Mass Effect: Initiation

  “An AI.” Cora blinked. Hardly believing what she was hearing. “And you had no idea this was going on?”

  “None.” Jensen was unwavering, but behind her eyes, Cora could see regret. “We’re not innocent. We went in eyes wide open. But… we all have lines that we wouldn’t cross.”

  “We were set up,” Singh blurted out. “Somebody knew this was going to happen. If we failed, no harm done. But if we succeeded, then Medea and her abominations would deal with us. No loose ends.”

  Cora was having a hard time processing this. Of course the Alliance would have black ops. Every military does. But she had to agree with Jensen; this crossed a line. And behind it all she couldn’t shake the feeling that something still didn’t add up.

  SAM-E broke the silence. “It’s unlikely the current situation could be considered a desired outcome. The events here speak of sabotage, at the very least. Not a planned experiment.”

  Cora had a similar thought. Either one of these people, or someone else, brought the AI and the cybernetics together. For a group of very smart people, she was surprised they couldn’t see that themselves.

  “We should’ve known.” Thangana’s voice was almost a whisper. “We did this to ourselves.”

  Jensen shook her head. “We can figure out who pays for which sins later on.”

  Thangana only smiled weakly, and looked down at his hands. Cora could empathize, but the damage was done. Unintentional or not, a lot of people had died because of their actions. She wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to be charitable.

  “So you tried to build an AI, but you didn’t have the skill to make it work,” she said. They all looked at her, some of the scientists wincing at that summation. “Then you stole something you didn’t understand, to fix it. When we stole it back, you then decided to kill someone to take it again. Am I getting this right? And then, when you installed the tech you didn’t understand, it tried to warn you—and you didn’t listen. And now, somehow, we’ve got a hybrid AI in control of the station and the augmented super-soldiers you accidentally brought to life. That the long and the short of it?”

  “The decision to kill Ygara Menoris was mine,” said a quiet young woman on the far side of the room, who hadn’t been introduced. Cora knew her type, though—saw it, in the woman’s economical movements and the stealth mesh built into her armor’s plates. Well, Quiet Eddy was a black op, and black ops always had wetwork specialists. “We didn’t have the budget to buy the tech at auction. Menoris was unlikely to be intimidated, and we had no means of extortion, so I made a judgment call.” She paused. “I understand Menoris spaced you, Lieutenant Harper, so I didn’t expect you to have any complaints.”

  “Captain Ariokis?” Cora guessed.

  The woman went very—dangerously—still. “How do you know my name?”

  “I found your shuttle in the hangar,” Cora replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sad about Menoris.” Ariokis blinked in surprise, then looked mildly pleased. Probably didn’t get complimented on her work often. “I just don’t see how this whole scheme of yours couldn’t have gone wrong—cybernetics aside. Not if you were willing to teach this AI, from the moment you created it, that organic life was cheap.” She stared at Jensen and Thangana.

  Jensen glanced at Thangana’s back, then sighed uneasily. “That’s painfully true, Lieutenant. We were willing to do anything to keep secret the fact that we were working on illegal AI, so that the Council wouldn’t find out about it. Even parts of the Alliance government don’t know what we’re doing here. The cover story was cybernetic weapons development. We did actually generate some combat-applicable tech. But…” She shook her head, then exhaled.

  They’d created much more than they’d bargained for.

  “Combat-applicable tech?” Cora asked—and then she gasped as she remembered the woman who’d run across the ceiling at Home Away. “Oh my God. That’s the connection! You’re the back end, where the prototyping gets done, but Home Away is the front end, where the finished versions get put into actual use. That weird fake AI of theirs… It’s what Medea was, before the alien contamination and the SA—the Ryder code.”

  Thangana sighed. “Yes. We’re actually a joint military-corporate operation. Home Away partially funds us; in return, we supply Home Away with commercial-grade technology. They stole the kernel first, and they were storing it until we could construct a safe testing environment here. But then several of the corporations tied into Home Away started to squabble over who would get final rights to the intellectual property. The military partners couldn’t talk them around. Things got bogged down in red tape, while every day the chances increased that we would be shut down, since we couldn’t produce the AI we were supposed to.

