Some French tart

Lily didn't have much in the way of vegetables, but she made do the best as she could and considered the stew a roaring success.

For some reason, despite the fact that she never actually ate rabbit stew in the Army, the meal reminded her of her stay in the Fayetteville School for Fallen Women, also known as Fort Bragg. Maybe it was the walls down here.

She worked there as an intelligence analyst and translator for psychological operations, working on things such as leaflets, pamphlets and radio broadcasts telling the peaceful people of Afghanistan that they were just there to help. It was kind of laughable when she looked back on it, although it seemed like important work at the time.

She had no idea why she was assigned to such a job; even back then, she didn't understand people too well. But, you learned pretty quickly that no matter how smart you were, there was the right way, the wrong way and then the Army way, and you got used to it. She was deployed twice but got out of the service by 2004 to attend an engineering school in Troy, New York.

Lily shook her head, shaking away the odd reminiscing of the past. Eyeing the jar with the dead psychic brain, she hummed. She made a couple of screens pull up side by side in her vision; one of them contained the map of electrical activation in her own brain while the Psyker-Gary, or rather the alien behind him, tried to access her memories. In the other window was the playback of the continual scan taken by the Termitron of the Psyker-Gary's own brain.

Although her scanner couldn't detect electrical activity directly at a distance the Termitron was standing, it could infer it by the presence of more or fewer oxygen molecules, which it could detect if there were more than a few in the same area.

Lily programmed the display in the form of a three-dimensional heatmap, with the "hot" areas on the weird brain the areas that contained the most oxygen.

There was a clear change in activity in the Brain Gary the moment her own electrical activity started rising, and Lily localized it to a number of anomalous structures of the brain that she had no name for. "Very, very interesting," Lily said, in a very fake German accent, dating herself with the impression of Arte Johnson.

Her Opa, an actual German, loved Arte Johnson's impression on the show Laugh-In, and she would watch the program on syndication with him when she was just four or five years old. That and episodes of M.A.S.H. He would call her from the other room, and when she came running pitter-pattering into the room, he would ask her, "While you're up, could you change the channel?" since the TV at the time was only the type with two round knobs and no remote control.

Lily highlighted the areas that saw the most activation to focus on them in her later dissection of the brain, then let the playback continue to the point where the brain used telekinesis and watched a much smaller area of the brain light up. Her eyebrows reached up to her scalp in surprise; she expected them to be the same areas of the brain responsible.

She highlighted that area in a different colour, then frowned at it. It wasn't scientific. It wasn't scientific at all! Sure, a lot of oxygen went to that area, but unless the brain was using positrons to extract the energy, there was nowhere near enough energy to pick her body up and accelerate it as fast as she hit the wall. Where did the energy come from? She didn't know, but she would find out.

Also, the fact that the two different "powers", for lack of a better word, seemed to be activated by different areas of the brain gave her ideas. Perhaps it would turn to nothing, but if she could harness that. Input a few oxygen molecules, which you don't even lose, and you get as output as what...? Over five thousand Newtons? Through some... mysterious force? Maybe it WAS the Force, for all she knew, but she desperately hoped not.

Discovering what might be a possible entirely novel and unknown type of energy field made her feel like a fictional species of space worm from a web novel she liked in her past life. [VERY INTERESTED], in other words.

She frowned. Interested enough that she would keep her squishy, vulnerable and inefficient organic brain? She could scarcely think about more than one thing at a time right now. It was barely tolerable.

That, she didn't know. Perhaps she could grow just this part of the brain and interface with it electrically like it was an oddly wet and squishy peripheral, like a gross keyboard or something.

Besides, she was getting very much ahead of herself. Chances are that this small "telekinesis" area required the larger parts, too, just wouldn't work or would turn a person crazy or something. The Psykers The Master made in Fallout 1 were all crazy or special ed if she recalled.

Closing the window with her brain data, she backtracked to the moment she suspected was when the alien connected to the Gary-Brain, noticing what she thought was a similar activity to what she saw at first when it was trying to access her thoughts.

That was, at least, as expected.

