If you do the Corvega factory, it can be a draw of business. Mechanist can automate parts and Protectrons guard the grounds, just set up a fence to keep thieves or wandering Hobo's away.
The business is vehicle parts, trucks must have a hard time finding parts, this can be a source.
Chryslus down the road may have blueprints that can be made here, Vault 108 has water, just run a line and Canterbury can be a community.
So, when are the Grenadiers cleaning out the top floor deathtrap in the hospital? The Mechanist can repurpose the eyebots, if he goes with or they are brought to him? Is there a central computer to control them?
Edit: How extensive is this factory? R & D? Able to make all parts? Will you strip employee engines of cells or just the factory storage?
Are you investigating the Bethesda ruins? Is this before Raiders took it over? It would make a fine rally point for Grace's bunch, near the Armory too!
it makes humans sterile we haven't a clue on what it does to stouts points at the fact that the stout is fracking really smart and it's supposed to make people really dang dumb
This fucking genius comprehends human social structures well enough to insert himself into the one feasible part where his creator refuses to kill him even if she had the opportunity.
Is Lily ever going to admit to Alice that she met Sir Longius first and tried to kill him for being an FEV mutant, at least?
This fucking genius comprehends human social structures well enough to insert himself into the one feasible part where his creator refuses to kill him even if she had the opportunity.
"Remember to feed my eels," Lily finished the list of things that she expected the Apprentice to keep track of for her while she was gone.
Alice rolled her eyes, "Yes, yes. Don't worry. Don't you mainly kill them and eat them, anyway?"
"Afterwards! Zhis is zhe fourth generation, and I think I'm only one or two generations from a usable genome," complained Lily. Alice thought her eel project was not only crazy but very mad sciencey, and she didn't see a problem at all with having to charge her computer every couple of weeks. The girl just didn't understand!
She finished talking with the Apprentice and watched the seven improved Labourtrons load up the truck with all the equipment she was taking.
She was leaving Alice in charge of the hospital itself, albeit not in control of any of the medical decisions the doctors working for her made. She had control of both Protectrons, all the standard Labourtrons and one of the improved Labourtrons, as well as the four auto-turrets that were in each of the possible entryways for the building.
When Lily returned, she intended to build auto-turrets for almost every room, armed with AirTasers. She thinks she could design one that did not look any different than a normal ceiling panel until it was deployed, which would make the building both incredibly dangerous to intruders while at the same time not seeming like the fortress it was to guests.
She didn't have any issues leaving the girl in charge of the hospital or the other two doctors in charge of the patients. Most of the trauma-related patients were fairly quickly handled by one of the three Auto-Docs she had, although these devices really did need a doctor to oversee their operation as they could be a touch quirky.
Lily had already had to override one that was stuck in a loop and would have just continued performing the same surgery on the hapless person locked inside.
Dr Bonesaw had become quite adept at programming custom surgical procedures into the Auto-Docs, and she had already treated a number of older patients for arthritis by programming it to go in and clean out and replace all of the faulty joint cartilage in various joints. They gave the strawberry blonde doctor rave reviews. Even the Apprentice liked her, she thought, because she was much nearer to the Apprentice's own age.
Lily herself had also sold a number of genetic treatments, mainly the clean metabolism mod and the life extension therapy, to a number of curious but well-to-do people in town and even had two patients waiting for her return to receive a fully cybernetic arm and one full cybernetic leg between them.
They had heard about her around the Wasteland and arrived together. Lily did their initial consultation but wouldn't be able to really assist them until she came back.
She thought they would be upset, but neither of them was. Both of them looked fairly well to do and did not mind cooling their heels amongst the fleshpots of the "Big City", as it were.
Lily even recently heard herself be mentioned by none other than Three Dogs himself, but she was a little bit concerned about that as, in her opinion, Three Dog was little but a mouthpiece of the Brotherhood, given how close their working relationship was.
Thankfully it was mostly a puff piece, talking about how the new hospital was already saving lives and featured advanced technology like Auto-Docs. The Brotherhood didn't really care about Auto-Docs. However, that couldn't last -- she just hoped it was Sarah Lyons or one of her Lyons Pride people who came to investigate her and not one of the soon-to-be Outcast hard cases.
At present, Monsieur Three Dogs seemed to believe that she was firmly in the camp of fighting the Good Fight, whatever he meant by that. He seemed to approve of the fact that it was her hospital policy that patients were only charged, except diagnostic fees, for successful treatments.
Lily never felt that doctors should pretend to be Evel Knievel and say, "I get paid for the attempt!" If you took your car to the mechanic, they wouldn't charge you if they couldn't fix it, and Lily's opinion of a person's body was no different.
The only case where Lily or her doctors would charge for an attempt was if the doctors told the patient that there was very little likelihood of success, and then the patient wanted to proceed anyway. In that case, she made sure to get payment up front!
