Darth Alice

Maniacal laughter was issuing forth from the pale blonde woman standing alone in a small room. She was wearing nothing but her bra and panties and had her arms raised into the sky. Spinning in place, long braid swinging freely while she cackled, "Mwahahahahaha!"

She suddenly had the thought that at this moment, spinning and cackling like mad over her invention; she looked like an older blonde, more voluptuous version of Jinx from League; even her braid was somewhat similar. So, was this how a mad scientist got her start? Would she be building fish-shaped rocket launchers next? Or blowing up Piltover? What even would be the Fallout equivalent of Piltover? NCR? Or, worse, would she remain in the jungle while the rest of her team died in a 4v5 team fight? Perhaps she should stop cackling, but she was just so pleased with herself.

It has been over five weeks, and now her first extremely modest nano-fabrication system was almost completely finished and, in fact, in operation. The first project was a set of mechanical armatures and fine robotic gripper-manipulators that would be installed back on the fabricator. It would allow her to queue prints without her being here to remove items from the fabricator herself. This was especially important on some parts that required complex doping strategies, for example, where the armature could remove the in-process print from the fabrication chamber and place it in what she was calling the doping chamber and visa-versa.

In addition to supplies of carbon, the fabricator had supplies of the four most common dopants for carbon allotropes to achieve differing effects. One of the most critical dopants was a simple proton accelerator that would bombard specific parts of any print with protons at high speeds.

Some allotropes of carbon became magnetic when bombarded by protons, you see, Lily thought smugly to herself. So, that meant she could build entire electrical motors or generators out of nothing but carbon! In a single manufacturing process!

Sadly, she could not actually utilize this feature at present because it was even more energy-intensive to extract hydrogen from water and then accelerate it at things, and Scott's lair didn't quite have enough electricity for all that. You'd think it would take much more energy for a mass of nanomachines to make diamondoid materials, but it didn't. It still used a lot, but nowhere what the proton gun did. Maybe if she didn't have to extract the hydrogen from water in real-time, but trying to keep any amount of hydrogen sequestered was just so annoying. It leaked through everything and tended to make things explode or catch fire, especially things connected to high-voltage, high-current electricity. She didn't have the engineering chops to be confident about it, even with access to super-materials.

She was still giddy and did a little dance instead of a spin, "How did I do it?! Nanomachines, son!"

Since she could also turn some carbon allotropes conductive, semi-conductive or insulative at will, that also the opened the possibility of creating what Lily would describe as traditional transistor-based computing technology without using a silicon semiconductor substrate. However, this batch process of moving back and forth from the doping to the fabricator area was slower and severely limited the printing resolution. The theoretical possible transistor density in this process was something similar to what Lily felt was Intel or AMD's 10-nanometer process. This was only a few years out of date by the time her memories of her life in America stopped. The only problem was that Lily wasn't entirely confident she could design an entire computing architecture from the ground up. Sure, she had taken classes on the theory behind computing architecture and was a professional electrical engineer. Still, in truth, she was the type of engineer that would buy processors from Texas Instruments or similar companies rather than design them herself. She built consumer products! Her other memories weren't much help, either, as they had stopped using a traditional transistor computer architecture ages ago. It was like asking someone who built nuclear submarines to build a sailing brig -- they know it's supposed to float, probably be made out of wood, have canvas to catch the wind, and sleeker was better than not... but that might be it.

Still, this was a massive opportunity for her. The Fallout universe had a real gap between their super-tech and the stuff that looked like it was pulled out of the TV show Mad Men or the 1960s in general. She did not entirely know how she would market such things without getting a lot of attention on herself, but it had to be possible. Either that or just accumulating enough strength so that subsuming her or wiping her off the board cost too much to do.

Quantum computers were still impossible for her, but she saw a time when she could fabricate the optical crystalline hyper-matrix that comprised the quantum cores she was most familiar with out of diamond. She thought it wasn't impossible or even hard; it was just maybe three or four fabricator generations beyond her current technology base.

