Lily decided to replace some of the Labourtron chassis parts with carbon fibre, even if it was a temporary measure, as it would allow her to get more of the robots online. She planned to replace the entire chassis anyway, so these new parts would go back into the recycler when she managed to do so.
She felt that designing the DMLS system to print 3D shapes in metal alloys would be one of her longer projects, at least as far as the design phase went, now that she had started to sink her teeth into it. There was a lot of iterative testing, and she expected a lot of failure and recorrecting, so she wasn't confident she could have the metal printer running before the hospital opened.
As such, she had gotten another twelve Labourtrons online. The last eight were a bit too much trouble unless she wanted to fabricate entirely new chassis for them, which at present, she definitely did not. Instead, she would utilise these last eight as the test beds for the complete rebuild into a human-form general-purpose labour platform design.
She had also been working on a number of finite state machine tasks for the Labourtrons, and she was almost done with one series of tasks and contingencies that would allow her to refurbish all of the walls and ceilings in her new hospital. While Monsieur Tombs' work crews had done an excellent job, cleaning even the trashed top floor, the walls were still in somewhat poor shape. Although, by the standards of the Wasteland, the building was in excellent shape.
The process she was conducting was replacing all the drywall, some of which was damaged in places, with panels constructed out of carbon fibre and graphene, with some invisible diamond reinforcement. She could print a two-meter by a one-and-a-half-meter tall panel at a time, so she ended up having to use two panels of slightly different sizes to replace one section of the walls.
The most complicated part was that these panels were impossible to drill through, so the areas where the wall studs were had to be programmed in custom for every section printed, which would have made this an impossible task if she had to do it herself. She just would not have had the patience to do it at all.
There were over a hundred distinct tasks she had to make to perform the wall replacement, some of which were simple, like demolition of existing drywall, taking destroyed drywall walls to the recycler in the basement, and similar. However, some were quite difficult, such as adjusting the panel's drill-holes position and then programming the fabricator to produce a custom panel every time.
Even some simple seeming problems were somewhat difficult to manage, such as mapping a three-dimensional model of every room using only optical sensors present in all of the Labourtrons.
She spent the entire day yesterday working on the tasks and the first part of the morning fixing bugs when the Labourtrons would inevitably screw up a particular task, like misidentifying the toilet downstairs for the recycler for some reason. That was a mess.
However, now it was running... well, not perfectly but pretty well. Lily rarely had to step in anymore, and every time she did, she wouldn't have to step in to fix that particular error again. She was using recursive self-correcting algorithms to run the tasks, which tended to reduce errors over time in any machine learning system.
Not only would the new walls, as they slowly were put up, be significantly impact resistant, but most importantly, they would look like what a hospital should look like. Sterile, off-white walls and ceilings! It would actually look newly manufactured, which would probably impress a lot of people who saw it, she hoped.
It might take a couple of days to finish the first floor, and then a little bit longer for every floor after that as the first floor had the fewest walls with its open floor plan, except for the basement, of course.
Lily watched a group of Labourtrons destroy the drywall in a section of the wall while several others swept up and dumped the debris in a trash can, which was carried off by another when it was mostly full. While drywall was mostly gypsum and therefore did not have any carbon content in it, all the paint and spackle were rich in carbon, so it was still worth it to run the debris through the recycler.
She had changed the programming of the recycler, also. While this version couldn't ionise nearly all matter like the heavy-duty machine could, it could still break the chemical bonds in some cases; in the case of gypsum, it could break off the calcium and collect it rather rapidly.
Lily did not keep the reactive metal in its elemental form long, as she quickly oxidised it through a chemical process before later converting the calcium oxide to calcium carbonate, which she was collecting and storing as anti-acid tablets, similar to Tums, albeit without any flavouring.
Thinking about them now caused Lily to pull a small bottle of such pills out of her bag and quietly chew on two of them, wincing at the absence of flavour, before drinking a full glass of water to wash them down.
She did not have an indigestion problem; however, it turned out that removing more than eighty per cent of your skeleton had some minor follow-along issues, for example knocking your calcium levels out of balance. However, calcium was an essential mineral used in a lot of cellular functions, not just involved with the skeleton, so Lily had solved the problem temporarily by taking supplements.
