Prime-Alpha regarded the Shepard-Captain. Her two comrades hovered near her, concerned. It did not miss the way the male kept glancing at them as if unsure of their motives.
He was unknowable.
But the Shepard-Captain was not. She belonged to geth. Alpha did not consider itself inquisitive, exactly, but the Shepard-Captain's interface, the record of her that Alpha—that all the Primes, to prevent the precious data's loss—carried acted as a sort of binocular filter.
Humans made more…sense…even when they didn't make sense.
"The water is safe, Shepard-Captain," the platform called Legion announced, indicating the stream by which they had stopped. Any geth with sensors could see that the Sharing had left the Shepard-Captain dehydrated.
Geth didn't feel dehydrated and being low on some integral fluid did not seem analogous.
"Thanks," the Shepard-Captain declared huskily before going over to the water source and filling her canteen from it. She drained it. Then again. Then sipped at the third.
"Are you sure you're okay?" the Alenko-Major asked in an undertone.
"Oh, yeah. Fabulous," the Shepard-Captain answered nervously, tossing down the third canteen and filling it again.
Alpha watched her sitting at the water and suddenly knew a day of thirst. It couldn't feel thirst, of course, though it knew the definition. It was a 'flat' word for geth. But with that strange binocular filter, one of the Shepard-Captain's memories swam across Alpha's consciousness, a memory of thirst clawing at her, mouth dry, lungs dry, grit soaking up saliva from soft tissues. Thirst gnawing at her, squeezing at her, trying to distract her, leaving her subconscious pining for lakes, ponds, pools, puddles, the drip-drip of water falling from cloudy skies.
It rained on Rannoch, sometimes. But Alpha had never perceived rain in quite the way Shepard-Captain had. It was certain it still didn't understand the simple fall of a drop of dihydrogen-oxide, responding to the pull of gravity having condensed in clouds the way Shepard-Captain did. It had the words, it had the concepts…but they were flat, faced with the way that Shepard-Captain's filter understood rain.
And there were more words. Words that it knew—together, apart, lonely, intimate—that had simply been words but now had weight, had substance, would facilitate communication with an organic. Geth understood loneliness as being separated from the whole, as losing some of their intelligence. Humans had a deep-seated need not to be lonely—and for them, 'loneliness' clawed at their psyches—to be surrounded by their own kind…or sometime other kinds. And they had so many shades of 'not lonely' that Alpha marveled one single entity could feel so many and yet have room for more.
It made sense, of a sort: the Normandy mobileplatform with all its 'geth' runtimes moving about within, carrying out functions, performing essential duties to maintain cohesion, sharing thoughts…yet remaining somehow individual, never really losing themselves in the whole.
-J-
Gamma found itself dealing with an overheating processor.
The Shepard-Captain filter provided insight, but it was not like picking a topic for insight. Geth had an orderly assembly of data. This filter showed everything…like paint that had exploded everywhere, tube after tube, acrylic, watercolor, oil…all of it sliding and running after its own particular fashion all over some surface that was neither flat nor textured, not vertical nor horizontal, not straight nor curved—madness. There was no formula, no calculation, no model that could make sense of the madness and the harder Gamma tried, the worse it got.
Things swam in the consciousness, rising up in response to stimuli from Gamma's own processor. Gamma had no control over what it learned from studying the world through the Shepard-Captain filter.
Gamma compromised, tried to relax the processes working so furiously to dredge up something it wanted to see. It tried to relax, to see what was available and hope something interesting might crop up. Back in the server, it saw that little nameless world, the one with geysers spraying sparkling clouds to a close-hanging moon. Several of the runtimes had been there. Many of the runtimes had been there. There had been nothing of interest there on that little nameless world…but many of the runtimes remembered it.
The drastic difference in perception—between the runtimes who knew that place and the Shepard-Captain filter—left Gamma deeply interested in seeing it again, to find the…the things this organic attached to words which were otherwise flat.
Like 'blue.'
'Blue' described the Liara-asari with Shepard-Captain. But the understanding of blue changed based on perception. The skies of Earth were blue. And oceans. Big, impersonal things were blue. Black was sometimes blue, too, and sometimes black happened with blue. But at other times blue was safety—when put into cloth and made into a uniform; it was not that blue satisfied human nudity taboos, but being wrapped in blue was important, familiar.
And blue was the Liara-asari, so sometimes 'blue' had ideas of affection.
There was blue for loneliness and isolation.
Blue sometimes bled and the Shepard-Captain recoiled from it.
Blue was the shell on the other human, the Alenko-Major. Blue protected him, but not like the blue cloth protected her. Blue armor. Blue energy. Safe blue. And it all melted and melded into a blue Gamma didn't understand, something it suspected was something purely organic. A blue that could be wrapped up in, a living kind of blue that wasn't a color at all.
Trying to figure it out—Gamma suspected even the Shepard-Captain didn't understand, so the filter couldn't make sense—made its processor overheat.
If the idea of 'blue'—450 to 495 nanometers, located on the visible spectrum—was so complicated, Gamma wasn't sure it wanted to experience any of the more complex subjects. How could organics function when such a simple thought—450 to 495 nanometers, located on the visible spectrum—was so complicated Gamma didn't understand.
It wasn't sure it wanted to.
…but it would like to see the geysers on that unnamed world again. Just for a moment.