A lazy day in Vault 108, and rabbit stew

Deciding to put a pin in Gary Prime, as he wasn't going anywhere, she explored the rest of the lower levels, which were in much better shape than the upper tiers. Since she had forsworn additional FEV experiments, her timetable was shot, and she suddenly had a lot of time on her hands.

She wondered why the Gary's didn't destroy everything down here but couldn't come up with a reasonable answer. Perhaps they listened, to some extent, to the Mister Handy? Maybe he bribed them with former-Gary and former-Wastelander nutrient paste made from the Fancy Lad machine? She made another note to examine the Mister Handy's memories before erasing him.

She casually unlocked a door that was sealed by a terminal through the simple expedient of hacking it as she walked by. Opening the door, she discovered a supply room and armoury. There was the traditional armourer's cage that she would have recognized from the Army, with thick steel bars blocking access. Most of it was already cleaned out, but inside, she saw a dozen or so full-sized rifles and carbines, similar to the original one she brought out of the Vault. This was the second armoury room she had noticed in this Vault, which she thought was kind of unusual.

However, it was locked, and no amount of picking it yielded an open door for her. She considered just melting the lock off but decided it wasn't presently worth the effort. She took an image of the lock's tumbler with her scanner in order to fabricate a key to open it with that data, so she would come back to it later. It didn't appear to have anything too interesting inside, anyway.

Not locked up were a number of PipBoy 3000s, rolls and rolls of what appeared to be fabric and a number of backpacks and miscellaneous equipment, including things like toolbelts, flashlights and what appeared to be kevlar rope.

Leaving the supply room, she discovered a laundry that had its own Auto-Tailor with fabric recycler. That was a nice find, but she already had one. She might still run off with it, or perhaps she wouldn't. It would depend on the status of the Vault after she brought Gary Prime back to life. If he wanted to settle down roots, she wouldn't loot the place completely and would instead only take the scientific equipment. She could sell the Auto-Tailor for a few thousand caps, probably, but she wasn't hard up for liquid currency.

She'd make sure to copy all of the outfit holotapes, though. She'd always wanted a vault suit but wasn't about to wear one of the ones the Gary clones were wearing, even if they were the same size. Which they weren't.

Getting a message that the water purification filters had been cleaned, she returned to set the system into operation. She triggered a purge mode that would run clean water throughout the pipes of the Vault but would have to go manually open valves all across the Vault. She went upstairs and opened the valves in the bathroom of both the female and male dormitories, which should start the process well underway.

She didn't intend to clean and perform maintenance on everything. She was just interested to see if she could get a clean glass of water in for her last few days here. Plus, taking showers with radioisotopes in the water dried out the skin, so it would be a nice luxury if she could take a regular shower. There was no way she could rationalize wasting so much purified water back in Megaton.

'Okay, let's look at Gary now,' she thought to herself while heading back to the cloning lab.

Lily peered at the holotape that contained Gary's complete genome, decoded, on it and sighed. She sat it down and opened up her engineering CAD system, she had design files for a device that read and wrote holotapes from her attempts to create new outfits for her Auto-Tailor, but she hadn't brought one with her. She'd have to fabricate one before she got started.

Pulling out some food, she casually made herself an eel sandwich while waiting for the device to run off her fabricator upstairs and get delivered to her. She was really excited about her new addition to the condiments available for use on sandwiches. She had been using it on every sandwich she had been making and was still pleased.

Apparently, one of the merchants had found a family cultivating a large amount of spice-type plants which grew well in the radioactive hellhole, including some manner of mutated version brassicaceae flower, which meant that she had mustard for the first time.

Lily was sceptical at first, but the seeds really did look like mustard seeds, so she had bought the man's full stock. She had to use vinegar and grind her own yellow mustard, but it was worth it. It didn't taste quite like the mustard she was used to, but she would take what she could get.

She waited to eat her sandwich until one of the robots delivered her an absolutely ice-cold beer. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, beer and other alcoholic beverages were one of the luxuries that Megaton had in ample supply.

Although there was no way to bottle it so trade in it beyond buying a glass in a retail setting at a bar remained in kegs or half-kegs, which were both readily available and readily manufactured from steel by the number of small micro-breweries in town. Somewhat surprisingly, Moriarty didn't own all the brewers, as they were small operations run by one or two people as hobbies.

Most of the breweries in Megaton tended to make a similar tasting brew, and Lily specifically didn't want to know what they used for either sugars or hops in the fermentation process; the latter she was almost sure wasn't available because she felt it would ruin her enjoyment of their products, so she pointedly never asked.

Like the mustard, it didn't taste like the beer she remembered, and if she had tasted it in her previous life, she probably would have hated it. However, by lack of any competition, it became a luxurious treat she could only recently afford to purchase in any bulk, partly because she and Tombs supplied the purified water to two of the brewers.

