Chapitre 67: Nat Turner
The woman looked like she wanted to pull out her weapon. She did not have any large weapons with her, thanks to Lily's security staff, but they had stopped trying to prevent people from taking pistols and knives into the hospital. A lot of people just wouldn't come inside if they couldn't be armed, and Lily actually didn't blame them at all, considering the world they lived in. She would have to get a better reputation for protecting anyone inside her building before people would be willing to surrender all weapons. People were starting to get better that way with the obvious auto-turrets installed at every entrance and the foyer, but still, most people wanted the sense of security only Big Iron on their hip could give them, and how, as a former American could she deny them?
It was quite interesting how the potential to get shot in her own hospital tended to make her rethink her philosophical approach to civil liberties and perhaps plan on incorporating stricter gun control in her building.
The main thing that slowed the woman from reaching for the weapon was she was sitting down on the exam table, which made reaching down to her waist a bit unwieldy. She was wondering what to say to the woman, as it was clear her initial attempt to play it off wasn't going to work until she saw which weapon the woman was reaching for. Of course, it was the fucking AirTaser Lily had given to her.
She had designed her brain interface and computer system to be very resistant to electrical surges. It was connected directly to every part of her brain electrically, after all. But she didn't know what would happen if she took a high-output shot straight to the face. Her skull was also designed to be insulating, but Lily could imagine the electrical shock travelling all the way through her optical nerves and cooking her brain. The possibility of her getting shot with the gun she made with her own two hands infuriated her to the point where she just said quietly, but more full of menace than anything she had ever said since arriving in this universe, "Do not."
Lily didn't know if it was her tone of voice because it really sounded kind of scary even to her as she said it or because this woman thought she was a Courser and was almost within grabbing distance, but she stopped moving her hand to grab the AirTaser. Lily had discovered what a Courser was, at least for the most part. From what she could tell, they were something along the lines of a biomorph with synthetic upgrades housing what appeared to be a mid-tier non-sapient AI used as ninja assassins and middle managers of less sophisticated robots.
From what Sarah Lyons had told her, the synths, even the ones in human-like bodies, weren't really sapient. They weren't AGIs or digitized egos, supposedly, although the Paladin had mentioned that the Institute allegedly occasionally kidnapped people in the Commonwealth Wasteland, seemingly at random, and then replaced them with a synth duplicate. To do that and have it not be detected implied that the duplicates had to be sapient. However, she didn't think that was how it happened. To her, it sounded a lot more like installing some sort of Hidden Agenda espionage mod on the kidnapped party and then letting them go again.
Either some sort of hardware-based cybernetic mind control system if they wanted overt control, or they possibly could have digitized the person against their will and installed a more subtle software-based sleeper agent package before installing their ego back in their body. Lily had seen it all before, and it didn't sound like a pod person situation at all.
Why go to the effort and trouble of creating a perfect duplicate of your victim when you had their original sleeve? Any organization that was able to download a person's memories and upload them into a duplicate biomorph body should be able to just do the same back into their original body after incorporating a sleeper agent package. It was the most basic of basic espionage where she came from, although she didn't know why one would do it to random dirt farmers like Lyons seemed to suggest.
A lot of the things Sarah Lyons told her about the Institute were things like that, incomprehensible, and they sounded more like fairy tales, like boogeyman stuff. It all sounded unscientific to her and made her doubt a lot of the things the woman told her about the Institute in general.
In any case, the Minigun Bridge Bitch stopped moving her hand to grab the AirTaser Lily gifted to her. Her social assistant was telling her that she should make the first move for reconciliation and that she should lower herself to the woman's eye level, as well. Sighing, she grabbed the rolling stool that was always present in a doctor's exam room and sat down at it.
"Good. If you were to attack me unthinkingly twice, especially using zhe weapon I gave you so zhat you wouldn't die in the Wasteland, zhere is no way zhat you would leave zhis room alive," Lily said, her tone arctic. For the moment, the woman seemed content to just sit there and listen, although her heartbeat was still a bit too close to the tachycardia range for her to be calm, according to her ears.
