Mission failed, we'll get em next time
"Die, American dog!" yelled the NPC in a terrible Chinese accent; simultaneously, he riddled Lily's virtual body with bullets from his AK.
MISSION FAILED.
Finding herself back in the pod, she sighed deeply and relaxed for a moment to let her heart rate fall again.
The Apprentice started cracking up, "Did you die again? Are you sure it isn't safe for me? How many times is that, now?"
Lily ground her teeth together, getting out of the simulator pod to stretch a bit. She had discovered that a fifteen-minute interval between simulator sessions increased her performance considerably. "Twenty-nine," she growled out, with her teeth still clamped shut, irritated.
The sim was a lot harder than what she remembered the DLC as being. Hard enough that she had been trying to hack the computing cluster to bypass having to complete it since twenty-three sims ago, but was finding it difficult.
To some extent, physical access meant she could do it, but she was very worried she would break something important. The computing cluster's individual servers did run on a RobCO operating system, so she could use her collection of exploits to get super user access to any single system, but the cluster management system ran on a custom operating system, like a virtual machine running on top of all thirty-four servers.
She had gotten some success three sims ago, in that she had managed to adjust some memory values in time to give herself some advantages like much more ammunition than she should have had. She hadn't told the Apprentice this, though, because she kept losing even when she was using hax!
If only she could isolate the value for her "health" in the sim, then she could turn god mod on, but it seemed to exist simultaneously in at least thirty-four different memory locations, and any adjustment to any of them caused the sim to glitch out in an incredibly torturous and painful way for the person inside.
Lily did not want to experience again what the sim thought it should feel like if she had -128 health points instead of the normal 128. Apparently, there was both a health value as well as an "alive" true or false value. With maximum negative health but still being technically alive, she had experienced incredible agony until she shot herself in the head with her pistol. The little helmet she wore piped the pain signals directly to her brain, bypassing even when she turned her sense of pain off with her computer.
Still, some of the values could be adjusted. After dying so many times, she fabricated a small device and placed it on a number of the servers' memory control units. Since she could connect to the device while in the sim, she could use trial and error to try to identify simple values like the number of bullets in a gun. Every time she started the sim, it usually took her a few minutes and about half a magazine to identify the memory location for her pistol's ammunition, and from then on, she could usually adjust it, but every time she did she would have to find the memory value again because it acted as though she reloaded the gun and stored the new number of shots in a different memory location.
All in all, it was very annoying, and the fact that she couldn't beat the damn scenario even while she was cheating infuriated her. She was trying to get a wallhack going now, but that was a lot more difficult.
All in all, the verisimilitude of the sim was... pretty good. Lily felt that they had gotten about a 90% reproduction of the reality that an average flat could perceive. To her, it looked kind of cartoonish, though. There was obviously no smell or taste, but most first or second-generation VR systems like this did not have that capability.
Honest, she was very impressed with the technology. The AI was not completely scripted, either. Lily thought that was why there were so many quantum processors to run a neural network for many of the NPCs. That was a very advanced technique!
The VR systems in her previous world would probably, by comparison, be considered the fifteenth or sixteenth generation. They were completely indistinguishable from reality, modelling physics entirely, even subatomic particles at least a little bit. In VR, in her past life, you could build an improvised explosive, and it would explode. In this sim, it would only explode if it was hard-coded to be explosive through some custom quest programming.
However, using Actor VIs, which is to say neural networks that are designed to play NPCs in a VR environment, didn't occur until the sixth or seventh generation of VR technology. So, in that sense, the engineers at the VSS corporation were fifty years ahead of where they should be!
Over the past twenty-nine sim sessions, Lily had made small talk with Sergeant Benjamin Montgomery to test the extent of the persona the NPC was provided with. Often with the early versions of this technology, the AI behind the NPC would, if asked for non-specified information, make up plausible information on the spot.