The seven robots she was taking with her all loaded themselves last, jumping up into the bed of the trailer. She wasn't taking too much, but she was taking a hundred-kilowatt generator, her footlocker-sized fabricator, tools and one robot charging station that they would have to use in shifts, as well as the prototype flying robot that she had finished over a week ago.
"Well, I shall be off, my Apprentice!" Lily told the girl, who appeared slightly nervous to see her go. She then jumped into the cab of her truck and started its reactor to idle, which took a couple of minutes before she pulled out of the parking lot and started driving towards the gate.
Her truck was far from the tank she wanted it to be, but she did have a chance to slightly armour the cab against ballistic threats by replacing all the glass in the windshield and windows and placing ballistic panels in the doors. She also added steel plates in the grill to guard the reactor against anyone shooting it from the front, as she would rather she did not have to conduct field repairs on it if it was damaged and leaking radiation.
The cab of the truck was quite roomy; it was a sleeper cab which was a nice bonus for now, although she definitely intended to completely rebuild the entire interior of the vehicle when she got the chance and materials to do it.
The guards let her through the gate with a wave, and she proceeded on a sedate pace towards the Potomac bridge. When she got a couple of kilometres away from Megaton, she pulled over and then mentally went through a test of the Gatling laser turret mounted on top of the cab. It could swivel a full 360 degrees and could even target enemies inside the trailer if she were boarded.
She could control it mentally by directly aiming and firing, or she could just designate targets with her computer interface, and her expert system would handle the aiming and shooting. She aimed the reticle at a piece of rubble and fired and judged its accuracy to be quite good.
Nodding, she pulled up the robot tasking and ordered one of the Labourtrons to open the case, which carried her flying robot. Ever since she arrived in the Fallout universe and found out about the levitation technology that Eyebots and Mister Handy-type robots have used, she had the idea of a flying surveillance bot.
She had tried many different ways to get it to work, and now that she was getting more understanding of how precisely the levitation systems worked, she realized it was completely impossible with the off-the-shelf emitters she was scavenging from Eyebots. The levitation worked as a kind of momentum exchange between matter.
The levitation technology needed some matter to "push" off of, like the ground, and that couldn't get too far away from the levitation emitters. This was a simplification because they didn't push at all; it was more like momentum and inertia could be transferred directly between the two objects. You could walk under a levitating bot and not be crushed, for example.
So, flying high wasn't possible with scavenged devices. She couldn't even build the emitters herself yet. Although she thought it might be a function of emitter size, so theoretically, it might be possible to fly a few hundred metres, but it would take an emitter the size of a small blimp to do it.
Lily blinked. That would be... not a bad idea. There was no way she could build such a thing herself, though. Perhaps she would design such a thing and offer it to the Brotherhood. She had some feeling in the back of her head that she couldn't precisely identify, telling her that they would really appreciate a flying steel blimp.
Shaking her head, she triggered the drone's start-up sequence. Building a quad-copter wasn't hard. She could build powerful electric motors entirely from carbon. She could build incredibly durable rotors from the same material. The hardest part was reprogramming the Eyebot brain to be able to fly without crashing into everything.
She made the decision to save development time by running the drone on a RobCo OS using a straight salvaged Eyebot core, even though she could use her own operating system on the processors. She had her own OS, but she didn't precisely have her own robot code. However, she ran into so many issues that she often wondered if she was saving any time at all.
Still, she finished the project in the end. The dark grey quad-copter lifted out of the case it was transported in and flitted straight into the sky while her expert system controlled its direction and goals in a similar way it controlled the Labourtrons.
'Nice, the added GPS receiver on the drone is letting my expert system populate my moving map automatically,' Lily noticed, very pleased.
She had finally cracked the data schema from the GPS satellites but didn't have any kind of map to correlate with a particular coordinate. At first, she made a program to automatically use her digital compass combined with the GPS coordinates to build a map as she saw things on the ground.
Amusingly it worked in practice almost exactly like a "fog of war" in a video game, where she would build a map as she saw new locations. However, it worked best for populating maps of buildings and didn't work so great translating images she saw on the ground with a bird's eye view that her moving map expected. Images of the ground displayed on the map would be a bit distorted, and Lily occasionally needed to go in and fix them manually.
Now, however, the drone was sending her real-time images of the ground from a couple of hundred metres up. Not only would it make her very difficult to ambush, which was the drone's primary purpose, but it would populate her map quite quickly and efficiently!
Lily grinned and said aloud, "I love it when a plan comes together!" Although the impression of Hannibal Smith lost something if she didn't have a cigar to go along with it, she felt. She put the truck in gear and verified that the drone would be in the correct follow-recon mode before setting off again.
---xxxxxx---
Lily peered at the overhead surveillance feed from the drone. It was still an analogue TV feed converted to a digital video stream, so it wasn't of the best quality, but it was what she had to work with, presently. She had slowed considerably when she neared the bridge because it was often a raider ambush spot.
