- - -
INSPIRED
MASS
- - -
Location: Milky Way / Local Cluster / Sol system
Date: 2170 (22 months later)
Guns - 5
Mathematics - 15
Engineering - 6
Chemistry - 6
Biology - 6
Biological Engineering - 6
Computer Programming - 15
Mass Effect: Technology - 10
Mass Effect: Quarian Enviro-suits - 5
HALO: Shields - 3
Star Trek: Replicator - 1
Civilization Beyond Earth: Molecular Forge - 7
Stargate: Alteran Molecular Construction Device - 5
"You keep smiling like that and your face might get stuck that way," the cheery voice of Sergeant Major (SgtMa) Jill Dah enthusiastically declared, breaking me out of my revelry.
I couldn't help it. For the first time in two years I was gazing out at the blue sky of Earth, only the occasional bird or skycar breaking up the painfully familiar picture. Part of me had thought I'd adapted, that over the past almost two years the eternal corridors of ship-board life had become my new normal, but the tight feeling in my chest had shown that to be a lie. I looked across the restaurant table to my guests, a smile still stretched across my alien features behind a faceplate so open and clear that it would be considered scandalously risque back on the Fleet, and shrugged helplessly.
It had been a long, perilous journey to get here, but I had made it.
She just shook her head and chuckled at my utterly unrepentant joy.
When I had arrived on Earth, via a normal passenger transport much to my surprise, I had been worried it would take me weeks of jumping from one illegal ship to another. Instead, I had been greeted by the two people across from me. One was expected, Commander David Anderson welcoming me to Earth as I stepped off the shuttle. The other, Jill, was a surprise. Apparently, she was a surprise to David as well, but a welcomed one.
She had been on a separate shuttle that had landed before mine, and was catching up with David when I'd disembarked. From there, it was quick introductions between them, me, and my three traveling companions
It hadn't taken long for Jill's connection to the Commander to be revealed. She'd served with Anderson's unit during the First Contact War, and it was still only just now sinking in to me that it had only been twelve years and change since the Turians showed everyone how large the stick up their ass was. They'd kept in touch after, and she'd eventually showed up on the SSVHastings to serve with David again. She had a nickname, "Amazon," and it wasn't hard to figure out why. At six-foot-three, and known for her aggression in the field, "Amy," as her friends were allowed to call her, cut a distinctive image.
Hell, she was an inch taller than Anderson.
After the introductions between the humans and the few other quarians I had brought along with me, the others had begged off to go find a hotel room and unwind after the journey. I couldn't blame them for that, after what we'd been through, and if the humans hadn't greeted us I would have joined them. So, with a fair amount of credits in their accounts and a recommendation from David for a place to stay, we went our separate ways.
David grinned at me, "You look like a man on his first shoreleave."
"Kind of feels that way," I admitted lazily. "Been looking forward to coming to Earth for so long, it's a little surprising that I'm actually here."
Jill leaned back in her chair, signaling a waiter with a pair of fingers in the air. "Is it everything you hoped for?"
"Can't complain so far," I answered after a moment of consideration, more for their benefit than mine, trying not to seem more eager than a Quarian should. I was home, even if not really, but there was no way to explain that. "The welcome here is much better than it was on the Citadel, anyway."
"It couldn't have been that bad," Anderson frowned, his reaction telling me he'd never been on the truly massive space station before.
"My Pilgrimage...excluding one incident...has to have been the easiest one any of my people have had thus far in our history. Yet it has been far from easy," I started to explain. "My fellows and I started our journey on Erinle, a Salarian colony in the Osun System the Migrant Fleet was close to. That's deep in Terminus space," I paused, remembering how little most Humans still knew of the political situation of the galaxy as a whole, "think of Earth's Wild West, but worse. It's known as a major refueling port for shipping coming from Citadel space, so it was a relatively safe place to drop some of us off. The Fleet transport stopped just long enough to recover six other Quarians who had been there and completed their Pilgrimage, and to drop us twelve off."
Not said was that there should have been twenty Quarians being picked up. Or that I had chosen to take the Pilgrimage as soon as possible. Anderson still hadn't asked about my age, and I wasn't in a hurry to tell him.
