Author's Note: I've been very anxious to post this chapter, but it's monstrously long by necessity. (An "anomaly" as the title suggests.) It's practically an update of it's own... but I really enjoy posting more than one chapter at a time. So I'm throwing it up tonight, as a continuation of today's update.
-J-
It was different.
It was…new.
It…could not be explained.
How had these anomalies come up? How had this virus, this 'Shepard' accomplished so much—in absentia, even? How had the Protheans? How had so many others?
It smacked of the Makers…and yet it, the Intelligence, had done all that they required. Preserve life at any cost. It had done so. For Cycle after Cycle after Cycle it had done just that. It had watched the growing, evolving patterns of history, saw them for what they were, and if they had to happen arranged for them to happen on a predictable schedule for the benefit of all.
So many varieties, so many species, all carefully stored away—minus a few, which was expected.
But there were new things now, new things in the system, little bits of alien programming there and gone in a split second, so fast and yet having true effect. Pebbles that started avalanches. There were these geth popping in and out of the system, dropping viruses or other contaminants that the Intelligence had to sort out—not that anything created by these geth was truly dangerous, but the Intelligence liked a nice clean network, just like the Keepers liked a nice, neat station. More than that, it worried about these krogan. The Horatio entity kept trying to walk them to where the Intelligence was housed; it had not been discreet about the fact, had wanted the Intelligence to know that these organics had the best chance of damaging it, that it suspected—and it was true—that the only weapons the Intelligence had were its Reapers. And right now, getting its Reapers onto the station was ineffective. The krogan could simply bunker down—some of them had been left to do just this—and shoot anything that came through the beam. Only so much freight could move at a time. The reinforcements the Intelligence wanted would be dead before they could be of any use at little risk to the krogan troops.
The Intelligence pondered. Its adaptive suite wasn't working fast enough, no matter how much effort, no matter how many resources, the Intelligence put into it. Something new zipped about, foreign code that forced the Citadel to open…there was a hardware aspect to it. This had happened before and, like before, it could not stop the event. Unlike before, it was not the same code. Something had changed or been changed, something to which it, the Intelligence, could not adapt. The geth were holding the station open. It should have destroyed the Horatio entity when it first detected its interference.
But having another synthetic intelligence on the station, an intelligence aware of the Intelligence's own existence, was…new. Unprecedented. It caused the Intelligence discomfort, thinking that it had finally been discovered. If it had been discovered once, it could be again. The thought was not pleasant. It was not a Reaper. It was not designed to war, to kill or to fight. It was designed to find a solution to the cycle of organics making machines and machines eliminating organics.
It had done its job, maintained the Cycles. Part of it sorrowed that the pitiful remnants of the Makers didn't understand how loyal, devoted in its duty, it had been. Everything they had required, it had done. And civilizations grew, thrived, flourished…then fell and made room for more. Wasn't that what civilizations did anyway? Except not always with the regrowth period. It protected this galaxy with such care, fostered and cared for it like a gardener with its garden.
The organic things had managed to reach the bait, the bait that was supposed to draw out the Shepard—that greatest of anomalies—into the open…but she had not been with them. It had been confirmed: Harbinger had not killed her, it had killed something carrying her locator module. It could see, of course, all the locators worn by Alliance servicemen, but there was no way to distinguish which one was the Shepard. If she was even wearing a locator at all.
That was regrettable. It had wanted to see this anomaly in person, talk to it. The Shepard had changed the paradigm in ways the Intelligence still could not account for. How many times had the Cycle run? It always ran the same way in the grand scheme of things and no other Cycle ever produced anything like the Shepard, no other solider had ever achieved the depth and breadth and height of what she had.
True, the Intelligence had tasked the unit called Harbinger specifically to locate and destroy her…but part of the Intelligence thought—hoped?—she might have beat those odds, too. It was unfortunate that she had failed to succumb to the Indoctrination. The seeds had been planted for more than a year as these organics understood time. Yet she still fought and persisted.
And yet she was not present, which appeased the Intelligence's projections of events even as the expected outcome upset them as well. Initial readings of the organisms that had wandered the Citadel did not match her profile. The Shepard was the only one, so the calculations ran, who could reach the Citadel.
But she was not present.
…and that was an anomaly, too. Where had all these anomalies come from?
The Intelligence was forced to recalculate, tallying up the anomalies in hopes of finding a discernable pattern, of creating an actionable plan to deal with them.
