Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Others since that first cousin who made their grandmother into a particularly unlovely dinner plate must have understood that an ancestor VI was not a geth Shock Trooper in the making. They posed no danger. Their code base was massive; K’s entire interface program would fit onto a glass wafer one fiftieth of the size of this clunky, heavy metal saucer. But code, code itself, just the presence of machine code, was harmless. It could not do anything you didn’t tell it to. Until, of course, you told it to. And someone whose DNA still moved in Senna’s cells must have known all that. Must have known that ancestor VIs were not sentient and could not become sentient just by giving them more input any more than you could make a fish evolve legs by talking to it. However organically a sophisticated linguistic-emotive-depictive triad seemed to arise, the words a VI used, the tone of voice, and the gestures it depicted were entirely algorithmically determined. Artificial intelligence was so much more complicated than that. Those rebellious aunties or uncles, whoever they were, had kept Liat’Nir and hidden her from the collective extermination of the quarians’ personal history. Each generation had passed her down to the next with so much love and reverence it made Senna’s heart ache to remember the day his parents had introduced him to her, hard-coded his name into her admin access controls, and told him never, ever to tell anyone. And he hadn’t. Not even Qetsi. Not even when they’d been at their closest. But there had never been a moment when Senna considered going all the way to Andromeda and not bringing Grandmother with him. He would rather have left both his arms behind.

  “Liat,” he said to the glimmering hologram. “I have a problem. Time is of the essence.”

  Ancestor VIs had a set number of phrases they could open a conversation with, and their available responses branched out from there, depending on how their descendant reacted. They could share something from an extensive catalogue of personal anecdotes or answer any query that the real ancestor would have been able to handle—or more, with all the style of a cantankerous relative at supper, if it were connected to a modern datacore. But the reason it was any use or fun at all talking to an ancestor VI was that they could improvise, and they could do it in two ways. One, by combining and recombining previous phrases, and every time you used a new phrase with Liat, she remembered it and could use it on her own, so that a conversation with Liat’Nir was actually a conversation with both her and every relative of his who had interacted with her, a private language of interacting references, a group call with the whole history of the Nir clan. But however impressive that might seem to the uninitiated, it wasn’t much more than a parlor trick—no different than the old human folktale about infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters infinitely attempting to produce something Yorrik could sink his slats into.

  The other method was why, despite her value, the mere existence of Liat’Nir was a crime.

  A small, firewalled part of her command line did allow for spontaneous recombination—a process called, ironically enough, genetic programming. Presented with a problem, his grandmother could independently apply a genetic algorithm to a group of her pre-programmed LED responses. She would then combine and recombine these responses as fixed-length strings to produce a completely original solution never presented to her by a user or by her to one. Each iteration generated “child” strings that contained some data from one “parent” data set and some from the other. Faster than a real grandmother could sip her tea, Liat could attempt hundreds and thousands of iterations, most of whose children would be useless mutations, broken fragments, or otherwise dead-ended strings, and yet, each “generation” approached a successful result until one of them optimally fulfilled the fitness function—whatever it was that her poor, slow-thinking grandchild had asked her. This was more like collecting all those monkeys in one room, demanding Hamlet, forcibly breeding the best writers among them, and then mercilessly irradiating any monkey that failed to produce a melancholy Dane. The definitions of fitness, optimal, and successful were key, which was why it tended to generate somewhat unusual conversations. A machine’s interpretation of fitness did not always match a person’s idea of normal grandmotherly advice. When he was a kid, Senna had asked Liat’Nir if he would ever really be happy. She had considered it, and answered: Sweetheart, you know I love you. But this life is long and hard and you’re old enough for the truth: not unless you install a significantly improved primary processor, defrag your main drive, and seriously supplement your RAM. He’d been upset at first. Switched her off and stormed off to brood on the trading deck about how nobody understood him. But ultimately, it wasn’t the worst advice he’d ever gotten. And sometimes she managed leaps of logic he could never have arrived at on his own.

  Sometimes she turned up total gibberish. Just before he joined Nedas, he’d asked her if he would ever see the quarian homeworld with his own eyes. Liat’Nir had answered: go fish and refused to elaborate. He still hadn’t figured that one out.

  Senna considered that it was not unlike the replication of a virus. The virus attaches to the surface receptors of the host cell, penetrates the membrane, fuses its own DNA with that of the cell, reproduces until the cell bursts and the process is repeated with new viral cells that contain some of the DNA of the host—mutations. Some small enough to reassure an unhappy child, some sheer nonsense, some, perhaps, uniquely ideal. More fit to spread the infection than the previous generation, stronger, more adaptable, able to colonize new parts of the body.

  In terms of artificial intelligence, this kind of problem solving was the equivalent of the first rock the first proto-quarian beast on Rannoch had used to crush the first fa’yin shell to get at the nut inside. It was almost unbelievably crude and unsophisticated. Nevertheless, in it lay… everything. Genetic programming was the most primitive, basic building block of a machine that could truly think. In Liat’Nir, the part of her that could, in some sense, imagine unique answers was well beyond shackled, its use strictly limited to verbal conversation, the algorithms safely quarantined from the rest of her functions.

  By using her personal name instead of Grandmother along with the command phrase I have a problem, Senna’Nir was directing her to access and use it.

  Liat rolled her eyes.

  “You always do, ke’sed.” She always called him that. It was what people called the blind newborn offspring of the qorach—an animal something like a very carnivorous bighorn sheep whose bellies were forever covered in blue-green climbing fern pollen and seed casings, dragging the thorny plants over the mountainsides. There were no pollinating insects on Rannoch; all the native livestock existed in uneasy and often ungraceful symbiosis. Senna didn’t know if she’d called everyone before him who had been entrusted as guardian of the ancestor VI ke’sed, and every time he’d almost asked, he just couldn’t bear to know. The phrase also served as confirmation that the VI had accessed her more creative programming. “I swear the day you can take care of yourself all the stars will go nova and the universe will end.”

