Introducing Big Chungus

By the next day, Lily's face had finally stopped feeling weird, sort of like she had just gotten back from the dentist. Of course, it wasn't entirely possible to eliminate all unnecessary inflammation after such a surgery, although since her natural immune system was already depressed, relying almost entirely on the medichines to function these days, the inflammation response was muted.

Leukocytes were such blunt instruments anyway that she was looking forward to finishing replacing her entire skeleton so that her body would no longer produce them.

While the monocyte breeder implant did produce myeloid ancestors cells, which could differentiate into leukocytes like monocytes, hence the name, however, in practice, it never seemed to produce these or any immune system cells. Instead, it produced only red blood cells, platelets and some customized stem cells that it made in small numbers and used for healing.

This confused her so much that she spent some time reading all the documentation, engineering details and even design correspondence of the device that she had downloaded from the hospital, finally discovering the reason.

The government funded the research for the device with a grant. It was initially intended to be a supporting implant for soldiers in areas with significant parasite and infection hazards by boosting their immune response. After about eighteen months and two prototypes, they discovered that this was a bad idea when the prototype devices gave everyone implanted with them super-lupus. However, one of the more brilliant researchers recognized the potential for an even more useful and lucrative device that could supercharge a soldier's healing factor, but they could not admit that they had wasted so much time and money on immune system research.

Despite the fact that their new research direction was producing amazing results, they were at a loss as to how to handle the bureaucratic hazards of admitting they wasted taxpayer money for a year and a half.

In fact, even just changing the name of the device they were producing would trigger automatic congressional oversight and likely end their careers. There was some panic in the e-mail archive she read until one of the engineers replied, "Senators don't know what a monocyte is or what it does. Just say this is what it was always supposed to do."

Lily laughed quite hard when she read that. It reminded her of the story she heard when President Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program, citing cost overruns. Then later, when President Reagan wanted a new bomber, and Congress did not want to approve a new design, so the generals called the proposed aircraft the B-1B, a variant of an existing and already designed aircraft, despite it being almost completely different in most systems.

Lily tilted her head to the side and wondered if that was a real or apocryphal story. In the Fallout universe, it certainly seemed plausible if that sort of thing happened quite commonly.

She had just come from a meeting with Mr Tombs, who had to break some bad news to her. Initially, she had wanted to build a small building housing her generator and cooling system next to the hospital to keep her technology close at hand and under her protection. But that was simply impossible; they would have to disassemble the power substation and reassemble it next door, which would blow the budget completely.

On the plus side, he had arranged the purchase of a fair bit of property in the ten-block radius that would soon have working utilities. Of course, they couldn't hide all the development around the water pumping station and the electrical substation. Still, the present theory by those in power was that Lily was going to build some minimal power infrastructure to provide water and power to the hospital that she had announced would be opening soon. As such, the prices for the properties around the hospital only increased slightly.

Lily did not personally oversee the discharge of the testing cohort, but Alice mentioned that their reflexes were already significantly improved, but they would have to wait the week to see for sure. Still, it was quite encouraging, if anecdotal, evidence.

After the meeting, she descended into her basement to test a prototype laser pistol. She was attempting to build an entire laser weapon from scratch, using the same base design of existing laser pistols but made with parts she could fabricate herself, minus the energy cells, anyway, which she couldn't replicate.

She was humming as she finished seating a connection with the laser output coupler attached to the device that was attached to a test stand.

Standing well clear of the potential hazard area and behind a set of filing cabinets that she had drug down to the basement to house her medical records, she triggered the device to discharge. There was a cracking sound as the laser ionized the gases in the air, and a visible blue beam struck the target, which caused her to feel quite pleased. She could even smell the faintest scent of ozone, which was quite a common scent when firing energy weapons.

However, after walking around to inspect the laser and target, she realized that there was no appreciable damage done to the block of wood she was using as a target, aside from a slightly blackened spot.

Sighing, she disassembled and checked every part of the laser but found nothing wrong. Test firing it again produced a similar result.