For example, if you asked about his first girlfriend every sim session, you might get a different name each time. However, good ole Benjamin was remarkably consistent with each "playthrough."
Some things were hard-coded, and she obviously noted a specific dialogue tree. But if you asked things outside of that, he provided complicated and consistent answers. About his sweetheart back home, about their first date, about getting caught by her dad making out in the back of his Chryslus.
It was suspiciously complete information on his life. At first, Lily was worried that they had completely digitised a bunch of people to play as NPCs in this sim, which sounded exactly what Fallout scientists might have done.
She spent over four hours examining the hardware of the system after that idea came to her head, just in case. She wouldn't keep putting them through hell if she thought that was going on.
But each of the quantum processors was not sufficient to actually emulate a human's neural network. She supposed it was possible that multiple processors working in parallel could do it, but that was a very unusual and almost impossible method that would induce significant lag through the communications between the multiple processors as they worked through the IO limitations of each processor.
Keeping a neural network in sync over multiple processors would be a non-trivial problem, too, even for technology she was familiar with. She was, in fact, one of the most preeminent experts on this type of computing architecture in the Solar system, although she did not really make that widely known because the only reason someone would study something like that would be if they were planning on creating an illegal hyperintelligence. It was part of her apotheosis plan to convert herself into a true hyperintelligence.
She had never quite managed to see her plan through, though. Did someone find out about it and kill her? It would have been hard. She had so many backups in so many different places. Some in different star systems many light-years away from Earth, as she travelled the Pandora Gates and left behind little breadcrumbs.
All her strategic planning indicated that she could survive even the sum total of transhumanity uniting against her, although she would have had to flee to a different star system and lay low for a considerable time period.
Looking at the computing architecture in the VR system, she did not see any hints or tell-tale signs that would indicate a neural network was being run in parallel on multiple processors. It was a very hard problem! Otherwise, she would be God Empress of Sol by now!
That left an Actor AI/VI as the most likely scenario. In this case, you use an ego bridge or similar technology to download someone, but instead of actually digitising their ego and neural network, you only store the memories in an indexed database. Then a custom-programmed non-sapient AI can, in effect, wear the memories like a skin suit and impersonate the person.
It was a standard espionage and even interrogation tactic in her past life, and it was one that she had used herself many times. There was no need to torture information out of someone if you could just download all their memories into an AI that is loyal to you and then ask that AI questions. It can be surprisingly effective at tricking even those that knew the person, at least for a limited amount of time.
There was one time she had managed to put a hardware-based man-in-the-middle attack on the neutrino transceiver on Luna and copied the egos of over three hundred people in her search for one specific one. She made the Solar System news that time! Or rather, some "unknown terrorist" did. Ha ha.
AI impersonators were actually a technology that she was already in the process of redeveloping. She had a number of people she wouldn't mind having the secrets of. And she could always scoop out their brains and replace it with a quantum processor running said AI; she could have the impersonator walk their old body around. Attacking the leader and replacing them with a pod person was a strategically and tactically sound way to deal with very hierarchal, top-down organisations.
She was close to the point where she needed to look for human subjects to test the ego bridge. However, since it may or may not cause minor, traumatic brain injuries if it glitched out, she would have to wait until she captured some raiders. Hmmm... didn't the Apprentice not want her to do that?
Now that she had two basement levels, she actually had room for a donjon, too! She made a mental note to tell the girl about that project. Surely, she wouldn't actually mind her experimenting on raiders. She probably was making a joke back then, right?
In any event, she had pretty much confirmed this hypothesis of an AI impersonator scenario in subsequent conversations with the NPC. He didn't pass her Turing test. If asked a question about his past, he was very convincing. However, asking it to employ even the slightest general planning intelligence, he either got the conversation redirected back to the "conversation dialogue tree" somewhere or gave ambiguous answers.
