Purposeless cruelty

The Apprentice was with her as she pulled the test prints out of the sintering machine. Lily had made a mistake when she let the primitive expert system select its own shape to print out to test all of the DMLS system's capabilities. One was a simple metal rod, but the other...

Lily squinted at it; the shape looked like something out of a painting that was a collaboration between H.R. Giger and Escher. It looked as if it was inside out and not at the same time. It vaguely gave her a headache when she stared at it too long, but it looked in spec as far as the printing resolution was concerned.

Now all she had to do was to scan it to be sure and then test the rod's tensile strength to make sure this alloy met the strength specifications, as well.

She didn't like the look of this shape and vowed to use simple geometric shapes to test things in the future, even if it took multiple tests. Lily sighed and mumbled, "Cthulhu fhtagn, huh?"

"Gesundheit," Alice offered her, mistaking the call of the cultists of a Great Old One for a sneeze.

Lily gave the girl a side-eye because she wasn't entirely sure if she was being trolled or not. Probably not, since H.P. Lovecraft did not, apparently, live in this universe.

"Why don't you go make yourself useful and get zhe 'ydraulic press set up," Lily finally said.

There were definitely engineering data sheets about the strength of various alloys around in the Fallout universe. However, she did not actually have access to any. She had programmed this print to simulate case-hardened steel, as that was the planned alloy she intended to use to repair her truck.

That just meant that it had an ultra-hard layer of steel on the outside, usually with high carbon content, and more mild steel variety inside to prevent the metal from being too brittle. If the entire form was made of a uniform ultra-hardness, it would fair no better than her first attempts to create a diamond knife, and it would be exceptionally brittle despite all that hardness.

Looking around for her toolbox of normal hand tools, which admittedly she did not often use these days, she pulled a steel file out and carefully tried to file a grove into the rod she had just printed. Such a feat would be very simple with mild steels or steels that had been produced with defects, but she found it quite difficult to mar the surface of the rod at all.

She glanced at the file, finding it also unmarred, which she also didn't find surprising. If it was made of really high-quality tool steel with high carbide content like chromium and tungsten, it probably would have faired better versus the rod, but your average steel file from a hardware store is just hardened steel, also.

"Good. I was mainly guessing with zhe carbon content; I am glad I didn't get it too far off, zhen," Lily said to herself.

The Apprentice called her, "Dr St. Claire, the press is ready!"

She took the steel rod over to the hydraulic press, which she had set up in a simple three-point stress test and carefully set it inside. The press had a digital strain gauge which would record the highest force in Newtons before either the object being tested or the press failed.

She no longer played around with eye protection and had a pair of laboratory safety glasses for both herself and the Apprentice ready before Alice pressed the button to start the press.

It started out slow, as hydraulic presses often did. The Apprentice asked curiously, "Is this press strong enough to break it?"

"I zhink so. It is a 100-ton press. I zhink it could shatter the steel just by itself, but with it set up for a zhree-point bend test? Zhere's just no way any type of steel rod zhis thin would stand up," Lily told her as the rod started to bend.

There were cracking sounds as the more brittle outer layer of steel cracked, and a few bits pinged off into the room, making the safety glasses an excellent idea.

Finally, the rod bent all the way, and the press stopped and slowly reversed itself. She walked over and pulled the rod out, humming at the condition of it and the stress values shown on the gauge. "Did it fail at the right point?"

Lily gave the girl the side eye. Should she be honest? Yes, she supposed she should, "I don't know. I've never made tools before, Apprentice. And I never saw a book titled Mechanical Properties of Various Alloys amongst zhe tomes in the public library. We'd have to hit an engineering school or polytechnic to for sure find something like zhat. I'm doing zhese tests to slowly build up our own data sheets on zhe off-chance we never find such data."

And also because it would be really obvious really quickly if the sintering machine was totally faulty, but no need to spell that out.

Alice grinned at her, "You don't know how good that makes me feel, Dr St. Claire!"

"Huh?" she replied.

"That you don't know everything," Alice said, "You're a very intimidating person to try to chase after, intellectually. You seem to have every single book we have, including all the ones we got from Tombs, memorized in your head!"

Taking the bent rod over to a vice, she secured it tightly before producing a small diamondoid saw. This tool cut the rod, while not easily then also without too much difficulty, either. She cut it into two pieces, then peered at the slightly different colour of the softer steel inside. She snorted, "You've only been trying to learn more zhan how to survive for less zhan ninety days, and your progress is outstanding. Amazing, even. And, yes, I have, well, most of our books memorized."

Rather than memorized, it was more like she had digital copies in her brain-computer and had them entirely indexed so she could find any part of them very quickly, but she would take credit for that as if it were her memory. It was better than her memory, in fact. A memory you were more or less born with, this she built with her own two hands!

