Mass Effect

“I don’t have time for this, Grandmother. You patched the trams, you must have made some progress.”

“When my first daughter was born, I gave her two pieces of advice. Do you know what they were?”

Senna’Nir sighed. It was no use trying to bully a VI. They didn’t have enough emotional capacity to feel the pressure of time or necessity. “What were they?”

Whick-snick, went the sound of her whittling. “I said to her: Be the soul of warmth to all you meet. And don’t get caught.”

The ancient quarian beamed at him, her sun-baked face full of pride. “You are very welcome, Grandson.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“But I have solved your problem for you. You would say thank you if the youth had the manners evolution gave a scrubmouse with a fever.”

“I don’t see how.” Senna’s heart sank. Another of these koans of hers. Another go fish. Her iterative thinking process was prone to them, but he had hoped, perhaps foolishly, for the plainspoken truth. He put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples through his suit’s mesh. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand. Can’t you explain yourself? Just this once?”

Liat’Nir sat forward in her rocking chair with a sharp gleam in her holographic eye. “Of course, kes’ed. It is ingenious, really.” She held up the object she had been whittling.

It was a lemek worm, a desert vermiform species of old Rannoch. He had seen pictures of them. Small and slender and covered in metallic rose-colored scales. You could cut them into pieces over and over and the pieces would grow into new lemeks every time, down to the thinnest shavings of its body. Liat’Nir had been carving a worm with two heads. She spoke briskly, businesslike, not at all like his grandmother and more like a team leader reporting to her superiors.

“Per your instructions, I have not interfaced directly with the Keelah Si’yah so as not to contaminate my code base, so you will understand this is only a hypothesis, but it fits the evidence, and when you access the core, I believe you will find I am correct. It is a worm, but you had to have known that. An organic system crash is much faster and more holistic. By now, it would all have simply shut down and tried to retro-boot itself into a clean save state. A program is working its way through this ship, doing exactly as it was told. Unfortunately for you, grandson of mine, over the last nearly six hundred years, it has had to improvise in order to obey those very basic instructions.”

“The computer virus is alive? Sentient?”

“Don’t be stupid. Did I raise a drooling fool? Of course not. But the nature of a virus is to be adaptable. Anyone who creates one knows it will at some point be targeted by a program designed to annihilate it, and it must have some rudimentary defense mechanism, or none of us would ever have technical support issues to force our grandmothers to mend on holidays like old socks, hmm? In the case of our foreign friend, when it was born, it received two pieces of advice. Two instructions with which to interact with the world around it.” Liat held up one arthritic finger. “One: raise the temperature.” She held up another. “Two: cover your tracks. It is that second one that is causing us so much trouble at the moment.” She began to pace. Liat had been a great one for lecturing in her day. The cigarette appeared in her glimmering hand, trailing smoke up into nothing. “The first is simple enough—raise the temperature on X number of cryopods—where X is sufficient to cause a chain contagion in a set population—just enough to allow the barest of physical processes to take place. Then, any infectious agent introduced from the outside can begin the replication process. But cover your tracks— ah, there is a pernicious little bosh’tet of a command. It satisfies parameters simply enough—boom! The ship will read only healthful life signs from the affected pods. But the second any infected person leaves those pods, well, then our wee friend must spread in order to cover up their existence, make them unseeable, undetectable, or else it has failed its programming. Every time you tried to look at what was going wrong, from this angle or that, every time you spoke to the Keelah Si’yah and tried to get it to detect a problem, the worm gained access to a new system to prevent it. This is very basic stuff, my idiot grandson. I am surprised you needed me to figure it out. The only tracks in the sand it left was its effects—the sublimation in the pods, the carbon dioxide exhaled in the cargo hold. Anyone infected cannot be seen, because they are evidence. How does it know? An elevated temperature, a detectable scent, any physiological change that can be apprehended by the internal scans would immediately mark this person as invisible to the person using the scans. The ship is not blind, she is mute. She knows, she just can’t tell you.”

“Grandmother, why have you never explained yourself so clearly before? If you could talk to me like this, why all the riddles?”

Her face set into itself stubbornly. “You never asked. Manners, young man. Manners.”

“That is why the codevault looked so perfect when Irit and I examined it. It was covering itself. I thought that! I thought that we would find it in the perfect places.”

“Congratulations, you had a good idea and left it up to your old gran to do the legwork,” snorted Liat’Nir.

His mind raced. “The worm must have been installed at the same time that the pathogen was smuggled on board. They must have dep

loyed at nearly the same moment, working side by side, though not together, the one to enable and hide the other. That is certainly deliberate.”

“Do you think so?” Liat’Nir blinked her eyes innocently. “Of course it was deliberate, ke’sed.”

“But what could be the intended effect? To kill us all? They could have just blown up Hephaestus if that’s all they wanted. To exterminate the drell? Then why has it spilled over into so many species? How could it have spread at all before we started mingling, after the first victims had already died? This is so complex simply to cause death.”

“I don’t know, ke’sed. I just work here. I can work on the problem if you like.”

“No,” Senna said, shaking his head furiously. “No, that’s Anax’s territory. Our first priority has to be fixing the ship. Liat, I have a problem. What is the most efficient way to purge the worm from the Keelah Si’yah?”

The ancestor VI knelt at an invisible river, washing invisible linens in invisible water. Another of her loading icons. “Working,” she sang to the tune of an old Rannoch fishing song. “Working.”

It did not take long this time, but Senna’Nir hated the answer.

14. LATENCY

Yorrik had never been so hungry in all his life. A volus, half in and half out of his suit, lay on the autopsy table below him, but the elcor could hardly see it through the haze of hunger. It was a ruin of metallic, electric color, flesh bulging out of the pressurization suit, blood coagulated in huge greasy lumps, almost unrecognizable as anything formerly alive. It reeked of that sweet flowery smell, that smell which Yorrik, now that he had so many specimens to work with, understood was the body beginning to consume its own sugars to feed the viral replication process. Beside the volus lay a small quarian girl, quite dead, her limbs beginning to stiffen in her suit. Horatio looked down at her with his grotesque neon smiling face. Yorrik felt sick now, having done that. It was disrespectful. But how could he have known then what there was to disrespect?

Irit Non had brought the child corpse. Hauled it over her shoulder like a sack of grain. The volus fashion designer stood next to him in the medbay now, panting, her suit covered in unspeakable stains and burns.

“Self-pitying: I am glad you are here, Irit Non. But I wish you would stay outside where it is safe.”

The volus made a disgusted noise. “Safe? Where is Ysses? Pretty safe, do you think? When I got here the door was wide open and you were snoring. What’s safe around here? No, it doesn’t matter now. Quarantine is well and truly broken. If we are exposed, we are exposed. And that”—she gestured at the dead girl in the helmet—“makes everyone,” she wheezed, her voice as emotionless as his had ever been.