  “When we heard that the kernel had been stolen from Home Away, we thought it was the best thing that could’ve happened. A way to get the project moving again.” He shook his head. “Damn.”

  Cora shook her head. She would let the Initiative deal with the political and financial ramifications, if she survived. Speaking of which…

  She frowned at Ariokis, who hadn’t had a helpful SAM-E to assist her. “How’d you make it down here?”

  “These people hadn’t completely battened down by the time I got in,” Captain Ariokis said, jerking her chin at Jensen. “It had only been a few hours since I’d transmitted the kernel, just ahead of my arrival. There was no sign of trouble until Medea took over my shuttle and killed the drive core during the landing sequence. Immediately after that, a bunch of the creatures attacked the troops in the hangar. I fought a few, then cloaked and just tried to survive.” She shook her head, grimly. “The Gamma Lab sent one final signal to all uncompromised staff, telling them to get down to the lab level if they wanted to live. So that’s what I did.” She shrugged, though Cora guessed it wasn’t as nonchalant a gesture as it seemed. “The creatures were mostly… busy, at that point.”

  Killing people. She didn’t say it. She didn’t need to.

  “Excuse me,” said Dr. Tseng, who held up his hands. “This is all interesting, but shouldn’t we be discussing how to destroy the AI…”

  Suddenly a dozen other people were talking, shouting, cursing. There was an edge of hysteria to the whole morass, the held tempers of the past twenty-four hours all snapping at once, and for a moment Cora thought there might be a riot brewing. She raised her voice to try and shout for calm, but there were too many others doing the same thing. Dr. Jensen tried to stand on a chair, but someone jostled her, and Dr. Thangana barely caught her before she would have fallen.

  Cora took a deep breath, then deliberately flared her biotics as brightly as she could. The flickering blaze of dark energy startled everyone into taut silence.

  “Everybody just… relax,” she said, glaring around her at twenty wide-eyed, anxious faces. “Focus. We’re not going to make it if we panic. Right?”

  Half a dozen frightened nods. That would do. Cora took a deep breath and let the light bleed away. Then she turned to Jensen. “So we can’t call for help without letting Medea know this place exists. The longer we stay, the greater the chance Medea will find us anyway. And if we somehow outlast her and starvation, the Alliance is going to bomb this rock into interstellar dust. Right?”

  “Right.” Jensen swallowed, running a hand over her dreadlocks to compose herself. “If we don’t run out of air first, because we had to cut ourselves off from Medea’s life support grid in order to maintain the illusion that we don’t exist. And we run out of food in a day or so, even with rationing.”

  “Got it. So we either get off this rock somehow, or we die, plain and simple.”

  “What about the AI?” That was from Shante, who’d turned in Singh’s arms to peer at Cora. “Don’t we have to kill it?”

  “Dr. Jensen said it herself,” Cora replied. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with children—Traverse colonies used strict population controls to prevent famines and resource depletion, so there were only a few at any given time—bu
t it was a good question, so it seemed logical to just treat Shante like any other soldier at a military briefing. “Standard procedure in the event of an out-of-control research project is automatic orbital bombardment. I don’t know how often this facility was supposed to check in, but most likely an Alliance cruiser is already on the way.” She glanced at Jensen. “Unless you people were stupid enough to store a copy of the kernel or Medea somewhere else, that should take care of the whole infected-AI problem, shouldn’t it? Not to mention all the augmented creatures out there.”

  Jensen grimaced. “Yes. For security purposes, our backup storage is here on the asteroid, rather than offsite. The storage servers certainly can’t survive kinetic weapons. When Quiet Eddy dies, Medea and the stolen Ryder code will, too.” She sighed. “I would take comfort in that, if it didn’t mean we all have to die, as well.”

  “We just need to not be here when that cruiser arrives,” Cora said.

  “All the shuttles have been destroyed,” a woman in the back said.

  Cora shook her head. “Not mine.” Twenty people would be a tight fit, but they could make it work.

