Someone call X-COM!

Lily did not have to wait an entire day to see the results. The activity in the brain started merely two hours after she administered the FEV, and the catastrophic hypoxia started occurring no more than three hours after that.

While she waited, she considered the group of people she met on the bridge. Their behaviour was out of spec and even more irrational than usual. Lily was normally used to somewhat irrational and inexplicable behaviour from everyone she met; even her Apprentice displayed it on a semi-regular basis. It happened so often that she more or less discounted it, so she had some difficulty detecting when a reaction was truly out of the ordinary in real-time.

Her only conclusions were that everyone was irrational or that something was wrong with her own perspective, neither of which was a particular great conclusion as far as she was concerned.

She had been trying to recreate her social assistant using her computer, but its suggestions that would pop up in conversation were either not timely, as in the AI only finished churning the optimal social strategy long after the conversation was ended, or poor enough that even Lily felt that they were inappropriate, or both. It was still barely on the level of a chatbot.

However, in the case of the woman with the minigun, Lily felt that the optimal strategy the AI suggested for defusing the situation and preventing her from escalating to violence might have worked, except the system didn't offer it to her until she was already driving down the road after stunning and robbing the woman.

It suggested she should have asked, "What is a Courser?"

Lily rubbed her chin, "That would have worked, wouldn't it?" She considered the dictionary definition of the word. Either a warhorse or a dog that hunted prey in the English style, like foxes.

She felt neither option was particularly flattering to call a classy lady like herself. Still, she felt that the more dangerous sounding definition would be the most likely given their fear, and extrapolating that gave her the idea that a Courser was a hunter or perhaps only a hunter's tool, like a dog running down a fox.

The alphanumeric designation she, at first, took to mean an object, like a prototype piece of technology or maybe even some sort of knowledge kept on holotape or similar.

But the woman said "him," right before Lily's bots stunned her. "Surely this couldn't be a Blade Runner-type situation?"

Lily frowned, pulled up her memories of the encounter, and then overlayed onto her visual feed the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum she had antennas for. The spectrum she could listen to was most of the radio and microwave bands up until the infrared band right before the visible light spectrum.

Designing anything using electricity that didn't shed some unintentional electromagnetic frequency radiation was actually very difficult. The stories of a faulty hair dryer blocking out TV for several blocks, back when people still received TV signals mostly from antennas, were true and happened every year.

Even her own body leaked unintentional EMF radiation, to say nothing of all the intentional high-frequency broadcasts that came in and out of her head almost constantly these days. If one or more of these four were androids, she didn't believe they wouldn't be using radio to communicate with each other.

She should be able to get a leak, even if it's a sideband, off of their power cells discharging, at the very least! Especially if they haven't had maintenance in some time.

She used her hands to pan, tilt, and zoom over each of the four, especially of the three "hims." She played the memory several times but got nothing, except for one anomalous reading on one of the men, but the best she could say about it was that it was inconclusive and likely nothing.

Still, she pulled up her radio spectrum analyzer and isolated that one anomalous signal that could possibly be originating from one of the three. It was a spike in the seventy gigahertz range, which she wasn't aware of anyone but herself using. She used a big chunk of the seventies and eighties for ultra-high-speed data transmission, in the fifty gigabits per second range at about ten watts of output.

That was really high up in the microwave range, suitable for very high bandwidth transmissions, of which most Fallout technologies aside from radar had no use whatsoever as they didn't have the processing power to even receive so many bits per second.

This band also had the disadvantage of not having the best range, especially when it had to go through objects like a building's walls.

And after inspecting the signal's waveform, she couldn't say for certain that it was modulated for a digital signal. It might be, but it could be noise, and even if it was a real signal, it could be a signal from somewhere behind the man that went through his head and appeared to be originating from him. The quick burst did not last long enough for her to triangulate since neither she nor the man was moving when she recorded it.

Her expert system chewed on the signal and declared it was either noise or an encrypted burst transmission of an unknown cypher. Frowning, she pulled up a visual representation of the signal waveform again. It just didn't look like the clean hills and troughs of a digitally encoded radio signal... unless it was specifically designed to be challenging to analyze and to blend in with background clutter.