There were a number of ideas of either genetic modifications or synthetic cybernetic solutions to the problem ruminating in her head, but she felt that she had way too much on her plate as it was to work on an issue that she could solve in the medium term by taking some pills. Once she had some free time, perhaps she could solve this problem permanently, but as it stood, taking a couple of pills a day was good enough, even if they were blandly tasteless.
Lily tilted her head to the side as she heard a vehicle roll into her parking lot. She peered out a window to see who was visiting her this morning and smiled. It was Grace's crew and Miller, along with a reasonably fully loaded commercial truck. Lily started to rub her hands together but then noticed that all of Grace's people looked a bit ragged like they had a significantly more challenging job than she thought they would have. She saw that new girl Melissa wincing and limping out of the cab of the truck, which wasn't a good sign.
Lily pursed her lips as she walked out the front door to greet them. Had she jinxed them? She assumed she was sending them on a milk run, so perhaps Murphy put a hand in, and there were significant complications for Lily's temerity of suggesting that they had an easy job.
Grace greeted her with a wave, "Hey, Girlie. Can you look at Melissa? She took a bad hit in the thigh, and while these healing implants are amazing, something must have healed wrong because she can barely walk."
Lily blinked and nodded, "Of course. What happened? Zhere were only zhe ghouls zhere when I went in; you guys didn't go to zhe top floor, did you?" she asked nervously.
Miller showed up to answer her question, and he shook his head, "Nah, that looked like an obvious death trap. Everything was going well until we were almost fully loaded up, and then two Super-Mutants and a Centaur showed up."
Miller scowled, "We could have run, but they'd probably trashed the truck, and you have no idea how expensive one is..." Lily did have an idea, actually, but she didn't interrupt him, "... so we fought them, leading them away from the fragile merchandise and truck. Honestly, we might have been killed if it weren't for these healing implants, but especially the enhanced reflexes. We got lucky and took one of the muties out pretty quick, but the other almost chewed us to pieces with a Gatling laser. I think everybody took a hit somewhere, thankfully in non-vital spots. We took cover, and eventually, he had some sort of weapon malfunction, so we all popped out of cover and shot him to pieces. The Centaur wasn't much to write home about."
He looked pleased, though, "We got everything on your list, plus some extra that we think you will be really pleased with. Although, I don't particularly appreciate fighting the muties without Power Armour, even if these local strains of mutants are really dumb. So we expect a bonus, especially if you want to buy a slightly broken Gatling laser and a working tri-beam laser rifle, which the other Super Mutant had."
Lily clucked her tongue and nodded. It was normal to offer mercenaries a combat bonus if they saw action, and she definitely did want to buy the Gatling laser at least. She had no idea what a tri-beam laser rifle was, though, but it sounded like something she could disassemble and improve as well.
"Of course, although I'm a little bit cash poor so if you would take some of your bonus and extra payment out zhrough either what you already owe me or in-kind trades I would really appreciate it. Let's get Melissa into an exam room so I can take a look at her," Lily said. But first, she called the worker foreman over again to coordinate unloading the truck.
She just told him to unload it all into the main entrance for now. She did not have a generalised truck unloading task for the Labourtrons, but she did have one to move things around the hospital, so she would be able to relocate all the gear downstairs to look, repair and sort it.
One of the first things she programmed in her brain-computer was the ability to pull up scan images and display them, so she did not even have to go into a different room to examine the medical images she surreptitiously took. Looking at the scan in, she palpated the region of the woman's left hip. It had healed, alright, but there was a shard of bone remaining inside the joint, which grated against the healed bone every time she moved. It looked quite painful.
"Just lay there; there is a shard of bone that needs to be removed, but other than that, it looks pretty well healed already. I'm going to go look at the rest of your team," Lily told the paramedic woman, who nodded and just relaxed.
Lily left her and examined each of the other five in turn. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with them, but they were clearly tired. She called the Apprentice around and got her to duplicate her efforts for training. Then she asked the girl to make up some banana bag IVs for each of them and also to add some generalised healing nanites in the drip as well.
A banana bag was so called because of its bright yellow colour and consisted of a bunch of B complex vitamins as well as magnesium and saline, given through an IV drip. It was generally quite effective at treating both chronic vitamin deficiencies, some of which she saw some signs of in a Grace's crew, as well as a fairly effective pick-me-up, common as a hangover cure. If it was one thing Lily wasn't short of in the pharmaceutical department, it was vitamins.