And sure enough, there was a group of a dozen or so raiders attacking a group of four travellers on foot. The four travellers seemed... heavily armed, which surprised her a little bit, but after considering a moment, she shrugged. That just made them smart, in her opinion.
The travellers had made it to this side of the bridge before being pinned down with suppressive fire, although they didn't look as though they were in any immediate danger.
Lily hummed, parked her truck and hopped out. She triggered six of the seven robots to fall into position with her while the seventh got into the cab of the truck. Her driving task for these improved Labourtrons wasn't the greatest, which is why she wasn't having them drive in the first place, but they could make short trips in straight lines well enough.
She didn't want to get her truck shot to pieces if the raiders turned and thought she was a bigger threat, but she felt the best way to deal with this medium-sized group was an attack at their rear when they were distracted trying to kill their original prey.
She carefully designated the four travellers as tentative allies in her tactical system, which propagated out to the Labourtrons and set out on foot the last fifty metres.
Her current loadout was her trusty laser pistol, the prototype AirTaser and her completely rebuilt tri-laser rifle.
The AirTaser project was really fortunate she had bought this tri-laser rifle from Miller, as she invented the semi-steerable optics for laser emitters when she was rebuilding this gun.
It seemed very effective, but only at a short range. Almost like a laser shotgun, she thought. At long ranges, the laser beams would tend to diverge, and there would be significant misses. But she had the idea to incorporate a central laser range finder and then use the distance to steer the three beams, so they more or less struck the target at the same spot.
It took her a few days to invent optics that change the direction of a beam, although only a couple of degrees. But it turned the tri-laser rifle into a terrifying weapon at any range.
It was pure coincidence that the AirTaser project needed exactly the same sort of engineering is done. Lily loved pleasant coincidences like that.
Mentally designated targets in advance for her robots, she picked her own targets while shouldering her weapon. Any further, and they'd be noticed for sure, so Lily mentally triggered the attack command while she fired on her first target, who was closest to the group of four travellers and was trying to open an angle to shoot them behind their cover.
The AirTaser was specifically designed to put about ten centimetres of distance between both laser impacts, but her tri-beam was designed to land all three beams more or less at the same point. The raider's head exploded when three blue beams converged on it, which Lily found a little gross. She started sprinting towards the raiders, picking out more targets.
The Raiders were caught more or less off guard, and a couple were starting to turn around, but as soon as they did, one of the travellers popped out of cover and riddled them with bullets from a Gatling gun. Lily blinked at the sight, 'Damn, that woman must be strong to just carry a Gatling gun like it was nothing.'
At the same time, the blue-white beams from her robots' AirTasers lashed out at their targets. She was testing the lethal mode here, and judging from the way a nearby raider was struck, fell to the ground twitching and then went still, she thought it was working.
'Great!' she really thought it would work, given her extensive knowledge of the human heart's electrical system, but you just never knew until you tested a device.
All the raiders were mopped up in thirty seconds or less, and three of her robots closed protectively around her. Lily didn't think the group had noticed her robots just yet. Boy, would they be impressed! Time to show off!
Lily grinned as the four stood and stepped out of cover. However, instead of the looks of amazed appreciation she was expecting, the woman with the Gatling gun had a look of absolute horror. One of the others yelled, "Fuck! She's a fucking Courser!"
The woman with the minigun yelled, "Run! Take A3-21 and move south. I'll try to hold her off and try to catch up with you. We can't let her catch him!"
Lily looked like she was watching a film where the protagonist stayed behind to cover the retreat of his friends in a display of dramatic cinematic martyrship. She even looked behind herself to make sure some other woman, this Courser, wasn't sneaking up on her. The three just nodded, looked at her sadly and ran off.
Lily felt these guys must be mistaking her for someone else, and they didn't seem like bad people, so she switched her robots into the 'non-lethal' mode and issued a command to take her down if she moved to swing that minigun in her direction. She'd try to talk the woman down first.
Then escalate to stunning her, and if that didn't work, she'd have to put her in the ground, despite how nice she seemed.
The woman didn't seem in a hurry to fight her, at least, and she even looked confused as to why Lily and her robots hadn't attacked yet. Finally, when she saw her friends were well away, she said, "I don't want to do this. We don't need to fight."
Lily blinked, "I don't want to fight either? But you're in my way."
The woman shook her head, "No! I can't let you take him!" And she started to swing the minigun around and was stunned by three beams instantly, twitching and slumping to the ground. The other three missed, which Lily felt was a failure. How could a robot miss a stationary target? She'd have to look at these Protectron tactical programs.
