I Spy With My Spider Eye

Lily tried to build two more sets of cybernetic eyes, although neither set looked right from a purely human-based aesthetic perspective. Either the iris or the pupil didn't look correct, or both. She was trying to hide the apertures of four imagers inside one pupil, and it just didn't look right. However, she really wanted to replace her eyes with something much more useful, so she was going to proceed anyway. The idea of seeing more of the electromagnetic spectrum was always appealing to her. Seeing infrared light, especially, would be highly useful.

Additionally, she could change her skull and ocular cavity shape. She didn't particularly like the direct access to her squishy, squishy brain that the optical canal in her skull provided for hot plasma, acids, and any other number of other hazards. She felt she could wall it off, leaving both electrical conductors as well as an optical pipe for fibre optics. She wasn't entirely sure that would save her life in the event she took a plasma bolt to the eye; in fact, she was pretty sure it would not, but it made no sense to keep the door open for lesser threats.

Plus, the actual bandwidth available on the optic nerve was a bit limited. The eyes she intended to install in herself were similar to her sense of hearing in that they were piped digitally to her brain computer, which then used its almost unlimited bandwidth to stimulate her sensory cortex directly. Although, she did have designs for a traditional cybernetic eye that would interface directly with the optic nerve and fit into a standard optical cavity.

She had already tested them, too. They would be powered solely by a small betavoltaic cell and were currently limited to much simpler designs featuring only one small, low-voltage optical sensor and the smallest digital-to-analogue optical processor she could make. However, the eyes she planned to install would use digital fibre optic connections to a central computer, which she had sized to fit the area that used to be her sinus cavities. She was calling this an optical subprocessor, and it would be connected to and powered by her main computer.

Lily's highest-speed processors barely exceeded two hundred megahertz of clock speed, and the transistor density was at an insufficient level, so her optical subprocessor was still too big to incorporate into the eyes themselves, especially when they needed to composite multiple optical feeds in real-time. However, two hundred megahertz was a lot in the hands of an application-specific integrated circuit. It was a terrible general-purpose computer, but ask it to integrate a feed of digital images and rapidly composite them, and it was pretty good. The fact that her ability to create very fast access to non-volatile RAM was unparalleled meant the special processor had a ridiculous cache and was quite fast at its job.

The subprocessor also did have a failover mode, just like her "ears", as the device would be situated near enough to her optical tract that a direct electrical interface with the nerves there was possible. Still, in the event that her main computer failed, her vision would be both slightly nearsighted and farsighted and only in the visible spectrum. Her vision would also stop entirely in a couple of weeks after the included batteries discharged unless she shoved a charging cord up her nose.

She felt good about the technology. She wouldn't even be the first person in Megaton to use one of her cybernetic eyes, either. She had been declared the official doctor and possible saint of the Children of the Atom, and she regularly had one of the faithful brought to see her, often by one of the cult's leaders. Very few of the Children of Atom were what Lily might refer to as healthy, but she noticed that they mostly all tended to be very resistant to radiation. She supposed any faithful that wasn't didn't live that long, that or they wisened up and fucked off after the second or third time they got seriously ill.

Most of their problems could be solved, or at least treated, by a slow IV of medichines programmed to seek out heavy metals and eliminate them from the body through the urine. The body didn't have a natural way to eliminate most heavy metals like lead from the body, which was why there was no amount of safe heavy metal exposure--it was a cumulative hazard. When many radionuclides were heavy metals themselves, radiation and heavy metal toxicity tended to go hand in hand.

She had offered a potential cure for one of the faithful's blindness, as long as they didn't mind an experimental solution. When she explained that the new eyes would be powered by and infused by the holy Atom's glow, she had to stop the whole congregation from immediately gouging all their own eyes out just to get her replacements, too. Still, they found another whose eyes were damaged so completely in the past that they couldn't be repaired via StimPaks.

Although the cybernetic eyes she installed in her two volunteers were radically different from the ones she was planning on using herself, the fundamentals were the same. Her patients' biggest problem was reconnecting an optical input to a long, mostly reorganised sensory cortex. It took them several days before their vision was beneficial at all, and while they were still not where Lily thought they should be, they were still making progress every day and seemed very enthusiastic about their Holy Vision.

Since she couldn't reach the stage of mimicking a human eye yet, generally and hers especially, she decided to lean into the fact that they were cybernetic replacements. She was blatantly ripping off the aesthetics of a character from a light novel and anime she enjoyed from her past life in America. It was called "So I'm a Spider, So What?" She considered it very fitting!

