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“Always so formal, my grandson,” said the ancestor VI, as it always did. “Call me Liat, why don’t you? Never thought of myself as old enough to have grandchildren anyhow.”
“You bosh’tet,” whispered the captain. “How long?”
“All my life.”
“And you never told me.”
“How could I? But she’s… She’s truly extraordinary, Qetsi. She helps me think. Her capacity for deduction is unique. There is hardly anything she can’t figure out, although her answers don’t always make much sense. But she’s not… Don’t be afraid. She’s not alive. Her deductive abilities come from something, oddly enough, called genetic programming—”
The captain crouched down and stared at the little hologram, who stared right back. “It’s an abomination,” she said finally.
Senna sighed. It was the longest sigh of his life. In that sigh, a thousand hopes crumbled. “New world, new rules,” he said in vain.
“Not like this. Some rules are there for a reason, Senna’Nir. The geth murdered my family. Perhaps, because they did not murder yours, you do not feel how wrong this is.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Senna growled, through a jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth might shatter. He pointed at the VI. “You’re looking at what the geth did to my family. Reduced us to ash and code.” Qetsi ignored him. She couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of her own righteousness.
“You do not know, not the way I do, that machines are not to be trusted. I tried to tell the Initiative that, with their revolting Pathfinders, embedding AI in people’s flesh—it does not help the organic host, it makes them a monster. There can be no synthesis between organic and machine. They will find that out sooner or later, whether we reach the Nexus or not. But this? This is the abomination our ancestors were striving for when the geth came to life. You have repeated the end of the world, Senna. On my ship. Get it out of here. Airlock it. Burn it to ash. I don’t care.”
“Qetsi, please!”
“I never took you for stupid, Senna! That’s not your grandmother! It’s a copy, a copy meant to fool you, to make you feel things toward it. Don’t you think the old ones felt something toward the geth? And what happened to them? No. I would not allow the quarian Pathfinder to take the implant like the others and I will not allow unborn intelligences on my ship. Delete her, or I will.”
Qetsi’Olam strode around him faster than Senna thought possible. She reached for the disk, her furious breathing audible even in her suit. But there is an instinct for protecting family that is faster still. Senna had wanted to explain everything carefully to Qetsi, how Liat could help, how, by uploading her program directly into the ship’s mainframe, essentially installing her as an executable function within the Keelah Si’yah, she could maintain her individuality and capacity for creative thinking—bolstered and expanded by all his tinkering with the guts of the other VIs—long enough to hack the worm and destroy it herself. To pursue it through the failed systems, deep into the core of the codebank and exterminate it for them. But eventually, he had wanted to tell the captain that the sheer massiveness of the ship’s systems would overwhelm and drown out the little pieces of Liat’Nir that made her Liat’Nir, would wash away any dregs left of personality in the great sea of the ship’s core. It was a suicide mission, one he and Liat had discussed at length. One he’d begged her not to embark on. One he hated with every ounce of his soul. One he was willing to sacrifice the thing he loved most in all the world to accomplish. Why couldn’t Qetsi listen? Why couldn’t all her rhetoric about the new rules of Andromeda have been true? Why couldn’t he give the gentle, noble speech he wanted to give, and accept her gratitude for his sacrifice?
Instead, he cried out the command passkey to his grandmother: “GO FISH!”
Liat’Nir’s eyes went out like candles. She disappeared. Qetsi and Senna stood motionless in the shadows of his quarters.
“What did you do?” she seethed.
“Wait,” Senna whispered. “Please. I did something good, I promise.”
“Captain!” came a loud masculine voice, followed by a banging at the door. “I need to speak with you!”
“I’ll be with you in a moment, Malak’Rafa!” she shouted.
Senna’Nir shut his eyes. He prayed silently to the real Liat’Nir, his flesh-and-blood grandmother, so long dead. Be with me now as you always have.
> After a few moments, he spoke to the ship.
“K, establish a comm link between first officer’s quarters and medbay.”
You got it, ke’sed.
“Yorrik?” Qetsi said into her comm, almost without hope. “Tell me you found our needle in a galaxy, my friend.”
The voice that came over the line was not Yorrik’s. It was ravaged and ruined, so faint it seemed hardly a voice at all.
“Dejected: Affirmative. It is you.”
17. ASSEMBLY
Yorrik could hardly see the shape holding his head. He thought it was a man. It seemed probable that it was. It smelled familiar, but the elcor’s olfactory slats were caked in dried fluids.
“No, no, no, Yorrik, get up, old friend. How could this happen? Your neck…”
Senna. The shape was Senna. How nice. How good to see him again. There was a terrible pain in Yorrik’s limbs. Not only the swelling, though that was bad enough. But when he had fallen, he had cut himself on the shards of glass from the broken fish tank, or the broken volus goggles on that child’s toy, or something. Something sharp. He was bleeding, he could feel it. It wouldn’t be long now. And that was fine.
