That was a hell of a nasty fall you took!

Lily focused on the robots first, as that was actually their best line of defence. Essentially all of them had taken enough rads and isotopes that they were slight to moderately radioactive, which was annoying. She intended to use them to drag out all the VSS's VR tech, and radiation and sensitive computers didn't mix.

She had the working robots drag those that weren't back to the RV, and then she sat outside it while connecting to the Assaultclone inside. First, she had the clone come outside and repair her armour's damaged joint and reset her broken ulna and radius before they started healing wrong.

Then she got to work fixing the robots inside. Three were unrepairable, so she immediately tossed those aside. The others she sat down to repair, selecting the ones that could be repaired fastest first. By the time she was done with the last bot, some of which had some jury-rigged sections replaced or cannibalised from the three unrepairable models, her wrist was more or less in good condition as well, so she had the Assaultclone return to its docking bay and disconnected.

The Apprentice still wasn't at anything but the dabbler level of skill with electronics or robotics, so she couldn't really help at all, although Lily let her watch so long as she didn't get in the way.

Standing up and stretching, still in her Power Armour and said, "Alright, zhat was a waste of four 'ours." She was kind of expecting someone to come and investigate the explosion, which was why she was so rushed to get her robots back in operable condition, but nobody came. She supposed that explosions in the middle of the night, even large ones, weren't that unusual in DC.

Sighing, she moved both the RV and the truck right next to the VSS building and then pulled out some camouflage netting to hide them from casual inspection. It was a grey urban pattern of netting, and if you weren't too close, it looked like rubble instead of two vehicles hidden behind a net.

The Apprentice glanced at her, still in her pink-painted Power Armour, although some of the paint on the top of her helmet and arms had deteriorated as if she was lightly blasted with a sandblaster, which was kind of what happened. Annoying. It had taken her a while to find that pink... that salmon-coloured paint, "Alright, lets try zhis again, yes?"

The Assaultclone had brought out a sensitive geiger counter to scan each of their power armour, and there were a few sections that would have to be replaced. The armour coating their helmet, hands and arms, mainly, and a little of their sides.

Lily was already having the DMLS printer print those segments, although it may take a little while to do so. She brought quite a bit of feedstock for all of her printers with her, so she didn't expect any problems about running out, and she would just have to take the radioactive pieces they replaced back home and recycle them.

"Yeah, while you were fixing everything, I brought out that little generator, as I don't think this place has power at all," the Apprentice said.

Lily hummed and nodded. Maybe the sub-basement had power, that wasn't uncommon, but if not, they would need the little guy. It was about as big as a small cooler you'd bring a six-pack of beer with to a football game and could output about eighty kilowatts, and it was powered by the third fusion core she had. Fusion cores could output a lot more than that, about two hundred kilowatts, but the main issue with a device so small was cooling it. It was "cold fusion", but the electricity it outputted was still hot.

It only weighed about ten kilograms, though, so it was the most portable power system she had. It was pretty awesome, actually. She wanted a lot more fusion cores as soon as possible. Madison Li said that with the scans she had received, as well as the explanation of their "DRM", she might be able to manufacture them within a year.

Lily certainly wouldn't have been able to. The scans showed a boron-impregnated metallic alloy, but she had no idea how to create those. In Madison Li's scaled-up hydrogen-boron fusion generator, the process was started using very high-frequency electricity, rotating alternating current at a particular bias, along with levitation fields to compress the two fuels together.

It sounded like the jabber that you heard engineers on Star Trek talk about, phase couplers, harmonic resonators, words that didn't mean anything but sounded cool. However, she had already verified that it worked, albeit inefficiently, so Lily shouldn't be so judgmental. It just meant that Lily didn't know nearly as much about how the world worked as she thought she had.

Lily had agreed to provide a suitable clinic in Rivet City with her treatments in exchange for a healthy percentage of their take-home; in effect, she would sell to them at a big discount and allow them to pay after they, in turn, had sold the treatments. Kind of like a drug distributor might have fronted you a kilo of cocaine but expected to be paid after it was sold. At least, that's how she thought it worked from watching The Wire.

