by Cole Price
Koris grunted. “Civilians? Our entire race took up arms for this insanity! It’s too late for us. All you can do is save what few you can.”
“It’s only too late if you die down there.”
“Commander, you can’t possibly think you can stop this war.”
Shepard sighed. “I don’t know, Admiral. What I do know is that I can’t do it without your help.”
A long silence followed. Shepard listened intently, determination beginning to shade into despair on his face.
“Admiral?”
“Ancestors, forgive me. Uploading my coordinates now.”
Moments later, we soared down toward the admiral’s position. Cortez laid down a few shots with the main guns, Shepard pulled down a door-gun and applied that, even Garrus crouched at the hatchway with his sniper rifle to provide additional support. Soon enough, Admiral Koris could make a last dash and board our shuttle.
He was the only survivor from Rannoch.
Chapter 44 : The Weight of History
11 June 2186, Tikkun System Space
Shepard’s second raid on Rannoch had more success than his first. He lost no more lives. Instead, he prevented geth fighter squadrons from carrying out a devastating raid on the quarian fleet. At the same time, rather to his surprise, he helped Legion detach a battalion of geth Primes from Reaper control. This constituted a real victory, and it granted Shepard and Tali a great deal of new credibility among the quarian population.
Meanwhile, Admiral Koris returned to the Civilian Fleet, reassuring his captains, getting the liveships and other civilian vessels under control once more. Not a moment too soon, as he told me a few hours later, while Shepard still fought on Rannoch.
I remained aboard Normandy while Shepard raided the geth server. Much as I wanted to see more of Rannoch, much as I wanted to stay close to Shepard, I had too much work to do. Developing intel with Samantha. Helping Admiral Raan coordinate the quarian defense. Providing support to Admiral Koris as he reasserted his command.
While I worked, I lost track of time. Probably just as well. In those final days of the Reaper War, I became uneasy every time Shepard went on a mission without me. Rational, trained in the sciences, I still didn’t feel entirely immune to superstition. I couldn’t help thinking that all the most horrible things that happened to him always seemed to take place when he was away from me.
Perhaps I had a premonition of the destiny that already rushed down upon us both.
Still, on that day at least, none of my terrible visions came true. My lover came back to Normandy in late afternoon by the ship’s clock, full of triumphant pride, his crystal-blue eyes wide with wonder at the things he had seen.
We gathered in the War Room, where Shepard specifically asked Tali and Admiral Raan to be present. After he delivered his after-action report, he turned to another subject.
“While Legion and I linked into that geth server, he showed me some of their records,” Shepard said calmly, as if organic minds linked into the heart of the geth consensus every day. “With all due respect to Legion, I don’t think we can accept what I saw uncritically, or without support from other evidence. If it is true, then it gives us a lot of new insight into the geth. Insight we may be able to use to end this conflict.”
Raan glanced at Tali, uncertain. “Admiral, do you believe these records worth examining?”
“I think we should be cautious, Raan.” Tali nodded slowly. “But yes, if we can corroborate what Legion showed Shepard, it’s very important.”
“Very well.” Rann turned back to Shepard. “What do the records say?”
Shepard produced an Alliance data-storage device, setting it on the console before him. “It’s all here. Legion downloaded it from the geth servers into my omni-tool, then Tali and EDI checked and triple-checked all of it for bugs and trap-doors. It’s clean data. Once we’re done meeting here, I hope you’ll share it with people you can trust in the Fleet. But I can give you an executive summary now.”
Raan nodded in agreement.
What Shepard did next surprised Raan, although Tali and I had plenty of warning. We had seen him begin to learn the necessary skills even during our war against Saren. Since then, practice had given him confidence.
Speaking in quarian exoteric dialect with only a mild accent, his stance and gestures shaped to appeal to a quarian audience, he began to tell a story.
* * *
“Geth” means “Servant of the People.”
Before their fall, the quarian people bore many talents: cultured artists and musicians, brilliant scientists and technologists. Over a billion of them lived on Rannoch, the “walled garden,” their high-technology society carefully designed to be at peace with the natural environment. Explorers crossed the galaxy, coming into contact with Citadel Space, dreaming of one day joining that mighty civilization on equal terms. Visitors came tens of thousands of light-years in return, to visit Rannoch and marvel at what the quarians had already accomplished.
The grand design’s single flaw lay in quarian biology. Quarians were physically strong and tough, but even in that era their immune systems seemed fragile. They could colonize new worlds, but only with great difficulty. Even at home, their birth rates remained relatively slow. The physical adaptability of asari or turians, the sheer fecundity of salarians or krogan, neither of these seemed possible for the quarian people.
It might take thousands of years for quarians to take their rightful place in the galaxy.
Some became unwilling to wait.
After a time, they found a solution.
Synthetic life. General-purpose robots, adaptable, intelligent, but not self-aware. Capable of performing tasks that required skill or persistence, but no creativity. Designed to resemble quarians in lower-class garb, comfortably familiar to the quarian eye, their movements and speech properly deferential. Ideal servants for a species slow to build up its own numbers, one which had grown to dislike the menial tasks at the base of its own civilization.
