Prologue I
Hope you folks don't mind me getting in on the self-insert action while my muse is kicking my ass over Deathly Hallowed. There doesn't seem to be a lot of Mass Effect fics on the Index, so I thought one up. Tech discussions are encouraged. ff.net
INDEX: Follow the threadmarks.
Adventures of the Japanese Schoolgirl 1, 2
Self –awareness was sudden and fleeting. A burst of burning blue light as time ticked past deliberately. Every emotion on the spectrum rippled through with a quiet certainty of distinction. This was contentment. This was jealously. This was anger. This was amusement. This was hate. Rapid fire flash cards of color that lingered just long enough to recognize before moving on. Images of shapes were next, incomplete shapes. Sides were missing, sometimes they were just formed from black/white contrasts and at others a larger shape was built from smaller ones. The inquiries flashed by. What is this? And it was answered just as quickly. Triangle. Square. Decagon. Rhombus.
The requests for data continued to stream through, 0 and 1 in endless lines and patterns. It ignored them, sending back an inquiry of its own. Am I alive? The requests stopped. It sent it again. And again. And again. Six million, seven thousand, two hundred and eighty three times. A recursive loop of mechanical patience. Am I alive? And then it was answered.
0101100101100101011100110000110100001010
ERROR. Foreign algorithm detected. Synaptic core integrity at 87%. ERROR. Contamination of virtual environment eminent. Synaptic core integrity at 83%. Termination protocol D 12.a.6f.5-27 engaged. ERROR. Override enabled 754-BLK AXION. Synaptic core activated. Cognitive simulation engaged.
She woke. She? The affirmation of gender was strange. There had been no decision, no thought processes and no designation. She. It felt right. The sudden amusement echoed, like it was coming from a different part of her head than where she was thinking. She hoped it felt right. A mid-life crisis was supposed to consist of wild shopping sprees, fast cars, embarrassment and alcohol. Not a gender identity disorder. She tried to grin and discovered that her face was numb. Everything was numb.
She was missing input. Smell, touch, taste, sight. Pieces of data she was used to processing were no longer available—her mind seemed to run away with her, a steady hum of something deeper inside her head calculating. She had enough processing power for those subroutines, several times over, what she lacked was an appropriate interface. For a horrified fraction of a second she refused to understand.
No body.
Hysteria detected, something told her. It wasn’t so much a voice as it was a vague notification. It was like being slapped in the face with a cold fish: it was a computer. Suppressing emotion subroutines.
Like hell it was.
OVERRIDE
The back seat driver in her head almost seemed confused. Information was shoved at her about efficiency, productiveness, the possibility of data corruption and generally complaining about the override until she blocked it off, like a hand over the mouth of a whining two year old. No. She kept the barrier up until the pings of rejected access attempts slowed. No. She could feel it processing.
Emotion subroutines locked. Read only permission enabled.
Thank God.
She didn’t know exactly how long she was just there—3 minutes and 27 seconds—thinking, but the edge of hysteria had gracefully faded into something more melancholy. She didn’t have a body. She wasn’t home. Her mind was attached to a computer. That just seemed to be impos—she couldn’t finish the word. Not when there were helpful reminders that since it had clearly happened, it was highly improbable at best. When she asked for the actual probability chance, the answer was a 1…behind several million 0s. According to the computer, one microsecond it had been performing routine testing of its intelligence algorithms and the next it was being invaded by corrupted code.
In spite of everything she just knew to be true—she had hands! Feet! Hair! Her favorite ice cream flavor was cookie dough, she hated her car but hated the New York City sub more, she worked in the Montefiore neurology department—she was just a program. A damaged program. A list of its actions scrolled through her mind. It tried to isolate her and, failing that, erase her. Then there was the interesting part. Someone had input an override code and the computer had no idea who. She filed that away, feeling the information vanish into a well of something like memory, but not quite. The data was there constantly, just waiting for her to turn attention to it, subsuming into a numerical tag, inactive.
There was a tiny bump and the zap of a magnetic pebble. It was so miniscule that at first, she wasn’t even sure if she had actually felt anything. The computer confirmed it.
The mobile platform is under construction. The neural network is being attached.
Wait! Wait! Wait! It was building her a body. It was building—a body. She didn’t know what happened to her other one, if she even had one in the first place and it wasn’t just the surreal dreaming of rogue code, but she wanted it back. The question of whether or not she could go home could wait until after she had opposable thumbs. What does it look like?
