Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

Quick tally

I basically agree with the sentiments that we shouldn't waste it.

I can certainly see Mira agreeing to study it to find counter measures to whatever it is. She isn't dumb, if someone can create a weapon like this before then even if it is destroyed and all records purged someone can do it again, or there are other artefacts of the same kind.

Still it looks like we're sitting on a flipping gold mine of archaeology. That makes what 4 precursor sites discovered?

So4, the two Lytheni colonies and the one explorer Corps found. Just need two more to locate their home world.

Still only one Prothean ruin. Interesting.

Mrcrazyattire said:

[X ] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
That is reaper tech, Throw that away before we lose some scientists.

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My apologies in advance if this seems to be picking on you; I'm really not.
But I'd like to springboard off this to make a larger point.

This is NOT Reapertech.

For one thing, it's the wrong planet; we were explicitly reminded a few updates back that this is a Precursor planet, not a Prothean one.
There is no current evidence of the Precursors having encountered the Reapers; the Protheans were alive fifty thousand years ago, while the first Precursor ruins we found were a million years old minimum:

Turn 9 Results said:

The Rimward systems prove to be empty of garden worlds, a first for these missions. However, they make up for it in other ways. Right off the bat, your surveyors stumble across an old ore refining station of an unknown design in orbit around the terrestrial planet below. While survey probes report that the planet has been strip-mined into worthlessness, the station itself remains. Abandoned by whatever mystery aliens once were here, the station has decayed badly under what your surveyors report is over a million years of disuse. However, what remains is a marvel. There are indications of extensive automation well beyond your capabilities. The Engineering and Archaeology Councils have begged Durrahe for leave to get a crack at it.

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Turn 9 Results said:

Discovered +1 research system, +2 mining systems, +1 high-quality military system, +2 high-quality mining systems, +1 top-tier mining system, +1 volus system, +1 mining hub, +1 high-quality research system. +2 total colonization prospects. "Ancient Precursors," event chain discovered.

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Furthermore, the effects are different.
Reaper Indoctrination is subtle, it creates willing infiltrators and sleeper agents, and it enthralls them to the will of the local ranking Reaper.
Leviathan indoctrination creates thralls.

This is the opposite. It's loud. It's obvious. It's victims/subjects are almost obnoxiously antagonistic.
And instead of making it's victims subservient to some hierarchy like we see with Indoctrinated people or those under the control of the Leviathans or the Thorian, this actively makes the victims hostile to constituted authority.


It may be a product of someone following the same line of research that created Indoctrination, but it is not the same thing. Which gives us opportunity.
Part of the issue with Mindcontrol/ Indoctrination Research is how difficult it is to notice when someone is falling under the influence.
Not an issue here.

Even if all we manage to learn is how to detect people under the influence of Mass Effect brainwashing/mind control before they start doing shit, or how to detect the transmissions of something that can do this, it's a priceless protection for the future.
The next artifact of this nature we find is likely to be less benign.


I mean looking at Mass Effect canon, there are multiple mind-control and telepathy using antagonists about. The Reapers and the Leviathan are out there after all, and the Leviathan in particular canonically have interstellar mindcontrol capability.
Not to mention the Thorian.


And then there are the wider medical/technological implications.
This is a process that is panspecific across organic brains, regardless of their biochemistry, in a galaxy where some species can't even eat the same kind of food. That's almost exactly the same thing that Prothean beacons do to implant knowledge in people's heads.

EDIT
And like someone else pointed out, the Rachni control a third of the galaxy that's littered with the detritus of dead races.
Who knows what the hell they're going to trip over? What if they figure out how to project their QEC/telepathy signal beyond their species like the Leviathan did?

Sticking our heads in the sand is no defence.
And we have a population of lystheni already exposed to this artifact who can be studied ethically before they die of natural causes.
Take advantage of it.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

As much as I want to prepare anti-indoctrination measures by studying this thing, I believe the thing is too risky to keep. Even with the Lystheni having acted like guinea pigs I'm not a fan of risking our people on this line of testing. Besides, there is other less risky research available to us that I'd rather focus on.