However, she demanded that whoever ran it had to spend at least six weeks working at her hospital, so Dr Li was going to send one of their medical doctors to Megaton when she got back. Funnily enough, they didn't really have any geneticists like Lily thought they had, so in that sense, she supposed the mayor only had the Brotherhood to call on to confirm her treatments worked or at least didn't kill you.

She had her seven operating robots search the building as thoroughly as possible. The site, as far as she knew, was in the basement, but she didn't want to overlook anything.

There wasn't, not really. Most of the building was wrecked. There were a number of terminals that might have interesting data, which she made a note to check before she left. The elevator to the basement not only did not have power, but she felt it was a death trap, so she had to take some time to repair it.

"Apprentice, do you zhink you feel comfortable connecting the generator to the building's power junction?" Lily asked her.

The girl paused before nodding, "Yes, I think I can do that safely. I'll have to go back to get some tools, though." She grabbed the small generator.

"I'm having a lot of tools brought out already, zhis elevator needs some tender loving care," Lily said with a sigh. This building had already been restored somewhat, at least the sub-basement, in the game. You just arrived, and everything was working, and you got inside the virtual reality. Actual reality was turning out to be a bit of a different story. She was glad that she had told Dr Taylor and Bonesaw that she might be gone over a week.

"Make sure you disconnect zhe power junction from the city power lines, if zhey haven't already been destroyed. We don't want our generator back feeding into the municipal system, both because people might notice and because it isn't zhat big of a generator," Lily reminded her as three robots came, rolling large three large toolboxes behind them. A fourth was bringing several large cans of rather precious oil. Lubricants were needed in so many different machines, and with not a lot of oil around, most Fallout mechanisms were designed with captive systems that preserved their lubrication almost forever.

But she'd have to use quite a bit to get this elevator car moving, she felt.

---xxxxxx---

She and the Apprentice spent almost a whole day, although with rest periods, getting the large freight elevator fixed. Once it finally was, she ran into another problem, namely that the sub-basement had no power either.

It took stealing a downed power line to fabricate a power line to connect her RV to the building's power supply in order to power the elevator and then taking the small generator downstairs before lights started to come on and doors started to open.

Then, she had issues with connecting to her Mesh while downstairs, so she had to create a pair of relays connected by a long wire. One relay was stuck into the ground on the ground floor, next to the elevator. The wire ran down into the elevator shaft and terminated in a second relay in the basement.

She definitely wasn't going to spend a minute downstairs if she couldn't connect to the surveillance drones or her RV. What was that from Breaking Bad? "I am the one who knocks!" Well, for her, she wasn't about to be snuck up upon, as she was the one who snuck!

"Ugh, it is dirty AF in here," the Apprentice said.

"Stop saying zhat! You can't swear just because you use abbreviations," Lily complained, but internally she queued orders to bring all the robots downstairs. She had brought four auto-turrets with her and had a reasonably defensible position even without them, and she would need every hand on deck to clear and clean the first few rooms of the sub-basement.

"Whatever," the girl muttered in total teenager mode.

For that, Lily specifically didn't warn the girl to mind the overhead and watched her bang her helmeted head on the top of one of the doors as she tried to walk through into one of the next passageways. Lily muted her vox and snickered at the girl.

She tried to play it off, but Lily saw everything!

"Don't go too far, we may 'ave reactivated some internal security systems," Lily warned.

That caused her to pause, and she nodded, letting two robots duck ahead of her, and Lily followed right behind. They found what had to be the sealed vault right away, and Lily would scan it later. She had learned from her last mistake and left the scanner in the RV, otherwise it might have already been broken.

Still, the vault looked really... stout. Lily was expecting that she would be easily able to break into it without bothering to run the simulation. Perhaps she would, or perhaps she would be able to hack the simulation mainframe and bypass that mechanic, perhaps.

As one of the robots took another turn, a turret opened up with automatic fire, and the Kaytron reacted pretty well, rolling through the intersection and taking cover. It stuck its head out briefly, drawing fire while its friend popped the turret with a fully-charged lightning bolt, which disabled the turret.

Lily was wondering if a single Kaytron electrolaser shot would disable the electronics in a turret and was pleased that it seemed to be the case. At least the turrets in this building.

"Let's search that way first," Alice suggested, motioning towards the destroyed turret.