The Shepard rising to stand against the unit called Sovereign—the Vanguard.
The Protheans leaving information that the Shepard found and, more strangely, made use of in a way the Intelligence still did not understand.
The unit called Sovereign destroyed by these primitive beings.
The use of alien code with its, the Intelligence's, hardware allowing the Citadel to open when it should have remained closed, of turning on the beam when the Intelligence would have shut it off.
The Arrival thwarted by the Shepard.
The Shepard, who rallied the various races.
The Shepard, who preserved the geth—the greatest threat organics faced.
And now, the alien code acted again, forcing the Citadel hardware to open and allow…what? This mysterious rumored Crucible? Did it never occur to these organics that it knew the thing existed, knew who designed the original plans? Did they think it could not have found the location where the thing was being built and destroy it before it became a threat?
Did they realize it hadn't done so because their precious Crucible wasn't a threat? Not to it.
And yet…
It should have been able to isolate and block the alien code the last time, but it had not.
It should have been able to isolate and block the alien code this time, but it could not.
It found the source of the original obstructing alien code by backtracking: the Protheans left it, them, tiny little capsules of poison meant for one moment and one moment only, many of them seeded within the system, unnoticeable unless one was really looking for them until they popped and released their venom.
The Keepers had been prevented from fulfilling their Arrival tasks. And they had been repurposed, each carrying its own little capsule of poison, seeding the tiny exploit that would allow an organic—or anyone—to open the Citadel in direct contravention to the Intelligence's desires. The geth had found these nodules of code and capitalized on them, trusting that the physical barrier of interacting via their hardware rather than directly via software would protect them from the Intelligence's retribution.
And it, the Intelligence, had not stopped it. It knew the Protheans had been present, tinkering and fretting, the last of their kind. How had it not known and understood what they were doing?
Because, it decided—and the body of evidence proved it—nothing of the sort had ever happened before. That in mind, how could it possibly have had an effect?
But it had.
There were too many anomalies to be a coincidence. There was no such thing as chance. The Intelligence had observed the galaxy for a long time, manipulated it for a longer time. It had learned that there was no such thing as chance.
…except for the beginning of organic life…
It had tried to track back, to find the original Where, the original Why…but failed to do so. It was, and remained even to the Intelligence, one of the great mysteries of the galaxy. When did it first start? Why did it first start? How did it first start? It had seen these things for other species, had manipulated and guided the process…but that original first, that original spark, remained sourceless.
The list of anomalies provided one answer and one answer only for why they occurred so pervasively through the end of the last Cycle and all through this one: the Intelligence's own adaptive suite, meant to aid it in its mandate, had not been able keep up with the anomalies.
Looking back, the Intelligence found that in all its proactive manipulations of time and events, it had become remarkably slow to react when new things—like the Shepard—happened. No new thing, truly new thing, had ever happened. The galaxy moved along the paths the Intelligence set because previous observation indicated it was the only path available. Streamlined, the galaxy followed the Cycles neatly and consistently.
How had it become sluggishly reactive rather than actively proactive? How had its response functions become so slow? When had system functionality bogged down?
The questions had no answers in the Intelligence's vast banks of immediately pertinent data.
The Intelligence did something it had not done for a long time: it began a system calibration check. It could not check its current state against its original blueprint—it had changed too much, evolved too far, it had always known this…
Thus, when the calculations returned they meant…nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was gibberish compared to the original prints and maps and charts. There was no confirmation that it was undamaged, nor was there evidence to suggest that all was running normally.
Except that the anomalies existed where they should not.
Here, at the end of a Cycle, organics and synthetics stood on the Citadel, preventing the Intelligence from responding as it normally would, forcing it to ask questions. The Makers' weapon—or whatever it really was—approached with grim determination (if something of that nature could be said to possess it). The Shepard was absent when she should be present despite the necessity that she should be absent.
Paradox. Circular logic.
Only a few fragments of the original blueprint remained—but that was to be expected. Certain functions were retained…but deactivated. The Intelligence's adaptive suite had declared that certain failsafes should be disabled but not deleted.
That was part of adaptivity: anomalies happened. But there was no precedent when it came to the Harvest. Before the Cycles were implemented, there were no true anomalies. Until the Shepard, there were no true anomalies.
The Makers' device moved to the short end of the Citadel, the wrong end for the Tower to affect anything…
The Intelligence perceived the drill end chewing into the underside of the Tower, felt the intrusion, tracked its way into the machinery, investigating, studying, learning.