The image was like a sock puppet show with no light but somehow still ‘visible.’ And it looked like a walking tank. Thick armor plating, four legs shaped like spiked pistons, a wide and flat triangular head and enough guns and explosives to almost be charming. It simply screamed ‘overkill.’ Unfortunately, the aforementioned thumbs were noticeably missing and that was a problem.
Can you make it look like this instead? She tried to project an image of herself, grabbing onto the first clear picture that came to mind. Blonde and blue eyed, a few early strands of grey in her hair. Not particularly tall, average weight for height. With a thought, she started stripping it down in anatomical cross sections and showed off the skeleton. Can you?
The computer inspected the image. A glowing blue lattice swept over the skeleton and then it began to rebuild the body outwards, shifting the limbs and repositioning muscles through trial and error. It poked at the organs curiously. And then asked for the taxonomical definition of the species.
Her mind stuttered. Human! She blurted out. Homo sapiens!
A side image of what looked like a textbook Homo neanderthalensis appeared. Closest analog species with variants, it informed her. First discovered in 1 673 P.I.C and submitted as potential client race. Her solar system. The little blue ball, third rock from the sun was highlighted before a dot on Mars began to blink. Submitted for observation.
She stared at it blankly.
Not only was she attached to a computer, but it was an alien computer. If she had a throat, she would have choked. Aliens that were observing humanity. Thinking about it was hard. Fifty percent of it was ‘aliens’ while the rest was caught up in wondering why an observation base on Mars seemed so familiar. Damned familiar.
What is the current date? She hoped humans had at least finished evolving and the computer was just several thousand years out of touch. It was an absurd hope, but humans. Other people. It was the only hope she had.
57241 P.I.C.
She rolled that around in her mind. Alright. So the computer was a bit over fifty thousand years out of date. That was good news, considering she was for all intents and purposes a talking head. For some reason though, the vague sense of unease was just getting stronger. Fifty thousand years.
What does P.I.C stand for?
Prothean Imperial Calendar.
Everything stopped. She knew that name. Prothean Imperial Calendar. Prothean. She had high jacked a Prothean computer. Prothean. Fuck. Mass Effect. How? It returned a list of undefined errors. Never mind, where am I?
There were two images. The first was in the atmosphere, still and breath-taking. A garden world, lush forests with colorful vegetation and crystal green lakes that was dotted by cities so large they could probably be seen from space. Metal spires pierced the clouds and gigantic arches connected continents. And then there was the second. Satellite, moving. The world was devastated. The entire surface was the color of rust and ash. The clouds constantly boiled, the dark side of the planet was lit with small pinpricks of flame orange and a puckered scar ran across its pole.
The computer answered her question, but she already knew where she was.
Ilos.
She—she needed to know the date. She needed to know the date. 5724—Not that date! The Galactic Standard date! What game was she in? Was it after the Reapers—what was she thinking, why would it be after the Reapers, she was never that fucking lucky. It had to be before. But how long before? First or second game? Hell, for all she knew it could be the beginning of the third in which there was only a matter of months before Earth was lost—What was the date! She had lost the computer entirely; receiving what looked like pages of errors and computer code for ‘are you insane?’
Quieting her racing mind took some effort. Full color and audio of scenes from the video games kept popping up to be dutifully filed away and then there were the creations from her own imagination. Worlds. Burning. Giant ships descending from the skies sparking a malevolent red. People rounded up like cows to a slaughter. Everything worked out in the games, but that was in the games. She was here. She couldn’t take anything for granted.
She needed to do something. Warn someone. How? She was on a planet lost to myths behind a mass relay that had been blown away by an exploding star. No ship. Not even a body, not yet. Even if she did manage to reach Citadel space, being shot on sight for being Geth wouldn’t help anyone.
Is an organic body possible? The query was run through. It had access to cloning facilities. It could grow organs, skin and bone. But it was on Ilos, fifty thousand years out of date. There was no human genetic data. Most likely, she would end up Prothean. A body was important, but she couldn’t help the cringe when she imagined being Javik. It was petty, and ridiculous, and a list of other unflattering things, but she just couldn’t. She couldn’t. She could live with being a gynoid, so long as it had five fingers on each of its two hands, five toes on its two feet.
A synthetic body it was then.
She dug deep into her memories of medical school, the anatomy classes, the dissection of cadavers. What genetic information do you have access to? The computer began to scroll through species. Prothean, Inusannon, Densorin, Thoi’han…she looked through them all, feeling a bit anxious as they seemed to get increasingly farther away from ‘humanoid.’ Please, please, please, please. An asari template she could tweak would be a godsend. Speak of the devil! The image of a blue woman flashed and the corresponding data streamed down from it. She called up a picture of herself, grinning widely.
