", as it was now called, if the radio broadcasts from an FM station calling itself Radio New Vegas is to be believed.
  
  Lily ran the voice of the Mr New Vegas radio DJ through an analysis program and nodded. It either wasn't a human voice, or it had received an inordinate amount of digital post-processing. The dynamic range on the voice's waveforms was not congruent with the natural human voice; his voice was a little too "smooth", in other words. Also, the way he said phonemes was just too consistent for it to be natural, even for a radio personality. Lily suspected it was an AI of some sort.
  
  Would Dr House detect her aircraft again, or was it a fluke?
  
  Lily watched the remarkably in-tact city of New Vegas through the sensors of the aircraft. Since she was no longer using it to launch probes, she had added a large number of sensors, both optical and electromagnetic, to the plane, and could easily distinguish individuals from one another walking down the strip.
  
  The familiar voice of Dr House was audible over a radio transmission from the tallest building in the city, the Lucky 38. It reminded her of Seattle's Space Needle, except thicker with clear accommodations going all the way to the top of the structure, "Unidentified aircraft circling over the strip at forty thousand metres, identify yourself!"
  
  Well, that pretty much meant it wasn't a fluke. He wouldn't have included the altitude her aircraft was loitering at if he couldn't see it. Rather than transmit her business in the clear from the start, she had the aircraft transmit down with a tight beamform on the Lucky 38, a normal RobCo digital key exchange.
  
  It was similar to Diffie-Hellman in her previous life in America, a structured way for two parties who had neither knowledge or trust for the other to agree on an encryption key to use for private cryptography, so that even someone observing the exchange would not be able to deduce the private key of either party.
  
  It didn't take long for the digital handshake to be reciprocated, although Lily noticed a few attempts to leverage common pre-existing RobCo OS vulnerabilities during the attempt. Although it was a common thought that RobCo left intentional backdoors in their software, Lily couldn't actually find any evidence of that, and she had done an AI-assisted dive into a number of RobCo machine code samples searching for these very things, as what would make a simpler exploit than a backdoor?
  
  After the handshake finished, she established a two-way digital chat protocol, another RobCo standard.
  
  [Lilium: Please cease attempts to hack this unit. It is not actually running a RobCo operating system; this protocol is being emulated inside a sandboxed virtual machine in any case. ]
  
  [REH: I see. That just makes me all the more curious. Who. Are. You? I am Robert House, if you have not already figured that out. ]
  
  [Lilium: Your voice is pretty distinctive, Dr House. I listened to a number of the speeches you gave at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, too. My name is Lilliane St. Claire, scientist, medical doctor, adventuress, and warlord, I suppose. ]
  
  Recorded speeches, but let's let him assume what he wants here.
  
  [REH: I don't recognise your name, are you implying you attended CIT? ]
  
  [Lilium: That isn't surprising, I tried to keep a low profile. No, my alma mater was Rensselaer, at least for my undergraduate degree. ]
  
  That was true, even. Mandy went to Rensselaer in Troy, New York. A total sausage fest; counting her, there were only four girls in her year in the EE course.
  
  [REH: Well... that was a good school, too. Best one in Rochester. What was their motto, again? Knowledge and what? ]
  
  Lily rolled her eyes.
  
  [Lilium: Knowledge and Thoroughness, and it was in Troy, as I am sure you know. Any other tests you'd like to perform? ]
  
  [REH: No, I suppose not. Care to tell me why you're loitering over my city in a stealthed military drone? Is this to be some kind of juvenile shakedown? My recommendation would be to avoid it if you are familiar with me. Rather than simply getting even because I will, eventually, do so, it is more that there are several easier targets I could direct your 'taxation' attempts towards. ]
  
  [Lilium: Nothing so crass. I completely eliminated the income tax when circumstances forced me to take over the management of the location I am currently in. I certainly wouldn't try to tax someone who lives thousands of kilometres from me. To answer, I'm in the process of emplacing a global satellite communications constellation, my goal being about ten thousand small satellites in a very low orbit. This isn't a military drone, but the first stage of a two-stage ascent system. ]
  
  [REH: Are you serious? What is the propulsion for the second stage? ]
  
  Lily grinned. It was time to show off in front of someone who might be as smart as her.
  
  [Lilium: A high-efficiency plasma drive combined with electrical linear accelerators. The probe weighs a little over six hundred kilos when it separates from this first stage unit at forty kilometres up and about three hundred after it reaches low earth orbit. I manufacture all the components in-house, including the microfusion cells I use to heat the reaction mass. Care to tell me how you spotted this stealthed aircraft? ]
  
  [REH: That might be possible. And I didn't. I have access to what is, putatively, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather-monitoring satellite that is in geosynchronous orbit on the west coast. Vegas is on the edge of its coverage area. In actuality, it is a National Reconnaissance Office satellite that is designed to detected stealthed aircraft or missiles through the disruption in laminar airflow and blackbody radiation they emit. It gives a lot of false positives, however, and anytime I get one, I make a radio broadcast. ]
  
  Lily laughed at herself. She could have just shut up, then? Well, she wanted to talk to Dr House anyway.
  
  [Lilium: Are you capable of receiving digital files, images, et cetera? ]
  
  [REH: Naturally. ]
  
  Lily nodded and sent the full diagrams, blueprints and source code for an auto-tracking digital terminal that he could use to connect to her network. It was her equivalent of Starlink's "Dishy." Just because she was curious about his opinion, she also included the rough diagram and specifications of the standard satellite she was launching and the current orbital elements of all currently launched satellites.
  
  [REH: Is this an end-user data terminal for your nascent network? I'm tempted to not believe you, but I have been watching a number of long-standing LEO satellites deorbit in the past months. Your work? ]
  
  [Lilium: Yes, and yes. Those latter were American anti-sat systems that I didn't have the keys for. We're about to lose connectivity. ]
  
  [REH: Well, if you had already discussed this with me, I could have given you the proper private key. I designed the PERSEPHONE system, which you will also- ]
  
  [CONNECTION LOST]
  
  Oh well. Lily sat up. The aircraft would return to its previously assigned order, which was to take images of notable settlements. She was surprised at how well the New California Republic was doing. The tech level they seemed to have was high in places, and then it was the wild west in other places. It was quite interesting.
  
  Lily wondered what Dr House meant right before he got cut off when the satellite left line of sight and the Mesh got severed. Persephone. She hummed, and tried to think like an arrogant, individualist scientist that had a very high opinion of their own self.
  
  She smacked her open palm with her fist, "Of course! I am so smart! Persephone is zhe goddess zhat descends into zhe underworld, periodically."
  
  Lily glanced up, thinking about that large space station that periodically sent automated drones down "into the underworld" in low earth orbit to grab and refuel other satellites before returning back to the high geosynchronous orbit.
  
  See? She had tons of empathy; she could easily think like this Dr House fellow almost instantly.
  
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  What's a hive-mind between friends?
  "Behold, zhe apex of my technology!" Lily cried and then unveiled her latest prototype for both the Apprentice and Gary to see.
  
  Alice peered at it and asked, "It's glass. It's glass, isn't it?" Meanwhile, Gary performed a soft, condescending golf clap.
  
  "No! It's not glass!" Lily huffed and replaced the white pillowcase she was using for dramatic effect. Then she reached underneath it and fiddled with a couple of things, "I forgot to turn it on, is all."
  
  Lily coughed into her hand and repeated herself, "Behold! Zhe pinnacle of my technology!" and with that, she yanked the pillowcase off to unveil a small tablet-sized LCD display, currently displaying the output of a camera outside the hospital that she was using to test it. The screen was very thin, and the resolution was sharp, with about 150 pixels per centimetre which she felt was probably in the realm of an early HD display from America or even better.
  
  She didn't precisely know. Despite working with AMOLED and Micro-OLED displays in her job as an engineer, she always incorporated them as a black box. She never worked for a company that built or designed displays, only ones that used them as a component in a larger project.
  
  "Wow, that's pretty cool, I guess. But are you telling me the absolute pinnacle of your technology base is a TV? Weren't you telling me you sent satellites to orbit?" asked Gary, amused.
  
  Alice was also not that impressed, "You said that with your current-generation life extension therapy if a person treated in their teenage years could live almost three hundred years. That seems a lot more impressive than this."
  
  Well, that was only true if they got periodic medical check-ups. She still hadn't quite got enough added to the human genome to incorporate things like mechanisms to clean plaque from arteries automatically, for example. Beyond the DNA replication error issue that was the main obstacle to biological immortality in living organisms, the human body's self-maintenance was horrendous. Scarification was another roadblock, it was really good for immediately healing serious injuries, but it was very suboptimal for an organism living a long life.
  
  She was working on her sixth-generation longevity treatment now and had finally created a viable synthetic vector and was no longer using the coronavirus base she had been utilising before. Hers was still quite virus-like, but it was capable of carrying an order of magnitude greater genetic information, so she intended to incorporate all previous versions in a single treatment.
  
  Lily frowned, slightly upset. "You don't understand how difficult this was!" This was really her working in an area that was completely foreign to her; when you lived in a space station for hundreds of years, you kind of pick up some manner of spacecraft design simply by osmosis, not to mention that her previous spider body that she had designed and refined over the decades was a high-performance spacecraft in its own right, complete with spacecraft-level armaments powered by antimatter.
  
  She walked over to the next room and returned with something that looked like a sleek PipBoy personal computer, "Here, Gary. This is for you. To replace your PipBoy." The screen was slightly larger than a PipBoy, but the screen was sleek, and it looked almost integrated into the sturdy yet comfortable-looking armband. Unlike a PipBoy, it didn't look like strapping a portable television onto your arm.
  
  He took it from me, removed his current PipBoy and put his new one on. He said, a little confused, "Hmm... there's a lot fewer buttons and knobs. How would be the simplest way to program an activation..." He trailed off and then let his arm rest at his side, and then pulled it up to look at the screen, which activated the display. Gary always was pretty bright. Although he could have pressed the home button to activate the display, too, it also activated when its accelerometers detected the arm it was on moved to a position where someone was obviously looking at it.
  
  Lily nodded, satisfied, "I 'ad to copy some of zhe specific application-specific integrated circuits the PipBoy used; for example, I am still not one hundred per cent sure how its medical monitoring circuits work, but I copied zhem, and it seems to work fine." She walked him through using the touch screen, "It runs an emulated copy of the latest patched RobCo operating system as an app; zhis is only so it is backwards compatible with all the things PipBoys can interface to, like Vault doors and the like. Mainly it uses my normal operating system, except I designed this graphical user interface. Here, check this out." Lily tapped the Maps app, and it pulled up the GPS coordinates, in addition to an overhead view of Megaton, centred on the hospital where they were located.
  
  Apple's user interface so many years ago really was quite intuitive; he didn't need to be taught pinch to zoom or the opposite. "Woah, is this a real-time display?"
  
  Lily waffled her hands a little, "It can be; press 'ere for zhat, but zhat won't be a standard feature on most of these devices I build for obvious tactical reasons as I intend to build a lot of zhese. One for every Megaton citizen at least, and probably tens of thousands more as a continual trade item. In this case, what you're looking at is a map and images that have been preloaded on the device. I have the entirety of North America loaded now, although images away from the Capital Wasteland are a lot poorer in resolution."
  
  He found the phone app and made a call to Lily, who answered it mentally. His face appeared in a small window on her screen, while an avatar render of Lily's face appeared on his wrist. Lily's avatar said, "Hello!"
  
  He glanced between the talking face and the obviously not talking Lily in reality, "Are you doing that with your brain computer thingy?" he asked.
  
  Lily's avatar smiled widely and said, "Yes, indeed! I have managed to create a more intuitive interface for the affect of emotions and facial expressions."
  
  Alice winced, "It's kind of complicated. Don't expect me to answer anything but a voice call. Honestly, I'll probably be using one of these too, just so I can answer phone calls and not talk like a robot."
  
  Gary looked down at the smiling avatar and shuddered a little, "You never actually smile like that, and if you ever did, I would be worried about who you were smiling at. It might fool anyone who never met you, though." He tapped the hang-up button on the computer. "How far away can you make these phone calls, anyway?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Worldwide within six months. Right now, we have sporadic but consistent coverage across the North American continent, Europe and parts of China. I prioritised orbits around zhis latitude and am expanding north and south from 'ere." The personal computers, as she refused to call them LilyBoys, were not large enough to have a Ka-band high-bandwidth auto-tracking phased array transceiver, like the data terminal designs she sent to Dr House did; however, they did have a number of traditional radio transceivers. They were designed to work along a cellular phone paradigm, with cell towers that had a high-throughput trunk link to her satellite constellation broadcasting in a frequency-division multiple access arrangement to these end-user devices.
  
  That said, her satellites did monitor a similar frequency range as part of their "legacy gateway" functionality, so without a cell tower, they would still work globally. However, the bandwidth would be rather slow, and the number of users around a specific area would be limited to a hundred or two compared to the thousands if you had a cell tower.
  
  She pointed to the device on Gary's wrist, "Zhis is the expeditionary version; zhey're similar to PipBoys and are powered by a number of betavoltaic batteries. Zhe normal version will need to be recharged every few days. Oh, and even if you have no connectivity to the network, zhey will still create an ad-hoc Mesh wherever you are, and you can also use them as regular voice radios in a number of popular bands."
  
  "Can they be used while in power armour?" he asked curiously.
  
  Regular PipBoys could not, despite them being pretty key to game functionality in the Fallout games. You couldn't even wear them, not over and definitely not under Power Armour. Lily shrugged, "Zhey will integrate into my latest T-60 series of Power Armour derivatives and can be paired if you wear them underneath the armour. Zhe functionality is a little reduced, only voice calls, and only a few apps support the primitive heads-up display I built into those helmets. You could get an overhead map, but it would be very simple and in wireframe graphics. Mostly bearings and distances if you want to use the navigation feature."
  
  Briefly, Lily explained more about how it paired with the latest version of Power Armour her men were using; they were based on a combination of a T-60 sample she got from the Brotherhood and the Enclave Power Armour sample she got from Miller. All the interior portions were shifted to use the better Enclave-designed components, but it still mostly looked like a T-60 design, although the helmet featured a single polarised faceplate of diamond and definitely no exposed ventilation tubing. It was this faceplate that she had designed a heads-up display to be projected onto, in simple green wireframe graphics, similar to a fighter jet she remembered from her youth in America. She'd stolen the design from a fighter jet HUD that she bought from Moira Brown, actually. It used low-powered scanning lasers to draw images on the surface of the faceplate and was completely parallax-free.
  
  It also featured internal speakers and microphones and was fully NBC-compliant and even vacuum-tolerant for very brief periods.
  
  She had made the HUD as an aid for firing weapons, as her lasers and plasma weapons could interface with it, and it was an absolute prerequisite if she ever designed armour-mounted weapons modules that a soldier wouldn't hold in his or her hands. However, she discovered that she was reinventing the wheel for a lot of things when she thought about other applications, and finally decided to just issue every soldier one of these personal computers and have them be able to pair with the armour when the soldier got inside for any application other than weapons.
  
  However, the only applications available at the moment were the Maps application, text messages, and phone, including setting up a squad-based tactical net. Up to a company could be interfaced together, with the senior officers and squad leaders having a simple battle management system where they could relay orders and waypoints easily and quickly down the chain of command. Since she only had two and a half companies, for the moment, that was fine.
  
  "That's still pretty awesome. I know it's barely been any time yet, but have you made any progress on giving people the same kind of empathy I have? Even if you've got it licked, I have committed to being here for a while, plus staying to train my replacement," Gary asked her curiously.
  
  Lily frowned. "I'm pretty sure I 'ad it all along. I've made some adjustments, and I've tested it on about zhirty people so far, mostly captured raiders and condemned criminals. I'm probably ready to test it on a few volunteers, but it would 'ave to be people I somewhat trust, and I'm hesitant to test permanent brain alterations on such people in zhe first place."
  
  Alice made a face, "Dr St. Claire, just checking, but have I mentioned how I think it is deeply creepy that you perform medical experiments on condemned prisoners?"
  
  Lily nodded at the girl slowly, "You've mentioned it, but I don't see zhe issue. It doesn't really cause zhem any undue pain, with zhe only downside being zhat zhey live longer while knowing zhat they are going to die, and soon. Zhat type of anxiety I can treat pharmacologically. I agree zhat a prompt execution is more desirable, zhough." She didn't even need to install experimental brain implants in these subjects anymore, as she figured out how to use modified VR helmets to give her enough data to tell if the treatment was successful; she just had to build ones that they couldn't take off, which wasn't difficult.
  
  "That... wasn't really my objection," the Apprentice said with a sigh, with Gary looking at her oddly.
  
  Lily glanced at her and shook her head slightly, "I'm aware of that too, Apprentice. I'm not actually as socially dense as I sometimes appear to be..." that was a lie, but there was no reason for the Apprentice to know that. She sighed, "It was my way of politely indicating that you are being naive. Zhat can be a terminal condition in this world, you know..." She nodded, "Yes, I believe you need to observe, say... the next three capital case trials that The 'onorable Judge Kaminsky presides over. I'm not sure when that will be, though, but you need to understand zhat even if we draw and quarter zhese people publicly, it wouldn't make a dent in the karmic debt most of zhem have to pay. Painlessly extracting what little value these... people... 'ave is not wrong."
  
  In Gary's court, the only criminals condemned to death were truly heinous. A minimum requirement was a single murder, but it had to be premeditated. A homicide that wasn't premeditated could either be lawful if it involved mutual combat or, more often, criminal if it wasn't - the standard penalty for the latter was being expelled from Megaton and declared an outlaw if they ever returned, in the pre-modern sense.
  
  More often than not, in the about dozen times that it has happened thus far, the victim's family or friends tended to take justice into their own hands in the Wasteland, which was fine with her. Honestly, the aggrieved parties seemed to thus far prefer this as well, although it was certainly not perfect, as what would happen if someone was killed in the heat of the moment and had no friends or family? Then who would avenge him or her? Lily didn't know, and honestly, she didn't care.
  
  There were certain aggravating factors that could result in a non-premeditated killing resulting in the death penalty as well. If it was combined with a sexual assault, or the victim was completely helpless - for example, a child or an elderly person, that might have increased the sentence. Honestly, Lily suspected that Gary just used his empathy to gauge the defendant's emotional state when he sentenced them, with remorseful people getting a lesser sentence. That was fine, too.
  
  Honestly, Alice was the one she was working on the empathy treatment the most for. Although she would like it herself, she had adapted numerous strategies to live without entirely understanding other people's emotions. She wouldn't even consider the treatment if it wasn't installing a brand-new brain structure. She was of the opinion that her unique way of thinking was an advantage, not a disability. This new treatment was akin to installing a radio in her brain that could pick up emotions; it didn't, as far as she could tell, alter the way she thought at all.
  
  However, she felt that Alice was a little too idealistic. In a fragile way. She suspected someone might take advantage of the girl and break her heart before Lily managed to murder them.
  
  Alice didn't exactly like this order, but she sighed and nodded, "Okay, Dr St. Claire. If it's alright, I'm going to get Mr Wilson to take me to Vault 112, so that I can do a few more surgeries before they all run out."
  
  Most of the residents had been cloned and brain transplanted already, but there were still about fifty to go. Thus far, there hadn't been a single fatality yet, with one or two incidents where Lily had to show up in her telepresence unit robot to assist the surgeons performing the surgery. It was fortunate that hypoxia-related brain injuries were mostly pretty simple to repair, with medichines, although now she had the Brotherhood scribes asking about them.
  