She spent another half hour looking over the playbacks over and over, looking for some inspiration. The area of Psyker-Gary's brain that lit up during the display of telekinesis was somewhat similar to existing human brain structures. And when Lily watched the playback of Psyker-Gary's transformation, she confirmed it originally was the posterior parietal cortex as well as portions of the posterior cingulate cortex.

Lily hummed and tapped her fingers on the table she was eating lunch at. The posterior parietal cortex was a structure in the back of the human brain had had a number of functions; the most notable was spatial awareness especially involving spatial awareness and motor skills, as well as reasoning and calculation, so long as it involved a decision based on spatial cognition. The decision on how to catch a flyball or dodge if you thought something was going to hit you were examples of how this part of the brain worked.

The posterior cingulate cortex, on the other hand, was a much more complicated area of the brain involved in consciousness. If you were not focusing on a task or thinking of a particular thing, this is the area of the brain that would be active the most, as such people tend to refer to it as being responsible for daydreaming, although that wasn't entirely accurate. In the human brain, it was one of the most active areas, accounting for over twenty per cent of the oxygen and energy resources used by the brain.

The mind engineers of transhumanity had discovered this area of the brain was crucial to self-actualization and was very important. How fascinating that in the Psyker-Gary's brain, it had separated and grown into different distinct structures of its own, one of which joined with a portion of the brain that controlled spatial awareness and decision-making to be used for telekinesis.

She rubbed the back of her neck ruefully. With most of the activity of the brain coming from the area she recognized as originating from areas responsible for visual-spatial awareness, she suspected he wouldn't have been able to smash her into the wall if he hadn't seen her.

'Ah, well. I mean, it could have happened to anybody!' she told herself.

Standing up and stretching like a cat, she walked over to inspect Gary Prime's brain jar. She would likely have to run another life-supporting cranial healing vat off her fabricator, but she was running a bit low on carbon feedstock on the fabricator upstairs and hadn't actually brought a recycler with her. She still had a fair bit in the truck, though, so she wasn't in dire straits yet.

---xxxxxx---

Lily had to carefully disconnect Gary's brain jar by powering it briefly with a battery with crude alligator clips she clipped inline to its power source before transferring him carefully to her own life support tank, which he now floated comfortably inside.

At least, it looked comfortable to her. However, since she didn't understand how the stasis technology worked, she had to induce a dream-like state in his brain using medichines and drugs. While not completely unconscious, like she had been after she smashed into the wall, anymore, Lily was certain that Gary was in the equivalent of a deep sleep, dreaming, which she felt was necessary as his brain seemed to display almost post-seizure-like electrical activity after being taken off the stasis field.

Lily had no idea how it worked but suspected there needed to be at minimum a few hours after being stased to return to a normal baseline, and she felt it was better if he did that in a sleep-like state, considering he had nobody or sensory organs, after all. She hoped that the small number of narcotics and anxiolytics she included in his oxygen-bubbler made for pleasant dreams.

To be honest, she was a little concerned the stasis system might have been one way, and he would have immediately died after being removed. Of course, there was no reason she could see for this feeling beyond the fact that Fallout technology was often assholic like that, but she was glad she had been worried for nothing.

She carefully packed the stasis jar up. It was a little fragile, clearly not a mass-produced item and more like a one-off laboratory prototype, so she would carry it upstairs and store it carefully in the cab of her truck later.

She had about ten hours before Gary was finished cooking in the cloning machine, which gave her enough time to do one thing that her robots didn't yet, do well. Sadly, that was in-depth cleaning.

She intended to wake the man up in a room that was as spotlessly clean as she could manage in order to ease his impact back into reality; she even found some additional paint that she would have the robots touch up the walls with. However, she hadn't found a task combination that was much good at anything beyond sweeping up and taking out the trash.

He would already be getting a shock when he discovered he's over twenty years younger than he thought he was; she felt she should break it to him that he's living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

So, she picked up her old friend, the mop, and a bunch of cleaners which were in abundant supply down here and got to work on her chosen room.

It took more than three hours to clean the room adequately, and she immediately ordered a team of two robots to go in and touch up the paint on the walls while she sat down in her chair.

Doing manual labour wasn't something she was used to; that's why you invented robots in the first place. However, she would just call it her workout for the day and go with that.

Blinking, she realized she didn't have anything to do for almost five hours. So, she decided to take a little time for herself. She leaned back in her chair and pulled up one of the novels she hadn't read.

This one was about a plucky heroine from a noble family that would be kidnapped but ultimately fall in love with a dashing swashbuckler in the 17th century.

Bodice rippers were always a guilty pleasure of hers.

---xxxxxx---

Lily had a gurney and a couple of robots waiting for Gary's body when he was done, which was good because he sort of tipped over as soon as the easy bake oven opened.

She carefully laid the body on the gurney and ordered the robots to take him to the centre of the room. In the absence of an actual operating room, she had decided to just use this large room as it was quite clean and had a lot of space. So she cleared off some area in the centre and set up a tall table that would suffice.

She had built a stand to hold her scanner over and above the operating theatre so that she could overlay medical images onto the body while she worked.

This was a very complicated surgery, especially the implantation of Gary. There was only a small amount of time Gary could be out of his tank before he started to die from hypoxia, so she had to connect him to his major arteries very rapidly to ensure proper oxygenation.

This process would have been a lot simpler if they kept most of his spinal cord and brain stem attached as she had done with Psyker Gary, but they scooped him out like he was a bowl of Cookies & Cream. She definitely didn't believe they had any intention to do anything but throw him away when they were done.

Lily glanced at the robot acting as her assistant for the operation and tilted her head to the side. She was feeling something.

She didn't think there was an exact English word for what she was feeling, but in German, she would have likely called it sehnsucht -- the longing for a friend or family member. To put it more simply, she missed the Apprentice and felt that she would make a better surgical assistant than this robot. How interesting. She didn't normally have deep feelings about people, one way or another.

Perhaps she'd tell the girl about her experiments when she returned to Megaton. At the minimum, it would have been helpful to have her around. She might have had useful input on the relative merits of exposing a brain in a jar...healing vat to vast amounts of a mutagenic virus that she knew had a history of causing psi-like abilities.

Lily hummed and made ready to shave the hair on Gary's body's head. It had come out of the oven with long black hair down to it's butt, and Lily found long hair in men quite fetching. It was a shame she had to cut it all off, but there was just no helping it.

If Gary was like most men in the universe she was in, he wouldn't appreciate long hair anyway. Not like Captain Sebastian Hawk, whose long tresses trailed in the wind on the high seas.

Lily blushed and coughed. This wasn't the time to get distracted. She sheared his hair rapidly and then picked up a scalpel. The diamond-tipped power saw would come next.

---xxxxxx---

After the operation was done, Lily ran off Gary a new vault suit, as well as underwear and socks and dressed him. She had also considered dressing in one also but didn't know how Vault-Tec had convinced him to get his brain scooped out.

They might have tricked him, but it was also possible that they had just buffaloed him and dragged him to the medical bay, kicking and screaming or assaulted him in his room and anaesthetized him. There was just no knowing, so showing up looking like a Vault-Tec person was a gamble.

So instead, she wore her form-hugging dark grey combat suit, but without any of the extra ballistic trauma plates that she wore above it on a webbing-style plate carrier or her helmet. If he was even slightly heterosexual, he would be distracted.

And in her experience, heterosexual human males had almost a universal inability to associate an attractive woman with evil actions at first, which would tend to reinforce the fact that she was actually on his side. Which she was, for the most part. Well, unless they had been seriously vamped in the past by a malevolent woman, she supposed. But she would take the risk.

She hurried to the clean room she had placed him in when an alert told her that his brain activity was showing signs of wakefulness. Although, it still smelled faintly of new paint, unfortunately.

She grabbed the scanner from the Termitron that was inside the room and shooed it off; she had enough self-awareness to understand that they were a little intimidating if you had never seen one before. She didn't want to think she was about to probe his orifices, after all.

