Snow White and the Seven Robots

"Remember to feed my eels," Lily finished the list of things that she expected the Apprentice to keep track of for her while she was gone.

Alice rolled her eyes, "Yes, yes. Don't worry. Don't you mainly kill them and eat them, anyway?"

"Afterwards! Zhis is zhe fourth generation, and I think I'm only one or two generations from a usable genome," complained Lily. Alice thought her eel project was not only crazy but very mad sciencey, and she didn't see a problem at all with having to charge her computer every couple of weeks. The girl just didn't understand!

She finished talking with the Apprentice and watched the seven improved Labourtrons load up the truck with all the equipment she was taking.

She was leaving Alice in charge of the hospital itself, albeit not in control of any of the medical decisions the doctors working for her made. She had control of both Protectrons, all the standard Labourtrons and one of the improved Labourtrons, as well as the four auto-turrets that were in each of the possible entryways for the building.

When Lily returned, she intended to build auto-turrets for almost every room, armed with AirTasers. She thinks she could design one that did not look any different than a normal ceiling panel until it was deployed, which would make the building both incredibly dangerous to intruders while at the same time not seeming like the fortress it was to guests.

She didn't have any issues leaving the girl in charge of the hospital or the other two doctors in charge of the patients. Most of the trauma-related patients were fairly quickly handled by one of the three Auto-Docs she had, although these devices really did need a doctor to oversee their operation as they could be a touch quirky.

Lily had already had to override one that was stuck in a loop and would have just continued performing the same surgery on the hapless person locked inside.

Dr Bonesaw had become quite adept at programming custom surgical procedures into the Auto-Docs, and she had already treated a number of older patients for arthritis by programming it to go in and clean out and replace all of the faulty joint cartilage in various joints. They gave the strawberry blonde doctor rave reviews. Even the Apprentice liked her, she thought, because she was much nearer to the Apprentice's own age.

Lily herself had also sold a number of genetic treatments, mainly the clean metabolism mod and the life extension therapy, to a number of curious but well-to-do people in town and even had two patients waiting for her return to receive a fully cybernetic arm and one full cybernetic leg between them.

They had heard about her around the Wasteland and arrived together. Lily did their initial consultation but wouldn't be able to really assist them until she came back.

She thought they would be upset, but neither of them was. Both of them looked fairly well to do and did not mind cooling their heels amongst the fleshpots of the "Big City", as it were.

Lily even recently heard herself be mentioned by none other than Three Dogs himself, but she was a little bit concerned about that as, in her opinion, Three Dog was little but a mouthpiece of the Brotherhood, given how close their working relationship was.

Thankfully it was mostly a puff piece, talking about how the new hospital was already saving lives and featured advanced technology like Auto-Docs. The Brotherhood didn't really care about Auto-Docs. However, that couldn't last -- she just hoped it was Sarah Lyons or one of her Lyons Pride people who came to investigate her and not one of the soon-to-be Outcast hard cases.

At present, Monsieur Three Dogs seemed to believe that she was firmly in the camp of fighting the Good Fight, whatever he meant by that. He seemed to approve of the fact that it was her hospital policy that patients were only charged, except diagnostic fees, for successful treatments.

Lily never felt that doctors should pretend to be Evel Knievel and say, "I get paid for the attempt!" If you took your car to the mechanic, they wouldn't charge you if they couldn't fix it, and Lily's opinion of a person's body was no different.

The only case where Lily or her doctors would charge for an attempt was if the doctors told the patient that there was very little likelihood of success, and then the patient wanted to proceed anyway. In that case, she made sure to get payment up front!

The seven robots she was taking with her all loaded themselves last, jumping up into the bed of the trailer. She wasn't taking too much, but she was taking a hundred-kilowatt generator, her footlocker-sized fabricator, tools and one robot charging station that they would have to use in shifts, as well as the prototype flying robot that she had finished over a week ago.

"Well, I shall be off, my Apprentice!" Lily told the girl, who appeared slightly nervous to see her go. She then jumped into the cab of her truck and started its reactor to idle, which took a couple of minutes before she pulled out of the parking lot and started driving towards the gate.

Her truck was far from the tank she wanted it to be, but she did have a chance to slightly armour the cab against ballistic threats by replacing all the glass in the windshield and windows and placing ballistic panels in the doors. She also added steel plates in the grill to guard the reactor against anyone shooting it from the front, as she would rather she did not have to conduct field repairs on it if it was damaged and leaking radiation.