How the Fallout universe scientists approached quantum computing was vastly different from transhumanity. Still, Lily felt that their quantum cores were not much inferior to the ones she was familiar with, if at all. However, they looked like a Rube Goldberg device of dozens of different elemental types and odd structures when she scanned a few cores from different robots. Lily wasn't confident she would ever be able to reproduce them without raiding a RobCo factory and spending months reading their engineering notes. But, she wasn't against doing precisely that -- seeing a different way to accomplish the same thing was incredibly valuable. She surmised that the Fallout quantum cores definitely "cost" more than the optical equivalents, if only because they weren't used in absolutely everything. You wouldn't still use vacuum tubes unless they were much cheaper.

She would sit here waiting for the robotic arms to finish printing before connecting them to the motors she already installed on the fabricator and calibrating their precision, both in accuracy and force exerted.

Then she would start her first queue, which would be the plasma accelerator loops, to build herself a reliable electrical supply. She hadn't completely solved the cooling issues, not to her satisfaction.

When she moved to a more permanent address in Megaton, she intended to, perhaps, utilize the waste heat through a heat exchanger to power a distillation rig to produce fresh, clean water from irradiated water. The by-product of that over time would be a concentrated, highly radioactive bilge water that eventually would prove troublesome to deal with. Unfortunately, none of the radionuclides in the radioactive water was that useful, either. Mostly it was Caesium, radioactive Iodine, Strontium and minute quantities of plutonium but mostly the less useful Pu-238 isotope that wasn't fissionable.

In other words, it was going to be a big hassle that she would require infrastructure and either highly radiation-resistant robots or highly radiation-resistant workers to help her with.

However, what she could do right now was leverage the weirdly effective, and as of yet unreproducible, technology of Fallout to take a shortcut. It was apparent that there was some sort of miraculous materials technology Fallout used for either heat dispersal or, perhaps, heat reflection. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to carry a micro fusion cell at all! It would be roughly the same temperature as the plasma it contained inside its fusion reaction and would either melt itself or the person carrying it.

Lily had already scanned micro fusion cells and didn't have the foggiest idea of how it worked, but she was leaning towards the concept of heat reflection, or rather more accurately called a perfect insulator. It should be physically impossible. But, otherwise, how would a micro fusion cell sustain a fusion reaction for hundreds of years, even if it was just idling? That was just her speculation on why it worked, what it was doing but now how it was doing it.

In any case, she had utilized the spare heat-sinks from broken Sentrybots, which also utilize a sustained fusion reaction for power, for her electrical generator idea.

It was not ideal, not in the least. You just had to look at a Sentrybot in combat to realize they hadn't gotten all the kinks out -- they overheated all the time! So much so that this repair facility had over three dozen extra cooling rods when they only had five or six sentrybots. It seemed to be the primary engineering casualty of that series of robots.

Lily should be able to get over two megawatts of continuous power out of the generator she designed but utilizing the Sentrybot cooling technology, she would be limited to no more than two hundred kilowatts.

Still, two hundred kilowatts was enough to power her fabricator completely and her recycler twice over. While this made her, of course, a far ways from her dream of a nuclear-powered Vertibird, she would definitely be able to power her projects and clinic at Megaton and possibly still have power left to sell to the city, even if she could not incorporate it into a water purifier, at least at first.

In fact, after she very carefully, and from very far away, tested this generator -- possibly to destruction since it had the potential to be so dangerous, she intended to build Scott and Sophie one and leave it here. He had mentioned that whatever system he had managed to hook into was getting more finicky every year.

And if they ever had to flee his lair, they could take it, and their growing army of killbots, with them and setup essentially anywhere and be guaranteed to at least have some infrastructure if only power.

She hadn't managed to entirely stop giggling until the armatures were installed, tested and initiating the first print queue.

She practically skipped to town to work a shift in her clinic. Nothing could dampen her mood!

---

Lily stared, depressed, at her patient. She would never have realized how many medical problems in the apocalypse would be, either tooth or boil-related before she arrived here. Such things were, essentially, impossible the last time she practised medicine. In fact, the only real experience Lily's memories had practising medicine was either trauma-related or involved elective surgeries! When you were immune to essentially all diseases, didn't age, and would even grow your hand back like a lizard's tail if it was chopped off, you just didn't need to go to the doctor too often.

