1.1

Location: Phoenix Massing cluster, Typhon system, planet Aite

From: I.M

sent: 05/04/2183

Subject: motivations for AI code sharing exploration and solution

"We are not in Kansas anymore." --Jack Harper

Team,

It's time we raised our bar on performance. Despite good year-over-year growth, your value proposition to this organization remains unclear, beyond top line contributions. Letting go is never easy, but I’m confident this will position us better to build leading technology enabling the future of human

Rat fucking trash. Die in a fire, illusive man.

David Archer slammed his computer shut and pushed back from his desk. The email went on like that, for six pages, but he didn't need to read any more. All they had learned was meaningless, the successes they had made were irrelevant. It was good, but it wasn't good enough, and their reward for working 80 hours a week testing murderbots was to give all their research to that bitch Eva Coré, who would present all their project briefs and pretend to have done something with them. His boss would probably love them. Why? Because the Illusive man liked her, and didn't like David. Because she was hot and neurotypical, and David was not either of those.

Gavin, David's brother, called out from across the office. "What? What is it?"

David shrugged. "Email. From Tim. You talk to him, I can't." Tim wasn't the illusive man's actual name, it was just what everyone called him--though never officially.

"He didn't actually..." David spread his hands and nodded. Gavin paled and immediately stopped what he had been doing to open his email.

"Son of a bitch! The hell does he mean 'beyond top line contributions'? We contributed to the top line! That should be the end of it. What else does he want from us?"

David shrugged. "At least we get to live."

"Sure. For six months, before I get stabbed by some goon from Binary Helix looking to break in here with my DNA and steel our research."

"That's unlikely. Binary Helix doesn't care what we're doing. They'll probably be from a different Cerberus cell."

Either possibility wasn't exactly high, but they weren't low, either. David calculated the probability at around 46.857%. That could go up or down several times a day, depending on a variety of factors. Most of these could be averaged out by a careful examination of their rivals' stock prices.

Aite was actually a lovely world--a garden planet, so called, because of the temperate climate and fertile farm land. Perfect for colonization, on paper, accept for one thing: a moon was crashing into it. Not soon, but in about fifty years. As such, no one really wanted to invest long term in it. This led to the second major problem with Aite: the short-term investment. Most of it came from shady organizations, with shadier goals and lots of dark money. Organizations like, well, Cerberus, but David was pretty sure the other council race's off-the-books government sponsored corporations also had bases on world. If you were here, at best, it meant you had something to hide. Which basically meant you were fair game for anyone else. Law enforcement was non-existent, as there were no laws to enforce. The residents policed themselves quite effectively, with lots of guns and absolutely no paperwork. Not a fun family destination.

David wasn't worried about that though. Avoiding the locals was easy: stay inside. Forever. No one was that interested in what they were doing to come invade here, and anyone who did would regret it dearly. Cerberus paid a small army of mercs to protect them, though for how long was now an open question. But the real danger was in the research itself. Anyone who wanted a peak at their secrets wouldn't have to peak very hard to find the geth Colossi they were working on, but they'd never live long enough to make use of that knowledge.

Gavin was still sputtering behind him about the electronic pink slip. Lots of "this is so unfair," "what are we supposed to do," that kind of thing. It was getting loud, and a little hard to concentrate.

"did you see where he quoted the Wizard of Ozz, but named it after himself? That was funny."

"What?" Gavin looked up, distracted.

David pointed at the top of the screen. "That's about where I stopped reading."

Gavin snorted. "I keep saying you're so much smarter than me. That just proves it."

Fat lot of good all his smarts were doing them now. David didn't vocalize that though. The thought wasn't productive. They needed to find a way out of this.

While headline-grabbing incidents like the geth attack on Eden Prime--or the Citadel, for that matter--were terrible optics for colonizing the traverse, they were a goldmine for anyone in illegal AI research. Which, it turned out, was pretty much everyone, despite the Council's prohibitions. The project they were working on, codenamed "overlord," was to establish a human-Geth interface. Such would allow anyone to directly control them. The applications for this were limitless, to David's mind. Mostly limitless in terms of death count, if he was being totally honest, but that didn't interest him. Cerberus being pro-human like they were, he figured the chances he'd ever have to deal with one were pretty low. The work itself was fascinating, and The Illusive Man paid out in stacks. Until now.

David didn't understand it. They were making progress, of a sort. They'd figured out that the geth had almost religious tendencies about certain things. It made sense, to him at least. The logic of software was only as good as its data, so if you could inject into those logic tables, you could tell them up was down--or give yourself root access.

It was ironic, really. After all the centuries spent hacking on the problem, the only race to actually succeed at creating self-determining software were the Quarrians, who did so by accident. What had started as a relatively benign project to make their lives easier through virtual intelligences had snowballed beyond everyone's predictions.

