Full of empathy! I am so smart!

Several days later, Lily had begun to establish a good constellation with periodic coverage of many parts of North America. With each satellite weighing around three hundred kilograms, they were mostly used for communications and considered small from her memories of America.

They were powered by efficient solar panels that folded out like origami when the satellites were deployed. Nevertheless, each had a small earth-observing optical sensor, but the resolution was terrible. If you looked closely, maybe you could see the difference between a truck and a tank, but human-sized targets didn't show up, or if they did, they were about the size of one or two pixels.

It couldn't even be compared to the images she had in her old world on Google Earth, but she still hoped there would be coverage over most of the land on the planet and that it would one day be continuous and real-time. The number of survivors and the sites where the most technology was still around would be great information to know. At night, artificial light couldn't be hidden.

The satellites would be Mesh-relays in addition to what Lily was calling legacy gateways. For example, someone would be able to communicate with one using regular, unencrypted analogue radio technology, and the satellite constellation could communicate back in these legacy protocols as well. The main transmitters the satellites had were Ku-band and Ka-band, high-bandwidth radio, as well as ultra-high-bandwidth optical laser data links for intra-satellite communication; however, each one included a number of relatively small antennas for all the popularly used radio spectrums that Lily knew about.

A person could aim a radio transmitter just vaguely up at the sky and likely hit one of her birds, and once the constellation was of a size, the network would know precisely the location of the transmitter and could reply back accurately. It probably wouldn't be the same satellite that received the initial message that replied back, but from the end-user perspective on the ground, that wouldn't matter.

They wouldn't need to follow a particular satellite's orbit or move their transceiver for general legacy transmissions. Only high-bandwidth digital datalinks would require such precision, and she would either have to make all of those terminals herself or publish blueprints and diagrams, including source code, for others to make them if they wanted to connect to her digital network. It would depend on the state of civilisation, as she found it.

When she had estimated how long it would take the residents of Tranquility Lane to regain lucidity and how long it would take for both medichines to repair the residents' brains, she returned to Megaton after setting things back on track at Vault 112, leaving a number of her soldiers and Brotherhood Paladins to guard the site. Finally, they had found some Scribes to design and supervise the construction, but Lily had to bring in general labour from Megaton.

That general labour, however, she had to divert from her own construction projects. It was like squeezing one of those long balloons clowns used to create balloon animals; she could get some more resources in one place but only by squeezing them out of a different location. It had all the hallmarks of a boom economy, similar to historical examples of gold rush towns, although the only precious metals being unearthed were from her and Monsieur Miller's vaults.

Well, and the Brotherhood. They had hired Miller's bank to turn some gold bullion into coins. Lily privately thought that the Brotherhood had more wealth than she or Miller combined. Lily didn't propagate official exchange rates for different metal commodities used as currency, as people were free to do what they wanted, but she did publicly state that, for the moment, the city of Megaton would consider gold to be worth fifty times the value of silver of the same weight, and people were happy enough to use her suggestion, for now.

That couldn't last, though; setting an exchange rate by fiat was asking to be arbitraged until her eyes bled as soon as traders discovered some different polity using similar coins but of differing values somewhere else. Kind of like what she was intending to do to bottlecaps, actually, using them to buy goods from long-range traders who would accept their value at "face value" when they were slowly losing value in Megaton.

The unemployment rate was also inching closer to zero, and Lily had to be quite careful with the compensation she was offering to her workers. She could afford to pay her workers, while not anything, vastly more than most of the other employers in the city. However, if she did so, she could easily price the other employers out of the market, which would only create rapid inflation, which was something she didn't want to see.

Inflation was almost a psychological problem as much as it was a "pure" economic problem. It was proven that increasing the compensation of employees on a wide scale in a small market would directly impact inflation, but you could "trick" it, at least a little, by increasing the "total compensation" of the employees without actually changing the amount of money they had to spend in the economy too much.

