73 Companionable Silence

It wasn't too difficult to reverse engineer the copy protection on the fusion cores, but only because her scanner was almost an exploit. The fusion cores were designed to self-destruct if inspected or disassembled, either destructively or non-invasively, featuring some surprisingly sophisticated methods. Over a third of the interior volume of the device was dedicated to sensors.

If you tried to X-ray the device, it would likely explode, although they were self-aware enough about the possibilities of nuclear combat to prevent the x-rays from a nuclear blast from triggering the copy protection, as if it received gamma rays at the same time it would simply assume you were close to a nuclear explosion, not trying to reverse engineer it.

Honestly, she was taking notes as she would have built a few of these tricks into the recycler she had given to the Mechanist. However, these physical defences were much more sophisticated than the actual "software" DRM.

When inserted into a proprietary refilling station, the fusion core would send through a simple data connection the fusion core's serial number. A genuine Poseidon filling station would send back an authentication code, which the fusion core would check. If the code was correct, the fusion core would permit the refuelling process to begin. If it was incorrect, the fusion core would permit the refuelling process to begin, start-up and then dump its entire power output over the data line, frying the unauthorised device while detonating the onboard thermite anti-tampering charges, the combination of which had a very high probability of causing a hydrogen explosion.

At least Hewlitt Packard didn't try to kill you if you installed a non-genuine ink cartridge in their printer.

The programming for all this behaviour was hard-coded in core rope memory. Like used in the Apollo missions on the lander! That meant the bits were literally woven inside the core memory module, so she could easily decode the ones and zeroes from her image scans, and from there, it wasn't super difficult to figure out the "programming" of the entirely electric-based device, but that was only because she had an AI to help her and she was nerding out on seeing such a weird and archaic memory storage system. It was unusual even for the Fallout universe, and Lily suspected it was chosen because it was so arcane.

You didn't get a lot of data storage with rope memory, so there could never have been anything really that sophisticated as the DRM, but it seemed to have stood the test of time. The correct value the fusion core was looking for was the serial number sent through a one-way cryptographic hash function and then XORed. Quite simple, really. Lily didn't recognise the hash function, but it seemed somewhat similar to all types of such functions in that a small change in the input created a huge change in the output so as to make it impossible to infer if you were close to the correct value.

Such a simple solution also implied that the genuine refilling stations, at least partly, had to be at least as locked down as the fusion cores; otherwise, an attacker could disassemble them to find the correct procedure. It would be interesting to see one.

Acquiring the hydrogen to fill up the first version of her refilling device wasn't difficult; she used electrolysis on some distilled water, collected the hydrogen gas, and vented the oxygen.

However, she decided to test the device outside of the city limits, and Alice wanted to come along on an "adventure", so she was accompanying her in the finished RV on its first trip outside. However, she didn't seem all that impressed at first.

"There doesn't appear to be all that much space in the back," the Apprentice said, confused. It was true, too. There was so much she was taking in her vehicle that there really wasn't much space in the back, barely enough to walk, in fact. Although it was actually somewhat roomy for an RV in her past life, the Apprentice didn't understand how her vehicle would work.

Lily smirked, "Just wait!"

She didn't intend to go too far, so she just drove her small tank a little bit to the northeast of town. Glancing at the east fence of Megaton as she rounded the settlement reminded her she was supposed to start construction of the gate soon. She had received the funds from the mayor and was theoretically in the sourcing materials stage. Unfortunately, there were many ways she was being screwed over; one of the main ones was there were significant costly security demands, such as 24/7 security monitoring, if she was to do anything that involved, even temporarily, removing the Megaton security fence.

As such, she had decided to build a second fence outside of Megaton, in effect expanding the town, and when she was done, she would tear down and recycle the first fence, which was kind of rickety and built out of salvaged aeroplanes in the first place. She had a ridiculous amount of elemental iron and carbon from her excavations, and the half dozen cars the Mechanist brought her, so making steel wasn't difficult; so she intended to make a tall chain link fence, complete with barb wire, automated electrolaser turrets every thirty metres or so and very bright lights care of her Apprentice every five metres.

