A cyborg in the Wasteland [Fallout] [Self-insert]
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Novel Sci-Fi
RangerKarl
angry un liaison on forced vacation
hehe longboi.
Wondering if she is actually going to hire someone to forge a new transmission for that old beast. I guess her fabbers don't have the right toolsets for working with metal and can't build those tools?
also
Wondering if she is actually going to hire someone to forge a new transmission for that old beast. I guess her fabbers don't have the right toolsets for working with metal and can't build those tools?
also
I keep reading this in Sariel's voice and now I can't unassociate.
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Huh, I just realized she just made 'Fallout' Nezu. Large, White, Intelligent mink like creature, one who was created/experimented on in a lab? Why it fits perfectly!
misterq
Mister Questionmark
- Location
- Somewhere near Space
And when the chicken free test subject woke up, his skeleton was missing.
Lily is moving away from normal mad scientist doctor territory and right into TF2's Medic land, and it is fantastic.
She just needs to take Sir Longius as another apprentice / mascot. Then he can become Dr. Sir Longius the Super Stoat.
I wonder if he would be agreeable or be willing to work with her if she promises not to hurt him and possibly try to make him a mate later.
Normal doctor stuff. And now that she has a truck, she can isekai all sorts of people!
Lily is moving away from normal mad scientist doctor territory and right into TF2's Medic land, and it is fantastic.
She just needs to take Sir Longius as another apprentice / mascot. Then he can become Dr. Sir Longius the Super Stoat.
I wonder if he would be agreeable or be willing to work with her if she promises not to hurt him and possibly try to make him a mate later.
Normal doctor stuff. And now that she has a truck, she can isekai all sorts of people!
*torture revenge porn scene...
Which at least is tons better then having the next scene of her cooking Haute Cuicine with classical music like in Hanibal.
Or to break the guy down for spare organ parts.
- Location
- uk
I KNEW IT
Does that mean she can do a hand stand, wiggle her legs just right and get a better signal?
Cartwheel comms
Missionaries spreading the Good News
Now, Louis really thought that the woman would have let Bones off with just a beating, as she demonstrated a number of inventive ways to cause some pain to him without doing any actual harm. It wasn't any worse than what the boss did when someone fucked up mildly, actually. Probably less than what they would have gotten for failing to teach the bitch a lesson, really.
However, Bones, the utter idiot, started yelling some really, really vile shit at her and threats. Stuff that he, Louis, thought was beyond the pale, even!
He finally said, "Bones, shut the fuck up, you fucking idiot!"
But he didn't listen like he never listened. Louis didn't know precisely what the last straw for the woman was, but he could see the change in her expression. Finally, she looked at Bones with crazy girlfriend eyes and asked, "Your name is Bones? But... have you SEEN your bones?"
With that, she pulled out a dull grey stiletto and showed him.
His screams didn't last that long, as again Louis had seen the boss do a lot worse and for a lot longer. Blaze had gotten his name for his penchant for setting people on fire one limb at a time, after all, but there was something a lot more disturbing and intimate about the idea of someone fileting your finger bone out of your hand and showing it to you while you were paralyzed and couldn't move.
Louis was reminded of one evening when Blaze was burning a man to death and making the gang watch Blaze got into a philosophical debate on torture, saying torture was proven to be inefficient if you wanted to get information out of people, which was why he, Blaze, only tortured people for fun!
Louis didn't know if that was actually true, knowing Blaze it wasn't, but even if it was, what was absolutely obvious to him and Eric now was that watching someone else get tortured was very effective in making them talk!
She had just shot Bones in the head with some fancy-ass laser after that. Both he and Eric answered every question she had then. Afterwards, she looked at the two of them and said, "You know... zhere is a fine line between self-confident optimism and flat reckless stupidity, and Monsieur Bones was about a 'undred klicks on the far side of zhat line. Something to remember, yes?"
Then, she left without touching a hair on either of their heads, and a few minutes later, they could move their entire bodies again.
Eric was freaking out, "We gotta go tell Blaze, man!"
Louis was, surprisingly, pretty calm. He stayed sitting on the ground next to the wall for a moment. He already had a plan. "Go on ahead, run back to base and tell the boss everything that happened. I will take care of Bones' body."
Eric looked surprised, "Didn't even think you liked him. Alright." With that, he ran off.
After Eric was gone, Louis stood up and stretched. Then he gave Bones' body a hard kick in the balls, yelling, "You stupid motherfucker! You almost got us all killed! Fuck you!"
Louis felt like he got more intelligent watching Bones get fileted. He could tell the woman wasn't enjoying it as the boss did, and he could tell by the way she shot Bones in the head immediately afterwards that it wasn't for Bones' benefit, either.
So, if she didn't do that for herself or for Bones, then it had to be for him and Eric. She wanted them, the monkeys as she called them, to go tell the boss monkey she wasn't to be fucked with.
The only problem with all that idea was the boss monkey was fucking insane. He wasn't about to fucking tell him shit unless it was good news or at least not very bad news. Eric telling him not only that they failed, but the target killed one of his men? And the other was AWOL? Poor fucking Eric. There were even odds he will likely have his foot or hand burned off tonight, and Louis wasn't about to join in that fun.
Still, he wasn't about to NOT tell the boss either, after he figured out that was what that crazy bitch wanted. She might come back for him!
He was curious what the woman thought this would accomplish. It might stop Blaze temporarily, he might consider how best to retaliate, but within a week, he would hit back as hard as he could because he couldn't be seen to accept disrespect and not be torn apart by the gang. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that shit.
It didn't matter, Louis supposed. He wouldn't be around to find out what happened anyway. So sorry, Eric.
Well, he wasn't really sorry. Not really. Both Eric and Bones were kind of assholes. Everyone in this gang was an asshole except him.
Wait. His newly gained intelligence seemed to tell him that he might be an asshole too.
Whatever. He was getting the fuck out of here. Out of Megaton. His brother Jerome was still in Paradise Falls, and he could go back to raiding the stupid little villages and farms in the wastes. He just joined this gang because the Jet was real cheap, anyway.
Bye, crazy bitch. Bye, crazier boss.
---xxxxxx---
Lily walked down the streets, sort of conflicted. Had she gone too far with that fellow? She had to admit she let the things he said upset her.
At first, she was just going to give them a reason not to see her as a prey animal and send them on their way; tails tucked in between their legs. However... well, some threats she took less well than others.
Humming in thought, she considered. No, she didn't think what she did was against her morals, at least not particularly. She wouldn't hurt even an innocent animal if she could avoid it. But Monsieur Bones was hardly innocent. Lily felt that she was the instrument of karma, in this case with Bonsey.
In fact, she felt worse about the other two, given the things they and the worker foreman she talked to the other day said about their boss, this Blaze. She felt that guy was the shoot messenger type, or rather burn the messenger alive type.
She let them go because the unstated implication she gave them was she would do so if they answered her questions, but she got the feeling it would have been kinder to shoot them in the head, also.