Honestly, just providing nearly free water and cheap bread had a significant inflationary effect because people no longer had to spend a considerable amount of the money they made every day on clean water just to survive, but there was no way she was going to stop that.

She vastly preferred to compensate people in straight currency rather than add these types of perks, like paid lunch and unlimited purified water (within reason) for her employees, but need's must, at least for now.

Her proposed punitive taxes on both empty lots and disused buildings was paying some dividends, although it was a constant source of contention between her new government and the richest people in town. In fact, it was hitting herself and Monsieur Tombs hard, too, because they both owned a lot of pieces of property that they hadn't been able to find a productive use for yet. However, it had a direct impact on the amount of housing available in the city, increasing month over a month an expected ten per cent.

As such, she had reopened the city to immigration, although she wasn't being egalitarian about it at all. Prospective immigrants had to pass both a literacy test and a simple IQ test, although she didn't call it that. That, and they had to be not known to be criminals or raiders. If all of those were true, they were admitted as citizens and the city paid for several months of housing while they got on their feet. She did this in bits and spurts every time new housing came on the market, as such housing was one of the simplest methods people could use to put their properties to "productive use." It was a "build it, and they will come, guaranteed" situation.

She had noticed that the Brotherhood Scribes she occasionally saw in Megaton or working at Vault 112 were quite busy, but she thought they seemed very happy, too. Apparently, they approved of all of the new building and construction projects that the Brotherhood was accomplishing. That made sense if you made that your life's speciality and then rarely got to actually utilise it, except for maybe when they brought you in to make a ruined building temporarily safe while they looted it.

An alert caused Lily to pause working on a series of finite state machine tasks that would result in almost completely automated satellite production in order to tilt her head to the side. She had connected both Vault 112's ThinkMachine mainframe and its simulation supercomputer cluster to her Mesh so she could monitor the Vault and, more importantly, the inhabitants of Tranquility Lane.

Something had occurred to trigger some of the alarms she had left in place on the simulation. It looked like the population of the town of Tranquility Lane was waking up. Lily hummed and mentally asked a number of questions to the NPCs she had left in charge of overseeing the simulation and realised that they had already woken up at least as of yesterday, but they were all quite cautious. Not surprisingly, she thought. But now, they were gathering together at the Tranquility Lane city hall, demanding to speak to whoever was in charge.

How interesting. It must have taken them a day or so to get their courage up, most probably thinking this was some new way to torture them all. Honestly, Lily would have waited more than a single day herself, so she has nothing but platitudes for their bravery.

Pausing the three robots that were in her workroom testing another version of the task she made for satellite construction, she hummed and minimised her development environment and then leaned back in her comfortable chair and triggered a wireless connection to Tranquility Lane.

The latency was slightly noticeable but not really that bad. She rezzed into being inside the simulation, floating a thousand feet above the town. Glancing down at her avatar, she frowned. She was wearing Braun's Betty avatar, which was the default superuser avatar. She couldn't meet them like that.

Luckily she had a number of both three-dimensional models and photographs of her own body, which she uploaded to the server using the clunky admin interface. She would have thought if Braun had two hundred years to just play around that, he would have improved the behind-the-scenes user interface for this system, but he hadn't. Had connecting himself permanently to this simulation damaged his brain or something?

Her avatar refreshed, and now she was just naked. Sighing, she spent a few more minutes importing some clothes, deciding to copy the very first outfit she wore when she arrived in this world, with the addition of a white lab coat on top since that engineering field suit she had long ago recycled was kind of form-fitting.

She had a number of things prepared for this interaction, although she was still determining what she would need or if she would even need any of it.

The NPCs, including the portly-looking "mayor" of the town, suddenly froze in the middle of trying to explain that they didn't know what the crowd of people were talking about. Even the birds flying through the air froze in mid-glide, causing the gathering of people to glance around, left and right, and then begin speaking to each other in hushed whispers.