Lily played back the experience recording again, this time focusing on the audio track only. Humming, she pulled up the same waveform analyzer she was using to inspect the radio signals but opened the audio waveforms in it instead.

First, she chopped and cut the dynamic range of the sound out, focusing only on the infrasound and ultrasound areas, the so-called non-audible sounds that she could hear. She could often hear and identify pieces of machinery or even electronics just by how they sounded these days and felt that it might be possible to detect implanted cybernetics that way.

However, she couldn't detect anything unusual that wasn't clearly originating from some objects and equipment they carried. Switching, she cleaned up the sound until she could hear the distinct heartbeat sounds localized in two of the males; the third was not distinct enough as his body was mostly obscured by the other two.

Lily piped these sounds into a Fourier transform to give her a visual representation of their heartbeat. It certainly wasn't a good enough resolution to be compared to an actual phonocardiogram, but it certainly appeared to be a genuine, organic heart to her expert eyes. She could even detect the spike of fear causing the beats per minute to spike into the tachycardia range briefly.

Sighing, she closed the experience playback.

"Well, whatever, I suppose. Zhey definitely aren't androids. So I'm zhinking too much into zhis? Remembering too many sci-fi shows?" Lily mused to herself.

The only other option would be biomorph sleeves, with more sophisticated bioware than she herself can create, which she didn't accept as a possibility. "Or maybe zhey're just regular people... or clones? Maybe zhis is like Blade Runner or Logan's Run, where zhey decommission you if you get too old?" Now she was just engaging in pure fantasy. Being in Vault 108 made her see clones everywhere, she decided.

What she really needed was an assistant that could understand the way irrational people thought and slowly teach her coping strategies. The Apprentice certainly might fit that bill, certainly better than she herself did. But wouldn't it be... insulting to ask the girl? Lily would be a mite insulted if someone came to her for help because she was thought to be an expert on the social interaction and thinking patterns of irrational flats.

She would ask her anyway. As the Mistress helped the Apprentice, so the Apprentice must help the Mistress. She just hopes she doesn't die an early death like her own Master did so many years ago. Stupid old man.

She'd thought about this subject enough. She had some design work she could do.

---xxxxxx---

A mental alarm caused her to sit up. Her experimental subjects' vitals were in the shitter. She leapt to her feet and ran into the room where the first subject was. It looked like it was about to code, judging from his blood pressure and oxygen saturation. It was also in the middle of an incredible tonic-clonic seizure, which, if she were a detective, she would call a clue.

She would treat the seizure and work from there.

Fifteen minutes later, and after he coded twice, he finally expired. She never quite got him into what she would consider an actual postictal state, and she wasn't able to resuscitate him the last time he had a cardiac arrest.

She walked over to see the other dead subject but was amazed to find him still alive, but barely. She judged him pretty much beyond saving, though, so she didn't attempt any extraordinary methods on the second Super-Gary and number two passed ten minutes later.

Besides, she was flabbergasted. When you have two genetically identical subjects and infect them with an identical virus at the same time... the one who dies sooner was the one she spent fifteen minutes trying to save? How is she supposed to take that, as a doctor? That her efforts were worse than doing nothing at all?

No! She can't accept that. She intended to go back to the truck and go to sleep, but now it was personal. She won't be able to sleep until she's done with the autopsy on both of these guys and knows the truth because it CAN'T be her.

---xxxxxx---

Several hours later, she washed herself off and felt a little better about things. It turned out that the first subject that she attempted to save had more neural development than the one who had died after.

She felt that her attempts to save the first subject's life had prolonged the period of time the virus was continuing to change its brain, which got to the point where intracranial pressure was quickly becoming fatal.

In other words, the subject's brain had literally grown to the point where it killed itself due to the limitations on the size of the subject's skull, even though the subject's skull saw rapid growth during the first.

She only had two more Garys-in-Waiting, so she was unsure what her next experiment should be. Perhaps she should wait until she has breached the actual cloning lab? But she had two main ideas of avenues of investigation left, and they were mainly just similar experiments but varying extremes.