  Thangana tensed visibly. “There’s likely a reason Medea hasn’t attempted to destroy your shuttle, Lieutenant Harper. Is it possible she intends to use it to save the… things she’s created?”

  Cora hadn’t thought of that. “All the more reason we need to get to it. Quickly,” she said, then she paused inwardly.

  “I still have control of the shuttle. For now,” SAM-E said softly into her ear, “but time is of the essence.”

  Cora blinked and focused on the people in front of her again. Thangana was staring at her. “I don’t think you fully understand the danger, Lieutenant Harper.”

  “I have a… preventative in place,” Cora said, a bit too quickly. She’d never been good at lying. “Something provided by Alec Ryder in, uh, in anticipation of potential problems.” Damn. Now Jensen was staring at her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “So if we can get to the hangar bay, we can get out of here.”

  Startled exclamations all around her, tones rising in sudden hope. But Jensen reminded them, tightly, “Getting to the hangar bay means running a gauntlet of augments.”

  “Noted.” Cora considered for a moment. “You fooled Medea into not seeing anything on this level. Can you make the AI see something else? As a decoy?”

  Jensen blinked, her expression immediately turning thoughtful. “That’s… not a terrible idea.” Then Cora saw an ah-ha expression cross the woman’s face. “That’s actually a brilliant idea! But I’ll need time to come up with something. And—” She sobered. “Once I could’ve told you how Medea might react to things. She was simple as AIs went, before we introduced the kernel code. Now, though, Medea has undergone her own private technological singularity, advancing so quickly that she’s beyond our understanding. Will she send all the augments to check out the distraction? Will she hold some in reserve to guard the halls, now that she knows you’re here? Will she ignore the distraction entirely and decide to vent the facility to space instead?” She sighed. “We just don’t know.”

  “We should just stay here,” murmured another man in a lab coat, who sat against a wall with his head clutched in his hands. “Stay where it’s safe…”

  “That’s not helpful,” Thangana snapped, but then he sobered. “Kiyohiko, you need more rest.” When he saw Cora frowning at this, Thangana added, more softly, “Specialist Hoshina was near the barracks wing when Medea brought the augments online. That he escaped was a miracle, but the things he saw…”

  Cora nodded. Nothing could’ve prepared these people for what they’d faced. Nothing could really prepare them for what awaited, either, but there was no other way. “Dr. Jensen, start work on your countermeasure. How long will you need?”

  Jensen had called up a haptic display and was already tapping rapidly on it. “Two hours, maybe?”

  “See what you can do in one.” Medea would know that Cora had to be somewhere in Quiet Eddy. They couldn’t rely on Jensen’s camouflage for much longer. “Meanwhile, everyone… Getting to that hangar is going to mean moving at speed. And fighting, if it comes to that.” She looked around, trying to meet the eyes of everyone in the room. “Take one hour to rest and prepare. If you’ve got rations you’ve been saving, now’s the time to distribute them. We don’t need anybody having a blood-sugar crash at the wrong moment. Weapons too—those of you who’ve got the training need to give quickie lessons to those who don’t.” She’d just have to hope that nobody shot themselves by accident. “We can get out of here. It’s just going to take everything we’ve got.”

  The group began to disperse and murmur, though many of them kept staring at her, some hopeful, some doubtful, all terrified. For an instant Cora quailed with the realization that these people’s lives were in her hands. Leading soldiers was one thing. Leading these people to their potential deaths...

  “Lieutenant,” SAM-E said into her ear. “It’s important that we speak. I have a proposal, but we will need assistance. Could you inquire if any of the survivors are medically trained? If not, a properly equipped infirmary will have to do.” He paused, meaningfully. “You will need to reveal my existence to whoever helps you.”

  Reveal that Cora was getting help from an AI, to people recently traumatized by an AI? She turned to walk down the corridor, keeping her head down so no one would notice her preoccupation. “I don’t think that’s an option, SAM-E.”

  “It is our only option, Lieutenant. Please.”

