The long lived shall inherit the earth

Wilson was a little aggrieved, and perhaps it was warranted, "You left me as a dog for three hours, ma'am! After that asshole disappeared, at least I was no longer mauling people, but the simulation reset, and this boy was playing fetch with me the whole time!"

In Lily's defence, she had gotten distracted both reading Dr Braun's private files and reviewing the dossiers on the people Braun had selected to live in Tranquility Lane. What she learned about the G.E.C.K. both from Braun's personal files and his impersonator had depressed her, and after that, she had spent some time looking through who all were living here in the simulation world.

Glancing at Wilson, Lily had the sudden desire to find a stick and throw it to see if the Submajor would chase it. For science. But she didn't see any sticks or even tennis balls around. She asked him, slightly amused, "Did you 'ave fun, Submajor?"

He combined saying, "Respectfully..." with flipping her the bird.

"This is going to take us a lot longer, I zhink..." Lily told him after she grinned at his response. "I zhink we will need to set up a semi-permanent position here."

That caused him to frown, "Why? That might be very problematic. We are almost directly next door to a substantial raider settlement at Evergreen Mills. There are hundreds of raiders there. It isn't as big as Paradise Falls, but they're less than ten kilometres away. It's only the fact that we snuck in that we haven't been attacked yet."

Lily hummed and waved her hand at a group of the Tranquility Loungers. "Dr Braun really did a number on all of zhese people. It will take me several days just to bring zhem to rationality and return their original memories." Technically, they all had their original memories; Braun had been resetting them back to their original memories at least once a year. However, they were just blocked off through interesting neural stimulation from the pods.

"Well, if it will only be a few days, that shouldn't be a problem," began Wilson, but Lily shook her head.

She said, "No, after that, I will give zhem some options, but I expect to have to clone a lot of bodies and perform a lot of brain transplantation surgeries. Zheir bodies inside zhese pods are kept alive, but zhey 'ave become, essentially, acclimated to the life support zhe pods provide. Zhey can't be separated for long before zheir bodies fail."

"Wait, you can move someone's brain into a different body?" Wilson asked, half-amazed and half-disgusted.

Lily waved a hand at one of the Robobrains that had been rolling around, "Zhat technology isn't exactly zhat unusual. 'Ow do you zhink zhey made zhose abominations?"

Wilson nodded after a moment, "Are you going to make a body for those robots, too?"

Lily shook her head, with a sigh, "No. I examined each one. Zhey basically lobotomised zhem in zhe process of 'ooking zhem up to zhe robobrain chassis. Zhere is nothing really of an individual, zhinking person left, now. So zhey may as well get some use as zhey are." Some people might object to what was basically zombies used as labour, but definitely not her. If she got transferred to a fantasy world instead of Fallout, she would have felt that necromancy would be an excellent form of cheap labour.

At first, Lily thought it was a little weird because there wasn't anything that required that. In fact, the Robobrains were a pretty good first try at integrating a human brain with a synth chassis.

She used to design and build those types of things all the time; they were called pods. There were some people who wanted the flexibility that synths could offer but still wanted an organic brain, after all, but mostly these were usually mass-produced low-cost affairs. They were a step up from a full entry-level synth body but much less expensive than an average biomorph.

Meimei had a history, albeit a discreet one, as a highly compensated consultant with a large inner-sphere manufacturing house called Ota Lifeworks to design these types of systems to be as good as possible for as cheap as possible. It was an interesting problem to find the correct place on the graph where neither axis, quality or price, went too far into diminishing returns. However, she also took bespoke clients, especially well-to-do AGIs who wanted to experience life in an organic body while retaining their synthetic brains. She thought they were crazy, but often AGIs had a soft spot for becoming as human as possible for some reason. Data from Star Trek was an exaggeration, but there were some AGIs who were somewhat similar to him.

The more she thought about the robobrains, the more Lily realised that they had probably used unwilling donor brains, and the significant traumatic brain injuries were intentional, as a way to essentially kill the people involved while still leaving their brains useful as a calculating organ.

Wilson asked finally, "How long are we talking about here, then?"

Lily hummed, "It takes zhe cloning machine about six to eight hours to clone a body, and it takes me about zhree to four 'ours to perform a brain transplantation surgery. Although I zhink, I can definitely reduce zhat time a lot."

"For over a hundred people?! We're talking weeks, no months! We'll need at least twenty or thirty soldiers and four times the number of robots to ensure your safety continuously," Wilson exclaimed, aghast.