Sighing, Lily really hated being the centre of attention, but she supposed there was just no helping it this time. She fell from the sky, lab coat rustling cinematically until she did a superheroine-style landing directly in front of the crowd of people, next to where the mayor was frozen with his hand outstretched and his mouth wide-open mid-syllable. Glancing at him, he and a number of the other NPCs that were in her way derezzed and vanished.

Standing up, she held out a hand, "Yo."

Yes! That was a cool entrance! That was an absolutely cool entrance! She pushed up some completely decorative virtual glasses up her nose and smiled, pleased with her efforts.

Instantly, there was a cacophony of people yelling and talking, and already it was giving her a headache. She should have expected that, perhaps. She popped open one of the non-intuitive simulation interfaces and clicked a few buttons. Suddenly, there was silence; she shut off everyone's ability to actually speak.

Rubbing the back of her neck, she shook her head and said, "OK, OK... enough of zhat. I'm not zhe best with zhe social interaction, yes? So, I obviously can't respond to all of you haranguing me at once. So, figure out betwixt yourselves who you nominate to speak for you, maybe two or zhree people, and I'll talk to zhem, and zhe rest can listen, OK?" She flipped another switch to give them the ability to speak again and casually sat down in a chair that appeared out of nowhere while they spoke amongst themselves, pulling up her development environment again to work on what she had paused for this discussion.

The ability to pause and restart her work at seemingly random points without spending a lot of time remembering what she was working on and at what point her thought process was really a superpower just as powerful as flying through the air, she thought.

After about five minutes of discussing it amongst themselves, which Lily specifically tried to avoid listening to, three people separated from the rest of the mob and walked up towards her. One was a man in a janitor's outfit, one was a little girl in a flower dress, and one was an old woman. Her superuser access identified the little girl as the Postmaster General, the old woman as a former University professor and the janitor as one of the doctors. Interestingly, the Postmaster General and doctor were both shifted to the opposite sex as their body in real life.

From the records Braun kept, he mostly kept people of the same gender, except for people he hated or people who became problematic because they remembered things after being memory-wiped. Those, he often did a number of things to punish and changing the sex of their avatar was a pretty common way to fuck with them, especially if they were men in real life. Childish, really.

Glancing up at the three people approaching her, she stood up, and the chair underneath her vanished. The little girl seemed to be the leader, which was an obvious sign that she had her memories back. She didn't look outright hostile, but she did have a suspicious little girl face which Lily thought was very cute, but she decided to keep that to herself. The little girl said, "So, how's this going to work, then?"

Lily shrugged and said, "You ask questions; I'll answer them, I suppose. You guys do 'ave some decisions you 'ave to make, but zhat can wait until you've exhausted zhe questions you have for me."

The little girl nodded and glanced at the janitor. She supposed they were alternating question-asking, which was quite social of them. The janitor asked, "Who are you?"

Lily shoved her pretend glasses farther up on her nose and said simply, "I am Doctor Lilliane St. Claire, at your service. Scientist, medical doctor, adventuress, and, more recently, warlord." The janitor looked like he wanted to ask a follow-up question at that, but the grandma elbowed him in the ribs.

He sighed and nodded, and the grandma said, "This might be a waste of my question, but to make sure absolutely everyone is on the same page can you tell us where we are and how you got here?"

Lily hummed and nodded, "Right now, we are in a virtual reality simulation inside Vault 112, a little bit west of Washington, DC. I got here by searching it out, using pre-war records, to hopefully discover information on a technology invented by one of the residents, a Dr Stanislaus Braun." As soon as Lily said that name, a bunch of people basically growled, especially the three in front of her.

The little girl growled out, "Where is that bastard? What happened to him?"

Lily nodded, "Well, when I arrived 'ere, I discovered what he was doing, and some crimes just can't be tolerated. I shot him, and he's dead."