There was a character called Shiraori, a seemingly human girl who had a special relationship with spiders, as Lily did. She had blood-red irises, with each eye featuring four smaller "sub-eye" pupils. That way, she had eight eyes, just like most spiders, right? That was genius! By coincidence, Lily had four optical sensors for each of her cybernetic eyes. Three were normal visual sensors, while the last was optimised just to see infrared and UV light as special polarising filters blocked the entire visual light spectrum out.

Lily hummed as she peered at the fully assembled cybernetic eye. It featured a bright red colour iris, but instead of one larger black pupil, it featured four smaller ones arranged as if they were the vertices of a diamond or square. She thought that Shiraori's four pupils were actually white-coloured, as that was her theme, but the idea of reflecting light away from a camera's aperture was silly without amazing spider magic, so black they had to be.

'Wait a second!' Lily thought to herself as one of her memories of that anime returned. Didn't Shiraori also have the original human pupil too? For five pupils per eye? Lily sighed. That was impossible; there was no way she could fit five sensors in that eye. This would have to do. Plus, this way, she wasn't entirely ripping the character off!

Lily considered asking the Apprentice to assist her, but if you've helped your Mistress peel the skin off her face one time, you've done it a thousand times. And this time, she could use a wireless feed from cameras to perform the surgery on herself after she has already removed her eyes.

Besides, it'd be more fun to surprise the Apprentice with her new eyes!

---xxxxxx---

Lily spent the hour and a half after her surgery both getting used to her new sense as well as poking the slightly inflamed, numb-feeling skin on her face, just like she scolded the Apprentice for doing after the girl got her computer installed initially. She had to replace everything from the upper jaw upwards on the front quarter of her skull, but now there was both diamond and metal in between her ocular cavity and actual grey matter.

She could also see so much better now. Although she had been kind of surprised when testing the optical subprocessor in failover mode in that she became almost completely colour-blind. She didn't know precisely why this occurred, and she had not had any complaints of such a symptom from her two test subjects. She suspected there was a slight bug or malfunction in her optical subprocessor's digital-to-analogue converter. However, since that was only employed in the event of a main computer failure, she decided not to bother replacing it at this juncture. She was building and designing the subprocessor with what she hoped would be obsolete technology in the next few months, anyway.

She hoped in a few months after she got back from the VSS building that, she could hit the RobCo factory. It would be ideal if she got that RobCo widget from Moira Brown, but honestly, she wasn't going to wait two years to hit that place if it turned out that Moira only got it recently before the Fallout 3 game and plot started. She was very hopeful she could find the production process for quantum processors there.

The more she remembered about the quantum processors of her own world, the more she realised it would take a long time to achieve that technology. It would be nice if she could just skip the steps of reinvention of a whole type of computing and scavenge the process from RobCo.

Her three visual sensors per eye granted her a theoretical superhuman field of view of over one hundred and sixty degrees. However, she discovered that when she attempted to go much farther than normal, she was getting headaches, so she stopped at one hundred and thirty degrees for the moment.

The human brain was incredibly adaptable, and she suspected that she could easily reach the one-hundred-and-sixty-degree effective cap of her current set of eyes in a few weeks of building up to it. However, most biomorphs that had a very large field of view, or even three-hundred-and-sixty-degree-vision, had specially designed or naturally evolved visual cortexes that handled that task.

That didn't mean she wouldn't work towards that direction, as there were tons of ways to accomplish it, from neuroplasticity treatments to the complete replacement of the primary visual cortex with a synthetic replacement. Some of the things she had learned from the FEV experiments with the Gary clones could also be an option after being clinically tested.

While she definitely wasn't going to expose her brain to FEV, she discovered what she believed was the cause of the rapid brain development, which was triggered when the FEV caused cells to produce a special enzyme and protein combination. However, unfortunately, she didn't presently have a cell-free protein synthesis machine, so she didn't have any way to easily produce the identified proteins and enzymes (absent infecting neural tissue with FEV in vivo), but she thought they might be the actual biological trigger for the accelerated brain development and pathway creation.

If so, it might be an option to carefully administer such proteins and enzymes in her occipital lobe and in small quantities to encourage new pathway development. That was definitely a long-term plan, and she wouldn't be the first or even the first dozenth to try such a thing. She liked her brain too much!

She fished out her compact from her bag and clicked it open to stare in the mirror. Then, fluttering her eyelashes testingly, she nodded. Her eyes didn't look human; they looked better! It was time to show the Apprentice.

---xxxxxx---

She found Alice in the cafeteria having breakfast. Wait, did that mean Lily worked through the night again? Oh well. She could get a quick ninety-minute nap.

