Mass Effect: Initiation

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Ryder!”

  Silence. Cora’s throat tightened. “Ryder, goddamn it! If you’re dead…”

  “If you interrupt me right now, Harper,” he called back, his voice unnaturally calm and tight with concentration, “my chances of survival will drop from unlikely to delusional. Everything’s offline. I have to handle the download of SAM’s personality matrix manually.” He paused. “Ninety seconds to completion.”

  Damn it, he wasn’t going to make it for ninety more seconds. She needed to get him out of there. Summoning all her concentration, she focused her biotic energy on the shuttle, trying to at least clear a path for Ryder. She pushed. With a metallic groan, the shuttle slid aside, to reveal—

  Ryder, on the far side of the room. He was crouched between two of the tall hardcases, staring intently and typing rapidly with one hand as his omni-tool continued to stream data. But his clothes had begun to smoke. His hair wafted in the heat, its ends shriveling even as Cora watched. His pale skin had gone bright red, shiny in its dryness, cracking and peeling. She could see him blinking rapidly, perhaps to try and keep his eyes from drying out. Another minute—no, another few seconds—and he would burst into flame, if he didn’t just keel over dead.

  His SAM had to be keeping him alive somehow. How? It didn’t matter. Cora knew this much: Physics were physics, and there was only so much even an AI could do to keep a human being alive under such conditions.

  Okay. Use biotics to shape a mass effect corridor between me and him—the same way relays did, except on the personal scale. Zip in, grab him, zip out. Just because she didn’t have SAM-E and her implant supercharging her biotics anymore didn’t mean she couldn’t do it; she would just have to remember everything Nisira and the other Daughters had taught her. And apply it under pressure, without practice. And not screw it up.

  “I can do this,” she muttered, trying to concentrate. In theory her shields could take a second or two of plasma—

  “Don’t you dare charge in here,” Ryder snapped. He didn’t lift his eyes from what he was doing. “I’ll fight you, if you try it. Then we’ll both die.”

  “Ryder…” She had to make him see reason. “This mission needs you.”

  “It needs SAM more than it needs any individual human being. I told you, Harper, without him we can’t catch up to the other races. If we don’t progress, we die.” His face twisted suddenly, and he coughed; Cora saw the blood spots on his lips, even from across the chamber. Whatever SAM had done to keep him alive thus far was failing. And was he hunching, now? Struggling to stay upright and conscious. “But I can’t save them both, Harper.”

  “What?”

  He drew in a labored breath. “SAM-E. I told you, I fissioned it off from SAM. For all intents and purposes, it was never—” Another cough, followed by a quiet curse. “Never separate. That means—”

  Cora understood then, with a hollow chill. The silence inside her, since SAM-E had gone dark. Ryder was saying that SAM-E wouldn’t be back.

  She’d lost colleagues before. And now wasn’t the time for grief. Cora clenched and unclenched her hands in frustration. “Okay. You can explain it later—”

  “You should evacuate.” Ryder’s voice was infuriatingly calm. “There’s still a risk of decompression.”

  She seized on this. “I’ll leave if you come with me!”

  He tapped out some sequence on his omni-tool. “There are three plasma streams between me and the door.” Cora started, edging closer to the opening to look. He was right: three thin jets of glowing gas curled from under the shattered shuttle. No way to move around them to get to him. Damn it!

  Abruptly a look of relief flowed over Ryder’s face. The data stream ended, and he sat back—then flopped, slumping against the hardcase behind him. All at once he looked like a dying man: visibly weakening, more blood on his lips as he coughed again, eyes drifting shut. An instant later, the emergency lights in the corridor flickered around Cora, then shut down entirely. There was a loud, electrical crack somewhere down the hall, and suddenly when Cora moved her feet drifted away from the floor. The level’s artificial gravity and mass effect envelope had collapsed. Emergency generators had slapped localized mass effect seals over the breaches, but that would only last for a few minutes, to enable evacuation. The whole ring was that much closer to an explosive decompression.

