Matilda

"So, our main targets for this trip are working computer parts, electronics in general, power systems like energy and micro fusion cells and fission batteries. In other words, low-weight, high-value items that are easily convertible into caps," Grace said as they walked up the stairs.

"However, since we got the hover bot to carry most everything else, we can also get some personal items that we can take back ourselves, but only if they don't fall into the previous categories. If they do, then you can still keep them, but you have to buy them from the venture, at a discount, either with caps right away or with portions of your share," Grace continued, then her voice got serious, "So, everything we cart off has to be known to all the rest of us, just to keep everybody fair."

Everyone nodded, but Lily tilted her head to the side. Grace seemed to be implying that they would be doing some searching not as a group, "We are going to split up?" Her voice made it clear what she thought about that idea.

Grace made the universal hand-waffling motion, "Yes, and no. We will work building by building; we will completely clear it first quickly, and then when we've agreed the danger is minimal, we'll generally use the buddy system and split up to gather things faster in separate areas. You'll probably be by yourself since you have Little Miss Murderbot with you." The Assaultron seemed to approve of this designation, if her body language was any guide. Grace dug out three things from her pack and handed one of them to Lily, then the next to Big John.

Lily glanced down at it; it was hand-held radio. Although it seemed bigger than it needed to be, it was about the size of one of those old Motorola brick-style phones. It was way better than Vietnam-era military radios, but the main thing keeping those big was the shitty batteries of that era. Grace warned each of them, "I'd say be careful with these, but they're actually strong enough to withstand a bomb blast and still work -- I know because we found them in a blown up pre-war Vertibird. So, what I really mean is don't fucking lose them. This kind of tech is almost impossible to find these days. Even with all that we're going to take if we lose one of these, we're at a net loss this trip." She glanced straight at Lily, "You know what this is? Do you need help figuring it out?"

Lily shook her head, "Hand-held radio." She inspected the device. Nothing designed to work for the average soldier would be insanely complicated. She easily found the on/off, volume, push-to-talk, squelch and frequency selection dials. "Seems pretty straightforward, but what is this?" Lily indicated a small circular gauge that looked like a clock on the front of the device, next to the speaker grill, except it just had a minute hand.

Grace stared at her hard for what seemed like a long time, which caused Lily to feel a bit self-conscious. Then Lily realized that maybe most people have never seen a hand-held radio in the grimdark future of Fallout. Even most radios in the game looked more like ham-radio sets. Still, Grace didn't mention it but smiled after a moment, "Ah, that's the coolest thing about these. It has an automatic direction finder built-in. So while the radio is receiving a broadcast, that needle will point to the bearing of the transmitter making it. Girlie, you're the egghead, and I've always been curious about how that works. Do you have any idea?"

Lily hummed a bit before clipping the radio onto her belt while they arrived at the top. All members were scanning every direction with their weapons, "Well, the basics of radio direction finding is simple spherical geometry while radio triangulation is based on combining that with trigonometry. The earliest systems in WW2 used a physically rotating antenna -- it would spin at a known RPM, and the highest signal strength received during one full rotation could be correlated to a bearing from the receiver. Think of it like when you call for an all-around defence, you got men looking in each direction, and if one of them hears a gunshot, even if every man heard the shot, the one pointed in that direction hears it the best, understands it is coming from that quadrant and he calls it out."

She tilted her head to one side, "But these obviously have no moving parts, so they must be using multiple tiny antennas and electronics to do a similar calculation. That is much more complicated and requires you to know a little bit about the physics of how light on this part of the spectrum works. It's not looking for the highest signal but instead when a signal is at 90 degree offset of an antenna a--"

Grace held her hands up and started waving them, "Stop, stop, stop! I got the first explanation, but now I am starting to feel like I know less than when you started. So, let me just pretend they have a rotating antenna in them; that makes sense and is something I can wrap my head around!"

Lily smiled and nodded. They got to the first mostly intact building on the campus. Grace growled at the sign which declared this was the 'John C. Coolidge building', "It's just named after some guy, with no telling what's inside."