Curious, she asked, "Why?"

The girl said, with logic, "Because if it had a gun guarding it, it had to have some good stuff that way!"

Lily's first impression was to go the other way because her game sense said that turrets usually guarded the main objective, so it made sense to save that for last if you were a completionist, but she realised that was an incredibly stupid opinion to have when she wasn't playing a game, but living her life.

Nodding, she said, "Okay, zhat makes sense." Still, she sent a team of three robots going the other way, too.

After that, they systematically explored every inch, except for the vault, of the underground bunker over the next half hour or so. As underground bunkers went, it wasn't that large, perhaps only five hundred square metres. By comparison, each of her current two sub-basement levels, one of which was usable at her hospital, was about twice as large.

Alice was right; the room guarded by the turret was obviously the main attraction. After turning the lights on, they were greeted with a large room. If she recalled, in the game there were wires and cabling all running through the floor throughout the base, as if a mad-man were trying to wire it for ethernet.

However, that wasn't the case, except for this room. Covering three out of four of the walls was a dense computing cluster of a type that she had, as of yet, never seen the like, with networking and power cables snaking on the ground and into the centre of the room, which stood a retro-futuristic pod, made of metal and glass. The computers covered each of the three sides of the room wall-to-wall.

"Woah, this is totally sick," said the Apprentice. Lily didn't correct her use of slang vernacular because she had to admit it really was. Even if the vault room was totally empty, this would still be worth all the trouble, including being blown up.

There was a small raised area overlooking the pod; in fact the ceilings in this room of the bunker were about twice as high, which they immediately noticed when they didn't need to duck their heads to walk. That was quite nice.

None of the large computer systems was turned on, and Lily specifically avoided looking for a way to turn them on. She was going to inspect each one carefully. She didn't want to short out something due to dust falling into a case and into an open contactor.

None of these computer systems seemed similar to any of the mainframes she had seen so far, and they all looked custom-built one-offs, networked together. That excited her, as it was interesting. She bet that this was the prototype VR system, with engineers adding to it as they iterated through its design.

"Okay, zhis is going to take a while. I am going to inspect every one of zhese computer systems before I power on zhe system. Go explore zhe base, zhere should be some sort of VR feedback suit, or suits, go find zhem," Lily ordered.

"Aye, aye, Captain!" retorted the Apprentice. Now the girl was just trying to push her buttons.

---xxxxxx---

Lily discovered an amazing thing about each of these computer systems. They all used massively parallel quantum processors of a model that she had not seen yet. They were of the same general type, though, but they were not an obvious RobCo model even if they appeared to be RobCo compatible, judging by the way they featured an identical IO layer as the processors she has grown very used to. If Lily ever wanted to just disassemble all the computers entirely, she could have over five hundred robots.

But that, she felt, was short-sighted if she could get the system to work. Lily wondered why there was such a beefy processor bank. She had assumed that they would have had to use quantum processors, but it didn't take 1/100th of this amount of computing to create a fully immersive virtual interface.

Alice found about a dozen interface suits of various sizes, and Lily scanned them along with the vault door when she had a robot bring her the scanner from the vehicle. The vault door, she thought it might be possible to break through. She could see where all of its mechanisms of it were, so drilling it out seemed possible, but there were sensors inside there as well, and Lily didn't know what function they served.

It might be that they were to trigger an alarm, or it might be they were to trigger a giant bomb to go off inside the vault. This was the Fallout universe; she wouldn't make any assumptions. Moreover, it wasn't like Lily was a safecracker, so she would leave breaking into it as a solid plan B for now.

The suits were interesting. They used technology kind of similar to the Institute brain-computer to, through electrical induction, interact with all the nerves inside your body. It was interesting, but it was also kind of a stupid and dead-end technology. VR in her past life started in similar methods, but why would you wear a suit when a simple brain interface can render fully immersive virtual worlds to include sight, sound, smell, and taste?

It reminded her of her past life; when she was a kid and before high-speed internet was a thing, she had a vast collection of songs in MIDI format. She remembered thinking that there was no way this new-fangled MP3 technology would exceed the pure, dulcet sounds of her MIDI files! Why, they took like thirty minutes to download one song, too! Right before MP3s took off, she installed these custom MIDI sound fonts, and she thought she had found the absolute apex of MIDI sound! ... And maybe she had, but it was still crap compared to 128 kilobits audio.

