Consequences of my actions chasing me right now o/~

Lily groaned as she slowly returned to consciousness. The drugged feeling and somewhat loopiness she was experiencing was a sure sign that she had a concussion and probably not a minor one.

That pissed her off. Concussions meant brain damage, and her brain was the most important part of her, at least until such a time as she decided to destructively dissolve it one neuron at a time as she converted it into a quantum computer, anyway.

She wanted to stand up and punch that brain right in the frontal cortex, or whatever equivalent was in the radically different brain structure that she remembered noting.

She started to redirect her medichines to her brain to ensure the swelling was minor and repair any obviously damaged neural connections, but the alerts her nanohive was relaying into her computer indicated that there was a lot more damage to her than she thought.

Ruptured spleen and liver, myocardial contusion, severe internal bleeding, and a host of other minor things such as contusions to other organs like one of her kidneys and lungs. The only reason she didn't have a dozen broken bones was that she did not have any bones in her body anymore.

Oh, and a detached retina in her left eye. Lovely.

'Okay, maybe I'll just sit here and won't get up,' Lily thought to herself while ensuring that the PHOENIX system and her medichines prioritized the most severe injuries. She did open her eyes, though, looking through the working right one for both her pistol and the status of that fucking brain.

Her pistol was too far away to grab without getting up, so she disregarded it and carefully pulled out the new AirTaser she built for herself, thumbing it over to high output. She must have lost consciousness for at least a few minutes because she could see a number of Termitrons leaving the room.

The Proto-Healing Vat she made for the brain, she refused to call it a jar, was well and truly destroyed with the brain flopped unceremoniously on the floor. She took aim at it and considered pulling the trigger but stopped herself.

There was no way Brain-Gary could be conscious or even alive; it required continuous oxygenation at high levels, so she sighed and placed the AirTaser back in her holster and just sat there while thinking about her life choices. Frying it would make her feel good, but it would damage it and prevent a proper pathological examination of the mutant.

She coughed, a little blood visible on her hand and sighed again. At least she was still being a classy lady and keeping all of her bleedings internally rather than messing up the only lab coat she had brought with her. She had driven out to the Vault in a customized dark grey form-fitting combat suit and helmet, as she was rightly worried about ambushes during the trip. However, science always felt better if you were appropriately dressed for it!

She didn't particularly want to think about the fact that she might have created a Psyker-Gary, at present. Nor what she felt when the brain reached into her mind. Eventually, she would get to that, but for the moment, she pulled up her sensorium playback and went through just what happened because she still wasn't entirely sure.

Lily disabled the tactile sense and reduced pain to ten per cent in the playback settings while changing the visual opacity to only seventy-five per cent, so she could still see a little bit of the real world from her one good eye while she watched the playback. She wasn't afraid to admit that she was still a little bit nervous.

Lily slowed the playback to a quarter speed at the moment the brain reacted to seeing her. Why did she even keep the eyes attached to the optical nerves on that brain, she wondered?

Next, she paused the playback at the part where she was clearly reacting in pain, but no pain was in the sensorium recorded. Thinking that it must be on the tactile track, she re-enabled it and found that there was no pain there either.

That was very interesting, and very concerning too. The brain cannot feel pain; it has no nerves to do so. Lily thought that she must have been feeling some sort of induced migraine headache, but if so, it should have played back in her sensorium.

What was this? Some sort of... metaphysical pain? Pain attacking the psychic mind rather than the physical brain? Lily wanted to scoff at such fantasies, but she was still staring at the brain that did it to her, so she couldn't discount them as much as she wanted to.

She had known that there were psychic powers in the Fallout universe. Hell, she had known that some FEV strains could cause psychic powers, as that was a minor plot point in Fallout 1. However, to be honest, her hyper-materialist mind had sort of... discounted the possibility. Which was stupid, she now considered.

She sighed. There were a lot of little weird things in the Fallout games that couldn't possibly be real, and she just assumed that fucking actual Psykers were one of them. For example, one of the characters in Fallout 1 was supposed to have been exposed to FEV and turned hyper-dense, weighing one Imperial ton but in the same body shape as a normal man. That was ridiculous unless he was made out of indium.

