The God Child: A Mass Effect Discussion

by Church Shepard

My personal theory that helps explain the most controversial ending to one of the greatest games of all time. Please come read and form your own opinion in my first Mass Effect Discussion. (Rating: Some inappropriate humor is used throughout for a cheap laugh, not recommended for those under the age of 12)

WARNING

A warning to all those reading. This is my personal opinion based on interpretation and experience. I am open to discussion and will be pleased to argue with you and explain why you're probably wrong =P You have been warned.

END Of Warning

The God Child has, for a while now, been the most hated part of the Mass Effect trilogy. Entire fundraisers and forums have been ripe with the discussion and theories of what can only be described as an incredible mistake for all of gaming.

Don't get me wrong, I love the entire game, the entire series even. But the original vanilla ending is a testimony to a rushed game. The extended cut made it soooooo much better. Mainly because it explained the God Child more, while the original had sooooo many oddities and quirks. So many that it's too long to list here, but if you'd like to know please look up "Why we hate the ending" on the Angry Joe Youtube channel. He explains perfectly why the ending was terrible, and in another video he explains perfectly why the extended cut is a much needed improvement.

Now I know it may seem odd that I'm publishing something that's already been done so late after the game has been released. Not to mention the argument has died down considerably. Well the reason I'm publishing this now is due to a recent debate with a friend of mine, and I'd like to share some outside sources on figuring out what exactly the God Child is. (Not to mention I'm seeking attention P=).

This is of course opinion based, but also a highly thought out theory that often helps me digress the game. I welcome all discussion and feedback. If all goes well this will be the first of many Mass Effect Discussions.

A Mass Effect AI

The God Child is first and foremost an artificial intelligence. This is an obvious fact. Therefore we can not compare him to organics in terms of logic. Here is where we find a problem. Throughout the trilogy there are only 4 examples of AIs, the God Child, EDI, the Reapers, and the Geth.

However, the Geth are not true AIs. They are but highly advanced VIs (Virtual intelligence, basically really smart computer programs designed for a single task Think Avina) that learned to think together and create hive like mind capable of highly advanced though. Ergo we can't use them as a comparison for the God Child.

Next of course are the Reapers, the God Child's own creation. Now I could go into a long speech about every little detail of the Reapers, but the main thing I'd like to bring up is how un-AI they are. For starters an AI is simply data, a program that can load and unload itself in anywhere it can. True it is a highly advanced and highly sophisticated program capable of self teaching and learning, but a program non the less. This means if you had a flash drive large enough, you could put an AI on it.

The Reapers are machines, you destroy the machine you destroy the Reaper AI itself (presumably). An AI should be able to exist where ever it can store their data, and we see this with the Geth and their servers. Not to mention the Reapers lack free will, all of them follow a single program to harvest every cycle. There are many great fanfics that involve good Reapers, but there is no instance of cannon saying a Reaper will go on to do something else. A Reaper does not think about the possibility of other things to do with their lives, like the Geth and EDI did. Instead they go on without questioning a thing, cycle after cycle.

EDI of course is the only pure true AI outside the God Child. Meaning that except for 5 minutes at the end of ME3, she is our only insight as to what an AI does. So in order to gain a comparison into my theory, I think outside of Mass Effect to other potential sources.

I would have been your daddy...

Sorry to those of you who don't understand the above reference, I needed to throw it in here somewhere. To those of you who know here it's from congrats! You get internet cookies!

The above line is from a favorite video game series of mine Halo, and if any of you have seen my profile for at least a minute probably know how big of a nerd I am towards it and other series. My reason in using Halo in this discussion is not to argue as to why it's the better game (I'm not a troll), but to use it's own lore in order to explain Mass Effect's God Child.

Throughout the Halo series, more so in the books, there are multiple AIs. Each AI is unique, in creation and personality. However, something that each human AI has in common is an eventual death and decay. (Skip to next paragraph unless you have read Halo Fanfics: While I'm on the subject there is something I'd like to point out real quick. In every post Covenant war fan fic everyone always says "The Elites gave the UNSC advanced slip space, and the UNSC gave them advanced AIs." WRONG! The Elites could have used advanced AIs if they wanted to, but they didn't trust them. There is even a line in a newer book with an Elite AI starting up a ship, Jul says the dumb AI is nothing like the human's "pet machines" Sorry it's been bugging me)

After about 7 years the AI enters a state known as Rampancy, (And half of you just went "Ahhhh, I get where this is going.")where basically the AI becomes so overwhelmed with thought that it thinks itself to death. They try to do to many things at once and begin to decay. This decay doesn't happen peacefully, they often go insane endangering humans and themselves. Sometimes going so far as to killing an entire ship's crew full of people that the AI originally liked. Over exerting themselves can hurry this process along, but normally the humans decommission the AI before it causes any real harm.

