Latrodectus mactans

The next day proceeded pretty well. She woke up after a full three-hour sleep cycle pleasantly cuddled up in the crook between Grace's arm and her bosom and just laid there for another full hour, relaxing. Truly being the shorter of two people was the best for cuddling purposes, as being held or laying on someone's chest was clearly superior. Being the little spoon was the best! Although the woman later snuck out before breakfast in her attempt to avoid any of the Brotherhood personnel, it was still an excellent way to start the day.

Then, the Brotherhood scribe attended both of the consultations. Typically, Lily would have used her scanner to take images of the patient's body to use as a model to construct a prosthesis. Still, she had been attempting to move into directions where she could duplicate some of its functionality so she would not be shut down in the case of its loss.

In this case, she used both. Primarily she used a wand-based millimetre wave radar system to scan the exterior shape of the patient's body. The wand had an accelerometer in it, and combined with software running that would be compatible with any Fallout mainframe, she produced a three-dimensional shape of the patient's body for use as a base to design a suitable prosthesis.

She had backed this up by covertly scanning them with her scanner when no one was looking, as well, just in case her programming was faulty. However, when she later compared the two shapes, she found that the wand method was accurate to at least the accuracy limit of the radar.

However, she had no Fallout equivalent of computer-aided design software, so that still had to be her proprietary secret for the moment. She also didn't want the Brotherhood to shake her down for her DMLS metal printing technology, at least until the Outcasts left, anyway, so she had couched the scan as a way to find the dimensions of the limb so that she could create it through traditional casting and machining techniques.

Talking with Ferguson, she discovered that the Brotherhood's usual method of linking nerves to an implant wasn't unusual to her, although she could see a number of ways to improve it. They hadn't figured out how to link a prosthesis into the patient's proprioceptive sense, so every cybernetic limb felt more or less like a missing limb even when they moved it around, rather than like a person's real limb. Nor had they figured out a way to link pressure-sensitive materials, even the crudest designs that used the piezoelectric effect, to the body's tactile sense. A person could move their prosthetic arm but not feel it at all. Nor could a person feel an item they picked up with a replacement hand. It was all very sub-optimal, and she suspected that a person would take a lot of training to get used to using a cybernetic limb like that. They might be better than wooden peg legs and a hook for a hand, but that was all she would say about the matter.

After the appointment and her discussions with Ferguson, Gary met her and gave her an abridged syllabus of what he thought a child should know in the Wasteland. She reviewed it briefly and then handed it back to him and nodded, "Zhat seems alright."

Gary blinked at her, "You don't have a problem with any of the subjects?"

That caused her to mentally review the listed elements, namely reading, writing, history, arithmetic, literature, firearms, hand-to-hand combat, orienteering, desert survival, home economics and basic science. It was listed that some of the classes would be irregular or combined with others and that the normal school day would be about four hours.

She shook her head, "It all seems fine to me." That caused Gary to grin slightly and nod.

However, he had one gripe, "One thing, the breadth of your digitised library, especially textbooks, is not bad but is there any way you can print individual books for the students? Reading on terminals is... not very good for learning. It's best if they can have something in their hands, you know? Especially something to take home with them since the school day will only be a half-day."

That, she made a face and shook her head firmly, "No. Paper is really 'ard to come by and quite expensive when it is available at all. 'owever, I will try to work on a potential solution, but don't expect anything for a few weeks."

More than ever, she was curious about the source of toilet paper that she had a standing order from the merchants for. In her mind, she had built mythology of an automated forest, a TP factory complete with replanting robots that were the stewards of the forest deep in the Earth's crust in an almost faerie-land setting.

She was worried that if she tried too hard to find it, it would disappear just like the mythical brownies that would clean your home so long as you never told anyone about them, and she couldn't live without it anymore.

She shook her head. It was better not to rock the boat in this area.

---xxxxxx---

The next few days proceeded well. Lily would have been ready to do her two patient surgeries that day but had to wait at least thirty-six hours or so to give verisimilitude to the story that she was constructing the limbs using machine tools in her basement.

It wasn't a ridiculous story, as from what she could tell from the machine tools the Mechanist stole from the Corvega factory, this was a possibility for the automated tools.

Ferguson was impressed with the processors she included in each limb that handled all the inputs and outputs and analogue to digital conversions, but the fact was the Fallout universe had similar processors already; even the ones included in Pip-Boys were a little bit superior to the ones she could make, even if their technology for memory was light years behind hers.

In fact, she was using the same traditional computer architecture and instruction set that the Pip-Boy processors had as she had stolen it. They were also similar to the processors installed in all but the most basic terminals, so they were actually ubiquitous in the Wasteland, and she suspected the Brotherhood could build them, too.

