Archived
There was a planet of red. It was cold and dead, it's only signs of any activity being the occasional storm wreaking havoc.
Below the surface, there was a structure, inert. It had been in that state for tens of thousands of years. But something caused all of it's systems to activate. An anomaly in the form of an unknown life sign. The life form had appeared in the structure's central chamber, accompanied by a bright flash of light.
Bob was feeling groggy. The cold surface beneath him didn't help his situation.
He slowly opened his eyes, and was surprised at the lack of light around him. Bob looked around, and saw that he was in a large room with nearly pitch-black walls, and a strange monument in the center.
He got up, and started walking towards it warily, ready to book it the moment something happened.
Bob stopped at something that looked suspiciously like a console. He stared at it warily for what felt like an hour. Then he poked it with his finger.
He jumped back when suddenly a loud humming noise came from the monument. The entire room suddenly lit up, bathed in bright green light. Bob noticed that a series of symbols had appeared on the console in front of him. He pressed something that looked like a button.
Suddenly, a holographic display appeared. There were more symbols on it arranged in a way like a menu of some sort.
Bob had suspicions nagging at the back of his mind, but when he pressed another symbol, and saw what appeared on the display next, nearly gave him a heart attack.
He knew he was in the Mass Effect universe. How? The holographic display in front of him had been separated from the middle. On one side, a video of human mating was playing, and on the other side was a video that looked suspiciously like a prothean mating ritual.
Occasionally small boxes appeared, filled with symbols and pointing at things in the videos with arrows.
„I didn't know the protheans were this thorough in their research," Bob muttered to himself, astonished and disturbed by the sight in front of him.
When he finally realized where he was, he felt excited and scared at the same time.
He was on the Prothean Archives right under Mars. But he noticed that there were no objects that even remotely looked like something the humans could have brought there.
He was slowly starting to panic.
„Alright, alright, think! Why are there no humans except me? Maybe they just arrived?" He asked himself, looking around frantically. He then spotted an object that looked suspiciously like a door, with a small glowing panel next to it.
Bob ran over to the object, slammed the panel and felt a small amount of relief when the door opened. He went outside the chamber to explore.
A few hours had passed, and Bob was sitting in front of the data cache, crying.
There was nothing in the entire research base but the cache, some rooms that looked like a recreational area, and of course a small hangar with about a dozen prothean shuttles.
He had tried to operate one, but could only figure out how to close and open the doors.
A few minutes passed, and he decided to see if he can find anything useful in the data cache. He got up and slowly waddled over to the console.
Hours had passed, and he had only found out that the protheans studied humans by implanting them with chips that connected to their brain. Then they came back after a few years, picked the human up and extracted the chip. By extracted, it meant they violently ripped it out of the human's brain without any sort of concern for the test subject's survival.
So there he was, staring at the footage as the ancient humans hunted, ate, and sleep.
Bob closed the video, and kept skimming the cache's information. He came across what seemed to be technical information on the protheans themselves.
He started looking through it with little excitement, knowing he was very likely doomed already.
But then he came across something very interesting. There was an image in front of him. Blueprints of the shuttles in the hangar, to be more exact. He pressed a symbol on the panel, knowing it would give him a more detailed look of it. The display went a little larger and gave a more detailed look of the blueprints. Then suddenly a small object came up from the console.
He touched it carefully, and then the world disappeared. He felt as if his brain was on fire as information from the cache was being streamed into his mind. He was unable to move for minutes, until the data cache was done with it's sudden info-dump and let Bob slump down onto the cold floor.
Bob was holding his head tightly between his hands, as if afraid it would explode otherwise.
He knew the amount of information dumped in his brain was small, but it still hurt like hell.
He slowly sat up, grimacing in pain, and looked around just in case to see if the research base was still there. It was, and his grimace deepened. Bob had almost hoped he would wake up from a dream.
He waited for the pain to subside. When it was more bearable, he started pondering.
Bob was searching his mind for anything new or out of place. He soon found it, a jumbled mess of unfamiliar words and memories. He slowly stood up, and started walking towards the hangar, driven by a nagging suspicion at the back of his head.
Bob was sitting in one of the shuttles. He was looking at the buttons and symbols, slowly, one by one figuring out what they were supposed to mean with the help of the new memories and information in his mind. Soon, he pressed what he hoped were the necessary buttons to start up the shuttle.
Amazingly, they were. The shuttle started humming, and small lights came on. Bob then started manipulating the shuttle's mass effect field with a series of buttons.
The prothean shuttle was slowly rising into the air as Bob readied it's systems for flight.
Even though he had the memories of a prothean operating the shuttle, he got overconfident, as he soon found out. He accidentally pressed a wrong button, and throughout the hangar a teeth-rattling crash could be heard as the shuttle plummeted back to the ground.
The tiny mass effect core went unstable, flooding the hangar with element zero.
Bob was feeling worse than ever before. He was sure half of his ribs were broken. He slowly pushed himself off the broken control panel, and started stumbling out of the shuttle, leaning onto the walls for support. He nearly got out, when suddenly the mass effect core detonated, blowing the shuttle in half, and vaporising everything inside.
Hundreds of years later, the humans would officially discover the prothean Archives on Mars, find the security footage of the prothean research facility from 500 years ago, and wonder:
„Why the fuck didn't that guy just use the auto-pilot?"
Credit: Chaszcz for the idea
Sorry it took me this damn long to upload the next chapter. Life, the fat bastard, decided to use me as a punching bag this week.
Hopefully I'll have another chapter up later today, or tomorrow, to make up for it.