Daydreams

Inside a surprisingly clean but mostly bare room sat a woman with long braided blonde hair at a long, flat table that was covered in miscellaneous parts, tools and supplies. She was putting the finishing touches on what appeared to be a footlocker. However, the inside was segmented into four compartments which looked meticulously clean and fitted with various wires, electronics and hydraulic tubing.

Lily tilted her head to the side, which caused the metal on metal tinkling sound as the silver bracelet she used as the end of her braid dragged on the metal floor. But she was well aware of its location as it only took one time faceplanting on the floor after tripping on your own braided hair when you tried to stand up to make you hyper-vigilant in the future.

She was finishing soldering the access jack for a rugged programmable serial port data-line in a waterproofed dust-cover shielded port that she had drilled out on the lid. Then she carefully fitted it in place, along with a circle of rubberised weather-proofing she carefully measured and cut out earlier.

Humming, she finalised the installation with silicone-based epoxy around the edges of the programming port, underneath the weatherstripping. She followed all the best practices in assembling a device that both used hydraulics and high-voltage electricity and may or may not be exposed to the elements for periods of time, according to the textbooks she had been reading.

Thinking back to when she showed up to the first lesson with Scott, it had consisted of him handing her duffle bag of textbooks and telling her to "Read these."

She had started to come to the opinion that the man who became the superhero known as The Mechanist in his grief probably hadn't been obsessed with comic books like she initially thought. He probably just had such low interpersonal skills that he used comics as a research tool for how one should act when they become a vigilante and need to defeat a supervillain. It would explain the campy dialogue she remembered him having in the game.

That didn't explain the AntAgonist, though, but she was pretty sure that bitch was just crazy. She wanted to have ants kill all human-kind, after all, and lived in a giant ant hive.

At first, she thought reading the textbooks, especially some of them, would be a waste of time. She was both a practising electrical engineer and a researcher of synthetic cyberware in the past, after all. It was a fact that most technologies in this universe looked clunky, like the aesthetics were from the space-age and atomic-age, rather than the sleek devices she was used to. However, there was something to be said about the engineering principles of a society that knew, with one hundred per cent certainty, that they were running out of resources.

They built things to last, which is why much of the stuff they built was still running even now. She decided that her inventions would follow this principle even if she had to scale up some devices to a clunkier but more robust aesthetic. Except for cybernetics, she would maintain strict miniaturisation and aesthetic discipline there. She was an artist, after all.

What she was working on now was her first-generation nano-fabricator. The design spec for this device, which she had been dreaming up in her head since she arrived in this universe, had many weaknesses and wasn't very versatile at all. Its main problems were that it would take a lot of power, had limited print size and would only be able to construct 3D prints out of carbon allotropes. That was still pretty impressive when you think that diamond, lonsdaleite, graphene sheets and nanotubes were all made out of carbon.

It was still awe-inspiring. Or, it would be. Right now, it might be better called merely a nano-stabiliser. She had only finished the first compartment inside, which, eventually, would be the actual fabrication chamber. It was filled with an ultra-low viscosity oil and already had hundreds of trillions of nanites in suspension. This was the chamber where the fabricated objects would be printed inside the liquid. It wasn't large and would only allow her to build objects with dimensions slightly bigger than a bread box, but that was more than sufficient for her needs at the moment.

However, without its own, dedicated nanohive, it couldn't build anything or control any of the nanites in any acceptable way. So she had wired the low-end quantum processor from an eyebot to manage the entire device. It turned out that while operational eyebots were rare, scrapped ones were some of the most common bots in the Capital Wasteland. She had to admit that she was somewhat impressed by the quantum processors used by RobCo and General Dynamics robots. The central processor for an eyebot was about the size of an undersized grape, and Lily already had ideas of incorporating it into several neural cybernetics. While eventually, this processor would be used to run the fabricator, right now, it was used to preserve the nanites inside the suspension fluid.

In the absence of a nanohive, or other central controlling computer, nanites, her medichines included, had a very short shelf life. Yet, at the same time, she would need a large number of nanites, more than she could reasonably store in her body, to ramp up to the point where she could build a new nanohive to install in the fabricator.