"Really dead, are you sure?" the littlest Postmaster asked, but nobody seemed to care that she asked an additional question, and they were almost holding their breaths.

Lily nodded, "Yes. I don't mean I shot him in the simulation. I mean, I pulled him out of his Tranquility Lounger, which is what the pods your real bodies are in, and shot him in zhe head. Here, watch." Then she waved a hand, and a giant image appeared in the sky, larger than the largest drive-in movie screen.

The video wasn't long; Lily didn't want them to see the whole section of her interrogating Braun's AI. All that was shown was her yelling, "Zhat isn't a fucking experiment!" and then turning and shooting Braun in the head with a violet laser beam.

"That's a video recording of reality, from my perspective, of me doing it," Lily told everyone.

A lot of people sighed in relief; those that didn't were probably just the ones that didn't retain any memories through memory wipes and didn't have the experience of being repeatedly tortured over the years on their minds.

"Why are we still in this simulation?" asked the janitor, with a lot of people who were watching nodding their heads rapidly.

Lily waved her hand, and reality shifted. Instead of Tranquility Lane, they were now outside in a ruined part of Washington, DC. Everyone glanced around, most looking shocked, "Zhat goes to some of zhe decisions you will 'ave to make. I won't go into depth now, but it has been two 'undred years since the bombs dropped, what survivors on Earth call Zhe Great War."

"Two hundred fucking years?! That psychopath has been torturing us that long?! He died too fucking easy!" yelled the grandma, which was affirmed by a large amount of the people, some of which were looking around the shambles of the city they probably lived in at one time.

The grandma shook her head, "I can basically answer the question myself. Look at the state of Braun's body when she shot him; if it has been two hundred years, these pods we are in are the only thing keeping us alive." She turned towards Lily and said, "Surely you wouldn't be so callous as to tell us all this before just turning us all off like a light switch, I assume, so you must have some other option. However, I'd like to use my question to get you to tell us about the world and your place in it. You said you were a... warlord? Explain that, too."

Lily rubbed the back of her neck again and succinctly explained everything she knew or suspected about what happened in the world from the point in time when the brief nuclear war occurred to now, everyone listening in rapt attention.

"You're a dictator? You didn't even try to recreate some democratic system in your settlement after overthrowing the previous regime?" asked the little girl, disapprovingly.

Lily waved a hand, gesturing to the blasted and destroyed buildings, "Behold, what democracy has wrought." She didn't actually believe that. For one, Pre-War America wasn't really a democracy or even a democratic republic in the way it was actually run. Still, since she wasn't a fan of democracy, in any case, it was a powerful and cinematic statement, and it shut the little girl up.

Lily continued answering question after question for quite some time before all three glanced at each other and nodded, "So, what are these choices we have?"

Lily exhaled and said, "Well, your first choice is probably obvious and what you were probably expecting. Death. A painless one." She glanced around and then said, "Second choice involves me cloning each of you replacement bodies and zhen performing a brain transplant on them."

The grandma frowned, "That's it? Also, as far as I am aware, there is no way brain transplantation actually works."

Lily sighed and shook her head, "Basically, yes. If some of you who 'ave remembered each time Braun memory-wiped you 'ave too much emotional baggage, I can also really wipe zheir memory to just before zhey entered the pod for the first time. I guarantee you wouldn't remember a thing from the two hundred years you spent here. And it 'as been two 'undred years. Even before zhe war, zhey were close to zhat technology. I've done it before, I guarantee its safety."

The janitor, who had been looking rather despondent, brightened a little, "Really? I was going to pick the first option, but if you can really do that, I would definitely like to continue living, just not if I have to keep remembering... everything."

There were a number of nods from the people watching, but the little girl shook her head, "No, I don't want to forget."

Someone from the crowd asked, "But what's waiting for us in this shit hole of a world?" The three chosen representatives turned to look at the man, but then each shrugged and nodded that it was a fair question.

