Dorothy was kind enough to show where House could get his text books for the coming year, it seems her tour guide training at the university was designed to end at the college store. There House could get his back to school supplies, at least the crucial necessities for semester. Outside of 10 text books, lab packages, and a backpack to carry it all, House got nothing else. Putting out nearly $3,000 dollars hurt Robert in a way no words could for the teenager who had spent an entire year scraping by to survive. Anything else like a calculator, notebooks, and pens, House planned to buy that all in Monsignor Plaza, the large mall had far more affordable prices than what CIT cut-throat thieves claimed to be necessary for the semester.
"Thank you Dorothy for the help, you have been very…" The first words that House thought were useful, but such words would House instantly knew to be inhuman if not at best rude. It took a nano-second for House's charms to activate, but as he stared down on the country girl from out west, wearing simple glasses that frame her bright, attentive eyes, House settled on the simplest word he could think of. "...Helpful."
"If you need anything else, please don't be afraid to ask me." The 2nd year college student working in administration, fidgetted, straightening out her already straight-hemmed skirt. House's perception picked it up as a sign of nervousness and only looking upon her face did House see the reason why. Dorothy Hayes was not comfortable when it came to smiling, it seemed foreign for her, but when she did it brightened her facial features. The lights in her eyes were like fireworks that helped soften her features, radiating a warm, genuine happiness that felt quietly reassuring, and fleeting as her next words were a warning which her face showed clearly. "If you are planning to use the labs, I recommend waiting for school year to start, the current facility member in charge of it is known to be zealous in who gets access."
Her mentioning of an Edgar was noted and cataloged for later. As the two separated, House went about spending the remainder of the summer, preparing for the semester and all others to follow. His full tour with Dorothy had enabled Robert to understand where to focus his hours for the next three weeks leading up to the school year. The situation was extreme as two new quests were marked upon his system, alerting House to the important issue before him.
Main Quest Assigned— Trial of Ten
"Genius is potential. Survival is proof."
The Commonwealth Institute of Technology does not forgive excess.
Ten classes. Five days a week. Thirteen-hour days spent in lecture or labs. From dawn lectures to night laboratories, your first semester will test not your intelligence, but also your endurance, precision, ability and luck to dominate systems designed to break lesser minds. This is not merely education. This is filtration. And you have decided to increase the risk for larger advancement.
OBJECTIVE
Survive and complete your first semester at CIT.
Attend and pass all ten courses you have registered for.
Maintain performance under sustained academic pressure
Manage labs, lectures, exams, projects, and social expectations without collapse
DAILY STRUCTURE (ACTIVE UNTIL SEMESTER END)Schedule:
Monday–Friday
07:00–20:00
3–4 classes per day, rotating lectures, labs, and seminars
Status Effects (Passive):
SUCCESS CONDITIONS (BRANCHED OUTCOMES)
OPTIMAL SUCCESS — Apex Scholar
Condition:
Finish the semester as Top Student in all ten classes
REWARDS:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +3,000 XP
REPUTATION:
Major gain of reputation with the Commonwealth Institute of Technology
Faculty begin advocating on your behalf without prompting, students know you as future expert leading to a brighter future, your status within CIT will become legendary.
BONUSES:
Automatic priority access to advanced labs next semester
Professors offer independent research opportunities
Administrative scrutiny decreases (they stop questioning your workload)
FLAG UNLOCKED:
"Institutional Asset" — CIT begins quietly protecting your interests
"Dean's notice" — The great and infamous Dean of the CIT will be alerted to your success and know you as a rising star within his university.
