I will never waste you

Despite hiring Talon to carry out an attack for him, Burke didn't stay around to see whether it was successful or unsuccessful. After his nominal boss had been transformed into tomato paste on top of Tenpenny Tower, his intuition had told him it was time to get out of town.

Having listened to his intuition countless times during his long career as an Enlightened agent, he was already pushing west into Dominion territory as the attack took place, along with most of Alistair Tenpenny's liquid wealth.

After meeting with the Dominion bureau chief, he would move north into Ontario and east back home. His heart went out to the poor bastard working the Dominion desk. Until recently, his job in the Capital Wasteland almost took care of itself. In contrast to most post-war tyrannies, the religious fanatics in what was once Ohio stabilised the situation, which was contraindicated, but their actual resources to throw monkey wrenches were somewhat limited. The Enlightened's primary means of action were catspaws, raiders, and mercenaries, none of which were abundant in Cleaveland.

Tenpenny was a fool, and he had been his minder as well as the bureau chief for the Capital Wasteland for the last two years. A long assignment, but his superiors felt that the man could be useful in keeping the status quo just how they liked it. By sending a signal off a pre-war satellite in geostationary orbit, he had already informed them of his change of status and received coded orders to return for reassignment.

It was about time for him to be rotated out, in any event. At least, he thought so! DC was a terrible place to live.

---xxxxxx---

When Alice found out that Lily was going to experiment on her prisoners, she protested, but Lily forced her to watch some of the memories they had downloaded, not even very many, which kept her from complaining. At times, Lily felt that the girl was extremely naive. What world did she think she was living in?

Each brain scan was saved by Lily. After parsing the machine's memory format, she realised that the memories were not exactly, one hundred per cent duplicated, but a normal human wasn't expected to have perfect memories, anyway. In addition, she would not call the machine an ego bridge. It was more accurate to describe a person as their neural network rather than the sum of their own memories, even though she often said the latter in the past as a way to simplify a complex topic.

It was true that some parts of your neural network could be safely excised and replaced with more efficient hardwired programming. Identifying the brain area responsible for math, for instance, was easy. It would be possible to physically remove that part of the brain from your head and replace it with a computer that, as long as it interacted correctly with the rest of your brain, would give you super-math abilities. That was the basis of both many types of cybernetics and pure bioware, as well.

Other things, such as language, followed the same pattern. Nonetheless, there were areas of the brain that were neither involved in memories nor in "mechanical processes" abilities that were still essential to consciousness, personality, or decision-making.

For digitisation to work, you must get a neuron-to-neuron map, not leaving a single axon out, so that the ego will run correctly in an emulator.

But for her purposes, these were sufficient. There was a lot of value in all of them; she would keep them all. She was able to use them to create NPCs in her sims, either entirely or by chopping and pasting memories from various sources to create an amalgamation. In addition to reassembling the SIM pod, she had also replaced all data cables with fibre optic cables, but she had to create an interface device for each end; basically, a router or dongle that would convert from the optical data signals back into the electrical data signals each device expected.

The pods she would create herself wouldn't need that and would feature fibre optic digital connections fully, but she wasn't ready to rebuild the entire supercomputing cluster just yet when she barely got it functional in the first place, but she expected to start on that project in a few days.

As far as her prisoner's current status, a genetic therapy derived from Gary's unique genome was being tested on half of the prisoners, and the special proteins she observed in an active FEV infection were being tested on the other half, which Lily hypothesised would accelerate brain and neuron development. She had already conducted animal tests on cloned rabbits for these latter proteins. She had finally created a cell-free protein synthesis setup to make some of these proteins in small quantities.

As she cloned the rabbits directly into adolescence, it was a little hard to tell how much intelligence boost the rabbits had. They were rather derpy without the accumulated memories of growing up. However, her attempts to test the animals' baseline cognition through mazes and other similar methods of testing animal cognition clearly showed an improvement compared to the control cohort for the protein cohort, so she was rather optimistic about the four raiders.

Having never tested Gary's empathy before, she wasn't sure how she would do it; might changing their housing arrangements bring the prisoners closer together so that they could interact more? On the other hand, she had enough quantum processors to build out a number of brain interfaces. She could possibly forcibly install them on the Gary-cohort and then use them to monitor their sensorium to see if there was any detectable empathy.

She chose the worst of the prisoners for the Gary cohort because she did not intend to let any of them leave alive. Honestly, if it wasn't for discovering that the VSS brain scanner could also erase a person's memories, she probably would not even let those lesser monsters of the protein cohort leave either, as they would have very interesting stories about being forced to take obvious IQ tests.

