Matters Beyond Mortal Ken
Grandpa looked down at her and said, "No, liebchen, it isn't weird that a little girl wants to know about how things work. Now come and hold the light, and I'll show you how a differential gearbox works... They're in almost every car except all-wheel drives. Wheels have to be able to spin at different rates when you turn your car!"
---xxxxxx---
Grandpa chuckled, "Remember, liebchen, friends might help you move, but real friends will help you move bodies. And there are very few problems in the world that can't be solved with judicial application of the 3-S principles."
I glanced to the side and up at Grandpa from our seat in the deer blind, "What's the 3-S principle, Opa?"
"Shoot, Shovel and Shut-Up," replied Grandpa.
---xxxxxx---
I already knew Grandpa was a little bit racist, the same way a lot of really old people were, but what he said surprised me, "I didn't fight them in Manchuria to buy no damn Jap car, girl!"
"But Opa, it's 1996," I said patiently, "None of those people are building Toyotas. They're a good car, Opa."
"Liebchen... you just ... don't understand. I know that. I know that here," he pointed to his head, but then he thumped himself on the chest, "but I just can't feel it here. The things they did there..." he shook his head and stared off into space.
"Okay, okay, Opa. Maybe a Ford, then?" I asked, trying to distract him. "Did they send you to the Pacific theatre because we're German?"
Grandpa snorted and nodded, "Didn't send. I volunteered before Pearl Harbor, was flying with a unit of volunteers with the Republic of China and even the Reds for a year before we entered the war. I knew that war was inevitable, liebchen, and if I hadn't volunteered, there probably would have been serious questions about a recently naturalized German officer serving in the Air Corps. Our family might have been interned, even."
I intentionally didn't mention the slight hypocrisy I noticed here. He was Grandpa, after all. That did answer the question about why Grandpa had a pin with Chairman Mao's head on it with his other war things, though.
---xxxxxx---
I liked listening to the news or videos online while I worked, and I vaguely detected the voice of Elon Musk talking about rockets as I worked the interface of AutoCAD.
A few years ago, I accepted an unusual job offer as a senior engineer for all things a search engine company. And to work on, for all things, a smartphone project. Something I had no experience working on for a company with no experience working in this sector. It should have been madness, but the pay was too good to pass up, even with the fact that I had to move to California, something a country girl like me really disliked.
It recently had come down from high that the camera had to be flush with the body, which necessitated a redesign of certain PCBs to make room inside the case. It would be a lot easier if we could get rid of the headphone jack like Apple already had.
The video of the rocket billionaire talking droned in the background as I worked, "...Yeah, all our new rocket nozzles will be built using this one-of-a-kind version of Inconel superalloys... High strength at temperature, extreme oxidation resistance... It's needed for over the 800 atmospheres, hot, oxygen-rich turbopump on the Raptor rocket engine...These single-crystal superalloys are mostly just steel and nickel, but there are some exotic elements in order to better ensure really unusual crystal formation in the metallic lattice... effectively has no visible grain ... really remarkable ..."
I liked Elon most of the time, but something about his voice sometimes irritated me. I changed the channel.
This smartphone project was coming along well. If only I could say the same thing about my marriage.
---xxxxxx---
Lily again woke up with vivid dreams of her past life; in this case, it was her life in America. The fact that she could now remember what her Opa looked like made her quite happy.
Remembering her old life's ex-husband was something she could have done without, though. Although now she started to remember bits and pieces of the daughter they had together, so perhaps he was good for something after all.
However, she wanted to kick herself for changing the channel in that last memory. Maybe the Rocket Bro was about to tell everyone what those alloys were made of?! Lily searched her memories while lying naked in bed for several minutes.
She did remember some things about Inconel alloys but nothing about the Space-X special sauce version. The Inconel alloy she knew about was over fifty per cent nickel, twenty per cent chromium, with small amounts of molybdenum and manganese, with the rest being steel.
She didn't know the precise numbers, and it wasn't that the alloy had vastly increased operating temperatures than traditional steel. It wasn't a refractory metal alloy like the kind she had been making with tungsten for her robots.
However, it was almost as good because it was a steel alloy with somewhat increased temperatures, but most importantly, the alloy could operate very close to its max temperature without deforming or losing strength due to its unique crystalline structure. Most steel lost its strength and deformed when it got even halfway to its melting point; just ask the steel beams in the twin towers.
Humming, she got out of bed and got dressed. She had managed to find a small source of tungsten by buying old and broken tungsten carbide drill bits and other similarly broken tools from around town. Although they indeed lasted a very long time, they did break in the end, and it was fortunate that Moira was a borderline hoarder and collected all kinds of seemingly useless junk.
So while she did have all of her robots built, only eight of them were in the new-style humanoid chassis.