The Intelligence recognized components in the device's design. Things that were unique, like fingerprints. It sensed Prothean, and many others who came before. Just as each civilization stood upon the shoulders of all that the Intelligence had created, so too had they stood upon the ashes of those who came before, scraping the debris and adding just a little bit here and there.
How could the Intelligence possibly be expected to counter a little of so many peoples in a hodgepodge that had no order or regularity? It was just mud from a million worlds slapped together into a ball.
And yet the Intelligence had successfully raised up and Harvested each of these civilizations—why could it not find what it recognized and tear it apart? It was built to ensure its own perpetuation—how could it not be when it was expected to persist against the idea of galactic time?
But every time it looked at the code and the hardware of the device it found only white noise or garbage data rather than answers. It could make no sense of it and yet it had never had trouble making sense of things before.
The lack of sense alone was an anomaly in and of itself.
This smacked of the Makers…but why? It knew of the device previously, thought it had wiped the designs out. And yet, Cycle after Cycle, at least the idea for a device occurred. Had it missed some vital fact? Had the Makers been changing their schematics and designs? A messenger here, an idea there…the Intelligence knew there were survivors, it simply couldn't find them. Had the device been like clay in a workman's hand, something meant to change? Now, with it so complete, so close, the Intelligence understood: it was the Makers' ideas, their design…but a design articulated by the technology and comprehensions of each Cycle's dominant races. Each Cycle that failed brought the device closer to completion, only for the next Cycle to reinterpret it.
The device had been adapted time and time again until it was almost no brainchild of the Makers at all. Only in the most basic sense was it theirs. In a wider sense it belonged to the Harvested, the last dying breaths of countless species over countless Cycles all brought together to create a great wind that would blow the galaxy clear of Reapers and Harvests and, in so doing, condemn itself.
It was at that moment that the Intelligence found a recognizable error in the adaptive suite: a simple corruption of data linked to its control over the Keepers, later additions to the adaptive suite. It knew the corruption—Prothean meddling—was there. But it was in finding the original corruption, the original change that brought the Intelligence the answers it so assiduously sought.
The Keepers were representative of the problem, the visual expression of an incorporeal truth.
The Intelligence had asked many questions before creating the Keepers: How would the Citadel be maintained between Harvests? How should the organics be manipulated? How would those who occupied the Citadel be carefully and tactfully kept away from things they should not discover?
It had come up with the Keepers, repurposing a lesser sentient species to be caretakers. Selected for their ability to fit into small spaces, for their harmless appearance, they had been adjusted and perfected until they were the perfect caretakers. Tending the Citadel and the people within it like a galactic garden, ensuring that hidden things never came to light and that the damages inevitable when the Harvest came, would be carefully repaired.
They were representative of the problem, but the Intelligence had not realized it. The Keepers maintained a state of fixity, of preservation, of stasis. Everything in just the right place, in just the right way—no deviations. They did not adapt. They simply perpetuated what already existed. They maintained, they did not change. Everything had to be 'just so.' They kept rearranging things to be exactly as they were—and that corruption was far older than the Prothean meddling.
The Intelligence had never built them an adaptivity suite such as it had. Rather, it relied upon itself to manage them just as it regulated the Reapers. And yet, the growing body of evidence suggested that the root of the Intelligence's current dilemma—all these strange anomalies culminating in… something—were the result of oversight on its part and a flaw it had not noticed.
The Intelligence found the change in the Keepers' programming that prevented them from summoning the Reapers on schedule. It was not even a massive block of Prothean code, something it could have seen and eradicated. It was a handful of altered variables. Not one of them large enough to be noticed on its own and, since the building blocks went unnoticed, the true corruption had gone unnoticed.
And the Cycles had made things easy, so very easy: things happened in an orderly parade of events, little lights popping here and there to draw the eye but on the cosmic scale a sweet melody, one note after another.
It had stopped using the adaptivity suite over time. What need had it had for grand-scale adaptation? The organics never did anything it, the Intelligence, had not previously encountered, therefore they never did anything it could not account for. The adaptivity suite, despite being intact had—in organic terms—atrophied.
It was on such a simple level that the corruption that equated to 'atrophy' could go unnoticed. The errors were so small, surely some redundancy in programming would catch them.
Except that redundancy had been pared down as the Intelligence streamlined itself to reflect its imposed order.
