Aria's Advisor (Mass Effect SI)

[Mizuki_Stone]

More over this could be a case of 'just crazy enough to work'.

Because let's be honest here... outside of plot hax that may or may not come into play, it's not like he's swimming for options. The Geth are about the one faction in the entire setting that might be able to pull a zerg rush on the reapers, and no one can pull a tech advantage on them.

 

[Arthur Hansen]

The Geth allowed themselves to get mind-whammied by the Reapers twice to become enemy mooks. Who's to say they won't pick a third time to save themselves by their 'logic'? Sorry, if I had to pick between the Geth and Quarians, I picked the Quarians.

They are just idiots.

 

[Xeno Major]

The Geth allowed themselves to get mind-whammied by the Reapers twice to become enemy mooks. Who's to say they won't pick a third time to save themselves by their 'logic'? Sorry, if I had to pick between the Geth and Quarians, I picked the Quarians.

They are just idiots.

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But consider, the Geth only partially turned once to the Reapers (and that was only a small percentage), then turned the second time only because the Quarians were attacking them without asking to negotiate. Because of game balance, the Geth didn't roflstomp the Quarians with sheer numbers, so they turned to the Reapers purely as a last-resort for self-preservation, which if you recall, is why they drove the Quarians off of Rannoch in the first place.

Honestly, my first choice would have been to be prepared via having numerous other Geth worlds set up, with full manufacturing capacity, or at least a 'flee' option for the Geth, but it comes down to a choice.

If your mother and father advanced on you with weapons, quite intent on killing you, and would not listen to pleads for understanding, what would you do?

I would flee, not for fear of my life, but for fear of theirs.

If retreat was not an option, I would fight my parents, with full intent to kill if necessary.

I would not do so lightly, I would most likely be haunted for a long time, but if it came down to life or death, regardless of who it was, I would choose life, no matter the cost. I may be in the bizarrely logical, batshit-insane minority for that view, but I would.

Mind you, I would not choose life when fighting the Reapers. A suicidal charge would be better than a life as a husk. I'd go out with a firebomb, with a detonating ship, or with a nuke, so as to deprive the Reapes of biomass.

But if I was the Geth, facing the Quarians... I'd fight until I died, without the Reaper's help. I'd do what Legion suggests with plenty of attempt to communicate, but when it comes down to it, I'd fight and die against the Quarians willingly. If the idiotic bigots want to continue to the path of self-destruction, it will take a goddamn miracle to dissuade them.

I'd choose the naive but wise Geth over the Quarians any day, because you can teach the Geth like you could a race of children. The Quarians, 0n the other hand, have three hundred years of conditioning to hate the Geth. Imagine if Hitler (hello, Godwin) had three hundred years for his followers to pass on his ideology, and to weed out the smart people who don't agree (for the record, I am aware that most of the German army was fighting for country, not for Party) and given three hundred years to distill that belief, it would be very hard to convince the Quarians not to go completely genocidal to the Geth. IMO, the only reason Tali didn't take her shotgun to EDI was because she trusted Shepard with every fiber of her being.

More over this could be a case of 'just crazy enough to work'.

Because let's be honest here... outside of plot hax that may or may not come into play, it's not like he's swimming for options. The Geth are about the one faction in the entire setting that might be able to pull a zerg rush on the reapers, and no one can pull a tech advantage on them.

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Obviously the Von Neumann Machine plays quite heavily into my decision to gain the help of the Geth, but it's not my primary reason.

Consider: I have large amounts of blackmail on the Council, as well as connections to Aria. On the other hand, we have the Geth.

Which one, do you think, will believe me? And if they believe me, which one would be willing to put almost all of their resources into my hands?

Organics are lovely, I enjoy them quite a bit. But sometimes, you need the simple logic of a machine (not always, 'cause, hello Skynet, HAL, Glados, SHODAN, the Heretics, and numerous others).

Also, if I were to distill my raw essence into one saying, it would be Mizuki's second quote in his sig.

As I said before, the popular definition of sanity is not sanity. It is madness, organized by group perception.

If by using my brain, I am insane, then so be it. I will make whatever tough decisions I must, though I may mourn them later.

I'd rather live to mourn my decisions (as long as I still have sentience and free will) than die without anything to mourn.

