The Mesh

Lily washed her hands carefully, as she always did when she was about to leave the hospital. She did it to set a positive example rather than for any real need; she was humming, but internally she was a bit upset. She just finished performing her second pregnancy termination since arriving in this universe. If you considered the ratio between the number of obstetrics patients she has seen and the number of terminations she has had to perform, it would make a third-world country in her past life look positively enviable as far as infant mortality was concerned. It was running 20% morbidity right now, just from terminations!

The first was ten days ago when a woman and her husband came in for an OB consult, and Lily saw some unusual signs on the ultrasound. The expectant mother was gravida two para one, which meant she had one healthy child already. For the challenge aspect, Lily had been trying to avoid using her diagnostic scanner as much as possible, as her days working in the hospital were absolutely dreadfully boring if she had the answer to absolutely everything immediately.

She had considered breaking that challenge, but she had her answer right away after sequencing the mom's genome. She was a recessive carrier for Zellweger syndrome, and judging from the unusual facial features present in the ultrasound; it was pretty clear what she was seeing. After sequencing the father's genome to confirm he also carried the same recessive trait and just for good form, taking a sample of the fetal DNA present in amniotic fluid, she established the diagnosis and recommended that they terminate the pregnancy.

In a civilized world, the couple would have had those recessive traits eliminated immediately after they were identified at birth, but the Fallout universe was the opposite of civilized. The fetus was too far along in development for any kind of treatment she could produce to affect it. Zellweger's Syndrome was characterized by a complete absence of an important cellular organelle in every cell of the body. There was no real way to survive it absent a full nanomedical rebuild, and that was technology she did not have.

They had, not surprisingly, wanted a second opinion, so she called Dr Taylor in on his day off to also explain it again, after which they were still conflicted. Both of them wanted to, at first, take the pregnancy to term even if the infant had no chance to survive more than a month or two postnatal. She had finally just placed her hands on the woman's shoulders and shook her head, urging, "Don't do zhat to yourselves."

After that, they acquiesced. The only silver lining, if there was one, was she got to demonstrate a normal D&C for the Apprentice, who assisted her with the procedure. She had been sad enough that she had included the Zelleger's expression on her second level of life extension therapy, even if it was rare, and gave both parents coupons to get both levels gratis. Although, since it was a recessive expression, a potential child had a seventy-five per cent chance to be normal and healthy, she didn't particularly want to do that again if it could be easily and cheaply (for her) avoided.

The second case was a lot less of a problem for her feelings, as there was an easy and clear diagnosis of anencephaly, which was a malformation of fetal development that caused a failure to form any brain or most of the skull. Most times, the fetus would develop some part of the brain stem, enough for most autonomic functions to continue for a few hours past birth, but that was it.

As far she was concerned, such a fetus not only wasn't alive but never had the potential for life in the first place, and Lily wouldn't feel the least compunction about terminating such a pregnancy. She'd throw the malformed fetus into the trash NBA jump shot style, too, except that it would be incredibly unprofessional for her to do so.

Once again, the Apprentice assisted her with the D&C, so that was good. However, the mother couldn't be consoled, and Lily found herself feeling something like empathy for the silly woman, which was very unusual, and she had to admit she didn't care for it at all if that was how the emotion worked. So, finally, Lily injected the woman with nanomachines that were programmed to regulate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain and quickly fled the room she was recuperating in, leaving Alice to deal with her.

She had long ago realized that she was not... neurotypical in a lot of ways. Her past life in America was a lot better in that respect, there she was just a slightly weird and prideful tomboy, but in many aspects, it didn't help at all because she had memories of how a normal person should feel in some types of situations, which conflicted with how she consistently felt during similar situations. So, the outpouring of emotion from that woman regarding something she considered so irrational just shined a light on that, and it wasn't entirely a comfortable feeling.

Ah, well. She was who she was, and it wasn't an unusual feeling to consider almost everyone else in the world slightly crazy. It was a very profoundly nostalgic feeling, even.

She walked over to the hangar that she and Scott were using to construct the first prototype truck. She shuddered. Two weeks ago she told Scout that she thought she would have gotten to this point on her own in a month. Without the man's help, she probably wouldn't have gotten close in three!

She had tried to keep the truck design as simple as possible, but if you counted all the fastenings, such as nuts and bolts, as individual parts, the prototype they had settled on had twenty-three thousand and six parts! However, this kind of monotonous and detailed-oriented work was right up his alley.

