Chapter 7: Setting Down Roots

The transreality jump I made was not anywhere near as smooth as it had been with the Taelon Shuttle, but decidedly easier/better than it had been with the way my jump capsule had first been configured. Out of the twelve terra-root plants that were keeping the ship operational, four had dimmed down completely and would need time to recover. I felt as though I'd run a short marathon but had a chance to sit down and recover for a bit -- there was a deep sense of exhaustion but while it was 'bone-deep' it also wasn't crippling. This was not something I'd be doing with high degrees of frequency, in the slightest, but at least it was something I could do twice in rapid succession without dying if I absolutely needed to.

I stretched my proverbial legs and made the push to ID to take myself to Mars. I hadn't wanted to take the chance that my entry into the local universe's space would be detected by the people of the Earth below me. It was, after all, the early twenty-first century there and this wasn't a post-apocalyptic Earth. No. It was the Earth of the Mass Effect Universe. Circa 2030, in fact.

Giving myself roughly an extra hundred and twenty years to work with before humanity would have canonically discovered the Mass Effect. I was going to play utter and merry havoc upon that timeline. Especially since this wasn't the only Mars I had plans to visit. But that was for later. Settling down into the Promethei Planum, nestling in a cavern that should mostly cover my existence, I began running the Heartseed's scanners looking for anomalous phenomena. Should really have sensor drones. Damned oversight.

It didn't take long to find what I was looking for, given the Star Trek Universe's scanner technologies included gravimetric sensors, and I was within light microseconds of my destination/target. Extracting myself from the control tank, I suddenly felt very, very much smaller than I had done a moment before. I looked over at Smiley again. "Alright, buddy. You and me now. Maximum effort! Help me into that vacsuit will you?"

Now. the drone Hosts I had been created did have a limited ability to understand human language -- about as much as a very sophisticated Alexa program -- but that wasn't the same as being able to fully process general language use. It just felt right to be conversational with Smiley even while issueing actual commands using my cyberbrain firmware interface. The suit I was putting on was itself barely more than a copy of the Host body. A two millimeter thick coating of the organic hull thickened to one centimeter plates in vital areas but still largely flexible, I'd woven in thermal heating elements and CO2 scrubbing mechanism. I did include a faceplate, but that was secondary to the automail eyes each attuned to various segments of the electromagnetic spectrum. I'd be able to see EM flux, xray backscatter, heat, ultraviolet, and regular light … all at varying degrees of amplification. This had the unfortunate -- or perhaps awesome? -- effect of a sort of "steampunk goggles meets horrifying spider eyes" look to the whole ensemble, as it was designed to rotate in place based on the automail sockets I would connect into it with.

I'd tried to emulate the 'stillsuit' design of the Fremen of Dune, though that was difficult considering I'd never actually gone to that universe. It also didn't help that the suit was designed to be more NBC controlled, either. Thermally regulated capillaries of Hostblood all powered by a very small nodule of terra-root nestled by my waist, and Host musculature provided a minor strength boost along with the sensory feedback provided by the automail connectors.

What I didn't have right now -- a bit of an oversight, really -- was anything I could actually use as an airlock. I'd have to correct that in the future. Blargh -- there was always something to modify a design with.

Maybe a land-vehicle of some sort in the future too. Seriously. Walking long distances was for suckers, and here I was doing just that on a long-distance hike on friggin' Mars, freezing my balls off despite all the temperature assistance. Why was I walking? My scrying had shown me that there was some kind of sensor gear in the Prothean emplacement I was coming up upon and I didn't know exactly what it was tied to or what it would do if something magically appeared out of nowhere within. Eventually, however, I came within range of the wireless interfaces that the Protheans had left for their installation, and proceeded to make fairly quick work of the security suites used.

That actually worried me a little -- someone setting up a bunker to survive Beserker AI destroying their galactic civilization and they don't have decent software security against AI? I supposed it was just a matter of my using a proper "hacking" AI from a civilization that was actually rife with the things as compared to what this universe could accomplish on its own. Either way, I in quick order found myself standing before a pair of utterly massive doors -- no, airlock gates. Ugh. -- that would have fit my entire corvette if I'd had a mind to fly it through them. Sideways.

Fifty thousand years of constant freeze/heat cycle and zero maintenance and the damned things opened like they'd been built and tested yesterday. That … actually that was damned impressive is what it was. The open, metallic, blatantly artificial environment was in a weird sort of way comforting. It was familiar, at least, in a way that my Heartseed was not. At least, not yet. Moving right along, I found myself in a relatively empty facility with half a dozen spaceworthy vehicles. Two of which were frigates, while the other four were more readily defined as upjumped skycars; not even worthy of the name of corvette. Fifty thousand years of decay and lack of maintenance had done a hard number on the objects contained within the facility, but the flickering power systems were just barely enough to keep the lights on.