It was the main reason she had branched out into genetics oh so many years ago. There was so much more work if you provided bioware mods to any and all types of biomorphs instead of just healing them. And then, when you go down the road of customized human augmentation, well, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, you end up as a giant robot spider. Happened to people all the time, really.

And when you're a giant robot spider, well, it makes perfect sense that you'd spend more of your time researching robotic augmentations. Altogether it made for a full life, but a good life. A good life that didn't involve pulling teeth or disinfecting boils. To say nothing of the rashes!

"Thanks, Doc!" said the man who hadn't seen a bathtub or shower, perhaps ever.

"Of course, any time," cheerfully replied the young Doctor, who must have clearly spent all of her level-up points into Acting to maintain such a professional bedside manner.

Lily sighed and glanced over at Alice, the girl who had been her assistant for the past five weeks. She had gradually allowed the young woman to help with procedures, and she seemed to be learning a few things, at least. She was less useless than she had been at first, at the very least. Lily had begun paying her the last three weeks, even.

Lily smirked, "What's the most surprising thing you've learned about the glamorous world of medicine, Alice?"

Alice paused while cleaning up the exam room, "Probably that almost every case of a baby brought in with breathing problems has been booger related, Dr St. Claire."

Lily snorted, then chuckled. It was true. Infants weren't really built to breathe from anything but their noses. They could, but not well. At that age, their mouths were optimized to suckle. "About 85%, I'd say. They don't tell you that in medical school, either."

Not that she had ever gone to medical school, precisely. She received her initial medical training so many years ago as the apprentice of a Chinese doctor who had fled the planet Earth on the same evacuation shuttle Lily herself had taken. They had watched, together, as the TITANs deployed anti-matter warheads on the sprawling city they had once lived in, and Lily had grown up in... Wait, did that mean she used to be Chinese? She could certainly speak it, but her memories of self prior to when she became a synthmorph were spotty or altogether absent. Her apprenticeship wasn't that uncommon, even if her former Master was a slave-driving bastard. For a couple of decades, Apprenticeships in many fields were the norm.

Perhaps the booger thing was on the curriculum in medical school back in America, though, but Lily thought they probably let the new doctors figure that out in residency for themselves, too. For the laughs, if nothing else.

Lily tilted her head to one side and asked the slightly younger-looking woman, "So, what are your plans when I leave Canterbury Commons in a couple of weeks, Alice?" If she said to practice medicine, Lily might shoot her. She could barely lance a boil at this point.

Alice looked nervous, bringing her hands up to her modest bosom, "Well, I had been wondering... if I could come with you?"

Lily blinked. Okay, perhaps she should have expected that? But she didn't. She pursed her lips together, "Why? Weren't you devoted to Canterbury Commons?" Lily found the idea of being devoted to any place, much less a two-horse town like Canterbury Commons. Why, it only had ONE Mad Scientist in it, if you didn't count Lily herself, which she didn't.

Alice smiled and said in a tone that made it clear that her devotion was somewhat wavering, "Yes, my family is here. But if I work and learn from you for a year, two, maybe even three, I would know more than most self-described doctors in the Wastes. Certainly more the most of the quacks that come around on caravans. I don't know where this 'medical school' you went to is, but they taught you actual medicine, biology, and anatomy!" Her tone had the same feeling of zealotry that Lily tended to get when she was able to talk to someone about replacing a limb or organ with a superior synthetic alternative, which caused Lily to raise her eyebrows. Then Alice continued, "After that, I could come back, and I'd BE someone in this town. I'd be important, knowledgable, valuable! Uhhh... I mean, if it was okay with you, Dr St. Claire."

Lily snickered slightly but considered things. She would need staff at the clinic she was going to set up in Megaton, and it was not like she had any desire to keep any of her purely medical and anatomical knowledge secret. If she could just download it into Alice's head, she would do so, but that would require both of them to have either neural meshes or cyberbrains, cortical stacks and for Lily to use an ego-bridge.

On the other hand, she definitely had the desire to keep some of her knowledge about, specifically, nanomachines secret for as long as she could. It would be hard to teach the girl medicine when she used her own medichines in procedures so liberally. At the moment, she was just calling it medicine, but an apprentice doctor worth her salt wouldn't accept that prevarication for too long.