Oh well. She can't control what this Blaze did. He did seem like a cartoonish bad guy, though. Like, way beyond the pale. Why hadn't Sheriff Timms shot his ass by now? They seemed to be a bit understaffed from what Lily saw when she visited the Sheriff to talk to him about the plan for the nuke, which he approved after he figured out she wasn't about to blow them all up.
Well, she kind of wished Grace's Grenadiers were still in town. Her little stunt would probably surprise the cartoonishly evil man briefly, but she had already been wrong about her estimation of his escalation rate once. She wasn't about to take that risk again.
She changed directions, turning to go to the better part of town where Tombs lived. It wasn't a long walk; it wasn't like Megaton was actually that big, after all.
Knocking on his door, she waited patiently for him to greet her, which he did with a big smile and pleasant words, "Doc! Nice to see you! Rare to get you out of your cave, eh? Come in, come in!"
Lily walked in and accepted his offer of a drink as hospitality, sitting down with him and his wife in their living room.
Taking a sip of the offered drink, she immediately started coughing, and she felt her eyes water, which sent Tombs into hysterics and Lady Tombs grinning. Then, blinking away tears, she lied humorously, her tone kind of gravely as the battery acid may have taken a layer of tissue off her larynx, "S-smooth."
"Well, it gets the job done. What can I help ya with today?" replied the man.
Lily told him straight out about the problems she had been having. He was aware of them for the most part, anyway. She even told him about the example she had made of Bones earlier.
"Well, that might have been kind of stupid," Tombs said amusedly, although he didn't apparently think it was a big deal either.
"What would you 'ave done, zhen?" asked Lily, testily.
Tombs shrugged, "You wanted more time? What would have really given an evil bastard like Blaze pause would have been if all three of his men disappeared without a trace. People's imaginations are always better at coming up with horrible possibilities, and a man like Blaze has to have tons of enemies. He might have spent days air boxing with some gremlin who wasn't even there."
Lily pursed her lips. That seemed plausible, actually. She sighed. She was always the worst with psychology and human interface operations. She had gotten a lot better in this new, weird life in the Wasteland, but it was clear she still had some blind spots. Well, it could be learned, like anything else.
However, she said, "Yes, but I wanted information from zhe two I let go."
Tombs looked at her like she was riding on the short bus, "So? You don't 'disappear' them until after they answer your questions. Do you really need help with the order of things?"
Lily frowned, "Zhe implication was zhat I would let them go after zhey answered zhe questions. To go against zhat would impinge on my personal 'onour; it wasn't a possibility. It would 'ave 'ad to be either or; in this case, I wanted answers."
Tombs continued to look at her like she was a very special person, "You cut this man's middle finger bone out of his finger and showed it to him. And you're saying that your what... ethics... wouldn't let you pop his two good-for-nothing friends after questioning them? You have to know what they were going to do to you, Doc."
Lily nodded, "Yes, precisely. Besides, I'd say zhey might be being Blazed right now, depending on how their boss feels about bad news at present. So I might not have done zhem any favours there."
Tombs shook his head slowly, "You know, you kind of remind me of them Mormon boys." This caused Lily to turn slack-jawed, and she replied real intelligently, "Huh??"
"Well, there's not a lot they won't do to what they consider evil-doers, but at the same time, they have a bottom line and pretty much will never lie or go back on an agreement, even if kills 'em," Tombs said simply.
Well, that did actually sound like her personal ethics, actually. However, she didn't have any problem in shading the truth, beyond the fact that she wasn't the best at it. She just quietly considered the similarities for a moment. Tombs surprised her by smacking his fist into his open palm, "That might be a solution to your problem. You said your merc friends are out of town for a couple of days? I know there's a team of six missionaries in town."
Now it was Lily's turn to stare at Tombs like he was mentally deficient. She had memories of the clean-cut, polite young men in white shirts and black ties ringing her doorbell from her past life. She said simply, "I don't want to save 'is soul, Tombs! I want to kill 'is ass!"
Mrs Tombs guffawed and piped in, "You say things that make me really curious where you grew up, little lady. Mormon missionaries are all but mercenaries in another name; they just won't take every type of job; it has to be against an evil-doer. They're one of the biggest export products of the Dominion! Moreover, they'll never fuck you over unless you lied to them about what you want them to do. As mercs go, they have a good reputation."
'Oh,' Lily thought.
"Oh, zhat might work, actually. Is zhere a way you can set up a meeting with zhem today? I don't want to wait until tomorrow, I was already wrong about zhis man's escalation rate once," Lily replied.
"Yeah, I reckon we can," Tombs nodded, standing up. He hollered, and a mini-Tombs appeared from deeper in the house. The elder Tombs talked to the boy, who nodded and ran out of the house.
"My boy will go send them a message to meet me here. It'll probably take an hour. Want to play a game of poker with the missus and me while we wait? One cap an ante?" Tombs offered.
Lily grinned. She was well equipped to dominate these flats at this game, and she could test some of her preliminary emotion-detecting software to detect bluffing.
---xxxxxx---
A little over an hour later, Lily was down sixteen caps, but she was pretty sure she just needed a few more hands to catch up. She was pretty sure Mrs Tombs had some sort of advanced espionage cyberware that allowed her to fake any emotion she wanted, so it was quite a challenge. She was starting to notice slight imperfections in some of the cards in the deck, though, so it shouldn't be much longer until she had them right where she wanted them.
However, mini-Tombs arrived through the front door, trailing two young men who must be the so-called missionaries. Tombs aborted the hand, gathering the cards as soon as his son walked through the door and before the two men could see them. 'Prohibition on gambling, perhaps?' thought Lily.
Well, they weren't wearing black ties and white shirts, but they were clean-shaven and dressed rather professionally as mercenaries went, wearing matching combat armour that Lily recognized as National Guard surplus that was so ubiquitous in the Wasteland.
They introduced themselves, being exceedingly polite towards Mrs Tombs and herself, Lily noted.
Lily wondered if Tombs would explain the whole thing, as perhaps they would take direction better from another male, but he did not. Internally, Lily shrugged and explained her issues, and the two men listened carefully.
Afterwards, one chuckled and said, "Ma'am, you could have stopped after saying he was a drug dealer; that would have been enough for us. Although, ma'am, the rest of it just makes us feel bad about accepting payment for this mission. Verily, the devil himself must be working through this Blaze." The other missionary nodded solmenly. However, Lily did notice they didn't offer to do it for free, not that she blamed them. If you do something well, don't do it for free.
"This is pretty much open-and-shut, ma'am, as long as you aren't some kind of competing drug dealer and are hiring us to get the competition out of the way?" asked the second man.
Lily tilted her head to the side, "I suppose zhat is a matter of perspective. I am planning to run zhe pharmacy in zhe hôpital that I am starting soon, where drugs will be sold, yes? While we likely won't stock purely recreational substances, many of zhe drugs with medical uses can be abused, no?"
The first man waved that off, "That's definitely not a problem, ma'am. The world would be a better place if brand new clinics with pharmacies," he made some air quotes, "out-competed the average drug dealer. So, let's get down to specifics."
