Chapter 36: Unlimited Power!* (*Power not actually unlimited)
The next day started without much fanfare. Lily woke a little bit past six thirty and completed her morning ablutions, had breakfast and then spent some time working on the preliminary design for a metal sintering 3D printer. She knew of this technology both from her life in America, where it was pretty state of the art, as well as from her life living in space habitats where it was commonly used in both prototyping as well as mass production.
Lily knew, in general, how it worked but not precisely. However, knowing something was possible with the tools you had available was half the battle and if you knew sort of how it worked on top of that? Well, success was inevitable. She still expected to have to go through at least a dozen different iterations before she got to a place where she had a usable device.
It was so much easier if she was working on something that had a biological component or worked with a biological component. 'Wait, could I make a metal 3d printer biologically?' she asked herself, then considered a number of different processes that constructed organometallic compounds biologically. Finally, she shook her head. She was dealing with mostly flat biology here, so the only carbon metals routinely produced were things like some types of lithium, Vitamin B12 or the methanogenesis process that produces methane, and some metals as a by-product in the body's digestive system. And that process wasn't even conducted by the human body precisely but by the microbiome of bacteria that lived in every human.
Lily sighed. If she had access to her old laboratory, she could definitely make a simple bacteria that produced all manners of alloys in whatever shapes she wanted. One of the reasons she was so wealthy in her past life was she had a patent on a type of synthetic bacteria that produced crystals one atom at a time in whatever shape you wanted, which a more brilliant person that she was used as the basis to construct a type of net-energy positive cold fusion system.
Lily still had no idea how that worked, even after a hundred years of peering at it. The man who had explained it to her, and it went something along the lines of if you built a quantum trap using a crystalline cage that was sized to fit only a single deuterium atom, then if you forced another inside the same space, quantum mechanics dictated the simplest way to achieve a stable energy state was to fuse the two deuterium atoms into helium and then spit the helium atom along with the free energy back out the way they came. It all sounded like magic to her, even now, but she was decades away from being able to create a similar crystalline-producing bacteria, which she had made from scratch, anyway, so it was kind of moot.
That man was the smartest octopus she had ever met. Although, Lily did not know if he was an actual uplifted octopus or just preferred living in an octopus sleeve, as octopus bodies had many distinct advantages in microgravity environments.
Lily shook her head a little. She was mentally digressing, which she often did when she didn't want to admit the problem she was considering was, essentially, impossible. So, a biological solution to a metal printer was impossible, for now.
'Command, Take Note - Remind self to search for G.E.C.K.s that aren't in Vault 87. There was only one matter to energy converter terraforming G.E.C.K., but there were many that were supposed to have a cold-fusion power system along with a pack of seeds, which would have to fit inside a suitcase-sized package. That would be very useful, especially if I could reverse engineer them,' Lily thought to herself and her computer. While she was recording everything she saw, heard and thought now, it still helped her to make mental notes, as she hadn't managed to parse her brain's memory engrams yet.
She only worked for a couple of hours, mainly working around elements in the design she could not change or alter in any way, which was the laser components and the cooling system for them.
*BEEP* Time is now 0900. *BEEP*
An internal alarm roused her from her work. She had finally gotten a text-to-speech system working on her computer by the simple expedient of recording every phoneme she knew of, but it sounded like a robot voice in her head, but it was better than nothing, she supposed.
She had to be at the power substation at 1100, but she still had other responsibilities to attend to before then. She went to find the Apprentice and spent an hour discussing with the girl her current learning status and goals, as well as answering any questions Alice had. Lily tried to spend at least an hour a day with the girl doing such things.
Lily never told the girl her precise score on the intelligence battery of tests she gave her, but she scored more than two standard deviations from the mean, which Lily thought was impressive. The girl certainly appeared to be doing well with this type of education at your own pace type of syllabus, although there were areas she did not care for such as mathematics and hadn't pursued it much past the pre-algebra level.
Lily had to adjust the syllabus twice already to add more biology and English literature, though, which the Apprentice devoured as fast as they were added. She had decided to start adding some elements of college levelled chemistry and organic chemistry so that the girl would smash her head on the wall, as they required some mathematics to really sink one's teeth into.