The Apprentice was sitting across from Gary, listening to him talk, and she could hear their conversation from across the room, "It's not easy, let me tell you... you never know when the next one will go, and then *BAM*. It's all over." Lily tilted her head to the side. Was he regaling her with his war stories? As a senior NCO in the Navy, she highly doubted he ever walked through landmines, so she was wondering what the hell he was talking about. She slowed down her steps to eavesdrop a little longer.

"I tell you, it's a tight-rope walk of peril, living on the knife's edge between the fart-shart line..." he continued.

Wait, what?

He finished, "Verily, the most satisfying farts are the least trustworthy." For some reason, this caused Alice to laugh uproariously, but Lily was just stunned, 'Wait, I slept with this man?'

Shaking her head a little bit, she finished walking up to the table they were seated at and sat down as well. Well, completely disgusting or not Gary's opinion would be useful as well. "Apprentice! Monsieur Kaminsky! 'Ow do zhey look?"

They spoke at the same time.

"How do-ahhh!"

"What do you ---ahh!"

Lily grinned! That was great! The Apprentice was first to reply, "Dr St. Claire, why do you have demon-red eyes?! And are those four pupils? I thought you were trying to work towards more human-looking cybernetic eyes?"

That caused Lily to moue prettily. She didn't like admitting something was presently beyond her, especially in the field of synthetic cyberware. "It's really 'ard getting past zhe Uncanny Valley. A lot of zhe small zhings zhat a 'uman would expect a real eye to do is a bit tough. You 'ave no idea 'ow much neural circuitry 'as evolved just to look at another 'uman's eyes!"

That caused Alice to blink, and Gary to ask, interested, "What do you mean?"

Lily hummed, "Zhis room is about twenty metres in its longest dimmension. If we stood on opposite ends, I would be able to detect zhe slight difference between you looking at my eyes and my breasts, at twenty metres. Do you 'ave any idea 'ow little difference in angle of incidence zhat is?"

That caused Gary to grin, "Are you suggesting the human race has evolved to detect when men sneak a peek at a lady's boobs?"

That caused Lily to snort and wave a hand, "Zheres plenty of advantageous evolutionary reasons for zhis adaptation. Eye movement is correlated with many social behaviours, including deception. Eye movement also precedes action, sometimes zhe violent action, yes? And if you can identify what a predator is focused on, you can use your big 'uman brain to out-think it."

Then Lily coughed a bit, "In any case, I decided to go zhe other way. Zhere is evidence to suggest zhat zhere are better reactions when it is obvious you are not failing to mimic an 'uman feature."

That caused the Apprentice to hum thoughtfully and nod, "You might be right; they were a little surprising but---achhckk!"

Right as the girl had been speaking Lily had made all of her four pupils in both eyes start looking in different directions just to mess with her. The Apprentice almost fell out of her chair, "Dr St. Claire! Don't do that! That is creepy AF!" There were those words again. Lily didn't think they meant what the girl thought they meant.

Then Alice narrowed her eyes and asked, "Wait, Dr St. Claire. Did you include four pupils per eye just so that you would end up with 8, like a spider?"

"Hehe," Lily offered but shook her head, "No! It was just a coincidence. I need two visual sensors for zhe increased peripheral and field-of-view advantages while preserving one for the focus, including zoom. Zhe last one is a focused sensor zhat sees only infrared and some UV light."

"Well, they do sort of look cool..." Alice began only to have Gary shake his head and pipe up.

"No, they look scary as fuck! But that is cool, so maybe you're right."

Lily nodded. She agreed with both sentiments, "Well, zhat was really all I wanted to show you too. I'm going to go for a ride here in a bit, I 'ave something I'd like to do today."

That caused them both to perk up and Alice asked, "Adventure?"

Lily shook her head, "Yes, and no. I'm going to test zhe truck, test something else confidential and at zhe same time try to clear zhat fourth floor at zhe 'ospital we found, Apprentice."

That caused the girl to frown in worry, "You said that was a death trap!"

Lily nodded, "That's why you're not going, either of you. But the thing I am testing should make it not dangerous for me."

Alice sighed, but Gary shrugged and said to the younger girl, "You had me convinced not to go at death trap.'"

---xxxxxx---

Lily did a thorough inspection of what used to be her truck. It had changed a lot, although it wasn't complete. For one, it featured two long tracks on either side instead of wheels. Also, the cab of the truck had been completely covered in armour plates, and even the windshield was removed and replaced with an armour plate, with not even a slit to see through.

The rear compartment had not been finished, so from all respects, it appeared like a cross between a large pickup truck and a tank. The Gatling turret looked more military, with armoured shields guarding everything but the spinning apertures of the weapon. Instead of the rear compartment, there was a temporary long truck bed attached, and the six Kaytrons she was taking with her were standing on it.