'Fuck. I meant you're in my way of the bridge! Well, that was a Speech check failure, Lily ole girl,' Lily thought as she started running to the woman, fast. She pulled her own AirTaser out and thumbed it to non-lethal, slinging her laser rifle. She leapt into the air, aimed and stunned the woman again as she landed right next to her. She holstered the AirTaser and pulled out what she was now referring to as her hypospray, and tagged the woman with some paralytic medichines.
When the stun wore off, and the woman found herself paralyzed, she was obviously quite scared judging from the rapid eye movements, but Lily had no intention to kill this lady for a case of mistaken identity if she could help it.
'Command, Priority word association tag on the word "Courser", and "A3-21", context is associated with robotics,' Lily made a mental note that would notify her if she read or heard that word again, especially in that context.
Her truck was pulling up to the bridge, and Lily hummed. She had no intention of killing this woman, but there should be a penalty for trying to kill her, shouldn't there? She glanced down at the minigun and nodded. She grabbed it and hefted it into the truck cab, then paused. You couldn't leave a person unarmed in the Wasteland. It would be kinder to kill them.
Lily hummed. She glanced at the weapons her Labourtrons were looting from the Raiders; she could leave one of those for the woman.
Lily had an odd itching feeling in the back of her head, telling her that wasn't what she should do.
'Well, I'm not giving her one of my weapons! I can't replace any of them!' Lily argued with her feeling before she glanced at the prototype AirTaser in her hand. She could replace that.
The feeling in the back of her head stilled, which Lily took for agreement. Sighing, she pulled a couple of extra small power cells out of her bag and put them in the woman's pocket before showing the AirTaser to her. She showed her the switch on the back, "Safe, Non-Lethal, Lethal, High-output." Lily demonstrated all the firing modes and the safety before leaving the electric gun in the paralyzed hands of the woman and jumping back into her truck, rolling northeast across the river.
'I have no idea why I just did that. That prototype is probably a little bit better than the production models I make!' Lily groused to herself a kilometre away, but she had come to trust the feelings she had.
"Well, Vault 108 or bust!" Lily decided to forget about it. She would fabricate herself another AirTaser when she got to the Vault and plugged all of her equipment in.
---xxxxxx---
The two Railroad agents were surprised to see their friend alive when she caught up with them half a day later; that much was certain. A younger-looking one was amazed and asked, "Did you kill that Courser?!"
The woman scowled, "Of course not. Did you see how fucking fast she took down those raiders?"
She sat next to her two friends and explained, "She told me I was in her way, and I thought that she meant in the way between her and A3-21, so I figured I was dead but would at least give you guys a headstart."
The three nodded; that was pretty much what they had expected. They were already mourning her when they ran off, in fact.
"She stunned me with some new weapon I've never heard about, made all my muscles spasm out of control for like ten seconds, and then she drugged me with some drug I've also never seen before, which paralyzed everything from my eyes down," the woman reported in a surly tone.
"Then the bitch stole my minigun and was about to drive off in a truck, but for some reason, she handed me the weapon she used to stun me!" she finished, confusedly. She held out the sleek grey energy weapon for inspection, "She even told me the switch positions were safe, non-lethal, lethal and high-output before driving off. A few minutes later, I could move again and started chasing after you guys."
She paused her story, "I think the non-lethal is the stunning setting she used on me, and I think the lethal is what she used on the raiders. I tried the high-output setting out of curiosity, and it shot a giant lightning bolt, but it takes a while to recharge after one shot of that."
The older of the two men looked thoughtful, "She must have been ordered to do something else, but almost any Courser would have mopped us up as a secondary objective, maybe even switch to us as a primary objective after you were stupid enough to say A3-21's designation out loud in her hearing."
The woman groaned, "Yeah, that was stupid of me," she admitted. She was technically the leader of this cell and was a great leader, but not really the greatest of thinkers.
"I think she might be close to waking up. She is still following their orders, but she disregarded us and pretended she didn't hear A3-21's name. And she even gave you, who she had to know was a Railroad operative, what looks like a prototype Institute energy weapon. This is huge. Coursers almost never turn away from the Institute; their indoctrination is too strong," the man mused aloud.
He asked A3-21, "Did you recognize her?" but the escaped synth shook his head.
The woman considered that and nodded, "You're right." The younger operative asked, "What should we do? Should we try to find her after we get to Rivet City?"
Both the woman and the older man shook their heads.
The woman finally found her smarts, as she had an intuitive grasp of tactics, "No. You have to wake up naturally; you know this. But we should definitely tell the higher-ups when we get back to the Commonwealth. Just the fact that there was a Courser working this far south is something they have to know."
"So our destination is Rivet City? We've heard there was a new hospital with advanced technology in Megaton, though," the younger man mentioned.
"Yeah, but we know for sure there is a scientist that can do what we need in Rivet City. Time is of the essence, especially now. If there is one Courser here, there could be more," the older man mentioned.
