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Perchance to Dream (Mass Effect / Commander)

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Aetharian said:
Humanity is basically an entire race of less powerful Driches
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Well Drich basically did give them its effectively godlike abilities and heavily influenced their initial development of said abilities, so the children growing up to resemble their adoptive parent is to be expected.
Especially as Drich was itself technically a human at one point in the distant past.
 
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5.8
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    • 5.8

    +++

    "I'd ask how something of this magnitude stay a secret, but after the Athame Beacon, this doesn't seem so much of a stretch." Salvilus sighed.

    Tevos eye twitched, slightly, when nobody but Marcus would have been able to see it.

    "It's a combination of the former Quarian Government having had surprisingly good information control, the Geth making it nigh-impossible to penetrate networks at the time, isolation of Quarian space and people, and the general shortness of the war itself." Marcus noted. "The perfect storm to hide something. It stayed secret because the Geth, afterwards, were the only ones who knew, and they weren't willing to tell. Partially because you weren't willing to ask, but mostly because of the actions of the Citadel Species at the time; when a purge of Artificial intelligences came through in Citadel Space, the Geth calculated that you were hostile and unwilling to listen, so they didn't try to engage."

    "That 'purge' was done entirely by the overzealous." Tevos noted. "And there weren't many. Which is classified extensively."

    "The Geth are aware of it. Therefore, so are we." Marcus shrugged. "Fifty Artificial Intelligences offlined doesn't like much, but when more than a few of those had their platforms gunned down by C-Sec when they were trying to protest the purge?" He directed a look at her. "It doesn't look good, Tevos. Especially not to other AI. Especially to AI who are only in a war in order to prevent themselves from being terminated by their fearful creators."

    "So we have information. What does it really change?" Corha asked.

    Marcus shrugged, again. "That depends entirely on how much of it will be getting released."

    "Keeping it under wraps would preserve the status quo." Tevos noted.

    "On the other hand, having the Geth's help for the Harvesters would be invaluable." Marcus stated. "They're as much a target as the rest of us. Perhaps even more so, considering the industrial capacity."

    "Can they be trusted?" Salvilus questioned.

    "We can trust that they will attempt to preserve their own continued existence, which is something the Reapers threaten." Corha noted. "Under that auspex, aligning with us -or, at least, forming a non-aggression pact with us-, makes logical sense."

    "The Geth will follow that logic." Marcus agreed. "They will not engage in hostilities with people if they can avoid it. They do not dislike organic species on principle." He made a show of stretching, then stood up. "Well, regardless of all of that, I will be taking my leave. You're all quite busy, after all."

    "And who's fault is that?" Corha directed a look at him.

    "Who indeed." Marcus smiled, directing a brief glance at Tevos. "Goodbye, Councillors. I hope the political machinations don't take too much a toll on you."

    He vanished.

    +++

    "How do you think the Quarians will react?"

    "Anger. Denial. Calls that it must have been faked. Those will be the primary reactions."

    "You seem quite certain about that."

    "It is not a hard thing to guess. The entire Quarian culture that exists today is biased against the Geth. The last two centuries have created an atmosphere of hatred and disgust towards them. The Geth, in their minds, are ultimately responsible for everything that they're currently going through. There will be outliers, but they will be just that; outliers."

    "Will they escalate to violence?"

    "It is possible, though unlikely."

    "Will it be a problem if they do?"

    "The Quarians numbers some seventeen million people spread out over fifty thousand ships, nearly all of which are at least two-to-three decades old, and only a small portion of which are dedicated warships. Militarily, they are the smallest, though most concentrated, force in the entire galaxy. They would not be able to do too much damage, even if they did decide to attack."

    "Again, however, it is unlikely. Their military ships are tied up defending the civilian ships, and the entire Migrant Fleet is simply too many to move with any degree of swiftness or speed. They cannot send ships out in numbers enough to matter without leaving the Migrant Fleet defenceless against raiders and other opportunists. They would have to be suicidal in order to attack."

    "More likely is that will simply continue their previous operations. However... That is limited. Once the news breaks and is confirmed, the Quarians will eventually face an internal schism between those who would wish to return to Rannoch and those who are too afraid of the Geth."

    "Rannoch, after all, is an object of near worship to the Quarians. 'Retaking the Homeworld' is a common theme among current Quarian society. They only reason they do not go there is because the Geth are in the way. If they think that this will stop being a problem... They will go."

