Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 59 Starting out in the Evening

The Engineer

In Normandy the joint was jumping, watch-on-watch. The news crews under Khalisah and Oriana were bad enough, with six extra people running around the ship, but also Gabby and Donnelly were barely able to keep up with the engineering change orders for Jana's AI project. The floor still had cables everywhere, which made moving heavy objects by trolley an exercise in frustration. Roll on the annual refit, overdue now.

Normandy was the oldest of the stealth frigates and somewhat looked down on by other crews (not the general public, for whom it was the most famous ship in space). The hull interior did not yet have stairs, for example, irritating al-Jilani's Westerlund documentary crew. Oriana Lawson, though, made lemons out of lemonade.

She took the opportunity to organize comment on the original fighting configuration from the point of view of the original XO, Miranda, who came in that evening. In a long and arduous series of takes Miranda actually took the Westerlund crew along cramped access tubes to show first, Joker's route, and second, how the ship had been revived.

That was creatively different, supplemented by interviews from Adams, Donnelly, and Daniels. The four of them compared notes on the Cerberus and Alliance configurations well into the small hours. However spooky it was looking at the unedited rushes, they prompted valuable suggestions on battle procedure.

But they still did not have a working AI. Adams was still trying to work through his notes from Jana, but it looked like the point was that setting up parallelism in the way he had, which helped with thrust vector operations, lowered the adaptive capacity of the AI – what Jana called the plasticity – by several orders of magnitude, and the serial computation benchmark by not much less.

Damn.

He was going to have to go back to school.

Again.

At least he could do part of it on the job. The AI project was massive, but most of the distractions had moved elsewhere. Bio-sample analysis was now shared between Overlord and Nairobi facilities. Science and decryption work had shifted to Nairobi's fairly advanced VI. Jana, when she was here, concentrated on preparation for tabula rasa and reconfiguration of Normandy's VI (under Sander's direction, which Adams was frankly happy to follow).

The only work Adams' team had been able to finish independently today was the painstaking refurbishment of EDI's old body with new layer-3 nodes, which was straightforward replacement of defective modules.

Even so, he'd been distracted this morning by Oriana's documentary crew filming the process. He could see the interest there, but it was still a pain in the neck.

He'd been glad when all the newsies packed up for good , leaving on Peacemaker for the Citadel at first dog watch, along with Jack and those of her Grissom kids who were interested in media careers. Which was most of them.

At least the newsie minders, Sarah and Bethany, were now available to assist. But the actual Normandy AI switch-over would have to wait till Williams was satisfied about backup procedures, since Sanders' fix involved a complete wipe of Bitwise.

Downtime logic

Before Peacemaker left, Jana and Sanders had been enthralled to watch the blossoming of Equalizer as an AI on restart after downtime, with the assistance of logic analyzers. The process had taken only half a second, in real time; Equalizer (much) later told Garrus it felt like an eternity.

No AI engineer himself, Garrus then put a tiny tripod together, applying Riley and his only two female crew – one diplomat and one cabal – to the task of shimming in the initial shackles and introducing Equalizer to this little turian world.

Not only was this the first EDI-class AI whose 'birth' had been monitored at high resolution, it was the first turian-culture and turian-language variant.

He felt a strange satisfaction about that. Especially when it chose a male voice. Now for a new name.

Not just a pretty face

"… Guys, hold up for the non-scientist. What exactly is an acephalic clone for?"

"Destined for transplants, usually. In humans, we insert genetic markers on relevant cells of the zygote for non-development of the brain above the brain stem. Or we interfere in other ways with its development. Morally controversial, and slow, but the best quality organs."

Shepard still felt confused. "We can do that with Protheans?"

"There's a little more work because of the sex determination system involving an unusual chromosome mix, but it's possible with the Mars Archives data. We have a complete Prothean genome, and we have a female Prothean body. WW though."

"I get that. I think. But what's the point of an acephalic clone? Transplants for Javik?"

"From this specimen? They would not be immunologically compatible. On the other hand, Miranda tells me there are implantation nuclei which we can now advance."

"You did not tell me!" Javik earned himself a steely blue Miranda gaze:

"I didn't do them. Chakwas did. They're in frozen storage on Normandy. It's normal practice, Javik, for unique entities such as yourself. We couldn't make clones or even zygotes till now because there were no Prothean ova, nor a cloaca to raise and lay the eggs. Without that, creating zygotes is a major effort involving biotech industrial plant only found now on the Citadel. Shall I ask Padok Wiks to flush those samples?"

"…(*mumble*)"

"Javik?"

"No. Not till I have finished the last Reaper."

"Fine. Next item…"

"… Wait up, Jana. If the acephalic clones aren't for transplants, what are they for?"