Lily clucked her tongue, "Must have been built with the donation money of some rich guy, probably who used to go to the University of Maryland. I'd say it's probably classrooms and physical lab rooms. Schools like this would usually add a suffix if it were office space like it would be the John C. Coolidge administration building or what have you."

New John piped up, "Thanks, Professor Girlie," to which Lily stuck her tongue out at him.

"Okay, we'll clear this building first. Girlie, you hold back and just watch, see how we do this, and in the next building, we'll give you a shot," Grace said.

The four of them cleared the room as well as anything she had a memory of from her time in the US Army, at least when they only had a total of four people to do it. The Army would have set a whole platoon on this building. It took over an hour to finish, even with them moving fast, and there were three pockets of feral ghouls that were put down without Lily having to do anything.

Speaking of which, the personality simulation of this Assaultron was well into the bitch range, Lily decided, giving it a side-eye again. Earlier, after the second fight where neither it nor Lily had to do anything, the robot piped up with its own comment. Pausing, Lily decided that wasn't appropriate and mentally started using feminine pronouns for the robot. Besides clearly having a feminine voice, anything this mean-girl bitchy had to be a girl. Earlier, the exchange with it went, "Query, have we switched to the Baby Protocol? The protocol for big babies who can't do anything for themselves?"

When Lily just stared at her, she gave a final derisive, digitized, "BABY," before turning to look for ghouls, which, by her body language, she clearly hoped would get by the grenadiers.

The building was full of classrooms, chemistry and physics labs, with a computer lab on almost every other floor. After clearing the last floor, they paused. Grace directed, "We should hit the computer labs first, then each team should work that floor downwards. Then, after that, wherever you want for an hour or so. Make sure your radio is set to channel six. Every time you shift floors report that. I'll do a commo check every fifteen minutes; if there is no reply, all teams will drop everything and head to the last reported position, group, up and search. The Brotherhood sometimes uses channel one, but more often, they use radios that operate on different frequency bands than these units."

Everyone nodded and selected floors. She and the Assaultron would begin on this top floor. She began systematically searching the computer lab. A handful of terminals still worked, and she took a little time to see if there was anything interesting on them. There wasn't.

She carried a small cachet of tools most of the time now, and she used them to quickly disassemble the working units, taking the motherboards and the high-voltage display symbol generators, something akin to a graphics card. The actual glass screens were not that valuable and could even be manufactured by some large settlements, like Rivet City, but some of the individual components were still mostly unreproducible by any but the Brotherhood and the Enclave. She also took the fission batteries out of every unit, even the broken ones, but that was such a quick process as they attached somewhat like laptop batteries on the back and just slid out without using any tools.

The mainframe computer that the terminals were connected to in the past wouldn't power up. Lily didn't know if it was just a lack of sufficient power or whether there was significant damage to it, but he suspected a little of both.

Humming happily to herself, she opened up the service panel. It was large, like the hood of a car and opened up like a Delorean or Tesla Model X door. Or it probably would have if it was 200 years ago. Instead, Lily ended up having to ask the Assaultron to rip it off its hinges, which she did with relish.

Lily shined her PipBoy light into the cavernous computer. These mainframes were built similarly to the "blade" style of servers in her past life. There were dozens of subordinate but full computers that slotted into the main motherboard. She diagnosed more than half as not worth her time, those she yanked out and tossed on the floor in a pile. She took out the others one at a time and examined them briefly.

Even with the Mr Handy corpse, she couldn't take all of these with her. So she settled for the most expensive parts of each, which thankfully were small. She pulled out each processor and all the RAM and core memory and set that aside in her keep pile. After she was done, she salvaged the power supplies at the bottom of the mainframe's chassis. These mainframes needed very smooth power in a lot of amps, so these power supplies were quite sophisticated, expensive and could be repurposed in a lot of different ways. When she was about to leave, the Assaultron piped up, pointing, "The stupid human baby forgot the parallel processing control unit."

Lily glared at her, "The wha---ahh.." She had been salvaging parts from each of the "blades" of the mainframe but didn't bother with the mainframe's motherboard itself. The actual mainframe's CPU wasn't that much more valuable than each of the blade processors, and it was a lot bigger pain in the ass to reach. But what the Assaultron was pointing to was a plug-in module next to the CPU. She had missed that, but honestly, she had only briefly read texts about mainframe computing since he got into this world. She glanced at the Assaultron, "Does that organize the computing cluster, then?"