Were enough. After queuing the airlock to fully close behind me, I began to mentally sort through the list of what I could connect to with my cyberbrain's interface. It honestly wasn't much. Almost all of the actual data systems were lost, but the hardwired systems and circuitry meant to operate the various systems still responded. Between that and my heavy duty hand-scanner, I started to non-invasively reconstruct the various systems and how they operated. This took a few hours, until I got to set my eyes on the real prize of the show: the eezo core of the first of the two frigates. Thing had endured fifty thousand years of mothball decay, but the crystalline structure was perfect still. Damned impressive. Even better -- now that I had heavy duty scans of the material I could actually make some sense of what it was enough to begin to attempt an alchemical deconstruction of it. Clapping my hands together, I pressed them onto the surface of the core and just … felt out the shape of what I was perceiving.

If it weren't for the Fahrkan neural implant I would've been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of insight I was getting. It was a bit like the trip to see Truth all over again. But -- hah! -- the one thing it wasn't, was a blackout-inducing experience. No lies, I straight up did a victory dance as soon as I came back to my senses on that accord. Why would I do that? Well, between my scanners and the alchemical reactions, I got a major victory of understanding.

I'd been afraid that I wouldn't be able to synthesize eezo on my own, despite knowing that it had naturally occurring circumstances -- at least in the Mass Effect Universe -- that I could potentially reproduce in a laboratory with high energy values. And as it turned out, I'd definitely need a solid energy contribution to make it work, even with my alchemy, but I didn't need actual dark matter to pull that off. I had been worried that Element Zero might be a sort of darkmatter clathrate. My scans and interactions had shown me that instead it operated more like a tuning fork for dark energy. The whole positive/negative current thing? That related to the current frequency the eezo crystals were resonating at when at rest. The details were … well. I would be lying if I claimed to really understand them. But my Thinktank Hosts were quite confident that I didn't need to understand it to reproduce it -- just a source of neutrons to capture into a crystalline structure, and those were easy enough to come by with the machinery I could construct thanks to the STU and ACU technology bases at my disposal.

In the meantime, I took the liberty of reconstructing the power conduit systems of the various objects that were still present within the facility to fully working order as best I could with my limited access to fully operational examples of the various components. I had enough on-hand fully inoperable materials to replicate the most-intact computer systems I could find, though it did take a long series of transmuting reconstructions using examples of working subcomponents from different sources until I had the best available I could get, whereupon I used a combination of the handscanner and my cyberbrain interface to transfer what little data was still available onto those systems. I didn't get a chance to break the encryption involved -- though I did keep copies of said encrypted data objects -- but that wasn't really a concern. For the moment.

In short order I had completed the reconstruction of the facility to the best of my abilities -- it was depressingly sad that for the size of the outpost it took me a mere day or two -- and while I was at it, topped off the reactor tanks of the various ships and the facility itself. This would make blatantly clear that someone had come to the place before the Mass Effect humanity discovered it -- but it was necessary in order to drastically amplify the eezo fluctuations and ensure that humanity discovers them from Earth orbit, as I didn't plan on making contact with them myself until after they'd discovered the Prothean archive.

My lack of planning to introduce myself to the Mass Effect Earth's humanity just yet shouldn't be taken to imply that I wasn't planning on facilitating matters further for them. No, I had another trick up my sleeve planned for the peoples of this Earth that would facilitate them for the future. To that effect, I made a few trips of hopping sideways in my hardsuit scrying as I went. I was looking for something very specific -- a derelict ship of Citadel Council origin. The older the better.

It was a pain but I eventually did find one that was fairly suitable to my needs. Obnoxiously, it was a "inexplicably well constructed pirate vessel that merely happened to be owned and operated by a purely Batarian crew". The Batarian slaver frigate had been drifting in space for sixteen hundred years. Sixteen hundred years. Damn I hated the Citadel civilizations' stagnance. So many followed the path of the Protheans and never advanced any further.

Anyhow, the ship was already heading in the dead of space in basically the right direction, but it just needed a nudge or two to make sure things worked out properly. The static buildup of the ship's core was relatively easily handled thanks to simply porting in a capacitor bank to handle it, and adding a terra-root reactor to connect to the vessel quickly got its drives back online.

This vessel, I drained dry of all of its possible information. A map of the Mass Effect relays, a translation matrix for the known races of the time, the basic details of VI software engineering, the autofab instructions for the various hardsuit options of the Batarian State Arms, personal kinetic barriers, personal weapons; the entire lot of it. I made an especial point of recording the Batarians' data on biotics -- what caused them, how they were induced, and how to predict a genetically stable biotic individual in arbitrary species… including the way the Batarians got that information. Though I left out the reasoning behind why they would have that information aboard a slaver vessel. Ugh. At least it would prevent a rather large number of birth defects and stillborn babies from happening because Fuck Cerberus and their goddamned taco cart of doom. Humanity was getting quite the little gift. I wanted them to have the best possible leg up based on their "native" techbase when I finally deigned to make contact with them myself.

