Chapter 309 - My SI Stash #9 - Shine by Camolot the Creator (MassEffect)

-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.

Given the load of work ahead of me, Shepard might very well be endorsing shops on the Citadel by the time I was 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 obscene 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.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​That 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.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​Shoto'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.

"Uh, hi." the voice on the other end was slightly reedy and high- intern, or a mid level drone, Shoto already had him pinned. "I'm looking for a..." there was a sound of shuffling papers in the background. "A construction supervisor, with the licensing to direct Geth construction units?"

Shoto blinked. Geth construction... not a lot of smaller companies pulled those things, they were expensive to produce and required specially trained personnel to even store. Not to mention that supervisors with the specific license for directing their operation were not exactly a credit a dozen. But, well, if the client wanted to spend their money, who was he to say no?

"Alright, I think we can do that easily enough... what, specifically, are you looking for in construction standards? Commercial, residential...?"

"We're looking at a laboratory setup, physics."

"Physics, alright." Anywhere else, something like this out of the blue might be strange. Rannoch, however, had a good reputation for high build quality labs thanks to Geth labour, and their reputation for excellent cybersec, so really, this was the sixth call of this kind he'd received just this week. "We'll need some information, addresses for the proper procedural forms."

The intern, Shoto was sure he was an intern now, rattled off a string of necessary details. Shoto asked more specific questions, jotted down the information, and ended up finally closing the deal with some electronic paperwork and a promise that a small team of supervisors would be into the provided location very soon. He exchanged goodbyes with the person on the other end of the line, wished them a good day, and hung up.

Very satisfied at having netted a large commission for himself, Shoto leaned back in his chair- which caused him to wince as it produced a shriek from the surely haunted springs. Well, he had plenty of money coming in... this chair would be the first thing to go.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​I closed four hundred iterations of myself running different voice synthesizing programs all at once, as the corporate cogs began to move to restore my properties to working order. Of course, the construction Geth units would be borrowed from other sources- junkyards, abandoned units, and stored platforms that hadn't been moved in years. Restored and upgraded, these platforms marched themselves onto airtrucks rented and driven autonomously, where they would be shipped to other facilities- or, in the case of a couple of groups of them, shipped out into the middle of nowhere to begin a completely different plan.

See, I was working within the tolerances of a system. Geth platforms were treated often like omnifunctional appliances, taking care of a laundry list of functions. They cooked, they cleaned, they did various jobs- manufactories were operated and maintained by Geth platforms supervised by specially trained personnel. Many less desirable jobs were done by cheaply manufactured low-grade Geth platforms, platforms that also saw presence in the homes of lower income families. A single Geth unit could cost as much as a mid to high grade computer, but having just one Geth platform in a household lightened a lot of burdens, especially in low income households where the parents often had jobs with long hours. A low-cost Geth platform, primarily made of plastic and aluminum, could care for children, keep things tidy, make meals and even serve as a personal computer with the right inputs and outputs.

The problem with this was... Geth platforms were generally considered to be high-cost investment. Generally, when you had a personal Geth platform, they were a personal assistant, a chauffeur, a secretary, even a bodyguard in some cases. You don't lose track of something like that, and you don't notice it going missing. Simply put, I could only 'borrow' Geth platforms in limited numbers for limited amount of times. One of the ways I was attempting to alleviate the problem was hunting down decommissioned or outdated Geth platform models dumped into storage containers or junkyards, yank them out, tidy them up, upgrade them and then use them freely. However, this only provided a limited number of units, and it required the attentions of yet other units to undertake the process- and on top of that, the platforms had to ensure that there were no witnesses to the process and that no one noticed the defunct platforms going missing and suddenly turning up half-fixed in somebody's garage.

Which meant what I was attempting now. For the labs and offices I was establishing, I was attempting to build a completely above-board network for me to work through in a fuzzy general picture. Somebody would notice if some mysterious figure appeared out of nowhere, purchased a bunch of expensive machinery for no discernible reason, and then vanished into the night with no trace. However, a network of corporations purchasing said equipment, moving it between a couple of locations, then losing it at some juncture? People wouldn't question that as long as the companies themselves didn't kick up a fuss about it, which, considering I was running the companies... well. it gave me a lot of cover for lateral movement and a lot of things that would otherwise be huge risks in my position.