She would sleep on it. She might do both; there wasn't much use in using an identical Gary for control. She had already learned that the changes FEV induced were highly random in a band of possibility. The end result was mostly homogenous from a cursory inspection. Suspiciously homogenous, one might say, but the transformation process was quite divergent in many ways. It was fascinating.

Before she slept, though, she would have to do some maintenance on her aerial drone. Theoretically, with its fission batteries and lightweight construction, it should be able to hover in overwatch indefinitely, but there has been a slow failure of the motors' output.

Towelling herself off, she sighed. If it wasn't one thing, it was another.

---xxxxxx---

Although Lily did not get to bed until after 0400, she woke up at precisely 0630 the next morning feeling refreshed and ready for a new day.

She did not have to spend any time laying in bed waiting to fall asleep; she could trigger herself to induce sleep and rapidly enter the most restful deep phase, followed by REM sleep at will, which is something she would have been intensely jealous of in her past life in America.

She felt she could have slept for another half hour or maybe even two if she was feeling luxurious, but her alarm woke her at the pre-set time, and now that she was up, she felt energized.

She dreamt of aliens. Intelligent amoebas that called themselves the Factors from the universe where she was named the Spider Witch.

She had studied, in-depth, the devices and biological samples she had stolen from the Jovian Junta but was ultimately forced to return them, along with her analysis. She was forced to give up her own work product to the biochauvinists.

Usually, she wouldn't have folded to such threats, but they seemed really keen to kill her permanently if she didn't return everything to them, to the point where they were threatening strategic strikes against any habitat that would house her, which was an almost unprecedented escalation of threat. And they had the largest military in the Solar System, so she actually had to take them seriously.

It worked somewhat to her advantage, though, because, like most tyrannies, the Junta didn't really care about the damage done to its citizens, so they offered her a blank slate so long as she quietly returned all the alien samples along with her own analysis of them.

Lily clucked her tongue. Remembering that series of memories of her assaulting the station made her have an epiphany. She really was kind of a lunatic, wasn't she? Well, not anymore, of course. But back then... she was a bit out there, wasn't she?

Lily came to the conclusion that forking and merging multiple times a week for hundreds of years might not actually be very good for your mental stability.

She shook her head. She was getting distracted. Besides, she was perfectly fine, now.

However, her thoughts about xenobiology made her think of the FEV virus. The interesting thing about the aliens in her memories was that they were not based on the traditional nucleic acids nor amino acids that she expected when seeing carbon-based lifeforms.

She remembered she was depressed for an entire day when her theories of panspermia as the source of all life in the galaxy were dealt a crushing blow. Instead, the xenos seemed to utilize some form of naturally synthesized polymeric nanostructure that was shaped like a scaffold, rectangularly, as opposed to the more elegant helix design of complex Earth-based animals.

Why was that so intriguing? Well, it just so happened that some brilliant and beautiful scientist who was also a spider was inspired by this type of genetic data encoding structure and utilized a similar method to increase the information density in biomorphs. She was talking about herself. She was the beautiful spider scientist she was referring to.

Her holy grail of information density in a biological organism was to be able to grow an organism from a genome in vitro that would itself grow a biological computer as it matured, complete with software pre-installed. That would open the door to true generational memories and was a hobby of hers. She hadn't gotten to that peak, as far as she knew, though.

Considering increased genetic information density... one of the weirdest and most fascinating things about the FEV virus was that it induced radical changes in the hosts' own DNA, converting the normal double-helix arrangement into a quad-helix arrangement of densely packed information. Quite pretty, in fact.

The changes were so radical, in fact, that the Genome Sequencer she brought with her reported an error when she tried to sequence the genome of all of her subjects post-transformation. She had to go deep into the settings and get it to print out the raw data just to get the data she needed for her analyses.

Perhaps she wasn't the only scientist in the multiverse to gain inspiration from the genetic structure of xeno-lifeforms? And perhaps in the Fallout universe, she was right about panspermia and aliens also used a DNA-like structure, just one twice as complicated as found in Earth-life?

Lily knew that aliens existed in Fallout, but she was kind of hoping they weren't as depicted in the Mothership Zeta DLC. But she also knew that the pre-war US government had a number of crashed UFOs and samples of alien cadavers, at least according to some "wild wasteland" random encounters amongst all the Fallout games.