Perhaps she just didn't have enough electrodes in her brain to detect the pain the Psyker Gary caused her, or maybe it occurred in areas of the brain that she discounted for sensorium. For example, she piped the inputs and outputs of the Broca region of her brain into the computer's sub-vocalization system, and that was only one such example of dozens.

Shaking her head, she just didn't know. She had a feeling that it was a metaphysical bullshit thing, though.

She continued the playback, rubbing her bruised chest at the point in the playback where she was launched into the rear wall of the room. The fucking brain had TKed her right in the tit, and it still stung even amongst all the other injured areas of her body.

But... it didn't compute. As much as the hit in her chest hurt, it didn't compute to the much harder impact she had with the wall.

Humming, she pulled up some diagnostic data included in the experience log, including the accelerometer she used as part of her backup inertial navigation system.

'Ah. It wasn't so much a single hit. My body was accelerated continuously until I slammed into the wall,' Lily realized. It wasn't so much that it hit me with TK, but more like it grabbed me and slammed me into the wall with TK.

Lily turned her pain and tactile playback off completely prior to her body hitting the wall in the experience playback, nodding at the deceleration numbers in her diagnostic log.

That would have been instantly fatal to any flat. Hell, it would have killed her if she was still the same as she was when she arrived in Vault 108.

The only sense track that continued after she blacked out was the audio, as it was piped directly from the digital microphones to her brain-computer. The rest of her brain was entirely insensate, with her brain's electrical activity being recorded as quite low.

Was being rendered unconscious and waking back up the bioequivalent of merging from a fork? True unconsciousness was a lot different from sleep, where brain activity was quite high. Her brain was, essentially, switched off for a time, like a computer rebooting. She felt that it was not a bad comparison.

Lily switched on the crude passive sonar system, and instead of blackness in the playback, she started to see indistinct shapes rendered in grayscale whenever there was a noise. For example, she saw the outline of the room's walls, the Termitron and the Psyker Gary's healing vat the moment her robot started shooting it with high-output lightning bolts.

She was very glad she didn't build the entire healing vat out of diamond-like she had considered doing. She only built the front viewing port out of diamond glass and the rest out of carbon fibre.

Very quickly, two other robots came into the room and started blasting the tank with blue beams as well, and one of them closed to a close distance and started smashing it with its hands.

Lily narrowed her eyes and immediately made a note to create retractable diamondoid claws for the Termitrons. The steel alloy fingers did nothing against the diamond glass.

Although Lily was pretty sure the lightning beams had already destroyed the device at this point, one of the robots just picked it up and threw it on the ground for good measure, smashing everything except the glass panel into bits.

At that point, the robots seemed to agree that their task was complete and started leaving the room, except for the one who had her scanner. However, all the other robots followed them into the room over the next two to three minutes as they had to individually see their target was destroyed before leaving to return to their duties.

The playback continued for a couple more minutes before she regained consciousness, after which she stopped the experience playback.

Lily hummed, starting to think about just how bad this could have turned out. She could have easily died or, worse, been turned into some kind of thrall. She didn't know such a thing was possible, but she didn't know it wasn't, either.

And that wasn't the worst part, either. She had been avoiding thinking about exactly what she felt when the Psyker Gary had connected to her mind. She was... almost positive that it wasn't, in fact, Gary anymore.

She felt connected to a mind that wasn't here at all, that was using Gary as some kind of relay. It was curious and confused at its location and had tried to pull that information from her mind.

Her expert system misidentified the attempt as an unknown brain hacking attempt that was succeeding and started throwing random memories into the front of her mind of her staring at walls, of reading novels or of anything that she hadn't considered important.

It, however, detected her surface thoughts and immediately responded with violence when she resolved to shoot the fucking brain with her pistol, and that was when it threw her against the wall.

The last thing she detected from it was a sense of disappointment that it'd had to kill her and that it likely wouldn't even get to dissect her since it didn't even know where her body was.

