A/N: This fanfic will eventually cover the events between Miranda's discovery of several unpleasant secrets about herself and her father and the time when she's passed the tests to become a Cerberus operative. It will shed some light on her becoming what she is, her loyalty to Cerberus and the three-way relationship between her, the Illusive Man and her father. I hope I'll be able to put up a chapter every one or two weeks. Thanks to fongiel24 for beta-reading and for everyone on Bioware Social's Miranda fan thread for the many interesting discussions that made this story possible.
Addendum: I've been told my paragraphs are too long. I'm trying to get better, but sometimes it isn't possible. Using 1/2 or 3/4 screen width for the text (see the buttons up right) makes it easier to read.
Promethean Legacy
A Mass Effect fan fiction
Chapter 1: Down the Needle
In the corporate world of the 22nd century, paranoia was an occupational hazard. Where high-resolution optics could scan a holoscreen from orbit and surveillance microphones eavesdrop on conversations through layers of bulletproof glass, corporate headquarters had resembled fortresses for several decades. Invisible, but equally formidable anti-hacking countermeasures equaled military electronic warfare suites in complexity. The needle-thin skyscraper housing the headquarters of Consolidated Aerospace and Engineering, sited in a generous open park landscape on the Tasmanian west coast, was no exception. If anything, the security needs of Earth's largest defense contractor and the personality of its CEO and majority owner combined to take corporate paranoia to a new level. Access to and from the building was obsessively controlled, and the automated security was rumored to be lethal, in a clear violation of law which limited VI-controlled devices to non-lethal weaponry. For some reason, no public prosecutor had ever bothered to order an investigation.
As if to provide vindication, sweeps of the park regularly revealed the signatures of millions of nano-machines, members of "hostile" surveillance swarms carried in by convenient winds to capture mostly insignificant pieces of information – the most obvious intruders from the perspective of the defenders in the towers, and therefore mostly ignored. Further away, investigative media reporters looking for hints of infamous weapons deals, some of them doubling as spies for CAE's competition, occupied places on cliffs and hills, huddled in thick coats to protect them from the biting wind, or on boats on seemingly random courses along the rocky coastline. With the tower as hermetically sealed as it was, these too had rarely anything dramatic to report to their employers or masters. Those lucky enough to be assigned to boats preferred to regard their duties as an extended vacation, lounging lazily in the warmth of their boats' cabins and leaving the real work to automated camera control systems.
Which is why, when the dramatic suddenly intruded on the quiet of this winter morning in the year 2166 and the few spy cameras trained on the executive level caught a light reflection on the walls of the tower, their software didn't recognize its significance and they continued their routine sweep as if nothing had happened. Only the unpredictability of the organic mind, its whims led by intuition or luck, made a single human spy observe the event.
A flash of blue light behind a window almost blinded the spy through his binoculars. A crack appeared in the window. His directional microphone caught the muted sound of a gunshot, the characteristic cracking report of a mass driver gun. Another blue flash and a circular area of the window shattered into a million tiny shards. A figure appeared. Retreating towards the jagged opening, it fired another burst of bullets against unseen opponents. The figure carried – no, wore a small backpack over a dark, close-fitting outfit. When it jumped, the spy was not surprised.
The figure began its descent, long, dark hair streaming upwards in the wind. Unprofessional, the spy thought. Then he frowned. The parachute should've opened by now. Two more seconds. Nothing happened. The figure disappeared behind a hill blocking the view of the lower levels.
-0O0-
Fourteen hours earlier….
The setting midwinter sun seemed huge on the horizon as it showered the piers and sheds of CAE's marina with an otherworldly light, and painted a golden road on the lazy swell of the ocean, as if to seduce its boats away from their moorings into an unknown mythic west. The light played on the tower's mirrored surface, shadows following it upwards as the sun continued its way down.
