Mass Effect

Senna stuck his head out of the first officer’s quarters. He saw a woman sink to her knees with her child in her arms. It was horrible. It was impossible. It was a slow-acting nightmare that curdled his gut and made his hair stand on end. But he couldn’t let himself focus on it. Not now. He could fix things on the macro level—the ship, the mission, the whole situation. But the micro level would drown him—a mother, her child, one person’s death. He focused on something else instead: the two green women standing in the corridor. One was not so green anymore—Anax in her custom volus suit.

“Therion!” Senna’Nir hissed. “Ferank! I need you!”

The drell snapped to attention. They moved quickly toward him. “Senna, it’s you! Are you all right? Are you seeing this? That’s a quarian child. There’s an extremely dead volus out there, too.” She paused, as if she was going to say something else, and thought better of it. “She’s supposed to be safe. Her suit and her,” the detective whispered helplessly, her voice thick with far too much feeling for a strange child she’d never known. Senna ignored that, too. He could only do what he could do and what he could do was this.

“Yes,” he said tightly. “It’s absolutely the worst thing I can imagine and under no circumstances should it be within the realm of possibility but I need you right now. I need your help.”

“Sure, boss,” said the batarian, her voice all silk and ice, still looking backward over her shoulder at the sobbing mother.

“How many VIs would you say are on this ship?” Senna asked.

“What? Who cares?” Borbala said.

“Total?” asked Anax Therion.

Senna shook his head. “No, just the independent or mobile ones. Self-contained VIs with their own power sources. VIs that were never hooked up to the mainframe; discrete units.”

The drell rubbed her long middle finger against her forefinger, calculating. “There’s the krogan microscope. I would imagine many people brought educational VIs to help with the colonization, entertainment VIs, that sort of thing. One of my sets of armor utilizes VI components.”

“Mine too,” nodded Borbala companionably, casually, as though the two of them had just discovered they liked the same perfume.

“And then there are the Pathfinders,” Therion said hesitantly. It was the third rail. None of them wanted to touch it. To risk infecting the Pathfinders for a little technological help felt like giving up on finding a homeworld. Felt like losing Andromeda before they ever arrived.

“No,” said Senna’Nir, very loudly. “We cannot wake them. I’ve tried to isolate their pods as best I can through the access hubs. They’ll be the last ones affected by any malfunctions.”

“My wager would be in the hundreds, then. People bring the strangest things across the universe,” finished Therion. “More importantly, have you seen any hanar since we talked last?”

“No, none, why do you ask?”

“A theory is beginning to form. The hanar are at the core of it. But they seem to be making themselves extremely scarce.”

“Good work, Analyst. When you are ready to report, come to me o

r the captain, no one else, do you understand?” She did, though her eyes narrowed in a way that made him nervous. “But for now, I need you to bring me every VI you can find.”

The batarian frowned. “They’ll be all over the ship. And in the cargo hold. Do you know what’s happened in the cargo hold? It’s a madhouse down there. They’ve all… congregated. Everyone who woke up in the revival cascade. Some of them went to guard their possessions. Some heard us on the comms before they shut off, and thought the ship had been boarded. They found the weapons stores on their way to the storage deck. Some went in search of food. Some followed the running lights and the sound of others. But they all ended up down in the hold, and getting anything out of there may quite literally be murder.”

He looked pleadingly at them.

“I can fix it,” he whispered. “I can fix the ship. I can make it all stop.” Well, his brain added, perhaps not just me.

“You need VIs?” the batarian crime boss sighed. “I can make VIs happen.”

“Aye, Commander,” said Anax Therion after a long, appraising pause. “We will do this for you. Stand by. It may take longer than you would like. Stay in your quarters. If it has spread even to the quarians, we may all be damned anyway.”

No, his mind simply refused to accept that. A quarian in a seal-tight suit could not get sick. That was the whole point of the suit. He hadn’t even taken it off in cryosleep. None of them had. It just wasn’t possible, so it was easy to put out of his thoughts. That poor child had died in the chaos, that was all. It was sad, but it didn’t mean the suits were compromised. They couldn’t be compromised, so they weren’t. As simple as that.

Senna’Nir slid gratefully back into the safe and controllable universe of his quarters. He pulled Grandmother Liat’Nir out from her hiding place and booted her out of sleep mode.

“Hello, Grandmother,” Senna’Nir said quietly.

“Always so formal, my grandson,” said the ancestor VI, as it always did, in her rolling, familiar Rannoch accent. “Call me Liat, why don’t you? Never thought of myself as old enough to have grandchildren anyhow.”

The visual interface rolled up the shimmering sleeves of her red-and-purple robes and ran her hands through her gray hair. She sat back on an old, creaky chair and began to whittle something in her lap. He liked the cigarette boot better than the whittling boot, but he didn’t have time to cycle her through just for his own comfort.

“Liat,” he said to the little hologram. “I have a problem. Do you have an answer for me?”

Liat’Nir rocked back and forth, back and forth, whick-snicking her knife across the little knob of wood. “When my first daughter was born, I gave her two pieces of advice. Do you know what they were?”