A Well Deserved, and Totally Legitimately Acquired Victory

Lily must have failed the Speech check when she finally managed to arrive at the end of the sim and talk to General Jingwei, after numerous attempts to clear the simulation. She remembered you could talk the man into committing seppuku, despite the fact that he was Chinese. He killed her the first time, but then she managed to beat him on the second by placing about forty landmines right in front of the area before the "boss fight" was supposed to happen, and then she immediately ran away. His AI wasn't that great, and he followed her, triggering over a dozen landmines.

She laughed because she saw General Chase teleport into position right next to her. Apparently, they scripted him teleporting and then walking up into the fort where the boss battle took place. He turned and congratulated her on her success and informed her that she should go get debriefed.

MISSION COMPLETE.

Finding herself back in the sim pod, Lily let out a long breath. She checked the time, and she had spent a little less than forty minutes of objective time in the simulation in this last attempt, which translated to a subjective experience of over twelve hours. It was a lot longer than the DLC's content, plus she had to save and load a number of times.

Lily got out of the simpod, stretched and walked over to the chair the Apprentice was sitting at. The girl was very clearly reading a book on her computer, and didn't notice her approach until she got rather close. Then she glanced over at Lily and grinned, "Died again?"

The look of supreme satisfaction on Lily's face surprised the girl, and then she said, "You won! Does that mean I can play it too, now?"

Lily hummed noncommittedly, "Yes, probably. Let me adjust some of zhese settings; zhen you can go get killed to your heart's content. Go get dressed in one of the VR suits."

"Yess!" exclaimed the girl, hopped up and ran off into another room to change.

Lily sat down at the terminal, and sure enough, anyone who had physical terminal access now had superuser rights. She opened the settings to examine what options there were, and sighed, shaking her head.

Battle for Anchorage!

Time Dilation: MAX (40.0)

Difficulty: Extreme

Pain sense: 125%

*WARNING SAFETY FEATURES HAVE BEEN OVERRIDDEN*

Lily had fucking thought things were more painful than they ought to have been. She adjusted the time dilation down to 20.0 and the difficulty down to be more realistic. The pain levels she turned down to thirty-three per cent.

The safety features just set a maximum cap on the pain threshold. She didn't think that was the primary reason that the sim might have been dangerous for people, but it was definitely a contributing factor.

After configuring the sim, she navigated to the main system menu and found the option to unlock the research vault, selecting it. Another sim scenario existed now, but it looked like a developer sim, which was used to create the scenarios in the first place. That was interesting.

Alice came hopping back into the room, and Lily said, "Okay, I've turned down zhe difficulty, but zhey should still zhe realistically 'uman zhreats. I've also turned down the pain experience. You should only experience about a third of what something should actually 'urt."

Alice looked a bit nervous and asked, "Why have that on at all?"

She sniffed, "Because the VR sim is actually somewhat realistic. I don't want you to get into zhe bad habits in zhe real world, like rushing a bunch of guys armed with automatic weapons because you kept doing it in zhe sim. A base level of pain will provide correction against reckless behaviour." Like Pavlov's dogs, Lily was thinking, but she didn't tell Alice that.

Alice blinked a few times, "Okay, that actually makes a lot of sense." She climbed up into the simpod, and connected her suit into the system the same way she saw me do so. "Okay, I am ready, Mistress!"

"Wait, first unlock and send me a link to your nanohive, temporarily. I am just... guessing about zhese settings. I'd like to monitor your vitals and zhe brain activity while you're in the sim," Lily told her gently.

The Apprentice nodded, "Okay... just a sec."

Lily heard a ping and then pulled up the girl's current vitals, streaming off her medichines. Nodding, she hit the LAUNCH SIM key. She was pretty sure what was going to happen, and rapidly too, so she didn't actually leave to go to loot the vault yet.

Barely any time later, the Apprentice gasped and started moving her hands rapidly. Then she relaxed and then chuckled, "That hurt... a lot! Are you sure you set it at a third?"

This caused Lily to roll her eyes, "Getting shot generally does hurt, yes. And yes, I did. Your vitals looked good."

Lily restarted her a few more times before she suggested, "How about you try the basic training sim?" Lily pulled up that sim on the terminal. It was listed as a complete four-week course. That was a bit short for basic, but with sim technology, Lily supposed you could skip a lot of things.

"You didn't bother," Alice complained.

Lily grinned, "Firstly, it was locked into the Anchorage simulation. But most importantly, I have already been to basic, and I don't wanna." She stressed the casual vernacular of 'wanna' in a way that was very unusual for her. She then continued, "I'll give you a break every subjective twenty-four hours... maybe you'll learn something that will keep you alive?"

That was the main reason Lily wanted the girl to do it. Finally, Alice sighed and nodded, "Okay,"

Lily changed the sim over to the basic training one. She suspected that sim was why the time dilation feature was set so high. If you could finish a four-week military training course in a couple of days, the military advantages would be insane. You could very rapidly take an untrained civilian and turn them into a slightly trained conscript. She remembered basic training being ten or eleven weeks in America, so she was kind of interested to see what the Fallout version was like, at least the version that the VSS company wanted to depict.

