What’s a hive-mind between friends?

"Behold, zhe apex of my technology!" Lily cried and then unveiled her latest prototype for both the Apprentice and Gary to see.

Alice peered at it and asked, "It's glass. It's glass, isn't it?" Meanwhile, Gary performed a soft, condescending golf clap.

"No! It's not glass!" Lily huffed and replaced the white pillowcase she was using for dramatic effect. Then she reached underneath it and fiddled with a couple of things, "I forgot to turn it on, is all."

Lily coughed into her hand and repeated herself, "Behold! Zhe pinnacle of my technology!" and with that, she yanked the pillowcase off to unveil a small tablet-sized LCD display, currently displaying the output of a camera outside the hospital that she was using to test it. The screen was very thin, and the resolution was sharp, with about 150 pixels per centimetre which she felt was probably in the realm of an early HD display from America or even better.

She didn't precisely know. Despite working with AMOLED and Micro-OLED displays in her job as an engineer, she always incorporated them as a black box. She never worked for a company that built or designed displays, only ones that used them as a component in a larger project.

"Wow, that's pretty cool, I guess. But are you telling me the absolute pinnacle of your technology base is a TV? Weren't you telling me you sent satellites to orbit?" asked Gary, amused.

Alice was also not that impressed, "You said that with your current-generation life extension therapy if a person treated in their teenage years could live almost three hundred years. That seems a lot more impressive than this."

Well, that was only true if they got periodic medical check-ups. She still hadn't quite got enough added to the human genome to incorporate things like mechanisms to clean plaque from arteries automatically, for example. Beyond the DNA replication error issue that was the main obstacle to biological immortality in living organisms, the human body's self-maintenance was horrendous. Scarification was another roadblock, it was really good for immediately healing serious injuries, but it was very suboptimal for an organism living a long life.

She was working on her sixth-generation longevity treatment now and had finally created a viable synthetic vector and was no longer using the coronavirus base she had been utilising before. Hers was still quite virus-like, but it was capable of carrying an order of magnitude greater genetic information, so she intended to incorporate all previous versions in a single treatment.

Lily frowned, slightly upset. "You don't understand how difficult this was!" This was really her working in an area that was completely foreign to her; when you lived in a space station for hundreds of years, you kind of pick up some manner of spacecraft design simply by osmosis, not to mention that her previous spider body that she had designed and refined over the decades was a high-performance spacecraft in its own right, complete with spacecraft-level armaments powered by antimatter.

She walked over to the next room and returned with something that looked like a sleek PipBoy personal computer, "Here, Gary. This is for you. To replace your PipBoy." The screen was slightly larger than a PipBoy, but the screen was sleek, and it looked almost integrated into the sturdy yet comfortable-looking armband. Unlike a PipBoy, it didn't look like strapping a portable television onto your arm.

He took it from me, removed his current PipBoy and put his new one on. He said, a little confused, "Hmm... there's a lot fewer buttons and knobs. How would be the simplest way to program an activation..." He trailed off and then let his arm rest at his side, and then pulled it up to look at the screen, which activated the display. Gary always was pretty bright. Although he could have pressed the home button to activate the display, too, it also activated when its accelerometers detected the arm it was on moved to a position where someone was obviously looking at it.

Lily nodded, satisfied, "I 'ad to copy some of zhe specific application-specific integrated circuits the PipBoy used; for example, I am still not one hundred per cent sure how its medical monitoring circuits work, but I copied zhem, and it seems to work fine." She walked him through using the touch screen, "It runs an emulated copy of the latest patched RobCo operating system as an app; zhis is only so it is backwards compatible with all the things PipBoys can interface to, like Vault doors and the like. Mainly it uses my normal operating system, except I designed this graphical user interface. Here, check this out." Lily tapped the Maps app, and it pulled up the GPS coordinates, in addition to an overhead view of Megaton, centred on the hospital where they were located.

Apple's user interface so many years ago really was quite intuitive; he didn't need to be taught pinch to zoom or the opposite. "Woah, is this a real-time display?"

Lily waffled her hands a little, "It can be; press 'ere for zhat, but zhat won't be a standard feature on most of these devices I build for obvious tactical reasons as I intend to build a lot of zhese. One for every Megaton citizen at least, and probably tens of thousands more as a continual trade item. In this case, what you're looking at is a map and images that have been preloaded on the device. I have the entirety of North America loaded now, although images away from the Capital Wasteland are a lot poorer in resolution."