"Huh? How is that possible, Dr St. Claire?! There are hundreds, and if you include the Tombs archive, thousands of books! You just don't even have the time to read all of them!" Alice protested, looking very put out.

Lily blinked, "I told you about zhe brain-machine interface I designed, did I not?" Lily suspected that the girl didn't have a complete understanding of the potential of such a device.

As Alice considered the question, Lily took the pieces of the steel rod over to the heavy-duty recycler and dropped them into the input chute. She had been running this device almost non-stop since the power station started delivering her the two megawatt feed she had been lusting after.

She did have to redesign it three times, not for function but for adding noise-cancelling elements. It was originally over ninety decibels during operation, which was just not acceptable. This last version incorporated both electronic active noise reduction as well as an exterior case that had honey-combed sandwich areas of hard vacuum over three millimetres thick.

The Apprentice was a smart girl, so it didn't take her long to figure out what Lily was implying. "What?! Do you have all the books in your head?! And you can access them as if they're your memories?"

Lily turned and clucked her tongue, making a waffling gesture. "Sort of. It doesn't quite work like zhe memory, but zhey're all indexed. So, if you mention something, I can perform a word search and pull up zhe particular page as if I am looking at it in front of my eyes."

Alice looked unbelieving. She said flatly, "The Great Gatsby, page twenty-five. Forth paragraph. First sentence."

Lily hummed and subvocalized a command to pull the book and page up into her optical feed and read in a deeper tone, trying to imitate the narrator of the famous book, Nick Carraway. Her American accent was flawless, "Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below."

The Apprentice looked shocked and said, "I ... don't actually know if that is right, but it sounds right! Why can't I get one of these, too? It would help so much!"

Lily nodded. It would. "Well, you have only seemed interested in genetic alterations so far. And we'd definitely have to replace at least part of your skull. What about your precious skellington?"

"But you said I shouldn't do any radical alterations until I finished growing?" Alice asked uncertainly.

Lily clucked her tongue, "Zhat is mostly true, definitely not for cosmetic reasons like we were discussing." She walked over and picked up the unearthly-looking shape the printer's expert system created. It really made her feel uneasy. She would put it on her desk in her office. "But your skull growth has slowed significantly, you know."

The Apprentice perked up, "Oh, really? How do you know?"

"Every night after you fall asleep, I come inside your room and precisely measure your skull's dimensions," Lily lied.

"Wh-what?! How would you even--" Alice looked completely freaked out, so she interrupted her, "That was a lie, does that even sound like something I would do, Apprentice?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed.

Lily pursed her lips, considering that. Deciding to ignore the implication, she continued, "Well, in any case. You're almost sixteen. While your skull will grow a bit more, it isn't all zhat much, actually. We could easily build space into your replacement and build you a fully adult-sized skull. Of course, people won't notice if zhe difference is less than five per cent, which it won't be. I made my skull slightly bigger when I replaced mine, too, so I could build in some extra shock padding."

"Uhh... if you make my skull bigger, how will my skin and connective tissues fit around it?" asked the girl.

"Zhat's the neat part; zhey don't! We'd definitely need to make some planned incisions and zhen use liberal amounts of StimPaks to regrow skin around it; I did the same zhing," Lily replied, pointing to areas around her forehead, cheeks and back of her neck.

Mentally connecting to the sintering machine, she pushed a dozen or so parts to print in a queue. One nice part about this system and one of the reasons it took over two weeks to build, despite it being as simple as, "use a laser to melt powdered metal," was the printer added the metal as it was used.

Normal sintering setups that Lily had seen working in America required a large bed of powder, and the laser would slowly make the print rise out of a giant amount of powdered metal, sintering one layer at a time, which meant only a single alloy could be used.

Theoretically, her system could have a part built using multiple alloys. The printer had large input bins for iron, carbon, manganese, titanium, aluminium and a number of rare earths. Only the iron and carbon were full, as it was a bit difficult to find the rarer metals, although they were present in small quantities in a lot of things she has recycled, so she does have some.

The first parts she built were the parts of the truck's transmission, as well as one set of parts to build a new chassis for one of the unassembled Labourtrons. They were shaped in a very human skeleton-looking form. However, she was using a high chromium steel alloy with a fair bit of molybdenum, titanium and what little tungsten she had to make it refractory and, therefore, energy-weapon resistant as possible.

She had to size up the skeleton to just over a hundred and ninety-five centimetres tall to install all the hardware and motivators. She had already made the graphene cables needed to simulate all the tendons in a human body, as this robot would have very dextrous fingers and joints.

She couldn't call these things Labourtrons anymore, but hadn't figured out a suitable name for them, yet.