Clearly, there were levels or domains of neurodivergence, and Scott was working well in the "I like to assemble ten thousand piece pure white puzzles for fun" and "building a ship in a bottle sounds like a great lark" areas.

Although... perhaps not. He might, like her, consider those kinds of things pointless. However, she had a suspicion he might like them. He looked like a puzzler. Her little brother so long ago loved solving puzzles, and one of the meanest things she did to him once was she gave him a puzzle but hid one of the pieces, so it was impossible to complete. She wondered how children had such a seemingly supernatural way of identifying the cruellest choice possible in a series of possible behaviours.

She chuckled. Not only had she needed to build an extra metal printer down here, but she also had to build four more, although they were all connected to communal feedstock input hoppers. The many small parts she hadn't realized they would need meant that a single one just wasn't good enough. It would take forever just to build one truck!

She wasn't sure how they made screws or bolts in quantities in factories, perhaps some sort of automated lathe, but what she did know was they didn't sinter them because it took a lot longer. She wondered how the Brotherhood handled that problem; surely they didn't just... scavenge nuts and bolts.

"'Ows it going, Scott?" she asked the Mechanist, who was watching a team of five Termitrons do most of the physical labour and assembly. He had gotten as good as her at controlling the robots and quickly. He had already submitted a number of high-quality tested tasks, as well.

"I think it might be ready for a roll around the block later today," he commented happily. Then he asked, "Are you going to be working on your robots again today?"

Lily hummed a bit and nodded. She worked on a lot of projects every day, but she was finishing up a project to port the standard RobCo quantum neural emulation model to her own operating system. She intended to reflash all of her Trons to use her own OS as soon as possible. Not only did she prefer using her own operating system, which was designed by professional paranoiacs that would put her to shame, but she had an innovative solution designed to make her Trons much more useful, which was only possible when it had a very low-level wireless mesh connection.

It was also becoming more difficult to integrate and manage such devices in her nascent mesh, as they didn't quite fit in or obey the standard way to handle such communications. They communicated on a different frequency and in a different RobCo proprietary protocol than she used for her standard mesh and were kind of grafted on as an afterthought in a very clunky way.

By now, she had already standardized all of her Tron bots into the Termitron chassis and weapon load outs, which was one laser, one AirTaser and one pneumatic dart gun. However, she changed the Termitron head because she had gotten repeated complaints that the Terminator-style metallic skulls were "unsettling," "scared the children and animals," and "creepy AF."

That last one had been from the Apprentice. She thought the girl had been getting into some of her American media and books that she had been accumulating in digital form. Most were books, as it was kind of hard to turn a memory of watching a film into a film, as she included all the times she turned, blinked, coughed, et cetera. But that was the only explanation of how the girl was using TikTok words like "A.F."

In the face of such criticism, she buckled to popular opinion and changed their faces to have only smooth curves and resemble the Kaylon from the TV show Orville from her past life, although she didn't have the present capability to have their eyes light up without blinding their optical sensors, yet. This had gotten widespread approval as a pleasant and inoffensive design. She was internally calling them Kaytrons now or just Kays.

Scott nodded, "You know, and I had a question about that. Your operating system... it seems not only more secure than the RobCo OS, but much more feature complete."

Lily nodded slowly, "Yesss?"

"So, it seemed very... mature. I don't mean to offend you, but it seems unlikely that you created it in the timeframes available," he finished.

Ah. Right. Of course. She nodded, "Yes, zhat is quite true. I call it my OS only because I'm zhe only one zhat 'as access to it anymore, but you're definitely right. I didn't write it at all, zhe only zhing I can take credit for is porting it to be able to run on RobCo's quantum processor instruction set. I'd rather not discuss its precise origins, zhough, if you don't mind." She had no good way to explain it. It really was superior to the RobCo OS, and clearly written and designed by English speakers, so it didn't make sense to him why he had never seen any sign of it, even in government computers that he had no doubt scavenged in the past.

Scott rubbed his chin and then shrugged and nodded, "Alright." And that was all he said about the matter. Lily really did like him for things like that. If he said he would do something, he would do it. If he said something, he wasn't prevaricating and actually meant it. When the Mayor had come to the hospital to get treated with her first life extension treatment, afterwards, she had gone to chat with the Mechanist just to hear someone who meant the things he said.

She glanced at the robots who were underneath the raised truck and installing armour around one of the main differential gears that combined the power of both fission motors. She was really glad that she had the advice of people who knew purely mechanical solutions better than she did, as she thought such a solution would not work when Scott had first mentioned it.

