Dem Bones

Lily was humming the 'Dancing Bones, Skeleton Dance' song as she was carefully working the controls for a series of dozens of very fine armatures, tiny little mechanized arms with treble joints and numerous tiny blades, hemostats, suction tools, syringes, microsutures and other surgical tools installed. These arms were installed on either side of the gurney that Lily was lying in, her fingers gracefully manipulating tiny joysticks, buttons and dials that were built into remote controls.

The kids had long ago separated the large basement into more private areas with dividers made of simple tarps and cloth, which gave Lily the privacy necessary to complete this latest step on her path towards apotheosis without being bothered by the gremlins.

The Apprentice's voice was unexpected, but it didn't startle her because she was focusing too much on the task at hand, "Dr St. Claire, what should I pack for our trip Frid---what the fuck!?"

Lily didn't bother to look up, as she was wearing a pair of somewhat crude-looking virtual-reality goggles that appeared to be made from a small television. She still wasn't able to fabricate CRT or LCD displays quite yet, but many scavenged small displays had sufficient resolution to be used for her purposes; it was just a shame they were so heavy and clunky looking, she thought. However, she did raise her voice, "Apprentice! Language, please. Nobody respects foul-mouthed little ladies. And we will go over your gear this evening, don't wor-ree."

Alice was quiet for what seemed like a long time to Lily. She would have looked up to check if the girl was still there if she wasn't wearing the goggles, but finally, the girl asked cautiously, "Uh... Mistress... what exactly are you doing?"

Lily narrowed her eyes slightly behind her goggles, 'Wasn't it obvious? Sometimes, this girl...' She sighed audibly, "I am replacing my skeleton with a specially built diamond and carbon prosthesis. It features an exterior of special bio-active carbon fibres that allows complete unification with the organic connective tissue that previously interfaced with the skeletal structure." Servos whirred as mechanical arms with tools dipped in and out of Lily's surgical theatre before she asked, "Pop quiz, what are the names of the bones I am replacing right now and what is the name of the connective tissue in these forceps?"

One of the forceps that was holding a bit of tissue taut wiggled slightly.

The voice of the Apprentice was incredulous, "Your... WHOLE SKELLINGTON?" But then she paused before saying, "Uhh... that looks like the calcaneal tendon, also known as the Achilles' tendon. And those appear to be your calcaneus and talus bones, which form the .. uhh.. ankle joint?"

Lily corrected the girl quickly, "Talocalcaneal joint, please. The ankle comprises three joints, so don't just say ankle joint, Apprentice. Which movements does the talocalcaneal joint mechanically permit, and 'ow would you improve this structure without hampering the normal range of movement one would expect from this joint?"

There were a lot of Umms from the Apprentice girl before she paused to think about it, "Umm... is it the moving the foot to the left and right? And I'm not sure. Maybe it could be made into a ball joint if the material was sufficiently strong? But wouldn't that potentially cause tears in the tendons if you had a greater range of movement?"

The dozens of mechanical arms stopped moving briefly as if Lily was considering the girl's answer, "'Alf credit. The movement is called inversion, which allows you to tilt the foot towards or away from the centre of the body, but that is to the left and right, I suppose. Good. And yes, mechanically, ball joints do provide some of the most flexibility, but as to whether that is an improvement or not? Hmm, yes, so long as you're dealing with normal connective tissue, you will be mostly limited to standard movements."

Lily finished with a slightly more disapproving tone, "Also, always approach the first step to improving a bodily structure from the perspective of mitigating its most obvious failure modes that we already know of through the study of trauma and illness, rather than necessarily adding additional features. We, as doctors, have a vast trove of experience to draw from where the body fails us; we shouldn't throw that away."

In an exasperated tone, Alice asked, "Doesn't that hurt?!"

"No, I'm using my medichines to turn off my sense of pain, in effect blocking all nociceptors from communicating through my CNS. 'Owever, other senses remain, so it is somewhat uncomfortable as bones are innervated with sensory neurons in the periosteal layer, at least until I disconnect them, anyway. And, to answer your earlier question, no, not my entire," Lily coughed delicately, "skellington."