"Normally when you get dropped off," I continued to explain, "you just have your suit, a sack of supplies - food and medicine and such-, and enough credits to last a week. That's all you get. Oh, you can always return home early if things are too difficult, but you'll be ridiculed for years, and possibly never accepted into a ship's community. The other issue there is that trying to get back to the Fleet without a ship of your own is damn near impossible, so you have to show up at scheduled stops for pick up. And that can be difficult if you don't have the funds to travel."
"That sounds annoying. And poorly planned," Jill frowned. "You can't send evac?"
I shook my head, and paused as the waiter showed up, offering to get refreshments. He accepted my request for water, and then made a point of asking if I was a dextro or levo eater, which I appreciated. My response of "don't worry about it" and waving off the question left him a bit confused, but he soon rallied and moved off to collect the drinks.
"Anyway," I declared after organizing my thoughts so I could answer the woman's question, "We don't have the ships, ironically, but more than that it isn't meant to be easy. While the Pilgrimage has a legitimate purpose in how it sends out people to gather things that might help the community, I've always felt the real purpose of the Pilgrimage was to get rid of people who don't have the mental fortitude and adaptability to survive our way of life. There is a reason eighty-five percent of all people who go on Pilgrimage return safely. And those that don't return, it is usually because our Pilgrims found a new life somewhere. Only around three percent of our pilgrims are trapped somewhere, and when we can we try to get them free. Only two percent of our pilgrims are lost because of death."
Normally that information wasn't public, but that's what happens when you're a bored kid with near-supernaturally good computer skills. You start digging in databases you weren't ever supposed to find. The Fleet as a whole thinks that something like ninety-five percent of people return, and the other five percent are killed. No one wants the news of family members choosing to join small Quarian communities on Oma Ker or Cyone in Citadel space. Not that those places are good places to go, per say, but it's another option to Fleet life that the Admiralty would rather keep hidden.
Officials lying to the people to maintain power and control? Some things were universal.
"So they just drop you off with nothing but the clothes on your back and a couple bucks? Harsh." David grimaced as he spoke, and I had to admit when put that way it sounded bad.
"It could be worse," I offered, even as I winced, the words sounding hollow even to me. "Still, I'm not like other Quarians and I've been preparing for this trip for years."
"Right, your side business," David broke into a smile that made him look a decade younger. "I'm sure that gave you a leg up."
I nodded at that, a smaller matching smile on my own face. "More than a little. Still, we aren't supposed to have anything to help us. So I had to wait for the Fleet to leave before I made my move with the others."
"Your move? Isn't this thing supposed to be a test?" Jill was leaning back in, looking interested. "And what moves could you make? Are you Zod Bond?"
"I do have a license to... code," I quipped, getting a short bark of laughter from the woman. "Of course I'd help them. You didn't think I would just let the others who left with me flounder? No, after the Fleet had left I gathered all of us together and offered them a chance to come with me as far as the Citadel. Of the other eleven, eight came with me. So I took the credit allowance the Fleet gave me and split it with them so they would have a little extra, and wished them well."
David gave a slow nod of understanding at that, "Generous of you."
Jill frowned, "But then you didn't have any money. What did you do to travel?"
"I paid for it," I answered, smiling wide. I leaned forward, arms resting on the table as I bragged a bit, "My job doing freelance programming has paid very well, even kicking most of it back to the Fleet, which I was perfectly fine with. Between that seed money, and a few choice investments, I could have easily bought a small ship and flown it here."
Anderson frowned at that. "Didn't you say bringing a ship back was grabbing the brass ring for a pilgrim?"
I frowned and leaned back in my chair, and nodded, trying to figure out how to explain this next bit. I'd thought it would be a harder sell, with how well Humans got along with the Citadel races, but my experiences from the games colored my perspective. With two First Contact War vets, they'd likely believe my story, which had the benefit of being true, but that didn't mean much.
The waiter picked that moment to return and drop off drinks. After a few minutes to see if the two were humans ready to pick something to order, only to be told they needed more time, the waiter left and I continued on, "In retrospect, it was a good thing I didn't do that."
