Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Oh, better far to live and die

  Under the Khar’shan flag I fly,

  Than choose to play the paragon’s part,

  With a pirate head and a pirate heart.

  Away to the Citadel go you,

  Where pirates all are well-to-do;

  But I’ll stay true to the life contrarian,

  And live and die batarian.

  “Ah well. A new life in Andromeda, they said. And so now you will hate me because of what I brought into that new life. Because of what I could not resist. Because of what I was afraid to leave behind. The old ways, the old world. I smuggled the old life into the new, and now I will have neither it nor the profit, which is, perhaps, what I deserve. But I cannot… Anax, I cannot escape what I was born, any more than you can escape your useless lungs. That is the whole meaning of caste. If you could escape it, it would not be much of a caste.” She tried to smirk. “Don’t say our date’s off.”

  “If you are such a perfect batarian, why did your sons blind you? Why does Jalosk call you the mother of worms?” Anax hoped she had laid enough groundwork for this question to pass.

  Borbala smirked a little. “Because I quit. I left the family business. I tried to convince my people that our ships and manpower could be better used spreading batarian culture—and that in order to do that, we had to create some. Art, music, theater, novels. I wanted a batarian renaissance. Fewer guns, more songs. They wanted my eye for that.”

  The drell and the batarian edged along the north wall. The noise in the cargo bay was deafening. Moans and cries and splashes of unspeakable liquid. An occasional firing of biotic or rifle. Footsteps. Running. Running where? There was hardly a crate left fully assembled now. We are all so very inventive when we need to be, Anax thought. This is why we knew we could rebuild in Andromeda. Give an organic the smallest space, and they will put a civilization in it.

  A hanar rose up from behind a cargo container with a shrill, bleating scream of a laugh. It was covered in pustulating sores, not quite the same blue as the ones on Soval or Jalosk or even Kholai; these were almost turquoise, suppurating blood and pus clotted with dry blue dust, its tentacles swollen to the thickness of tree trunks, its inflated flesh digging into its levitation packs painfully. Any face it might have had, inasmuch as hanar had faces, was obliterated by dried vomit, tears, and a horrendous rash like a fisherman’s net thrown over the miserable jellyfish.

  “Do not be sad!” it shrieked. “Everything is all right now! Rejoice! Make merry! The Day of Extinguishment is even more glorious than prophesied!” It floated down toward Borbala and Anax, who stumbled backward to get away from the flying, tentacled infection. “Kholai was wrong,” it chortled thickly, through a ruined throat. “Kholai the Enkindled One was wise, but it was wrong. It preached that only the pure hanar would see the final days and reap their pleasures—but look! All species, together as one! Dancing, dancing so beautifully, in the ballroom of heaven! This is unity! All the creatures of the Enkindlers feasting upon the dregs of time together! Together!” The hanar fanned out its oozing tentacles like a carnival barker revealing the splendor of the midway.

  Gun smoke drifted down the stacks of crates. Screams of agony echoed. Quiet, snickering laughter cut through the din, food changing hands like money, money changing hands like food, deals in the dark. A drell boy, hardly a man yet, vomited his innards onto the wedding linens his mother had packed for him, and collapsed into the sinkhole of his own liquefying body. The sick hanar giggled again. “This one is happy! This one is euphoric!” It tried to lean into them again, confidentially, like old friends, and once again the two green women struggled to get away. “I am happy!” whispered the hanar.

  A blast of plasma fire shot out of the corner of the hold. It caught the hanar between two sores on its magenta skull and blew out its brains onto the floor. An enormous elcor trumpeted a scream of incandescent, incoherent rage, and thundered toward another hanar down the piles of ruined luggage, one who had swollen out of its levitation packs and was crawling pitifully along the floor, trying in vain to stand tall again. The elcor in the grips of madness trampled it underfoot, bellowing, “Furious hate: You did this to us, you did this!”

  The elcor disappeared in the maze of cases.

  “I think we had better run,” Borbala said.

  The captain’s voice rang out over the belly of the ship. Those who had the presence of mind to hear it lurched toward the exits in a river of broken, leaking flesh.

  Please remain calm. Form an orderly group and proceed to medbay for treatment. I repeat: Please remain calm, form an orderly group, and proceed to medbay for treatment. Be patient, my friends, and we will see our new worlds yet.

  They ran. They ran as though Borbala Ferank was not long past her prime and Anax Therion was not drowning in her own sweat. They ran as though this one thing could matter, in the end of it all. They ran as though the room was not pink with laughing, singing hanar spinning like dervishes of joy. They ran as though they knew they would be able to run out of this place again.

  Be patient, my friends, and we will see our new worlds yet.

  “Here,” panted the batarian. “It’s here. It’s somewhere… oh, you must be joking. This must be an amusing jest, yes? The universe is having it on at old Borbala’s expense. Hilarious, truly the height of comedy in the known universe. Get the fuck off my nest egg you disgusting blob,” she roared.

  Ysses had wrapped itself around a comparatively small crate and was suckling at its innards lustily. It looked up, its wedge-shaped head blistered with sores, as though it had stood too close to the sun.

