Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Impossible. There is something else! We know when it happened, and it happened on your watch,” the batarian fumed.

  “When what happened? Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You said you inspected the cryopods…” Anax ventured softly, tracing an idle pattern on the table. It helped her think.

  “Yes. I confirmed each and every one of 20,000 were in good working order with the assistance of the elcor team member, Threnno.”

  “And you saw no problems at all?” Borbala said.

  “Did something go wrong with the pods?” asked Malak.

  “Why don’t you tell me whether something went wrong with the pods?” snapped Borbala.

  “You were in love with her,” Anax said quietly. “With Soval Raxios. With a drell.”

  The quarian’s faceplate showed no expression, but his voice was tight and thin. “That’s preposterous. I told you she’s married.”

  “Yes, to Osyat, the radical. I know him fairly well. He is obnoxious and disliked. Married to his politics. She would have been lonely. And though twins may well be less close than you and Qetsi’Olam, I have seen the way she and Senna’Nir speak. She left you lonely, too, even on your salarian Pilgrimage. Even in your Nedas cell.”

  “I would like you to leave. I can’t help you, Anax. And what…” Malak’Rafa held out his hands pleadingly, “…what point can there be to any of that now?”

  Therion said nothing for a pregnant moment. She had her line. Now she needed only to cast it.

  “I was in love once,” she said, filling her voice with all the softness of someone who really, truly had. “It was forbidden for us, too. But not because its immune system could never withstand my subcutaneous oils. Simply because the soul bond between a drell and a hanar is never meant to be a physical bond. Its name was Oleon. It bought me from another hanar, a cold and cruel master who worked me nearly to death to spread the word of the Enkindlers without having to do any real work itself. Oleon was kind. It was giving and soft. When it was happy, the lights of its skin were brighter than any galaxy here or there. We were happy, for a time. I was the first drell to love a hanar in that way. As far as I know. But we were discovered, and…” Therion hid her eyes in one hand, as though she could not bear to go on. She heard Borbala snort.

  The captain’s voice droned on through the public audio system.

  If you detect symptoms in yourself or others, do not report to medbay. Isolate and confine symptomatic individuals to designated residential quarters on your species’ environmental control decks and await further communication.

  “So you see, I know,” the drell said. “I know what it’s like, to love someone you can never touch again.”

  The quarian’s faceplate fogged gently. He was crying. “When we reach Andromeda, she’ll go back to him,” he whispered. “And all I will have in my memory is the way she smelled on that last night, so impossibly sweet, like flowers, flowers in the depths of space…”

  A bone-cracking scream echoed down the hall. All the tiny hairs on Anax Therion’s neck stood up straight. That was a mother’s scream. Once you heard it, you could never mistake it for any other.

  They dashed out into the corridor. A quarian woman was standing there, her violet hood black in the shadows. She was holding something small in her arms. Something terribly small. A child, clutching a stuffed green keeper toy in one limp, dead hand.

  With a little luck and ingenuity, we will all be safely back in our pods in a few days and the next time we open our eyes all we’ll see before us is the Andromeda galaxy in all its wonder and infinite promise. Everything is going to be all right.

  13. REPLICATION

  Someone banged on the door of Senna’Nir’s quarters. No one else had closed their doors in the quarian zone, so this had begun to happen very frequently. The locking mechanisms now cheerfully activated and deactivated whenever they pleased, so he simply hoped they were active now and tried to be as quiet as possible, ignoring the insistent and regular punching of his door.

  Yes, they were in pain. Yes, they were starving. Yes, they were dying.

  But if Senna could just get the ship working right again, they could fix it all. The med scans, the communications, the decontamination protocols—it could all work, if he could just make it work. They were only in this mess because they couldn’t access their own tech. Technology will save you. It will always save you. As long as you treat it with respect. As long as you don’t leave it alone with its thoughts. Those people out there didn’t understand. He was in here saving them. No less than Yorrik in the medbay. Of course they don’t understand. People with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis don’t even understand how many fingers they have. And if one of those thundering knocks was Qetsi, well, he could not risk her seeing what he was doing in here. He just needed more processing power.

  But even through the door he heard the scream.

  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?”

  “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?