86 La Jefa

The La Jefa, Potentate, President-Until-She-Found-Some-Other-Sucker sat at the mayor's much more comfortable office at the city hall building and reviewed the reports she received from Simms about the current status of the city government, its assets and liabilities and its income. This was what she was worried about the entire time! Reports!

If she wasn't careful, then soon she would have so many reports that she would have to hire someone just to read them all and then prepare for her an executive summary. Then it would be too much for a single assistant to do, and that was how you ended up with a bureaucracy and people lying to you because the news was bad.

Lily had very conflicted opinions about taxes. One of the main reasons that Lily hated taxes was that she thought that they were essentially robbing the people for what those in power would do anyway, even if they didn't collect taxes for the purpose. Kings of old maintained an Army to keep themselves in power, for example. She was no different from that, she supposed. She would have maintained her military forces to protect Megaton even if she had managed to continue the charade that she was a private citizen. Police and the military protected those that had institutional power, intrinsically, and yet they were paid for by everyone.

And sure, Kings of old collected taxes too, but nothing like the tax burden that was commonplace in the world she remembered from her life in America. Although in her memories of space, taxes were a lot more variable, from non-existent to essentially one hundred per cent in some small communes. The tax burden of your average English subject of King Henry was five to ten per cent, depending on your occupation.

Of course, a function of that was the relative productivity in the two societies. Back in the Dark Ages, and even in the Rennaisance period, those in power could only extract so much from a subject before that subject starved to death. America was so productive they could take even a third or more of what poor people made and still have those people not starve to death. So that was... something, she guessed. She couldn't figure out if it was good or not, though.

Although she was a country girl at heart, she had lived in California for two decades before she passed away, and she was fortunate to work in an industry that was very well-compensated. She made over two hundred thousand dollars a year, but with federal income tax, state income tax, medicare withholding, social security, property taxes, sales tax and all the rest, she once figured that she got to keep maybe a little bit less than 45% of what she made. And at least a third of that money went to pay for the military and various wars and imperialist adventures she didn't agree with at all. It seemed both ridiculous to her and intrinsically a first-world problem all at the same time.

Ultimately, she felt that the idea of "government by the people, for the people" was nothing but PR bullshit. If it existed, she had never experienced it in any of the nations that she had lived in. It was a very useful bit of public relations, though; it was enough that it got the people as a whole to agree to pay for what the oligarchs would have to pay for if they didn't, namely a military and police force to protect them and their investments.

Her opinion on the matter might be a bit shaped as much as growing up in a theoretically communist country as much as it was growing up in America. She had been simultaneously inside and outside both cultures, and she thought it gave her great insight.

Since she hated taxes, the part where she was conflicted was that she was now collecting them. The main way the city of Megaton was funded was through an income tax.

As such, she had totally eliminated the Megaton income tax first thing. It was fatally flawed in a number of ways. It was a complicated progressive taxation scheme with a lot of loopholes that tended to favour those that already had a lot of money. It took a lot of people working in city hall to administer it, so there was a lot of overhead, but more fundamentally, any time you, as the state, start asking citizens how much money they make, you will create liars.

And when people become accustomed to lying to the state, they are accustomed to believing that the law isn't really important and can be disregarded if they can get away with it. It trains them to break the law. Just like 55 mph speed limits on the highway during the Carter administration. It not only prepares a person to break the law but also to have disdain for it.

Ugh. She almost threw up a little bit, thinking about how it was important for the state and its laws not to be disdained. Gross.

However, one of the first things they taught you at NCO school in the US Army was a leader should never give an order that he or she knows will be disobeyed. It engenders disrespect in your command. The obvious corollary, which she wasn't sure that any lawmaker or politician in her past or present lives understood, was if you were the state, you should never make a law that you know will be disobeyed. People won't respect the law or the law enforcers. Then you look weak when you're unable to crack down on whatever behaviour you're trying to curtail, like drinking beer, smoking some plant or women showing salacious ankle-flesh. It was one of the reasons she deleted every single law in Megaton. If she had to create what amounted to a legal code, she would start with absolutely nothing and build up, not the opposite.