It was a quaint anachronism, in other words. Although, perhaps, she had to admit that they would be very useful for people she did not trust with brain interfaces to still make use of the VR pod when she brought it back home.

"Everything looks good over here," the Apprentice called. After checking each server of the cluster for any apparent malfunctions, Lily had the girl verify that all the power inverters and other associated systems appeared to be in working order.

Lily nodded, "Alright, go ahead and flip zhe main breaker and let's see if the system powers up."

The girl rubbed her hand together; they had both ditched their Power Armour as it made fine manipulations a bit difficult, and with a loud ka-chunk sound, manipulated a large circuit breaker from the OFF to ON position.

Immediately LEDs started lighting up everywhere around them, the hum of computers powering up, and the cursor on the controlling terminal on the raised podium area behind the pod started blinking and then thereafter scrolling text.

Lily sat down at the terminal and hummed as she watched information scroll past. It was a self-test of a large, complicated, system so it took a while.

Frowning at something that started flashing on the screen, "Apprentice, find zhe server numbered twenty-one," she called out.

"Uhh... they don't appear to be numbered," Alice complained.

Lily wanted to facepalm. What a clusterfuck. No doubt, the engineers that pieced this thing one of a kind monster together as a labour of love would know precisely which server twenty-one was and probably a lot more about it besides that.

Biting her lip in thought, "Go around and look for one that doesn't have any flashing lights near the data cable."

After a moment, "Found it!"

Lily stood up and walked over to look at it. "Hmmm. Simplest solutions first," and unplugged the data cable and then plugged it back in. Instantly the flashing light indicating data passing through the network interface started going crazy. Wait, was it that easy?

She turned to glance at the terminal in the centre of the room and shrugged. Sure enough, it seemed to be that easy. Sometimes you get lucky.

She returned to the terminal and sat down again.

VSS Inc VR System ALPHA-01

Selected Simulation: Battle for Anchorage! [EDIT SETTINGS] [OPEN POD] [LAUNCH SIM]

Available Simulations: Battle for Anchorage!, Basic Training

Superuser access is locked until Battle for Anchorage! cleared by order of General Chase, lock note: "Get it right, dweebs!"

Lily snickered at that. The game implied that the supposed hero of Anchorage, Constantine Chase, had been going crazy with power and making unreasonable and unrealistic demands of the developers of the simulation. It seems before the end he had descended to out-and-out verbal abuse.

Lily tried to edit the settings but found them locked. Could this sim actually kill someone if they died inside the sim? Lily very much doubted it.

"Oh, oh. Can I play the game first?" asked the Apprentice, eagerly.

Lily frowned, "It's not a game. And no. I 'ave reason to believe it might be dangerous. Supposedly if you died in zhe Battle for Anchorage sim, it killed you in real life."

Alice looked incredibly sceptical, "That sounds ridiculous, Mistress."

Lily sighed, "I know. I don't really believe it either. Maybe stress induced cardiac arrests? Sometimes incredibly realistic VR can induce zhat, but usually only for incredibly stressful scenarios, like being tortured in fully immersive VR."

Lily shrugged, "Still, I will go first. I 'ave a lot more protections zhan you. It would be almost impossible to kill me unless they put an explosive charge in the seat. And even with me, I am going to take zhe precautions." Lily stretched and started stripping, which caused the Apprentice to squawk. She had already pre-cached tons of medichines around important body organs and she also tested the system that would restart her heart in the event she had a cardiac arrest or severe arrhythmia.

The Apprentice waved her hands, "Don't rub my nose in the fact that you're stacked like a triple-stack of pancakes, Dr St. Claire! I can leave the room! Why are you even taking everything off?"

She clearly was still self-conscious about her own body, still. Lily found that both amusing and concerning. Still, she stopped before she exposed anything else, waited until the girl turned her back, before continuing and then quickly putting on one of the VR suits sized closest to her.