The Assaultron turned away, "Yes. Unknown how many chickens or shiny beads a disgusting human TODAY would exchange with you for it as this Unit is only specialized in killing disgusting humans, not understanding their stupid tribal economics... but it was worth almost a quarter of the value of this entire machine when it was built."

Lily rolled her eyes. Was the killbot a tsun? Also, her personality seemed a bit developed. She'd mention it to Sophie and the Mechanist; maybe the Assaultron was sandbagging them. She half-climbed into the mainframe's chassis and carefully unslotted, and then pulled out the module in question. Since she was already inside the machine, she took a couple more minutes to free the mainframe processor but decided to skip the memory as that wasn't as easily removed without spending another hour at the job.

"Thanks," Lily mentioned but got no reply.

She carefully wrapped all of the delicate parts in cloth and secured them in her rucksack. After Grace did the next commo check, she replied with, "Girlie reporting, all clear." It really was her codename now.

She searched the rest of the rooms but not as thoroughly. Still, she came home with about two dozen energy cells that powered each of the lab stations in each chemistry lab. They were discharged, but it was relatively easy to recharge them and about that many fission batteries and some easily transportable and salable chemistry precursors.

She reported her descent to the next floor down and began looting that too. After a while, she heard the radio squelch, "B.J. to boss; we found a door in the basement none of us noticed during the initial sweep."

Grace's voice came back on the radio, "Roger, don't investigate yet. We'll hit that when we group back up. Any clue what it is?"

Big John got back on the radio after a moment, "There is a sign that says: 'BSL-2 rules in effect. All personnel must wear proper PPE.' Do you know what that means, boss?"

Lily perked up immediately. She started running through the last two rooms; now, she was excited. Grace got back on the radio, "PPE means Personal Protective Equipment, so maybe it's like one of these chemistry labs where they use some of the more dangerous chemicals? Professor Girlie, do you have a clue?"

Lily grabbed the radio and keyed the PTT excitedly, "BSL means Bio-Safety Level, it is a set of standards ranging, generally, from 1 to 4 and contains rules and standards about equipment for the safe handling of viruses, prions, bacteria and other infectious diseases."

There was quiet on the radio for a long time. Finally, Grace came back, "Uhh.. then maybe we WON'T look through that door," and Big John offered, "No shit, boss."

No, no! Lily definitely was going to rummage through ALL the drawers in that lab. She keyed the PTT again, "No, no! There's unlikely to be anything very dangerous there. BSL-2 is the second lowest level, and they'd only be investigating simple, relatively harmless pathogens like the common cold, or maybe not even that dangerous. I definitely want to look around down there. It might be really important to me."

Grace replied, "Uhh, I dunno, Girlie. We definitely aren't going in there, so it might be dangerous for you to go in alone. Then after that, what if you were infected with something and then brought it back to us?"

Lily went to click the PTT to say that she was likely immune to any such viruses but then realized that saying such a thing in the clear unencrypted in D.C. might be a poor idea. Instead, she just said, "I'm done with the top two floors anyway, so I'm headed down there. I'll tell you in person. Girlie, out."

She skipped with excitement down the stairs. She met up with Big John and Tangent in the basement and waved at them.

After about twenty minutes, Grace and New John showed up; Lily supposed that they finished up their own looting before coming down. Grace glanced at her before saying, "So, what did you not want to say on the radio? If you can convince me it is more or less safe, we'll go clear the dormitory next door while you can search this BSL lab."

Lily grinned, "Well. I do not really want to talk about why and, in fact, will refuse to speak further about the specifics, but I am immune to most pathogens. Maybe not things like the New Plague or weaponized hantavirus or ebola, but even baseline versions of those pathogens would require a BSL-4 facility, of which there probably is only one or two in D.C." Actually, Lily was pretty confident about her ability to fight off most mundane bio-weapons, so long as she wasn't suffused entirely with virions.

Grace shook her head, "You know, you're making me more and more curious about your background and not in a good way. But okay, I will assume you are telling the truth. And that there isn't anything more dangerous than the common cold in there, but what about defences? Roof turrets, security bots, etcetera?"