He found the phone app and made a call to Lily, who answered it mentally. His face appeared in a small window on her screen, while an avatar render of Lily's face appeared on his wrist. Lily's avatar said, "Hello!"

He glanced between the talking face and the obviously not talking Lily in reality, "Are you doing that with your brain computer thingy?" he asked.

Lily's avatar smiled widely and said, "Yes, indeed! I have managed to create a more intuitive interface for the affect of emotions and facial expressions."

Alice winced, "It's kind of complicated. Don't expect me to answer anything but a voice call. Honestly, I'll probably be using one of these too, just so I can answer phone calls and not talk like a robot."

Gary looked down at the smiling avatar and shuddered a little, "You never actually smile like that, and if you ever did, I would be worried about who you were smiling at. It might fool anyone who never met you, though." He tapped the hang-up button on the computer. "How far away can you make these phone calls, anyway?"

Lily hummed, "Worldwide within six months. Right now, we have sporadic but consistent coverage across the North American continent, Europe and parts of China. I prioritised orbits around zhis latitude and am expanding north and south from 'ere." The personal computers, as she refused to call them LilyBoys, were not large enough to have a Ka-band high-bandwidth auto-tracking phased array transceiver, like the data terminal designs she sent to Dr House did; however, they did have a number of traditional radio transceivers. They were designed to work along a cellular phone paradigm, with cell towers that had a high-throughput trunk link to her satellite constellation broadcasting in a frequency-division multiple access arrangement to these end-user devices.

That said, her satellites did monitor a similar frequency range as part of their "legacy gateway" functionality, so without a cell tower, they would still work globally. However, the bandwidth would be rather slow, and the number of users around a specific area would be limited to a hundred or two compared to the thousands if you had a cell tower.

She pointed to the device on Gary's wrist, "Zhis is the expeditionary version; zhey're similar to PipBoys and are powered by a number of betavoltaic batteries. Zhe normal version will need to be recharged every few days. Oh, and even if you have no connectivity to the network, zhey will still create an ad-hoc Mesh wherever you are, and you can also use them as regular voice radios in a number of popular bands."

"Can they be used while in power armour?" he asked curiously.

Regular PipBoys could not, despite them being pretty key to game functionality in the Fallout games. You couldn't even wear them, not over and definitely not under Power Armour. Lily shrugged, "Zhey will integrate into my latest T-60 series of Power Armour derivatives and can be paired if you wear them underneath the armour. Zhe functionality is a little reduced, only voice calls, and only a few apps support the primitive heads-up display I built into those helmets. You could get an overhead map, but it would be very simple and in wireframe graphics. Mostly bearings and distances if you want to use the navigation feature."

Briefly, Lily explained more about how it paired with the latest version of Power Armour her men were using; they were based on a combination of a T-60 sample she got from the Brotherhood and the Enclave Power Armour sample she got from Miller. All the interior portions were shifted to use the better Enclave-designed components, but it still mostly looked like a T-60 design, although the helmet featured a single polarised faceplate of diamond and definitely no exposed ventilation tubing. It was this faceplate that she had designed a heads-up display to be projected onto, in simple green wireframe graphics, similar to a fighter jet she remembered from her youth in America. She'd stolen the design from a fighter jet HUD that she bought from Moira Brown, actually. It used low-powered scanning lasers to draw images on the surface of the faceplate and was completely parallax-free.

It also featured internal speakers and microphones and was fully NBC-compliant and even vacuum-tolerant for very brief periods.

She had made the HUD as an aid for firing weapons, as her lasers and plasma weapons could interface with it, and it was an absolute prerequisite if she ever designed armour-mounted weapons modules that a soldier wouldn't hold in his or her hands. However, she discovered that she was reinventing the wheel for a lot of things when she thought about other applications, and finally decided to just issue every soldier one of these personal computers and have them be able to pair with the armour when the soldier got inside for any application other than weapons.

However, the only applications available at the moment were the Maps application, text messages, and phone, including setting up a squad-based tactical net. Up to a company could be interfaced together, with the senior officers and squad leaders having a simple battle management system where they could relay orders and waypoints easily and quickly down the chain of command. Since she only had two and a half companies, for the moment, that was fine.

"That's still pretty awesome. I know it's barely been any time yet, but have you made any progress on giving people the same kind of empathy I have? Even if you've got it licked, I have committed to being here for a while, plus staying to train my replacement," Gary asked her curiously.