The refrigeration system was of her own construction, and she just copied the cryogenic system she had stolen from the University of Maryland. At first, she was worried she would need to find some complicated chemical gas used as the refrigerant, but she discovered that it was just nitrogen, which she could easily extract from the air, so it wasn't a challenging build.

The Apprentice had been shocked and amazed at being able to chill or freeze things, so she had made the girl her own version, in the size of a stand-up refrigerator, for her apartment.

Lily narrowed her eyes while nibbling on her sandwich. The Apprentice better be feeding her eels! Not only did they taste delicious, but she had big plans for them.

Finishing her meal and her beer, she got up and inspected the cloning machine more closely. Seeing something on the top of the tall machine, she peered up at it while stepping onto her tippy-toes to see a brown cardboard box, which she couldn't reach even by jumping.

Sighing, she wheels an office chair over to the machine and uses it in an unsafe manner as a step-ladder, retrieving the box and setting it on a nearby desk. Carefully cleaning all the dust off of it, she inspected its contents.

It appeared to contain a bunch of holotapes, which Lily found interesting, 'Genetic samples from other Vault-Dwellers? That could be interesting. It is an interesting field of research to see how living with high levels of radiation might have changed the baseline genome of the people of the Wasteland, compared to people before the bombs fell.'

However, she found a sheet of paper underneath and protected for the most part by the two dozen or so holotapes. Dusting it off, she peered at it.

J Finnigen,

Vault-Tec

Mr Finnigen,

Enclosed you will find a sample of the proprietary holotapes that are necessary for the proper operation of the Nuka-Gen Replication equipment you have sourced from our company.

These are copies of holotapes we use at Nuka-World and can be safely overwritten by any standard genetics terminal, according to my man Dr Hein.

As agreed, I expect to be CCed on any pertinent research findings as I have a deep interest.

J.C. Bradberton

Nuka-Cola

JCB/jdr

Lily stared at the letter, perplexed. She read it three more times, 'Surely, not.'

Lily shook her head, 'Surely the most sophisticated biological equipment I have seen yet on this planet wasn't built by a... carbonated beverage company? What is even Nuka World? Like Disney World?'

However, she started looking over the twenty holotapes in the box, and discovered a tiny label on each one. She peered at them, 'Eudorcas rufifrons, equus grevyi, panthera leo... I think the first one is some sort of antelope, the second is a zebra, and how could I mistake the mighty lion? Why are they mostly African animals?'

However, the next holotape was Bos taurus which excited her, as that was the regular domesticated cow, although it didn't specify which variety. She glanced over at the holotape she had taken out of the machine earlier, which she assumed contained Gary's genome. There was a small label on it, as well, rattus villosissimus. Some type of rat, but she didn't immediately recognize the variety. At times like these, she wished that Tombs' book collection included a digital encyclopedia.

She guessed they erased or overwrote the rat to put Gary in. How intriguing. A bunch of genomes of pre-war animals of various species was a lot more interesting to her than a bunch of examples of a single species, h. sapiens.

'If this equipment was designed to clone cows, it explains why it is so much bigger than I thought it would be,' Lily mused.

Thumbing through the box, she looked for the smallest animal in the box, pausing at oryctolagus cuniculus, 'That's the common European rabbit, but I suppose it did range all the way to North Africa too. The only non-African animal I see here is the two domesticated ones, bos taurus and capra hircus. And maybe that rat.'

She slid the rabbit tape into the machine, booted it up, selected eight months as the maturation level and started the process. She was careful to make sure both the repeat function and the experimental memory engram transfer were disabled.

Lily was aghast that such an option was even available, 'What absolute lunatic would include an automatic repeat function on a cloning machine in the first place? It's only luck that we weren't hip-deep in psychopathic Garies.'

The stocks of biological precursors were high in equipment, so the machine started humming as it began operation.

There was even a progress bar that indicated the cloning process. And it seemed, unsurprisingly, that the mass of the clone had a lot to do with the quickness, as a small rabbit seemed like it wouldn't take more than an hour or two.

About halfway through the rabbit's cloning, a robot brought her a small device that looked like a Walk-Man. It was the holotape reader/writer peripheral. Humming, she slotted Gary's tape in and then took the cable and carefully connected it to her auxiliary data port at the base of her skull that was hidden behind her hair.

She copied the entire data track off the tape to her local storage before unplugging the reader and beginning her inspection of the raw data.

It would have helped a lot if the user manual for the editing terminal was still here; it might have talked about what data format these genomes were encoded in. Still, she knew the human genome like the back of her hand, so it wouldn't take her too much time to decode whatever file format this was in, so she sat in the comfy office chair and got to work.

She wasn't more than a quarter of the way done with decoding the genome file when the cloning machine dinged in what Lily felt was the... exact same sound as her Easy Bake oven did a lifetime ago, and the output door opened to reveal a rabbit.