It had been interested in her, but only slightly. Lily felt the same amount of interest as a clerk at the DMV might show when a new customer showed up at their window to get a driver's license.

She stopped to consider this for a moment. Unless she was being buffaloed, the alien... and it could only be a fucking alien... didn't know where she was and thought she was dead, too. That was good.

Lily didn't get the sense that she was being fooled or played with because of the incredible sense of arrogance she felt. Was she connected to one of the boss aliens, then?

The Aliens from Mothership Zeta did have psychic powers, but she did not think they had powers that could connect to minds on the ground from orbit. That's why they kidnapped people, but perhaps the incipient mind of Psyker-Gary reached out to it and formed some sort of stable connection.

Also, part of her brain-computer detected the mental intrusion, even if it didn't detect the psychic pain she felt. That made her feel good, in that maybe the whole thing wasn't one hundred per cent metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Only maybe seventy per cent?

Lily tried connecting to her robots but felt her radio connections were down-hard. When she had lost consciousness during a suspected brain hacking attempt, it defaulted into a protective mode by disabling all networking in and out of her brain.

The only context it had was a hacking attempt had to be conducted through her radios, so it had shut them down entirely.

She sighed. She would have to go through an abbreviated Master/Stranger protocol she devised before she could unlock her computer any further. She was honestly surprised it even let her access her stored memories.

Lily tried accessing a random memory before today and got a permission denied error.

Interesting. Was her expert system growing up a little bit? It seemed to know that she would want to watch the recent playback after she went offline and made the complicated value judgement that it wouldn't compromise her to give that to her, even if she was mind-controlled.

While her system was a quantum computer, it did not actually have the processing power to run a real person's neural network in emulation.

She couldn't, for example, fork herself and run her emulation on this present hardware. She had taken these processors from Eyebots, after all. But that didn't stop it from self-improvement, and it might even reach the stage of a primitive VI with some level of simulated personality, eventually.

She'd retain this trained expert system even when she replaced her processor with one that was superior, she decided. It made no sense to try to retrain a Muse, after all.

She decided just to close her eyes for the moment. She was healing quite fast, but it might still take her an hour or more to be in full form again.

---xxxxxx---

It took another hour on top of the first to run through her self-devised Master/Stranger protocol, which unlocked full access to her system again.

With as many electrodes as she had in her brain, she was able to get an idea of what her brain's electrical activity looked like during the psychic attack, and it was sort of unique, and hopefully, she would recognize it again in the future.

Well, actually, hopefully, she would never recognize it in the future because hopefully she would not run into, or create, another Psyker in the future.

Because she had no idea how to protect herself from psychic bullshittery, but it stood to reason that you had to BE a Psyker to protect yourself from Psykers, and while she certainly would study the physical changes in this Psyker-Gary brain, she was a bit leery of incorporating any genes into her own brain, even if she found them.

For one, she didn't want a brain three times the normal size. For two, she didn't want the possibility of becoming a psychic beacon to some aliens orbiting the planet.

Still, she rebuilt the healing vat -- now it actually was a jar because she programmed the medichines inside to preserve the dead brain from decomposition, so she could study it later at her leisure.

She had a number of additional FEV experiments planned, but the incident with the brain kind of soured her taste for continuing them. She did have a lot of data from them to study, so it wasn't as though she was losing much.

She would conduct a Safety Stand Down as far as FEV experiments were concerned, at least for now. She had to take time to digest her gains, in any case. She really felt that she was onto something as far as the last experiment, where she interrupted the FEV transformation only a few hours after exposure.

On the plus side, the corridors had been cleared to the lower levels. It would still take a few hours to widen the entry into the cloning labs, but for now, she took some time to repair the water purifier in this Vault.

Not only was the water chip in need of repair, but some of the cleanable filters were full of radioactive bilge. She could take care of the first, while a couple of her robots would take of the second.

A working Vault water purifier could produce quite a lot of pure drinking water a day, and while she didn't have any desire to set up shop here, she could always sell or trade the information to someone who might. Perhaps Scott and Sophie would like to relocate?