Two kilometers above ground, on CAE Tower's executive level, a pair of blue-grey eyes allowed itself to be distracted for a moment. A rare smile transformed Miranda's face as she reflected that four of five requirements for a perfect moment were fulfilled: no company, it was quiet, there was a stunning view, and she was on her way to do something forbidden. The holoscreen on her desk showed the layout of the tower in a detail any spy would envy, but the image only confirmed that she didn't need it. These rooms had been her home for as long as she could recall, and this tower her world. She suspected she knew it better than anyone, with the exception of a few areas she wasn't allowed in.
She turned away from the window. Perfect moments didn't exist. The fifth requirement, or rather the first, was something she rarely admitted to herself. The last time she had screamed "I wish you were dead!" at her father no one had taken her seriously, but he had remarked in his typical offhand manner that people who couldn't control themselves ended up in mental hospitals or jails. So she had learned control. But the wish remained. As did the roiling mixture of fear and hate that she could feel eating her guts at times when she thought of him.
Her father ruled CAE with an iron hand, but the way he ran her life made that hand look soft. For the first fourteen years of her life she'd wanted nothing more than to please him, longing for acknowledgment, for any sign of the love she was told there was between them. But all she ever got was a distant nod – and the next task. And when she failed, no matter if it was her fault or not, no matter if her task was so hard she could only expect to fail, the air around him seemed to turn to ice, and his words inflicted a pain sharper than any slap could. He had hit her only once – when she started to cry when facing his icy disapproval. Control again. It was a pattern, she'd learned since then; an obsession. Even his punishments were controlled, in accordance with recommendations from the psychologists he employed for her education. She'd never cried in his presence again. If this was love, then love was a lie.
She pushed the memory of that time away, determined to take as much fun as she could from her sixteenth birthday, limited as the opportunities were. She wasn't allowed to see Niket, and the presents, along with anything else she got without asking for it, were always work-related, calculated to further her efficiency and her integration into her father's world. As were these, she thought with distaste as she opened her walk-in closet and looked upon a row of dark business suits. Every two months she would be presented with a new custom-tailored set, to account for her growth as she was told. She hated the things. For her, they were symbols of submission. Even so, practicality demanded she put one on. A bit of fashionable eccentricity in clothing was one of the few freedoms her father allowed her, and she used to take every advantage of it. Appearing in a business suit and putting her hair up in a bun would go a long way in turning her into a nondescript paper-pusher. There wasn't much she could do about her easily recognizable face, but many of CAEs employees knew it only from the media. The media loved to cook up stories about her. There were only a handful of authorized photographs, but that only intensified the curiosity. The mysterious beauty hidden away in the tower of a notorious defense tycoon, it sounded like a modern Rapunzel. As usual, the extranet wallowed in the tasteless instead, describing in lurid detail the decadent parties she was rumored to throw in her penthouse on the five-hundredth floor. If only they knew how much of a prison it was.
Quickly she took off the tea dress she had spent her afternoon in. She took one of the grey suits out and closed the closet, taking the opportunity to examine her body in the mirror on its outer surface. She envied girls with smaller chests. The damn things always got in the way. But all things considered, her body was surprisingly athletic for an executive-in-training. By "executive order", she was expected to always keep at peak health, but she didn't mind. She had opted for martial arts and bribed one of the security guards to teach her the less formal styles used by the real professionals. No doubt he had thought of asking for more than money, but at CAE HQ, it was rumored a dalliance with the boss's daughter was bad for your health.
She put on the suit and picked up her omnitool. With a fluid movement built from long familiarity, she fastened it to her left arm and activated it. Rows of text and cryptic symbols appeared on its holoscreen as she initiated the systems check. Adapting this standard model to something more suited to a spy had been a lot of work. Four hours of sleep for eight months would exact a heavy price in health to pay for secrecy from any other human, but it had been no problem for her, another unexpected gift of her engineered genes, she assumed. And it enabled her to do things she liked, in satisfying defiance of her packed schedule during the day. With all the corporate secrets she had unearthed with its help, she'd have been able to make millions of credits by selling it to CAE's competitors, but she wasn't after money. A thousand people could live in decadent comfort for the rest of their lives from the interest of her father's fortune alone. She'd never understood why he wanted more. Instead, she was consumed by a burning need to know what others would hide. First and foremost, what her father would hide. Once, he had ruled her by his knowledge of her innermost thoughts, her secrets, which she had told him in childish naiveté. This was her way to fight back. Knowledge was her weapon.