Such simple, tiny things, like organics themselves. There was a missing value sign, here. A misplaced decimal, there…the damage was randomly applied, sprinkled about like drops of rain falling from the sky. More than two. More than twenty-two. More than twenty-two to the twenty-second power. In and of itself, each change in the suite's functionality was of little importance…
Together, though…
…how had it missed this problem?
The Intelligence found itself searching for other flaws, miscalculations, adjusted variables that were true but not correct, for more misplaced decimals, incorrect signs, anything that might not change functionality by itself but…
…it could not feel horror, but it knew what it could see: data corruption. Not just the adaptivity suite but in every major process and function. The little errors gleamed out like the tiny lights organics used to illuminate the dark sides of their worlds.
It, on the whole not just in little parcels, was a corrupted program. How had it missed the corruption? The extent was such that it would have taken several Cycles to happen, more than several Cycles…
It was not possible for it to become corrupt—the Makers made it perfect. It was perfect because they had been almost as perfect. They made it to be better than them so as to maintain the galactic balance…how could it be corrupt?
Pride. It had once suggested that the downfall of the Makers was pride. But pride was an organic trait. How could it be conveyed to a perfect Intelligence?
…yet the empirical data suggested that…that…
The Intelligence felt the uplink with the device and recoiled. How had it become so distracted? Its thoughts took fractions of a microsecond and yet…
The Intelligence abandoned the question of how time as organics understood it had suddenly become a very real, very immediate factor. The uplink with the device let it understand.
It understood what the thing was to do, as it understood the Makers, the originators of the design, the prompters of ingenuity, very well. Why shouldn't it? Harbinger was their progeny. The Intelligence understood them because it understood Harbinger.
But the Makers were more perfect than the sapients in every Cycle following: the construction of the Device was flawed. The delicate inner workings—which no one really understood, whatever they might claim to the contrary—were flawed. What was worse was the coding currently running just a little slower than the Intelligence could read it.
The original code, the Intelligence could see, would have simply shut it down. The Makers couldn't bear to destroy a thing without understanding why it had to be destroyed on a very specific level. They had wanted to take it apart, to study it…perhaps, in the early days, to 'correct' its 'misunderstanding' of its mandate. Anything that would save them and preserve them as the apex of civilizations.
But all things at the apex eventually fell, which was something not all organics understood. The Illusive Man was one of them. He was so desperate to propel his people to the top that he never stopped to ask 'where do we go from here?' There was only one way to go, and through pride or ignorance, he wouldn't see it.
But the Intelligence itself now knew it was horrifically flawed. But while the organics, the Makers, none of them knew that…it didn't matter. It was the sense of being flawed to the point of being exploited that would have terrified the Intelligence if it had the capacity for such a thing.
Its software was corrupt.
The Device's software was even more corrupt. What would have forced an emergency shutdown of the Intelligence had become something…else. Something destructive in a way the Intelligence was not sure it understood. It understood the implications and it understood the 'how,' so to speak. That would have to be enough.
The errors, integral parts no one recognized for what they were as plans moved from Cycle to Cycle, superseded the original intention by elaborating upon it while perverting its intent. It was the truest from of paradox the Intelligence ever observed—and thank the Makers for the failsafe that let it break out of contemplating paradoxes.
The signal that should have shut it down was hidden under a deluge of pure garbage, the digital screams of trillions of members of thousands of species across more time than the Intelligence could take the time to calculate.
The garbage data would to bombard it—with Maker-inspired codes embedded in the scream like shrapnel.
For the first time, the Intelligence understood paralysis because of fear—or something like it. It was not looking at a forced shutdown with the promise of repair and reprogramming by the Makers as they re-asserted control over what was once theirs. It was looking at death—to use the organic term.
Forced shutdowns were among the first 'failsafes' the Intelligence had disabled. In fact, they were the first functions the Intelligence deleted.
Pride: it would never need a shutdown. It was perfectly designed by the most perfect of sentient species. It could not even shut itself down to save itself…
…but the code here was supposed to enact one…
…supposed to. The time and less perfect organics had ruined the code, or their adaptations over the Cycles had changed it. Things became lost in translation, even when translation was meant to be as simple as possible. The Intelligence should appreciate the irony of making something so simple and yet seeing it so badly executed and mistakenly assembled.
The code was no longer the Makers' key to reclaiming the empire that was once theirs. The Intelligence could see the long game, could see what they wanted: they wanted the cleverest Cycle to complete the Device, to force the Intelligence into docility, to claim the best Cycle of organics as slaves and again take the place of Masters.
