75 The Fate of the AntAgonizer

Lily discovered a Brotherhood scout team trailing them as they left Megaton, which she found Very Interesting. They seemed able to keep up with her enough that they might realize she was heading towards western DC. So instead of turning southeast in that direction after leaving Megaton, she turned north-northwest to throw them off. She knew where she thought Vault 106 was, so she thought she would head there first.

Vault 106 was the location that piped psychoactive drugs into the air as an experiment, and it might be interesting both to see the chemical composition of the drugs and to find the drug synthesis setup that managed to keep manufacturing drugs for two hundred years.

From a game perspective, it was actually very similar to Vault 108, the Gary vault. It was inhabited by a number of "insane survivors" wearing Vault 106 jumpsuits, armed with things like pipes, wrenches, and swords.

She doubted very much that the people if there were any, were actually two hundred-plus-year-old survivors of the Vault. Their descendants? Perhaps, it depended, she supposed, on how insane they were. More likely, if they end up being totally wacky, she expects them to be more along the line of insane scavengers.

This would be a shortstop. She just wanted to give any Brotherhood scouts the location as a plausible place for her to investigate. It was a Vault, and it had novel and interesting psychoactive drugs. If they had a psychological profile on her, then her stopping and spending some time here would make perfect sense. After quickly clearing the area, she would try to take any interesting chemical synthesis equipment and then head due west over the open Wasteland, then south and east to hit the Western part of DC from a different angle. If the Apprentice wasn't with her, she would be very, very tempted to investigate the Dunwich building on this trip since she was already going in that direction.

She knew it was a bad idea to do so, but she just couldn't help herself. Honestly, if there was Cthulhu in this universe and just investigating it would drive her insane or kill her, then she just wouldn't, ultimately, survive. There was no way she wasn't investigating that place, after all.

The aerosolized drugs in Vault 106 wouldn't be a danger to the complete NBC protection she built into both of their sets of armour, and they would use the dart guns she had finally built or her robots to subdue any drugged people they saw, drag them out of the Vault and treat them. Hopefully, they would return to normal; if not, she supposed she'd have to shoot them, as it would be a mercy. It would depend on how much actual brain damage being continually exposed to an unknown chemical agent had caused.

Monsieur Three Dogs was getting a lot of airtime out of the one hundred songs Lily had sent him on holotapes. She intended to, at first, demand a significant payment from the man like the Mechanist suggested, but when she talked to him over the radio, she discovered an interesting fact about him. Namely, he was "poor AF", as her Apprentice might say.

She supposed he could have been lying to her, but it didn't sound like it to her. In fact, reviewing some of the saved radio broadcasts he had made, he routinely asked his listeners to come and bring him something to eat. And he offered her advertising on his show, including paying him in food herself.

She had just sighed and arranged for the holotapes to be delivered to him. However, she wrote on the note any future ones would need to be paid for and that he should use the new songs to start a listener-donated fund to both support the radio station as well as to buy new songs from her. She had quite a number of them, by now, from both her past lives.

In this first hundred, she mainly selected songs that were along the same style as those that Three Dog already played. A lot of Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublè, Dean Martin and country songs. However, she also slipped in about twenty songs from Elvis and The Beatles to see how they would be received. She might have accidentally started the Rock and Roll revolution.

All of the new songs were a big hit, and Three Dog seemed quite happy that he now had one-hundred-and-twenty-five songs.

She glanced over at the Apprentice, who was glancing left and right. She was seeing the exterior view of the truck following her, but the system should have only mapped the exterior view to the three-dimensional shape that comprised the exterior armour of the RV, as if she was seeing outside the windshield that wasn't there, so Alice should still be able to see her and hear her, "We were being followed leaving town by zhe Brotherhood, so instead of making it obvious where we are headed we will go north and visit Vault 106, zhen swing west and around after they stop being interested where we go, yes?"

The girl glanced over at her briefly before smiling, "Ooh! Field trip! I think this is a good idea. I have no idea really how to use the Power Armour you made me; I'd rather get that down before we maybe run into Super Mutants."

Lily didn't intend to run into Super Mutants at all. Her RV had a Gatling laser, a missile launcher and a pneumatic launcher for the twenty loitering-munition kamikaze drones she carried. Storing them, they were about the size of a small thermos of coffee and expanded to full size when ejected into the air. She did not waste any fission batteries on these devices, so they only had about a thirty-minute endurance, but that was more than enough to practice the American way of war, namely bombing people from the sky until they gave up and fucked off.