Without the turrets or the lights, it would be pretty simple for intruders to use wirecutters to gain access, but she intended to put the kibosh on that before it even started. Honestly, there were areas around the Megaton fence that weren't effective deterrents in any case. They would be exploited by smugglers, except for the fact that there wasn't really any such thing as contraband, to begin with, so in effect, what they were used for was for criminals, people banned from entry and the poor to gain access. Megaton would let you in, but not if you looked very poor. Not very egalitarian, for sure, but there were a ton more people in the Capital Wasteland than one settlement, even as large as Megaton could save.

Lily intended to, in effect, claim close to another fifteen blocks of the city that she would, for the most part, keep for herself. She didn't like her back door to be directly next to the security fence. She wanted at least a one-block carefully prepared kill zone in case she was attacked from the east. One block would be the new gate and security checkpoint, but the rest would be hers, although there weren't currently any buildings on any of it.

There was no way that she could make over two kilometres of a tall chain-link fence in her sintering machines in any reasonable time frame, so she first made a machine that would take the iron powder and carbon and create strong steel wire, which she was producing and stockpiling in her warehouse. She hadn't created the machine to create the chain-link fence yet, though, but she more or less knew how they worked due to watching a lot of the How It's Made TV show in her past life.

She wasn't entirely sure how to produce concertina wire for the tops and bottoms of the fence yet but figured that was probably a pretty simple evolution. Just curling the existing steel wire into a coil and sharpening bits of it to rip any person to shreds who tried to climb over or on it, it didn't seem that complicated. However, the fact that she was making more and more straight industrial machines made her a little amused. The automated steel smelter, even if all it produced was a steel wire from iron and carbon powders, looked properly industrial.

Every time she made something like that, she couldn't help but feel amazed that it worked. She still expected the pixel-producing machine to explode again, even though it had been producing over a quarter billion individual parts, pixels, as day every day for weeks. Well, except for the few days when she ran out of oil.

She was planning on replacing a lot more of the security fence than necessary to build an access gate, and she was doing it on purpose. Her fence would look new, modern, secure, and not salvaged from a bunch of grounded aeroplanes. It would be lighted at night, guarded by her men, her robots and her turrets. She didn't have any desire to be mayor, but she definitely wanted to be able to decide who the mayor should be. There was no way that raiders would ever attack her side of the city when it was such a hard target after it was constructed, and raider attacks did happen somewhat often-- once every couple of months on average. It was why she would continue to build the steel wire even after stockpiling enough to build "her" section of fence and the gate itself.

The rich people mostly lived on the north side of town, farthest away from the south side gate. It gave them a little sense of security, she supposed. Their fence was in better shape, too, but it was still built of repurposed aluminium and titanium aeroplane wings and fuselage parts that had been squashed flat or straightened out.

There was no way the well-to-do wouldn't demand a similar fence on their side of town, too. And it went without saying that she wouldn't build any turret that she couldn't, if necessary, take complete control of in an emergency. Well, that wasn't true. She would in fact, do that if it was specifically asked for and she agreed to do it. She wouldn't break her word. However, there was no way she would agree to build the city any turrets in that case.

She made sure to stop in an area that had a lot of space and smiled at the Apprentice, "Come, come. You 'ave to see zhis from outside."

Alice looked interested and followed her out of the vehicle. And it didn't take her too long to find out why the rear of the vehicle, which was actually quite big, felt so cramped. Lily triggered the deployment mechanism with the Mesh, and two large spikes shoved themselves into the ground on either side of the vehicle to stabilise it while the rear compartment started sliding out like a telescope on both the port and the starboard sides. More spikes jammed themselves into the ground, this time from the deployed area, securing the newly deployed rooms onto the ground as well.

When all was done, the inside area inside the rear compartment of the vehicle had, at least, tripled and became much less cramped as well. When fully deployed, there were almost seventy-five square metres of space inside the rear area, which wasn't a ton, but it was quite a lot for something meant to be mobile. A good portion of it was used for things like a robot repair station, which contained her Assaultclone, one of her generators, a recycler, a fabricator, a small kitchenette, a bed, a bathroom, and a repair station for Power Armour, which had the prototype she was still working on inside. She wasn't sure why she brought it with her, aside from the fact that it looked cool as hell. It still didn't quite work, but her experiments in using the Assaultclone had borne a lot of fruit. Instead of attempting to replicate the complicated laser gyroscopes and software that Power Armour used to keep their wearers upright, she would drive her version of Power Armour directly via a direct wired connection, the same way she controlled the Assaultclone.

