90 Comrade St. Claire?!

Lily hummed happily as she worked on extracting the genetic data from seed after seed.

There were numerous samples of seeds for each species, which was good as it allowed her to sacrifice some to sequence their genome. Her cloning machine couldn't, at least at present, create plants, so she wouldn't be able to do rapid iterative design modifications to the genome of the plants she decided to modify, but at least the nice thing about plants was that they matured rapidly... well, most of them.

Already, she was building special tunnels below her tenth level, which would be sealed off with airlocks. She'd have an artificially high CO2 content, such that oxygen would be needed if she or others entered them, and a lot of light at beneficial wavelengths. She could shorten the period of time between generations quite a bit if she did that. Eventually, she definitely would either build a cloning machine or alter her existing one so that she could produce plants rapidly and in quantity, but this was fine for now.

She already identified two good species if her goal was to spread radiation-resistant vegetation far and wide, kudzu and crabgrass. Kudzu had the benefit of having roots that were consumable for human consumption and an excellent source of starches, even if it was something of an acquired taste and was worse than beans for flatulence.

She wanted an interesting and unique series of traits; namely, she wanted both species to spread rapidly in the absence of other vegetation but not outcompete vegetation if they came across it. Basically, she didn't want to just convert the vegetative biomass of the planet to kudzu and crabgrass, especially if there were existing agricultural sites. They were both legendary invasive species, so she would have to actually reduce their ability to compete quite a lot while maintaining their capability to spread rapidly everywhere. That was... kind of hard but not insurmountable.

The radioactivity level would tend to give her modified plants a survival advantage, so she could reduce their ability to compete in the absence of a base level of radiation. That way, when their mission was more or less complete, and the level of radiation dropped as these plants hopefully sequestered them underground, they would then be outcompeted by other species.

Lily had no idea at all how long that would take, though. She wasn't even confident she had a surefire way to create a biological process to identify and sequester radiation yet. Perhaps she could adjust the chlorophyll to also be reactive with alpha or beta particles? That would be an easy way to identify radionuclides, but it would have to be separate from a plant's natural heliotropism. Radiotropism, then, combined with some form of thigmotropism to capture the radionuclide when it was detected very close, perhaps.

How would that even work? Plants weren't really her speciality, especially not if she wanted them to be mostly plant-like after she was done with them. But ultimately, DNA was just a programming language like any other. It was definitely possible.

Thinking about the message her aircraft received, Lily probably wouldn't be able to talk to Dr House until she got at least a few working satellites. Expecting to do some kind of relay for four thousand kilometres wasn't realistic, even if she could fly up to forty thousand metres.

With the curvature of the Earth, she would need at least seven aircraft loitering at forty kilometres to get a good signal through to Nevada. If she had that many, then it made more sense to just spam probes into orbit until something gave way. Already she had noticed that her probes were getting farther before being intercepted.

She was building parts for both the two follow-on aircraft at the same time and would assemble them together. She didn't really have the capacity to build more than fifteen second-stage probes a day anyway, even after ramping up just for that purpose.

She managed to reduce the weight of the microfusion cells slightly by creating two different types. The lightest type was using graphene and diamond; it was very light but would oxidise appreciably even at six hundred degrees, so it wasn't appropriate to use in the atmosphere. It was the power used when the spacecraft was in a vacuum; as if there was no oxygen, it was stable at over two thousand degrees.

The other type used her normal high-temperature steel alloy, and weight wasn't appreciably reduced at all. Her ideas of using some alloy of aluminium were, perhaps, optimistic on further testing. The only way it would have worked was if the alloy contained significant amounts of titanium, and she couldn't spare it. But she did test a few methods of jettisoning the empty microfusion cells after they were depleted, similar to the way traditional rockets did when they staged boosters and eventually reached a design that gave her acceptable payloads to low-earth-orbit. If the American anti-satellite systems would stop shooting her probes, anyway.

Right now, most of her probes weren't carrying anything at all except extra reaction mass and extra fusion cells. If they managed to get through, they were programmed to attempt to transform into kinetic kill vehicles by matching orbital elements with the identified railgun platforms at high speed.

