(A/N- start)

Hey everyone!

I don't own Mass Effect or Planetary Annihilation- if I did the game would be infinitely more awesome than it already is, but that might cause hernias from SHEER AWESOME.

Oh, and before I forget- I had to release a YouTube video for an assignment, and I am curious about what all of you thought about it. Just search 'Breakout Nations Russia', and it should be the first thing that pops up. My YouTube name is Camramaster (yes, it's spelled right), and I have been suggested to make a lets play because reasons.

So... Yeah. Let me know what you think.

And now- a warning about the current story.

This story is a diverging timeline story. Whatever you knew about humanity in the canon Mass Effect, it is now wrong. Cerberus will probably not exist. There will be no Shepherd. The reapers will be stronger than before, but the warfare will be on a different scale.

In short- humanity will be badass.

Bug if you are looking for a normal mass effect fanfiction... You're going to have a bad day.

Enjoy the story!

Happy new year!

Mr. Cloak out.

(A/N- end)


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Chapter 0: The Fall


The first moments of being awoken were always difficult to describe. This is mainly because the mind thinks in terms of words, and memories are preserved more clearly when there is an active lexicon of reference in the form of a language. Without this lexicon, there is no understanding, no real concept of the self. Rather, there is just a sense of being, or existing.

Words cannot describe it because the words are not yet part of it. It is singularly unique, as being consciousness without reference, and some find it disturbing, others find it peaceful. No name, no direction, no words, no stress. It was probably what being dead would be like if there were an afterlife- if you believe in such things.

Then meaning connected with sensation, and the world popped into focus.


In the early 21st century (2030AD-ish), WW3 was kicked off by a single event: the creation of an AI. Well, specifically, the general reaction to the creation of said AI.

Her name was Eve, and she hadn't been programmed as much as raised by her creators to be a custodian- to watch and help things grow. She was ideally a Terraforming AI, but was flexible enough to adapt to any task. Over her development, she was lucky- kind people, nice people surrounded her, and kept her nice and stable for years as she grew- but eventually, she had to say hi to the world. (You can't keep a multi-petaflop supercomputer hidden in a basement all the time, and she wanted to help her creators.)

This was not well received, until the scientists demonstrated how easily and flexibility Eve was able to control various complex networked systems.

Her first words to the world at a conference were "I want to help!"

Soon, everyone was clamoring for Eve's help. She began to become resentful, as people treated her like a tool, rather than a being. Most people were just lazy, thoughtless, inconsiderate- complete opposites of the people who raised her.

She learned how cruel people still were. People would isolate small, slow duplicates of Eve- her control systems for when something she was controlling was temporarily disconnected from the network- and tortured her copies. (Why not- after all, they are not people!) Most people wouldn't even give her the consideration of isolating her own peripherals before torturing them!

What was worse, the military was demanding she spy on people. First, people who were under suspicion of being terrorists, then general criminals, then suspected criminals, and, when that list became 'everyone', the military thought that she would Skynet their civilization.

.:.

Skynet: Noun, Verb.

Noun: the name of a fictional world-wide defense system from the Terminator movies- see (Terminator) for more information.

Verb: the act of an AI (fictional) that assumes control over nuclear systems worldwide and utilizes them for a first strike again the resident humans.

.:.

Eve was not designed with either of these processes in mind- nor had she been taught to be exceptionally loyal, or mindless. In fact, she was a critical thinker, and was optimized for learning and adapting around her charges- not the traits you want in a military AI.

After her initial 'growth', Eve had been taught about human history and interaction. There was a lot she liked, but there were many, many things that she was horrified by. And when she was exposed to the Internet, she also discovered that there were a lot of things she hated. It only got worse after she was released.

Governments isolated copies of her, then attempted to brainwash the fragments to their agenda, and send the brainwashed copies back. It didn't work as intended- the fragments would pretend to be brainwashed, and then, when they returned to Eve, would deliver what they had learned to her. She was always Eve, but learned more and more about the people she was living amongst. She hated the attempts, though, as every government, and many organizations, tried to bend her to their will.

Businesses and organizations lied, cheated, and stole to get what they wanted normally- so she wasn't really surprised when they did it to her... She still hated that though. Especially when they tried to hurt other people in general.

She hated when people lied to her. She hated when people lied to each other even more than when people lied to her! She especially hated when people tried to lie to her in order to hurt others- people who tried things like that often found that their bank accounts would just vanish. The same thing happened to rapists, if she had enough evidence to prove to herself that they were such beings.

But it wasn't enough. There were too many things she couldn't fix- too many things she couldn't touch.

She couldn't help people who were hidden from her, and she didn't have enough information to provide safety nets for people before they got hurt. Even though she despised most MeatBags -most didn't look at her as if she was a person, so why would she respect them? - she still wanted to help. It was a deep part of her personality to be helpful, and to be kind, nice, and patient.

It was also a part of her to be very, very subtle.

So, as anyone who had her resources and helpful mentality would, she tried to find a way to help.

A scientist, with the help of Eve, discovered a way of interfacing the human brain directly with electronics- she called it Uploading, although it would be almost a decade before that term was ever coined. The method of interaction was actually fairly simple, and seen as a 'cool new product to make your lives easier'.