While most of the useful drugs were already looted from the hospital, she had taken over fifty kilos of various vitamins when she looted the hospital the first time, and that was just a drop in the bucket. If the crew said they got everything on her list, that meant she might have almost a ton of various vitamins that the compounding pharmacy inside the hospital was preparing to make into formulations. Lily would have preferred a ton of various other drugs, but she would take what she could get.
Lily would have already given them this treatment before they left, but she hadn't quite gotten around to testing the vitamins for safety and formulating them in the pharmacy when they departed.
All of them could use the boost, and a couple of them showed some early signs of niacin and riboflavin deficiencies, so it was better to nip it in the bud now and tell them to eat a more varied diet, if possible. Admittedly, most of a person's riboflavin came from beef, chicken and dairy sources, which were sometimes difficult to find in the Wasteland.
Lily started Grace's IV herself but let the Apprentice practice on the rest of the crew, which got accusations of favouritism which she ignored because they were accurate. Besides, the Apprentice did a reasonably good job, only having to poke twice a couple of times.
Nodding at the five sitting in some comfortable chairs with their IVs going, she said, "Okay, just relax for a couple of hours, yes? Do you need to bring zhe truck back yourself, or...?"
Miller shook his head, "Nah, you may not have noticed him, but it came with a driver. Most places that'll rent trucks like that won't let you just drive off with them without one of their people on board. Most places won't even let you do that because you could just kill the driver and take the truck, but we have a long relationship with this guy. After the truck is unloaded, he'll be out of here."
Lily nodded, "Then I'll get zhat bone shard out of Melissa, it should not be a problem."
Miller and Grace nodded, leaning back in their chairs and possibly already asleep before Lily went back into the exam room. This was a simple surgery, so Lily would just do it here. Still, she explained everything to the Apprentice and Melissa as well, who was interested in both the surgery as well as the IV that she was taking.
Making small talk, she explained both. Lily was just using a local anaesthetic this time since Melissa had already started to take some normal healing nanites, and she still could not quite get different programming schema to run inside a body simultaneously, excepting if that body had a nanohive like she or the Apprentice did.
Melissa didn't seem to have any complaints as far as the pain was concerned, and it was barely a ten-minute surgery to pull a small thin shard of bone out of her hip. Dropping the bone shard into a metal specimen tray with an audible clink with her forceps, she finished up by using a small amount of surgical glue to keep the wound closed; she had found in her own surgeries that sutures were contraindicated when dealing with people with healing factors.
"Okay, zhat's all zhere is. Unfortunately, zhere was significant inflammation from you trying to walk on zhat leg with a piece of bone sticking out of zhe joint, so I recommend zhe light duty for a day," Lily told her, mildly chastising her.
Normally she would prescribe a simple anti-inflammatory painkiller, but the fact was she didn't have any. And the opiates she did have were a bit too much, but Lily felt the pain should be brief and mild, as the healing implant along with the gram or so of medichines would accelerate her healing very rapidly. She hoped to get a steady supply of aspirin from traders, as there were places that manufactured it now but hadn't, as of yet.
Melissa nodded, "Okay, thanks, Dr St. Claire. I'm just going to take a nap, for a little bit. We've been awake for thirty-six hours, almost."
Lily clucked her tongue and nodded, "Okay. When you guys wake up, feel free to go upstairs and use zhe showers in any of zhe guest rooms on the fifth floor. We have running water now, although I wouldn't drink it."
Lily turned to leave, and Melissa spoke up, "Oh! By the way, that clean sweat enhancement... it is amazing." Lily smiled and nodded. She had it too and was quite pleased with it, herself.
She glanced at the other five members of the team, who were all conked out, some of which were snoring, in the lobby before proceeding outside to look at her loot.
She needed to identify what was fragile and shouldn't be moved by the Labourtrons and what could be moved by them, as well as mentally catalogue what her take was.
The Apprentice came out with her and was also curious as to what their new equipment was, "The Auto-Doc looks in one piece," the girl mentioned.
Lily nodded, "Yes, as the Auto-Tailor, as well. Zhat will be nice. I wonder if we can learn how to program arbitrary designs, it just had a few 'olotapes for what you'd expect a 'ospital to 'ave, after all."
Neither the Auto-Doc nor Auto-Tailor was precisely fragile, just rather bulky, but a number of the portable X-ray machines and cardiac monitors were a little fragile, so she and the Apprentice carefully moved those into the hospital themselves.