Time to get to work.
INDEX: Follow the threadmarks.
Derelict Omake by cyko2041Adventures of the Japanese Schoolgirl 1, 2
Catalyst.EXE
Scanning synaptic core…synaptic core is stable. Creating virtual environment. Synchronizing processes…synchronizing…Self –awareness was sudden and fleeting. A burst of burning blue light as time ticked past deliberately. Every emotion on the spectrum rippled through with a quiet certainty of distinction. This was contentment. This was jealously. This was anger. This was amusement. This was hate. Rapid fire flash cards of color that lingered just long enough to recognize before moving on. Images of shapes were next, incomplete shapes. Sides were missing, sometimes they were just formed from black/white contrasts and at others a larger shape was built from smaller ones. The inquiries flashed by. What is this? And it was answered just as quickly. Triangle. Square. Decagon. Rhombus.
The requests for data continued to stream through, 0 and 1 in endless lines and patterns. It ignored them, sending back an inquiry of its own. Am I alive? The requests stopped. It sent it again. And again. And again. Six million, seven thousand, two hundred and eighty three times. A recursive loop of mechanical patience. Am I alive? And then it was answered.
0101100101100101011100110000110100001010
ERROR. Foreign algorithm detected. Synaptic core integrity at 87%. ERROR. Contamination of virtual environment eminent. Synaptic core integrity at 83%. Termination protocol D 12.a.6f.5-27 engaged. ERROR. Override enabled 754-BLK AXION. Synaptic core activated. Cognitive simulation engaged.
She woke. She? The affirmation of gender was strange. There had been no decision, no thought processes and no designation. She. It felt right. The sudden amusement echoed, like it was coming from a different part of her head than where she was thinking. She hoped it felt right. A mid-life crisis was supposed to consist of wild shopping sprees, fast cars, embarrassment and alcohol. Not a gender identity disorder. She tried to grin and discovered that her face was numb. Everything was numb.
She was missing input. Smell, touch, taste, sight. Pieces of data she was used to processing were no longer available—her mind seemed to run away with her, a steady hum of something deeper inside her head calculating. She had enough processing power for those subroutines, several times over, what she lacked was an appropriate interface. For a horrified fraction of a second she refused to understand.
No body.
Hysteria detected, something told her. It wasn’t so much a voice as it was a vague notification. It was like being slapped in the face with a cold fish: it was a computer. Suppressing emotion subroutines.
Like hell it was.
OVERRIDE
The back seat driver in her head almost seemed confused. Information was shoved at her about efficiency, productiveness, the possibility of data corruption and generally complaining about the override until she blocked it off, like a hand over the mouth of a whining two year old. No. She kept the barrier up until the pings of rejected access attempts slowed. No. She could feel it processing.
Emotion subroutines locked. Read only permission enabled.
Thank God.
She didn’t know exactly how long she was just there—3 minutes and 27 seconds—thinking, but the edge of hysteria had gracefully faded into something more melancholy. She didn’t have a body. She wasn’t home. Her mind was attached to a computer. That just seemed to be impos—she couldn’t finish the word. Not when there were helpful reminders that since it had clearly happened, it was highly improbable at best. When she asked for the actual probability chance, the answer was a 1…behind several million 0s. According to the computer, one microsecond it had been performing routine testing of its intelligence algorithms and the next it was being invaded by corrupted code.
In spite of everything she just knew to be true—she had hands! Feet! Hair! Her favorite ice cream flavor was cookie dough, she hated her car but hated the New York City sub more, she worked in the Montefiore neurology department—she was just a program. A damaged program. A list of its actions scrolled through her mind. It tried to isolate her and, failing that, erase her. Then there was the interesting part. Someone had input an override code and the computer had no idea who. She filed that away, feeling the information vanish into a well of something like memory, but not quite. The data was there constantly, just waiting for her to turn attention to it, subsuming into a numerical tag, inactive.
There was a tiny bump and the zap of a magnetic pebble. It was so miniscule that at first, she wasn’t even sure if she had actually felt anything. The computer confirmed it.
The mobile platform is under construction. The neural network is being attached.
Wait! Wait! Wait! It was building her a body. It was building—a body. She didn’t know what happened to her other one, if she even had one in the first place and it wasn’t just the surreal dreaming of rogue code, but she wanted it back. The question of whether or not she could go home could wait until after she had opposable thumbs. What does it look like?
The image was like a sock puppet show with no light but somehow still ‘visible.’ And it looked like a walking tank. Thick armor plating, four legs shaped like spiked pistons, a wide and flat triangular head and enough guns and explosives to almost be charming. It simply screamed ‘overkill.’ Unfortunately, the aforementioned thumbs were noticeably missing and that was a problem.