Kind of a chicken and the egg problem, she supposed. The processor was acting as a jury-rigged nanohive. It didn't have the production capability a real one had, but it could handle command and control, which would reduce the percentage of nanomachine attrition in the suspension fluid from 20% daily to less than 0.001%.

Building a critical part that was required to operate the fabricator in the fabricator before the fabricator was even built was going to be another challenge. Still, she knew a couple of ways it could be accomplished. But, unfortunately, they were laborious and annoying.

Glancing at her laptop, she double-checked that her internal medichines were gathering in the blood of her thumb as programmed before taking a pen knife and cutting her thumb, dripping blood into the suspension fluid steadily for over a minute.

The thinking part of this build was mostly done for now. Now she just had to bleed into it for about a month or so. She had been cutting her own thumb so often lately that she half expected herself to start saying 'Kuchiyose no Jutsu' and summon a giant slug.

It had been a week since she had returned to Canterbury Commons, and Scott had surprised her by offering her a room in his, not quite, secret superhero lair that was better known as an old discount electronics store that was a twenty-minute walk out of town.

He had said that she was the only other person besides his nieces that treated Sophie like a regular person. She had snorted and said that she WAS a regular person, that it didn't matter what substrate a mind operated on, be it squishy neurons, quantum computers or even something we haven't discovered yet, a person was a person was a person.

That was when he had offered her a room in his lair for as long as she would stay in town and she had accepted. The place was a fortress of Protectrons and Sentrybots. He even had one Assaultron operational which you didn't see too often in D.C. and several more in bits.

She cracked her knuckles and put pencil to paper for the next invention. She had been working on it for days, but, unfortunately, it was stuck in the design phase right now. To proceed further, she would have to have an operational fabricator to first build what would become plasma coils. Then, these pencil-thick graphene tubes would need to have a lithium-doped refractory alloy vacuum deposited onto them to become superconductive at room temperature. At that point, they could be used as the electromagnetic containment walls of a high-temperature plasma acceleration loop. Plasma rifles and pistols operated similarly, except they just accelerated the plasma from the micro fusion cell linearly out the weapon's barrel. In fact, she had cribbed half the design elements from a plasma gun on a scrapped Mr Gutsy in the shop.

She had been amazed when she studied the micro-fusion cells she had bought from the merchants. They were a literal small fusion reactor. And they were only about the size of a small thermos of coffee. She couldn't believe it. Of course, she knew that they SAID micro fusion cell on the tin, so she wasn't sure what else she was expecting, but it still was amazing.

It was the absolute most fantastic example of miniaturisation of high-energy plasma generation and containment she had seen in her entire life. Even transhumanity's stable fusion reactors, the smallest, were the size of a broom closet. Or a hot water heater at best, for the cutting edge.

However, the obvious question was... if they were an actual fusion reactor, then why, for the love of ThorAllahJesus was electricity so hard to come by in the wasteland? Well, it was because stable, net-positive plasma generation isn't, on its own, electricity. You could use some of this plasma for useful purposes or destructive ones, as that was how plasma guns worked, but a micro fusion cell would run out of fuel quickly if you used it to heat water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. After all, nobody tried generating power by shooting a steam boiler with plasma rifles. It just wasn't an effective energy transfer.

In other words, she wanted to invent a practical, mobile, fusion electric generator system that used the ubiquitous and readily available micro fusion cells and did so economically.

If you wanted small fusion electrical generators, the more advanced fusion cores which the same pre-war company Mass Fusion produced were one solution. The only solution, as far as she knew. These were used in power armour, primarily, but could be used as a generator. In fact, she was pretty sure that was their original intended function, and Power Armours were more or less designed around this power source rather than the other way around.

She hadn't got her hands on one of these yet, but she knew they generated electricity directly. She wasn't quite sure how, given their size, but thought that maybe they utilised the more complicated and higher temperature Proton-Boron fusion cycle. That was the only type of fusion that produced electricity directly without having to exploit the plasma in some way. So it was the only option she was aware of, but she wasn't anywhere near as educated on power systems or nuclear physics as she was on biology. So she was just winging it, which actually sounded kind of scary when combined with nuclear power.

