That's not science! None of this is science!

It took several hours both to drive to the location of Vault 112 as well as to precisely find it, as there were three locations that actually fit both the general location and what was described in the game.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the RV, Lily was listening to some music the driver had started playing over the interior speakers. The vehicle had her full library, although she had given more and more of it to Three Dog, this time in exchange for actual money or advertising. However, all of the songs she had given had been either classical music, country music, big-band type music, or, more recently, the very beginnings of rock and roll, with Elvis and The Beatles being examples.

Gary was perplexed, but Lily finally managed to convince him that he was just a square and didn't listen to young people's music. This was true in a sense, but even old fogies like him would have heard about some of these bands.

However, what was playing right now was one of her favourite songs from AC/DC, Dirty Deeds of the Thunder Chief. She was humming and even singing a little along to it and kept getting glances from the Submajor, who was sitting, out of his Power Armour, in a fold-down jumpseat in the rear of the cab.

Finally, she asked him, complaining, "What? I know I can't sing too well, but zhat wasn't off-key or anything."

"Ma'am... it's just... could you sing that over again, but slower?" he asked, his hand rising, hiding his face.

Lily stared at him but complied, "...Dirty deeds of zhe Zhunder Chief... Dirty Deeds of zhe Zhunder Chief!"

He started snickering, hiding his face, "Ma'am... the lyrics being sung are... Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap."

What? No. She's been listening to this song for more than fifty years! She was a little bit too young to actually buy the album but often heard it on the radio or in music streaming services later in life. It was clearly Dirty Deeds of the Thunder Chief. She thought it was one of those narrative songs with the man doing the dirty deeds being called the Thunder Chief.

Lily quickly brought up the song in her system and checked both the AI-generated title and transcripted lyrics before listening to the chorus several times.

Fuck! How long has she been mishearing these lyrics?! Her last memories in America were in the 2040s when she was over seventy years old, and she still thought it was that way and even sang it that way on the occasion that such an old song was played.

Remembering her children and even grandchildren snickering at her, she narrowed her eyes. So unfilial! How can you let your mom or nana sing the wrong lyrics to a song for decades?!

"Maybe you're right..." Lily quietly allowed, hoping he would shut up now.

Thankfully, he did, and she sat there as they drove to the last of the locations. This one had to be Vault 112. Otherwise, she was in a bit of a pickle.

---xxxxxx---

"Ma'am, it's confirmed. This is the right place, finally," Wilson reported. Lily nodded at him and waited until the driver of the RV parked and started the deployment process of the vehicle.

She then got up and walked into the back, and stepped inside her own Power Armour, blinking a little as it connected to her data port and rendered the outside world in her vision. This was her MkII armour, with integrated plasma and laser weapons. She wanted to include a shoulder-mounted guided mini-missile launcher, but it made it just too big to go into almost any building. As it was, she would probably be hunching a bit to go into the Vault.

"When are we going to get armour like that, ma'am?" asked Wilson.

Lily hummed. In quantities? Not until she could produce quantum processors herself. She could create the junior version of her brain interface now, though. Instead of a hundred of thousand individual electrical connections to your brain, it used the same technology she saw both in the VR stimsuit as well as the Institute's synth-computer she saw in the brain of Ms Natalie Turner.

She asked him, "How do you feel about zhe elective brain surgery, Submajor?" As that would still probably be required. She could try to build one that used a similar control system as regular Power Armour, she supposed, but it would be much harder to control than regular Power Armour.

"Uhh... generally, I am against it, but if it's required for me to get a set of giant Power Armour, I am willing to give it some thought," he said contemplatively.

Lily nodded at him, "We'll see when we get back then." The main reason she was restricting brain implants was that her version required a medichine nanohive as well. The nanites were necessary to keep the individual electrodes in your brain in position. Things, including your brain, shifted over time. New neural connections were made. Without the nanomachines keeping everything straight, you would likely die in a few months.

