For the Science!

Lily stared at the paralyzed Gary clone with a complicated feeling in her heart.

Have you ever played a role-playing game and returned to the first dungeon and just steamrolled the monsters with your higher levelled character and gear?

It felt great, didn't it? That's right. It was a lie! Lily's feeling wasn't complicated at all! She felt great! These fucking Gary's!

She arrived at the Vault a couple of hours ago and parked in a somewhat secluded area before unloading the truck of all of her equipment and proceeding inside with her robo-squad. It didn't take long to find the first Gary, who was stunned and paralyzed quickly.

She wasn't in a hurry here, so she had her robots clean the entrance and the first rooms, dragging trash out of the Vault and dragging her own equipment in.

She couldn't go too much farther in, or she would lose the data connection with the quad-copter drone, which was hovering high enough to be very difficult to see while watching over her truck.

Lily would have to build a number of signal repeaters as she explored the Vault if she wanted to stay in contact with the outside world, which she definitely did.

Lily had two main goals coming to this Vault, to liberate its cloning and genetic equipment as well as to conduct morally justifiable FEV tests on the population of Gary's.

She had taken additional brain scans of this paralyzed Gary and saw nothing to indicate that it was sapient at all. There were dogs that were smarter, she was sure. So, as long as she didn't cause them undue pain or suffering, she felt perfectly justified performing experiments on them.

There were a lot of bonuses to conducting this type of viral research on a series of clones that were genetically identical, as they were almost their own control group. Lily could vary the route of administration and the dose and see if that correlated to a change in the ultimate mutations expressed. She was very interested to see if that was the case, or would every exposure be similar, or would every exposure be random? She didn't know!

It took about a day before the FEV transformation was more or less complete, so Lily did not see any reason she should delay any longer. She wasn't in a hurry here, but she didn't want to waste any time, either. She expected to spend about a week here, followed by a few days visiting Sophie and Scott before heading back home.

Lily hummed and pulled out a carefully packed dark glass container containing some of the first ether produced. She learned from her experiments with Sir Longius and wasn't about to proceed in such a way that any of her subjects could escape from her. She didn't need Vault 108 to become another Super Mutant nexus, after all.

A subject didn't need BOTH arms and legs, after all. She could just examine the mutation in one of the limbs and extrapolate the changes she saw into the missing limb for her models. And Super Mutants might be dangerous, but one-armed, one-legged Super Mutants? Much less so.

She sedated the paralyzed Gary because even though it wasn't sapient, it could still feel pain, and she wasn't a monster, after all! After the amputations, she would change the paralyzation medichines to healing mode for a time to ensure there was no infection before turning them completely off for the first exposure.

'Hmmm. I should fabricate some graphene restraints, too, just in case,' she thought.

'Command, Audio - Play Frédéric Chopin,' she commanded as she got to work.

---xxxxxx---

Lily decided to go with a traditional intravenous exposure for her first subject.

She had the feeling from her memories that FEV was often aerosolized and exposed to test subjects that way, but Lily couldn't find a single reason why that should be the preferred method, so she discarded it at first as it was a less safe and less objective way to accomplish the same thing.

One of the slightly Terminator-looking Labourtrons was holding her diagnostic scanner near the first subject, taking continual scans of the restrained Gary, which she monitored through a wireless connection. One leg or no, restrained or no, she wasn't about to sit in there with what might be a Super Gary, soon.

Sadly, there was no real way she could avoid all of the distress of the clone during the transformation process. She had switched the medichines over to analgesic mode, instead of turning them off like she originally intended when the Gary regained consciousness shortly after exposure to FEV.

The virus triggered some reactions in its amygdala, which caused an adrenaline feedback loop which woke the Gary up. It no longer responded to the administration of benzodiazepines as an anxiolytic, either.

So, while she was sure it wasn't feeling any pain, it was clearly feeling some sort of distress that she couldn't treat pharmacologically. She would just have to live with that, she supposed.

Her scanner didn't have the resolution to see the genetic changes happen, but she saw the after effects as it seemed to be converting available fat into muscle rapidly. The changes in the brain were the most interesting, though. Granted, it was true that all the Gary clone's brains were scrambled eggs in the first place, but Lily wasn't seeing anything that should cause a loss of intelligence.

If anything, all the increased neural connections and activity should have the opposite effect! This type of effect was exactly what she would expect to see, for example, in the shitty weasel, and would explain its rapid gain of intelligence that she had already observed. According to Alice, the damn thing can do math! Even if it was only simple addition and subtraction.

Lily glanced over at the silver briefcase with Vault-Tec's logo on it. Did she get a different strain, somehow? But it was supposed to be picked up and taken to Vault 87; it didn't make sense that it wasn't the same sort of virus they were experimenting on already, or did it?

It was a shame she only had one scanner, she could have started the exposures for more Gary's, but she didn't want to miss anything. So she had only exposed two Gary's thus far. She had four others that she was keeping "on ice", as it were, and had ordered the robots to kill any of the others ones if they found them.

Lily hummed and made a note to increase the calorie content of the exposed Gary's to a minimum of six thousand a day, or perhaps even more. It's a shame she couldn't feed the dead Gary's to her subject-Gary's... she couldn't, could she?

Lily shook her head. No, she had some lines she wouldn't cross. The Vault's first rooms were starting to look pretty clean. Well, they lacked obvious debris and destroyed and wrecked objects -- they were still quite dirty in terms of filth.

