章 74: Madison Li
At first, Lily didn't quite know what to wear for the meeting with Dr Li. She actually had a number of nice outfits now, and the decision was one fraught with unknown implications. She had been attempting to lean less on her social assistant for several reasons. It wasn't that effective, as it was merely an emulated program run by her Muse rather than a dedicated agent, and she was starting to feel as though it was a bit of a crutch even when it was giving her good advice. Wouldn't it be better to internalise these functions in her own brain? If so, she would have to train them up slowly herself.
As such, she had turned off the function that gave her automatic advice and was only using the functions that attempted to identify human emotional states and append them as an Enhanced Reality tag, which she would pay more attention to in the hopes of training her own brain to handle these tasks.
FO
Lily closed her eyes and recalled all that she remembered about Miranda Li from the game. Honestly, she thought that the woman was a little bit naive. She was kind of a pure scientist and did not like the Brotherhood of Steel. If that was all, Lily would feel that they had a lot in common, but their motivations were completely different. Miranda had an antipathy towards them because they were something along the lines of a military organisation, like a weird caricature of a hippy from her last life.
She would have to make sure that none of her recruits, which approached about a company in strength and would remain there, for now, referred to her as Commander in the woman's presence. She didn't want to alienate the woman, so it was best to present herself similarly as a pure scientist.
She glanced at her wardrobe, made a decision and nodded.
---xxxxxx---
"Dr Li, it is good to finally meet you. I 'ave 'eard quite a bit about your expertise down at zhe Rivet City and was quite 'onoured when you asked to meet with me," simpered Lily in a friendly manner. She was meeting the woman in her office, at first. She had already replaced the two turrets in her ceiling with a covert model that flipped out of a concealed cubby when deployed, as she felt that for the most part it was better to not rub her visitors' face in the fact that she had what amounted to heavy weapons pointed at them during meetings.
The woman seemed very impressed at the appearance of Lily's hospital, and Lily was gladdened that she felt she had chosen correctly as Dr Li was wearing a fairly similar outfit featuring something that Lily would call business casual with a bright white lab coat on top. Although Lily noticed that the coat was a lot more substantial than the pattern Lily had, it was closer to a white trench coat and looked quite warm.
Dr Li seemed genuinely friendly, "I could say the same, Dr St. Claire! It is amazing what you have done with this building, and it seems like every week, we have heard about another one of your exploits."
That caused Lily to smile again, "Zhank you. Would you care for some tea? Your security people are more than welcome to either loom over you during our meeting or have some tea as well either here at zhe couch or in zhe cafeteria."
Although Madison Li didn't care for what she considered military people, she was the head researcher in Rivet City, and she didn't think that the community would have let her come to Megaton unguarded, even if she could, which Lily doubted very much. Her statement caused the woman to chuckle a little, "Well, I don't suppose they need to loom, but they would probably feel better if they stayed in the room if you don't mind?"
She seemed embarrassed at requesting it, and Lily took a guess at the appropriate social response by waving a hand and saying, "Of course not. I wouldn't want to cause zheir blood pressure to rise." Internally, Lily sent Alice a request for two tea services, with the tea already made. It was a bit of a faux pas, but she hadn't really run into anyone who appreciated her tea ceremony in the first place, except the Apprentice and Dr Li's assistant.
They made small talk for a few minutes while the Apprentice brought in the tea for both parties. Lily was thankful that Dr Li's two bodyguards didn't offer to taste it for poison. It would be pointless, anyway. Lily had already installed the seemingly decorative pillar inside the hospital foyer, which was actually a system that coordinated a series of tens of thousands of floating microscopic drones to collect skin or hair samples from every visitor that walked through the door.
And if Lily already had a person's genome, it was possible to create either a biological protein or targetted nano-attack that was only effectively toxic to them and nobody else. Not that she would do that, of course! Ha ha ha.
After they had sipped their tea, which Dr Li complimented her on, the older-looking woman got down to it, "I didn't even realise you were a medical doctor or a geneticist; I thought when I heard about a Dr St. Claire starting a new power company that you must have been a physicist of some kind, that specialised in high energy systems like myself."
Lily smiled, looking a little embarrassed. She had already, just from the small talk that they had, realised that Madison Li knew a lot more about physics and nuclear fusion than Lily herself did. To the point that Lily had to make a mental note not to talk about her generator at all because even the slightest hint about how it operated and Lily felt that the woman would understand the entire principles behind a hydrodynamic generator.