Lily frowned. "I'm pretty sure I 'ad it all along. I've made some adjustments, and I've tested it on about zhirty people so far, mostly captured raiders and condemned criminals. I'm probably ready to test it on a few volunteers, but it would 'ave to be people I somewhat trust, and I'm hesitant to test permanent brain alterations on such people in zhe first place."

Alice made a face, "Dr St. Claire, just checking, but have I mentioned how I think it is deeply creepy that you perform medical experiments on condemned prisoners?"

Lily nodded at the girl slowly, "You've mentioned it, but I don't see zhe issue. It doesn't really cause zhem any undue pain, with zhe only downside being zhat zhey live longer while knowing zhat they are going to die, and soon. Zhat type of anxiety I can treat pharmacologically. I agree zhat a prompt execution is more desirable, zhough." She didn't even need to install experimental brain implants in these subjects anymore, as she figured out how to use modified VR helmets to give her enough data to tell if the treatment was successful; she just had to build ones that they couldn't take off, which wasn't difficult.

"That... wasn't really my objection," the Apprentice said with a sigh, with Gary looking at her oddly.

Lily glanced at her and shook her head slightly, "I'm aware of that too, Apprentice. I'm not actually as socially dense as I sometimes appear to be..." that was a lie, but there was no reason for the Apprentice to know that. She sighed, "It was my way of politely indicating that you are being naive. Zhat can be a terminal condition in this world, you know..." She nodded, "Yes, I believe you need to observe, say... the next three capital case trials that The 'onorable Judge Kaminsky presides over. I'm not sure when that will be, though, but you need to understand zhat even if we draw and quarter zhese people publicly, it wouldn't make a dent in the karmic debt most of zhem have to pay. Painlessly extracting what little value these... people... 'ave is not wrong."

In Gary's court, the only criminals condemned to death were truly heinous. A minimum requirement was a single murder, but it had to be premeditated. A homicide that wasn't premeditated could either be lawful if it involved mutual combat or, more often, criminal if it wasn't -- the standard penalty for the latter was being expelled from Megaton and declared an outlaw if they ever returned, in the pre-modern sense.

More often than not, in the about dozen times that it has happened thus far, the victim's family or friends tended to take justice into their own hands in the Wasteland, which was fine with her. Honestly, the aggrieved parties seemed to thus far prefer this as well, although it was certainly not perfect, as what would happen if someone was killed in the heat of the moment and had no friends or family? Then who would avenge him or her? Lily didn't know, and honestly, she didn't care.

There were certain aggravating factors that could result in a non-premeditated killing resulting in the death penalty as well. If it was combined with a sexual assault, or the victim was completely helpless -- for example, a child or an elderly person, that might have increased the sentence. Honestly, Lily suspected that Gary just used his empathy to gauge the defendant's emotional state when he sentenced them, with remorseful people getting a lesser sentence. That was fine, too.

Honestly, Alice was the one she was working on the empathy treatment the most for. Although she would like it herself, she had adapted numerous strategies to live without entirely understanding other people's emotions. She wouldn't even consider the treatment if it wasn't installing a brand-new brain structure. She was of the opinion that her unique way of thinking was an advantage, not a disability. This new treatment was akin to installing a radio in her brain that could pick up emotions; it didn't, as far as she could tell, alter the way she thought at all.

However, she felt that Alice was a little too idealistic. In a fragile way. She suspected someone might take advantage of the girl and break her heart before Lily managed to murder them.

Alice didn't exactly like this order, but she sighed and nodded, "Okay, Dr St. Claire. If it's alright, I'm going to get Mr Wilson to take me to Vault 112, so that I can do a few more surgeries before they all run out."

Most of the residents had been cloned and brain transplanted already, but there were still about fifty to go. Thus far, there hadn't been a single fatality yet, with one or two incidents where Lily had to show up in her telepresence unit robot to assist the surgeons performing the surgery. It was fortunate that hypoxia-related brain injuries were mostly pretty simple to repair, with medichines, although now she had the Brotherhood scribes asking about them.

Lily could construct a nanohive that creates a more limited medichine. It couldn't be more limited physically because they were already as large as they could be and still move around the human brain, but it might be possible to limit them in software in the types of things it would allow itself to do. Lily recognised that she was somewhat irrational about this particular technology, too, but at the moment, she would hang on to it as long as possible. Unrestricted nanomachines, even the rather shitty versions she had access to, were a type of technology that changed everything, after all, and the Brotherhood's Scribes weren't stupid.

