I knew I was too late as soon as I heard the screaming.

I practically leapt out of the elevator the moment the gate started to open and scrambled up the balcony scaffolding, not wasting time with the stairs. Sprinting through the entryway and down the main hall, I nearly lost my balance on the wet floor, flailing forward and only just catching myself on one of the exposed pipes. Surprised the damn thing didn't take a patch of my skin, it was so damn cold. Still, I hooked around the corner and down the stairs.

Damn it, I was ten minutes early, this shouldn't be happening.

I found Asher in a heap in front of the autodoc, wailing in agony. I grabbed a syringe of Med-X from the top of a filing cabinet and uncapped the needle, jamming it into the newly installed injection port on his lower forearm. The system registered the injection and rushed the distribution of the drug into the bloodstream and throughout the body. A few seconds later, his screams died away and he calmed.

He coughed, hacking up biogel on his chest. "Wha… what the hell happened?" He opened his eyes, and immediately must have realized just how bad an idea that was. "Agh, damn it what the hell is wrong with my eyes?"

I ducked under his shoulder to support his weight and helped him to his feet, "Questions later, bed now."

It was a good thing that the cafeteria and quarters were just down the hallway. Moving, even with the drugs, was ungodly painful for Asher.

We'd cleared out most of the beds from the quarters, but there were still a few, and I shrugged him onto the one closest to the entrance. "Why is everything burning?"

"Because your entire body has been renovated and restructured in the course of about twelve hours. And before that you took about five rounds to the back, piercing multiple organs and disconnecting your spine at the L4 vertebrae." Blunt, but there's no good way to tell someone that they were shot in such a way that should have permanently disabled them.

"What?"

Oh right, biology classes aren't exactly common anymore. "You were shot in the stomach and two of the bullets went through to the spine in a place that would normally take away your ability to walk."

"And I still can because of this… renovation?" He shifted around on the mattress, trying to find a more comfortable position, which was of course impossible because his entire nervous system was on fire as it came to grips with the intruding system.

"Basically, you've been outfitted with a standard ISA tactical cybernetic rig." I jumped back as his arm shot out at me.

He opened his eyes again, in shock, then immediately screwed them shut again. "What the hell!"

I sat back down on the bed and rested a hand on his shoulder as gently as I could, "Nothing to worry about. Your body just needs a bit to adapt to the enhancements, this is why I wanted to be here before you got done with surgery. You pressed the emergency release, didn't you?"

The guilty look on his face told me everything I needed to know. "Not your fault, it happens, or used to happen, a lot. Waking up in biogel after getting shot is never fun. I meant to be here, but I got busy dealing with Preston and these morons who were trying to harass someone over a drug debt."

"Really… how'd that go?" I had to respect the kid, grinning and bearing it. The bearing it part is easy, it's not optional, the grinning is the hard part.

"Preston still won't budge on the whole honorable warfare shtick, the drug gang crumbled like a cookie submerged in milk for an hour. I put a blade to their leader's throat, and suddenly, what do you know, the debt suddenly didn't matter all that much." Preston gave his whole spiel to the proprietors of the trading post, a kid in his late teens or early twenties and his mother.

I won't lie, I'm not entirely sure scaring that group away was the right call. On one hand, Wolfgang was a drug dealer threatening to ransack a woman's home and possibly kill her and her son. On the other hand, the guy wasn't just dealing drugs, he seemed to be running a pretty similar operation to Carla, selling whatever he could scavenge, and he hadn't forced the kid to take the drugs, there weren't any laws against it, and hell, we sold a bunch of drugs to Carla, so we weren't exactly in a place to judge.

The morality of it didn't bother me all that much, nobody got hurt, nobody died, that's the best way it could have ended. My problem came in the fact that if we gained a reputation for stiffing merchants on payment on legitimate transactions and threatening them with force to back off, then not a lot of caravans would want to make the trip up to Sanctuary. Still, we'd be dealing with Trudy on a regular basis, and establishing contacts along trading routes was more important than keeping one drug dealer happy.

"You do have that effect on people, I should know." His body must have been acclimatizing, he managed to open his eyes, though he was still squinting.

I laughed, "Well, it's easy when you're about sixty leagues above almost everyone else. You'll be finding that out soon enough. You're really lucky, they didn't have the biogel when my system was put in."

He looked on curiously as I stripped off my vest and shirt, then gasped in shock. They always did that, "The biogel keeps you from scarring up, which is good, because the surgery essentially has to tear your back down the middle and from there it peels the two folds back in a way that kind of looks like macabre butterfly wings if you're watching while it happens…"

He was shaking his head, "Okay, I really, really, don't want to know this right now. I mean, I'll want to know later, but maca… whatever butterfly wings is too far for me right now."

I pulled my shirt back on and let out a small laugh. "Fine, but do you want to know exactly what we shoved inside of you."

Making him blush was so easy, "Please don't put it that way, but sure."

I took him through each part of the system in chronological order.

The first real step towards functional cybernetics began on a night in 2062 when Robert House noticed that he was having trouble reading a report from my father. A visit to an optometrist revealed that his vision had slightly worsened and he'd need reading glasses. A normal person would have either followed the doctor's advice to get the glasses or ignored the suggestion out of pride.

Robert House wasn't a normal person, he responded by going straight from the optometrist's office to his personal laboratory and workshop, there he locked himself in for two straight weeks before emerging with the sketches of what would become the Optics Enhancer. The device was very similar to a cataract, replacing the lens with a small camera that fed into an augmented optical nerve.

The problem with it was the same problem that had prevented cybernetics in the past, the body rejected it. The idea might have withered on the vine, had it not been for the single greatest boon for technological development since the discovery of electricity. Palandine, a top secret object recovered by the ISA. From that came the inventions that became the most impressive gadgets in the Activity's arsenal. The most relevant right now was the precursor to biogel, this allowed the body to meld with the implant.

From the Optics Enhancer came a hundred different little spin off inventions. Telescopic sight, thermal vision, magnetic and x-ray vision, recording capabilities, and of course the cochlear enhancements. It went from minor corrections to being able to bring a legally blind person to twenty/twenty vision. The version implanted in Asher was the basic model, full vision correction, hearing ability correction, minor low-light resolution enhancement, and of course the connection to the broader system.

Naturally, the military took an interest in the technology, and one of the first things that they wanted was the Logic Co-Processor. The military wanted their officers upgraded, they wanted them to have photographic memories, onboard GPS navigation systems, and full tactical awareness through the optical and cochlear implants. The processor acted as a command and control center for the rest of the system. Once again, Asher got the basic model with enhanced memory retention, basic expansion of higher learning functions, navigation assistance, and sensory collation.

This led to the Probability Calculator, which did exactly what it said by taking the mathematical functions of the Logic Co-Processor and focusing them in the prefrontal lobe in order to optimize decision making. This in conjunction with the Optics Enhancer became the initial version of VATS, the Vault Assisted Targeting System. Named because of the contract RobCo took with Vault-Tec to supply every vault with pipboys.

The VATS idea launched the Reflex Booster, a complete overhaul of the human nervous system to give humans lightning fast reactions. This wasn't actually that difficult, it was really just an expansion on the technology used in the Optics Enhancer, the problem was that moving the body at this speed tended to cause injury. The solution to that was the NEMEAN system and the Monocyte Breeder, the NEMEAN system strengthened the body's skin to prevent tears, the Monocyte Breeder healed the minor muscle injuries as they occurred, and the bone problem was brute forced, they simply reinforced the entire skeleton with titanium. The heart and lungs were augmented and the veins reinforced to be able to handle the extra strain on the cardiovascular system. The final piece was the Nociception Regulator to deal with the pain this would obviously cause.

The final piece was the Hypertrophy Accelerator. This was created as almost an after thought on request of the military. They wanted something that would allow them to take an average civilian and get them into fighting trim within two weeks and keep them in shape without the need for regular physical training. The Hypertrophy Accelerator did this by enhancing the effects of average exercise and everyday movements and serving as an artificial protein generator. It was a simple system, you set the musculature level on a one through ten scale and the Hypertrophy Accelerator got you there and kept you there. One had to be somewhat gradual about it, going from a one to a ten all at once was likely to do permanent damage. Going from a ninety pound lightweight to two hundred pounds of pure muscle done correctly with the Accelerator would take about two months.

For the most part, these items were implanted piecemeal, and you wouldn't find them outside of the military or classes of people with incomes lower than six million a year. On average, a full rig of basic gear such as the one implanted in Asher ran the price of two million dollars. A high level rig like mine would run you about twenty million.

Through my entire spiel, Asher sat quietly and absorbed what I was saying. Once I finished, he asked, "So now what?"

That actually got me to grin.

"Now we get serious."

…...

Yeah guys, I know, another monologue chapter, or would it be an infodump chapter, but this was necessary, if there are any of you left from the beginning, you know that the very first chapter I ever wrote was a PipBoy infodump chapter and I've put one in every one of my Fallout stories since.

But I promise, like Madison said, next week, we get serious, and hopefully, the week after that is Lexington.

I say hopefully because, well, you remember how I said I was working on my transfer. Said transfer is almost done. Next Friday, I'll officially be a student living on campus at the University of Illinois Springfield. I'm really excited about this because my life is finally moving forward after two years of generals, but it's going to be my first time living on my own and I'm going to be really busy.

I'm going to try and keep up with the updates, but things are almost guaranteed to be spotty now. In other news, I know there was no new chapter of LBaL, after I put the first chapter out, I got some interest, and now I'm going to take the few chapters I have back and put some polish on them.

Just one more thing, and I know this is already a long Author's Note, but this needs to be said.

I'm a very political person by nature, it's what my degree is going to be in. I don't mention it a lot on FF because that's not what you guys are here for. But I've got a decently sized audience to hear this now, and I can't morally be silent about this.

The events of August 12, 2017 were, without any shadow of a doubt, disgusting. My heart goes out to Heather Heyer and any of those injured standing up to the hatred there. To any of those who participated in the so-called "Unite The Right" rally, you are disgusting and should be ashamed of yourselves. Words cannot express how far beneath my dog's shit you are. My grandfather was a tank instructor during World War 2, his brother was on Omaha Beach, to see Americans celebrating the cause that they fought to destroy, is disgraceful. To see these people celebrating the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of slavery, celebrating groups that murdered American soldiers and are responsible for two of the greatest atrocities in the history of the human race, is appalling.

So now I'll say what Donald Trump seemingly can't. I fully condemn white supremacists and Nazis, as well as the cause they represent in the strongest possible sense. If any of you guys, my readers, support these causes, if any of you are angered by what I have said, then kindly unfollow, unfavorite, or just stop reading my stories, because I don't want your support in any form.

Hatred does not represent America, Nazism does not represent America, we stand strong behind our convictions and our ideals of freedom and human decency no matter what, and we shall never let those who stand against these ideals corrupt our nation. We represent America.

Thank you, R&R people.