"Need a hand, Shepard?"
Evangeline blinked and looked up from her omni-tool to see Tali staring down at her with as much of an amused expression as an opaque visor without a mouth could convey. Her first instinct was to deactivate her 'tool, change the subject for a couple of minutes, then make a graceful exit as soon as she could. But that would be stupid and amateur, and Evangeline Shepard was neither.
"Just tinkering."
"You've been tinkering a lot lately," Tali observed. "It seems every minute I've seen you outside of combat for the past few days, you've been doing something to your omni-tool. Are you working on anything in particular?"
"I'm adding some shield upgrades and beam weapon function to the combat drone app," Shepard lied. "Probably our last chance before the Relay Run. Anything to give us an edge, right?"
Tali's head cocked. "You aren't nervous, are you? If you've told us all this time we're surviving what's supposed to be a suicide mission, and now you aren't sure . . ."
Her tone was light, but there was a frisson of real nervousness beneath it. Shepard rushed to reassure her. "Oh, we're surviving. Just doing everything I can to make sure, just like I have this whole time."
"You'll test everything before the Relay Run, though, right?" Tali asked. "I don't have to tell you it's a bad idea to go into battle with unbeta'd tech. The last thing you want is for your drone app to explode your arm in combat because you forgot to stress test its compatibility with your suit shields and incineration tech under fire."
"Do I look like a first-year engineer to you or something?" Shepard asked.
She heard the smile in Tali's voice. "Oh, alright. But you know I worry."
"Get out of here!" Evangeline teased, waving her arm at the quarian. Tali laughed and headed back up to Gardner's counter for her specialty nutri-shake, made in an environmentally sealed blender and served in a sterilized cup. Evangeline watched her long enough to make it clear she hadn't left because of her conversation with Tali, then brought her own empty tray to the sink and headed for the elevator.
She'd have to be more careful. Tali was one of the last people she wanted to know about what she was actually doing with her omni-tool. First, because Tali was probably the first person who would be able to understand it, and second, because Tali had the most reason to panic.
It wasn't like she was adding intelligence protocols to her combat drone program or messing around with its core programming. She wasn't actively trying to turn it into an AI. She was just adding data receptors to its tech body and to the omni-tool in general.
And giving the program access to those receptors even in sleep mode.
And formalizing the app's access to all her omni-tool's translation programs.
And downloading several more, as well as other language programs.
None of it would effectively make Splodey an artificial intelligence. She just wanted to see if it would access the new sensors and language software, that was all. As an experiment.
No one had ever taken notes on the actual process of an application like Splodey transcending its original purpose and programming. That was what Evangeline told herself when she thought about how ridiculously dangerous her little experiments probably were. People usually noticed much later in the process, when the once-VI had already gone rogue and murderous, like Hannibal on Luna, or become something you could actually term sapient, like with the geth. Then one side or the other made a preemptive strike, just assuming organic and synthetic lifeforms couldn't coexist.
But what if that whole story played out different? What if the organic who discovered the aspiring AI didn't automatically assume the thing would turn evil? What if the aspiring AI didn't immediately encounter hostility and enslavement from organics? What if it was helped on its journey for self-actualization instead? It could have enormous implications for Normandy's relationship with EDI, for the quarian relationship with the geth, for all AI developed in the future.
PapĂ hadn't raised her to think small, anyway. "Evangeline, mi amor," he'd said, in the Houston Tejano accent he hadn't lost in years married to her Cajun mother or in living on Mindoir, "is that the best way this can work? What does your head tell you?"
Evangeline's head told her there was a more efficient solution to the AI problem than "kill or enslave all the robots." And that she'd better do everything she could about this weirdness that had dropped into her lap before Normandy went through the Relay. She'd already copied the Splodey application to a Normandy terminal and to a cloud data drop on the extranet, though neither copy was live or could go live without her activation or a compatible host device. Both were effectively just lines of code, albeit the very interesting, adapting code she'd found in her omni-tool three days ago.
Splodey was alive. It wasn't intelligent yet, as far as she could tell. Or not very. But she was almost positive it had tried to talk to her. Some stuff in the logs made her think it might have also talked to Legion and EDI, though neither of the synthetics was saying (Evangeline didn't blame them). But whatever happened, it deserved a chance to see if it could learn to do more than scan a single device or a closed intraship network, to see if it could say more than "hi" in every language downloaded in a standard omni-tool spacer translation suite.
But that didn't mean Tali had to know about it yet.