  “Anax Theeeeerion!” it gurgled. “This one has missed you! Look what this one found! It is wonderful, it is a miracle, it is this one’s Day of Extinguishment present!”

  The hanar’s nostrils and eating orifice were caked with red sand.

  “Oh, Bala,” Anax sighed. “You didn’t.”

  Borbala Ferank, former master of the greatest crime family in her quadrant, sang softly:

  For I am batarian!

  And it is, it is a call clarion

  To be batarian!

  “Don’t you want to try some?” the hanar bubbled. “There’s more than enough to share! Come, drell, this one will tell you its soul name and we will watch the cosmos perish together!”

  Anax Therion sighed in disgust. She extended her arm and activated a stasis field, snatching the hanar up into the air like a sack of salt.

  “Your soul name is ‘Shit for Brains,’” she snapped. “And you’re coming with me.”

  The drell looked down again at the red sand, washed black by the blue biotic light, her disappointment in the batarian mingled with gratitude. “Well?” she said to the most feared woman on Khar’shan. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes, darling,” whispered Borbala, in something very like self-loathing.

  16. ACTIVATION

  It was quiet in the quarian zone. There was an orderly line proceeding up the hall, with an older lady taking blood samples at one end of it, patting heads and reassuring everyone with those soothing sounds. It looked nothing like the rest of the ship. Quarians knew how to conduct themselves in a deep-space crisis. Even though they were terrified. Even though one male dropped to the ground in the sampling line and had to be carried away. Quarians understood that the ship that sustained you could always turn against you, and the least you could do was refrain from helping it along.

  “What in the name of Rannoch and the homeworld to come is this?” Captain Qetsi’Olam breathed.

  She was standing in Senna’Nir’s doorway, gaping at the technological wreckage within.

  “Don’t look. It’s not so bad if you don’t look,” Senna said, trying to keep his hands from shaking. Don’t ever tell anyone. You mustn’t tell anyone. But it was time, and she was his captain, and she was his Qetsi—surely if anyone was ever to break this promise, it would be him and it would be now. Qetsi had broken rules all her life. She would understand. And she wou
ld understand because his secret was going to save them.

  Cables and disassembled parts covered both chambers of the first officer’s quarters. Processing orbs, memory wafers, imaging pipettes, code cores, all ripped out of the dozens of unconnected VIs Anax and Borbala had dredged up out of the corners of the Keelah Si’yah. A cairn of deconstructed cryo fish tanks were piled up on top of his dining table, the guts ripped out of every one of them. A heap of hollowed-out early childhood education VIs was stacked up on his bed, eviscerated celebrity simulator VIs scattered the floor, gaming VIs filled up the sink. And toward the center of the bedroom was Senna’s old elcor combat VI that he’d built himself on his Pilgrimage, hanging off of the krogan microscope like a metallic octopus, clutching in its silicon tentacles the cold, dull disk that was the body of Liat’Nir, inasmuch as she had one. Yet she was not entirely Liat’Nir anymore. Or at least, not just Liat’Nir. He’d been augmenting her, increasing her capacity, her speed, everything he could before… before the end. He needed her to be able to do more, and faster, that was all that mattered, because his diagnostic tools were as blind to the worm as the ship was blind to everything else. Senna could not do it. No human could. He needed her to have access to more than the millions of responses of her descendants, no matter how varied and interesting her combinations of those lost and ghostly words might be.

  “I have something to show you, Qetsi. You’re not going to like it, but we are very, very far from home, and if you do not decide to punish me, there is no one who will. New world, new rules, that’s what you’ve always said to me. We have come so far for new rules.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Senna. Of course I’m not going to punish you. We’ve lost so many already… so many.” She looked at him intently—he could see the shadows of her eyelashes beneath her faceplate glass. “You know it was the hanar, don’t you? Not all of them, of course, but… the religious ones. The cult. With their Day of Extinguishment nonsense, bleating all day and night. They made it happen. They’re going to annihilate us. We are a sacrifice. That baby girl in Yorrik’s lab. She’s a sacrifice. Senna, what am I supposed to do with a crime that enormous? Convene a tribunal, as we would on the Flotilla? Try them? Or push them out an airlock? I am not ready to be that kind of captain. I just wanted to be the kind that flew.”

  “There can’t be that many of them left. Perhaps justice will take care of itself,” Senna said. He remembered the frenetic glow of Ysses’s tentacles as it surveyed the dead. If only they’d known. “In a moment, Captain, I’m going to press a button, and if I’ve done it all right, we’ll have our ship back. I think that’s worth trading a bit of sin for, don’t you?”

  She squeezed his arm through the mesh of his suit. “I’ll forgive your sins if you forgive mine,” she said softly. “Now, just tell me what you’re so afraid of, you great stuttering processing orb.”

  Senna’Nir took a deep breath and activated the conglomerate program. Liat flickered to life on the disk, smoking her hand-rolled cigarette, lounging on her rocking chair.

  “Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, this is my grandmother, Liat’Nir.”

  The captain froze. Her shoulders went tense and stiff. Her knees locked. Senna wished, and not for the first time, that he could see her face.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It depends on what you think it is.”

  “An ancestor VI.”