I ran a hand over the top of my helmet, anxious to be able to run fingers through my hair as it helped with my frustration. "When we arrived at the Citadel, C-Sec took us all in for questioning. 'Suspicious behaviour' they said. Then they made a big show about how none of us were in the Citadel's system."
"Of course you weren't," Jill offered, confused, "you'd only just gotten there."
"Exactly, but try telling them that," I sighed, shaking my head in annoyance.
I had known I would suffer racism and prejudice when I left the safety of the Fleet and joined the wider galaxy. I'd already been running into it. Even my online exposure had shown that it would certainly be commonplace. I thought I had been ready for it.
I was wrong.
It was the first time in my second life that I had broken down and cried, because even with my power, my capabilities, I was completely helpless. "They threw me and the others into a cell meant for two people. Said we would be more comfortable if we were packed in together like it was back at home. That was annoying, but then they threatened to remove our suits to 'check us for weapons' even though the scanners could see everything anyway. They did it, knowing it'd likely kill most of us, they even grabbed Lelu and started to do it until we begged them to stop. Made us get on our knees. Then they took our food and medicine as 'contraband.' It wasn't, the Fleet's careful about that sort of thing. We never got that back."
I grit my teeth. "The worst part was when they tried to claim I must have "stolen" someone else's tickets because there was no way a Quarian could have afforded it for one person, never mind the others. Took five days for them to get in touch with the ticket office and confirm it had been me who purchased the tickets. It takes about five minutes to get a response, by the way. Then those so-called 'law enforcement agents' tried to claim I must have stolen the credits for it. Fuckers would have tried to pin that on me if the purchase record hadn't put me buying them in Terminus space and thus outside of Citadel law."
Fucking Turians.
One of the things that'd made it all so much worse was that there were a couple of Humans working there as well. I'd thought they'd be better, but they'd been taking their cues from how the Turian's were acting towards us, and then doubled down on it to fit in. If it hadn't been for a Salarian who took pity on us, mostly by pointing out that no charges had been filed against us and that we were taking up space in the jail, we likely would still have been there.
"Eventually," I continued, after a long moment, "I managed to get some new supplies and book passage from that polished turd they call the Citadel to Eden Prime, where most of the others parted ways. We were there for a few days," which let me remake the specialty rations the Turians had stolen, "and from there we four reached Earth without issue." With a sigh of exhaustion I added, "That wasn't easy traveling either, getting a lot of pretty hostile looks from people who hadn't seen a Quarian before or had bought into the stories told about us being thieves, and I thought we would never find a legitimate captain willing to ferry us. But we found one after a bit, and got here."
I made it.
"You made it," David smiled as he echoed my thoughts. "I'm glad you did, Zod. Although I have to admit I'm curious about what you're going to do now that you are here. You were always vague about that."
I had to fight the giggle that threatened to explode out of me at that. After almost two years of working and using my advanced mathematical knowledge to build an honest-to-god recipe for fortune out of the galactic stock market -able to run in the background and just make money off the market's inefficiencies- with only a little light hacking to help things along, I had enough funds to last for however long it went undetected. And, if I was right, that would be a long, long time.
All those investments into Mathematical knowledge, which had seemed so useless at first, got stupidly powerful as they built upon each other over time. It hadn't been into the double digits that it'd started to pay off, finally moving from theoretical into the practical, but I'd learned how to effectively wield math like the conceptual weapon it was. Issac Newton might be the deadliest motherfucker in space, but he hasn't got shit on me and finance.
Linear optimization targeted companies and their resources to determine who was shipping products versus who was just blowing smoke in their boardrooms. Nonlinear programming helped me model which companies were surging ahead versus those falling behind in their respective fields (that one had helped me realise that the idiots on Illium were falling behind on the construction schedule for a new power plant, something the company wasn't telling anyone and I'd short sold the stock soon enough before the news broke to avoid regulators). Variational calculus and dynamic programming had gotten me the rest of the way, helping to extensively model the galactic economy on a quad of trashed and rebuilt-by-me parallel run VI in all its glory. None of this was easy, which was probably why no one else had done it.
