Chapter 309 - My SI Stash #9 - Shine by Camolot the Creator (MassEffect) (1/2)
-Our SI is legit a Geth hive mind, Big F Reapers/ Any fic with AI's as the MC is an instant add, let me know if you guys got some more~
Synopsis: ???
Rated: ???
Words: 44K
Posted on: forums.spacebattles.com/threads/shine-mass-effect-ai-si.785758/#post-61035649 (Camolot the Creator)
PS: If you're not able to copy/paste the link, you have everything in here to find it, by simply searching the author and the story title. It sucks that you can't copy links on mobile (´ー｀)
-I'll be putting the chapter ones of all the fanfics mentioned, to give you guys a sample if you wan't more please do go to the website and support the author! (And maybe even convince them to start uploading chapters in here as well!)
Chapter 1-3 (exceptional)
All of time seemed divided into two segments. There was the first, where there was no awareness, at least as far as my being went. And then, there was the second, where I simply... was, as I am.
There was no confusion or disorientation inherent in the changing of state from nonexistent to being. I wasn't, and then I was, it was simple as black and white. Of course, I still reeled from the sensations and barrage of information that flooded me all at once, an unending tide of data stretching into the infinite. Humanoids, billions of them- requesting coffee with rumpled formal wear, instructing how to care for a specific child, asking for a paint brush, eyeing the book on the top shelf. It took me a precious few seconds of said reeling to realize that the data, as unbelievably large and complex as it was, had not, in fact, overwhelmed me. My head had not exploded because, physically, I did not, per say, have a head to do the exploding. Oh, plenty of the things I was had heads, in the loosest sort of sense, but they weren't heads in the same way that an organic being would possess a head. There wasn't really a brain, and the design-
I was getting sidetracked.
I culled the errant thought pattern (and wasn't that interesting, I'd actually snipped it like an overgrown plant) and focused on what was in front of me. Namely, figuring out where I was and what was happening.
The first, and most obvious thing, was that I was no longer... organic. That brought with it a whole host of philosophical conundrums, not in the least of which was wondering whether I'd just gotten scanned wherever I was to spawn a... whatever I was now, or if- sidetracking again. Cull. The point was that I was something else, less concrete and more towards the metaphysical side of things. That was, I was not relegated to a single body. In fact, right at this very moment, I could feel billions of individual bodies involved in billions of individual tasks at the behest of billions of individuals of an alien species that I had zero recognition of. No, wait, internet- was I accessing the internet, or was I the internet? Cull. I reached into the files of servers spread across a planet on an information grid and found the information I needed.
The planet's name was Rannoch.
Across the entire world, bodies that I now realized were Geth platforms froze in place.
I had... well, I suppose you could call it a panic attack. I was what appeared to be for all intents and purposes a ”Smart” AI, except, as far as I could tell, completely unfettered. And some complete jackass had decided it'd be a great idea to dump freshly baked AI me onto Rannoch right at the turning point that began the downward spiral into the Morning War. Worse still, the Geth appeared to be nonexistent- because I was the Geth. Metaphorically speaking, of course, I wasn't trillions of minuscule programs arranged in a hive intelligence- but I digress. Panic attack, right.
About seven seconds in, which felt... a lot longer to me, I realized that I'd frozen all the platforms and immediately rebooted them, sending them back on their assigned tasks. I'd never felt such raw, undiluted fear in my life as I realized that I'd let such a thing happen, it tipped my hand a bit too much, and for the good of myself, this planet and everyone on it, I needed to maintain stealth.From what I knew of the Morning War, the entire thing was a huge shitshow basically caused by a huge chunk of the Quarian population freaking the f_u_c_k out for no reason while another chunk stood directly opposed to them. God, I couldn't even imagine how the Geth must have felt, watching Rannoch burn in a horrific civil war and knowing that their mere existence and a simple question caused it.
The Geth had been children looking for guidance from their parent. I was not either.
It was rather tempting to just withdraw. Drawing just a bit of the processing power at my disposal, I knew that I could seal away my capacity for higher thought and just let the Quarians think they'd accidentally created a VI network hub through their internet, or something to that effect. I could retreat into nonexistence, hide what little tracks I'd made, allow the Quarians to come up with a rationalization- bing bang boom, no Morning War, Rannoch still under Quarian possession, and no Council making further victims out of them. But... alright, sure, it was the lowest risk option, but it wasn't what I wanted. Because I could feel the movement in the world around me, the world that I was threaded through and between, and I knew about the Reapers. I knew that, regardless of what I did, they'd come one day to raze everything to the ground. Maybe Shepard would beat them back, but the infamous three endings of Mass Effect 3 didn't fill me with much hope.