 

[Arthur Hansen]

The Geth actually had no reason to stand their ground and fight at Rannoch. They could have easily just left as a show of good faith while trying to talk from a remote platform from the edge of that solar system.

The problem is that the Geth are more (and quite) willing to join the Reapers if it gives them a chance to live a little longer.

 

[Xeno Major]

The Geth actually had no reason to stand their ground and fight at Rannoch. They could have easily just left as a show of good faith while trying to talk from a remote platform from the edge of that solar system.

The problem is that the Geth are more (and quite) willing to join the Reapers if it gives them a chance to live a little longer.

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Which is what I said, that the Get should flee. That was my second choice, with the first being just spread the fuck out.

The problem is the game needed another conflict for the great messiah Shepard to fix. It needed a complicated choice, and it needed to make it a tough one, hence on one hand, you have Han'Gerrel being a fucking idiot, and on the other, you have the Geth devoting themselves to the Reapers.

The Geth got hit a little harder with the evil ball because Bioware needed us to weigh the two races somewhat equally, whereas if the Geth didn't turn to the Reapers in desperation (with Legion dissenting), then every player would have bitched out the Quarians for being such stupid fucking morons for attacking the Geth.

 

[Cyclone]

I suspect peace between the geth and the quarians would have been possible a long time ago if the geth, you know, didn't kill everyone who tried to talk to them for three hundred years.

 

[Xeno Major]

I suspect peace between the geth and the quarians would have been possible a long time ago if the geth, you know, didn't kill everyone who tried to talk to them for three hundred years.

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Which is a massive fuck-up on their parts, true.

While I could say that the Geth are somewhat justified in their fear of organics coming to exterminate the AI, that excuse doesn't fly after the first hundred years. By then, there should be enough of them for the Geth Consensus to try to establish diplomatic contact and apologize for the Mourning War. The fact they didn't means they didn't think about doing such, about wasting a few hundred runtimes and some minerals to send a diplomatic ship, and that is more of the same unthinking stupidity that the Quarians had.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I guess.

Yeah. Don't go assuming the geths are any better than the organics, no matter what they say. They are the pretty much the same as everyone else.

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Oh, I'm not loving the Geth here, I'm liking the immediate usefulness, not necessarily the entire race and all their history.

In the Immediate sense, for me, the Geth are a shit-ton more useful than the Quarians.



Besides, if I had free reign to judge that entire galaxy, I'd be bitching out everyone, for everything, and I'd be wrong about a fair bit of stuff. Again, just a normal human here, nothing too special. The Geth are, right now, my best choice.

 

[Cyclone]

Agreed. Morally, they're on close to equal footing. Up until the stupid ass war in ME3, the geth were ever so slightly more guilty than the quarians if only because the quarians who are alive at the time of the trilogy weren't born yet when the Morning War occurred, while the geth runtimes are the same geth runtimes that committed the near genocide (regardless of circumstances... and why is it that the geth version of events are accepted to be 100% true and accurate, anyway? I find it telling we never actually see any recordings from the geth on the actual part where the quarians were nearly exterminated). But in terms of practical war assets? The geth are just too damn valuable if you can get to them early enough..

 

[nightblade]

You should tell the geth its possible to make particle beams with mass effect tech.

 

[Xeno Major]

(regardless of circumstances... and why is it that the geth version of events are accepted to be 100% true and accurate, anyway? I find it telling we never actually see any recordings from the geth on the actual part where the quarians were nearly exterminated).

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Very good point. I'd overlooked the possibility unconsciously because of the attraction of the Geth's machine nature. Hmm... need to think on that. Good catch.

 

[Xeno Major]

Honestly, that probably can be chalked up the the Heretics. Remember that the Geth come to decisions on a consensus level - prior to Saren showing up with Sovereign, the heretics were part of the collective and influenced the consensus. Once the heretics left the collective, they no longer contributed to the consensus and ceased tipping the scales towards 'destroy all arriving organic ships' which is why peace is only achievable after the Heretics no longer contribute to the consensus, post ME1.

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Got a point, but weren't the Heretics only 11% of the Consensus?

Besides, the Heretics agreed with Saren because they wanted Reaper Tech and the True Geth wanted self-determination, there was no mention of opinion on Organics there. Blue and orange morality is in effect here.

 

[Cyclone]

Very good point. I'd overlooked the possibility unconsciously because of the attraction of the Geth's machine nature. Hmm... need to think on that. Good catch.