That said, this news is just as important for a whole different reason. How many Lystheni are indoctrinated? Do we know whether or not the indoctrination can be spread by those already infected? Is there anything that can be found to hint at indoctrination other than a change of values and behaviour? If the previous Dalatrass was indoctrinated, causing her to change her goal from isolationist to conquest, then how much of Shereel's sister's behaviour is from the teachings of her indoctrinated mother and how much of that is from indoctrination? With potentially indoctrinated Lystheni still running around, I'm also supporting of limited research by volunteers who are briefed of the risks to find out anything more. Not to mention that if these ruins and indoctrination artefacts exists elsewhere in the galaxy, we might run into an indoctrinated faction where this research may benifit us.

[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

I've seen so many posts stating no with the reason because "it's too risky".

But i can't see any risk, especially for the scientists.
(I'm no scientist, but even with my limited knowledge of scientific methods, i can see several ways to study with minimal risk)

It's already known that the artefact has detrimental effect on sentients that are in a certain range. Triple that range (at minimum) and keep any personel outside the new safety range.

Do tests with remote drones (zero risk, especially if you melt the drones down afterwards), then progress to animal testing.

If the artefact doesn't effect animals, try to find way to determine why that is. Does it only affect those with higher reasoning or is the artefact actively selecting whom to affect?

If (and only if) you've proven repeatedly that you'll get no further results from years of testing animals inside the effect, then you try it with some blank clones (example: just a freshly cloned brain), which you can freely vivisect. (I assume a hundreds of years old star-faring culture has the means to do that, we can already clone, not sure about the "blank" qualifier though...)

Again, if you've proven you'll get no further results from years of testing clones/cloned tissue, or if you need to test if the hypothized countermeasures truly work, then you'll go over to Human Sentient Testing
Get some volunteers (that's important, TIM!), subject them to extensive medical and psycholocigal scans and tests to establish the individuals baseline before they're exposed to the effect. Strap scientific monitoring stuff on them, send them inside the effect's range for an hour (while constantly recording).

Some of them do nothing in that hour, some surf the internet, another few do some scans/tests that for some reason couldn't be done by remote drones.

Then get them out again and subject them again to a complete medical and psychological tests and scans. Compile and compare the data pre- and post-exposure, analyse data and whatever else scientists do, make new theories and ways to test them and repeat the animal/cloned tissue tests.

While that happens, do some follow up checks on the volunteers to make sure the crazy effect did really stop and didn't just slow down to almost nothing after leaving the artefacts range.


I repeat, i'm no scientist and this was just something quickly cobbled together with my limited understanding, but using something like this there's no risk for any personnel involved. The only risks are taken by the volunteers, which A) would come into play after every other option has been exhausted and B) should be well compensated by participating in goverementally funded research (though likely banned forever from critical carreers like military or medical, but why would, for example, the lifetime-but-unsuccessful artist that volunteered care about that in any way?)

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

Ok after reading other peoples arguments changing my vote

[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

Though I add that we through it into the sun if it looks like becoming a threat.

[X] Write-In: Super limited experiments. Perform ONE course of experiments, with short exposure of a small number of volunteer subjects, using every sensor available to see if we can detect the mind-affecting mechanism. Run every known form of brain scan on the volunteers to see if we can spot signs of those who have been affected by every means, OTHER than simply monitoring their behavior. If we learn anything, put it on ice and figure out what to do next. If we can't detect the mind control process and can't detect signs of it in victims, throw it into the sun.

Because the OPTION of being able to learn, far in advance, "this is Reaper indoctrination, it runs on ultrasound and you can spot it by looking for this weird little spike on an EKG," would be very, very valuable. But if we lack the technology to learn that with a super-cautious experiment, it is not worth keeping this thing around and it should be destroyed.

Of the curated options, I'm comfortable-ish with...

[ ] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
[ ] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

But I would rather fire it into the sun than continue extended limited experiments.

WazugDaWierd said:

Any arguments for not shooting the experiment into the nearest sun? Besides using it to research a way to counter it?

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No, not really. Surround it with every kind of super-sensitive detector and field or particle sensor we can think of, send a very few test subjects close to it for times drastically less than that required to mind-control a salarian, see if we can figure out a physical mechanism behind its influence. If we can't, punt it into the sun.

Kinruush said:

So, this is a Reaper artifact, right? Mind control based on proximity with no apparent means of propagation? Is there any reason not to fire it into the sun?