It was one of those things that seemed very obvious if you looked back on it but might not be entirely obvious if you hadn't had it pointed out. It was basically a regular generator except for using the ions in the moving plasma as a stator instead of either permanent magnets or electromagnets. Well, in effect, the plasma was an electromagnet in her generator, which is why it was mainly more of a clever engineering trick rather than any kind of theoretical advancement in the field of nuclear fusion technology.
"Well, to be honest, all I know about fusion is zhe basics anyone with a similar education as myself might know. I know the main fuel cycles, like deuterium-deuterium, deuterium-tritium, and helium-3, that success has been found in both zhe electromagnetic and zhe inertial confinement of plasma, and what 'ave you. If I 'ad to build a fusion reactor from scratch, I do believe I would fail, or at zhe very minimum, it would be a multi-year project," Lily began, then continued, "I can't even really take credit for the design of the generators I made, zhat you seem so interested in. I know I was not zhe inventor, although I can not recall who actually was..." she trailed off because she didn't, in fact, remember who invented the hydrodynamic plasma loop.
While she knew it was invented in space, she thought it might have been theorised long before that. It generally served a dual function in a ship, the accelerated plasma would generate electricity directly and then most of that electricity would be used to accelerate small amounts of the plasma, almost to relativistic levels, for propulsion. It was a plasma drive for spacecraft. It was very, very efficient in its use of reaction mass, to the point that constant acceleration and then deceleration flight plans were common in the Solar System. Travel from Luna to Mars would only take a week, at the very most, depending on their orbits.
It wasn't quite as good as the fictional Epstein Drive in the Expanse novels and TV show she remembered in her past life, but it wasn't that far off, either.
Lily's admission caused Madison Li to grin slightly, "Well, I certainly would like to talk about that with you. As far as real mobile fusion systems capable of delivering electricity, all we have is the Mass Fusion fusion cores, which use a hydrogen-boron fuel cycle. It has the benefit of being a cold fusion system, but the output isn't what it could be. Plus, the systems have stifled reverse engineering to this day. I've managed to build a much larger proton-boron system, but I don't think it is what I am looking for."
Lily wasn't sure her system would be considered mobile like Madison Li seemed to be implying. There were two generators running at the Eastside power station these days, and Lily had redesigned and rebuilt the first generator to be along the same lines as the updated version she had built next to it. Both were eleven-megawatt systems now, but even though the new design was significantly smaller than the first generation, they were still each about the size of a large broom closet with all the cooling systems attached. Was that "mobile"?
Maybe, she supposed. It would depend on what a person meant by mobile. Well, she would definitely trade this technology to Dr Li in exchange for engineering specs on a real fusion-based power station. In effect, Lily wanted immobile fusion technology due to how it scaled upwards and provided a lot more electricity, and Dr Li wanted fusion for mobile applications. Perhaps she was trying to get Rivet City's carrier task group mobile again, assuming any of them were sea-worthy? She wondered if they would sell her a destroyer as a personal yacht.
"I'd be happy to discuss it with you, I 'ave even scheduled zhe time to go to our power station so zhat you can inspect one of zhe generators while it is shut down, assuming we can come to an agreement on zhe proper compensation. I'd like to trade knowledge for knowledge. Specifically, I am interested in zhe traditional fusion technology, such zhat I may be able to build a D-D or D-T reactor. Practical engineering plans, in other words. I am also very interested in anything you know about both zhe proton-boron cold fusion technology used in fusion cores and about how micro fusion cells can operate with seemingly no heatsinks, as I am perplexed zhat such a thing is even possible," Lily laid out all her desires for Madison Li. It wasn't that surprising that Lily didn't understand how cold fusion technology worked; it wasn't even the first time that had happened. She'd settle for some way to manufacture the systems, even if she didn't know how they worked.
Madison Li's expression got sly, "I see you are used to the sad state of affairs that science has descended to in these times. However, as much as I would like to spread all of our knowledge far and wide, just like in the Pre-War days, your wants are way too much to balance the trade. But perhaps we can at least meet some of them, especially if you were willing to perhaps license or franchise a genetics clinic at Rivet City. I came into town planning to ask you to relocate entirely, but you've put so much effort into your hospital here so quickly that it would be a shame."
Lily raised her eyebrows. She supposed Monsieur Zhao had been inspected by their doctors and her works found desirable. Not surprising! She didn't release inferior products.