Lily waved her hand dismissively, "No way! First, the BSL standards at all levels preclude anything like that -- the security is all supposed to be at the access control points, not inside the lab where a bullet or laser beam could break vials or explosions could aerosolize particles! Maybe if this was Fort Maryland and it was a DoD lab, they would do that shit anyway, but there is just no way."

Lily paused for a moment, "There might, probably, are ghouls, though. But that's why I 'ave Matilda here." She hiked a thumb at the Assaultron.

Grace's lips were twitching upwards, "Matilda?"

Lily nodded, "When she cuts loose, you'll understand. She goes waltzing around; it is not, how you say, the rock and roll step."

The Assaultron radiated approval for the potential to cut loose. Its claws spinning in what might be excitement, "Temporary Designation: Matilda. Accepted. Ready to engage dance of death protocols."

After a moment, Grace nodded, "Okay, you've convinced me the risk is minimal. First, let's go over all we've looted here and pack it up."

They each brought out their loot and spread it around the floor. There were a lot of energy cells, fission batteries, and generalized electronic scrap. Surprisingly, in Grace's pile, there were three laser rifles and what looked like a busted plasma rifle in two pieces.

Grace noticed her surprised expression, "Apparently, after the war, a small group of soldiers, deserters probably, holed up in that ROTC office we saw on the second floor. Probably not for too long, as they looked to have died there. Radiation, maybe?" The Amazon shrugged. "I wish the plasma rifle worked; that is something we might not even sell. We might be able to get it repaired at Rivet City or Megaton."

Lily clucked her tongue, inspecting it. "The damage to the stock is just cosmetic. But the accelerating coils on the plasma accelerator..." Lily shook her head, "They definitely need to be fixed. But all the superconducting wire is, more or less, still there. I'm pretty sure I can fix it, but perhaps test-fire it with a string from ten meters away after I am done?"

Grace grinned, "That would be great if you could, and yeah, that sounds prudent. What are all these chips?"

Lily grinned, "The processors and memory from the mainframe in the top floor computer lab."

Grace slapped her head theatrically with the flat of her palm, "It looks like us and BJ's team just grabbed the power supplies out of there. Perhaps you should hit each lab on our floors after you get done down here? We'll keep the comm check going while we work the dorms."

Lily nodded, "Oui, oui. But I do not know if the radio will reach the next building from inside the lab; if it is built properly, then there will be a fair amount of isolation built into it. But when I step out, I'll re-establish comms. Is that okay?"

Grace pursed her lips again before nodding, "Yes. We'll leave our haul from here down here in the basement but take the Mister Handy next door. Sound good?"

Lily nodded, and each of them carefully repacked all of the loot. Grace gave a simple, "Don't die, girlie!" before they quick timed it up the stairs.

Lily rubbed her hands together. She doubted she would find much that was very interesting, like a strain of F.E.V., but she would likely find things that were at least useful, even if they were common.

The door to the lab wasn't like Vault-Tec doors, but it did have a manual dogging that Lily had to undog before she could open the door. When she did, she glanced over at the Assaultron, "Matilda, sweep and clear. No killing any non-hostile sapient, though. If there are any bots, don't trash them unless they attack. And be VERY careful not to destroy any other equipment in here. If you encounter any automated turrets or bots armed with heavy anti-mat weapons systems, retreat back to the entrance. Acknowledge." Lily didn't EXPECT any still lucid ghouls in here, but it was a possibility.

The Assaultron grinned somehow, despite not having a face that had any ability to actually grin, and said, with her tone dripping pleased malice, "Sweep and clear!"

The Assaultron started moving ahead of her, but then, realizing that her orders were perhaps not specific enough, Lily added, "No MAIMING non-hostile sapients, either!"

The Assaultron's shoulders drooped momentarily before she continued into the unknown lab. Lily followed her slowly, her carbine ready.

As she watched the Assaultron step into the next room, she heard the groanings of ghouls followed by the bot vocalizing, "Hostiles detected in the AO. Beginning elimination sub-routines!"