The fact that she very likely would have a working set of custom, never before seen in the Wasteland, Power Armour before she ever hit the VSS building, made her feel a bit conflicted. She still felt that it was a good idea she made, seemingly so long ago when she first arrived in the world, but she had been gaming her arrival like it was a new playthrough of Fallout 3. She always ran straight to the VSS building when she started a new game to do the Anchorage DLC and get Power Armour training and that suit of T-54 armour. But she didn't care in those instances if she got splattered by the Super Mutants in DC in her mad rush there; she just would load a saved game. Her present reality was a lot different.

She still wanted to loot everything there, especially the Chinese stealth armour and the VR technology itself, but she wondered if the Power Armour would be that useful. Certainly, her version of Power Armour was a lot less flexible. It could only be useful for people with brain computers like hers, so there was still a lot to gain in general, even if not for her herself, by studying the Power Armour there.

When the vehicle was moving, most of those things, like the robot repair bay and Power Armour were carefully stored in areas that weren't obvious until the vehicle deployed in its stationary mode, which was why there was so little space available while it was in its mobile mode.

"Woah! That is awesome!" the Apprentice said, and then ran up the back door to see the inside of the vehicle now that it had "transformed." She grinned. Her "armoured research vehicle" was just over thirty-five tons, and the large fourteen hundred horsepower motor and tank treads gave it a max speed of a little over eighty-five kilometres an hour, but that was really only over fairly good terrain. When she was towing a trailer, even one as small as the one she had attached now, she wouldn't push it any more than forty-five or fifty.

Not fast if you compare it to a car, but nobody drove very fast in vehicles in the Wasteland in any event. Hers was a lot better armed and armoured, as in addition to the Gatling laser, it also featured small blister laser turrets on every side and a smaller secondary turret featuring a missile launcher that she had purchased from a scavenger.

She was pretty sure the Brotherhood was both a little nervous about her vehicle and purposefully ignoring it, probably for internal serenity. The idea that some waster that wasn't them had what amounted to an infantry fighting vehicle probably wouldn't sit well with the Outcast element. Honestly, she hoped they left sooner rather than later.

The Apprentice came back outside. She had known about the Assaultclone, and Lily even let her drive it a few times for fun, but she hadn't known about her Power Armour project. "Wow, is that Power Armour, like those Brotherhood people have? It looks a lot cooler!"

Lily made a face, "It will be when I'm done with it. Zhere are a number of small problems with it at zhe moment." It definitely did look a lot cooler, though. That was undeniable.

It was a bit more streamlined than normal Power Armour, and the helmet looked more like one of her Kaytron heads than a helmet. She felt that the number of disadvantages to using camera-based vision was less than the disadvantages of using very thin armour in the head so that you could see through it. Why, if you shot a normal person in T-45d Power Armour in the eyes, it was very likely to penetrate even with small rifles, to say nothing of lasers! There were about two dozen cameras on each side of the armour, so she could have the fabled and theoretic three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision using it, but her sensory cortex couldn't quite handle that at a reasonable resolution. However, she did have a simple picture-in-picture setup available, not to mention both the armour's onboard expert system, which was run on one of her purloined eyebot cores installed on the hardsuit, as well as her own inside her head, would analyse all cameras for potential threats and alert her in real-time.

It definitely looked more advanced and like a proper hardsuit, which it was. It would survive in a vacuum, although there currently wasn't any kind of reaction control system to control its movements in microgravity, so it would be kind of bad to use in that application unless you could guarantee you'd never be farther than arm's length from something to grab and hold onto.

Lily waved a hand, "Come, let's see if zhis zhing blows up!" She ordered the Kaytron squad in the small trailer to unload the prototype refilling station and dragged in a good thirty metres away from the vehicle.

"I think it will blow up," said the Apprentice confidently.

Lily frowned at the girl, "'Ey! Zhat's bad luck! Plus, I made zhis!"

"I know! I often hear explosions when you're working on things," she said, nodding.

Well... while that wasn't untrue, she felt pretty confident about this. Still, she had one of the robots plug the empty fusion core into the refilling apparatus.

After about twenty seconds, there was a loud ding and no explosion. Despite what she had said earlier about her confidence, Lily raised her eyebrows. Still, there was one more test to run. She had the robot pull the fusion core out and walk a little bit back to the truck. The other robots had pulled out a fusion core powered electrical generator off the trailer and also drug it a bit away.