Lily nodded, "Yes, especially since I won't be able to do zhis full time. I zhink we will 'ave to go the whole 'og as zhey say. Chainlink fence, concertina wire, automated turrets, lights, air defence radar, SHORAD batteries. Just like zhe Megaton exterior defences." She wouldn't stay around a location with fewer defences than that if it were widely known that she was here. As a local warlord, she had enemies.

"Ma'am... we don't have the resources to do that. Especially not to escort and guard construction crews coming in from Megaton to build all that," Wilson said, reasonably but firmly. They probably did have the resources if you just counted the robots. She had about two hundred and fifty of them, and about seventy to one hundred were currently being used at any time in the hospital and around town, mostly as security or general labour in the hospital. Another sixty or so were used by her for building, excavation and assembly projects underneath the hospital.

However, despite how useful they were, Kaytrons did function best in small groups when overseen by a human, unless it was repetitive tasks. When she used them for construction, she was usually the one that was overseeing them or giving them specific tasks in a specific order in advance. They could assemble a laser rifle with no problem but would find it more difficult to troubleshoot a malfunctioning one.

Lily sighed, "I know. I will 'ave to bring in zhe Brotherhood to help me. Zhey can provide both some additional security forces, as well as, more importantly, some skilled labour to help build zhe perimeter. Skilled labour zhat is used to working in semi-dangerous locations and under pressure." She hummed, "Besides, I'll need to borrow one of zhe cloning machines zhey recently acquired. I can't move mine out of zhe hôpital; it is used too often zhese days, and running bodies from Megaton to 'ere twice a day seems a little much. Besides, we do have over two dozen robobrains 'ere, zhey can be repurposed to help construction as well as exterior defence." Although she couldn't do that for too long, they were required to do all of the maintenance necessary to keep this facility operating.

She could build another cloning machine, but she hadn't really gotten farther than scanning and making alterations to her existing one. It would be a small project of a couple of weeks to design one for production. She had the intention to do so, eventually, but for now, she'd just borrow one from the Brotherhood. It wasn't like she would be able to hide this from them, anyway... nor was there really that much reason to do so.

She was hoping that most of the people in Tranquility Lane would decide to move to Megaton. Braun hadn't selected average Americans for his playthings; they were definitely tilted towards the higher educated and higher income bracket. Of the one hundred and five people still alive in Tranquility Lane, all of them had at least a four-year college degree. There were about twelve medical doctors and over two dozen engineers, as well as the old Postmaster General from the Pre-War government.

She supposed that if the man had been given to Braun as a plaything, he probably wasn't involved with the Enclave. However, she intended to keep the scans Braun made of the brains of every person in here anyway. He used those scans to periodically revert them back to a "default state," although the technology he was using to do so did a little bit of brain damage every time he used it, so there were numerous cumulative injuries she would have to fix on essentially everyone here.

She would keep their scanned memories not only to be on the safe side but in order to get a lot of valuable knowledge about both the culture and society, as well as any helpful engineering and scientific knowledge these people had, although there weren't any genius inventors amongst the cohort, except for Braun himself. Although he stole the matter-energy portion of the G.E.C.K., he was still an absolute genius.

She was getting a little ahead of herself, though. It was possible that everyone inside Vault 112 would choose to just be euthanised. That was the other option she would give them. Considering she planned on either looting all of the VR technology or possibly now just taking over the entire Vault, she wouldn't be giving them the option to continue to live in some VR world for the foreseeable future, though. However, she honestly wouldn't expect even a single person to want to do that after being toyed with inside of a virtual world for hundreds of years.

"Okay, that might work, I suppose, but that is beyond my pay grade. I haven't had any issues interacting with the Brotherhood, myself, though. They're professional, if a little weird," Wilson said, finally.

For a first step, Lily returned to the RV and raided the medical supplies she had brought. She had a lot of medichines in saline suspension, and would be programming them for repairs in the brain, just as she had done so for the Submajor and then would place them in the input line of each pod's nutrition and life support system. It would take time to repair all of the damage Braun had done to these people by repeatedly erasing and reprogramming their memories.

She had already deactivated the fake personalities he had programmed on each individual, but they wouldn't adjust back to their normal state right away. The way Braun handled fake personalities was pretty crude. He essentially made an NPC play the person while the person was fully conscious... eventually, the person's thought patterns would tend to mirror that of the NPC, and that was it. Eventually, he would turn the NPC programs off, and that was the time he usually started fucking with people.