Lily hummed, considering her options. She didn't think she had ever succeeded in a haggling-based Speech check since arriving on this planet. Her entire history, from her first transaction overpaying for some kebabs in Canterbury Commons to her most recent interactions with the Brotherhood of Steel, she had always come out the worse for it. She really ought to hire someone to conduct negotiations on her behalf, but even if she wasn't going to get the best deal, she still needed to at least get all the items she wanted. She didn't particularly mind about the particularities of the deal so much as what she, in the end, got out of it. That may be the reason why she was consistently taken advantage of, she supposed.
However, she wouldn't be open to presently licensing her genetic therapies, as that implied the licensee could produce them themselves. But, she might be open to a franchise arrangement where she would ship in the treatments that a local clinic would administer, so long as the doctors there followed her protocols. Like when you bought a McDonald's franchise, you still ordered your chips, frozen, from McDonald's corporate, and you didn't chop up the potatoes yourself, and you couldn't just make a random burger any way you wanted and call it a Big Mac.
"Well, I do have some other zhings you may be interested in. Specifically, I have successfully reverse-engineered the POSEIDON fusion core refilling stations and have a complete internal scan of the interior of a fusion core, including all of its mechanisms down to zhe elemental composition of every alloy used," Lily offered. This was actually her "big ticket item" that she knew Madison Li would be very interested in.
And sure enough, judging by both the sceptical and delighted look on her face, she definitely was.
---xxxxxx---
Thankfully, Madison Li wasn't a super shrewd negotiator herself, so Lily felt that for the first time, she might have negotiated a more or less even deal, with neither side being entirely advantaged over the other. It felt good.
Lily was trading her hydrodynamic generators for the detailed engineering plans for a large fusion reactor for use in a power station. She felt that was a good, even trade.
This necessitated Lily also trade Dr Li a room temperature superconductor manufacturing technique, which she was somewhat surprised that Dr Li didn't already have. Lily used carbon-based superconductors that were manufactured out of monolayer graphene sheets doped with tiny amounts of titanium, lithium and molybdenum, but she also was well aware of a traditional metallic superconducting alloy due to her scanning of plasma casters. They used room-temperature superconducting alloys for the plasma accelerator, so this alloy was what she traded them.
In exchange, Lily got the exact ways to manufacture levitation emitters, including the ways to configure them to push off of arbitrary things in the emitter's range and not solely the ground. Lily was almost certain this was how the classified levitation-based aerial drones she had read about so long ago functioned, in that they pushed off against the air directly beneath the emitter and functioned, in effect, like a helicopter. It was so obvious now that she realised it was a possibility that she wanted to thunk her head onto her desk. She'd have to redesign and rebuild all of her aerial drones. If she was no longer limited to using rotors, she could finally build some very stealthy shapes.
She may have even gotten slightly better of Dr Li for the next trade. She traded both the designs for a jailbroken fusion core refilling station, and the detailed scans of a fusion core for the design and theoretical underpinnings of Madison Li's larger hydrogen-boron cold fusion system. It was mostly a proof of concept as it was about the same size as her generators and didn't produce even one one hundredth of the power, but it was very interesting.
But more importantly, she got theoretical knowledge and practical engineering files to understand and potentially manufacture her own micro-fusion cells. She didn't understand it at all, and it seemed to violate the laws of physics and quantum mechanics, actually, but in the couple of days since Madison Li left, she had already built a small system as a proof of concept.
It operated on principles that Madison Li called quantum-locking. It was, in effect, a perfect insulator like Lily had thought originally, but instead of using some esoteric metal alloy, it used a highly specialised machine to create some sort of novel field inside the fusion cell, which created what was in effect a force field that both held the plasma and its heat inside the reaction chamber.
At first, it seemed to violate thermodynamics as well. Still, apparently, the force field was powered by heat, somehow, so in theory, a microfusion cell would slowly discharge over a few thousand years until it was empty. The electronics in a micro-fusion cell were mainly designed to flicker this persistent field slightly to either add extra deuterium gas or vent plasma.
It was an amazing piece of technology but had some important limits which prevented it from completely taking over all fusion reactors. Namely, every time you flickered the field, there was significant damage done to the containment chamber as the heat from the plasma escaped the containment very briefly.
That explained why she had to change out the micro-fusion cells in her generators every six weeks instead of every six months, as her math initially thought. A traditionally contained fusion reactor was superior to micro-fusion cells if your use case was being used constantly. However, micro-fusion cells were vastly, vastly superior to any other type of technology available for small-scale intermittent high-energy applications. They were perfect for weapons and other systems where you needed a ton of plasma every once and a while, in other words.