Although she tried her best in cognition testing with the prisoners, she was pretty sure that she wouldn't get a lot of useful data about the actual intelligence boost from the prisoners; forcing someone to take an IQ test was difficult. However, she was mainly interested in the overall safety of the treatment. If she felt it was safe, she could use her traditional volunteers, although she wouldn't be able to reverse the treatment at all.

As for the Talon mercenary operative, well, he actually seemed very competent, and she didn't feel it was safe to keep him confined long-term, so she had shot him in the head after verifying that the memory download was successful and reviewing some of his memories by loading him as an NPC in the developer mode of the sim.

In spite of the fact that he was a psychopath, Lily didn't hold that against him since she, herself, also had certain non-typical thinking patterns and motivations. However, from what the AI impersonator said when she told it to describe itself, the man was entirely untrustworthy. There wasn't a group that he worked for or with in the past that he either hadn't betrayed in some manner or planned to. He had some manner of impulse control disorder. In the same way kleptomaniacs could not resist stealing, so could he not resist betraying those who trusted him.

Her initial plan was to turn him and get a long-term mole inside this mysterious Talon mercenary company, but he wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation of double treachery, just like Alice couldn't resist the temptation of double cheese on her pasta.

As a result, she shot him in the head. In her eyes, he was neither a good guy nor useful to her. When it came to a person who had previously attacked her, she might be able to tolerate one of those things but not both.

Lily got out of the simulation pod and stripped out of the neural stimulation suit before putting her clothes back on. She had a duty shortly that she did not look forward to. Her injured soldiers were out of the hospital, including one that had a new pair of cybernetic eyes and one that had a new leg prosthesis, both wounded from the couple of missile launchers the raiders had.

Now that they were on light duty, there was a memorial service for the two that had been killed in action. She didn't even need her social assistant, which she was leaning less on these days, to tell her it was expected that she should say a few words.

---xxxxxx---

Lily glanced between the gathered men and their five squad leaders. She wasn't entirely sure what she was going to say, which was stupid of her. She should have prepared a speech beforehand instead of attempting to speak contemporaneously. She stood straight and took a breath.

Still, she said, "I did not know Jacob and William very well, except as two young men with a lot of promise. I would not 'ave brought zhem on board if I did not believe zhat about them or about all of you. I 'ave told each and every one of you that this is a dangerous job, and regrettably, both Jacob and William 'ave paid zhe ultimate price."

She placed her hands behind her back, in a casual parade rest, drawing on her memories of being an NCO in the Army to continue, "'owever, I also told you, and I stand behind zhis, zhat as dangerous as this job is, it is equally rewarding. You all saved a lot of lives zhe other day. Not only those you were charged to protect but zhe innocent men, women and children of Megaton itself. Maybe your sisters, parents, or sweethearts. You can feel proud of that achievement, and I believe both Jacob and William would feel proud of zhat as well."

Lily brought her hand from behind her back and coughed into it before continuing, "You have taken my shilling, so now you must fight my battles. Zhat is the story of zhe soldier that is older zhan time itself, and it will never change. I cannot promise you zhat I will never send you into dangerous situations again because I tell you now that I will. But know zhis, while I will use you, I will never waste you."

Lily saw the mass of them stand up straighter as if they were proud? A quick check with her social assistant agreed with that; they appeared to be proud. But, while she believed most of what she said, she was just spouting some bullshit that came to her mind because, honestly, she found these types of interactions very confusing. William and Jacob couldn't feel anything, let alone satisfaction, about their job protecting Megaton because they were both dead. But she felt that this was one of those cases where a white lie social strategy was called for.

Ignoring what she was feeling and thinking, she continued, "Starting in a week, we will be incorporating some advanced technology into your training regimen, one squad at a time. I expect zhis will provide excellent benefits for your training, survival and combat effectiveness. We will also be providing specialised training for medics, which we will include with each squad, as I feel zhat is a deficiency that needs to be addressed. If you feel you are interested in this opportunity, please let your squad leader know. Squad leaders, I'll expect nominees for this training on my desk no later than Monday at 0600. Let me tell you now, zhat I intend for Spider Company to become a world-class fighting force, and I 'ave confidence that each and every one of you will become world-class badasses."

She glanced briefly into the eyes of everyone present before moving to the next. Finally, she said, "Dismissed to your squads. Squad leaders, as you were."

Despite not being in uniform, she did a good about-face and stalked off. Considering she didn't have a uniform, she kept things somewhat relaxed with her men-at-arms when it came to military discipline. Also, because they didn't really know it very well, except the absolute basics.

She hummed as she walked off. She had to get a better rank structure. She just had recruits, squad leaders and her. She had about a company's worth of men, but no real officers, and no company-level NCOs, either. It wasn't sustainable.