It was because of how they networked to spread information. By itself, a geth hardware platform was just that--hardware. Inert without software. Likewise, a single geth program was just that. If you loaded one or two into a platform, it would behave like a dumb robot. The network effect of multiple programs serving different purposes massively amplified their capabilities. It allowed them to share data, goals, and--unexpectedly--perspective.

Before anyone quite realized what was happening, they'd started asking the big questions, like, "do these units have a soul?" Eventually, one asked an Admiral's daughter. This led to the predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth; woe is us, what have we unleashed, our creations are too dangerous, we have to shut them all down. Et cetera. The geth, unsurprisingly, did not take well to this, and resisted with violence. Somewhat more surprisingly, their resistance succeeded. War broke out, society was largely destroyed, and the Quarrians were forced into exile not only from Rannoch, but their entire solar system. The geth did not pursue them further, choosing instead to focus on building their new world. To what end, no one knew; ships that went beyond the Perseus vail did not return. The surviving Quarrians, meanwhile, had trouble adapting to the native climate of any world. Something to do with the lack of pathogens on their homeworld leading to weaker immune systems? David didn't know the details and none of the researchers were astrobiologists. So the Quarrians had built the largest space fleet in the galaxy, in search of a new place to call home.

A search that continued, to this day. Centuries of life on the flotilla had weakened their immune systems even further, to the point where they had to constantly wear biohazard suits or risk serious infection from even the mildest microbes. This, obviously, made finding a new homeworld nearly impossible. So now they migrated from system to system, scrounging off whatever they could, arguing about whether to retake Rannoch or continue their quest for a new planet, and generally making a nuisance of themselves wherever they went. It was ancient history now in any case, centuries old, but it seemed the geth had decided to play a larger role on the galactic stage. No one knew to what end, but It made recovering them intact a lot easier, which was ideal for David's experiments.

The hard part had turned out to be simple communication. They'd constructed a virtual intelligence interface that the Geth could use to talk to them, which was already paying off in several different ways. But it only solved half the problem. The truly unworkable factor was the meat on the other end. Humans could not pulse code modulate their vocal chords, for one thing. More intractable was that the geth operated on consensus, and human thought just wasn't fast enough to keep up. The network would simply ignore their tiny human voice.

Gavin let out a big sigh. "Well, I guess that's all the work you'll be doing today. Lucky you." Technically, Gavin was in charge of the project. Realistically, they both knew who was the bigger contributor from a pure ideas and code perspective, but David didn't mind. Programs, machines, he understood; they were just math, which was always predictable. People baffled him, and he preferred dealing with them as little as possible. Gavin was more charismatic, and that opened a lot of doors for them. Plus, being 'in charge' meant it was up to Gavin to break the bad news to the rest of the staff. David was more than happy to let his brother handle that. "At least Katherine will be happy. Were you in the sync last week? I swear, she was acting like she was gonna rig the server cluster to explode."

"Why?"

Gavin rolled his eyes. "Oh, you know. 'Man's reach exceeding his grasp,' 'mucking with technologies we were never meant to understand,' 'violating the natural laws of science and ethical research.' The usual."

"So why is she here?"

"I asked that. She didn't really answer, she just got mad and left."

Gavin shrugged. So did David. "Well. Solves that at least."

"Mm hmm." Gavin massaged his temples. "We've got to do something. Eva's AI-augmented mech idea is interesting--"

"Sure," David scoffed. "Tim wants a sex bot. So interesting."

Gavin winced. "You better not say that where she can here you, she might hurt you. I'm serious, you know I'll protect you, but she scares me. She should scare you too." He took a breath. "In any case, what we have so far won't help them. They're missing the AI component, and we haven't made enough progress yet. And they don't have the geth specialization, they won't make any more headway than we did. They'll just put it on the shelf and say we did nothing, those sycophants on Chronos will tell us we didn't meet expectations and then we'll all be begging Synthetic Insights for jobs."

"Do they have openings?"

"That's a good question, I have no idea. We might have to start working for Eclipse! God help us. We're scientists, not mercinaries. How long before one of us gets shot or stabbed or caught in an explosion?"

"Three years, that's the average life expectancy working for Eclipse. The ones who don't get arrested. Your odds of living beyond that are 16.315 per cent. Not odds I'd take."

"Thank you, David. That was rhetorical." Gavin knuckled his forehead. "We've got to make a big breakthrough. This week. After that the process takes over and it'll be too late to stop it. But nobody we've connected yet has been able to talk to them. Nobody has the..." Gavin trailed off. David looked up to see Gavin staring at him, his eyes suddenly alight with excitement, and a strange fervour. It was a look of appraisal, like you gave to your next meal. David did not care for it one bit.

"What? What is it?"