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The only reason to do it is to see if, using every tool at our disposal, we can detect any hint of what it's doing to people. By trying it, like, ONCE, with an extremely short exposure time.

In canon, there are indications that Reaper artifacts do mind control via electromagnetic waves and high or low frequency sound effects. Those are things we could conceivably detect and counter, or at least disrupt, if we had a general clue of what kind of threat we were dealing with. But the precautions hinge on knowing the general nature of the threat topeople's minds.

Sort of like how if on a camping trip, you know your food is threatened by bears, you take certain precautions, while if you're worried about ants, you take different precautions. You don't need or want to know every detail of ant/bear behavior to be able to pick the precautions that will work, but you do need a certain level of awareness that bears are big and strong while ants are tiny and swarming.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

Simon_Jester said:

The only reason to do it is to see if, using every tool at our disposal, we can detect any hint of what it's doing to people. By trying it, like, ONCE, with an extremely short exposure time.

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The fact that we know that the Reapers were able to develop in spite of Leviathan mind control means it can be beaten.
Similarly, the fact that the geth are immune to Reaper exposure, and needed to be physically compromised with a software update, suggests they are immune; simply hanging out in it's presence isn't enough.


Ergo, drones will work. Just keep the sapients out of range.
This isn't Reapertech though. More likely to have been invented to counter Reaper or Leviathan-tech. Or maybe even Thorians; I doubt that there is only one in the galaxy.

More importantly, animal testing remains a pretty strong avenue of research; what happens with exposure of say, troops of monkey-analogues, or herd animals. Groups with organized hierarchy who can be affected.
Sapient testing is a long, LONG way away, and only with volunteers.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

I like @uju32 's arguments that this is probably an anti-Reaper artifact (or anti-Thorian or even anti-Leviathan).

Of course, as I note below, the Lystheni might reasonably mistake certain kinds of Reaper indoctrination behaviors as 'anarchist,' simply because to them anything other than 'do normal Lystheni things' might be labeled as 'anarchist behavior.'

Notably, the precursors we're seeing in this cluster are very clearly from a much-previous Reaper cycle. It's possible if unlikely that they somehow self-destructed before even encountering the Reapers, but they're clearly about twenty times older than the Protheans. We know that some races in the past managed to at least make a dent in one or more of the Reapers trying to develop countermeasures or counterweapons, and if this turns out to be one of those countermeasures, it would be good to have it in the archives for later.

Kinruush said:

Are there any positive canon examples of studying the effects of indoctrination?

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If we knew how to detect it, how to scan someone and go "welp, they're indoctrinated," or even something as basic as "it works by projecting low-energy microwaves that we can detect, but they're in this really disturbing fractal-static non-pattern that we neither know nor want to learn..." That would be great. As noted, though, it's not clear whether anyone really tried this. The only groups researching indoctrination prior to Mass Effect 3 were reckless groups that themselves became indoctrinated in short order.

frostgiant said:

The only reason I can see for keeping it around is for possibly creating countermeasures. So I'm leaning towards putting it on ice, buried as deep as possible with as few people knowing about it as possible, just in case more of this mental affecting tech shows up. Reaper or otherwise.

if not iced, then shoot it into the sun.

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I'd rather not put it on ice. I'd rather do one last round of experiments now, see if we have the technology to learn anything relevant right now. If we don't, INTO THE FIERY ORB WITH YE!

Because if we keep this thing buried at the south pole or something, there's always a risk of someone digging it up later. Or someone finding out that we buried an artifact at the south pole, NOT knowing what it does, and stealing it because they figure it must be valuable or the government wouldn't be covering it up.

VoidZero said:

The wording is strange tho, Reaper and Organic cuttlefish are both about exploiting the subject races; implanting ideology opposing anything organizing or collectivizing is not useful to them.

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Kinruush said:

It appeared to implant an anarchist ideology. That's the conclusion that they came to, not necessarily what actually happened. What actually happened was that the people researching the artifact all collectively were brainwashed by something and tried to kill everyone they could.

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Yeah, by the standards of the Lystheni, anything besides 'do normal Lystheni things' is probably a sign of 'anarchist tendencies.'

Their society is basically a game of Paranoia, only with the absurd and dark-comedic elements toned down.