Still, the two motors were carefully computer controlled to stay synchronized, in any case. She had to agree to supply Scott with enough processors in order to satisfy his production requirements at a nominal cost. He also wanted assistance in researching how to produce traditional computing processors as well, which was something she was more than happy to help with as she was curious too. However, she would have to either find another source rather than the Brotherhood or trade them something again, as she used the last token to purchase the synthesis method for Rad-X, although she hadn't put it into production yet.

Lily knew that in her past life, processors and solid-state memory were produced through a photolithographic process, but she knew that it involved a lot of light-sensitive chemicals, extremely clean conditions and tons and tons of ultra highly distilled water to wash everything in stages. The way the Fallout universe seemed to build electronics after discovering quantum processor-based robotics, however, was by using automated robotic micromanipulators to quickly and accurately wire the millions of transistors. She thought that was incredibly interesting but wasn't surprised that the very best traditional processors available in this world were on the level of a Pentium 1 or 2. It was just difficult to scale down to very small sizes that way.

She finally nodded at the robots building the prototype truck and turned to head back inside. She wanted to show off to the Apprentice, now.

"So, what do you zhink?" Lily asked the girl excitedly.

"Dr St. Claire, is that your skull? Like the one, you took out of your body?! You know I think that is creepy; why are you holding it out like that?" complained Alice, in a much put-upon teenaged tone.

Lily chuffed, "Yes, it is! And it is for comparison! Zhe eyes inside it, silly girl! I 'avent until recently been able to construct proper digital optical sensors, so a cybernetic eye replacement has been impossible. But tell me 'ow does it look, from zhe aeszhetic perspective, yes?"

Lily carefully held her previous skull up next to her current one and fluttered her eyelashes a moment before allowing the girl to get a good look at the two different sets of eyes.

Alice sighed but spent a moment looking between the two sets of eyes, "Uhh... you got the colour right, I suppose. But... what is that thing that you told me about? Where it looks unsettling if it can't seem human?"

Lily frowned, "The Uncanny Valley."

Alice nodded, taking her skull from her hands to peer at it, "Yes, that's it. These look too much like a camera lens."

"They are a camera lens!" Lily complained, but just for show. She knew what the girl meant.

"Also, the sclera isn't the correct shade of white, and the entire thing doesn't appear moist enough, but maybe that is just because you put in a skull, you psycho!" the Apprentice finished criticizing her life's work, before walking over to her skeleton that was hanging in the corner and reattaching her skull to it.

Lily sighed, theatrically and much put upon, before flouncing onto her comfortable chair. Lily had caught the girl as she snuck another goat clone on the cloning machine. Lily had used a goat to test the device, and ever since the girl learned how tasty they were, she would periodically go and clone one to give to the cooks. So long as she killed it herself and didn't get any mess anywhere, she didn't particularly mind. The machine was still loaded with tons of biological material, but there was no replacement just yet as Lily hadn't been able to install the Fancy Lad machine into the sewer output yet.

"You know, I preferred zhe attitude the Alice the Front Desk girl 'ad back in Canterbury Commons," Lily groused.

That caused the girl to grin because who wouldn't enjoy being reminded of how far they have come? She asked, "Why do you even need cybernetic replacement eyes in the first place? You have like 20/5 vision!"

Lily turned her entire torso to stare at the girl in shock, "Apprentice! Zhese eyes can see infrared! And into zhe UV spectrum! And zhey have an integrated 10X, gyro-stabilized optical zoom! They have perfect peripheral vision! A wider field of vision! If I need to say any more at all zhen-"

Alice waved her hands in the air and interrupted her in mid-harangue, "Alright, alright! I understand exactly why you would want that." Then she tilted her head to the side and asked, "How do they create a perfect peripheral vision? If I understand the way cameras work, there should always be a focus..." she trailed off.

Lily sighed and stood up, waving a hand at a boring question, "Multiple sensors and zhen zhe digital post-processing to composite zhe image together, of course." Then she smiled, "But I 'ave something else to show you."

Lily walked over to where five of her Kaytrons were standing, completely shut down. She had one of their chests open, and a few tools and what look liked printed circuit board modules on the table nearby, "I 'ave finally been able to properly run zhe neural emulation software on my operating system, Apprentice!"

The Apprentice didn't look that enthusiastic, "So? I'm not as excited about purely computer stuff as you are, Mistress. I don't even really see the difference; they will still work the same, won't they?"