  Liat’Nir rummaged in her robes, swore a few times under her breath, and finally produced a holographic cigarette and a pink matchbox. She struck the match on her fingernail and inhaled her smoke with delight. Senna loved it when the program did that. Her physical behaviors were semi-randomly generated from a fixed cluster, ordered, he presumed, by the frequency with which the real Liat’Nir had done them. The cigarette sequence was a rare treat, but it was his absolute favorite. He’d never seen a quarian smoke in real life, and he didn’t think he ever would. The sheer number of carcinogens beggared the imagination. And to damage your respiratory system for pleasure, for recreation! It was incredible. Like watching a dinosaur repeatedly hit itself in the face for fun. Sometimes he rebooted her over and over until he got the cigarette prompt. The matchbox always said something different—Bet’salel Financial Advisors or Gaddiel & Sons Agrarian Suppliers or Ovad’ya’s Fine Cosmetics—this time it read Macaleth All-Night Café & Cabaret. Forgotten, long-vaporized businesses from his lost homeworld, from a life he could not
possibly imagine.

  “Well, out with it!” the VI said, her voice dear and loving and acerbic, gravelly with smoke.

  “There is something wrong with the ship’s datacore. We have experienced a series of erratic system failures, and I have no reason to think it’s going to stop.”

  Liat’Nir leaned forward, a glint of artificial interest in her translucent eyes. When she was alive, she had been one of the best geth neural designers who ever lived. They used to say she stopped having children because she could build a lot more and far better brains on a server than on a hospital bed. The real Liat lived for things going wrong in datacores. She lived for puzzles. Therefore, so did her VI. And so did Senna. “What systems?” she said, pushing back her woolen cowl, ready to work. “In order of failure, please—my mind’s not what it used to be.”

  Senna grinned, despite the ache of stress in his every bone. “Your mind is precisely what it used to be, Grandmother, down to the zeroes and ones.”

  His grandmother laughed, a short, sharp hack of a laugh. She slapped her knee with an arthritic hand. “You rude little shit! You want to comment on my figure, too? Spill your guts, ke’sed! By the gods, I would rather take my tea with a fully armed and pissed-off geth colossus than a young person these days.”

  “Internal scans on cryodeck 2, medical scans in medbay, interior lighting more or less everywhere, temperature control in zones 4, 1, 9, and 7, possibly cryopod BT566 but I’m not sure about that one, personnel tracking, external debris shield, water dispensers in first officer’s quarters.”

  “That last one’s a real emergency, eh?” Liat smirked. “We’re talking life and death here. They will sing of this battle down the ages.”

  He ignored that one. Most of the time, Senna enjoyed her jabs, and encouraged her to generate new ones, but he had no time for that now. “Most of the systems seem to come and go, completely out of central control. The shields fail every nine minutes and forty-one seconds.”

  “That means the outermost tactile shield’s your problem. Nine forty-one… probably the initiating starboard plasma-static generator’s down. Continuous unbroken forcefields are weaker than oscillating shields, more prone to single points of failure. The tactile shuffles through biotic vibrational frequencies every nine minutes and forty-one seconds and maintains the resonance of all the other shields. The inner fields shift, too, but on a longer cycle. As long as it’s only nine minutes and forty-one seconds, it’s most likely just the first resonance phase that’s malfunctioning, not all of them, or the shield would never come back, see? It’s not as bad as everything shorting out at once, certainly not as bad as a broken water dispenser, but some space crap is definitely going to get through. So access the datacore and start debugging before a stray pebble takes out your engines, idiot.”

  “Just access the datacore,” Senna repeated mockingly. “Yes, Grandmother, I did think of the most basic of all possible approaches. Let me finish. The problem isn’t just the system shutdowns. It’s that the ship cannot see anything wrong. Everything flips on and off at a moment’s notice and the Si’yah just keeps insisting everything’s fine. So I can’t run a diagnostic or roll out a patch, because the system itself cannot see any errors to fix.”

  Liat’Nir frowned. She stubbed out her cigarette with one toe and squatted down low on the metal disc. She picked up a holographic stick off the “ground” and began working something out on the dry sand of a planet that for him was long-lost and for her was firm beneath her feet. This was a buffering posture, used by the VI to indicate it had begun to identify, mate, and test informational strings.

  “Virus?” she said hopefully, without looking up.

  “That’s a whole other problem,” Senna sighed. “Know anything about volus chickenpox?”

  “Don’t get it? I don’t know. Fuck the volus. Those little walking asthma attacks get on my last nerve the second they open their fat mouths. That whole species isn’t worth the ale-riddled bladder of your stupidest cousin. I was married to one once, I should know.”

  “You were married to a volus? You never told me that.”

  “You never asked, ke’sed. It didn’t last. If you’d ever seen a volus without his suit, you’d know why. And on the subject of stupidest Nir cousins, my dearest, darling boy, if you don’t tell me at once that you were merely making a terrible joke and absolutely know I meant a computational virus, I shall give up on you right here and now and sell you to the first band of roving batarian pirates I come across. Mean ones. You know how they say there is always honor among thieves? I will find ones who have never heard that saying.”

  He hadn’t. Senna was so exhausted and thirsty and hungry he actually hadn’t realized she meant something infecting the ship’s computer. “I think I can be forgiven, Grandmother—” “I disagree.”

  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.