  That wasn’t ominous. “Explain.”

  “I reviewed the data from the holo that Dr. Jensen showed you,” SAM-E said. “Though the cybernetics that were installed on the augments were substantially more invasive than your own implant, there are some similarities.”

  Cora shuddered. “Go on.”

  “Have you ever heard of hysterical strength?”

  Cora blinked, thrown by the question. She had heard of it happening during hand-to-hand training, and half a dozen urban legends, like—“A two-ton skycar’s drive core breaks down and pins a toddler,” she said. “The toddler’s mother picks the whole thing up to rescue the child. Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “Precisely. Given the push you will soon need to make to reach the hangar, it would be possible—with your permission and some minor adjustments to your implant—to put you in an extended hysterical strength state. You will be faster than the augments, though not as strong, more resilient against damage and fatigue than you are now, and able to use your biotic abilities at something close to the level of a skilled asari matriarch or justicar.”

  Cora frowned and moved to the side of the corridor, folding her arms and leaning against it so she wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. This was exactly the thing SAM-E had recently promised he wouldn’t do.

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “Your body is not meant to operate in this state for more than a few seconds. Longer than that and your muscles could tear under their own force. Your bones will suffer stress and torsion fractures. Your system will be flooded with adrenaline and other stress-related neurochemistry, which has a toxic effect after sufficient accumulation. There is a substantial chance you will die.” SAM-E sighed, sounding surprisingly weary. “And there is a… psychological risk. In addition to the musculoskeletal changes, I will need to overwork your sensory inputs, which might reduce your higher brain function.”

  Cora understood at once. “Fight-or-flight. I’ve been in that state before, SAM-E. It’s called combat.”

  “Yes. Everything that you normally experience during combat, all the fear and aggression that you have spent your professional life learning to control, will be amplified beyond your control. You will react without thought. You will have difficulty telling friend from foe. It will be a condition not dissimilar to krogan blood rage, but that state is natural to krogan. They recover. A human… is not a krogan.”

  That… didn’t sound good. “If it’s going to kill me anyway, I’m
not sure what the benefit is here.”

  “Whether it does depends on how long you persist in this ‘human blood rage’ state,” SAM-E said. “If you reach the shuttle before fatal effects set in, I will be able to reset your metabolism to a near comatose state; a deep mode of rest and recovery. You will be vulnerable, but beyond the immediate dangers of this facility. With enough time, you should make a full recovery.”

  Should? “But if I burn out before I make the shuttle, I die. And if I don’t do anything, we all die.”

  “…Yes, Lieutenant.”

  I should have stayed on Thessia, Cora thought wearily. But…

  She pushed away from the wall and looked back toward the debriefing room. In a corner, Singh and Shante sat among a small group watching Chief Said demonstrate how to aim and fire an assault rifle. Said beckoned to Shante, who set her jaw and got up, reaching for the weapon that Said handed her. It made horrific sense; Shante’s legs weren’t as long, and if she fell behind, she might be able to slow down any pursuing augments. Across the room, one of Said’s men handed out small packets of rations. The speed with which people grabbed them suggested they had indeed been going hungry in order to stretch their supplies.

  The man noticed Cora looking and pointedly set aside one packet, nodding to her to indicate who it was for. She nodded back, grateful. She’d crammed down an energy bar on the walk from the elevator shaft, but she would happily eat another dozen. She couldn’t see Jensen or Thangana anywhere, which meant that they’d probably gone off to prepare Jensen’s decoy. But Dr. Tseng had moved to sit down beside poor Specialist Hoshina, who’d begun crying quietly with his arms wrapped around his knees.

  Dr. Tseng, who had to be a hundred years old if he was a day, clearly hadn’t taken advantage of any of the more fashionable quality-of-life gene therapies that had become available to the elderly since First Contact. He wouldn’t be able to keep up for long, if he managed it at all. As Cora stared at him, he looked up and noticed. He blinked, and then a rueful smile crossed his face. With the hand that wasn’t patting Hoshina’s back to soothe him, he waved dismissively: “Don’t worry about me.”