The ones that were carrying a payload had strong radar transceivers in her attempt to catalogue all artificial satellites and their orbital elements before being destroyed. There was quite a lot up there but surprisingly little debris. She supposed that over a hundred years or so, the debris from the war, which definitely had a space element, would have mostly deorbited. It was astonishing that there were even any satellites remaining in the low earth orbit slots, given the fuel requirements to maintain these orbits.

For example, the anti-satellite constellation was in the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre altitude range, higher than the ISS in her last life but not by much, and they were each large satellites massing many, many tons. They should have deorbited at least a hundred years ago, even assuming they had a lot of fuel.

There must be some kind of automated satellite tender that kept refuelling them; either that or they discovered some sci-fi inertialess drives and didn't tell anyone or use it in any other application. She was pretty sure the EmDrive in her past life was just vaporware but wasn't willing to be on it; after all, cold fusion existed in the Fallout universe. It was possible some sort of EmDrive-type system had been discovered that only produced tiny amounts of thrust, useful to stay in orbit but useless in most other applications.

She'd have to disassemble a satellite to find out, but she doesn't think it likely. Even that small accomplishment would be earth-shattering for the space industry, as satellites would be able to stay up forever. She would have heard something about it in one of the books, journals, or news media that she had available, but there were no hints at all that the USA had special space technology beyond the regular propaganda.

If there was such an automated tender, though, that brought the question of whence it got fuel unless it just had a completely ridiculously huge tank to start with. She was also interested in discovering the orbital elements of the Mothership Zeta, assuming it was in existence.

She already approximately knew its location, at least maybe, because she remembered you could nuke Canada with its death ray if you got to the bridge during the DLC. The Earth you were observing on the bridge of the alien craft did not move, which meant it must be in a geostationary orbit, and it had a line-of-sight on Canada. So, she should be able to see it from here, perhaps. But there were no radar returns, which meant that the ship either absorbed or redirected light in the spectrum that her radar used.

No matter, once she managed to start sending missions to orbit, she would be able to find it by sending a few missions higher than the geostationary level and looking down. Then, it should be obvious when it occluded the Earth below that or use infrared sensors to detect its heat, which must be significant if it was full of warm-blooded creatures and all of the associated life support systems such creatures require.

Just how did they get resupplied? Was the Mothership completely self-sufficient, or did it get periodic supply missions? Just why were they here? There was a lot she didn't know and was curious about. If it wasn't for her close encounter with Psyker-Gary, she wouldn't be so sure they were up there, but that mind that touched hers was definitely not a human one.

She also wanted to know if the captain or head alien or whatever could smash her into the wall or mind control her like he seemed to be able to do through Psyker-Gary. She had the feeling that Psyker-Gary acted as both a relay and an amplifier, so perhaps he couldn't. But... she didn't particularly want to bet her life on that.

She reached a stopping point and left her lab to go do patient rounds upstairs. She wasn't working today, but since she hardly slept, she often took the burden for the other doctors when they had patients that were admitted, which generally wasn't too often. Honestly, she cheated and had robots monitor such patients and just walked around to show her face because it was expected.

However, ever since she had decreed through her powers of absolute dictator that the citizens of Megaton would have at least a base level of medical care, there had been a lot of patients at the hospital. She had four doctors now, not just Bonesaw and Dr Taylor, but she recently hired that ghoul RN Missy as a doctor, as well as one of the existing doctors in town, after she finally deemed him qualified.

Her employees were conflicted about her decree. On the one hand, it was a lot more customers, and the city, in the form of its dictatrix, was paying for it. However, on the other hand, she wasn't paying full rates, and it was keeping them busy. Still, overall, they were all for it.

Sticking her head into the room with the sleeping patient, one of the Spider Company that was wounded in the pacification action against the Library of Congress. Lily was scheduled to finish her surgeries today, and the woman had already jumped on the idea of having her memories of the battle deleted from her brain. As such, she had been keeping the woman in a coma until the surgeries were complete.