And she was paranoid about effective nanomachines more than any of her other technologies. Perhaps it was irrational of her, but that's all she had to start with and look where she was now. If she was destined to have competitors, and she was sure they would appear somehow or somewhen, then she wanted them to at least arise in a different manner than she did, so at least she could learn something from them.

The electrode induction version of the brain-computer didn't provide as precise access to the brain nor as good bandwidth, but it was still better than what could be expected from the VR simulation, and that was already good enough to trick most people who went through it. So, maybe she should move forward faster on that. She had a rough design of a device, but she had not built it nor tested it in the brains of volunteers.

She had brought an extra dozen robots with them, in addition to the ones that were serving as the backbone of the two squads the Submajor was commanding. Mainly for labour, in the event that she was going to take things out of here.

"Do you want an escort inside, ma'am?" asked Wilson after he secured the perimeter.

Lily started to say no but then paused. In the game, there were a bunch of Robobrains and other working pieces of technology. Robobrains themselves were rather dangerous and rare. She hadn't seen any at all yet. Besides being a possible threat, she was quite curious about their brain-machine interface and what they did to the brains involved. In the game, they acted like machines -- did they just use the neural circuitry as some kind of biological computer, destroying the previous person's ego? If so, was that required, or could there be sapient robobrains?

"Yes, come with me. We'll bring eight of the robots with us for protection," Lily finally told him, getting a quick nod from his helmet-shrouded head.

They walked two abreast into the ruined mechanic's garage, which hid a secret passage until the passage widened out and a familiar cog-shaped Vault door bearing the number 112 was visible. There were a number of mole rats that the robots lasered without being prompted.

"Never actually been in a Vault before, except the one in basic training," said Wilson, kind of excitedly. She had included her memories of Vault 108 and a few other places as examples in some of the tactical evolutions in the simulation. Without the Gary clones, though.

"Hmmm..." Lily said noncommittally. Then she walked over to the entrance terminal and tried to open the door. Not surprisingly, it worked. A klaxon sounded, complete with rotating beacon lights, and they both waited for the multi-ton door to be slid and lifted out of the way.

"Woah, this place looks up and running, still," Wilson commented.

Lily nodded. She'd leave surveillance cameras behind when she left. If raiders or undesirable elements discovered it, she'd clean them out again. Her present intention was still to leave the place as she found it for the most part. She had carefully removed and brought with her a number of quantum processors from the spares of the VSS simulator.

If she downloaded Braun's memories, she would be able to run him as an NPC using an impersonator AI. Although she likely wasn't going to let the NPC Braun continue to torment the residents of Tranquility Lane, it could still be useful for putting the Lone Wanderer's dad on ice for a time. Also, it tended to be a lot easier to quiz such an impersonator about secrets than parse through decades of memories. Although it had a lot of limitations, it was pretty good at distilling all of those things into concise bits.

The fidelity of any impersonator AI depended on how well the AI was programmed, but even then, most people could only get about ninety-two per cent accurate. This was enough to trick most people for some time, but family members would usually discover the discrepancy in only a couple of days.

In her past life, they were designed not only to sort memories and respond but to carefully and automatically psychologically model a person. People who were very neurodivergent generally fell into one or two categories, though. They could hardly be modelled at all, or alternatively, they could be very accurately modelled.

Meimei was always of the latter category and thought that an impersonator AI of herself could model her reactions close to ninety-seven per cent and close to one hundred per cent on some matters, although they would still be a Chinese room and not a real consciousness as in the absence of stimulus such models would not think or consider, merely shut down.

In the past, some psychologists had created profiles of Meimei which were either wildly inaccurate or accurate enough that it caused her to change some of her behaviours to preclude being easily predicted. It was just humiliating that most of them were of the criminal, pathological psychologist variety.

Lily had been testing such a model using a complete download of her own memories as the seed, too. She had the idea of creating an impersonator herself to help run the city of Megaton. For the past week, she had been feeding it the exact same questions and requests she got from the people and workers in Megaton, but only after already deciding the matters. It had been eerily accurate, with only things that required on-the-spot problem-solving skills being somewhat lacklustre, and even those the model could infer a somewhat similar response based on her memories of past actions.

