Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “With growing intellectual excitement: All viruses mutate to some extent. It is part of their life cycle. When a virus meets a healthy cell, it first attaches to the surface receptors, then penetrates the protein membrane, then binds to the most susceptible mechanisms of the cell, fusing with them in order to take control of the cell’s reproduction in order to force the cell to make copies of the virus rather than more healthy cells. It turns the cell into a factory for making more viruses. At that point, there may be an incubation period as the virus enters the uncoating process—shedding that crystal part you see there in order to transcribe its proteins over the proteins of the original cell. And in mixing those proteins, mutations occur—parts of the host merge with parts of the virus, and this merger will be reproduced in the new viral copies during the replication stage.

  Many mutations will not be particularly advantageous. Some will be more specifically adapted to the environment. To the infected body. Better for the virus, worse for the patient. Personifying the internal monologue of a virus: I was a pulmonary infection, but I didn’t have much fun in those lungs, so I’m going to let my kids go play in the brain stem. Solemnly: But Fortinbras here has so many exotic proteins to draw on that it is far more likely to produce very bizarre and unpredictable mutations. That means many more of them will be catastrophic failures, of course. But the ones that succeed are likely to succeed in wildly interesting ways. Such as being able to jump from drell to hanar. Or from hanar to batarian. And all it needs to find these wildly interesting ways is time.” A strange thought sparked in Yorrik’s mind. The kind of thought that was hardly even a thought at all yet, just a little road in the dark that might lead somewhere… somewhere new. “That is why it is so resistant to Horatio’s attempts to kill it. Every time it reproduces, it actually becomes a different virus. Sometimes only slightly different. Sometimes night and day.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  But the captain did. The elcor could see it in her posture. She knew just how bad this was, and it was really starting to sink in now that she would not look back on this fondly in ten years. In ten years, she might not even be there to look back on anything at all.

  “With renewed confidence: Batarian, imagine you are preparing to board a vulnerable ship by force. First, you locate the airlock—the part of the ship you can commandeer and enter most easily, yes?”

  “Sure, I suppose.”

  “Then you penetrate the ship’s defenses and swarm onto the bridge. You either kill or enslave the command structure and the crew—now you have control of the ship. On the outside, it still looks like an asari cruiser or a volus frigate. But in reality, it is now a batarian ship, and you can use it to attack other unsuspecting craft and make them into batarian ships, too. Yet you did not kill everyone on board. Some you took as slaves. You absorbed them into the new ship’s hierarchy, into the batarian culture, and what will come of that synthesis it is impossible to say. That is what a virus does. It survives, consumes resources, and reproduces. Without mercy or morality. And just like people, once it has learned a new trick, it will not go back to the old way of doing things.”

  Qetsi was looking down at the floor, deep in thought. After a long silence, she said, “What is that little equation in the corner?”

  “Dejected: I was hoping you would not ask. That is the R nought number. Every virus has one. It is a variable. Not everyone who encounters a virus will contract it, not everyone who contracts it will die. There are always natural immunities and outlier cases. But the R nought number tells you how many people a single infected person is likely to pass the virus to given ideal conditions, population density, temperature, group behavior, that sort of thing. For example, the human disease smallpox has an R nought number of five to seven. So a person with smallpox might infect five to seven other people before they die. Ochreous rhinophage, an ancient elcor pandemic, had an R nought number of six to nine.”

  The batarian coughed and spat blood again. “And what’s my score, Doc?”

  “With grim fatalism: twenty-two to twenty-six.”

  None of them said anything then. What could be said? Yorrik watched the frost slowly fade from the medbay glass. It was warming up out there. Something was coming back on. Finally. He almost felt relieved, until he remembered how much better pathogens fared in hot climates. The batarian, however, was shivering.

  “Why in the hell do you want to call it Fortinbras?” he said finally, his teeth chattering. “That’s a stupid name. I can barely pronounce it. It sounds human.”

