Preparations

The machine was already preprogrammed to begin a production run, so all Lily had to do was flip the giant circuit breaker that also acted as an ON/OFF switch and rapidly step back as the machine began to run its self-tests. She had tested it once three days ago, but that was when it was in her basement before she disassembled, moved and reassembled it. She hadn't had time to return to this project since then.

A run of fifty pixels fell into the output chute, but Lily still did not step near it. After it finished its self-test, it started up in earnest and rapidly. Things got quite loud, a sort of rapid "chuckchuckchuckchuck" sound, and the closest approximation to the noise she could think of was a suppressed, fully-automatic machinegun firing subsonic ammunition. It was the sound of a loud stapler being actuated over thirty times a second.

Lily had changed the pixel design to discard the sphere shapes and switch to a hexagonal prism, but otherwise, they functioned identically. The hexagon shape was much easier to produce rapidly with the additional steps involved to squirt a pre-measured amount of transparent oil and charged pigments inside before the top was, in effect, welded on.

The hexagon shapes seemed much better as far as the screen design was concerned, too. There was almost no negative space using over a million hexagons when there were tons if you had a million spheres, and the hexagonal prism was a stronger geometric shape when it was used as a building block in composite construction. A sphere has less surface area than any other shape with the same volume, so it would be strong if it stood on its own, but if used as a component, it is somewhat lacking.

One of the biggest failure modes she had was the spheres not staying fixed in orientation during the production process before their top was sealed. A cascade of failures whose proximate origin was this very issue was what caused the original rapid unscheduled disassembly of her prototype.

She thought she got so fixated on using a sphere shape because that was how the e-ink company in the other world produced the devices, and she knew that worked. However, that was probably just the most straightforward shape for them to manufacture. The technology she was using was a lot different. In some ways, it was worse, but in others, it was far superior. She suspected that they would have preferred a hexagonal honeycomb structure to their pixels, too, if they could have managed it cheaply.

After watching the machine go for a full twenty minutes without breaking down violently, she nodded and said, "Nice." Still, she had one of the three robots that she was leaving in this warehouse factory collect the completed pixels and load them into the display assembler, which was the last part of the assembly process.

In theory, the assembler took glue, pixels, three different types of sapphire glass panes, and fine aluminium wire to assemble a fully working e-ink display. She was using aluminium instead of copper because she didn't have enough copper, and in this low-voltage application, the increased electrical resistance wouldn't matter.

When loaded with enough pixels to produce one display, the assembler started up automatically. It kind of reminded her of a cross between a plastic-style 3D printer, a pick-and-place machine used in her past life to assemble electronics and an inkjet printer.

The assembly head moved back and forth, using mechanical arms containing tools to build the electrode layer, and when it was finished, what reminded her of an inkjet printer made a pass and just spat out a stream of hexagonal pixels, filling in the entire space, accurately. Lastly, a final pass created another electrode and digitizing layer on top and glued all the layers of glass together at their bezel.

Lily blinked as the display rolled off the assembly line. The assembly process was quite quick, so her bottleneck in production was just making the pixels. But it wasn't like she needed millions of these devices, either.

"Wait... zhis worked?" she asked carefully. She half expected the machine to self-destruct. It was the first time she had run the assembly machine as she had built it in situ here in the warehouse since she found it was such a pain in the ass to move the pixel producer. Having something mechanical work the first time she built it wasn't how this usually worked.

She took the display. Well, there was only one way to find out. She had brought the other half of the device that she had made from her lair. Assembling it was as easy as snapping the screen into place and then snapping a top case of carbon fibre in place on top of that. She used one hand to press the start button while crossing her fingers with the other.

It booted up! The display worked! The user interface was simple, and she had already pre-loaded the device with most of the books she had available to her. She carefully touched an icon, and an English textbook pulled up. Many of her digitized books weren't scans of books but just the text of the books encoded in text, but at least bold, italics and whitespace were preserved, so they were still very readable.

She got a dopey grin on her face. Even the tiny vibrating electric motors inside the casing that she used for haptic feedback when a user pressed a button on the screen worked. She didn't know why she was so pleased with this. Compared to any of her genetic therapies, cybernetic limbs and especially the computer in her brain, it was such weaksauce as to be laughable.

She left the warehouse and jogged the two blocks back to her hospital. Normally she would show something like this to the Apprentice first, but it really was weaksauce compared to what they could do with their implants, so she went and found Gary.

He was eating breakfast at the cafeteria. Today it was egg and chorizo burritos, although Lily hadn't actually seen any domesticated pigs around, so the pork was probably more aspirational than actual. So long as it wasn't the long pork, Lily didn't mind. Eggs from chickens were available as chickens were still pretty common. They could practically eat anything, which was one of the prerequisites for any animal to survive the bombs falling for very long.

Only about half of them still had feathers. The chickens without feathers tended to make tastier eggs, but they didn't taste as good as the chicken with feathers, so there were some attempts to cross-breed the mutants with the normal chickens to get the best of both worlds, but it hadn't succeeded yet.