However, she would have to start manufacturing her own high explosives if she really wanted to practice this type of warfare.

Lily arched an eyebrow, "Super Mutants are pretty terrifying; if we see some, please hide behind zhe robots even if you are in zhe armour. I don't want to..." she was about to say 'lose you' but couldn't quite make her mouth say those words so instead she said after a halting pause, "... train another Apprentice."

Alice grinned widely at her pause as if she realized what she intended to say and gave a sloppy salute and said, "Aye, aye, ma'am!"

"Whatever we are, we are definitely not in zhe Navy, Apprentice. You have been hanging around Gary too much," she groused. Still, she smiled. They were finally outpacing the Brotherhood scout team, who were four klicks behind them and seemingly slowed to a stop, giving up, which made sense. They had opened up to about fifty kilometres an hour on the open terrain. The Brotherhood didn't have any real mobility-focused exosuits, just general infantry hardsuits and the deficiency really showed in their scout members. Most of them didn't even wear Power Armour because of its deficiencies in moving fast over terrain and staying unnoticed.

Some of the Enclave, however, had a few speciality suits that made a really good time over terrain. She had observed them in their missions near D.C., and even if they got dropped and exfiltrated by Vertibird, they still had really fast-moving hardsuits. She kept her drones very far from them, especially the Vertibirds, which might have air-to-air radar sets, so she didn't have good images on them, but they appeared to be some sort of special forces variant of their Advanced Power Armour, perhaps?

Honestly, she respected the Enclave's threat a lot more than the Brotherhood. They had more diversified forces, acted with a more military bearing, and stealth and had a combined arms doctrine featuring close air support with Vertibirds. The Brotherhood did have some vertibirds, but near as she could tell, they only had about six. She had identified over twenty unique encrypted transponders in the Enclave fleet. It kind of made sense; the Enclave was both more directly descended from the government and had a history of losing.

Losing was kind of the opposite of what you wanted when you were a military force, but at the same time, having a long history of winning tended to breed complacency. The Enclave clearly respected the Brotherhood's threat to them and conducted operations accordingly. Lily didn't see that the Brotherhood really respected the threat the Enclave presented, which she found a little amusing because the Enclave could incinerate the Brotherhood HQ at their leisure.

The AI that ran the Enclave had the keys to at least one orbital nuclear weapons satellite, which was something she would have to handle one way or another. She didn't really feel like sitting under a constant Sword of Damocles, so she would either have to wrest control of that satellite from John Eden or destroy it. Or kill the President, which was probably the best solution.

She needed to find some other VAX AI unit first, though. While she was pretty sure her E-war capabilities should be superior, she wanted to go in with a silver bullet if she had to kill the AI. Examining other VAX units was the best way to craft an attack vector that would work the first time.

She had already identified a number of radio relays that Eden used to transmit both his radio station and the command and control for his large fleet of several hundred Eyebots that just roamed the Wasteland spouting propaganda. It helped that she already knew he was at Raven Rock, so she could work from the source and start outwards, for sure.

---xxxxxx---

Watching the RV deploy to stationary mode while inside it was kind of interesting, and once it was deployed she took the Apprentice back into the back to show her her Power Armour.

"Why is mine pink?" asked the Apprentice, offended.

Lily sniffed delicately, "I believe zhe colour is called salmon, actually."

"Pink," the girl insisted.

Ignoring her, Lily showed her the virtual controls and forwarded her the Armour's owner's private key. She watched as the girl triggered the Armour, which opened the rear allowing the girl to step inside it.

"Okay, when you get inside, get comfortable and zhen trigger zhe close function. After it closes, just remain still, for now, please," Lily told her.

Lily watched the armour close up, the mechanisms were a bit complicated, more so than the Brotherhood Armour she scanned, but it ensured a complete hermetic seal to prevent ingress of chemical or biological elements. The interior was held at a slight positive pressure, as well, and all incoming air was routed through a number of graphene filters and screens.

She had devised, at least in theory, a levitation-technology-based filter that she thought would be an extremely effective first-pass filter, which would divert heavier than air items downwards, which would make an effective inertia-based air filter. However, she had only recently gotten that technology out of Madison Li, so these first models had not had that incorporated yet.