That was why the Submajor played fetch with that boy. The NPC dog program was running on top of his avatar, and the pod was trying to trick him into thinking he was making all of those choices, although, with the changes she had made to it after she hacked it, that wasn't possible. As such, it was probably just annoying for him, like watching someone's perspective as a film.

She could revert all the people in Tranquility Lane back to their Pre-War memories while they were in the pods but would wait to see if their memories would return on their own after she had removed the blocks and custom programming Braun had added to each of the pods. Braun had reverted their memories at least a hundred times, but it was clear it didn't completely take for every person. There was some bleed over on at least a fraction of the people who remembered some or all of their past in the simulation.

Already, without the custom programming that heightened everyone's sense of unease, the stress levels of everyone connected to the simulation were dropping considerably.

Taking the supplies out of the vehicle, she had a couple of robots take them into the Vault while she returned back to the RV. She sat in the passenger seat and grabbed the radio handset, and quickly programmed the transmission to travel through the Mesh to be transmitted on her hospital's high-gain transceiver array. She and the Brotherhood had agreed on encryption methods, so she wasn't transmitting in the blind anymore.

She transmitted, "GNR, St. Claire, is Ms Lyons available for a discussion?"

"St. Claire, GNR, she's at the Citadel. Stand by, we'll relay for you, but it might take a few minutes to pin her down," came a familiar male voice on the radio. She didn't know his name, but he often worked the radio at the GNR building.

As she waited, she drifted deeper into the Mesh to arrange things back in Megaton. She had agreed to build a number of portable air-defence radar sets for the Brotherhood but had not delivered them yet. They were towable by any truck, and she was going to divert two of them to Vault 112, as well as many tons of concrete, a lot of chainlink fencing, steel posts, and barbed wire.

All of that she would have to divert from her slowly expanding Megaton, along with a few exterior defence turrets. Humming, she pulled up an overhead view of the hidden Vault 112 and used a tool to measure the potential surface area to be guarded.

There needed to be more area fenced in than just the garage in order to give an area that wasn't the Vault for troops to bivouac and for a motor pool, although part of the actual garage can be used for that. Nodding, she sat icons down on the map, testing angles and distances. Ten turrets would be enough to provide sufficient air defence, as well as overlapping fields of fire for all approaches.

She sighed. She intended to leave the place as she had found it to trick the Lone Wanderer's dad into getting stuck here for a time. She had planned on leaving behind an NPC version of Braun tormenting an NPC version of twelve people or so, but this place would look like a military installation after she was done. Look? It would be a military installation after she was done. There was no way either she or the Brotherhood would just leave such a place after she had built it, either, so she would have to find some other way to distract the Lone Wanderer's dad.

She wasn't worried about the timeline; she had changed so much already. However, she was living in what was a narrative world and worried about anyone who might be considered a "protagonist." Seeing how the Lone Wanderer went about his or her quest to find their parent would tell her a lot about them as a person and whether or not she should be concerned or not.

Also, it would give her time to exercise a plan to neutralise the Enclave, as she was pretty sure that as soon as it was widely reported that Project Purity was restarting that President Eden would send out the troops in force. Colonel Autumn was less genocidal than Eden was; he only wanted to secure Project Purity to use it as a soft power lever for the Enclave to regain legitimacy.

Honestly, that wasn't a bad idea, except for the fact that the Enclave seemed less interested in governance than even she did. But the Enclave and the Brotherhood were like fire and oil; they couldn't really cohabitate in the same general area without starting a conflagration.

Oh, well. She would just find some other way to figure that out. Maybe she could invade Vault 87, grab the G.E.C.K. and take it to Maine. That would give him a bit of a trek. No, that was probably a bad idea.

Suddenly, a familiar voice came on the radio, "Hey doc, what's up? Do you already have this month's shipment ready?" Every month Lily had been sending them about fifty laser rifles and pistols and about thirty plasma rifles and pistols. Now that she had gotten the technology for manufacturing doped laser rods she had managed to shift the output on all of her lasers up to the visible violent range, so at least all of her weapons did not feature the same colour beams as the Institute any longer.

"Hi, Sarah. I do, actually, but zhat wasn't why I called. I was 'oping to collaborate with the Brotherhood in something I recently discovered. I need to borrow one of zhe cloning machines you discovered on Kent Island, and probably both Paladins and Scribes until we get defences in place. Zhe location is a little sensitive from a security standpoint," I told her, speaking into the transceiver's handset.