It seemed similar to the reduced instruction set chipsets she was familiar with working on in her jobs in America, to be honest. So, instead of trying to create a computer processor from the ground up like a madwoman, she had done the sensible thing and copied from RobCo, at least as far as Dr House's traditional computing technology was concerned.

He was also impressed with the idea of installing a dedicated port at the site of amputation, which featured a standard and modular connector. You then connected the limb to the port, and it was good to go. Did these barbarians just graft a bare metal limb to people's bodies with no standard interface? What happened when the limb inevitably needed maintenance? Or replacement or upgrade?

Truly, they were barbarians. She had written several journal articles about everything they had discussed. She had written each article carefully, ensuring that it was couched in technology and terms familiar to the Fallout universe and wouldn't need any of her advanced technology in order to duplicate the results. Well, they were structured as journal articles, not like there was anywhere to publish.

She was running up into two competing moral modes of thought. On the one hand, she did not particularly want to share her technology with the Brotherhood. This was because they were unreliable, feudalistic neo-barbs. However, what was stronger was her desire to improve the overall cybernetic state of the art of the world at large. Of course, she wanted to provide the best herself, but she almost couldn't stand not helping people with cybernetics.

According to what Ferguson had told her, there were dozens of people going around waving ghost hands around, probably punching themselves in the face as often as waving hello, or walking on ghost legs, tripping on their own metal feet.

She didn't even care that some of them were no doubt future Outcasts; it was still unacceptable. If she killed them later, then at least they would die while feeling the joy of being able to feel their cybernetic fingers flip her off as she killed them. One thing didn't have anything to do with the other, as far as she was concerned.

As such, she compromised and wrote articles that utilised only pre-existing technology that any savvy group in the Fallout universe would have access to. To be honest, she felt so strongly about this that she wanted to send copies to the Enclave, also, but the more sane part of her brain stopped her.

She was also curious about what would happen if she sent them via a courier to the north, addressed to the Commonwealth Institute of Technology. However, she was getting better at identifying clearly bad ideas as she made them. A common factor was that they were all driven by her curiosity, she noticed. While she didn't necessarily believe the things the Brotherhood had told her about this Institute, she would at least proceed on the basis that they were bad guys, at least for now.

Drat! She had totally forgotten to ask Grace about them. Somehow it had totally left her mind both during their meeting in her office and during their little dinner and a movie "date" later that evening.

The articles were titled: 'A Method of Utilising Accelerometers to Integrate a Cybernetic Prosthesis with the Proprioceptive Sense Through Direct Access to the CNS', 'A Method for Combining Pressure Sensitive Sensors and Computing For a Novel Haptic Perception in the CNS' and finally 'Repurposing RobCo Central Processing Units as a Low-Cost, Low-Power Solution for Cybernetic Limb Prosthesis: A Cost-Conscious Engineering Guide.'

She spent most of the day writing them, creating their graphs, figures and appendixes. She wrote them in the same style and format as the Pre-War academic papers she had already read from the data download she got from the hospital dealing with the PHOENIX system and Nemean armour, which were published in the classified Proceedings on the American Cybernetics Institute. Apparently, the entire publication was a classified document, which she found was more common than not. Academic journals were replaced by classified Government journals if the science discussed at all impacted the national defence.

And considering it was standard in Pre-War America to classify things as innocuous as total corn crop yields as Strategically Important Information, it meant that more than seventy-five per cent of Academia was captured, as if they said anything at all against the government, they would lose their security clearance and therefore be unable to read, much less publish, anything in their field of speciality. Some of the things she read suggested that some were even detained indefinitely for the unauthorised possession of classified information, that is to say, in their minds. It wasn't a criminal charge, so they weren't entitled to due process because all they had to do was surrender the classified information they weren't authorised to possess and they'd be let go. Now that's what she called a Catch-22!

She thought she was wasting time spending so much time writing the articles, but the part of her that grew up in America thought it was completely ridiculous that she was writing three post-doctoral academic articles in a single day. It was odd for her to have such an odd disassociative feeling, as most of her didn't think it was odd, no more than it would be odd to write three high school book reports on novels she had read a hundred times before. They were on the same level of complexity, after all.

The feeling passed, and she shrugged. She almost never got a disagreement in her memories anymore, and even this one barely lasted any time at all. It was more like a feeling of deja-vu than anything. Academic articles took so long to write because of the research necessary needed to conduct them, which was already done here.

The fact that she wanted to give these to the Brotherhood just so they would stop butchering people did not mean, however, that she didn't want to be compensated for it. They didn't know her proclivities in wanting to spread knowledge of cybernetic augmentations far and wide, after all. They'd see the value, and she would ask for suitable compensation in knowledge, like for like.