Spending another hour inspecting every element, she finally concluded that the gain medium she was using was just not going to work. She disassembled one of the laser pistols she recovered at the hospital, removed the synthetic ruby rod it used, and installed it in the newly fabricated laser. When it was carefully test fired, it burned a hole through the two-foot block of wood and left a burn scar with slightly melted metal on the steel plate backstop. Lily grumpily thought, 'That confirms it, then.'

Frowning, she replaced the ruby rod and rebuilt the working laser and stared up into space, thinking. She had tried to replace the ruby gain medium with a lonsdaleite replacement, and while it produced a coherent laser beam, the power output was just not there.

She didn't have the technology to build synthetic rubies or garnets at present, nor did she have a supply of the rare earth metals they were doped with. Lily had seen signs of yttrium, flourite, neodymium and several other rare earths when she scanned the ruby rod initially.

She had hoped the perfect hyper-matrix of the lonsdaleite would compensate enough so that none of that would be necessary, but she wasn't really educated in high energy systems or lasers, and she was basically practising alchemy... just throwing possibilities out to see if they worked.

Scowling at the device she built, she tossed it on her workbench after carefully disconnecting it from its energy cell. It would probably give a person a blister, but no more damage than that, 'Well, it could set their clothes on fire. I could call it the firestarter. Or the Blinderer, and just tell users to only aim for the eyes.'

Standing up and stretching, she walked over to the aquarium she had built and fed her electric eels. The research on creating a biological organ to create electrocytes was coming along much better.

It was a lost cause to use a coronavirus to transfer enough information to cause a human to grow an entirely new organ, probably. Maybe if she used FEV, but that was asking for trouble as that virus was the opposite of stable and would recombine or mutate if you looked at it the wrong way. Absolutely the wrong thing if you wanted a stable vector for genetic change, although the quad-helix genetic structure it induced in living cells was fascinating.

She considered her previous experiments with FEV after she had brought the briefcase back from the hospital.

---

Lily couldn't help herself and had taken a small blood and tissue sample from herself and exposed it to a tiny bit of the FEV virus, and the changes she saw were extraordinary and chaotic. And dangerous.

She probably should have stopped there, but her curiosity was a strong thing. But she rationalized that a small animal experiment couldn't harm anyone, so she carefully exposed a small white stoat that had been repeatedly captured pilfering their foodstuffs. The small white mammal was cute but was a real menace.

The first two times, Lily had released it outside at progressively farther distances away from her building, but it came back both times and ate even more of their food than usual, as if the creature was charging them a fee for forcing it to walk back.

The last time it was captured, Lily decided to euthanize it but rationalized a small experiment would be morally acceptable so long as she did not cause the creature too much pain or suffering. She was experimenting the hell out of the eels, after all. Was it universal that you considered something more questionable if you did it to a small cute mammal, Lily wondered.

In any case, after exposing the stoat to FEV she watched it in the makeshift cage she fashioned out of chicken wire. Over the course of the day, it got ravenously hungry and over trebled in size, to the point where Lily was really questioning if magic was at work as while she increased its feeding, she hadn't fed it four times its own body mass in food. Where did the extra mass come from?! Maybe it just looked big and was hollow; she hadn't weighed it yet. She supposed she would find out when she dissected it.

While it continued growing after that, its explosive growth slowed down considerably. Lily was able to get a small sample of the post-FEV stoat's genome, and that was really all she was interested in. She wasn't set up to do complicated animal cognition experiments, like put it through mazes or test its strength, so she felt her investigation was over. She had planned to do a thorough pathological examination and compare the physiological changes to the detailed scans she took of the animal pre-exposure.

However, when she went to take the animal out of the cage so she could use nitrogen to asphyxiate it painlessly, the little terror bit her on the finger and ran off. Lily had tried to corner it at the closed door to the stairwell, but the not-so-little mustelid exhibited a degree of intelligence by quickly shifting targets and leaping through the open elevator shaft and climbing up the side of the shaft, upwards.