The woman nodded, "Exactly. Let me rest another fifteen minutes, and then we can get on the move again."
Well, that's going to be a hilarious moment when they eventually bump into Lily. She's going to be so confused by everyone. Although I do have slight concern that this "never actually talking like regular people" plot evolves into real problems.
Y'know, the "if your plot can be solved by five minutes of talking sensibly, it's a stupid plot" -thing. Of course, if it's just for laughs, then it shouldn't bother anyone with a sense of humor. But when it becomes a backbone of a story, it's a problem.
Well, just my thoughts. Right now it's funny as shit.
Why would they think that she is a Courser?? If they know their name and what they are they sure as heck know that they wear that ugly as sin black coat with pauldrons and the belt with the metallic "I" of the Institute.
From what I remember Lily goes with your typical scientist garb but +10. With that I mean mainly the white coat.
Also from what I understand the Coursers don't use cars. They just teleport wherever they want.
To me this looked like the author tried to force the joke of mistaken indentity again.
Why would they think that she is a Courser?? If they know their name and what they are they sure as heck know that they wear that ugly as sin black coat with pauldrons and the belt with the metallic "I" of the Institute.
Because she was with a squad of what appeared to be gen 1 synths, wasn't Kellogg, appeared to display super human raider-killing abilities and wasn't in the Institute hazardous environment suits the actual Institute members wear when they usually go outside.
I always assumed if they had Coursers leave the Commonwealth that they would dress more normally, similarly to how Mr. Zimmer dressed in a regular suit when he came to Rivet City.
Edit: I also didn't mention it, but she isn't going alone in danger wearing her lab coat. She's in customized combat armour, but it doesn't look anything like what the Coursers wear, that is true.
The Institute makes androids (synths), some of which are basically human clones with control chips in their brains. The Railroad is a group of escaped synths from the Institute. One of the android types the institute makes are called Coursers, which feature spec-ops ninja training, cybernetic enhancement and are generally considered badasses that the Institute sends to kill people or recover escaped synths. Coursers generally supervise groups of humanoid robot androids while they work.
Ya.... that isn't going to have all kinds of bad consequences Down the road, one the rail road thinks she's a synth which considering how much tech is In her body how could she prove otherwise, two she's now on the radar of the morons in the institute. And if the brotherhood even get a hint of that they will ask no questions and just try and purge, purge, PURGE!.
So she's on her way to conquer a vault and turn the cloner tech inside to her own purposes and once she's secured it she can probably lock the vault behind her as a base for her and a fall back position if she needs it.
I do wonder if she will let the brotherhood know the source of the super mutant in the DC area. Also I know it was a game but never made any sense to me why there were so many time mutants In DC when there source was in a vault near the edge of the map and hardly any mutants between them.
Wish they would do a remaster of fallout 3, seems like everything gets a remaster but the games I actually want. LOOKING AT YOU! Last of us remaster number 3? I don't care how much nicer you look I'm not paying 70 bucks for damn re re release go to hell.
The Institute makes androids (synths), some of which are basically human clones with control chips in their brains. The Railroad is a group of escaped synths from the Institute. One of the android types the institute makes are called Coursers, which feature spec-ops ninja training, cybernetic enhancement and are generally considered badasses that the Institute sends to kill people or recover escaped synths. Coursers generally supervise groups of humanoid robot androids while they work.
You know what one of the worst bits for the Institue is? The broken mask incident where an early synth was sent to the surface unauthorized and glitched out and murdered people in Diamond city happened before the Institute sent a synth to massacre the representatives trying to form a unified government.
Between that, and the mention that the Institute was actually part of the efforts to form a unified government before turning their backs on it, it looks a lot like they screwed up, and then killed all those representatives and hid to avoid the blame and explanations.
The Institute massacred representatives and crippled diplomacy and government in the Commonwealth tohide one of their screwups.
You know what one of the worst bits for the Institue is? The broken mask incident where an early synth was sent to the surface unauthorized and glitched out and murdered people in Diamond city happened before the Institute sent a synth to mixer the representatives trying to form a unified government.
Between that, the mention that the Institute was actually part of the efforts to form a unified government before turning their backs on it, it looks a lot like they screwed up, and then killed all those representatives and hid to avoid the blame and explanations.
The Institute massacred representatives and crippled diplomacy and government to hide one of their screwups.
I often wonder if that wasn't sabotage. We know from various things, like the Lawgiver and Contract Killer perks and Desmond the ghoul that there are forces behind the scenes, still, that seek to keep certain places chaotic for their own benefit. Maybe its a longshot that such groups, probably Pre-War themselves, had contacts or spies in the Institute that could have sabotaged that synth, but it isn't impossible. It just seemed very convienent timing.