STANDARD SUCCESS — CIT's Favor
Condition:
Earn A-grade results in all ten classes
REWARDS:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +1,500 XP
REPUTATION:
Reputation increase with Commonwealth Institute of Technology
BONUSES:
Increased likelihood of recommendation letters
Early access to select elective courses
Reduced resistance when requesting lab time or exceptions
MINIMUM SUCCESS — Survivor
Condition:
Pass all ten classes, regardless of grade
REWARDS:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +750 XP
REPUTATION:
Minor Reputation boost with Commonwealth Institute of Technology
BONUSES:
Scholarship retained
Enrollment permitted next semester
Administrative oversight increases
FAILURE CONDITIONS
WARNING — SCHOLARSHIP AT RISK
Dropping or Failing more than 3 classes will result in:
Immediate Scholarship Review
Loss of administrative support
Reduced access to labs and research opportunities
Being passed over for assistance, recommendations, or special consideration next semester
Catastrophic Failure:
Scholarship revoked
Forced reduction in course load
Reputation damage with faculty and administration
STATUS: ACTIVE
TIME LIMIT: End of First Semester
DIFFICULTY: EXTREME
Side Quest Assigned — Extra-Curricular Optimization
"Influence isn't assigned. It's accumulated."
The Commonwealth Institute of Technology runs on more than lectures and labs.
Beneath the syllabus lies a secondary ecosystem—clubs, societies, and informal power structures that shape reputation, access, build contacts and future leverage.
You do not have time for chaos. You must spend time investing in future growth and there is no better place for that than attending one or more clubs.
OBJECTIVE
Integrate into CIT's after-class club ecosystem without compromising academic performance.
Join up to as many college-recognized clubs as you can maintain
Maintain active participation (attendance, contribution, leadership, or results)
Leverage club presence to build social capital, bonds of friendship, and future contacts in power players that will influence the upper echelons of American society and science
CONSTRAINTS
Maximus Clubs Activities, the more you have the more rewards granted.
(Time segmentation prevents effective participation beyond this limit.)
Clubs attended casually provide reduced returns
Clubs actively managed or meaningfully contributed to provide enhanced rewards
PARTICIPATION TIERS & REWARDS
Member — Active Participation
Condition:
Regular attendance
Completion of assigned tasks
Visible engagement
Rewards per Club:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +100 XPREPUTATION:
Minor reputation gain among club members, translating to reputation gathered for an overarching sector of American society (Example: Reputation earned among young libertarian club influences your position when joining the larger Libertarian party.)
Minor social recognition among peers
Contributor — Operational Value
Condition:
Solving problems, and standing out positively among your peers.
Improving systems, logistics, or outcomes your clubs deal with
Providing technical or organizational expertise
Rewards per Club:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +200 XP
REPUTATION:
Moderate reputation gain among club members, translating to reputation gathered for an overarching sector of American society
Club leadership begins deferring to your judgment
Coordinator — Strategic Influence
Condition:
Managing club resources, schedules, or projects
Acting as a stabilizing or optimizing force
Quietly improving efficiency without seeking attention
Rewards per Club:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +300 XP
REPUTATION:
Large reputation gain among club members, translating to reputation gathered for an overarching sector of American society Faculty advisors take notice of your involvement and help guide you towards important contacts and possible career opportunities.
Architect — Institutional Asset
Condition:
Restructuring or significantly upgrading a club
Introducing systems that persist beyond your involvement
Raising the club's prestige, output, or funding prospects
Rewards per Club:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +500 XP
REPUTATION:
Major reputation gain among club members, translating to reputation gathered for an overarching sector of American society
Larger portions of reputation bonuses persist even into the overarching sector of American Society after club departure. Hidden Quests and possible paths for pre-existing quests opened.
CUMULATIVE BONUSES
Joining 1 Club:
+5% bonus to peer social interactions
Joining 2 Clubs:
+10% bonus to faculty recognition in non-class settings
Joining 3 or more Clubs:
+15% reputation gain from all non-academic interactions at CIT
Administration begins viewing you as a "well-rounded asset"
FAILURE CONDITIONS
Overcommitting on clubs causes:
Diminishing returns
Attendance penalties
Reputation stagnation or loss
Neglecting club responsibilities:
XP rewards reduced
Reputation bonuses revoked
Both quests had rewards worthy of attention, yet the warnings of overcommitting made it clear to House that the Institute did not imagine he would succeed with his insane schedule alone. He planned to prove them wrong, not for the validation or the simple hope of getting them to like him, but for the system rewards and the university Degrees that would open doors to a future that was running out of time. The Standard Success on the main quest was enough to get him to level up, the Optimal success would not only push him into level 9, but also offer the road of least resistance in CIT oversight while maximizing all benefits the university offered. House had three weeks to prepare, and he had no plans to waste the most precious resources, time.
