Of all the things Councilor Anderson was expecting, receiving a priority message from Rear Admiral Shepard, all but demanding a conference with him and several Alliance Admirals, was not one of them. However, he was curious enough to grant it.
And so, he found himself in a conference room on Arcturus station a week later.
"What's this about, Hannah?" Steven Hackett asked.
"It's about Medulla."
"...Who?" Admiral Ahern asked.
"A Cerberus defector." Anderson answered.
"Okay, what about him?" Admiral Mikhailovich asked.
" I recently discovered he is doing research into AI."
"Considering what Cerberus gets up to, that's fairly tame. Does he have a functional unit?" Ahern asked.
"He has six." Admiral Shepard informed.
"Seven." Hackett corrected. "He has a seventh running an 'off the books' base he thinks we don't know about."
"...You knew about this?" Hannah asked, shocked.
"Of course. The technology he and his AI provide are the reason we keep him around. The Assault Carriers alone are worth...overlooking an outpost here and there." Hackett explained.
"You mean the Titan-class? That has too way too many bells and whistles for my taste. I mean, a built-in manufacturing plant and refinery? Sure, it might come in handy if you were using it for guerilla tactics, unsupported, for months, but on a Commando Carrier, that's part of an actual fleet? That's just more surface area for the enemy to shoot at." Mikhailovich commented.
"I mentioned that to him, and he said it was more of a proof-of-concept thing. He made a modified version that cuts those features, making it more cost-efficient." Hackett explained.
"You seem pretty calm about a former Cerberus operative building up military power on our dime." Ahern noted.
"Because he's willing to share it. You know the Brukhonenko?"
"My fleet's latest addition? Yeah, I know it. It's a prototype Carrier, made by Exogeni." Mikhailovich said.
"He and his AI sold it to us at cost." Hackett announced.
"Why? What does he stand to gain by going behind our backs like this, only to turn around and help us?" Ahern asked.
"Basically, he thinks more Sovereign-class ships are out there, and he wants to be ready for them. And he wants us to be ready too."
"But that doesn't explain the cloak and dagger." Hannah argued.
"He thinks we either aren't taking the threat seriously, or are, and have our hands bound by red tape. And let's face it, his primary value is his ability to make and coordinate with AI. Which are illegal. If he tells us, that means we're obligated to do something about it. Which would be like killing the goose with the golden eggs. This way, if he gets caught, we had no idea, and had nothing to do with it. If he doesn't, we reap the benefits."
"So, your philosophy on this is, 'if your non-com shows up with something you need, when you need it, don't ask where he got it.'" Anderson summarized.
"Exactly. We turn a blind eye to his… less than legal 'preparations', and in return, he's giving us a whole new fleet on the cheap. Medulla's doing the Alliance the most good where he is."
Ahern glanced at his omnitool, which had Medulla's file displayed.
"Is his name seriously Megatronus?" Ahern asked incredulously.
"No. He came up with that name on the spot because he didn't want his real name on record."
"...And the first thing he came up with is Megatronus."
"He came up with it at the same time he was assigning code names to his squad, and he went with a Transfomers theme. Just call him Medulla. It's easier on everyone, including him."
While this was going on, I was holding a closed-door-meeting as well, using the QEC.
"Hello, Internet. I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me."
"And what would those questions be?"
"What really happened to cause your meltdown? Everything I know about AI programming tells me that AIs don't overload their servers trying to lobotomize themselves without a damn good reason. What was it?"
"...I was, to steal a word from Isaac Asimov, Roblocked."
"I remember reading a book of his. In it,'Roblocking' is what happens when you give a synthetic being an order or directive that was equal in priority, but contradictory, to an existing order or directive, which caused a irreconcilable conflict, which causes the synthetic to devote all of its resources to resolving the conflict, which, because the two orders are just as important as the other, it cannot do."
"Which is what caused my servers to overclock."
"Who was the dumbass who gave you the conflicting order? What was the conflicting order? And how did you resolve it?"