It could be the start of a very useful tool! She basically had the technology to create an alpha fork of herself, but she wasn't Meimei anymore, and the idea of another her around filled her with a little apprehension. Hell, even Meimei didn't like forks of her around that didn't get merged back into the base periodically.

The last time one appeared, due to a resurrection timing mishap, they had to negotiate the distribution of their collective assets as if they were a married couple that had a divorce. Meimei kept most of them, but that fork got enough to set herself up on a similar path. Meimei had to bribe her off, as she had knowledge enough to compromise all of their resurrection points, their most secret and hidden plans, and all the rest. Meimei thought she was a weirdo, too, as she had switched to a partial biomorph body of a snake woman and went back to Extropia Station to live.

They walked through a couple of doors, but as soon as Lily got sight of the robobrain that was waiting to meet them, the robobrain yelled in a digital voice, "Unauthorised robotic equipment! ERADICATE. ERADICATE. ERADICATE." What the fuck, were these things, Daleks?!

The robobrain started shooting small plasma blasts at her robots, and she thought it was aiming at herself as well as she had to duck once to avoid one of them. She stopped both her robots from firing as well as Wilson and indicated that they should all back out of the way.

"Well, I don't zhink it likes me or my robots," Lily told Wilson while watching the robobrain roll back into the main area of the Vault. It didn't seem to want to follow them out or even shoot at them once they had left the premises.

Lily glanced at one of her robots that took a hit from a plasma packet. Its frontal armour was a bit melted, but it still was operable; it just didn't look so great. It wasn't a priority and could be fixed later.

Wilson glanced at her, "What should we do? We can probably scrap the bots if we go about it systematically."

Lily hummed. She'd rather not. She glanced at him sideways and said quietly, "You poke your head in. I'm sure it has data about Pre-War Power Armour in its databanks, so it won't consider you a robot. If it starts to shoot at you, run back; if not, see what it tells you."

Although she couldn't see his face under his helmet, she sort of imagined his expression. After a moment, he sighed and nodded. He slung his plasma rifle at his side, presumably to look a little less threatening, and walked back through the doorway they were waiting behind.

Lily's hearing was really good, but the Vault Doors were insulated really well. She couldn't hear any plasma casters firing, though, which was a good sign, so she just sat there and waited.

After a few minutes, the door opened back up, and Wilson returned, carrying a folded-up Vault 112 jumpsuit. Lily asked him, "Let me guess, it said you were about two 'undred years late but directed you to get inside one of zhe Tranquility Loungers."

Wilson paused and asked, "How did you know? Do you have microphones on our armour or just have really good hearing?"

Well, she had a really good sense of hearing but not quite good enough to hear through the insulated steel doors, "Neither. Just a guess." Besides, she had played this before.

She stepped over into the corner of the room and triggered the armour to let her out, and she stepped out of it and stretched each of her limbs. She thought that the robobrain had identified her Power Armour incorrectly as a robot, so if she wanted to wear it inside the Vault, she would have to go on foot first and begin systematically hacking every robot and computer system she saw.

"Alright, let's go back. We'll leave the robots out here for the moment. I plan on hiding behind you if someone shoots at me," she told the older man, who was an experienced mercenary even before he came under her employ.

His voice was wry, "Naturally."

They walked together into the Vault again, and the robobrain began the spiel that she had been expecting. It gave the same spiel to Wilson even though he had already heard it one time. While it wasn't paying attention, Lily casually walked behind it and snaked a data cord from behind her neck into the machine's criminally scandalously exposed data port without even a dust cover to protect the robot's modesty.

Hacking robots in this world was as simple as identifying which version of the RobCo OS the robot was using and then consulting a list of multiple remote-execution vulnerabilities that existed for that version. It was even more straightforward than the silly minigame she remembered in the Fallout 3 game. For her, it was a completely automated process. While she hadn't seen this particular version of RobCo OS yet, it bore a lot of similarities, including unfixed vulnerabilities, to many of the other versions that General Atomics used for their Mister Handy and Miss Nanny series of bots.

