-3.4
SSV Vimy Ridge SR-4, Vostok system, Maroon Sea Cluster
~1 hour later
-3.4
Traynor woke slowly on a Med Bay recovery ward bed. Kaidan and Dr. Legace were standing a couple meters away in the lab area talking quietly, and the lights were occasionally flickering. She looked the other way and saw Nivelle Offensive's platform from the comm lab laying inert on the bed next to hers.
"Um... hello?" she called out. Alenko and Legace immediately flocked to her side with expressions of relief but also curiosity.
"How do you feel?" Sarah asked in a cautious tone, running a scan with her omni-tool.
"Bit of a headache," Sam groaned. "It feels like the morning after my grad party. How long was I...?" Legace nodded and held Traynor in a scrutinizing gaze.
"It's been a little over six hours. I'm seeing some unusual synaptic activity and neurotransmitter levels, nothing outside safe margins. Your ICP is slightly elevated and your electrolytes are low, but we can deal with those- what I'm really concerned about is... Specialist, were you aware of the... well, your hand, Samantha. Had you noticed your hand?"
Traynor held her hands up in front of her face and her eyes got wide as she noticed the faintly glowing pattern of blue-green lines that formed a rhombus in the palm of her right hand, with an outcropping from the corner nearest her wrist extending a few centimeters up her forearm past the carpal bones. "No, I hadn't. What is that?" she asked, sounding more fascinated than worried.
"They appear to be organosilicon fibres," Legace explained. She handed over a datapad with a readout of the scans she'd taken, which didn't make a lot of sense to Traynor, but she examined them closely nonetheless. "Your body's creating them and they're branching off your median nerve, infiltrating the dermal layer. I can't say for certain what they're doing there, but they're highly photconducive- their root structure geometrically magnifies the electrical signals of your nervous system, translating them into visible light- and the orderly arrangement... well, my first instinct is that it's a new, macro level development of your synthempathic architecture."
"Like an organic fibre-optic interface with my nervous system?" Sam posited. She ran her fingertips over the patch, marveling at the anomaly.
"Doc noticed it just after you and Nivelle collapsed in the lab and we got you here," Kaidan added. "Which- what the hell was that?" Kaidan asked, puzzled.
"I- I'm not sure," Sam stammered. "I touched him and then it was just... Lights and sounds, and this explosion of ideas in my head all at once. But it was so much, so fast, then it was like a migraine and then... I guess that's when I blacked out." She looked again at the inert geth platform one bed over. "Is he...?"
"It's been inactive since you both dropped. We tried to get one of the other geth to run a diagnostic but they're all non-responsive, along with a bunch of our systems that they normally manage." The lights flickered again, as if to punctuate, and Kaidan pointed up at the ceiling. "That, for instance. We've been getting them back operating on overrides, but as far as we can tell all of the digital crew are offline. Do you have any idea how they might be connected?"
Traynor turned to sit up on her bed and peered at the machine body, concerned. "I'm not sure," she said, sliding onto her feet and stepping over to examine it. "It's possible that-"
As she placed her hand on the geth's body to shift it for a look at its networking relay, the lights in its 'face' and conduits lit up and it let out several low electronic chirps and tones as its systems booted up. Simultaneously, the ship's lighting steadied. Sam jumped with a start as Nivelle became animated and sat upright, looking around at its surroundings.
"Specialist Traynor. Doctor Legace. Major Alenko. The medical bay as opposed to the geth servicing bay... curious. Apologies. We are now back online," it said.
"'We?'" Kaidan asked. He still got a bit jumpy whenever he heard geth refer to themselves in the plural, since it always reminded him of his more negative early experiences with them.
"All geth programs within the network mainframe of SSV Vimy Ridge SR-4. We were preoccupied with processing new data."
Sam stared at the platform's 'face,' transfixed by the impressions she was receiving via their physical connection. "Nivelle- the data you were processing-"
Nivelle chuckled and its' facial plates fluttered expressively. "The humourous nuance of exaggerated timescale," it replied, "we would have provided an estimated runtime, however... it was problematic to ascertain whether our analysis would require a femtosecond or ten to the twenty-third years." What followed was a disturbing outburst of electronic noise that resembled- in grotesque fashion- the sound of laughter. Kaidan cringed but Traynor seemed delighted.
"Wait, so we had a blackout because the geth were analysing your la- your joke?"
"Oy! You were going to say 'my lame joke?'" Sam snapped. Kaidan looked away and cleared his throat awkwardly. "Philistine. But regardless- I think we must have formed a direct connection in the lab. Nivelle received the feeling I was having about my hilarious joke, and I... well, I had just the strangest feeling of... a perspective on time, like it was..." Traynor shook her head suddenly, as though in the throes of some revelation, and practically leaped for the nearest work station, tapping at the keyboard furiously. A moment later, the station beeped a notification and Sam smiled, throwing up her hands again with excitement. "Hah!" she yelped, "Wow!"