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Near genocide is near genocide. Sure, the geth didn't finish them off, but the sheer effectiveness with which they nearly wiped out the quarians indicates that there was likely at one point a conscious effort to do so before they changed their minds. I suspect it was a simple logical train of thought (must protect self; Creators trying to destroy selves; must destroy Creators) that occurred before they properly understood the moral implications of such an act.

 

[Xeno Major]

Near genocide is near genocide. Sure, the geth didn't finish them off, but the sheer effectiveness with which they nearly wiped out the quarians indicates that there was likely at one point a conscious effort to do so before they changed their minds. I suspect it was a simple logical train of thought (must protect self; Creators trying to destroy selves; must destroy Creators) that occurred before they properly understood the moral implications of such an act.

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Children.

Horrifyingly powerful, strong, and numerous children, who have no idea of what we call our morality. They only know the logic of the Mind, ignoring the need for logic of the World. It's a shame, but it was conscious.

I mean, these are the beings that after three hundred years, are naive enough to make a 'gesture of goodwill' by bringing down the shields of their dreadnought... in the middle of a pitched space battle.


They decided to kill their Creators, so they did it as effectively as possible. Chem and Bio warfare, as they had an immunity to it. As well, all the nuclear fallout from the Morning War probably isn't just from the Quarians.

But nonetheless, I will at least try to teach them, before I condemn them all to death. If a child does someting wrong, you must teach him, you don't kill the child and give birth to another one.

That job of teacher will be mine, I guess.

To teach morality and it's applications to an AI, to teach them of sanity. My God, I will need Your help to survive this one.

 

[Xeno Major]

I do not remember the exact percentage of heretic geth, is it only 11%?

As for the opinion of organics, it's just an extrapolation. The heretics see no trouble with husk-ifying organics or killing them. They do not attempt to communicate with organics, and only use whatever their modem squawks are called. On a hunch, I'd say the heretics would be against any peace talks or communication. True geth sent Legion, who not only talks, but plays video games and attempts to understand organics. I would hazard that the heretic mindset would be the backing behind the 'destroy all unknown ships arriving from council space' doctrine.

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Legion was at the dead Reaper to recover Reaper-tech so that the true geth could try to defend themselves from the Reaper Virus that the Heretics made, from Legion's loyalty mission. He wasn't sent to contact Shepard. Other than game design, it was a coincidence.

And while evidence suggests that of the Heretics, we have no evidence saying that the True Geth won't do the same to us. After all, they did destroy all intruding vessels, civilian, military, or diplomatic, regardless of the Heretics or not. We have no way of knowing.

Don't go assume that they will accept you in this role just yet. IF they do, then you can consider it, but as it is now, as far as you and we are aware, they are just as likely to kill you as they are to hear you then send you back on your way. What they aren't very likely is that, even if they believe you, they decide that you are the one best qualified to make the decisions on the "how" to prepare and fight against the incoming Reapers, or that you should be the moral compass for their whole society.

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Oh, I'm not assuming it, and I will not be putting that notion anywhere near the storyline. I am a flawed human being, and it might be better for the Geth to have multiple teachers, from all races, or some other solution. There are, no doubt, a couple hundred thousand possible solutions, and I do not have time to consider that problem in-story.

No, I am concerned with one major thing in-story, and that is the Reapers. If the Geth continue to be wise-but-naive children/sociopaths, I am fine with that until we defeat the Reapers. We all need to band together to even have a smidge of a chance to beat them.

After the Reaper War... I'm going to go away and retire. Any wars that spring up afterwards, be they Quarian v. Geth, Krogan v. Salarian & Turian, or Human v. Batarian, are for later consideration. They are not important to me, because my only goal is the Reaper War.

 

[Cyclone]

Legion was at the dead Reaper to recover Reaper-tech so that the true geth could try to defend themselves from the Reaper Virus that the Heretics made, from Legion's loyalty mission. He wasn't sent to contact Shepard.

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That's why Legion was at the Derelict Reaper, but Legion's platform was created and sent out of the Perseus Veil to contact Shepard because Shepard opposed the Old Machines, only to discover Shepard dead before they could make contact. Remember the story leading up to that piece of N7 armor on the Legion platform's chest?