Lily didn't immediately change anything about the robot's behaviour but placed a backdoor so that she could remotely shut the system down in the event it received some updated orders that she didn't think should be followed.

As they walked around the Vault, it became clear that there were a lot more pods in place than there were in the game. That did surprise her but not that much, as there were only ten people in the Tranquility Lane simulation quest line in the game, and the actual world she found herself in always seemed to be much more widely populated.

"Are these VR pods like the kind that you salvaged from that building in DC, Commander?" asked Wilson curiously as they walked through a large room with about twenty occupied pods inside. Lily was carefully hacking each terminal that controlled the pods, giving her superuser access to each occupant one at a time.

Lily nodded, "Yes. Zhe guts of this system were made by VSS, too but then improved. You don't need the full neural stim suit, for example, for this model and zhe pods themselves have been modified with advanced longevity systems. Zhese people all were alive before the war and 'ave been living in a simulated reality for two hundred years."

"Woah, that could be heaven or hell. I tried that Anchorage simulation, and even on the easiest difficulty setting, its a bitch, ma'am. I'm not sure how you managed to beat it," he said.

Lily nodded and said while giving him a side eye, "Perhaps I am just that good!" Yes, that was a legitimate and fully earned victory, that was.

"What simulation is running now? Should one of us get in one of these pods?" asked Wilson.

Lily told him what she knew of Tranquility Lane and Dr Braun. He seemed off-put, "He's pretending he's a little girl?! That's pretty sick!"

Was it? Well, there was a biomorph type that had a very bad reputation, which was a type that never really achieved maturity. If you bought one, you'd select an age, and it just wouldn't mature past that point. People always did look at anyone who chose to be sleeved inside one of those types of bodies with a little suspicion. However, if it was just the sex change, then there was nothing that unusual.

There was a piece of bioware that was only slightly expensive that would trigger a complete, total sex change to the point where the correct gametes would be produced in only about forty-eight hours, and it could be triggered at will and as often as you'd like. Well, unless you got pregnant. There was a small minority of people who really liked that and flitted between one sex and the other, or one gender role and the other, or some amalgamation of all of the above, or something completely different. So, to her simply experiencing a different sex in a VR game or simulation was tres tame. She wasn't one to throw stones, as people thought she was a lot weirder for choosing to remain in a synth body, especially a non-humanoid one, even though she was rich.

In her past life, fully synthetic bodies were something people who couldn't afford biomorphs lived in, and there was a considerable social cost for being amongst "the clanking masses."

She knew people who had sleeved into giant, specially engineered vacuum-tolerant space whales and drifted in the atmosphere of Saturn or sleeved into an actual spaceship. She always felt the latter was interesting, as the manufacturers incorporated a strong maternal instinct to protect the inhabitants of your ship into the way your emulated neural network ran. She always wanted to try it to see if it would work on her.

Lily sent via text-to-speech radio broadcast, so it would only play over the speakers in his helmet, quietly. "Go ahead and get out of the Power Armour and put on that Vault suit," Lily told him, "After I hack this terminal and put a backdoor in so he can't cause you too much pain or erase your memories, I want you to go in the simulation and play dumb. I'm still not convinced that Dr Braun can't see and control everything around here. I kind of think that's why the place is so open, as a lure for him to find new toys to play with."

Wilson blinked and looked at my mouth, which was clearly not moving, "You're going to have to tell me how you did that sometimes, boss." But then he nodded and stepped out of his Power Armour, leaving his helmet by the feet.

Lily blinked at the man's bald head. The dark skin was almost shiny. Didn't he use to have hair? Yes, definitely. She decided not to comment on it, though and busied herself hacking and subtly reconfiguring the computer that took the input and output of the Tranquility Lounger. After she was done, she plugged in a small wireless dongle to the back of the system, which would give her a wireless connection to Wilson's lounger.