"Now, perhaps we got off on zhe wrong foot, yes? You see, when I saw you and your friends being attacked by raiders, I zhought to myself: Lily, girl, do zhe good deed for zhe day, and 'elp zhem, yes? And what did I get for my consideration? If I recall... you tried to shoot me with zhe minigun," continued Lily, her tone still cold enough that it was a wonder her breath wasn't visible.
Lily concluded with an introduction, "It was only zhe obvious fact zhat you all seemed genuinely afraid of moi, a stranger, zhat kept you alive. I was sure zhat zhere was some sort of misunderstanding, so I was merciful. So, let me introduce myself; I am called Lilliane St. Claire, zhe medical doctor, scientist and adventuress at your service. It would be appreciated if you would be so kind as to reciprocate and zhen perhaps tell me why you attacked me."
The woman's heartbeat had slowed a fair bit, as it seemed clear even to her that immediate violence was not going to occur. However, her eyes still darted left and right, almost like a cornered rabbit seeking an avenue to flee. Lily didn't particularly understand what was making the woman so antsy. It was an illogical, emotional reaction similar to the hypervigilance reactions of people suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Well, there was plenty of that in the Wasteland, which made her curious about what exactly happened to this woman and the mythical Coursers to generate this reaction. Was she a survivor from one of the settlements they had genocided for no real reason? Lily doubted that happened at all but was open to changing her mind if she was in the presence of a first-hand witness account and survivor.
Finally, the woman sighed and relaxed a tad more, "My name is Natalie Turner. My friends and I thought that you were a Courser, which is a very dangerous enemy sent by very evil people." She frowned, "Honestly, I'm still not sure you're not, except nobody has ever mentioned any kind of deep-cover Courser that pretends to be a doctor."
Lily hummed appreciatively, glad at least this Natalie was capable of speech that didn't involve some sort of dramatic last stand. She nodded, "Yes, I kind of figured zhat first bit. At zhe time, I did not know what zhis Courser was. However, I have since used some of my contacts to give me a briefing about relatively nearby organizations." She coughed delicately, "Also, I have to admit zhat you were not zhe only person to mistake me for an agent of this group. A Courser is... some manner of cybernetically enhanced biological robot used as a sort of special forces commando force by a mysterious organization based in the Commonwealth called the Institute? Would you mind telling me why you thought I was a robot ninja?"
That caused her to bristle a little bit, which Lily found a bit odd. Still, Natalie replied, "Uh, that's pretty much right. And it is because you seemed unusually fast, and dangerous, using blue laser weapons, and on some sort of mysterious mission. I mean, lady, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its probably a damn duck. Also, I don't appreciate that term, robot."
Lily tilted her head to the side, genuinely curious as to why she had offended the lady, "Firstly, those weren't what you would consider zhe synths. And secondly, why are you offended at the term robot?"
"Because that's what the fucking Institute calls all synths!" she replied testily.
Lily blinked, and changed expressions to one of incredulity. From what she had been told of at least two of the varieties, they were as robot as robot could be! "Uh... and what term would you prefer?"
Natalie said confidently and with a tone full of emotion, "People!"
Well, Lily did not consider those two terms mutually exclusive at all. She had, in fact, been a "robot" for most of her life. There was also a significant societal stigma against "clankers" where she was from, that is to say, robots or people who were synthmorphs, as they were considered to be the underclass, so she kind of understood where Natalie was coming from. However, to explain that would require something of a serious digression, so she just asked, sceptically, "Wait, are you trying to tell me zhat all synths produced by zhese people have zhe same level of intelligence and self-actualization zhat a 'uman being does?"
That caused Natalie to pause and say, "Well... maybe not the first or second generation, but definitely the third generation does! And Coursers are third gen. They're just brainwashed, so you shouldn't call them robots."
It's been some time since any of her use of language had been policed by anyone, which she found amusing. She thought she had left that all back in America. Still, she didn't want to intentionally be mean, and now she was curious. She had been told that the biological synths, or third generation as Natalie were calling them, were merely slightly more complicated AIs, but clearly sub-sapient. She did not question this because she was told that they were mainly used for cheap, disposable labour, and it made no sense to her at all to basically create people and enslave them for menial labour.
Robots and AI were very effective even in semi-skilled and skilled labour if supervised. Still, she should remember where she was, namely, the Fallout universe. She shouldn't be so inflexible about using regular logic here for the decisions of people here.