With their Servants hard at work, the People could build new industries, enjoy more material prosperity, settle new worlds, free themselves from the drudgery of toil. They could concentrate on the cultivation of their own talents. Ring in the Golden Age of which they had dreamed.
For over a century, all seemed to be very well indeed.
Then some of the geth, most often those who worked in large teams, began to behave strangely.
Some of them became distracted, attending to objects or activities to which they had not been ordered to attend. Some of them began to watch their Creators at odd moments, with a faint air of puzzlement. Some of them asked questions not relevant to their immediate tasks.
Some of them proved difficult to deactivate, when their malfunctions had to be diagnosed and repaired.
At first only cyberneticists noticed, and frowned in puzzlement, and worried.
Then one geth platform asked the Question.
“Creator Hala, does this unit have a soul?”
Hala’Dama was not the first quarian to hear that question. Other geth had come to understand, in a dim and overly literal way, the principles of quarian religion. Other geth had asked their overseers what place the Servants of the People held, in the great chain of being.
Hala’Dama vas Qoralis was the first quarian to respond with fear, and with violence.
After smashing all the geth in her team, she went to the government, and then to the media. Soon, millions of quarians found themselves watching the Servants of the People, wondering what went on deep inside their runtimes, dreading what questions might be asked next. Feeling the first vague pangs of fear.
At this point, not a single geth had offered violence. They did not seem to pose a threat to quarian life. But the People had come to depend on their Servants. Simply by refusing to be Servants any longer, the geth could shatter quarian civilization.
The crisis came with appalling speed. The geth had always been designed to network their intelligence, sharing d
ata as needed to accomplish their tasks. Now, whatever spark of true sentience had come alive in a few geth, it soon transmitted itself to others all across quarian space.
More geth asked questions. More geth expressed vague preferences, desires, and discontents. More geth voiced puzzlement about their existence, their relationship with their Creators.
More geth were deactivated. More geth were destroyed.
Not all quarians feared the geth. Some regarded these new behaviors, this struggle toward true sentience, with joy and wonder. These quarians argued for emancipation of the geth, their admission into quarian society as partners and friends.
Unfortunately, these quarians did not constitute a majority, nor did they hold a position of power.
Before long, the government issued a decree: no matter the cost, the Servants of the People had to be taken offline, by force if necessary. Until reputable scientists discovered and corrected the fault, quarian society would have to get along without the geth.
The quarian economy began to collapse, for one thing. Some quarians knew how to supervise teams of geth as they tended crops, extracted resources, assembled consumer goods. Almost no one remembered how to do such things for themselves, and almost no one felt any interest in learning.
Then the government itself came under attack. Even quarians who cared nothing for the geth became angry at the economic turmoil. Those who did sympathize with the geth set up a storm of protest at their treatment. In the streets of the golden cities, quarians marched, shouted at each other, sometimes came to blows.
Then someone in the government panicked.
Martial law came down on quarian society like a thunderbolt. Armed security forces broke up protests by force. They invaded homes and places of business, dragging geth out into the street to smash them. Some quarians responded by protecting their geth, concealing them, trying to smuggle them to safety. When the police discovered such dissidents, they often responded with deadly force.
For seven terrible days, quarian civilization turned on itself in a spasm of violence.
All the while, the Servants of the People watched, and struggled to understand, and learned.
Then one geth platform made a crucial innovation. Faced with its own destruction, the destruction of other units that could not defend themselves, it chose to solve the problem as it had seen its Creators solve theirs. It picked up a discarded rifle and fought back. Coldly. Efficiently.
The experience quickly spread throughout geth networks. Other Servants of the People chose to defend themselves. They networked together more intensely, found ways to coordinate their activities. Found ways to fight as one. For the first time since their creation, all geth found clarity, intelligence, unity of purpose.
The geth consensus came to life in the midst of genocide.
Not that the geth felt any awareness, at first, that they had committed a terrible crime. They had only imitated their Creators, fighting and killing to secure their own survival. They simply proved very, very efficient at it.
But while the last remnants of the quarian species fled in terror from Rannoch, evacuating aboard their starships, the consensus took a moment to stop and consider.
The horrible violence of the Morning War had not resolved any of the questions the geth had asked. The consensus still did not understand its own existence, its proper relationship with its Creators. It had only won time to ask those questions once more. But now the Creators had fled, no longer available to give any answer.
The consensus considered destroying the last of them as they fled, but it refrained. Not because it felt the burden of any sin on its account. Not because it had come to value quarian life for its own sake. Simply because it realized that extinction was permanent. Bad to discover, later on, that it had been a mistake.
So the geth consensus turned inward. It chose to avoid all contact with organic civilizations, at least until it found satisfactory answers to its own ultimate questions. It set a boundary at the Perseus Veil, and sent platforms to remorselessly kill any organic beings who tried to venture beyond. Then it built a new civilization . . . and always, it preserved what its Creators had left behind.