Lily squinted. Of course, she would teach her as much medicine that did not involve the use of nanomachines, but it would be kind of hard to hide, and it would be dickish to say that it was medicine, and you can never have it.

Perhaps she could install one of the inferior nanohives in Alice if she "graduated" her as someone that wouldn't shame Lily by her practice of medicine on her own? They could be programmed as medichines, except they were bigger than was ideal. They'd work okay for most things, but they were too big to do anything in the brain, for example.

It was an option and one she could even do now. And it would be practically impossible to not advance her fabrication technology in the one to three years it might take Alice to learn. So, that wasn't really an impediment at all.

Lily pursed her lips, "On two conditions. You may not like them; if so, you do not have to agree."

Alice shrieked in excitement, jumping up and down. "Of course, of course! I can't imagine there being something I wouldn't agree to! What are they?"

Lily nodded, "First is loyalty. Personal loyalty, to me. An apprentice is loyal to her Mistress and keeps her Mistress' secrets, of which I may have one or two. When an apprentice reaches the stage in her craft that she can practice on her own, the requirement for personal loyalty is removed -- but the requirement to keep her former Mistress' secrets remains. An apprentice goes where her Mistress goes and, for the most part, does what her Mistress tells her to do. My obligations are to teach, provide and care for you until you reach such a stage."

Lily continued to stare at the younger girl before continuing, "You don't have the proper cultural referents to understand the personal obligations in both honour and your physical body that a military commitment would entail, but it is similar to that. Imagine if, for some reason, you joined the Brotherhood of Steel as an Initiate. That is the level of commitment I expect. Understood?"

Alice paused to parse out that sentence before nodding, "Y-yes, ma'am!"

Lily smirked, "We aren't actually a military, Alice. You can just continue calling me Dr St. Claire. In formal situations, for which you also have also have no reference for, or when dealing with fellow apprentices, of which there are presently none, you would refer to me as Mistress or Mistress St. Claire."

Alice nodded her head rapidly.

Lily took a breath and said, "The next condition is perhaps the one that may be difficult for you to accept and is, simply, this: I won't allow someone to besmirch my reputation. An apprentice reflects on the Mistress. As such, I will not permit you to practice medicine independently until I am satisfied you will not shame me in so doing. That means if you ever quit before I declare your apprenticeship over or if I expel you for some reason, and I would only do that for a serious breach of trust, then you may never practice medicine in your life. Even if you are, by comparison to some Wasteland quack, vastly superior."

Alice looked quite nervous at how serious Lily seemed to be. "Uh, I can understand that. And I certainly will never break your trust. So I can agree with that!"

Lily smiled slightly, "Okay, but think about it. I am not joking. If I found out a hypothetical former apprentice was about to make me look like a quack, I would stop him or her in the most expedient method possible. Possibly fatally. Do you understand?"

Alice gulped then but, after a moment, nodded. "I won't let you down!"

Lily sighed, then nodded. "Alright, Alice. I won't make you kowtow three times because honestly, nobody does that anymore, even when that old bastard made me do it. Plus, China blew half the world to cinders here. What is your family name, Alice?"

Alice looked embarrassed, "Uh, we don't really have one? When I said family, I meant more along the lines of fellow orphans? There are three of us. They'll probably come with me to Megaton, but we can look after each other."

Lily pinched the bridge of her nose. "In the culture I was trained in, an Apprentice in your situation would take the name of her Mistress, but I feel that would make everybody extremely confused here. So we will start thinking of a family name that suits you, okay? No hurry." The girl nodded.

"Well, then, Alice of Canterbury Commons, I accept you as my apprentice. You are the first apprentice of my lineage. That'll make you the Senior Apprentice if I am ever stupid enough to agree to teach someone else something," Lily said the first part formally and the latter part teasingly.

Alice made a fist bump, "Yessss!"

"Oh, and I don't pay apprentices," Lily added quickly. Alice looked a bit sad and said, "Aww..." To which Lily grinned and chuckled, "I'm just messing with you. Of course, I pay apprentices. We're not cultivating immortality here; I already know how to achieve it, after all."