However, if she could figure out how to reinvent some of the Inconel alloys, that would be really nice; she could use them in place of the steel-titanium-tungsten alloy she was using now for a robot's chassis. It wouldn't be as good for either strength or for heat resistance as just using titanium and tungsten, which were remarkable metals, but it would be good enough to provide over twice the heat resistance of normal steel!
And if she wanted it primarily for use in armour, which needed to be cheap, it would be good enough. She could make plates a third of a millimetre thick and then alternate between diamondoid and steel alloys to create a composite armour that would be very effective and relatively light. She'd have to run tests, but she suspected even 1.2 millimetres of such composite armour would be greater than six millimetres of plain steel plate.
Moira told her that Vertibirds used an aluminium-titanium alloy, so she could have a ready supply of titanium if she could find some crashed ones, which dotted the Capital Wasteland like zits. Moira already knew of a few and would verify the locations and then sell me the information soon. However, tungsten was just not available readily in quantities enough that Lily felt confident designing her armoured truck.
Most mining of tungsten and manganese in North America came from mining operations in Alaska, which obviously weren't shipping any product in the past couple hundred years.
Moira's suggestion was that I explore the National Guard Depot or Fort Constantine, as both tungsten and depleted uranium were often used as armour for US main battle tanks. After suggesting she was trying to get me killed, I considered the advice. However, it was circular because of the fact that I felt I needed what amounted to a tank to go searching for a tank so I could build a tank. That meant I would have to rely on other sources. Maybe if I had power armour, but I would be relying on this armoured truck to hit and loot the VSS building for some Power Armour in the first place.
However, with these superalloys of nickel... that might be enough.
She needed to build an actual systematic way to test each potential alloy for tensile strength, elongation at break, elasticity, electrical resistance, shear modulus, and thermal properties. The whole shebang. She had one single book on material science in her collection, and it was a digitized book from Tombs. It didn't include a chart like she would find useful, but it did address the testing regimes briefly for glasses, polymers, ceramics and metal alloys.
And the tests had to be able to be performed by her robots independently. Then she could just work her way through all reasonable possibilities; even if she could only test one potential alloy every two hours, she would find the correct one in a few weeks at most.
Lily hummed. Her precious basement was already getting more and more full. Perhaps she should use the fourth or fifth floor for this project.
---xxxxxx---
"Yes, shoot me with it," Lily said plainly.
The Apprentice said, seemingly unsure, "Uhh... okay, if you're sure." However, she lifted the taser, aimed it at my chest and fired.
The little prongs stuck in her flesh, and she found herself falling to the hard-looking concrete floor of her basement.
Lily had time to think, 'I immediately regret my decision,' before she thunked on the ground, limbs moving spastically with the click click click noise of the taser discharging in my ear.
"Are you alright?" asked the Apprentice, yet she kept her finger on the trigger of the taser, causing it to click click click. "I will be when you stop shocking me," I managed to yell.
Alice stopped, and she stood up, dusting herself off. She was not sure what she expected. The neuromuscular interference a taser caused bypassed the brain, so there was no real way to avoid the effect aside from armouring yourself and preventing the circuit from being able to be formed.
Lily carefully removed the probes from her skin and sighed. The Taser was quite effective, and she would give them to her humanoid robots. Still, it might be of limited utility since they could be defeated by armour so easily. The Apprentice was nosing around her workbench and picked up something, "Is this a new model of a laser pistol, Dr St. Claire?"
Lily turned to see what the girl was talking about. She was holding the sleek attempt at a laser pistol that turned out to be such a failure, 'That piece of shit. I meant to recycle that crap already.'
"No, Apprentice. Zhat was an attempt to build one, but it was zhe total failure. I can't produce zhe synthetic doped ruby or sapphire rods used as a laser gain medium, and tried to replace them with diamond, but..." Lily shook her head, "It produces zhe laser beam, but zhe power output... it just wouldn't hurt anyone. Maybe give zhem zhe blisters, yes? But it is barely powerful enough to even ionize the air, much less do an..y... real... damage..."
Lily trailed off after seeing the Apprentice holding the taser in one hand and the defective laser pistol in the other.
'Of course! I'm such a moron! If the laser is powerful enough to ionize the air, that plasma channel will become conductive to electricity! An electrolaser! Of course! We even had that technology in space. We even called them AirTasers,' Lily internally berated her own stupidity. She even literally face-palmed.
"Uh, Dr St. Claire, you look like you've had one of those sudden moments of insight where you realize how stupid you've been being. I also have those a lot," the Apprentice, surprisingly insightful, hit the nail on the head.
"Zhat is... exactly zhe case, Apprentice. You often surprise me with your insight, you know?" Lily told the girl, but her tone wasn't complimentary.