  “Did it,” Ryder breathed then, as Cora grabbed onto the damaged door to keep herself in place. His voice was too soft. If Cora hadn’t been listening via her omni-tool, she wouldn’t have heard it. “P-processors are slag.” He ran out of breath, seemed to flounder. “My implementation of SAM…” From across the room, through the heat-waver, Cora saw him smile at her. “Tell my son and daughter… their mother…”

  His smile faded. His head thumped onto the hardcase. Whatever SAM had done to keep him alive, it had failed with SAM’s shutdown, and now Ryder was being dry-roasted before her eyes.

  No! In the darkened hall, the only light now came from the fire, the plasma, and the blaze of biotic energy that Cora had inadvertently summoned around herself.

  If she had planned what she did next, it would have gone wrong. If she’d thought about it, she’d have killed Ryder and probably herself in the process. Now, though, she moved on instinct, swinging up to plant her feet on the outer surface of the broken door. In an instant, without gravity, her perspective reoriented: now the door was the floor, and SAM-Node was down. Then she “reached” into the room biotically, envisioning her arms lengthening and her hands wrapping around the limp form of Alec Ryder.

  Careful, careful—so easy to crush fragile flesh. But she had to sheathe him in it, wrap the dark energy around him like a singularity skin, because otherwise the friction of the air alone might kill him when she—

  —clawed a path through the surrounding matter and—

  —shoved aside the ions of plasma that this path crossed, and—

  —hauled with all her mental strength, snatching Ryder through the intervening space so fast that even passing through a vent could not harm him, and—

  —then the hurtling projectile of him flew up from the chamber. Too fast! But it was instinct, too, to “catch” him, flinging herself between him and the wall and pushing out with her biotics to slow the one and press back against the other. It still slammed the breath out of her when he struck, and when she struck the wall. She suspected she would have some magnificent bruises at best, if not cracked ribs.

  But.

  When Cora sat up, easing the dead weight of Ryder off of her so she could check his vitals, he was still breathing, though in a disturbingly labored way. Still alive, which meant there was a chance to keep him that way.

  Setting her jaw against a grin—they weren’t out of this yet—Cora latched onto the back of Ryder’s shirt. The fabric tore under her hand, the synthetic material breaking down in the wake of the chamber’s heat. She grabbed his wrist instead, grateful for the lack of gravity as it allowed her to drag him with relative speed through the corridors, bouncing off walls and angling carefully to avoid anything that might slow their momentum. Or break Ryder’s neck, she realized, grimacing as once she lost control of him and accidentally slammed him against a wall. She was more careful after that.

  But as she reached a stairwell that should’ve led to one of the usable hangar bays, she heard a hollow groan throughout the ship, and the walls shuddered. Startled, Cora checked her omni-tool, which was still patched into Hyperion’s schematics in real time. The whole section above, to which the stairwell led, was now a stark black. Depressurized. The stairwell door seals were holding, for now, but getting to a shuttle was no longer possible.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” she muttered aloud. “SAM-E, I need—”

  No. SAM-E was gone. Dead. There was no station VI available to help—if it had been unable to prevent depressurization in this section, then they were completely cut off from the rest of the Hyperion. Ryder needed medical help fast if he was going to survive, but
he wasn’t going to get that in an escape pod. She tapped frantically on her omni-tool, requesting an alternate route, but there was no response. No way to access the ship’s systems to figure out which hangar still had an unlaunched shuttle—and without SAM-E, she was no pilot, even if she found one.

  But as she stood there, her mind numbly trying to figure out somewhere to go, something to do, her omni-tool’s speaker crackled.

  “Bring him here,” said a woman’s voice. And then Cora’s omni-tool lit up with new navigation instructions.

  Cora froze, staring at this. “What the—who are you?”

  “You don’t have time for this,” the woman said, sounding… amused? “Come on. At the end of the route I’ve mapped, you’ll find the ring’s infirmary, complete with a Sirta Home Series AutoMedBed. With that, you might be able to keep him alive until the rescue-and-recovery ships get here from Luna and Theia.”