Robert's mornings were taken over by the repair counter that smelled faintly of ozone, solder flux, and stale coffee. Gadget Galaxy occupied a narrow but deep storefront on the third level of Monsignor Plaza, its windows filled with demonstration models that flickered endlessly through promotional loops: smiling families gathered around glowing television screens, radios promising connection to a world that felt increasingly distant, terminals advertising productivity that fewer and fewer people believed in. Inside, the reality was less curated. Stacks of malfunctioning devices formed a kind of urban sediment behind the counter radios with burnt capacitors, televisions whose color channels bled into one another, terminals that booted only halfway before freezing into uselessness. It was this backlog that Robert House dismantled with quiet efficiency.
Each device took minutes where it once took hours. House moved with a precision that bordered on clinical, sleeves rolled just enough to avoid catching fabric on exposed circuitry, fingers steady as he replaced components that should not have failed for another decade. He did not merely fix what was broken; he corrected what had been designed poorly to begin with. Weak solder joints were reinforced. Heat sinks were repositioned. Power regulators were adjusted to compensate for grid instability that manufacturers pretended did not exist. By the time he was done, the devices were not only functional they were better than new. Customers noticed. Word spread. Refund requests slowed, then stopped entirely. People came in frustrated and left confused, clutching repaired electronics that worked flawlessly, uncertain how to reconcile their expectations of decline with what they had just experienced.
The experience accumulated quietly. 5 experience points per device, though House did not consciously track them anymore as he slowly edged closer to level 9, the experience threshold was one of the down sides of his system, without the Hintbook it would have been impossible for him to reach level 3, not without becoming a serial killer, an act that disgusted the House to his core. Robert was currently happy with his current rate of progression, a subtle sharpening of already honed instincts, a sense that the system itself acknowledged the efficiency with which he operates. And luckily for him, his workload did not seem to end, as more and more items came back to Gadget Galaxy for repair, even items not sold by the store.
Televisions were the most common of the pre-war models strained by constant use as families tried to distract themselves from rising fuel prices and rolling blackouts. Radios came next, their vacuum tubes fragile, their tuning assemblies misaligned by careless hands or cheap materials. Then there came terminal repairs, House treated them with particular care, as hacking into these bulky devices offered an additional 5 experience, something that his high intelligence, computer skill, and science skill nerfed greatly. House personally believed it was due to the operating system, for this defunct form of OS would be replaced with the magnificent UOS that Robco Industries, AKA, House, would create. Currently Fallout America had a joke for early computerization, not a funny haha joke, but a depressingly sad one since Robert remembered a universe that had sleek alienware and other master devices that outcompeted the terminals that House worked on. Computerization was stagnate, the limits and processing power of these devices were obsolete, and worse the amount of available resources used to create them were ruinous in a society doomed to kill itself over limited resources. Even now, he could see the inefficiencies baked into their architectures, the limitations imposed by outdated programming languages and hardware compromises that his old universe had overcome. Each terminal he repaired filled him with joy for the xp, but horror at how this civilization had stagnated. This was the first issue he would fix, for after working the morning at Gadget Galaxy, House went directly to the labs of CIT.
"The school year has not started yet, newbie, you're not even considered a first year. I don't think I can let you into the labs." The tone of Edgar Bartholomew Crowley the third spoke no argument as he looked down upon House with a sense of authority and hierarchy that no third year at CIT should realistically possess. Edgar barely passed as a facility member, as he was just a student trusted with managing a modicum of responsibility and immediately it went straight to his head. Crowley was large and soft-bodied, his extreme authority compensating for a lack of physical presence. His movements were abrupt and officious, as though every step needed to justify its own necessity. And he was the first hurdle in the way of House's progress, Edgar smiled thinly, his pale complexion coming off more alien than humanizing as the facility member cited procedure with no end. House did not have time nor the mental energy to spend arguing with a man who spent too much time lecturing others and simply dropped a single stack of bills equaling $1000 dollars upon the counter.
