Neither Amy nor Jack had wanted to go back into town with Drew, which was rather irritating. He wasn’t going back there for the fun of it, he was going because they hadn’t yet moved out. They still had a lot of stuff back at the old house including clothes, equipment, and furniture. He didn’t want to leave any of it and with Leanne parked outside having just brought them back from the hospital up north, he had thought it a perfect opportunity to move the bulk of it.

While convincing Amy ended up being a waste of breath, Jack eventually relented. With a goodbye, they left her alone with the two Gutsies and the seemingly dead Miss Nanny and climbed back into the truck, Jack jumping in the back.

“Ready?” Leanne asked.

“Yeah,” Drew said.

“So, how much are we moving?” she asked as she started the ignition and pulled out of the parking lot onto the highway.

“A lot,” Drew answered. “Might need to use your services again pretty soon.”

“I know you’re good for the caps,” she said. “And as I said before; it’s thanks to you I’ve been able to keep these things running.”

“I know how much they’re needed,” Drew said. “The region depends on them as much as they depend on the caravans.”

“That’s right, and you need them more than most right now. It would have been impossible to move all your stuff without a truck,” Leanne said.

“That much is certain,” Drew agreed.

It took them an hour or so to get back to Colville, and just about as long for them to pack a good chunk of their stuff into the truck, which Leanne had parked in the street outside their place for ease of access. From there, they made their way back to the plant where they unloaded.

With Drew handing over the due caps to Leanne, she headed off back to town while Drew and Jack made their way back inside, meeting up with Amy. From there, they headed to the nurse’s office where they had left the Nanny robot.

“So, what do you think is wrong with it?” Jack asked after Drew had taken a look at the medical robot.

“Programmers, that’s what’s wrong with her.”

Jack frowned. “Programmers? What does that mean?”

“It means that someone was a little overzealous. She couldn’t leave the hospital and when she tried, she shut down.”

“Can we reboot her?”

“Probably. I’m going to have to take a look at her programming, though, otherwise she might just switch herself right back off again.”

After taking off her back panel, Drew took the jack from his Pipboy and inserted it into the slot. After going through the code, Drew shook his head with a sigh.

“What’s wrong?” Amy asked from where she sat on the edge of a hospital bed.

“They had a kill switch for if she tried to leave the hospital.”

“So it’s dead?” Jack asked.

“No, just switched off. I don’t understand why they did it? Unless they were worried she would wander off?”

“Probably,” Amy said with a shrug. “I bet these things cost a lot of caps.”

“Dollars,” Drew corrected. “They used to use dollars. Like the NCR.”

“Whatever,” Amy said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Can you fix it?”

“Yeah, I can fix it. It won’t take long either.”

“If it won’t take long then why didn’t you fix it back at the hospital?” Amy asked.

Jack answered. “Because you have to take the back panel off.”

“Actually, you don’t,” Drew corrected. “It’s just a helluva lot easier to get it in the slot if you do. Besides, I didn’t realize someone would actually put a kill switch in a Nanny. If I did, I would have tried to fix it there in the hospital. It’s not like it’s an Assaultron or something like that. It’s a freaking Miss Nanny. The thing is harmless.”

“The thing has a buzz saw,” Amy pointed out. “Hardly harmless.”

“It’s standard,” Drew said as he checked that he had properly removed the offending code segment. He needed to make sure that there were no references to it anywhere, otherwise it would throw up errors and possibly cause issues.

“A buzz saw being standard is stupid,” Amy continued. “Who needs a robot with a buzz saw? What’s it doing? Hacking off limbs?”

“Possibly,” Drew said. “Whatever the reason, those at General Atomics thought a buzz saw should be standard equipment on all of their Mister and Miss line of robots.”

“I know it’s standard. I could guess that much considering they all have one,” Amy said. “I was just wondering why?”

Drew looked at her before he shrugged. “No idea. You would have to have asked the ones that designed it. Not important now.”

“Yeah, I suppose not.”