"Zhat's fine, Alice. He usually sends a supply shipment every other day. You'll 'ave to wear your armour for the whole trip over, though," Lily told her.

Alice sighed dramatically, in the teenage fashion, "I know, I know!" After that, she flounced from the room.

Gary glanced at her and asked, amused, "How old is she now?"

"Sixteen. And a 'alf, or so she says," Lily said with a sigh, full of as much emotion as she ever did affect. The only reason Lily wasn't more at her wit's end was that she had experience raising a number of children in the past, who all successfully survived to reach adulthood.

Gary chuckled, "Are you sure you want to shatter her optimistic outlook by sending her to some of the trials I have to put up with? She might turn jaded if you do."

Lily shook her head, "No, I don't zhink she will. She has boundless optimism, and she isn't actually as naive as I accused her of being." Lily tilted her head to the side, "Of course, you are zhe expert on other people's emotions; what do you think?"

He shrugged, "I'm not psychic; I can't see the future. But I agree that she is not as fragile as when I first met her. If I had to explain what I feel about her, it is that she knows the world is shit, but she is determined to reject it. At the moment, she is doing so by making herself assume the best about people until proven otherwise, but eventually, she's the type that would lead a bloody revolution, I think, so you better watch out." He said with a grin.

Lily didn't have any illusions about what Little Miss AntAgonizer was capable of if she was pushed the wrong way. She didn't see that as a negative, either, but it would be best if that... passion was tempered with a bit of realism so that she didn't become a psychotic crazy woman. And strategy so that if she did become a psychotic crazy woman, after all, she became a successful psychotic crazy woman. Lily thought, 'They called me crazy, after all, and look at me now.'

"If only... all she has to do is say the word, and she can run the whole shebang," Lily said longingly. "Have you given any ideas about where you are going to target your expedition?"

He shrugged, "There are so many options that it makes it difficult..." Then he blinked and glanced down at the personal computer on his arm, and pulled up the Maps app again. "I could use this to get some better intel, though, couldn't I?"

Lily nodded, "Yes. I've done a little research, and it depends on how far you want to go west and how many people you will have to agree to follow you, but I would recommend Chicago, Dallas or Colorado Springs."

"Why those three possibilities?" he asked while dragging his finger over the display, moving the map west to hover the map over Chicago.

Lily shrugged, "Zhey all fit a number of possibilities that I zhink you wanted, as well as 'ave options. Zhere appear to be a fair number of people in all of zhese locations, but no organised polity, at least that I can see from overhead, and signs of lots of raider activity. Also, zhey each have a relatively undamaged airport. In Chicago, the old Midway airport has one runway that looks like it is in good condition. In Colorado Springs, the former Air Force Academy has an airport that looks deserted, and in good condition, and in Dallas, Love Field has one undamaged runway. All of zhese locations would be excellent central locations and strong points for you, with the advantage zhat I could likely send and receive supplies and personnel via air."

"Just having the capability to call home with these Super PipBoys will at least double the number of people willing to go adventure with me, to say nothing of the potential to go back and forth to the Capital Wasteland again someday. What would you choose?" he asked.

She shrugged, "I wouldn't. I would stay 'ere. So, to answer your question... I don't know. Too many unknown variables. I don't know 'ow you zhink. However, the best choice for probable immediate success is Colorado. It wasn't as hit as hard as some other states. Denver to the north is kind of a death trap of thousands of raiders, but I've detected sporadic organised agriculture and cattle and brahmin ranches, but nobody especially organised, and little technology. But maybe you would put additional weight on Chicago because it is close to Lake Michigan, and you secretly desire to be a lake pirate."

"Arrr lass, surrender ye booty," Gary said with a terrible pirate accent.

Lily simply raised an eyebrow at him, which caused him to chuckle and then rub his chin in thought. Lily wasn't about to be the side dish to Gary's existing long-term girlfriend, even if said girlfriend approved. She was only ever the entrée! Wait, that didn't sound right...

"Colorado wasn't badly hit, though. Really? That is odd. You'd have thought the reds would have glassed Springs on account of Peterson Air Force Base. That was the HQ of Strategic Bomber Command," Gary said, perplexed. In Lily's last life, it was actually the headquarters of NORAD. Her previous life's equivalent, Strategic Air Command, had been headquartered somewhere in the boonies in Nebraska but changed in the early nineties to just Strategic Command as a joint services command to cover both ICBMs and bombers.