"Call this extra preparation for the coming semester. I need that given my current schedu-" Before House could finish, the rotund man opened his mouth gaping at House like he was a zoo animal, the recognition in his eyes outweighed his sight of the money.
"Now I recognize you, you're the newbie that Professor Gorllewin is talking about! You okay up there buddy, that head working right, cause no one on earth plans to run 10 courses in a single semester expecting to pass… also this is bribery I can get you expelled for this." Edgar pocketed the stack of cash as if that would be the end of the conversation, but House utilized the full might of his 300 in barter and 10 in charisma to wiggle himself into his ideal position.
"Oh you know me, and luckily for you Mr. Crowley I too know you as well. Professor Gorllewin had a positive image about you, and mentioned how someone like you Mr. Crowley could aid the newer students with priority lab time. That payment is the first of what could be many more, to help prepare you for the upcoming year." Like honey, the lies came out of House with something that Edgar found sweeter than the groveling of younger students, respect and recognition… and a further, larger bribe.
"Professor Gorllewin truly thinks that well of me." Edgar pocketed the $4,000 that Robert placed upon the counter for the lab, nodding and singing the man's reputation and praises until Crowley was beaming like a lighthouse, almost welcoming Robert into the Labs personally. A fixed deal was negotiated, one where House would pay $5,000 a week leading up to semester, as a head start for a private unused lab. A portion of the money that House "donated" was used to replace any important resources that House utilized in his "preparation" for the coming semester. This only covered the most basic resources from the Lab's store rooms that Edgar had access to, anything like fuel and coal would cost more than the bribe that was already paid for. Giving a mental list for Edgar, only a handful of the items House needed was on the more expensive side, requiring a further inconvenience for House's stash of illegal Reno earnings. Outside of needing to pay for his room and board, his collection of cash spent on lab early equipment, time and research material was a good way to spend his illegal earnings without drawing too much attention… assuming Edgar could keep his mouth shut and his records up to date. "You can use Lab room 8, the rest are being operated by Dean Oz's handpicked students. I'll put it down that you're there cleaning the lab for extra credit or something. Just don't cause too much trouble and no one will come to investigate."
House gave Edgar a reassuring nod, Robert did not know if there was a secret Charisma test involved because the next moment the system alerted him, displaying Edgar's status affinity had gone up, displaying a friendly status between the two of them. Ignoring the companion affinity of Edgar entirely, House walked towards the Lab room 8, more focused upon the work. For whatever extra pay that Edgar had squeezed out of House, the work he would do within the week would make the loss of money meager compared to the items House would build and profit from in the future. For the technological leaps that House was about to undertake would prove extraordinarily profitable. Just as Robert began making his way to the lab room, using his pass on the card reader to the lab room, a system alert came to him.
SIDE QUEST ASSIGNED — Technological Ascendancy Cycle
"Innovation isn't complete until the world depends on it."
The Commonwealth Institute of Technology produces ideas by the thousands.
Very few survive contact with reality.
You are not here to invent curiosities.
You are here to build systems—repeatable, scalable, and dominant.
Each technological breakthrough follows a familiar path:
Conception → Creation → Control.
The system recognizes and rewards mastery at every stage.
This quest may be undertaken repeatedly. Each completion strengthens your position within academic, industrial, and economic power structures.
OBJECTIVE
Design, construct, and refine a new piece of technology, system, or service that exceeds current standards.
Then transition that innovation into practical leverage through release, licensing, integration, or controlled distribution.
