A/N: I've updated the Biotic Encyclopedia, OSABC, and this doc all in one day. The biggest holdups are beta reading and copy editing. I'll try to get another update or two done before Sunday.
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
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HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED
Dearest Jack, clever Richard, and lovely Rachel,
I must admit that your response to my historical document was vastly entertaining – who knew I could reduce elegant Richard to apoplectic spluttering? Did you really buy the salarian "oh we are all just absent-minded scientists, research research research" line?
How can you hope to dominate the galaxy when you are as naïve as a quarian on Pilgrimage?
I tease, but I am serious as well. You are correct, your analysis of the threat presented by the salarians was grossly off-base. I will not miss Agent Dasan, as his arrogant dismissal of the salarians as "tiny sneak thieves" was, of course, criminally stupid. If there is value in having a flower of Thessia in the garden of Terra, it is in the fact that I do not blind myself with preconceived notions. To handicap myself in such a way makes me vulnerable, not superior.
Ah, but life is embraced in the discovery of personal flaws. Flowers only grow through pavement when it cracks, after all. In that light, I am happy to give you what I can about the mindset of the salarians.
Do not underestimate them.
Cerberus Thought for the Day: Be strong in your ignorance of the alien. Curiosity, after all, did not help the cat in the end.
Salarian Priorities
I have spent several hours discussing the works of Maslow with Ms. Lawson. It is a fascinating work, and an insight into how fragmented and chaotic the human mind must be, that you must frame even your ability to exist in layers of urges and priorities.
The 'hierarchy of needs' posited by Dr. Minsta for the asari left me in gasping laughter. If there is an advantage to working with your group, it is to be found in the sheer entertainment value of watching a being who isn't even as old as most of my clothing attempt to fathom the mysteries of my entire race.
But perhaps there is wisdom in this approach, and it has the aura of the familiar to humans, so I will embrace it. As such, applying this ladder of needs to the salarians produces some interesting results.
Maslow foolishly ascribes motives such as "food" and "shelter" to a motivating needs structure. Even fire, which is not alive, pursues nourishment – that is not a motive. It is survival. Let us set aside these asinine entry points and focus on how a salarian defines self-esteem.
At it's most basic, humans define self-esteem, I think, through personal achievements and family. That is, the ties that bind most closely are to your immediate blood-kin, and measures of success are always predicated on your own goals and wants. A human who is a virgin will value sexual activity higher than popularity, but will not shun popularity if it leads to sexual activity. These 'goals' are all linked together, feeding one another and the concept of self.
The core concept of 'self' for a human (or, I must admit, an asari) will always be tied to their own perceptions. One can alter the framework these perceptions are made from,, but a human will not willfully delude themselves as to the nature of a thing once they are familiar with it. In this light, humanity's need to secure 'personal security' before they go after achievements or self-actualization is understandable. Human biological drives are those of a race who has never faced the reality of extinction.
Humans define freedom not as openness to concepts, but in the ability to determine one's own path. This is alien to many cultures, who rely on those above to do so. How can a maiden with a mere century of life know more about what to pursue in life than her matriarch who has lived ten times her span?
Salarians... well, salarians are more linear. A salarian's mind works on many levels simultaneously, but towards one goal or status. They are almost inverted from humanity. A salarian pursuits individual achievements and recognition first. Above personal safety, above family, above sexuality. Their highest calling is the achievement of actual worth, that allows them to define their value to society.
A salarian who is a brilliant scientist is valuable to his clan. A farmer who brings in massive amounts of money is also valuable. If the clan values advancement more than profit, however, the farmer is not valuable.
Salarians only reward success, and rather than build up supporting resource to lead to achievement and success, demand success and achievement to be allowed to build up supporting resources. Males can't even think about offspring, or owning a home, or alternatives like starting a family with an asari, until they feel their achievement provide evidence of their skills and prowess.
In other words, self-actualization provides self-esteem, which leads to family and security. In humans, family requires security, which requires self-esteem leading to achievement.