Perhaps West-Tek based their biowarfare program on an alien genome? To her, that sounded like one of the worst ideas she had ever heard of in her entire life. Which immediately made her think she was onto something, given the state of Pre-War America in the Fallout universe.

She suddenly wished she had an alien DNA sample; it would help her research on this virus significantly. But just knowing the source might be extraterrestrial in origin helped her a lot, too.

She was fabricating a lot of surgical tools, as she had two ideas to test on her last two Gary's today.

On one, she would repeat yesterday's experiment; however in this case, she would program the medichines to, at a certain point, go on a viral-hunting rampage.

She already knew her nanomachines were very effective at destroying the FEV virus, and she wanted to stop the transformation process about midway through. There would be some physical alterations and quite a lot of changes in the brain. If she could stop the transformation before it went too far in the brain, the end result would be quite intriguing.

She timed this point at about an hour after the virus began its rapid changes to the brain, so the transformation would only have about five hours to proceed. What she would get wouldn't be a Super Mutant, but it would be something new. Something interesting.

She had that subject ready to go quickly, as it was just a matter of programming changes. She wouldn't even need to amputate this subject's limbs, as the process wouldn't proceed too long.

Her second subject, though. Well, she decided she was just going to go all the way this time. She had the skill, tools and knowledge to perform brain transplants, so she would remove number two's brain and spinal cord and place it in a special tank she fabricated to keep it oxygenated and supplied with chemical energy.

Then she would expose it inside the tank and see how far down the rabbit hole this could go.

---xxxxxx---

Watching the FEV transformation proceed at a pace on a brain without any body in the way was quite intriguing. So long as she kept the medichines in its tank well supplied with both oxygen and "food" it proceeded very quickly, faster than the first subject even.

But it was still a bit like watching paint dry or a kettle set to boil, so she left the Termitron, who was continually scanning it and returned to check on her first subject.

She got there just in time to watch the medichines shift into viral hunting mode. Although she didn't have her scanner with her, it didn't take her long to realize she had made a mistake with how vigorously the medichines were hunting down the virus.

Although medichines were vastly, vastly superior to the body's own immune response, they still could do some damage to healthy cells while fighting an invader, and Lily was watching them kill the subject's brain in the attempt to save it.

She considered quickly adjusting the behaviour to something less aggressive, which would still be very effective but decided that the data was already tainted and that she would likely learn something valuable anyway, so she decided to just sit back.

It wasn't like she thought she'd never see another Gary, after all.

Lily suspected the damage to the autonomic system in the brain stem was what actually killed the Gary, but she wouldn't know until she did an autopsy.

She hummed and decided to do one right away. She'd let the other subject keep cooking while she worked here. Everything over there was being recorded, anyway.

---xxxxxx---

A proper autopsy takes a couple of hours if you were thorough, and Lily was thorough. She really hoped that her robots would open the path to the lower level lab soon; she hoped her guesses that there was a people mulcher in there were true because she had a lot of bodies and parts of bodies to mulch.

But now, she excitedly hurried to the second subject's room. She had been peeking at the scan results during the autopsy and had to admit that things looked terrific. The brain had trebled in size and seemed to be reorganizing into a different shape and the brain structure, and there were numerous individual areas of the brain that Lily could no longer identify!

She walked into the room and peered at the brain, eyes and spinal cord in the tank. What surprised Lily was it seemed to notice her too. While the eyes couldn't actually turn in the absence of the ocular muscles to do so, she saw a dilation response immediately that was correlated with recognition.

'How interesting,' she thought. However, before she could consider the implications, she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her head, like the worst migraine she had heard a tale of. She grabbed her head and groaned.

Looking at the brain in a jar in shock, she put two and two together. As she reached for her laser pistol at her waist, she suddenly felt as if she was kicked in the chest by a mule by an unknown force, sending her flying backwards.

She managed to clear leather while flying backwards and simultaneously fired several shots into the tank while subvocalizing to her robo-squad, 'Command, Direction, Destroy Designated Object. Engage.'

Before she could see if she scored any hits in mid-air with her pistol, she was smashed into the wall back-first with incredible force, and her vision and senses went black.