  “With great sorrow: Because, no matter what you do to save your family, Fortinbras always swarms in at the end and destroys it all.”

  * * *

  Jalosk Dal’Virra began to swell ten hours after entering the iso-chamber. His tears crusted over, clogging his tear ducts and coating his eyelids with angry, fouled scabs. The flesh around them bulged. His throat and chest filled with fluid, likely an edema—fluid where there should be no fluid. The batarian was drowning in his own skin. He screamed for the lights to be shut off, screamed that they were burning him, even though the medbay was no brighter than it had been for hours, a place of mostly shadows and dim blue emergency lighting. When this passed, he began to stare at the lights in awe, moving his hands over them as if in a trance.

  “They’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and began to laugh softly. A giggle, really. A batarian. Giggling. “So beautiful. Like sapphires made of feelings. Can you see their feelings?”

  Yorrik turned to Ysses for help, but the hanar still snoozed away. How long could a jellyfish sleep? The swelling seemed to be putting pressure on Jalosk’s already taxed brain. “Worried correction: They are running lights, and they do not have feelings.”

  Jalosk rolled onto his back on the narrow cot, staring, dazzled. “I thought it would be different in Andromeda, Yorrik. I really did.”

  “Perplexed query: You thought the lights in the Andromeda galaxy would have feelings?”

  “No. I thought… everything would be different. Why would it be the same? It’s not a new planet. It’s not even a new system. It’s a whole galaxy. Why should it still be the Council races on top, and the rest of us scrabbling for scraps? Why should it not be all of everyone, equal, eating the same size slices of the same size pie? Why should people still hate batarians? Everyone gets a new slate. Me. I get a new slate. Grozik and Zofi get a new slate. Maybe in Andromeda people will think batarians are the enlightened, wise, sexually desirable ones, and asari are hideous and stupid and morally bankrupt, hmm? Why should anything be the same? Why should the old castes hold?”

  “There are no castes in the greater galactic society, Jalosk. That is the batarian obsession.”

  The captain paced slowly back and forth, working something over in her brain. When she spoke, she seemed surprised at the words pouring out of her own mouth. “You think? Then why did the elcor never have a place on the Council? Why do the batarians and the volus not have their own Pathfinders? Why did quarians get turned away at so many stations and harassed on the Citadel? Ah, you are a good elcor, Yorrik. Too good to understand anything about the world. There are always castes, Doctor. At least batarians have the decency to name them. Perhaps Kholai was right. All systems tend toward their worst possible conditions.”

  “It will be the same in Andromeda,” Jalosk mumbled. “Humans, asari, salarians and turians up here, then drell, elcor and hanar in the middle, batarians and volus on the bottom, and quarians where everyone else sees fit to stick them once they’ve seen to every single one of their own needs.” He began to giggle again. The giggle turned into panting, then wheezing. “And blue running lights full of feel… feel… feelings to enslave us all.”

  The sores on his neck burst in a spray of fine, dry dust that hit the iso-field, sizzled, and vanished.

  The captain knelt next to the glass, as close as she could to Jalosk’s iso-chamber. She leaned her head against it and spread her fingers against the cool barrier.
“No, my poor, poor soul. It will be different. It will be better. It has to be. That’s why we came. For something new.” Her gaze lifted past the ruin of the batarian’s dying body, past the medbay, into the stars. She hardly saw him now, Yorrik or Ysses or Jalosk or any of them. She saw something so much bigger. “You may not see it. I may not see it. But Andromeda will be beautiful. I swear it to you on your death.”

  The batarian spluttered and gagged. He clawed miserably at the shimmer of the iso-shield. “The only peace in the universe is entropy. I will see you at the end of all things, sister.”

  A few hours later, the madness began.