Lily explained what she wanted. Mainly she wanted Blaze dead, along with at least his two lieutenants that the two men she let go told her about, "If zhose zhree men are gone, zhis gang, such as it is, will implode. It's being 'eld together by zhreats, drugs but most importantly the cult of personality from zhe leadership. Zhey're basically drug-addled murder-'obos."
The first missionary nodded his head, "That should not be a problem, ma'am, especially with the intel you provided. Now for the discussion of remuneration... we can do this mission for you for a suitable donation of five hundred caps to the cause. We should have it completed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours."
Lily internally smirked. A donation? Would she get a tax write-off? Lily considered the price. It was a little high if you only considered they needed to off three people in the slums, but since those three people were surrounded by up to thirty or forty armed minions, she thought it was quite reasonable. The long, mean-looking sniper rifle on the second man's back gave a hint to how they likely would accomplish the job, too.
Lily nodded, "Zhat would be acceptable. 'Alf now, 'alf at job completion?"
The first man nodded, "That would be fine. However, if we could possibly talk about a discount for some StimPaks in lieu of currency? That medicine is always sorely needed by missionaries and the Dominion in general."
Lily pursed her lips. She had started a StimPak breeding vat, a small one, but it wasn't producing yet. She was using mutafruits as the main biomass, presently, as they seemed to work the best out of any plant matter she had tested. Her stocks of StimPaks weren't super high, but they were certainly high enough for this, especially when she would be having her own production running soon. "Yes, that would be acceptable. I might also, in the future, be willing to sell you such things at wholesale price points."
They looked quite interested in that. However, they firmly declined her offer to assist or even for her to show them where Blaze resided; they looked very uncomfortable at the possibility of her in the line of fire.
One odd question the first missionary asked Lily was her opinion about whether or not there was a God. Lily decided to answer honestly, although it was perhaps a shading of truth, "Well, something happened to me a couple of months ago to make me seriously reevaluate my opinion on the existence of the world of the supernatural, so I can't rule it out anymore." Lily did not think Monsieur ROB was the god that spoke to Moses, though, but she would let these two missionaries come to their own conclusions about what she meant precisely.
Both men nodded gravely, as if they understood completely. The first one smiled, "It often happens like that."
Well, whatever. After that, she concluded the deal, but instead of shaking her hand, the first missionary applied a chaste kiss to the back of her hand. What a charmer, Lily thought!
They departed, and Tombs was grinning at her, "A gentleman suitor?" he asked, to which Lily loudly denied, "No! But a lady appreciates a little class, you know?"
She started to collect herself to depart, but curiousity got the better of her, "Why are zhere so many armed missionaries from zhe Dominion, anyway?"
Mr. Tombs guffawed a little, "Generally speaking, a young man in the Dominion won't be able to take a wife unless he spent a period of time doing missionary work, spreading the good news and all that, right?" He glanced at her, suddenly grinning, "Well, that's except, of course, if he tames a foreign girl and marries her and brings her back to the Holy Land. One of the reasons why they are always very polite with the ladies."
Lily narrowed her eyes, "You needn't be concerned. I don't zhink I'd thrive in zheir culture, so it is quite impossible."
Lastly, she asked Tombs why someone hadn't done what she was doing already, to which Tombs scowled, "Five hundred caps is actually quite a lot for most people. Plus, it is just like you said -- this gang will implode, but a new one will just start up sooner or later. They'll let anyone through the gate if they have enough caps -- tourism is one of the main businesses of Megaton -- and then when they lose or smoke all their money, some of them join these types of groups instead of leaving. It's going to be one of our primary outlays keeping them out of our interests until the neighbourhood can recover some."
Lily nodded; that did make sense.
With that, she left and walked back home, taking a circuitous route this time. She saw the man who was selling her the truck standing there with the truck, looking anxious to get paid.
Lily felt happy with this gang situation, even if it was probably only the first of many, probably solved. She was whistling a jaunty tune, and her Apprentice tilted her head to the side, asking, "You sure are happy to buy a truck, aren't you?"
Lily chuckled, "Happy to send a message. Zhe truck is a bonus."
However, Bones, the utter idiot, started yelling some really, really vile shit at her and threats. Stuff that he, Louis, thought was beyond the pale, even!
He finally said, "Bones, shut the fuck up, you fucking idiot!"
But he didn't listen like he never listened. Louis didn't know precisely what the last straw for the woman was, but he could see the change in her expression. Finally, she looked at Bones with crazy girlfriend eyes and asked, "Your name is Bones? But... have you SEEN your bones?"
With that, she pulled out a dull grey stiletto and showed him.
His screams didn't last that long, as again Louis had seen the boss do a lot worse and for a lot longer. Blaze had gotten his name for his penchant for setting people on fire one limb at a time, after all, but there was something a lot more disturbing and intimate about the idea of someone fileting your finger bone out of your hand and showing it to you while you were paralyzed and couldn't move.
Louis was reminded of one evening when Blaze was burning a man to death and making the gang watch Blaze got into a philosophical debate on torture, saying torture was proven to be inefficient if you wanted to get information out of people, which was why he, Blaze, only tortured people for fun!
Louis didn't know if that was actually true, knowing Blaze it wasn't, but even if it was, what was absolutely obvious to him and Eric now was that watching someone else get tortured was very effective in making them talk!
She had just shot Bones in the head with some fancy-ass laser after that. Both he and Eric answered every question she had then. Afterwards, she looked at the two of them and said, "You know... zhere is a fine line between self-confident optimism and flat reckless stupidity, and Monsieur Bones was about a 'undred klicks on the far side of zhat line. Something to remember, yes?"
Then, she left without touching a hair on either of their heads, and a few minutes later, they could move their entire bodies again.
Eric was freaking out, "We gotta go tell Blaze, man!"
Louis was, surprisingly, pretty calm. He stayed sitting on the ground next to the wall for a moment. He already had a plan. "Go on ahead, run back to base and tell the boss everything that happened. I will take care of Bones' body."
Eric looked surprised, "Didn't even think you liked him. Alright." With that, he ran off.
After Eric was gone, Louis stood up and stretched. Then he gave Bones' body a hard kick in the balls, yelling, "You stupid motherfucker! You almost got us all killed! Fuck you!"
Louis felt like he got more intelligent watching Bones get fileted. He could tell the woman wasn't enjoying it as the boss did, and he could tell by the way she shot Bones in the head immediately afterwards that it wasn't for Bones' benefit, either.
So, if she didn't do that for herself or for Bones, then it had to be for him and Eric. She wanted them, the monkeys as she called them, to go tell the boss monkey she wasn't to be fucked with.
The only problem with all that idea was the boss monkey was fucking insane. He wasn't about to fucking tell him shit unless it was good news or at least not very bad news. Eric telling him not only that they failed, but the target killed one of his men? And the other was AWOL? Poor fucking Eric. There were even odds he will likely have his foot or hand burned off tonight, and Louis wasn't about to join in that fun.
Still, he wasn't about to NOT tell the boss either, after he figured out that was what that crazy bitch wanted. She might come back for him!