“What is important is that I think I’ve sorted it. I ran the code, got no errors.”

“None?”

“Well, a few. Actually, there’s a lot of errors, but not from my edits. I might go back in and fix the corrupted fragments and recompile.”

Jack groaned. “How long will that take?”

“A few hours,” Drew told them. “While I work on this, do you think that you and Amy could start on plans to make a water purifier? We have parts that should work from the hospital.”

Jack frowned. “I thought we were selling the parts to the guys at the Colville purifier?”

“We are, but we have plenty of spares.”

“So we’re keeping some parts for ourselves?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. I’m not selling all of it. Besides, there are plenty of spares here we can use.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jack said. “This place should have a boiler, so we can use that as a base to build a new system.”

“I’ll help him,” Amy said.

“Excellent,” Drew said with a sniff. “The water here isn’t too irradiated, but I’d prefer if we could bring that as close to zero as possible.”

“Agreed,” Jack said.

The two of them left the room while Drew continued to go through the code. There had been clear corruption and degradation over the years, though that was to be expected. Thankfully, it wasn’t that bad. He had seen a lot worse. In fact, his former Assaultron companion, Izzy, had been near inoperable when he had found her. Her code had almost been unsalvageable. But after a few weeks, and a lot of improvements even over the base code, he’d made a companion that would be with him for years. She had even been there when he had first met Jack, Amy, and, of course, Gemma, the woman that would become his love. Then his love lost to the super mutants.

Drew worked well into the night. He still hadn’t quite caught up with his sleep debt from before and knew that a crash day was coming; a day when he would feel absolutely exhausted and wouldn’t be able to do much of anything. Still, he felt that he couldn’t go to bed until he was done.

Finally, as the time on his Pipboy changed from 3:59 to 4:00 in the morning, he finished. He briefly considered activating her, but instead, he turned off the light and climbed onto the hospital bed in the corner and went to sleep.

When he awoke, it was still dark, though considering the room had no windows there was no opportunity for natural light to get into the room anyway.

Drew checked the time on his Pipboy to find that it was half-one in the afternoon.

He climbed off the small bed, yawned, then headed out of the room making his way along the hallway to the bathrooms where he took a piss and a shit. He flushed the toilet using a bucket and water from the sink before he washed his hands and headed down into the basement where he found Jack and Amy.

“Finally decided to get up?” Amy asked with a smirk.

“Sorry, I was up till four fixing Suzy’s corrupted code.”

“Started her up yet?”

“Not yet. Thought I’d wait. How are you two doing down here?”

Amy smiled. “Jack had an idea earlier.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jack said, smiling proudly. “I remembered how Handy units had water condensers for producing purified water, so I checked to see if there were any parts laying around and sure enough there were. This place has a lot of condensers and purifiers in stock.”

“Well shit,” Drew said grinning. “I never thought of that. Completely slipped my mind. Most Handies out there have lost their condensers over the years, either from rust or by simply falling off.”

“Well with your help we can probably jury rig a few into the system.”

Drew nodded. “That sounds like a solid plan. I also want to take a look at the ovens in there, see if I can fix any up. First, though, I want to restart Suzy. If there’s one thing we need, it’s a medic. Especially considering how much work I plan on doing here.”

“You should do that now,” Jack said. “We’re almost done for the time being. We’ll be up shortly.”

Amy agreed. “Yeah, getting a medic sooner rather than later is a good idea. Earlier, Jack almost had an accident, one that definitely would have needed some medical attention.”

“What happened?” Drew asked.

“It was nothing,” Jack said, glaring at Amy.

Drew decided not to push it and instead headed off back towards the nurse’s office. First, though, he stopped by the cafeteria where they had dropped off some of their supplies and grabbed a mutfruit from the semi-functional refrigerator.

Back in the nurse’s office, Drew squatted down next to Suzy and switched her on, putting her back panel on while she booted up.

Stepping back, he ate the mutfruit while he waited. Finally, after a nervous few minutes, her irises began to move and her arms began to flex.