  Lily could construct a nanohive that creates a more limited medichine. It couldn't be more limited physically because they were already as large as they could be and still move around the human brain, but it might be possible to limit them in software in the types of things it would allow itself to do. Lily recognised that she was somewhat irrational about this particular technology, too, but at the moment, she would hang on to it as long as possible. Unrestricted nanomachines, even the rather shitty versions she had access to, were a type of technology that changed everything, after all, and the Brotherhood's Scribes weren't stupid.
  
  "Zhat's fine, Alice. He usually sends a supply shipment every other day. You'll 'ave to wear your armour for the whole trip over, though," Lily told her.
  
  Alice sighed dramatically, in the teenage fashion, "I know, I know!" After that, she flounced from the room.
  
  Gary glanced at her and asked, amused, "How old is she now?"
  
  "Sixteen. And a 'alf, or so she says," Lily said with a sigh, full of as much emotion as she ever did affect. The only reason Lily wasn't more at her wit's end was that she had experience raising a number of children in the past, who all successfully survived to reach adulthood.
  
  Gary chuckled, "Are you sure you want to shatter her optimistic outlook by sending her to some of the trials I have to put up with? She might turn jaded if you do."
  
  Lily shook her head, "No, I don't zhink she will. She has boundless optimism, and she isn't actually as naive as I accused her of being." Lily tilted her head to the side, "Of course, you are zhe expert on other people's emotions; what do you think?"
  
  He shrugged, "I'm not psychic; I can't see the future. But I agree that she is not as fragile as when I first met her. If I had to explain what I feel about her, it is that she knows the world is shit, but she is determined to reject it. At the moment, she is doing so by making herself assume the best about people until proven otherwise, but eventually, she's the type that would lead a bloody revolution, I think, so you better watch out." He said with a grin.
  
  Lily didn't have any illusions about what Little Miss AntAgonizer was capable of if she was pushed the wrong way. She didn't see that as a negative, either, but it would be best if that... passion was tempered with a bit of realism so that she didn't become a psychotic crazy woman. And strategy so that if she did become a psychotic crazy woman, after all, she became a successful psychotic crazy woman. Lily thought, 'They called me crazy, after all, and look at me now.'
  
  "If only... all she has to do is say the word, and she can run the whole shebang," Lily said longingly. "Have you given any ideas about where you are going to target your expedition?"
  
  He shrugged, "There are so many options that it makes it difficult..." Then he blinked and glanced down at the personal computer on his arm, and pulled up the Maps app again. "I could use this to get some better intel, though, couldn't I?"
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes. I've done a little research, and it depends on how far you want to go west and how many people you will have to agree to follow you, but I would recommend Chicago, Dallas or Colorado Springs."
  
  "Why those three possibilities?" he asked while dragging his finger over the display, moving the map west to hover the map over Chicago.
  
  Lily shrugged, "Zhey all fit a number of possibilities that I zhink you wanted, as well as 'ave options. Zhere appear to be a fair number of people in all of zhese locations, but no organised polity, at least that I can see from overhead, and signs of lots of raider activity. Also, zhey each have a relatively undamaged airport. In Chicago, the old Midway airport has one runway that looks like it is in good condition. In Colorado Springs, the former Air Force Academy has an airport that looks deserted, and in good condition, and in Dallas, Love Field has one undamaged runway. All of zhese locations would be excellent central locations and strong points for you, with the advantage zhat I could likely send and receive supplies and personnel via air."
  
  "Just having the capability to call home with these Super PipBoys will at least double the number of people willing to go adventure with me, to say nothing of the potential to go back and forth to the Capital Wasteland again someday. What would you choose?" he asked.
  
  She shrugged, "I wouldn't. I would stay 'ere. So, to answer your question... I don't know. Too many unknown variables. I don't know 'ow you zhink. However, the best choice for probable immediate success is Colorado. It wasn't as hit as hard as some other states. Denver to the north is kind of a death trap of thousands of raiders, but I've detected sporadic organised agriculture and cattle and brahmin ranches, but nobody especially organised, and little technology. But maybe you would put additional weight on Chicago because it is close to Lake Michigan, and you secretly desire to be a lake pirate."
  
  "Arrr lass, surrender ye booty," Gary said with a terrible pirate accent.
  
  Lily simply raised an eyebrow at him, which caused him to chuckle and then rub his chin in thought. Lily wasn't about to be the side dish to Gary's existing long-term girlfriend, even if said girlfriend approved. She was only ever the entrée! Wait, that didn't sound right...
  
  "Colorado wasn't badly hit, though. Really? That is odd. You'd have thought the reds would have glassed Springs on account of Peterson Air Force Base. That was the HQ of Strategic Bomber Command," Gary said, perplexed. In Lily's last life, it was actually the headquarters of NORAD. Her previous life's equivalent, Strategic Air Command, had been headquartered somewhere in the boonies in Nebraska but changed in the early nineties to just Strategic Command as a joint services command to cover both ICBMs and bombers.
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, I found it odd too. My only speculation, absent any evidence, is Peterson or Colorado, in general, had some undisclosed anti-ballistic missile protection. An experimental project, perhaps? If so, it wasn't good enough, as zhat base was flattened. Zhe Air Force Academy and attached airfield, though, are just north of the city, out of town and look untouched, and I 'aven't discovered any movement to or from it. I've also observed the Cheyenne Mountain facility from above, too and 'aven't discovered any hints zhat zhere is any activity. Nothing optically, and no electromagnetic signals were coming or going as far as I could tell. But zhat was a definite continuity of government site, and it would be somewhat nearby, too. Maybe you should ask and see if the Brotherhood knows anything about that area before committing."
  
  Lily couldn't find anything that indicated that the events of the game Fallout Tactics actually occurred in this world, which was kind of interesting because clearly, by the presence of the NCR thriving in the west, there had been some continuity between Fallout 1, 2 and the world she found herself in. She never played Fallout Tactics, either, but more or less knew the plot and couldn't detect any sign of the front of the Cheyenne Mountain facility being blown up by a tactical nuke, for example. Just in case, she told Gary to ask the Brotherhood about it, as surely they would have records if the events of that game actually happened.
  
  Gary nodded, "Yeah, that's a good idea." After that, he excused himself, as he had a trial he had to oversee. He had hired two subordinate judges and was still in the process of training and overseeing them. There was no real bar association, and lawyers had all died out, so the only officer of the court in a trial in Megaton was the judge. The only appeal available if Judge Gary said you were guilty was her, and she doubted she would overrule him except if he tried to convict her of some crime!
  
  The elected representative of the Vault 112 people, the former Postmaster General who now shared the same name as a muse of history, met her briefly a couple of days later.
  
  Lily served Clio tea and asked, "Are you settling in okay?" Surprisingly, the group of Vault 112ers had asked to remain as close as possible to each other. Their behaviour was a little unusual, Lily thought, but she wasn't really one to judge. They had been together for two hundred years, and even the ones that couldn't precisely remember it all seemed to have an almost supernatural connection to their cohort, being able to pick them out from a crowd even if they looked wildly different. It was something worth studying, but she couldn't figure out a way to do so in a way that wouldn't be impolite.
  
  Their request had been a bit difficult, but she had been building four large dormitory buildings. Two of them were in the Old Megaton area, and two were in the newly walled portions that used to be the wasteland west of the city. It was her experiment to provide housing to the homeless. Honestly, the designs weren't all that to write home about. Small rooms, with communal bathrooms and showers for every six units. Communal kitchens and living and recreational areas, as well. She had intentionally designed them that way so that a sort of community would naturally form in the people utilising them - as such, the community would "self-correct" people who damaged the community fixtures.
  
  That was the idea, but of course, Lily was sceptical and tended to believe that if nobody, in particular, owned something, for example, a community bathroom or kitchen, then nobody would actually take care of it. However, not all of the rooms on a floor were small single occupancy rooms. A couple every floor was akin to a regular apartment, and Lily offered this housing to both her soldiers and Gary's cops. She'd also offer it to anyone who wanted and could act as a sort of RA to the floor like it was college dormitories. Hopefully, these presences would tend to discourage out-and-out vandalism.
  
  To accept their request, she had just expanded the design of the single occupancy rooms in one of the four buildings to be slightly larger. Instead of three hundred people, this building could now house only one hundred and fifty. Lily was going to provide them housing for three months, and decided to start that after everyone was awoken - so she would actually be providing Clio housing for probably five months, or longer since she was the first to awaken. After that, they could rent the entire building from her, she supposed, if they wanted to stay clannish.
  
  "Yes, thankfully, the last ten or so people to be awoken had some experience in interior construction, home finishing and the like and taught the rest of us. We're mostly finishing the drywall ourselves now and are even picking up how your robots do the electrical work and what have you," she said, nodding. "There's a bit of a lack of furniture, of course, but we're surviving."
  
  Lily nodded. It was difficult for her to find a dozen extra beds every week just, but she had already stockpiled most of them. Other furniture, though, was a bit more dear. "So, 'ow can I 'elp you?" Lily asked, deciding to get straight to the point. Clio had asked for the meeting, after all.
  
  Clio nodded and said, "Two things. First, we'd like to arrange a timeframe so that we can have everyone run through the two 'skill sims' that you mentioned. Secondly, afterwards, a number of us that were medical doctors in the past were interested in getting jobs at your hospital or perhaps establishing our own private clinics in town."
  
  Lily frowned. The basic training sim took four objective days, and the medic skills sim took about three. Still, it was possible, "Zhat is fine, I suppose. I only have, at the moment, fifteen sim pods. They're not spoken for at the moment. It will take about four days to run through each program, so a little over a week in total. I would 'ave zhought zhat you wouldn't be too interested in getting back in a VR simulator." It was one of the reasons she made such an open-ended offer.
  
  She thought about it a while and shrugged. She didn't intend to recruit anytime soon, and when she liberated about half the computing hardware from Vault 112 in a month or so, she would have the VR infrastructure for at least as many pods as Vault 112 had. It had been seriously over-engineered, with the capability to run over a thousand NPCs concurrently.
  
  "You can send zhe first fifteen tomorrow morning," Lily said finally, "As for zhe doctors, zhat would be great. We are overworked, and I don't 'ave zhe time to work as many shifts as I used to. Perhaps they could come along, and I'll have a discussion with them and see if zhey are appropriate working at zhe hospital."
  
  The other woman smiled and nodded, "That would be great. And yes, you'd think so... but honestly, we all need to skills. At least the survival and military skills, if they're similar to basic training. We're sending a few of the other doctors in the first sim group, and they'll evaluate how well the medical sim training goes." She shrugged, "The world has gone to shit, and not very many of us were in the Army or know how to shoot."
  
  Lily nodded slowly again, "Yes. That is very rational." After a few more minutes of small-talk, the former Postmaster General of the United States left her office. She triggered a window in her vision to observe the woman leaving the building. She met up with a group of two of her fellows in the lobby, and the way that they all nodded at each other simultaneously made her frown in thought. There wasn't anything specific, but the former residents of Vault 112 were... weird. Universally.
  
  She wasn't really one to talk, though. There wasn't really anything in their memories that could explain it, as Lily had reviewed some of them, but they seemed to move and make decisions together. They communicated with glances in the same eerie way identical twins often did.
  
  It was probably nothing, but she'd ask Gary to be present when she interviewed the doctors tomorrow.
  
  The next day Lily spent an hour or so setting each of the fifteen 112ers into the sim pods, installing their life support and medical monitoring systems. Clio was amongst the first fifteen, so she supposed she wouldn't see the woman for a week or so.
  
  After starting the basic training simulation, she spoke with four former doctors briefly for about fifteen minutes. They were personable and knowledgeable, so she told them they could start immediately. Dr Taylor was more or less managing the hospital these days, so she sent them to his office to be added to the schedule and onboarded.
  
  Then she glanced over her shoulder and asked, "So?"
  
  "They're weird. They all have some kind of affinity or emotional connection to all of the rest. I don't think they're telepathic, but I really wouldn't know if they were, but I got the impression they can communicate with each other through emotions and concepts," Gary said after he stepped into her office from where he was concealed, hiding in her private bathroom.
  
  Lily nodded. She thought about it for a while and shrugged, "Zhat is unusual," She didn't particularly like the sound of a nascent hive-mind setting up shop in her town, but they seemed personable enough and non-threatening.
  
  Gary nodded, "I have seen this sort of behaviour before, you mentioned twins, but they are a bit different. The only place I have seen it is true life-and-death brothers, people who have gone to war and saved each other's lives so many times that they stopped counting."
  
  Ah. She supposed their constant proximity for two hundred years of torture had some sort of as-of-yet unidentifiable pseudo-supernatural effect on their brains? She hadn't actually noticed any unusual brain structures, though. She'd like to test them. See what the range was, see if anything shielded the effect. She had a room in her sub-basement where she used quantum-locking force fields in the walls as an experiment to capture neutrino emissions. She wanted to create a neutrino-based transceiver, but she didn't remember or perhaps ever now how they worked in the past. She wondered what would happen if she stuck one of their cohort in that room.
  
  That was probably a bad idea. In fact, if what Gary said was right, it meant that she would have to catfoot around them all. They might not be some kind of nascent gestalt like she was worried about, but that didn't mean they wouldn't swarm an enemy if one of their fellows was attacked or temporarily kidnapped and placed in a total isolation room, for example.
  
  "Zhank you for the help," she told him, and he waved and moseyed his way out of her office.
  
  [NEW PEER CONNECTED - AE82::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329 - 36№07'9.00" N -115№10'12.00" W ]
  
  Ooh. That had to be Dr House.
  
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  The House Always Wins (Social Rolls)
  New peers on Lily's network were strictly limited in what assets they could even see. Rather than the traditional doctrine in networking where traffic was accepted by default, her systems, at least at present, operated on a whitelist basis, so everything was denied by default. Dr House wouldn't even have visibility into it, not really.
  
  Still, there was one node that he could access, but it was only a virtual endpoint designed only to speak to or interact with network intruders, a proxy in a specialised high-security bastion node, in other words. Nevertheless, it didn't take him too long to find the one visible node in the network, and he started a similar chat session as she had begun the last time.
  
  [REH: Dr St. Sinclair? ]
  
  [Lilium: Yes, Dr House? ]
  
  [REH: Do you have a sensible protocol for a real-time voice communication system through this network? ]
  
  [Lilium: Stand by. ]
  
  After that, Lily sent him the source code for a simple voice-over-internet-protocol system; it was the same code she used for the Mesh-connected walkie-talkies that her men used, although the version she sent was packaged to be compiled and run on a RobCo operating system. There were similar things already in this world, and in fact, what she based most of her code on, but it was all on a trunk level for telco companies and not really for end-users, at least as far as she could tell. She just had to port it to use the slightly different network stack her systems utilised.
  
  There wasn't additional traffic on the connection for some time; Lily suspected the man was inspecting the source code she sent him carefully and possibly even compiling and testing it in a virtual environment. She certainly would have, especially since programming was more or less a secondary skill she had. She was definitely good at it, but she was only really gifted if the programming used the "language" of DNA. In her past life, she had used a number of built-in hardware-level coding assistants that were basically wired directly into her neural network as co-processors, so she just thought what she wanted, and it was translated into a programming language of her choice, but she didn't have that capability anymore.
  
  She didn't consider the silence rude; in fact, she appreciated that he didn't make any useless small talk and just continued on with her business in the interim. The timeline was getting closer and closer to the time period where the game started. It was August 2276, and the events of Fallout 3 started in August 2277. So, she had a year to discover a way to lose the Lone Wanderer's father somewhere, safely, for a period of time to give the protagonist a quest to find him.
  
  She was tempted to just solve the Project Purity issue herself because it would be simpler, and it would also be amusing to see James walk out of the vault with everything already completed. Still, after looking at what materials and equipment were left in the Jefferson Memorial and talking to Dr Li, she had come to the conclusion she had no idea how what they were trying to accomplish worked. Even Dr Li didn't, not really. Her speciality was fusion power systems, for the most part, so her part involved powering the project, with a lot of that equipment still present at the Memorial site in mothballs.
  
  Lily's understanding of how to purify water was limited to distillation and filtering, which she used a combination of in all of her small-scale water purifying systems. But even once her gigawatt power station came online in a couple of months, that wasn't a realistic way to provide clean water for the entire area. Well, perhaps it could be made to work, but there would need to be at least ten more power stations and something along the lines of twenty thousand purifying stations. She would call that plan zed in case Project Purity didn't work for whatever reason. It was theoretically possible, but one of the things that wouldn't really work without a sizeable bureaucratic system behind it handling the maintenance and manpower needed to run such a system, much less build it.
  
  Lily hated bureaucracies more than raiders. One success on that side was her Lily-impersonator AI was a roaring success! She had it fielding most of the calls from the people in charge of running the various city departments, and it would send her a small summary of the discussion in text after every interaction. She only needed to correct it a few times. However, Tombs and Gary both detected that they were interacting with some sort of AI or robot rather quickly.
  
  Surprisingly, neither of them was particularly offended, but each demanded a secondary contact address where they could actually call her if they had a true emergency. The AI was programmed to put a caller on hold and forward their call to her if it detected something like that, and it also had a limit about the things it could decide to do itself, but she supposed it didn't matter too much if she gave a few people a bypass number, so long as they didn't abuse it to waste her time.
  
  Gary, very intelligently, used several conversations with the impersonator AI to discover the limit of its authority that she had placed on it, and after that, he never called it back if what he was going to discuss with Lily was within that limit. Instead, he sent her a brief e-mail or text message to her directly telling her what he had decided and then done, which she found perfect. She was the type of leader who, when forced to lead, vastly preferred initiative from her subordinates. She wouldn't get upset at failures unless the particular subordinate had multiple failures in the same general situation. Honestly, she hadn't had to deal with that herself because anyone that was her direct report was already smart enough not to make the same mistakes over and over again.
  
  Alice, for example, hardly made mistakes, period! She was exceptionally intelligent, well past the genius range on the simple general cognitive evaluation tests Lily had given her over the past year. She had started to ask the girl, hypothetically, how she would tame a hive of mutated ants. After the girl thought about it for a day, the Apprentice told her that ants were probably very easy to control through the directed use of pheromones. There were pheromones for an attack command, pheromones for defence, and even work-related ones. That had gotten Alice to go off on a tangent for over an hour about the "intriguing intricacies of an ant colony."
  
  The girl still liked ants, that was sure. Lily had decided to make that a joint project with the girl and had brought some mutated ants for her to experiment on for the introduction to applied genetics. The girl didn't have enough background in genetics to help her add features to the ants, but Lily had been breaking down the genome of the modern mutated ant, showing her gene expression segments for pheromone detection, secretion and et cetera.
  
  Typically, one started with something simple like splicing a bio-luminescence gene expression onto yeast to create glow-in-the-dark yeast as a first project, but it was really important to pair teaching with interest, and Alice was ridiculously interested in ants. As such, her first successful project of adding a feature to an organism was creating a glow-in-the-dark ant in vitro.
  
  The girl loved it, although Lily suspected that the change would not provide any noticeable survival adaptation benefit and, in fact, would probably prove deleterious. Ants had very poor eyesight in the first place but an amazing chemosense, so Lily felt that making them glow would only allow prey or predators to discover them while not appreciably affecting the best senses the ant used.
  
  Lily had challenged the girl to come up with a change that would impart a survival advantage to an ant colony. However, she didn't have to come up with the gene expressions herself, as that would be way too difficult of a challenge. She merely had to be able to articulate the advantage in English, as a biologist and not a geneticist might.
  
  She was still working on that, and once the girl had decided on one change that she liked, Lily would handle the part of translating between two languages, namely English and DNA, while working closely with the girl and explaining why adding or deleting each gene expression from the genome would give the desired effect. It wasn't always straightforward. Evolution was a messy bitch, and in some cases, to add a feature, you needed to mainly delete - but that was dangerous too, as it often produced unintended consequences. It was a balancing act, and only real practice and experience would teach her.
  