The cab of the truck was quite roomy; it was a sleeper cab which was a nice bonus for now, although she definitely intended to completely rebuild the entire interior of the vehicle when she got the chance and materials to do it.

The guards let her through the gate with a wave, and she proceeded on a sedate pace towards the Potomac bridge. When she got a couple of kilometres away from Megaton, she pulled over and then mentally went through a test of the Gatling laser turret mounted on top of the cab. It could swivel a full 360 degrees and could even target enemies inside the trailer if she were boarded.

She could control it mentally by directly aiming and firing, or she could just designate targets with her computer interface, and her expert system would handle the aiming and shooting. She aimed the reticle at a piece of rubble and fired and judged its accuracy to be quite good.

Nodding, she pulled up the robot tasking and ordered one of the Labourtrons to open the case, which carried her flying robot. Ever since she arrived in the Fallout universe and found out about the levitation technology that Eyebots and Mister Handy-type robots have used, she had the idea of a flying surveillance bot.

She had tried many different ways to get it to work, and now that she was getting more understanding of how precisely the levitation systems worked, she realized it was completely impossible. The levitation worked as a kind of momentum exchange between matter.

The levitation technology needed some matter to "push" off of, like the ground, and that couldn't get too far away from the levitation emitters. This was a simplification because they didn't push at all; it was more like they were locked in space relative to the ground. You could walk under a levitating bot and not be crushed, for example.

So, flying high was a complete impossibility. Although she thought it might be a function of emitter size, so theoretically, it might be possible to fly a few hundred metres, but it would take an emitter the size of a small blimp to do it.

Lily blinked. That would be... not a bad idea. There was no way she could build such a thing herself, though. Perhaps she would design such a thing and offer it to the Brotherhood. She had some feeling in the back of her head that she couldn't precisely identify, telling her that they would really appreciate a flying steel blimp.

Shaking her head, she triggered the drone's start-up sequence. Building a quad-copter wasn't hard. She could build powerful electric motors entirely from carbon. She could build incredibly durable rotors from the same material. The hardest part was reprogramming the Eyebot brain to be able to fly without crashing into everything.

She made the decision to save development time by running the drone on a RobCo OS using a straight salvaged Eyebot core, even though she could use her own operating system on the processors. She had her own OS, but she didn't precisely have her own robot code. However, she ran into so many issues that she often wondered if she was saving any time at all.

Still, she finished the project in the end. The dark grey quad-copter lifted out of the case it was transported in and flitted straight into the sky while her expert system controlled its direction and goals in a similar way it controlled the Labourtrons.

'Nice, the added GPS receiver on the drone is letting my expert system populate my moving map automatically,' Lily noticed, very pleased.

She had finally cracked the data schema from the GPS satellites but didn't have any kind of map to correlate with a particular coordinate. At first, she made a program to automatically use her digital compass combined with the GPS coordinates to build a map as she saw things on the ground.

Amusingly it worked in practice almost exactly like a "fog of war" in a video game, where she would build a map as she saw new locations. However, it worked best for populating maps of buildings and didn't work so great translating images she saw on the ground with a bird's eye view that her moving map expected. Images of the ground displayed on the map would be a bit distorted, and Lily occasionally needed to go in and fix them manually.

Now, however, the drone was sending her real-time images of the ground from a couple of hundred metres up. Not only would it make her very difficult to ambush, which was the drone's primary purpose, but it would populate her map quite quickly and efficiently!

Lily grinned and said aloud, "I love it when a plan comes together!" Although she felt that the impression of Hannibal Smith lost something if she didn't have a cigar to go along with it, she felt. She put the truck in gear and verified that the drone would be in the correct follow-recon mode before setting off again.

---xxxxxx---

Lily peered at the overhead surveillance feed from the drone. It was still an analogue TV feed converted to a digital video stream, so it wasn't of the best quality, but it was what she had to work with, presently. She had slowed considerably when she neared the bridge because it was often a raider ambush spot.

And sure enough, there was a group of a dozen or so raiders attacking a group of four travellers on foot. The four travellers seemed... heavily armed, which surprised her a little bit, but after considering a moment, she shrugged. That just made them smart, in her opinion.

The travellers had made it to this side of the bridge before being pinned down with suppressive fire, although they didn't look as though they were in any immediate danger.

Lily hummed, parked her truck and hopped out. She triggered six of the seven robots to fall into position with her while the seventh got into the cab of the truck. Her driving task for these improved Labourtrons wasn't the greatest, which is why she wasn't having them drive in the first place, but they could make short trips in straight lines well enough.