He was curious what the woman thought this would accomplish. It might stop Blaze temporarily, he might consider how best to retaliate, but within a week, he would hit back as hard as he could because he couldn't be seen to accept disrespect and not be torn apart by the gang. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that shit.
It didn't matter, Louis supposed. He wouldn't be around to find out what happened anyway. So sorry, Eric.
Well, he wasn't really sorry. Not really. Both Eric and Bones were kind of assholes. Everyone in this gang was an asshole except him.
Wait. His newly gained intelligence seemed to tell him that he might be an asshole too.
Whatever. He was getting the fuck out of here. Out of Megaton. His brother Jerome was still in Paradise Falls, and he could go back to raiding the stupid little villages and farms in the wastes. He just joined this gang because the Jet was real cheap, anyway.
Bye, crazy bitch. Bye, crazier boss.
---xxxxxx---
Lily walked down the streets, sort of conflicted. Had she gone too far with that fellow? She had to admit she let the things he said upset her.
At first, she was just going to give them a reason not to see her as a prey animal and send them on their way; tails tucked in between their legs. However... well, some threats she took less well than others.
Humming in thought, she considered. No, she didn't think what she did was against her morals, at least not particularly. She wouldn't hurt even an innocent animal if she could avoid it. But Monsieur Bones was hardly innocent. Lily felt that she was the instrument of karma, in this case with Bonsey.
In fact, she felt worse about the other two, given the things they and the worker foreman she talked to the other day said about their boss, this Blaze. She felt that guy was the shoot messenger type, or rather burn the messenger alive type.
She let them go because the unstated implication she gave them was she would do so if they answered her questions, but she got the feeling it would have been kinder to shoot them in the head, also.
Oh well. She can't control what this Blaze did. He did seem like a cartoonish bad guy, though. Like, way beyond the pale. Why hadn't Sheriff Timms shot his ass by now? They seemed to be a bit understaffed from what Lily saw when she visited the Sheriff to talk to him about the plan for the nuke, which he approved after he figured out she wasn't about to blow them all up.
Well, she kind of wished Grace's Grenadiers were still in town. Her little stunt would probably surprise the cartoonishly evil man briefly, but she had already been wrong about her estimation of his escalation rate once. She wasn't about to take that risk again.
She changed directions, turning to go to the better part of town where Tombs lived. It wasn't a long walk; it wasn't like Megaton was actually that big, after all.
Knocking on his door, she waited patiently for him to greet her, which he did with a big smile and pleasant words, "Doc! Nice to see you! Rare to get you out of your cave, eh? Come in, come in!"
Lily walked in and accepted his offer of a drink as hospitality, sitting down with him and his wife in their living room.
Taking a sip of the offered drink, she immediately started coughing, and she felt her eyes water, which sent Tombs into hysterics and Lady Tombs grinning. Then, blinking away tears, she lied humorously, her tone kind of gravely as the battery acid may have taken a layer of tissue off her larynx, "S-smooth."
"Well, it gets the job done. What can I help ya with today?" replied the man.
Lily told him straight out about the problems she had been having. He was aware of them for the most part, anyway. She even told him about the example she had made of Bones earlier.
"Well, that might have been kind of stupid," Tombs said amusedly, although he didn't apparently think it was a big deal either.
"What would you 'ave done, zhen?" asked Lily, testily.
Tombs shrugged, "You wanted more time? What would have really given an evil bastard like Blaze pause would have been if all three of his men disappeared without a trace. People's imaginations are always better at coming up with horrible possibilities, and a man like Blaze has to have tons of enemies. He might have spent days air boxing with some gremlin who wasn't even there."
Lily pursed her lips. That seemed plausible, actually. She sighed. She was always the worst with psychology and human interface operations. She had gotten a lot better in this new, weird life in the Wasteland, but it was clear she still had some blind spots. Well, it could be learned, like anything else.
However, she said, "Yes, but I wanted information from zhe two I let go."
Tombs looked at her like she was riding on the short bus, "So? You don't 'disappear' them until after they answer your questions. Do you really need help with the order of things?"
Lily frowned, "Zhe implication was zhat I would let them go after zhey answered zhe questions. To go against zhat would impinge on my personal 'onour; it wasn't a possibility. It would 'ave 'ad to be either or; in this case, I wanted answers."
Tombs continued to look at her like she was a very special person, "You cut this man's middle finger bone out of his finger and showed it to him. And you're saying that your what... ethics... wouldn't let you pop his two good-for-nothing friends after questioning them? You have to know what they were going to do to you, Doc."
Lily nodded, "Yes, precisely. Besides, I'd say zhey might be being Blazed right now, depending on how their boss feels about bad news at present. So I might not have done zhem any favours there."
Tombs shook his head slowly, "You know, you kind of remind me of them Mormon boys." This caused Lily to turn slack-jawed, and she replied real intelligently, "Huh??"
"Well, there's not a lot they won't do to what they consider evil-doers, but at the same time, they have a bottom line and pretty much will never lie or go back on an agreement, even if kills 'em," Tombs said simply.
Well, that did actually sound like her personal ethics, actually. However, she didn't have any problem in shading the truth, beyond the fact that she wasn't the best at it. She just quietly considered the similarities for a moment. Tombs surprised her by smacking his fist into his open palm, "That might be a solution to your problem. You said your merc friends are out of town for a couple of days? I know there's a team of six missionaries in town."
Now it was Lily's turn to stare at Tombs like he was mentally deficient. She had memories of the clean-cut, polite young men in white shirts and black ties ringing her doorbell from her past life. She said simply, "I don't want to save 'is soul, Tombs! I want to kill 'is ass!"
Mrs Tombs guffawed and piped in, "You say things that make me really curious where you grew up, little lady. Mormon missionaries are all but mercenaries in another name; they just won't take every type of job; it has to be against an evil-doer. They're one of the biggest export products of the Dominion! Moreover, they'll never fuck you over unless you lied to them about what you want them to do. As mercs go, they have a good reputation."
'Oh,' Lily thought.
"Oh, zhat might work, actually. Is zhere a way you can set up a meeting with zhem today? I don't want to wait until tomorrow, I was already wrong about zhis man's escalation rate once," Lily replied.
"Yeah, I reckon we can," Tombs nodded, standing up. He hollered, and a mini-Tombs appeared from deeper in the house. The elder Tombs talked to the boy, who nodded and ran out of the house.
"My boy will go send them a message to meet me here. It'll probably take an hour. Want to play a game of poker with the missus and me while we wait? One cap an ante?" Tombs offered.
Lily grinned. She was well equipped to dominate these flats at this game, and she could test some of her preliminary emotion-detecting software to detect bluffing.
---xxxxxx---
A little over an hour later, Lily was down sixteen caps, but she was pretty sure she just needed a few more hands to catch up. She was pretty sure Mrs Tombs had some sort of advanced espionage cyberware that allowed her to fake any emotion she wanted, so it was quite a challenge. She was starting to notice slight imperfections in some of the cards in the deck, though, so it shouldn't be much longer until she had them right where she wanted them.
