Divinity

For a time, Lily felt that she was back working 80-hour weeks, although without the stress. It was really the best when you were your own boss.

She would wake up several hours before sunrise, run around the exterior of the electronics warehouse for about an hour and then take a morning shower, albeit it was abbreviated as even radioactive water fit for showering was on a bit of a premium at Scott's lair. First, of course, one usually had to fill the cistern on the top of the building manually.

So, her first actually useful invention in this world was what she called a high-pressure shower to replace the traditional shower that wasted a lot of water Scott had been using. It was pretty simple, just an extra water reservoir above the shower that was kept pressurized by an air compressor and a small touch-activated panel under the showerhead. You'd step in the shower, touch the button, and it would spritz you briefly with a high-pressure mist. Then you'd soap up, hit it again and wash off. It wasn't as lovely as standing under a shower was, but it used less than one-tenth the water. Nor was it hot, but it got you just as clean, and it was much better than hauling water up to the roof every day, even with robot assistance.

Scott thought it was a fantastic improvement to efficiency. He really liked that word, efficiency.

Unfortunately, Scott only had two operable Mister Handy variants that might be able to do the chore themselves, Sophie and the Mister Gutsy. Unfortunately, Lily wouldn't ask Sophie to do it. That would be like asking her teacher's wife to do manual labour, and the Mister Gutsy had called her a "staff puke" and told her to do it herself when she had asked him to do the chore every morning. It seemed like all variants of the Handy line got slightly weird after two hundred years of continuous operation. So, for the present time, she hauled water up to the roof and felt like she was living out an isekai training montage after being apprenticed to the blacksmith in the newbie starting town.

Tilting her head, she supposed this was a bit close to what was happening, so she did it with gusto. It was sure to be worth a lot of XPs. Her PipBoy refused to show her level, but the possibility remained that she was just in Iron Man mode or something that made the user-interface invisible, but doing quest-like chores would surely reap a bountiful harvest. And if not, it was like Wax On, Wax Off from Karate Kid, right?

Scott would wake up at the same time every morning. As befitting the apprentice, she would have made his breakfast and lunch, but Sophie looked like she had kicked her puppy when Lily suggested it. It was clear Sophie enjoyed caring for him and who was she to deny the man his love-love bento every day?

After breakfast, she would return to her room and either perform self-study or work on her own projects for three to four hours before setting out to the settlement to put a shift in at her clinic. She would wait for patients while programming on her laptop in her office. She was still occasionally surprised her scanner even had a keyboard for user input but supposed that the military model must have it for when EMCON precludes the use of neural mesh inserts for controlling devices.

She didn't see too many locals as patients anymore, not like at first, save for the occasional accident or raider attack. Instead, her main clients became merchants and the mercenaries that accompanied them to and from the transshipping hub. Her prices were reasonable, and skill undeniable. Some people had even hiked a day or two from nearby settlements just to be seen by her. She didn't turn anyone away, even if they were very raider-looking if they were peaceably following the rules of the settlement. This engendered her a good reputation, and she couldn't find a proper way to explain that she was doing it for the XP, so she just shrugged.

After closing her clinic, she would jog back to Scott's lair and get about two hours of tutoring from him about both electronics in general and robotics in particular. Sophie was more knowledgeable about hacking, as befitted her status as an AGI. Which Lily had no doubt about now.

It was odd for a VI or non-sapient AI to spontaneously develop awareness but even transhumanity did not have experience where a system with a vastly overpowered processor and limited ability to reprogram itself would run for hundreds of years straight. So, she considered it plausible that many Miss Nanny might be close to developing self-actualization or already there. She would have to look out for them; she wanted a Miss Nanny companion herself.

Sophie would give some hacking tips after Scott went to work on his own projects, although the tutorials were more centred around hacking robots. Apparently, anyone doing any kind of scavenging and repairing of robots had to be able to hack them as a matter of course. Still, since the underlying RobCo OS was somewhat similar, there were some universal applications on the ubiquitous RobCo consumer and business OS.

After that, she might talk with Sophie for a bit, eat dinner, return to her projects, and study until well past midnight.

Like this, time slipped by like water and over a month passed.

---

"Thank you for breakfast again, Sophie. I'm going to skip clinic rounds today, I have two projects I need to finish before my trip tomorrow," Lily said while cleaning her plate at the sink.