"What's going on?"
"When we touched, I experienced a moment of... insight, I suppose... I was able to grasp, just briefly, how Nivelle conceptualizes time. Which was weird, but in the sort of after-glow of that the solution to the comm buoy's timing error came to me," Sam explained. "I just uploaded a patch that should do the trick. And apparently in the exchange he was able to get from me what was so funny about my joke, Major Deadpan," she playfully scolded.
"Acting."
Traynor giggled and sighed, closing her eyes and concentrating, as though she was trying to hold on to the fading impression in her mind. "That really was remarkable," she said. "I mean... it was a little surreal- like an altered state-"
"Had a lot of experience with those, have you? Do I need to run a drug screen?" Legace interrupted, teasing.
"Nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair. For anxiety. Well... feigned anxiety. It's a little bit of a vice of mine," Sam smirked. "And it's strange because there was a bit of a similar feeling of time dilation but it just... wow..." She snapped her head toward Nivelle and furrowed her brow, perplexed by something lingering in her mind that she couldn't quite even begin to articulate.
"No, the curve is more... red," the geth replied to her un-asked question. The exchange made no sense to Alenko, but it seemed to quell Traynor.
"So, hold on," Kaidan said, squinting at the pair, "are you saying you actually formed a synthempathic link with Nivelle? Like a real, full-blown ideation link, actually sharing thoughts? I've picked up feelings from EDI before, that sort of approximated human emotions, but I thought what you're talking about was... I mean, I thought their way of thinking and ours didn't 'translate?'"
Sam and the geth operations officer looked at each other briefly and then back to the sentinel.
"I always thought so too," she said with a bit of wonderment. "And before you ask, no, I don't know how it... I mean it was the first time I've ever connected with one of the geth crew. Except for that time Commander Shepard was plugged in to the geth consensus, and the report I read about Cerberus' Project Overlord, I've never heard of anyone else actually forming a mind-to-mind link with any synthetic, either. It's... remarkable, I can't think of any other word for it. But these fibres that have shown up in my hand- they must have been able to facilitate a BCI! Er- sorry- brain-computer interface."
"I have a biotic amp implant, I know what a BCI is," Kaidan grumbled.
"My metacognitive runtimes detected a foreign data stream within my primary process" Offensive volunteered, holding up its arm where Traynor had made contact and scrutinizing it. "The invasive stream propagated via a tactile optical data feed, with encryption consistent with synthempathic signaling protocols."
"Hey- 'invasive?'" Sam said, playfully feigning hurt feelings. "You make it sound like my sense of humour was malware."
"I wouldn't install it willingly," Kaidan guffawed.
"Oy! The abuse I take! Anyhow- synthempathy has been gradually evolving over time, getting easier to use. It's conceivable that this is a natural evolution of the ability, maybe even that everyone will eventually develop the same. That... wow... well that could revolutionize communications, how we interact with technology... maybe everything!"
"Nivelle, does the expression 'kid in a candy store' mean anything to you?" Kaidan grinned. Traynor shot a faux-smug look at him but couldn't help smiling.
"You make fun now, but if this is an emergent trend, you'll be coming to me later all 'oh, Traynor, help- I just ironically uploaded, I don't know, my after-action report to my porn folder, what do I do now?' or 'oh, Traynor, help- I've mentally downloaded the geth language and one one oh one oh oh one oh one one oh!'"
"Definitely malware," Alenko sniped. Sam narrowed her eyes at him, at which point Legace cut in.
"Sorry to interrupt," she said, "but revolutionary or whatever, to me this is a medical condition that needs to be monitored. So, Specialist, I'd like to observe you a bit longer and then release you with a biomed telemetry tag."
"She's right," Kaidan nodded, "we should keep tabs on this. In fact, Doctor, why don't you test a random sampling of the crew and see if this is showing up- or on the verge of showing up- in anyone else. Meanwhile, Nivelle, if you could submit a report on the digital crew's condition after this event, I'd like to know how this has effected them. As well as a systems diagnostic."
"Acknowledged, Acting Major Retired." Offensive's face plates fluttered again and there was another cringe-inducing peal of electronic laughter. Traynor's face contorted into an uncomfortable smile and Kaidan raised an eyebrow, a little disturbed by the sound.
"Yes Sir," Sarah said, shaking her head at the weirdness going on around her.
"Meanwhile I'll-" Kaidan sighed, catching himself, "I mean... I'll have Liara call the Normandy and tell Hadrian about this. They should know so they can be on the lookout, try to minimize the chances of a similar systems disruption. I can call Earth to let the Council and Alliance leadership know, if they don't already."
"I'd think that if they did, they'd have told us about it," Sam said.
"Granted, but still... they might have withheld information from us, but I want to make sure we don't withhold this from them. For all we know you're the first."