Before the surgery that Ferguson would be assisting on, she let the man read the summaries, and he got excited, "You really wrote these? And it goes into depth about the methodology and how to replicate and reproduce your findings?"

Lily nodded, "And includes all appendices, such as zhe microcontroller code for the in-limb processor for all of zhe examples. If you want these, then I want something in exchange. Zhat means your trades probably can't be in zhis field because, no offence, I don't zhink I would learn much. It 'as to be something I don't know. It doesn't need to be what your group might consider sensitive knowledge, either. It could be something as simple as low-water hydroponics techniques, zhe method to synthesise Rad-X or RadAway, zhe location of a seed vault zhat is preferably closer than the one in Spitsbergen or similar innocuous but interesting items."

Ferguson nodded slowly, "Yeah, okay. If you don't mind, let me take the full papers back, and then I'll send you a list of titles and summaries, and you can pick three if you trust me. I'll have to get this signed off by the Head Scribe, but it won't be a problem." He paused and asked, "Spitsbergen?"

Lily had no idea if this was true in the Fallout universe, as it was made in her universe in the 1990s, she thought, but she would proceed on the basis that it was true because how could they verify it in any case? "Zhe Svalbard Global Seed and Genetic 'eritage Vault is on zhe island of Spitsbergen in Norway. It is a repository for all of zhe planet's common plants and seeds and many of zhe uncommon ones. And tissue samples from many animals, too. Designed to 'elp in zhe event of a global catastrophe."

She wanted to get a number of plants, especially grasses and weeds, and hopefully alter them not just to be resistant to radiation, which was more or less straightforward, but for the larger varieties like trees to absorb and then sequester radiation from the water safely in the ground somehow.

That would be more challenging, but there were a number of ways it might be possible. If a plant could concentrate all its absorbed radionuclides in one place and then surround them with some robust sap or similar non-water soluble substance, it would take those radionuclides out of the water and rain cycle. Over time, years perhaps, it would clean and purify the water over a large area. Sure, there would be slightly radioactive pellets buried in the ground, but that was better than them being in drinking water or rain, right?

She could always go to Oasis for samples of trees, but she was very hesitant about using those mutated trees that might have an incipient hivemind awareness in them. Would they work the same when they were away from Bob and Harold? It was much better, from her perspective, to start with a clean slate when working on genetic alterations to a species. She would call dealing with what might be a human-tree mutant chimaera plan Z.

He nodded in understanding then, "Ah, I had heard about similar projects. Honestly, I have heard about similar projects here in America. I will look them up; there very well might be a government vault like that somewhere nearby on the east coast."

They did both surgeries back to back, and it was pretty simple. Even though she liked to keep her knife hand strong, for his benefit, she did as much as she could with the Auto-Doc as that would make it very repeatable. She noticed him watching her program the machine carefully and told him that he could have a copy of the programs if he wanted.

"Take zhe patient to post-op room two, please," she told the Labourtron orderly, who waved a manipulator as it was programmed before rolling the patient out of the OR.

"How did you get such useful programs for those RobCo Tron bots?" Ferguson asked, shaking his head.

"Zhat, I'm afraid, is confidential. But, 'onestly, I don't zhink I did anything anyone else couldn't do, if zhey were also an anal retentive detail freak. You basically just start with creating small tasks, and build from zhere and you don't stop. Even today, I try to create at least a couple of new zhings for them to do a day if I can find zhe time," Lily said while shaking her head. It was mostly true, except that her interface for creating the finite state machine tasks was orders of magnitude easier to use than programming a Labourtron manually on a terminal. They were still mostly the same thing, though.

"Ugh," he said with the tone of somebody who had clearly programmed a Protectron or Labourtron at least once.

They went in together and installed the prosthesis on the patient's ports, and Lily allowed Ferguson to conduct his own standardized post-operative protocol, "Amazing. They use their prosthesis better than people have had one of ours for years. And an excellent job on the artistic features, they almost look like their own limb, just metal."

Lily hummed and nodded noncomittally. She wasn't entirely pleased with the results. She had to sandbag a fair bit since the Scribe was watching the entire process. They were still very functional, full featured and useful limbs, she was sure but it was like a Vermeer doing a work with finger paints or crayons. She intended to refund half of the the charge to the two patients and call it some kind of promotion or something. Her sense of artistry wasn't satisfied at all.

She waved off any more discussion with Ferguson, and ambled down into her lair in the basement. She wasn't depressed, as she didn't really get depressed, but it was kind of like the feeling you get when you have an itch but can't quite scratch it. Unsatisfying.

She walked over to her tank of eels, who started getting agitated when they saw her, "Did you not get breakfast?" she asked them, then checked their current feeding scheduled and decded that they could use a little treat.