The doctor paused as the spindly little tools accelerated into a particularly tricky microstructure, before continuing, still in lecture mode, "Only my feet to my femurs; I've already finished the left side. Why might I stop there? Consider the bodily processes involved with bones, Apprentice."

Alice had moved closer to observe whatever her insane teacher was doing, 'I thought she was just being eccentric when she talked about replacing her bones in the past. Uh... why would she stop with just a third of her body?' "Because there is no way to replace your skull and spine without killing yourself?"

Lily made a game show buzzer sound, "Bzzzt! Wrong! Try again! The 'ardest part about replacing my skull is doing it so I won't have to sacrifice my 'air in the process, which I've become somewhat attached to. But the skull is the most complicated set of bones to replace, yes, so good job realizing that."

The red-headed apprentice doctor stopped to consider what she's learned about bones, 'Wait, what is bone cancer? Isn't that when the bone marrow develops malignant cells?'

Finally, Alice answered confidently, "Your diamond bones don't have bone marrow in them, do they?"

This time Lily made a different sound effect, "Bing bing bing! Correct! Bone marrow is responsible for the production of multipotential stem cells called 'emocytoblasts. You need these to stay alive, Apprentice! These stem cells differentiate into many vital cells from monocytes, which is to say normal blood cells, to about a 'alf dozen different cells involved in the body's immune response."

Alice's concerned response made Lily happy, "Are you going to die?! Don't you need all the bone marrow to produce blood cells? People can get sick if even a little bit of it is malfunctioning!"

Lily gave the girl a reassuring smile, but with her steam-punk VR goggles, it looked more mad sciencey than ever, "Ahaha, don't worry, my dear Apprentice. I've used a 'ormone therapy injected into my remaining bone marrow in several places to supercharge its production of monocytes and platelets. I'm less concerned about the killer cells and the T cells and other immune system cells because they're terrible anyway, but you needn't worry! I won't run out of oxygenating blood cells any time soon! And my remaining bone marrow can last months at this rate of production rate before the strain starts causing irreversible damage to the tissue."

Alice did not even bother to mention that her teacher seemed to imply that she would burn out her bone marrow in only a few months because she could already imagine the response being something along the lines of, 'Foolish Apprentice, I won't need mere bone marrow then!' Instead, she asked cautiously, "You know how you said you wanted me to undergo surgery before we left on our trip? Are you planning on fileting me like that eel we had for dinner and yanking my skellington out? Because if so, I think I'll stay in the basement."

Lily smirked, "Your... skellington... is safe, Apprentice. Didn't we already discuss no radical changes until you finish maturing? I'll be installing a medichine factory, also known as a nanohive, in your body. They are programmed to 'eal trauma and fight illness automatically and are the base amount of protection you need to survive in the wasteland, in my opinion. It might not save you if you get shot directly in the brain or 'eart, but you stand a good chance of living through the experience anywhere else. Now, if you don't mind, these small foot bones and the related connected tissue are fairly complicated. We can talk later when I am finished."

Seeing that as a dismissal that it was, Alice nodded before leaving the area of the basement that had been tarped off as Lily's bedroom.

Lily returned to humming and even sang a few bars, "🎶 Dem bones, dem bones, dem metatarsal bones... 🎶"

---

Friday came quickly, with Alice's surgery proceeding without any real difficulty on Wednesday. However, the location Lily chose to install the nanohive was a temporary one, near the girl's stomach, which was kind of problematic as she had to graft a brand new artery and veinous connection to not only power the mechanical device but also give the nanohive instant access to the cardiovascular system for rapid deployment in and around the body.

Although, StimPaks really made it simple to steal veins and arteries from other locations on the body and immediately grow them back; so the problems were easily solved.