  “Hello, Grandmother,” Senna’Nir said softly. His heart was racing. He had never shared this with anyone. It was more intimate than sharing suit environments.

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

  “You bosh’tet,” whispered the captain. “How long?”

  “All my life.”

  “And you never told me.”

  “How could I? But she’s… She’s truly extraordinary, Qetsi. She helps me think. Her capacity for deduction is unique. There is hardly anything she can’t figure out, although her answers don’t always make much sense. But she’s not… Don’t be afraid. She’s not alive. Her deductive abilities come from something, oddly enough, called genetic programming—”

  The captain crouched down and stared at the little hologram, who stared right back. “It’s an abomination,” she said finally.

  Senna sighed. It was the longest sigh of his life. In that sigh, a thousand hopes crumbled. “New world, new rules,” he said in vain.

  “Not like this. Some rules are there for a reason, Senna’Nir. The geth murdered my family. Perhaps, because they did not murder yours, you do not feel how wrong this is.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Senna growled, through a jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth might shatter. He pointed at the VI. “You’re looking at what the geth did to my family. Reduced us to ash and code.” Qetsi ignored him. She couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of her own righteousness.

  “You do not know, not the way I do, that machines are not to be trusted. I tried to tell the Initiative that, with their revolting Pathfinders, embedding AI in people’s flesh—it does not help the organic host, it makes them a monster. There can be no synthesis between organic and machine. They will find that out sooner or later, whether we reach the Nexus or not. But this? This is the abomination our ancestors were striving for when the geth came to life. You have repeated the end of the world, Senna. On my ship. Get it out of here. Airlock it. Burn it to ash. I don’t care.”

  “Qetsi, please!”

  “I never took you for stupid, Senna! That’s not your grandmother! It’s a copy, a copy meant to fool you, to make you feel things toward it. Don’t you think the old ones felt something toward the geth? And what happened to them? No. I would not allow the quarian Pathfinder to take the implant like the others and I will not allow unborn intelligences on my ship. Delete her, or I will.”

  Qetsi’Olam strode around him faster than Senna thought possible. She reached for the disk, her furious breathing audible even in her suit. But there is an instinct for protecting family that is faster still. Senna had wanted to explain everything carefully to Qetsi, how Liat could help, how, by uploading her program directly into the ship’s mainframe, essentially installing her as an executable function within the Keelah Si’yah, she could maintain her individuality and capacity for creative thinking—bolstered and expanded by all his tinkering with the guts of the other VIs—long enough to hack the worm and destroy it herself. To pursue it through the failed systems, deep into the core of the codebank and exterminate it for them. But eventually, he had wanted to tell the captain that the sheer massiveness of the ship’s systems would overwhelm and drown out the little pieces of Liat’Nir that made her Liat’Nir, would wash away any dregs left of personality in the great sea of the ship’s core. It was a suicide mission, one he and Liat had discussed at length. One he’d begged her not to embark on. One he hated with every ounce of his soul. One he was willing to sacrifice the thing he loved most in all the world to accomplish. Why couldn’t Qetsi listen? Why couldn’t all her rhetoric about the new rules of Andromeda have been true? Why couldn’t he give the gentle, noble speech he wanted to give, and accept her gratitude for his sacrifice?

  Instead, he cried out the command passkey to his grandmother: “GO FISH!”

  Liat’Nir’s eyes went out like candles. She disappeared. Qetsi and Senna stood motionless in the shadows of his quarters.

  “What did you do?” she seethed.

  “Wait,” Senna whispered. “Please. I did something good, I promise.”

  “Captain!” came a loud masculine voice, followed by a banging at the door. “I need to speak with you!”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment, Malak’Rafa!” she shouted.

  Senna’Nir shut his eyes. He prayed silently to the real Liat’Nir, his flesh-and-blood grandmother, so long dead. Be with me now as you always have.

>   After a few moments, he spoke to the ship.

  “K, establish a comm link between first officer’s quarters and medbay.”

  You got it, ke’sed.

  “Yorrik?” Qetsi said into her comm, almost without hope. “Tell me you found our needle in a galaxy, my friend.”

  The voice that came over the line was not Yorrik’s. It was ravaged and ruined, so faint it seemed hardly a voice at all.

  “Dejected: Affirmative. It is you.”

  17. ASSEMBLY

  Yorrik could hardly see the shape holding his head. He thought it was a man. It seemed probable that it was. It smelled familiar, but the elcor’s olfactory slats were caked in dried fluids.

  “No, no, no, Yorrik, get up, old friend. How could this happen? Your neck…”

  Senna. The shape was Senna. How nice. How good to see him again. There was a terrible pain in Yorrik’s limbs. Not only the swelling, though that was bad enough. But when he had fallen, he had cut himself on the shards of glass from the broken fish tank, or the broken volus goggles on that child’s toy, or something. Something sharp. He was bleeding, he could feel it. It wouldn’t be long now. And that was fine.

  “Warm affection: Say it, Senna,” he rasped. “It is time. Say it. Wry rejoinder: Also it is clear how this happened. I have been breathing Fortinbras in for days. I did not want you to know.”