The fusion core was plugged in, and the generator came to life, immediately starting to power one of Alice's street lights which Lily connected to the device for testing purposes.

"Huh... it works," said the girl, mildly.

Lily growled at the girl, feigning anger, "Don't act so surprised! Zhis is my genius, after all!" Honestly, she had been working on and off the fusion core project for over a month since Grace gave her the three cores. It would be a little bit weird if she didn't see some progress! It was only eighty per cent due to the fact that her scanner bypassed all of the physical anti-tampering devices on the fusion cores, after all. The rest was all her genius!

Both Alice and Lily blinked simultaneously as they both received an alert. The girl was the first to say anything, "It looks like there is a patient looking for a genetics consult, and neither of us are there. Should we head back?"

Lily nodded and triggered the RV to return to driving mode. It was much more pleasant now that there were a lot more of her aerial drones flying in the sky. Not only did she have a dozen eyebot processors that didn't have an eyebot to return to, but she realised that a single eyebot processor on a single aerial drone was overkill. Now, she had one command drone which controlled and directed about a dozen subordinate drones, and those drones could be a few kilometres away, such that a single command drone could cover an impressive area. Each of the subordinate drones had optical and radio surveillance, as well as Mesh, relays installed. Not only was her visual surveillance of the DC area getting downright impressive, but her network area was large too. She could almost walk to the Potomac river and stay in touch, and with the overpower transceiver and directed dish antennas in her tank, she could literally drive back to Canterbury Commons or as far as Tenpenny Tower and stay in touch with her network in town.

The main thing keeping her from expanding her area drone fleet was actually a lack of fission batteries now, not eyebot processors.

She kept the drones very far away from either Adams Air Force base or Arlington, though, but still had been noticing some radar transmissions from the Air Force Base that might indicate that her drones weren't entirely unnoticed anymore, even if they were small.

The entirety of Megaton was covered, such that she was tempted to invent the cellular phone. Already her men carried walkie-talkies she made for them that used the Mesh to transmit voice broadcasts or point-to-point messages. They didn't currently leave her side of town, much less Megaton, so they were always in range, so it was a very useful tool.

Their training was increasing as well, thanks to herself, Gary and their squad leaders, of which she hired another. However, she did lose four recruits, to Gary of all people, who asked her permission to hire them as drivers for his water business. He said they were very trustworthy, and that was just the sort he needed. 'Me too,' she wanted to yell, but she gave him permission, even though she had already given all of her recruits genetic therapies as a sign-on bonus on the agreement that they work for her for a minimum of two years, like an Army enlistment.

He was out with them now in Canterbury Commons, training them to drive the truck and starting the first deliveries from Vault 108 to Canterbury Commons. It had barely been two months since the man had left the Vault, and he was already delivering his valuable product.

Certainly, Lily had helped him tons, to say nothing about the Mechanist who designed at least half of the truck himself, but she felt that Gary's quick rebound after discovering everything he ever knew was burned to cinders. She quite liked that about him. It was a bit of a shame that he had started to date a girl that worked in the hospital as one of the chefs, as that brought an end to their sporadic trysts.

Grace was still seeing her when she was in town, though, which was nice. It was difficult for Lily to find anybody that understood that she just couldn't be around a person every single day. Or even every other day, to be honest. It certainly meant traditional romantic relationships, even if she barely understood the concept, were out of the window. Most husbands or wives, she thought, wouldn't take it well if she told them she'd see them next week every time they spent a day together.

She generally only spent an hour or two at the very most around even the Apprentice every day, and Lily basically considered that girl to be her daughter now, although she hadn't quite told the girl that yet. It was too awkward socially to do so and involved too many unpredictable responses from the girl to that admission.

Speaking of which, she'd like to get away from the girl now for a while before they had dinner together with her siblings, so she would take this genetics consult. It was a new patient, anyway.

"Alright, let us 'ead back, zhen," Lily said, pleased with their outing, nonetheless. She would, in fact, have a working fusion core refilling system to trade Madison Li tomorrow.

Perhaps sensing her Mistress' desire for solitude, even cheered as she was with the success of the experiment, the Apprentice and her teacher simply sat in companionable silence on the way back to the city.