Lily blinked at it from her seat at the desk. It seemed a bit off, which didn't surprise her. In fact, it was frozen in place, looking very confused.

Lily didn't expect to get a functional animal out of this test, but she still felt that this soda cloning machine was remarkable.

To be a functional animal, you kind of have to go through the whole process of being born and growing up as a baby and adolescent before becoming an adult animal. Sure, a rabbit has some instincts, but an incredible amount of information is taught to the children by the parents.

Lily felt it was remarkable that the cloning machine produced an animal with basically a blank brain that just froze in shock rather than totally flipped out.

Humming, she stood up and walked over to the animal and grabbed it, and before it could notice anything was wrong and start to flip out, she quickly slit its throat with her stiletto, being careful that it didn't bleed on any of the equipment.

Placing the body on a steel surgical tray, she pulled out her scanner and scanned it. She didn't detect anything wrong in the rabbit's bodily structures, so it was cloned properly, she thought.

'Well, whatever. I'm having rabbit stew tonight!' she thought happily.

---xxxxxx---

It took her most of the rest of the day to decode the file format, but after she did, she copied all of the holotapes to her internal storage. The animals were a variety of African animals, and she could start her own Safari if she cloned them all, but some of them were too big for even this machine to create unless she cloned them as infants, such as elephants and hippos.

Leopards and cheetahs were present, as were their prey animals, such as wildebeests and warthogs.

It was a shame that there was really too little vegetation in the Capital Wasteland to support such large herbivores, at least at present. The only animal she felt had a good chance of survival was the domesticated goat or the rabbit, and that was because they could eat practically everything.

Still, she already proved that if you supplied the biological precursors, the animal could be created as an adult, so there was nothing stopping her from making some of these animals specifically to consume immediately. Warthog bacon, perhaps?

Plus, she could always modify all of these animals for differing traits. There was a reason the Brahmin outcompeted all the cows early, but she could induce a very high radiation resistance into the genome for cows. It was something to consider.

Now, however, she was carefully adjusting Gary's genome. First, to add the radiation resistance and basic life extension therapies she had already developed, and secondly, to grow the fully mature body without an actual functioning brain inside it.

If Gary was digitized and she was just copying him into the body, she wouldn't feel conflicted. But she felt it was a bit unethical to grow an adult human body with an adult human brain, even if it was blank, and then scoop that brain out and toss it in the trash.

Although she might admit that some of her experiments have not entirely been completely ethical, they were all done to psychopathic clones that she was going to have to kill, anyway. She'd feel no problem about scooping a raider's brain out and giving someone their body, either.

However, a brand new brain? That was a brand new potential for life and reason that was as of yet innocent, and she found that her ethics wouldn't let her just throw it away.

But that was easily solved. The hardest part was ensuring that the change affected the body as it was growing but reversed once it reached maturation, so it wasn't reflected in the gametes the body produced.

Since Gary was a male, it was a bit simpler. The human female created all of her ova at birth, whereas a male creates his gametes throughout his life.

It would be a bit awkward if she sent Gary out on his way in the world, and he later met the woman of his dreams and married her, and then every child they had together was born without most of their brain. She'd get a 1 star on Yelp for sure if that happened.

Making changes to a genome this way to propagate in vitro was so much easier; she could really go ham if she wanted but decided to hold herself back. She didn't give him exactly the same mods she had when she arrived because that would make him susceptible to cancer if he ever had to use a StimPak, but she gave him as much as she could.

While he didn't have the special, novel organelle that she had in every one of her cells, he still had a vastly improved error correction and replication process, so he would be extremely resistant to radiation. Just not as much as she was, or a ghoul.

As she was transferring Gary's edited genome back to the holotape, she considered Alice. She knew the Apprentice didn't seem to be open to Lily cloning her a new body and performing a brain transplant; but it would really make things so much simpler. The only reason she wasn't considering it for herself was that she didn't have anyone she trusted to perform the surgery.

Ah, well. She slid Gary's tape into the Nuka-Gen Replicator like it was an eight-track tape of Led Zepplin and booted the machine up. Then, she paused. The Gary clones she had seen looked to be all in their forties. But, what man or woman wouldn't want a chance to return to their youth?

Plus, if he was to survive in the Wasteland he would likely need some of that youthful vigour. Lily selected two hundred and forty months on the maturation dial and hit the start button.

She'd go take a nap while Gary was cooking, and when she woke up she'd carefully examine his brain's stasis jar. She'd have to know how to disconnect it safely and how long his brain could survive in the jar after she did that. She probably would have to fabricate another jar...healing vat to transfer him. It would likely be the safest option.

Besides, the rabbit stew needed to simmer for at least six more hours to be juicy and tender.