For the moment, she was going to pay for the military forces of Megaton out of her own pocket because, as she was an oligarch, she needed such forces to protect her own interests. It was the very reason she built them up in the first place because she definitely didn't trust any government to protect her. She never has. She believed most people with wealth or power agreed with her; they were just a lot more highly socialised or, in some respects, they controlled the state apparatus and use of force anyway, somehow, so they felt they didn't need their own military forces like she always desired.

However, there were types of taxation that were better than others.

If the worst type of taxes were income taxes, then in the ultimate ideal sense, the only moral type of taxation was fee-for-service type taxes. For example, a fee for getting a driver's certificate, a consumptive tax to drive on public roads, and similar. Things that you only paid for if you wanted to use the public service provided. There were a number of taxing schemes in between that weren't as bad as income taxes, and she was probably going to have to implement some of them. For example, a small fee to enter the city if you were not a resident, property taxes, and import and export duties. A sales tax or value-added tax would be ideal, but it also ran into the same problem of forcing a person to tell you how much money their business made and also it made them act as an unpaid revenue agent for the state, so she would be skipping it.

Despite being the personal embodiment of the government, at present, if she had to define her actual opinions, to put them in a neat little box, she would consider herself fundamentally an anarchist. It was an almost utopian idea that was more aspirational for her, as a goal to always work towards as something an individual had to achieve, not so much as a society.

Lily wasn't idealistic enough to care so much about people as a whole, nor was she narcissistic enough to think that she personally could convince people about her opinion of how society should be structured, or rather not be structured. And that was saying something because she had a healthy opinion of herself.

If the people in Megaton themselves weren't willing to work towards throwing off their own shackles, as she had done, then she wasn't going to drag them kicking and screaming into it. She'd just try to have the minimum laws possible, and she would have no laws that said she was the only one allowed military force or similar traipsings, and if a group organised to such a point that they were effectively controlling part of the city, she would be willing to treat them as equals. She wouldn't think they were, but she would treat them as such.

Honestly, it was less of a political ideology for her and more of an ultimate life goal. A life free from fetters of all kinds.

A lot of people assumed, when she was Meimei, that she hated communists from what was known of her early days and the fact that everyone considered her an ancap, but she didn't. They were idealists and dreamers, just like her. She respected them so long as she was allowed to do so from a great distance; they did have quite the body count behind them, after all. But... so did she, now. And it wasn't likely to get any smaller any time soon.

Anarchism was kind of like communism in that both were ideal utopias which might be impossible to ever achieve in a way that scaled past a small community. Or perhaps both could be achieved; she didn't know.

But, she felt that any political idea that relied on eliminating the state would just see the strongest guy on the block reinvent the state as soon as you turned your back on him. Then he'd hold you by your ankles and shake all your gold coins out of your pockets to reinvent taxation, too. But that didn't mean it was necessarily wrong to have that be your ideal.

She often felt that Marxists were surprisingly intuitive about identifying problems in society, yet at the same time, from her perspective, they chose just about the worst possible solutions almost every single time. But she was biased.

Speaking of communism, she was considering nationalising her own hospital. Well, not really! But, she had to do something to get the poorer people in the city better healthcare.

Basically, she wanted, selfishly, a baseline level of healthcare to be provided to every citizen of Megaton. Not really because of egalitarian idealism like a socialist might want, but because of rank selfishness. A very large percentage of the city was dealing with at least one serious chronic illness that was very much affecting their productivity. If your population's health was bad enough, then there was even a capitalist argument for some amount of socialised healthcare as the relative unhealthiness of your workforce curtailed the amount of value you could extract from them.

She wasn't sure how to structure it, though. Nationalising health care would be the simplest, but a bit... uh... both not in her best interest and something she was sort of philosophically against. A charity, perhaps? She wasn't too fond of NGOs, either. She felt a lot mutated from their initial ideal goals and into bloated jobs-programs for bureaucrats within ten years or less. She knew a lot of charities in her past life that spent most of their money on fund-raising, a weird and malevolent cycle.

They needed your money to raise more money to spend on the costs to raise your money. And since fund-raising expenses didn't count as an administrative overhead but a program expense in most cases, on the surface, the charity looked good, spending most of their received money on whatever their program was.