  Cora tensed. An AutoMedBed? She’d heard of them—emergency units with a sophisticated medical VI—but never seen one. Just one of the things supposedly cost millions of credits. But if they worked the way rumor said… She tightened her grip on Ryder’s arm.

  “Got it.”

  The route navigation was brief, thankfully, because the infirmary wasn’t far from the other administrative facilities of the Hyperion, but Cora felt every moment of it. By the time she drifted around a corner to see the brighter light of what had to be an infirmary, Ryder’s breathing had taken on a loud, rasping wheeze.

  Inside the infirmary, however, floor lighting activated as soon as she entered the space. White panels lit up to direct her toward one of the chambers, where there was something that looked like a bulkier and more complex version of the cryo units in the arkholds. It stood coffinlike but vertical, set into a swiveling base that was bolstered along its sides by incomprehensible modules and what might have been sensor arrays.

  And in front of this stood the holo of a woman. She was smaller than average, Asian, slim with dark hair—though it was difficult to see details in the holo. And she was familiar. Cora stared at her for a moment, though she beckoned for Cora to pull Alec over to the unit.

  “Medical emergency,” she said, flickering to appear on the other side of the device. Its door unlocked and swung open, and Cora carefully maneuvered Ryder’s limp form into place. There was an instant glimmer as the device’s mass effect fields activated and adjusted his position to optimal, then the door slid shut. She saw robotic arms and tubes uncurl from the device’s sides, attaching sensors and checking vitals, and the unit immediately swiveled back to put Ryder in a prone position.

  “Messed himself up good,” the holo-woman said, watching the first readouts appear on a nearby console hidden among the ferns. “But he’ll probably make it. His SAM isn’t really offline; it just can’t talk. It’s still hard at work trying to save his life. Between that and the AMB, he should pull through.”

  “Good,” Cora said, something inside her uncoiling in relief. Then she focused on the woman. “So who the hell are you?”

  Wait. No. Cora blinked. Because now that she’d gotten a good look at the woman, she knew her, somehow. There was a wry smile on her open, cheeky face that almost distracted Cora from the cool knowing in her gaze, and that frustrating sense of familiarity.

  “I know you,” she amended. “Jien Garson.”

  “Correct,” the woman replied, “and you’re Cora Harper.”

  “Yeah,” Cora said. “Why is Jien Garson—” The founder and funder of the Andromeda Initiative, and one of humanity’s wealthiest spec-tech inventors. “—just appearing in the emergency systems of the Hyperion?”

  “I like to keep an eye on my investments. Including an eye that not everyone knows about, which doesn’t show up unless it’s absolutely necessary.” Garson’s holo crossed the room to stand next to a counter. “I mean, I am an eccentric genius, after all.”

  “So you can project yourself throughout this ship? Anywhere?”

  “Not everywhere, but I’ve got holo projectors in most places. Paid for them myself.” The holo kicked its heels. “I’m alerted under certain circumstances, and then choose whether and where to appear.” She said this last bit with a flourish of her hand. “Fortunately for you and Alec Ryder, the current conditions meet those parameters.”

  There was a sudden, hollow thunk sound throughout the ship, and through the glass windows of the infirmary, Cora saw the emergency lights turn red. The doors of the infirmary and the room that contained them hissed audibly, locking down.

  “Aaaand there goes the level,” Garson said. “Don’t worry, though. The infirmary is rated to withstand full vacuum and to preserve liveable temperatures for about eight hours or so. You’ll be rescued long before that.”

  Cora relaxed a little, but something still bothered her. “You seem pretty calm given that someone just tried to blow up your ark ship.”

  Garson smiled. “Is that what you think they were doing?”

  “Well…” Cora paused. What the hell else would they be doing? As she started thinking through the possibilities, she realized she’d half expected to hear SAM-E chime in and finish her thought.

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence that the shuttle exploded directly above SAM’s node?” Garson asked.

  “No.” Of course not. Cora frowned. “If you know what’s going on just spit it out.” She hated when people tried to tease out an answer they already knew.