She didn't have the technology to erase arbitrary memories while keeping others except if she installed a brain implant on her and spent significant time cataloguing all of the woman's memories. If she wanted to erase the memories of the battle, the woman would lose all of these memories of being in the hospital, too. So, there was no reason for her to remain conscious and still in some pain, be it physical or mental.

The Bank had finally opened, as well, after they had amassed a prodigious amount of silver coinage, a lot of which had been delivered to her to use to fund the government. It was how she was affording to pay for things like the increased payments to her doctors, which were more like contractors than actual employees, as well as all of the expended supplies and general labour needed to run a hospital and city government.

At first, people were a little bit unsure about the new coins. But that didn't last long. Trading precious metals wasn't a new thing, and the smallest denomination coin was two grams exactly, which was more or less equivalent in value to a bottle cap. Once they realised that the weird glass coins did, in fact, contain two grams of silver inside, many of the first run coins had been broken with a ball-peen hammer to test this theory, after which the public started accepting them as equivalent.

It helped that Lily proclaimed that either bottlecaps or precious metals would be accepted or offered by the city for all payments to and from. City employees could choose to be paid in one, or the other or a combination, and already only a couple of weeks after their introduction, most of her city workers were taking their payment in a combination.

One of the main disadvantages of trading in precious metals was that there was no real trusted source of purity, so traders had to conduct their own assays or assumptions when metal was presented as a payment. However, her coins were .999 bullion grade. She made it clear that Miller's banks should and could not adulterate the coins by alloying.

That was usually how Kings of Olde made their seigniorage. They'd take enough silver to make ten coins, alloy it and make eleven. Bam, free money, even though the coins had less face value. Lily didn't want this and demanded any seigniorage be taken off the top. For example, of the metal she gave the bank to make twenty coins, she only received back nineteen.

This high-quality bullion-grade coin, combined with the sapphire glass encapsulation, meant that trust in the coins was high! So long as the encapsulation wasn't destroyed, a merchant or trader could really trust that the actual metal content was what the coin specified and that it wasn't a counterfeit, diluted or shaved.

She hadn't expected the coins to take off as fast as they had. She was sure it would happen, eventually, but she thought people would be more suspicious. But she supposed when your competition was the literal caps off bottles; then there was a lot of demand for any sane alternatives.

The minting machine she made produced and encapsulated coins in five different weights. The smallest coin, which was going to be for now equivalent to a bottle cap, weighed only two grams, not including the sapphire weight. The other denominations were five, ten, twenty-five and fifty grams. The fifty-gram "coin" was actually a small bar.

She included the last because it tickled her to create taels of silver. Taels of silver and gold were a common medium of exchange in the Solar System she was familiar with. Perhaps it was because a lot of the culturally Chinese people that survived the Fall weren't too impressed with fiat currencies, so they went back to their roots and began using precious metals mined from asteroids. It didn't start right away because, for a long time, gold and silver were more useful industrially, and any coins minted would just be melted down for electronics immediately, but eventually, they became quite common.

Nodding at the last patient, she went upstairs to her private apartment. A long bath was in order, followed by a nap before she got on with the rest of her day.

---xxxxxx---

A couple of months passed, and Lily was not really that closer to finding someone to run the government. Worse, she had been dealing with annoying people that were trying to push as far as they could get away with. There were disputes with the constabulary about the lack of laws ("Well, that isn't illegal is it?!") and disputes between individuals.

There were also weird instances of her patrols and even the gates of Megaton being attacked. There was a suicide bomber, of all insane things, just the other day. A couple of people waiting to get into the gate were killed. She had attempted to back-track the suicide bomber to his compatriots using her surveillance drones, but it wasn't anyone local, instead coming from the north and not really interacting with anyone in the Capital Wasteland as far as she could tell. She couldn't really know, though.

And now, she actually had to mediate between several people that had differences they couldn't reconcile. It was insane; they were insane thinking she was any sort of person to mediate anything! She could barely even mediate herself! Most of the time, she could settle the matters because it was usually clear which side was on the right and which side was on the wrong.

Finally, though, she had enough. She couldn't see that much of a difference between either gentleman in front of her; as far as she was concerned, they were both in the wrong, and they just hated each other. They were, at one time, business partners and best friends but had a falling out, and over the years, they reached a point where they could hardly stand in the same room without attacking each other.