Kinruush said:

We throw that one into the sun, too. Or, if we keep running into the damn things, we can eventually decide to study one of them. The thing is, though, I can't think of a single instance of studying indoctrination effects that didn't result in the scientists doing the studying getting indoctrinated. Yeah, it would be nice to get a couple thousand year head start on beating the Reaper indoctrination, if that's a realistic goal. But... we're not going to be here two thousand years from now, and we probably won't see any results in our lifetime that are anything but "Hey, all those people you had studying that thing are trying to kill everyone again."

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Mira's lifetime is about eight hundred years; it's not unlikely we'll run across a(nother) Reaper artifact in that timespan.

Also, basically every group studying indoctrination that is brought to our attention started futzing around with the artifacts before they knew about indoctrination, and had goals besides learning about indoctrination itself. Goals that kept them poking at the artifact long past the point where it was wise or safe to do so.

Given the Reapers' conspicuous role in Mass Effect 3, there almost has to have been research into what the hell indoctrination is, how to detect it, and how to block it during that game. The bare fact that we don't hear about indoctrination research groups in Mass Effect 3 strongly suggests that they existed but were moving very, very carefully. On the one hand, they didn't get infected; on the other hand, they also didn't learn anything useful before the whole issue had ceased to matter.

Kinruush said:

Okay, so what sort of in-character justification would you use to support studying it, since our character knows nothing about the Reapers?

"Studying it would let us know whether someone has already been affected."
"There may be more of these things with this sort of effect, and I want to be able to protect our researchers going forward."

(I have more, but they're mostly jkes)

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Yeah those are the big ones. Knowing something as insidious as artifacts that mind control people is out there, you really do want some way of observing directly whether or not any given person has in fact fallen prey to mind control, or whether any given weird artifact you find is itself a mind control device.

RoninSword said:

I would like to point out that we were informed that the Lystheni did perform rather stringent protocols to try and have it only affect their test subjects. The paranoid nation state bent on attempting to control these affects failed at keeping the affects contained only to their subjects. I would be all for trying to figure out the how of it working, but we would end up sacrificing people figuring it out.

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Uh, it sounds like they only failed to keep the effects contained before they realized it was a mind control device in the first place. Remember that it was one of a huge pile of artifacts they gathered up in a haphazard way; they weren't studying it systematically before it had already done its work.

Fehu said:

[] Continue full experimentation. While the Lystheni's direction of research was utter madness, they weren't wrong about the sheer potential of this artifact. If it can be invented once, it can be invented again -- and you'd like to know if there's a countermeasure.Authorize a full and proper team, and tell them to get you answers.

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Would you consider voting for multiple options? That way there's no vote-splitting; you can vote for the thing you want without fear that the thing you want least will win due to being incrementally more popular than the other options in, say, a 35-27-27-10 split.

uju32 said:

An anti-hierarchy weapon? This is pretty evidently an anti-Reaper weapon. Specifically, an anti-Husk measure, to subvert them from enemy control.
It would help explain why the ruins of that particular planet were so intact if Reaper infantry couldn't be deployed on the planet without rebelling...

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Oh, heyyy, you're right, that would explain a lot.

As I understand it... Normally, Reapers sweep planets carefully to make sure no archives or evidence of their existence survives. If they couldn't do that with this one particular species because they'd created anti-indoctrination devices that would cause husks to turn on their controllers or just shut down... Well then, all they could do would be to bombard the shit out of the planet until all life on the surface was exterminated, then hope for the best. It would also explain the (as I recall) lack of garden worlds in the general area these precursors lived in; the Reapers killed those garden worlds rather than leaving them to evolve future intelligent species, because they had no option for dealing with the inhabitants besides "bombard the planet into a radioactive wasteland."

Okay, thinking it all over...

[] Write-In: Super limited experiments. Perform ONE course of experiments, with short exposure of a small number of volunteer subjects, using every sensor available to see if we can detect the mind-affecting mechanism. Run every known form of brain scan on the volunteers to see if we can spot signs of those who have been affected by every means, OTHER than simply monitoring their behavior. If we learn anything, put it on ice and figure out what to do next. If we can't detect the mind control process and can't detect signs of it in victims, throw it into the sun.

[] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productivelystudy it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisitexperiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

[X] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

I'd prefer to hold onto this for now. Research on it seems like it'd be political poison for now, but it's possibly not Reaper tech and even if it is it seems a waste to destroy it.