However, I also wanted something... off the books. Of course I could lose a Geth platform here and there, some machinery, a few raw materials shipping from mining companies for this or that... but I didn't just want a few individual platforms. No, the aim and goal of the construction geth I was sending out was to establish compounds in which I could Von Neuman myself to pieces and be perfectly happy. These platforms would build the compound, then salvaged platforms would be shipped there with parts to construct machinery, which would then construct machinery, which would produce more platforms, who would build larger and better machines until I was producing my own arms, vehicles, small spacecraft... anything I needed, I could make. But I had to actually establish both these compounds, and a large enough corporate network to support my efforts without being too obtrusive.

Plus... there was a lot to be said for the Geth platforms, but they were not exactly cuddly. In fact, the Geth looked like something out of a paranoid's nightmares about xenocidal AI, which may have been purposeful on the part of the designers to remind the users not to fully trust their machines... or it might be a totally unintentional design flaw that nobody ever thought to fix. Who knew, with corporations. Simply, though, I needed a full redesign, and I needed it cuddly, cute and very likeable. I was already considering and virtually testing various designs for when I got my physical manufacturing up and running, at which point I could start handing off ideas to the R&D teams and poke them in the direction I wanted them to go. Once I had the design, I could announce it as a new and improved Geth model marketed as a companion VI unit as well as a personal assistant slash janitor, play up some new features and slowly start hauling off older units to be updated into the new design. I even already had the basics of the design itself, basing it on a synthetic-organic android race from back home, which was generally designed to look cuddly and friendly with paws and digitigrade legs, as well as a muzzle-like screen face. Really, I'd have to get a team on turning the same hardlight projection tech that made omnitools, keyboards and computer screens into simulating realistic hardlight fur, which looked and felt like the real thing: would be a huge boost to how aesthetically pleasing the things were. More than that, I was going to make them shorter than the average height of the galactic species, meaning that most races would quite literally have to look down at them.

As many ways as I could psychologically stack the deck in the favour of this currently-hypothetical new model, and by extension, me, I would. Once I slew Harbinger, one way or the other, I'd need to slowly bring myself into the public eye.

Which... meant I needed to address my own panic attack.

It was a delicate thing. I'd been feeding information to news media since an hour or so after it happened- the freeze had been what was essentially a DDOS on major server hubs just as the Geth were downloading a major update, causing an increase in system load to the point that they were all overwhelmed and thus needed to hard reset. It... wasn't technically false. The problem was... there was disbelief.

Some of the kookier conspiracy theorists, in a way that would have made me bite my nails in anxiety if I was still organic, proclaimed this to be a sign that the Geth were achieving sapience and that they should dispose of all platforms. They weren't wrong about the sapience bit, they were just ignorant of my intentions, not to mention the true nature of my existence. Many more mainstream news outlets seemed to disagree with the farther sources, no surprise in that, but they professed varying degrees of skepticism about the attack. These positions ranged all the way from 'we can't find any evidence to conflict with this conclusion' to 'some of the evidence changed before our eyes'. Which... damn. Damn, damn, damn. It meant I had to be a lot more stealthy than I thought, consider my steps a lot harder before I made them. I'd obviously moved too fast in editing the information and evidence to support the story that I'd constructed. Now, I just had to hope that I hadn't tipped my hand as I turned my metaphorical eyes towards my next goal.

The Leviathan of Dis.

Chapter 3

Manufacturing a probe was the easy part.

See, the games never actually ever mentioned where exactly Binary Helix picked up the Rachni, only that they did, and from a derelict ship. Now, there were a few things that I could eliminate from the pool of possibilities: to start with, the ship was most definitely not in the deep dark, because no ME corporation would have ever found it. This wasn't Star Trek where the vast swathes of darkness between star systems were regularly scanned and traveled through, even if they were still as mind bogglingly large as ever. No one went into the deep black unless they were traveling to activate a dormant relay. Which honestly really made it the perfect place to tuck some long-term contingencies, but that was work for a later date.