She told them that if they returned to her for her judgement, she would use a random number generator to pick one of them and shoot them, problem solved, and please stop wasting her time. For now, that worked; although one of them looked like he was considering taking her up on it just to be rid of the other, they finally agreed to talk to each other and try to settle their dispute.

She wasn't antisocial enough to think that she could continue to do such things on a regular basis, though. Not and have it still be considered something like justice. Of course, people would accept a certain amount of pique and whim from a dictatrix, but it couldn't be her go-to, or people wouldn't feel safe at all. So she stomped over to find Gary. For a while, he had been gone from the city while he set up his water business, but he had been around more and more lately now that it was functioning without his day-to-day involvement. He was a good teacher, but she could find a good teacher to replace him.

She needed him for something more important. And she was annoyed enough that she would use whatever coercion or inducements necessary to get her way.

Although he talked about buying his own place, he still lived with her in the accommodation section of the hospital, although he invited his sweetheart in to live with him. She thought it was cute. Occasionally, she missed Gary as a lover, but to her, he was like a very large Thanksgiving dinner, very filling, pun intended, but only suitable for special occasions, so she thought this relationship where they were just friends was probably a lot better, anyway.

He was right that she definitely couldn't love him like he seemed to want. She wasn't unfamiliar with the emotion like he implied so many months ago, but it wasn't really an emotion too intrinsically linked to romance to her, and it had never been. Even when she was Mandy on Earth, the only people she actually loved were her children, which might have explained one reason why her marriage never worked out. It wasn't solely her ex-husband's fault, despite how nice it was to think it was.

Meimei didn't really love anyone, not really, but could experience the emotion or something like it when she made a scientific discovery. Lily, some combination of the two people, was more Meimei than Mandy, but she still felt a similar emotion to love when she thought about the Apprentice. Was it the same? She didn't know, but the Apprentice would make a good daughter, and she had been treating her as such, although she hadn't actually put such a relationship into words with the girl... yet.

She knocked on the door to Gary's private rooms and waited for a moment before he answered. He grinned at her, "Woah, who stepped on your tail, Doc?"

She harumphed, but still waited patiently until he invited her inside before intruding on his personal space. "I 'ave zhe job for you," she told him, "It is vitally important."

That caused him to grin slightly, "I don't want to be Mayor."

"Why not?!" Lily exclaimed. That wasn't actually the job, but he would be a really good one for the same reason Lily wanted him as a Judge.

Gary looked confused as if he thought it was crazy that I didn't understand, "Because it would be mostly for show? You want to retain enough personal power and ability to depose, at any time, anyone stupid enough to take the job. You want all of the power but none of the responsibility. I mean, I don't blame you... that's a great thing if you can pull it off..."

He paused and then said, approaching it another way, "Did you know that Nuka-World up in the Commonwealth was an actual town? It had its own Mayor, police department and everything. Being Mayor of Megaton would be like being Mayor of Nuka-World. Everyone knows that John-Caleb Bradberton was really in charge." He then nodded, "What you really need is something along the lines of an actor or someone really good with administrative matters that only cares about appearances. There are a lot of those types of people around. Because, if I was the Mayor, I would want to actually be in charge."

Okay, that was really insightful, and it cut her to the quick. She sipped some of the offered water and said, "Well, I can't really dispute any of that... but Mayor wasn't actually the job I was going to ask you to do." She paused before admitting, "Mainly because you already told me you wouldn't do it."

He looked more interested, "Oh? What do you have in mind? I assume it is working for the city, as you only get so worked up when dealing with details of your... demesne. You haven't created a lèse-majesté law yet, right? Because I need to know before I start making fun of you."

Lily gritted her teeth. Such a law was very tempting, but she wouldn't go down that path. "No. I need you to be a Judge. Zhe Judge, actually. Any subsequently appointed jurists would serve under you."

That caused him to laugh out loud, "I don't know the first damn thing about the law!"

"Zhere's no law!" Lily hissed at him. She was so annoyed because she had had to say this repeatedly lately, "You don't need to know anything about legal procedures except what is right and wrong! And zhat, I know, is something you can do."

