Mass Effect
Senna ran his hand over the back of his neck. He knew she was only a VI. He knew it, so why did he so often feel like a misbehaving child being made to confess to stealing toys when they talked? Yet he did. LED triads were effective. No matter what displayed them. “Well, you see, there is also… at the same time… a physical virus infecting some of the passengers.”
Liat’Nir burst out laughing. “Well, that won’t be a coincidence, will it?”
“It could be.”
“It could not be.” The small avatar of his grandmother reached out and smacked his thumb. He felt nothing, not even a static charge; the projection had no physical presence at all. “I raised you better than that!”
“Just because they’re both called viruses doesn’t mean malware and pathogens are the same thing. It would have to be two completely different coordinated attacks happening at the same time. What are the chances?”
“High, I’d say, since it’s happening to you, ke’sed.”
“Either way, I did check for a virus, because I am not an idiot—”
“I disagree.”
“And, Grandmother… there’s nothing wrong with the source code. Nothing at all. It’s perfect. No virus. No wormcode chewing its way through systems. It’s all fine. Not even an unclosed bracket.”
“Shut your mouth,” said Liat in disbelief.
“I know!”
“That’s not possible,” the ancestor VI blustered.
“I know it isn’t, that’s why I’m talking to you about it!” yelled Senna in his empty chambers. “No code that complex is that perfect.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. Of course, yes, that’s true, I was the best there was. I could make geth stand in a row dressed in lace garters and turn out a perfect kickline without breaking a sweat, I rode servers like stallions to war, and my whole life is one enormous unclosed bracket blinking away on an infinite terminal screen. But that’s not what I mean, grandson of mine.” Liat’Nir looked up at him, her prismatic eyes blazing, strands of gray hair hanging free past her frail collarbone. “Code is truth, code is life! The only honest thing in this galaxy or the next is a datacore. What the command line says, happens. It can’t be shiny and perfect line after line while your tactile shield is failing and your lights won’t stay on and your scans won’t scan and you can’t even get a damned drink of water in your own quarters! It is not possible. If the codebank is active and running, that’s what the machine is doing. It’s all there, because it has to be all there, because there’s no other place for the ship to get instructions, anymore than your sweet little genes could express someone else’s DNA. That’s not how it works, ke’sed!”
Liat’Nir was getting extremely worked up. She had never once, in all his years with her, referenced the fact that she was a VI and not actually living on Rannoch right this second. He didn’t know if she was programmed not to, or if he had just never found the right combination of input phrases to prompt it. But sometimes, very occasionally, when they were working on a problem together, she could get like this, and it always seemed to him like a kind of digitally wounded pride.
“Okay,” he said with a deep breath. “All right. Here we are. We have arriv
ed at our destination. You and me, Liat. A family affair. I have a problem. How can a datacore be severely compromised, rendered unable to recognize the problem or the effects of the problem, while showing no corresponding fatal error in the source code? And how do I fix it?”
The ancestor VI’s mouth snapped shut. She turned her head to one side, then the other. Liat’Nir turned around and walked two or three steps to the edge of the projection disc. She fiddled with something invisibly, the way she had “drawn” in the Rannoch sand. When she turned around, his grandmother had a truly jaw-droppingly large glass of krogan ryncol in her hand. On the rocks. It had taken him weeks of immunizations and antibiotic courses to spend one night sipping ryncol with Yorrik, and it had felt like sipping knives. But Liat lived long before the quarian immune system was ravaged by living on the Migrant Fleet. Before the suits. Before anything that made a quarian quarian in Senna’s world. She drank it down in one gulp, fixed herself another, this time with a twist of citrus, and sat down moodily in the center of the disk with her knees drawn up under her chin like a sullen kid.
“Well?” Senna’Nir said after a few minutes. Even as old as the VI was, she had never taken this long.
The ancestor VI glared at him. “Working,” she said, and returned to staring. She swigged her ryncol angrily.
“I’ve been away too long already. Can you hurry?”
Liat’Nir stuck her finger in her drink, swirled it around, sucked it off the tip of her thick forefinger, and pointed it at her grandson. “Working,” she growled.
After five minutes—five!—of silence and drinking and working, Liat’Nir gave up and retrieved the bottle from the invisible bar. She sat down again, hiccuped twice, pulled a small pair of scissors out of her robes, and started clipping her toenails with a murderous look on her face. Another new loading screen.
“The reason ryncol is the best alcohol is because it hurts you,” Grandmother slurred. Tink. A purple hologram-toenail flew off and disappeared in midair.
“Are you kidding me,” Senna’Nir said.
“Shushup, ke’sed, I’m talking. I do a good talk, everyone says. Ryncol is better than turian brandy because ryncol tastes like lighting all your mistakes on fire in a glass barrel and then eating the barrel. Mouthfeel like a tactical nuke. I heard they let a city get fire-bombed just to capture the smoky flavor. The bouquet. And the best part is, ke’sed, the best part is, with every sip, you know someone wanted to make you feel that way. Some krogan distiller did this to you on purpose. It looks so harmless in its wee little glass—wee. Little. Glass. You look so thin, little glass. Have you been eating enough? Your growth is stunted, wee little glass. You need some gene therapy? Granny knows a guy who knows a guy, don’t you worry. But ke’sed, ke’sed, are you listening? Nothing that fucks you up this thoroughly while looking that small and innocent happens by accident. And so you and the krogan have made a long-distance agreement, where he gets to do this to you, and you get to let it happen and also you never retaliate. Wee. Little. Glass of angry krogan.” She looked up at her grandson through three hundred years of Nirs, eyes weeping from the ryncol fumes. “How many VIs you got?”
“Seventeen of the Si’yah’s systems use a VI interface, but it’s no good, Grandmother. They’re all connected to the same compromised datacore.”
Tink. Another toenail.
“Well, how fortunate for you that your grandmother is not a complete and utter von. I didn’t ask how many the ship’s got, I asked how many you can put your slow, dumb baby hands on.”
Tink.