She was fairly confident that most charities wouldn't exist in America of her memories if there weren't tax benefits for being or donating to one.

She sighed and said, "Zhank you, Sheriff. Zhat's all for now. We will overlook zhe discrepancy of 'ow much money zhe city should 'ave versus 'ow much it actually 'as, for now. But if zhe former mayor doesn't provide a suitable explanation as to the accounting irregularities I've observed, zhen I'll just seize some of the assets he 'as left behind, starting with zhe most profitable."

The Sheriff nodded, and after a few more line items and scheduling his and his men's training beginning tomorrow, he left.

As she stared off into space, she was looking absently at a composite map of Megaton generated from her surveillance assets. She had over twenty tons of silver to her name, so she could create a lot of coins and personally fund the city operations for a while, but she would have to find some way to fund the city longer term. Extracting value via taxes was something she would probably have to do, and it was very traditional as far as governments were concerned but it kind of made more sense to create value instead.

How could... ugh... government create value? Then she remembered that she still had to pay the city for the land she had purchased in the auction. Thank god that nobody had paid yet, or the ex-mayor would have absconded with that money, too. That could be one way. The city could fund the expansion of the city by building another exterior wall segment along with power and water connections. Then seize all the land inside the newly walled-off portion and then auction it off periodically. So long as she didn't sell too much too fast, the value wouldn't drop, and the values of the existing Megaton property holders wouldn't drop. Their values might even rise because they would be in the interior circle, behind not one but two walls. It would seem much more exclusive.

There was already a community of non-Megaton citizens sort of squatting directly outside the chain-link fence to the south, near the rebuilt southern gate. They were inside the arc and protection of the city's turrets, and that area was well-patrolled, so they were, in effect, leeching off the protection she had built for the city. Lily didn't care, really, and honestly wished them the best, but it did mean that there was a demand for Megaton housing and property, but just not at the prices these people could presently afford.

She highlighted areas on the map, both to the east and to the west. The east had the levelest ground, and it would be the easiest for construction and integration with the Eastside water and power grid, which were of a bit better quality than the rest of the city. However, if she built to the west...

U.S. Route 29 was the north and south highway that everyone used to cross the Potomac bridge, and if you went further south, it led to the ruins of Fairfax. The highway was in surprisingly good shape, which was why it was the defacto best way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, and it was only a few kilometres away. Megaton was already the premier location to stop for traders, but if she worked going west, she might make it the ultra-premier stop, especially if lots of land inside the protection of this "second circle" of Megaton could be used and converted into warehouses and transhipment hubs.

Actual safe places for merchants to store their goods when they weren't around were really rare. Practically only Canterbury Commons had such a place, and it was why they were one of the most common stops for trader caravans, even though they were kind of out of the way.

Nodding, she would have to talk with Tombs and Miller. The latter to extort a lot more silver out of. He had, essentially, an unlimited, for the moment, supply, and the only thing both of them were worried about was introducing too much coinage too fast to cause inflation.

If he was going to cosplay like a Russian oligarch, then she could at least act like the Russian president and shake some silver ingots out of his pockets for the good of the state, comrade.

She'd make it up to him. He had mentioned wanting more T-51Bs, anyway. As far as she knew, only she, the Brotherhood and the Enclave could build them around here so she could gouge him on the price. Hers were better and easier to repair, anyway.

Plus, after six months of trial and error, she finally finished a third life extension treatment, as well as, finally, the treatment that would result in a person needing only about thirteen to fifteen hundred calories a day. She had to rejigger the entire human satiation sense so people wouldn't just balloon up, but she added additional features while she was at it. There was a better understanding of just what vital minerals the body needed, and a person would tend to both crave them and be able to identify them by taste. It was an entirely synthetic addition to the human genome, and she was quite proud of it.

She had tested this new sense in twenty volunteers, but only for the past month. In that short period of time, nothing was detected in their psychological makeup, so she was pretty sure she wouldn't trigger some kind of nascent pica disorder where someone got an irresistible taste for iron shavings or started licking magnesium like a salt lick or something else. But only time will tell for certain.