  Garson’s holo sighed. “Alec put a lot of faith in you, and I’m putting a lot of faith in him.” The holo walked over to where Ryder lay, motionless, his breathing erratic. It reached out an ephemeral hand and ineffectually brushed at a patch of hair plastered to his forehead. “He knows—as do I—that there are things at play beyond our control. That the very fate of our species may depend on our success in Andromeda.”

  “He hinted at something like that.” Cora was becoming more annoyed at the “hinting.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Garson looked up at Cora, still smiling. But there was something else… Concern maybe?

  “If I seem like I’m playing at a game, don’t be fooled. This is very real. There are those who would see us fail. Those who believe that we are wasting our time. Our resources. And there are others still who would take what we’ve learned, all we’ve built, and use it for their own purposes. You’ve seen that for yourself.” She paused, smiled. “And, there are those who believe if they can’t have what we’ve made, then nobody should.”

  That got Cora’s attention. “Are you saying the Alliance tried to blow up the Hyperion?”

  “The Alliance. Home Away. Homeward Sol.” She waved her hand. “In the end, it doesn’t really matter. They’re all just marching to the baton of an invisible conductor.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Cora snapped.

  Garson’s holo made its way over to Cora, standing uncomfortably close. Cora refused to back down. The smile faded and Garson stared intently at her. She almost seemed to be looking for something.

  “What is the one constant in everything you’ve seen, or been a part of, since you met Alec Ryder?”

  Vagueness and chaos, she almost said.

  “Adapting. Survival…”

  “You’re just guessing.” Garson continued to stare. “What one thing is at the heart of that adaptation? Something bigger than our journey to Andromeda. And more dangerous.”

  “Artificial intelligence,” Cora ventured. “SAM. The adaptive matrix.”

  Garson didn’t so much as flinch, but her tone softened. “I don’t think I need to explain to you how powerful Ryder’s innovations are. Likewise… I assume you can understand that, despite the laws against such things, there has always remained a great interest in harnessing that power.”

  Cora wasn’t sure where she was going, but she wanted to find out. “Sure. Like splitting the atom back in the twentieth century, I suppose. It had a dark side, but that didn’t stop everyone from wanting to control it.”


  Garson’s smile returned. “Precisely.” She stepped back a bit, but her eyes remained fixed on Cora. “Then you can imagine how much interest there would be in having a legitimate reason to pursue its creation.”

  “The Initiative—”

  Garson interrupted her.

  “And while Alec, and I, strongly believe that his invention is a critical aspect of our journey to Andromeda…” Garson paused. “It’s fair to say we’ve been permitted to pursue this endeavor because there are those who believe equally as strongly that such power should be available here. In the Milky Way.”

  That much was clear. Given everything she’d witnessed over the past several weeks, people were willing to do just about anything to get their hands on a working AI.

  “Are you saying that the Andromeda Initiative was just a cover to create an AI?” That seemed far-fetched. “There’s got to be an easier, and cheaper, way to go about that.”

  “Most certainly.” The holo’s eyes almost twinkled as she spoke, and something suddenly occurred to Cora.

  “It was you,” she blurted out. “You were the one trying to leak the AI.”

  The smile was replaced with an abject look of disapproval. “No. I’m afraid not.” Garson’s gaze drifted from Cora, to nowhere in particular. “I’m as much a pawn in this as you, Cora Harper.”

  Cora frowned. That seemed even more far-fetched.

  “Well, perhaps not as much as all that.” Garson’s smile returned. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m getting everything I want, but I’m not the one pulling the strings. I’m not the conductor in this grand symphony.”

  “Then who is?”

  “That’s the problem with power, isn’t it?” She waved a hand as though swatting a fly. “It can bring you anything—except the ability to see what those with more power refuse to show you.” She turned and wandered back to the unconscious form of Alec Ryder. His breathing seemed to have stabilized. That was a good sign. “The point, in all of this, is that the real prize—the one thing that everyone is after—is the thing he created and almost died to protect. It saved your life. It may save it again. Each of us has our own reasons for wanting it. And…” Garson looked up at Cora, her voice barely audible. “The person who has orchestrated all of this wants it more than any of us, and is willing to do anything to see it come to life.”