Technologies may include (but are not limited to):
Computing hardware or software
Robotics or automation systems
Energy generation or storage
Medical or chemical advancements
Infrastructure or logistical tools
Artificial intelligence frameworks
CONSTRAINTS
Projects must represent a clear functional improvement, not a cosmetic change
Prototype-only projects yield reduced rewards
Time, materials, and attention must be allocated carefully
Overextension across too many projects increases risk of interference or sabotage
DEVELOPMENT TIERS & REWARDS
Prototype — Concept Proven
Condition:
Functional prototype completed
Core concept demonstrated
System or device performs as intended
Rewards:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +500 XP
Minor reputation gain among technical and academic observers
Unlocks advancement to next tier
Refinement — Production Viable
Condition:
Reliability improved
Resource usage reduced
Design stabilized for repeat use
Rewards:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +1,000 XP
Moderate reputation gain with academic departments or niche industries
Reduced resource and time costs on similar future projects
Deployment — Market Entry
Condition:
Technology released to external users, institutions, or markets
Civilian, institutional, or downgraded versions distributed
Adoption beyond personal use achieved
Rewards:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +2,500 XP
Large reputation gain with corporate, commercial, or governmental entities
Passive economic or logistical advantages unlocked
Domination — Dependency Established
Condition:
Technology becomes difficult or impossible to replace
Competitors eliminated, absorbed, or outpaced
Full-capability versions retained internally
Rewards:
EXPERIENCE GAIN: +5,000 XP
Major reputation gain across multiple sectors of American society
Hidden perks, future quests, or strategic leverage unlocked
CUMULATIVE BONUSES
Completing this quest multiple times grants escalating benefits:
First Completion:
+10% efficiency to all future technological projects
Three Completions:
Reduced oversight and fewer administrative barriers
Increased tolerance for unconventional methods
Five or More Completions:
Academic institutions and corporations defer to your technical judgment
Government and military interests begin discreet observation
FAILURE CONDITIONS
Project abandoned or stolen
Premature disclosure of full-capability designs
Market rejection due to poor timing or sabotage
Administrative or political intervention halts deployment
Failure does not end the quest permanently, but:
XP rewards reduced
Future iterations increase in difficulty
Now I know I'm making the right decision! House pondered the system prompt in front of him some more, focused on the failure conditions. Once entering the Lab, he looked around and immediately noticed 3 security cameras observing the room with expensive and high tech items. Though with his 10 in perception House noted that the cameras were completely stationary in their focused area of observation. Triangulating a proper blind spot in his mind due to his limited knowledge he had on this version of security cameras that CIT research labs were using, House was certain what end would help obfuscate his work. Objectively he knew he could not fully eliminate all traces of what he was about to do, worrying about scuttling rats watching his work was a problem, but at the very least in a perfect blind spot they would be unable to record him working on his preparation project. For what he was about to do in a week's time was something no one within Fallout America was able to properly produce until well after the world ended. God damn Vault-Tec, those assholes learned how to miniaturize chips sometime during the events leading up to the Fallout TV show, specifically only for the purpose of controlling people. Biggest joke in the entire Fallout series. First thing I plan to change.
House treated equipment not as tools but as extensions of intent. The microfabrication wing, largely reserved for graduate researchers, contained photolithography tables, clean hoods, chemical baths, and precision etching rigs that most students struggled to use correctly. House did not. He repurposed the existing vacuum deposition chambers and silicon wafer slicers to fabricate custom microchips, a motherboard, and other components that were far denser than the era's commercial standards. Occasionally it required him going in personally to customize the hardware with less automated lab tools, reducing trace distances, eliminating redundancy, and rewriting the internal logic architecture to suit his needs rather than industry convention. Where CIT taught theory and process, House applied already discovered outcomes of a different universe. His complete understanding of circuitry, thanks to his high science and repair, allowed him to bypass years of trial-and-error in less than two days. It would have been finished within an evening had it not been for manual work that the CIT equipment were not automated of doing. Yet at the end of his first two days, House designed chips that were purpose-built for computation density, heat efficiency, and modular expansion from the outset. With a proper silicon shell casing the miniaturized components were finally ready to be fitted within.
