[Rec: 1(of individual 2)]

[Sub: G. Vakarian (vas Rannoch)]

[Interview Sub: Perseus Microswarm Incident]

[Timestamp: Sep 20th, 2188, 010:01AM, Standard Earth Time]

[Investigators Ryan Shepply, Bellanora Lysander]

[Interview Timestamp: 01:03]

[Audio Logs Accessed]

[Auido Logs Retrieved]

[Playing]

G.V: It was... about a day before we killed the Reaper on Rannoch.

R.S: A day? No time to let the reality sink in?

G.V: There was no time to be given. And losing Legion... that's what really broke her. She... begged him not to do the upload.

B.L: I hear she attempted to take her own life soon afterwards? That can't have been easy, losing someone else after enduring what she had on the Normandy.

G.V: And she did a lot of it with Legion's help. The only reason she's still alive is because... well, have you ever seen a Turian run? I only managed to catch her by the ankle. I'm glad we evolved to be fast. Thanks again, for letting her go. She... well, she only recently started talking again.

B.L: I hear we may owe that to a someone referred to as... Jona, correct?

G.V: Yup. Bright boy, glad to have him. Anyway, it was about ETA 26 hours to the Rannoch mission...


"Shepard... I still don't understand it. I've only scratched the surface." Liara explained. They had brought this strange, shoebox-sized pob aboard. And within it was something that could forever change the tide against the Reapers.

"You said the message in the capsule was corrupt? There was something odd in the nanite's structure?" he asked. Carlton Shepard was a tall man, and had to look down at her to speak to her. Green eyes glinted in the odd lights of her cabin, and his black hair was as messy as usual.

"Yes." She confirmed, looking up from her workstation, where she had the open nanite capsule under a microscope. She looked both excited and a little worried. "At first glance, this is alien technology. But upon further study... Shepard, the base patterns of coding follow human encryption patterns."

"Human?" his eyebrow raised in confusion. "Could this be Cerberus?"

"Shepard, not even the Protheans had tech like this. Watch what it does when I do this..." she took a pen from one of her desks, and took the capsule, setting it on the table. Inside, the nanites had conformed to a shape similar to an earpiece. Liara fiddled with her omitool, and then stuck the pen in the capsule, letting go quickly.

He nearly jumped when the red, almost sinew-y substance shot up the pen, covering it, before shrinking slowly, until it replicated the appearance of thbe pen perfectly in size and shape, as if it were not covering the pen, but had become it.

"The pen no longer exists. Look at these readings!" she exclaimed, showing him her omnitool. "What happened to the pen at a molecular level is... mind-blowing! The SIVA nanites consumed it to re-create it!"

"SIVA?" he asked. She nodded, eyes bright with discovery.

"One of the few things I was able to recover from the capsule information files. This thing is very damaged, Shepard. SIVA was the only thing within the capsule that was still intact." she waved a hand over to the rectangular metal box sitting on her desk now empty and partially fried. "This could be the discovery of the century!"

"Not if the Reapers win." he reminded her grimly. "Can it be weaponized?"

"I'm not sure..." she shook her head doubtfully. "I don't think we should, if we can. It replicates what it consumes. Who knows what would happen if a half-consumed Reaper were to gain control of the SIVA that was eating it? The risk would be too high. But making weapons... maybe it could be programmed to make weapons?"

"Maybe." he agreed. Taking a last look around, his eyes fell on the clock. He cast her a kind smile, putting a hand on her shoulder. She took it in her own, their eyes meeting. "It's one in the morning. You should get some sleep; we have big things to plan tomorrow."

"I will. You get some sleep, too, Carlton. You know Garrus will bug you if you don't." she insited, planting a kiss on his cheek.

"Heh, let the velociraptor complain." he pulled away from her with a grin. She shook her head, rolling her eyes.

"You know he's just looking out for you." She chided, as he left the room. He cast her a sly look over his shoulder.

"I know!" he said, the door closing.

As she got ready for bed with a yawn, she failed to remember to put SIVA away.

A red strand creeped loose of the small confinement.


Garrus glanced at the clock. 2:00 in the morning.

He stood and stretched. He really should get to bed... but if he could just tweak the aiming matrix a little more... Besides, they had a lot of things to do in the next day or so. His baby, the Thanix, needed to be in peak condition.

"Hey Garrus?" He jumped and hit the reply button on instinct as Tali's voice suddenly floated over the comms.

"Yeah!" he replied, a little too quickly. "Still up, can't sleep."

"Me neither. Anyway... guess what I just found out." her voice took on a mischievious tone.

"Let me guess... Javik likes to eat whip cream fresh outta the can?" he put a talon to his chin thoughtfully, though he knew she couldn't see him. He was rewarded with a chuckle from the other end of the line.

"No. But I would love to see that. Anyway, remember the mystery extranet hog from the Collector mission?" Boy, did they. As the team had prepared to part ways, Shepard had revealed Miranda had discovered an odd sort of issue. Someone aboard the Normandy used extranet access. A lot. For non other than to play Galaxy of Fantasy: Online.

Now, almost everyone on the Normandy played the game(Scoped-and-Dr0pped37 having raked up some serious kill points), so normally this would not have been an issue. If not for the fact the data history stated that whoever was playing... played nearly constantly. As in only stopping when they went ground side.

"Now, I haven't got a problem with this... except I simply refuse to believe that anyone can rack up 250 gaming hours in the time we've been together, without anyone noticing. Nobody's that geeky." Shepard had said. Nobody had stepped up to take responsibility.