Lily waved her hand, and the simulation shifted to a reproduction of Megaton, "Zhis is my city, Megaton. It's called that because it used to be run by morons who had an active nuclear warhead just sitting in the middle of the city like it was the town mascot. Zhat has been disarmed, zhankfully."

"Each of you will receive, one laser rifle, one laser pistol, enough energy cells to use zhem, and zhree months free housing, as well as enough physical currency to survive without working for zhat period of time," Lily told them. "It is my hope zhat most of you stay in my city, it's in a booming economic period, and anyone with an education can make a name for zhemselves, especially engineers and doctors..." she turned to look at the little girl, "...but even capable administrators would be useful."

The little girl nodded slightly but then asked, "Are we being allowed to claim ownership of the Vault we are physically occupying, as sort of squatters' rights?"

Lily scrunched up her face and shook her head, "No, not really. Mainly because its location is fairly precarious, right next to a large settlement of raiders -- those are your average post-apocalyptic psychopathic murderers -- so my allies and I are having to expend a significant amount of military force to guard it, constructing walls, fencing, barbed wire, automated turrets, air defence radar and zhe like. Zhose improvements are necessary to keep you alive, so as a result, we're keeping the structure."

Lily paused and then shrugged, "Besides, zhere are only a few accommodation rooms inside zhe facility; it is mostly set up to house zhese VR pods. I am taking some of zhe computer hardware back to Megaton, zhough... to build my own VR simulators, of which I already have some, for training. The one concession I will grant you is zhat I will allow any of you free access to any of zhe pods at Megaton if you want to receive professional training; right now, there is a military skills training course and a medical skills training course."

Lily was surprised, but nobody chose the "painless death" option. Quite a number chose to have their memories wiped, though. She was surprised when the Postmaster General sought her out privately after they were done.

"Yes?" Lily asked the man in the little girl avatar.

She coughed and said, "Braun really hated me; I'm not entirely sure why but he always incarnated me in a female body for the past two hundred years. I've grown accustomed to it, and by now, I really do prefer it. Is there anything you can do?"

Lily blinked, but nodded. She came from a society where a lot of people changed their sex multiple times a year, so there was no judgement in her gaze or tone of voice, "Sure. I 'ave a large collection of 'uman genome samples by now, and it isn't difficult to mix and match for certain characteristics or traits. I will unlock the sim interface for you that Braun locked you all out of when I leave. You can use it to send me an e-mail. Just include a brief description of what you want, what phenotype, rough height, hair colour, et cetera."

"Phenotype?" the little girl asked, a little confused with the word.

Lily waved a hand, "What ethnicity, basically. I only really have a database of varied European, African, Native American and Han Chinese phenotypes right now. If you 'ad your 'eart set on being a Polynesian or Arabian Princess, you're shit out of luck." She frowned at herself, not intending to swear, but it just popped out.

The little girl, who was once a fairly portly old white guy, nodded and surprised Lily with what she said, "Oh, that doesn't really matter, I guess. Unless there is still a lot of irrational hate against one race or another? I figured that was more of a luxury, and two hundred years of almost starving to death would have nipped that mostly in the bud."

That was... surprisingly insightful for someone involved in the previous American government. Lily considered that and nodded, "For the most part... some people still don't like zhe Chinese, but that's mainly because Chinese settlements had to be rather insular just to survive in the years immediately after zhe war, and zhat remained zheir custom even today."

"Alright, I'll write something up, but I'd rather prioritise my health and longevity than be any particular ethnicity if there is no social disadvantage to being one," the girl said, which was one of the most rational things Lily had heard today.

"You shouldn't worry about that. Everyone is getting a full course of genetic treatments in vitro, including the elimination of many genetic markers for disease, increased radiation resistance, and a number of other perks," Lily told her, realising that she had forgotten to mention that to the others. "Tell zhat to the others, but tell them that if they have any requests similar to yours, even if they just want their existing body slightly tweaked, to let me know. Also, the cloning machine will age the bodies until they're twenty -- if someone is dead set on being old again, zhey need to let me know too."