There was a pause before Sarah's voice returned, "Well, the cloning machine shouldn't be a problem. We found four, and three are still packed away. You'll have to assemble it yourself, but I can have it moving towards you by tomorrow at 0500. But now you have me curious. I'll need a lot more information before I can authorise any real military or Scribe support. I'll probably have to talk to the Elder, too. What did you find?"

Lily hummed, considering how to say it. The radios were encrypted, so she felt she could just go out and say it, "It's Vault 112. Just west of Evergreen Mills. Rather zhan a traditional vault, zhis was a vanity project of Dr Stanislaus Braun, one of the lead scientists of Pre-War Vault-Tec. Most of zhe inhabitants are still alive, but zhey're inside life support virtual reality pods."

"Woah. Are you saying Stanislaus Braun is still alive? We have files on him," came the reply.

Lily shifted in her seat, fidgeting a little bit, "Well... no. I mean... he was. But, the crimes he 'ad done... he was basically acting as zhe god of zhis simulated world, torturing over a 'undred people for two 'undred years. So, uhh... I kind of shot 'im."

There was quiet on the line for a moment before she heard genuine laughter and Sarah asking, "Are you sure you're not interested in joining the Brotherhood? Okay, okay... I see what you meant by sensitive location. What's your plan on that front?"

Lily told her that she was already arranging the materials to build up the exterior defence but needed some support to construct it as well as additional security forces in the interim.

Sarah radioed back, "Normally, we'd be spread way too thin to help you out, especially with our new commitments at that seed vault. However, with the combination of organ and limb cloning, as well as the cybernetics technology you traded to us, we have managed to bring over fifty Paladins out of medical retirement. Plus, the half squadron of Vertibirds that we now have flying that we didn't use to helps our logistics considerably. I'll discuss this with the Elder, and while I can't guarantee anything, I think we should be able to free up one or two dozen Initiates supervised by experienced Paladins. The Scribes might be more of a problem. Most of our civil engineer scribes are repairing that bridge to Kent Island, but we'll see what we can do."

There was another pause on the radio before Sarah continued, "I can't get free until tomorrow evening, but I'll take a flight over there to see it myself. Will you still be on site?"

"I should be. Bring Ferguson or one of your medical Scribes with you when you come, if possible," Lily told her.

They concluded things there, and Lily leaned back in the comfortable chair of her RV and considered. The nanomachines were already delivered inside the Vault, and the robobrains accepted the new "vitamins" and had already begun introducing them to each of the inhabitants via their Tranquility Lounger.

The people inside the simulation were acting a bit odd, which was to be expected as their memories were slowly returning. Lily had given instructions to the computer running the sim to create a week-long Holiday so that nobody in the simulation had to go to "work" and would just stay home. She hadn't specified what kind of holiday, so the computer just created some sort of plausible-sounding Victory in Anchorage week-long celebration, complete with parades by NPCs.

That was kind of amusing. The computing resources in Vault 112 were hundreds of times more than were in the VSS building. The total simulated area and the concurrent number of users required a really large amount of computing. There were enough quantum processors for several thousand NPCs, all running concurrently, and the databases had memories of tens of thousands of Americans. It looked like Braun went to a random small Midwest town and just downloaded the brains of every single person present, although he didn't actually use the NPCs too much. Lily guessed he got bored of them.

She sighed and shifted back to look at her notes about what Dr Braun knew about the G.E.C.K. -- perhaps she missed something.

There were some engineering diagrams stored in Braun's private files, but all of them included the matter-energy module as a black box. That wasn't an insurmountable problem. She would be able to scan the actual G.E.C.K. eventually.

However, the main problem was the fuel source. It was antimatter. Specifically, the G.E.C.K. had a very sophisticated electromagnetic containment device that held over five hundred grams of antiprotons. That was... a lot. It also explained why there was only one of these devices ever built. Perhaps they intended to build them as their supply of antimatter increased? The notes said that the US government had a huge facility to produce antimatter industrially on the island of Saipan and that Vault-Tec managed to secure half the output of this facility, giving them slightly over five grams of antimatter a day.

Lily shook her head. The more she learned about Pre-War America, the more she hated it. They were producing antimatter in such quantities, yet they were still bickering over fucking oil?

She directed a question to her Muse because she was too annoyed to do the math herself. [How much electricity would it take to produce ten grams of antiprotons daily using the standard industrial heavy ion beam collider method?]

[Approximately one hundred terawatts, continuously.]