Lily checked the girl's equipment last evening and found she had done a fair job at packing. Alice was wearing a customized set of body armour where Lily had replaced all the kevlar for graphene and all the ballistic trauma plates with diamondoid equivalents so that it was twice as effective at half or less the weight. Lily was wearing a similar set of combat armour over her normal off-white engineering field bodysuit, and they both had identical helmets with flip-down diamond glass plates that Lily had modelled somewhat after the VaultTec riot helmet.

Alice carried Lily's old M4 carbine, as Lily had shifted to using the laser rifle she had begun customizing as her personal weapon. Lily replaced the entire frame with a lighter grey carbon fibre replacement, and she upgraded the laser rifle's output coupler.

She had hoped to reach the higher energy invisible UV wavelengths, but the components inside the rifle made this impossible. Still, she was able to shift the light spectrum up to at least the visible blue wavelength, though, which should still offer an over 15% increase in effective energy delivered to a target, so she felt that her efforts weren't wasted.

Lily asked the younger girl, "Alright, you ready?" Alice nodded, so they started their hike to the northwest. She had gotten Vault 101's exact location from Mr Tombs, although he had told her she was wasting her time.

While she still did not have a floating Mr Handy corpse to carry all of her heavy bags, she had found a man who was selling an old and outdated, even before the bombs dropped, walking mule bot. She had paid five hundred caps for it and couldn't tell if she got a bargain or got ripped off.

It couldn't carry as much as the jury-rigged Mr Handy could and wasn't much more intelligent than it either. It reminded Lily of those walking dog robots from Boston Dynamics in her previous life, except three times as large. Still, for lack of other options, it made walking bearable.

They encountered no raiders on the way to Vault 101, but they did run into two giant radscorpions. Lily made Alice engage them at long range to give her a controlled taste of combat, even if it was against monsters and not people. She had to admit she found it funny when, after the girl was only able to put down one and injure the other, she started shrieking and running away when the scorpion was barely ten meters from her. Lily quickly burned it down with several blue beams of light before it got close to the Apprentice.

Honestly, Lily would have probably reacted the same way the first day she was here if she had found one of those big bastards.

More than two-thirds of the way to the location marked as the Vault on her PipBoy a flitting movement in her peripheral vision caused her to skid to a halt in a low crouch, with the Apprentice almost colliding with her but managing to get into a crouch herself.

Lily scanned to the left, where she saw the movement, with her dark grey laser rifle held in a high-ready position. It didn't take her too long to spot the monstrosity, at about their eleven o'clock position hovering above a mostly evaporated pond. Something in the back of her head told her the thing was familiar to her, but she knew she had never seen anything like this in her life, nor was such a monster in the Fallout games she played.

It was about the size of a medium breed dog but looked like a cross between a bloat fly, a wasp and a dragonfly, with four dragonfly-style wings that she could only see when it occasionally lit upon a surface and stopped hovering briefly. Lily was sure it had wasp as a significant genetic contributor because the thing clearly had murder on its mind.

She thought she recognized a couple of genetic contributors, but Lily wasn't naive as to think wasps or any of the others were actually ancestors to this thing. She was instantly aware there was no method by which such a monstrosity, even assuming rampant radiation or FEV., could occur in nature.

It just wasn't possible to take a small arthropod like a wasp and scale it up to such a ridiculous size without significantly redesigning several internal bodily processes. She was absolutely certain that this thing was a genetically engineered abomination of some variety. A Pre-War bioweapon? It certainly looked scary enough.

"Eleven o'clock, fifty to sixty meters. On the lake," whispered Lily, so the Apprentice would turn and point her gun in the proper direction. When Alice asked if she should shoot it, Lily hissed at the Apprentice, "Do you have a death wish?! We're giving that winged horror a wide berth." Although Lily quite wanted to get a tissue sample, the same back of her head feeling of familiarity with the monster was telling her that they were a potentially existential threat. They detoured a half kilometre around the pond it was flitting around while it just continued to do giant wasp things, likely killing puppies or whatevery they did for fun.

