Tali'Zorah nar Rayya
Three Projects

The melody rippled through the server room. Synthesized vibrations at deliberate frequencies and deliberate patterns bounced off the floor. Off the walls, the ceiling, off the violet, claw-shaped geth data centers. Her suit filtered the sound and relayed it in real-time to her ears. Tali'Zorah nar Rayya frowned at the tune. Machines had no use for the aesthetic works of organics. An insult, her first instinct was, but they had no need for those, either.

She approached the center terminal and opened up her omni-tool. Shepard assigned her to find the geth data banks and download any and all useful data. Geth operations in the Armstrong Nebula and beyond, she surmised, but she had her own search.

The complexity of the virtual architecture and its countless optimizations reminded her that very, very few quarians had ever gotten this opportunity. If only she had unlimited storage space…

No. Something about how the geth have evolved. She entered a search query and began.

"Hey." Her suit's radar showed Ashley coming up behind her. "How's the download coming?"

Tali's gaze remained focused on the geth windows and her own omni-tool. "Very slowly. Geth data is formatted differently from what the rest of the galaxy. It's entirely illegible without a reader."

Ashley stepped to her side in the corner of her vision. "A reader? I guess that translates the data?"

"Yes. The geth used to rely on standard formatting, but they've changed. Translating geth data is the only real advancement my people have made since then. Until now, we haven't had many chances to study them." The search turned up results on the Armstrong Nebula. Tali started to download. "And with a geth database, I can't just dump everything into my omni-tool like a geth memory core. It's—"

She glanced at Ashley. Human and asari faces showed attention in similar ways. Tali saw none of them on hers. "Err, sorry. I babble enough to Shepard about my people and the geth already."

"Fancy tech isn't really my strong suit." Ashley stared at the geth console. "But this is really important to you, huh?"

The quarian hymn continued on, a choir singing a simple melody to a steady rhythm. Those nameless singers would've been standing in a grand temple, all tall walls and ornate domes. Stone and steel tablets inscribed with ancestors' names covered the walls from floor to ceiling. And Tikkun's light shone through the windows, casting warm golden rays on uncovered quarian skin.

Outside the temple were more buildings. Schools. Parks. Streets. Skycars. Spaceports, where starships weren't the entire world, only vehicles for getting from one to the other. Wind and rain—some of the Normandy crew talked about them so casually. Tali had only seen wind speed measurements and trickling raindrops on her visor.

And those singers were long dead. Geth bombardments ensured that the temple, the schools, the parks and streets and skycars and spaceports only existed in half-decayed holograms.

"It's important. To my people," Wrex said about his disk. If that was his gift to the krogan, the geth data was hers to the fleet.

"Yes," she said to Ashley. "It is."

A second window appeared above her omni-tool. The schematics themselves were under heavy encryption, but the file IDs… early post-exodus geth designs. The fleet didn't have any clear records, but the picture of a single house for a single family on Rannoch, surrounded by bur'that shrubs and red alarei trees, shone brighter in her imagination than any other.

"Now that I can understand," Ashley said.

Tali downloaded the data. "All right. It's done. We should get back to Shepard."

The Normandy had become a home, too, though quieter and emptier than the Rayya. At least the cargo bay was. Tali knew that the bridge was louder.

"So, uh," Joker asked, "tell me again what we're doing?"

Tali fitted nodule after nodule on an unused hardsuit sitting on the workbench. "My message wasn't that complicated. I want to give Shepard a gift, and I wanted to test it while he's busy with the Council. Everyone says you know him best, so…"

Joker sat down on a crate. "All right, all right. So what're you getting him?"

"You were watching the mission on Nepheron through our cams, right? Kaidan told me about a Cerberus trooper who used some kind of cloaking technology. On the last sweep, I took the trooper's hardsuit and omni-tool data and tried to reverse-engineer it."

"You couldn't just rip the tech out and stick on his armor?"

"That's salvaging. You salvage when you need a quick repair for some broken-down engine. Some quarians bring useful salvage back from their Pilgrimage, but… Shepard deserves more than that."

"Yeah," Joker said after a moment. "He does."

"See? Now to test it." Tali adjusted the last few nodules and opened up her omni-tool.

"This won't blow a huge chunk out of my ship, right?"

Tali tossed him a look. "I've been working on the Normandy's advanced prototype drive core for weeks, and you're worried about my modifications to a hardsuit?"

Joker raised his hands. "Just kidding."

She switched on the power source—re-purposed from a kinetic shield generator—and booted up the activation program. Tali had replicated the Cerberus coding line for line, taking extra care to watch for any unwanted malicious processes. The caution the geth had instilled was good for other things.

In the corner of her visor, Joker leaned forward. A nodule flared bright white. Then another. Two. Four. Sixteen. The lights overtook the hardsuit like a wave, only to fade to nothing. Seconds later, only a fuzzy distortion of space remained where the hardsuit lay.

"Wow," Joker said.

"It worked!" Though some portions of the stealth field flickered light gray. "It's not perfect yet, but it worked. Do you think Shepard will like it?"

Joker rested his chin on a hand. "If it'll let him sneak up to the big bad guy and shoot him in the back of his head, he'll love it. Probably will love it even more if he gets to work on it."

Shepard had mentioned working on various omni-tool projects, asking for her help on more than one occasion. "He'd have to fix the power fluctuations in the light displacement map, bugfix the old Cerberus coding, install the nodules into his hardsuit…"

"I think he's one of the few people who likes half-finished tech gifts."

"Then I'll give it to him soon." Tali shut down the cloak, picked up the chestpiece, and stood. "Thanks for coming down. I should get back to work."

Joker lifted himself off the crate, grabbing his crutches. "Right. Think I have time for another episode of C-Sec: Zakera before Shepard finishes facepalming at the Council?"

Tali stared at him. "You watch Zakera? Tayseri's so much better."

"Okay, Tayseri has Sheera'Kai, and she's great, but you know what it doesn't have? Yarelia T'Sora. James Chen-Evans."

"If you say so."

As Joker stepped into the elevator, Tali tucked the chestpiece into her locker and returned to engineering. During the lulls between maintenance procedures, she opened up an extra haptic. Over half of Wrex's data was decrypted with an acceptable amount of error—the third project.

"It's important to my people. A relic from the Rebellions." Tali sensed a "don't mess it up" in Wrex's words, but it didn't bother her. Her father had spoken the same way when he let her view the old records—some of the Fleet's greatest treasures—aboard the Rayya.

Towering cities under Tikkun's rays. Tuchanka had cities, Wrex told her when she asked, all sprawling ruins dotting the planet's barren surface. Did Wrex ever imagine them whole? Skyscrapers and temples and streets and parks? Tali pictured Wrex gazing wistfully at the stars and chuckled to herself.

But as amusing as the idea of nostalgic Wrex was, the real one spoke of Tuchanka with a bitter edge to his rumble. Tali looked at the project's progress and wished it would go faster.