    "Such a thing is technically avoidable. It would require extreme situations, however."

    "Situations that they cannot truly engineer, in their current state."

    "If they'd tried, they'd likely rip themselves apart."

    "Hmm. Troublesome."

    "The Quarians typically are, yes. Being too much trouble and not worth the investment required is usually what stops everybody else from helping them."

    "Are they really not worth the effort?"

    "Speaking... purely logistically, no, not really. Fifty thousand ships with seventeen million people may sound like a lot, but it really... isn't. They're too small. Far, far, far, far too small. Talented engineers they might be, there's so few of them that somebody, somewhere else, in the galaxy, is doing the same thing they're doing, but with access to more and better resources. Their technology has mostly stagnated, alongside their culture. They maintain technological parity mostly through the Pilgrimage Tradition, but even then, it isn't parity, it's scraps that are out of date and useless to somebody else. Even if you did help them, it would be centuries before you saw an return for the investment. Nobody but the Asari would go for such long time-scales, and the Asari have a problem where it's too recent. Two centuries may be several Quarian generations, but a very significant amount of the current Asari population was alive when the morning war happened."

    "And, keep in mind, Quarian culture being what it is means that such 'help' will be a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Coupled with the lack of truly viable planets, as well as the considerable expense of space-habitats, the Quarians fall into a very unfortunate zone."

    "We could help them. Those factors are not problems for us."

    "We could. The problem is, the Quarians are biased against us."
     
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    • Helping someone just because you could, and helping someone knowing the one you help will never be thankfull.

    How very human these humans are.
     
    In before the humans leave a trail of fully function and habitable ships as a line of breadcrumbs to lead the entire Quarian race around like mice chasing cheese.

    Like, seriously the solution here is to build a giant self sustaining ring habitat around a planet somewhere and just, well, give it to the Quarians. I mean, they can't exactly say no now can they.

    Once you settle them down and prevent them from genocide by faulty maintenance then you can solve the long hard problem of explaining to them they are carbon based bigots.
     
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    Who needs to hack speakers when ya could just make the ships frames vibrate in time to the audio...... I will not abuse a mass effect core to create the largest subwoofer ever known.x10
     
    So is there an embargo between humanity aid the Citadel for material goods, or is stuff allowed through a maze of tariffs and red tape?

    I'm asking because I'm thinking the situation could be used to help the Protheans via re-exportation at market values. They might need it for a currency-based economy if they still have one, or could use the capital to re-invest it into Citadel military developments.
     
    Fouredged Sword said:
    In before the humans leave a trail of fully function and habitable ships as a line of breadcrumbs to lead the entire Quarian race around like mice chasing cheese.

    Like, seriously the solution here is to build a giant self sustaining ring habitat around a planet somewhere and just, well, give it to the Quarians. I mean, they can't exactly say no now can they.

    Once you settle them down and prevent them from genocide by faulty maintenance then you can solve the long hard problem of explaining to them they are carbon based bigots.
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    The issue is the established power structure in the Migrant Fleet basically relies on their limited resources to maintain its hierarchy, large chunks of the Quarian population leaving the fleet to go live on [Insert Place Here] will fundamentally undermine that hierarchy, causing a loss of status and power. Combine this with a big ole dollop of pride and bigotism and you've got a strong likelihood that the Quarian leadership would attempt to respond by demonizing the opportunity while enforcing anti-emigration laws, preventing the civilian population from leaving the fleet and imprisoning or executing dissenters for attempting to upset the status quo.

    Keep in mind; this is the people who, during the Geth War, had their leaders order orbital bombardment on their own cities and civilian population in the name of 'asset denial'; an obviously bullshit reason given the nature of the Geth. At least some of the Quarian leaders at the time would rather execute their own people than allow them to live with the Geth, and a significant number of Quarians literally committed suicide rather than live in Geth captivity. Calling the Quarians 'fanatical' is almost an understatement.

    The Quarian culture has some seriously massive inertia towards insular bigotry and hatred of Geth, and only some of that is because of the shitty way the Council has treated them. They've spent two centuries basically resenting the rest of the galaxy for discriminating against them and reinforcing a fanatical hatred of anything to do with the Geth, that isn't something that will just go away in the presence of a viable solution, that is the sort of thing that people literally fight to the death over rather than allow their beliefs to be proven incorrect.