That thing definitely had a lot of wasp in it. That was wasp 'tude.

On the walk, Lily taught Alice a little outdoorsmanship and orienteering, beginning with the same shadow north-finding trick with a stick.

After getting to the general area, according to her PipBoy, it took a half hour of searching to find the actual cave entrance for the Vault, "Okay, they shouldn't 'ave any automated guns or anything on the Vault. Chances are they're just going to tell us to fuck off or try to ignore us, but if you see the Vault door open, retreat to the front of the cave and wait for me there, okay?"

Alice nodded her understanding. They left the mulebot at the front of the cave and ventured deeper in. There was a swarm of radroaches that attacked them at a blind turn. There was a girl shrieking, lasers blasting and gunshots going off for a good half minute before the last one died.

Lily managed to get through the situation without being bit, but one of the roaches bit Alice on the hand, which already looked red and was slightly swollen. Lily clucked her tongue; they were supposed to be slightly venomous, weren't they?

Lily brought her scanner out and took a brief scan of a number of the more in-tact roaches, followed by a detailed scan of Alice's injured hand. Lily hummed in thought, 'Seems like there are some caustic alkalines associated with the saliva, so not quite a poison.'

"You'll be fine. Your medichines are already massed in your 'and; you might have a rash for an 'our. These roaches are quite fascinating, though," Lily told the girl.

Alice squinched up her nose, "Quite terrifying, I'd say! And gross!"

Lily snorted, "Put on your big girl panties; I have it on good authority that a ten-year-old can kill those things with a BB gun. Alright, the Vault is up here; I can see it."

They walked up to the Vault door control, which Lily stood in front of. Lily thought that they would likely just ignore her if she pressed the call button, so instead, she pulled out the data line from her PipBoy and plugged it into the panel. If there was no response from the security area, this would trigger the Vault door to open, but instead, the speaker buzzed to life, "What? Who is that? Vault 108? We don't care; take a hike!"

Lily said pleasantly into the speaker, "Ah, yes, Monsieur, I'll definitely be doing that, but only if you'll do me the favour of telling me the precise date and time, first? My PipBoy's real-time clock had to be reset, and I really need to know."

There was a pause before the male voice came back, "It's December 25th, 2402, 22:02. Now go away!"

Lily narrowed her eyes, "Ho Ho Ho. If you don't want me to start singing Christmas Carols until you submit, I suggest you answer my simple question and get me out of your hair. I know it is in the mid 2270s, by the way."

There was silence, so Lily sighed and did as she threatened. She knew quite a few Christmas Carols, so she sang one. She was pretty sure that they could not mute her speaker so long as she kept her PipBoy connected to the terminal.

About halfway through the first song, the male voice returned with, "Wait, wait, wait..."

Lily frowned, was her singing voice that terrible? She thought she would have to really annoy them for over an hour or two.

The man's voice was more reasonable now, "We've never heard that carol before. Suppose you start it over from the beginning and sing another one after it; now that I have the holotape recording, I'll tell you the current date and time in exchange. Then you gotta get the hell out before the Overseer finds out and puts his boot up my ass for talking to an outsider, okay?"

Smiling, Lily said, "You got yourself a deal. Tell me when you want me to start."

The male voice did a countdown, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1..."

Lily began the carol again and tried actually to sing it well instead of annoyingly. She finished it after several minutes and started another one right away.

She paused for a long moment after the second song, but then asked, "So what time is it?"

There was a long pause, and then he said, "At the beep, the current time is exactly July 17th, 2274, 10:52 ... beep." He just said beep; he didn't even try to make the sound effect.

Lily, who already had her PipBoy ready to set the time, quickly dialled in the correct date and time in. At least, she knew more or less how much time she had until the plot of Fallout 3 started. Slightly more than two years.

Lily didn't bother to say goodbye. She didn't want to deal with the Vault until the Lone Wanderer was already wandering, especially considering the Overseer was crazy. She just unplugged her PipBoy and nodded at Alice, "Let's go."