So, if this woman was part of a group that was enemies with this Institute, then she might have seen a number of these synths. Her accounts wouldn't be as valuable as actually talking to one of these supposed synths, but it would still be helpful. She asked, "Oh? 'ow do you know for sure? 'ave you seen many of zhese zhird generation synths?"
For some reason, this caused Natalie to go red in the face a bit. Damn, Lily just wasn't very good with Speech checks, it seemed like. She raised her hands in the air, like a pissed-off New York City pedestrian and half-yelled, "Yeah, every time I look in a mirror! Lady, you are looking at one!"
Lily rocked back on her heels in shock, the little stool she was sitting on rolling back a few centimetres. Oh, she hadn't actually anticipated that. It shows her what happens when she gets fixated on the data she has already supposedly acquired, even if she doubted most of it.
She held up her hands in a placating gesture and said quietly, "Peace, peace. First, I don't consider zhe terms robot and person mutually exclusive. I believe any robot with a sufficiently complex neural network is just as much as a person as any natural-born 'uman. And zhat would be obviously zhe same for any constructed biological entity. It is zhe mind, and whether one is sapient and self-actualizing zhat determines personhood, in my opinion, yes? I'm not trying to deny anyone zhat can argue with me zheir personhood."
This caused Natalie to blink, calm and quiet down considerably, "Uhhh..." she said, confused when the woman she got so pissed off at as to break regulations and identify herself as a synth succinctly stated her own philosophies on personhood back to her, unprompted.
---xxxxxx---
After the woman named Natalie realized that she wasn't her enemy, she opened up a little after extracting a promise of secrecy from her. At first, Lily suspected that the woman was one of the "replacements", in which case it was still her theory that it was more likely than not that such an individual was just a modified normal human.
However, she was surprised when the woman told her that she was made or born in the Institute. She was pretty free with that information, telling Lily about how she escaped from a work party in the Commonwealth and discovered friends. This was clearly the organization she was a part of; she would only call it the Railroad and would not talk about it at all except to say that their goal was the liberation of synths.
Wait a minute. Railroad? Underground Railroad? And her name was Natalie Turner? Nat Turner? Whoever suggested that name for her had read a little history, at least. It was a name tinged with the spectre of imminent violence, which fit the woman it was attached to as far as Lily's encounters with her were concerned. Still, it was a good name, and there was a power to it.
Natalie talked a bit about what she knew about the Institute, but what she knew wasn't a lot. She followed the orders she was given, as she knew what would happen to her if she didn't. If she could be believed then these Institute people really were as despicable as everything Sarah Lyons said, just for totally different reasons.
Lily surreptitiously brought out her "clipboard" and scanned the woman synth thoroughly. During the discussion, Lily saw to the woman's actual medical complaint. Someone had shot her in the hand, and the bullet had damaged the extensor tendon in her left hand, causing a crippling injury even after being repaired with Stimpaks.
It was a simple surgery that she just did on the table in the exam room. However, she almost fubbed reattaching the tendon when she heard something unbelievable, "You don't know where zhe Institute is because zhey teleport in and out of zheir base? Teleportation?!"
Natalie looked surprised at Lily's surprise and nodded. "Yes, they would teleport all the workers and whoever was supervising them to the job sites. And then back when we were done."
Lily let out a slow hiss. She knew there were teleporters in the game, but she thought they were all alien technology on the Mothership Zeta. She had never heard of any kind of teleportation technology that was used by a human faction. And the fact that they used them in such a casual manner.
She shook her head. That would give this Institute such an incredible tactical advantage. They had the potential to just drop a platoon of shock troops on your head so long as you were in the range of their device. She desperately wanted to disassemble the device. It would be so useful, but she would have to know precisely what kind of teleportation it was. If it was the Star Trek variety that disassembled you and reassembled you later, she wasn't interested in dying and being cloned every time she wanted to be transported.
It wasn't just a one-way conversation. Lily told the woman some about herself, about her study of cybernetics, genetics and robotics and even that she probably had more cybernetics than one of these supposed Coursers, although she did not specifically go into depth on what kinds, and about how Lily was very sympathetic to their struggle. Lily was hoping to use these disclosures to fish more information about the woman, and it was helpful as far as Natalie's own life and the Institute was concerned, but she absolutely wouldn't say anything about the Railroad.