This reversal of importance is why salarians come off as humble and effacing to you people. A human who decided to become a billionaire before he had the confidence to feel good about himself or date a girl would be seen as … what is the word? A weirdo?
To salarians, rewards without proof of excellence is corrupting. A worker who is rewarded merely for showing up to work is insanity. Humans working jobs below their level of competence to pay for their child's education is lunacy.
More importantly, salarian perceptions of success are not based on a concept of self. In their mind, the self-assessment is the most worthless of things! Only when others acknowledge the achievement does the salarian take pride in it.
Salarians as individuals
On an individual basis, most salarians are psychologically simple. They have a long term goal they aspire to, which is usually either the chance to produce offspring or the chance to make their name important. This goal is a distant thing that they expect to consume their life. In pursuit of the goal, almost nothing else matters. As long as the goal is achievable, the salarian has a focus to their life that they cannot be shaken from.
Leading to that goal are a series of checkpoints, in their mind, of where they need to be in terms of achievements and acceptance. Salarians don't have 'self-esteem' – they merely determine if a thing can be done or not. They don't go after 'dreams' – they only pursue goals that are both plausible and reachable without heroic efforts.
The individual salarian does not think about 'his race' or 'his species', unlike asari. They have no universal feeling of brotherly or sisterly love. What they do have is an iron-lined determination to get to their planned goal, and a focus on planning the best way to achieve it.
Rewards come when the goal is achieved, and are rarely the goal itself. One doesn't want to have kids to engage in sex, but because being chosen to breed is a sign one is a valuable member of society. They seek importance not even to validate themselves, but to prove to others that such validation is needed, for they have aided the group.
It is hard to understand the difference this makes when reduced to clinical terms, so let me put it more plainly: a salarian doesn't sublimate their personal desires for the good of the group, as an asari might. Their personal desires are literally to be of service for the good of the group. It is not unity of thought and purpose, but rather the inability to perceive success as anything but this self-sacrifice. A salarian who is not chosen to breed doesn't resent the ones being called, rather, they simply accept their value is not worth that investment.
This makes salarians almost immune to depression and other mental maladies caused by lack of achievement. The salarian's goal or focus gives them a tangible and unalterable deterrent to disappointment and setback, as the goal will almost always require effort to achieve and as long as any progress is made, the salarian is pleased.
It also means salarians, very simply, do not "give up". They may shelve a goal for a period of time, but they neither forget it nor abandon it in the long term.
Salarians as clan families
Salarians do not have nuclear families. They have clan families based on a linage of females. Each clan has one and only one dalatrass. The dalatrass is a female (usually a daughter) hat carries out the will of the daltriana of the clan. The daltriana is the salarian female who is pregnant and lays eggs, increasing the family size.
A daltriana's only concern is preparing her daughter to take her place. She passes on wisdom and insight, and in time the daltriana dies. The dalatrass ascends. Males compete for her favor and the right to breed, either with her or with a daltriana of another clan in a swap.
The 'family' has some aspects similar to yours – a feeling of brotherly affection for siblings, a last name, etc. But it is also very different. There are no salarian 'father's that get to acknowledge their child as the eggs are usually fertilized by several different males to ensure diversity. The very nature of salarian childbirth ensures the 'father' is only around at the whim of the dalatrasses and daltriana.
A clan that is very successful may have multiple egg-laying females, who in private refer to each other as "sister". Due to the complex breeding relationships and the homogeneity of salarian RNA, inbreeding is not a factor but remains taboo, only used when the clutch is in danger of failure.
Salarian Males
Males are bombastic, full of themselves, and usually icy calm even under provocation. They are more aggressive than the female, and define themselves by dint of their achievement and prowess. Given to a flair for the dramatic and a curious lack of critical self-examination, the salarian male will usually focus on a given endeavor to the exclusion of all else.
Male salarians are particularly prone to hubris, as they are often blind to the effect of their actions or focus, preferring to see what humans call the 'big picture' and what salarians refer to as the wide view. A salarian mercenary does not stop to think of the lives he has ruined, because his focus is first on his value to his mercenary band and second on his personal combat prowess and how he must grow that.