"Zhese suits work through electrical induction. I don't want zhem to maybe induce a current on zhe underwire of my bra, which would get hot, and maybe it set my boobs on fire while I'm in the sim and didn't notice," Lily said mildly. She didn't think that would happen, but the mental image was so distressing that precautions were warranted. She didn't like using this suit at all but figured it was best to use everything as they had designed it at first. Later she would design an interface with her computer to render all the VR directly into her brain, though.

Alice turned back around, snickered, then started out and out laughing. Lily patiently waited for the girl to get it out of her system before sighing, "If you're done laughing at your poor teacher, let us get on with it. When I get in zhe pod, I need you to 'it the LAUNCH SIM button when I give zhe word."

Lily got into the comfortable leather seat of the pod, plugged the suit into the port and placed the one-size-fits-all helmet with electrodes on her head, and relaxed. "Okay, go for eet, Apprentice."

The pod started closing up, but Lily didn't notice it for long because all of the suddenly her vision went white.

Things cleared, and she could see a cliff face as if she were lying on her back. A man leaned over her and said, "That was a hell of a nasty fall you took. When your chute bunched up like that, I thought you were a goner! I hope the other guys made it. I don't think their patrols spotted us coming it, so at least we still have the jump on 'em. You still have your gear, so I'm going to let you make the call. Quiet or guns blazing?"

Immediately after he started talking, she started receiving very urgent e-war warnings on her system.

[WARNING! WARNING! TEMPORAL ANOMALY! LOST TIME OR EXTRANEOUS MEMORIES DETECTED! NEURAL INFERRED CLOCK AND ATOMIC CLOCK DATE MISMATCH!]

[WARNING! EGO BACKUP DISABLED. E-WAR SYSTEMS, ENGAGED. NO TARGET. NO TARGET. NO TARGET. SAFE MODE ENGAGED. RADIOS DISABLED.]

What the fuck was going on. My system automatically triggered a failover mode, detecting a possible brain hack. It wasn't as bad as last time, I wouldn't need to prove who I was, but I immediately lost all connection to everything outside my brain.

I stood up while the NPC was doing his spiel and finally said, "Give me some time to zhink; I just got zhe wind knocked out of me, no?"

The soldier nodded, "Alright, but hurry up."

I pulled up the internal alerts and hummed. My current perception of time was running at about forty times the rate of what the small atomic clock in my brain said time should be going. Naturally, trusting the atomic decay of caesium over my own experience, my computer thought I was being hacked somehow, specifically that fake memories were being inserted into my consciousness in real time. That was a typical if insidious, type of brain or basilisk hack.

My brain activity levels were also through the roof, too; although not reaching dangerous levels but I was definitely using a lot of calories. I started to have an inference on why perhaps people died in this sim.

Glancing at the NPC, I decided I wanted to test it. "Okay, I zhink I know what we should do..."

The man nodded eagerly, and I said a bunch of gibberish to see what kind of programming he he had, "Tulpa finni pela cella oriela."

The soldier frowned, "What the fuck was that? Some kind of commie talk?! Senator McKinley was right; they've penetrated even the Army!"

With that, he threw the knife he was carrying. She was kind of expecting something like that, so she had already tilted her head, but the fucking knife homed in on one of her eyeballs and penetrated up to the hilt with a terribly gross *swick* sound.

Immediately after, the words 'MISSION FAILED' appeared and then she found herself sitting in the sim pod, panting for breath. Her internal nanohive indicated that her pulse reached the tachycardia levels briefly.

Her test of the NPC's AI was inconclusive. They could have hard programmed in that encounter, and actually, Lily suspected they had on account the knife seemed to have terminal guidance manoeuvres.

As soon as she was out of the sim, her clock synched up with her subjective experience of time passing. That was amazing. I take everything negative back that I ever said to you, VSS engineers. They built in time dilation to their VR system and got it to work on biological flats? That was quite impressive.

It was also probably what was killing them. A forty times dilation is pretty impressive for any biomorph, and no doubt it stressed their brain and hearts to the limit. Lily thought she should be fine. The Apprentice, though? It probably wouldn't be healthy, but she could handle twenty times easily.

The settings were locked, though, so she would just have to clear it herself.

"Ahahaha... I died, Apprentice. Start me again," Lily yelled.

"That was a hell of a nasty fall you took. When your chute bunched up like that, I thought you were a goner..."