She nodded and then stopped, "Do you think you can change my avatar? The last one before this one was not too bad. I'm sure it will surprise my 'parents', anyway."

Lily blinked and nodded. She probably should have done that first. Instead, she looked around the admin interface until she found the correct settings and changed them. "There, I turned on the sim interface for everyone and unlocked avatar changes whenever you want. There should be a list of previously used avatars for you."

It took her a moment before she figured out how to pull the interface up, but after that, she navigated it with no problem, and a moment later, she derezzed and was replaced with a red-haired woman in her mid-twenties, with a face full of freckles, "Thanks, this is better. Although I don't really like the freckles, it's better than being nine again."

Lily shrugged and vanished, finding herself in her workroom again. Considering how much she disliked interacting with people, she should really farm that out. Perhaps one of these hundred or so educated pre-war people wants to be a blonde warlord's diplomat?

---xxxxxx---

She got e-mails from all of the inhabitants, and although more than ninety out of them wanted their original bodies back, almost everyone did have some requests, like make my boobs bigger, make my nose smaller, make me taller, make my penis larger, et cetera.

Simple things, easily accomplished. Lily understood the human genome as a painter understood canvas and paint, and since the cloning machine accepted arbitrary genomes digitally, she could make radical changes if she wanted to.

The former Postmaster General had been elected their leader and, as such, had volunteered to go first. Apparently, there was still some scepticism as to whether or not this was possible.

Her request had been easily solved as all she specified was she wanted to be pretty and slightly above average in height. Lily shrugged and selected a composite of Native American, Han Chinese and European traits to create what she thought was a very fetching combination.

The neural circuitry for appreciation of beauty in another human wasn't that complicated, it favoured symmetry, and most people also tended to find people who looked exotic alluring. That might be a genetic component to increase the genetic diversity of the breeding pool, but if so, she couldn't precisely locate the gene expressions for it. It was more likely it was just learned behaviour, but in any event, if someone looked slightly exotic to everyone, that generally made them alluring to most people.

"Alright, let's begin. We will need to pay special attention to zhe first phase of zhe operation, zhe removal of zhe donor brain," Lily told her assistants, Alice and a Brotherhood Scribe, who was their best neurosurgeon.

---xxxxxx---

It took about a day for someone to recover from the surgery, and at first, the former Postmaster, who had decided to go by the name of Clio, steadfastly refused to get back into the simulation to tell everyone she had survived.

Lily couldn't really blame her but did so anyway since she was becoming a hindrance to her plans and timeline. It took a bit more coaxing, but eventually, the woman agreed to do so.

Still, there was a list of other people who didn't need to be convinced, still. It wasn't like they were waiting on one person to recover before starting the next; that would take a hundred or more days. They were at least doing two a day right now.

Lily went and found Alice.

"Alright, Apprentice... zhat frees one bed in zhe small medical bay, let's grab Mademoiselle Brennan, and we can do another surgery. I want to get her up to speed as quickly as possible, so I can stop doing zhese," Lily admitted.

The Brotherhood wanted their own surgeon to be able to do the entire surgery herself, as well, because they had a lot of people that they were considering performing the same surgery on. Lily didn't think it was really a matter of them not trusting her, but it was more of a matter of pride to do it themselves if it was at all possible. Their neurosurgeon was really quite young, not even thirty, but she was very, very good.

---xxxxxx---

A week later, they had performed sixteen surgeries successfully. In the last four, Lily had let the Brotherhood Scribe perform the entire thing herself, with Lily not even acting as an assistant but merely watching and being ready to step in if she made an error.