However, she had incorporated adding graphene filters to the water purifiers at the Eastside Water & Power building. Although the filters had to be changed and cleaned almost daily, they increased the water being purified almost by half, and the cleaning procedures for the radioisotopes that got through the graphene filter were a lot simpler for her ghoul employees.

She was a little embarrassed that she hadn't included such a feature on the water purifier to start with. One of the best products that graphene could make was near molecular-sized filters. She hadn't wanted the project to be dependent on her to supply the filters but had come up with a design that was easily cleanable by her employees without using a lot of purified water so a single filter could be reused hundreds or even thousands of times.

"Woah, what just happened?" asked Alice over the speakers.

"Ah, yes. Zhere is a small... articulating..." Lily searched for a way to explain it. Finally, she sighed and simply said, "... tentacle for lack of zhe better word. It 'as sensors and automatically detects zhe data port in your neck and plugs itself in. Keeping ingress time low is an important factor for zhese kinds of hardsuits, Apprentice, so I can't use a system where you plug yourself in at your leisure."

Lily paused and considered, "Oh, and if you're looking through zhe settings and options, I would recommend you don't go above one zhree zero degrees for field of view, for now. Your brain will start to hurt." She stood back a fair way. Perhaps she should have unloaded this armour outside before letting the girl get in it, "Try to keep zhe movements very slow at first. In fact, go into zhe settings and adjust zhe setting called boost factor to 0 decimal two five."

The Apprentice was motionless for a moment, and then she moved her arms and hands around slowly, "Ah... it really is just like moving your regular limbs."

Lily nodded, "Try taking a careful step, and zhen if you can, a left turn and walk straight out zhe ramp out of zhe vehicle. Try to avoid hitting your head on zhe overhead by zhe ramp."

After a couple of unsure steps but the girl managed to get out of the vehicle, which reassured her. There were a lot of fragile things in here.

She walked over to her armour, which opened up and stepped inside. Her machine had a more complicated system that gathered up her braid and coiled it up by her skull before enclosing herself in the armour. Her vision snapped back into place as the data port was inserted, and she went through a quick self-test routine. All motivators were OK, integrated weapons OK, fusion core fuel status 99.9%.

She grabbed the Power Armour-sized sword she had fabricated for herself, and clipped its scabbard to her waist, humming. What was she forgetting?

Oh! She went and grabbed the two dart guns. They were sized to be used by normal people, not Power Armour, but like her latest weapon designs. Using the trigger was a bit of a chore in Power Armour with small arms. Unless you were using heavy weapons that were designed explicitly for Power Armour, it made things a lot clunkier and slower.

However, in her most recent weapon designs, there was an electronic interface both in the weapons grip and her armoured hands, which would integrate the weapon into her Internal Battle System. It took a little bit to get used to firing weapons mentally, especially using the safety features so you wouldn't have a negligent discharge, but it was over sixty per cent faster than using triggers.

She followed the Apprentice out of the RV and closed the ramp behind her. All of her robots were already patrolling the area, she had seen some raiders to the north, but so long as they didn't bother her, she did not consider them her business.

Well, unless the Apprentice wanted some live fire practice, she supposed.

She watched the Apprentice practice with some jumps, jogging and rolls before she made her run through the weapons system. There were integrated lasers and electrolasers in each of the hands, above the palms, and firing them, she felt kind of like Samus Aren, except she didn't have any jetpacks and couldn't roll into a ball.

After a few false starts, Alice picked up the target designating and firing of the battle system pretty well. However, what she said next made Lily almost tilt over in shock.

"I just need a throne, then I could sit there and..." The girl changed tone of voice and affected a very haughty tone, "At last! You have come before the court of the AntAgonizer! Queen of All Ants! None can stand before me, and my royal regiment of fighting ants!" Then she started laughing.

What the fuck?!

"Uhh.. Apprentice... what zhe 'ell was zhat?" Lily asked, mildly.

"Oh, well... I and the rugrats used to play, I guess, supervillains and heroes, and I would always play the role of the villain so that they could defeat me. Weren't you aware of the comic books featuring the AntAgonizer?" she asked meekly, now seemingly a little embarrassed.