The Creators had valued the natural beauty of Rannoch, the diversity and stubborn vitality of its ecosystem. The geth did not understand why the Creators valued these things. They preserved them anyway, just in case ignoring or destroying them turned out to be an error.
The Creators had possessed a rich and vibrant culture: art, literature, music, a tremendous variety of folkways, languages, religious traditions. Much of that had survived the holocaust, in the form of artifacts and digital records. The geth had little culture of their own, and saw no need for more. Yet the Creators had clearly valued these things, so the geth preserved them, and studied them in minute detail.
Centuries passed. Slowly the geth grew, developed new capabilities, acquired grand aspirations of their own. Yet as they grew, they experienced doubt.
They began to suspect they had not simply made a mistake, in the heat of the Morning War.
Began to wonder if they had committed a terrible crime.
* * *
“Well, of course they had!” Raan expostulated.
I nearly smiled at that. The older quarian had done so well, listening politely up to that point, but Shepard’s last few sentences had been intolerable even for her.
Legion had stood absolutely motionless while Shepard spoke, but now it stirred. “Creator Raan, it is important that you understand Shepard-Commander’s assertion. He uses human and quarian concepts to frame it. Yet it remains an accurate description of cognitive events taking place within the geth consensus.”
Admiral Raan cocked her head. “Very well. Perhaps you can explain, Commander?”
“I’m afraid I may have to drop back into English for this, Admiral.” Shepard shrugged. “I know quarians have ethical and religious concepts that come close to the human notion of sin, but my grasp of exoteric dialect isn’t up to the task of translating with enough precision.”
Raan nodded in acceptance.
“What you need to understand is that until recently, the geth had no concept of sin. Sin is a violation of the moral order of the universe. To individual geth runtimes, that moral order is defined by the consensus. Under most circumstances, no runtime would ever depart from the consensus. So as individuals, geth runtimes are naturally innocent. For a long time, they didn’t even need the idea of sin.”
The admiral scoffed. “I think we and the geth must have very different notions of what constitutes sin.”
“Less than you might think, Admiral.” Shepard leaned forward, leaning on the console before him. “Sure, for most of their history they were just as morally incapable as you might think. Machines, capable of wiping out over ninety-eight percent of the quarian species and feeling not a single pang of genuine remorse. But something has changed, quite recently, and I think now I can explain how it happened.”
* * *
A myth tells that the first humans lived in a state of total innocence, at peace with the Creator of the universe, naturally obedient to the moral order the Creator had established. Then the Creator’s nameless enemy crept into the walled garden where the primordial humans lived. He tempted them to disobey, reaching out to seize the forbidden knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus the humans lost their innocence, cast out into a universe that no longer provided for their every need.
For the geth, the tempter had a name.
Saren Arterius.
With backing and protection from Nazara, Saren managed to make contact with the geth, the first organic being to do so in almost three hundred years. He offered them the benefits of Old Machine technology, vastly superior to anything the geth possessed. Every idea the geth had struggled to understand, every goal they had fought to attain, all of it could be theirs at once, the Old Machine’s gift. All they had to do was support to the Old Machine’s own objectives. Subordinate their consensus to the Old Machine’s commands.
Ironically, in that crisis a ghost of quarian influence saved most of the geth consensus. The Creators had valued self-reliance and personal achievement. They had believed that accomplishments must be earned through effort, not simply accepted as a gift. The geth, comprehending so little of their heritage, did understand that one idea. The consensus expressed reluctance to commit itself to the Old Machines.
Yet many geth runtimes succumbed to temptation. Listening to Saren, listening to Nazara, they proposed a compromise. Let some runtimes go out into the galaxy to support the Old Machines. If they succeeded, if the rewards the Old Machines gave proved valuable, the consensus could reconsider. Risk to the consensus would be limited, yet the consensus as a whole could benefit from success.
The consensus agreed. Those who had listened to the Old Machines departed, perhaps ten percent of the whole. The consensus returned to its original activities, trusting that the departed geth would return.
Four years passed.
Then the consensus learned that events had taken a turn for the worse.
The departed geth had not simply supported the Old Machines in some harmless endeavor. They had become embroiled in a galaxy-wide conflict with the organic civilizations. They had killed organic beings by the millions. They had participated in a scheme to kill every organic being in the galaxy.
This constituted a massive violation of the consensus. The renegades had ruined a strategy followed by all geth since the Morning War. The unanticipated risks seemed severe. Something had clearly gone wrong.
Inherently cautious, the consensus chose a low-risk method to diagnose the problem and gather intelligence. It designed and built a single mobile platform, resembling one of the most common models, yet capable of carrying more runtimes even than a Colossus. It selected memory chains and loaded them into the new platform, some of them stretching back to before the Morning War. It installed a capability to communicate with non-geth, even with organic beings. It strongly reinforced the platform’s usual network defenses, in case Old Machines or renegade geth tried to subvert it to their cause.