Before she hopped up and entered the cab from the rear, she got an alert that her security forces were dealing with a violent disturbance at the front of the hospital, so she turned and started jogging that way.

Her attempts to find leaders to help run her incipient PMC had been an utter failure; everyone interviewed was either a psycho, intended to betray her at the first opportunity or not qualified. She had managed to find two squad leaders, though and employed two ten-man squads, which wasn't nearly enough even to defend the hospital. She preferred younger people for the average recruits, even if it meant they were not strictly speaking trained. At the moment, they were getting OJT, being supervised by more experienced mercenaries that she continued to contract.

She got to the front of the hospital in time to see four ganger-looking men tussling with two of her recruits. She could see another four or five recruits running towards their comrades from the other direction. Before any of her half-trained warriors accidentally shot her with a taser, she immediately ordered the two Kays that had jogged with her to stun the assailants, which they did with surprising accuracy.

The two of her men immediately got the upper hand, kicked off the twitching assailants and got back to their feet. One gave one of the twitching men a good kick in the side for good measure. She approved of that, but she would make sure their squad leader smoked them for allowing four men to get within hand-to-hand combat range of them. She had given each of them an AirTaser carbine. While she had ordered them to keep it on the non-lethal setting, unless they were about to die, they should have tased these four instead of wrestling them.

Her recruits comrades showed up and held the four men, who were slowly stopping twitching and rising to their feet, at bay with their weapons.

The leader of the group of four nar-do-wells yelled, "You fucking bitch!" so Lily pulled her own AirTaser out and shot him right in the crotch area, causing him to squeal, clench up and fall back on the ground twitching. Glancing at her two recruits, she told them in a firm command voice, "Report."

Both of them braced to something like attention and glanced at each other, then one said, "M-ma'am! Recruit Davidson and I were working the front, and these four fu--individuals showed up, demanding we turn over one of the patients. I think it is some gang thing," he finished, and then quickly added, "uhh ma'am."

Lily blinked. They occasionally had this happen. Gang members would come in injured, and then a rival gang would show up or wait off the premises to finish the job. The guy with, no doubt, sore balls stopped twitching and stood up again, she raised the AirTaser again, but he held his hands out, "Fucking fine! Guys! Let's go!"

His three men started to turn around, and he looked at her, "But I know you now! So, you best hope we never meet again because if we do, it will be the last time!"

Lily blinked. Did he just..? She piped his speech through her expert system and asked for its opinion.

[An implicit threat of violence. The implication is that if he sees you again, it will be the last time due to the fact that you will be deceased and therefore unable to meet him in the future (77%.)]

Lily nodded; she thought so. See? She was getting better and better at understanding people socially, even without using her social assistant. She flipped the switch to the lethal setting and shot him in the back as he turned around to walk away with his three friends. This time he fell over but only twitched a couple of times before becoming silent. One of his friends freaked out, "What the fuck, man! We were leaving!"

"Firstly, I am not a man. Secondly, he threatened me," Lily said mildly, looking at the gang member like he was insane.

"Those were just words ma--woman!" he continued.

Perplexed, she glanced around and asked, "Is he..." she searched for a word that was both classy and meant stupid as fuck.

The recruit that hadn't spoken up earlier did so now, "Uhh... it was kind of a bluster thing, ma'am. He couldn't look bad in front of his boys, ya know?" This recruit, like more than half, didn't have the best childhood but, for one reason or another, had not joined a gang, just yet.

Well, actually, she wasn't conceited enough to call what she was creating anything other than a gang, either. But at least he had joined her classy gang. In fact, she had the same opinion about governments in her past life. The only distinction between the government and the mafia was usually that the government got there first.

A look of comprehension came over her face, 'Ohhh. He's talking about face.' To be perfectly honest, she often had trouble understanding this concept despite growing up in Shanghai. She glanced at the man she shot on the ground.

His heart had only been stopped for a minute at the most. It was still possible to resuscitate him. She hummed and then shook her head. No, she didn't want to. She glanced at the three of his friends and raised her pistol, which caused all of her men-at-arms to raise their weapons as well, pointing at the three.

"Woah, Woah, Woah... chill, chill. It's not that big of a deal. I guess.." the one that had been criticising her said.

His unfaithfulness to his friend just made her want to shoot him even more. Instead, she said, "If you say something to me as zhe bluster, I reserve the right to believe it. Leave. Do not return."

They didn't need to be told twice and beat feet right out of there. She sighed, shook her head and holstered the AirTaser pistol.