For example, she tried asking it the simplest of logic puzzles, couched in terms that would seem familiar using communist Chinese and the cliffs they were in, and she got no good answer. If you asked him the best way to attack an entrenched Chinese position, he'd say to flank them because that was what his memories indicated. But if you pointed out an entrenched Chinese position and asked the best way to attack it, he would pause and then say, "Well, you're the officer!" or something similar along those lines.
It was actually a pretty passable impersonator AI, as far she could tell. Enough that she would likely liberate the code of it, so she didn't have to start from scratch.
It also meant that there was something like an ego bridge somewhere on the premises. At first, she was worried that it would kill the people hooked up to it. Destructive copying of the brain was the first method invented in her past life many, many centuries ago. That would be very Fallout, too. But two playthroughs ago, she finally managed to get past the cliffs area and saw General Chase's NPC, and he was another impersonator. Apparently, most of the NPCs were just hard-coded enemies or allies, just mobs, with only a few that you spent significant time with actual impersonator AIs.
If the great man himself put his brain in the device, then it surely was, at least... pretty safe. After dying that playthrough and getting run over by a fucking tank, she searched the underground base and found it. At first, it looked like a regular comfortable chair, but there was a similar helmet featuring electrodes that had to be carefully placed around your head sitting in the seat.
Perhaps safe or not, she definitely wasn't putting her head into some untested ego bridge. The need for raider test subjects was rising!
The internal fifteen-minute timer dinged in her mind, and she sighed. She grabbed a Nuka-Cola and drank it rapidly. She would need those carbohydrates and complex sugars.
If she ever put regular people in this, they would need an IV of dextrose and medichines programmed to keep their brain oxygenated and cooled. If so, she suspected she could get up to twenty, maybe even twenty-five times time dilation. That opened a lot of very interesting possibilities. One of the big problems of her nascent PMC, which she was tentatively calling Spider Company for now, was that she favoured young, untrained recruits so that she could instil an esprit de corps and, more importantly, personal loyalty to herself. She was pretty sure she could reproduce both the VR pod and the VR suit. Could she make this sim multiplayer? It would be worth it, even if she had to provide medical monitoring to each "player." If one day could turn into twenty or twenty-five, she could have some highly trained mooks pretty quickly!
The idea of using the pod in that way kind of reminded her of the memories of cyberpunk media and literature, where you had to lay in a bath of ice water during deep diving into the matrix so that your brain didn't overheat!
She got back into the pod and replaced the electrodes on her head, "Alright! Again!"
---xxxxxx---
...
MISSION FAILED.
---xxxxxx---
...
MISSION FAILED.
---xxxxxx---
...
MISSION FAILED.
---xxxxxx---
Lily rolled, coming up in a dramatic slide, kicking one of the communist Chinese feet out from under him while shooting the other in the head. Jumping up, she kicked the downed soldier relentlessly about the head and neck until he disappeared into digitised collections of pixels, which faded into nothing, like smoke in the wind.
Panting, she reloaded her Chinese assault rifle and carefully set up the demolition charge on the last of the big artillery pieces on this cliff. Arming it, she turned around and walked directly in front of a Chinese flamethrower soldier who immediately immolated her with a long burst from the weapon.
MISSION FAILED.
Waking up in the sim pod again, she just let a long uninterrupted series of expletives. When she ran out of swear words in English, she switched to French, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Esperanto.
If it was one group in the Solar System that she always hesitated to mess with, it was the Esperanto League.
The swearing went on for a good two or three minutes. The Apprentice was curled up into a ball in a fetal position laughing, begging her to stop, that she was killing her.
Already, she had queued up a number of things to produce on my carbon-based fabricator. Lily hopped out of the simpod, then walked over to the controlling terminal and inputted the key combination that would gracefully shut down the entire computing cluster, with Alice looking at her oddly.
After all the machines shut down, Lily walked out until she met one of our robots which handed me a large wrench. She carried it back into the sim room, and the Apprentice started to grin but the girl got up to her feet and stepped in front of her, "Woah, woah, Mistress. Let's not be hasty. Just what are you going to do with that wrench, now?"