However, mini-Tombs arrived through the front door, trailing two young men who must be the so-called missionaries. Tombs aborted the hand, gathering the cards as soon as his son walked through the door and before the two men could see them. 'Prohibition on gambling, perhaps?' thought Lily.
Well, they weren't wearing black ties and white shirts, but they were clean-shaven and dressed rather professionally as mercenaries went, wearing matching combat armour that Lily recognized as National Guard surplus that was so ubiquitous in the Wasteland.
They introduced themselves, being exceedingly polite towards Mrs Tombs and herself, Lily noted.
Lily wondered if Tombs would explain the whole thing, as perhaps they would take direction better from another male, but he did not. Internally, Lily shrugged and explained her issues, and the two men listened carefully.
Afterwards, one chuckled and said, "Ma'am, you could have stopped after saying he was a drug dealer; that would have been enough for us. Although, ma'am, the rest of it just makes us feel bad about accepting payment for this mission. Verily, the devil himself must be working through this Blaze." The other missionary nodded solmenly. However, Lily did notice they didn't offer to do it for free, not that she blamed them. If you do something well, don't do it for free.
"This is pretty much open-and-shut, ma'am, as long as you aren't some kind of competing drug dealer and are hiring us to get the competition out of the way?" asked the second man.
Lily tilted her head to the side, "I suppose zhat is a matter of perspective. I am planning to run zhe pharmacy in zhe hôpital that I am starting soon, where drugs will be sold, yes? While we likely won't stock purely recreational substances, many of zhe drugs with medical uses can be abused, no?"
The first man waved that off, "That's definitely not a problem, ma'am. The world would be a better place if brand new clinics with pharmacies," he made some air quotes, "out-competed the average drug dealer. So, let's get down to specifics."
Lily explained what she wanted. Mainly she wanted Blaze dead, along with at least his two lieutenants that the two men she let go told her about, "If zhose zhree men are gone, zhis gang, such as it is, will implode. It's being 'eld together by zhreats, drugs but most importantly the cult of personality from zhe leadership. Zhey're basically drug-addled murder-'obos."
The first missionary nodded his head, "That should not be a problem, ma'am, especially with the intel you provided. Now for the discussion of remuneration... we can do this mission for you for a suitable donation of five hundred caps to the cause. We should have it completed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours."
Lily internally smirked. A donation? Would she get a tax write-off? Lily considered the price. It was a little high if you only considered they needed to off three people in the slums, but since those three people were surrounded by up to thirty or forty armed minions, she thought it was quite reasonable. The long, mean-looking sniper rifle on the second man's back gave a hint to how they likely would accomplish the job, too.
Lily nodded, "Zhat would be acceptable. 'Alf now, 'alf at job completion?"
The first man nodded, "That would be fine. However, if we could possibly talk about a discount for some StimPaks in lieu of currency? That medicine is always sorely needed by missionaries and the Dominion in general."
Lily pursed her lips. She had started a StimPak breeding vat, a small one, but it wasn't producing yet. She was using mutafruits as the main biomass, presently, as they seemed to work the best out of any plant matter she had tested. Her stocks of StimPaks weren't super high, but they were certainly high enough for this, especially when she would be having her own production running soon. "Yes, that would be acceptable. I might also, in the future, be willing to sell you such things at wholesale price points."
They looked quite interested in that. However, they firmly declined her offer to assist or even for her to show them where Blaze resided; they looked very uncomfortable at the possibility of her in the line of fire.
One odd question the first missionary asked Lily was her opinion about whether or not there was a God. Lily decided to answer honestly, although it was perhaps a shading of truth, "Well, something happened to me a couple of months ago to make me seriously reevaluate my opinion on the existence of the world of the supernatural, so I can't rule it out anymore." Lily did not think Monsieur ROB was the god that spoke to Moses, though, but she would let these two missionaries come to their own conclusions about what she meant precisely.
Both men nodded gravely, as if they understood completely. The first one smiled, "It often happens like that."
Well, whatever. After that, she concluded the deal, but instead of shaking her hand, the first missionary applied a chaste kiss to the back of her hand. What a charmer, Lily thought!
They departed, and Tombs was grinning at her, "A gentleman suitor?" he asked, to which Lily loudly denied, "No! But a lady appreciates a little class, you know?"
She started to collect herself to depart, but curiousity got the better of her, "Why are zhere so many armed missionaries from zhe Dominion, anyway?"
Mr. Tombs guffawed a little, "Generally speaking, a young man in the Dominion won't be able to take a wife unless he spent a period of time doing missionary work, spreading the good news and all that, right?" He glanced at her, suddenly grinning, "Well, that's except, of course, if he tames a foreign girl and marries her and brings her back to the Holy Land. One of the reasons why they are always very polite with the ladies."
Lily narrowed her eyes, "You needn't be concerned. I don't zhink I'd thrive in zheir culture, so it is quite impossible."
Lastly, she asked Tombs why someone hadn't done what she was doing already, to which Tombs scowled, "Five hundred caps is actually quite a lot for most people. Plus, it is just like you said -- this gang will implode, but a new one will just start up sooner or later. They'll let anyone through the gate if they have enough caps -- tourism is one of the main businesses of Megaton -- and then when they lose or smoke all their money, some of them join these types of groups instead of leaving. It's going to be one of our primary outlays keeping them out of our interests until the neighbourhood can recover some."
Lily nodded; that did make sense.
With that, she left and walked back home, taking a circuitous route this time. She saw the man who was selling her the truck standing there with the truck, looking anxious to get paid.
Lily felt happy with this gang situation, even if it was probably only the first of many, probably solved. She was whistling a jaunty tune, and her Apprentice tilted her head to the side, asking, "You sure are happy to buy a truck, aren't you?"
Lily chuckled, "Happy to send a message. Zhe truck is a bonus."
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- Location
- 'Straya
Bones got shot, Blaze is the boss (I think).
Fixed, thank you!
RangerKarl
angry un liaison on forced vacation
Mutfruit as the base for her Stimpak vat? I guess she hasn't come across any xander root or broc flower yet.
- Pronouns
- She
XD Louis gaining brain cells that was awesome
Thank you for the update!
Producing new meds, stimpacks/radX/radaway will be huge in the Capital wasteland.
Once you get that going and making bank, hire all the mercs you can and go loot the Gary vault, re-purposing that cloning tech to grow replacement organs for people who can't afford high-tech upgrades
Producing new meds, stimpacks/radX/radaway will be huge in the Capital wasteland.
Once you get that going and making bank, hire all the mercs you can and go loot the Gary vault, re-purposing that cloning tech to grow replacement organs for people who can't afford high-tech upgrades
Ambulance truck to "make the rounds" by visiting settlements?
- Location
- zwolle
think more of a loot truck hauling stuff around from expedition
good bet grace's merc will be put on retainer almost i guess
doubt you want the attention with the alarms anyhow in wasteland
- Location
- miami
Once went to dinner and I got to meet a retired surgeon who was going a bit senile, it was one of the scariest 90mins of my life dude just had no filter and kept telling me how easy it was to do all kinds of horrible shit and Implied it was easy to kill a patient and make it look like a accident.