She saw him groggily returning to consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around and didn't immediately flip out, which was good. It meant she had connected all of his optical sensory neurons back up correctly. There were thousands of them, and especially on a new body, she was concerned she might have connected the wrong ones together. It wouldn't have been a big deal, the brain would have adapted in but it would have taken a fair time where he was seeing god knows what while it happened.

"Ugghh... what happened..." he slurred, his eyes glancing at me.

Lily pursed her lips and said in a professionally pleasant tone, "I was wondering if you could tell me that, Monsieur Kaminski. What's zhe last thing you remember?"

He finally sat up in bed, and looked a bit more conscious; and Lily's voice seemed to centre him a bit, and he finally looked around the room he was in and at her, eyes dipping down to her chest momentarily before rising up to look her in the eyes and stay there, 'So, he is a bit of a gentleman, or at least polite.'

He coughed and said, "Ahhh... I had a meeting with the Overseer, but I didn't know about what. I went into his office, and that's it. Are you a doctor from Vault-Tec?" He seemed confused, likely as a result of Lily not wearing a vault suit herself.

Lily raised her eyes. There could have been any number of things that happened in the Overseer's office, but Lily suspected the Overseer simply had him drugged as soon as he arrived.

The same drugs the vault carried for sedatives tended to have a deletrious effect on short-term memory while you were under them, which was actually very good and a desirable effect for the most part, medically speaking.

"I am a medical doctor, but I'm not from Vault-Tec. I'm from outside zhe vault; I suppose you could say," Lily offered ambiguously.

Gary wasn't a dumb cookie, he blinked a couple of times before saying, "But... we had confirmation that birds from the chicoms were on the way, confirmed detonations in Pennsylvania, and we felt it when they blasted D.C. even all the way down in the Vault."

He started to look angry, "Just what the fuck did that son-of-a-bitch do to me? I am remembering a bit more, as soon as I walked into the Overseer's office, one of his security goons grabbed me." He shook his head, "If you're from outside the vault and aren't incinerated, then... how fucking long was I out?"

Lily nodded. So much for her idea to break it to him slowly. Sighing, she took a seat in the office chair she had placed next to the desk on the wall, her social program suggesting that being on the same eye-level as him would send a better signal, "Insightful question, Monsieur Kaminski. I'm not sure how to break it to you, so I'll just be blunt, but it has been... a long time. We're the only two living souls alive in this Vault, in fact. The date is December 1st, 2274. 'Tis zhe season, and all."

His eyes went googly-eyed, "Two hundred fucking years?! How is... what the fuck..." He then narrowed his eyes, "You're fucking with me, right, lady? Do you have any proof?"

Lily tilted her head to the side, "That you can see immediately? Not unless you want to go outside the vault and see what a blasted wasteland is awaiting you."

He nodded smartly, "Yes! I do!" He tried to get up from the bed but was unsteady on his feet.

Lily stood up as well, and tried to mollify him, "Monsieur Kaminsky, please. You've just had zhe very serious surgery. You need to be on bed rest for at least a little while."

But he wouldn't be mollified and started to stand up, "Look, I am fine, I won't have some French tart tell me..." and with that, he tipped over and fell out of his bed in a tumble of limbs.

Lily started down at him, smugly now, "Tart, huh?" she asked frostily, raising her boot to lay it on his chest threateningly and firmly.

Gary coughed and just lay there for a moment, "Perhaps I was a tad impolite. I'm a bit at loose ends, and I apologise. I didn't mean to impinge on your honour, madam. It won't happen again."

Lily nodded and leaned down to help him back to a seated position in bed. "You are probably very hungry." She imagined he was famished since there was essentially nothing in his stomach at all. She would, in fact, have to treat him a little bit like a starvation patient. Otherwise, he could deal severe damage to his digestive system without even knowing it.

Gary looked a little embarrassed when his stomach started growling audibly, "Ah... yes, I suppose I am. Very. Hungry, that is."