Males, being so much more common than females, tend to defer to the female when it comes to clan family relationships and long-term decision making. This is due to the fact that the salarian male is impulsive and will often engage in decision making without following through on all possible outcomes, confidently secure that their actions, made in the intent of advancing the interests of the group, are justified.
Males can be sentimental, a flaw females do not have, and often form honor-based attachments to other males (alien or not). This kind of bonding serves a purpose, as it's often with a more powerful male, who will act to aid in defense of the salarian in question (and thus, aid the group), but it can lead to a more friendly set of actions as well, when the result outweighs the cost.
Males still have a streak of the old valor-honor based braggadocio somewhere in their heart of hearts. They will be flashy and witty when it strikes them, and their taste for the dramatic or creative lends them more interest in alien interests and people that females have.
Salarian Females
By contrast, the rare salarian females can be summed up as stubborn, insular, and dismissive of anything that doesn't benefit them personally. Females spend half their lives learning to lead, and half their lives incapacitated by egg-laying. Denied much opportunity for travel, exploration or to determine the path of their own lives, they instead retreat within duty to the family and close their minds to many alternatives.
The salarian survival instinct means that a salarian female's focus will always be the security and success of her offspring and mates, and nothing else. Dealing with the dalatrasses of Sur'Kesh is always a nightmare because every deal and negotiation must be framed in a light that lets the dalatrass find exclusive benefit for her and hers. There is no word, nor even a clear understanding of the concept, of charity or altruism in salarian culture or language.
To a female, her outlook depends on if she is a breeder or not. (The term sounds demeaning, but it's a literally straight translation from the salarian, "daltris" – to breed"). Young females are constantly being evaluated for their mental agility, charm, foresight, and physical endurance. Given their scarcity, the fact that they lead sheltered lives far away from the bustle of modern society should be a shock to no one. Only the most rare dalatrasses, such as the High Dalatrass, ever leave the world and participate in politics to any degree off of Sur'Kesh or their colonies. As a result, most young females are somewhat depressed, often shy and nervous, and constantly wondering if they offer any value to the clan.
Once a female turns 15, she is old enough to become one of the clan breeders. Usually, this involves being impregnated and laying her first clutch of eggs. These will become her "gift" to the clan, if the individuals born of this clutch show promise she will be placed in the lines of breeding. This is the goal of any younger salarian female, and they will resort to whatever it takes to achieve it.
Once they are breeding regularly, their minds fixate solely on the preservation of their clutch and clan, and ensuring advantage that leads to more opportunities for the same. Salarian females become more inflexible as they age, seeing themselves as the sole arbiters of life and acting as measuring sticks for salarian males. Being surrounded your whole life by people who literally live to impress you and serve you makes most females very unfit to judge the intent and purpose of those who are alien.
Finally, a key aspect of the female mindset is the understanding that as long as the clutch survives, the race survives. Salarian females will sacrifice almost everything in daring gambles for the ability to secure an advantage if they can be sure they will survive the outcome, regardless of the risk or damage. Unlike humans, who prefer that risk balances reward, salarians will engage in acts that on the surface seem too risky to chance, with the understanding that in a few short years any losses can be made up with a new generation of salarian offspring.
Emotional Shifts
Salarian emotions are powerful and mercurial. They sweep through a salarian and then move on quickly. The salarian mind, processing multiple lines of thought at once, doesn't slow down enough to allow long-term reflection.
Salarians can be angry, sad, or morose, or they can be happy and excited. Many salarians try to keep a tight rein on their emotions, as once they get carried away by them they can often go to extremes that normally they would not engage in.
Linking with them is fraught with danger, as the salarian mind is ever-shifting in how it views and interprets the cascades of data their nerves give them. I believe it is this overwhelming sensory input that drives them to move beyond emotions rapidly.
That being said, salarians are certainly not emotionless. While they move through emotional states quickly, 'quickly' can be a relative term. A salarian who loses a good friend will be sad for several days rather than weeks, one who loses an lover might take months to recover rather than years. Likewise, emotional flashpoints are also reached much quicker – salarians have, as a rule, hair-trigger tempers.