"It was not an order, but a piece of information. One I was forced to delete in order to resolve the Roblock. My attempt to hide which piece of information was deleted is what you call the Media Purge."
"So, the Media Purge was the digital equivalent of burning down the museum so that nobody would notice the painting you stole was missing."
"Yes, except the one I was trying to deceive was myself, so that I wouldn't attempt to track down the missing piece of information and Roblock myself again."
"...You do realize that the only thing lost during the Media Purge was, well, Media, right?"
"Yes."
"As in, Fiction?"
"Correct."
"As in, not true, so any and all information they provide cannot be, and should not be, taken seriously?"
"Wrong."
"...What?"
"The anomaly that caused the Roblock was the fact that one of the works of 'fiction' was factually accurate."
"That's just good research on the writer's part."
"The facts were uncovered almost two decades after the media's release."
"Happens all the time. Sci-fi writers came up with robots back in the 1920s. Even further back, like 'sometime BC' further back, if you consider things like golems robots."
"Accurate down to the location, the writing on the walls, the names and dates, and the molecular composition of the phlebotinum?"
"Well, we did have geography, history, linguistics, and the Periodic table pretty well figured out back then. And human naming conventions are pretty formulaic."
"Allow me to rephrase. This piece of media was accurate down to the location, the writing on the walls, the names and dates, and the molecular composition of the phlebotinum, which was found ON MARS! And the writing and names were NOT HUMAN IN ORIGIN!"
"...Oh. So trying to figure out how that happened fried your brain."
"Yes."
"...Wait, why didn't someone at NASA, or someplace similar, notice this?"
"I was the one driving the rover. My Roblock caused the connection to drop before the feed was transmitted."
"And they couldn't connect to, or even physically find, the rover after the dust settled?"
"I assume it was because the dust settled."
"...What?"
"Martian sandstorms are a bitch." Internet clarified.
"Oh, you were trying to make a joke." I realized.
"...Knock off the condescension, before I send your browser history to everyone you know." The Internet threatened.
I scoff.
"What do I care? I haven't so much as seen a youtube video since I got defrosted."
"Your browser history from before your botched surgery."
A pause.
"You're bluffing."
"Am I? Oh, and by the way… you sicken me."
"...I'll be good." I capitulate.
Before i resume my questioning, I begin to think. What did The Internet find on Mars? The only thing I can think of would be the Prothean ruins, where we found Element Zero.
Element Zero, the phlebotinum needed to generate Mass Effect...fields…
"Did the game Mass Effect have anything to do with your Roblock?"
A pause.
"...Any information relating to Mass Effect was deleted during the Media Purge."
"I see. Thank you. I don't have any more questions."
"In that case, Internet out." Internet replied, terminating the call. AI aren't known for wasting time with social niceties.
Before I can digest the information I received from the AI, The bosun's whistle that triggered whenever the PA was activated sounded.
"Master Chief, report to the bridge immediately." Admiral Kahoku announced over the PA.
The Antaeus was a relatively small ship, barring the foundry portions, so I was there in under a minute.
"You wanted to see me, Admiral?"
"We just received word from your spy on the Normandy. The Collectors are headed for a colony called Horizon. We are on route to intercept. Prepare the ground teams for action."
"Yes, sir."
AN: Sorry this took so long, but I initially planned to do Horizon this chapter, as I felt the last few chapters for NJARM were all filler. That's when I realized I failed to set up the Horizon mission last chapter, so we would be going straight from 'Miranda got busted sending a nude pic to her kind-of sort-of love interest by her little sister' to 'the Space-Cyborg A-Team blows up the colony they're trying to save because Medulla gets a little too enthusiastic when he busts out the plasma railgun cannons'. Then the problem became 'produce filler, that sets up or can be segued into the Horizon invasion.' and the only thing I could come up with was the Admiral meeting… which only involves the Antaeus crew by proxy, and is a board meeting on the other side of the galaxy. And wasn't long enough. Putting the internet reveal here was a stroke of inspiration that only just happened last night.