She didn't want to get her truck shot to pieces if the raiders turned and thought she was a bigger threat, but she felt the best way to deal with this medium-sized group was an attack at their rear when they were distracted trying to kill their original prey.

She carefully designated the four travellers as tentative allies in her tactical system, which propagated out to the Labourtrons and set out on foot the last fifty metres.

Her current loadout was her trusty laser pistol, the prototype AirTaser and her completely rebuilt tri-laser rifle.

The AirTaser project was really fortunate she had bought this tri-laser rifle from Miller, as she invented the semi-steerable optics for laser emitters when she was rebuilding this gun.

It seemed very effective, but only at a short range. Almost like a laser shotgun, she thought. At long ranges, the laser beams would tend to diverge, and there would be significant misses. But she had the idea to incorporate a central laser range finder and then use the distance to steer the three beams, so they more or less struck the target at the same spot.

It took her a few days to invent optics that change the direction of a beam, although only a couple of degrees. But it turned the tri-laser rifle into a terrifying weapon at any range.

It was pure coincidence that the AirTaser project needed exactly the same sort of engineering is done. Lily loved pleasant coincidences like that.

Mentally designated targets in advance for her robots, she picked her own targets while shouldering her weapon. Any further, and they'd be noticed for sure, so Lily mentally triggered the attack command while she fired on her first target, who was closest to the group of four travellers and was trying to open an angle to shoot them behind their cover.

The AirTaser was specifically designed to put about ten centimetres of distance between both laser impacts, but her tri-beam was designed to land all three beams more or less at the same point. The raider's head exploded when three blue beams converged on it, which Lily found a little gross. She started sprinting towards the raiders, picking out more targets.

The Raiders were caught more or less off guard, and a couple were starting to turn around, but as soon as they did, one of the travellers popped out of cover and riddled them with bullets from a Gatling gun. Lily blinked at the sight, 'Damn, that woman must be strong to just carry a Gatling gun like it was nothing.'

At the same time, the blue-white beams from her robots' AirTasers lashed out at their targets. She was testing the lethal mode here, and judging from the way a nearby raider was struck, fell to the ground twitching and then went still, she thought it was working.

'Great!' she really thought it would work, given her extensive knowledge of the human heart's electrical system, but you just never knew until you tested a device.

All the raiders were mopped up in thirty seconds or less, and three of her robots closed protectively around her. Lily didn't think the group had noticed her robots just yet. Boy, would they be impressed! Time to show off!

Lily grinned as the four stood and stepped out of cover. However, instead of the looks of amazed appreciation she was expecting, the woman with the Gatling gun had a look of absolute horror. One of the others yelled, "Fuck! She's a fucking Courser!"

The woman with the minigun yelled, "Run! Take A3-21 and move south. I'll try to hold her off and try to catch up with you. We can't let her catch him!"

Lily looked like she was watching a film where the protagonist stayed behind to cover the retreat of his friends in a display of dramatic cinematic martyrship. She even looked behind herself to make sure some other woman, this Courser, wasn't sneaking up on her. The three just nodded, looked at her sadly and ran off.

Lily felt these guys must be mistaking her for someone else, and they didn't seem like bad people, so she switched her robots into the 'non-lethal' mode and issued a command to take her down if she moved to swing that minigun in her direction. She'd try to talk the woman down first.

Then escalate to stunning her, and if that didn't work, she'd have to put her in the ground, despite how nice she seemed.

The woman didn't seem in a hurry to fight her, at least, and she even looked confused as to why Lily and her robots hadn't attacked yet. Finally, when she saw her friends were well away, she said, "I don't want to do this. We don't need to fight."

Lily blinked, "I don't want to fight either? But you're in my way."

The woman shook her head, "No! I can't let you take him!" And she started to swing the minigun around and was stunned by three beams instantly, twitching and slumping to the ground. The other three missed, which Lily felt was a failure. How could a robot miss a stationary target? She'd have to look at these Protectron tactical programs.

'Fuck. I meant you're in my way of the bridge! Well, that was a Speech check failure, Lily ole girl,' Lily thought as she started running to the woman, fast. She pulled her own AirTaser out and thumbed it to non-lethal, slinging her laser rifle. She leapt into the air, aimed and stunned the woman again as she landed right next to her. She holstered the AirTaser and pulled out what she was now referring to as her hypospray, and tagged the woman with some paralytic medichines.