  Jalosk Dal’Virra’s four black eyes filled with blood. He began to scream, to spit, consumed by gibberish and rage, bellowing, throwing himself over and over at the forcefield, using profanity Yorrik had never dreamed of. The batarian clawed at the invisible barrier between him and his doctor, kicked it, punched it, at one point even tried to tear at it with his teeth. He foamed at the mouth, sobbed, leaked from every orifice, and all the while his fury never stopped, his absolute need to tear the elcor he had only just before called good and kind to shreds.

  Yorrik watched without moving. He was stunned, and sorry, but he could do nothing as the batarian died raving and shrieking in front of him.

  The awful noise seemed to finally rouse the hanar. Ysses floated to the elcor’s side and joined him in staring at the ruined corpse in numb horror.

  “He looks so pretty,” said Ysses after a long quiet. “This one could look at him for hours.” Yorrik turned to gawp at his lab partner. “And you smell wonderful, Yorrik! Like flowers.”

  “I should go,” whispered Qetsi’Olam.

  11. MUTATION

  Hello… everyone. This is your captain speaking. Please remain calm and return to your respective environmental control zones. There is not enough acclimatization equipment for everyone, and we must conserve the supplies we have. While person-to-person comms are offline at the moment, the public address system is still operable. However, its use should be restricted to emergencies only. This is an emergency. Now, if you can hear this, then you are awake, and if you are awake, you must have figured out by now that something has gone very, very wrong on our little ark. Really, rather a lot of things.

  The acrid smell of weapons’ discharge hung over the cargo bay as the captain’s words boomed out through the cavernous space.

  Containers spilled their contents everywhere. The hold stretched out in every direction and in every direction was destruction and chaos. Groups of containers had been dragged together to form makeshift blinds and shelters and forts. It looked like a tent city down there. Anax Therion crouched behind an unmolested shipping crate, where she’d been crouching for hours now, her knees throbbing, her eyes smarting with the smoke. She could just make out the squat, round shape of Irit Non several crates away, clutching a shotgun that had, until recently, belonged to a completely unreasonable hanar. The drell had fallen asleep in her crouch several times, startled awake, and drifted off again. Her skin was beginning to itch inside the constricting volus suit.

  A flurry of gunfire blasted past Anax’s crate. She took a deep breath, swept round, fired back through the wreckage, and returned to her holding position. She could hear Irit swearing, repeating the same thing she’d been saying over and over for hours now, as though saying it again would produce an answer out of thin air. What the fuck is going on? Why are they shooting at us? Someone’s plasma bolt had sliced through the thigh of the volus’s suit. A protective bubble had immediately encased the exposed area while nanobots began to repair the mesh, but the bubble was bulky and it slowed her down.

  From the labyrinth of luggage, a garbled voice arose. There was a great deal of swearing in this voice, and at the very least the words overcharge, overheat, and you said you knew how to use these things.

  “This is all highly unnecessary,” Anax Therion called out. They were coming up on forty-eight hours since Sleepwalker Team Blue-7’s attention had been required. Forty since she and the batarian had taken their leave of the cargo hold. How long had these people been down here, alone, confused, hungry, unable to use comms or the ship’s interface or even half the doors, all of them cryosick, some of them perhaps sick of something much worse? She could hear screams, and they were not screams of pain, but of an incredible, rationality-shredding rage. “Let us come out and we’ll explain everything.”

  “Enraged desperation: Unlock the fucking doors and let us out of here,” droned an elcor who then, Anax was nearly certain from the sound, threw his or her slagged weapon in the drell’s general direction.

  This is a Code White situation. I repeat, ship security is currently set to Code White. There is an active pathogen aboard the Keelah Si’yah.

  The most extraordinary wail of hopelessness and terror went up around the cargo hold, from every cluster of containers and fortress of belongings. Not one of them moved toward their respective environmental zones.

  “Hello, stranger,” came a voice too close to Anax’s ear. She whipped her head around to see Borbala Ferank crouching next to her, shotgun in hand, peering up over the lip of the overturned crate, the only thing between them and a shot between the eyes.