Thanks for the chapter, loving the story keep it up.
Thanks for the chapter, loving the story keep it up.
Are these Mormons related to/the same as the ones Joshua and Daniel in Honest Hearts come from?
No. Except in the sense that they're both LDS (sort of.) This group sprung up around Cleaveland near Lake Eerie and aren't connected to anyone else, although they'd like to be reconnected to Utah.
Is this repeated for a reason?
Just to emphasize that this chapter happened in between the previous chapter chronologically.
Weaving
Lily forbade the Apprentice from leaving the building for a couple of days, explaining to her the issues they were having with the gang of murderhobos and the fact that she had been attacked herself.
Paying the used car salesman, who departed the area with a quickness and in a separate car that was waiting for him, she descended into her basement. Most of the day was over, but she had a lot of things on her checklist.
She hummed and considered her options. She could work on a direct metal laser sintering system, a sort of 3D printer for metal alloys, as this would allow her to fix the truck rapidly. It would take sacrificing one of the laser pistols she had on hand, but it would be worth it. She had plans to construct things out of metal alloys, especially high-temperature refractory alloys, for a long time now, both for her own uses and possible trade, as she has come to the conclusion of constructing everything out of carbon allotropes was a little conspicuous.
However, she couldn't really do much practical work on it until she had the power station online. The laser sintering system wouldn't use all that much power, actually, but the metal recycler would use tons. At least five hundred kilowatts and probably more, she guessed. She already had that recycler built but hadn't even been able to test it. It should recycle whatever she puts in it and separate the product it produces into carbon feedstock, a dozen different elementary metals including iron, titanium, aluminium and a few rare earths, and then everything else, which would be the waste product that she couldn't presently separate.
The system relied on using incredible energy to literally ionize a layer of the recycled object, turning it into a plasma, and then separating the plasma using a combination of a particle accelerator, multi-stage centrifuges and finally, the levitation field emitters from several eyebots to separate out the plasma into its elementary constituents based on the differing masses involved in each atom.
It worked kind of like how uranium was slowly enriched to produce nuclear weapons in her past life, except the process was much quicker, although it was still much much slower than her first recycler, so this second version would be primarily used to recycle metals only.
Lily clucked her tongue. A laser sintering system required very, very fine metal powders to work, powders as fine as ten or fewer micrometres in diameter; otherwise, the system would not function properly.
The power station was scheduled for a run-up test tomorrow that she would have to be present for, but she wouldn't be getting full power from the system for several days yet.
She then nodded. Since she had no way to actually test such a sintering system until she could produce such powders, she decided to shelve working on it at all. While she could complete broad strokes of the design process using her CAD system, she was more in the mood for a little hands-on work this evening to relax her.
Her eyes turned to the boxes of robot parts that she had bought from Grace and smiled. While she had no idea what she would use these Labourtrons for, assembling and fixing them would be a relaxing, mindless activity until she could go to sleep for the evening.
She mentally started listening to Three Dogs radio station while she got to work.
---xxxxxx---
Lily looked at the three assembled Labourtrons. She verified the integrity of all but one of the processors, but her bottleneck on fixing these robots was actually the chassis elements, as there was considerable damage to them across all of the individuals.
The Labourtron looked more or less like a Protectron except that it was a bit thinner as there was no armour in its chassis at all, and they had more sophisticated manipulators -- not quite hands, but much more effective than the two claws.
Lily had to say; she hated it. Lily considered herself something of an expert on synths, and the best bet was always either to either mimic the human form as closely as possible, which had incredibly utility as evolution would tell anyone or diverge wildly from it, which was her usual modus operandi.
This half-assed semi-humanoid form was pretty terrible, Lily thought. And it wasn't like Dr House couldn't make a fairly good replication of humanoid movement, form and capability, either. She glanced over at the Assaultron in the corner, which quite impressed her with its hardy and simple mechanisms.
But, House went all in for a modular platform for many different uses in the Tron series of robots, so she suspected that limited his overall specialization which would have created an exemplary product. Lily glanced up at the ceiling in thought. Was it Heinlein that said specialization was for insects? Well, it was for robots, too, in her opinion.
She decided she would rebuild these Labourtrons, better, once she could build arbitrary shapes out of metal alloys as she could out of carbon. The programming probably couldn't handle anything that diverged too much from a bipedal form, so she would mimic a human much better. She already had scans and models of her skeleton; she could build slightly larger ones in hardened steel, with graphene composite areas to shield critical parts. Just the addition of the fully functioning hands would increase the capabilities of the bot by leaps and bounds.
Lily was absolutely incapable of creating a robot that mimicked a human form without falling deep into the uncanny valley at present unless she started with an actual human and slowly replaced their parts like she was doing to herself, so she would not even try. General utility and labour bots wouldn't need to interface with actual humans much, anyway. Once she got the Auto-Tailor that Grace was bringing back, she could clothe each of the bots in a unique colour of scrubs, and people would likely accept them as they did menial tasks in her hospital.
She had already connected each of these three to her diagnostic console and did a in-depth analysis of their neural networks. She was of the opinion that Protectrons were just incapable of the complex neural network necessary for actual sapience, which puzzled her. Didn't she recall some special Protectrons that would have likely passed a Turing test when playing Fallout 3?
Humming, she thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion such things had to either be custom Protectrons or, alternatively, the Protectron offloaded a lot of their neural mapping into a mainframe computer, and the mainframe plus Protectron might have achieved some level of sapience.
But since these neural networks were so simple, she did not feel bad about resetting them to factory defaults, as she had no real desire to work around whatever primary programming they had received at whatever warehouse they were working at.
She booted the Labourtrons up one at a time, and it went through its initial set-up procedures, registering herself as the principal owner along with a long password that she committed to memory.
Lily had her radio direction-finding system activated. Hence, she noticed when each Labourtron began transmitting, both to one another and also to the actual Protectrons in the hospital proper, which caused Lily to tilt her head to the side in curiosity. It appeared that they were programmed to establish a sort of ad-hoc mesh network amongst themselves.
She used her mental commands to listen to the frequency range used by the Labourtrons and then grabbed her tablet and set it up in laptop-mode. She sighed, this would be a lot simpler if she had the user interface of her development environment already coded for her brain computer, but at present she still needed to use her laptop to do any programming on it at all.
Lily turned off the audible playback of the Labourtron's frequency, which was just digital noise, and ran the signal through automatic decoding for binary or ternary signals instead, getting an incredibly long series of numbers printed on her vision during every transmission.
Sighing, she got up and searched around for a particular book of interest. It was given to her by the Mechanist, and it was a RobCo maintenance manual for the Protectron series of robots, and it was over seven hundred pages of single-spaced texts and diagrams.