She was still working on the way to organically produce vitamin C and thiamine, vitamin B1, in a similar manner as many plants did. It wasn't difficult, and it would completely eliminate the diseases of both scurvy and beriberi if it could be done without any negative side effects. Scurvy was actually really prevalent in the wasteland as there weren't actually a lot of sources for vitamin C, except mutfruits, and not many people even understood the origin of the disease.

---xxxxxx---

Alice came with Lily down the nine-kilometre tunnel to the west, past highway 29 and into the barren wasteland that had nothing and nobody in it. It was a perfect place for her secret space program. There was a very flat area that she had made into something akin to a runway, and she had sections that would open into underground maintenance and service centres like it was the bat cave.

Although unloaded the first stage she was using was capable of verticle take-off and landing, when the entire second stage was loaded on top of it then, it required a running start to get off the ground, as the component of lift provided by the wing's airfoils was much more critical.

So, it basically needed a running go to take off fully loaded but could land like a Harrier when it came back from missions empty. Right now, she was servicing it, which was required periodically. She had to verify the lubricants on the flight control surfaces hadn't boiled off at forty thousand metres, check the hydraulic systems and a few other minor details. However, she was iteratively changing the design slightly during every maintenance period, which slowly reduced the maintenance it would require going forward.

Today she had finally replaced all of the lubricants with vacuum tolerant custom manufactured molybdenum disulfide, which was one of the so-called "dry lubricants" which wouldn't boil off at high altitudes. She had learned a lot from Fallout-universe engineering practises about building in truly epically over-engineered mechanisms with captive, enclosed lubrication that might not need to be serviced for a thousand years, but that was just not possible on an aircraft where she wanted to save every kilogram of weight possible, at least not with what she knew about aerospace engineering.

"Is this the second version?" the Apprentice asked while standing in front of a triangular flying wing-style airframe, which was about three times as big as the first generation that she was servicing. It had over a sixteen-metre wingspan, which was a little bit less than a third of the wingspan of a B-52 bomber, and had a projected basic operating weight of close to three tons, or perhaps more. It definitely would be able to carry passengers if she included a version with a cabin and cockpit, which was a version she had been planning until she stopped working on the entire system in a huff a week ago.

The large monster took up the entire length of the small underground hangar that they were standing in. Lily had been building it in stages while simultaneously testing the flight characteristics of a 1:4 model powered by energy cells and fission batteries, but she had stopped recently despite the success of the smaller models' flight tests.

Lily glanced at it, frowning, but nodded. That had been her first step to building an airframe that included a fusion hydrodynamic powerplant, just like her electrical generators. There was no way it could land or take off vertically, though. It would need at least a thousand-metre runway and possibly double that if it was fully loaded.

Lily discovered she could create really efficient electrically powered air jets using the same levitation technology. Pretty simple, too. They were the same thing that was included in the gauss rifle, actually, alongside the normal electromag accelerators. They were tubes with levitation emitters inside that would accelerate air, or essentially whatever was in them, from one in and out the other.

However, Lily had stopped working on the beast about a week ago when she had an epiphany. And she didn't like looking at it because it reminded her that she was, occasionally, an utter moron. She had been slamming her head against the wall on how to integrate the hydrodynamic fusion system into an aircraft and still provide cooling so the reactor wouldn't melt down. At normal operation in the air, it would be fine; air cooling would be way more than sufficient, even at extreme altitudes where the air was thin. However, for landing and take-off at low air speeds, it wouldn't be.

She had designed more than six iterations of various fuel tanks for water as a coolant, including multiple redundant pumps and sprayers, but the water was so heavy that she was still running against weight problems, not to mention controllability issues in models when the aircraft suddenly lost a good amount of weight really close to the ground.

Those were surmountable issues, though, and she was quite pleased with her progress. Until... until... she wondered why didn't she just include two or three fusion cores to run the electrical demands of take-off and landing. Fusion cores were cold fusion, and their power output, when combined with the low-level power of the hydrodynamic fusion system that could be cooled at low speed, would definitely be enough to take off and land.