Heck, anyone with the skills was probably working in some black-ops lab instead of playing around in the stock market, or so full of themselves that they got arrogant, got greedy, and got caught. No, this was stupidly intricate and detailed, especially as it related to economic growth and the stability of various smaller economic systems. Pillage and raid would be easy, but to skim enough to not be noticed was more difficult. And, working in one area, wouldn't've been worth the effort. Working in almost every sector, however, was a nice chunk of change.
All of that was to say, if the Volus knew what I knew about the inner workings of the economy? They'd send countless assassins after me, laws be damned, because the kind of thing I was doing could only be done by a single source per market. And the Volus had shown how little they cared about things like laws or morality if profit was to be made, as evidenced by how the Volus that'd screwed me got a slap on the wrist, and then paid the fine with half of the money he'd stolen from me.
At some point, I might actually need to hire some krogans to be my bodyguards if I ever feel like stepping on the Citadel or going anywhere near Turian space again. When one knew enough to see the shifts in the tides of finance, the way the banking clans have managed to siphon funds from every transaction, each individual change adding a number so small and sending it to the Vol Protectorate that it was almost impossible to find, was impressive. Very Office Space. It was small, yet with trillions of transactions happening every day, that number grew very quickly.
On one hand, stealing from the Turians to pay the tribute they demanded was karmically amusing. The fact they stole from everyone else, however, put them on their oppressor's level. I could tweak it enough to show the others exactly what the Volus were doing, but I'd have to be strong enough to survive the backlash, and I wasn't anywhere close to that level.
Yet.
"I've had a thought or two," I smile behind my mask. "Admittedly, my first concern is helping the Quarian people. Although what is best for the Quarians and what is best for the Admiralty Board isn't usually the same thing. I'm thinking we Quarians could use some friends," I offered, and wasn't that the truth.
Math was good for more than just economics. It was one of the purest disciplines for a reason, and, once you started to hit a critical mass, it started to leak into other fields, slowly, drip feeding bits of knowledge as everything started to line up into an enormous pattern. And I knew a lot about a great many subjects. For months now I've been sitting on inventions that could change things radically. Stronger weapons, tougher shields, and the like.
More than that, I was starting to get a handle on things you could do with mass effect fields that were little better than fucking magic, or miracles, to those who'd been studying it the normal, scientific way. Or had been sucking on the teat of the Protheans, like the Asari, cribbing their homework and passing it off as their own. Now, I was only hampered by a lack of ability or means.
Jill and David glanced at each other, before shrugging at me in response. I smiled at them as I lazily explained, "I've got some ideas I might like to run by you. And maybe Hackett next time I see him."
Anderson lifted a single eyebrow, before slowly starting to say, in a way that made it sound like he really didn't want to hurt my feelings, "I know we've been friends for awhile, Zod, but I don't have the kind of the pull needed to get you a job just because you have a few ideas."
That stung more than I thought it would. "Cause I'm a Quarian?" I asked, trying to keep the hurt off my face. I'd thought David was above this kind of thing.
"God no," the human immediately held up a hand, looking almost physically pained. "I just mean that I'm not in a position where I can pick people and toss them at my superiors so they get a job. I'm not that high up the pecking order yet." After a second he lowered his hand and added, carefully questioning, "Besides, if your stuff is as good as you think, why the hell are you coming to us with them. Why not sell them to a larger company, or use them yourself?"
"Uh," I eloquently began, having expected him to agree. 'Right' I told myself, 'You didn't want to cause problems, so you didn't tell him, but you didn't tell him, so he doesn't know'. "Several reasons. First, because if I sell it to another company it isn't mine. No, that's… I have some ideas that I'm willing to sell, because they're completely helpful, but some of the things can be… misused, and I'd like to have some sort of control over what gets done with the stuff I'm putting out. I've looked into the Alliance, and you guys are better than most when it comes to not pulling the kinds of things that the Turians have. Like building planet crackers."
"They what?" Anderson demanded. "But they told us. . ."
I gave a derisive snort. "Turians say a lot of things. Like how an uncontacted species should become a servitor, sorry, client race because they broke a treaty they weren't a party to, with a government they didn't know existed. And they're effectively the Citadel's military."
I hesitated, wondering if I should say it out loud. 'They don't know,' I had to remind myself, adding, "Also I'm a Quarian. That means starting my own business is more than a little difficult. And by that I mean functionally impossible."