Lily was also running out of books! She only took about a hundred and fifty out of the library and now planned to loot the place to the bedrock. Perhaps she would start a Megaton city library if she could somehow find a way to prevent the books from being damaged by the unwashed masses?
"... and zhat's why zhe text says, somewhat repetitively, zhat zhe mitochondria is zhe powerhouse of zhe cell," Lily finished explaining the enthalpy of adenosine triphosphate to the Apprentice. The current biology text the Apprentice was reading from was flawed and meant more for general studies, so it did not go in-depth into the chemical processes involved that a proper biology major would need, but honestly, Lily hadn't expected the girl to hit close to the college level in any subject yet so she thought it would be sufficient.
She finished with, "To really understand, you will need to read at least zhe first ten chapters of General Chemistry, and at least zhe first half of the text Heat and Zhermodynamics: A Chemical Primer. Although, I'd say you don't really need to understand zhe exact chemical processes yet."
Alice nodded rapidly, writing down notes as she spoke to her, as the girl often did.
Then the Apprentice surprised her and asked Lily if she had a favourite poem and to recite it for her. Lily tilted her head to stare at the ceiling in thought and considered the question. She knew what she would say her favourite poem was when she was a robotic spider, but she wasn't the same person anymore. However, to her surprise, the same poem was also her favourite poem when she was living in America. Was that a coincidence? It seemed like long odds, if so. The poem was an old one, but Yeats was hard to beat.
Lily tilted her head back to stare at the girl before coughing into her hand as one tended to do before a recitation:
"HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Alice had the sparkly doe-eyed look teenage girls often got when they heard a poem they particularly liked, and she said, "That was amazing! Who was the poet? What is the poem called?"
Lily pursed her lips, "The poet's name is William Butler Yeats, or as he styled himself W.B. Yeats. He was an Irish nationalist and authoritarian that was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. He was quite a famous playwright and poet. The poem's title is Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven and was published in a collection of his poetry called The Wind Among the Reeds. However, much of the poetry section of the library I looted was destroyed, so I don't have this book just yet."
Lily suddenly hoped that Yeats was in this world, but she thought the divergence point for the Fallout universe was around the second world war, so he should be safe.
She bid her Apprentice adieu and left to walk to the electrical substation a few blocks away, thinking about that poem. It was as insightful as ever despite some of the delusions the crafter of the poem suffered under; Lily was spreading her dreams across the ground even now -- it was just a shame that there were so many jackboots around as well.
---xxxxxx---
"Alright, I think we can start it up..." Lily said after spending some time inspecting every inch of the generator and all of the plasma conduits. She had fabricated them all, but they were assembled to her directions; she did not do it herself. She had to correct a couple of errors, but less than she would have thought.
Lily walked over to what was the operator's station and tapped a few keys into a terminal, which caused a noticeably loud humming to start as well as the background sound of an electric pump starting to work outside.
The plasma run on this generator was large enough that it completely emptied two micro fusion cells just starting it up. Theoretically, most of that plasma could be captured back into the two cells during a graceful shutdown, but in the event of an emergency shutdown, all that plasma would be vented and accelerated out into the air on a separate emergency plasma run, which would damage the venting run such that it would have to be replaced. That would shut down the power station for one or two days, but it would still be less damaged than if cooling stopped without a scram, in which case the entire plasma run would melt, as would any operator inside the building when the plasma escaped magnetic containment.
Lily's hand was hovering above that scram button on the operator panel that she had constructed, even now. It was a protected switch, and she had the glass panel slid out of the way with her fingers touching the button. If a catastrophic failure occurred during start-up, she would only have about five seconds to trigger a scram before it would be too late. Her plan B was leaping through the window to her left and to safety before the plasma escaped containment. Actually, she would likely execute that plan immediately after hitting the scram, if she were honest, just to be safe.
After a good five minutes staring at the reactor output telemtry, with her fingers precariously resting on the emergency shutdown button, she carefully lifted her fingers and slid the glass-guarded panel back across the switch and nodded, "Everything is to spec plus minus two per cent."
Tombs, as well as the four engineers he had working for him on this project cheered.
Lily pursed her lips, "Okay. Let's start pushing it gently. We'll divert power to zhe substation's heavy inverters, we'll run it for about an hour and zhen initiate a graceful shutdown. I don't want anyone in the building when we do that, zhats actually the most dangerous part. I won't even be in here; I'll trigger it remotely."