Sophie seemed to vibrate a little bit in unease, "Ah, yes. Those mercenaries wanted your help with searching ze old University of Maryland satellite campus to the south. But, I do hope you will be careful, Miss Lily. Sometimes people aren't to be trusted! Plus, that is almost in DC proper, you will have to be very careful!"

Lily was a bit worried about that, too but she wouldn't have agreed if the gains weren't potentially worth it. Plus, as scavenge locations went, it wasn't a hot spot like former military bases, so there likely wouldn't be any super mutants. Plus, she intended to have backup. Lily found the robot's concern touching and smiled, "Don't worry, I don't intend to die -- ever. One of my projects I'm finishing today should be able to watch my back."

Sophie contracted her sensor's irises curiously, "Oh? Is that why you wanted the spare Mister Handy CPU? But we have no more chassis here; this place mainly served RobCo products. Protectrons, especially."

Lily grinned, "I will show you when it's online."

With that Lily went back to her room. Standing in a robot repair bay was the culmination of a month's long project of discovery and tinkering, a nearly fully repaired Assaultron.

Scott had one operable Assaultron in his base, and the various parts of about a half dozen more. Lily didn't have any memories of this model of RobCo robot from playing Fallout, but she wasn't surprised there the game wasn't comprehensive. It would have been a terrifying opponent if it was in the game -- it's specs were insane.

And Lily had almost completely repaired it. With some caveats. For some reason, even though there were parts from a half dozen Assaultron's she had to go through all of them to get enough to rebuild two sets of legs. She supposed they got damaged the most often, as they were the least armoured part of the unit. However, the one thing they were missing were any Assaultron CPUs so she was going to attempt to install a Mr. Handy quantum core instead. Neither the Protectron or the Sentrybot cores were compatible, but the Handy's advanced quantum core seemed to be designed for adaptability.

Also, sadly, the giant laser in the Assaultron's head was missing. Apparently, it had been scavenged for parts and was why Scott's Mister Gutsy had such a terrifying cutting beam. So, it would be completely without ranged weapons. Still, after watching Scott's Assaultron run at, leap at, and rip a giant scorpion to pieces, she felt confident even a cludged-together Assaultron could watch her back from potential betrayal by the group of mercs that she was teaming up with. Not that she expected betrayal, the group had a good reputation, and everyone knew she was going with them. The four-person team almost reminded her of an adventuring party saying on regional chat, "LF Healer 4 scav quest, pls."

If they came back without her, many people would have some very pointed questions. Still, she was a belt and suspenders kind of girl. It never was a good idea to rely on the good intentions of others, only the good intentions of your own killbots.

Lily opened up the Assaultron's chest. Unlike many androids, RobCo had wisely decided not to put the central processing unit in this model's head. She wasn't sure if it was just because the giant laser assembly took up so much space in the head that there wasn't enough room, but it was much safer behind the thickest armor plating this robot had.

She felt it was interesting that the quantum cores had a universal I/O module adapter even though they were manufactured by different companies, competitors even. Did RobCo consult on the Mister Handy and Miss Nanny projects, or was it more like USB connectors in her old life where a standards body dictated a universal standard?

She slotted the Handy's brain inside the chassis, and connected a long data cable that snaked from the terminal on her desk to the robot's auxiliary port, before sitting down at her comfy office chair. She had disassembled six chairs in the office area of the electronics warehouse to get a single chair that was in top condition.

She began tapping keys, bringing up a terminal connection to the robot's debug systems. She remembered being a little disappointed that the RobCo OS was nothing like a UNIX-style OS that she had some experience with in her past life. It wasn't like DOS, either. It was rather well-designed, though. The books she read said Robert House designed it himself before even entering college, and it had been updated over the years ever since. If half of what she read about that guy was true then he would have been a genius of the first salt.

She tapped the enter key and began hearing a humming as the Assaultron powered up. A rather distinguished but monotone English man's voice came from the speaker, "Mister Handy, version six point seven booting up. SAFE MODE. Peripheral driver mismatch... stand by ..."

There was a pause, followed by an almost disgusted, "Ugh... RobCo? Recompiling drivers. Complete. Boot up full personality emulation... now."

The Assaultron turned its head left and right, then focused on her. It's voice had a bit more emotion to it now, "What is this? I have... legs? I HAVE LEGS!" The Assaultron lifted and moved one of its legs, "AND ARMS!!"