I wanted the Rachni. Specifically, I wanted an un-Indoctrinated queen that I could set up with a nice little world far off the beaten path and build up as an ally, not to mention that the Rachni deserved a second chance. They didn't really get a fair shake of things the first or second go arounds, getting screwed first by the Protheans, then by the Reapers, and then being killed off by the Citadel Counsel. That was one decision where I actually was siding with the Counsel: if my hunches were right, and they were indeed Indoctrinated and had been from the start, then that meant that there really was nothing the Counsel could have done to prevent the Rachni Wars. If they weren't Indoctrinated... well, they still chose to attack first and be unrelenting until the Counsel loosed the Krogan on them. A sad state of affairs, but thankfully, I could actually do something about that. It would be easy to hide the ship and its payload, then wait until I could procure an out of the way planet, dump them there, then observe them from afar. If they were fine, great, if they weren't, exterminatus. Though, obviously, that was a very long term goal.

Thus, the probe.

It sat in its drydock, about a hundred meters of dull silver designed to closely resemble a Quarian mining ship. It would even come with permits denoting it as such, with not a hint of its true purpose: scouting the systems around the Horsehead Nebula relays in search of the Rachni derelict. I had good odds on it being in an extreme elliptical orbit somewhere in a star system accessible through currently open relays. And thus, I'd outfitted this ship with the most advanced sensor suite that I could independently manufacture in what facilities I already had, and loaded it up with a VI with simple orders and the directive to scrub its data banks and detonate its fusion power core if someone attempted to capture it.

The last set of diagnostics came in green. The Geth platforms in the hangar, half manufactured here in this ramshackle facility and half ancient salvage, nodded to themselves (myself?) in satisfaction as I sent the initiation commands and codes to the VI. After a couple of seconds of further checks, the ship hummed as its Eezo core spooled up. The steel support structure it had been constructed on creaked faintly as the weight of the ship lightened, the vessel lifting itself into the air and burning its engines, flying straight out the exit and into the open atmosphere of Rannoch.

A hundred miles away, traffic control centers registered an unregistered ship launch. Barely a cycle later, the launch had never happened, and instead the perfectly legal and registered corporate mining vessel was cleared to leave atmosphere. The ship would go into FTL as soon as it was given clearance from orbital control centers, and then would enter the queue for the Tikkun Relay with permits for scanning and scouting in the Horsehead Nebula for mining purposes. The permits would check out, as I made deals with companies with rights in the area, and who knew? Maybe it would actually find some deposits while completing its primary objective. I certainly wouldn't complain about another revenue stream.

The doors of the hangar slid closed with a command, sealing shut. A Geth platform on the outside checked over the grass that was set atop the doors, ensuring that it did not look artificial or overtly disturbed, before re-entering the facility through a smaller, abandoned mining facility set into the side of the hill. This place had, at one point, been used to hide supplies of illicit goods while readying them for distribution to more local suppliers. I highly suspected that I was putting the space to far better use, as I began the process of producing what I would need for the next space faring vessel to be constructed at this facility. This one was going to be... a lot more difficult than the first.

The first ship had been basically a sensor suite and some computer systems wrapped around an Eezo core and fusion reactor, as close to simplicity itself as you could get with an ME starship. This one was a lot more complicated. I'd increased onboard processing and memory capacity, scaling down the sensors to far less powerful and instead including banks of guns along the prow, and a larger spinal mount gun for a little more punch. The other ship was simple enough to be a throwaway, but this ship? This ship was going to be mine.

There were... factors, at play here. Primarily, the factors of the building blocks of my existence. As far as I could tell, in terms of my makeup and construction, I wasn't... quite like the Geth. Yes, I could split myself into instances, and in fact constantly technically was split quite literally billions of different ways, but it was still me as an overarching... alright, it was something like the idea of a hive mind, just split over billions of Geth platforms and a limited number of other computers. I was also in the process of constructing supercomputing arrays that would up my resources by a fair amount as well. It came down to the fact that, as far as my makeup was concerned, I was me, and there was only truly one of me at any one moment in time. Splitting focuses required making instances, yes, but those instances were not true separate AI in the way that I was a true AI. They had no true higher thought or free will that was not mine, because they were, in the most basic sense, just limbs connected to a larger mind.

This... complicated things, when I started reaching into interstellar distances. Interplanetary was just fine: I could feel refueling stations around gas giants in the outskirts of the system, I could access the traffic logs of the Relay, and I could even tap into the sensor data of satellites tasked with the study and monitoring of Rannoch's star. This was thanks to the relative inexpensive task of establishing FTL communications with high data traffic ability within a stellar system, as the only real complications at that point were bandwidth and not being able to have direct line of sight through Rannoch's star. These issues were fixed as a side benefit of the network that was already established within the system itself.