She spent a few minutes briefing the two chucklehead's squad leader, who was already frowning and staring daggers at the two, before informing them to dispose of the body, and they could split if he had anything of value.

She then turned around and headed back to her truck, and hopped in the cab as her two Kaytrons remounted the truck bed.

Inside the pitch-dark cab, she sat in the operator's seat. The passenger seat was already full of the equipment she was planning to test today. From the back of her seat, she pulled out a small filament of a cable before connecting it to one of her auxiliary ports in the back of her neck.

She briefly saw a loading icon float in front of her vision before it disappeared, and a full panoramic view of outside took its place. There were dozens of cameras carefully placed on the exterior of the vehicle, in places that she hoped would minimise their damage in a fight and in lieu of a windshield that could be shot through; even if windshields protected one ballistically to a degree, they didn't protect one from lasers. It was best to do away with the concept entirely for what she wanted to be a very protected vehicle.

She could also operate the truck from the Mesh, but her wireless mesh network wasn't actually that resistant to jamming yet, so it was a better practice to use a hardwired connection. For operators that didn't have a brain implant, there were her old improvised VR goggles behind the seat that would work in a pinch.

Now featuring an oversized automatic transmission, she put her petite tank into drive and left Megaton. She had already gotten visits from the city authorities, as tracked vehicles were generally not permitted in the city limits. However, she showed them her innovative pneumatic track system, and they finally agreed it wouldn't damage the roads.

After the vehicle was outside city limits, she inflated the tracks to their normal operating range and set out to the hospital. It wouldn't take too long to get there at all. It was just a shame her vehicle wasn't that inconspicuous. She'd already overheard the Brotherhood talking about it when she took it out of the city for a test drive the first time. She'd have to do something about that. She didn't think she could build a StealthBoy big enough to affect a tank, though.

Her drone overwatch was back, too and much improved. The digital cameras and improved optics allowed for it to loiter at a thousand metres and still provide the same level of service the previous model could. She also included reinforced rotors and ducts and radar looking both sideways and upwards for possible birds. Although it didn't have any armament, this model did have several preprogrammed evasive manoeuvres if it detected avians trying to mate with it.

The fact that she wanted to build more aerial drones, including armed versions, was the main reason she wanted to come to the hospital. She could scavenge a lot of parts and processors if she could clear out all of those Eyebots upstairs.

Pulling up to the hospital, she parked the vehicle and glanced at the passenger seat.

At one time, it was the Assaultron she tried to reassemble. However, it didn't look like that now. Instead, it looked more like she did, including wearing a duplicate of her dark grey combat bodysuit, ballistic armour and helmet with a polarised visor. Unfortunately, she never did find an appropriate quantum processor to put inside it, so she finally decided to rebuild it as a robotic duplicate.

If she were a man, it would not have been possible, as a lot of the Assaultron's most important hardware, including the processor when one existed, was housed in the armoured chest. But thankfully, Lily was "chesty" enough that all of that equipment fit even after she rebuilt the chassis with her own dimensions.

She triggered a program on her computer and suddenly her point of view shifted. She was now sitting in the passenger's seat, looking down at her lap. She looked up, and glance to her left to see her real body. Controlling the Assaultclone wasn't a 1-to-1 experience because there was only very limited tactile sense, and even that was limited to her hands. The limbs were correctly integrated with her proprioception, but she just couldn't feel them if someone touched them.

She had some questions about how useful this device was actually going to be. It relied on a very obvious wireless data connection to accomplish, so anyone that knew what ECM was could rob her of it, or if it went inside a faraday cage, underground, or any number of things. However, she had built it mainly as a proof of concept, to test being able to digitally control what amounted to a robot with her normal senses. She needed that capability for another project.

Plus, she had to admit there were plenty of mindless but incredibly dangerous threats in the world. Those fucking wasps, Deathclaws, Bloatflies, Super Mutants, including the Behemoth ones.

She stood up in the cab, carefully avoiding jumping into the roof with her increased strength. She opened the door and left the rear of the cab, carefully securing it again. She still had full access to her computer, including the drone overwatch, while driving the Assaultclone.

She tested its speakers. After chewing on weeks worth of samples of her speech, her Muse had finally created a digital model of her voice. It was, in effect, a very good Deep Fake. It meant she could send voice radio calls in her own voice with her mind, or in this case, talk when she was a robot. She tested it, telling the squad of Kays with her voice, instead of with her mind, "Alright, boys. Let's 'ead out. Leave two to guard zhe body."

The six nodded together as one, but only one of them spoke, "Yes, ma'am."

All six hopped off the truck bed with her, two finding hiding places to stand overwatch while four flanked her protectively as she stepped into the hospital.