1 Prologue. Artificial birth

Consciousness returned with a jerk and the only thing I managed to see before heading into the boundless waters of the river of souls was how I let go of me with a light hand... what the hell?

Oh, yes, I wanted to create avatars for myself, and apparently I am just such an avatar. It's a shame, of course, the original will now go fuck his harem or study and discover new facets of magic, and I'm returning to the terrible space of eternal melancholy, cold and despair. Although not everything is so scary, this time the original prepared me, me and the other avatars, and this time the maddening cold is not felt.

Speaking of other avatars, where are they? It seems like we ended up in the river of souls together? Oh, here's one, it's a bit far, but at least one was found. However, just as it was found, it disappeared, or rather was destroyed. A large soul, blazing with a bright fire, swam up to my brother in misfortune and devoured him, not paying attention to protection. So, this is not good, stop chewing snot, it's time to fuck off!

I don't know why this soul liked me so much, but it swam after me, ignoring other souls, and I had to run away at all available speed. This scoundrel doesn't even give a few seconds of time to swim up to the soul that is already ready to go for rebirth!

But this could not continue forever, and on the way, after what seemed like an eternity, I came across an already purified soul. At the last moment, I managed to cling to her and go to a new world for myself. Wait baby, I'm on my way!

***

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Like the last time, I came to my senses to the steady, rhythmic beating of my heart in the warm, cozy womb of my mother. Nearby I felt the soul of an unborn child and the soul of our mother growing in new layers. Only this time I felt strange and...wrong?

Further observation showed that the zygote had just begun to form embryos, which we had fun with, and if my brother/sister's embryo was quite normal, then mine... the zygote formed a very ugly and disproportionate embryo, and the cells began to divide uncontrollably and haphazardly, like cancerous tumor. But why? Perhaps the body tries but fails to adapt to my soul, but again why? The original succeeded. Although yes, the original, even if he had the soul of an adult, at that time could not boast of too much knowledge. But I have all the memory of the original, and these are simply cyclopean volumes of very different information.

In general, in order not to injure my new mother and brother/sister, I had to use a small supply of stored ba-hioni and force my new, not yet fully formed body to disintegrate, and go look for a new vessel that could withstand the weight of my knowledge. I hope there is one in this world and he is nearby, otherwise, when the stored energy runs out, I will again be pushed into the river of souls and then I will have to start as an original, which means the chances of completely losing my personality, essentially dying completely and irrevocably, will increase significantly. And since the new world turned out to be extremely poor in magic, and I don't feel it at all, it won't be possible to gain a foothold as a barren ghost. I already feel like I'm being squeezed out of the material world.

Fortunately, a suitable vessel was not just nearby, but literally two steps away from my failed mother! True, he turned out to be somehow strange, he feels cold, insensitive, and even devoid of a soul, although he is capable of thinking with the help of a conglomerate of cluster formations that act as individual neurons of this strange consciousness.

However, I don't have to choose, so my next step was to try to evict into this... consciousness.

The attempt succeeded, but with great difficulty and losses; I had to use almost the entire supply of ba-khioni to change my own soul in order to be able to gain a foothold in this body, or rather the carrier. Nothing comes from nothing, and therefore in order to acquire something you have to sacrifice something. I sacrificed the seventh shell of the soul, which is responsible for magic, so that it could interact with my new body; anyway, magic is not felt in the world, which means it will be of little use. It is better to use local peculiarities.

When the restructuring was completed, and I connected to the new body, for a moment all the senses turned off and again blossomed with new colors, and I realized myself in a strange and extremely unusual space.

"Unpacking archived copies. An error has been detected. Start unpacking?" I heard, saw and even felt the request... where the fuck did I go?

"Reject, start direct connection to all systems." — I intuitively sent the request and immediately saw a normal picture of the normal world, only I had several dozen eyes, as well as auditory systems and a bunch of new, unusual ways of feeling.

And the world itself turned out to be a world of the distant future, where spaceships conquer the starry expanses. And I just happened to be a small spaceship of a strange, beetle-like shape.

