"All matter is made from atoms."
The dull, emotionless voice of the Lone Wanderer echoed up through the Engineering deck of Mothership Zeta from where he stood on the very bottom level, the catwalks and walkways overhead giving the vast compartment of the ship some small feeling of enclosure. His audience watched, attentive, as the most legendary figure of the Capital Wasteland gestured towards a simple chalkboard behind him, standing on small wheels that creaked and squeaked as the board was adjusted.
His countenance was inhuman, marred with the extensive cybernetic augmentation that had turned him from the bright-eyed saviour of the Wasteland to the cyborg he remained to this day, eyes replaced with coal black substitutes, part of his equally dark metallic skull exposed to the open air in order to make room for access ports and data-lines. Where skin and scalp had not been peeled off the skull to allow room for such additions, the hair was shorn as short as could be achieved to stop a wayward hair from growing through the implants.
To his audience, he was a hideous reminder of both what science could achieve in both the right hands, and the wrong ones.
Not even his mind had remained intact.
He was a dual-personality within a single body, his positronic brain not advanced enough to truly simulate a true human personality, along with the many other functions it was required to govern.
The personality currently loaded into the sections of his brain most readily accessible, was known as the Alpha.
A scientist, diplomat and engineer. It also had access to a truly profound amount of information and scientific literature stored in its internal databanks. It could not fight, however. At least, not with the same degree of efficaciousness its counterpart, the Omega, was capable of. But fighting was not required in this particular instance.
Just patience. Infinite patience
"Astounding. Stop the fucking press. Any pre-educated numbskull with one eye to read with knows what atoms are," Chris Haversam, the quarrelsome, albeit brilliant aerospace engineer commented in his gravel-on-glass harsh voice. He was sitting on one of the many varied and mismatched chairs they had managed to dig out of various corners of the formerly alien vessel and transport to Engineering for this improvised lecture. He was not pleased with the interruption.
They were currently on their way to Mars, to fulfil the Courier's promise to search for the remains of his former family, The Bright Brotherhood, who had been launched off the surface of planet Earth like oversized fireworks some years previously, and who's ghoulish remains presumably lay scattered across the interior of a small crater, somewhere on the red planet's surface.
He had been on-edge ever since the announcement and was in no mood for lectures.
At the back of the group, one Tanya Christoff, formerly known as the Ant-Agoniser, blushed scarlet and quickly diverted her face away from prying eyes. She did not, in fact, know what atoms were. Educated to a far lesser degree than the company she currently kept, her area of expertise lay in zoology and more specifically, entomology.
"We are beginning from base principles in order to make sure that everyone has the rough understanding required to make sense of what we are striving to achieve, and why," the Alpha reposted in a simulation of reasonable clarification. "Do you object to this approach?"
"Yes, I do. We have Projects piling up like dogshit and more jobs than we know what to do with. If we must participate in this farce, then this lecture needs to speed up."
With this he stood and marched across to the chalkboard, plucking the stick of chalk from the Wanderer's mechanical hand as he went. The Wanderer didn't object, just angled his head to the side like a cocker spaniel seeing something it didn't quite understand.
"As Robot-Einstein here so correctly pointed out," Chris hijacked the lecture out from under the cyborg without a backwards glance, "All matter is made from atoms."
He drew a crude circle on the chalkboard, surrounded by another wider circle, with another, even small circle situated on the outside ring. "This is a traditional Bohr model of the atom, for those of you who somehow contrived not to already know this. In which case, please get up now and take a long walk out of a short airlock hatch."
Tanya hung her head more deeply, trying to disappear into the surface of her chair.
"Atoms are miniscule structures composed of several smaller sub-atomic particles. Neutrons, protons and electrons."
He tapped the innermost circle with the stick of chalk, leaving a small dot of white dust in its centre. "Neutrons and protons are here, in the nucleus."
He tapped the outside ring and, more specifically the smaller circle. "Orbiting around the nucleus are the electrons. Electrons are proportionate to the number of protons, because protons have a positive charge and electrons have a negative charge, and the two attract one-another. I'll give one of you smoothskins a prize if you can tell me what charge the neutrons have."
At the very back of the assembled company, Tanya's hand shot up into the air eagerly.
"That was a joke, smoothskin," Chris barked, making use of the term only ever employed by ghouls to address humans, "Put your damn hand down!"
The hand retracted itself, hurriedly.
"There are several forces at play in this structure. The two most relevant to us are the strong and weak nuclear forces. When neutrons and protons are forced together, a weak nuclear force struggles to prevent such a joining. Once pushed to a certain extent, the weak force is overcome and the strong force takes over, bonding the subatomic particles together. This process is known as…."
He wrote on the chalkboard in quick, messy strokes that echoed through Engineering in a clamour of harsh clacking. "…Nuclear Fusion."
"When you split the same sub-atomic particles away from one another, overcoming the strong nuclear force so that the weak force will once more reassert itself and push them apart, this is known as Nuclear Fission!"
The words appeared on the chalkboard in a stream of drifting chalk dust.
"During both of these processes, energy is generated in the form of radiation. In conventional nuclear power generation, most of this radiation is thermal, and can be siphoned off to generate electricity. Some of it is released in waves on the electromagnetic spectrum and are categorised as Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays. And if given half a chance, they will fucking kill you!"
He cast around with a serious gaze to emphasise his point, before landing on the face of the one ghoul present. "Except you, Murphy. They'll just turn you feral if you absorb too much," he amended his statement with a nod towards their resident Chemist. His tone was markedly less hostile than it had been during the rest of the lecture. Chris had always had an affinity for ghouls. After all, he had gone through a delusional phase of believing that he was one of the radiation-effected humans who looked like the walking dead.
"Ohh, thanks a bundle," the equally surly Murphy replied. "If you smoothskins try and make me do radiation work without a protective suit, I'll dose you all in your sleep. I know how to make Chems that'll make your insides look like my outsides. And your outsides look like his face," he added, pointing towards the Wanderer. The Wanderer didn't reply.
Elliott Tercorien, the resident medical officer abord the Zeta, edged tentatively away from the ghoul in the direction of his significant other, Somah, who was seated with the rest of the engineers. Emily Ortal, the most accomplished scientist and programmer from the City State of New Vegas, performed a similar movement on the ghouls opposite side. She found herself sitting next to a potted plant, staring down at it in utter confusion.
Slowly, the small sprouting tree turned its bark encrusted face up towards her and regarded its new seating companion through disturbingly fleshy eyes.
"Hey there," the tree greeted her in a miniscule voice, "My names Harold."
Emily turned her attention back to the lecture, away from the talking plant, and spent a long moment pondering her recent life choices. She didn't trust herself to speak.
Murphy used the resulting extra space to turn Chris's unoccupied seat around to face him and prop his legs up relaxedly, enjoying the solitude. He settled back with the self-satisfied air of superiority possessed by most ghouls who had lived long enough to remember the Great War that had made them.
"Continuing on!" Chris brought their attention back onto himself with his harsh voice. He pointed towards a haphazardly strewn pile of chunky devices that had been dumped against the wall, behind and slightly to the side of the chalkboard, in clear sight of the chairs.
"The devices you see stacked up against that wall over there are Vending Machines from the laboratories of a place called Big Mountain. A pre-war research facility run by an organisation known as the Think Tank. That floating monstrosity behind you all is the representative from their labs."
They all turned as one to regard the levitating jam-jar filled with preservative fluid, within which clearly floated the disembodies brain belonging to one of the greatest scientists humanity had ever produced. It's three screens, one for her mouth and two for her eyes, waved lazily to simulate something approaching human expression. Her audio emitters crackled slightly as she responded to the sudden attention.
"Ohh…"
The single syllable, though somewhat laced with static, positively oozed repressed perversion. It sounded like the voice of that one librarian you used to fantasise about, dressed in a tweed skirt and a professional blouse, with the glasses attached to the beaded strap that kept them hanging across her ample chest. She had the kind of voice that made a man think that she would not object to being pushed into a dark corner of the library and summarily ravished.
Extensively.
"… My apologies, my mind was… indulging itself, elsewhere. My name is Doctor Dala, First Head Chief Researcher of Mineralogy and Medical Sciences at Big Mountain. I hope our collaboration will be…"
She let out a sound that might have been a considering grunt, but from her sounded distressingly like a moan.
"… fruitful."
Stiggs and Scott, the two robotics engineers present, whose tastes in the sexual line ran slightly more metallic than most sane humans would traditionally indulge in, bumped fists together in silent satisfaction. Score one for the robosexuals.
"Due to her extensive experience in numerous fields of scientific enquiry, and against my better judgement," the Wanderer cut in for the first time, his coal black eyes encased in metal sockets with the eyelids and surrounding skin long since stripped away, focused on Dala dispassionately from his spot to the side of Haversam, "I am appointing her the Head of the Science Department of our R&D labs aboard the Zeta. Under close supervision, of course."
"Of course," Dala replied in her provocative voice, "I am not averse to being… supervised by another. You will supervise me, with your strong robotic arms, intertwined with supple organic matter. And I will supervise the rest of these proud teddy bears. Don't worry," she added to the horrified faces of the R&D team who didn't realise up until this point in their lives that the word 'supervise' could be made to sound… quite like that.
"I'm sure you will enjoy being supervised as much as I hope to," she all but purred in their direction.
There was a long, awkward silence punctuated by the faint rustling of trousers being surreptitiously adjusted.
Then Chris Haversam spoke up:
"All those in favour of electing a new Head Scientist, raise your hands and say 'Aye'."
A forest of hands belonging to almost every single member of the audience shot up into the air, those of both Stiggs the former Enclave mechanic, and Scott Wollinski the former Mechanist, being most conspicuous in their absence. "Aye."
"I nominate Weston Lesko for the position," the Wanderer stated in quick succession.
"All those in favour?" Chris asked.
"AYE!"
The combined shout was just loud enough to drown out the lone voices of Scott and Stiggs, furiously crying out, "Nay!"
"Motion passed," Chris stated definitively.
"My word," Weston Lesko said in his nasal voice as he adjusted his glasses and stared around at those responsible for his abrupt elevation to a position of responsibly, "What luck. And what surprising good fortune. I am most honoured by your sudden and unexpected trust in me. I will do my best to lead us to greater heights of scientific enquiry!"
"Yes, yes!" Chris dismissed the D.C. based egghead with a wave of his hand, brushing his fraying combover that he had dislodged in his rush to salvage the situation before it became unmanageable. That had been a close call.
"Getting back to the subject at hand. These Vending Machines work by breaking down matter into its individual subatomic particles and then reforming them into pre-programmed blueprints."
Chris walked over and tipped one of the Vending Machines over so they could see its front end, and the various knobs and dials used to operate it, as well as the intake slot for the coins themselves that served as the source of matter to recombine.
"It does not make a difference what type of matter goes in, or what matter you wish to pull out. You could put in a piece of chalk and get a chunk of cheese out. As long as the sum of matter put in does not exceed the sum of matter you hope to output, the conversion will work."
Emily Ortal regained her voice long enough to protest the assertion, "That's absurd! The amount of energy needed to break matter down to its individual subatomic particles and reform them into comprehensible atomic structures would be ludicrous."
Many of the assembled scientists nodded along with her protests, already having known enough about the underlying science to see the inherent obstacles in what Haversam was proposing.
"Not to mention the problem of how to keep them isolated from each other and stop them from bonding back together again before the process is complete. And the radiation output would be lethal at close quarters!"
Chris himself was nodding his own balding head, impatient for her to finish. Once she had, he continued.
"The radiation is precisely why it does work, Miss Ortal. The generated radiation and heat is siphoned off and converted into electricity. This electricity is then used to power the process. Only enough power to jumpstart the initial division is required from outside the machine. The rest is self-sufficient. And I am sure you all see the possible applications for the underlying technology."
There was a long silence, broken only by the imperceptible sound of ten keen scientific minds, and one tree, contemplating the possibilities. The Wanderer glanced sideways at Chris Haversam during this lull and addressed the man in a low voice, "I am surprised you knew enough to conduct this lecture at such short notice. You were neither privy to the work at Big Mountain nor present in the Capital Wasteland to know of the related work with the G.E.C.K. When did you become familiar with it?"
"Last night," Chris admitted, with a self-satisfied smirk, "The Courier told Yes Man to send a report around to all the new scientific staff, detailing the work at Big Mountain."
"And you read through all of it last night?"
"Skimmed it, more like."
The Wanderer nodded slowly, "Then you will be appointed the new Head of Engineering. Congratulations."
"Unlimited spare parts," Scott Wollinski finally broke the silence among the rest of the scientific and engineering staff, dazed at the prospect. He had lived his entire life scavenging for parts. The prospect of having a source of any manner of mechanical component he might care to want, in precise dimensions calculated right down to the individual atom, made his head spin.
"An all-purpose machining tool," Stiggs added, knowing that when you could create anything from anything else, it made a large workshop full of tools and equipment superfluous. If he needed a screwdriver he could shove a block of metal into one of these Matter Recombinators, use it for however long he happened to need it, then shove it back through the machine to be reused.
"Unlimited, renewable power," Emily Ortal whispered, which drew everyone up short. Then tens sets of eyes widened as they realised.
With a tool that could take any form of matter, break it down, and then use the resulting power to fuel the process of atomic fusion, all you needed to do was cut out the last step and you had batteries full to bursting with electricity.
And you didn't need traditionally fissionable or fusible materials like Uranium, Plutonium or Caesium. All matter was fundamentally energy.
You could do it with an unremarkable lump of rock or a waste-pipe full of human faecal matter. And it would work. Power and resources limited only to how much raw matter they could gather. And that was no limitation at all.
"And all we have to do is turn those," Chris Haversam pointed at the Vending Machines, "Into an all-purpose device capable of performing the functions that we need it to."
The Wanderer stepped forward and deftly flipped the chalkboard on its revolving axis, displaying to all assembled the detailed schematics of the Vending Machine internals he had painstakingly copied out onto the chalkboards surface. The clear white chalk lines seemed to shine from within with the hopeful light of infinite possibility and promise.
"So," he asked calmly once the audience was properly attentive, "shall we begin?"