However, she wasn't curious enough to try it herself. Later, she will open the developer sim and look through the scenario without actually having to play it herself.

Once the girl was in the sim, she grabbed her scanner, left the room and headed to see what goodies she might find in the vault. She knew what there would be in there if this was the game Fallout 3. A suit of T-51 Power Armour, a Chinese stealth suit, a gauss rifle, General Jingwei's shock sword, and a bunch of miscellaneous loot, like missiles, missile launchers and mini-nukes.

The truth that she had been avoiding thinking about while she was humming and skipping down the corridor was she was pretty sure she could have either cracked the vault's door or, alternately, once she had all the memory control modules installed in each server she should have been able to gain superuser access on the cluster easily enough by inspecting where programs were being run in memory and then inserting arbitrary code in there herself.

However, by the time things had descended to that point, Lily was already... emotionally invested. She wasn't going to let that stupid thing win.

Was that stupid? A waste of time? Pride went before a fall, so they said, and she had always had minor hubris issues. Nobody who wanted to turn themselves into a hyperintelligence didn't.

The vault door was literally that. Not like a Vault-Tek vault, but more like a bank vault. She had to push it open, although it was still balanced quite well, allowing her to open a door that probably weighed twenty tons just with her body. Quite amazing engineering that you just didn't see too often anymore.

As was her standard practice, before walking into a room that featured a door that had a mass measured in tons, where she could be trapped, she carefully sabotaged the door to prevent it from closing in on her in case some ghost showed up and locked her in.

The vault was rather large, and immediately she saw eight suits of Power Armour sitting in a row. That would have been an amazing find a few months ago, but she was pretty sure her version of Power Armour was much superior. Still, she would take every single one. She still needed to get the code from their processors to see how Fallout engineers solved the problem of how the hardsuit's suit-assist functions worked.

Lily solved this problem by directly connecting their armour to their central nervous system, but most hardsuits and exosuits used gyroscopes, sensors, force feedback and complicated programming to detect when a user was using their own muscles and then amplify them in ways that would be useful and controllable.

She was relatively sure she should be able to manufacture her own copies of the T-51 rather quickly now that she had physical copies of them to study. However, it probably wouldn't be a great idea to outfit the entire Spider Company in them, at least not yet. Still, she would definitely build enough so that she could, in an emergency. The biggest problem would be getting fusion cores for them.

She scanned the shelves full of boxes and items until she grinned suddenly and ran right for the item she was looking for. The dark grey on the lighter grey suit was unmistakable. It was set up on a mannequin on the other side of the room.

Before she even touched it, she scanned the whole thing. She knew that it supposedly worked on similar principles to StealthBoys, in that the StealthBoy was produced after reverse engineering these stealth suits, but understanding the principles of how the StealthBoy operated was a bit difficult.

Having another, and especially the original, example of how this same technology worked might be the break she needed to understand and duplicate it. China was supposed to be much more advanced in stealth technology; supposedly, they had stealth submarines and aircraft as well.

Decided to test it immediately; she carefully cleaned all of the dust off, stripped her underthings and put it on. She was taller than the average woman, and the suit fit her virtually perfectly, except in the chest, where she would have to take it out a bit once she figured out how it worked. When she put the helmet on, an honest to god simple Heads Up Display started being displayed. It was overlayed on parts of her normal HUD, so she disabled that for a moment and then read the directions, which were of course, in Chinese.

Interesting. There were a number of modes the armour could operate in, from being invisible all of the time, which was the most energy-intensive, to the current setting where it would attempt to vanish when you were stationary, which was the default. It used primitive eye tracking and blink interface technology, which could definitely be improved. Even in its most energy-intensive mode, though, it was vastly more efficient than StealthBoys. She suspected it was because the StealthBoy pushed the stealth field far beyond the field emitters inside the device to surround a person, whereas, in the Chinese stealth suit, the emitters seemed to be worked into the fibres of the armour, so the whole person using it was within the dimensions of the device.

Not much energy was used while invisible if you were close to stationary, and Lily didn't understand that as that wasn't how StealthBoys worked, but she didn't understand how the thing worked in the first place. However, from a cursory glance at the scan she took of it, the electronics that generated the "stealth field" was radically different than a StealthBoy, which was a very good sign. It improved the odds she could look at two different ways of accomplishing the same thing and infer what both methods were doing and replicate them.

The shock sword was interesting as well. Especially since it wasn't a shocking sword at all, but a vibrosword. That technology wasn't unfamiliar to her, but it made her curious why it was depicted as an electrical attack in the game. It saved her a lot of time, as she intended to make the sword she carried in Power Armour a vibroweapon, but actually devising methods to vibrate a blade at such high-frequencies was a little difficult. Knowing something was possible, and sort of how it was done was a lot of help, but it didn't make things quick, necessarily.

Lastly, as far as new technology was concerned, was a gauss rifle. She was looking forward to this, too. She had been avoiding reinventing this technology because it felt like a waste of time when she would have a working example as soon as she got here. It would have been funny if nothing was in this vault, as it wasn't like her "game knowledge" was always right.