All the men agreed, so Lily tapped a few keys, and the substation started coming to life. Tombs had to rebuild part of the station, as her generator produced clean DC electricity instead of the AC power the substation was expecting, so in addition to the large reactor building, about two dozen large industrial inverters were arrayed. Lily had no idea where the man got them, but he said they should be able to handle eight megawatts of output, so it was more than enough.
Lily stopped the plasma accelerators at about fifty per cent of what they were rated for and then glanced at another terminal that was displaying the AC output of the inverter array, and nodded, "Two decimal seven megawatt at fifty per cent, which is significantly more than we zhought we'd achieve. So we might end up providing a teensy bit more power zhan Megaton Light & Power." However, that wasn't true because Lily intended to steal a minimum of two megawatts for her own hospital, and she didn't intend to pay for it.
One of the engineers, who had just been whispered to by his assistant that ducked in the building, said, "We're getting reports of both electrical power across the Eastside as well as a number of down powerlines that are producing a hazard."
Lily made a face, "Should we abort?" She didn't particularly want to.
Tombs shook his head, "We already informed everyone around that there would be a particular electrical hazard around power lines in the Eastside for as long as an hour at this time. We even told the regular homeless squatters this, the only people that are at risk are the ones that tried to shoot at us when we went to deliver the message, and fuck those assholes."
Lily smirked and shrugged. This would break so many OHSA regulations, but honestly, most things she did wouldn't pass muster in the presence of an actual functioning government.
She turned to the engineer in question, "Get your people to make a note of every downed powerline, zhey will need to be repaired prior to full production run out. We're not in a position to selectively turn off particular sections of zhe Eastside, just yet."
The man nodded and spoke to his assistant, who ran off out the door.
Thirty minutes later, they were all outside the reactor building, although Lily was still watching the reactor and inverter telemetry on a terminal emulator running in her brain. She had to set the opacity of it to no more than fifty per cent, otherwise she would have a large section of her vision blocked with a giant square terminal.
Currently, such user interfaces crudely followed her vision as they were just piped directly into her visual cortex. Still, she suddenly got an idea to program them to make a note of the direction she was facing and partially rendered them if they were not entirely "in view" when she was looking somewhere else. If she could decode the GPS signals and combine them with a location, also, she could leave virtual displays around at random locations, which would be really cool.
"Okay, I am going to initiate zhe shutdown now..." Lily said and then casually used her terminal emulator to send the shutdown key combination sequence. Then, realizing she wasn't actually externally doing anything and it would be odd, she stuffed her hand into her pocket to pretend like she had a remote control.
The humming of the inverters stopped immediately, but the pump kept running.
One of the engineers said, "Pump is on battery power now; looks good." In fact, the pumping and cooling station had begun venting clouds of white steam out the top. It took extra power to collect the pure water it generated, so that feature was disabled during the shutdown process.
Lily did not have to design much of the water purifier or coolant pumping elements, much to her delight. She did look at them since they were a critical system to the reactor, but they looked as good as she could design, she thought. Tombs had asked her for them to both contribute an additional two and a half per cent of equity to bring this group of engineers on board, and she agreed readily after seeing their expertise level.
She technically had less than a 50% stake in the enterprise now, but she did not mind. This wasn't the world where slick corporate drama could actually work because she could just always shoot the person involved in a shareholder meeting if they tried to dilute her interest through some arcane legal shenanigans.
Lily peered at the white steam rising from the simple condenser tower and then walked over to it; there was a simple spigot that was connected to the collection cistern. She found a cup and poured herself some water, taking a sip to the shock of the engineer that had designed it there. She blinked at them, "What? Did you think I didn't believe this would work?"
The engineer then grinned and shook his head, "No! I wanted the first sip!" Then he found a cup of his own and claimed second, followed by the rest of the engineering teams and Tombs himself.
After congratulating everyone, Tombs walked up to her, "Well, the secret is well out of the bag now. We only had to bribe a few people, too. Moriarty and a couple of the city workers. The mayor is going to be pissed we got so much of the pie, even if that fucker will probably end up with most of it himself."