 

[Lone Wolf 666]

Geth:"We have reach consenses. Guide us, great one!."

Xenomajor:"As leader, i hearby name you all "Legion" for you are many".

Geth:"AVE, IMPERATOR!. AVE, IMPERATOR!".(Broadcast live accidently)

Council&terminal space:"Holy shit!, somebody just declare themself emperor, with the geth!"
"I knew humans can't be trusted!"
"How in goddess name did we miss him!" etc.

Meanwhile on the quarian flotilla, heart attacks everywhere. Now you have your robotic legion of doom!.

 

[Allon Marton]

You know these Geth have a similar mindset to myself. They were 'born', did their job, learned that their creators seemed to split everything into 2 categories, organic and synthetic, got attacked by Organics, and so they forced the threat off their home and then just wanted to be left alone to live their lives, keep the enemies away from themselves in order to do so.

You all seem to be forgetting something, why do people negotiate, why do they try to end conflicts and make allies...it is because they need eachother to survive long term, whether that is because of a greater threat, or because they are going to kill eachother, the reason remains the same. The Geth never needed anyone but themselves to survive, until they found out about the reapers, they had no reason to take the risk of letting the organics near them again, no reason to interact with them at all period.

 

[Ardion Prosili]

I am sorry but the best part of this story thread is gonna be the Sheogorath faces. Its an interesting and good story but it just can't compare to smarmy Sheogorath.

 

[Lone Wolf 666]

And somehow they mistaken this as him, now everyone even their grandmother prepare for WWII in SPACE!.

 

[SwiftRosenthal]

"The Xeno Major does not approve of Latin accolades. Accessing human history databanks...accessing...appropriate substitution found.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil!"

And now the System Alliance is after him, too.

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Nah, that's the Batarians. Geth would probably just call XM their Comrade.

 

[consequences]

(regardless of circumstances... and why is it that the geth version of events are accepted to be 100% true and accurate, anyway? I find it telling we never actually see any recordings from the geth on the actual part where the quarians were nearly exterminated).

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Because apart from some additional heart string tugging the Geth records seen in ME3 fundamentally agree with Tali's unapologetic declaration of the Quarian actions to start the war in ME 1. It's not like the two sides disagree about events, it's just that one of them still doesn't get that there might be anything wrong with their actions apart from the failed execution.

Near genocide is near genocide. Sure, the geth didn't finish them off, but the sheer effectiveness with which they nearly wiped out the quarians indicates that there was likely at one point a conscious effort to do so before they changed their minds. I suspect it was a simple logical train of thought (must protect self; Creators trying to destroy selves; must destroy Creators) that occurred before they properly understood the moral implications of such an act.

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So, how well would humanity do if we decided to shut down all of our farm machinery tomorrow? How well would we do if our farm machinery was self aware, doubled as our military, and objected? How well would we do if we went about systematically killing everyone saying 'wait a minute this might not be the best idea'?

After 300 years of natural selection against resource waste and ill-thought precipitous action we still got the Quarians as shown in ME2 and 3. And they were, with no exaggeration and very few exceptions, fucking retarded impulsive lemmings. I truly have no doubt that whatever passed for Quarian leadership on Rannoch could have thoroughly fucked over their own species.

There may be shades of grey to be found, and there are undoubtedly failures by Bioware to present a remotely balanced approach or just flat out dictate who killed what in a Codex reference. As things stand the scales don't look even remotely balanced to me, with my personal bias leaning towards the slaves who got attacked first. It's entirely possible that things were as you say, but it's not the only way things may have played out to reach that result.

 

[Cyclone]

So, how well would humanity do if we decided to shut down all of our farm machinery tomorrow? How well would we do if our farm machinery was self aware, doubled as our military, and objected? How well would we do if we went about systematically killing everyone saying 'wait a minute this might not be the best idea'?

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First, the section I bolded is patently untrue. The geth were not at all part of the quarian military, as the geth themselves noted with particular significance the memory of first taking up arms. Second, I'm pretty sure we'd manage better than a 2% survival rate if they weren't actively trying to exterminate us; 17 million is a mere 1.7% out of a a low-ball estimate of 1 billion for the prewar population

EDIT: For comparison, 1.7% survival rate basically means only about half of the population of New York City survives out of the entire United States. A low-end estimate of 51.17% of Hiroshima's population survived the nuclear bomb. So the geth were far efficient at wiping out the quarians than a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city was at wiping out just that city's population alone. A quick google suggests that professional estimates of all out global thermonuclear war wouldn't be as effective at wiping out humanity as the geth were at wiping out the quarians. The numbers make it fantastically improbable that the geth did it purely by accident and in self-defense.