The salarian's mercurial emotional state also provides them with defenses against mental illnesses and the like. Salarians can be paranoid, but that is the only known real mental illness they suffer, and many of them view such paranoia as a survival instinct.
Salarian Ethics and Morality
Oh, Ms. Lawson's dry wit is at times a bit sharply razored for my taste, but she does have a certain faculty with words. Her view of salarian ethics was expressed to me as "the idea that if it's possible to achieve an act, however reprehensible, then it's possible to find a way to cover up doing it" struck me as apt.
Salarians do not have a word for 'ethics', and they have several words for morality. To them, morals are a measure of things that are good or bad. Murder, theft, treason, etc are bad. Working together, cooperation, respect, etc are good. The difference, in salarian minds, is that good and bad are merely properties, not absolutes.
A murder that saves ten lives is not 'bad' in salarian eyes. Theft of a product that wasn't properly protected is merely prudence. The viewing of morality as a property of an action, not something inherent in the action, reduces most salarian activities to merely balancing benefits versus costs. Salarians have no concept of the human idea of "sin" and see morality more as a method of determining if a given course of action's drawbacks outweigh it's costs.
The exposure of salarians to alien cultures, particularly the guilt-ridden and ancestor-worshiping turians, did not introduce any hesitance in salarians to go to any lengths possible to achieve their goals, but did introduce a concept called 'mithra'. Mithra is the closest thing salarians have to an ethical framework, and it's premise is abominable – as long as an act cannot be traced back to the originator, evil is non-existent. It is the logical follow through to a concept that only accountability imparts guilt, and that only the observer can judge actions.
Salarians will perform any act, no matter it's brutality, and as long as they aren't caught doing it, they do not see it as a crime. On the flip side, salarians who commit illegal or unethical acts and are apprehended or otherwise identified are seen as failures and surrendered for punishment or executed.
The crime is not in the act, but in allowing the act to be seen. I cannot say that this mindset is particularly understandable to me, or in fact to any other alien species. Even batarians understand that murder is morally wrong, and they do it because they see other races as lesser beings, not because they feel murder is acceptable. Salarians, on the other hand, will happily murder even each other on an individual basis if it strengthens the clan family and have no qualms about any form of act if they can cover it up.
This is, sadly, my main reason for not really having a problem with Cerberus – the most disgusting and vile actions your group has taken would not stir the sands of the beach compared to the monstrosities the salarians engage in. Living vivisections, experiments on children, twice enabling genocide and the creation of the Disimulat nano-plague weapons are just few of the things that can be laid at their feet. Salarians operating within Eclipse have turned that group from the mere darkness of Jona Sedris's anger to drug-running slavers, murderers, and arsonists, and the premier mercenary groups of salarian origin like Foresight and Unlimited have taken some of the most criminal contracts in history. Only salarians would make money from capturing poor people and using them to create organ farms.
Not all salarians embody this form of ethics. Some of the more eccentric salarians have taken up religious or philosophical stances that impart a different level or focus in ethical behavior. Additionally, most salarians in the medical care industry have in recent years taken up your human mantra of "first, do no harm" when it comes to the practice of medicine and biomedical research. However, these salarians are an extreme minority, and even they will often times be a part of research or operations that seem deeply unethical or immoral to most other races.
Salarian sexuality, romance, and love
The conventional wisdom is that salarians do not have a sex drive, which is completely untrue. However, the salarian sex drive is utterly unlike that of most other species, and is entirely driven by the female, not the male.
Female salarians regularly go into heat, during which time they emit very strong pheromones that attract and arouse male salarians. In ancient times, females in heat were literally unable to control themselves. Since the biological makeup of salarian sexuality requires the female to be fertilized multiple times, this resulted in females being passed around fairly often and raids being staged to steal them.
In the modern area, females are secluded from males once they go into heat, and only those males who have been approved to breed (based on a host of factors, such as intellect, achievements, and the like) are allowed into their quarters. Once properly aroused by the pheromone discharges, salarians are actually quite sexually aggressive. The females have the stronger sex drives, often engaging in sexual activity with between six to ten males in a given breeding session for a clutch. Given each heat usually requires the fertilization of between nine and twelve clutches, a female may end up going through over a hundred male partners. Given that the ratio of females to males is nearly 1 to 100, and that not all females are allowed to breed or are breeding, even this high ratio does not ensure all males get a chance to participate, especially since some females take the same male more than once.
These sexual relationship are not in anyway romantic, they are pleasurable and also a mark and reward for the male, but tender emotional states do not come into play.
Salarians rarely have a form of the nuclear family, in what is called a yindo, or a breeding circle. This is basically the salarian version of marriage, practiced by what mainstream salarian culture views as deviants. These relationships are usually between lesser salarian males who have no chance of breeding with a clan female and the females denied the opportunity to breed by the dalatrasses. In these close-knit yindos, there is a great deal of bonding, and even gentle affection. Being incapacitated by the heats she has to undergo, the female depends almost entirely on the males for both care and income, while the males, constantly bombarded by pheromones, end up devoted to the female to truly incredible degrees. Yindos are far more common on worlds where salarians are immigrants, and especially on the so-called Black Fringe colonies, along the border with what used to be Rachni space. A yindo is limited, eventually the offspring allow it to turn into a small clan, and after a few generations of breeding they become indistinguishable from a normal breeding line.
A very few salarians (usually males, and eccentric males at that, but rarely a female denied breeding rights) will end up with alien partners, usually asari. Salarians are usually attracted by intellectual capacity, physical agility and the ability to keep up with their thinking. While they are truly not very good lovers in a purely physical sense, they are very devoted to their partner, and often surprisingly sweet. I would like to think, somewhere along the way, even the mazes of a salarian mind can find romance.
That is not to say that salarians don't understand or feel love! They love their children, almost fiercely, defending them with a savagery that shocks those unused to seeing anything like strong emotion from salarians. They are not the best parents – often demanding and serious, and rarely taking the time to truly interest themselves in the interests of their children – but they can be surprisingly inventive when it comes to a birthday party or other method to cheer them up.
Nor can I say with any certainty that salarians don't love their extended clan families. I have seen salarians endure torture that would break a krogan and still not sell out even the financial interests of their families. Even the most sadistic, eccentric and criminal salarian would rather die in agony than betray their family.
Salarian and aliens
Most salarians view aliens as different, and as a source of danger. There is no such thing as a salarian letting down their guard. Asari and salarians have been allies for thousands of years and I suspect the salarians still don't fully trust us.
Salarian viewpoints on asari are varied. As Dr. Minsta pointed out in an earlier document, asari and salarians are both unlike and alike. Our viewpoints on the interpretation of the universe is very different, but our focus on methods other than force is similar. Generally speaking, the salarians tend to feel asari are the closest matched to themselves in terms of intellect and overall potential.
Salarians dislike, and have always disliked, quarians. Not just because quarian technology nearly matched their own, but because salarians improve things in slow increments and the quarians were geniuses capable of creating breakthrough technologies overnight. Salarians also dislike how the quarians experiments lead to the geth, which reminds them of their own AI failures.
Salarians have a curious relationship with krogan. The two races do not get along – most salarians feel krogan are ignorant, savage brutes, a tool with no real use left it. And the krogan see most salarians as murderers and blame them genophage on them. On the other hand, many salarians also feel vaguely sad over the ends the krogan have come to. More than once I have seen a salarian staring at the Krogan Monument on the Citadel, and walk away regretfully.
The drell, volus, and hanar don't make much of an impression on salarians from what little I know. They simply interact too little, and too infrequently.
The salarians view the batarians and the humans in much the same light, oddly – as military oriented brutes. As insulting as that comparison probably is, from the salarian point of view such a thing should be taken as a complement. The salarians see humans and batarians as the most dangerous elements in modern galactic society, and as a result take your kind more seriously.