A cyborg in the Wasteland [Fallout] [Self-insert]

[SpiraSpira]

"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 a 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 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.

 

[SpiraSpira]

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 world 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 scavenged 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 which she did, "You got yourself a deal, Doctor."

 

[SpiraSpira]

This chapter featured a ton of dialogue back and forth! Normally, I don't like writing chapters like this, but I couldn't figure out how not to do it.

----

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 eight kilometres 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 all to the Potomac. 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.

 

[SpiraSpira]

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 with an air compressor 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 and make do, but considering it was a temporary solution she did not particularly mind.

She had transferred all the nanites from the previous fabricator into the new one and installed four nanohives and 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 to leave 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."

 

[SpiraSpira]

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."

 

[SpiraSpira]

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 emotion.

Alice blinked. Oh. They wouldn't be eating it for breakfast, then.

 

[SpiraSpira]

This explore and loot the hospital arc turned out longer than I thought!

---

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."

 

[SpiraSpira]

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."

 

[SpiraSpira]

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 had taken 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. Settling 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.

 

[SpiraSpira]

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, "fènghuáng 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!"