It wouldn't even deplete the fusion cores that much. She might have to refuel them every twenty flights, perhaps. She only had about twenty free fusion cores that weren't earmarked for the Spider Company and Sheriff's Power Armour, but that would be enough to create at least several such aircraft. It would be enough.

She sighed and said before the Apprentice could question her further, "Yes, but I am changing the design a bit. This new model should be able to carry about ten second-stage vehicles, but probably only about half that if we want to maintain its low cross-section."

It was childish of her to get so upset as to stop development on the project just because she was butthurt about wasting so much time on a developmental dead end. She'd start work adjusting the design tonight. She had the details on the United States anti-satellite constellation, and her options were either to make an adventure to the NASA building or perhaps the Pentagon to find transponders that would identify her probes as American... or what she was more likely going to do, which was lean into her Chinese roots and run them out of ammunition by sending probes up until they ran out of bullets. Robot-wave attacks, in other words.

Both of the first options were kind of bad because, first, she wasn't going to go to the Pentagon, and second the NASA building was hit pretty hard, and it was within throwing distance of the Jefferson memorial, near the Potomac. Both places were Brotherhood territory.

While everyone was playing pretty nice, now, she didn't want them to know she had a need for space-related things. Lily had the designs of the anti-satellite systems, and they used railguns to accelerate steel ball bearings, like a shotgun. They were automated and even very ecologically friendly, as they would always ensure that each shot would result in a deorbiting target instead of additional undetectable space debris. They supposedly had a really prodigious amount of ammunition, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been if they had been set up with some kind of long-range SDI-style space lasers.

She estimated she could throw enough of her "boys" at the barrels of their machine guns to win the day in as little as a month if she could build three of these second-generation first-stage vehicles. Then she would launch low earth orbit satellites until she had a global communications system.

And then she could use these fast, ultra-high altitude planes to scour the world and identify any large settlements of people. Once they were identified, she direct radio broadcasts to them and maybe even provide satellite phones to connect settlements across the world. She was sure that some people would use this capability for communication and news purely for military purposes, but that was on them.

As if reading my mind, the Apprentice said, "Couldn't you use some of your fancy technology to get around having to use radio to communicate with these space probes? You said everyone used quantum entangled communications where you were from."

I hadn't said that, actually. Everyone actually used neutrino-based communications because they were unjammable and somewhat difficult to eavesdrop on. A lot of people did use QE comms, herself included, but they were more specialised and expensive. She hadn't known how to build the entangled particles when she first found herself in the Fallout world, but over the period of time digitising her past memories, she discovered that Meimei had several factories that produced QE communicators.

At first, she hadn't bothered and just bought the QE comms commercially, but she eventually discovered that people were placing man-in-the-middle attacks when they sold her paired quantum qubits; namely, if they sold her two paired qubits supposedly connected together, they were actually connected to two different qubits that they kept in their possession, and they'd forward her communications after presumably inspecting them. She encrypted transmissions, even QE comms, but allowing that to continue could imperil her life if they stopped forwarding the data when she was sending out an emergency ego broadcast, for example.

It was an unacceptable risk, as her entire network of hidden resurrection points was linked through a careful network of quantum-entangled communication systems.

So, she built her own factories building entangled qubits and found it was cheaper in the long run anyway.

Lily shook her head, "Zhe way quantum entangled communicators work is zhat we would 'ave to entangle two particles, called a paired qubit, for every bit we transmit. It is very, very expensive. When you transmit one bit of information, the paired qubits disentangle and become useless. So you 'ave to have vast reservoirs of entangled qubits even for just simple transmissions."

She tilted her head, "I could maybe make a small setup to entangle one particle pair at a time, but it would be a slow process. Zhe best method for industrially producing qubits involves zhe broad spectrum radiation released from an antimatter annihilation reaction, and zhere is no real way to produce industrial levels of antimatter anytime soon or safely. Or I'd be using it as fuel. Probably not for decades. It's like asking me to cook up a bunch of Higgs bosons and zhen trying to keep zhem stable. Difficult."

The Apprentice looked confused, "Oh. I don't know what any of that means. But I'll learn, Mistress! I'll learn!"