However, there were cases of advanced alien AIs beginning to enter Rampancy. An AI left alone for 100k years, even though created by a civilization that was more advanced than the Leviathans (Don't argue against it), still showed extreme signs of Rampancy. Imagine what the God Child's mental state would be at, left alone for millions of years.

Rampancy: the parallels between Mass Effect and Halo

Now I know what some of you are thinking, this is Mass Effect not Halo. Why would I compare the two completely different lores? Well yes they are very different, but looking purely at the AIs, they are very similar. In both games, the AIs picked avatars that represented their personalities. Cortona (Halo AI for those of you who don't know) chose a form that fits her perfectly, the God Child picked well exactly the God Child! EDI picked a fine ass sexbot, I think you can see my point on that similarity. Seriously, there is a crap ton of EDI and Cortana hentai out there! I'm disgusted by how much of my memory its taken up, disgusted but not ashamed =P.

Back to the point. The AIs in the series are incredibly similar, Halo even has their own version of VIs called simply "dumb AIs" that do the exact same thing as the more advanced VIs. And, except for their creation, the AIs are almost complete parallels. It's not too hard to see some possibility of Rampancy in the Mass Effect Universe. The only AI to possibly be old enough to show signs is the God Child himself, with EDI only being a couple years old in ME 3.

Not convinced, well the Mass Effect games show several examples of crazed VIs/AIs killing people and suffering the signs of Rampancy. The VI EDI was created from killed several people on a base. There is a mission in ME 2 that has you traveling through several locals (A very obscure side quest!) that include a space station where the entire crew was killed by a VI suffering from some kind of malfunction. It was incredibly creepy! The lack of squad-mate dialogue made it creepier, like I was completely alone. It isn't too hard for someone to see the comparison to Rampancy.

Motives and the Rampancy effect

The God Child was created with one goal, to preserve life. Be it synthetic or organic, his only goal is to make sure it remains one way or another. Now a machine gives a completely different meaning to life than we do. While you or I may see a baby and think that is a human life, we may not feel the same way towards a vial of spit containing our DNA. However in that DNA is us, everything that makes our species unique. It is literally our building block for all that life is on our planet. To a machine, preserving DNA is preserving Life in a way.

And to the God Child's rampant mind it makes sense. Organics create a race of synthetics, who in turn kill the organics, completely wiping out all members of their creator's race (Ala Terminator). They then go on to see every organic as unpredictable and proceed to destroy them, wiping out everything with the capacity to threaten them. What they do after that is completely unknown (Seriously what the hell was Skynet going to do with a nearly destroyed world and no humans! Same thing with Battle Star Galactica! We've destroyed all humans, what the fuck are we supposed to do now? Just go on and make little robot families and babies. NO that's the plot of the Robots movie (Look it up kids)). The Geth wanted to create their little hippie Geth dyson sphere and have every Geth connect in one big hippie bubble thing. However other synthetic machines might not be so peaceful, see the Metacon wars.

And so by the time an Organic civilization becomes smart enough to develop advanced AIs, BOOM harvest time! The God Child preserves every species' DNA (even synthetics) into a different Reaper. There are countless dead, but the species as a whole survives through the DNA in the Reaper machine. This allows new life to flourish and start the whole cycle over again. For an immortal AI, you learn to have some patience.

Remember, he's Rampant. The God Child is trying to complete his programming and purpose, just through a sick twisted way of mass genocide. He even believes that the organics are the ones who fight a war. The Reapers only complete the Harvest, preserving the species in the form of DNA made Reaper. And in a sense he does save the species, every unique thing about the race is preserved in their DNA. Meaning even if the race goes extinct some form lives on, to go on and kill a different civilization 50,000 years later. I know, none of it makes sense to us, which is why I believe the God child is Rampant. In the end it doesn't matter his motives. Even if a serial killer believes his killings are somehow saving more lives down the road through some twisted logic, we don't agree with him. We simply lock him up and hope the mercury in our water doesn't make another person crazy.

But, as my favorite youtube series would say, that's just a theory. A game theory!

Author's Notes:

Sorry if it ever seems to ramble a bit here, I tend to do that. But I got my main point across pretty well. Please comment and favorite! It really does help get me noticed which helps my writing in general.

This is all part of a planned series meant to inspire discussion and debate. If it is well received, I plan on making more like it. My next planned topic is the possibility of other intelligent civilizations. But if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.