Chapter 1: KEEP CALM


Disclaimer: BioWare owns Mass Effect. Pan Books owns the rights to Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams.


Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly cute little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think Windows-based OS Systems are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather, had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much most of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the going-ons of other unhappy people on online social networking services, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the online social networking services that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, especially the ones with Windows-based OS Systems.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever had left the oceans.

And then, one Tuesday, over two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small coffee-franchise cafe in American Pacific Northwest suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get internet access on her fruit-named tablet to post it on online social networking services, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The N7's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthmen.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporation of ICT - of which no Earthman had ever heard of either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Thessian Home Care Omnibus, better selling that Fifty-three More Things to Do while Stuck on Tuchanka, and more controversial than Ashana T'vara's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where the Goddess Went Wrong, Some More of the Goddess's Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This Goddess Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the N7's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Salariana as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words Keep Calm and N7 On! inscribed in large friendly letters on its back cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Tuesday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It starts with a hangover.