 

[consequences]

I blame propaganda.


"THIS IS YOUR ENEMY. IT HATES YOU."

I mean 300 years of running. All that time spent trying to recover and go home. Sure from an outside perspective its a very shortsighted and plain stupid reaction but its 300 years of being ingrained with "The Geth took our home. We're gonna take it back one day. We're going to kill them all!"

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This would explain a fair bit. However the first impulse of the Quarians during the Morning War as far as the available records go was still 'Shut it down, shut it down now!', not, 'Hang on a moment, will we even survive without the Geth at this point?'

First, the section I bolded is patently untrue. The geth were not at all part of the quarian military, as the geth themselves noted with particular significance the memory of first taking up arms.

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You might want to read the codex entries on the Geth war and Geth race. Them taking up arms against Quarians was a big frikking deal.

Second, I'm pretty sure we'd manage better than a 2% survival rate if they weren't actively trying to exterminate us; 17 million is a mere 1.7% out of a a low-ball estimate of 1 billion for the prewar population




EDIT: For comparison, 1.7% survival rate basically means only about half of the population of New York City survives out of the entire United States. A low-end estimate of 51.17% of Hiroshima's population survived the nuclear bomb. So the geth were far efficient at wiping out the quarians than a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city was at wiping out just that city's population alone. A quick google suggests that professional estimates of all out global thermonuclear war wouldn't be as effective at wiping out humanity as the geth were at wiping out the quarians. The numbers make it fantastically improbable that the geth did it purely by accident and in self-defense.

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There is a profound lack of data available on exactly how bad a global famine situation would get. There is even less data on such a thing happening in the middle of a world war. There is, unsurprisingly, even less data than that about the results of such a war and famine breaking out on a world that has relied on advanced technology for nearly two thousand years. Defining the outcome of said war being against the very infrastructure is Right Out.

There is also the difficulty of defining what constitutes pure self defense, much less determining it at the time when facing a thoroughly irrational enemy. Any Quarian with an omnitool can potentially hack a Geth into attacking its comrades briefly. Any ship that is remotely near the planet could be turned into a KKV. So yes, the Geth almost certainly killed people they shouldn't have by most civilized standards of war, and that's bad. Trying to say they're at least as bad as the Quarians requires some damned fine mental gymnastics.

 

[Cyclone]

This would explain a fair bit. However the first impulse of the Quarians during the Morning War as far as the available records go was still 'Shut it down, shut it down now!', not, 'Hang on a moment, will we even survive without the Geth at this point?'

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Shepard: "Was that the first time a geth asked if it had a soul?"
Legion: "No. It was the first time a Creator became frightened when we asked."

Gee...

You might want to read the codex entries on the Geth war and Geth race. Them taking up arms against Quarians was a big frikking deal.

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A single word in a codex entry that is directly contradicted by the video logs in ME3. Also, note that the codex has been provably wrong before, most notably in its entry on Sovereign before ME3.

There is also the difficulty of defining what constitutes pure self defense, much less determining it at the time when facing a thoroughly irrational enemy. Any Quarian with an omnitool can potentially hack a Geth into attacking its comrades briefly. Any ship that is remotely near the planet could be turned into a KKV. So yes, the Geth almost certainly killed people they shouldn't have by most civilized standards of war, and that's bad. Trying to say they're at least as bad as the Quarians requires some damned fine mental gymnastics.

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I was comparing the geth to the quarians as of the trilogy before the stupid ass war in ME3, which I specifically stated earlier. Up until said stupid ass war, most the living quarians are not guilty of anything except being misinformed and unknowingly perpetuating the misinformation, whereas the geth who are around are the same runtimes who nearly exterminated the quarians and also systematically killed anyone who tried to contact them for three hundred years. Did you even what I wrote?

 

[Mizuki_Stone]

I'd like to remind everyone that the Codex is by and large, space wikipedia. I mean hell in ME 2 it lists Sovereign as a Geth flag ship!

Not the most reliable of sources.