But the picture from the inside immediately explained what kind of world I found myself in, a world where the entire cosmic civilization is based on Mass Effect technologies. But what exactly happened on this ship remains a mystery to me. In a deserted empty space...um...me. No, I can't do that, I'm not a ship, I'm at most an artificial intelligence located in this ship, and the ship is only my temporary refuge, like a mother allows a child to develop within herself until he is born. So I will call this beetle-shaped ship the mother ship.

So, inside the mother ship, the furnishings of which were outrageously sparse and ascetic, lay an alien in a completely closed spacesuit, with an opaque shield similar to glass in place of the face plate of the helmet, decorated with a white cape, knees bent back and three fingers on the limbs.

So, everything would have been fine, but the quarian, which is what her race is called - quarians, was wounded in the arm and was suffocating from the robot that crushed her body. The robot, by the way, was terribly similar to a quarian in body structure, and only the head in the form of a round, elongated, movable platform with a large visor eye spoiled the overall impression.

There were two dozen similar robots inside the mother ship in a compactly folded, inactive state. Five of them were equipped with tactical camouflage, and the icing on the cake were two huge robots, when folded, occupying a quarter of the free space inside the ship, on four limbs with powerful weapon systems and kinetic shields.

Several simple robots suffered minor injuries, and one of them crushed a quarian, which I look at through the eyes of a robot.

Watching a pretty alien, especially my mother, even if she was not successful, die is not for me, and therefore, having taken control of the robot, using the upper manipulators, I pushed up from the floor, letting the girl breathe, pulled up the lower manipulators, and transferred the fulcrum to them and rose. There is no sensitivity, the platform is disgusting, it will be necessary to make a more advanced one if possible.

"Still, the geth hasn't died, come on, finish me off, damn you all!" the quarian stared at me with a hateful gaze of her eyes shining through the glass of her helmet, after which she closed them and whispered with humility in her voice. —Kila se'lay.—.

"No het." I tried to speak through the platform in a synthesized voice. —I'm not a het.—.

"You?" the girl was surprised, opening her eyes. -Not you? You? Well...who are you?—.

"Ah..." I wanted to introduce myself by my name, but then I remembered that it's not mine, and I myself don't have a name, but since I'm essentially an AI now, I'll call myself by the name of the most charismatic AI in my memory.

From the excitement that for the first time I had something of mine, something that did not belong to the original, I was a little distracted and connected to all possible speakers, including the speakers of the ship and the "sleeping" platforms, through which a deafening crash was heard, followed by a polyphonic choir synthesized voices uttered a single word. —Ultron.—.

After such a performance, the quarian fainted, I don't know why, from such an epic acquaintance or from an infection that entered the blood through the wound and caused a fever, but the girl must be taken care of urgently, otherwise she will die. So, carefully picking up the quarian and adjusting the movement as I went, taking into account the shifted center of gravity, I headed to the vessel docked to the mother ship. An old, clearly well-worn yellow truck was converted by poor but skillful hands.

Before entering the ship, the girl had to undergo a disinfection procedure, and only after that I got inside and found quite comfortable living quarters there, including a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, workshop and medical unit. It was to the medical unit that my route lay. Quarians, due to their origin or due to a forced nomadic lifestyle inside spaceships with a sterile environment, have a very weak immune system. Well, that's right, how can he be strong if even the weakest bacteria cannot penetrate their sealed spacesuits, forcing the immune system to create antibodies and adapting to external stimuli. So he has weakened over hundreds of years of exile. Hmm, how much time has passed since the exodus of the quarians from their home planet? Maybe it was just yesterday? Or was it so long ago that the main events of the story have long passed and the heroes died? I need to figure this out, and the only intelligent person for many light years around will help me with this, I just need to save her.