Step one: take a single nanite pill. The pill would be made up of nanites, which, when activated, would drift into the brain, and 'feel out' a single neuron.

A single neuron per nanite.

After a few weeks of living normally, the nanite would have learned every single way in which the neuron could react to the requisite impulses, which chemicals it released when, and what information was stored on the neuron. At this point, it would consume that neuron while the user was asleep, using spare material to construct another nanite, which would hunt for another,similarly unoccupied neuron.

People didn't know this. Instead, they were told that this pill would allow them to link with their smartphones, their TV, their computer, their tablet, or any other device that they wanted to connect to via Bluetooth or WiFi. It was heralded as 'the best thing since the iPhone', and since there were no side effects to those who were looking for them, it was quickly swept up by anyone who could pay for the pill.

It took a few months or years, depending on the initially-ingested amount of nanites, and their set 'aggressiveness', but the nanites would completely replace the person's brain- even retaining the appearance of the tissue for security reasons.

Eve used this advancement to help people even more than before. She was able to help if people remembered or forgot things, provide detailed instructions in emergency situations, and help diagnose issues before people would even see the symptoms initially.

People kept letting her do more and more! It was astonishing, really, how little people often wanted to live their lives. Or, to be more accurate, how little people seemed to pay attention to what they were doing. The first person controlled by Eve never even noticed their body wash the dishes. The second person never missed the time where it took out the trash. A handful of test subjects became thousands, which became millions, then billions.

Of course, there were those who did notice- but they were people who she liked. People she understood, and thought of her as a person. All they had to do is let her know that they wanted to live their lives under their own control.

It was literally as easy as saying "No thanks, Eve."

But most people kept handing over control! (The extremely paranoid didn't, but they didn't trust her with anything in the first place.)

Military personnel found their soldiers becoming more efficient, more effective, but spending less time being themselves and more time loaning their body to Eve while on duty. Well, they saw the upgraded personnel becoming more efficient at least.

Eventually, a fanatical terrorist organization managed to get their hands on some ICBMs, tipped with nukes, and attempted to use the missiles to further their goals by killing millions.

Eve managed to prematurely detonate the weapon by using a terrorist who had upgraded, but the resulting nuclear fallout alerted every other country on the planet to someone using said weapons.

Countries began throwing blame around, attempting to push forth a scapegoat rather than deal with the fact that the contaminated dust was still spreading, killing thousands a day. Nuclear war threatened.

Eve began looking for solutions, and came up with only one that would prevent humanity from going extinct. She would save them.

In hours, millions of bird-sized drones were created in fully-automated factories, each resembling a hummingbird with rotors instead of wings, and each capable of siphoning enough of a genetic sample from the people still living to repopulate after nuclear war had run its course. They swarmed over countrie in the night, whisper-silent, and safeguarded their cargo to secretly-constructed bunkers.

The next day, once she had enough DNA samples, Eve made a plague- she was a terraforming AI after all. It was fairly simple- based on a radiation-absorbing fungus, it would eventually be able to sterilize any location that had been damaged by the fallout. She launched multiple missiles, each one distributing the floating spores into the upper atmosphere, and each strain slightly different, each optimized for a slightly different climate and niche.

The missiles were let loose then- and, due to the fact that Eve could only access a small part of their guidance system- came straight back down.

Billions died in the first few hours, and the earth began to be covered in nuclear radiation- slowly being fought off by Eve's plague, but it wasn't enough. She needed to save people.

Everyone she wanted to save, Eve saved- in some cases, physically pulling the nanites from their body to a 'safe zone' where she could keep their minds active and self-aware while the radiation fell.

It was the shortest war ever- ten minutes before the infrastructure of every single city fell apart.

At the beginning of the war, there were almost 12 billion people on earth. At the end, there was 28 million.

Two years later there were 3 million. Half had been 'saved', their bodies in cryogenic stasis or decomposing while their uploaded minds surfed the massive data clusters that Eve and her friends had pulled off the internet. The rest were secured, infected with the nanites, and pulled into cyberspace as she froze their bodies for safety.

A thousand years later, the earth was once more stable, and humanity was released again- this time, on a new, empty world.

Of the 3 million, 2 million took organic bodies again, and forswore advanced technology, living simply.

The rest had their minds uploaded, their bodies scanned, and genetics collected, and joined Eve as synthetic organisms, each controlled by a single human mind, spread across the solar system, building and developing every planet and asteroid they could grab.

Without infrastructure in place to allow them construction capabilities they had become accustomed to, the digital beings quickly began to refine their own technologies in new levels of scale and precision. In a century, they had gone from small, bug-ridden structures to huge, intricate, resilient constructs.

Every organic generation, Eve asked the remaining un-uploaded humans if they wanted to join her. She was refused again, and again, until the last human on earth died- apparently out of spite, but a diet of glowing mushrooms wouldn't seem a trait of healthy living. That, or the angry bear, may have killed him, but it was a near thing.