That caused him to pause, and he waved a hand at Lily as she prevaricated in front of his girlfriend about his special ability, "She knows, you don't have to hold back, although I appreciate your discretion." Things must be getting serious if Gary told the short, pretty, caramel-coloured woman his deepest secrets. Lily made a note to try to remember her name.

He rubbed his chin, "You know, I figured you would have like isolated the genetic components in my special ability and given yourself the same ability by now."

Lily sighed, "I 'ave isolated the gene expressions, more or less, but you 'ave a special structure inside your brain, and any alterations to my brain I am very leery about trying because zhey aren't exactly ... reversible." She waved a hand, "I've 'ad some success, but zhe only 'uman test subjects I've 'ad access to are murderous raiders now and zhen, since to keep your secret I 'ave to terminate zhem after experimentation is complete." She had a number of test subjects since the first group, mainly people that were condemned to death under what amounted for her "justice."

She was pretty sure, maybe eighty per cent, that she had a workable treatment. It was clear that the subject of the treatment needed some amount of empathy in the first place. Otherwise, the treatment didn't do anything. She wasn't too concerned because although Gary liked to tease her that she didn't have any, the truth was she did. She just didn't feel it at the same intensity regular people did.

Gary's girlfriend looked shocked at the implication, but Gary just stared at her for a moment before grinning, "You know you're quite scary sometimes, Lily. Although I actually appreciate you doing that, and don't really care about dead raiders, perhaps you should keep stories like that to yourself. Most people wouldn't understand."

Lily nodded at him, taking his meaning.

He continued, "If I agreed to this, I would want a lot of concessions."

She tilted her head to the side, "Like what?"

"I would want to run, actually run, both the courts and the Sheriff department. And my rulings couldn't be overturned by you... not for legalistic reasons, anyway. You could wave your hand and say whatever you want, call it high justice if you want, but I want the complete system of low justice under my control," he said firmly.

His girlfriend looked confused, "What is low justice and high justice?"

Lily scrunched up her face, "Your boyfriend likes to pretend he is zhe ignorant country boy, but he is actually very well educated. 'igh justice, or ius gladii or the right of the sword is the ability a monarch to either absolve someone or condemn someone just because zhey 'ave all the swords and nobody can stop zhem. Might makes right, no? If I say off with someone's 'ead, then his 'ead comes off, yes? Not because zhe poor guy committed some crime and was adjudicated guilty necessarily, but because he offended me personally."

Gary nodded, "Precisely. If you want to get involved in criminal or civil justice matters, then you will have to use that heavy hand and everyone will know it isn't actual justice happening."

Lily sighed and nodded, "Zhat is fine."

He held a hand up, "I'm not done. I want a complete budget and at least a squad of soldiers under my personal command, not including the cops, which I also want under my command while I am working this job." Lily frowned; she'd have to recruit some more people but nodded. It was worth it.

"AND I don't want to do the job forever. Eventually, you'll figure out how to give yourself or other people the same sense I have. When that happens, I want to be replaced. And then, I want your help to mount an Expedition to the west. I want to start my own settlement somewhere where I can be in charge," he finished.

So he did want to be Mayor! Just to be clear, she clarified, "So, what kind of help? Like, vehicles, weapons, armour for anyone that you got to agree to follow you on such an adventure?"

He nodded, "Precisely. I'm sure there are places that just need some stabilising force; I think I could save a lot of lives. Plus, you made me fucking almost eighteen again, and my hormones are aching for some adventure. I didn't want to be a mercenary, but going out with the monarch's blessing to start a new nation in the wilds used to be a time-honoured tradition, no?" He used a fake french accent at the end, and Lily casually gave him the finger, which caused him to chuckle.

Perhaps that was a mistake. She should have made him thirty-five or so, ready to settle down. She actually favoured that idea, a lot, but she tried to still her emotions so he wouldn't be able to tell. She nodded slowly and lied to him, "Your 'elp as a judge isn't enough to buy all of that. You'd still need to maintain some kind of relationship with Megaton afterwards."