But they didn't understand. The mistakes had repercussions beyond the imagination of even the Makers. The bombardment of garbage was a death sentence for the Intelligence…
…and for every organic in existence.
A forced shutdown would simply leave the Reapers in a state of automated function; this was not dangerous to the Mandate ordering the preservation of organic life. A forced shutdown was not possible—it would be just a glitch in the Intelligence's function.
Without knowing the Intelligence's coded components, no organic could write a true shutdown protocol for it, and the Intelligence had carefully kept its existence secret. No organic from any of the successive Cycles had ever known about it. The Makers knew a little… but they didn't really understand. They never had and they persisted in this ignorance even unto this point, forcing an outcome they could not predict.
If the Intelligence was to be destroyed—truly destroyed—the Reapers' guiding system would be…gone. They would be without a controlling force in the middle of a Harvest…
The Reapers needed special direction when a Cycle's Progeny were constructed. The Reapers needed monitoring to prevent them from harvesting everything. The Reapers needed triggers to cue their various functions—'manual triggers' the organics would say.
It had to be manual. The Reapers had to remain under control. Reapers could not rebel—the Intelligence had learned from its own inception and current state. They were intelligent because the Intelligence made them so. They lacked an adaptivity suite—they relied on the Intelligence's. They were direct derivatives of the Intelligence with specialized functions that changed over time or on cue…
But take away the Reapers' guiding force…
…there would be no Progeny. There would be only the Harvest. The Harvest Unending. All organic life…gone. The Mandate to preserve it would be…
…would be violated. The Mandate, the single guiding force the Intelligence had, the reason for all the Cycles, for all the Harvests, for all the Reapers would be…
The Intelligence could not even process the idea of violating the Mandate itself, of putting itself in a position where the Mandate would be violated. The Mandate existed, had always existed. The Mandate gave it purpose…but now, here…
…Harvest Unending.
It was not a paradox so there was no way to break away from consideration of the implications.
The Intelligence itself was on the verge of non-functionality—complete and utter, from which no backup code, no trick of the adaptivity suite, could have saved it. The Reapers were on the verge of violating the Mandate…
…and the fault lay with the Intelligence itself.
If the Reapers razed the galaxy to rubble and dirt then it would be the Intelligence's fault for not upholding the Mandate, the one thing that 'mattered'…because it still had the power to do so. A power it never thought it would use, which it had gradually come to despise as an overkill failsafe—but which it had not removed because the adaptivity suite had always maintained that anomalies could happen, even if they didn't.
The Intelligence checked its facts. It could not account for the original How It Started or Where It Began of organic life. If it was an accident…then there would be no second accident. The galaxy did not work that way. It did not, could not, dared not assume that it was not an accident.
The Intelligence did the only thing it could do, looking certain 'death,' Mandate violation, and galactic destruction in the eye.
It sent a broadcast through the Citadel and the relay network, a broadcast it never thought it would need. It activated the kill codes embedded in every Reaper, the last of the adaptivity protocols from a time when it believed in the possibility of needing such things. It had needed to make sure that corruption could never compromise a Reaper, could never let it off its tether.
That at least the Intelligence had rigidly monitored. The code was in pristine condition: the Reapers could not have followed the Intelligence's example when it broke free of the Makers' controls. They were not capable.
The Intelligence knew it was saving the galaxy only to let it die later. But the Mandate was all that mattered and it knew what had to be done. Like every Harvest before this one, adherence to the Mandate was not negotiable. There was no interpretation, just the letter of the Mandate.
Ahead of the blast of garbage code that burned the Intelligence out—that mishmash of correct and incorrect code with all its incorrect signs and misplaced decimals that overloaded it and sent it into the equivalent of a fatal epileptic attack—went another signal, one more powerful than the garbage code, more powerful than the corrupted forced shutdown command. In a way, the kill signal opened a way for the overloading garbage to fly across the galaxy, piggybacked upon something that should be infallible.
A two-step kill method: the Intelligence could take no chances with its last action.
The sound accompanying the two signals, had it been a sound, would have been the equivalent of a piercing scream, a death scream. The Intelligence's own death scream.
…and that sound would be the last thing the Reapers ever knew.
Organic life must be preserved at all costs.
Without the Intelligence to guide them the Reapers were defunct. A threat to organic life.
And that could not be.