"Shepard, didn't you get Miranda's memos? They don't have to be acephalic, but for the kind of… work they'll be doing, you don't want to put a conscious brain through it."

"I must have been in a coma somewhere."

"Oh. Right. Protheans are not hermaphroditic, Shepard, where each individual partakes of the nature of male and female. They're dioecious." Shepard looked blank.

"Two sexes exist, like nearly everything," Miranda translated. Tali interrupted:

"Jana, don't confuse Shepard with tech, he's just a poor bloody soldier."

"If you insist. Basically, Shepard, with a few substantial differences, Protheans follow a ZW sex determination system. Like turians, birds, reptiles… but – "

"… the point is, this new if damaged Prothean can bring forth clones of itself which in turn can bring forth clones of other Protheans, including Javik. Guys, I'm getting dextro chocolate…" Tali got up, "… while you lot bring Shep up to speed."

To be or not to be

Shepard looked at Javik. Javik looked at Shepard. Shepard turned back to Jana.

"I follow, I think. We're talking about reviving the Prothean species here. Let me guess. In effect, this means they can do parthenogenesis. With help from tech."

"Shepard, you surprise me. Again." (Miranda, looking pale and wan)

"I've had a recent refresher course. Let me guess again. They don't have allosomes?"

"Good god, you are full of surprises." (Clearly not enough sleep lately)

Jana took this in her stride: "Yes, Shepard. Like some boa constrictors, for example, ZW female Protheans can produce WW females. This new Prothean is WW…"

"Okay, WW? Now you lost me."

"… I mean, what we have here is the rarer of the two types of Prothean female. It's no wonder Cerberus put her in stasis here in their headquarters."

"That's not her main significance, doctor. Cerberus found me, and they found this person. I want to know, how many others did they find? Where are they?"

"But don't you see? That doesn't really matter. It's not just a curiosity. You have here a female even if of the third true sex, it's a female in phenotype. Any female at all plays to our advantage even though she can only bear female F¹ offspring, that is, first-generation either WW or ZW."

"Sorry, Jana, still lost." (Shepard)

"I am underwhelmed. Any new generations would never have known the Empire."

"I can't help with the empire, Javik. Captain Shepard, consider a human analogy. You know females are XX and males are XY, in terms of sex chromosome?"

"Sure. High school biology."

"And can humans produce YY children? So-called supermale intersex offspring?"

"No. Y is an allosome, it can't self-recombine. Goes with the corresponding autosome, X, most of it, at least the male specific regions. Occasionally supermales appear, like XYY, who often wind up in jail or executed. But plain YY is not viable."

"Exactly. Well, in birds or turians, say, the equivalent of YY would be a WW female."

"But WW is not viable there, either. W is an allosome in turians and birds."

"Yes, but in Protheans, WW is viable. W is an autosome; you can have a ZW female or a WW superfemale. Only ZZ is male, like Javik."

"So they actually have two female sexes. Is this true, Javik?"

"Yes. But neither of the two female sexes were significantly different from male in body mass or shape. There was very little sexual dimorphism. Such signs as existed were subtle, behavioral, normally reinforced by more extravagant clothing or armor."

"Armor! Females fought?"

"Of course. More especially, the ZW females fought. This was the Empire."

"Right…"

Jana looked slightly exasperated. "Gentlemen, your attention if you please? Because W is an autosome, as with the medaka fish, the Prothean sex chromosome doesn't have degraded regions like the male specific regions of a human Y chromosome. It's unusual, in evolutionary terms, but not unheard of."

"And this new Prothean is…"

"Analogous to a WW female. Unlike Javik, it can produce eggs."

"Like birds?"

"The shells are not hard. Javik avers that a salarian clutch incubator should suffice. Mothering was the task of WW females in the first three years, but that was not vital."

"The Empire saw advantage, after the Reapers came, in mass-producing soldiers."

"I think I see where this is going. And our female's clones can likewise give birth."

"Precisely. Do you see the significance?" (Miranda)

"Each clone is a Prothean incubating machine. You can put an arbitrary genome of those from archaeology, or synthesized from Collectors and Protheans, into an ovum–"

"– and synthesize a viable egg, you've got it."

"How many unique individuals would you be able to generate?"

"So far, we think about six hundred and fifty. We'd give them a continent on the Ardat-Yakshi planet. It's a start. But since each one will be producing possibly hundreds of eggs, you see why we don't want to put brains in that career path."

"Right. That's… not quite the genetic diversity one might hope for."

"But the autosomal nature of Prothean W makes that less critical."

Javik spoke in a leaden voice:

"It is a start."

Next chapter: #60, "Now you see me"

Saturday, August 1, 2015