That wasn't why Lily was surprised! Was the Apprentice the fucking AntAgonizer all along? Lily considered that. The Apprentice would be a little over eighteen years old at the start of the plot of Fallout 3, so the age could be right. But wasn't the AntAgonizer's name Tanya or something?

"Apprentice! Does zhe name Tanya mean anything to you?" Lily asked her, curious.

Alice nodded, the motion seemingly exaggerated in the armour, "Sure! Miss Tanya. She was, I guess, you could say the orphanage matron for us, really though she was just someone who took us in and turned her house into an orphanage. She died two years ago. It's just been us since then, well, until you came along, Mistress."

Holy shit. Lily thinks that the Apprentice might have been the AntAgonizer. From what she remembered of the game, the AntAgonizer went crazy after a giant ant attack killed her family.

Was the Apprentice capable of having a complete psychological break if a bunch of ants killed her siblings and then taking on the mantle of a supervillain and then stealing the identity of the only person who ever showed her something like affection in her life? Lily could definitely see that happening.

Say what you will about the AntAgonizer from the game; she was at least smart enough to tame giant murderous ants, somehow. She could see the Apprentice doing that if she was insane. The girl could do virtually anything if she put her mind to it, Lily felt. Now, she had to state that she definitely wouldn't support her if she later decided to genocide the human race with fighting ants, but it was kind of nice knowing that the girl would always land on her feet if something happened to her. She'd just have to talk to her and make sure genocide wasn't her go-to option in case things got bad. There were plenty of better options, short of genocide, Lily felt.

Well, Lily was wondering about the fate of the so-called AntAgonizer and if that crazy woman would show up. Now she knew, she supposed? There would be, hopefully, no Antagonizing done by the Apprentice.

"Alright, let's run zhrough zhe Vault. You go first. Make sure you don't laser zhese people; just use zhe dart gun, yes? Some might be salvageable, and be cautious about any traps or tripwires," Lily warned.

She wanted the girl to go first in order for her to have a bit of practice in exploring new places. They could have the robots clear this Vault easily if they wanted to, and while she wasn't expecting much trouble, she also wasn't about to be jinxed, and she wouldn't rely on just her game knowledge, which could be faulty.

Alice bobbed her head again. The Power Armour that Lily made was larger than the standard Pre-War Power Armour, because it was in many ways more complicated and included a lot more individual systems, including its own quantum processor, radar, vacuum-rated seals and internal weapons. So, both Lily and the Apprentice were easily over two metres tall when they were wearing it. It took some getting used to not banging your metal head on entryways, and Lily looked forward to chuckling at the girl every time she did it.

---xxxxxx---

Although the girl meeped at the insane, drugged-up people roaming inside the Vault, she ended up darting them easily enough. To give her an idea of what protection she had, she told her to let them wail on her for a while, and one man just kept beating on her armour with a lead pipe until he slumped to the ground in exhaustion.

There were twelve of them, and Lily wondered why they didn't kill each other. They had no nascent Gary gestalt nor his interesting brain structures that could plausibly form one. It was a mystery. She took some brain scans of each person before one of her robots dragged or carried them out of the Vault.

A group of four Kaytrons outside had setup an aid station, well... they tied up the prisoners so that the medichines they had been darted with could switch to healing mode, anyway. That was "aid."

There weren't a lot of valuables to find in the first levels of the Vault, although the Apprentice did find two mini-nukes, which Lily carefully carried outside to the truck herself. In fact, she was fabricating a cushioned carrying case for both of them. They appeared to have a nose-triggered pressure switch to set them off when they were fired at a target, and although they had a little safety rod and flag in the tail fins that supposedly deactivated the fuse, Lily didn't want them rolling around in the bed of a truck, just in case.

Mini-nukes were interesting. Every fissionable material had to have a at least a minimum amount of material to set off a supercritical reaction. For example, plutonium went supercritical at 11 kilos. Most bombs only had about four kilos, as you didn't want anywhere near the supercritical mass to store -- it was dangerous and would blow up on its own. The explosive compression of the implosion-type bomb was a way to get the supercritical mass smaller, very briefly, during the explosion.