The volume of the voice went up, and it got a maniacal tilt, "I AM A _GOD_ NOW!" She heard the soft hum of a capacitor charging. Wait, was it trying to laser her?! The laser wasn't even installed. The maniacal British voice continued, "YOU ARE FUCKED!"

Lily tapped another key very quickly on the terminal while yelling, "Nope, nope, nope..." With a keypress, she hard-disconnected the robot's core from controlling any part of the chassis. It froze immediately, the hum of the capacitor-bank draining away.

He could still speak over the speaker, which he did with a cough and an obviously fake laugh, "Ahaha, good joke, right mum? I meant to say Bigsby reporting for duty, madam."

Lily squinted at the obviously rampant machine before tapping a few keys and bringing up a different diagnostic page. There was flashing red text on the screen that said: "Anomalous neural network detected. Data loss detected. Physical core irregularity detected. Please return to an authorized service center immediately."

Lily chuckled, "Ah, no problem Bigsby, let me just return chassis control to you..." She began typing away again.

Bigsby said, "Yesss. I need to be able to move to --" he cut off suddenly as Lily hit the shutdown key combination on the terminal. She didn't think this rampant bot was self-aware, despite its tirade about its own divinity.

However, just in case it was, she felt it was kinder to surprise it with with the shutdown instead of it possibly feeling anxious for the last few seconds of its life, as she presently had no plans to ever reactivate this core again after his murder attempt and doubted any one else would either.

Lily sighed before disconnected the rampant AI from the Assaultron chassis, "Well, that was a bust." She would have to ask Sophie and Scott if she could borrow the working Assaultron for her trip. The Protectrons were too slow, the Sentrybots were too slow and too intimidating and Scott always wanted to have Mister Gutsy available to guard Sophie.

She had more hopes for the fabricator. She had finally accumulated enough nanomachines, gotten a CAD system operational and thorough scans of her own nanohive designed an inferior but still capable version that was capable of being manufactured almost entirely out of carbon, except for some parts that had to be doped with certain chemicals to become either conductive or semi-conductive. Free carbon was a great insulator, so she didn't need to change anything for that.

For now, she would just dump the dopants into the suspension solution and have the nanobots find and apply it a handful of molecules at a time. Very slow, but simple. It had the downside of poisoning this vat of suspension fluid, though.

Before she could print anything else would have to completely drain it and replace it, which was why she would be building ten identical nanohives first. She had to do it now because these inferior nanohives she was planning on installing on the fabricator produced a slightly bigger and inferior nanomachine. While these bigger nanos were capable of printing carbon allotropes, they weren't capable of printing them with enough resolution to reproduce the nanohives themselves, which required virtually atomic-level precision in the micromanipulators inside that assembled the nanomachines. So, since she had to use her more capable medichines to do this, at least for now, it made sense to overbuild and keep the spares in "inventory" so she didn't have to bleed into a vat again for a month if she wanted a second fabricator.

Rather than be disappointed by this, she felt that this could be a pretty slick built-in copy-protection measure. It meant that a nano-fabricator could not build another nano-fabricator. Realistically, she doubted any scanner on the planet could get images with enough resolution to copy the nanohive but there were scatterings of pieces of technology that made the best she could even dream up seem pedestrian, like the supposed matter-energy converter on the G.E.C.K. used in Project Purity.

Plus, nobody that might reverse engineer her tech was strictly speaking dumb. They could possibly re-invent a nanomachine factory, so it is best that the fabricators themselves didn't quite have the capability to build one.

This did open the option that she could, perhaps, sell these devices in the future without too much worry. Although, it would be hard to make the best use out of one without a modern suite of CAD software that just was not able to be run on any RobCo terminal. But that was, like most problems, surmountable.

With the jury-rigged fabricator requiring multiple stops and starts, Lily figured that each nanohive would take ten hours to print, and she would have to be within two meters of it the entire time. That's a long time for an object that was smaller than a marble, but fabricators were always the slowest thing to print on fabricators. The precision required in everything meant that any incidental printing errors couldn't be ignored but had to be stopped, corrected and repeated, where in most other designs, a small number of errors were assumed and budgeted for.

She would print the first one today and the rest after she got back from her trip. She powered up the fabricator, clucking her tongue. It would take a while to preheat and prepare the medichines; she didn't need to be here just yet until assembly started.

She sighed when she glanced at her great hope for backup immobile in the robot repair bay. Now to puppy-dog eye a robot girl. Lily wasn't under any delusions about who really wore the pants in their relationship, so it was best to go straight to the robot in charge.