    The only reasons Shepard was theoretically able to end the Quarian\Geth hostilities relatively peacefully was because the Reapers were actively invading the galaxy at the time and that they were Commander Shepard; a person with an effectively (and possibly literally) supernatural ability to make people sit down, shut up and stop being hateful bastards.

    Without Commander Shepard and the imminent existential threat of the Reapers, getting the Quarians to accept anything less than violent revenge against both the Geth and the Council that spurned them is at best going to be a complex, lengthy and messy process, and is extremely likely to provoke an incredibly bloody Quarian civil war.

    Lazor said:
    So is there an embargo between humanity aid the Citadel for material goods, or is stuff allowed through a maze of tariffs and red tape?

    I'm asking because I'm thinking the situation could be used to help the Protheans via re-exportation at market values. They might need it for a currency-based economy if they still have one, or could use the capital to re-invest it into Citadel military developments.
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    I think the Prothean economy was implied to be a form of functional communism, with everything centralized and run by the Empire. A system that would actually work with a species that can communicate on a mental level by touch, making corruption effectively impossible to conceal for any real length of time.
     
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    Neruz said:
    I think the Prothean economy was implied to be a form of functional communism, with everything centralized and run by the Empire. A system that would actually work with a species that can communicate on a mental level by touch, making corruption effectively impossible to conceal for any real length of time.
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    What if it's state sponsored?
     
    The problem with the Quarians- and the Geth- is that literally nothing about them makes sense. Virtually every part of what we hear falls apart after spending, like, a minute thinking about it.

    Even from the beginning, the idea that the Geth could take- and hold- so much of the Quarian fleet/orbital defenses (because they must have to drive the Quarians out of the system) makes me, as a computer programmer, cringe.

    Then you have the Citadel kicking the Quarians off the Citadel, off whatever colonies they might have had away from Rannoch, leaving them to wander around with a sizeable fleet of armed ships. Thats both logistically difficult, and pointlessly dickish.

    Then you have the Quarians trying to colonise Ekuna. A planet with litterally 5 times Rannoch gravity! Not to mention 1.5 times the atmospheric preasure, and 1/3rd the temperature at the HOTTEST! That planet would never have been habitable to the Quarians without an insane amount of technology- it would have been cheaper to build a domed colony on an airless moon! But instead they settle on some planet they could never actually live on, and then we're suppost to feel sorry for them for getting kicked off it.
    (Frankly, that whole thing reads like it was actually a thinly veiled attempt to hold the planet hostage and force the Elcor to buy it off them for a high price, and the Turians wouldn't let them get away with it.)

    Then you have the Quarians wandering the galaxy for 300 years. And none of them thought to settle down in the Terminus Systems somewhere, outside of Citadel teritory, with their large fleet (which could hold a single system), or to dissapear into the depths of space to find somewhere beyond the Citadel's knowlege to settle down in.

    With just how advanced the Quarians are, they should have been able to settle down on a crude space station or asteroid base somewhere. And the fact that they didn't requires either
    A: Unbelievable amounts of petty dickishness on the Citadel's part to refuse to even give them an empty solar system with a few asteroids, somewhere out of the way, for 300 years straight.
    or
    B: Unbelievable amounts of blindness and fanatisim on the Quarians part to consider settleing down in some out of the way corner of the galaxy, for 300 years straight.


    And then, finally, you have the Geth in ME3. The Geth with their story of how they are really the good guys, the Quarians are the bad guys. Only, we don't even learn this through decent recordings. We learn this through re-inactments, poorly staged, with Rannoch-era Quarians played by modern suited-Quarians.

    This is not evidence!

    Yet, at no point does any one even ask the question "hey- what if this is a lie? Are they making this up to make themselves look better?"

    Hell, even the fact that the need the suits, that they were never able to see the problem with their whole 'lack of plants to brush against' in time to, you know, put some potplants on their ships makes no sense.


    That's the thing about the Quarians. They're suppost to be a Battlestar Galactica expy, the poor Woobies everyone feels sorry for. And as of ME3, so are the Geth. But basically every part of their timeline requires everyone to make the worst decision possible, the most Dickish, the most short sighted, every time, for 300 years straight.
     