The Apprentice was looking at three copies of a similar or identical device, each one looking about the size of a small automatic teller machine, the kind you'd find in a convenience store, "Dr St. Claire, what are these? I don't remember them in the hospital."
Lily walked over to one and peered at it. She didn't quite recognise it either, or the brand name or model name, which was just a random seemingly the number of letters and numbers. However, on one of them, she lucked out, and there was a usual manual attached to the side, much like the Auto-Tailor system had. She pulled out the manual and looked at the cover, grinning immediately.
The cover read, "Greenetech Genetics, Genome Sequencer model GS-1200A Operator's Manual."
Lily smiled. She did not recognise the company, although there were likely hundreds of such companies building and selling medical devices in Pre-War America. She wondered where the crew found the devices and hoped they were either functional or could at least be cobbled together for at least a single working model.
Sequencing genomes on her scanner was tedious, and she only trusted herself or the Apprentice to do it. Suppose she had a device that could sequence a patient's DNA and wasn't unique technology. In that case, she could have other people, like techs, nurses or other doctors, handle the sequencing of every patient so that Lily could perform genetic counselling about their risk factors for various diseases or potential benefits involved for some enhancements that she could offer them.
Once she got all the fragile items removed from the pile of loot, she triggered the Labourtron task to move the rest of the items downstairs to her basement lair, at least for the moment.
She was confident in her robots, but she did watch them as they completed the task, just in case.
Walking back inside, she found Miller already awake. His IV was about halfway done, so he still had about a half hour to sit, but he was energized, "This is great stuff! You're sure it's just vitamins, Doc?" he joked.
Lily nodded. "Yes, a couple of you showed some signs of zhe vitamin deficiency, you amongst them. It is kind of hard to eat properly in zhe Wasteland, I know, but multivitamins aren't hard to find; perhaps you should take one a day, yes?"
Miller groaned, "Melissa's mom told me the same thing. I guess I will start if I know I will feel this much better."
Lily slid a chair over to him and sat next to him, "Where did you find zhe genome sequencers? I'm very sure zhey were not in the 'ospital, I would have noticed them for sure."
Miller grinned, "You saw them, did you? Yeah, that's the main extra we found. We found them in a nearby building; I guess it was where both the hospital and other doctors nearby sent specimens for lab tests. Sadly, the rest of the machinery there was wrecked, but these were packed in a closet safe and sound."
Lily blinked. She should have considered that. Any time you build a hospital, a sort of medical district forms around it with doctors' offices and other businesses that cater to the high volume of medical professionals. So it wasn't too surprising that there were interesting finds in nearby buildings near the hospital.
Lily nodded, "As far as your bonus, I'm willing to offer either two reflex treatments, which you can take with you, or one of the phoenix devices, which you can either take with you or leave with me for implantation whenever you send someone to me."
Miller closed his eyes to consider, "The reflex treatments. Although the healing devices helped a lot, what really saved our bacon is being so much quicker than those muties. I'm going to have to recommend all of our combat teams get treated, so I am hoping for some bulk discounts on that over time -- but we just can't afford to buy them all right away, or perhaps even soon." He nodded and then said, "Also, throw in a hundred caps to each of the team members, except me. I'll throw in another hundred caps myself so that they get an individual bonus of two hundred caps as well," he added.
Lily hummed before nodding, "Okay. Yes, it is a little hard to see zhe personal benefit of zhis to zhem without something for zhem as individuals, also."
Miller smiled, "And do you think we can lean on your hospitality again tonight for your barracks? Err... isolation ward." He grinned, "Then we can handle the nuke in the morning, and after that, we all have to leave on some other pressing business. It would be convenient if we could just rack out here."
Lily nodded. She wasn't about to ascribe any probabilities on tomorrow's mission at all, so as they wouldn't be jinxed and would be ready for anything.
But after that mission, and after her hospital was up and running, she decided she would start planning a return trip to Vault 108. At the time, she had left there alone and terrified, vowing never to return until she had at least power armour, but she felt, and she was careful with her wording to avoid jinxing herself this time, that while it was still a death trap she, herself, was a lot more dangerous too, and she could at least explore it.
Plus, the clones offered her a possible ethical avenue for experimentation involving a certain silver briefcase carefully hidden in her basement. She would just need an effective way to subdue them non-lethally, first.