"Oh? How?" he asked, mandibles parting in a grin.

"Well, I needed some time to kill, so I asked EDI to pull up the access timelines and compare them to ground missions. Then I analysed the signal." She sounded like she was honestly going to crack up. "You won't believe it; it was Legion all along!"

Garrus almost choked on his own tongue. Legion? Galaxy of Fantasy? No way!

"You're kidding!" he exclaimed, barking a laugh.

"Nope! Keelah, I always wondered what it was doing in the AI Core all the time!" Tali laughed. He always did enjoy the sound of her laugh. Turians made a sort of chuffing sound, humans varied between odd bark/hiccup, sharp sounds, but with quarians, who's laughter was similar to humans, they had a sort of... msical note to them, in his opinion.

Or maybe it was just Tali.

"Yeah, me too." he said. He had always thought it seemed a bit lonely, but when asked, all Legion gave was that geth didn't experience loneliness. He still called bull hockey on that one. At least... he thought 'hockey' was the term. It was, wasn't it? "You know, I'm surprised you two are actually getting along now. Who would have thought it?"

"Yeah. Who would've." she agreed. "If the mission goes right, we might actually be able to secure peace through Legion, if it can convince the rest of the geth like it did those primes. I hope it works out."

"Never thought I'd hear you hope for peace with the geth. Cheers to change, then, I guess." he shrugged.

"Cheers to change." she echoed. New silence drew out for several moments before she spoke again, a thick blanket seeming to weigh over the air with words unspoken. It made his mandibles press tighter with nerves, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

"Well, I'd better go work on getting sleepy." Tali said. He nodded rapidly.

"Yeah, and I'd better finish these calibrations. Goodnight, Tali." he told her.

"Sleep well, Garrus." the line cut, and he stood there thoughtfully for a few moments, his hand still on the console. There had been something... else about the way she had said it, something that... was that even a possibility? What did he know about women; his sister was, as the human saying went, crazier than a bedbug. A bedbug that loved high-end explosives(the horror stories had spread wide and far).

And Tali was... well, Tali!

The lights flickered oddly, snapping him out of his thoughts. He looked up, and they stopped. There was nothing forbodeing at all about the flicker; it was just odd. But as he went back to his calibrations, all he was convinced of was that it was normal times all around.

How wrong he was. How dreadfully wrong he was.


Liara didn't know exactly what woke her. Maybe it was the sound of something creeping along her wall, the creaking of the bulkhead as something ate away at it. Maybe it was some instinct that all beings had, that told them they were about to die. Or maybe it was the feeling that her soft, warm be, was about to become her grave.

She woke, and at first didn't notice what was wrong. Then she became aware of a harsh red lights shining through her eyelids. She opened her eyes, and screamed.

Sinew-y wires had spread through her room completely, like some mad jungle of red cables that seemed to pulse and wave as if alive. Black nodes, some open to reveal the SIVA within, some closed to contain their payload for future use, were scattered, along with black mesh.

She scrambled back against the wall behind her bed, terror pulsing through her. Was this a nightmare? The jungle of death blocked her way out, covered almost everything in her room. The door was blocked was a thick weave of the wires. The comm unit was uncovered.

She rushed to it, pressing it frantically, scrolling through the names.

"Shepard? Carlton?" no answer. She tried others, panicking. "Kaiden? Javik? Garrus, please answer!"

She jumped, freezing as a garbled, twisted language came out of the speaker. It was not her friends, and she looked down to see that SIVA cables had cut off the connection.

"En...ha-a-a-anc-c-ce..." she jerked her finger off the speak button, and ran to the door. Charging her biotics, she tried to blow the cables apart. It worked; the door was free. Hope surging in her chest, she made to open it...

Only to stop, as a swarm of crimson nanites struck the middle of her back. She gasped with shock, and then again with pain as a tendril of cable, guided by the nanites sunk into her spine. All feeling ceased below the area, and she fell to the floor in shock. Agony surged through her at SIVA spread through her insides.

The weave of cables closed over the door again as she screamed.


Just as a warning, there will be some serious blood and gore next few chapters, and this fic overall. Didn't have the space to put it in the summary, but there you are.

Guest(#1): Aww, thanks! Glad you like it so far.

hylianodst: Nope, no slicers; just pure; rapidly-replicating SIVA creepiness. And, to a fellow Zelda fan, I must say goodday to you, sir! Man, it will probably so conflicting to LoZ fans who are also ME fans; we got Breath of the Wild coming out, then Andromeda not twenty or so days later! Twenty days is not long enough to finish a Zelda game that big!

This Is Sarcasm: Yup, Javik. And not to fret; I AM working on 15 Seconds continuation. This won't be nearly as long as any of the Dysfunctional Fireteam installments, it's just a little thing on the side, to quell my plot bunny farm for the time being. Expect the Padfoot oneshot to come before 15 Part 2, though.

Guest(#2): I say that ten times a day about multiple aspects of life. If everything made sense, the universe would be a boring place.

Furious Titan: Rasputin did. He made that code for himself. it was his idea, nobody else knew about it.

Whew. To be honest with you all, I'm using this as practice writing horror. I'm doing a horror/crime novel for senior project, and SIVA is a great material to use for building a situation like this. Grant it, my novel won't be featuring self-replicating nanites of doom.

Hope you guys keep with this!

Next Time: Kaiden becomes SIVA's second victim, and the Crew Deck turns into a slaughter house.

Cheers!^^