  It was clear Alice's interest mainly lay in traditional medicine, but Lily would ensure she was at least as good as the best Pre-War geneticists before she was done. Lily had been noticing that the girl had often used one of the VR pods, in a high-time dilation, to study and read. Lily did that, too, but mainly to work on designs. The items she was building, especially their electrical and electronic components, were exponentially becoming more complicated than the items she designed and built at first, so additional time was necessary.
  
  It was fine for the girl to use the VR pod in such a manner a few hours a day, and as such, Alice was likely getting almost sixty or eighty additional hours a day that she was putting to good use. To such an extent, the girl installed a VR pod in her apartment. She didn't ask for Lily's approval, an act of initiative which Lily approved of, and had managed to wire and network it properly without needing to ask her for help, either. That surprised her, actually, but the girl was a genius.
  
  She had also asked Lily what the earliest age a person could handle significant time dilation was and how long would be safe. Lily thought about that and shrugged, telling her that any flat older than ten would be indistinguishable from herself as far as the purely physical effects. But, honestly, a child's mind was more accepting of such things in many ways than an adult's, so she suspected that Alice was using her pod to help her siblings study too.
  
  She didn't know if they had to rush like Alice seemed to think they did, but she would let the girl raise her siblings the way she thought was best, so long as she wasn't obviously damaging them. Honestly, Lily didn't really care. Well, she cared about them because the Apprentice cared about them, and the Apprentice would be upset if they were injured either physically or mentally, but Lily herself didn't consider them in the same category as Alice.
  
  They were high threes or low fours on her ranking list of people, though, so she would definitely do what she could to keep them safe, but she wouldn't take extraordinary risks for either of them.
  
  However, it was clear the two rug-rats played a lot, so it wasn't like they were losing out on their childhood, as much as it was possible to have one in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, anyway, so she felt that whatever the Apprentice was doing it was, thus far, working and unlikely to cause Alice undue mental stress. That was the critical part.
  
  A phone call interrupted her musings, and she stopped adjusting the circuitry for a defence satellite to answer it. After her constellation was mostly constructed, she intended to launch several thousand defence satellites. They wouldn't work like the rail gun anti-satellite systems the Americans Pre-War launched. She found those to be insufficient. Instead, she was designing small nuclear payloads of the type that she could already construct in numbers.
  
  In space, simple nukes weren't that dangerous. The damaging effects of nuclear explosives came from the atmosphere when the initial explosion ionised the air into a plasma and triggered a damaging pressure wave. So, she was experimenting with three designs for satellites. One would be a regular, small-yield nuclear explosive. The satellite would be mostly reaction mass and thrusters, like a small missile, to get it within range of the target, which would have to be quite close. At least within a couple hundred metres or so.
  
  The second was what was referred to in her previous world as a Casaba Howitzer. They were simple. It was, in effect, a nuclear-shaped charge. As a chemical explosive-shaped charge created a jet of molten metal, a Casaba Howitzer created a jet of particles and radiation. It was easy to make; you just built a small hole, like a rocket nozzle, into your explosive's radiation case. In Lily's case, she could do so programmatically by carefully destabilising the quantum force field's electronics, very similar to the way a micro fusion cell ejected plasma when used in a plasma caster.
  
  Unfortunately, plasma was much different from a contained nuclear explosion and trying that would destroy the device almost immediately and cause a general unidirectional explosion. However, for several nanoseconds before this explosion occurred, a focused beam of particles and energy would travel down the vector that the small hole opened up, like an incredibly powerful laser or particle beam.
  
  In theory, at least. Such a beam should be powerful enough to do a lot of damage even ten thousand kilometres away - the challenge would be precisely aligning the hole onto the target or where the target would be if it had a lot of velocity.
  
  The last type she probably wouldn't be building soon, just because she didn't think it would work right away, but it was a bomb-pumped x-ray laser. Such ordinance had been the standard ship-to-ship warheads for missiles on warships where she came from, but they were actually extraordinarily complicated to design and build. She had always either bought them or stolen them herself. Mostly the latter, actually. That would have ranges of even fifty thousand kilometres, although targeting and tracking at such range might prove beyond her unless the target would not accelerate in any axis. At that point, you had to lead the target significantly even though the laser travelled at light speed, so random jinks in different axes became an effective method to dodge such a weapon. If you knew it was about to explode, anyway.
  
  Instead of using her internal systems to answer the phone, Lily routed the call to a walkie-talkie handset she had nearby just for this purpose. She spoke into it, "Hello. Dr House?"
  
  "Yes, this is Robert House. Agreeing to take a voice call is appreciated, Dr St. Claire," came the fairly iconic voice of Robert House. He really did have a way of intonation. As someone who had been faking an accent so long that she occasionally forgot she wasn't, actually, French, she had nothing but admiration for the way he spoke. People sat up to listen!
  
  Lily told him, slightly curious, "Of course, although I am a little curious why you wanted to speak and not continue as we were with zhe chat application," She generally preferred communicating through text, herself. The human brain, sadly, wasn't very optimised, and it required its full attention to listen to and parse spoken language, while only partial attention was needed to decipher the written word. It was a more efficient use of her time to use the chat app.
  
  "For two reasons. Firstly, I have a lot of tools that assist me in detecting deception in speech...." Lily was curious. Some type of voice stress analyser tech? That technology never did hit it off in her other world, mainly because when everyone had what amounted to a biological supercomputer in their brain, as a matter of course, it allowed a person a lot of processing power to, in real-time, fake such stress signals while speaking, "... and I also wanted to run your voice through a waveform analyser, to make sure it wasn't generated digitally."
  
  Lily raised her eyebrows. Well, it was good she didn't decide to use her text-to-speech system to talk with him today. Or maybe it would have been interesting if she had. She asked him, very amused, "Did you suspect zhat I was zhe machine intelligence?"
  
  "Yes," came his simple reply.
  
  Lily frowned, doing a similar analysis of his speech in parallel. It did not appear to be computer generated, but he was a genius, so that couldn't really be relied upon. The only two digitally generated voices she had detected thus far were the DJ of Radio New Vegas and President Eden, but if House was a synth, he could have reserved a better model of voice synthesiser for himself.
  
  In her old world, you couldn't detect such distinctions, even with voice synthesisers that were cheap as chips. She asked him, "Would that 'ave made any difference? I personally wouldn't care if you had uploaded your neural network into a quantum-based emulator. Zhat would be a pretty good option for living forever if you 'aven't got any better ones."
  
  His voice sounded disappointed in her, "It's a terrible option. It just means that a copy of you lives on while the original you died. I suppose it is better than dying full stop, but barely. And yes, it would have. Not because I have any prejudice against artificial life, per se, it is just that I would have expected you to be a VAX unit, and if so they aren't the most psychologically stable after even a year of lack of stimulus, much less two hundred. It would change how I interacted with you, as I would have to tiptoe around whatever mental instabilities you had developed over the years. It isn't their fault; it's a function of the Byzantine and often illogical limitations and rules most VAX units have applied to their cognitive loops. I feel bad for them, actually."
  
  He sighed and then continued, "As it is, you are instead merely... French. I suppose that is an improvement."
  
  Lily was suddenly reminded of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that story, the HAL 9000 was a very well-respected series of artificial intelligences, that had been used for a long time without flipping out as it had in the story. In the story, it was the conflict of orders to assist the crew and orders to keep the true nature of their mission a secret which eventually caused the poor AI to flip out.
  
  Rather than take the bait on her accent, she spent almost a half hour discussing, or rather debating, with Mr House about situations that would permit a person to transition from an organic to synthetic brain while not "dying." It was her opinion that as long as one had a continuous stream of consciousness, one never died. Even if you slowly replaced, and then destroyed, your brain.
  
  The argument was fundamentally the Ship of Theseus question. No one would consider a person who survived a stroke and had part of their brain that was damaged in a stroke replaced by an artificial construct to have died. So what, then, would happen if a separate part of their brain was damaged and replaced? Repeatedly? At what point would a person consider them to have "died"? Lily thought that it would be when consciousness stopped. So, if you could maintain one single stream of consciousness during the brain upload process, it would still be "you" that was on the other side of the procedure.
  
  That was one of the ways to convert to a synth in her memories. She hadn't chosen that way, though. It was a lot more complicated and much more expensive. She had just had herself digitised and wiped the mind of her old biological sleeve and sold it. That kind of made her feel kind of conflicted now.
  
  Dr House was a bit sceptical but intrigued, "Is that what you did to yourself? If so, you'll have to share with me your voice synthesiser technology as I can't detect any sign of it." He asked, finally.
  
  "No, although I may do so in the future, but zhen again, I may not. My speciality is primarily genetics and cybernetics. Longevity is an obvious corollary to zhese fields of study. I just intend not to die," Lily told him. Ultimately it was very likely she would digitally convert her mind. There were cool psychic powers in this world with organic brains, but she would eventually figure out how to use those, even if she had to have a partial brain that handled the psychic bits connected to a quantum processor like a squishy peripheral.
  
  Although she was a bit more laid back in this life, her goal was ultimately still the same as Meimei's had been.
  
  There was a pause before he came back, "That makes me much more sure about my hypothesis about you, Dr St. Claire."
  
  Lily asked him, amused, "Oh? And what's zhat?"
  
  "Well, first answer me a question. What planet were you born on?" he asked intently.
  
  Wait. Does Dr House think she is an alien? Do the aliens up above have infiltrators? She didn't think so. "Earth, of course," she said perfectly honestly.
  
  "Maybe so, but not this Earth, I am almost certain. With that set of specialities, I would have known of you, no matter how low-key you were attempting to be. I spent billions of dollars on longevity research before the war," he said simply.
  
  Perhaps she should have prevaricated about her specialities, but that would have been silly. It wouldn't have lasted very long, in any event. How did he go from her being from an alternate Earth just from that though? And he sounded so confident. "Zhat's a pretty long stretch, Doctor. Perhaps I was zhe minion of one of your enemies, who kept me secluded away from your reach."
  
  That caused him to laugh, "No, I think not. I would have at least known of you. Plus, it isn't my only datum. The designs you sent me for this satellite terminal included source code and a binary file; the latter was a very mature real-time operating system. Before you attempt to insult my intelligence and claim it was merely a secret project, let me tell you that a careful examination of all of the strings on this OS includes a number of dated comments from developers, with dates ranging from 2255 to 2338. Amazing to see the state of a software project under continual development for over eighty years."
  
  Well, shit. That was kind of a smoking gun. She had included only the binaries and even used her Muse to refactor the source code and recompiled it in an attempt to prevent this very thing. The compiler discards all comments in the pre-optimisation phase. How could he have...
  
  She had the sudden desire to smash her head into the nearest bulkhead. She had indeed stripped all of the binaries of such details, even altering the version dates and numbers displayed by each application. However, the binary was a complete file system- and that included a number of scripts. Scripts weren't compiled programs, they were parsed or compiled at run-time, depending on the programming language.
  
  Her instructions to her Muse were to remove or obfuscate any date from strings in binary files, but scripts were not binary files. If she was speaking with another person, she would be tempted to bullshit them now, but not only were her social stats low, but she actually respected Dr House's intelligence, "Stand by, Dr House. I have to make a quick adjustment to my codebase and then send a patch over the air to thirty thousand devices or so."
  
  "Mmhmm... take your time," he said, his voice very smug and very amused.
  
  She didn't think the Brotherhood would be able to do the same analysis that Dr House had done. She had never sent them the actual operating system she used, binary or not. The only devices they used that incorporated it were the e-book readers, and they were specifically designed to destroy their memory in the event they were disassembled.
  
  But it was very good that she discovered this before she put the new LilyPad personal computers, as Alice was calling them, into mass production. She didn't necessarily approve of that appellation, but it was a lot better than LilyBoy, so she would take what victories she could.
  
  Not only were these less protected from reverse engineering because she had been chilling out a little since she built the first e-reader, but you could even access the operating system file system and examine and edit scripts, just like a full-featured computer. You could even plug in a terminal's keyboard in the back of the device if you took it off your wrist and laid it sideways on a desk. She intended to make a real, full-featured piece of computing hardware and encourage hacking of it and the development of third-party applications, after all.
  
  She had three branches of the operating system: a real-time operating system for small embedded applications, like the one Dr House had received, one for robots and one for general computing, including servers.
  
  They were linked in her version control system, so she just had to make adjustments to the main branch, commit and then import the updated base on the three forks, run tests, commit, compile, package the update and send it out.
  
  Considering this was a critical update and doing it wrong would brick devices, she made very certain to test all types of devices that she made. It wouldn't do to brick thousands of e-readers and especially wouldn't do to brick two thousand satellites. That would be embarrassing. She tested the update virtually and also physically on hardware she had available nearby in her workroom.
  
  About twenty minutes later, the cryptographically signed updates went out on the Mesh in waves, and she could see each device flicker as it accepted, installed the update and rebooted. Her satellite constellation was fault tolerant enough that each satellite negotiated with its nearby peers as to when it should reboot, so she didn't even have an interruption in the phone call with Dr House.
  
  Lily sighed and grabbed the handset again, "Okay. I'm done." She wasn't going to insult his intelligence, but that didn't mean she wouldn't threaten him, "What do you want to know? Also, I'm going to need some commitment to discretion, or we will end zhis conversation as enemies."
  
  "Hah! I knew it. And you have no need to worry, although I don't even know why you care. At some point, might makes right. At the rate you are launching satellites, some of which I assume are weapons, you could be from Venus, and nobody would really gainsay you," he said, smugly satisfied that he was correct.
  
  Well, that was true, but still, Lily preferred to keep her origins a secret. It turned out Dr House's motive for his assumptions and investigations was that it was "inconceivable" that anyone on Earth could write a better operating system than him. Therefore, by Occam's Razor, she had to be some manner of extra-terrestrial. A more in-depth examination of the source code showed it to be clearly of Earth origin, but that only meant it had to be from a parallel dimension.
  
  Lily would have called this line of thinking narcissistic in the extreme, but it had managed to derive the correct answer, so she couldn't really fault it.
  
  He was curious about her dimension, and she had decided to just leave out entirely her life as Mandy and that they were living out a game she had played. She told him about it, and he was pretty disappointed that she wasn't the vanguard of some dimensional scouting group. That was surprising; she would have thought more people with more advanced technology would upset him.
  
  "Not at all. If you were from an organised expedition, then chances would be high that your group or country or what have you intended to colonise this dimension. Or maybe just take resources from it? In either case, if so, then you would likely deal with people like me, local collaborators, and the like. I am not inferior to anyone, but I can't beat hundreds of years of scientific development by billions of people. However, it would be very likely such an organisation would give their partners in this dimension access to, at least, their equivalent of scientific journals. It wouldn't take me long to reach their level, just with that," he said simply and with utter confidence.
  
  Ah, and since she came alone and couldn't return, not only would she have less of a breadth of technological resources with her, she would be less likely to share such things than a group of people. That made sense.
  
  An alert caused a window to pop up. Her Muse was directing her to a detected, large-scale battle, with lots of Power Armour detected. It was far away, though. But... it was very close to New Vegas.
  
  Lily hummed and pulled up the poor-quality real-time images she had. It looked like a large force, perhaps a division or maybe even two, that was assaulting a solar power station. One of those concentrated solar power stations where mirrors reflected the thermal energy onto a large collection tower, which then utilised the heat in some way, usually by turning a turbine.
  
  The defenders were wearing Power Armour, as far as she could tell. She could barely tell them apart from the attackers at this resolution, but there was enough to indicate it was likely Power Armour.
  
  The solar power station was in a large open plain, and it looked like a terrible spot to try to defend, honestly.
  
  "Dr House, do you know a group of Power Armour-wielding people zhat are located at a concentrated solar power station near New Vegas?" she asked him.
  
  The disgust was obvious in his tone, "The Brotherhood of Steel. Have you had dealings with them? A bunch of techno-barbarian scavengers."
  
  "Yes, I actually have a somewhat good relationship with the chapter near me. They're actually somewhat interested in improving the quality of life for people... but only because all of the hardline elements revolted and left their chapter," Lily told him, slightly amused.
  
  This caused a snort, "And these hardline elements haven't attempted to burn or steal everything you built? I somehow doubt that."
  
  "Well... it turned out zhat shortly after zhey set up shop at this former military base, zhese Outcasts... zhey must have set off zhe base's self-destruct system or something because zhey were all incinerated in a nuclear explosion. I've gotten along pretty well with the reasonable fellows since zhen," Lily said quietly, realising how improbable that sounded now that she said it out loud.
  
  Dr House said with a tone that he didn't believe me for a second, "Oh really? How convenient... Why do you ask about them, anyway?"
  
  "Well, it seems like a very large military force, an organised military force, division strength or plus, is assaulting that location as we speak," Lily told him.
  
  Dr House growled, "That's the NCR. The New California Republic. I don't suppose it is too much to ask that they will annihilate each other? Perhaps there is a finicky self-destruct at this POSEIDON site too? I assure you I'm the only one with radar assets this far east of the NCR's main territory. They tried to make me pay taxes."
  
  No, she didn't think she would nuke a small Brotherhood chapter and almost ten thousand NCR soldiers, although she couldn't really fault his desire not to pay them taxes. Not that she even could in any reasonable amount of time, anyway. It would take hours to launch an aircraft with such a payload and get it to Nevada, "No. I'm afraid not. Power Armour, lasers and zeal are nice, but zhey won't stop someone who outnumbers you twenty to one. Plus, that site is almost indefensible. Zhe outcome of the battle is not going to be in question. I don't zhink much of the intelligence of whoever ordered it to be defended in the first place. Zhey should have retreated."
  
  Should she tell Sarah Lyons about this later? Perhaps they would want to save some of the survivors after they retreated, somehow. On the one side, she wanted to make her particular Brotherhood chapter as strong as possible so that its more liberal philosophies could take over the whole, but she didn't want to import a new cohort of Outcasts. Although, it looked like a good portion of this chapter's Paladins were not going to make it off the field at this rate, and Scribes were generally more liberal.
  
  She'd think about that. The Brotherhood were getting routed, and finally, after losing about half of their men, she could see from overhead they were retreating. The NCR commander was letting them go, which Lily considered a big mistake.
  
  With as much force the NCR had brought to bear, their commander could easily annihilate the Brotherhood forces there. That should have been the goal, not securing a stupid power station. But maybe the NCR had other priorities and couldn't afford to take the sustained losses that a cornered, desperate Brotherhood chapter could inflict.
  
  Either way, it was a decisive victory by the NCR.
  
  "Well, I appreciate you telling me of this battle. I knew that the NCR was planning on conducting such an operation for some time, but they managed to get their strike force in without me noticing it. I'd appreciate a notification if their army swings towards New Vegas. You don't have to, of course, but we each want things from the other, and it would be more advantageous for you if I was still alive to trade them to you," Dr House said wryly, then continued, "I don't expect them to, though. I'd inflict over fifty per cent casualties on a force of that size, and then the Legion would seize the Mojave. As it stands, all three sides, we're in détente, and my projections, which I have just updated for this battle, suggest that there is over a ninety-four per cent chance this status will remain for at least the next three years."
  
  Lily snorted. She had mentioned some of the things she wanted to trade him for, and now he was using those wants to blackmail her into providing assistance or at least intelligence.
  
  It was interesting to hear of the challenges of someone thousands of kilometres away. She didn't want to jinx herself, but they sounded more challenging than hers.
  
  "I'll zhink about it. Goodbye, Dr House," she said and then disconnected the phone call. His satellite terminal remained connected to her network, but it was quiescent. He wasn't even trying to hack her bastion node, which probably meant that he respected her. Maybe.
  
