Last day in town

"Dr St. Claire, here are the tests from Mr Brooks that I conducted according to the protocol you left me prior to his discharge," Alice told Lily politely, handing over a manilla coloured file folder that they were using for medical records. Lily sat aside the sandwich she was eating and took the file. Technically, it was her lunch hour, but she was quite interested in the results.

Today was one of Alice's practical education days shadowing Lily in the clinic, and considering it was the last day this clinic would remain open and, therefore, the final day that Canterbury Commons might have a doctor for some time, it was quite busy for everyone.

Lily flipped open the record and then found the test results both from before and after the man's treatment and sighed. The data was utterly useless to her, and considering she had not charged the man anything for the experimental treatment, she supposed she had to count the entire thing as charity to increase her karmic merit. The only useful datum she had was that the treatment seemed to work with no sequelae, at least in the very short term.

She had cobbled together a simple reflex testing machine, which was almost indistinguishable from a particular memory and reflex game in her past where a series of coloured buttons would light up in increasingly complicated and shorter durations with the goal to repeat the sequence as quickly as possible. Lily hoped to start her data about how effective an average person's baseline reflexes were improved, but she should have known that the man's pre-existing condition would poison the data. He had shown an improvement of over six hundred per cent, which was impossible.

Similarly, the endurance testing on a stationary bicycle that Lily had explicitly fabricated for the purpose was also showing over a one thousand per cent improvement over his baseline, when Lily had been expecting a reduction in endurance in the range of five to seven per cent.

'Oh well, at least I feel confident performing more human testing with strain four of this therapy. I will lock this strain in for limited mass production when we arrive in Megaton,' Lily thought to herself, then glanced sideways at Alice. 'The apprentice requires additional cardiovascular conditioning. Megaton is likely not an appropriate venue for ten kay runs, at least until I am confident in her ability to defend herself. Repurpose stationary bicycle as work-out equipment? Build another for myself?'

Alice got a bad feeling; she had come to recognize some of the looks that her Mistress gave her, and the current one seemed to indicate that Dr St. Claire was thinking about her for some reason. Glances like these always seemed to precede some new assignment or chore for her to accomplish, so Alice looked for avenues to flee before her workload could be increased, "Ahaha... I will perform the initial exam and take the vitals on the patients waiting for you in exam rooms two and three!"

Lily blinked, and the fifteen-year-old apprentice girl was gone. She was very swift sometimes, like a rabbit escaping a predator. Odd. It was somewhat puzzling to her. Sighing one last time, she scribbled a quick note to hire someone to follow up on the man's health in six months and closed the folder.

The very fact that Lily was reduced to the point of using written notes as reminders to herself like some kind of barbarian out of stories grated on her. While her present memory was excellent when you compared her to an average human, especially with a host of medichines patrolling her brain and keeping neural connections healthy, they were NOT perfect.

It was Lily's opinion that a person was nothing more and nothing less than the total sum of all their memories and experiences. If that was the case, then how else could she look at the state of her imperfect memory as anything other than slowly bleeding to death from a wound she could not heal? Now that her immediate survival was less in question, every part of herself told her to rectify the situation before a permanent and irreversible loss of ego occurred.

Truthfully, while not unusual for AIs, synths and infomorphs, Lily's perspective was actually uncommonly held by people who lived in biomorph bodies. Only specialized biomorphs had eidetic memory bioware, after all, which was not utilized by the vast majority of people. Instead, they felt that a person's past was only a guide and that a person was who they were in the present. Lily felt that idea was insane, 'What if you were hacked?!'

She glanced at the several quantum cores she had salvaged from Eyebots sitting in a small tin on her desk. They were tiny, barely larger than a particularly nourishing pea, and they were Lily's first plan to keep her memories perfect, forever and ever. She was already mostly done with the designs incorporating an Eyebot core as the nexus of a neural co-processor implant.

Size for size, the Eyebot cores offered somewhat better processing power than the purely optical quantum architecture Lily was familiar with, which intrigued her to no end. Combined with a preliminary designed solid-state memory module, the size would increase only to approximately the size of a grape, which was suitable for implantation at the base of her skull, with her medichines assisting in drawing millions of semi-conductive carbon wires to every part of her brain to complete the brain-machine interface.

The co-processor built of two different world's technology would have storage of over five hundred exabits, which should be sufficient to download the entirety of her long-term memories onto, in full resolution -- or at least as full resolution as squishy biological memories could be. They weren't even INDEXED and didn't use any kind of relational tables at all, which caused Lily to wonder how normal humans remembered anything.

The main thing holding Lily back from performing brain surgery on herself was the software. There was just no way in hell she would implant something that was fully electrically integrated with her brain if it was running a RobCo operating system. While she deeply respected Dr House, even managing to access and listen to holotapes of some lectures he had given at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, she definitely didn't trust him. Plus, if her history of hacking every piece of tech running a RobCo OS said anything, it was that Dr House didn't have a particular emphasis on the security of the software he wrote. Considering the neural co-processor included wireless radios on several spectrums, the need for an absolutely secure RTOS was paramount.

Lily might not have had a choice but to accept the risk of a RobCo OS, as writing a new real-time OS from scratch was simply beyond her programming abilities. However, thankfully, she was long ago able to download a flash of the software and OS that her nanohive ran. In fact, that OS was running on the subsequent nanite fabricators incorporated in her fabricator and recycler.

The challenges were porting this OS to a new quantum architecture vis a vis the RobCo quantum cores. It wasn't an insurmountable problem, and Lily was making progress, but it had slowed her plans for apotheosis considerably.