If her brain computer was still running a RobCo OS, it likely would have been able to convert these signals into something more useful right away, but her antipathy to using any RobCo OS in her brain was well-established. Still, she could decode these signals. She had the maintenance manual; she had the robot's encryption keys. It wouldn't be hard, but it would be kind of interesting. Just something to distract a woman who only needed three hours of sleep a night for the rest of the evening.
---xxxxxx---
Four hours later, Lily had a preliminary model coded into her own system. It had taken a lot of tries, a lot of reading and a lot of ordering the Labourtron to do specific or random tasks and watching the signals they generated in response to each request before she got a usable protocol established.
She had also come to a startling conclusion about these robots. She was fairly confident that no Tron-series of robot was designed to work alone. They were clearly intended to work in groups along with a supervisory-level robot of clearly superior neural complexity in a mesh network, which would coordinate each action by its subordinate robots into something that wasn't stupid at all.
Utilizing a mainframe to coordinate a group of Labourtrons or Protectrons was a suboptimal solution as most commercial mainframes in Fallout did not actually use quantum processors and were actually slower, computationally, than even a single Protectron was. That said, even if it was suboptimal, it did work.
Lily wondered why RobCo never produced such a supervisory robot model; at least, she did not know of any such model herself. She knew that Dr House was the originator of every robot designed by RobCo, and guessed that he must have gotten distracted by other matters. Did he know that nuclear war was approaching, she wondered? A lot of the smarter people Pre-War felt that such a war was inevitable, she thought.
She sat there typing away at her keyboard, otherwise motionless, for another half hour before the protocol she devised was optimized and tested again.
'Command, Activate Supervisor Emulation', she told her computer, and then saw visualized herself transmit to each Labourtron, and then each Labourtron transmitted back to her a complicated handshake of negotiating encryption methods and keys back and forth before a connection was established into the bots' ad-hoc mesh network.
In her vision, she saw each of the Labourtron's Enhanced Reality tags update to indicate that she had an active connection to each of them and smiled.
If these robots were designed to work with a superior supervisory intellect, well, she could provide that!
It wasn't a perfect solution, though. She had to carefully construct a series of orders and contingencies for even a simple task like 'clean the floor.'
She realized about halfway through constructing one such series of commands and contingencies that they were finite state machines, a type of abstract computational machine she used fairly commonly in her past life as an electrical engineer. They could be visualized as a highly complex flow diagram; for example, completing the task of cleaning the floor required a precise number of steps, the first of which might be finding a broom.
With this realization, she managed to accelerate, creating several complete tasks that she could use for testing and building other tasks.
What Protectrons had trouble with, intellectually, was discovering when a task had reached a failed state and should be abandoned or even when it was completed, so she had to carefully construct such things for them.
The bots would flash over the network constantly at their current state, and her own expert system would handle keeping track and what their next order should be. Each of the Labourtrons was running through the 'clean the floor' task, one on each floor, and they were performing swimmingly! They hadn't run into a wall yet!
She constructed a much more complicated and useful patrol task for the Protectrons, also, so that they would maximize the area that they patrolled at seemingly random intervals while also offering any intruders a chance to either surrender or run off instead of just ventilating them as their default programming would do.
Lily glanced at the boxes full of Labourtron parts. She needed to get them assembled. The feeling of being at the centre of a vast web of robotic minions was both reassuring and nostalgic for her, but she only had five trons listening to her at present, and that was insufficient.
The fact that these Labourtrons were unarmed was a problem too. She could use them as dual-purpose machines if they had some way to deal with intruders or defend themselves, which would make the patrol patterns she could envisage be much more complicated and unlikely to be casually bypassed.
She could build their skeleton-chassis out of diamond, after all, but felt that a refractory hardened steel alloy would actually be superior in a lot of ways, especially as a defence against lasers and plasma, so she would just have to see how much power she could get out of the run-up test tomorrow and the next couple of days and then begin rapid development of a practical sintering system.
But presently, it was well after 0300, and she was actually quite tired now. She retreated to her bedroom and lay in bed until she fell asleep. She dreamt of spiders and their webs, content.
Paying the used car salesman, who departed the area with a quickness and in a separate car that was waiting for him, she descended into her basement. Most of the day was over, but she had a lot of things on her checklist.
She hummed and considered her options. She could work on a direct metal laser sintering system, a sort of 3D printer for metal alloys, as this would allow her to fix the truck rapidly. It would take sacrificing one of the laser pistols she had on hand, but it would be worth it. She had plans to construct things out of metal alloys, especially high-temperature refractory alloys, for a long time now, both for her own uses and possible trade, as she has come to the conclusion of constructing everything out of carbon allotropes was a little conspicuous.
However, she couldn't really do much practical work on it until she had the power station online. The laser sintering system wouldn't use all that much power, actually, but the metal recycler would use tons. At least five hundred kilowatts and probably more, she guessed. She already had that recycler built but hadn't even been able to test it. It should recycle whatever she puts in it and separate the product it produces into carbon feedstock, a dozen different elementary metals including iron, titanium, aluminium and a few rare earths, and then everything else, which would be the waste product that she couldn't presently separate.
The system relied on using incredible energy to literally ionize a layer of the recycled object, turning it into a plasma, and then separating the plasma using a combination of a particle accelerator, multi-stage centrifuges and finally, the levitation field emitters from several eyebots to separate out the plasma into its elementary constituents based on the differing masses involved in each atom.
It worked kind of like how uranium was slowly enriched to produce nuclear weapons in her past life, except the process was much quicker, although it was still much much slower than her first recycler, so this second version would be primarily used to recycle metals only.
Lily clucked her tongue. A laser sintering system required very, very fine metal powders to work, powders as fine as ten or fewer micrometres in diameter; otherwise, the system would not function properly.
The power station was scheduled for a run-up test tomorrow that she would have to be present for, but she wouldn't be getting full power from the system for several days yet.
She then nodded. Since she had no way to actually test such a sintering system until she could produce such powders, she decided to shelve working on it at all. While she could complete broad strokes of the design process using her CAD system, she was more in the mood for a little hands-on work this evening to relax her.
Her eyes turned to the boxes of robot parts that she had bought from Grace and smiled. While she had no idea what she would use these Labourtrons for, assembling and fixing them would be a relaxing, mindless activity until she could go to sleep for the evening.
She mentally started listening to Three Dogs radio station while she got to work.
---xxxxxx---
Lily looked at the three assembled Labourtrons. She verified the integrity of all but one of the processors, but her bottleneck on fixing these robots was actually the chassis elements, as there was considerable damage to them across all of the individuals.
The Labourtron looked more or less like a Protectron except that it was a bit thinner as there was no armour in its chassis at all, and they had more sophisticated manipulators -- not quite hands, but much more effective than the two claws.
Lily had to say; she hated it. Lily considered herself something of an expert on synths, and the best bet was always either to either mimic the human form as closely as possible, which had incredibly utility as evolution would tell anyone or diverge wildly from it, which was her usual modus operandi.
This half-assed semi-humanoid form was pretty terrible, Lily thought. And it wasn't like Dr House couldn't make a fairly good replication of humanoid movement, form and capability, either. She glanced over at the Assaultron in the corner, which quite impressed her with its hardy and simple mechanisms.