She knew she wasn't a genius in this area like the people who invented the fusion cores. There was no way she could build a system like that. Hell, the only reason her generator idea was possible was that she didn't have to make the micro-fusion cells that were almost 80% of the system's complexity. But with a running micro fusion cell, if she could pipe the plasma through the superconducting loop then she could take advantage of magneto-hydrodynamics.

Plasma was made entirely of ions, and all ions were electrically conductive. A super hot, fast-moving, electrically conductive plasma travelling through a loop functioned as a powerful generating coil, producing electricity directly. It was almost exactly how traditional generators worked, just that the movement that created the electrical field wasn't being sourced from a belt or drive shaft that turned a solid magnet but instead a moving magnetic fluid, the plasma.

The best part was, of course, the plasma was almost entirely reused. The only energy loss was radiated heat and the electricity extracted from the generator, which was required to keep the hydrodynamic loop's electromagnetic containment powered. If her math was correct, a footlocker-sized generator of her design could provide over one to two megawatts of electricity for years before needing the micro fusion cell replaced. On the other hand, the fission reactor of a U.S. aircraft carrier was about as big as a house and only provided 100MW.

The main design trouble she was running into was dissipating the waste heat without melting the plasma loop. The cooling apparatus might be three times bigger than the generator.

She wished she could talk to someone who actually understood high-energy plasma systems or power generators, as she was sure her design was poorly optimised. And probably somewhat unsafe, as a stray bullet to the generator while it was operating would cause the plasma to lose containment and release an explosion like a plasma grenade which would likely incinerate everything within two or three meters.

It made her almost want to go to the Brotherhood; she was sure that they would love this design as it would provide effective mobile electricity generation without utilising fusion cores which they would no doubt prefer to use in Power Armour. With their help, she might even be able to optimise it, so it provided enough power to use in vehicles. However, she knew Vertibirds used combustible fuel, which must be a considerable supply bottleneck for the Brotherhood. She wondered where they were even sourcing it from. But, if she could increase the power output to at least 10MW without increasing the size by more than three or four times, it would be of equivalent horsepower and size to whatever gas turbine the Vertibirds were running. Nuclear-powered Vertibirds sounded cool as hell.

Maybe in the future. At a minimum, she had to loot the VSS building first and establish a bit of a name for herself. Otherwise, she'd be shuffled off as some no-name Initiate Scribe or given no freedom at all. Or worse, she would be "protected" as a valuable and upcoming source of technology, even if she didn't want to be.

She liked the goals of the Brotherhood under Elder Lyons but not so much the tech hoarding and xenophobia clannishness of the west coast Brotherhood or the Brotherhood Outcasts, although she suspected the schism hadn't occurred yet. But, she definitely wasn't about to give away her freedom. If she could approach them already in Power Armour, with novel technology of her own devising... power systems, human augmentation... she could write her own ticket at that point. Then, she wouldn't need to worry too much about being stifled or controlled as Scribes typically were and could negotiate a relationship where she could come and go as she pleased.

An Associate Scribe, perhaps?

She shook her head. She had been daydreaming. She was thinking about things fifteen or sixteen steps away when she was still struggling with step two. Still, she had made good progress. It had only been two weeks since Gary had shot her in the ass. She was more or less safe, wasn't starving or being raped to death by cannibals. That made her feel almost content.

She sat her pencil down, glanced at the PipBoys chronometer and stood up. She had three more textbooks to read, a shift in her clinic and a lesson on robotics with both Sophie and Scott before the day was over.

The robot girl almost knew as much as he did. Of course, it wasn't unusual for girls who were head over heels to become interested in the same things their boyfriends were, but she supposed that was unfair to assume. It was possible Sophie, the nanny, always had a deep interest in dismantling and rebuilding RobCo Protectrons.

Lily snickered before hitting the books.