Turning around, she raised her eyes at the Apprentice, who was smiling, "I think that's totally worth it! Only my skull, though. I don't want to lose out on any growth! When do you think we could do this?" the young woman asked her.

Lily was amused. The Apprentice was always worried about her growth, and in all areas, it turned out. Granted, she wasn't even past the 160-centimetre mark yet.

"Zhese systems are still one-of-a-kind works of art, so I will 'ave to start building and designing one around one of our available quantum processors," Lily mused. Then, after considering the matter, and everything else she had on her plate, "Friday." She would also have to write a user manual for the system or create some sort of training software. The latter might be better.

The Apprentice scrunched up her face. It was two and a half days away, which Lily didn't think that long. Finally, the girl nodded, "Okay. Does it take some getting used to?"

That was an understatement, so Lily just nodded. "Also, Apprentice. These devices are classified confidentiality level ... Deepest Void." That was the level of secrecy she had instructed the Apprentice to mean nothing written down, nobody else told, never spoken of when they weren't alone. It was the same level she internally classified information about her experiments with FEV, although the Apprentice had no need to know of that data. "However, once you get it, we should be able to discuss such things mentally, given the encryption I set up in the wireless radio data network."

"Wait, this will make me telepathic?!" the girl was enthused.

Lily outright chuckled at the girl, "By some definitions, except instead of telepathy where you could talk to anyone mind to mind and is considered a superpower, zhis is limited to only me. And robots, I suppose." She tilted her head in thought. Weren't there actual telepathic powers in Fallout? That brain in a jar guy? How could they work, she wondered?

"A super-curse! Although talking to robots sounds cool," the girl clapped back, but she was grinning.

Lily nodded rapidly; she thought so too. She hadn't quite gotten the RobCo wireless protocol completely emulated yet, not enough to actually talk and send data back and forth to robots that were capable of conversation anyway. It was limited to merely directing the stupider variety of RobCo bots at present.

Perhaps Sophie could help her with that when she went to Vault 108. She intended to visit them, after all. She didn't mind if that Miss Nanny knew she was more than meets the eye, anyway.

Lily glanced at the PipBoy on her wrist, she had intended to give the device to Alice when she finally got the global positioning system data schema decoded, but that hadn't happened until a couple of days ago. So maybe she'd just continue to wear it for the style points. If only it could be miniaturized and made to look a bit sleeker.

She could at least pull the exact atomic clock date and time from the GPS satellites when she was downloading the constellation almanack, which pleased her. Her internal chronometer was off by over fifteen minutes. Lily suspected that Vault security man must have set his PipBoy clock fast on purpose, perhaps to make sure he arrived to work on time?

"Well, I'm going to go finish all my reading for today and make sure the rugrats are doing the homework I set out for them," the Apprentice mentioned.

Lily waved a hand to dismiss the girl. "I will be down 'ere assembling a robot. Try to zhink where I can find zhe titanium and tungsten. I need zhe tungsten, girl!" Lily mentioned, calling the last to Alice's back as she climbed up the stairs.

Lily sighed. She really did need a lot of tungsten. And titanium. She wanted to turn her truck into less of a truck and more of an infantry fighting vehicle with cargo capacity, and resistance to lasers and radiation was an absolute pre-requisite.

Her truck's oversized fission motor wasn't much less powerful than the gas generator that would come standard on a main battle tank, so as long as she kept the thing under thirty tons, it should still move quite quickly. In her mind, she had pictured an armoured RV with a small sleeping area and perhaps some scientific equipment.

She already had the repaired Gatling laser incorporated into an ultra-fast traversing turret that she would put on top. She'd like a couple more of those, but they weren't really sold on the market very often.

She walked over to the robot repair station and began digging through the boxes of parts.

---xxxxxx---

Several hours later.

"Rise!" Lily said dramatically as the robot took its first few steps out of the robot repair bay. Lily hummed as she watched it. It looked a little bit like a Terminator, but not quite as intimidating. The head she had designed with flat, smooth shapes was somewhat oversized and looked nothing like a human. She did this, so it avoided the uncanny valley, which she judged it did. Barely.

The Protectron software definitely needed some updating, though, which she would work on tonight. The motivator drivers couldn't handle the different centres of gravity, nor could they operate the extra limbs like individually moving fingers and the more complicated three-dimensional ankle and knee joint movements.

Lily casually pushed it with barely any force, and it tipped over and fell on the ground unceremoniously. Yes, it definitely needed some work, but she was already pretty comfortable working on the Tron-series software.

She stepped back and watched it work its way up, standing as ungracefully as a mermaid that had just gotten her legs.

She couldn't help herself, she reached over and pushed it again, and it fell on its back and sprawled, flailing like a turtle. She could sense its error packets flash over the network in distress, and she giggled at the purposeless cruelty to non-sapient robots, "Hehehe."