Lily nodded, "Yes, I found it odd too. My only speculation, absent any evidence, is Peterson or Colorado, in general, had some undisclosed anti-ballistic missile protection. An experimental project, perhaps? If so, it wasn't good enough, as zhat base was flattened. Zhe Air Force Academy and attached airfield, though, are just north of the city, out of town and look untouched, and I 'aven't discovered any movement to or from it. I've also observed the Cheyenne Mountain facility from above, too and 'aven't discovered any hints zhat zhere is any activity. Nothing optically, and no electromagnetic signals were coming or going as far as I could tell. But zhat was a definite continuity of government site, and it would be somewhat nearby, too. Maybe you should ask and see if the Brotherhood knows anything about that area before committing."

Lily couldn't find anything that indicated that the events of the game Fallout Tactics actually occurred in this world, which was kind of interesting because clearly, by the presence of the NCR thriving in the west, there had been some continuity between Fallout 1, 2 and the world she found herself in. She never played Fallout Tactics, either, but more or less knew the plot and couldn't detect any sign of the front of the Cheyenne Mountain facility being blown up by a tactical nuke, for example. Just in case, she told Gary to ask the Brotherhood about it, as surely they would have records if the events of that game actually happened.

Gary nodded, "Yeah, that's a good idea." After that, he excused himself, as he had a trial he had to oversee. He had hired two subordinate judges and was still in the process of training and overseeing them. There was no real bar association, and lawyers had all died out, so the only officer of the court in a trial in Megaton was the judge. The only appeal available if Judge Gary said you were guilty was her, and she doubted she would overrule him except if he tried to convict her of some crime!

---xxxxxx---

The elected representative of the Vault 112 people, the former Postmaster General who now shared the same name as a muse of history, met her briefly a couple of days later.

Lily served Clio tea and asked, "Are you settling in okay?" Surprisingly, the group of Vault 112ers had asked to remain as close as possible to each other. Their behaviour was a little unusual, Lily thought, but she wasn't really one to judge. They had been together for two hundred years, and even the ones that couldn't precisely remember it all seemed to have an almost supernatural connection to their cohort, being able to pick them out from a crowd even if they looked wildly different. It was something worth studying, but she couldn't figure out a way to do so in a way that wouldn't be impolite.

Their request had been a bit difficult, but she had been building four large dormitory buildings. Two of them were in the Old Megaton area, and two were in the newly walled portions that used to be the wasteland west of the city. It was her experiment to provide housing to the homeless. Honestly, the designs weren't all that to write home about. Small rooms, with communal bathrooms and showers for every six units. Communal kitchens and living and recreational areas, as well. She had intentionally designed them that way so that a sort of community would naturally form in the people utilising them -- as such, the community would "self-correct" people who damaged the community fixtures.

That was the idea, but of course, Lily was sceptical and tended to believe that if nobody, in particular, owned something, for example, a community bathroom or kitchen, then nobody would actually take care of it. However, not all of the rooms on a floor were small single occupancy rooms. A couple every floor was akin to a regular apartment, and Lily offered this housing to both her soldiers and Gary's cops. She'd also offer it to anyone who wanted and could act as a sort of RA to the floor like it was college dormitories. Hopefully, these presences would tend to discourage out-and-out vandalism.

To accept their request, she had just expanded the design of the single occupancy rooms in one of the four buildings to be slightly larger. Instead of three hundred people, this building could now house only one hundred and fifty. Lily was going to provide them housing for three months, and decided to start that after everyone was awoken -- so she would actually be providing Clio housing for probably five months, or longer since she was the first to awaken. After that, they could rent the entire building from her, she supposed, if they wanted to stay clannish.

"Yes, thankfully, the last ten or so people to be awoken had some experience in interior construction, home finishing and the like and taught the rest of us. We're mostly finishing the drywall ourselves now and are even picking up how your robots do the electrical work and what have you," she said, nodding. "There's a bit of a lack of furniture, of course, but we're surviving."

Lily nodded. It was difficult for her to find a dozen extra beds every week just, but she had already stockpiled most of them. Other furniture, though, was a bit more dear. "So, 'ow can I 'elp you?" Lily asked, deciding to get straight to the point. Clio had asked for the meeting, after all.