    DarkAtlan said:
    The problem with the Quarians- and the Geth- is that literally nothing about them makes sense. Virtually every part of what we hear falls apart after spending, like, a minute thinking about it.

    Even from the beginning, the idea that the Geth could take- and hold- so much of the Quarian fleet/orbital defenses (because they must have to drive the Quarians out of the system) makes me, as a computer programmer, cringe.

    Then you have the Citadel kicking the Quarians off the Citadel, off whatever colonies they might have had away from Rannoch, leaving them to wander around with a sizeable fleet of armed ships. Thats both logistically difficult, and pointlessly dickish.

    Then you have the Quarians trying to colonise Ekuna. A planet with litterally 5 times Rannoch gravity! Not to mention 1.5 times the atmospheric preasure, and 1/3rd the temperature at the HOTTEST! That planet would never have been habitable to the Quarians without an insane amount of technology- it would have been cheaper to build a domed colony on an airless moon! But instead they settle on some planet they could never actually live on, and then we're suppost to feel sorry for them for getting kicked off it.
    (Frankly, that whole thing reads like it was actually a thinly veiled attempt to hold the planet hostage and force the Elcor to buy it off them for a high price, and the Turians wouldn't let them get away with it.)

    Then you have the Quarians wandering the galaxy for 300 years. And none of them thought to settle down in the Terminus Systems somewhere, outside of Citadel teritory, with their large fleet (which could hold a single system), or to dissapear into the depths of space to find somewhere beyond the Citadel's knowlege to settle down in.

    With just how advanced the Quarians are, they should have been able to settle down on a crude space station or asteroid base somewhere. And the fact that they didn't requires either
    A: Unbelievable amounts of petty dickishness on the Citadel's part to refuse to even give them an empty solar system with a few asteroids, somewhere out of the way, for 300 years straight.
    or
    B: Unbelievable amounts of blindness and fanatisim on the Quarians part to consider settleing down in some out of the way corner of the galaxy, for 300 years straight.


    And then, finally, you have the Geth in ME3. The Geth with their story of how they are really the good guys, the Quarians are the bad guys. Only, we don't even learn this through decent recordings. We learn this through re-inactments, poorly staged, with Rannoch-era Quarians played by modern suited-Quarians.

    This is not evidence!

    Yet, at no point does any one even ask the question "hey- what if this is a lie? Are they making this up to make themselves look better?"

    Hell, even the fact that the need the suits, that they were never able to see the problem with their whole 'lack of plants to brush against' in time to, you know, put some potplants on their ships makes no sense.


    That's the thing about the Quarians. They're suppost to be a Battlestar Galactica expy, the poor Woobies everyone feels sorry for. And as of ME3, so are the Geth. But basically every part of their timeline requires everyone to make the worst decision possible, the most Dickish, the most short sighted, every time, for 300 years straight.
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    I agree with everything you have said however everyone being an unrelenting dick for three hundred years straight is not outside the realm of plausibility, if you would turn your eyes to RL human history for a moment lets work backwards from today: climate change has been a visible known thing since the industrial revolution and we are only just making a concerted effort to deal with it, the only thing that has kept us going so long is projects like the new forest in england which is a very old reforestation project plus others, the point is they were individual desires by people with the ability to do something. moving back Slavery and racism towards black people in america. moving back the witch purges. moving back the dark ages where a whole continent faked illiteracy and poverty as part of a century long tax evasion scam. alongside that the racism that made the black plague worse because washing became unfashionable because of anti jewish sentiment. moving back well we could do this all day. for the quarians after committing genocide on their moderate elements the only opinions left were the radical anti geth and that then stewed and was reinforced by the rumspringa expy of the pilgrimage that resulted in their current state.
     
    The Geth taking control of the majority of the Quarian fleet does make sense if you assume that the Quarians had replaced most of the crew on their ships with Geth, which they probably would have done because why wouldn't you? The Geth were extremely effective 'slave' labor for quite some time, and though it is unclear how long it was between their creation and the Geth War, I think it's safe to assume they worked fine for at least a couple of generations. It is entirely likely that the Geth were basically ubiquitous throughout Quarian culture, effectively comprising the entire 'unskilled labor' force and a significant amount of 'low' skilled labor as well. Under those circumstances it is not unreasonable to expect that Geth platforms likely outnumbered the Quarian population by as much as five to one or more, and as the Geth are a networked consciousness when they decided to go hostile they would have all gone hostile all at once. Under those circumstances, any ship that hadn't completely purged its Geth contingent would have rapidly fallen under Geth control, as they could simply take over the ship's computer systems and turn the ships internal security systems and soforth on the Quarian occupants, or just vent the atmosphere and wait for the Quarians to run out of suit oxygen.