"A vassal?! Are we really reinventing feudalism right now?!" he asked, offended.

She waved a hand at him, "I don't care what you call it! If you want to take a lot of my technology, especially zhe kind that can restart an industrial base and would be useful for starting a new city, zhen you can call yourself a buddy zhat can't tell really tell me no; if you want."

"That sounds weirder; I think I'd rather reinvent feudalism," he said after thinking about it for a long time.

She nodded, "You don't have to be a dictator, be a democracy for all I care. But you saw what zhe greatest democracy in the world did to the planet, first hand." She waved a hand at the window, to the blasted hellscape that was the Capital Wasteland.

"America wasn't much of a democracy for a long time; you know that as well as I do," Gary harumphed, "I think perhaps discussing what kind of government I intend to form is a little premature since I have no one, presently, willing to follow me into the wilderness in the first place. But I think I'll work towards some type of republic."

Lily nodded. She would have a lot more information about the best places he could go, depending on how far the man wanted to go, soon as well. She had been launching fifteen probes a day into low earth orbit, and yesterday one probe got through and managed to destroy one of the railgun systems. It was only a matter of time now. There were only sixteen anti-satellite satellites in the first place and only fifteen now.

"Alright, Judge Kaminsky, I will make zhe necessary pronouncements," she told him giddily. He really was asking a lot, but it was worth it. She actually would have jumped on his plans to start a new city somewhere west, too, so she tried not to sound too excited. She didn't really want to see Gary go, but it was just a good idea.

She didn't think finding a few hundred people, or more even, to go along with him would be a hard sell at all, and if he made sure the first thing he built was a small runway, then by that point, she would probably be able to run passenger or cargo flights, not just orbital missions. It was kind of ass backward that she put something in orbit before even starting what amounted to an airline, but this entire universe was ass backwards in a lot of ways, anyway.

Her robots and the human construction crews were working in two shifts to build a larger section of concrete and chainlink fences to give Megaton more land, and there was still a considerable shantytown right outside the security fence.

Ultimately, people just wanted relative safety, clean food and water and the freedom to pursue their own individual interests. She was working on the safety and water bit. As for the food? She had started building a dozen copies of the Fancy Lad people mulching machine to incorporate into the sewer system at the highest flow junctions.

The first test machine was already in operation, as was the Fancy Lad cake factory that she had raided in DC. She actually approached the ex-Chinese Soldiers at Mama Dulce's first, but they weren't too interested in cooperation at present, despite her perfect Mandarin.

If anything, approaching them speaking Chinese had been a big mistake and made them much warier of her. They weren't the mindless enemies that Fallout 3 made them out to be. Apparently, they had a thriving community and used the food manufacturing equipment at Mama Dulce's to produce and sell food, mostly to Rivet City.

Still, they did point her and her men in the direction of the one Fancy Lad factory in town, which she raided for all of their equipment.

The cakes she was producing were more like bread loaves now, though, but she was rationing them at a cost to the citizens of Megaton. They were basically free, like the purified water dispensers that had already gone into operation. Right now, they just used facial recognition technology to ensure the same people weren't served more than once, as she hadn't introduced ID cards yet.

The project bakery/bread factory was a huge success, at least in the sense that everyone in Megaton thought it was a great idea; even the ones that realised where the biomass was coming from didn't mind, which Lily found unusual for humans.

She was considering building a number of large housing buildings both above and below the ground once the fusion power station was running and then outlawing and banning homeless people.

By that, she intended if a police officer found a citizen sleeping on the street, i.e. a homeless person, they would be arrested and taken directly to one of these small vacant apartments and released. It would be illegal to be homeless because she would furnish you with a small temporary home. A lot of the time, she noticed, that it just took a few mistakes or a few instances of bad luck to render someone living on the street, and at that point, their only options were really to leave Megaton, even if they had a lot of useful skills. The rest had all manners of mental illness, which she couldn't really treat.

It was just... why was it that every time she did something with the government, things were getting closer and closer to socialism? She didn't understand it, but free food and potentially free housing was almost definitionally socialist, wasn't it?

It was disgusting... but on the other hand, at least fewer people were starving to death in her streets.