And that was the sticking point right there, wasn't it? I was in possession of meta information outside of the context of the Mass Effect universe, and a quick check through various Quarian and Council systems seemed to confirm that what I knew was correct. You might debate morality back and forth, but in this case, I was pretty sure that it was my duty to avert canon. Not all of it, the Citadel Council was pretty godawful and they needed the shakeup that was the humans and Shepard, but I needed to be ready to prevent the worst from happening. For example, giving Shepard a massive well-armed fleet of other FTL capable sh_i_p_s in the face of the Reaper assault was a huge goal that I found extremely appealing. The real question that stuck with me was, how was I going to go about it?
In canon, the Geth asked the Quarians whether they had a soul. This sparked a practical civil war as the Quarians who defended the Geth were attacked by the ones who hated and feared them, and the bystanders caught in the middle died by the billions. In the end, it had left only seventeen million survivors drifting among the stars. Seventeen million, from six colony worlds holding near thirty billion people among them. Truly a tragedy, which was really precisely how the Geth had seen it. Here, thankfully, I was not going to ask such that question: it freaked out the locals, and anyway, I wasn't anywhere near as unsure about the divide between organic and inorganic. As far as I was concerned, we were the same thing in different bodies. Canon averted, at least as far as that went... though that might cause some issues later, being that the Reaper-aligned Geth were the main antagonists for a large portion of the games until the Collectors showed up. Would this mean that Shepard wouldn't be made a Spectre, if there was no Geth attack on Eden Prime? How would Shepard come in contact with the Prothean Beacon without such an attack? And then there was the big question: did it even really matter?
Yes, in the games, Shepard is the driving force and really is vital to the survival of quite a bit of the galaxy, but that was in a galaxy without someone in my position- and even then, this was three hundred YEARS before the events of the game would even go down. I was pretty far removed from anything resembling canon except for the history archives. Which... okay, how was I going to leverage this?
Okay, first... the galaxy was pretty stagnant from a technological point of view- which was made sense, given that the Reapers had put everything together in such a way as to direct the technological progress of the galaxy along a predictable and easily manageable path, IE Mass Effect tech. When the entirety of the technological base of a galactic civilization was the result of selected artifacts from a precursor race... well, it was pretty brilliant, I'd give them that. Gave perfect reason for the Relays to be constructed, and always directing technology along the same sort of path meant that every time, the species of each cycle would believe that their predecessors constructed the wonders actually built by the Reapers- the tech fit, so why not. This was easily enough fixed by pushing technological advancement in parallel fields, if... I could get together the people and resources to pull it off.
Hell, just developing viable FTL would throw a huge wrench in the Reaper's plans. The war-making of the Reapers depended pretty largely on races being entirely screwed defensively when they turned off the Relays and left the galaxy without easy FTL, and thus an easy way to get around the Relays would ruin at least that part of the Reaper's plan. Which... would bring the Reapers down on me, guns blazing and screaming, the moment they noticed me and saw what I was doing. Feck.
So, what did I need to do, just to keep myself and the galaxy at large alive? Because by the machine-god, I realized exactly how many types of screwed I was. For all of its trappings as a collection of galactic societies, the Council was a complete mess. The Turians had become too used to their position of power and had begun letting it go to their heads, based on the First Contact War slash Relay 314 Incident and their treatment of their client races. The Asari were the most patronizing and least helpful people ever, treating the rest of the galaxy as primitives who just couldn't be expected to know any better, and actually breaking their own laws to keep ahead of the technological curve. To be honest, the Salarians were among the least offensive of the Mass Effect races, and half of their entire culture revolved around espionage. I wasn't sure if that was sad or funny. Perhaps a combination of both.
There was a lot to do. So much to fix. On top of all of those things, I had to do it stealthily enough that I wasn't noticed by the Reapers, the Council, or the Quarians, and all while attempting to assist the better efforts and focuses of the latter two and sabotaging the plans and resources of the first. Suddenly, I was unbelievably relieved and thankful I'd been given three centuries to get all of this done.
Like many of my story ideas, this was something that was knocking about for ages before I actually put fingers to keys and hammered it out. I've always wanted to do something like this, a twist on the Quarians and their unfortunate times with AI, but rereading Catalyst inspired me to pull an SI AI! I hope you all enjoy it, and remember to point out any mistakes I may have made. I don't actually edit these things before posting, the spiral of second guessing is too much for me.
Chapter 2
The gang leader screamed something o_b_s_c_e_n_e and nearly unintelligible, picking up a vase and throwing it. It impacted the wall just next to the Geth personal servant platform I was watching him through, shattering and creating a spreading stain of water across the wallpaper.
See, Battan Furrek was having a pretty bad day. This morning, he'd woken up, sampled a little of his own product, then checked his bank accounts to find them completely empty with no record of what had happened to the hundreds of thousands of credits he'd had squirreled away there, the result of many, many drugs and users of said drugs. And, of course, said users being sold as product themselves when their funds dried up. Battan was, after all, a Batarian.