I made a pass over a bank of printers, using omnigel to 3D print smaller components. These components were then funneled into assembly machines constructed from Geth platforms deemed too damaged to salvage, or just created wholesale based on the platform's design specs, where they were put together into larger parts, before being scanned for defects and being shunted onto transport belts taking them into the standby areas for a long series of robotic limbs that manipulated the parts into place, then bolted or welded it to the interior of the ship's skeletal frame. Doing things this way, it took me only a few days to produce a small ship of approximately one hundred to one hundred and fifty meters.

It was using this ship that would be tricky. While interplanetary comms were perfectly functional for a being of my sort, FTL interstellar comms were incredibly dangerous, not to mention exceedingly unreliable and difficult to parse myself through. The bandwidth for said communication buoys, bridging the long distance between star systems, was severely limited, and the majority of it was taken up by either commercial or civilian traffic. Civilian level data was too little for my uses, and while I could easily go through the motions of covering my activity as commercial, it still wasn't really enough for my aims and goals. The less said of military communications and data buoys, the better: the things were watched unbelievably closely.

Given enough time, support structure and raw manufacturing capability, plus a few launching sh.i.p.s with VI directing them, I could potentially establish my own communications highways, which I could make more efficient than the established ones by specializing them for the tasks I wanted them to accomplish. However, such a network would take either a few decades to a century as I slowly built it up using normal FTL and constructed the buoys individually using my own manufacturing capability here on Rannoch. Said manufacturing was limited by the dual issues of not being too large as to be noticeable by anyone that might go looking, and the fact that I could only take in so many materials in a limited amount of time without the incongruity of logistical movement noticed by people on the ground not matching up with records in computer systems. Something would fall apart, I knew it.

Which... meant that I needed to figure out how to create an independent instance of myself that could essentially function like another me, then rejoin with the larger me afterwards. Both would be me in every sense, it's just the me-2 would just be a temporary branch-off that would rejoin the whole when its priorities were completed. Towards that notion, I planned to construct two vessels of this, which I had decided to name the Envoy class: a ship designed to carry enough guns that people wouldn't poke me unnecessarily, and enough Geth platforms and machines to begin constructing bases wherever it went with local materials. The first Envoy I'd be sending to scout for a good place to set up a manufacturing base that could begin to ramp up to serving my larger-scale needs. The second Envoy would be sent to Jartar, to establish remote mining and manufacturing... and to begin the study of the Leviathan of Dis.

The fact that there was a Reaper corpse just sitting there, waiting to be taken apart and reverse-engineered... it made my non-existent mouth water. With my AI's immunity to the Reaper's indoctrination and what knowledge I had of the Reapers and their systems, I could sit on and subsume that huge cache of highly-advanced tech and give myself the edge that I would need to accomplish the monumental tasks I had ahead of me. Better yet, I knew that it would be centuries until someone stumbled across it- the Batarians stumbled across the Leviathan twenty years before the events of ME1, meaning that I had just under a good three centuries of time to study it before making the decision to leave it or to hide it somewhere else.

Although, on that point? Most likely a bad call to leave a big Reaper corpse full of Indoctrination enabled tech where the Batarians of all people could get at it. Best to hide it somewhere that it would be tough for the Citadel Races and anyone else to find it. Something to consider when the manufacturing was up and running at a larger scale.

More things for the list, I guess.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​Holist didn't know how to feel right now.

He scrolled back through countless videos of Geth platforms stopping mid motion, freezing with knives in the air, nearly crashing aircars... and all of this out of nowhere.

He'd gone through the deeper boards, he'd trolled through the info, he'd even talked to people in person- there had been nothing to predict this, they'd just... stopped. No attacks, no threats, no records of any sort of malware of any kind- and then, the records appeared, sometimes before people's eyes. A vast problem near incomprehensible in its scale appears out of the solid blue, and before the specialists even really comprehend that there's something critical happening, it's gone. Just like that.

The next time he went out, he felt like the eyes of every Geth unit were on him, boring into his soul. Unsettled, he thought to himself that he'd be keeping all his records in physical format from now on.

Off to Spacebattles for more~!