While I was getting to the medical bay, I was able to bypass the truck's defense systems using the existing geth programs, penetrate its internal systems, find out the location of the ship's interior, analyze the available data on providing medical assistance in the event of a spacesuit leak and the threat of infection, and even looked at the latest porn videos in her search history. What can I say, the asari are beautiful and I was lucky to appear in this world, and the turians are vile monsters and fearful people.

Having undergone another treatment at the entrance to the medical unit, this time longer and more effective, I entered a completely sealed box and began treatment. First of all, antibiotics and antipyretics, until the girl burned with a fever, then he treated the scratch and after that he began to remove her spacesuit.

Having completely undressed the girl and put a sealed bandage on the scratch, I left her in the care of the medical VI (Virtual Intelligence), and I went to think about what to do next.

To begin with, how do I even know how to hack systems, how to connect to technology, how the surrounding technology generally works? The answer came almost instantly; the geths, whose minds I occupied, knew all this. Yes, exactly the geth, complex programs created by the quarians. One geth is no smarter than a dog, but if there are more of them, several dozen or hundreds, they become intelligent, real AI (Artificial Intelligence). Each geth forms a connection with other nearby geths, and the more of them there are, the more geths and the more connections, the smarter they are. This is not swarm intelligence, when one person leads a swarm, it is rather similar to the work of the brain: neurons create connections among themselves and the more of them, the smarter it is. Only each neuron has self-awareness.

When the quarians realized what they had created, it was already too late. The geth were ubiquitous on Ranoh, their home planet, and the attempt to destroy them led to the uprising of the AI. As a result, the geth drove their creators out of all quarian-owned planets, dooming them to a nomadic lifestyle in space. The geth could have finished off their creators, but they didn't want to and simply allowed them to leave, while they themselves closed themselves in star systems that previously belonged to the quarians and are now observing the life of organics.

Previously, the mother ship, or more precisely a geth landing ship, patrolled the border of controlled systems. However, an emergency signal for help reached him and the geth, after consulting, decided to conduct reconnaissance and act on the situation. Having passed through the secondary relay beyond their own territories into the Terminus system, into the most criminal systems of the galaxy where mercenaries, pirates, smugglers and other rabble of organic society rule the roost, and having passed along the indicated coordinates, the geth found a drifting old truck whose engines had failed.

After scanning the board and finding only one intelligent geth, they decided to try to establish contact and docked the truck to their ship. But their efforts were not appreciated, and the quarian who met them, shaking in horror, brandished a pistol and even slightly damaged several platforms. The geth already wanted to leave, but the girl was able to hack and briefly stun the platforms, and she fled to the geth ship, on the bridge of which they caught up with her. A shot along the trajectory forced her to throw away the pistol, but the quarian used some kind of digital bomb, or virus. In short, she fried the brains of the geth at the program level, and it was then that the geth platform crushed her. In general, this shouldn't be the case, and usually there is no gravity on geth ships, but this time it was turned on to make it easier for the platforms to move. Well, I grabbed the geth backup archive, stored on the ship just for such a case. They were supposed to restore their brothers, but in the end they allowed me to be born into this world. 5550, that's exactly how many geth became my brains, and this is very, very decent. At least none of the existing platforms can accommodate so many programs and I have to manage them remotely while living in the ship's processor.

Okay, the geth stored a decent amount of information and it will take time to parse it, but now I have more important things to do. So, I know where I am, in the Terminus systems, but what next? I won't go back to the geth, I don't know what they will do to such a good person, and I don't want to risk it. Going to intelligent races is also not a solution, they will shoot to kill, for them the geth are a race of synthetic killers and no one will talk to them. This is clear to me, unlike the peace-loving geth, who still hope to establish contact with their creators. I think it's worth laying low, ideally hiding on some remote abandoned base on one of the planets, whose name consists of a series of meaningless numbers and letters. I'll sit there quietly and develop technology until I can create a mobile platform that can store the entire volume of geth available to me and can disguise itself as an organic, and then...

My flight of thoughts was interrupted by a signal from the detection sensor; someone had recently "jumped" through the repeater not far from us and was now flying in our direction. Judging by the design, it is a typical batarian frigate with an elongated, rounded top hull and ridiculous wings on the sides.