    The only Quarians that would have escaped Geth capture would have been the most fanatically fearful ones who went all out and destroyed all their Geth at the first sign of trouble, the others would have found themselves badly outnumbered by physically superior Geth platforms and either surrendered, suicided or got destroyed by the fanatics in the name of 'asset denial'.

    The numbers still don't really add up; there should be more surviving Quarians than there are, but the concept of an overwhelming majority of the Quarian navy falling under Geth control is pretty reasonable when you consider that there were probably Geth everywhere. The only reason the entire Quarian navy didn't fall under Geth control would be because the Geth didn't fight back initially, which gave the fanatics time to secure a few assets before consensus was reached and the Geth turned actively hostile.
     
    Neruz said:
    The Geth taking control of the majority of the Quarian fleet does make sense if you assume that the Quarians had replaced most of the crew on their ships with Geth, which they probably would have done because why wouldn't you? The Geth were extremely effective 'slave' labor for quite some time, and though it is unclear how long it was between their creation and the Geth War, I think it's safe to assume they worked fine for at least a couple of generations. It is entirely likely that the Geth were basically ubiquitous throughout Quarian culture, effectively comprising the entire 'unskilled labor' force and a significant amount of 'low' skilled labor as well. Under those circumstances it is not unreasonable to expect that Geth platforms likely outnumbered the Quarian population by as much as five to one or more, and as the Geth are a networked consciousness when they decided to go hostile they would have all gone hostile all at once. Under those circumstances, any ship that hadn't completely purged its Geth contingent would have rapidly fallen under Geth control, as they could simply take over the ship's computer systems and turn the ships internal security systems and soforth on the Quarian occupants, or just vent the atmosphere and wait for the Quarians to run out of suit oxygen.

    The only Quarians that would have escaped Geth capture would have been the most fanatically fearful ones who went all out and destroyed all their Geth at the first sign of trouble, the others would have found themselves badly outnumbered by physically superior Geth platforms and either surrendered, suicided or got destroyed by the fanatics in the name of 'asset denial'.

    The numbers still don't really add up; there should be more surviving Quarians than there are, but the concept of an overwhelming majority of the Quarian navy falling under Geth control is pretty reasonable when you consider that there were probably Geth everywhere. The only reason the entire Quarian navy didn't fall under Geth control would be because the Geth didn't fight back initially, which gave the fanatics time to secure a few assets before consensus was reached and the Geth turned actively hostile.
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    I still think that it doesn't make logical sense for there to not be surviving Quarians on Rannoch. A few centuries of reconditioning should have helped with a lot of the cultural problems.
     
    I just write said:
    I still think that it doesn't make logical sense for there to not be surviving Quarians on Rannoch. A few centuries of reconditioning should have helped with a lot of the cultural problems.
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    Depends on how thorough the orbital bombardment was really, rendering a biosphere functionally uninhabitable with kinetic strikes is alarmingly easy. The entire planet could have been effectively glassed and the Geth would still have been fine thanks to not really having any actual need for planets, after all.

    But yes, unless the Geth at the very least chose not to save any surviving Quarians, there should be some. Sadly, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale in video games as well as books.
     
    Eh, it's quite possible that as the quarians fled from Rannoch that they bombed any identified quarian position that was not aligned against the geth, and that's if any survived at this time. The remainder could have chosen to fight to the death rather than submit to the geth, while the damage from the war to the biosphere and their own society caused a collapse that the quarians did not recover from, eventually seeing all of them dead of old age, disease, injury and a variety of other reasons.

    It's unlikely, but not impossible.
     
    Mr. Cloak said:
    Yup. Still true what I said- it's good, and I hope more is eventually coming. I too have lost a muse for months before.
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    I believe that he was pointing out that Thread Necromancy is frowned upon. If no one has posted for months, don't post. The Author is the only one to revive a thread.
     
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