As she planned on having her men work side by side with robots, who would be the real grunts, it was especially unsustainable. For her men to be able to command a small fire team of robots in the future, even the lowest rank would need to be equal to a Corporal in terms of skill and leadership qualities.

Additionally, she would need to come up with some kind of decoration as soon as possible. A few men who went above and beyond in the battle against the raiders deserved to be honoured.

---xxxxxx---

By the time next Monday had rolled around, Lily had already gotten all the data she had needed from the test subjects of the Gary cohort. She had gone ahead and installed a brain implant in each of them, and in two of them, she had detected definite neural activity that was similar to Gary in the new brain structure that was grown while simultaneously detecting unusual waveforms in the part of the brain that was correlated with emotion when the subject was in the presence of another person that was experiencing intense emotion.

Although she took this as a positive sign, she had no idea why she only succeeded fifty per cent of the time. Even so, she didn't really know what else to test other than ensuring there were no long-term effects of the treatment, which she wasn't willing to do with this batch of subjects. For the purpose of ending their experiment, she used the medichines to cause instant cardiac arrest in the subjects' bodies.

Over a fifteen-point improvement in measurable IQ was observed in all the other four, on average. That was an improvement of one standard deviation! Granted, all of them were below the mean in the first place, so a larger improvement was not that surprising. In addition, she had no idea what the fact that they had given up and cooperated with the testing the second time around had contributed to.

Having reviewed the memories of these last four raiders similarly to the Talon mercenary, she selected only two to release. She would roll the two she would not release into a small two-man Gary cohort before disposing of them. The two she would release were left unconscious in an abandoned building with a few caps and notes saying that their families missed them after she erased their memories, not only of the last week but also the entire few months they were part of the raider group.

They were a pair of brothers, and hopefully, they would take the hint and return home. Before they fell into that raider group, neither of them was a particularly bad boy.

A room filled with ten identical dark grey pods occupied a significant amount of space on the fourth floor as Alice exited the elevator and approached her, bringing her out of her reverie. Even with improvements, such as integrated life support on each pod, it wasn't difficult to incorporate multiple pods into the simulation. From the start, VSS intended to network multiple pods in a single simulation, so multiplayer functionality was already in place.

Although she could include fewer NPCs with more participants, with ten participants, she had space for over seventy-five impersonator AIs and innumerable simple NPCs.

That was a lot more than either sim scenario had used. Lily had duplicated the basic training sim, except changed it to take place in the Wasteland and Megaton, taken from both the memories of her prisoners and of herself.

While she hadn't put her own head into that brain scanner, it was pretty easy to upload segments of her sensorium packaged in the data format that the simulator expected. She used these the most for the city, as they were in very high resolution and made everything look slightly more real.

Changing all of the scripts for the Drill Sergeant wasn't difficult. While his vast experience in training recruits would still be beneficial, he would not use so much scripted patriotism. When she deleted all of the scripted jingoistic bits, he dialed that way down. It only took a few scripts to change references to America to Spider Company, and a few quick run-throughs seemed to do the trick.

She scrapped almost the entire story elements that VSS had written into basic training, as they seemed needlessly dramatic or added for propaganda purposes, but the same general skills would be taught to the same levels of proficiency.

"Dr St. Claire, the first squad, is ready," the Apprentice reported. In order to ensure her men's comfort, Lily made certain each pod was fully stocked with saline and medichines. Their individual vital signs would be monitored by a computer, but she would receive an alert if there was any issue beyond a number of set threshold values.

"Alright, go ahead and bring zhem in. Are you OK to start zhem up yourself, or do you want some 'elp?" asked Lily

Alice shook her head, "Should be fine. We've already tested these new pods and the new suits, just this time, we're doing it ten at a time." She shrugged and then grinned, "I'll have them meeting the Drill Sergeant in no time!"

Lily nodded. She intended to create a number of different simulation scenarios as well. At the present time, the underlying realism wasn't sufficient for conducting medical training, but Lily felt she could make some changes to make wounds act in a realistic manner, both in getting them and in treating them.

If that happened, she could not only make a simple couple of week medic course for her men, but Alice could benefit from a simulation of every likely surgical procedure that she would likely see as a journeyman doctor in the Wasteland. That would take months, maybe years, to complete, but it would be very helpful not just for the Apprentice but for anyone who wanted to learn practical medicine in the apocalypse.

Humming to herself tonelessly, she took the elevator down to the basement, which was bristling with robots and automated defences. The bastion level served as access control for the sub-basement complex. There were two test subjects that needed to undergo the experimental Gary treatment. Perhaps these two would prove more enlightening than the others.