She grabbed a burrito and some water and went over to sit at the table he was at.

"Hey, Doc," he greeted her affably.

Setting her burrito down for a moment, she shoved the e-reader at him. The screen was about the size or even slightly larger than a full-sized iPad and about twice as thick, as she had considered that textbooks would be better read on a larger screen than most e-readers usually offered. Still, it was quite light. She said simply, "Books."

He took the device and peered at it from every angle, obviously noting the text on the screen. He must have accidentally touched the edge of the screen because he blinked as the page changed. He figured out how to go back and forth on the pages pretty quickly, and he praised it, "Oh, this is sweet. It doesn't even look like a terminal display or TV, either. Do you have to build one of these for every book?"

Lily grinned and shook her head, "Press in the middle of the screen, and a graphical user interface should be displayed." Then Lily spent a few minutes explaining the concept of a GUI to a man who had never seen one before, what "buttons" did, and the like. He caught on very quickly and was quickly navigating the book list. "This is awesome, Doc! How many of these can you make?"

Lily shrugged and said, "As many as you like, I suppose. I am set up for zhe mass production now. I will probably even sell zhem as a product or start a neighbourhood library where you might be able to check zhem out, or at least use zhem inside zhe library."

He nodded, "Well, then get me twenty. And I need a way to show just the books I want on the main screen, maybe add a button in the corner so the kid can see the whole library if they want, but I don't want to confuse a ten-year-old with ten thousand books. I just want them to see the ones I put on their syllabus. Can I keep this one?"

Lily blinked. That made sense. It wouldn't be a difficult change to make, and these devices did include a wireless module so that she could push automatic updates if they came near her hospital.

She nodded, "Okay, zhat shouldn't be a problem. And yeah, sure. It takes zhe standard charging cord and shouldn't even need to be recharged except every couple of months even if you use it every day."

That first device didn't feature any of the waterproofing she intended to install in the production run, but she figured Gary probably wouldn't take it into the shower with him, whereas a child very well might. Or walk home in the middle of a downpour or any number of things.

---xxxxxx---

Later that day, as she was finalizing the first draft of the treatment that would allow a person to extract a lot more useful energy from food through their digestive system, she noticed her truck pulling up into her garage at long last. It had actually been close to two weeks since Scott and Sophie had left.

She looked for a stopping point before going to visit with them.

The treatment she felt would be both effective and undesirable on its own. She was pretty confident it would work, but without a solution to the original man's problem, everyone would just balloon up as their stomach told them to eat even when they didn't particularly need the calories. She was already working in parallel to design a complementary alteration that would completely overhaul a person's sense of satiation, but that was entirely novel work and may need to go through two or three rounds of clinical trials.

She suspected she would have the second level of life extension therapy complete before the low-calorie mod, even though she was hoping to launch both products at the same time. The second version of life extension therapy incorporated more genetic fixes but also included the radiation resistance trait that she had noticed in Natalie, the synth's genome. Natalie's genome was radically different than a baseline human, although she would still be able to breed with a human, and most of her novel gene expressions were designed to be dominant, to pass to any progeny.

Lily hadn't decoded exactly what every change would do yet, but some of them were very obvious. She was stronger, faster and would live a little bit longer than a similar female human. Some of the changes were amateur hour, she thought and felt that they may run into a lot of problems five or ten generations down the line, especially if they cross-breed with flats. However, she thought that the radiation resistance alteration was pretty clever.

It was exactly the opposite of how she encoded a radiation resistance in Gary. He, like she, had a much better system to ensure replication errors did not happen in the first place. It was much less elegant, but it had the benefit of being, from a data encoding perspective, much smaller of an alteration.

She could easily include it on a virus with a lot of room to spare. It was kind of crude and would trigger immediate programmed cell death in any cell that showed signs of radical mutation. Her genome included something like this, too, actually, but it was the last resort and only relied upon when the error correction and replication correction functions failed.

It would definitely prevent virtually all serious mutations, but it would do so at a cost -- longevity. Triggering programmed cell death in a sufficient number of mutated cells would necessitate more cell replication to replace them, which only can be done a limited number of times. The reason she included this alteration was her first therapy had already lengthened the telomeres in the host's DNA, which was the controlling factor for the limit on how many times a cell could divide. She lengthened the telomeres enough that it was no longer in any way the controlling factor on longevity.

Old age was caused by the buildup of damage over time, as well as DNA replication and transcription errors, none of which were considered a mutation exactly.

She felt that a few extra divisions here and there to protect one from probable cancer or other nastiness was a good trade-off, even in a flat. However, since she would only allow people to receive this treatment if they had already received the first level, which lengthened telomeres, it meant that the main downside was mitigated.

There was a second downside to the treatment, though. If a host was exposed to a radically mutagenic compound like FEV or whatever triggered the ghoulification process they may just die. It kind of depended on if the mutagen was acting locally or systemically.