Lily wondered if she was being incredibly stupid, but she decided it didn't much matter either way. She had never taken an Apprentice before. By the time she was capable of doing so, not only was she a robotic spider with a reputation for being slightly highly eccentric but also traditional places of learning had already been reestablished in most habitats.

She was interrupted from her reverie by Alice greeting someone at the door. Oh, yay, another rash or something, Lily thought.

A man Lily had never seen before was talking to Alice, who had motioned to her. The man started, "Doc St. Claire?"

Lily asked in her best professionally cheery tone, "That's me! What seems to be the problem today?"

The man grinned, "No problem! I'm calling about the notice I saw that said you would pay to examine someone if they had an unusual talent?"

Lily felt her interest rise. "That's true. It has to be a talent or quirk you were born with, for the most part, and you have to be able to prove that you have it. It doesn't have to be useful, necessarily either. Some examples are things like having perfect pitch, needing to sleep less than the average person, being born ambidextrous, or being really good at multitasking. But there are probably thousands of other different quirks a person might be born with that I'd be interested in. As I said, it doesn't have to be useful at all."

The man chuckled evilly, "Oh, mine is definitely useful. You see... My name is Edgar, and I'm the fastest man alive."

Barry Allen, is that you?!

Lily clucked her tongue. "Like... running?"

The man shook his head, "My hands! But I'm guessin' my reflexes, actually. I'm the fastest draw there is. So, very useful to me as a caravan guard."

That was useful. Lily hummed for a moment while she considered a safe way to test his reflexes. She nodded and said, "I'm pretty fast myself. Have you ever played the slap game?"

The man grinned widely. "Have I? I used to make more caps on that than I did working as a guard, but almost everyone has wised up now, even if they've never met me before. So, now I guess I am the all-Capital slap game champion or some shit. So now I just do it for the love of the sport, ya?"

Lily chuckled. She liked men who seemed so sure of themselves, but only if they could actually back it up. "Alright. If you beat me, I'll agree that you have a special quirk of quickness. So I'll give you one hundred caps to get a scraping of the inside of your cheek and a small sample of your blood. Deal?"

The man nodded. "Ah... this is so nostalgic. This might also be the biggest pot I've ever played for in the slap game, too." He held his hands out and leered a bit at her, "You fancy being on top or bottom?"

Lily snorted. That was so blatant she couldn't even find herself offended; instead, she played it straight, raising an eyebrow before laying her palms gently on top of his hand and replied archly, "On top, of course. Whenever you're ready."

She really was faster than the vast majority of people and was going to look forward to humiliating him if he was bullshitting her.

He waggled his eyebrows, but she wouldn't be distracted. After a short delay, Lily saw his hands begin to move, and she started to yank her hands out of the way, only for them to get a sharp slap on her fingers. She had halfway gotten her hand out of the way, but it wasn't good enough.

"Wow! You weren't lyin', Doc! You really are fast. That may be the closest anyone's come to beating me, but I suppose I remain undefeated," the man named Edgar gloated.

Lily had to admit; she was surprised and impressed. This Edgar had all the hallmarks of a genetic, inheritable trait. Some mutation to the myelin sheaths in his nerves, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was worth studying. "Okay, that was impressively fast. You win. Come into the exam room with me briefly, so I can take my samples, and the caps are yours."

"Yess! Alright, Doc. Lead the way," Edgar said.

It did not take long for Lily to take both a cheek scraping and a blood sample. She then counted out one hundred caps and handed them to him, and walked him to the door. Standing just outside, he looked at her appraisingly, "You know, Doc... I'll be in town two days if you want a rematch. I'll let you be on top again."

Lily snorted at the thinly disguised proposition. The man would be attractive if he wasn't so dirty, and she didn't mean lewd. He could use a bath. She decided not to let him down easily, "Maybe next time you proposition a lady, first take a shower, a bath or at least look up the word soap in a dictionary." She paused, and then added conspiratorially, "And maybe don't call yourself the fastest man alive; she might believe it."

"Wait! I'm not fast like tha--" Lily waved and closed the door in his face.

Her new apprentice cracked up laughing behind her.