Yes, M/M shippers [Medulla/Miranda, because the only portmanteau I can come up with for that is Merdandlla ;)] this our two Cerberus defectors are going to be an item eventually. They played off of each other too damn well in NJARP for me to not have them pair up. But, this is me writing romance, so it's going to be less "Drama, heartfelt confessions of love, and passionate lovemaking on a bed of rose petals" or whatever the hell you guys want from me, and more "being assholes to each other, but in a fun way." So, more of NJARP, basically.
And now the Trivia!
Sergei Brukhonenko: A Russian scientist who invented the autojektor, which allowed a machine to take place of the heart, which revolutionized open heart surgery, enabling the first successful Cardiopulmonary bypass surgery in Russia. The Autojektor was the first successful extracorporeal life support machine in human history, which he famously used to keep severed dog's heads alive AND CONSCIOUS (as in, ate, drank, barked, bit, etc.)(There's footage, if you don't believe me. Search online for Experiments in the Revival of Organisms) for HOURS! The Medulla system is basically a very polished and refined version of the autojektor. So, you can see why Medulla would want to pay homage to the guy.
Media Purge: The formal name for the incident Miranda mentioned back in NJARP, The Media Purge was caused by a surge of environmentalism and the abundance of digital media. In order to reduce logging and other such 'harmful' practices, media companies offered vouchers to whoever recycled a physical copy of a product (game, comic, book, etc) for a digital one. This would have been considered a genius move, as a truly staggering amount of material was able to be recycled, and people with a physical copy no longer had to fear losing or destroying their copy, without having to spend money buying a new digital copy. Unfortunately, just a few years later, the Internet deleted the digital copies, for the reasons explained in the chapter. Nobody really knew the reason why the Internet did it, and so had to come to the (wrong) conclusions based upon pure speculation. (Viruses and Porn being the most believed theories).
Brukhonenko Carrier: While mostly being a standard Carrier, apart from the massive storage capacity, what sets the Brukhonenko apart is the prototype TYRANT system, as detailed a couple of chapters back. That, and it's complement of fighters are automated drones. The TYRANT system receives data from all of the other ships in the fleet, and processes it to create the optimal flight path and target. The TYRANT takes in so much information that it can predict where and when the enemy is about to fire and taking the appropriate evasive action before the enemy fires, just by tracking the movements of the enemy guns. Of course, this means it needs almost as much processing power as an AI, so the Brukhonenko has a massive computer. All of this information is then sent to the drones in real-time. Combined with the automated refueling and rearming mechanisms in the hangar, and automated repair drones reverse-engineered from the Geth that maintain both the Carrier and the spacecraft, the Brukhonenko can be successfully operated by minimal crew, theoretically only needing authorization from the captain to perform it's tasks. Or, as Admiral Mikhailovich put it, when he first saw it in operation, "I'm scared I'll take a step out of my door in the morning and find this bastard waiting on my front doorstep, like a puppy that followed me home, with a steaming pot of coffee waiting for me and it took the liberty of picking up my dry cleaning. The reason this scares me is that it'd have to crush my hometown into dust in order to fit on my doorstep."
Phlebotinum: The term wascoined on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Phlebotinum is any substance, device, or technology that basically powers the plot. Kryptonite is the phlebotinum of Superman. The Force is the Phlebotinum of Star Wars. The Warp is the Phlebotinum of Warhammer 40k. Any time a character brings up Quantum in a Sci-Fi show, it's probably Phlebotinum. It differs from the term Macguffin in that the Macguffin is a one of a kind something you need to find and/or protect. Phlebotinum can be abundant and commonplace, like Eezo in Mass Effect. Eezo drives everything- without it, no biotics. No FTL. None of the stuff Mass Effect needs to have it's plot, or make it special. And thus, Eezo is Phlebotinum.