I often wonder if that wasn't sabotage. We know from various things, like the Lawgiver and Contract Killer perks and Desmond the ghoul that there are forces behind the scenes, still, that seek to keep certain places chaotic for their own benefit. Maybe its a longshot that such groups, probably Pre-War themselves, had contacts or spies in the Institute that could have sabotaged that synth, but it isn't impossible. It just seemed very convienent timing.
True, but even if that is what happened, the Institute still decided to massacre the representatives of their own volition.
We hear that the broken mask synth wasn't supposed to be on the surface, but no one in the Institute questions the CPG massacre or mentions that it was anything other than deliberately planned and approved.
Lily stared at the paralyzed Gary clone with a complicated feeling in her heart.
Have you ever played a role-playing game and returned to the first dungeon and just steamrolled the monsters with your higher levelled character and gear?
It felt great, didn't it? That's right. It was a lie! Lily's feeling wasn't complicated at all! She felt great! These fucking Gary's!
She arrived at the Vault a couple of hours ago and parked in a somewhat secluded area before unloading the truck of all of her equipment and proceeding inside with her robo-squad. It didn't take long to find the first Gary, who was stunned and paralyzed quickly.
She wasn't in a hurry here, so she had her robots clean the entrance and the first rooms, dragging trash out of the Vault and dragging her own equipment in.
She couldn't go too much farther in, or she would lose the data connection with the quad-copter drone, which was hovering high enough to be very difficult to see while watching over her truck.
Lily would have to build a number of signal repeaters as she explored the Vault if she wanted to stay in contact with the outside world, which she definitely did.
Lily had two main goals coming to this Vault, to liberate its cloning and genetic equipment as well as to conduct morally justifiable FEV tests on the population of Gary's.
She had taken additional brain scans of this paralyzed Gary and saw nothing to indicate that it was sapient at all. There were dogs that were smarter, she was sure. So, as long as she didn't cause them undue pain or suffering, she felt perfectly justified performing experiments on them.
There were a lot of bonuses to conducting this type of viral research on a series of clones that were genetically identical, as they were almost their own control group. Lily could vary the route of administration and the dose and see if that correlated to a change in the ultimate mutations expressed. She was very interested to see if that was the case, or would every exposure be similar, or would every exposure be random? She didn't know!
It took about a day before the FEV transformation was more or less complete, so Lily did not see any reason she should delay any longer. She wasn't in a hurry here, but she didn't want to waste any time, either. She expected to spend about a week here, followed by a few days visiting Sophie and Scott before heading back home.
Lily hummed and pulled out a carefully packed dark glass container containing some of the first ether produced. She learned from her experiments with Sir Longius and wasn't about to proceed in such a way that any of her subjects could escape from her. She didn't need or want Vault 108 to become another Super Mutant nexus.
A subject didn't need BOTH arms and legs, after all. She could just examine the mutation in one of the limbs and extrapolate the changes she saw into the missing limb for her models. And Super Mutants might be dangerous, but one-armed, one-legged Super Mutants? Much less so.
She sedated the paralyzed Gary because even though it wasn't sapient, it could still feel pain, and she wasn't a monster, after all! After the amputations, she would change the paralyzation medichines to healing mode for a time to ensure there was no infection before turning them completely off for the first exposure.
'Hmmm. I should fabricate some graphene restraints, too, just in case,' she thought.
'Command, Audio - Play Frédéric Chopin,' she commanded as she got to work.
---xxxxxx---
Lily decided to go with a traditional intravenous exposure for her first subject.
She had the feeling from her memories that FEV was often aerosolized and exposed to test subjects that way, but Lily couldn't find a single reason why that should be the preferred method, so she discarded it at first as it was a less safe and less objective way to accomplish the same thing.
One of the slightly Terminator-looking Labourtrons was holding her diagnostic scanner near the first subject, taking continual scans of the restrained Gary, which she monitored through a wireless connection. One leg or no, restrained or no, she wasn't about to sit in there with what might be a Super Gary, soon.
Sadly, there was no real way she could avoid all of the distress of the clone during the transformation process. She had switched the medichines over to analgesic mode, instead of turning them off like she originally intended when the Gary regained consciousness shortly after exposure to FEV.
The virus triggered some reactions in its amygdala, which caused an adrenaline feedback loop which woke the Gary up. It no longer responded to the administration of benzodiazepines as an anxiolytic, either.
So, while she was sure it wasn't feeling any pain, it was clearly feeling some sort of distress that she couldn't treat pharmacologically. She would just have to live with that, she supposed.
Her scanner didn't have the resolution to see the genetic changes happen, but she saw the after effects as it seemed to be converting available fat into muscle rapidly. The changes in the brain were the most interesting, though. Granted, it was true that all the Gary clone's brains were scrambled eggs in the first place, but Lily wasn't seeing anything that should cause a loss of intelligence.