She would still sleep in the cab of her truck tonight.

---xxxxxx---

The robots had killed seven more Gary's overnight and had begun working their way to where Lily suspected was the overseer's office on the upper levels, which was blocked by a bunch of debris and overturned furniture.

She pulled up the map of Vault 108 that has been generated by her robots and considered it while she made her rounds on the subject Gary's and Garys-in-Waiting.

The two exposed Garys more or less resemble Super Mutants now, and have already gone through the process of what she is referring to as androgynization, with them losing their primary and secondary sexual characteristics. The first subject had already tried to destroy her Labourtron that was continually scanning it, but thankfully the graphene restraints held. It would set her back considerably if she lost that scanner, although it wouldn't be the death blow it used to be.

She still has no idea how it works and isn't willing to disassemble it to try to figure it out. It was a shame it couldn't scan itself, also.

She pulled up the latest scans of Gary's brain, interested in this new now-typical Super Mutant behaviour. She was shocked at what she saw. Much different than when she left, the current brain looked... damaged. Gone were the rapidly developing additional neural connections that Lily would have taken for signs of increased intelligence. Instead, it looked like Gary had been the victim of a traumatic brain injury.

She sat down and pulled up the scans that her brain-computer had saved and went backwards in time until she got to the point where she left to go to sleep. She began playback at ten times normal speed, watching neural connections develop rapidly with fascination.

It took about fifteen minutes of watching to pinpoint the exact time everything started to go wrong for Gary, but it took another hour of her studying all the processes that were happening before she figured out exactly what was going on.

It seemed to her that FEV, or at least this strain of it, was intended to increase intelligence. However... there was such a thing as too much of a good thing. The virus didn't know where to stop. The density of neural connections in Gary's brain increased and increased until such a point where his body could no longer support the energy and oxygen demands of so much neural activity, and no matter how much the heart pumped blood, the brain couldn't remain properly oxygenated.

Then over a period of about an hour, the brain suffered increasing and increasing hypoxia-related brain injuries until an equilibrium was reached where the body could support a new level of brain activity. It was like having a thousand strokes, so it wasn't that surprising Super Mutants were so stupid and aggressive. What was surprising was that they survived at all! Most of the sacrificed brain area was the areas that stored memories and processed higher-ordered thinking.

What a tragedy.

Lily thought back to the stoat and wondered why it was so different. Was this the reason why FEV sometimes increased intelligence in some animals but not others, like humans?

Well, these first two subjects had served their purpose. It was time to examine them in-depth, pathologically, to see any differences in the viral exposure on a genetically identical subject. Grabbing her tri-beam, she walked over to the rooms she was using to house the subjects. There was no reason to keep these two feeling any more distress.

---xxxxxx---

She had managed to get into the overseer's office that evening. She was putting on hold any further experiments after dissecting the two Gary's. There were significant divergences in how the exposure effected the two identical Gary's, despite being exposed to an identical amount of virus in an identical way.

She suspected that there was a significant amount of randomness in every FEV exposure up to a certain point, which might make studying it less useful than she thought.

While the Overseer's room didn't have the two miniguns on the arms of the Overseer's chair like she remembered from Fallout 1 & 2, it did have a ceiling-mounted machine gun that damaged one of her robots before it was destroyed by two high-output lightning beams.

In the Overseer's files, Lily found what she thought might be the secret purpose of Vault 108. When she first got here, she thought maybe it was a breeding test, considering the prominently labelled "Female Dormitories," but she had already uncovered an area labelled "Male Dormitories," as well, which put paid to that theory.

The Overseer's protocol didn't lay the entire purpose behind the experiments out, but Lily could read between the lines. Vault 108 was, unsurprisingly, a test of cloning technology. But specifically, they were testing the ability to copy an existing brain into a newly grown clone.

The Overseer was to select a non-essential male and female person so the tests could be conducted. In the Overseer's notes, he had already selected a maintenance worker named Gary Kaminski but was waiting on the first phase being completed before selecting a female "volunteer."

After their brains were copied into a series of new clones, the experiment was to transition to a social one studying how a group of people with identical memories would interact with their fellows and how they would interact with a group of similar people of the opposite gender. They clearly hadn't gotten that far.

Lily wasn't surprised. It wasn't specifically stated, but this was immortality research at its root, too. The average person might not consider an exact duplicate of themselves as a route to immortality, but a lot of people would. Plus it would make a very good way to create tons of super-soldiers; you only had to train one completely and then just copy his brain into a bunch of clones. Bonus points if you could adjust their memories, so the clones didn't know they were clones.

Wasn't that the plot of a Tom Cruise film? She couldn't quite remember.

It did make her all the more curious about what precisely she would find in the lower-level labs of this Vault. Already her robots were working in that direction. She would have to have a good path clear of debris if she intended to loot the labs to the bedrock, in any case, so now it was just a matter of waiting.

She considered her Garys-in-Waiting. Well, she had enough time to run one more FEV experiments on a pair. It would likely take a day or more to clear more than the small path the Gary's used to get in and out of the lower labs. She needed to clear an entire corridor, after all.

She paused to consider. She would let the transformation go a little longer this time. But this time, she would program a number of medichines to keep the Gary's brain oxygenated as best as they could. And perhaps they didn't need any of their limbs; it would assist Gary's heart to keep the brain oxygenated if there was less body mass to pump the blood through, after all. Plus, the transformation wasn't that interesting on the limbs. Just more muscle, denser skin. She's seen that, already.