Finishing the systems check, she looked around her room and after a moment of hesitation, pulled a pistol out of a drawer. She wasn't exactly competent with guns, and if she needed to use it, the shit would've hit the fan in a way that couldn't likely be hidden, but better to be prepared. Ironically, it was one of CAE's own new models, the first pistol-sized mass driver gun made on Earth. Her fingers flitted over the omnitool, then brushed the touchpad to open the doors. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through the doors. Nothing happened. Her omnitool, monitoring the security, could detect no silent alarm. By stepping into the corridor armed, she had passed the first test.
The executive level was mostly abandoned at this time, which suited her fine. As the CEO's designated heir, her clearance topped most others' she would encounter, excepting only the security and employees in certain top-secret areas. Even so, she didn't care to be monitored or seen. The risk of having to share the elevator could be minimized by analyzing the work schedules, but she had no floor plans or schedules of the biolab section. Once there, she'd have to rely on stealth, another valuable skill she had acquired almost without trying. But first, she had to pass the elevator's security zone. As the main access point to the executive level, its security wasn't lethal – a rare false-positive could trigger a fatal accident – but it was full of sophisticated scanners. Identity codes, unauthorized weapons, unusual substances or energy signatures, everything was scanned for with multiple redundancies. Again, her pistol triggered no alarm. She had an executive override code that would send her directly down to the biolabs, but it would attract attention. Instead she entered the security guards' code she had stolen from their VI, hitting the touchpad for sublevel 12 only after the code was acknowledged. The door closed, and with the familiar sensation of vertigo, the elevator started its way down.
The tower's interior design was old-fashioned for a modern corporate HQ. There were endless corridors with personal offices instead of the stereotypical "sea of cubicles", too much of CAE's work being strictly compartmentalized for security. Also, labs were integrated in the floor plan in a way which went against half a dozen occupational safety laws, considering the kind of research undertaken there. But nobody ever complained. The elevator passed the legal department. Miranda had studied there for half a year, discovering she didn't like it there but had a knack for finding legal loopholes. She thought about her birthday again. One year less to her majority, a gift she appreciated more than anything her father would ever give her. Two more years, and he would have no legal hold on her any more. She doubted he would simply let her go her own way. But at least the law would be on her side, and she could use that as a lever. If he wanted her as his heir, he couldn't have her declared insane and lock her away, could he?
So she had to work at her duties as if there were nothing else. Her competence was her power base. She had to be good enough for him, and keep up the appearance of the dutiful daughter in spite of the truth. The truth was it was all an act these days. She learned and she worked – but for herself. She liked to learn, and deciphering complex patterns came easily to her. She also liked acting. The first time she had successfully fooled her father had been exhilarating, like an unexpected gift of a hitherto cruel fate. Now she could even fool the psychologists. She could take two more years of this. Nobody ever knew what she felt anymore. Nobody would ever know again.
The thought was like a mantra, bringing with it an inner calm and detachment that had been faked only a moment before. Emotions receded into insignificance, her heartbeat slowed down as the elevator did. Relieved that she'd encountered no one on her way down, she opened a compartment in her omnitool, pulled a dull grey circlet out and fastened it carefully on her head. A push of a hidden button, and a one-eye visor rotated out. Then she dimmed the omnitool's output. From now on, the visor would project any data directly onto her retina. With a barely perceptible jolt, the elevator stopped. Miranda allowed herself another smile. She knew she was good at this, and she was where she wanted to be: alone, and on her way to another's secrets.