If anything, all the increased neural connections and activity should have the opposite effect! This type of effect was exactly what she would expect to see, for example, in the shitty weasel, and would explain its rapid gain of intelligence that she had already observed. According to Alice, the damn thing can do math! Even if it was only simple addition and subtraction.
Lily glanced over at the silver briefcase with Vault-Tec's logo on it. Did she get a different strain, somehow? But it was supposed to be picked up and taken to Vault 87; it didn't make sense that it wasn't the same sort of virus they were experimenting on already, or did it?
It was a shame she only had one scanner, she could have started the exposures for more Gary's, but she didn't want to miss anything. So she had only exposed two Gary's thus far. She had four others that she was keeping "on ice", as it were, and had ordered the robots to kill any of the others ones if they found them.
Lily hummed and made a note to increase the calorie content of the exposed Gary's to a minimum of six thousand a day, or perhaps even more. It's a shame she couldn't feed the dead Gary's to her subject-Gary's... she couldn't, could she?
Lily shook her head. No, she had some lines she wouldn't cross. The Vault's first rooms were starting to look pretty clean. Well, they lacked obvious debris and destroyed and wrecked objects -- they were still quite dirty in terms of filth.
She would still sleep in the cab of her truck tonight.
---xxxxxx---
AN: This has been retconned. I am keeping the deleted text for anyone interested. Lily did not regain her memories of FO: NV.
Lily woke up and was amazed at her dreams. She had dreamt of being excited to come home and play a newly released game, Fallout: New Vegas. She expected it to be great because it was made by the same people who made Knights of the Old Republic 2, which was one of her all-time favourite games, along with its prequel. Some of the memories were disjointed in time, as she had some memories of different play-throughs and some memories of DLCs which weren't released until much later.
Lily now had most of the knowledge of the plot of Fallout: New Vegas in her head, including some things that really made her nervous considering she now lived here; for example, the Old World Blues expansion made her nervous.
The "Think Tanks" seemed insane, and coming from a former robotic spider that was universally also considered insane, that was saying a lot! The expansion pack played all of the things you saw in Big MT for laughs, but they sounded quite terrifying if you thought about it.
"Perhaps... perhaps zhey don't actually exist? I mean, 'ow could you take someone's brain out of zheir skull and zhen have zhem still walking around looking for zheir brain as a quest?" Lily said to herself, but the fact that she could think of at least three ways to do that off the top of her head made her hopes ring hollow.
In the one play-through in her memories, she sided with Dr House, which she tended to agree with as well. While he was definitely an autocrat, he was the best of a bad series of choices. She also didn't precisely know the timeline of the games. Did New Vegas happen after or before? It's so far away it might not even be of her concern.
She did find it amusing that Dr House had almost exactly the same opinion about the Brotherhood of Steel as she did, although she wouldn't go as far as blowing them all up...
She paused. She was planning to blow them up. A little bit. "Not all of zhem, zhough!" she said aloud, to herself, churlishly.
She would have to think long and hard about how any of the information she learned from New Vegas might be of use to her today in the Capital Wasteland. How many years after New Vegas did they publish Fallout 4? She didn't remember. She supposed it didn't even matter; she wasn't collecting memories chronologically, not usually.
The robots had killed seven more Gary's overnight and had begun working their way to where Lily suspected was the overseer's office on the upper levels, which was blocked by a bunch of debris and overturned furniture.
She pulled up the map of Vault 108 that has been generated by her robots and considered it while she made her rounds on the subject Gary's and Garys-in-Waiting.
The two exposed Garys more or less resemble Super Mutants now, and have already gone through the process of what she is referring to as androgynization, with them losing their primary and secondary sexual characteristics. The first subject had already tried to destroy her Labourtron that was continually scanning it, but thankfully the graphene restraints held. It would set her back considerably if she lost that scanner, although it wouldn't be the death blow it used to be.
She still has no idea how it works and isn't willing to disassemble it to try to figure it out. It was a shame it couldn't scan itself, also.
She pulled up the latest scans of Gary's brain, interested in this new now-typical Super Mutant behaviour. She was shocked at what she saw. Much different than when she left, the current brain looked... damaged. Gone were the rapidly developing additional neural connections that Lily would have taken for signs of increased intelligence. Instead, it looked like Gary had been the victim of a traumatic brain injury.
She sat down and pulled up the scans that her brain-computer had saved and went backwards in time until she got to the point where she left to go to sleep. She began playback at ten times normal speed, watching neural connections develop rapidly with fascination.
It took about fifteen minutes of watching to pinpoint the exact time everything started to go wrong for Gary, but it took another hour of her studying all the processes that were happening before she figured out exactly what was going on.
It seemed to her that FEV, or at least this strain of it, was intended to increase intelligence. However... there was such a thing as too much of a good thing. The virus didn't know where to stop. The density of neural connections in Gary's brain increased and increased until such a point where his body could no longer support the energy and oxygen demands of so much neural activity, and no matter how much the heart pumped blood, the brain couldn't remain properly oxygenated.