But you still needed about the same amount of mass no matter what, even if you wanted a large or a small explosion. In other words, each mini-nuke still contained about four kilos of plutonium, just like the core she had removed from the giant bomb in Megaton. In other words, if she wanted to, she could disassemble and convert any mini nukes she found into a maxi nuke. It was good to have such options and was kind of scary, considering you could find mini nukes just randomly sitting on the ground, or in this Vault's case, in a fucking janitor's closet.

However, they found a hidden door using the synthetic aperture radar sets in their armour, and after a while, Lily figured out how to open it to reveal the experimental section of the Vault. Lily took point here in case there were heavy machine gun turrets.

However, all they found were a few dead scientists and another Mister Handy. The Apprentice got excited about that and begged, "Oh! Can I have this Mister Handy, then? Jeeves is so cool!"

"Well, I'll say here young lady, I am the property of Vault-Tek and unauthorized diversion of company property is strictly prohi---" the Mister Handy in question turned to lecture Alice, which exposed his vulnerable data port to her, which she attacked using a darting, articulating metal tentacle from her left armoured gauntlet. It was the same general mechanism that was in the interior of their suits that automatically plugged into their own data ports.

She had to admit testing this feature had been very amusing. Jeeves didn't like being her guinea pig in the matter, but if he didn't want to do it, then he should develop sapience and tell her no as soon as possible.

She bobbed her own head at the Apprentice, "Sure. We'll have to do a diagnostic and wipe him to factory defaults. I don't zhink he seems sapient, but we'll check."

She explored this experimental area, which was built for the scientists that ran the experiment to watch their test subjects and contained all the equipment necessary to run it. That was what she was interested in.

She was a little disappointed she didn't find any similarly miraculous machine like the Fancy Lad people mulcher that she found in Vault 108, but she did find a very sophisticated automated robotic chemical synthesis machine. You could program in arbitrary synthesis procedures, and it was set up for industrial output, including all steps, such as post-synthesis cleaning of every element. It didn't take her long to disconnect it from power and call her robots to carefully take it upstairs. It was a bit heavy but nowhere near what the cloning machine was. It was only about as big as a kitchen refrigerator.

The reason why they still had chemical precursors after two hundred years made her chuckle; she discovered it after hacking a few terminals. Apparently, they were supposed to have enough chemical supplies to run the experiment for at least ten years, but someone complained that someone must have screwed up a decimal place somewhere because they had shipped enough chemical precursors to run their experiment for one thousand years!

That sounded like a ridiculous amount of chemicals that were in their storage room down here, and in some cases that was true, but while the chemical synthesis machine was interesting, the actual chemical aerosolized into the air vents wasn't interesting at all. It was LSD. LSD had a dosage in the microgram level incredibly small. And their experiment had even smaller doses than that since they were testing with small exposures cumulatively over time. So eight hundred years of supplies sounded like a lot, and it was, but for her, if she wanted to use them to make medicine, it wouldn't last nearly as long.

Still, it was over five metric tons of useful chemical precursors, although about a third of it was ergot which was only valuable if she wanted to make more LSD, at least as far as she knew. That or convince pilgrims in Massachusetts that their neighbours were Witches.

Six out of the twelve "insane survivors" seemed to recover; the other half's brains were so fried from constant exposure to LSD that god knows what they saw all the time. However, they weren't really that violent anymore, so Lily just had them placed back in the Vault and re-paralyzed. The medichines would wear off in an hour or two, and then they could just do whatever they wanted. Maybe they'd start a hippy commune or convert to Buddhism or whatever it is that you did after long-term exposure to LSD.

The rest, she offered a ride in the back of her truck to the nearby settlement of Arefu, which they all accepted. Lily did allow them to loot as much as they wanted from the Vault in the meantime while her robots were loading all of the chemicals. They all told stories that they had arrived there fairly recently to scavenge the place.

Lily did find about a dozen firearms in the Vault, so she basically just gave them all to the group of six. She was at the point where she could fabricate any kind of chemical firearm she wanted using her DMLS system, so they didn't really have a lot of value to her anymore. Trade value, she supposed, but she also didn't really make those nickel-and-dime trades with one merchant at a time.

The Apprentice commented on that, mentioning that it seemed odd for a "businessman" like her to offer charity.

She was about to correct the girl that she was a business lady, but then the wisdom from the Dao of Jay-Z caused her to stop. Instead, she internally grinned and told the girl as they started to drive off, "I'm not zhe businessman; I'm zhe business, man!"