She hissed, "I am going to create zhe Game Genie!"
"...eh?" replied the girl.
---xxxxxx---
Lily had given up on using simple memory editing hacks; it was just too complicated to pull off using a crude device that had so little control over the memory of the servers.
She used the wrench, not to smash the machine as Alice may have thought, but to carefully disconnect the entire computing cluster from the high-voltage 240-watt power supply coming in from the ceiling. It was one thing to add a device onto a machine, but for what she was going to do, she needed to make sure there was no power at all.
After that, she carefully removed the memory controller on one of the mainframes with her soldering iron, as well as one of the memory modules. One of the areas that she was light years ahead of everyone on the planet was memory technology. She was going to replace all the memory! She just had to reverse-engineer how this memory controller worked and replicate it along with her own little additions.
"Zhis may take a while, Apprentice," Lily warned the girl after explaining more or less what she planned on doing.
Alice shrugged her shoulders, "That's alright. We're still in contact with our network in Megaton, so I can just watch some TV or do some homework." The girl paused, "Say, Dr St. Claire..."
"Yesss?" she replied as she pulled up her engineering CAD software.
The Apprentice asked curiously, "What is a Hummer Truck?"
Lily blinked. Humvees only existed in her past life in America. There were similar vehicles in Fallout's universe, but they were called Multipurpose Infantry Transports System, or MITS.
The only information the Apprentice had access to about her previous life in America were the memories of mass media that she had digitised.
While explaining it to the girl, she simultaneously had her Muse perform a search of all of her media for the words Hummer Truck, Hummer, or Humvee.
Lily began, "Eet is a small, lightweight military vehicle. You know 'ow zhe Army liked acronyms, right? Well, it was called zhe High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. Zhis got shortened by zhe soldiers that used to Humvees. That, in turn, got also shortened to just Hummer, or Hummer truck."
Lily paused as she got the answer from her Muse, a found match based on song lyrics and suddenly narrowed her eyes at the Apprentice. Still, she continued her explanation, "Compared to regular cars, zhey were quite big, so civilian model Humvees became kind of a status symbol. Moreover, zhey were quite expensive, both to buy and to operate."
[Match found in /media/audio/songs, title "Shake That" by artist "Eminem". Sample of match follows...]
[ "...I'm lookin' for a girl I can fuck in my Hummer truck, apple bottom jeans and a big ol' slut..." ]
"And now, before I start 'ere we are going to 'ave a conversation on what songs are appropriate for you to listen to and what are not," Lily said firmly.
Alice got the expression of a kid with their hand caught in the cookie jar.
---xxxxxx---
It took her a little over a day to accomplish what she set out to do.
Lily was still a bit unsure about creating an actual Game Genie™, as the way the cluster controller used and assigned memory locations was very odd. But there was one thing that she absolutely knew she could accomplish, and that was all she needed to defeat this accursed simulation.
Her memory was much, much more miniaturised than even the best memory used in quantum processors in the Fallout universe, so she created each memory module that had ten times the memory as the Fallout versions, but each was partitioned.
Her memory was non-volatile, too, so even if the power was lost or the machine reset, she wouldn't lose the contents of the memory unless she specifically cleared them.
One partition out of ten, the first, was designed to operate exactly like normal RAM. She programmed procedures on her custom memory controller to clear the memory every time the power was interrupted. However, the others were used to store a "saved state" of all the memory, which she could trigger any time she wanted while playing the sim.
Then, at the moment of her death or if she triggered it, one of the memory states could be reloaded in the primary/run-time memory, in effect creating a system of "saved games."
Lily found it incredibly amusing that she had to reinvent saved games in Fallout to have a chance to beat this damn thing, but she was done playing around with this sim now. The only annoying part about dying, aside from the fact that it was incredibly painful, was that she lost her progress.
Now, though... it was time to let the save scumming begin.