She believed that there were multiple factors in the ghoulification process, and one of them was likely a genetic predisposition, although she did not know if it was a natural one. She had long ago collected a genetic sample from Moira Brown after the woman came for a check-up, and she knew for sure from Fallout 3 that Moira would turn into a ghoul if the bomb in Megaton was detonated. And there definitely appeared to be something slightly abnormal about her genome, but it did not explain such a transformation in itself.

The extraneous genetic flags present in Moira were not that uncommon either, but she was positive that they were not present in the normal human genome, at least not the one she was familiar with. She hadn't thought about an explanation yet. However, there had to be some other factor that she hadn't observed beyond the genetic quirk and radiation.

It was like she was missing half a book. Radiation could be considered randomness, but expecting randomness to consistently recreate a matching half of the book that fit the story of the first half she already had was silly.

Lily didn't like that the alteration may kill potential future ghouls but felt that radiation resistance was too good of an alteration to give up. She was also almost certain that the vast majority of people undergoing ghoulification die anyway due to radiation-induced brain damage. Most people didn't want to become ghouls in the first place, even if it was a path to a much longer life. Besides, she could always roll this alteration back in a future update or, more likely, complement it with a similar error correction mod that she had.

Standing up, she closed all of her working windows and glanced around, feeling a bit surly. She didn't like her temporary work area. She had moved almost everything out of the basement into the fourth floor to share an area with the cloning machine over three days ago, as she had built a digging machine in the basement.

She had even drained her eel tank, as apparently, it was a lot harder to get people to agree to get live eels out of the river in the middle of winter. She would have to wait until it warmed up, or perhaps clone a series of eels herself. Yes, that sounded about right.

Her little spiders had moved to take up one entire wall in the foyer, illuminated by lights so that people coming inside could admire them. There had been a mixed reception to them, though, especially when she released insects into their habitat so that they could feed.

She needed the free space as she built an utterly enormous giant recycling machine that took up close to a hundred square meters in the basement. She was using it to recycle all of the "fill" of soil and rocks that the digging machine was digging up rather than try to dispose of it. Over a third of earth recycled was either water or gases, such as nitrogen, oxygen or hydrogen. She vented the gases and drained the water into the sewage system.

The rest was mainly minerals and carbon, primarily consisting of silica, aluminium, calcium and iron. There were a few random metals, too, like magnesium, in fair amounts. All of that she was keeping. She did have to dispose of the unsorted material, which was mildly radioactive, but that was less than one part in twenty.

Most of the stuff she kept was useful, and useful elemental feedstocks stored in medium-sized drums were slowly filling the large hangar where the Mechanist was parking her truck.

The main problem was that she hardly had enough electricity to run the giant recycler. Her smaller version used over five hundred kilowatts, and this one used three megawatts, and she had been running it twenty-four-seven. It was more than she was supposed to divert, but at present, there wasn't a lot of demand on the system, but she may have to build a second generator wing at the power substation just in case. It would help in the event one generator needed maintenance to have a backup, in any case, she supposed.

It would take at least a month to dig out her first sub-basement level at the rate she was going, and it might take almost that long to fit it out with walls, ceilings, floors, electricity and running water. There was nothing for it, though. It was just something she had to do.

---xxxxxx---

"You're finally back! It took longer zhan I zhought," Lily greeted Scott.

He looked tired, "Yes, I may have underestimated all of the things we needed to drag away from that store, but it is all done."

Lily chuckled, rubbing the back of her neck, "I often underestimate zhe time zhings take myself, especially recently."

She glanced at the several wrecked cars stacked on the trailer and raised her eyebrows, "Zhat looks more zhan two tons to me."

To that, he just shrugged, "A few were as easy as just one, I suppose. Now, the question is what should me and Sophie do now? Are you near the stage where you could start building any of those trucks?"

Lily hummed, "Depends. I was zhinking I was about a month away, but if you were 'ere to 'elp full time, I zhink we could cut zhat in 'alf, at least. It's up to you. I could drive you back 'ome if you don't 'ave zhe time."

She actually thought his assistance would help her start building sooner than that. She would have to bring the DMLS system down here to the hangar, though. That or build a second one. She had built it so that parts longer than the machine itself could be built and "extruded" out one end in phases. However, if she built an axle or power shaft upstairs, she'd never be able to get it down except by throwing it out a window!

He nodded at that, "Yes, things are settled enough, and we have a direct link to the Vault, so I can access sensors and even my defences from here, so I feel alright staying until this is done. A couple of weeks is fine, I suppose."

"Excellent," she said happily. Finishing the trucks was important as she was going to attempt to up-armour her truck at the same time.

"Did something happen to zhe drone?" she asked curiously, not detecting the feed.

He nodded, "Yes, we're not entirely sure what, but we think a bird collided with it. We have the wreckage, though."

A bird? There weren't exactly a lot of birds anymore, although there were some in Oasis. Talk about bad luck. Oh well, she intended to redesign it anyway. She had designed it to protect its processor in a crash, so hopefully, that wasn't damaged.

She was feeling good. She had a number of boxes to check before she felt comfortable raiding the VSS building, and it was getting closer and closer. She was already ahead of schedule and thought instead of three or four months, she might be ready to leave right after meeting with Madison Li.