Lily hummed and nodded, "Zhat isn't surprising. 'owever, you can't have all you want. Due to your particular medical issues, I 'ave to treat you as if you're zhe... how do you say? Starving person. Who has been without food for a long time. That means, just a little now, and a little every few 'ours."

He looked surprised and looked down to inspect his arms and body, which seemed quite healthy. "Uh, okay, Doc. I know all about that. I served twenty years in the Navy, we often saw places like that and know all about how you have to treat those kinds of refugees."

Lily raised her eyebrow, "Well, zhen. As you might expect, it isn't as zhough the grocery stores are really in business anymore. But I 'ave some rabbit stew that I made; it's quite good?"

Gary nodded several times, "Okay. I'll go get you a bowl. If you want answers to your questions about what zhe Overseer did to you, I have placed all I know on files on zhat terminal at your desk. I recommend you read zhrough it. Do you want help getting up into the chair?"

"Yes, ma'am. Please," he said simply, so she got him to his feet and sat him in the cleaned-off office chair. Lily nodded at him, "Some of zhose files are zhose I removed from the Overseer's terminal, some are from zhe medical bay, and some are from zhe laboratory downstairs, where we are currently located. Zhe rest are my own personal speculations," she offered.

He nodded, and she left the room. Her super-hearing heard him mutter, "..laboratory?" as she walked to go get him a small bowl of stew and some cold water.

She returned to find him reading the first file she put in there and sat the stew and water down next to him, "Pause your enlightenment, for zhe moment. Eat zhis first, I suspect you are going to get so angry shortly zhat you will forget all about zhe stew, and zhen it will be cold. We shan't have zhat, no?"

It looked like he wanted to argue with her, but thought better of it, "You might be right, Doc." He sat there and began eating the stew, "Oh, this is pretty good. Could use some carrots, though."

Lily nodded, "As you might suspect, vegetables are not as accessible as zhey used to be," She thought it could use some carrots, too.

He blinked at her, "But rabbits are?"

Lily chuckled ruefully, "Ah, zhat is complicated. Let's just say I happened to find one, yes?" She nodded, and asked, "So, what is a man with twenty years experience in the navy, as I presume a chief petty officer, doing as a janitor in Vault-Tec?"

It was his turn to chuckle, in between bites, "That's senior chief petty officer to you, civilian." He grinned and said, "Senior Chief Petty Officer Gary Kaminski, Retired. At your service, ma'am."

"Mhmm..." Lily offered in a non-committal fashion as if she wasn't quite sure.

"Ah, to answer your question. Not just twenty years of experience, hell, I have a Master's degree in Military History. Vault-Tec used a points-based system to hire employees, so I'm a very competitive applicant as a janitor," Gary mentioned. "I applied for every job from Overseer on down that I was at minimum qualified for. Being something of a student of military history, I was pretty sure the war would go nuclear, and soon. We were getting close to Beijing in our offensive, and there ain't no way that the chicoms would have accepted that." He shook his head rapidly, before spooning more stew in his mouth.

"I figured it would start with a tactical or theatre-based nuclear exchange in East Asia, but they seemed to jump straight to a full strategic nuclear bombardment," he sighed and shook his head, "So fucking stupid. All of us. Anyone with a brain could see it coming, and I have no idea why they pushed the Reds so far." He looked down at his finished bowl of stew sadly, "So, I guess to answer your question, I'd rather have been a janitor in a Vault than teach high school up above, ya?"

Lily nodded. That was very rational, and she would likely have done the same thing if she was in his position, "Zhat makes sense. Make sure to read zhe file I titled Speculations on the Societal Experiment of Vault-Tec," she said quietly, although she expected him to read every damn thing on that terminal. "I'll return in about zhree hours, and you can have some more stew, and if you're a good boy, maybe a half cup of beer? The starches would do you well."

His eyes lit up at that, and he nodded his head rapidly, "I don't know what kind of hospital you run, lady, but I like it."

She nodded and left the room. She was amazed he hadn't discovered his youth yet, but she assumed that he just felt, in general, better and hadn't questioned it. How often do you really inspect your body every day, anyway?