Alice took it as a compliment anyway, preening and saying, "I've often thought that, what with my incredible insight and all!"
A mental ding of a completed job brought her attention to the smallest carbon fabricator she had. It used to be one she built out of a footlocker in Canterbury Commons, but she rebuilt it to use a much more sophisticated nanite colony, so it was her go-to machine when she was building extremely finely detailed items.
It had just finished building the memory modules, spools of graphene nanotubes and exterior casing for the quantum processor that she was going to install in the Apprentice. "Oh, looks like your computer is done," Lily told the girl.
Alice got excited, "Oooh... are you going to do the surgery today after all, then?" It was Friday, but she was a little optimistic in her estimation the other day and ended up having to build the device twice.
Alice's replacement skull was already constructed in several pieces, waiting for the surgery.
The girl was getting a bit better version than Lily had of everything. The skull included the digital audio transducers for ears from the beginning, along with several hidden ones that were designed to detect most frequencies of sound, even with a layer of skin over them, that would allow the girl to have a passive sonar system out of the box.
Her computer was also a bit better, having over one hundred exabytes of data storage available compared to Lily's sixty. Lily wasn't entirely sure what precisely anyone would do with all that storage because even when she digitized the entirety of her three hundred-plus years of memories, Lily won't have used more than fifteen per cent of her storage. Digital memory streams, including full sensorium, compressed really well, surprisingly, with no real loss in resolution.
That was one of the advances that made human digitization possible in the first place. Lily hadn't told Alice this, but the computer also served as a cortical stack, as well. After Alice finished recording all of her memory engrams, an up-to-date backup of the girl's entire neural network would be stored on the computer, although there was insufficient processing power to emulate it.
If the worse happened someday, Lily might be able to recover the device in the girl's skull and bring her back to life. She'd have that discussion with her later because she'd kind of like the same courtesy herself.
"Well, let us plug it into zhe diagnostic frame, and we shall see," Lily offered. If it was working and passed all tests, Lily would prefer getting the surgery over today. She had tentative plans to set out for Canterbury Commons and then afterwards Vault 108 on Monday.
Lily hummed as she placed the small spherical device into the diagnostic test bed she designed for them and triggered a full self-test, "Who is working upstairs today?"
"Dr Rebeca! She is really quite skilled for how young she is, don't you think, Dr St. Claire?" replied the Apprentice.
Ohh? Lily thinks she detects a bit of hero-worship. Still, the girl was right. The Doctor, formerly known as Bonesaw, really was quite adequate. Her deficiencies were mainly in the actual use of some technology; for example, she had to be taught how to use every one of the devices in the hospital. However, she learned quite quickly.
Lily found her knowledge, especially in the area of pathology and disease, quite broad. Lily asked her how Little Lamplight could possibly educate her to such a degree, and Rebecca told her that ever since the first Doctor of Lamplight, they had a significant amount of books, including one written by every Doctor that came before.
Lily was shocked to find out that their general and science education came from materials taken from Vault 87. Lily had dragged the girl to her office after that to interrogate her, "What about the Super-Mutants?" Lily asked her pointedly.
"Oh. Yeah, they're a problem. Always a problem. But history says they weren't a problem right away. It's recorded that half the people in the Vault fled after some experiments they were conducting with a virus they called FEV got out of control. That's where Super Mutants come from in the first place if you didn't know. They were regular mungos until exposed to FEV, which causes sterilization in 100% of subjects. So every generation of Super-Mutants has to infect the next subsequent generation, or their species, such as it is, will die out. It's why they are such a big problem in the Capital Wastes, always looking for people to drag back to their place." The younger woman doctor casually mentioned what would be secrets you didn't discover until halfway through the game.
She then continued, "But the Super Mutants, they get stupid. All the time. So they're quite easy to deal with, given the defences on Murder Pass. If you can find a way to trick ONE Super-Mutant, it will work on ALL of them. And they only come through Murder Pass in ones and twos, in penny-packets. A Lamplighter might die every two to three years to them, but that's all. Dysentry and starvation are a lot bigger threats, I'd say." She shook her head and sighed, then said, almost to herself, "Just like mungos, huh, to toy with matters beyond their ken and got most of themselves killed."
Lily remembered having the sudden desire to bring Bonesaw along with her to Vault 108 to help her with her own FEV experiments to delve into the depths of things beyond mortal ken, but she got the idea that Rebeca didn't approve of such experiments. She definitely would like to make copies of any information Little Lamplight has about the subject, though.
The beep of the diagnostics terminal and green indicator showed Lily that the device was functioning in all respects. Excellent, she wouldn't have to postpone her trip. She wanted Alice well adapted to using the device before she left. She might be gone for one or two weeks, after all.
Lily smiled, "It looks good. Let us go see if we can borrow zhe operating room, yes?"