Ah, so the local mafioso was going to be a minor shareholder, then? Actually, rather than upsetting her that somewhat reassured her, "Zhat's good, Monsieur. The 'ospital is well on its way to opening in another two weeks, maximum, also. I am hopeful of recruiting and employing at least zhree other doctors, but I 'aven't got any applications yet. I zhink zhey are waiting to see which way zhe wind blows, no?"
She also had to ensure any such doctors applying to work for her met her bottom line in terms of skills were concerned. Although, she should have three Auto-Docs operational by the time, which even laymen could use in some ways. She would rather recruit a younger doctor that could still be trained up to her standards than an older quack set in his or her ways, she decided.
"That's great!" said Tombs, with a cheerful laugh.
One of the engineers walked over to her and asked, "So, will a reactor operator be needed to stand by inside the building at all times?" He had noticed the prominent shutdown button, she thought, and wondered if there would need to be someone on standby to press it in other situations.
Lily shook her head, "Only during zhe start-up and shutdown. If any of the specs of zhe reactor exceed certain zhreshold values for longer zhan a certain safety time, zhe reactor will initiate an automatic scram. I am a little untrusting as far as zhe reaction times of a man who has to sit there and stare at a screen all day." Most of the famous nuclear accidents in fission reactors in her past life were induced by the reactor operators themselves, after all, so she had designed this one to be as human-proof as necessary. Only Three Mile Island and Fukushima were a result of design, engineering or mechanical issues.
Then she paused and stated, "However, it will need to be continually guarded. A saboteur could do significant damage to our enterprise, so I would recommend whomever we selected as lead guard to be trained as a reactor operator. Zhey need not remain inside zhe reactor building, zhough." Lily pointed to the construction in progress near the entrance to the substation, "Zhe security building will be heated and air conditioned, after all. Eventually, we 'ope to have either robots, auto-turrets or both installed inside the reactor building to protect from possible sabotage."
The engineer looked very relieved, "I had the same worries about the reaction time of a man whose only job is to sit there. You can put whatever you want in the SOPs, but there's an even chance if the guy's job is too boring, he'll be asleep. Especially if he is working solo."
Lily nodded. That was an issue for the security team, as well, which was why it was a two-man team, minimum. In fact, they would need significantly more security for the water purifier than the reactor, she thought. They budgeted almost half the revenues from the water purifier to pay for security for it, which reminded her of trying to build a fuel refinery in Somalia. Probably not that much different, actually, now that she considered it.
After the cool-down period ended, they performed another reactor start-up, and left it running at idle for the time being. "Okay, zhe priority is to repair or replace zhose downed power lines, then after another run-up I believe we'll be good to go at offering full service for the Eastside."
Tombs nodded, "And the power meters?" Lily said, "Zhey're pretty much ready, but we might want to offer a period of time for free as a teaser, marketing, yes? Plus it will take significant effort to install zhe meter on every building. Zhat's up to you and your operations people."
Lily mentally disconnected from the terminal inside the building, drank another glass of pure, clean water and left, headed back home.
---xxxxxx---
She found her Apprentice flirting with one of the Mormon missionaries from the other day, which annoyed her. While these missionary boys were fairly young, they were still several years too old for her Apprentice, she thought. Not to mention she was training the girl for a life better than life as first wife, she hoped.
When she was done with Alice, the girl would be the one to have a harem, not be IN a harem. Anything less impinged on her as her Mistress!
She would have to have a discussion with the girl about local geopolitics. She didn't have any books on the Dominion or any Post War polities but there was significant information available nonetheless.
Well, at least the missionaries were being polite and not encouraging the girl too much, so perhaps they realized her youth, "Ah, Elder Lewis, was it?" Lily greeted the young man with his missionary title.
The man looked pleased to see her and nodded, "Yes, ma'am. We just came to inform you that the mission you set us to was completed successfully and without much trouble, either."
The second man turned to her, "And we were wondering if you needed.. uhh.. any.. confirmation of success?"
Ah, Lily hoped these two didn't bring her severed heads. "No, zhat isn't necessary. All zhe missionaries from zhe Dominion have a good reputation -- I can take you at your words."
Both of them smiled at that, and the first one said, "See? I told you."
As she was boxing up the young mercenaries of God their payment in StimPaks, Lily suddenly came to the conclusion that she had graduated from performing quests to giving them out!
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