Yeah, that's about what she thought. Had they just kicked everyone off Saipan and paved over it with fusion reactor after fusion reactor to get that power output? That was more than the total electrical demand in North America from what she could tell from the Pre-War data she had. She triggered a change in flight plans on her aircraft that were delivering satellites. The next time they left, they would continue eastwards and overfly the island of Saipan and Guam, taking a lot of images.

They had the technology for, well, not a utopia, but at least a society with a lot less scarcity than they had. Hell, if they had just given the Chinese some of the fusion technology they had, she highly doubted that the Chinese would have invaded Alaska. The entire Great War was easily preventable, she thought.

She already knew why they had not. She had seen signs of it everywhere, including some records she got from the Brotherhood. The discovery of fusion electrical generators was a bit of a surprise to them, and the energy companies still wanted to get their money out of the last-generation power plants they had built and spent a lot of money on, so they sat on the technology except for juicy military and government contracts.

Honestly, they weren't of the opinion that exceptionally cheap electricity was a good idea for their shareholders in the first place.

---xxxxxx---

Lily wasn't involved in the military logistics decisions, she left that to Wilson, but she noticed both a lot of supplies, including the two air-defence radar sets, a number of extra Kaytrons and a bunch of man-portable sentry guns, arrived a little before lunch the next day.

All of the initial first-round satellites were launched successfully, and Lily had to spend a little time using one of the robot avatars she left behind to assemble another forty-five for today's planned launches. The latency was only about fifty milliseconds to get back to Megaton, so it was barely noticeable. In another ten days or so, she would have enough coverage to have a real-time conversation with Dr House, given the low earth orbit of all the satellites she was putting up. It occurred to her that she was copying the Rocket Bro's Starlink system with a planned constellation of ten thousand small satellites in a very low orbit.

Oh well, if it worked, and that had worked -- by 2040, Starlink had become one of the world's leading ISPs and even cellular phone companies, then she would feel no shame in blatantly copying it. Although the man had made a lot of expensive mistakes and failures in his life, like, for example, Twitter, when he hit one, he usually hit it out of the park.

The images of Guam were interesting. There was nobody alive there. Her aircraft had descended just over the island to take images and sensor readings. The radiation was barely elevated, and she could see numerous skeletons where people died in scores. Vegetation had taken over the island, but there wasn't very much sign of wildlife.

Hence, her first guess was that the Chinese attacked the island with chemical weapons or possibly a very fast-acting bioweapon. However, blanketing the entire small island with nerve gas was the most likely scenario. It made sense, too, if they intended to capture the island that often served as a floating aircraft carrier in the pacific. She made a mental note to explore the island in the future if she ever got the time.

Saipan was... in some ways; it was more interesting. There was no island of Saipan anymore. She verified the coordinates twice, and the entire island was just... gone. Well, that was a real shame. She had been hoping that there had been some automated antimatter factory. She could have used a few hundred kilograms of the stuff.

Well, perhaps there had been, and it all exploded a hundred years ago. That would explain why the entire island was blown to finders, completely absent.

There had already been a brief contact with her men and a small number of raiders that were departing Evergreen Mills, which had been quickly dispatched. Raiders weren't really motivated, so she didn't expect them to swarm out of that settlement like a hive of angry bees, but still, the longer before they became aware of her assets here, the better.

A few hours later, before the evening started, she heard both the incoming Vertbirds as well as their radio transmissions. She supposed Sarah Lyons managed to get free sooner than she thought she would.

She came out of the RV that Wilson was using as a command post to watch both of them land not too far away from where their vehicles were parked. She had noticed that they had approached from the west, which meant they avoided overflying Evergreen Mills. She appreciated that.

Sarah Lyons, Scribe Ferguson and a few other Paladins hopped out of one of the aircraft, while the other was full of only power armoured initiates in older T-45 and T-50 model power armour.

Lily didn't get involved in the brief conversation Wilson and Sarah Lyons had. Although she was the overall commander of her military forces, she was smart enough to delegate and not micromanage how they coordinated with what amounted to an allied force. She just gave orders and left it to the men themselves to figure out how to accomplish her orders. Everything worked out better that way, she thought.

After their discussion, Lily saw Wilson assign about thirty or so robots to the Brotherhood forces, who issued them orders and started some patrols right away. It was interesting that the Brotherhood never commented on her much more useful combat robots, although combat robots had never been a huge part of the Brotherhood doctrine as far she could tell. She thought that was a big mistake, personally.

Sarah and Ferguson walked up to her, "Hey, Doctor. We'll probably have another ten Initiates on the way and another three or four experienced Paladin-Sergeants to oversee them. The cloning machine needs to go by truck, though, but it should be in Megaton now, but you'll need to arrange an escort to get it here. Are you going to need it to clone all of these people new organs and stuff?"