But, House went all in for a modular platform for many different uses in the Tron series of robots, so she suspected that limited his overall specialization which would have created an exemplary product. Lily glanced up at the ceiling in thought. Was it Heinlein that said specialization was for insects? Well, it was for robots, too, in her opinion.
She decided she would rebuild these Labourtrons, better, once she could build arbitrary shapes out of metal alloys as she could out of carbon. The programming probably couldn't handle anything that diverged too much from a bipedal form, so she would mimic a human much better. She already had scans and models of her skeleton; she could build slightly larger ones in hardened steel, with graphene composite areas to shield critical parts. Just the addition of the fully functioning hands would increase the capabilities of the bot by leaps and bounds.
Lily was absolutely incapable of creating a robot that mimicked a human form without falling deep into the uncanny valley at present unless she started with an actual human and slowly replaced their parts like she was doing to herself, so she would not even try. General utility and labour bots wouldn't need to interface with actual humans much, anyway. Once she got the Auto-Tailor that Grace was bringing back, she could clothe each of the bots in a unique colour of scrubs, and people would likely accept them as they did menial tasks in her hospital.
She had already connected each of these three to her diagnostic console and did a in-depth analysis of their neural networks. She was of the opinion that Protectrons were just incapable of the complex neural network necessary for actual sapience, which puzzled her. Didn't she recall some special Protectrons that would have likely passed a Turing test when playing Fallout 3?
Humming, she thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion such things had to either be custom Protectrons or, alternatively, the Protectron offloaded a lot of their neural mapping into a mainframe computer, and the mainframe plus Protectron might have achieved some level of sapience.
But since these neural networks were so simple, she did not feel bad about resetting them to factory defaults, as she had no real desire to work around whatever primary programming they had received at whatever warehouse they were working at.
She booted the Labourtrons up one at a time, and it went through its initial set-up procedures, registering herself as the principal owner along with a long password that she committed to memory.
Lily had her radio direction-finding system activated. Hence, she noticed when each Labourtron began transmitting, both to one another and also to the actual Protectrons in the hospital proper, which caused Lily to tilt her head to the side in curiosity. It appeared that they were programmed to establish a sort of ad-hoc mesh network amongst themselves.
She used her mental commands to listen to the frequency range used by the Labourtrons and then grabbed her tablet and set it up in laptop-mode. She sighed, this would be a lot simpler if she had the user interface of her development environment already coded for her brain computer, but at present she still needed to use her laptop to do any programming on it at all.
Lily turned off the audible playback of the Labourtron's frequency, which was just digital noise, and ran the signal through automatic decoding for binary or ternary signals instead, getting an incredibly long series of numbers printed on her vision during every transmission.
Sighing, she got up and searched around for a particular book of interest. It was given to her by the Mechanist, and it was a RobCo maintenance manual for the Protectron series of robots, and it was over seven hundred pages of single-spaced texts and diagrams.
If her brain computer was still running a RobCo OS, it likely would have been able to convert these signals into something more useful right away, but her antipathy to using any RobCo OS in her brain was well-established. Still, she could decode these signals. She had the maintenance manual; she had the robot's encryption keys. It wouldn't be hard, but it would be kind of interesting. Just something to distract a woman who only needed three hours of sleep a night for the rest of the evening.
---xxxxxx---
Four hours later, Lily had a preliminary model coded into her own system. It had taken a lot of tries, a lot of reading and a lot of ordering the Labourtron to do specific or random tasks and watching the signals they generated in response to each request before she got a usable protocol established.
She had also come to a startling conclusion about these robots. She was fairly confident that no Tron-series of robot was designed to work alone. They were clearly intended to work in groups along with a supervisory-level robot of clearly superior neural complexity in a mesh network, which would coordinate each action by its subordinate robots into something that wasn't stupid at all.
Utilizing a mainframe to coordinate a group of Labourtrons or Protectrons was a suboptimal solution as most commercial mainframes in Fallout did not actually use quantum processors and were actually slower, computationally, than even a single Protectron was. That said, even if it was suboptimal, it did work.
Lily wondered why RobCo never produced such a supervisory robot model; at least, she did not know of any such model herself. She knew that Dr House was the originator of every robot designed by RobCo, and guessed that he must have gotten distracted by other matters. Did he know that nuclear war was approaching, she wondered? A lot of the smarter people Pre-War felt that such a war was inevitable, she thought.
She sat there typing away at her keyboard, otherwise motionless, for another half hour before the protocol she devised was optimized and tested again.
'Command, Activate Supervisor Emulation', she told her computer, and then saw visualized herself transmit to each Labourtron, and then each Labourtron transmitted back to her a complicated handshake of negotiating encryption methods and keys back and forth before a connection was established into the bots' ad-hoc mesh network.
In her vision, she saw each of the Labourtron's Enhanced Reality tags update to indicate that she had an active connection to each of them and smiled.
If these robots were designed to work with a superior supervisory intellect, well, she could provide that!
It wasn't a perfect solution, though. She had to carefully construct a series of orders and contingencies for even a simple task like 'clean the floor.'
She realized about halfway through constructing one such series of commands and contingencies that they were finite state machines, a type of abstract computational machine she used fairly commonly in her past life as an electrical engineer. They could be visualized as a highly complex flow diagram; for example, completing the task of cleaning the floor required a precise number of steps, the first of which might be finding a broom.
With this realization, she managed to accelerate, creating several complete tasks that she could use for testing and building other tasks.
What Protectrons had trouble with, intellectually, was discovering when a task had reached a failed state and should be abandoned or even when it was completed, so she had to carefully construct such things for them.
The bots would flash over the network constantly at their current state, and her own expert system would handle keeping track and what their next order should be. Each of the Labourtrons was running through the 'clean the floor' task, one on each floor, and they were performing swimmingly! They hadn't run into a wall yet!
She constructed a much more complicated and useful patrol task for the Protectrons, also, so that they would maximize the area that they patrolled at seemingly random intervals while also offering any intruders a chance to either surrender or run off instead of just ventilating them as their default programming would do.
Lily glanced at the boxes full of Labourtron parts. She needed to get them assembled. The feeling of being at the centre of a vast web of robotic minions was both reassuring and nostalgic for her, but she only had five trons listening to her at present, and that was insufficient.
The fact that these Labourtrons were unarmed was a problem too. She could use them as dual-purpose machines if they had some way to deal with intruders or defend themselves, which would make the patrol patterns she could envisage be much more complicated and unlikely to be casually bypassed.
She could build their skeleton-chassis out of diamond, after all, but felt that a refractory hardened steel alloy would actually be superior in a lot of ways, especially as a defence against lasers and plasma, so she would just have to see how much power she could get out of the run-up test tomorrow and the next couple of days and then begin rapid development of a practical sintering system.
But presently, it was well after 0300, and she was actually quite tired now. She retreated to her bedroom and lay in bed until she fell asleep. She dreamt of spiders and their webs, content.
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