The Amazon jumped back in. "What does that have to do with anything? Yeah, those cops were stupidly corrupt, and I believe you," she added, reading my expression, "but it can't be that bad."
David winced so hard in response that I thought he might have really hurt himself. The big man added, "No, Amy. It could be. I've asked around, and what I've heard… what happened to Zod is more common than I'd like to believe."
Nodding, I admitted, "Even I didn't expect it to be so bad, to be honest. We grow up being told how everyone hates us, treats us like trash, but until you step foot off The Fleet you don't really expect it. Something about having a fleet in orbit makes people nicer, go figure. And I didn't realize that they were being nice. "To compare it to something Humans might better understand, looking at your history, imagine a black man traveling from Ontario to Alabama in the mid-19th century. Or a Jew or Romani walking around 1930s Europe. Hate is something all intelligent species experience, and have to overcome in their own ways. Turns out most haven't." I nodded to Anderson. "But some have, at least a little. There's a reason that, with my skills, I came to Earth."
As silence descended upon the group once more, the waiter returned and asked to start taking our orders. After the two humans had given theirs, the waiter turned to me and asked, "And you, sir?"
Feeling a bit mischievous, and really wanting to raise the mood I just crushed, I looked to the waiter and then pointed at David as I said, "He knows what I want."
Anderson looked puzzled for a few seconds, before suddenly his eyes widened and he slowly drew out a disbelieving, "Nooooo."
"What?" Jill Dah looked back and forth between us, clearly confused.
"You didn't!" the Commander shot back with a smile, equal parts skeptical and excited.
I couldn't help the matching grin spreading behind my faceplate. "I did."
Slowly, I reached up to my helmet. Fun fact: while I didn't really have a lot of time to do any shopping while on the Citadel, with CSS breathing down my neck, that didn't stop me from doing any shopping at the other stops we made along the way to Earth. It was all impulse buying, really. A few tools here, a computer there, a couple of 3D and 4D printers, all of it fairly cheap and not going to raise any questions about a Quarian procuring.
It had taken me a solid week of just tinkering with stuff I bought to get anything done, but the results were worth it. The entire time, both to Eden Prime, and then Earth, the other Quarians and myself were holed up in a single room - although at least this was because of a lack of cabins instead of blatant racism/speciesism. It was kind of fun to be the teacher for a change, showing the other Pilgrims a small part of the things I knew, but had to keep secret on the Fleet lest someone in charge tried to keep me there. It also kind of solidified my status as the 'leader' of the group when they realized what I was working on.
Especially once I succeeded.
With a few taps of the electronic releases, and a hard twist of the manual seal, I carefully lifted the mask away from my face and took a deep breath of fresh Earth air. Between a slight adjustment to the OS on the implanted cybernetics that aided the immune system, and the ingesting of a pair of specialed viruses I'd managed to 'build' in my cheap-as-fuck lab, I'd made some much needed adjustments and repairs to our biology. Through them, I'd managed to not only find a fix to the problem with our immune system, but also our body's negative reactions to consuming levo-proteins.
Because Math.
It wasn't a permanent fix, that'd take rewriting our genetics to a point that the other Quarians wouldn't accept - although Human GeneMods might make a decent bridge between the two, but we'd only need to re-up the symbiotic viral load every few weeks with some specialty, shelf-stable rations. The basic recipe was such that it could be created fairly easily, and I'd made sure that every Pilgrim with me had a copy of it, with orders to spread it to every other Quarian they met. I knew I could probably have held the recipe ransom, trading favors and funds for it, but not only did I have other sources of income, I wouldn't deny any Quarian this freedom.
The enviro-suit would remain, of course, because it was both practical -comfortable armor one could wear anywhere without raising a fuss- and a part of our cultural identity at this point, but it was no longer the damn prison it used to be, that we'd had to carry at all times, and which had kept us separate from everyone and everything.
As Jill and David stared at me, blinking in disbelief along with the speechless waiter, I took a deep breath. Earth smelled a little different than I remembered, but I had a different nose, and it had been a little over a hundred years. That said, there was something unspeakably… right about it. Smiling broadly, I announced, "I believe I won our bet, David. I would like the scrambled eggs, please."