Drawing upon his experience repairing terminals at Gadget Galaxy, majority of the time House had to dismantle the bulky assumptions that the Fallout world passed off as their version of computers. These heavy oversized casings, wasted space, inefficient power routing were considered the cutting edge newest products within pre-war America. Yet, House went about rebuilding the entirety of computer design, creating something truly cutting edge on his third afternoon inside the CIT labs. Robert filled his originally-created silicon shell with tightly integrated boards, custom-fit heat sinks, and layered power regulation that allowed components to operate closer together without thermal runaway. Using CIT's machine shops, he fabricated additional precision housings measured in millimeters, not inches, while adapting power cells normally meant for laboratory instruments into stable, compact energy sources. Every component was measured, weighed, and optimized, not for mass production, but for singular excellence. His custom excellence.
By the end of the week, when the casing finally sealed and the system booted cleanly, the interface flickered once, then stabilized. The result sat open and unassuming on a lab bench: a fully functional sleek midnight black laptop housing a computational core that rivaled CIT's room-sized processing machines, even surpassing the powerful ZAX's super computers that could inhabit genocidal AI, all while maintaining far greater processing power. More importantly it only took a fraction of the resources and time that it took to create those outdated relics that pre-war America found to be so amazing.
The very architecture of House's laptop would be considered alien to the scientist of this world, its internal hardware and design tailored to support rapid computation, data storage, and expansion far beyond contemporary limits of both this world's computational devices as well as the old universe he had inhabited. No committee approved this technological master-piece. No professor supervised its creation. The machine existed because House had decided it should and because nothing in CIT's inventory, nor in its curriculum, was capable of stopping someone who already understood the device before it could even come into existence. The only problem was the operating system, the next goal of House. Just as he packed up his laptop, hiding it within his backpack acquired from the CIT's overpriced school supply store, House got a system alert.
SYSTEM NOTICE: MINIATURIZATION BREAKTHROUGH ACHIEVED.
+500 EXPERIENCE GAINED.
Outside of the Hintbook, there was only one other time that House earned this much experience from the system and that was getting to Commonwealth Institute of Technology before the session started. If the system agreed this was the true miniaturization that old America had spent centuries researching, then this laptop placed in an overpriced backpack would be ground breaking enough to be worth billions… once a proper operating system was put into place.
That was what took up the entire of Houses 2nd week before the start of the semester. Every minute of the afternoon off of work from Gadget galaxy was spent in the CIT Labs, devoted entirely to the creation of this software, a domain House considered more valuable than hardware by an order of magnitude. Working upon this marvel of programing software that required the entire might of Robco to design, something the original Robert House would not even start till 4 years later and then finish a couple years before his 30th birthday, was all done in a single week. The future was changing and it was changing fast with a Robert Edwin House that not only possessed 300 in his skills but also memories of Microsoft and the Linux Operating systems played out in creating a far better Robco UOS than canon lore could imagine.
The RobCo Unified Operating System—UOS—in its original canon form was a rugged patchwork of legacy code: a modular, scalable architecture capable of running on everything from simple terminals to automated platforms. It was a largely text-based system responsible for core processes such as memory management, hardware drivers, and basic program execution, relying on the MF Boot Agent and the RETROS BIOS to initialize hardware and arbitrate system functions. House's revised UOS did not replace this foundation so much as refine it into something colder and more efficient. Rather than true self-learning or spontaneous evolution, the new system employed aggressive background workload management—constantly profiling running processes, dynamically reallocating memory and processor time, and autonomously deprioritizing or suspending non-essential routines to reduce overhead and prevent resource starvation. It assumed human error as a baseline condition, correcting inefficient configurations, sanitizing malformed inputs, and enforcing rigid execution hierarchies without prompting. Designed to be forward-compatible by intent, the system exposed interfaces for robotic control frameworks House had not yet built but had already architected in theory. Where earlier systems demanded constant human oversight to remain stable, the improved RobCo UOS functioned as a tireless systems administrator: uncomplaining, unsentimental, and built to persist long after its creators fail.