Then she walked over to her large terrarium and checked on her black widows. They too seemed to be interested to see her. A half dozen came out to see her, which was unusual, "Ohhh... did you miss mommy?" she asked them.

When she first came to this world she thought the first cybernetic implant she would make would be a subdermal armour based on graphene nanotubes, however that didn't work out at all. Nanotubes were way too thin, it wasn't quite a molecular cheese grater but it turned out that putting them under the skin, even if you made the finest of nets it would do damage to you just to push on your skin. The nanotubes would slice into you tissue no matter how fine you made the fabric they were constructed into, it seemed like.

That was a shame, because subdermal armour was something she desperately wanted. So, she had begun the longer research project to replicate it one way she knew would work, the same way she remembered from her past life, which was a complete biological implant that incorporated spider silk in a similar ballistic netting underneath a biomorph's skin.

She opened the terrarium and fished a few of the females out and let them play on her hand. She was in the stage where she was using genetic alterations to these spiders to increase the strength of their silk. It was already one of the strongest silks, with the exception of the Darwin bark spider which wasn't native around here, but there was still a lot of room for improvement.

She also didn't kill these girls, like she did the eels, as they were more like pets. Normally black widows didn't reproduce but once a year, perhaps, but she had ways to increase that to about once a month with the right hormones and nutritional supplements, individually given. She was already on the second generation, here. After she altered the spiderlings in vitro, she would take them to one of the houses she had bought and release them, and would allow nature to take its course. Later, she would pick several of the liveliest looking females to take back home both to be her pets and to be the mothers of the next generation. She thinks she could have a good quality silk either in this next third generation, or at the most one more.

At that point, her project will become more difficult, as Vector Mk1 is insufficient to carry that much information, so she will have to shift research goals to improve it first before she can work on the armour bioware.

Suddenly, she, and the spiders on her hand were all startled by her Apprentice's shriek. It startled one of the little ones so much that it bit her. She spoke to it soothingly, "Zhere, zhere..." before putting her hand back in the large terrarium so they could hop off her hand. She glanced at the Apprentice and said, "You scared her into biting me. Why did you scream so loud?"

The Apprentice looked upset, "They're black widows! They are poisonous! Oh, she bit you! Where is the antivenom? Are you going to be okay? It's a neurotoxin, isn't it?"

Lily sighed and shook her head, "First, zhis may sound pedantic but zhey are venemous. The distinction is, I assure you, important if you're zhe spider. Also, spiders are very shy, and zhey don't want to 'urt anybody, Alice." She said, using the girl's name, which wasn't something she often did. Her Master almost never called her by her name, so she figured that was the correct way to handle things when raising an Apprentice.

She wasn't upset with her, it was more like she liked sharing some of her interests with the Apprentice, "Zhey just want to live their lives in their home and not be bothered too much, yes? Also, females can choose whether or not to inject venom. And venom is very precious to a spider. Zhey probably won't use it unless you try to squish zhem. Zhat was just a warning bite from zhe little one."

She paused before admitting, "Plus, our medichines are pretty good at neutralizing most neurotoxins, so long as zhe dose is not exceptionally massive."

The Apprentice stared at her with a weird expression on her face, "You really like spiders, don't you, Mistress? I thought you were just keeping them for some weird science reason." Well, she was! But she didn't consider those things mutually exclusive.

She rubbed the back of her neck, and chuckled, "I suppose. I mainly feel a kinship for zhem, I suppose. An understanding, yes? Do you want to hold one? So long as you don't scream at her like you did, she probably won't bite you."

The Apprentice looked unsure, but then nodded and walked over closer.

Lily hummed and reached inside the terrarium, searching for a particular female. Finding her, she fished her out on her finger before setting her on the back of the Apprentice's hand. "'ere, this one, she is the friendliest of all of them. She is my favourite."

Alice blinked, "You can recognize them? What did you name this one, then?"

Lily looked at the girl like she was stupid, "Aleph-Three." She was a first generation of altered spiderlings specimen, and the third spider she chose to return home. Did Alice expect her to pick real names for all of them, or something?

Apparently she did, because the Apprentice had that expression that indicated she disapproved of something she was doing. "Dr St. Claire! You have to at least name your favourite! She can't just have a designation like the eels."

She tried to think of an appropriate name for her favourite with a annoyed hiss. After a moment she nodded and then said, "Fine. Her name is Alice."

Wait, why is the Apprentice crying? "Apprentice! Why are you crying? Be careful, you will scare her!"

"Ow! She bit me!" the Apprentice yelled.

Lily sighed and carefully transferred Alice the Spider back into the Terrarium before Alice the Apprentice accidentally squished her or something.