Transiting back to the Prothean outpost, I started filling in the computer cores of the various vessels with the field dynamic instructions to operate the FTL drives from the lost Batarian ship. I also included a message, in English, on a written plaque placed directly at average human eyeline immediately after entering the facility through its doors: A picture of the Sol system, along with a circle around Jupiter, with the text: "All these worlds are yours, and more. But the Jovian System is denied to you. Make no efforts to come there. Trust not the Citadel. Trust not the Relays. As the original builders of this place learned, as did the Irusannon before them, and their precursors before them: they are a trap. Be ready. Be silent. Be vigilant. When the time is right, we will make ourselves known to you. We will be watching."

Beneath that, I left a series of stone tablets with the necessary equations and instructions for the synthesis of a series of objects: warp field mechanics (though without the subspace component; they would need to use Mass Effect field manipulation for that, but still; it was good enough for the Kett -- it would be good enough for them too), the construction and design principles for particle accelerator weapons (the instructions for the pistols I got from the Conastoga turned out to be highly scalable; they'd be effective up to the point of qualifying as capital ship weapons to a degree, especially as the particle weapon design principles very emphatically did not rely on Mass Effect technology. The chemical synthesis instructions for tritanium. Gravity plating. Monohydrogen fusion. Tachyon emitters and receivers -- though sadly the Conastoga's databanks didn't include directional emitter technology, so I couldn't give them true long-range FTL comms, not yet anyhow. Hull polarization technology. Precursor ion thrusters. Basically, enough of a techbase that the only things they'd need eezo for would be kinetic barriers and FTL drives. Maybe not even that if they could generate sufficiently dense tachyonic eddies -- though that would be a rather intense energy commitment.

The Humanity of this Mass Effect timeline would possess capabilities that would take the galaxy by storm when they finally made themselves known to the races of the relay network. If I accomplished nothing else here, having accomplished that would be enough.

With that done, I 'hopped' back into the Heartseed and performed a ship transit to the moons of Jupiter, to settle down for the long haul. Ganymede, in particular, would become my new home for the next while.

You'd think I would have learned from my lessons regarding the complexities of setting up the life support systems of Heartseed that some systems are just dauntingly complex. I'd decided, as a result of just being tired of things taking so damned long, to set up a cryopod and set myself to sleep for three months at a time and only be awakened in between if there was something that deviated from expected parameters. I'd set the Host printer to overtime in setting up dozens of Hosts and went to sleep, giving them instructions to borrow from the databanks of the Heartseed to build out a subterranean habitat using the plans I'd put in place for things like taking interior cuttings of the Heartseed's hull and terra-root connectors to create structural layering and the hexagonal glass layer for radiation shielding, on top of simply being buried at great depth. The Conastoga had been nearly a generational ship, due to its nine-year voyage, so it wasn't a surprise that it had contained instructions and seedstocks for maintaining the necessary plantlife for stable long-term habitation in a largely passive format.

But it wasn't designed, not really, to scale. The same design AI I'd used for the Heartseed could manage some of that to an extent -- if nothing else, reproducing the interior of the Heartseed itself in hexagonal layers over and over in a procedural manner would get something done. I just hadn't really anticipated the sheer mess of what I would be confronted with after my first months sleeping. As I looked around at my new home, I decided I couldn't be fucked with dealing with the nonsense and that it would be good enough to expand upon as it was, even if it was nothing like what I really wanted.

I declared some sections to be used for Host personality development -- basically, having the Hosts act out various holomovies from the Conastoga's entertainment banks, and storing the experiences for later examination and extrapolation. I specifically restricted the rating to PG-13, with a gore and violence filter on the selection. I knew that even this much emulation wouldn't result in the Hosts becoming self-aware, but I wasn't really worried about that. Simple vocoders could be attached to the drone-hosts and I'd finally have a Smiley that could answer me back. And that would be good enough, to start with. Between that and the VI software I'd shamelessly stolen from the Batarian ship, I would start to have something I could approximate as real companionship here in the dark. But I could still do better overall.

So I left the Host drones with some extra instructions on top of the basics they had thus far to simply build out the compound I needed. Seriously; fifty percent of the place was hydroponics bays. I already had enough power supply from the terra-root cuttings they'd deployed to develop the facility fifty times over as it was. Hell, there was probably enough to turn it all into a working spaceship if I needed to.

So, no, instead I had the Hosts start to work on the design and operation of biotic Hosts, on top of continuing to work out the kinks of the integration of bioneural implants, Host Pearls, and cortical stacks. Maybe, with some actual personality development based on the entertainment re-enactments, they'd start to make some real progress. With that, I went to sleep again and awaited further progress.