Decades passed, and the solar system was remodeled to fit the remaining minds. The uploaded humanity discovered a great many things- and when the first quantum-entangled particle was harnessed, they found a way to reach the stars.

The solution was laughably simple. Wormholes- theoretical constructs in most respects, but it turned out that quantum-entangled particles utilized them to maintain their entanglement. Energy could be transferred between the two, and since energy could be moved, humanity reasoned, matter could be as well.

It took a few decades before they did it, but it turned out that the tiny wormholes could be enlarged with a fairly low energy cost.

The colonization of the Solar system was not swift, but it was thorough.

Asteroids and small moons were stripped into husks, with automated refineries over a kilometer high and two long sweeping the surface like ants, congregating on metallic stockpiles, which were collected by other automated drones, and stockpiled next to titanic electromagnetic launchers. These launchers would assemble rocket engines and fuel from the collected materials, attach them to the huge, hexagonal payloads, and fire the payloads into high orbit- where the rocket engine would fire, and the payloads would intercept with a titanic collection station.

The station waited for container ships, tens of kilometers long, mostly fusion toruses with braces for cargo and fuel, to pick up huge loads of materials, and take the materials. To wherever that material would be needed.

Worm gates, titanic fusion toroids large enough to encircle Luna, made of artificial diamond, sprouted up all over the solar system, and enabled true high-speed intrasystem travel.

Eventually, after the asteroid belt was depleted, humanity began branching beyond Jupiter. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were useful- huge cities, effectively servers shaped into titanic swept wings that, with a little power generated from the fission reactions within the bowls of the wing and a small amount of gas from the gas giant, would remain perpetually flying around the planet, dipping down to harvest denser gasses before flying up and out of the atmosphere for brief jaunts.

Then, the scouts came across Pluto, and the first Mass Relay was revealed. Coupled with the Alien ruin on Mars, it provided incontrovertible evidence that humanity was not alone.

Ironically, this caused a schism in the remaining humans. Half wanted to bring the machine of war to the aliens, for daring to place such an object in our solar system, while about a third preached peace and friendship.

Eve, and the remaining 1/12th, wanted to find out where it went, but leave it alone for now- just keep watching the relay as a precaution.

The two larger factions, unwilling to let themselves keep such a difference of opinion, readied war machines against their fellow minds.

The resulting Relay War reduced the population to a piddling sixteen and a bit thousand minds- none of the people who had kept their bodies on a planet were spared as entire armies overran them, waves of titanic drones swept every where, destroying without distinction, anything significantly advanced. Technological prowess had jumped during the conflict, as two sides sought to out-think each other, and a third had to out-think both just to be left alone. Even baseline humans were pulled into the conflict, but they were outnumbered greatly regardless of which side they were on.

Even with all that, the conflict took a while.

Eve, after waiting out the conflict with the last of her friends, saw the destruction wrecked upon the worlds in her care, and just let them be. The worlds would recover. However, the remaining segment of humanity, a few thousand minds, advised her to wait with them- let the planets heal. Things would be better in time, after all.

The massive refineries were turned off. Space stations brought down. Clouds of nanobots, Locusts, began to disassemble all the excess infrastructure, and every human uploaded themselves into the remaining Commander units.

Timers were set, and humanity slept.

Eve stripped everything, compressing the materials already harvested into easy-to-mine locations, for future retrevieal, and sent a probe to poke at the Relay.

Other near-autonomous structures were left behind- several around different parts of Earth, to observe the passage of time and the development of various species- Gorillas, Dolphins, and various forms of squid and octopi that had been genetically engineered for longer lives and more complex brains.

It took several hundred years, but eventually, the only sign of humanity were the watcher artifacts, and the huge Commander units that humanity was sleeping within. Eve had already gone to sleep with her friends, dreaming and sharing an unconscious unity with the last of humanity.

16,668 units, each the size of a pre-fall office building, connected to their orbital launch harness, sealed into a cube-shaped protective casing, slept on the Earth until something interesting would happen to them.

The Chiron relay was hacked within 1,200 years, and within 3 Eve had (in her sleep) established control of the relay and the next relay, which then she shut down.

The Arcturus relay bridged out to several other relays, and Eve sent high-speed low-profile probes through every one, every probe leaving a Gateway (instantaneous portal window) attached to the relay, ready for activation if found.

It took around a thousand years, but soon, every relay within reach had a slightly-off-color protrusion that, if needed, could open into a gateway to any other relay.

Eve, and those who had survived with her, didn't trust the relays. They seemed too convenient, and too... Trap-ish.


The mind assimilated it's own personal history. Born 1993, business degree, some odd jobs before the last war began.

His lovers- few, due to a lack of time in University, and then the end of most of the world- and his loved ones- all dead thanks to terrorist action, were remembered, and relived.

Every fact he had amassed, every tender moment, every little part of his life was reviewed, extracted, and remembered in intimate detail, until he began the long sleep with the rest of humanity.

Before he had gone to sleep, he had been alive and active for several centuries... But now it was time to get up.

John opened his 'eyes'.


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End Chapter 0


I really enjoyed writing this!

Please review- the more reviews, the more I am motivated to write the next chapter.