Well, at least she is having fun, Lily thought. She started examining the first couple of rooms. There was some useful loot here already. Nothing that she really was looking for, but the PPE inside the donning and doffing room would be useful and eminently salable. Despite this being only a BSL-2 lab, they had full-body suits and full positive pressure respirators in a closet. Perhaps as emergency equipment for if there was a break in their lab containment or protocols?

Before she could even enter the first room of the lab proper, Matilda returned, "Reporting, four ghouls eliminated with extreme prejudice, the AO is clear."

Lily squinted at her, "Did you try to at least communicate with them first?"

The Assaultron's speakers suddenly played back a zombie-like groan of "Raaahhhhhh," followed by her robot voice dripping sarcasm, "Like that?"

"Just.... never mind," Lily said, "Go guard the entrance from the basement side. I'm going to be thorough here."

Matilda did a passable salute with one claw before turning and heading out through the entrance, but Lily could just barely hear most of a low-volume mutter the robot was making to herself in the next room, which ended with, "... sorry you didn't get a chance to surrender to them... stupid frogs."

Lily bristled as she thought angrily, Hey, first of all, I am only PRETENDING to be French. Also, dude, frog is really not the preferred nomenclature. Franco-American, please.

Whatever. She pulled out her scanner from her bag and booted it up. First, she opened up her medichine interface and checked the log. There was no sign of a detected viral infection that they destroyed. She waved it around the air and did not find any virons there either. She'd repeat this for each room she entered, just in case.

She was mainly here for specialized lab equipment that would be difficult or annoying to make. For example, she was disassembling an autoclave right now. She could take its most important pieces back with her.

However, she hit the jackpot. In both biosafety cabinets, she discovered still operable, running cryogenic systems. The first was almost entirely full of the synthetic guide RNA and complex nuclease used for primitive gene editing.

Did this lab have a small nuclear reactor providing electricity? Honestly, Lily was always curious about power sources whenever she saw operating electrical devices in the wastelands, but these cryogenic freezers used significant power.

She supposed she didn't really need to know, but she would mention it to Grace.

Opening the second freezer, she was pleased it contained specimens. Useless, useless, useless. She went down the list of stored pathogens. Most were bacteria or prions that she didn't have much use for. Of the few viruses, none were easily edited to become a good vector for genetic modifications... except...

She smiled. HIV, although she didn't recognize the precise designation but HIV was always a useful retrovirus. And lastly, a similarly unknown coronavirus. It appeared like the viral designations she was familiar with have no history here.

She took the four vials of HIV and coronavirus out of the second freezer and began scanning them to identify their specific strain. There was no match to the HIV in her scanner's databases, but it was very similar to HIV-2. As for the coronavirus, it was identical to what Lily would call one of the strains of the common cold.

She was amazed that a respiratory virus like coronavirus was being stored in a BSL-2 lab at all, even if it was just the common cold.

She wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and she supposed, considering the usual outbreaks in viral research labs in the Fallout universe, potential coronavirus recombination would be hardly noticed in a world of F.E.V. and New Plague.

She slid the viruses into the first freezer and then carefully disconnected it and brought it out of the cabinet. She clucked her tongue. This called for some practical electrical engineering.

She half disassembled the fridge, removing any unnecessary bits to cut down on the weight. She could have tossed the freezer's transformer rectifier unit as she planned on powering this for the trek back to town with energy cells, which provided DC power, but she figured she would need that when she got back, so she only bypassed it.

It took almost an hour to get the now mobile cryogenic system operational. Lily looked longingly at the second freezer -- freezers that could keep things cold enough that they could be called cryogenic were quite valuable. But there was no way the group could cart back both of them. Even with this one, she'd probably have to pay some of her share for it.

She heard a shout from the entrance, "HEEEY Girlie! There were some raiders in the dorms, and Big John was hurt. Are you fucking done in there?"

Blinking, she made sure the freezer was stable for now, slid her scanner back into her bag and rushed out.

They all looked a bit injured, and Matilda the Assaultron glared daggers at her, "We MISSED it!"

Then Big John caught Lily's attention by waving at her, except he was waving his severed right hand with his good one, "Hey, we came over because we thought you could use a hand!"

A groan involuntarily escaped Lily's lips.