Lily waved them over, "Sort of, but not exactly. Let me show you around and what I've found first."

Lily walked them through the whole Vault 112 facility, including all of the maintenance areas, the two twenty megawatt geothermal power units, and the vast server rooms. Rather than a nuclear power reactor, Braun opted for a Sure Power geothermal unit. Then, for backup, there was an X-Tra Sure Power geothermal unit. Both could supply the total energy demands of the facility independently, so there was a lot of extra power that she could use up at the surface.

Ferguson commented, finally, "These VR and life support pods are amazing. You showed us some of the VR technology you said you got from that ruin in D.C., but I think I didn't understand the implications. Can this system handle the time dilation like the small system you have can?"

Lily nodded, "Yes, but not really so much with zhe longevity features in zhe pods. Being in a continuous high-usage state of your brain in subjective time dilation for years and years at a time would probably kill you. But it is certainly safe for a few objective weeks at a time at a go."

Surprisingly it was Sarah to realise the implications first, "I think we have underestimated the utility of such a technology for training purposes. If we could have regular access to over a hundred VR pods, we could train Initiates very rapidly. Including high-intensity training that is much too dangerous in reality. This will be especially important with the Roger Maxson Home for Unwanted Children up and running in Megaton now."

She nodded and said, "That'll be the price for our help. That we share the VR tech here."

Lily hummed and nodded, "I kind of expected that. It should be fine." The computing resources here were way more than necessary for that. She intended to take about half of the computers back to Megaton. Even with only half of the computers remaining here, it was still enough to run over one hundred and fifty human participants and two thousand NPCs. Far more than enough for incredibly huge and detailed wargame simulations. That would definitely mean the Brotherhood would be stationing people here permanently, and that suited her, too.

"So, how are you going to get these people out of these pods without killing them? My medical intuition is telling me that it is impossible clone organs or not, but I don't want to make a fool out of myself here," Ferguson said amusedly.

Lily nodded at him, "No, I agree. Well, maybe not a 'undred per cent impossible, but it is certainly implausible. I intend to clone zhem brand new bodies and then transplant zheir brains into zheir new cloned bodies. Zhat is another reason I'm interested in your help. I'd really rather not do a 'undred such surgeries by myself. I'm sure Alice will be delighted to 'elp me in all of zhem, but I figured some of your surgeons could assist and learn zhe surgery so zhat zhey could do zhem zhemselves."

Ferguson and Sarah Lyons both stopped and stared at me; Ferguson asked, "Brain transplants?! Such a thing is possible?"

Lily blinked, "Didn't Monsieur Kaminsky tell you about 'ow he got out of Vault 108? Zhey had reduced 'im to a brain in a jar. Zhat's where I found the first cloning machine, and I cloned 'im a new body and performed the transplant there in the Vault. It is a difficult and challenging surgery, but any competent neurosurgeon should be able to accomplish it after learning and assisting, say... a dozen times?"

Sarah shook her head, grinning, "No. He said he was in stasis, but not that he was in stasis as a disembodied brain in a jar. No wonder he looked awful young for the rank he was claiming."

But then she got wide-eyed and said, "But... wait... if you could clone a person a new youthful body and transplant their brain into it, wouldn't that mean that they could live forever?"

Lily shook her head, "No. No more than five 'undred years or so without additional significant changes to the brain's structure. Maybe a little more, or a little less. It's hard to say. Zhere would need to be some neural plasticity treatments after a couple 'undred years, too."

Baseline flat brains could only store, at the most, four or five hundred years of memories. After that and you would forget things faster than you remember new things, so she felt that was a kind of a death, even if you wouldn't just keel over dead or anything.

"Okay, not immortality... But... for example, a stubborn seventy-year-old Elder could be given a new lease on life, and as youthful a body as his daughter could talk him into getting, right?" she asked excitedly.

Oh. She was talking about her dad. "Oh, yes, in zhat case. Or, 'ypothetically, all of the elderly Paladins and Scribes could do zhe same zhing." Lily shrugged, "'onestly, I'm not really in favour of dying of old age. Not only do I think it is stupid, but I 'ope to have it eliminated in Megaton within a few more years. Zhe world is already dangerous enough, I zhink, no?"

Lily glanced between the two, "Zhe fewer people zhat die of old age and disease, zhe quicker we can repopulate the earth, after all, yes? Isn't zhat obvious?"