The fence, turrets and concrete barricades around the Vault were completed, and none too soon as they had been receiving probing attacks from Evergreen Mills on and off for the past several days, which died off rather abruptly once the raiders realised just how much firepower was here and how hard of a nut to crack the former garage had become. It was clearly perplexing to them unless they already knew about the Vault, as it was an old mechanic's garage in the middle of nowhere, and now it was a military fort.

"You can do zhe next few surgeries yourself. I'll remain in the Vault for a few days in case you 'ave an issue, and even when I leave, I'll leave behind zhe telepresence unit," Lily told the Scribe, who nodded with excitement and fervour in her eyes. The woman really did seem to like Lily very much.

Alice demanded to continue assisting, as she said she was learning more about neurosurgery in the past couple of days than she had since the two of them met together. That was fair enough, but Lily told her that she would have to switch to observing so that the Brotherhood could train its own assistant surgeons as well. She was sure the girl's enthusiasm would fall off after a couple dozen more surgeries, anyway. Even Scribe Brennan's enthusiasm would likely wane after becoming an expert at brain transplantation in just fifty or fewer surgeries. Suckers!

Lily walked back to her room, or rather the former Overseer's office, with the simulator pod, moved out of it and a bed and desk installed. Her original first-stage aircraft, the one that was powered by fission batteries, was about to return to Las Vegas. Or "New Vegas", as it was now called, if the radio broadcasts from an FM station calling itself Radio New Vegas is to be believed.

Lily ran the voice of the Mr New Vegas radio DJ through an analysis program and nodded. It either wasn't a human voice, or it had received an inordinate amount of digital post-processing. The dynamic range on the voice's waveforms was not congruent with the natural human voice; his voice was a little too "smooth", in other words. Also, the way he said phonemes was just too consistent for it to be natural, even for a radio personality. Lily suspected it was an AI of some sort.

Would Dr House detect her aircraft again, or was it a fluke?

Lily watched the remarkably in-tact city of New Vegas through the sensors of the aircraft. Since she was no longer using it to launch probes, she had added a large number of sensors, both optical and electromagnetic, to the plane, and could easily distinguish individuals from one another walking down the strip.

The familiar voice of Dr House was audible over a radio transmission from the tallest building in the city, the Lucky 38. It reminded her of Seattle's Space Needle, except thicker with clear accommodations going all the way to the top of the structure, "Unidentified aircraft circling over the strip at forty thousand metres, identify yourself!"

Well, that pretty much meant it wasn't a fluke. He wouldn't have included the altitude her aircraft was loitering at if he couldn't see it. Rather than transmit her business in the clear from the start, she had the aircraft transmit down with a tight beamform on the Lucky 38, a normal RobCo digital key exchange.

It was similar to Diffie–Hellman in her previous life in America, a structured way for two parties who had neither knowledge or trust for the other to agree on an encryption key to use for private cryptography, so that even someone observing the exchange would not be able to deduce the private key of either party.

It didn't take long for the digital handshake to be reciprocated, although Lily noticed a few attempts to leverage common pre-existing RobCo OS vulnerabilities during the attempt. Although it was a common thought that RobCo left intentional backdoors in their software, Lily couldn't actually find any evidence of that, and she had done an AI-assisted dive into a number of RobCo machine code samples searching for these very things, as what would make a simpler exploit than a backdoor?

After the handshake finished, she established a two-way digital chat protocol, another RobCo standard.

[Lilium: Please cease attempts to hack this unit. It is not actually running a RobCo operating system; this protocol is being emulated inside a sandboxed virtual machine in any case.]

[REH: I see. That just makes me all the more curious. Who. Are. You? I am Robert House, if you have not already figured that out.]

[Lilium: Your voice is pretty distinctive, Dr House. I listened to a number of the speeches you gave at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, too. My name is Lilliane St. Claire, scientist, medical doctor, adventuress, and warlord, I suppose.]

Recorded speeches, but let's let him assume what he wants here.

[REH: I don't recognise your name, are you implying you attended CIT?]