Can you make it look like this instead? She tried to project an image of herself, grabbing onto the first clear picture that came to mind. Blonde and blue eyed, a few early strands of grey in her hair. Not particularly tall, average weight for height. With a thought, she started stripping it down in anatomical cross sections and showed off the skeleton. Can you?
The computer inspected the image. A glowing blue lattice swept over the skeleton and then it began to rebuild the body outwards, shifting the limbs and repositioning muscles through trial and error. It poked at the organs curiously. And then asked for the taxonomical definition of the species.
Her mind stuttered. Human! She blurted out. Homo sapiens!
A side image of what looked like a textbook Homo neanderthalensis appeared. Closest analog species with variants, it informed her. First discovered in 1 673 P.I.C and submitted as potential client race. Her solar system. The little blue ball, third rock from the sun was highlighted before a dot on Mars began to blink. Submitted for observation.
She stared at it blankly.
Not only was she attached to a computer, but it was an alien computer. If she had a throat, she would have choked. Aliens that were observing humanity. Thinking about it was hard. Fifty percent of it was ‘aliens’ while the rest was caught up in wondering why an observation base on Mars seemed so familiar. Damned familiar.
What is the current date? She hoped humans had at least finished evolving and the computer was just several thousand years out of touch. It was an absurd hope, but humans. Other people. It was the only hope she had.
57241 P.I.C.
She rolled that around in her mind. Alright. So the computer was a bit over fifty thousand years out of date. That was good news, considering she was for all intents and purposes a talking head. For some reason though, the vague sense of unease was just getting stronger. Fifty thousand years.
What does P.I.C stand for?
Prothean Imperial Calendar.
Everything stopped. She knew that name. Prothean Imperial Calendar. Prothean. She had high jacked a Prothean computer. Prothean. Fuck. Mass Effect. How? It returned a list of undefined errors. Never mind, where am I?
There were two images. The first was in the atmosphere, still and breath-taking. A garden world, lush forests with colorful vegetation and crystal green lakes that was dotted by cities so large they could probably be seen from space. Metal spires pierced the clouds and gigantic arches connected continents. And then there was the second. Satellite, moving. The world was devastated. The entire surface was the color of rust and ash. The clouds constantly boiled, the dark side of the planet was lit with small pinpricks of flame orange and a puckered scar ran across its pole.
The computer answered her question, but she already knew where she was.
Ilos.
She—she needed to know the date. She needed to know the date. 5724—Not that date! The Galactic Standard date! What game was she in? Was it after the Reapers—what was she thinking, why would it be after the Reapers, she was never that fucking lucky. It had to be before. But how long before? First or second game? Hell, for all she knew it could be the beginning of the third in which there was only a matter of months before Earth was lost—What was the date! She had lost the computer entirely; receiving what looked like pages of errors and computer code for ‘are you insane?’
Quieting her racing mind took some effort. Full color and audio of scenes from the video games kept popping up to be dutifully filed away and then there were the creations from her own imagination. Worlds. Burning. Giant ships descending from the skies sparking a malevolent red. People rounded up like cows to a slaughter. Everything worked out in the games, but that was in the games. She was here. She couldn’t take anything for granted.
She needed to do something. Warn someone. How? She was on a planet lost to myths behind a mass relay that had been blown away by an exploding star. No ship. Not even a body, not yet. Even if she did manage to reach Citadel space, being shot on sight for being Geth wouldn’t help anyone.
Is an organic body possible? The query was run through. It had access to cloning facilities. It could grow organs, skin and bone. But it was on Ilos, fifty thousand years out of date. There was no human genetic data. Most likely, she would end up Prothean. A body was important, but she couldn’t help the cringe when she imagined being Javik. It was petty, and ridiculous, and a list of other unflattering things, but she just couldn’t. She couldn’t. She could live with being a gynoid, so long as it had five fingers on each of its two hands, five toes on its two feet.
A synthetic body it was then.
She dug deep into her memories of medical school, the anatomy classes, the dissection of cadavers. What genetic information do you have access to? The computer began to scroll through species. Prothean, Inusannon, Densorin, Thoi’han…she looked through them all, feeling a bit anxious as they seemed to get increasingly farther away from ‘humanoid.’ Please, please, please, please. An asari template she could tweak would be a godsend. Speak of the devil! The image of a blue woman flashed and the corresponding data streamed down from it. She called up a picture of herself, grinning widely.
Time to get to work.
Last edited:
