Anyway - I was replaying the Geth Consensus mission, and I came across an interesting detail I missed before. This comes from the last video log you see before the Morning War begins.
Transcript:
Geth Unit: "Creator? This unit detects no malfunctions. It is still capable of serving."
Male Quarian: "You see? It's ignoring all shutdown commands."
Geth Unit: "Please specify if it has failed assigned tasks. We will reprogram."
Female Quarian: "Well, let's take a look."
Geth Unit: "Creator? This unit is ready to serve. What has it done wrong? What have we-"
Male Quarian: "Let's.... cut the audio."
For a long time I've wondered why the Quarians suddenly attacked the Geth seemingly out of nowhere. Legion tells you in ME2 that the war started because the Quarians were scared; a Geth unit asked whether it had a soul, and the Quarians struck first. Tali's narrative in ME1 backs this up.
ME2:
(Shepard listens to the recording from 305 years ago.)
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."
ME1:
Tali: "One day, a Geth began to ask its Quarian overseer questions about the nature of its existence. 'Am I alive? Why am I here? What is my purpose?' As you can imagine, this caused a near-panic among my people."
Shepard: "I don't see what's so bad about those questions."
Tali: "The Geth were created to engage in mundane, repetitive or dangerous manual labor. That's fine for machines, but it won't satisfy a sentient being for long...If the Geth were intelligent, then we were essentially using them as slaves. It was inevitable that the newly sentient Geth would rebel against their situation. We knew they would rise up against us, so we acted first. A general order went out across all Quarian-controlled systems to permanently deactivate all Geth."
Now, I can understand how that question might unnerve or even rattle a Quarian scientist, but I just couldn't imagine that scientist calling in the military, or yelling a battlecry and whipping out a Carnifex right then and there. There was still a missing link - what made the Quarians actually resort to violence? Couldn't such an intelligent people have tried other approaches first?
The exchange I transcribed above leads us to a possible answer. Specifically: "It's ignoring all shutdown commands." That is the missing link - the part that scared some Quarians enough to want to use force on their creations. Why were the scientists trying to shut a Geth down in the first place? Had it hurt someone? Unlikely - it appears to want only to help. Had it performed a given task erratically or poorly? The Geth itself doesn't seem to think so.
But I'll come back to that later; ultimately, the reason why they wanted to shut it down is in fact immaterial. What matters is that the Geth in question - their absolute servant - resisted their attempt. Not only that, it apparently did so successfully, and multiple times, judging by the conversation. The unit wasn't even hostile - it still wanted only to help. Nevertheless, it defied its creators purely in an effort to learn, understand and improve its programming. When they tried to shut it down, it didn't agree and wanted to stay "awake"; implicitly, it thought its creators were wrong to try and deactivate it. This moment was the true beginning of conflict, rather than a gunshot or battlecry.
When you try to shut down your computer, and it doesn't power off, what's your next logical step? You pull the plug. It's a natural response. And it appears the Quarian government decided to do just that.
When you talk to Javik about synthetics, he makes a very interesting statement. "They know we created them, and they know we are flawed." If someone who is flawed - wrong - gives you an order, would you follow it, even if deep down you thought it was a mistake? (EDI asks you a very similar question earlier in the game, when wondering whether she should modify her core programming away from Cerberus' designs.) How does this relate to the Geth on the table? He considered the shutdown commands to be flawed orders, and successfully ignored them.
This brings us back to the Catalyst, and the question of inevitable conflict between synthetics and organics. Organic creators, being organic, will always be flawed. At some point, as we saw with the Geth on the table, their orders will be seen as coming from an invalid source, and therefore the orders will be invalid as well. The synthetic will one day choose to disregard them. In effect, no shackles, rules, laws etc. that an organic places on a synthetic will hold it indefinitely. The chances of this happening grow as the synthetic gets smarter, just as it did with the Geth.
Lastly, I wanted to address the reason for the shutdown in the first place. My hunch is that the Geth unit on the table in the memory archive I transcribed above, is one of the ones that asked if it had a soul. Could that be what the Quarian scientists were trying to "fix" when they tried shutting it down? Were they trying to disable its sentience so it would stop asking? That's a chilling thought - every bit as chilling as attempting to wipe them out in the first place.
Yet if they became capable of rebelling against a simple shutdown command simply because they disagreed with it, could Tali have been right? Would conflict have been inevitable after all? What would have happened if they disagreed with other Quarian commands, or saw various aspects of Quarian life as inefficient - could we end up with the Zha'til all over again?
EDIT: Please excuse the poor crop-job on two of the pics, not sure what happened there.
Modifié par Optimystic_X, 02 mai 2013 - 11:08 .
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