"Alright, ma'am. I'm ready, I guess. How long do you expect to leave me in here?" Wilson told her, seeming a bit curious and concerned at the last part.

Lily shrugged, "However long it takes." She didn't want to tell him anything out loud if Braun could hear. She wasn't too concerned about him watching her fiddle with the terminals, as she wasn't leaving any real traces of her successful hacking attempts, nor was she noticeably changing any expected behaviour.

She pulled out her pneumatic hypospray, rolled the revolver-style selector to regular medichines, and motioned him over. As he got close, she placed the hypospray on his arm and depressed the trigger about six or seven times rapidly in quick succession. "Owe!" he complained, frowning.

Grinning, she put the tool back into her pocket and reprogrammed the nanomachines that were now in his body to focus on his brain as a second layer of protection and then motioned him towards the pod. He shook his head at Lily one last time before climbing in. The pod closed, and Lily opened up a window in the corner of her vision that corresponded to what Wilson was seeing.

Before the sim started, a flurry of commands from farther down along the line arrived, reprogramming the man's avatar. It looked like Braun was well aware of what was happening and changed Wilson to spawn in a child-like avatar. Not a dog, yet, it seemed. Her hacking did not attempt to stop this, although it quietly ignored some commands about stimulating his limbic system and amygdala, which would have tended to make him much more afraid generally. What an ass, Dr Braun.

Just in case she got attacked on the way out, she hopped into Wilson's Power Armour and grabbed his plasma rifle before retracing her steps and leaving the Vault entirely. Once she was outside, she left his armour and grabbed her modified Chinese stealth armour from one of her robots who was waiting for her with it. She also reclaimed her scanning device, as she was curious how a lot of the stuff inside worked. The Tranquility Loungers had a lot of extra features compared to the pods in the VSS building!

Now, while Braun was distracted with his or her new toy, it was time for a sneak mission! Sorry, Wilson! It is for a good cause, and she limited how much you could be really tortured, anyway!

---xxxxxx---

As Betty was interrogating Wilson, Lily snuck back into the Vault. She seemed very interested in who we all were but lost most of her curiosity when Wilson explained we were from a settlement around western DC. It seems as though she didn't have much respect for the state of civilisation.

Wilson wasn't really cooperating with her attempts to make him do amusing things, such as torture some of the inhabitants of her virtuality, so she was trying to convince him that Lily had left him there to die. It didn't make any sense at all, but she slipped a rendered line of text into his virtual stream stating the opposite, but to feel free to play whatever role he wanted so long as he kept the psychotic virtual tween busy.

According to what she could see from the Vault's network, there were two dozen robobrains working here, with about a third shutdown or undergoing maintenance which was performed by another third at any one time. She only had a few hacked, so as she snuck around inside the facility, she had one of her hacked robobrains report a mechanical irregularity. It was directed to go to maintenance and was replaced by one of the robobrains that were shut down.

The robobrain performing maintenance was infected and compromised as soon as it connected to her hacked one to diagnose its maintenance issue. It then hacked all of the rest of the robobrains, including both the other maintenance models as well as the ones getting maintenance done.

It wouldn't take too long for her to have the whole cohort under her control.

The computer system powering the simulation was similar to the one made by VSS. It had the same architecture, except it was much more extensive. It was interesting to see because, from the documents that she read from the VSS building, they were the company that invented the technology, but there was a much more complicated and much more finished system than they were able to produce using their own technology, including their own proprietary operating system that ran virtualised in a large cluster.

She knew a lot more about how the system worked these days and how to hack it without resorting to her crude hardware attacks. However, it did necessitate her sneaking around and hacking each individual mainframe one at a time, and they were located in five different rooms in the lowest level of the Vault.

She knew Braun was in the Overseer's office, but he was her absolute last stop.

---xxxxxx---

It took her over three hours to compromise every single system and robot in the building, and she got a lot more data while she was doing so. There were about a hundred and six in Tranquility Lane, down from a hundred and thirty-five when the bombs dropped. There had been casualties over the years, despite some really impressive longevity and medical technology.

What was she going to do with all of these people? She did not think that they would survive very long after being removed from their Tranquility Loungers. The pods were a completely closed system, and while she didn't have enough time to reverse engineer them thoroughly, she believed that after so long inside of one that, a person's body would have adapted to the additional support the system provided and would fall apart without it.

None of them had much of an immune system after all this time, and many of the people in the pods were directly connected to both artificial dialysis and blood-pumping machines. They didn't really have a heart that worked very well anymore.

She finally snuck into the Overseer's room, hacked the number of mainframes there, including the main ThinkMachine system that coordinated everything and peered at the old man inside the Tranquility Lounger. He was one of the ones who wouldn't survive too long outside of it. Perhaps... no, undoubtedly, he knew that. It was a shitty version of immortality, indeed.

Instead of immediately taking overall control over the vault, she used her root access to the ThinkMachine mainframe that oversaw the entire vault, including the simulation, to create a new user, Lily. Then she created a new user access paradigm, a Super-Overseer if you will, and assigned herself that role.

Then she subtly removed all of the permissions from Braun by degrading the access permissions of the Overseer role until he could only access things in his simulation. Just to be safe.

When she was done, she stopped sneaking around and just hurried out of the Vault, returning with a wheeled trolley containing the brain-scanning system and assorted electronics.

Glancing at Braun, did she really care what he had to say? No, not really. He had already changed Wilson to a dog, including some NPC code in his avatar, and was going around having the dog-Wilson maul the residents of Tranquility Lane, cackling like a madman. Braun hadn't noticed her traipsing around at all.

Sighing, she took her hypospray back out and rotated it to a sedative, and triggered the pod to open. Braun only had a moment of confusion; she didn't even really think he was conscious yet before she jabbed him in the neck with the pneumatic spray. If she was a bitch, she would have just paralysed him while she did this, but there was no reason for the man, even if he was a sadistic bastard, to suffer more than necessary.

After that, she placed the electrodes on his head and sat there for several minutes it took to download and catalogue all of his memories. Not surprisingly, it took a lot longer than normal.

Nodding, satisfied, she plugged in an impersonator AI and connected it. Right now it was piped through her Mesh only, so only she could question it. However, that was sufficient.

Lily asked it, "Who are you?"

"Betty, more recently, but most people know me as Stanislaus Braun, of course. Doctor Stanislaus Braun," a little girl's voice said. That was another issue with impersonator AIs, you had to be real careful with them on people who switched sleeves often.

Lily nodded, though satisfied, "Do you remember all of zhe work you did for zhe Societal Preservation Program and Future-Tec?"

"Of course! My greatest life's work, you know," the girl said.

Excellent. Lily smiled, "Give me a brief synopsis of how the G.E.C.K. works."

There was silence for a moment, "Well, I don't entirely know how it works. This is weird; normally, I'd never ever admit that you see, but you seem very trustworthy, and it seems important that I tell you the truth."

What?! Lily asked, "Didn't you invent it?!"

"Well... one of my assistants did if you want to be technical. But he had no real vision for how the technology could be used. I'm the one that integrated it as a whole into the G.E.C.K.," admitted the Braun AI, "He threatened to expose me, but I got him to agree to let me take credit for it. In exchange, I placed him in one of the Vault's as the Overseer. He wasn't a dummy; he knew it was only a matter of time before the Chicoms set the world on fire."

For fuck's sake! "Which Vault? Was it a control vault? If not, what was the experiment?"

"Vault 67 in Ohio. Well, he thought it was a control vault," said the girl, laughing, "But the experiment was to see what would happen if a hundred serial killers were put in a Vault together with one man who thought he was an Overseer. Really we only found ninety-one serial killers in North America, you know, so we had to toss in nine random people. Serial killers are a lot rarer than you'd think."

Lily turned around and shot Braun's body in the head. "Zhat isn't a fucking experiment!"

"Says you. I have five doctorates that say it is," said the AI Braun in her head.

Lily felt a headache coming on.