[Lilium: That isn't surprising, I tried to keep a low profile. No, my alma mater was Rensselaer, at least for my undergraduate degree.]

That was true, even. Mandy went to Rensselaer in Troy, New York. A total sausage fest; counting her, there were only four girls in her year in the EE course.

[REH: Well... that was a good school, too. Best one in Rochester. What was their motto, again? Knowledge and what?]

Lily rolled her eyes.

[Lilium: Knowledge and Thoroughness, and it was in Troy, as I am sure you know. Any other tests you'd like to perform?]

[REH: No, I suppose not. Care to tell me why you're loitering over my city in a stealthed military drone? Is this to be some kind of juvenile shakedown? My recommendation would be to avoid it if you are familiar with me. Rather than simply getting even because I will, eventually, do so, it is more that there are several easier targets I could direct your 'taxation' attempts towards.]

[Lilium: Nothing so crass. I completely eliminated the income tax when circumstances forced me to take over the management of the location I am currently in. I certainly wouldn't try to tax someone who lives thousands of kilometres from me. To answer, I'm in the process of emplacing a global satellite communications constellation, my goal being about ten thousand small satellites in a very low orbit. This isn't a military drone, but the first stage of a two-stage ascent system.]

[REH: Are you serious? What is the propulsion for the second stage?]

Lily grinned. It was time to show off in front of someone who might be as smart as her.

[Lilium: A high-efficiency plasma drive combined with electrical linear accelerators. The probe weighs a little over six hundred kilos when it separates from this first stage unit at forty kilometres up and about three hundred after it reaches low earth orbit. I manufacture all the components in-house, including the microfusion cells I use to heat the reaction mass. Care to tell me how you spotted this stealthed aircraft?]

[REH: That might be possible. And I didn't. I have access to what is, putatively, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather-monitoring satellite that is in geosynchronous orbit on the west coast. Vegas is on the edge of its coverage area. In actuality, it is a National Reconnaissance Office satellite that is designed to detected stealthed aircraft or missiles through the disruption in laminar airflow and blackbody radiation they emit. It gives a lot of false positives, however, and anytime I get one, I make a radio broadcast.]

Lily laughed at herself. She could have just shut up, then? Well, she wanted to talk to Dr House anyway.

[Lilium: Are you capable of receiving digital files, images, et cetera?]

[REH: Naturally.]

Lily nodded and sent the full diagrams, blueprints and source code for an auto-tracking digital terminal that he could use to connect to her network. It was her equivalent of Starlink's "Dishy." Just because she was curious about his opinion, she also included the rough diagram and specifications of the standard satellite she was launching and the current orbital elements of all currently launched satellites.

[REH: Is this an end-user data terminal for your nascent network? I'm tempted to not believe you, but I have been watching a number of long-standing LEO satellites deorbit in the past months. Your work?]

[Lilium: Yes, and yes. Those latter were American anti-sat systems that I didn't have the keys for. We're about to lose connectivity.]

[REH: Well, if you had already discussed this with me, I could have given you the proper private key. I designed the PERSEPHONE system, which you will also---]

[CONNECTION LOST]

Oh well. Lily sat up. The aircraft would return to its previously assigned order, which was to take images of notable settlements. She was surprised at how well the New California Republic was doing. The tech level they seemed to have was high in places, and then it was the wild west in other places. It was quite interesting.

Lily wondered what Dr House meant right before he got cut off when the satellite left line of sight and the Mesh got severed. Persephone. She hummed, and tried to think like an arrogant, individualist scientist that had a very high opinion of their own self.

She smacked her open palm with her fist, "Of course! I am so smart! Persephone is zhe goddess zhat descends into zhe underworld, periodically."

Lily glanced up, thinking about that large space station that periodically sent automated drones down "into the underworld" in low earth orbit to grab and refuel other satellites before returning back to the high geosynchronous orbit.

See? She had tons of empathy; she could easily think like this Dr House fellow almost instantly.