They had the robot labour force to clean the whole Vault out, and this place had a lot of ample electricity from its geothermal reactors.

---xxxxxx---

There were no additional automated machine guns in the lab, but there was a Mister Handy that assumed she was a Vault-Tec doctor on account that she had lied and said she was.

It seemed pretty helpful, and it felt its main job was to keep the number of clones stable. So, it must have been the reason the Vault failed. She remembered reading the notes from the female dormitory when she first arrived in this world that the vault dwellers managed to kill most of the Garies, but more Garies just kept coming.

As soon as the Mister Handy turned around to check the status of the "organic materials recycler", which was the people mulcher she was expecting to find, Lily plugged in a data cable to his exposed diagnostic port and launched a lightning-quick cyberattack, using some unpatched RobCo remote-code execution vulnerabilities to gain superuser access and initiated a shutdown.

Lily had decided that she would definitely reset this Mister Handy to factory defaults. She didn't even intend to examine it for sapience, although she felt it clearly failed her Turing Test.

The way she looked at it, it was either not alive in which case it made sense to reset it, as she did not know what kind of contingency programming Vault-Tec included or it was alive and deserved to die for continuing to inflict all these Gary's on the Wasteland for so long, even after it should be obvious to a sapience that it should have stopped.

Still, she wanted to nose around in his memory banks before she reset him, so she would just keep him shut down at the moment.

Shame it wasn't a Miss Nanny; she still wanted a cheeky Miss Nanny companion. Maybe one with a Southern Belle accent, though, like Scarlett O'Hara.

Reading some terminal entries, she discovered a fairly disturbing fact about the people mulcher. It was technology sold to Vault-Tec by Little Charlie, the corporation that made Fancy Lad cakes and was the local equivalent of Little Debby from her own America.

Were Fancy Lad cakes made of... actual lads? She stopped to consider and then opened the user operator manual for the machine, which she had to admit was still going strong after over two hundred years.

She sighed in relief. It turns out that Fancy Lad cakes were probably not the Fallout equivalent of Soylent Green. The machines were made to recycle all types of bio-matter into a variety of usable forms, one of which was being used by the cloning machine here in Vault 108.

The manual discussed optimal settings for when input was raw sewage as well as various types of algae, so it seemed more likely that Fancy Lad cakes were, instead, just made out of shit. How reassuring.

Lily would be interested to find out if the Little Charlie company donated any sewage or water treatment plants to cities where its factories were in. Knowing Pre-War companies, she doubted they donated them at all. They'd charge the city for that service, too.

Well, this would be useful for her. She could even set it up in a similar manner as Little Charlie did, taking input from sewage. So, while she probably wouldn't make snack cakes out of it, she could use it as a source of biomass if she wanted to clone organs or body parts.

Although, she actually had no real objection to the snack cakes. A lot of space habitats were very thorough in their recycling systems, as they were closed environments, after all. It wasn't that weird, except that it was being done on the planet's surface where there was no need to be so miserly.

She moved over to what looked like the cloning machine and started inspecting it. However, she stopped short when she saw what was wired into it. It was a brain floating around in a jar. She didn't build the jar, so she was all right with referring to it as that, compared to her much more sophisticated cranial life support healing vat.

"What zhe fuck..." she said softly, looking over all the pieces of equipment attached to the jar. She was careful not to disconnect anything, as she suspected that the brain might actually still be alive, but it definitely wouldn't stay alive for very long if she disconnected wires randomly.

Lily pulled out her scanner and gave the brain and associated brain equipment a good thorough scanning. It was alive and unconscious. The very low level of electrical activity made that very clear, which was a blessing. Lily couldn't imagine the hell of being aware but insensate for hundreds of years.

The equipment connected seemed to be keeping the brain in stasis, but Lily didn't understand the mechanism of how precisely it worked, which excited her. She didn't know what she could use some sort of biological stasis technology for, but it could be handy, depending on how it worked.

Lily recognized the rest of the equipment as numerous non-invasive scanning devices. She suspected they were to get a total brain scan of the brain in order to copy it to the new clones, which Lily found completely unexpected.