Lily could not understate how important this technology was for her continued defence. Although, on its face, it was a fairly even trade, and she would have paid much, much more for it than she did. Madison Li discounted it because it was a technology with a lot of limitations, and it was most suited for weapons, which she had a clear disdain for.
Lily already had the technology to manufacture effective plasma weapons, but she didn't because almost every microfusion cell she found or bought was destined to be used in one of her generators. She literally couldn't afford to use them, and her lasers were still quite effective.
She was pretty sure this was also the technology that made plasma grenades possible, and she also had ideas to use it as a useful way to shield highly radioactive waste.
She had a sudden tingle in her scalp that she had recognised as herself having a terrible idea. She thought about it for a while and wondered what might happen if she used what was effectively a forcefield to surround a radioactive and fissionable material. Wouldn't the neutrons bounce off the force field like a pinball machine, causing even more fission events and promptly going super-critical?
Well, she knew a very simple way to produce nuclear explosions now. Not every radioactive material was fissionable, and in fact, most were not, but she was pretty sure that putting even a small amount of the highly enriched fuel rods from Vault 108 inside one of these forcefields would trigger a super-critical reaction after only a few minutes. On the plus side, it would likely use up almost the entire amount of fission fuel in the reaction, so it would be both a surprisingly high-yield weapon and surprisingly ecologically friendly, with no uranium wasted or blasted into the atmosphere.
She didn't presently have the computational resources to simulate the reaction if she used this technology on the mixed kind of radioactive waste she extracted from water. She didn't think it would explode, as there was only a small amount of fissionable materials, and they were spaced so far away, but she wouldn't bet her life on it, so perhaps that plan wasn't a great idea.
She sat down her tools on her workbench. She had finally finished getting the bugs out of her Power Armour system and had been finishing the construction of the Apprentice's version. The girl had already wheedled her into bringing her along on her "adventure" after Lily talked to the girl about it.
Dr Bonesaw had just returned from her visit to Big Town and Little Lamplight, taking one of the generators Lily had built for her as well as about two dozen book readers completely filled with books that Lily had donated to her cause.
[Lilium: Apprentice, we will be leaving in the morning. Your Power Armour is finished, but we don't have time to get you used to operate it here. You'll have to work on it when we get to the Virtual Strategic Solutions site.]
[Alice: Yesss! Okay, I'll get all my things ready.]
Lily had already talked to Dr Taylor and Bonesaw, telling them that it may be a week and a half before they returned. She had already trained Dr Taylor in operating her genetics clinic.
She had to bring both Dr Taylor and Bonesaw closer into her trust circles, as neither of them was stupid, and it didn't take them long to realise that she was using some kind of nanotechnology in a medical capacity in the hospital. She didn't trust them enough to offer them individual nanohives to install in their own bodies, but she taught them how to use the medichine fabricator that she used to create medichines for the hospital and how to program them for a number of different therapies. They were quite impressed, but neither of them thought it was anything except some manner of Pre-War tech.
She hummed; she had a few things to do to get ready before she herself would get a few hours of sleep so that they would be ready in the morning.
---xxxxxx---
The Apprentice met her the next morning at the RV. They would be taking both her RV and the one truck that she had asked the Mechanist to build on top of the four others he had made for the water truck, himself and Gary.
However, the Apprentice would be controlling it remotely from inside the protected cabin of the RV. There was a similar hardwired connection in the passenger seat, which allowed the girl to control the more vulnerable truck in what amounted to a VR radio connection.
Lily hoped that she would have the technology for auto-driving trucks, but she didn't want to waste one of the few quantum processors on one of her trucks to train an expert system to do it, so she would use the free labour of her Apprentice's in-built neural network to accomplish the same task, for now.
Lily checked the moving map. She had already identified the VSS building with a drone, as it had a large sign that identified it right out front. It would be a bit of a challenge getting her vehicles nearby the exposed elevator shaft to their underground sub-basement, but she felt it was doable.
There were both Super Mutants and highly armed raiders in the vicinity, but she wasn't as afraid of the Super Mutants as she was in the past. While she wouldn't take them for granted, one of the aerial drone designs she had built included a small kamikaze model that featured a half-kilo-shaped charge that she felt wouldn't do anything good to anyone, mutant or otherwise if it went off right next to your head.
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