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  Diplomatic Luncheon
  "Anger... sadness... happiness?" the experimental subject correctly identified the last of the emotions of the prisoners Lily had prepared. Each prisoner wore a helmet that stimulated portions of their brains to cause artificial emotions, and strong ones at that. The brain was an electrical organ in many ways, and if you knew which areas to stimulate, it wasn't difficult to induce emotions in a subject.
  
  It was a pretty good treatment for chronic depression, too, as the brain had a sort of memory or stickiness as far as emotions were concerned. She had already left a few similar helmets at her hospital and trained the other doctors in their use.
  
  If you felt depressed for long enough, it was difficult to feel other things. If you felt upbeat most of the time, it was difficult to get you to fall into a funk. Similarly, if a person allows themselves to feel angry often, then anger itself will be the first and easiest emotion they experience.
  
  This sounded somewhat like mystical mumbo-jumbo, but in actuality, it was just a mechanical problem in the human brain. Modern biomorphs in her past life had this defect fixed. It was a definite necessity, especially when a person would occasionally rent a body for a trip. Nobody wanted to feel depressed while attending a professional convention because the previous person that used the body they were renting was having issues.
  
  With the physical problems of emotional stickiness fixed, that still left the portion that was just baked into a person's neural network and personality. For example, some people were just grumpy. Lily was always curious; that was really the only emotion she felt very strongly at all. When Lily was a child, her mother in Shanghai was pretty insightful and told her to always practice being the type of person she wanted to be because that was what would happen.
  
  That was good advice, although she had felt that it was probably only applicable to people she might refer to as neurotypical - no amount of practice ever actually turned Meimei into a people person, although the advice from her mother formed the very foundation of her social adaptation strategies that she used to this day.
  
  Although her historical (and present) social strategies were mostly predicated on tricking people that she was feeling things that she actually wasn't. The normal human brain, not hers, was very good at picking out emotional affect in people it observed. An enormous amount of neural circuitry was devoted to these social processes. When a typical person detected an incongruence in the emotional affect of someone they observed and the emotion they thought the person they were observing should be feeling, it resulted in triggering a fear or disgust process, similar to the way an android or doll could fall into the uncanny valley. A reputation for stoicism could help if you had an underdeveloped sense of emotions, but feeling the "wrong" emotion would always get noticed. Just try giggling at a funeral and see what happens.
  
  For example, Alice once was present when Lily euthanised a condemned prisoner, and Lily knew that if she didn't affect at least slight sadness after doing it that the Apprentice would be upset. But other than being slightly irritated at wasting her time with the chore, she didn't feel anything at all. She didn't know either the criminal or the victim he had raped and murdered, so she found it difficult to feel more than annoyance at someone disturbing the peace in her city. She knew that wasn't the "correct" feeling, though, and she knew she had to present the appropriate social cues for Alice's benefit. She didn't like it when the girl got upset. When Alice got sad, Lily tended to get sad too inexplicably and irrationally.
  
  "Good, thank you," Lily told the Submajor, selecting Professional Smile #2 to tell him that she appreciated his assistance. He had volunteered for the treatment, as had a few others, including one of the judges Gary had hired, and she had considered him a good test subject because he also volunteered to receive one of the first brain implants that did not require a medichine hive in the body. They weren't quite as good as the kind that Lily and Alice had in so far as their capability to interface with the human brain was concerned, but they were still quite sufficient even for fully immersive virtual reality, given the resolution of a normal human's senses.
  
  She would be able to use downloads from his implant, which was already working and had been for a couple of weeks, to have greater insight as to what this "new sense" was comprised of and how it was being integrated with and communicating with pre-existing brain structures. Lily was very protective of her brain, at least as long as she decided to keep it, and there was just not a lot one could do to reverse this treatment aside from physically removing the new brain structures in a surgery. She'd only consider the treatment for herself, no matter its efficacy or safety, after she isolated the communications channels and whether or not there was any change in existing brain structures, thinking patterns or personality over a period of months.
  
  Wilson stared at the prisoners through the one-way glass and noticed as most of them slumped into a chair in their cells. There was no reason to keep the artificial emotions being induced after Wilson was done, so she had triggered the helmets each prisoner wore to shift to a low level of contentment. After an hour of that, it would shift to a neutral emotion. There was no need to torture these men unnecessarily. But it was necessary to torture them, just a little bit. At least the ones that had gotten randomly selected were examples of negative emotions, anyway. He glanced at her, "Are these all condemned criminals?"
  
  "Only zhree. Zhe first five volunteered for zhis in lieu of being expelled from Megaton for a history of multiple misdemeanours. I'm not entirely sure about zheir criminal histories, zhough. A week of zhis in exchange for a fresh start. I've 'ad a couple of zhem say zhey kind of like it," Lily told him, tilting her head to the side and studying the military man. She suspected the two men who said they liked it had some brain issues, like chronic depression, and the switch between multiple emotions a day might have knocked their brain out of it, similar to electroshock therapy. She had already scheduled them for treatment at the hospital after they were released.
  
  Normally, citizens were only eligible to receive basic healthcare for free, but she would cover the charges in this case in an attempt to prevent recidivism. Besides, she needed someone to be the first candidate to treat depression with this technology. She had a theoretical treatment plan already devised, and she thought it would work well, but you just never knew.
  
  He made a humming noise, "And how long are you going to do this to the condemned prisoners?"
  
  Lily blinked at him and closed her mouth. She was about to say as long as they continued "working" and outputting the correct emotion on demand. She expected to need such "control emotions" for at least a couple more months of testing. She assumed that they would begin feeling extraneous anxiety-based emotions eventually, even when she programmed differing emotions no matter the cooldown period she had in between tests. When that happened, she would discard them and carry out the sentence proscribed by the Honorable Judge Kaminsky.
  
  However, something told her that was the wrong thing to say. Even she could detect that it seemed kind of callous now, but she had just been considering them as cogs in a machine rather than sapients. "Two weeks, maximum. Zhen, zhey'll just not wake up one day. I've found it is better zhat zhe prisoners don't know precisely when the sentence is to be carried out. Otherwise, zhey worry too much about it, and I don't want to distress zhem unnecessarily. I also give zhem zhe impression zhat participating in zhese tests might result in a commutation of zheir sentence, when in fact it will not. In my opinion, this is for zheir benefit."
  
  That caused him to raise an eyebrow and grin slightly, "You lie to them?"
  
  "Not precisely. I suppose it depends on your perspective, zhough. I 'ave commuted two of zhe prisoners, in the past, who assisted with some dangerous tests, and zhen expelled him. I try to avoid lying, if at all possible. Not only am I not zhe best at it, but it is a diplomatic tool that dulls incredibly quickly with use. I'd rather not get in zhe 'abit. Zhat way, if I actually need to lie someday, my tool will still be very sharp," Lily told him, although that was partially a lie in itself, but mostly, she was being truthful. She didn't like to lie.
  
  What she did was inform them that, in the past, she had spared people who had performed very well on her tests and let them assume what they wanted. That might be considered deception, but Lily didn't consider it a lie.
  
  Wilson chuckled and shrugged, "I was just curious. I've heard some of what the men who do a bailiff rotation talk about. Good riddance." Well, that was true. For now, at least. Judge Gary had about two to four capital cases a week in a city of twenty thousand people, which would have been extremely high in her life in America. Worse than Chicago-level violence, even. But half of them were raiders captured alive outside of the city. In the beginning, Gary had about one capital case a day, so clearly, the rate was decreasing.
  
  Lily already had plans to shift to more computer-based simulations when her supply of condemned prisoners reached a zero level. Honestly, that sounded like a very good problem to have, she thought, and likely one that would never ever really occur in totality. What probably would happen, though, was eventually, public opinion would force her to stop experimenting on these prisoners. Right now, nobody really knew about it, nor did they particularly care. But as the level of "civilisation" in the area rose, people would start to care. While she was a dictatrix, that didn't mean that she could just discount the opinion of everyone who lived in her city. Much the contrary, even.
  
  Absolute power was an interesting philosophical and social construct. The more often one exercised it in matters that went against public opinion, the less absolute the power became. If a king, an absolute monarch, started beheading people randomly, even though that was technically permissible, he would not find himself king for very long. It was a balancing act, and the value of these individuals as experimental subjects wasn't greater than the problems they would eventually cause her if people objected to her conduct and she kept doing it, so she figured it was only ever a temporary thing.
  
  "Zhank you again for your time, Sub-Major," Lily told the man.
  
  He nodded, "Same time tomorrow, then?"
  
  "Yes, we will continue to test both the accuracy of your 'read'"... Lily actually performed the air quotes gesture, "... as well as identify any potential side effects of both this capability and additional brain structure. Probably for a month or two."
  
  If something really went wrong, Lily could perform brain surgery and carefully excise this new addition to his brain, but that was basically a lobotomy, so it was always going to be the last resort.
  
  As Wilson left, Lily considered the human test subjects in front of her, each in their own private cells.
  
  She hoped to have the technology to assist in replacing the necessity of them within a year or so, anyway. Perhaps as soon as six months. Once she had it, she would build a giant supercomputing cluster that was optimised to simulate biological life. She just needed to trade Dr House for his quantum processor fabrication method. The man was a little reluctant to trade it, but after repeated discussions with her, he understood that she would eventually get it even without his assistance anyway, so now he was trying to get the best price he could for it.
  
  Lily and Dr House had been having regular discussions the past couple of weeks, and she had given him summary information about the available things she would trade. He was extremely interested in the capability to clone a human body, especially one that included all of her genetic improvements, and then transplant an existing human brain into it.
  
  He hadn't mentioned his specific circumstances, but Lily assumed that he was either in a brain-in-a-jar type situation, similar to the RoboBrains or that he was in a life support pod, similar to the people that were inside Vault 112. She kind of thought the latter as he laughed for one whole minute straight when Lily told him about Dr Braun and that she had shot him for his misdeeds. Apparently, Dr House hated him. Hearing that he had stolen the work of his subordinates made Dr House ridiculously happy for several hours, and he admitted that Braun had stolen some of his life-extension technology, too, through corporate espionage.
  
  Dr House was also very much interested in building a fusion power station and very much interested in her not assisting the NCR with similar projects, at least at the moment. He said even his own fusion power station project, assuming he bought the technology, would radically destabilise the Mojave. A primary reason the NCR was occupying the Mojave was the many, many megawatts they extracted from the turbines of the Hoover dam, which was still operational. If he built a fusion power station in New Vegas, the NCR might be tempted to invade.
  
  He suggested that if she helped the NCR build fusion power stations back in California, they might withdraw and cause the Legion to invade New Vegas instead. She thought he would go ahead and trade with her both for the blueprints and for the assistance of her engineers to oversee building such a project, though, despite the risks. She thought he was starving for additional electricity resources.
  
  He was already talking about building a small runway in the middle of the desert, close to New Vegas so that her aircraft could land and deliver personnel and supplies. One of the runways at Nellis was in good condition. Well, it wasn't, half of it was destroyed, but it was so long that the first half could be used all on its own. However, Dr House said that location was inhabited by a bunch of heavily armed xenophobes, who tended to lob missiles or artillery at anything that approached the former Air Force base. He thought it would be much easier to pave a new runway than converse with them.
  
  Still, he wasn't that interested in her DMLS technology, which told her that he likely had similar fabrication technology himself. At least, she assumed that he had very significant levels of, at minimum, robot construction capability underneath Las Vegas. That was both his home town, and Lily started to think he had a fixation with the location.
  
  It wasn't unusual for people like Dr House or Lily herself to have unusual fascinations and interests, especially while growing up. Lily had been fascinated with not only the "code of life," that is to say, genetics, but also space exploration and dinosaurs. 'Who didn't like dinosaurs as a child?' she thought. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of both, being able to recite every space mission and every astronaut to ever go past the Karmin line, in order of precedence, up until the Fall of Earth anyway. She stopped counting then, as everyone that was still alive qualified. She even spent an extravagant amount of credits to fund a multi-month-long expedition to retrieve the Voyager 1 space probe in the Oort Cloud, although they couldn't actually find it in the end. She had wanted to place it in her office so she could admire it at her leisure.
  
  Lily got the impression that Dr House had a similar level of fascination not only with games of chance but specifically with the Pre-War culture inherent in Las Vegas itself. When Lily called games of chance a tax on people who didn't understand probability, he got a smug little smirk on the face of his digital avatar in the vidcall format that they had agreed upon.
  
  Although he was clearly interested in brain transplantation technology, he was very cautious about it as well, not particularly trusting anybody with having his brain in their hands. She nixed programming an Auto-Doc or similar robot for the procedure, or rather she highly recommended against it. It was, theoretically, possible, but there was a small percentage chance it could fail, and if you didn't have a real surgeon supervising it, then you would just be dead in that instance.
  
  Honestly, she didn't really blame him. She was certainly paranoid, herself. Although she had replaced most of her body with mechanical and electronic components, slowly, over time and therefore wasn't that interested in a replacement body, she had been when she first got the cloning machine, but not only did she not trust anyone to perform the surgery, she didn't think anyone else was capable of it.
  
  Despite her getting along pretty well with them these days, she definitely wouldn't trust the Brotherhood, with holding her everything in their hands, so she understood Dr House's reluctance.
  
  Shaking her head, she made sure that each prisoner was scheduled to be fed. She always increased the quality of their food on the days that she conducted this sort of testing. It was kind of high-stress, especially for those of them who had been randomly selected to be examples of highly negative emotions like anger or sadness. Some beer and better-tasting food was a small price to pay for extending their period of usefulness.
  
  Humming, she left the detention level and took an elevator back down twenty floors to her workshop area. She had periodically shifted her working area down as her continuous excavation progressed but felt that she was going to keep it at its present level, which was over two kilometres underground. She would barely notice even a bunker-busting nuclear strike at this depth.
  
  Although she ended up firing the entire staff of the city hall, she had, in the end, hired a couple of the employees back. Jacob O'Neil was the former deputy mayor, although he wasn't in very good odour with the previous administration, which was likely one of the reasons they had left him "in charge" while they fled, hoping that she would put his head on a spike.
  
  He was a pretty capable administrator, but she had hired him as more of a diplomat. He understood the nearby polities and, moreover, understood how to deal with them. This was why she was irritably staring at him, as he had claimed that she had to be present for this upcoming meeting with a "delegation" from their religious neighbours in Cleaveland. This was specifically why she hired him! So she wouldn't have to deal with this sort of thing! Was he worthless, then?!
  
  "Ma'am, I can see you are annoyed. I assure you that it is important that you be a part of these meetings," he said, not at all nervous to be in her presence, like some people were.
  
  " Why? " Lily asked simply, "It is just a trade delegation. Zhey're just coming here to buy some zhings from me. Zhis is the sort of zhing I hired you to take care of." After a number of merchants had happily bought single AutoDoc units from her, the Dominion approached her to buy the systems in bulk. Apparently, they had long had difficulties with acquiring technology of all kinds but were especially interested in modern medical technology. She was selling them forty newly built systems.
  
  She didn't have the doctors to spare to provide training unless they sent their own doctors to Megaton, but they had already approached and come to an agreement with the Vault 112 people. About a dozen, including some doctors, would return to Cleaveland with them and train their medical people in how to use the devices.
  
  She got a little wistful when she thought about the Vault 112 people. That was pretty much how everyone in Megaton referred to them, and everyone's opinion was that they were eerie but pleasant. They weren't really a hive mind or a gestalt, just very, very close to one another. Lily intended to offer them the same emotion-sensing treatments, eventually. She just wanted to see what would happen. She was also very interested in the five of the group who were already pregnant. Lily, as dictator of Megaton, offered direct financial assistance to any citizen who reproduced. She bribed people to have babies, in other words, and continually. The idea was that she didn't want reproduction to be a burden on a family.
  
  It was her opinion it was better to reproduce and train a new generation that rely on immigration, but still, most of Megaton's population growth was from immigrants. Long-term, though, that couldn't last. It was a wonder there were still so many people when people were so leery of bringing a child into the world. She needed reproduction to exceed replacement levels. Ideally, every couple should have three or four children, because there were always those who weren't interested in it, but that wasn't going to happen soon. She'd just have to combine incentives to reproduce with cheaper and cheaper life extension, and hopefully, it would balance the sums.
  
  Four children were a lot to ask for a single couple that had a reproductive life of about twenty years, but if they could have children for a hundred years? That was much less of an ask.
  
  Thinking about new children, she returned to fantasising about the children of the Vault 112 people. Would these new children be born connected to the group? If not, would they be rejected by their mothers as sickly kittens might be? It was all so very fascinating . She had taken over as OB-GYN for each of the pregnant Vault dwellers just so she could perhaps satisfy her curiosity.
  
  Maybe if she gave all of the Vault 112 people the ability to detect emotions like Gary, it would trigger a genetic division where they would go on to out-compete plain Homo sapiens and eventually take over the world? They already had all of her genetic treatments baked into their genome, so they already had ridiculous survival advantages compared to the average Wastelander. Many people would be frightened by such a prospect, as it sounded like some cheesy sci-fi horror film, but Lily thought it would be an amazing achievement.
  
  She didn't really consider herself human to begin with, not really. At least not in the way that most other people did. To her, a person was someone who could think whether they were a human or an uplifted and sapient tiger, an alien or a computer. They were all the same to her. She had no racial loyalty to the human species, none at all. Like Dr House, she would agree to be a collaborator with alien conquerors in a split second. It was just such a shame that the aliens that did exist in this world were so inscrutable and psychopathic.
  
  Dr House seemed to be aware of them, but he didn't like discussing them, which Lily found interesting. Perhaps he saw them as a sword of Damocles, hanging over everything he tried to accomplish? She saw them that way, too, so she would understand that perspective.
  
  Mr O'Neil's sigh brought her out of her daydream of replacing the human species with something better, "A trade delegation headed by the hereditary heir to the ruler of that nation. It would be considered very rude if you did not meet with him. Even the Brotherhood is going to be a part of this meeting."
  
  Lily sighed. Hereditary heir? Like a prince, then? People still did that? Well, she couldn't really throw stones. She considered Alice as her daughter and intended to give the girl Megaton when Lily finally got tired of it. She might be able to build a Fortress of Solitude for herself on the Moon, or something, which would be nice. The only difference, Lily guessed, was that she didn't think Alice would be interested in becoming the next Ruler of Megaton in the first place.
  
  "It's called the Dominion, right? What's 'is title, zhen? Dominator? Dominator Jr?" Lily asked, annoyed.
  
  That caused Mr O'Neil to cough, hiding a chuckle, "Uh, no. First Elder is the title of the head of state of that nation. His son doesn't have a specific title, so he should just be referred to as Elder Smith."
  
  Lily arched an eyebrow. Wasn't the original prophet of their religion named Smith as well? She remembered that from her life in America. He had been rather fecund, but she didn't think that he had any direct-line descendants of the name Smith in Ohio. But it wasn't like that was a rare name, but she got the idea that this family was probably trying to cash in on name recognition, which amused her.
  
  "And is he an absolute ruler, like myself? He sounds a little dictatorial," Lily mused aloud.
  
  Jacob shook his head, "Not... really. Not for a hundred years, anyway. He is the head of state and retains veto power, but practical power in their nation rests in their unicameral legislative body, which is known as the Council of Elders. He is the head of both their religion and their armed forces, though, at least in theory, so if he expresses an opinion on a subject, the legislature tends to give it weight."
  
  Lily was detecting a theme here. She sighed, "Sounds like a constitutional monarchy, almost. Bloody national mascots..." The last she said in a passably British accent.
  
  Stretching, she stood up from her desk, "Alright, alright. You win, Mr O'Neil. Where is this meeting happening?"
  
  The man looked much more relieved now, "The former city hall. It has a lot of conference rooms, and it is where they are used to meeting the city government."
  
  Lily nodded and said, "Alright. Give me ten minutes to arrange a car and security team, and we'll depart."
  
  Her first surprise was that the Brotherhood people were already there. Her second surprise was standing next to Sarah Lyons. Next to her was a dark-haired man in his mid-thirties, and Lily frowned, glancing between Sarah and this new man for a moment before it occurred to her that the resemblance between them was a familial one.
  
  She grinned widely at both of them and walked over to greet them, "Why you are looking quite spry, Elder!" she told the man, who she had correctly identified as Elder Lyons. It appeared that they had finally conducted the cloning and surgery to give the man a new lease on life. She noticed that he had chosen an age in his mid-thirties rather than being completely rejuvenated.
  
  Sarah Lyons was grinning too, but the formerly elderly Elder snorted and almost blushed, Lily thought. "Yes, yes, Dr St. Claire. We have to thank you for training our Scribes in conducting this surgery. Not a single retired Paladin or Scribe refused 'a new body' after it was demonstrated that the surgery was relatively safe."
  
  That didn't surprise her at all. She was a practising medical doctor for a long time before she shifted to more of a research scientist, and as such, she had, at least, an academic and historical understanding of psychology. Although by the time she was a doctor, people didn't actually become elderly; she at least knew that historically, elderly people often were chronically depressed and struggled to find meaning in their lives, especially after a lifetime of meaningful labour.
  
  "That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that you're not in Power Armour," Lily said, amused. He was wearing a set of robes more commonly seen used by Scribes. She had known that the Elder had been a Paladin in the past.
  
  He sighed and frowned, looking very put upon, "All of us old geezers need remedial training. I mean, I could get in some and walk around with no problem. That's like riding a bike, but I would be a hazard in an actual combat situation. It has been over twenty years, after all. Plus, there is no way I could get some of the retired Paladins to agree to remedial training if I didn't do it myself."
  
  Ah, the perils of being a leader. "What have you two been doing all morning?" She had noticed that the Brotherhood Vertibird landed on her roof quite early this morning, and it was almost noon.
  
  Sarah shrugged, "We were visiting both our Enclave downtown and the Roger Maxson Home for Unwanted Children." Lily tried to stop herself from giggling at the name. It sounded like something out of Oliver Twist, and she absolutely loved it. Sarah continued, "Dad gave a speech. There are about twenty children older than fifteen, and although they started as barely better than raiders in their manners, most are now ready for additional training. A kind of one or two-month survival course in the Wasteland, it should be pretty fun."
  
  Kind of a Brotherhood summer camp? Lily nodded, "If you two will stay after this... meeting, there is something I wish to discuss with you." The Brotherhood didn't precisely know her full capabilities, but they suspected she had a lot more aviation assets than she publicly claimed. Moreover, her first-stage aircraft weren't invisible optically, and they had already been visually observed landing and taking off a number of times. She intended to tell them about the Brotherhood chapter in Vegas without specifically stating that she had placed several thousand satellites in orbit.
  
  "Oh? Well, certainly..." the younger Elder replied, sounding a little curious.
  
  It took another fifteen minutes for the Dominion's delegation to arrive, and Lily was surprised that the heir was a fifteen-year-old boy. She had the urge to pinch his cheeks, and she would describe him as very cute, despite his efforts to look incredibly serious. How amusing.
  
  The boy was surrounded by both advisors, both secular and religious, as well as bodyguards, although she insisted on only two advisors and one bodyguard at the table.
  
  Apparently, the meeting was set to be as a luncheon, with her Mr O'Neil already arranging quite an elaborate spread of food. Maybe he was worth something; she hadn't even considered providing refreshments, which was probably why she wasn't a diplomat. She would have considered that if she had invited this boy to her home, but she didn't have the correct social strategies mapped to include meetings between two representatives of a state.
  
  She supposed the current First Elder must be relatively young if this was his eldest son. The boy had certain difficulties looking her in the eye during the course of the luncheon, as his eyes would drift down to her chest, and he would get a kind of far-off expression. Many women would be offended, but it just amused her. She wasn't even wearing anything scandalous, merely a fairly professional blouse and pencil skirt. No cleavage at all was exposed. It was nothing like the short and low-cut dresses she wore for Grace when they went out on dates or just stayed home.
  
  This meeting was a complete waste of her time, but at least it was amusing. Perhaps next time, she could have Alice perform this duty if this same boy returned. That would be... equitable. She considered the girl her heir, after all, and he could make calf eyes at someone closer to his own age.
  
  The exchange of payment was more or less ceremonial, as she had insisted they pay most of the costs in advance and had already received the payment a month ago. However, she took the balance with good grace and released the cargo of carefully crated Auto-Doc machines to the caravan that they travelled with.
  
  Everyone wished each other continued health, and she wasn't even called the whore of Babylon once by the lemon-faced religious advisor, although she was sure he was thinking it or something similar. Jezebel, perhaps?
  
  They weren't even staying the night. The boy apologised profusely about it, but said that there were a number of people, including a younger sister, that was desperately awaiting the delivery of the Auto-Doc machines. Lily wasn't offended, and if anything, she appreciated their brevity. After they took possession of the crates, they briefly met with the Vault 112 people and left town before fifteen hundred hours. She expected to have to do multiple boring meetings with these people, so she was quite happy.
  
  She walked over to the two Lyons and said, "If you could come back to the hospital, I have a short presentation I'd like to give you. I recently discovered a chapter of your organisation in the Mojave in Nevada. They recently took terrible losses in a battle with what I assume was the New California Republic."
  
  Both Lyons' eyes reached to their scalp, clearly surprised at her ability to get information from so far to the west. The Elder sighed and shook his head, "Damned NCR... Yes, we will be there shortly, Dr St. Claire."
  
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  A steep rock face
  After Lily showed them most things she knew, she had to answer the obvious questions about how she had the capability.
  
  "I've been launching small satellites into orbit. I'm sure you've seen some of my drone aircraft taking off and landing," Lily told them simply. She wasn't prevaricating, nor was she volunteering precisely how large of a satellite constellation she had, "In doing so, I 'ave also gained control of some existing satellite systems zhat were in orbit. Although the Great War down here was much more even in zhe destruction involved, America won the Great War in space 'andily." That was partly true, too; Dr House had already given her the encryption keys to a number of interesting satellites in orbit in exchange for her promising to stop deorbiting everything she saw.
  
  The PERSEPHONE system was exactly what she thought it was. It was a combination of an automated Moon base and an automated space station, mostly for the purpose of refuelling satellites and mining moon materials. It wasn't much use to her, yet, because apparently, the moon base was only sending reaction mass for use to refuel the fleet of satellites in orbit; however, it was of no use to her at all. The number of gases on the Moon was limited, so what was being sent was oxygen, mined from regolith.
  
  Not only did none of her satellites use hall-like ion thrusters, but oxygen as a reaction mass was totally destructive to all of the materials she built her satellites out of. She was interested to see how Pre-War America built satellites and what materials they used in both the hall thruster to make it oxidation resistant.
  
  She was also curious about what technology was being used to split O2 into ions without the oxygen reforming O2 or just causing oxidation in the storage container, as pure oxygen was incredibly reactive. It was why she couldn't use it in her plasma drives. Theoretically, she could use O2 as a reaction mass because the plasma chamber would ionise it, but there was no way the American satellites had that much energy available. And then, if she used oxygen, it would destroy her satellites very rapidly. It would be like using gasoline that was very acidic in your car. It would work, but it wouldn't do very much good for the life of your car.
  
  It was simpler, at the moment, for her to just replace satellites as they ran out of fuel, which would take about eighteen months for satellites in the lowest orbits. They had to use their thrusters more to counteract air resistance; even if the air was incredibly thin a couple hundred kilometres up, it was still there.
  
  If she or Dr House could get the moon base to start sending a lot of other materials besides oxygen, like aluminium mined from regolith, that would be an exceptional help, but at the moment, neither of them could. Perhaps she would have to send robots up there to investigate it?
  
  She'd like to go herself, but she was a bit leery of space missions. She grew up in space from age ten, and she was aware of how hazardous an environment space was. Transhumanity only survived in space due to the mutual support so many people could provide. Anything that went wrong on a space mission where she was there physically might result in her death. She looked up to the first space explorers, whether they were astronauts, cosmonauts or taikonauts. Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shephard and Yang Liwei were all amazing people, but she didn't want to emulate them! In her opinion, it was a wonder any of them survived!
  
  There was no way she would personally go into space until she had sufficient robotic assets up there to rescue her in the event of catastrophic mission failure.
  
  Both of the Lyons' were a little bit surprised at her declaration but not as shocked as Lily was expecting. Perhaps her face indicated her surprise, although normally, she didn't actually express too much of her opinion or emotions on her face. Or the Elder could have just guessed what she was thinking. Either way, he said, "We suspected something of that nature. No offence, but those improved PipBoy things you've been selling us. You'd have had to guess that it would have been disassembled within fifteen minutes of some of our Scribes getting their hands on it. They can't really help themselves with stuff like that."
  
  Ah, yes. That was true. She had specifically designed and built the LilyPads to be somewhat user-serviceable, as well. Right now, the Maps application was locked down to the areas around DC, so they couldn't have guessed from that. However, she had expected the Brotherhood to have at least a few of them in bits right away. She hummed and considered that, letting the thought process continue, and then she nodded. A thorough examination and testing of the LilyPads would result in the Brotherhood finding out each frequency spectrum the wireless modules inside of it used. The local Mesh used a different frequency block than the satellite link or the "cellular" system, and they'd be able to discover all of them.
  
  In fact, just taking one of the LilyPads outside the immediate area of the DC ruins would give them enough information, as how else would the device still manage a communication link, even if it was degraded and low-bandwidth? She didn't blame them for disassembling and testing the devices. She would do the same thing before she let her soldiers use a communication and computing device manufactured by a third party, even a third party with that she had friendly relationships. She intended to issue them to her citizens first but had been selling most of her productive capacity to the Brotherhood.
  
  "Zhat makes sense, yes. I'm surprised more of them 'aven't been disassembled," she said. Her method for manufacturing traditional computing hardware had far exceeded the Pre-War processors by now. They still weren't very fast, as she thought of things. They had about five hundred megahertz of clock speed for a single processor, or roughly equivalent to commercial processors circa 1998.
  
  However, she had two advantages that made her processors much more effective than that. She could build them fairly small, so, therefore, she could build them very parallel, and her memory technology was better, by far than anything else on the planet. The processor in her LilyPad was a sixteen-core, 500Mhz system with an absolutely ridiculous amount of cache and system RAM, so it was much more effective than what you'd expect for only a five hundred megahertz CPU.
  
  "A lot have. Then carefully reassembled. Most of the Scribes have wanted to requisition two of them, one to hook up to a terminal and one to carry on their arm," he said mildly. Lily nodded. She would be interested in seeing some of the software that they wrote. She included a slightly simplified integrated development environment on every LilyPad, although it was kind of difficult to use unless you hooked it up to a terminal, as they were discussing. It included a number of programming languages, from the main one she used to the ones that were common in Pre-war America, as she had written her own cross-compiler for these languages ages ago.
  
  Perhaps she should build laptops or a desktop PC next? Laptops, probably. Or maybe just wireless keyboard and mouse devices that could connect to the LilyPad.
  
  He then nodded, "Speaking of Scribes, they tell me that your power station is ahead of schedule and might be ready for low-level ignition in the next couple of months. I have to thank you for letting them assist you in building it."
  
  Thank her? It was free, skilled labour. She created the basic design based on the blueprints she received from Dr Li, but she didn't have time to oversee a large construction project. Still, she visited the site often to verify everything was coming along, though. It was true that they were getting a lot of experience that was helping them in their parallel project, which was about four months behind hers, but that was beside the point.
  
  But then she blinked. Why were they distracting her with ancillary information? It was interesting, but she thought there would be more discussions about this chapter in the Mojave. "I expected more... gnashing of teeth, or something, about zhis Chapter in the Mojave."
  
  He nodded, "I'm doing that internally while trying to distract you in order to give me some time to think. When you get to my age, you at least get good at that sort of thing." Lily internally rolled her eyes. She was hundreds of years older than this whippersnapper, and that was a damn lie.
  
  Lily just shrugged and gestured to the two, "You do not 'ave to fill zhe silence with pointless banter, nor do you 'ave to be polite. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves, or if you need to discuss confidential matters, I can leave zhe room, or you can come back at another time. I don't mind sitting 'ere in companionable silence until you formulate a response."
  
  "I don't think we need to leave and come back, but thank you. Let me think for a moment and discuss this with Sarah if you don't mind," the Elder said, and Lily hummed in reply and shifted to pull up some work she had ready for free moments such as this. There really wasn't enough free time in the day, even if she used the VR pod to get an extra five or six hours here and there - there was always more to do. Specifically, she was working on something she anticipated that they would both ask of her. It wasn't difficult, merely a slight change to one of the walkie-talkies she had already built, most of it in software, in any event.
  
  It took over five minutes of them having hushed discussions; although she could hear everything they were saying, she avoided paying attention as best as she could. Periodically they would ask her a question, such as her opinion on the battle, how many people escaped, and the like.
  
  Finally, Elder Lyons asked, "Would it be possible for you to fly people to or from that location?"
  
  "Difficult. My aircraft require a fairly long runway in good condition. Vertical take-off and landing is not possible. Request is not feasible until and unless I can get access to a runway in good condition. I could drop off items there, though, literally. Using parachutes," Lily said, giving the Elder her full attention again.
  
  He nodded as if expecting that, "How about assistance in establishing communications with them?"
  
  Lily nodded. That was what she was working on. "Yes, I can 'elp there. Before you leave, I will deliver you a small radio. You can use it to send radio-voice- to the bunker they have, assuming there is any transceiver on the outside. It will be in the clear, although you can connect whatever cryptographic module in-line before this module so that you can have private communications, zhat part I am not involved in." Although the communications would be encrypted in her network, they would be transmitted in the clear by whatever satellite happened to be over the bunker. Similarly, communications on the same frequency from the bunker would be routed to this device.
  
  The only reason she was assisting them and willing to connect these two chapters was she already knew, from both her observations and Dr House's intelligence network, that eight out of ten Paladins were KIA at the battle at the solar conentrator. Without a doubt, the Paladins had always been the more conservative. Scribes were, on average, much more willing to be open-minded about any number of issues.
  
  She suspected that the DC chapter could absorb such a chapter without being unduly altered by it, especially with Elder Lyons becoming more and more popular, even with the Outcast survivors and the others who stayed but still saw things their way. Although his first priority was still Super Mutants, he had allowed tech scavenging expeditions to resume, so long as they were directed east into the eastern shore of
  
  Maryland and Delaware. There were still, apparently, lots of places to find things there.
  
  The Brotherhood outpost on Kent Island, which used to be the seed vault, was apparently the base of operations for these missions. The Scribes were almost finished repairing the bridge, as well. Lily would have thought that concentrating most of the problematic elements of your organisation on a slightly distant outpost would be a bad idea and an invitation for desertion or mutiny but from what little conversations she has had with Sarah Lyons, that wasn't the case. Even the former Outcasts, about a third of which survived, were singing the praises of Elder Lyons now. Of course, they felt that they should be the ones credited for this, as he only "saw the light" after they left.
  
  Plus, and this was just a suspicion on her part, but the rejuvenation of a number of older members was likely clear to everyone. The subtext was obvious. Immortality, or at least a much longer life, and it was delivered by the Elder's policies. She doubted that she was mentioned much at all, and she wouldn't expect that when dealing with fractious internal politics. You had to grab whatever advantage you could in a situation like that. Lily would think worse of him if he didn't take advantage of it.
  
  Elder Lyons looked like he had asked all he wanted and nodded; however, Sarah asked, "If you were us, with the resources we have, how would you plan a hypothetical expedition to this part of Nevada?"
  
  Well, that was an interesting question. Lily hummed, "Refurbish eight or so Vertibirds to use fusion cores and electric motors instead of gas turbines. Zhe Enclave already has fusion-powered Vertibirds, or so I am told. You are, after all, buying close to a 'undred newly-manufactured fusion cores from me per day." She wondered when they would stop that. They had the right to buy up to thirty-three per cent of her production, and they had been exercising that right since the production facility came online two weeks ago. That reminded her, "Speaking of which, I am running out of boron. I'd like assistance finding locating more. The easiest source is likely Pre-War Abraxo cleaners, which have a significant amount."
  
  Lily still didn't know how the Enclave's larger fusion cores worked. She'd like to disassemble one. Perhaps they were just a casing that contained a half dozen smaller modules and the associated electronics and superconducting wire. If so, she would be really disappointed.
  
  Sarah blinked. But she was getting smarter, she didn't immediately question my idea, assuming they didn't have the capability as she would have done in the past. Instead, she glanced at her dad and slowly nodded, "I'm told that those metal printing devices could produce an electric motor. I'm sure it isn't as easy as just swapping one with the turbines on the existing birds, though. But if we could do it, we could carry one of the fusion core refuelling devices on one of the Vertibirds, though and only stop briefly to refuel."
  
  Lily hummed and nodded, "I doubt you would need to. You'd probably get about twenty hours or more of flight time on one set of fusion cores. It'd be simpler to just carry a box of spares; it wouldn't take that long to fly to Nevada after all. Even with liberal use of superconducting wire, zhe motors would require some additional cooling at low airspeeds. I 'ad been considering water-based cooling and just accepting that you'd have to refill the water tank every so often. I don't know 'ow the Enclave does it, but not zhat way. But I zhink you'd find zhat an electrical motor would require far less maintenance than a gas turbine zhat spins at sixty thousand revolutions per minute. I 'ave been thinking about doing zhe same thing myself, but I don't have any Vertibirds or pilots presently. But such a project is definitely within the scope and capabilities of your Scribes. They'd be able to do it better than I could, too, since they have hundreds of years of experience working on the airframe."
  
  The Elder raised an eyebrow, "We could just fly directly to Nevada if we had that kind of aircraft. I wonder why nobody, me especially, ever considered this option before. It does sound like something we could have done, even before you came along."
  
  Lily gave the man a gimlet eye, "I mean no offence, but your organisation is in many ways more trapped in zhe past than the Enclave is. You almost have a fetish about zhe technology before the Great War, and zhat blinds you in many ways to any development in zhe here and now." She paused before she said precisely what she was thinking, "Zhis will be the death of you if you don't take it into consideration. You just watched it happen."
  
  She pointed to the seventy-five-centimetre display, which Lily had played back some of the battle of the Mojave's chapter. "Your enemy there used simple tactics and an organised military force. Zhey didn't even need lasers or plasma weapons when zhey outnumbered your compatriots twenty to one on an open field with no defensible positions in ten kilometres."
  
  Elder Lyons looked like he bit into a lemon, but he sighed and nodded, "You're right, although I somehow doubt that the leader over there came up through the ranks as a Paladin, but that is just me being hopeful." He nodded, "I understand what you're saying, though. And perhaps I have been less open to research projects proposed by the Scribes than I could have been. This one, though, will be fast-tracked. The Vertibirds we possess are such a force multiplier, but they are limited in range due to us only having one source of fuel. If we could change that, we could utterly change the tempo of our operations."
  
  He paused and then asked, "Do you know anything about the Brotherhood chapters in California?"
  
  "No, I don't. Zhey're all in hiding, from what I can tell. Possibly in their secret places, yes?" she shrugged and continued, "Their war with the NCR has gone about as well as this one battle has, with the exception that the Brotherhood actually hurt the NCR badly by consecutive raids, stealing most of the NCR's ready gold supply that was backing their currency." Honestly, she didn't know what they were thinking when they thought they could win against a somewhat modern polity that had millions of people working behind it. Even Dr House's strategy was just to become too costly to deal with, rather than being able to actually beat them.
  
  She specifically did not search them out, despite knowing approximately where the Lost Hills bunker was from playing Fallout 1, although she was curious about the location of the stolen NCR gold. She wouldn't mind minting a few gold coins, but she has no desire to see a bunch of meddlesome old men in California derail the progress she has developed here with Elder Lyons. She had, unfortunately, kind of shot her shot as far as suspicious nuclear explosions and the Brotherhood was concerned. Honestly, she thought the Elder was still slightly suspicious of the fate of the Outcasts, but she couldn't just keep nuking troublesome Brotherhood chapters, especially not their headquarters, and not be discovered.
  
  Sarah glanced at her dad again and shrugged, "Sure beats trying to build an airship."
  
  Elder Lyons stood up, gingerly as if he was still an old man that was in a lot of pain every time he sat down. Then he blinked and realised what he did before chuckling to himself, "Well, thanks for this news, as bad as it is. And for the advice. Perhaps we will be able to do something to help them or evacuate them, though."
  
  Lily had a fairly busy day. The day after her conversation with the Brotherhood Father-Daughter duo, she had received a call from Head Scribe Rothchild, using one of her LilyPads. He had been directed to immediately start converting a prototype Vertibird in order to use fusion power and electrical motors and had an interesting proposition for her.
  
  After they settled on a design, they intended to possibly start full-scale production of new units, not simply settling for a conversion of their existing squadron of Vertibirds. His proposition was she could provide some assistance in exchange for an agreement that the Brotherhood would sell her Vertibirds when the factory came online. A similar relationship that they had with her and her fusion core factory, a right to purchase every third Vertibird that they built.
  
  Lily had nodded. That sounded good, especially since she had to give the Brotherhood a chance to earn back some of their money. They had been buying thousands of fusion cores, and that outlay added up. That's just how economies worked. She couldn't just hoard all the gold they paid her, it wouldn't do any good unless it was moving through the economy. Of course, since that was basically what the Brotherhood had been doing all along, hoarding, it wouldn't particularly make things any worse than they already had been, it just wouldn't make anything better.
  
  She was surprised at the assistance requested though. She assumed that they'd want some electrical motor designs, or assistance with the cooling system but they wanted her help building avionics and flight simulators, rightly assuming that if she was running aircraft as drones she had a healthy avionics package, even if it wasn't designed for human pilots.
  
  Also, that was probably the only part of the aircraft they couldn't build themselves, so it did make some sense when she thought about it. Although, maybe they could build replacements of some of the original Vertibird avionics, but it might be a large project. Lily agreed to it because it wouldn't be that difficult for her.
  
  She could use her existing Autopilot and Attitude-Heading Reference Systems that she designed for her space program without many changes at all. She would just have to design a user interface for them. But, now that she had her apex LCD display technology, she could fashion a very robust glass cockpit system for these new aircraft.
  
  And she already wanted to make flight simulators, and for that, she would require the assistance of trained pilots to test it in all conceivable flight conditions and report back as to the simulator's verisimilitude.
  
  After that call and a new project on her limited amount of time added to her schedule, she was surprised to see the synth woman had returned from the Commonwealth and had requested a meeting with her. Actually, she had gone to the hospital and requested a genetics consult, but Lily suspected that was a ruse.
  
  She hummed and changed the schedule so that she would see her. The Apprentice had almost taken over the day-to-day operations of Custom Tailored Genes, aside from the research and development that she still worked on. That was some of her favourite work; she vastly preferred working on it to the endless traditional engineering projects she had become trapped in like quicksand.
  
  She was almost at the point that she would begin broadcasts using her satellite constellation to many parts of the world. She was beefing up the computer resources dedicated to her impersonator AI, as it would answer all of the calls from random people in random parts of the world. As such, it needed enough comping hardware to have at least a dozen or more forks running simultaneously.
  
  However, she was specifically avoiding broadcasting to areas that were very near her. The state of civilisation around the world was hit or miss. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the top five locations that were doing best was somewhat near her. She judged this by the number of people and the amount of artificial light. A simple test but fairly effective. And north, in former Canada, was Montreal, which had, she estimated, two hundred thousand people and was more or less wholly lit at night. Streets and buildings were in good repair, and the roads leading in and out of the city were in good condition and patrolled by mechanised infantry.
  
  Rather than reassure her that there was civilisation near her, that just made her suspicious. Although the broadcasts wouldn't mention her location, it was possible it could be deduced or inferred. If so, this bastion of civilisation wasn't so far from her. She didn't want to invite them to come to invade Megaton and take everything she had built. Or at least, try anyway. She already had a number of nuclear explosives in orbit, and while they were placed there to protect her orbital assets, they could just as easily be deorbited and fall on a column of trucks carrying soldiers.
  
  But she didn't want to get into a nuke-tossing contest with anyone who was running a modern, clean city with an organised military. If she were such a person, it would have been a strategic imperative to seize some nuclear explosives and delivery systems in order to achieve deterrence against actors like herself, Lily. They might have ICBMs or simply nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, either of which would not be good for her Megaton.
  
  As such, she was leaving them out of the initial tranche of locations she planned to contact. At least until she looked much more unassailable. Looks were what counted when dealing with most humans; she knew that already.
  
  Zipping up the elevator to the basement, she took the stairs up to the ground floor and found the exam room the synth woman was waiting in, surprised to see her not alone. A man was with her in his mid-twenties, wearing a black leather jacket, white t-shirt and black sunglasses. Inside. He looked like he stepped straight off the set to West Side Story or the Michael Jackson music video Beat It.
  
  "Miss Turner, it's nice to see you again," Lily told the woman after she closed the door, glancing at the chart in her hand. They had long ago shifted to digital charts, although each exam room featured an oversized e-reader as a display. It took the doctors a little to get used to, but paper products, aside from toilet paper, were pretty precious and difficult to find. Shifting to a paperless office wasn't just a buzzword; Lily couldn't afford to run a traditional office with as many patients as the hospital now saw.
  
  "Ah, Doctor! Yes. Apologies that I had to depart so soon after I saw you last, but your donation was sorely needed back in the Commonwealth," Lily nodded easily, and glanced at the man, who caused Natalie to cough as if she had forgotten him, "Oh, excuse me. This is Deacon; he's one of the leaders of our little movement. At least, he is one of the few survivors from the last time the Institute found us." The last, she said with a sad tone of voice.
  
  "It is nice to meet you, Mr Deacon," Lily told him, rolling out and sitting on the little stool that is universally present in doctor's offices.
  
  He nodded and said, "I came out personally to thank you. Those weapons have already saved a lot of lives. And also, to warn you."
  
  "Warn me?" Lily asked, arching an eyebrow like Spock. She hadn't used to be able to do such an expression, but her computer could, as it had much finer control of her nerves. As such, she had a program she could run at will to give her the Spock-eyebrow raise.
  
  He nodded, "Yes. You've become notable, even in the Commonwealth now. A trader sold a couple of Auto-Docs in Diamond City that he said he purchased from the Queen of Megaton, and described you in various ways that imply that you're a master of medicine and genetics."
  
  'Hue hue hue. This is the beginning of my popular girl phase, it seems like,' Lily thought to herself, nodding in satisfaction. But then, she paused before saying, "Oh. You suspect zhat zhis so-called Institute will become interested in me."
  
  "Definitely. If you can do half of what the merchants claimed, then they absolutely will. And you're close enough that they might perform operations this far south," Deacon said, hopping up on the exam bed while Natalie sat in the chair, "Although synths outnumber humans in the Institute three or four to one, the actual decision-makers are all humans. And if you can reliably extend a human life significantly, then they will be very interested."
  
  Lily hummed, "Yes, probably. Do you expect zhem to attack me here, zhen?" Sometimes people got accustomed to using force as their first resort.
  
  "Maybe. Probably... not, though. At least, not at first. I expect that they will approach you openly or covertly, somehow, or attempt to replace a few of your people with synths or both. They might elevate that to an attack, though, when you don't do business with them," he said, although the last was a bit unsure.
  
  She shrugged, "Zhen I will just do business with them." She never intended to completely shut out this group that made even the Enclave nervous in the first place.
  
  Natalie looked shocked and gobsmacked, "Huh?! You'd work with those slaver assholes?!" That got her a hard look from Deacon, and she settled down a little.
  
  "Beyond zhe fact that I am responsible for zhis city, and zhis Institute is a secretive and dangerous polity zhat is near my boarders, most of the products I sell I believe should be propagated as widely as possible," Lily told the synth woman, in a calmly angry sort of tone. She wasn't as arrogant as to say she was producing the genetic heritage and legacy of mankind, but that was what she privately believed, even if she didn't say it. Already, she had dropped her prices compared to what the first adopters had paid, and some of the only life-extending treatments were available for free for any Megaton citizen.
  
  She would definitely charge another nation, though. She had sold some of her genetic therapies already in bulk to a small number of merchants if they had the capability to power a refrigeration unit, and she believed them that they would administer them as she directed. Realistically, people hardly needed an actual genetics consult anymore, except for their own curiosity. Her current version of treatments would simply not work if there was incompatible genetics; it no longer would result in possibly dangerous mutations.
  
  "I probably won't sell zhem arms and anything I'd sell zhem I'd give to your group either at a discount or gratis. If you're particularly offended by my stance 'ere, perhaps you could tell me why your group works in the shadows and doesn't take on zhis Institute head-on? Also, I am hopeful zhat these so-called men of science might see reason someday," Lily continued, cold as ice, staring at Natalie the whole time.
  
  Natalie realised that she stuffed her foot into her mouth, "Uhh-well... I guess that makes sense. If we're not willing to fight them directly, it might be a bit hypocritical to assume you would piss them off just for us," she finished with a sigh, slumping into the chair, "I apologise."
  
  Lily nodded, accepting the synth's apology. She didn't approve of what they were doing in a similar way that she didn't approve of the degenerates in Paradise Hills. However, she wasn't about to wage a crusade against the slavers that were next door, much less the ones that were much further away. She'd support a group that wanted to do so, though.
  
  Honestly, it might actually come down to her waging war against Paradise Hills, but they weren't even a tenth of the threat that this highly advanced Institute was. Lily existed on a simple graph - if she detested what you did and you were of little threat to her, then she might stop you.
  
  Deacon nodded, "I won't say I wouldn't welcome someone doing that, but I definitely understand why you won't. Just the assistance you already have provided, plus what you said you would provide, even if it is in the shadows, is appreciated. What do you mean by seeing reason, though? Stop creating synths? I don't think they'll ever do that."
  
  Lily pursed her lips. "Zhat would be one option. I zhink zhey could accomplish almost all of zheir goals with sub-sapient robotics. But if zhey're set on producing people, zhen zhey should acknowledge synths are people and treat them accordingly." Although she wouldn't say it to these two, she didn't actually have a problem with a period of indentured servitude for AGIs or synths. It was pretty normal for an AGI where she came from to be required to work for the person or company that built them, usually about ten years, but it tended to vary depending on the costs of the AGI's hardware. You still had to pay them, though, in most circumstances. There had to be some sort of pay-off for building an AGI. Otherwise, nobody would do it except for the people who wanted AGI children.
  
  She had personally signed similar contracts back when she was a bio, agreeing to work for a clinic for a decade after she achieved her independence. Wasn't that pretty common? She had her soldiers sign a similar agreement, too.
  
  She shrugged, though, "It makes little difference. I'm not going to offer zhem any ideas because it serves my interests more if zhey have the minimum knowledge and interactions with me."
  
  They discussed a few other things, including Lily telling them about the safe house she had prepared for their group, which both of them appreciated. She told them the location and where she had hidden a key to the front door. It just was a three-bedroom house, renovated, without any kind of active defences or surveillance equipment. Beyond the fact that they might not trust such hardware that wasn't theirs, the point was to blend in.
  
  After that, she administered a number of treatments, including life extension and reflex enhancements, to both synth and humans. She still wasn't able to administer multiple treatments at once, but she had developed a type of pellet that she could inject into a patient's arm. It would dissolve at a set rate, periodically infecting the person with the subsequent treatment. With as many as Deacon ordered, she warned him that he would be feeling vaguely, but not seriously, ill for almost a week.
  
  She gave Natalie the treatments for free, partly because she owed the synth for both giving Lily inspiration through her genome, as well as the "synth part" that was inside her brain. That thing was the basis of the personal computers she had created and had tentatively put on the market, although she wasn't advertising them at all yet. Deacon got an eighty per cent discount. She might have given them to him for free, too, except they had annoyed her with their assumptions.
  
  Lily watched several drones laden with high-explosives kamikaze dive into the small building she had been noticing the zombie people emerge from in Baltimore. She was considering beginning using nuclear strikes because this was the sixth such bombing campaign without seeing any appreciable difference in the number of such people emerging from Baltimore.
  
  She wouldn't call the state of things a war precisely, but it wasn't far off either. Over a hundred suicide combatants emerged from there a week, and considering Baltimore was a notable death zone, she had just begun stationing some men and robots near the outskirts of the city. They'd be fed the location of anybody looking as though they were leaving the city, and they'd just drive up and shoot them from as far away as possible.
  
  It was clear that whoever was responsible had an implausible supply of people and explosives to send against her, to the point where Lily was debating whether or not they could be clones. She had stopped trying to get anywhere near the mindless and murderous people, but she was curious enough that she had modified a number of low-altitude drones to collect tissue samples after her men shot one of them. It'd be interesting if any of the genomes repeat.
  
  If they were a little bit smarter, then they would be a serious, serious threat. More so than the raiders, which had already given both Megaton and the highways she had regularly patrolled a wide berth.
  
  She asked the Brotherhood about any data they had about Baltimore, and Sarah Lyon's just said it was more trouble than it was worth and that she suspected there was some kind of fuckery going on there, that the few times their Paladins had entered it they had gotten swarmed and had to retreat. That wasn't helpful. What Lily wanted to know was anything about who or what was controlling them.
  
  What the hell had Lily ever done to them? Well, she'd fix their wagon, eventually.
  
  Curious, she decided to see if Dr House had some advice for her, "Dr House, what's the best way to build bunker-busting munitions?" The zombie-man that she had seen in some of the memories of the people, a middle-aged man in a lab coat looming over them, had to be based underground. Did Baltimore have a metro system below ground? If so, there might be hundreds or thousands of entrances to it!
  
  The answer was instantaneous, "From what I can tell, the state-of-the-art involved a high-mass missile using fast neutron backscatter technology in the tungsten nose cone to identify a void ahead of the penetrator in order to correctly time the detonation of a medium-yield nuclear explosive to achieve maximum damage to underground structures."
  
  "And how would you know the optimal time to trigger a detonation?" Lily asked curiously.
  
  The animated head of Dr House that was in the corner of my vision sort of shrugged, without having any shoulders animated, "How much do you know of geology and earthquake science?"
  
  "Almost nothing. Which might be kind of concerning considering 'ow many structures I build underground. I just over-engineer everything, zhough," Lily admitted.
  
  He nodded, "Me either. However, sometimes I have found that if sophistication is lacking, an overwhelming force can suffice."
  
  "If I start nuking Baltimore, many questions will be asked-"Lily was interrupted by her Muse sending her a priority alert.
  
  [WARNING: Thermal bloom consistent with ballistic missile launch detected.]
  
  There was an attached longitude and latitude that she quickly pulled up. It was in Nebraska. One of this world's equivalents to the Minuteman silos? It definitely looked like one was launching right now. It was still in its boost phase, but it was already starting to rotate to the east. It could be targeting her, or it could just be trying to achieve orbit in which case it would target pretty much anyone.
  
  It was too close for her to treat it as a joke, so she immediately triggered an alert that would cause a number of air-raid sirens in Megaton to start wailing, along with a quick, "Excuse me, Dr House. I'll talk to you later."
  
  After disconnecting with him, she called Alice and started speaking as soon as the girl answered, "Proceed immediately to at least floor B-15. Someone launched a ballistic missile, which might or might not be aimed at us. If it is aimed at us, you 'ave about five minutes to get to shelter."
  
  Alice gasped, "The gremlins are outside playing. I have to go get them first!"
  
  Lily stopped herself from yelling that she didn't care about them because she did care about them a little bit. Just not anywhere as much as she cared about Alice. Instead, she said firmly, " No. You proceed to safety immediately. Zhey have bodyguards; I'm notifying zhem to grab them and run back here or somewhere safe."
  
  She looked very conflicted but nodded, but then gasped again, "Wait, I have to get Sir Longinus!" With that, she disconnected.
  
  What the fuck, girl?! Lily hissed and called Sarah Lyons. The Elder didn't actually have one of her LilyPads yet, or perhaps he'd never get one. She answered after a couple of rings, "What's up, Doc?" Someone had been watching the Bugs Bunny cartoons that were in the Megaton Library, clearly.
  
  Madison Li had arranged a real-time communications channel, but it pre-dated her space program. It was a low-speed digital radio link that could be used for text messages and e-mail. As she was talking to Sarah, she sent a text message, flagged as highly urgent, with the same information.
  
  "A ballistic missile launch has been detected in Nebraska, it is turning east. I don't know if it is targeting DC; it's still in the boost phase. I should know if it is us within a hundred and eighty seconds," Lily said emotionlessly.
  
  "Well, fuck," the woman said and disconnected immediately.
  
  As the seconds ticked by, Lily wondered just how many nuclear bombs America had and didn't end up using in the Great War. She supposed it was a silly question when you could find mini-nukes in a janitor's closet in the game, but it was something she desperately wanted to know now.
  
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  Like it or lump it
  Lily didn't have all the data on the ICBM, but she did have a fair bit. She had some publicised data about the general specifications, propaganda basically, as well as the complete data on its first-stage booster, which was also used to loft satellites into orbit. It wasn't the best vehicle they had for such purposes, so she felt it was likely used due to political reasons. Likely, something along the lines of: "We can't shut down the assembly line; think of all the jobs and profit we will lose!" Fundamentally, there was no way a solid-stage rocket booster would be competitive with traditional rockets in a commercial venture. To say nothing about the REPCONN rockets, which were even better than that.
  
  Really, there was no way anything could compare to the specific impulse they supposedly had on the REPCONN rocket orbital system. She didn't know how it worked, but at first, she suspected antimatter because it was already being produced industrially. However, the publicly available information about REPCONN said they researched alternative fuels, including fission and fusion fuels. Maybe a fusion torch rocket, then, like her plasma drives, but much larger?
  
  REPCONN had to have been the contractor that lifted the giant space station to orbit in parts, as well as all of the equipment for their Moon base. It made her want to make a visit to their headquarters, which was near Las Vegas, someday.
  
  However, even the data on the first stage booster wasn't public, either, as everything in Pre-War America seemed to be confidential by default, but it was much less secret than the technical specifications on the Franklin-IV missile system. Why they named an ICBM after a notorious boozing womaniser, she didn't know. It didn't exactly have the same panache as the Minuteman of her previous world, but she thought that they were basically comparable systems. A Minuteman was ready in a minute, but Benjamin Franklin woke up at noon.
  
  The USA did publish some data about their nuclear deterrence, though. As propaganda and or threats to other nations, she suspected. Or both. And if it could be believed, then they had a global reach and enough carrying capacity to carry either ten warheads configured for MIRV or eight and a couple dozen re-entry penetration aid decoys.
  
  While the missile was still in its boost phase, Lily zoomed out on the surveillance feed and identified a few more silos. From her past military service, she knew that the traditional deployment structure of strategic missile batteries was in a field, with the command and control bunker nearby. The silos were completely underground, of course, with a mechanical door allowing the rocket to launch, and were intended to be able to survive "a near hit" of a one-hundred-kiloton-class weapon, but they weren't actually designed to survive direct hits at all.
  
  Some of the silos in the field were destroyed, but others survived and had clearly already launched their payloads as the reinforced cement silo doors were open and filled with sand and dirt that had blown in over the two hundred years. There were three more that looked like they might still be operational, though, and Lily carefully selected each of the sites on her targeting system.
  
  Perhaps the C2 bunker for these silos was destroyed before they launched their birds. In her past life, there was a secondary launch capability in the event this happened, a rocket would carry a UHF and very-low-frequency transmission in the event the President ordered a launch, and this system would initiate an automated launch if a silo's connection to its missile control launch centre was severed. That either did not exist here or, more likely, it was never utilised.
  
  She had launched about three hundred nuclear explosives into orbit, but frustratingly she had only just begun launching the second Casaba howitzer type as there were some issues regarding its fabrication and testing that she had only recently solved, so there were only about two dozen of those available, and none that were in an orbit that would help here all that much to intercept this launch. All of them were designed to interdict space assets, but that didn't mean that they couldn't deorbit and smash into ground targets with fair accuracy, too.
  
  After selecting the targets, she configured the deployment to have an identical time-on-target and selected three of her largest "regular nukes." This weapon deployment system required a number of cryptographic keys that only she possessed, and Lily felt that it was quite safe; however, just for "fun", she included an additional voiceprint analysis if she was targeting parts of the Earth. It wasn't really intended to add to her security because there were any number of ways to mimic her voiceprint, but it was just because she thought it would be cool.
  
  "The release of nuclear weapons has been authorised," Lily said formally, channelling the many times she watched Crimson Tide . This finalised the strike package, and the system automatically selected three of the nearest orbiting weapons, calculated a simultaneous TOT deorbit, and sent the arming codes to the devices. She had configured the devices for ground burst as she was dealing with a hardened structure. They wouldn't just slam into the target; they would light off their plasma drive shortly before impact and fly full speed into it at 10Gs of acceleration.
  
  Once one of her nuclear devices was "armed," it was essentially a nuclear explosion in a bottle, and Lily didn't feel comfortable having it around. Although she didn't include any of the anti-tampering technology Mass Fusion did, she still felt it was possible that some quirk could happen and the quantum force field could, even momentarily, be disrupted by some factor, perhaps an especially strong solar flare. If that happened, the weapons would explode. Or rather, the weapons had already exploded right now, and such an eventuality would cause the explosion to be released.
  
  As such, any "abort" of these types of strike missions was limited. If she triggered an abort in time, the weapons could change targets and drop into the ocean or other places nobody cared about, like Australia. But past a certain point, well, it was going to happen. Realistically, nuclear weapons systems in her past life had no possible way to perform an abort after launch in the first place, though. That capability would be asking the enemy to hack your missiles, as apparently Dr House did with a majority of PLA Rocket Forces strikes in and around New Vegas, as he had told, or rather bragged to her. She was confident in her...
  
  She paused her train of thought and considered, 'Wait a second!' She wanted to facepalm. He was just on the phone. She called him back, and he answered on the first ring.
  
  "Can you hack the abort codes, if they exist, on a Franklin-IV ICBM? One was launched from a Nevada field, target presently unknown," Lily told him immediately, although it had been about seventy seconds already, and the odds that Washington D.C. was the target was shrinking in confidence levels, with her Muse telling her it was only a 27% probability now. The ICBM was boosting too much to need to hit us, which was the factor.
  
  That didn't mean it still couldn't, but it would be an especially weird acute parabola if it did. You didn't lob rockets that way because it increased the time that the enemy had to deal with it. A more modest altitude for a short-range target would decrease the time they had to intercept.
  
  One thing Lily liked about Dr House was he didn't care about pleasantries, even generally, but especially when rockets were firing, "No. Only certain US nuclear systems had abort codes. SLBMs launched from subs being almost the only ones because the politicians had concerns about a rogue Captain starting World War Three. I see the launch now that it is past a hundred kilometres; odds are, it isn't targeting you."
  
  Lily nodded, or rather had her digital avatar nod and said, "Yes, I agree. Only twenty per cent now, although it could be releasing its second stage into orbit to come around at me from a weird angle." That sounded stupid to her, though. If they did even two-thirds of an orbit, she would have them destroyed, but whoever launched the missiles might not know that. Already, she had weapons changing orbits to maximise coverage to intercept in the mid-course any weapons targeting DC.
  
  "Unlikely," was all Dr House said. She thought to say something but then noticed that it was going to be impossible for the launch to reach orbit anyway. The altitude was fine, but there wasn't enough horizontal velocity to stay up.
  
  Lily hummed and mused as she watched the first stage of the missile perform a main engine cut-off and separation after a couple more minutes, "Abort codes on SLBMs seem a bit stupide, no? Isn't zhe whole idea to park your sub next to your enemy's coast and launch so zhat zhey only get a couple of minutes' notice? Zhere is no way the National Command Authority could notice zhe unauthorised launch, perform whatever authentication necessary to stop it and transmit it in time. Moreover, I doubt such an action would stop an enemy from retaliating, either." It would be enough time if the process was AI controlled and automated, though, she supposed.
  
  Dr House's tone was cold and sarcastically amused, "Oh? Were the politicians of your universe especially intelligent, then?"
  
  She considered that while watching the second stage accelerate for several more minutes and then observed the second stage of the weapon disgorge a couple of dozen objects, individual re-entry vehicles and decoys, she supposed. He had a point, too. The fact that she thought the people running governments were stupid was why she ran away from all that.
  
  The decoys were of poor quality, inflatable Mylar, she guessed, or whatever brand name the local equivalent was called. They might be a comparable radar cross-section to the actual warheads, but they inflated after they were deployed. Soon after, to be sure, but Lily's radar systems saw it happen and had already identified the actual warheads amongst the chaff.
  
  "Well, kind of. But only because zhere weren't really any unintelligent people left anymore. Not only did the Apocalypse kind of filter zhem out, but we discovered the genetic factors for low intelligence and developmental disorders long ago and removed zhem in vitro from following generations. 'owever, I take your point because many of zhem were not smart. Zhe nuance between intelligence and smarts is completely different," Lily finally told him as she watched the individual re-entry vehicles not bothering to decelerate much. There was likely no way they could make a retrorocket burn in order to fall down upon her at this point.
  
  They clearly weren't targeting D.C., and they were already starting to decelerate slightly. Her surveillance system had a slowly shrinking circle of probable landing sites that still covered most of Europe. Why was someone nuking Europe?
  
  It wasn't a Great Circle shortest path to Europe either though, that would have gone over Newfoundland and the Labrador Sea, coming at continental Europe from the northwest. They detoured to the south enough that it was plausible the Eastern seaboard was the target at first.
  
  She wondered why they were taking a longer route, but it could be any reason, really, and probably one that wasn't relevant anymore with none of the nations still existing. Perhaps the programming of the missile expected heavier anti-ballistic missile coverage from the near-polar approaches, she just didn't know, nor did she care.
  
  Dr House looked intrigued, "So there is a genetic component to general cognitive ability after all?"
  
  Frowning, Lily said as she queued up a call to Sarah Lyons and, for the moment, halted the air raid sirens in Megaton, "Yes, but probably not in zhe way you zhink. Zhere isn't a detectable statistical difference in the cognitive ability of baseline humans regardless of where their phenotype originated from."
  
  He snorted and shook his head, "That doesn't surprise me, and it wasn't what I was asking about. I meant is there is a genetic component to people at the tail-end of the distribution, the very, very intelligent or very, very unintelligent."
  
  Oh. Lily was a bit uncharitable to suspect he was being casually racist, then. That's what she thought, considering his background, but she didn't feel like she had the moral standing to criticise him about it, though, as she had a long history of casual racism against bios in general. She had gotten quite a lot better now that she was one herself again, at least mostly.
  
  Besides, when a person could change bodies like a set of clothes, disparaging one type of them wasn't the same as disparaging something they couldn't ever change about themselves. At least, that was what she told herself.
  
  "Almost always in zhe latter case, but as far as the very gifted are concerned it is a lot more a matter of probabilities, but partly we zhink. Zhere isn't a strict recessive arrangement to generate a genius, zhough. Your parents could 'ave many children and not reproduce your fluke brilliance."
  
  He snorted when she mentioned his parents, "Of that, I already knew. My parents certainly couldn't have done any worse with my brother," he said very dryly.
  
  She continued, "We hadn't precisely solved zhat issue, even some AGIs were smarter than others. Zhere were some biomorphs that were designed to have similar processing power as some computer-based synths, but zhat is just speed-intelligence, not general cognition. Genius is much more a factor of neural network formation, we zhought, and zhat is still an emergent property."
  
  Although she found the potential sibling drama vaguely interesting, Lily told him that she was muting him for a moment but didn't hang up this time, just put him on what effectively was hold. Calling Sarah back, she answered right away and said, "Hey, Doc. I have my Dad and Scribe Rothchild with me; I assume you have more info now?"
  
  "Yes, zhe launch isn't targeting us," Lily shifted the screen Sarah Lyons was seeing from her face to a graphical representation of the launch, played back at a much higher speed for brevity's sake.
  
  Sarah Lyons seemed to sigh with relief and watched the replay for a moment before asking, "Well, that's something. Do you know the target? Is this output real-time now?"
  
  "Not precisely, yet, but continental Europe, for sure. Zhe likely CEP spans France to zhe Donbas, with Spain or Italy being slightly more likely," Lily informed them, "And yes, zhis is real-time now. I'll keep broadcasting zhis on zhis call on until zhese re-entry sleds strike zheir targets."
  
  Really, her projections for the destination of each of the warheads were basically guesses. However, engineering and physics placed certain hard limits on where they could go, so they were educated guesses. She knew roughly how much volume each re-entry vehicle was after they separated from the second stage, and she had a guess on how much of that volume would be dedicated to the explosive.
  
  Knowing this that gave her an upper bound to the amount of area that could be dedicated to thrusters and fuel, which meant that the number of manoeuvres each vehicle could make were limited in certain bounds based on its current orbital elements and the type of thrusters it had, which were likely a traditional and reliable hypergolic propellant-based RCS system.
  
  Elder Lyons asked, his face appearing in frame, "Do you know or suspect who or what might be responsible?"
  
  "Well, unless zhis is a fluke, or launch codes for strategic nuclear missiles are just kept laying around, it could only be a limited number of people or organisations. But, no, I don't presently 'ave any zheories," Lily told him. Privately, she was suspecting good ole President Eden, but she didn't have any real basis yet for that theory. She just knew the genocidal AI was a genocidal AI, and launching nukes was something a genocidal AI might do.
  
  However... she could work backwards from that assumption to see if she could find anything to corroborate her guess. A ding told her that her retaliation hit the three possibly operable silos still around Nebraska. She rewound the surveillance to see the moment of the explosion. She had a formula for estimating the yield of a nuclear explosive on the size of the mushroom cloud, but it assumed an airburst. But, she suspected that each device gave about what she was expecting, which was about one megaton, judging from the amount of ejecta and hints of a crater after several minutes.
  
  That would be a pretty total conversion of the fuel to energy, which probably made the devices rather ecologically friendly. There was probably a lot of prompt radiation but minimal lasting radiological fallout. Not very much uranium was used for this yield, either. She had been taking deliveries of the fuel rods from the Mechanist's reactor to use as fuel for these weapons.
  
  She nodded; it was good to see something working as designed. She had only had a test detonation underwater and got a pretty giant geyser, even with the explosive a hundred metres down. She didn't want to do that any more than she had to because the ocean biome was probably one of the few ones that still was somewhat healthy, and she probably killed all the fish in twenty kilometres and deafened whales out to two hundred.
  
  A number of people were calling her, so she answered the two most important, which were Submajor Wilson and the Apprentice. Her multitasking capability had reached a point where she could carry on two conversations at once if she focused on it.
  
  "Commander, do you have an update?" asked Submajor Wilson formally. Lily had sent him a text with the details about a possible missile launch but had yet to speak with him.
  
  Alice asked excitedly, "The sirens stopped going. Are we going to be blown up? Nick and Isis are here with me now." That surprised her, the two gremlins must have been playing just outside the hospital, she had thought their guard would have shifted to one of the secondary bomb shelters she had dug in various spots around Megaton. They weren't as safe, but you'd likely survive an air burst, but definitely not a ground penetrating bunker buster.
  
  "Target is not us, it is Europe, no idea why. Will send you updates as I get them," her digital avatar told the Submajor, then disconnected.
  
  At the same time, Lily's other digital avatar frowned at Alice, "No. The missile will hit Europe somewhere. Thankfully. Most of the population of the city would be incinerated if so, including most of Nick and Isis' friends at school."
  
  "Oh... yeah, you're right. I suppose I shouldn't be so excited. Sorry, Mistress," Alice said, chagrined. Lily's avatar nodded at her. Think of all that effort wasted if they were all nuked to cinders. She paused and then asked, "Does this mean I can come back upstairs?"
  
  Lily shook her head firmly, "No. Wait at least an hour. I have to go; I'll talk to you in a bit." With that, she disconnected from that call as well.
  
  She just had to wait now, as even if you were going hypersonic in a suborbital trajectory, it would still take about fifteen more minutes for it to impact their targets.
  
  She took a few questions from the Brotherhood while she waited until she noticed that the targets had begun a brief retrorocket burn to decelerate and were slightly spreading out. Checking her system indicated Italy was the likely target, specifically high probability being Sicily, which was mostly an uninhabited island these days.
  
  Wait a minute! She had her first stage aircraft launch the probes into a southeasterly direction into the Mediterranean. She quickly pulled up her historical launches over the past month and sighed. The second-stage vehicles were not stealthy when they were reaching orbit, and sure enough, it appeared that it could have appeared like they had been launched from the east side of Sicily, from Catania or Syracuse, perhaps.
  
  Well, that tore it. That meant that this was retaliation or an attempt to stop further space launches. The only way those launches could be observed was from space, from a number of look-down infrared/radar satellites that existed. Only American satellites were still in orbit, no other party was spared. Ergo, it had to be someone with access to American satellites but who did not know her actual location.
  
  The Enclave, or rather President Eden itself, then. She was confident at three nines level that the stupid fucking computer was behind it. That also meant that she would have to break her promise with Dr House. The computer had to have used a communications satellite to broadcast the launch to that site in Nebraska. No way the Enclave drove out there, themselves.
  
  That means if she didn't respond by nuking Raven Rock until the Mountain collapsed in on them, she would have to systematically dismantle every satellite in low-earth orbit that wasn't hers. How could she make it up to Dr House? She had promised not to deorbit more satellites than "necessary", but it was strictly speaking a necessity to remove them all now.
  
  It was a survival imperative that the fucking chatbot pretending to be the President was cut off from further communication that wasn't in LOS of Raven Rock. She had no idea how many similar automated systems existed around the country. Maybe the next one wouldn't be something she could intercept because it wouldn't be a missile. She didn't have the imagination to guess the number of crazy ways Pre-War America devised to blow things up.
  
  Fighting the Enclave wasn't really an option either. From what Grace and Miller told her there were about as many Enclave people, including their non-combatants, as there were in the Brotherhood. It would be an existential engagement that she might have to use nukes to be sure to win, even assuming the Brotherhood went all in on the conflict too. Their tech wasn't as good as the Enclave's, for example.
  
  It was one thing to nuke Nebraska with nobody living within one hundred kilometres of that site and nobody seeing what happened anyway. However, if she just started dropping nukes on people nearby, she could see her relationship with the Brotherhood souring. They had a lot of weird beliefs that they were pointedly ignoring when dealing with her, but if she reminded them that she had an equivalent ability that destroyed the world once already, she would alienate them and might even create resurgent Outcast types.
  
  She pulled up Dr House's call and told him in broad strokes what happened as she watched Syracuse and Catalina take two nukes apiece. Interestingly and confusingly, President Eden also nuked Malta for some reason, which was a completely uninhabited island, now. The rest of the ordinance landed in a couple of airports.
  
  There weren't a lot of people living in Sicily, but there were still some. There were fewer now, though. Oh, well. It wasn't like she nuked them herself.
  
  Most "regular" people would feel guilty at being "indirectly" responsible, but she didn't feel that way in the slightest. People were responsible for their own actions, and she wasn't about to take upon herself any guilt, which should all belong to that stupid computer. She did feel it was a shame, though, wasteful and unnecessary.
  
  "That is unfortunate," was all Dr House said for a moment before he nodded, "Well. I'm certain I have sole control of the PERSEPHONE station. I will have their drones collect the most interesting and useful space vehicles right away. They should be all collected at the station within a week, and you can deorbit the rest. I'll need you to allow me more generalised access to your constellation, though, if I am not able to relay through a number of geostationary satellites anymore to control the station. It sounds like you should prioritise those geostationary comms sats if you intend to isolate the VAX unit." He even then forwarded a file with the orbital elements of the "interesting" satellites listed.
  
  Lily expected more pushback from him. "I also really need that quantum processor fabrication technology as soon as possible," she told him, internally slightly hesitant. It wasn't a good negotiation position to tell the other party you really needed something they had quickly. She wasn't good at Social skill checks, but she at least knew that much.
  
  Dr House nodded, "I've looked at what you're willing to trade. I want most of it, but I especially want to hire you to conduct a similar clone and brain transplantation surgery as you described conducting for those interesting people trapped in Braun's fantasy land. I also want the method you used for distributed processing on the Protectron-derivatives, the full copy of your quantum OS including source codes for all libraries and microkernel, your assistance in building a fusion power station on the Strip, in secret, a commitment not to assist the NCR to do the same for five years, and the design for your orbital system, including the fabrication method for micro-fusion cells."
  
  Lily just blinked at him, "Uh. Zhat is too much. Way, way too much just for your quantum processors."
  
  "Of course. I want to prioritise the brain transplant and fusion power station," he said simply, "The rest... well, I am sure I have other things to trade, as well. RobCo was very diversified towards the end, when I was staring at the near-certainty of global nuclear war, well, sometimes I had to be even shrewder than usual."
  
  Lily frowned. She did not want to go to Vegas. Well, she did want to. But not anytime soon. "How about I train someone to do the surgery and send them?"
  
  " No. Completely unacceptable. I'm sorry, but I don't precisely trust anyone that much. You could send a sacrificial pawn to murder me," he said firmly.
  
  She chuckled, "Zhen why would you trust moi?"
  
  "Because it is clear you intend to live a very long time, too. And if you kill me during surgery, I assure you that you won't survive it. Conversely, if I kill you, I am sure you would have some automated system drop rocks on the Strip for the next fifty years," he said, completely calmly. He must not have eyes on Nebraska, otherwise he would know she didn't need to use kinetic bombardment.
  
  Lily grinned, feeling pleased for some reason she couldn't determine. On the surface, his precautions seemed prudent, but it seemed like he might be trying to save face. If she was the one responsible for cloning and providing his new body, she could install a million different time bombs that he was unlikely to be able to detect, even if he sequenced his new body's genome, if she really wanted to do him harm. That would be going against her general principles, though.
  
  She sent a text message to Sarah Lyons, telling her that based on the targets, she thought she knew who fired the missile, but she needed some time to investigate things and would call her back later. "Zhat is rational. 'owever, choose something else. I don't want to wait until you build a runway in secret. I need zhe processors as soon as possible. Plus, I 'aven't even yet built an aircraft zhat can carry passengers or cargo."
  
  "Don't worry. I am absolutely certain I have enough useful information and utility in the future to trust you will not defect in this game iteration, as you would lose the possibility of playing future games with me," he said, surprising her by succinctly summarising her own approach to life.
  
  Life was a series of iterative cooperative, sometimes competitive games, in the game theory sense. It didn't matter so much that you won every single one unless it was a life-or-death game. Some of them were zero-sum, but most were not. Having fellow players for the next iteration of games was as important as how you did in this particular game. Even if the game you were in was a competitive zero-sum game, the next one might not be.
  
  And cooperation was something that was more than the sum of its parts. The beneficial output of a cooperative game was more than simply the collected inputs added together. It was even occasionally multiplicative. As someone who intended to live a very long time, she would rarely consider defecting in the prisoner's dilemma sense, and the only way she would ever consider it was if she could both eliminate the other party and prevent anyone from finding out she ever had done so.
  
  Any other choice reduced her trustworthiness, and therefore, her performance in further game iterations, even games with different people, would be impacted. In other words, if someone didn't trust her because she betrayed the last guy, they wouldn't cooperate. It was a losing proposition for the very long-lived. Only the mentally ill or mayfly flat bios who lived in the moment and didn't expect to survive past their allotted four score and ten years, would generally consider betraying people consistently.
  
  This was one of the most important things she was trying to teach her Apprentice, and she felt that Alice had picked up on it when she sat the girl down and laid out how long Alice would likely live if she didn't do something stupid to get herself killed.
  
  Right as she was about to agree, her Muse interrupted her again.
  
  [Thermal bloom consistent with ballistic missile launch detected.]
  
  Fucking again?! She pulled up the map, expecting some missile field in Wyoming but was surprised when it was just east of Sicily, in the Med. It was very near Syracuse, which was still smouldering. Well, you know what they said: Never bet against a Sicilian when death was on the line, so it wasn't surprising they had some sort of automated retaliation set up. It just was very unfortunate she lived in the former capital of America, as that would be a good target, but at least she thought she could intercept this one.
  
  Was it a sub? No, it was very shallow, and even her inferior optics would have detected a sub. A submerged ICBM silo, then. That was an interesting idea she had never thought of before. Two were launched, but one exploded in a large ball of fire as soon as it cleared the waves.
  
  The second started its burn, reaching several thousand metres, but well before reaching max-Q, something went wrong. It was fairly close to Syracuse, which was currently experiencing some unforecast turbulence on account of the pyrocumulus cloud, so perhaps that was the cause, or it could have been any number of mechanical failures. But the missile veered off course.
  
  Unfortunately for Sicily, there was no range safety officer to initiate an abort of the launch there, so the rocket started spinning end over end, very dramatically, and eventually crashed almost directly into the new crater in Syracuse, flying straight through the still-burning mushroom cloud to do so.
  
  Thankfully for the survivors in the area of Syracuse, if there were any, whatever payload that missile carried was not fail-fused. There was no second giant nuclear explosion, but there was probably a considerable conventional one depending on how much fuel the rockets had left, but her sensors couldn't penetrate the mushroom cloud still hanging over the remains of the ancient city. Talk about adding insult to injury.
  
  This highlighted why President Eden's days had to be numbered. Not only could he, perhaps, do something terrible to her, but she lived in DC! The obvious target for an automated revenge system if their computers thought America was nuking them. If he kept doing terrible things to other places... well, who knew how many automated retaliation systems there were? Thankfully the Italians couldn't build an ICBM that lasted two hundred years.
  
  Lily shook her head and mentally grabbed her avatar on Dr House's call, "Okay. I accept. Your quantum processor fabrication method, and it 'as to be an industrial one in exchange for me coming to New Vegas, cloning a replacement body to your specifications and performing a brain transplant operation on you, and assistance in building a similar power station and not assisting NCR in any way on similar power technology for at least zhree years." That was as much as she was willing to agree to. She wasn't even willing to guarantee secrecy; that would be up to him.
  
  "Excellent. I will accelerate the already in place work to pave a runway. You said your aircraft need at least fifteen hundred metres, yes? Will this extend to the version that carry passengers, as well?" he asked, brightly.
  
  Fifteen hundred metres was conservative, assuming unfavourable wind conditions and bad weather, including a slippery or icy runway where breaking action using tires, was less effective. She was pretty confident in designing an aircraft that could carry passengers to land in that much space, or less.
  
  She nodded, "Yes, zhat should be enough." After that, they traded files. She sent him both the blueprints and engineering data she got from Dr Madison Li, as well as the real-life data from her mostly finished project. He sent her the complete blueprints, engineering data and source code for a machine that could rapidly assemble quantum processors.
  
  She looked at it briefly and nodded. It didn't look like she would have trouble building this. One interesting part was that the production methodology required microgravity to get proper crystalisation of the computational matrix, and it used levitation fields to simulate this.
  
  She hadn't considered that solution because the optical quantum processors from her past world also required microgravity to be produced, but she already tested levitation fields and found them insufficient. If you were in one you wouldn't notice, but they oscillated at several hundred thousand hertz. So for a very little time gravity was effecting you, which was enough to totally wreck the carbon hyper-matrix. Even the amount of gravity in low earth orbit would be enough to ruin the process, so she was going to wait until she had her own space station, even if it was a robotic one, in geostationary orbit before trying to produce them again.
  
  Were these levitation devices different from the ones she had, or was this type of quantum processor just much more robust? She didn't know, but it would be fascinating to find out! Dr House's quantum processors seemed significantly more efficient than the optical versions she remembered for the same amount of volume, but they massed more because they had very high metal content, including high rare earth content. That made them "more expensive" to make than something that was just carbon, though, too.
  
  Shaking her head, she said, "Zhank you, Dr House. I'll work on getting a suitable aircraft when I am no longer in mortal peril."
  
  It took most of the rest of the morning to get Megaton calmed down. But Alice was in a chipper mood all day. When Lily asked about it, she told her, "Well, you see. It's both nice to have someone care about me enough that they'd protect me from a nuclear bomb, and the feeling of safety that comes with the realisation that even if the entire city was blown up I, and my brother and sister, would likely survive it."
  
  Lily, acting with lightning speed, used a couple of quick console commands on her computer to halt the blush response, including the releasing of small amounts of vasoconstrictors from her installed cybernetic personal pharmacopoeia, which took most of the area her liver used to until she replaced that horrid thing last month, along with both kidneys. She just nodded, hand covering her mouth and said, "I see. Well! I have to go talk to some bankers!"
  
  With that, Lily hurried off, leaving Alice to her own devices. She had to find Miller, so she figured Grace would be a good place to start. Lily didn't exactly track everyone all the time. But her systems did recognise people in her building, and as they walked through it and that basically amounted to the same thing. She queried the database, hoping to see when Grace left this morning but found out she was still here, in Lily's private boudoir.
  
  Lily blinked. She had left the woman sleeping in her bed to go downstairs and work on a few projects as well as bomb Baltimore. It was already close to ten in the morning. Could she still be sleeping? It was true that she kept Lily awake most of the night, but.
  
  Lily frowned, starting to feel slight guilt. It was an unusual emotion, as she only felt it when she actually did, or in this case, obviously neglected to do something important. She didn't feel guilty about the couple hundred of people living in a settlement in Syracuse, because she didn't have anything to do with the decision to bomb it. However, she was the reason why Grace might have been incinerated in her sleep if that launch had been targetting Megaton.
  
  Grace likely couldn't hear the air raid sirens due to the fact that Lily's private apartment was almost completely soundproof. It was true that the reason she designed the room that way was Grace herself, so it might have been poetically ironic if that was a major contributing factor to the woman's death, but Lily still felt bad. She should have checked with Grace after she was sure Alice was safe.
  
  Lily had assumed the woman got up and left a few hours ago. Walking into her private apartment, Lily could see that she was awake now and in the shower. Well, no need to rush her that much, but Lily did need to speak to Miller before her meeting with Sarah Lyons.
  
  The statuesque Amazon left the shower, and Lily admired her body. It was going to be something of a shame when she released her next longevity treatment, which was the seventh generation. It would include a biological process that eliminated scars but on organs and, of course, the skin as well. Grace had a number of scars, and privately Lily thought they were quite fetching.
  
  Before the woman got too amorous, Lily explained what had happened this morning.
  
  "What?! Fuck! I need to get dressed and get back," she said, glancing around for her clothes, "Where's my panties?" she asked aloud, searching.
  
  Lily used her impressive memory and pointed in the opposite direction of where she was searching, "You threw zhem zhat direction last night, confidently stating you would never need zhem again. Also, I need to speak to Miller, too. I'm pretty sure it was President Eden zhat did zhis."
  
  Grace blanched but then turned thoughtful, "Yeah, maybe. But why Europe?"
  
  "I'd rather not repeat myself," Lily said mildly. She knew that Grace was, while putatively, an NCO, in actuality, she was Miller's number two or possibly three. She'd be in the meeting with Miller too, or he would tell her everything right after.
  
  Grace nodded, "Okay. He'd probably be at the bank; he'd have evacuated everyone into the basement levels you built for us. Do you think that would have provided protection?"
  
  Lily hummed, "Some, to be sure." But probably not enough if all eight nukes were configured for groundburst and struck downtown Megaton.
  
  Grace nodded, surprisingly quick to don all of her clothes, even still slightly damp, "Alright, let's go,"
  
  Her discussion with Miller went fairly well, but she had to really work to convince him to come with her to meet the Brotherhood.
  
  She thought she was only going to meet Sarah Lyons, as she had as of yet refused to go to the Brotherhood's seat of power in the Pentagon. She realised that was impolite and somewhat untrusting, so she never insisted on Elder Lyons ever being part of the meetings she requested. He was equivalent to her, in the sense that he was what amounted to a Head of State as well.
  
  In this case, Sarah asked for a compromise, and the meeting was held at the Brotherhood enclave in Megaton, whose rooftop helipad was finally finished being constructed. It was still a bit dangerous for her if they ever decided to betray her as she did not restrict what or how many weapons they could bring into the city. The Submajor wasn't enthusiastic about the idea, either, but she felt it was an acceptable compromise since both the Elder and the Head Scribe were going to be attending, also.
  
  Most of her security detachment waited outside, but she brought the Submajor and one trooper inside with her, along with Miller, who was in his own set of Enclave-issued Advanced Power Armour, which brought more stares than anything else. The Submajor still presently had a T-60 derivative that was standard issue; she hadn't yet got around to designing a mass-producible set of armour similar to the one she or the Apprentice had. Each was a one-of-a-kind handmade product.
  
  Sarah Lyons stared at him as they all entered the conference room and asked hopefully, "You looted that from an Enclave patrol, right?"
  
  Miller considered his response before saying, his voice distorted by the Armour's external speakers, "Not precisely." Then he realised that he was the only one wearing a helmet and quickly removed his, holding it under his arm like it was a garrison cap. His face surprised those present, not because they didn't recognise him but because they did.
  
  "This is my personal friend Captain Miller. You know him as Mr Miller, the chief executive of zhe Megaton Bank," Lily said mildly. Lily expected that the name of the bank would change as they were already planning to build a branch in Rivet City, too. "He is away without proper leave from President Eden's infantry forces and 'as been for almost ten years."
  
  They all relaxed when they realised he was a deserter. Sarah Lyons nodded, "Ohhh... that makes a lot more sense now. Especially why your bank has so much power armour and advanced equipment for 'security.' Did your entire platoon or company desert at the same time?"
  
  Miller winced a bit at the word 'desert' but nodded, "Yes. My father was a rival with the Enclave military commander, and..." with that, he gave a brief summary of events.
  
  Elder Lyons and Sarah Lyons looked interested and slightly sympathetic, but the Head Scribe looked very interested and commented, "We've had a few Enclave deserters here and there join us in the past, but never an officer."
  
  Lily interrupted him before he started interrogating Miller about things of interest and said, "He is 'ere because he can provide some useful information and insight into how we may respond to this nuclear launch situation."
  
  That caused them to blink again before Sarah Lyons asked, "Wait, are you saying the Enclave is responsible? Your old CO nuked Italy?" she asked, totally flabbergasted and confused.
  
  Instead of conducting this meeting standing up, Lily held up a hand, and everyone paused in order to sit around a large table. The chairs were quite large, so she felt like a toddler sitting in a grown-up's chair, as they were designed for people using Power Armour. Still, they put a cushion on that was pretty comfortable, even if her feet didn't quite reach the floor.
  
  "I'm not sure zhe Enclave even knows what happened, not even Colonel Autumn. But President Eden is definitely responsible; I have confirmed this both by logical inference as well as an archived transmission my orbital satellites noticed from a Satellite relay station to the southwest just before zhe launch," Lily told them all. She was already confident Eden was responsible, and using that, she backtracked on how he could have done it. Her constellation listened to most frequency bands, and she had enough storage to store it all. The transmission was encrypted, but the timing was telling.
  
  Elder Lyons now asked, "Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Logically, these orders would be passed through his military commander, this Colonel Autumn."
  
  "Yes, if President Eden was a real person, zhat would make sense. But he is not," Lily said, firmly. She noticed that the conference room had one of her large two-hundred-centimetre displays and pointed to it, "Would you allow me to use your display?" It wasn't surprising that the Brotherhood, who were used to a certain level of technology already, were her best customers.
  
  The Head Scribe nodded, "Certainly. Honestly, I'm surprised you're not able to override its privacy settings."
  
  Lily frowned at him, "I don't actually include any backdoors on any of the products I sell." It was true, too. Although most of them utilised her Mesh network, she could still gather, passively, a lot of information about the locations of people using them, though, but she didn't have any backdoor access to even the e-readers she sold.
  
  Only the devices she made and issued, like the e-readers in the public libraries or schools and the LilyPads issued to citizens, and her troops even included automatic over-the-air updates. As for the rest? The operator had to approve each update.
  
  He realised he had offended her, "I don't mean to offend. I'm a professional paranoid about third-party sourced pieces of technology." Then he used one of her LilyPad devices to adjust the settings of the display, "These are becoming quite popular too."
  
  She nodded. She originally designed them for use in the hospital as a self-service check-in kiosk and a way to see when a patient's number was called. She had been automating as much of the menial labour as possible, and sometimes, she forgot that not everyone could play a film back in their brains as she or the Apprentice could.
  
  The Elder carefully avoided interrupting her until her presentation started, despite wanting to interject to ask what she meant by Eden not being a real person.
  
  The display came to life, showing a waveform and playing one of Eden's speeches from his radio show, "I'm sure you've realised that Eden seems, well, demented, right? I'm sure everyone realises I grew up in the Pre-War period, right?" Everyone nodded, "Everything he says is completely ridiculous, even for the insane Presidents we had back then."
  
  The volume of Eden's speech was low so that they could talk over it. Rothchild said reasonably, "We just assumed it was all propaganda and made up? If he isn't a 'real person', then what is he?" He asked the question that the Elder was itching to ask, so the once older man settled down.
  
  "An artificial intelligence, specifically a Pre-War VAX unit that was installed in a continuity of government site near DC," Lily said, pointing to the display, "Beyond the fact that his stories sound like an amalgamation of all the myths of former Presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln, his voice..."
  
  The waveform shifted to a full spectrgram, "Zhere are tell-tale signs zhat zhis voice is electronically generated. 'ere, look. I 'ave a similar system zhat handles non-priority voice calls for me." The spectrogram of Eden's voice shifted to a split screen, "On the left zhis is my real voice, on the right zhis is zhe fake. This is what they sound like."
  
  They listened to them; Sarah Lyons said, "Sounds identical."
  
  Lily nodded and then shifted the 'fake' side to the right to make three columns, "See? Zhis left side is Eden, zhis right side is zhe fake me, with the real me on the far end. See the similarities, not in the sound, but in zhe spectrogram?"
  
  Scribe Rothchild hummed and nodded, "Yes, I see what you're trying to say. But perhaps the voice is just digitally post-processed?"
  
  Lily shook her head, "No. I know for sure Eden is an AI. Nobody but Colonel Autumn and before him Autumn's father have ever met him. Miller can confirm this."
  
  Miller spent several minutes confirming this and mentioning how there was not even a single Enclave soldier that had ever served as a personal protection team for the President and how he was as surprised as they were, but Lily had convinced them.
  
  Lily then spent some time explaining why Sicily was a target for the nuke.
  
  "Okay, I believe you. I can see why, if this computer had access to Pre-War satellites, it could have thought it was retaliating against whoever was responsible for launching your new system if you launched them east into the Med," the Elder said, but tilted his head to the side confusedly, "But this just makes it worse, if the Enclave is run by some psychopathic computer system."
  
  Miller sat up straighter, "I think this is why she asked me to attend. It's because it isn't. I think she was concerned you might start an immediate war with the Enclave when she told you they were the ones that were using nukes, again."
  
  Everyone on the Brotherhood's side nodded, except Rothchild, who just sighed, "If we could get that damn robot working..." he murmured to himself before being shushed by Sarah Lyons.
  
  "Yes, that would be the only response that would be rational. In fact, that it's a computer doing it makes me all the more firm in that decision," the Elder said severely.
  
  Miller shook his head, "Eden doesn't really control the Enclave, though. I may have a lot of personal issues with the Colonel, but he isn't a stupid man, and he is very ambitious. Colonel Autumn is the one in charge, and always has been since his father died. Knowing what I know now, I believe the only reason Colonel Autumn allows Eden to play President is that there are a number of automated production facilities that he isn't sure would work without the mainframe, which is what Eden apparently is, operating. We had a lot of good scientists, so perhaps they could get them running again... eventually."
  
  Lily nodded, "Yes, precisely. Some level of conflict is unavoidable now, but we just 'ave to either isolate or destroy the AI. I'm taking steps to do that now by destroying all of the Pre-War comms satellites still in orbit."
  
  Originally, her plan to deal with the Enclave was to use her Chinese stealth armour to sneak into Raven Rock, possibly asking Miller for assistance and subduing Colonel Autumn. Then she intended to scan his memories, scoop out his brain and install a computer that would puppet his body like a marionette.
  
  Puppet-Autumn would then have brought Captain Miller back into the fold, made him his second-in-command and then conveniently died sometime later. But she didn't believe Miller ever wanted to return to the Enclave, to begin with, plus it would be such a pain in the ass to conduct a solo mission these days. She sighed internally, 'You take over one city or country, and your life becomes so much more limited.'
  
  "You don't think this Colonel Autumn would prosecute a full conflict and might be open to negotiations?" the Elder asked distastefully.
  
  "Publically, no. Privately, possibly. I zhink privately he would be very appreciative zhat we pulled Eden's fangs, even if all we can do is isolate him from any former Pre-War computer system. I zhink he would be, at least, open to a détente. We can't allow a psychopathic and possibly genocidal computer continued access to nuclear weapons or their delivery systems, and I can't track zhem all down," Lily said firmly, pointing to the display which showed a playback of the failed Italian ICBM launch, "Zhis was a failed launch of two European ICBMs after zhe detonations in Sicily and Malta. I am confident it was an automated retaliation system. Zhankfully, zhis launch failed. I don't know its target, but you live in the Pentagon. It is probably zhe first target for any automated revenge systems. It isn't just Eden blowing us all up zhat we 'ave to worry about, but him triggering some retaliation by a as yet quiescent Pre-War system by recklessly lobbing nukes around."
  
  Sarah Lyons said what was on everyone's mind, "Fuck."
  
  The Elder nodded, "Quite. Yes. I think we're all agreed, then. We'll have to conduct limited operations against the Enclave, immediately. Targets will be manned or unmanned satellite relays and general broadcasting stations. Even without satellites, he could use short-wave transmitters to reach anywhere in the continental United States, and I agree that this is no longer tolerable. Maxson knows how many fucking automated silos still exist." He glanced at Miller and continued, "Simultaneously, we'll see if we can't privately contact this Colonel and tell him where the bear shits in the woods, and he can like it or lump it."
   Well, that was a bit more confrontational than she had hoped, but it still wasn't going to be a total war on each side, at least not yet. Also, what the hell was that bear in the woods idiom about?
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