Lily had stared at it escaping, slackjawed, then sprinted up the stairs to get to the first floor, laser pistol in hand. Kicking the stairwell door open on the front floor, she levelled the pistol at the open elevator shaft of this floor, intending to shoot the critter as it continued climbing up the wall.

Instead, it leapt out at the elevator shaft on this floor and made a break for the front door. With audible cracks multiple laser beams lashed out and missed the white-furred mutant weasel, who was demonstrating an intense amount of cunning as it zigged and zagged all the way out of the door.

Lily did not chase the thing out of the door. She was smarter than that. There was no guarantee she would hit it, and she would be seen for sure, and that would associate her with the little bastard in people's minds. She glanced around conspiratorially, glad nobody had been in the lobby. However, Alice was coming to investigate after hearing the laser shots, "Dr St. Claire! What was that? Is everything alright?"

Lily slowly holstered her laser pistol and glanced at her Apprentice, "Nothing. It was nothing. If you'll excuse me, I have something to do downstairs." Lily glowered internally, 'Like, burn some documents. Stoat? What stoat? What is even a stoat?'

---

Lily shook her head as she recalled that travesty. Since it escaped, she hadn't seen the stoat that was now the size of a chubby cat. If it was as cunning as it appeared, it would stay away and just live its life peacefully, and she would never see it again. Surely, it wouldn't come back to bite her in the rear.

However, that incident had made her carefully place all the vials of FEV back in the briefcase it came in, and she hadn't opened it since.

She was definitely confining her viral experiments to coronavirae for the time being.

Which was a shame as adapting a coronavirus to induce herself to grow an electrical organ was likely impossible. But, she felt it was possible she could alter the eel species themselves to produce a suitable organ.

She could then extract it and use a coronavirus to humanize and individualize it to her genome, then implant it in her body. She would have to build the "wiring" herself, though, but that was a small matter. It also gave her the option to wire the organ directly to her palms which would give her an unarmed taser-like attack that could range from debilitatingly painful to potentially lethal.

This would make this type of modification unsuitable for mass market production, as she would have to expend significant labour growing an eel and customizing to a particular person's individual genome before implanting the organ into their body. So, this might be limited to only her and her Apprentice, if she could get her to agree to it.

She still had plans to completely replace her arms and legs with cybernetic limbs, but not until she could build ones that completely passed for organic limbs, even if they had the capability of opening up like a flower with innumerable spider legs or tools could popping out. That, however, was probably years away.

She wouldn't stop upgrading herself in the short term just because long-term upgrades would necessarily make these initial upgrades obsolete. She'd have to sit around like a flat for years if she did that, which was unacceptable.

The first cohort of eels had already been studied and eaten, while this next generation seemed to have much more promise. She had been improving the electrocytes primarily so that they could provide low-level electrical power over a long period of time, as opposed to short bursts of high voltage.

Hopefully, the end product had both capabilities, which would allow her to have that taser hands option; otherwise, it would strictly be for powering implanted electronics.

Lily heard her Apprentice's voice calling from the stairs, "Dr St. Claire! There is a tall lady here to see you! She says you wanted to see her?"

Lily smiled coquettishly; there was only one tall lady she remembered asking to come to visit her, 'Down, girl! This is about business!'

Lily almost asked her to send her down here, but a glance around her basement revealed a room that screamed mad science super villain, complete with a large aquarium filled with a dozen or so eels that visibly arced electricity into the water at regular intervals.

"I'll be right up!" she yelled to the stairs.

She glanced around her desk and found the stack of paper that she had written detailing everything she wanted to be looted from the hospital, with maps and diagrams. She started to head up the stairs but stopped herself.

She found a mirror, one of the small rectangle mirrors she had taken from Vault 108, and looked at her reflection. Brushing her hair a little bit, she fished around her desk and pulled out some cosmetics. Much had been found in the various rooms of the apartment building, and while it had all dried out, Lily had carefully reconstituted it with a little oil.

She carefully applied the barest touch of rouge to her cheeks, and then cherry red lipstick to her lips before nodding and walking up the stairs.