Then over a period of about an hour, the brain suffered increasing and increasing hypoxia-related brain injuries until an equilibrium was reached where the body could support a new level of brain activity. It was like having a thousand strokes, so it wasn't that surprising Super Mutants were so stupid and aggressive. What was surprising was that they survived at all! Most of the sacrificed brain area was the areas that stored memories and processed higher-ordered thinking.
What a tragedy.
Lily thought back to the stoat and wondered why it was so different. Was this the reason why FEV sometimes increased intelligence in some animals but not others, like humans?
Well, these first two subjects had served their purpose. It was time to examine them in-depth, pathologically, to see any differences in the viral exposure on a genetically identical subject. Grabbing her tri-beam, she walked over to the rooms she was using to house the subjects. There was no reason to keep these two feeling any more distress.
---xxxxxx---
She had managed to get into the overseer's office that evening. She was putting on hold any further experiments after dissecting the two Gary's. There were significant divergences in how the exposure effected the two identical Gary's, despite being exposed to an identical amount of virus in an identical way.
She suspected that there was a significant amount of randomness in every FEV exposure up to a certain point, which might make studying it less useful than she thought.
While the Overseer's room didn't have the two miniguns on the arms of the Overseer's chair like she remembered from Fallout 1 & 2, it did have a ceiling-mounted machine gun that damaged one of her robots before it was destroyed by two high-output lightning beams.
In the Overseer's files, Lily found what she thought might be the secret purpose of Vault 108. When she first got here, she thought maybe it was a breeding test, considering the prominently labelled "Female Dormitories," but she had already uncovered an area labelled "Male Dormitories," as well, which put paid to that theory.
The Overseer's protocol didn't lay the entire purpose behind the experiments out, but Lily could read between the lines. Vault 108 was, unsurprisingly, a test of cloning technology. But specifically, they were testing the ability to copy an existing brain into a newly grown clone.
The Overseer was to select a non-essential male and female person so the tests could be conducted. In the Overseer's notes, he had already selected a maintenance worker named Gary Kaminski but was waiting on the first phase being completed before selecting a female "volunteer."
After their brains were copied into a series of new clones, the experiment was to transition to a social one studying how a group of people with identical memories would interact with their fellows and how they would interact with a group of similar people of the opposite gender. They clearly hadn't gotten that far.
Lily wasn't surprised. It wasn't specifically stated, but this was immortality research at its root, too. The average person might not consider an exact duplicate of themselves as a route to immortality, but a lot of people would. Plus it would make a very good way to create tons of super-soldiers; you only had to train one completely and then just copy his brain into a bunch of clones. Bonus points if you could adjust their memories, so the clones didn't know they were clones.
Wasn't that the plot of a Tom Cruise film? She couldn't quite remember.
It did make her all the more curious about what precisely she would find in the lower-level labs of this Vault. Already her robots were working in that direction. She would have to have a good path clear of debris if she intended to loot the labs to the bedrock, in any case, so now it was just a matter of waiting.
She considered her Garys-in-Waiting. Well, she had enough time to run one more FEV experiments on a pair. It would likely take a day or more to clear more than the small path the Gary's used to get in and out of the lower labs. She needed to clear an entire corridor, after all.
She paused to consider. She would let the transformation go a little longer this time. But this time, she would program a number of medichines to keep the Gary's brain oxygenated as best as they could. And perhaps they didn't need any of their limbs; it would assist Gary's heart to keep the brain oxygenated if there was less body mass to pump the blood through, after all. Plus, the transformation wasn't that interesting on the limbs. Just more muscle, denser skin. She's seen that, already.
She paused to consider. She would let the transformation go a little longer this time. But this time, she would program a number of medichines to keep the Gary's brain oxygenated as best as they could. And perhaps they didn't need any of their limbs; it would assist Gary's heart to keep the brain oxygenated if there was less body mass to pump the blood through, after all. Plus, the transformation wasn't that interesting on the limbs. Just more muscle, denser skin. She's seen that, already.
Omg she's going to end up creating a smart / normal super mutant, who she's also amputated all the limbs of.
Lily why are you like this. (I know why she's like this.) She needs to literally set a reminder to herself that most people don't see their bodies as a tool to upgrade.
And then she accidentally a perfectly reasonable supermutant and he's a Gary cutlet.
Good going Lily!
On other note, how New Vegas floats up out of nowhere is... well, kinda out of nowhere.
I recon revealing stuff either in a singular dedicated chapter dealing solely with New Vegas recollections and preparations being made for the eventuality of those events, would have been better.
That, or just recollectong a little bit every chapter and Lily reacting to those thing she remembers, would have worked too.
How it is now is neither this nor that, just an awkward middle ground, sharing chapter space with FEV stuff and breaking out in middle of it narratively?