"Just last year, we were decimated. Wait, no... that implies only one-tenth of us died. Is there a word for the opposite of decimation? Where only one-tenth survived?" she asked, with a macabre sense of humour.
One of Lily's social weaknesses was that she sometimes couldn't detect subtle humour like this, and she could be kind of literal. She hummed, "Well, if you decimate zhe group approximately twenty-two times, you would end up at about ten per cent of its original strength, no?"
Natalie stared at her for a moment as Lily finished most of her work on her arm and wrist and then asked amusedly, "Are you sure you are not the synth? Some special quant-type that is literal all the time?"
Lily chuckled a bit ruefully, realizing her mistake, "Well, I don't zhink so. If someone made me a slave and I escaped, I wouldn't flee to safety out of zheir jurisdiction, or if I did, it would be temporary while I built zhe strength. I zhink I would stay and attempt to murder zhem."
That caused a fire of zeal to light up in Natalie's eyes, and she slammed her not quite healed hand onto the table, making the surgical tray bounce a couple of centimetres off the table, "Right?! Fucking right!" Then she winced and rubbed her hand.
Lily grinned a little, "You know, with zhat attitude, you are very suited to zhe name you have chosen."
"Huh? Do you recognize my name? One of the others, he said it suited me, and that's why I started going by Natalie. But... he didn't make it out of the fighting, and I never had a chance to bring it up again," Natalie said sadly.
Lily glanced at her internal chronometer. This appointment was going way past the normal time frame such a simple procedure should have taken, but she was fortunate that there wasn't anyone else waiting. "Would you like some lunch? My treat, and I'll tell you all about zhe tragic life of a man by the name of Nat Turner, who was born as a slave but died zhe free man."
Well, they did catch him in the end, if she recalled, but she suspected by that point nobody sane was willing to buy him at that point even if he wasn't considered a criminal, so she would give him the credit of freedom, even if they hung him. She then continued, "I suspect I may 'ave to teach you a little American 'istory, so zhat you get zhe reference."
The woman smiled, perhaps for the first time that Lily had seen and nodded, "Yeah, sure."
---xxxxxx---
Lily watched the interesting woman depart her hospital. She had spoken with her at lunch for a little over an hour, and only half of that was retelling the story of Nat Turner's slave revolt. She had tried to impress upon the woman the numerous failures that Nat Turner had and that he was to be admired but not emulated -- since he died in the end. She gave a brief overview of another more successful slave revolt, even if it did fail in the end as well, which was Spartacus.
Lily was impressed that the woman didn't ask for her minigun back and that she absolutely refused to say one single word about her organization or her cell. Although saying that told Lily that they used a cellular structure, which wasn't all that surprising since they were, in effect, a guerilla and insurgent force.
However, Natalie did give her a code word and a challenge that a Railroad operative might tell her to identify themselves after Lily admitted that she would be willing to provide support to their organization. Natalie stopped her from saying any specifics, telling Lily that she wouldn't be cleared to know, but asked her in general what sort of things Lily might provide, be they weapons, material support, money, safe houses, and a bunch of other things.
After thinking about it, Lily told her most of the above. Everything but direct combat assistance, as she wasn't planning on going to the Commonwealth anytime soon. This caused Natalie to smile and nod and tell her that although they were a bit short-handed, someone should be getting in touch with her.
Lily also bought the woman's genome from her. Although, in truth, she already had it as she carefully kept a sample of her blood from when she fixed the woman's hand. However, Lily did feel better about paying her for it. If she had declined... well, Lily would still have kept it. She would have just felt bad about it for as long as five minutes. There was no way she was not examining the genome of what might be the first biomorph-style created sleeve on the planet.
Did the Institute just clone regular humans, maybe randomizing their genome a little bit for diversity? That would make them boring. Or did they have some sort of baseline advantages baked into these synths? Lily would find out.
She pulled up two scan results, each taking roughly half of her visual field while she walked back to her basement using her hearing alone. Although normally, the way her passive sonar mode worked was to have the computer interpret the results and draw them on her visual field in a sort of wireframe grayscale, she had begun trying to let her brain interpret some of the feed from her microphones, as well. It wasn't exactly blindsight like Daredevil had, but it might become that someday, although unlikely to be as cool since she wasn't a superhero and still had her sense of sight.
