[Last Hope] 14 – Extremely Capable Intern

[Dr. Caroline Biggs - Head of BioScience PoV]

As I went about helping around the lab, I couldn't help but look out the corner of my eye to look at our new intern, Sarah, the mutant. She was the only 'deviant' so far in the Institute, but more were likely to come with how little 'new' blood got introduced within the Institute. While most did not like to think about it, there's only so long we can live down here before we start facing inbreeding problems and situations. 

Sarah had a brilliant mind for science, which she has shown with her already surprisingly in-depth knowledge of Computers, Biology, and Engineering for her age. From my brief conversations with Charloate, I learned that she was quite the mechanic, repairing most of their computers and Synths quickly, even the more troublesome Gen 1 Synths with faulty programming. She even did something with our own computers, improving them tremendously to the point where we haven't had a single bad batch since before she joined. She also had quite the novel ideas, such as making several large aquaponics farms to provide the institute with fresh fish and aquatic plants that had difficulty growing in the pillars.

The problem with her idea was that not only did we not have any fish, but the oceans were so irradiated that most of the aquatic life forms known before the Great War had likely undergone tremendous changes and mutations. While she was disappointed by my response at first, she later came back with a solution to the problem. We bred the fish until we had something that was safe to eat, contained a lot of meat, and was easy to feed.

While that idea did have some merit, I still politely put her down. 

She was eager to prove herself, and with each week that passed, she came up with new ideas, and I'd come to enjoy our talks. She was a breath of fresh air, with every day for the past thirty or so odd years feeling stale and repetitive with nothing new, but Sarah? She lifted the atmosphere around here, as morale seemed to rise with her mere presence. 

Something to take note of, was her request for several samples and seeds of flora found in the Wasteland. Things like Tatos, Bloodleafs, Mutfruit, Xander Root, and even several different Fungi. When asked about her request, she stated that she wanted to give a go at crossbreeding and making a small garden within her quarters. 

Wanting to see where this would go and what she would do, I personally granted her request, providing several of the samples and seeds she requested as we had them already in storage. 

...

[MC's POV]

Another month passed since I started my internship, and in that time, I gained two more levels. The skill points I was given were placed in Robotics and Biology, raising them to 25 and 45, respectively, and I chose two new perks.

[Flora Compendium] and [Journeyman Mechanic].

The first gave me a sort of mental library that stored all of the information of whatever Flora I discovered, down to their specific uses, traits, and so much more, while the second gave me the knowledge of how cars worked, from the engines down to ACs. Not the nuclear-powered cars, mind you, but the old gasoline ones.

Why would I possibly want such a weird perk? Money. Cars, parts, and scrap metal litter the wasteland, and if I ever need money in the future or a form of transportation, I can make myself a car or get into the business of selling them. Sure, oil and gas are rare commodities and expensive out here in the Wasteland, but it's not like there are no other forms of fuel or energy I could use instead. Fusion and fission-powered Nuclear cars existed for a reason, after all. Plus, from the perk, I got the basic knowledge of how engines worked, and if I ever needed to, I could build a makeshift generator using kinetic energy via a pedal or another system as fuel or even gas.

Outside of that, I've been...busy.

For one, I think I've started cracking the language of the programming in the Droid's head. I didn't understand anything, yet, but I was beginning to find what specific lines did in the droid's program as well as what some symbols were. Trying to learn a complex language through nothing but a program was insanely difficult, even after spending every night prodding at the program through the Terminal. It would likely still take me more than a few years till I had anything resembling an understanding of the language itself, not even the programming language.

I'd also somehow managed to get my own little garden going in the corner of my room by my desk, the rest of the droid's body now hidden under my bed. I had a few reasons for having a little garden for myself. For one, I wanted to grow a few things for my own consumption as well as a few little experiments I had in mind. For example, could I crossbreed two wildly different species of Flora and make some kind of super medicinal herb? Though such experiments would have to be done carefully, I did not want to accidently create some new variant of plant monsters, like the Spore Carriers down in what remains of one of the vaults down in Vegas.

I'd also been spending much of my free time writing on my Terminal, its storage vastly increased through my trial and error with its internals, and starting writing stories. Memories from my past life, stories such as the story of the Dragonborn, of Maud'Dib, of Predators and Prey, of so many wonderful things from my last life. 

The literature available in the Institute was...bland. Stale. Nothing new has been created in the nearly two centuries since the Great War, and I won't deny that I was getting stir crazy doing the same monotonous thing every day.

I'd also make a secure file that only I could access where I typed down my future plans and some noteworthy events I'd need to remember in the future, like the Gunners, Railroad, the eradication of the Minutmen, the Sole Survivor, etc, as well as events from the other games. I added as many security measures as possible to the file and hid it away in a folder labeled as 'Homework' that I flooded with a bunch of other dummy files that were also password protected.

I took my digital security very seriously, and with the protections I installed and wrote for my Terminal, it would take the best hacker in the world to hack my Terminal, it was even better than the 'Code Defender' the Institute liked to use, and my own defenses constantly adapted and changed just like it, making it near impossible to break through and leagues better than the Code Defender the Institute used.

Of course, this meant I was now able to access whatever I wanted in the archives, which I used to my full advantage, finding accurate blueprints for the older sections of the Institute that were full of rogue turrets and robots as well as a bunch of other data I could use, such as bluepritns for Boston's sewer system, electical grid, and so much more, including top secret research projects that were mainly forgotten over time that were being worked on before the bombs dropped.

Things like experimental data, logs, research notes, journals, and so much as well. It was a gold mine, and only I knew about all of it.