When the stun wore off, and the woman found herself paralyzed, she was obviously quite scared judging from the rapid eye movements, but Lily had no intention to kill this lady for a case of mistaken identity if she could help it.

'Command, Priority word association tag on the word "Courser", and "A3-21", context is associated with robotics,' Lily made a mental note that would notify her if she read or heard that word again, especially in that context.

Her truck was pulling up to the bridge, and Lily hummed. She had no intention of killing this woman, but there should be a penalty for trying to kill her, shouldn't there? She glanced down at the minigun and nodded. She grabbed it and hefted it into the truck cab, then paused. You couldn't leave a person unarmed in the Wasteland. It would be kinder to kill them.

Lily hummed. She glanced at the weapons her Labourtrons were looting from the Raiders; she could leave one of those for the woman.

Lily had an odd itching feeling in the back of her head, telling her that wasn't what she should do.

'Well, I'm not giving her one of my weapons! I can't replace any of them!' Lily argued with her feeling before she glanced at the prototype AirTaser in her hand. She could replace that.

The feeling in the back of her head stilled, which Lily took for agreement. Sighing, she pulled a couple of extra small power cells out of her bag and put them in the woman's pocket before showing the AirTaser to her. She showed her the switch on the back, "Safe, Non-Lethal, Lethal, High-output." Lily demonstrated all the firing modes and the safety before leaving the electric gun in the paralyzed hands of the woman and jumping back into her truck, rolling northeast across the river.

'I have no idea why I just did that. That prototype is probably a little bit better than the production models I make!' Lily groused to herself a kilometre away, but she had come to trust the feelings she had.

"Well, Vault 108 or bust!" Lily decided to forget about it. She would fabricate herself another AirTaser when she got to the Vault and plugged all of her equipment in.

---xxxxxx---

The two Railroad agents were surprised to see their friend alive when she caught up with them half a day later; that much was certain. A younger-looking one was amazed and asked, "Did you kill that Courser?!"

The woman scowled, "Of course not. Did you see how fucking fast she took down those raiders?"

She sat next to her two friends and explained, "She told me I was in her way, and I thought that she meant in the way between her and A3-21, so I figured I was dead but would at least give you guys a headstart."

The three nodded; that was pretty much what they had expected. They were already mourning her when they ran off, in fact.

"She stunned me with some new weapon I've never heard about, made all my muscles spasm out of control for like ten seconds, and then she drugged me with some drug I've also never seen before, which paralyzed everything from my eyes down," the woman reported in a surly tone.

"Then the bitch stole my minigun and was about to drive off in a truck, but for some reason, she handed me the weapon she used to stun me!" she finished, confusedly. She held out the sleek grey energy weapon for inspection, "She even told me the switch positions were safe, non-lethal, lethal and high-output before driving off. A few minutes later, I could move again and started chasing after you guys."

She paused her story, "I think the non-lethal is the stunning setting she used on me, and I think the lethal is what she used on the raiders. I tried the high-output setting out of curiosity, and it shot a giant lightning bolt, but it takes a while to recharge after one shot of that."

The older of the two men looked thoughtful, "She must have been ordered to do something else, but almost any Courser would have mopped us up as a secondary objective, maybe even switch to us as a primary objective after you were stupid enough to say A3-21's designation out loud in her hearing."

The woman groaned, "Yeah, that was stupid of me," she admitted. She was technically the leader of this cell and was a great leader, but not really the greatest of thinkers.

"I think she might be close to waking up. She is still following their orders, but she disregarded us and pretended she didn't hear A3-21's name. And she even gave you, who she had to know was a Railroad operative, what looks like a prototype Institute energy weapon. This is huge. Coursers almost never turn away from the Institute; their indoctrination is too strong," the man mused aloud.

The woman considered that and nodded, "You're right." The younger operative asked, "What should we do? Should we try to find her after we get to Rivet City?"

Both the woman and the older man shook their heads.

The woman finally found her smarts, as she had an intuitive grasp of tactics, "No. You have to wake up naturally; you know this. But we should definitely tell the higher-ups when we get back to the Commonwealth. Just the fact that there was a Courser working this far south is something they have to know."

"So our destination is Rivet City? We've heard there was a new hospital with advanced technology in Megaton, though," the younger man mentioned.

"Yeah, but we know for sure there is a scientist that can do what we need. Time is of the essence, especially now. If there is one Courser here, there could be more," the older man mentioned.

The woman nodded, "Exactly. Let me rest another fifteen minutes, and then we can get on the move again."