She had surprised herself in her design of how to power these computing components in her body. Powering it in the same way the nanohive was was not a possibility; the blood flow in and around the brain was insufficient unless she wanted to graft a new artery just to power the computer. Initially, she would just have used power cells or perhaps fission batteries, but lately, she had found herself gravitating to more and more genetic solutions.

Alice had brought home an eel that was fished out of the Potomac river for dinner, which at first had Lily shocked and terrified. It was clearly a mutation, and Lily shuddered at the thought of what kind of radioactive virus or aggressive prion the possible chimaera had waiting for them. But, after she examined it and found it surprisingly nonradioactive and healthy, she took a sample to decode its genome later, as she had for every organism she had seen thus far, 'Getting samples from cats is a lot harder in the Apocalypse. They all think you want to eat them when you approach them with your hands out all grabby-grabby!'

She later found that the eel was obviously a mutant of the electrophorus genus. 'Who would have thought electric eels would be so delicious?' Lily thought as she nibbled on her leftover eel sandwich. And weren't they subtropical animals? These had to originate from ancestors that escaped captivity in a D.C. zoo, and whatever mutation occurred had to have provided a significant survival adaptation advantage, as they were not an uncommon organism in the river, if the reports of them occasionally electrocuting people to death was to be believed.

Was Lily's personality changing? She wouldn't, in the past, have considered a genetic adaptation like the electrocytes in eels as a solution to provide continuous power to a cybernetic implant for a biomorph, before, especially in herself. She wouldn't have, in the past, accepted any kind of biological solution for a personal problem like that.

Lily slowed her breathing into a meditative pattern, closed her eyes and did some weighty introspection, and thought to herself, 'I am a composite ego comprised of two individuals' memories.' At least, in theory. The set of memories as a refugee from planet Earth who became a renowned doctor and synthware researcher had the advantage of being over three hundred years longer than the other set of memories, which only lived to approximately fifty years old. But it wasn't as easy to say that since one set of data was larger than the other, then that side dominated the other because there wasn't more than one side. She was integrated more completely than she thought possible, even given the state of the art the current generation of mind engineers could accomplish, 'Another sign that I am actually a newly born AI that was downloaded by some unknown entity into this body. Or I was fused with my soulmate that I didn't even know existed.'

She had been thinking about her choices in the past as a default, but she needed to consider her preferences now since she was no longer the same person.

Interesting. She found that she was somewhat attached to the human form, if not its constituent parts or its organic brain. Would she slowly change herself into a gynoid in the future, then? Wistfully she considered her past as a twelve-meter tall robotic spider. There was just so much valuable space in a body that large and so many useful tools one could incorporate into eight legs.

She sat down her mostly finished eel sandwich and picked up her pencil and a rare sheet of clear mostly-white paper. Her drafting skills were actually quite good, and she wouldn't allow this idea to be lost to the vagaries of organic memory.

She drew a female figure in a dress looking normal, then followed by a similar female figure with her legs opened with each cybernetic leg deploying four long articulating spider-shaped legs. Such a setup would be incredibly fast and dextrous, and she could incorporate specially built nano-materials to allow her to grip walls or ceilings.

It was just a shame that she would lose out on the space to store tools in her legs as she did in the past. Then she glanced at the normal hands and arms her drawing featured and lifted her eraser, 'Or maybe I won't? I could include a lot of fine tools in a cybernetic arm and hand, especially if they were comprised mainly of carbon allotropes.'

After a while, she set her pencil down and glanced at the two drawings. She was considering the one on the left of a normal-looking girl as "infiltration mode," with the spider legs and tools in the stored state. The drawing on the left was an attractive-looking woman with long braided hair, while the one on the right was the same woman with robotic spider legs and dozens of thin, articulating tools deployed from her arms and hands.

'If it is not my fate to be a robotic spider in this life, then at least I can be a robotic spider girl!' enthused Lily. Then she blinked curiously. Why had she drawn these two figures in an anime style? She snorted; she knew which part of her memories that came from.

She took the last few bites of her sandwich and stood up. She still had a half dozen or so patients to see today before she closed up shop and crated everything up to take to Megaton.

She had secured passage with a trader that operated a caravan consisting of a handful of fission-powered flatbed trucks. The cost was fairly small, even though she was transporting a relatively large amount of weight with all the Protectrons, Assaultron, fabricator, second-generation generator and clinic supplies. She wondered how the trader dealt with the intrinsic problem of pneumatic tires in a society with little support structure. He had to manufacture or repair them himself, somehow. Wouldn't articulating tracks be the ideal system of vehicle propulsion in the wasteland, especially if you had essentially unlimited fission power and weren't worried about fuel economy?

Lily made a mental note to investigate the Corvega car factory south of Cantebury Commons the next time she came to visit Sophie and the Mechanist after she settled down in Megaton. She had plans to investigate many parts of the Capital Wastelands, and transportation beyond her own two feet might be necessary. Didn't the Corvega company make large Recreational Vehicles? Lily wondered if they could be easily converted to a tracked vehicle design. It was something to think about.

Lily dusted herself off, put on her lab coat and slid her laser pistol into the cross-draw holster on her left side. It was mostly hidden by her lab coat for professionalism, but she did not see patients unarmed. She was absolutely certain a small portion of her clients were raiders, but she did not turn them away if they could pay. The newly fashioned stiletto made of diamondoid materials was already hidden in a comfortable sheath on her other hip. She only wore it in a pull-down sheath on her breast when she was feeling especially "tacticool."

Lily perused the medical record on the door of the exam room before opening the door, plastering a pleasantly neutral smile on her face, "So, Mr Jones, what seems to be the problem today?"

"Well, Doc, there is this rash," began the farmer.

'Of course, there is,' thought Lily, with an internal sigh.