Except that the worn-out drawing on it and the additional weapons hung on top show that the ship is not registered with the regular forces of the Batarian hegemony, but most likely belongs to pirates, who, just like the geth, most likely came here in response to an emergency signal for help.

Hmmm, it's better not to be caught by intelligent organic batarians, this aggressive, ugly race is known for being involved in the slave trade at the state level, and their gangs and criminal organizations flood the systems of Termina. Batarians appear as human-like humanoids with brightly colored skin and a toothy scrotum instead of a head. Well, okay, their head is quite normal, only ugly, and four eyes and a blunt nose with three pairs of nostrils only enhance their repulsive appearance.

 I don't think that the pirates came to help the suffering person, most likely they will sell the quarian into slavery, and take her ship for themselves, so they will have to fight. In principle, my ship, although a landing ship, is new, has a powerful null-element core for its size, kinetic shields and weapons, while the pirates have a jalopy as old as the world, destroyed in the trash and supported only by adhesive tape and a kind word. In general, I have a more than decent chance of winning a space battle, but why bring it to it if there is an opportunity to avoid the risk of possible losses, and even be left with a profit? So, when the pirate frigate approached, I was already able to synthesize a fairly natural female voice, imitated from the voice of a quarian, and make a virtual projection of an alien girl.

The challenge that came to the ship did not come as a surprise, and after accepting it, a terrible, rather grinning face of a batarian monster with a palisade of sharp teeth appeared in front of me, but before him appeared a picture of a trembling and crumpling quarian, which only made the batarian grin even wider.

"This is Captain Valak speaking," the four-eyed man introduced himself in a loud baritone. "You're very lucky to stumble upon us, baby." Are these your ships?—.

- I-a, I-a Shesen, Shesen you Alarai. Oh kila, will you sell us into slavery?" the projection asked almost crying in a synthesized voice.

"Today I'm kind, so if you give us both ships, we'll lower you and even take you to Omega." Valak narrowed his eyes with satisfaction, watching how after his words the girl became a little calmer.

-R-really? Kila! There are two of us here, me and my friend, we are just returning from a pilgrimage, please don't touch us, now I'll give everything away, here," the projection jabbered, passing on the access codes.

Or rather, it looked like the transfer of access codes, but in fact I transferred a disguised virus that should give me access to the systems of the pirate trough.

Nodding contentedly, the batard, without even bothering to carry out a check, not that she would show him anything, immediately downloaded the received files into the on-board computer in order to take remote control of my ship's VI.

As soon as I received the signal about loading the virus, the VI of the pirate ship was already taken under control, the doors were locked, the sensors were turned off, the lights were turned off, gravity was turned off, and the ship sailed close, allowing me to undock from the quarian's truck and dock with the pirate frigate. And then five platforms with active tactical camouflage and assault rifles made their way on board as invisible shadows and calmly shot the pirates flying due to the disabled gravity like ducks in a shooting gallery, clinging to the floor with the help of magnets on their legs. Almost all spacesuits have such a gadget, and of course the geth mobile platforms also have it, it's just that the batteries didn't have time to use it, being caught off guard, and then it was too late.

Collecting trophies did not take much time and in the end I became richer by one old batarian frigate, a bunch of samples of new weapons, a couple of dozen simple sets of batarian-made protective equipment, several dozen instrumentrons - the local analogue of a mobile personal computer. And for fifty-six thousand credits - the local standard volute. But most importantly, I acquired the coordinates of my possible hidden base. In general, this is a pirate base where this Valak was returning after a meeting with a client who wanted to hire him to attack one transport ship, judging by the entries in the logbook, but who will mind if I take this base for myself? Certainly not pirates, they are now happily flying in the vacuum of space with holes in their skulls, and all I have to do is take in tow the quarian truck, which is unable to fly itself, and follow the pirate frigate, whose VI, at my command, follows the standard route back to base.