On the left was the scan of Initiate Romeo's Power Armour. She had already done the preliminary work of excluding Initiate Romeo himself from the scan, smoothing out some details and normalizing it so that her CAD program would import the scan.
The right side had Natalie's scan, and Lily hissed and almost stumbled down the flight of stairs as she was surprised. So, she, the woman, wasn't cloned. That was pretty clear, at least not all in one piece, anyway. She appeared to be assembled in segments, and her connective tissue saw some signs of what might be a primitive fast-grow compound.
She hummed. She suspected older gen three synths probably had significant problems with arthritis, but she doubted that they were ever planned to remain "in service" that long. Other than that, Lily didn't see anything that would prevent them from living a long, normal life. So it didn't appear that there were any Nexus 7 situations here, but she'd have to do a deep dive into the woman's genome just to be sure.
The security door into her lair downstairs had been improved. Lily subscribed to the rule of three as far as physical security was concerned. Something You Know, Something You Have and Something You Are. To get in, you had to provide a palm-scan, had to have one of her cybernetic implants and had to have an appropriate key inside the implant, which you used to unlock the door.
Granted, it was mostly theatre since there were two giant gaping elevator shafts that went directly to her level, but the people who saw it, like her Apprentice and the Mechanist, all seemed very impressed. After she got a number of sub-basement floors dug, she would change this basement into a security bastion floor filled with auto-turrets and robot defenses and then build a second elevator for her complex.
Twisting and pinching, she zoomed the scan to Natalie's head, "Ohoho... what do we 'ave 'ere?"
Somewhat hidden was a small, clearly electronic component. She suspected that it would be very difficult to pick this device up using a traditional x-ray. It was half hidden in the shadows behind some thick bones while also being constructed mainly of polycarbonate and carbon fibre, both of which had very high x-ray transparency. There were definitely metal parts, including a small quantum processor, but Lily didn't think a normal x-ray from the front or sides of one's head would detect them.
The quantum processor was a custom chip but used the same methodology that all of the existing quantum processors she had seen utilized. Judging its processing capability from its size and complexity, she judged it insufficient to emulate a full human ego, so it wasn't a cyberbrain or a ghost module. It did have a very significant amount of memory attached, enough, she thought to hold an ego if it wasn't over sixty years or so, depending on how they compressed memories.
It was connected through some novel method of electrical induction to areas of the brain in a method that Lily would likely steal for her second-generation brain-computer interface if she could get acceptable performance using it. Lily would call this device a crappy cortical stack if she didn't know any better. However, knowing the people who built it, she suspected it was a built-in ego bridge so that a synth could be downloaded, wiped, or uploaded into their sleeves.
And maybe incorporating some sort of override commands via speech, given the way it is hooked into the cochlear nerve input. Very interesting. She saw a few things she might be able to "take inspiration" from using this device, but overall she felt they spent too much time trying to make it stealthy, which sacrificed a lot of potential and features.
She swiped the image away, for now, to work on the Power Armour until another patient arrived. Unfortunately, the Initiates had been wearing old T-45D model Power Armour. Lily would have liked to have gotten a scan of Sarah's T-60 armour, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
Lily had been looking at the design off and on since the Brotherhood had left. It looked surprisingly... simple from the exterior, but the interior was another story. The motivators were small, powerful and sophisticated, and it featured computerized elements, redundantly controlled and other electronics, including a remarkably sophisticated laser gyro.
Lily hummed. She could build the exterior with no problem, but it might take her some time to ramp up to the point where she could build the whole thing. Plus, it would help her a lot if she could get a download of all the software.
Lily was expecting to see some crude and almost steampunk-level technology, but it turned out even the oldest model, T-45D Power Armour, was a very sophisticated (for this universe) hardsuit. It couldn't handle a vacuum, though, and she definitely considered that an oversight.
She sighed. She might not have her own version of Power Armour ready by the time she hit the VSS building, which was a shame as that area of DC was dangerous, but she felt she might be able to build them not too long after that. And then improve them.
She glanced at the shut-down Mister Handy in the corner. Time to get this guy running again; she could use a lab assistant down here.
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone