23. FUSE

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[Ana] winced at the sudden headache. What had she been - right, right. With a sigh, she moved her attention from [Rebecca]'s files to the window. She'd gleaned all she could from them for now. It was time to stop trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Air traffic was a bit different from street traffic. [Ana] knew, intellectually, that the traffic light polls and the zebra crosswalks and curbs and the poor schmucks in neon yellow reflective vests gripping stop signs in sub-zero weather couldn't really be a thing several hundred feet up.

Instead the byways were plastered on the sides of buildings in bright fluorescent colors, strobe effects telling drivers which way their lane went. Some large intersections had a floating buoy dead center, flashing colors. On Ilium, and most Asari worlds, Orange was 'Stop.' Because the color contrasted starkly with blues and purples? Someone on the traffic control committee liked the color? Green was 'Slow down' and Blue was 'Go.'

Naturally.

Aethyta's sleek maroon car had a traffic indicator bar at the top of the windshield, displaying the colors of their lane for upcoming intersections, and keeping airborne clutter to a minimum. Physical clutter, that is.

The airwaves were drowning in information.

Short on-off signals broadcasted, audio waves of drivers, pedestrians below, workers in the buildings framing both sides of the air lane on their phones, PDAs and other devices rippled. Email, FTP server requests, domain lookups blazed over the wireless connections she could perceive, connecting and disconnecting to connect again. She could hear air traffic control communicating with police over long range transmissions, packets of information flickered in and out of her awareness with addresses leading up into the atmosphere and beyond.

Her eyes were closed as she leaned her head back, looking for all the world like a young human taking a nap on a long drive. She could say with 99.8% accuracy that was what the world saw, she was viewing herself in third person from nine different viewpoints.

She let her conscious layer drift.

Photo upload intercept. Display error message. Brute forcing personal omnitool …done. Corrupt file.

A salarian teen began to viciously jab at his omnitool in the backseat of the car Aethyta eventually overtook.

"Live only half a century," the matriarch muttered venomously. "Drive like you've got forever. Sure, why not."

[Ana] let go of devices at the edge of her range, and seamlessly switched to new ones. A public server tower was nearby, and she tapped into it, feeling the lifeblood of Ilium's cyberspace flow beneath her fingertips. Latency, under 1 millionth of a second.

Nigh omniscience.

She could feel the car slow to a stop and hear Aethyta's impatient fingers drumming the wheel. Edeena was shopping for another place to live on her omnitool, price matching rent. The car started up again after roughly 2.7 Earth minutes and [Ana] saw them turn a right in bird's eye view from a wireless camera. She adjusted the angle, idly watching cars and looking up their model, year and make.

You could find nearly anything on Ilium's air lanes. Cheap cars, luxury vehicles, transport, custom made and illegally modified. Aethyta's car was riding the line of 'above-average,' a car that would have been prohibitively expensive when it was new but years later depreciation eventually took its toll.

Wait.

A dark grey 2150 Riven turned onto their street. The driver slowed down to let a taxi shuffle in from a sidelane.

Z model, audio file mismatch, car was 22.6% quieter than it should be with standard engine. Modified. Custom windows, shaded light purple. Back left light non-functional, sun roof. Should have integrated phone and video, driver using personal device. Electronics issue?

Nothing concerning in of itself.

No, security. Call is heavily encrypted. Decrypt results…nothing. Open call, dead air.

If she hadn't seen that same car turn off as if going somewhere else, then reappear twice before.

"Drive past Eternity," [Ana] instructed without opening her eyes.

Aethyta sighed, shoulders slumping as she diligently ignored their turn. The very edge of Nos Astra exchange's brilliant vermillion and hot pink advertisement billboards vanished behind a blank building face. "Well, shit."

"Already?" Eddy hissed, half turning her head.

"Don't look," Aethyta thumped the heel of her palm on the wheel. "What are you, a moron?"

"She can look," [Ana] corrected mildly. "Dark grey two door, license plate ZYTM4, two lanes left of us, twelve cars back has been following us since A'ves Byway."

"Twe-" Edeena stopped. "How – "

[Ana] cracked an eye open. "I am monitoring everything."

That got her a look.

"Okay," the young Asari drew out. "Not something most people casually admit to, but okay."

Aethyta switched lanes to get in front of a large transport. Decent move, [Ana] analyzed. Obscuring a target makes that target harder to follow, something you want when that target is you.

Wasn't going to be enough. The grey car showed no indication of relying on line of sight to find them. Was the car bugged?

"Better hope its Eclipse," Aethyta murmured. "Better hope its Eclipse."

"Uh, why?" Eddy said immediately. "Like, fuck, hoping people mad enough to murder you are following you home is not what I want."

[Ana] switched her sight out of the visible spectrum, right eye sliding to UV to X-Rays, left eye flicking to infrared, and then microwaves to radio.

Nothing.

'Veto, how are we being followed?'

A red eye blinked open on her omni-tool. 'I'm going to take a wild guess and say….' A several microsecond pause for calculations. 'Satellite.'

Compile database of satellite addresses, filter for ones with the necessary telescopic capability.

'Which?'

'Dunno.'

[Ana] took photos of the car through all the cameras under her control, different angles, different lighting. She was limited, the cameras weren't her own eyes. She couldn't control fidelity, zoom or filtering; she had to run each frame through custom made programs to alter contrast or color searching for a good picture.

"Because if it isn't Eclipse, this clusterfuck just became a three-way."

She idly hacked into Ilium Security for its facial recognition database as she ran through hundreds of pictures.

"Rebecca," [Ana] addressed her newest VI out loud. "Who's following us?"

"License plate is privately contracted with details kept off public record. Without serial numbers, car make and model is of limited use. I can narrow it down to five hundred and thirteen dealerships across the colony if we assume they also tinted the windows. Aftermarket modification expands the list to seven hundred and twenty one dealers, with an additional two hundred ninety eight legitimate options for customization."

"So," Aethyta drawled, squeaking by a green light seconds before it turned blue. "No idea."

"Not necessarily," the VI offered. "We do know Eclipse was contracted for retrieval. This was already a three-way."

"Does that sound like something you should immediately tell your boss?" [Ana] didn't need her advanced computing to tell that was a rhetorical question. "That sounds like something you should tell your boss." The car jolted as it sped up. "Fan-fuckingtastic."

[Ana] made the decision not to say that the third party was the Shadow Broker.

"Sor-"

MATCH.

A lucky picture just as the grey car passed underneath a ray of sun shining through the peaks of two skyscrapers. Glare reduction, angle slightly adjusted and color filtering. The face in the driver's seat was just clear enough.

72.482% match.

The match didn't come from Ilium Security's databanks. It came from her databanks.

Adjusted for variance.

89.71% match.

An Asari matron of dark blue coloring, with indigo speckled lines following the contours of her face, outlining her eyes and down her neck. [Ana] followed the reference address to her memories of Mass Effect and pulled up the linked file.

Council Spectre.

Tela Vasir.

Well, [Ana] thought slowly, sitting with her hands gripping her knees. This is fine.

She couldn't say this was bad news. Everything she knew about Vasir was dated two years in the future, and considering her meta-knowledge to real world application had an inaccuracy rating of 'hilarious' she might as well know nothing at all.

Was Vasir working for the Shadow Broker now?

Safe to assume she was already a Spectre, but even if she only answered to the Council that wasn't exactly good news either.

Ambivalent news?

Didn't matter, that news needed to be off their ass, yesterday.

"Aethyta, [Ana] began lightly. "If you were able to give our unwanted admirer a phone call, what would you say?"

The matriarch's maroon eyes glanced up in the rear view mirror, one brow raised. "Fuck off?"

Eddy snorted so hard, she ended up coughing, wincing as she jostled her broken arm. "Aren't you a matriarch?" she asked after a few wheezy breaths.

"You live long enough, you really see the value in keeping things simple." Aethyta glanced into the mirror again. "You're going to call them." It wasn't a question.

[Ana] hummed. Breaking into the call Tela had would be simple enough, she'd already done half the work just getting in and analyzing the packets. Just lift the address from a databit and phone in. Or she could follow the routing to the destination for a clue on who or what was on the other end. She spun off some resources.

She could do both. Tracing the call through the jungle of Ilium's networks was barely half a thought, the other half cracked open a voice encoder she found on the extranet and reassembled it.

"Thought about it," she lied. One lane to the left, now only eight cars back, the phone in a dark grey 2150 Riven began to ring.

[Ana] counted two rings and slightly over half a second before the third when the line picked up.

"Vasir."

[Ana] was instantly cast back into her fabricated memories of being human. Not of any moment in particular but of remembering the feeling, the one moment when her eyes landed on someone she didn't know but just having the thought, 'wow, they kinda look like a douchebag.' Right then, in the back of Aethtyta's car, she was having that reaction to just Vasir's voice. The one word was said lazily, arrogant, with full expectation that her caller, whoever it was, had better know just who it was they were interrupting.

"Tela," she said back through the voice encoder, assembling audio bits manually. Heavy Thessian accent with the subtle trill on the 'L' sound that was common in the northern city states and just the right amount of slight derision that said, 'yes, I know who you are and I don't give a damn.'

"Don't know you," Tela turned it back on her with a small dismissive snort. "Reason to care?"

Tricky question. She could give a name but that would be waving a target in the Council agent's face. A target that wouldn't stand up to any level of serious scrutiny. But if she didn't name herself, then she was all but admitting that she didn't have the power or the willingness to retaliate openly. And for a Council Spectre, that would be a carte blanche wouldn't it?

But. She was calling a Spectre's unregistered car while they were in the middle of an op. Like as not, Vasir didn't just hang up on her for just that reason.

"I believe you have your eye on something that belongs to me," [Ana] said, ignoring the question. God, she hoped that wasn't going to come back to bite her in the ass.

…

That was totally going to bite her in the ass, wasn't it?

"Really?" Tela Vasir drawled with an amused lilt. "Are you taking ownership of an Ardat-Yakshi fugitive then?"

What?

Several thought cycles were wasted on reeling. What on earth – what kind of game – but what was a few empty processes when she could run thousands? She could afford that luxury, the rest of her was already dismantling the conversation.

Misdirection. Wouldn't hurt to confirm, so she did, pulling up snapshots of every car that occupied the same airlane byway as them from Century Plaza onwards. The benefits of perfect memory. There were two other cars Vasir could potentially be following, law of large numbers ensured there had to be at least one other driver. One was driven by a male Drell with a Hanar in the passenger seat so they were disqualified. The other had a single Asari.

Lookup license plate, registered. Rental car, owned by BST. Cross-reference, online service found for renting and returning cars. Car make, model, year…rentee found. Encryption on data…decrypting. Cara Akos. Cast the net...compiling…on Ilium for business. Place of employment: OCZ manufacturing, headquartered on Cyone. 421 years of age, marital status….married to Aleia Akos, Asari.

Disqualified.

"Turn right at the next intersection," [Ana] said with her physical voice. Aethyta shrugged one arm and drifted into the far right lane.

Aethyta, matriarch, known relations and one daughter, Liara. Disqualified.

Edeena… [Ana] glanced at the ex-Eclipse out the edge of her peripheral vision. Thessian native, estranged. No details. Compiling data…results: Inconclusive.

Misdirection, the conscious layer insisted. Perhaps. The best lies were half-truth, however. Just the words 'Ardat-Yakshi' were likely to scare off most Asari. 'Most.' Not all. It would be far too sloppy of Vasir to blow smoke without a fire.

Eddy, [Ana] thought sadly, then buried it in the priority queue. Later. It, like many other troublesome things, could be dealt with later. It would be dealt with, she affirmed before glancing at Edeena again. The Asari was looking out of her window, broken arm hanging limply and worrying her bottom lip with her brow creased in frustration and anxiety.

Just…not this minute.

She switched back to the phone call, loading her digital voice with sarcasm. "Matter of galactic importance, is it?"

Deflection. High Asari was like that, with three times as many abstract concepts as the runner up language, 22nd century English. And English had to steal at least half of those from other Earth languages, even from other alien languages. The art of being indirect was about 80% of Asari to Asari communication. Not that anyone could really be surprised about that fact once you remembered that the Asari had molded themselves into a race of politicians.

And that explained everything there was to know ever about Ilium.

"I'm on vacation," Tela verbally shrugged. Ah, there it was. A call trace. [Ana] caught it, and redirected the probe to the nearest com tower. Her own call trace was going slowly, on its five hundredth hop around the globe of Ilium and showing no signs of stopping. "Called in a favor."

From the Shadow Broker? [Ana] thought. She almost asked, but there was a strong possibility that she would just be plain wrong.

There was a search out for Zulaika Sareem, and she arrived on Ilium in an identical ship. She recalled reassuring herself that it was just a search, not an arrest warrant. Not like they would send Spectres after her or anything.

But what if they did?

"Speaking of favors," the Spectre continued lightly before the levity abruptly dropped from her voice. "Why don't you tell me who are before I have to hunt you down?"

"You already tried," [Ana] pointed out flippantly. All of her processes were in consensus. She was…losing this conversation. It was going nowhere. Her own call trace finally ended. A warehouse in Saefos Valley, registered as belonging to the SG Corporation. A VI was on the other end. She gently circumvented its firewalls and pried into its inner workings. Who do you belong to? What is your purpose?

It locked her out, and cut the connection.

Tela swore over the line. "You - !"

"Good bye," [Ana] sent hurriedly. 'Veto – '

An automated shuttle bus bucked free from its lane, side lights flashing through all of its colors like it was in a rave as it smashed into Tela Vasir's car with a scream of twisting plastisteel and splintering plexiglass.

Aethyta half-turned in her seat. "The fuck?"

'Veto!' [Ana] nearly screamed out loud.

'What?' The red eye on her omnitool blinked lazily. 'What?'

[Ana] looked backwards through her commandeered cameras. The collision had jettisoned both vehicles clear out of the airlane onto an open patio. The back end of the shuttle bus sticking out haphazardly over the side, railing crunched beneath it and Tela's car had bowled over the water fountain. The car looked as if it had been punched by an angry god, the frame so bent out of shape the passenger side door was half open. [Ana] watched, transfixed as that door popped the rest of the way and Vasir covered in the telltale blue shimmer of an active Barrier scrambled out.

'Veto…was that you?'

'I sure hope it was me,' the AI broadcasted immediately. 'Because if I'm hallucinating then we've got a big problem.'

[Ana] dragged a cam through the lit windows of the bus. 'Empty. You didn't kill anyone.'

'Too easy.' Then, after a slight pause. 'And it occurred to me that lethality at this junction would not be your preferred outcome.' Another pause. 'Unless that changed?' It concluded hopefully.

Foresight. Veto was…predicting her.

The VI had the algorithms. You couldn't be an interdictor without some way to predict the movements of trespassing forces, never mind accurately shooting them. There was an efficiency in being able to manipulate those movements, from the creation of blockades or bottlenecks to psychological attacks. She could say Veto had the basic tools. This wasn't how they were meant to be used.

Initiative.

'No. You were right,' [Ana] cautiously praised. 'Good job.'

'I do good work.' Veto preened.

"We are…no longer being followed," she told the others with a weak smile. Courtesy of Veto. Strangely enough, Edeena didn't look at all relieved. Her eyes started shifting between the other cars in the airlane and [Ana]'s omnitool.

[Ana]'s attention shifted back to the traffic cams, on the recordings of Spectre Tela Vasir, dripping water, standing at the edge of the open patio looking at the line of cars flying past. The fist at her side was clenched, glowing with raw biotic potential.

Yeah, that wasn't going to be a problem at all.

"Did you just - " Aethyta started.

"Shuttle bus, empty," [Ana] rushed to explain. Technically, she really didn't do it. Sure, she had been about to tell Veto to do something a little violent, but the order had never left her wireless emitters. Not that it made any real difference, in the end. Letting people know that Veto was capable of some self-direction just after she implied that it was a malfunctioning Prothean VI she couldn't fix would be idiotic.

Not quite as idiotic as giving a hostile Reaper AI self-direction like Cerberus, but up there.

"Non-fatal, delay tactic."

"Well, that's a relief," Edeena muttered. "Want to delay someone, throw a car. Hate to see how you'd get someone to hurry up."

Yes, well, considering [Rebecca] had pulled off a pseudo Geth invasion on the Citadel to get their instincts of self-preservation moving, it was…probably better she didn't respond to that.

"Got anything on who it is?" Aethyta asked.

[Ana] blazed through her options. Tell all, tell nothing, tell something, misdirect or…she reached out for the Rebecca VI.

"I have determined the method by which they are following us." It parroted. "Satellite imaging."

Veto broke in, an approximation of righteous indignation in its voice. [Ana] had a moment of profound relief that Veto chose to transmit, instead of using the omni-tool's speakers. 'You mean I determined – '

'Veto? Veto, hun, I'm lying right now, okay?'

It fell silent.

"Satellite!?" Edeena yelped. "That – " Her voice caught in her throat as she looked up. She was probably imagining Ilium's cluttered atmosphere. It was what happened when you didn't have any central governments, everyone with the ability and desire to have their own equipment in orbit…did. From comm relays for telecommunications, to extranet backbones, weather observations, academic research, anything that could benefit from having minimal property taxes and being miles up.

There were tens of thousands of satellites up there.

"So…we're fucked."

[Ana] held up her index finger. "Not…exactly."

Aethyta had the strangest, little half smile tugging at the side of her mouth and a distant stare, as if getting ready for the punchline to a joke she half-expected was coming.

"They are using satellite imaging, yes," [Ana] continued. "But think. If she – " Oops. " – or he could follow us from the atmosphere, why are they physically following us?"

For a moment, Edeena just had this blank expression on her face as she absorbed the question. The lights were on, but the occupant had gone fishing. Check back later.

Her brow then crinkled. "Maybe they needed visual confirmation?"

"Of what, the car?" [Ana] countered. "Unlike theirs's, Aethyta's car is registered." She brought up her omni-tool. "Speaking of registration, your license expires tomorrow, boss."

There was a thump as Aethyta pounded the steering wheel with the air of someone who just knew they were forgetting something and only now realized what it was. "Damn it!"

"We didn't have to take this car," Edeena pointed out. "We could have taken a shuttle, or taxi car. Or stole one."

A puzzle piece slid in to fill a hole [Ana] didn't even realize existed.

"Goes for both methods, doesn't it?" She murmured. "They'd have to know what vehicle we were using." Which means they'd have to watch them get in it. She may not have gotten involved, but Tela Vasir had been there at Century Plaza when Eclipse attempted to cash her in.

Extra insurance in case Eclipse reneged on the deal? Middleman? Just an observer?

"They can't have the satellite focused on us," [Ana] said, louder and faster to simulate excited rambling. "They wouldn't need to still be tagging. They follow for a few blocks, then turn off, then come back. Follow, turn off, come back. But why come back at all if you're using satellite? Because – because its proximity based. Satellite isn't on us, it's on them."

"GPS," Aethyta offered casually alongside a good long blast of the car horn.

It was crude, but you couldn't argue with the results. None of the line-of-sight weaknesses of eyeball trailing and a lot more flexible in making it look like you weren't following them. How was Vasir so sure they wouldn't take a turn and get out of range before she got back on the trail? There was only one answer for that.

Know where they were going.

Tela wasn't following them to find out where they were going. She was making sure they were there.

"STG?" Edeena's voice wavered, really, strongly, sincerely hoping what was coming out of her mouth wasn't the truth.

"Too crude," Aethyta said immediately. "And they always work in teams."

…speaking from experience, are we?

"Not a fan of Velara, or Vel's not a fan of them," the matriarch thought out loud. "Vereli doesn't have the spine, won't give permission without getting permission. And if they had permission, wouldn't have to GPS rig it. Probably outside Ilium's hierarchy, but…" her lips pursed.

[Ana] stared. Was she - ?

She had to check herself then. Why not? Just because she could think of things faster than any organic could hope to, didn't mean she was the only one capable of puzzling things out. Where did that arrogance come from? She was beginning to wish she'd held [Rebecca] back for a bit longer, just to trawl through her head a bit. But as far as she could tell from the files she'd been given, [Rebecca] simply had no ideas on undoing Harbinger's work.

Which was about what she expected.

"Unregistered car? Nice connections." Aethyta's fingers drummed the steering wheel. [Ana] could almost see the thought train wind the tracks. Nice connections, but you didn't go through Velara Maris or Ilium associates to get them.

Thessia?

Aethyta's eyes met hers in the rearview mirror again and narrowed.

Council.

[Ana] swallowed and averted her eyes. "Security on the Veridian buildings active?"

"Yeah?" Aethyta tilted her head, already guessing what she was asking. "Don't exactly have the key on me though."

The 'key' being a sixty four character encrypted passkey that had long since replaced the physical lock and key. The passkey would be generated by a program on an authorized omni-tool or PDA, and then if it fit the rotating hash provided by the system, you got access. If you didn't, you either got a still locked door or gun turrets in your face.

"No need." [Ana] smiled mirthlessly, as she turned to look out of her window. "I can let myself in."

This was Ilium and it was Aethyta's property, so there was gonna be gun turrets.

Aethyta visibly thought it over, weighing the pros and cons of letting her hole up in the very expensive prototype manufacturing building in downtown Nos Astra. It was probably boiling down to [Ana]'s inexplicable ability to pull shit off she really had no business doing, and very expensive equipment.

[Ana] rolled her eyes. "Oh come on!"

"Fine," the matriarch gritted out and made a quick left turn.

"Thank you," she sighed.

Aethyta just grunted.

They weaved through the airlanes and narrow alleys of Nos Astra. She noticed Aethyta taking the 'scenic' route on the way there, but couldn't exactly blame the woman. You hear someone is following you, expect some paranoia for at least a couple of hours after.

Veridian, Inc was a block on the south side of an industrial plaza. Ilium's equivalent of zoning laws grouped companies in the same industry together in tiers. If you had the connections and the money, you had a wealth of space, were close to public transportation, and could have your own shuttle ports and a host of creature comforts in nearby business parks maintained by the Serrice Council.

[Ana] didn't know exactly how or when Aethyta set up her company on Ilium, but it was here in the corner nestled between a sapphire artificial lake and business park that Veridian, Inc's corporate campus was located. It said a lot of things about how far Liara's father had fallen that all of the buildings lacked employees, a few were even boarded up and all that remained was Eternity.

Aethyta's sleek maroon car meandered into the large semi-circle driveway. The Veridian sign was dark against the chrome plating on the building and all the metal shutters were closed. The entrance had a few white lights that flipped on as soon as the car came within range, with the keypad lighting up with the globe logo.

This was her stop.

Edeena had fallen asleep along the way and was resting with her cheek against the door, a troubled frown on her face. [Ana] made sure to touch her, under the guise of checking the armor around the broken arm, and sent a burst of transmission: self-destruct.

That was as much as she could do to hide the nanomachines. Hopefully, that would be enough.

She got out of the car, closing the door with just the right amount of strength. She heard the driver's side door open as well and bit her lip.

Aethyta came up beside her looking up at the building. She made a short snorting hum, then walked off. That didn't count as a dismissal, not from a matriarch.

Follow.

There was a long sixty three point seven seconds where nothing was said. Aethyta looked back, saw her following and smirked.

"Tristana raised you polite," she remarked. [Ana] couldn't help tensing, just slightly, knowing what was coming. "You know, for Omega. Almost impressed."

"She's an assassin," [Ana] said flatly. She didn't say anything else. That was a profession that could run anywhere from hired thug, to subtle infiltrator. A former Justicar? Let Aethyta come up with the right answer.

Her boss rocked on her heels. "You don't have six months anymore, you know."

"I am aware." It came out more than a little bitter. "Stay away from the Eternity for a few days. I mean, I can try to jury rig an advanced warning system or something, but – "

"Kid."

[Ana] stopped.

"How old do you think I am?" Sources on the extranet hinted at somewhere in the late nine hundreds, but the decision tree was caught up in trying to figure out if that was some kind of trick question. If an Asari was an adult then they were at least a century and the number only went up from there.

Aethyta's brow quirked, clarifying that yes, she expected an answer.

"Um." [Ana] shrugged. "Old?"

"Damn old," she corrected. "Think I've figured out how to take care of myself?"

Oh. She cringed hard. "Yes," [Ana] sighed and let her shoulders slump. "Yes, of course, please accept my apologies."

It was waved off.

"I'm taking the lead on this one, calls to make, people to contact." Aethyta looked out towards the center of Nos Astra. [Ana] triangulated her gaze. The Serrice Council building. It was tall and thin, lit up in a soft purple light. Velara Maris' penthouse was at the top. The building stood head and shoulders over every other skyscraper in the city, only a telecommunications company run by one of Velara Maris' daughters came within fifty feet of its height. [Ana] briefly imagined what it would be like, living at the very peak. She imagined taking a break from work at a desk and swinging her chair around to look out onto her city. Each and every person in it, beneath her.

She wondered if Aethyta was imagining that too.

"I'll let you know if there's anything I could use you for," the matriarch said eventually. There it was, put in her place. Several processes rebelled even as others accepted it without protest. This was the end of the matriarch's patience. She depended on Aethtyta's goodwill right now. She wouldn't be completely helpless without her, but [Ana] had no illusions about her chances without any support. It was only going to get worse from here.

Aethyta shrugged a shoulder at the building. "Document what you build, will you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

And that was that. Aethyta turned on her heel and started to walk back to the car.

"Can you – " [Ana] hesitated as she stopped but didn't turn around, a questioning tilt to her head. "Can you take care of Eddy, please?"

Aethyta shrugged and started walking again. "Sure, kid."

Dismissed.

"Becky?" [Ana] whispered. 0.0013 seconds to splice the VI into the wireless security cameras. She allowed for two minutes of idling in order to watch the maroon car complete the circuit and pass through the gate back onto the road. "Keep an eye out for unwanted traffic."

"Of course."

"Veto." She approached the door and reached out, placing her hand on the keypad. The tips of her fingers warmed as the nanites swarmed through her skin onto the surface and into the circuitry.

"Yeah?"

It took three seconds to bypass the key system entirely by completing the circuits within the electronic lock itself. The door chimed, and slid open. She stepped through and walked over to the security control panel on the wall. 0.728s was all it took to transfer administrative control of the security measures to Veto.

"Deal with the unwanted traffic."

A wall panel just below the ceiling slid open, and the mechanical arm of a built-in gun turret sprung out. It was shaped a bit like a video camera head, with two 'barrels' on an elongated shape. The upper barrel sitting back on the main body was the scope for the high definition scanning equipment searching for weapons. The lower barrel was snub nosed, but the red light laser pointer just above it said plenty about what it was for.

Veto angled the turret around, unerringly focused on [Ana]. She raised an eyebrow at the antics.

"Satisfied?"

"No flamethrowers," Veto noted from the facility's intercom system. "Disappointing."

[Ana] sighed and shook her head. "Let's save the flamethrowers for the tank, hmm?" The gun turret retracted back into the wall. "Any modifications I need to make?"

"No need." The lights in the foyer turned on without ceremony, then turned off just as abruptly as Veto fiddled. "I am capable of handling the necessary adjustments."

I'm sure you are, [Ana] thought as she nodded in the wall's general direction. There really was no telling what exactly Veto considered a 'necessary adjustment,' but it was safe to assume it would fall on the side of 'more lethal.' I'm sure you are.

The foyer of Veridian, Inc Research and Development building looked like every corporate building entrance in the Mass Effect games. The walls were metallic silver and chrome and the floor was mostly uncovered with just a strip of deep blue plush carpet running from the entrance across the room to disappear under a set of heavy duty double doors behind a walk in scanner. To the far left was where the secretary, if there was one, would sit behind a desk that looked like it was made of wood.

It wasn't. Her own scanners could detect over 52 varieties of plant material making up thin planks on the surface, but underneath was solid metal. A consequence of advanced spacefaring civilization, plastisteel and other industrial products were far cheaper and readily available than genuine trees.

Maybe all of the twenty first century Greenpeace types were on to something, if by the twenty second a single good oak was worth more than its weight in Californium-252. She stopped by the desk and rapped it with a knuckle. The sound was sharp and rung hollowly. Totally not wood.

Aethyta really should get her money back.

She stepped up to the scanner. It was built like the ones she remembered in the games. Two thin walls on both sides of the walkway. To the right behind the wall was the terminal hidden behind protective shielding. As soon as she stepped between the panels onto the soft black mat, the scanner lit up but the door to the rest of the building didn't open.

"Veto," [Ana] said. It was a simple no nonsense statement that wasn't a question but a 'you better have an adequate explanation for this young lady' and she inwardly cringed at how much it made her sound like the mother she didn't have.

"I am taking accurate measurements of you to place in the systems. Standard biometrics as well as body composition."

"Why?"

"So that I can place it behind a proxy file. It negates the need for manual alteration of scanner results every time you come in because you will already be in the system, but prevents anyone actually looking at the system to see the irregularities."

A digital smokescreen. The machine couldn't be fooled so easily, but the people?

"Where'd you learn to do that?" [Ana] asked, intentionally sounding as mild and curious as possible. The scanner hummed, a lattice of blue light running up and down her.

"You."

Oh, of course.

"I am not blind to your methods of intercepting data," Veto continued.

Because that would be asking way too much, apparently. [Ana] smiled even as her process threads alternated between feeling pride that Veto had chosen to follow her example, and completely fucking terrified.

"Might as well take advantage of being the only ones in the building."

"Precisely."

The scanner finished with a chime and the heavy doors slide open. "Welcome to Viridian, Inc Head Researcher Ana Lancashire," a female automated voice said as she stepped through the doorway. [Ana] paused, looking up.

"What was that?"

"This facility has a resident virtual intelligence," Veto answered, sounding as exasperated as the synthesized voice would allow. "Dumb as a bag of bricks through."

"Get rid of it."

"Done!"

"And upload Becky in its place," she continued, using her omnitool to make a copy of her VI available for downloading. The Rebecca VI was almost literally an extension of herself. She made a few adjustments to the copy, primarily to allow it to shelve decisions it wasn't authorized to make for later when [Ana] herself was near. And giving it the code to shut Veto down in an emergency.

"Aww."

[Ana] could feel her lips twitch at Veto's disappointment. "Unless you want to do all of the administrative work?"

Veto didn't answer, but her omnitool beeping a notification that it was beginning a file transfer said it all. So Veto wasn't a big fan of paperwork either, huh? Clever girl.

[Ana] didn't have much, if any experience with what research and development facilities looked like. Belan Outpost on Ilos was over fifty thousand years old, so it didn't quite count. The setup reminded her of twenty first century Cambridge with hallways of departments and testing rooms behind massive doors and keycard readers, various safety warnings in multiple languages plastered on the right wall and over the doorframe.

The best she could do was cross reference the equipment present in the rooms after years of abandonment, the dead terminals and the few posters on the walls from the time when Aethyta had still been a world mover.

That was roughly one hundred and fifty three years ago.

She had to give the Asari credit. They knew how to build stuff that lasted. The majority of the equipment was still in use in Council space, the equivalent of companies still using Windows XP by the time Windows 8.1 came out.

A small hatch at the bottom wall to her left slid open and small cleaning robots filtered out to do their jobs now that the facility had visitors. There were round, and kind of cute looking with chubby arms and flashlight heads. If she knew Veto half as well as she thought she did, they would be moonlighting as death-bots soon enough.

She already had the blueprints to the building in her memory. Technically illegal. She didn't 'own' the blueprints. Ilium officials wanted top dollar for releasing such 'sensitive' information to those not authorized to have it. Think of all the low class plebians trying to appear cutting edge by borrowing the floor plans of the successful. Designing buildings for efficiency of space utilization as well as being fashionable was a multi trillion credit business on Ilium alone. And they had very good lobbyists.

As far as she was concerned, if they wanted her not to have it, they should have protected their servers better.

[Ana] made her way to the concept development side of the building and stopped before a double glass door. The room itself was massive, and reminded her of a college auditorium. Semi-circle desks in an offset pattern like ripples in a lake surrounded a mainframe computer. That computer was easily the most expensive thing in the entire facility. Considering the amount of processing power the standard computer had, what would one use a mainframe for? Projector buds were embedded in the ceiling and walls for 3D imaging and that computer was what she was here for.

The keycard reader sat on the wall beside the door stoically.

"Veto?"

"It is on an independent system."

And therefore no errors, or inexplicable access attempts in publically accessible logs. All she needed to know. [Ana] placed her hand on the small panel and let her nanites work their magic as they seeped through the casing to the circuitry within.

Within moments, the doors hissed open releasing the room's stale air.

[Ana] strode in and watched the terminals on the desks wake up, glowing orange haptic interfaces and screens shimmering into being. She toed the power button at the base of the mainframe and listened to it whir to life. The main projector node in the center of the square computer lit up. She leaned over, placing both hands on the mainframe's case.

[Password]? blinked in white 3D letters in the air.

[Ana] lifted a hand and trailed it through the air while simultaneously battling the mainframe's security. "You don't need my password."

It put up a good fight, better than nearly every other foreign computer but Sovereign had but in the end, she got what she wanted.

The prompt vanished after several minutes to be replaced by a blank desktop. Huh. [Ana] quickly navigated to the mainframe's data storage and found it just as blank. There was evidence that it had been wiped, but only the faintest shreds of what had been wiped.

A computer with admirable security behind a locked door on a separate system from the building's own security system. And the data had still been erased.

Well, well. Aethyta, just what had you been up to here?

That question made her a bit uneasy. She'd hinted that she knew why Aethyta was on Ilium the first night they met, and the matriarch had gone along with her expectations. But, she'd never actually confirmed Aethyta had been ousted from Thessia for the crime of being too inconveniently loud, did she?

[Ana] snarled softly, logging the observation for later. She had something else to deal with first.

'Becky, use the resources available to you in computer XDI-089,' she smashed through that terminal's firewall with brute force and handed the VI its network address. 'And develop iterations of my Replicators that solve the observed limitations.'

'Matriarch Aethtyta requested documentation," the VI reminded her. It shared more than a few of her own processes. Looked like the 'conscience' subroutine was rearing its troublesome head again.

'Document away.'

Becky was silent for a few microseconds and, irrationally, [Ana] swore the back of her neck prickled with invisible eyes. She ignored it as best she could and navigated to the folder holding the files [Rebecca] had given her. Everything was there from the shreds of data and leads on the Shadow Broker to [Rebecca]'s own dealings with Ilium's elite.

Most of those dealings were in the name of Veridian, Inc, money changing hands and rumors started. She could see what the other AI had been doing; it was the equivalent of a threatened cat puffing up its fur in an attempt to look bigger to scare off predators.

She'd painted an intriguing picture. An up-and-comer on the verge of something big. Coupled with Aethyta registering her company in the tech expo sponsored personally by Velara Maris herself and the hints and promises suddenly became more real.

The sharks were in the water, eyeing each other. Aethyta didn't even have all of this information, but she'd still been so fucking right.

She didn't have six months.

She was Veridian, Inc. Without her, these buildings would stay abandoned and empty until the Reapers came. And that…was part of the problem, she realized.

One source was fantastic for keeping a sharp supply and demand curve.

It was also an extraordinary bottleneck.

Her reasons for approaching a business with her data were still there. Doubly so her need for access to Geth manufacturing. But her plans had assumed time scales that just weren't feasible anymore, if they ever were. [Rebecca] hadn't said it. She didn't have to. Even if Eclipse completely dropped out of the business tomorrow, [Rebecca] had already set in motion a chain of events that would force her to abandon waiting for the expo regardless.

The folder had a simple text file named 'ReadMe' explaining why.

We don't have time.

And an unprecedented hog of a program that, when run, spit out a bunch of gibberish. Memories, she was guessing. There was something about her data structure that just couldn't process it correctly, and it took so much resources that it crippled her ability to analyze it while it was running. She'd deleted metadata files created by the program, scared of introducing system glitches.

If she didn't know any better, she'd say [Rebecca] had given her a virus.

But why?

She migrated the program to the mainframe and watched the screen as a red progress bar appeared. The program was self-extracting.

She watched it settle itself into the mainframe, and then a vaguely familiar black screen popped up. This was about where the problems started, she recalled from an orphaned memory address.

After a few moments, the desktop screen disappeared and the projector nodes on the ceiling lit up, an image forming. A red code matrix hung like a teardrop in the air, before beginning to move. Lines traveled directions mimicking data flow operations, she could see 'hubs' of processing that filtered incoming and outgoing data, a few pieces that looked vaguely like programs in 3D representation. [Ana] looked it over and nodded to herself.

Still gibberish. The hell was this?

"Becky, what is this?"

"Insufficient data."

[Ana]'s lips pursed in irritation.

"Wait, are you serious?" Veto broke in. A camera on the wall whirred as it moved to face her. "You don't know what that is?"

From the mouth of babes. The saying ran through [Ana]'s mind then as she gazed upon the matrix. The ruby code was almost mesmerizing. It was like an optical illusion of a spiral staircase, an ouroboros never ending. Data flows advanced through the queues, were processed, and advanced through the queue again to end up at the same hub it just left. There was no 'beginning' or 'end.' Programs simply existed suddenly, or faded out of sight once she took her attention off of it, and when she returned, something the same, but different had taken its place.

It scared her.

She tore her eyes away. "What is it, Veto?"

Her omni-tool vibrated slightly as it woke up from sleep. She watched Veto access it in order to piggy back on her own connection to the mainframe.

Another matrix in blue popped up. It was nearly fifty percent smaller and 'rougher' somehow, not as refined and easier to dissect. Veto slotted it neatly into the center of the red code, and it fit too well, as if it belonged there.

"That's Creator," Veto explained, highlighting the blue matrix. [Ana]'s eyes widened.

Creator. Creator. Veto had always known the difference –

Then it highlighted the red. "And that's you."

That's…me. It still took her several moments. That's me…from the perspective of someone who wasn't shackled - !

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Her head split in two.