  “Where did you come from?” asked Anax. It was the first time anyone had successfully snuck up on her in years.

  “Oh, I’ve been here. It doesn’t take very long to count up very little, multiply by however long this takes, and divide by all of us. I came back here to check on my nest egg and what do you know—our intrepid colonists have colonized the place. They wanted food. I could make food happen.” She gestured toward one of the container corridors. Borbala Ferank’s precious frozen fish bowls lay everywhere shattered, rolling around the floor like a child’s marbles. Most of the fish were still half frozen, with bites gouged out of the bellies. “They might have asked more politely.”

  Please remain calm and return to your respective environmental control zones. This will help to slow the spread of the disease. Right now, drell, hanar, batarian, and elcor are all susceptible. The earliest symptom is an overwhelming sweet scent, followed by a distinctive rash, extreme fatigue, and small blue abscesses around the throat, chest, and under the arms. We believe it is most contagious during this phase. These symptoms may be accompanied by uncontrollable weeping, fever, and excessive hunger. The final stages are characterized by euphoria, hallucinations, severe edema, or a swelling of the limbs, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a very scientific way of saying violent, all-consuming madness as the brain swells in the skull. Unfortunately, all cases so far have been fatal.

  Please remain calm.

  “Really wish she wouldn’t do that,” Anax Therion grimaced. “They’re not going to stay calm now.”

  “Shall we make a run for it?” Borbala suggested.

  The drell glanced over at Irit Non. She was pinned down far worse on her end of the row.

  “You go!” the volus snarled. “Go, go, go!”

  * * *

  Your first officer is attempting to repair several malfunctions in the ship’s datacore. Until he does so, the following systems are offline: temperature control, lighting control, person-to-person communications, water dispensation, hull shielding, trams A–D, short-range sensors, and locking mechanisms, including those on small arms containers. Revival cascades have commenced and continue to trigger in cryobays 1, 4, and 8, which is why so many of you are listening to me right now.

  Senna’Nir spliced another pair of wires together on a panel in the empty tramway tunnel. The captain’s voice sharpened on the intercom. Their tram car had shut down, stuck halfway between the quarian zone and the Radial. They’d split up, the captain heading for medbay, the commander after his crew, walking toward the cargo hold, trying to meet up with the drell and the volus there. But there was a mainframe access panel down here, Senna remembered from the blueprints back on Hephaestus. They stood near it now, in the dark, while Senna made it possible for Qetsi to tal
k to her ship. She looked at him with hope and misery. He could see her expression, even through the shadowed glass of her faceplate. Senna felt for her. He was horrifically glad all he had to do was hotwire a microphone. She had to hotwire the morale of half a starship.

  “Am I doing okay?” she whispered.

  “You’re doing fine.” He squeezed her hand.

  “I’ve spliced the tram malfunction,” crackled his grandmother’s voice in his ear. “If you’re interested. You forgot to turn me off, so I had to do something with my time. You know how I feel about idle hands around the house. I’m porting you the codepatch now. Upload it and get back here. I suspect it’ll only work temporarily.”

  “Not now,” Senna hissed as cool, clean, elegant, machine-generated code flowed down the curve of his faceplate. “You fixed something? You really did? And… you couldn’t have fixed the shields first?”

  “What?” Qetsi said in the shadows of the transport tube, her voice frightened, sounding so much younger than she was.

  “Nothing,” he said as he transferred the patch through his omni-tool and into the access hub. “Keep going.”

  Deep in the bowels of the ship, Senna heard a tram car begin to move toward them with a grinding, reluctant sound.

  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. Food distribution will commence at 0600 hours beginning with the drell in Mess Hall 2. We have limited supplies on hand. We are at least three weeks’ travel from the nearest planet, which is, I should mention, a lifeless rock with nothing to eat on it but dust and a very calorie-inefficient lichen, so we must make what we have last as long as possible.