Lily rapidly shook her head, "No, zhey will be better! See, zhis is the custom wireless mesh board that I can now install, now."

That caused Alice to look a little more interested and walk over, "And what can you do with that?"

"Well, you know 'ow zhese Tron robots are really very dumb?" asked Lily excitedly.

"Of course. They're really quite a pain to deal with if you're not already half-robot mentally like you and Mr Kaminsky," she said drily.

"Well, zhe key part of 'ow I design zhe wireless modules is zhat zhey continuously form ad-hoc mesh networks with any similarly equipped device, yes?" Lily continued.

"I sort of understand what that means. It means they maintain a wireless connection and can communicate with any similar devices in range, right?" the girl asked.

Lily nodded, "Of course! And zhere are a lot more nodes on my network zhan you'd zhink. Every smart water or an electrical meter, every neighbourhood transformer zhat Eastside 'as rebuilt! Your little sister's book reader! The trucks we're building outside! For example, I could send you an update to your software, and if you're at the edge of town, it may be delivered zhrough zhree or four intermediaries before arriving to you."

Alice hummed, "Okay, I follow. But wouldn't that be a severe security vulnerability? You can't trust those intermediary devices with something as important as an update to the software my brain uses."

Lily wanted to kiss the girl on the cheek since she considered the computer part of her brain. That was the correct way to think about it. Lily waved a hand, "Don't teach your grandma to suck eggs, Apprentice. Zhe operating system zhis all runs on, and zhe Mesh network concept was designed by professional paranoids. Everything is encrypted. Everything is digitally signed. We use traditional but quantum-resistant encryption algorithms with lots of keylength. As much as zhese teeny little processors can stand. Your computer can accept an update from a random person on zhe street because I have cryptographically signed it."

Lily slid the wireless module into the robot's chassis, clicking it into place and then carefully connected a series of antenna cables, before fastening the board into place and closing the robot's access panel for its peripherals. Alice sighed and shrugged, "Okay, I don't know precisely what all that means, but I do trust you, Dr St. Claire. But I'm still not following your explanation..."

Lily blinked, "Oh. Well, zhis module is different from zhe normal wireless module I produce. Zhis one 'as a separate, dedicated subchannel. A Tron is stupid, but what if you could link zhe cognition and neural emulation of multiple Trons together zhrough zhe Mesh? Zhese five, zhey would zhink much better zhan just zhe one, no?"

Alice started backing away, "Uhh... Mistress... you remember when you told me about your secret research and asked me to warn you if I thought you were doing something stupid?"

Lily hummed, "Of course, of course..."

Alice coughed, "Well, what would happen if more and more of these robots were linked together to such a point that they got so smart that we couldn't even understand their motives? That would be..."

"Awesome!" Lily finished for her with deep emotion.

"Well, I was going to say dangerous," Alice replied.

Lily snorted, "You have been getting into my science fiction stories; I just know it. Zhat is zhe only origin for zhis paranoia." Just because one set of hyperintelligent AIs destroyed her past world didn't mean they all would! Lily intended to be a benevolent hyperintelligence someday. Besides, it was impossible. If connecting multiple neural networks together was all that it took to create a genuine hyperintelligence, the Solar System would have been under the benevolent guidance of the Legion of the Spider Queen ages ago!

"Besides, your fears zhey are unfounded, Apprentice. You don't know much about computers, but parallelism isn't a free lunch. Zhere is an upkeep cost on any kind of parallel computing, an overhead management cost on zhe effective computing power. Plus, combined with zhe fact zhat zhe communication channel, is both lightspeed limited and meters away? No way. Plus, zhe mesh subchannel 'as limited bandwidth."

She sighed, "It would truly be amazing if I could build a hyperintelligence just by adding more and more artificial stupids, but zhat isn't 'ow it works. I would 'ave to be at least ten times as gifted in the field of artificial intelligence for zhat to be possible."

Lily switched on all five of the robots and stepped back as well, "With zhe limitations we're working with on zhe area of diminishing returns, I expect about eight is about zhe max. Adding a thousand to the network after the eighth wouldn't add much at all. And I expect zhe total neural complexity of eight networked Trons to be a little bit less zhan a Mister Handy."

She glanced at Alice, "But zhat is a nice idea; I am just not smart enough to pull it off."

The five robots finished booting up, glanced around, then nodded, and proceeded to carry out the series of complicated but ambiguous orders that Lily had left them to test their cognitive abilities.

"Mistress, you scare me sometimes," Alice said honestly.