“What ’as ’appened?” she asked as her thruster ignited and she floated into the air. “Where am I?”

Drew cleared his throat and took a step forward. “What do you remember?”

All three of its eyes focused on him. “I remember you,” she said, nodding her front eye in his direction. “We were in ze ’ospital.”

“That’s right,” Drew said with a nod.

“I do not know what ’appened after zhat.”

“You don’t remember wanting to leave?”

“I ’ave wanted to leave for many years but I was unable. Are you telling me zhat you managed it? What ’appened? We were in ze foyer last I remember. Did you switch me off and carry me out? That is very rude.”

“No, I didn’t shut you down.”

“Zhen ’ow?”

It was clear that she didn’t remember what had happened. She did shut down rather suddenly meaning her last memories were likely either not saved or had been corrupted. He realized that he should have checked her memory for fragmentation before switching her back on.

“It wasn’t easy,” Drew told her. “Unfortunately, you had a kill switch in your programming that shut you down when you attempted it.”

“I see.”

“I fixed it as well as some corrupted code.”

“I zhank you,” she said. “You are too kind.”

He smiled. “Think nothing of it. We could do with a nurse around here.”

“And I would be ’appy to ’elp.”

“That’s great. Today and probably over the next few days we’re going to be working on getting a purification system installed for the water.”

“Clean drinking water is a necessity for a ’ealthy lifestyle. I would like to ’elp?”

“I’m sure we can find something for you to do,” Drew said. “Come on, let’s get to the basement. That’s where the others are.”

“Actually,” Jack said as he stepped through the door. “We’re not. I was thinking of putting some of the condensers into the cafeteria first. There’s those old water coolers in there and I think I could rig them to collect atmospheric moisture and output purified water. Then we’ll have some clean drinking water available while we work on the main system.”

Drew patted him on the shoulder. “Great thinking.”

“Thanks.”

“My idea, actually,” Amy said as she peeked her head inside.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Okay, Amy thought of it. But I’m the one who knows how to rig it up and I was the one who thought about the purifiers in the first place.”

“Good work, both of you,” Drew said with a smirk.

The three of them, plus Suzy, headed out of the nurse’s office, Jack leading them to where the moisture condensers were stored. Together, they took seven of the devices to the cafeteria where they assisted Jack in installing them into the water coolers after cleaning and sterilizing them.

It took a good few hours, but finally, as it turned half-six in the evening, they finished. Though that didn’t mean they could get a clean glass of water. It would still take some time for the moisture to be captured, condensed, filtered and cleansed, which meant it still wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow. They still had some clean water in the form of bottles, but that was finite and they had less than a week left until they had drunk it all. By then, if everything went well, it wouldn’t be much of an issue as they would have plenty of cleansed water from the coolers, and hopefully, they would be halfway to getting clean water flowing out of the faucets.

Bringing the old Robco plant back online had been a dream of his for a while, but the sheer amount of work it would take had always stopped him. For the longest time, he hadn’t even bothered to check the place out, only knowing of its existence from old maps.

Still, they had a lot of work ahead of them, an unfathomable amount, but clean water would be a solid first step. For one thing, it would mean they could actually live there long-term, especially now that they had a medic.

Ever since Paulson, Drew had been living from day to day. Now, he felt like he had an actual goal in his life, something to work towards, something to look forward to.

There was an unfortunate downside, a metaphorical glowing cloud on the horizon that threatened a radiation storm, and that came in the form of the green deathclaws. Thankfully he hadn’t heard of anyone being killed by one of them, though that was certain to change.

He forced that last thought out of his head. He couldn’t afford distractions, not before he had brought the place online. First, though, they needed clean running water, then a means of reliably cooking food. Once the place had been made truly habitable, then he would truly bring the plant back online. He would build robots that would help keep everyone in the region safe. Safe from deathclaws, Greenclaws, raiders, super mutants, and whatever else the world could possibly throw at them.

It was his vow.