Lily thought that they would have digitized one copy of Gary's neural map and just forked that copy onto the clone Gary's. She thought they would have binned Gary's brain hundreds of years ago.

"Hmmm..." she said, looking over the scans of the primitive ego bridge, which was a technology she was very intimately familiar with. It really was primitive, too; it was no wonder it didn't work properly, and the clones turned crazy.

From what she could tell, it was no different from a crude copy-and-paste job, with no finesse involved at all. Just because a clone was genetically identical didn't mean that their brain developed identically in vitro and in vivo. Brains definitely didn't grow that way; otherwise, identical twins would also have identical personalities!

It was like these people didn't know the first thing about digitizing human egos or even the complicated neuro-development processes of the human brain.

That thought triggered an epiphany in her, and she said gently, "Ah."

They hadn't digitized his ego because they didn't have the technology to do so. Transhumanity had developed the technology to digitize a human mind first before the technology to apply any random digitized mind back to an organic brain, so she was making assumptions again that the Fallout scientists had followed a similar development pathway, and they clearly hadn't.

She found herself offended at the sloppiness of the technology she was looking at, the same way that Johannes Vermeer might feel if some scruffy hobo showed him a crude fingerpainting and said, "See? I am an artist, too. Just like you!"

Shaking her head, she carefully replaced the brain in the jar in its position and went to inspect the actual cloning machine and a number of ancillary pieces of equipment next to it.

She recognized the genetic sequencer as the exact same model she had brought with her, but the other device next to it did not have an operating manual. Still, it appeared to be a crude genetic editing terminal when she booted it up. It was also labelled Greenetech Genetics model GT-100C. She had better software to edit genomes both in her brain and on her laptop, but it probably would have been a state-of-the-art tool for any geneticist in the Pre-War era.

The only odd thing she noticed about it was that there was no protein output like she would expect from a primitive genetic editing apparatus. How much use could it be to these scientists if you made genome changes in software only if they didn't have some viral or plasmid to induce changes in, like CRISPR? It was like a word processor that didn't have a printer in the days before computer networking.

However, when she started inspecting the cloning equipment properly, she understood. There were no manufacturer's marks on the cloning equipment, which was a shame as she'd definitely like to know who built it. Sighing, she sat in one of the office chairs nearby in thought.

Once again, she was confronted with the dichotomy of primitive, laughable technology on the one hand and amazing technology on the other. The cloning equipment didn't take biological samples or gamete samples like she was expecting; it took a sequenced genome—data, like from the genome sequencer.

Then you specified the maturation level of the clone and pressed a button, and it would spit out a clone of that organism at the specified age in only twenty hours. That explained why a robot was able to operate it for so many years, she supposed.

In some ways, this cloning equipment was similar in operation to the equipment Lily was used to working with, but in other ways, the fast-maturation process was relatively superior! For example, it usually took several days to fast-grow a completely arbitrary biomorph body, whereas here, it took less than a day.

She was definitely stealing this. Glancing over at the brain in the jar, she pursed her lips. She supposed the least she could do, after learning so much from the man's clones, was to make one more and perform a surgical brain transplant into it.

Besides, if the cloning equipment would accept arbitrary genomes, she could incorporate some of the changes her own body had, such as the radiation resistance in his clone in vitro and then study the differences, which might allow her to craft a viral therapy that she could use in vivo back in Megaton. The Apprentice definitely needed additional radiation resistance, at minimum.

It would also be sufficient compensation, as the last survivor of Vault 108, to take all of his stuff. Honestly, she doubted he would very much want to be in the same room with all this cloning equipment anyway after she told him what happened.

First things first, though. Time to get rid of all of the evidence. She ordered her robots to begin throwing all the Gary-bodies, mutated or not, into the Fancy Lad machine. She'd keep a few tissue samples carefully hidden, but she didn't need their bodies anymore. The only one spared was Psyker Gary, which she wanted to examine in depth back at Megaton. She also had the sneaking suspicion that if she put its genome in the cloning machine, what would pop out wouldn't be human at all, assuming the machine worked at all on such divergent genomes.