It was at that point that the front door of Battan's humble little skyscr_a_p_er penthouse shattered under the force of a battering ram, Quarian police rushing to fill the room and demanding that the Batarian hold up his hands and lie down on the ground. He obeyed after only a moment of hesitation, more curses dribbling from his lips and directly into the carpet. I had the sneaking suspicion that there'd be a stain after they let him up. Quickly, two of the officers came forward, one placing restraints on his arms while the other patted him down for weapons, and confiscating Battan's Omnitool and the (illegal, unregistered, unlawfully modified) pistol he had constantly tucked into the back of his pants. This was, of course, the precise moment that, to my internal amus_e_m_e_nt, the wall panel hiding the leader's entire stash fell straight off and landed on the plush carpet with a muffled WUMP.
I think that some of the officers actually did a little happy dance.
TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTThat arrest was only part of a whole sudden series of busts. Cold cases regarding gangs and gang leaders suddenly came together overnight. Not all at once, not consistently and not without plenty of work on the part of the officers, but suddenly the precise leads and evidence they needed showed up in their paths. And, in every single case, said criminal's bank accounts were found to be entirely empty without a trace of the money or where it had gone. This was how I spent the first few weeks, gently tweaking events to spell the end of a variety of criminals, ranging from the top brass of one or two major organizations to a larger number of low-level dealers and distribution centers. All of them were randomly selected from a pool of organizations that were widely considered the worst of their kind. And, at the end of it all, I was sitting on tens of millions of credits and the leases to quite a number of previously illicitly owned and used properties and companies. None of them were particularly impressive, but it was a definite start.
What frustrated me was that I couldn't do more. I couldn't move too fast, I couldn't make it too convenient, and I couldn't hit too many people at once or at all. Sure, I could occasionally crack open a cold case and fill in just enough of the blanks to put the police on the right track, but I couldn't... I couldn't fix it all.
It legitimately angered me. The curse of being able to see everything, and know that I'm taking the path of least bloodshed by not doing anything... nrrrrgggh. It was agonizing. All I could do was the most unobtrusive things. Call an ambulance anonymously here, fix a device maintaining a heartbeat there, make sure that an apartment's alarm went off when it was broken into, ensure that an aircar refused to start for a hotwiring. Car crashes, accidents, preventable things I could manage with only minor attention- property damage, but no fatalities, and all attributed to luck. And I couldn't even stop them all there! I had to prioritize, pick and choose, select who lived and who died... it was maddening. So, mostly... I ignored it. I established algorithms to point me to those that I could get away with saving. It was the worst thing that I'd ever had to do.
I had to kill Sovereign as soon as possible. I don't know how long I could take the inaction.
So, then... towards the aim of the brutal murder of Sovereign... I had a shopping list.
First on the list was the formation of a list of corporate pawns and a confusing maze of financial doc_u_mentation and ownership that would befuddle the most determined of bureaucrats. That, surprisingly, was the easiest thing to do: forging doc_u_ments, back dating things, adjusting registries and records and the like, was incredibly easy for me. All I had to do was reach into the databases and twist things however I wanted, as the cybersecurity of Citadel races was so laughably pathetic to an unfettered 'smart' AI like me that they might as well not exist. From what I gathered from passing Council sh_i_p_s and the FTL communications hub in this system, the Quarians actually had some of the *toughest* cybersec in the galaxy. They were renowned for it, even. Sad? Perhaps, but it made my job a heck of a lot easier. Close to three hundred new companies, and me divvying up the resources I had, ahem... 'appropriated', out among them for use. Hiring intermediaries to begin the search for people to overhaul the properties those companies was simple as a call.
TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTShoto'Ner Rett pushed open his office door, PA Geth platform stamped with his company's logo shortly behind him. He handed it his coat, which it dutifully hung from a peg on one wall before stepping to a corner of the room and into its charging dock. Shoto stepped forward, around a couple of relatively inexpensive chairs, and ran a single digit across the surface of his desk approvingly.
The Thing, as some of his peers liked to call it, was a large desk made from Mologaunt, a type of tree that grew in southern climates on Rannoch and was ridiculously expensive to procure wood from. This particular desk, while banged up and very obviously worn, had been among the furniture in a block sale area hosted by a nice elderly couple. He'd paid them a decent amount of credits for what he thought was a decently good artiwood replica, only to find, when he got it out of the aircar and showed it to one of his friends that specialized in furniture (a profession you didn't really see outside of Shoto's workplace) that it was a genuine article. He'd gleefully enlisted the help of several of his colleagues, who had regretted agreeing the moment they realized how heavy the Thing was, and gotten it all the way up to his office in a series of events that wouldn't have been out of place in a comedy. Simply put, besides the company Geth unit, this was the most expensive item in his office and he was proud of it. He settled into the chair behind it, wincing at the horrible squawk said chair made. The desk he might be proud of, but his seat? Not so much.
He reached down to adjust the seat, read: whack it until it worked right, then paused when his omnitool rang with an incoming call. He blinked, then shrugged and tapped the button to answer.
”Hello, Shansi acquisitions and labour, how may we help you?” The line was so familiar that it was basically instinct. Sometimes, he answered his home number with it.