Examining the railgun, she was surprised. They certainly used electromagnetic accelerators, using superconducting material similar to plasma rifles. However, inline with these were complicated levitation field emitters. They were built in a peculiar way, but she figured out that they were exactly the same thing, built as a linear accelerator also.

That was clever. If you couldn't get enough velocity with purely an electromagnetic system, add a second system which used an entirely different field that could do a similar function.

Kind of cheeky to call a gun that didn't purely use electromagnetism a gauss rifle, though, innit?

Her timer went off, and she ran back into the sim pod room and used the savegame mechanic to create a save file for the girl and stopped the sim, and deactivated the stealth system on the suit she was wearing. The girl came around and looked tired, but she did a double take on seeing Lily, "Woah! That looks awesome. Did you build that?"

Lily explained what she was wearing and demonstrated the stealth features, which impressed the girl.

"I didn't realise you would be able to sleep in the sim, not that the stupid computer-controlled Drill Sergeant is letting me or the other characters sleep very much," Alice said wryly.

Lily raised her eyebrows. She hadn't known that, either. It shouldn't be possible to get any kind of sleep using this kind of time dilation. Your brain couldn't really be stimulated and working overtime and restful at the same time.

She just assumed you wouldn't get tired at all. Although she had been in the sim for, subjectively, a couple of days, she didn't, herself, get tired as she was just annoyed. Although, now that she thought about it she did find herself rather tired. She pulled up the girl's brain activity during the sim session and hummed.

Interesting. The simpod used similar techniques that she did to induce a quick and restful sleep. She suspected as soon as you lay down on the bunk in the sim, it induced a restful sleep and reduced time dilation so that your brain could get rest. She'd watch the process closer together the next time the girl fell asleep in the sim.

Still, she chuckled, "Oh? You want to quit?" She knew the Apprentice well enough that she didn't even need to ask her Muse to give her the best response to manipulate the girl, even if she was trying to avoid doing that more than she had to.

Alice got an angry and determined look on her face, "No way! It isn't actually that hard!"

Lily nodded, "Take a break for a couple of minutes, but you probably don't need anything to eat yet, zhough." She paused, delicately placing a finger at her lower lip, affecting a curious and thinking pose, "It makes me wonder 'ow they managed regular people going zhrough this zhing. Maybe they 'ad an IV for a long sim?" she asked nobody in particular, curiously.

"I was told in the beginning, there was a kind of introduction, that there would be a break in real life every seven days," Alice offered.

Glancing at the girl, Lily's hand alit upon her hip, and then she nodded, "'ow about we try to do zhat then, as it was designed. If you want to take a break, or if I see your brain activity suggest you need one, or your blood sugar drops, I will bring you out again, zhen."

Alice agreed and, after a few moments, returned to the pod.

It only took Lily an hour to comprehensively loot the vault, and now she wondered what she should do. If the Apprentice wasn't in the sim, she would be disassembling it.

[Lilium: Alice, do you think you are safe enough to stay here by yourself, if I leave all the robots?]

[Alice: Yes, probably. Especially if I set some triggers with the drones to alert me if someone gets close, I'll need a way to pause the sim and get out from inside here, though. Where are you going?]

Lily explained her plan now that she had the stealth suit and then took a few minutes to fabricate a small device she plugged into the terminal that controlled the sim. Both of them could already "save" and "load" the sim from their computer, but this would allow either of them to pull up that terminal on their computer as well.

If she had seen either regular Super Mutant or Brotherhood patrols this far west, she never would have considered this option, but none of their drones had detected any activity within four blocks of them in the days since they had arrived.

She grabbed Jingwei's vibrosword, her plasma rifle and some tools and once she got on the ground floor began running to the west. She had the robots and turrets set to defend the building on the ground floor instead of setting up the last line of defence inside the sub-basement. She didn't think, tactically, that was a good idea. It would take resources away from a defence upstairs which could be much more effective. Alice, in her Power Armour, would be the last line of defence. She did leave the girl the gauss rifle just in case, standing it next to her pink armour, fully charged and loaded.

She wouldn't be able to come back immediately if someone attacked, but she could hunker down and reconnect to the Assaultclone. However, the latency over that distance might be up to fifty milliseconds, depending on how many nodes in the Mesh had to be hopped through. But her aerial drones would ensure she had a signal back here where she was going.

She was headed over fifteen kilometres back the way they had come on foot. She'd have to go a bit past the cannibals to reach her destination, the RobCo facility. She didn't have the so-called RobCo widget, but she was pretty sure she could hack a RobCo server unaided.

Running there at a quick jog wouldn't take too long at all! She was amused at the idea that it was somewhat likely both Mistress and Apprentice were probably doing a fifteen-klick run simultaneously, or close to it, except for wildly different reasons.

Or perhaps not. What would the point be in a run in a sim where it wouldn't even exercise your body? Just to torment the recruits? Oh, well, actually, that did sound likely if it was like the Army she remembered.