Clio nodded and said, "Two things. First, we'd like to arrange a timeframe so that we can have everyone run through the two 'skill sims' that you mentioned. Secondly, afterwards, a number of us that were medical doctors in the past were interested in getting jobs at your hospital or perhaps establishing our own private clinics in town."

Lily frowned. The basic training sim took four objective days, and the medic skills sim took about three. Still, it was possible, "Zhat is fine, I suppose. I only have, at the moment, fifteen sim pods. They're not spoken for at the moment. It will take about four days to run through each program, so a little over a week in total. I would 'ave zhought zhat you wouldn't be too interested in getting back in a VR simulator." It was one of the reasons she made such an open-ended offer.

She thought about it a while and shrugged. She didn't intend to recruit anytime soon, and when she liberated about half the computing hardware from Vault 112 in a month or so, she would have the VR infrastructure for at least as many pods as Vault 112 had. It had been seriously over-engineered, with the capability to run over a thousand NPCs concurrently.

"You can send zhe first fifteen tomorrow morning," Lily said finally, "As for zhe doctors, zhat would be great. We are overworked, and I don't 'ave zhe time to work as many shifts as I used to. Perhaps they could come along, and I'll have a discussion with them and see if zhey are appropriate working at zhe hospital."

The other woman smiled and nodded, "That would be great. And yes, you'd think so... but honestly, we all need to skills. At least the survival and military skills, if they're similar to basic training. We're sending a few of the other doctors in the first sim group, and they'll evaluate how well the medical sim training goes." She shrugged, "The world has gone to shit, and not very many of us were in the Army or know how to shoot."

Lily nodded slowly again, "Yes. That is very rational." After a few more minutes of small-talk, the former Postmaster General of the United States left her office. She triggered a window in her vision to observe the woman leaving the building. She met up with a group of two of her fellows in the lobby, and the way that they all nodded at each other simultaneously made her frown in thought. There wasn't anything specific, but the former residents of Vault 112 were... weird. Universally.

She wasn't really one to talk, though. There wasn't really anything in their memories that could explain it, as Lily had reviewed some of them, but they seemed to move and make decisions together. They communicated with glances in the same eerie way identical twins often did.

It was probably nothing, but she'd ask Gary to be present when she interviewed the doctors tomorrow.

---xxxxxx---

The next day Lily spent an hour or so setting each of the fifteen 112ers into the sim pods, installing their life support and medical monitoring systems. Clio was amongst the first fifteen, so she supposed she wouldn't see the woman for a week or so.

After starting the basic training simulation, she spoke with four former doctors briefly for about fifteen minutes. They were personable and knowledgeable, so she told them they could start immediately. Dr Taylor was more or less managing the hospital these days, so she sent them to his office to be added to the schedule and onboarded.

Then she glanced over her shoulder and asked, "So?"

"They're weird. They all have some kind of affinity or emotional connection to all of the rest. I don't think they're telepathic, but I really wouldn't know if they were, but I got the impression they can communicate with each other through emotions and concepts," Gary said after he stepped into her office from where he was concealed, hiding in her private bathroom.

Lily nodded. She thought about it for a while and shrugged, "Zhat is unusual," She didn't particularly like the sound of a nascent hive-mind setting up shop in her town, but they seemed personable enough and non-threatening.

Gary nodded, "I have seen this sort of behaviour before, you mentioned twins, but they are a bit different. The only place I have seen it is true life-and-death brothers, people who have gone to war and saved each other's lives so many times that they stopped counting."

Ah. She supposed their constant proximity for two hundred years of torture had some sort of as-of-yet unidentifiable pseudo-supernatural effect on their brains? She hadn't actually noticed any unusual brain structures, though. She'd like to test them. See what the range was, see if anything shielded the effect. She had a room in her sub-basement where she used quantum-locking force fields in the walls as an experiment to capture neutrino emissions. She wanted to create a neutrino-based transceiver, but she didn't remember or perhaps ever now how they worked in the past. She wondered what would happen if she stuck one of their cohort in that room.

That was probably a bad idea. In fact, if what Gary said was right, it meant that she would have to catfoot around them all. They might not be some kind of nascent gestalt like she was worried about, but that didn't mean they wouldn't swarm an enemy if one of their fellows was attacked or temporarily kidnapped and placed in a total isolation room, for example.

"Zhank you for the help," she told him, and he waved and moseyed his way out of her office.

[NEW PEER CONNECTED - AE82::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329 - 36°07'9.00" N -115°10'12.00" W ]

Ooh. That had to be Dr House.