However that was not all that House's UOS was capable of, by dissecting both Microsoft's bloated corporate safeguards and Linux's lean, permission-driven architecture, House fused their strengths into something greater. Now after loading hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a week straight, he went about creating an operating system that treated security as a structural law rather than an afterthought. A complete elimination of exploitable abstraction entirely, a process that was sandboxed at the hardware level, disallowing intrusion from the terminal models left all around the fallout wastelands. Because of this new and improved Robco UOS, any hacking attempts would self-terminate before they could even be forcibly logged into the new and improved Software. A marvel of programming which would most likely damn all wastelanders attempting to harness any Robco tech, as the computing layered defenses would make it impossible to hack into this program even if they had a 100 in science. Taking a moment of silence to pay respect to the countless hundreds if not thousands of future wastelanders who will be stuck, unable to access House's future computer terminals without the proper passwords and authorizations, effectively crippling the main characters of all the fallout games into being unable to proceed beyond a Robco Security terminal. House would have to come up with a work around for this and as he pondered the solution, the system again altered house to the good news.
SYSTEM NOTICE: FOUNDATIONAL SOFTWARE PLATFORM CREATED.
+500 EXPERIENCE GAINED.
House only needed 250 xp to level up to level 9. Yet more importantly he had just spent a week to do what the original house would need to spend eight years to do. The UOS alone was the reason that made Robert House a billion several times over when he became 30 years old, yet now that same…actually more improved version of UOS was safely stored upon the mega-processing laptop before him. If he started Robco industries right at this moment, House was sure he could make his billions by the time he left the university at the age of 22. A tempting desire, if not for the fear of possibly being sued by CIT, the forms House had signed for the scholarship program to fully go through stipulated that any discovery and designs that House created while on school property would officially belong to the University. The Deal with the devil.
House shrugged his shoulders, irritated, yet impressed with Professor Gorllewin, or the CIT Legal team for coming up with such an ingenious clause to take advantage of hopefuls that entered this university. As such House would have to wait before unleashing his amazing UOS upon the general public, most likely after he graduated. In the meantime he had to go about cleaning his tracks, the cameras inside of the lab room, as well as the card readers outside of the doors could be considered evidence of his new creation. The future legal teams of CIT could use this to hinder Robco in litigation, it would be flimsy, but also possible. Between the cataloged evidence, the only other person who could be a threat to the future of Robco's rise was Edgar, but with the money that House had given him, as long as that fool restocked the missing items to match the CIT reserves that problem could be ignored. Leaving only Edgar's testimony which House's future lawyers could discredit… if he just gets rid of the security camera footage and the card reader log. There was a way to do that, and as such the last week of August before the start of the semester House spent his evenings after work focusing upon creating a special way to eliminate the digital evidence he left behind.
This would have to be my Magnum Opus of the month of August. My last act of preparation before the start of the school year. That evidence will bring about the ruin of all that is MINE! Only you can save me, my dear old friend. With hardware and OS complete, House turned to his most ambitious project yet. A distributed intelligence seeded through RobCo UOS, capable of inhabiting terminals, routing through security systems, and quietly observing the digital bloodstream of the Institute. More importantly, correct and alter information, while also building a friendly enough matrix to be able to aid with the taxing and lack of compassion aspects that House currently lacked… in a spiritual sense. To put it quite simply House was not a people's person even with his high charisma and social skills due to the Hintbook. Half the time when he looked at people he saw parasites, vermin, and in the best case such as people like Dorothy useful tools. This was not a mindset that enabled you to make friends. No, it is the mindset that will likely cause me to get a golf club to repeatedly hit me in the face. I can't risk that so I need you to help me with the social aspects of my future company. A perfect, American, friendly AI. My sweet dear friend.
As House typed the last line of code, and pressed enter, his highly advanced laptop generated an all too familiar face of a cowboy winking, and tipping his hat in respect.
"Howdy Partner, what could good Old Vic help you with today?" The highly advanced AI spoke in a tone friendly and lovingly as his eyes, no longer a stationary like the old still image focused upon his creator, waiting, almost begging to find a way to serve House. Just as House was about to answer, his system notified him twice. The first being:
SYSTEM NOTICE: COMPANION CREATED — VICTOR
+500 EXPERIENCE GAINED.
Then a noise as beautiful as it was addictive, alerting House that he just reached Level 9. More skill points and a perk was awaiting his decision.